A Conversation with Brent Monahan
by Beecher Smith

 

Brent J. Monahan is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, mostly in the horror-mystery-suspense genres, including THE BOOK OF COMMON DREAD and its sequel, THE BLOOD OF THE COVENANT, which was released in paperback in October of 1996. His latest novel, THE BELL WITCH (St. Martin's Press), regarding a celebrated, extensively documented poltergeist occurrence in Adams, Tennessee, early in the nineteenth century, was released March 1, 1997. His short stories have appeared in ROBERT BLOCH'S PSYCHOS, MONSTERS FROM MEMPHIS, and MORE MONSTERS FROM MEMPHIS.

 

SMITH: Brent, we've both seen some extremely successful authors like Larry Brown of Oxford, Mississippi, who aren't very erudite but manage to tell a wonderful story with a unique voice. This is largely attributed to his personal experiences as a fireman and how he relates them to his readers. How do you feel about that?

MONAHAN: One of my major beliefs is that fiction writers should be basing most of their writing upon real life experience because most people aren't willing to invest the time to sit down and work hard at creating situations or characters. I think that's been proven, for example, by Mario Puzo. He authored THE GODFATHER, which is really just an amalgam of the New York Cityfamiglie and, when he tried to do other things it just didn't have the breath of life in it and it didn't ring true. Same thing with TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee. I'm now hearing some very disturbing stuff about it. That's my favorite novel and, in point of fact, not only was Truman Capote a cousin of Harper Lee, he may have done a lot of heavy duty editing on it. That may be why she never wrote another novel. We may be seeing a lot of Truman Capote in that novel. He is Dill in that novel. Isn't that amazing?

SMITH: It is. I love books that take me to another world, one I haven't been to before, and one which fascinates me. The book may scare me, it may amuse me, but it must definitely entertain me. Having read two of your books, I found them definitely entertaining. What got you started on the vampiric theme?

MONAHAN: I guess because it's one of the most durable in horror. It won't die for many reasons: Fear of death, fear of contagion, fear of sex, lots of other things. The thing that most made me approach vampirism was reality. I'd read it and read it and read it. Even with the ancient legends, I said, "Couldn't be! No one would purposely make a deal with the devil that would enable him to live a thousand years in exchange for an existence which required him not to expose himself to the light of the sun and to live in a coffin filled with dirt--Can you imagine how uncomfortable that must be?--to rise at night only to suck on people's throats and maybe, maybe have a little sex. People only know they want to live--they fail to think ahead to realize how boring that might be.

SMITH: Your vampires in THEBOOK OF COMMON DREAD and THE BLOODOF THE COVENANT follow tenets much more closely aligned to the concepts of vampires originally reported in central and eastern Europe--the traits reported by Father Dom Augustine Calmet and others in the eighteenth century claiming the actual existence of vampires. They described members of the undead who still had human cravings, in particular for food and sex in addition to blood.

MONAHAN: My concept is really more Faustian than vampiric because you have to make a deal. If not with the devil, then some otherworldly power that wants to remind you constantly that you are in its thrall by making you drink blood, which is the inverse of Christ. You drink His blood to save your life in the afterlife. But in this situation, this life, you are forced to drink human blood to serve the Antichrist.

SMITH: Your two vampiric novels center around ancient scrolls which contain and reveal this secret, called the Ahriman Scrolls. They bear one of the oldest names for the Devil, "Ahriman." How did you come up with the idea for the Ahriman Scrolls?

MONAHAN: I needed what Alfred Hitchcock used to call a "McGuffin." He couldn't remember from one film to the next what the thing was that people were chasing--whether it was a Maltese Falcon or a ridiculous thing called the Letters of Transit, which don't make any sense--but everybody always has to chase it. So, in this case, my McGuffin was these scrolls predicting imminent doom for the world, which the devil could not allow to be exposed.

SMITH : Well, you certainly know how to keep your readers in suspense until the very end. Now, you live in Yardley, Pennsylvania?

