An upcoming genre author having participated in several anthologies and full-length novels, Ben Monroe has gathered several promising accolades and accomplishments that have positioned him as a voice to watch in the genre. Now, in honor of his upcoming book "The Seething" being released, I talk with him about his early writing, the style and approach he takes with his work, and the book itself.
Me: Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this. First off, when did you get into horror in general?
Ben Monroe: Hi! Thanks for inviting me to chat with you.
In all honesty, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in monsters and horror of some sort. One of my earliest memories is of going to see a revival showing the original King Kong with my dad when I was probably 5 or so. I loved watching monster movies of all sorts on the local Creature Features show, and one of our local channels showed things like the old Universal monsters every Saturday afternoon.
I recall seeing the trailer for the original Star Wars in a theater when I was around 6, and getting super excited about the idea of a sci-fi movie with a wolfman in it (Chewbacca, of course).
Me: Were you into genre films growing up? What films specifically got you into watching horror movies?
BM: Absolutely! As I mentioned above, the Universal classics, and other old black-and-white movies, were my bread and butter growing up. I remember loving Frankenstein and the Wolfman the most of all of them. The local channel I mentioned above was stuffed full of weird old movies like Robot Monster, The Monolith Monsters, Them!, and their ilk. When I got a little older, I started watching more modern films, like The Omen, and The Exorcist when they were broadcast on local TV.
At a friend’s birthday party one year, he rented the movie Phantasm, and it completely floored me. The gore was a little much, but it was such a great roller coaster. After that, I started watching more “modern” films. Which, fortunately, coincided with the video boom, so I had access to a wide range of movies. When I got into High School, I made friends with one of the guys at the local video store, and he’d let me rent pretty much whatever I wanted. He was also really into horror, and would often suggest movies for me to watch.
Me: Who were some of your favorite writers growing up? Do you try to take influences from their style with your own voice in your work?
BM: So, I was one of those weird kids who discovered people like Tolkien and Lovecraft pretty early. I think I read The Hobbit when I was 6 years old and discovered Lovecraft a couple of years later. Over the next few years, I read a lot of fantasy, a little sci-fi, and all the Lovecraft I could get my hands on. Fortunately, I had a good library in my neighborhood. When I hit my teen years, I found myself getting into Stephen King a bit, and became a big fan of Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, and Anne Rice.
When I was in college in the 90s, the Abyss line of books landed pretty hard, and I got into writers like Kathe Koja, Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin Kiernan, and others.
I’m sure all of them, and everything else I’ve ever read have influenced me in some ways. I love the way King and Tolkien make a setting come alive. Lovecraft and Barker’s limitless imaginations inspire me. I also read a lot of Ursula LeGuin as a kid, and I’ve always appreciated her ability to tell a compelling story, no matter how dreamlike and strange they get.
Me: What was the starting point of becoming a writer? Were you always into writing growing up?
BM: Yes, and no. I was always a storyteller growing up but didn’t get into writing for a while. I played a lot of fantasy and horror role-playing games through my youth and more often than not was the game master. The person who comes up with the ideas for the adventures, and presents them to the players. Which might not seem super-relevant, but it gave me a lot of time telling stories face-to-face with people, and learning what sorts of things are interesting, and what loses their interest.
After graduating High School, I went to work for a company that published RPGs. I ran their shipping and warehouse for a year or so, and then they decided to move me into publications. While there, I learned a little bit about book publishing but also started doing editorial and writing.
I left that company to go back to college. After college, I started getting work and I found myself falling back on my game company experience more than my college degree. Notably in the realm of copy and technical writing. My first novel and short story collection (one book, containing both 8 short stories and one novel) sort of grew out of all that. I was hired by a game company to write some content for their new Lovecraft-themed board game. Then they asked me to write a few short stories to accompany marketing material for the game. And they liked that enough to ask me to write a whole tie-in novel. I often say that my first novel was the result of a copywriting gig suffering from extreme “scope-creep.”
Me: What is your writing process? How do you stay focused on writing?
BM: My process is fairly fluid, and currently evolving. I don’t try and write at the same time every day, because my schedule is malleable enough that I’m not always given free time at the same time.
I try to carve out an hour or so each day to write, in any case. One thing that really helps me a lot is to have focus features turned on on my devices. A way to just shut out the outside world for an hour or so with the flip of a switch.
Once I’ve settled in to write, I find it helps a lot to begin by rereading what I wrote in the previous session in order to remind me of where I was going. I also try to end each session on an open end for me, so I’m curious and excited to come back to the page the next time.
I also suffer from extreme tinnitus, so I tend to have music playing in my earbuds to drown that out to allow me to concentrate. Film and game scores are great for getting into the “zone” for writing. I have a playlist of a bunch of great horror scores I listen to. I think the trick with them is to listen to something without lyrics, and also films I’m not super-familiar with, so I’m not distracted.
Me: Having contributed to various anthologies early in your career, what tools and skills do you acquire working on those that transferred to future projects?
BM: A few years ago, I took up running as a way to force myself to get out of the house and get some exercise. I pretty quickly drew a connection between writing and running. Short stories are like sprints: quick bursts of energy to get you from point A to point B quickly. Novels are like marathons or endurance races: you must pace yourself, and enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
I find that writing short stories is done best when I can bang out a first draft in just a few days. Never more than a week. Editing and polishing may take much longer than that, of course. But if I take more than a few days on a short piece, I start to lose focus.
Novels are a different thing altogether. They need room to breathe, to explore. Although in the two novels I’ve written (and I’m now working on a third) I find that sometimes individual chapters are written almost in the way I do short stories.
