1.List three adjectives todescribeyour novel “The Destroyers of Worlds”?
In terms of what I'm going for, I'd say "engaging," "moving," and "funny." That last adjective might seem like an odd one to apply to a horror novel, but my experience is that people who can maintain a sense of humor even in grim circ*mstances tend to be survivors.
2. What isthe genesis of "The Destroyers of Worlds", which is the sequel to your first book, "Lovecraft Country"?
When I wrote Lovecraft Country, the book it started out as a possible TV series, a failed pitch for a TV series, so when I was trying to turn it into a novel, one of the things I wanted to do was preserved the idea of allowing each of my characters a chance to star in their own tale. So, I suggested a book of short stories, but I didn't want to write a book of short stories, I wanted to write a novel. So, I had to figure out a way to sort of fuse those two ideas and I came up with the idea of structuring the first novel as a series as an imaginary season of television that you would binge read instead of binge watching. That led to a conversation with my agent about whether we should pitch it as a season of television or as a series. My agent argued persuasively that I should just do one book to start because multiple book deals are just complicated for many reasons. So, that was the idea, I would write one book and then if I wanted to write more, I would come back and do more. So, I wrote Lovecraft as a standalone, but as I was working on and I kept thinking about a much longer arc story involving these characters, because I fell in love with them and I wanted to do more. By the time I'd finished the first book, I had an idea for a larger story that would take another two or three books to complete and the question was what I get the chance to do that. The TV show gave me the opening (to write the sequel), which made the first book become a best seller. At that point, I had to say, "Okay, Now is my chance, if I want to start telling this larger story is going to be now or never," That was what drew me back into it.Specifically, what I wanted these next few books to be about, I want to tell the coming-of-age story of Horace, who is the young member of the family, the comic book enthusiast, and Horace is 12 years old and Lovecraft country and I have this idea that the larger story is going to end in 1964 when Horace is 22 years old, so it's sort of a perfect arc for just telling his history of him growing up. I wanted to make each of the subsequent books about a different chapter or different aspects of getting older. This book is specifically about coming to terms with the reality of death. The title is a reference to the death, being the destroyer of worlds. I wanted to tell this larger story, and specifically, I was really in love with the idea of telling Horace story of growing older and coming to terms with this.3. Did the Oppenheimer's quote inspired the novel title or did he get it from somewhere else?
It's definitely in reference to the Oppenheimer title. I knew the book was going to be about Horace, a friend of his gets killed and he's going to be wrestling with life. And with the fact that even though I'm young, death is going to come eventually and what do I think about that. And I hit on the Oppenheimer quote, and once I did that, sort of tied into other aspects of the novel, I started thinking more broadly, how do I weave that thematically to other parts of the story? So, the idea came first and then I came up with a title and I kind of backed into it and that was sort of the same thing that happened with Lovecraft Country where once I came up with a title then the idea of making sort of adding additional Lovecraftian elements to this story of this family dealing with the paranormal came into it. So, that's very common for me, where I bounced back and forth between different inspirations and it kind of builds on itself. 4. W
I have some other ideas but this was just the right one as soon as I hit on it. I realized this is the title that is right for this book. It just fit really well.
5.what research did you do when writing the sequel?
My wife is is a professional researcher and so she is the one who came up with this really interesting book. It's a thesis written by Hugo Prosper Leaming. He wrote a book called "Hidden Americans". It's about the story of the maroon colony in the great dismal swamp. That was probably the single most amazing discovery in terms of history for this novel. It's what I call the third loss Colony of Roanoke. There's the famous lost Roanoke colony, but there are two other other colonies called Roanoke that also existed in history and one of them became the nucleus for this maroon colony of escaped slaves that survived in the great dismal swamp between North Carolina and Virginia for almost 150 years. That fit into the story of how you deal with the uncertainty of death and mortality, because these were people fled into the wilderness with no idea of what they'd find there. They had a million chances to just sort of give up and die and they never did. That becomes a really inspirational story for Horace, and it fits into the larger story of what I'm doing with this novel. Once I found that it was like, "Okay, that's a story I can build into this and that will fit the general theme." I did some other research just on the subject. Once I had the atomic bomb theme, I'm like, "Okay, I will send Horace and his mother to Las Vegas," because that was another thing about the 1950s is that the atomic bomb test in Nevada, were actually a tourist attraction. I did some research on that. And I did other little historical anecdotes as I went along. The interesting thing about writing a sequel is that a lot of the heavy lifting I'd already done for myself with Lovecraft Country, I was already very familiar with Jim Crow laws and other challenges faced by my characters in this time period. I was already working on solid ground and was just sort of finding additional interesting things to fold into the novel. 6. W
There's a scene where Horace and his mother are sort of stranded on this alien planet. They've escaped to it and they're finally have this deep conversation about all of the things that Horace has been wrestling with since a friend of his was murdered. And he sort of been angry about that for a long time and his mother has been trying to reach him and they sit down and have a conversation about how you wrestle with that. As soon as I imagined that scene, I was like, "Okay, this is what I want to be able to write." This is why the rest of the novel is important to me. So, that was my favorite scene for me.