MONAHAN : Right.

SMITH : .. And that ’ s very close to Princeton, isn't it?

MONAHAN: Yes, well, I used to live in Princeton, too. So, this once again goes back to what I had to say in the beginning. Some people would say, "Well, isn't that a ridiculous statement in talking about writing from experience? How can you write horror from experience--horror doesn't exist! It's speculative fiction. But my tenet is to surround my novel with as much truth as possible to suspend the audience's--the reader's--disbelief. So that they're constantly saying, "Yes, yes, yes, I understand. It's the same situation I've seen firsthand before: I've been in that town; I know where that cemetery is; I've eaten at that restaurant. People behave that way. Yes, yes, yes, yes." And then, into that frame of reference, to throw in the supernatural and really scare them.

SMITH: You get them settled into reality and then pull the rug out from under them. Your premise is to build a three dimensional world, a believable world, and then, to scare your reader, inject something horrific into that world where the reader is already snared. Then the reader can't get out until the writer, through the resolution of the tale, takes him out.

MONAHAN: That's one of Stephen King's stronger points. In fact, he bludgeons it to death because he goes for an easy reference like a Coca Cola bottle. He uses lots of trade names and so forth. Every reader knows what a Coca Cola bottle is.

SMITH: You have mixed feelings about Stephen King, don't you?

MONAHAN: Yes. I originally liked Stephen King a great deal, even though I knew what he was--a master writer with a twelve-year-old boy's sensibilities. Most of the time he's saying, "Gee, look at this insect on the ground. I wonder what it would do if we ripped its wings off and threw it on a hot car hood." That's the kind of horror he creates. I liked him until he became editor-proof. In situations such as the second release of THE STAND, he now effectively says, "Look, I'm really angry that I was edited in the past. So now, I'm going to throw back many hundreds of pages of previously edited out material." That basically flies in the face of a process I think is very worthwhile, provided your editor is competent. I happen to think King ’ s early editor was.

SMITH: It seems the purpose of an editor is to help the writer make the manuscript more marketable, but large publishing houses have gotten away from that now. The writer no longer receives the support from editors he allegedly got twenty years ago.

MONAHAN: Amen. Now a lot of times the editor's job seems to be only to hold your hand and to go out to lunch with you. I have twice had good editing. Early in my career I did not. In point of fact, with my first novel, which I co-authored, we got a great deal of money up front, but virtually no editing by the company, which was a very wealthy start-up company that had a lot of money but no expertise in their house. We hired, right in Princeton, Fletcher Knebel's wife Laura. He co-authored SEVEN DAYS IN MAY. She was a well known editor in New York City. We paid out of our pockets to get good editing. Even in that case, the editing wasn't particularly good because she really wasn't a fiction novel editor. But I recognized the need at the time and she filled it best under the circumstances. Excellent editing comes along rarely.

SMITH: It's becoming a lost art, almost like good writing.

MONAHAN: I would think so, at least from my experience.

SMITH: Do you see a corollary between what's happening in the movies today, with this incredible emphasis on the box office gross receipts on opening week compared with the releases of books and what they're supposed to do within the first month after release?

MONAHAN: Yes. The real horror story that's going on now is the consolidation of all enterprises for economic reasons. This certainly touches upon an author's ability to sell out of the gate because, now, computers keep track of how many books are sold. That's public record. If you only sell 40,000 paperbacks from your first book, you won't get a print run bigger than 40,000 for your second book, no matter how much better the theme, the writing, or the plot is. You get nailed in there. So, if you don't come out of the gate fast, it's almost an impossibility to climb. I don't know if it was happening back then, but I do know that Elmore Leonard was constantly in the mid-range of hard back. I guess that's about 7,500 copies. It was years and years before they took a chance on him. He'd even had a couple of movies made and was somewhere up near his twentieth novel before he really made it because of this system.