Oh, and I should note that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool “panster.” I never outline my fiction writing. I come up with some characters, or a situation, or sometimes an endpoint, and write the piece to find out how it gets there.
Me: What is the general process for getting involved in these projects?
BM: I follow a lot of genre publishers on Twitter and Facebook. I’m also subscribed to a bunch of their newsletters, and a few Facebook groups which post open calls for upcoming short fiction.
My system is pretty much to keep an eye out for open calls for stories, and if an idea hits me and I can’t shake it, I write something to submit. I never write for an anthology theme unless I’m excited about it. What’s the point? A lack of enthusiasm will show in the writing.
Of course, my stories don’t always get into these books (I have two or three stories that have been rejected four or five times each, but I’m still looking for homes for them). But I’ve sold and published about a dozen short stories over the last few years, so I think I must be doing something right.
Me: How did you settle on the plot for your new novel "The Seething?"
BM: A few years ago, I was hiking around a lake near my house in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’d been in the middle of a pretty bad drought, and I was noticing how low the water in the lake was getting. At some point, I found myself thinking “You know, if there were a monster in that lake, it’d be a lot closer to the surface now.”
That got me thinking about what would happen if ecological trauma forced a monster to leave its habitat, and try and find some new place to live. "The Seething" took a few turns away from that idea along the way, but the core of it is still there.
When I started writing it, I threw a few characters at the idea, and just went along for the ride.
Me: Was there any special significance to making the characters engage in a troublesome vacation gone wrong?
BM: I think vacations sort of always put people off-kilter. You’re trying to relax, but you’re not really sure where everything is. That’s sort of alleviated here by Gabe (one of the main characters) because he grew up in this house, in this town. But for everyone else, they don’t 100% know the lay of the land, or what to expect from the local folks.
Really, it was sort of a way to instill a little bit of isolation in the main characters.
Me: Was there any part of your real self injected into the characters?
BM: Oh, inevitably. When I first started writing "The Seething," I’d been between jobs for longer than I’d liked. I was feeling sort of lost and aimless much like Gabe was. Gabe also spends a lot of time in the book wondering about Kimmie (his daughter) and what was going on in her world. My kids were approaching teenagerhood at the time, and I was also doing a lot of soul-searching as far as how my relationship with them was evolving and changing.
I guess in many ways, writing this book over a couple of years sort of helped keep me grounded on something concrete. Especially when COVID hit, and suddenly my kids were doing school from home, and I was supervising that.
Me: What difference, if any, in your style did you find between this and your previous writings?
BM: I mentioned earlier that my first novel was written on contract as a game tie-in. I had some basic parameters I needed to fulfill for that project. "The Seething" was whole cloth out of my own fevered imagination, so didn’t have any of that baggage. I found myself sort of wandering in my mind, thinking about trips and experiences I’ve had over the years, and metabolizing them into bits of this story.
I was also broadening my horizons as a reader at the time. I’d started reading a bunch of westerns, and a few John Steinbeck novels and sort of fell in love with the way they described the natural world. A lot of "The Seething" is influenced by that, I’m sure. Steinbeck especially, as a lot of his work is set in roughly the same Northern California areas I like to write about. I spent a lot of time trying to describe the mountainous regions of Northern California, the lake and town where the story is set, and all that good stuff. Really trying to give a reader a good vision of this area.
Me: Once it was finally written, what was the process for having it published?
BM: When the first draft was complete, I closed the file and didn’t look at it again for two months. Worked on short stories and didn’t think about "The Seething" at all. When I came back to it, I did so with fresh eyes. I think I hacked off about 20,000 words right out of the gate, eliminating and compressing a few chapters early on which just slowed things down. Then it was a few months of honing and polishing before I even considered showing it to other people.
I fiddled and muddled with it over a few months, and then pitched it in the #PITDARK pitching party on Twitter in the fall of 2021. A few different agents, editors, and publishers expressed interest. In the end, Brigids Gate made me an offer I was happiest with. And since I’d had a previous track record with them by having sold a few short stories to their anthologies, I was excited to work with them in getting this book out into the world.
Me: How did moving from short stories to full-length novels challenge your writing skills?
BM: I mentioned above that I sort of learned to write short stories at the same time I did novels. Really what I’ve learned over the last few years about writing a novel is that it’s important to just take it in bite-sized pieces. Not to rush it, and give it time to grow in whatever direction it needs to.
Me: How do you do to keep your creative energy flowing?
BM: I’m a big fan of what Julia Cameron called “artist dates.” Which is pretty simple, just making time to be creative, maybe not in a way related to writing (or whatever your “main” creative endeavor is). Sometimes I’ll just go to the craft store, and spend a few dollars on some supplies to make something transitory. Or take an afternoon to go for a walk in nature, and just observe the world around me (as noted previously, The Seething was inspired by such a hike). Spending time with my family, going to the movies, playing games with friends, or reading are all great ways to refill the creative well.
Me: Lastly, what else are you working on that you'd like to share with our readers? Thank you again for your time!
BM: I’ve got a few short stories I’m working on right now, as well as a new novel. Don’t want to say too much about that one, as it’s still early stages. But it’s an idea that hit me a few years ago and has elements of a few different things I’ve been thinking about for probably my entire life. I’m excited to see where it goes!
Aside from that, readers can always see what I’m up to at my website www.benmonroe.com. I’ve got a blog there which I update semi-occasionally. The site also contains links to find me on social media, if anyone’s interested.
And thank you for taking the time to chat with me, and ask such great questions. I really appreciate your interest in my work.
Comments
Post a Comment