American - Author | 1972 -
If the main character's not in jeopardy - physical, psychological, emotional, whatever - then you don't have any tension, and you don't have a story.
Stephen Graham Jones
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Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
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People shouldn't go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely.
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Jeans and sneakers are definitely best for the haunted house. They usually won't let you in with a mask, even. It makes sense. They need to be able to tell who the rubes are. And, sneakers are good because the ground's uneven, and you're running and falling and stepping on the slower of your friends.
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You have to want the haunted house to scare you. It completely steals your money to go through with one of those people who shrug it all off, who touch the monsters' faces to show they're fake.
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In 1990, I was an undergraduate freshman archeology major sneaking over to the English building and unearthing an amazing repository of books I'd never even suspected. By 1998, I'd have my Ph.D.
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You always want to read something that everybody says has gone too far, don't you? That's supposed to not just be charting our decline, but embodying it?
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Joe Lansdale is one of the few writers able to write in whatever genre or mode he wants on any particular day. How? He doesn't ask permission. He just steps in, out-writes everybody in the room.
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Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer.
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The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre.
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Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface's mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early '90s.
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My uncle Randall always had a book in his hand. He read in the car, he read at restaurants, he read when you were talking to him. He read lots of different things, but mostly it was Louis L'Amour's westerns and contemporary thrillers.
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