SMITH: Talk about mid-life crisis! Mid-list crisis may be even worse.

MONAHAN: Right.

SMITH: There's the old story that, out of each ten books published, only two will be financially successful, but they all start out on the same footing--all equally appraised potential winners by the publisher.

MONAHAN: I think to a certain extent it's luck. To a larger extent it's who you know, especially with the so-called literary novel where people from Princeton, Harvard, Wellesley, and Smith are writing these very self-absorbed novels but they know people in New York City. So these things are coffee table successes. I know a situation where a connected young Ivy League student worked as a doorman one summer in New York City and got an obscene amount of money for his memoirs, if you can believe it. Otherwise you can be condemned to the midlist forever. What unfortunately happens is that when a good agent will "auction" an author, sort of sight unseen on the merits of the novel, what's known as a "feeding frenzy" happens in New York where virtually all the publishing goes on. And it will bid up this one book into the hundreds of thousands range, which means that every author in the midlist has to support it because, if the publisher bid several hundred thousand up front, he ’ s then got to put considerable advertising money behind it. So that may even double the cost of that novel. Once that happens, if it doesn't pay out, then it will have to be carried on the backs of perhaps dozens of midlist people who will get not a cent for advertising.

SMITH: And advertising is what moves books today, is it not?

MONAHAN: Yes. It is so bad now that--

SMITH: We want to think that good writing moves books, but it's advertising that does it.

MONAHAN: Well, word of mouth will work with the extraordinary novel, but that doesn't happen very often. Sometimes people will push the novel themselves. They'll go around the country in their car and get it started, but advertising is generally what does it. It's reached such a place now, that the general public doesn't realize the houses are paying for the front ten to fifteen feet of a bookstore. They're paying an excise over the forty-five to fifty percent or greater discounts that they're giving the megastores. They're also paying for front shelf space. That's how important that is.

SMITH: The premise that James Michener gave over ten years ago, that America is a great country--you can make a fortune as a writer you just can't make a living at it-- still holds true, doesn't it?

MONAHAN: That's still true. Same with Hollywood. When I had a movie made through a Hollywood producer, he said exactly the same thing. He said, "You can get rich in this business, but it's very difficult to make a living."

SMITH: What was the movie?

MONAHAN: I won't say because the movie was a bigger horror than the subject of the book. Eventually it sold to a Canadian bank that had foreclosed on a motion picture company and bankers made the movie. I'll let you just imagine what happened after that.

SMITH: It must be like lawyers trying to dictate culture--it just doesn't work well.

MONAHAN: Yeah, that's right. It's like what Samuel Johnson said about women preachers, comparing them to a dog dancing on its hind legs--

SMITH: --The amazement comes not that it does it badly, but that it does it at all--

MONAHAN: Exactly.

SMITH: I think it was Mencken who said no one ever went broke under-estimating the tastes of the American public.

MONAHAN: Well, I hope that my public at least has pretty good taste. I don't write--and unfortunately my wife is very angry at me because I don't--for a front list audience. I write to please myself, since this is my avocation. She would like me to really pander and try to mimic the field, but then most wisdom says that mimicking the field doesn't guarantee anything either. Usually you're six months to two years behind the market demand.

SMITH: That's like trying to hit a moving target, when people try to write like Dean Koontz or Stephen King.

MONAHAN: Exactly. And there is only one Dean Koontz and one Stephen King. It's like the unfortunate guy who looks and sounds exactly like Elvis. He can't make a living even though he's talented.

SMITH: So people who do that either end up getting out of the business or finding their own voice, or their own role, eventually.

MONAHAN: They have to.

SMITH: Dean Koontz has given some excellent advice to aspiring writers in the horror genre and in general. He's said to avoid being part of any school of writing, to be true to your own voice, avoid conventions, stay home and write, trust no agent to fully understand your vision. He says betrayal is routine, to expect resistance, indifference, callousness, bad advice, incompetence, deceit and corruption. He also admonishes to persevere, write for the sheer joy of writing, strictly for the love of it.