7.What is your writing habit in general?
The most important thing for me is just to try and maintain a regular schedule. I am easily distracted. The days when I get work done, I've got to get up and get to work as soon as possible after I get up in the morning. If I let myself get distracted by the Internet or by Twitter, I've got one more chance after breakfast to really sort of set my sights and get to work and if I don't, then the day is shot. Which is why for me, it's really important to have deadlines, either self imposed early on or later once I've sold a book, contractual deadlines, because I really don't like disappointing people either. That's a good way to get myself going and keeping at it. Consistency is the most important thing, it is just getting in the habit of working every day as soon as possible while I'm still fresh. 8.
No. I gotta say that part of it is that I already have this general plan of where I'm going. My hope is to write at least two more Lovecraft country novels to bring it to a close. By the time I started writing, I knew how the book was going to end and very often I know what the last line is going to be. Looking back, I may have considered different ways of a novel could go while I was first thinking about it, but once I get to work, I already have this set destination, there's still a lot of discovery to be made along the way, but it's good to have something to know where you're going. I've always been inclined to have a plan when I work.
9.
What's the best advice you've ever received about writing?
I think one of the things that that really stuck with me and helped me a lot is just the trusting readers to get it you know, you not to over explain things. I think, particularly early in my career, I sometimes just would take a little too much time or drive a drive a point home one too many times. And I had a really good editor named Alison Callahan, who worked with me on my third novel set this house in order, which is also the longest of my novels, I believe. And she was just really good at pointing out Yeah, you've made this point. You don't need to make it again and you can you can trim this shorter and yeah, it's just sort of getting in tune with who you think is going to be reading the book and how they're going to perceive it and then trusting them to get the point and not over explaining is is important.
10.What's the best advice you've ever received about writing?
One of the things that that really stuck with me and helped me a lot is trusting readers to get it, not to over-explain things. Early in my career, I sometimes just would take a little too much time or drive a point home one too many times. I had a really good editor named Alison Callahan, who worked with me on my third novel "Set This House In Order", which is also the longest of my novels, she was really good at pointing out, "Yeah, you've made this point. You don't need to make it again" and "you can trim this shorter". It's just sort of getting in tune with who you think is going to be reading the book and how they're going to perceive it and then trusting them to get the point and not over-explaining is important. 12.
pg. 92, lines 7-8: "The Drowning Octopus," Hippolyta told him. "That's what Winthrop called it."
13.Jordan Peele’s production company “Monkeypaw Productions” along with Bad Robot productions and Warner Bros. Television were all involved in the TV Adaptation of “Lovecraft Country”. Could you talk about the genesis of that project? How did you discovered that the industry was interested in that particular book?
