The Locus and Nebula winner spoke with Nerds of a Feather about his writing process, the varieties of horror, and why some monsters just want to be friends
Arturo Serrano: You seem to have created a solid niche for yourself as the writer who sympathizes with the monsters. Do you apply the same approach to classic monster stories? Do you look for an angle to empathize with Dracula or the xenomorphs?
John Wiswell: One of the things that compels me to write Fantasy and Science Fiction is finding the unexplored angles in worlds. We love rigorous worldbuilding that thoroughly explains what it is to live as a special hero or an average person in a fantastical world. But whose stories aren't told? Whose perspective is erased? This certainly extends to classic monster stories. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's creature is infamously sympathetic. But what is the life of a wraith trapped at a summer camp forever? The locals say that the shapeshifting lump at the bottom of the well is out to kill all humanity, but what is its point of view? How do we look through different eyes? That's fundamentally compelling to me, especially as someone who has spent most of his life feeling barely human. It's an invitation to care. And that is a great place for a story to begin.
AS: Do you generally come up with the plot first and then the monster, or the monster first and then the plot?
JW: The funny thing about monsters is I usually conceive them with contexts. Without a context, a dragon is just a dragon. Smaug has to have stolen the dwarves' home mountain and terrorized the lake men to be a monster. So when I created someone like Shesheshen for Someone You Can Build A Nest In, I immediately conceived of her as a shapeshifting creature trying not to blow her shot at a relationship with a wholesome nerd. When I created 133 Poisonwood Avenue for "Open House on Haunted Hill," it was simultaneously a haunted house, and a lonely one that was willing to be gentle and caring if a family would stay in it. The context of the creature tends to be part of its essence, for me. Their claws and fangs are just as important as their insecurities.
AS: As someone who'd rather hug the monsters than slay them, what do you actually find scary?
JW: The U.S. healthcare system.
AS: Your stories tend to have elaborate, poetic titles. Do you have a process for choosing titles?
JW: My approach is pretty simple! I'll open a text document, or live out the cliche of turning over an envelope to make a list. And then I will simply keep writing down title ideas, no matter how bad they are. The goal is to keep going. Do permutations on the same idea. Swap a blander or spicier verb in. Flip the syntax. If a wild idea comes up, write it down. Sometimes the very first title is perfect (Someone You Can Build A Nest In was the first title I had in mind for my book, and I never wanted to change it). Other times I'll have a screen full of titles that I think are all terrible, and only upon rereading it will I realize the thirteenth is the lucky one (this happened with "For Lack of a Bed" and "I'll Miss Myself"). The process works because it makes me get out of my own way, by forcing me to accept anything my internal critic might normally block.
AS: What is your process, as an aromantic writer, for putting yourself in the mental space of a character who is in love?
JW: I don't mean to disparage my alloromantic friends, but it is not hard to pick up on how romance works because it's ubiquitous. Sexuality and romance dominate this culture. It's in so many books, the subject of so many albums, so many advice columns, so many podcasts, so many weepy diatribes on stoops, so many embarrassing arguments people have on speaker phones in the dairy aisle... So if you're aromantic like me? You've probably heard about love already. And many aromantic writers still find romance interesting on one level or another, because it matters to people we care about, or because of some narrative hook. You know, some of my best friends are alloromantic! [Laughs] For me, a character's love arc comes from them organically. Many of my short stories have no love plots. My next novel has a little romance to it, but it's not central. Whereas in this book, for who Shesheshen was, how self-reliant she was, for how alone she was in the world and who she'd meet, for the toxic ideas of romance she was carrying and the growth that would require from her, it was purely natural that a huge part of her book would be a love story. I entered that mental space the same way she did: wary, confused, afraid she'd be hurt, and unable to not hope for the best. Because I cared about this character for all the other reasons in her life, I could go on that journey. And similarly I could go on that journey because of what it said about the need for companionship. What is said in a story can be as important as the characters. Sometimes you find yourself just wanting to write a supportive, loving married couple because you see so few of them in media and want to balance things out. Sometimes you want to capture how we change internally in relation to how we change with other people. I don't have to fall in love to understand change. I just have to care for all the people in my life who do. If I didn't care for those real people in my life, then I couldn't write anything.
AS: Last time we interviewed you, you described your creative process as "I eat darkness, and then spit out rainbows." Could you describe how that metabolism works?
JW: Ha! I love that way of posing this question. And it's a fair question. So I have a copy of Tananarive Due's The Reformatory. I'm excited to read it. I don't know what it's about, because Due is a great writer and I just trust her to deliver something that is good on its own terms. When I have the free time to read something that big, I'll take it off my shelf, and just read it, and discover its characters and premise and twists. I've heard it's in the region of Horror, if not a pure Horror novel, so I'll be ready for that sort of experience. And if it works on me, I'll enjoy the parts that work. The tone, the atmosphere, the character psychology, the social ramifications, the weird creeping things in the walls—whatever is there. But I'll also find myself wishing I could help the characters. Perhaps in mediating their fights. Perhaps in being able to stop by the side of the road when their car breaks down. Some things meant to be scary will inevitably be funny, because I'm not the one experiencing them. Some will be so shocking that they'll have a funny dimension, because shock and humor are similarly electric impulses. Things will spark. Some parts will be so grim that I'll ponder how light would change our understanding. Inevitably, I'll turn the story around in my mind, to look at it from imagined angles. Maybe that will mean I'll sympathize with a ghost or a werewolf, who to me reads as misunderstood. Or maybe it will mean I'll consider how some people taking responsibility rather than shunning it would change things, or imagine how different people's contexts would change the series of events. How could life bend towards justice? Towards empathy? Towards another end? None of this will diminish the book. Again, this is presuming the book is good, but when isn't a Due book good? They've all rocked so far. But if the book is good, considering it from angles that it doesn't consider will help me appreciate its structure and what it achieves. Meanwhile I'll carry a charge of inspiration, for how other worlds could treat people. I'll be pondering, and probably cackling, and reaching to read the next book on my list after The Reformatory. And then the next book, and the next. After enough books, and short stories, and movies, all of that fictional darkness will be counterpointed by enough light from my other angles that refraction is inevitable. And then I'll be writing something wholly different, while loving what everyone else made. That is the metabolism.