MONAHAN: Mr. Koontz is a wise man, but he also holds the high ground of having made a lot of money.

SMITH: Well, at least he never left his readers in the middle of a novel like Stephen King did in THE WASTE LANDS.

MONAHAN: Not that I know of. Of course, I don't read that much horror myself. I don't find that reading horror informs my novels.

SMITH: Do you consider yourself a writer in the horror genre?

MONAHAN: No. There's an excellent essay on the nature of horror by Douglas Winter. You can still get it in the paperback called PRIME EVIL. His tenet is that very great writing--such as the works of Dostoyevsky and Hugo--contains elements of horror. It ’ s not some easily labeled and pigeonholed second-rate genre. It's best to read the preface to that book, too, because I don't want to redefine what he is saying. I also don't like the niche of horror because I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the Philadelphia Writers' Conference and the woman who invited me said that I was the darling of the selection committee, but that they had one request: when I did my keynote speech, that I not mention anything about horror because it was too declasse. People didn't want to admit its existence. Well, I had to mention horror. Turned out everybody was reading it and everybody loved it, so that didn't really work. But just the term "horror" has such negative connotations that not only don't I use it, but I tell myself what I'm writing is something different from that. I think it's more apt to describe it as supernatural thrillers. I craft a lot of mystery in them, also a lot of adventure.

SMITH: Mystery is the staple that has consistently sold, until recently when romance overtook it. Mystery has historically been the mainstream of publishers. Now romance is, of course, pushing it aside.

MONAHAN: Mysteries are "the normal recreation of the noble mind."

SMITH: But mystery requires cerebral exercise. At least good mystery does. I don't know about romance. Romance is much more of an emotional thing.

MONAHAN: The mystery demands some participation by the reader. Another nice thing that a well-written mystery novel tries to do is educate the reader simultaneously about some aspects of the world. So I take them on travelogues or tell them how to find somebody who's impossible to find, throwing in at the same time tons of arcane but interesting minutiae.

SMITH: For example, how close is the security system in the rare manuscripts section of the Princeton library you described in THE BOOK OF COMMON DREAD to the actual security system at the Princeton library? Is that an exact replication?

MONAHAN: Not at all. But I was able to get my hands on the blueprints for that library, so every door is in the right place. However, the rare manuscripts room is not in the same place, so, anybody who wants to get their hands on a rare manuscript, don't use my novel for a roadmap.

SMITH: What was your first book that was published?

MONAHAN: My first book was called DEATHBITE. Actually, my first book in print was my doctoral dissertation, which is still in print, but I don't think my readers will care too much about that.

SMITH: In which discipline was that?

MONAHAN: In music.

SMITH: You have a doctorate in music from where?

MONAHAN: Indiana University at Bloomington.

SMITH: Was that in instrumental or vocal?

MONAHAN: Vocal.

SMITH: Do you still sing?

MONAHAN: I do on occasion. I made my living for a while doing that, but it's a precarious living.

SMITH: I could imagine.

MONAHAN: Maybe even more precarious than being a horror writer.

SMITH: Your day job is with Peterson's.

MONAHAN: Right. Peterson's is the premier provider, both in print and on the Web, of information for making life-long educational and career decisions.

SMITH: You're a fairly important official, aren't you?

MONAHAN: Oh, I suppose. I'm in charge of the higher education division.

SMITH: Does that require you to travel a lot?

MONAHAN: I guess I go out on the road about a half dozen times a year, maybe twenty days or so.

SMITH: But you don't have to call on customers as a routine?

MONAHAN: I go to the conferences and conventions and I represent the publishing house.

SMITH: You've had quite an interesting career going from singing to a white collar executive's position.