AfterLovecraft Country, the novel, came out, I started getting a lot of interest from Hollywood. One day my CA agent called and said, "This is kind of unusual, but Jordan Peele would like to talk to you," At the time, Jordan was known for comedy (he was working on Get Out and the trailer hadn't dropped yet). Apparently he wants to break into horror and he'd like to talk to me. This led to a phone conversation with me and Jordan and Misha Green who eventually became the show runner. I was more familiar with Misha's work because she had done the TV series "Underground", which is the Great Escape set on a slave plantation. I was really excited to have her involved, because she knew how to pitch this kind of idea to TV executives in a way that wouldn't scare them off. She's a great storyteller who knows how to sell these stories.We had a really good conversation where we were clearly all talking about the same story and we were all excited about it for the same reasons. By the time I was done talking with them, I was these are the right folks to do it. A few weeks later, the trailer did get out and as soon as I saw that, I started laughing because I knew why Jordan wanted to Lovecraft Country. We were on the same wavelength in terms of what we were trying to do with those two projects. I also could see from the trailer (Get Out) that it was going to be huge, and in turn, make it easy for him to pitch his next project, which was Lovecraft Country. That was how it started. I just got really lucky in terms of the timing, and I still don't know exactly who gave the book to Jordan Peele in the first place. From there, it became incredibly easy. Jordan optioned the book and HBO was happy to option it for a series. It went incredibly quickly from my perspective. I have been working as a writer for 30 years, and suddenly, I'm an overnight success with this one. I will be eternally grateful to Jordan and Misha for that.14. Did you ever consider writing the teleplay to Lovecraft country TV series?
No. I don't know how to write visually yet. I'm thinking about getting into screenwriting, but It's a different dialect than what you do in novels where you have to describe everything in a book. With film, it's less important to the visual aspects are really the provenance of the director and the the production designers. Whereas in a book, you've got to do everything yourself. I would not have been the right person for that. I don't know the language and don't really know how to translate it. Plus, It would've been too hard to recreate exactly what I've done on the page on the screen. That's where adaptation is much more interesting. Misha had her own ideas about what you wanted to do that were different from mine. Watching the TV show, I definitely recognize my novel in it, but it also departs significantly in certain ways and that's great. I found it a lot more interesting than seeing something that was just a carbon copy of my book. So, I wouldn't have been qualified to do that (writing the teleplay).
15.So was there any particular pool or memorable moments or visiting those on the set that you're working on tour
I did get to visit the site a couple of times and watch the filming of the block party scene in the pilot episode. I was there for that. And then my wife and I visited set down in Georgia for a couple of the later episodes. That was just a fun getting to see how the business work. It was not a working visit so much.
The first experience of being out (on set), they took two blocks of Southwest Chicago and turn the clock back to the 1950s with old cars, storefronts, and hundreds of extras in period costume and just to be standing out in the middle of that at midnight. It was a night shoot and they had the street from six in the evening until six in the morning and those were hard deadlines. It was nonstop filming in production the whole time and just to be standing out there in the middle of night watching this and realizing all this is happening because of this weird little story I made up in my room alone. That was an amazing experience. There was a moment during our second visit we were there. One of the episodes they were filming when your wife and I visited Georgia was the episode called "I Am", which is Hippolytus episode in the TV series and there's a scene where she's in bed with George and she's sort of claiming her name. It's a scene near the end of that episode. This is very moving. I remember we were nearby, we weren't on the actual stage, but we were close enough that we could hear it going on. It was an amazing thing to watch actress Aunjanue Ellis. She was amazing in that role so that was really moving for me. The whole experience kind of blew my mind just seeing how that was like. 16. Besides your work, which novel or short story or novella or even article would you like to see adapted into a film or TV series?
There are so many choices. One of my favorite authors is a guy named John Crowley and he has his most famous novel is called "Little, Big" and I think that would be an interesting thing to see filmed. It's a story about this family who lives on the edge of a wild fairy wood and it's a generational story. it's really interesting and I believe it has been optioned a couple of times, but it's just never been filmed. So, that would be a fun one to see. I'm sure I could come up with a dozen others. One thing I've learned from this experience is the amount of things that have to go right to bring anything to the screen is incredible. So, you just sort of marvel that anything gets made given the number of things that have to go right.
17. If you have your own talk show, who would be your first three guests?
Well, H.P. Lovecraft, obviously -- although as I noted in another interview, if you resurrected Lovecraft in the 21st century, culture shock would probably kill him again. Shirley Jackson, so I could annoy her by being a fanboy for an hour. And Bertrand R. Brinley, who wroteThe Mad Scientists' Club, one of my favorite books from childhood, so I could help him sell a few more copies.
18. If you have a T shirt with one word on it, and you have to wear it for the rest of your life. Which word would you choose?
It's not a word, but I think I'd go with TK, which is an editor's mark used as a placeholder for text that hasn't been written yet. I use it liberally in my own first drafts to avoid getting hung up on parts of the story that I'm still figuring out.