AS: You've sometimes shared details with the public about your lifelong experience with chronic pain. How does your day-to-day negotiation with your body inform your writing about characters with nonconventional anatomies?
JW: It's predisposed me for that, for sure! I have to be mindful of my body in ways other people aren't, and I've normalized awful pain, and exhaustion, and having conversations when I have brain fog. My body has turned on me in so many ways over my lifetime. I think that's also why I call some of my work Fantasy where other people see it as Body Horror. They see it from the outside, whereas to me, it's something more routine. It's a fun schism to discuss with readers.
AS: You've also spoken about the ways books saved your life. What do you hope your books will do for young readers today?
JW: It would be too much to ask that my stories save their lives, too, right? [Laughs] But my stories have already started to do what I hoped. A couple years ago I spoke on a panel about how being asexual makes some of us feel monstrous because we don't give people what they want, and afterward a young reader came up to me in tears because hearing me say that made her feel less alone. Since then I've seen an uptick in comments and emails from readers who have been in terrible times, and who felt companionship with my characters that helped them through their burdens. If a story can be there for someone when things are terrible? If it can make them feel less alone, even for an hour? Then I haven't just given someone a gift. They've given me a gift, by hanging in there, reading and fighting. I couldn't ask for more.
AS: Horror still has an ableism problem. What ways of symbolizing evil that don't fall back on the demonization of bodily deformities would you like to see in horror stories?
Beauty, handsomeness, and attractiveness are so underrated as villain traits. Historically they're tapped into for conveying a disliked group (gay-coded sexy vampires) or as a facade (Patrick Bateman looks put together, but is yet another evil "crazy" guy). I think depicting more antagonists as the beautiful, not as lust objects, but as people who feel they are above normal people physically, who wear the most expensive clothing, whose presentation drips of class that is unattainable by their victims, could do some powerful things. More damage is done to our world by people in designer suits than people in hockey masks.
AS: You take monsters and turn them into cuddly lovable characters. How do you feel about the ongoing trend of taking cuddly lovable characters (e.g. Winnie the Pooh) and turning them into monsters?
I feel like Horror has been turning lovable things into scary things for far longer than I've been turning a few monsters sympathetic. How many classic and pop songs do we have to hear slowed down and turned creepy before that becomes funny? How many children's toys have been smeared with blood, from Chucky to Annabelle to M3GAN? Clowns, who dedicate their lives to inspiring mirth, are the stuff of nightmares thanks to Pennywise and the Joker. Horror in particular has always sought to subvert what we're comfortable with in order to explore discomfort, and inequity, and the vulnerability of taking anything for granted. One of my favorite movies is Jaws, which is really just a great way to ruin the hobby of swimming for yourself. [Laughs] I love this stuff when it's done well, so long as we mind our biases. For instance, again I enjoy Jaws, but I deplore how it's inspired shark fishing. In Humans Vs. Sharks, we are decidedly the actual monsters.
AS: For your own reading, do you prefer science fiction that warns "let's not do this" or that offers "here's what we could do"?
"Let's not do this" is the standard formula for SciFi Horror, and I won't say I haven't read and watched plenty of that. Give me another techno-monster hunting its own engineers and I'll probably read it. Whereas "here's what we could do" inspires resistance and rebellion against tyranny. I thought it was so funny when YA Dystopias took off, and some of the old guard said they'd ruined dystopian fiction by giving the protagonists the opportunity of winning. But isn't that what we've needed? Stories of warning us against authoritarianism can't fully inoculate us against it ever happening. So we have stories of possibility in conflict, and of encouragement to not lie down and submit. In this way, I don't see the two flavors as in competition, so much as they both encourage kinds of vigilance.
AS: What stories have you read or watched that you think have done monsters right?
Well, there are many ways to get monsters right. John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In is one of my favorite Horror novels, and Eli is one of my favorite vampires. There is such powerful loneliness on display throughout that book, and the yearning for connection. But I wouldn't say Eli is the only way to write a vampire. The film 30 Days of Night is pretty darned intense and fun in its own way. John Fawcett's film Ginger Snaps does werewolves in a gruesome and fun way, although you could balance that with Mamoru Hosoda's Wolf Children, which is both charming and aching in its depiction of two werewolf cubs growing up with a human mother struggling to keep them safe. It's all about the angle of the story. John Gardner's Grendel is a crackling fun read that humanizes the monster from Beowulf, and makes his story not just tragic, but funny. And I'll never turn down a chance to rewatch Tremors.
AS: What are you reading these days?
JW: I'm halfway into Park Seolyeon's A Magical Girl Retires, which is a chewy little book about a heroine struggling with the desire to step away from the adventuring life. It riffs on the conventions of the Magical Girl genre, which I have a big soft spot for after watching so much Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura when I was younger. Before that, I just finished Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors, which you already know is one heck of a book. And I just got my copy of Arkady Martine's novel Rose/House, which I'm terrifically excited to start. Martine is such a splendid writer that I am sure she'll have a sparkling take on haunted houses in the era of smart homes. That is probably next!
Thank you, John, for taking the time for this interview.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