MONAHAN: That's true. I came to Peterson s’ s on a lark, part time because I was a child of the Sixties--from Rutgers University, which they used to call the " Berkley of the East." Bombing Englehardt Industries was our favorite activity. And all business was Evil. I got into this because I was writing for ABC daytime serial television, which everybody thinks of as the "soaps." You're not allowed to say that there, of course. I was a dialogue writer, so it allowed me quite a lot of free time. Because nobody could "come out and play with me in the daytime," I was getting a little bored, so I took a part time job.

SMITH: At Peterson's?

MONAHAN: Right. And I found that a company which deals with business and academia and helps people find the right educational and career slot for themselves was actually quite rewarding. Talking to academicians is great for a writer because I gained so many links all around the country. Now, if I need some forensic information, I can pick up the phone and call a friend and get the state of the art answer.

SMITH: Did you ever have a time when you weren't into writing and went back to it? Or did you write constantly?

MONAHAN: I wrote constantly. What I did was make the same mistake as another "soap opera writer" named Victor Miller, who has his degree from an Ivy League school. I don't know how much I should say about this because Victor might get mad at me, but Victor was trying to do the same thing as I was, trying to write the great American novel, you know--very heavy duty Fitzgerald type of work for a prolonged time. On a lark he wrote one of those classic horror movies that became-and I won't say the name, but it went from "I" through "XIII"--and Victor still steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that he did that. But high flown prose was what I was trying to do for about five or six years. I'd write serious stuff and everybody would say, "This is unpublishable. The public isn't interested in this kind of thing. The words are too big."

SMITH: Sort of like the dilemma Sir Arthur Sullivan found himself in--he and Gilbert could write the most wonderful operettas which would be wildly commercially successful, but nobody would consider Sullivan as a "serious" composer.

MONAHAN: Probably for the same reasons that they didn't publish my serious novels--because Sir Arthur Sullivan was a second-rate serious composer. W. S. Gilbert is one of my bon mot heroes for saying, "Actors paint, but seldom draw."

SMITH: His lyrics are timeless.

MONAHAN: I agree that they transcend time. They're not Shakespeare, but they're the next best thing, at least as far as musical comedy. It's hard to imagine that things can be as germane as they still are after 125 years.

SMITH: Don't you think that Gilbert and Shakespeare were both successful because they were writing words that were intended to be spoken to people with very short attention spans?

MONAHAN: Probably. Shakespeare certainly knew how to pander to an audience. Meanwhile, they were getting the highest quality stuff you could think of.

SMITH: Even Shakespeare had his critics.

MONAHAN: Mel Brooks said, when asked about critics, "They make nice noise when they rub their hind legs together."

SMITH: Tell me, you didn't start out with the vampiric, but moved into it. THE BOOK OF COMMON DREAD was like your second or third published novel.

MONAHAN: It was my fourth published novel. After about seven years of writing really high-falutin' stuff, on a lark, in about six weeks, strictly part time, I wrote a novel about a very frustrated classical singer who--this is truly Faustian--would do anything to improve his life. His mentor, who is a very strange coloratura soprano, dies in a plane crash at sea, but keeps coming back to him at night as a sort of succubus. Every time she comes back, she gives him a pointer that improves his voice. But the dream sex becomes more and more sadistic, and horrific things are happening around him. The whole point of the novel is: just how far are you willing to sell out for fame and fortune? It ended quite well.

SMITH: What was the name of that novel?

MONAHAN: It's called SATAN'S SERENADE.

SMITH: Was that the predecessor to THE BOOK OF COMMON DREAD?

MONAHAN: No. The direct predecessor was my favorite child, called THE UPRISING. That one's based on a visit I took to see relatives in Ireland, where I immersed myself in Irish legend and fairy tales. Basically the point of this novel, although I have loaded it up so much it's sometimes hard to see the point, is the intolerance of religion and how religion has probably caused more division in human existence than help, at least organized religion has.

SMITH: Now, you've got a new one coming out very soon, don't you?

MONAHAN: Right. It's coming out in March and called THE BELL WITCH. This one deals with the most celebrated poltergeist haunting in the United States and the only one which ostensibly involves the death of a person.

SMITH: And it's in my home state.

MONAHAN: It's in Tennessee. In Adams, Tennessee. It occurred between 1817 and 1821. What I have done is "unearth" yet another journal. This one is penned by the teacher who lived in that town, which goes well beyond the [two existing] diaries used for source materials and explains exactly the horrific naissance of this poltergeist's being and why it haunted someone literally to death.

SMITH: Is this historical fiction, nonfiction, or a novel?

MONAHAN: Let ’ s call it "faction." The ultimate roman-a-clef, I would say. It's virtually 95% as recorded in several books--two diaries and a book by a woman who uses her initials (M. V. Ingram). In the Nineteenth Century women didn't want to be recognized, so they used their initials. Ms. Ingram collected all the accounts of the neighbors who had witnessed this as well. These events are extremely well documented.

SMITH: There are certain techniques people use to make poltergeists interesting. In the original movie POLTERGEIST they drew upon the idea that poltergeists are more than just kinetic energy, that they represent some force of intelligent, evil, undead spirits.

MONAHAN: That's a bit much. In most cases a poltergeist is as it's defined in German, a "rackety ghost." But there is no ghost. Usually during the change from girlhood to womanhood, at the beginning of menses, there is in some women the phenomenal outputting of tremendous psychic energy, which evidently can telekinetically affect things in some very strange cases like this one. It goes well beyond noises. In this case, I think it was a combination of THE THREE FACES OF EVE and the abnormal poltergeist thing--she was able to superimpose upon it a multiple set of supposedly ghostly characters, each with its own voice, an amazing thing. This was very much like the Epworth Ghost that haunted the Wesley family, the founders of Methodism. The daughter was jealous of the reputation of the father and the son, and subconsciously created this so-called ghost. I think that's what this young lady in Tennessee, this Betsy Bell, did. She subconsciously created a spirit to literally hound her father to death.

SMITH: Is the format of your book a novel?

MONAHAN: For all intents, if you picked up this book you would not think it was a novel. You would think it was an account from 1842.

SMITH: It's amazing, when you talk about building a three-dimensional world, it does seem sometimes that the things which happen in the real world are stranger than anything anybody could dream up. The Holocaust, for example--who would dream that Germany, the country which produced Beethoven and Kant, would also produce Hitler?

MONAHAN: He was an Austrian. But Mozart was too. It is amazing what the human mind, what ranges of behavior human kind is capable of. I mention at the end of this novel how Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a young man was able to attend the Sistine Chapel Mass. The Pope Marcellus Mass was taught to their choir voice by voice, then destroyed so it could not be performed anywhere else. He heard it once, then went back to his room and wrote the whole thing down from memory. We have no knowledge, really, of the extent of the powers of the human mind. I think that this young woman plumbed the depths of certain horrific powers.

SMITH: I wonder how far writers can take their readers and keep their credibility. Look at Stephen King's THE STAND, how he gets his readers to accept a post-apocalypse world. It's a tremendous challenge. When a writer succeeds in achieving the willing suspension of disbelief on a prolonged basis from the readers, then a successful novel has been accomplished.

MONAHAN: I agree. Toward this end, I visited the Bell Witch locale. I immersed myself in the writing from that period. I stole phrases and sentences, and St. Martin's Press was even kind enough even to print it in the look and print style of the Nineteenth Century.

SMITH: You mean with the "f's" for "s's" and things like that? Because if it does, the readers will really get lost.

MONAHAN: No, not that bad. That's more like Eighteenth Century, you "filly fot."

SMITH: It's interesting that those who write in the horror genre range from a few who actually believe in the supernatural to many who are basically cynical and use it to earn their bread and butter. Where does Brent Monahan stand in that spectrum?

MONAHAN: I generally disbelieve everything. I know where these things come from, like the myths of the centaur and the werewolf. I know about xeroderma pigmentosum, X-P, connected with the vampire myth. There are origins to all these things. One of the origins of the vampire was from the premature burial.

SMITH: And porphyria.

MONAHAN: Yes. So, I don't believe in much to do with the supernatural. Being a disbeliever, I don't place much credence in reincarnation. However, when I was over in Ireland and stood on a site that had a village about 11,000 years before Christ, I had the most overwhelming sensation that I had stood there before. I guess my mind is open enough at least to speculate upon these things--without believing most of them.

SMITH: You're a good rationalist. You would have fared well in the Age of Reason.

MONAHAN: I think that's what makes my writing compelling. Most people read a horror book for the same reason they get on a roller coaster. They want a good scary ride. They also are like my daughter, who is afraid to climb to the top of the jungle gym bars because she might get hurt, but she'll get on the steepest roller coaster in the world. When I ask her why, she'll reply, "Look, Dad, they wouldn't build them if people would get hurt." So she puts herself in the hands of the roller coaster builder and feels perfectly safe--"

SMITH: But won't trust herself on the jungle gym bars.

MONAHAN: Exactly. People know that the world is horrific. They may step outside their front door and take a bullet in the head from a drive-by shooting. But reading horror is a very safe, vicarious way to get your thrills. I want to do the very best I can to help them along. As a rationalist, I am constantly saying, "This is real; this is real; this is real. And then I just push them over the edge and let them free fall for a while.

SMITH: Despite parts of DRACULA which are simply atrocious writing from a stylistic perspective, people who critique it generally agree that what carries the day for the novel is Bram Stoker's credible presentation of an otherwise incredible subject. He spent seven years researching and writing the book. Although he didn't go to Transylvania, he got every resource available to familiarize himself with his subject.

MONAHAN: Another Irishman who did his homework.

SMITH: We hope Brent Monahan will be in print at least as long as Bran Stoker.

MONAHAN: Thank you.

SMITH: What is your advice to writers who are just coming into the field and are serious about getting published?

MONAHAN: Pay your dues. Read a great deal, but if you want to be a horror writer, don't just read horror. Read good writing. Read for dialogue and characterization, and for plot advancement. Gather your tools by writing every day, whether you want to or not. If you don't have anything on the paper in front of you, you can't say, "That's bad because ...." Make it a habit to write. Know a lot about the world, and mostly people. Because, no matter what that novel is, I don't care if it's THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, it may ostensibly be about rodents, but it's really about people. The only thing we're interested in is ourselves, ultimately. You have to be a student of human nature. Know how the world works, especially how the people in it work.

SMITH: What advice do you have about coping with rejection? Every writer must face it. How do you deal with it?

MONAHAN: Just persevere. Get smart though. Most of the time it happens because you're not in the right place at the right time. Try to get the best agent you can. Throwing un-agented manuscripts over the transom doesn't work. Hone your skills. Constantly strive to improve yourself. Take criticism only from those you deem qualified--fellow writers with more experience. Don't ask your mother.

SMITH: If somebody has had six novels published, then writers should listen to what he has to say about their work?

MONAHAN: Yes, but don't anybody send those novels to me, please!

SMITH: No. No. Thank you so much for your time.

 

Purchase Brent Monahan books online!
The Blood of the Covenant
The Bell Witch: An American Haunting
Monsters from Memphis
More Monsters from Memphis

 

About the interviewer: Beecher Smith is a practicing attorney and award-winning author and poet who lives in Memphis, Tennessee. He was Elvis Presley's personal lawyer and drafted and probated the late entertainer's will. He also incorporated Elvis Presley Enterprises and rezoned Graceland to become a museum. His publishing company, HOT BISCUIT PRODUCTIONS, has recently published two collectors' limited edition trade paperback horror anthologies: Monsters from Memphis and More Monsters from Memphis, both of which include vampire fiction. Stephen King calls Beecher, "The only person who really knows that Elvis has left the building." To find out more, visit Beecher's web site.