The WD Interview: Chuck Wendig

This interview first appeared in the September/October 2023 issue of Writer’s Digest.

Meet the Master of Disaster—from foreshadowing pandemics to dreaming up demon apples, author Chuck Wendig juggles multiple genres like a seasoned carny. Step right up for some tasty urban fantasy … a side-show of horror … a sci-fi circus … or a middle-grade book with plenty of thrills and chills. He’s got all amusements covered. With New York Times and USA Today bestsellers to his name, Wendig shines across numerous readerships. How does he balance all his acts? In a candid conversation, he shares insights on writing productivity, finding your voice, and embracing process over product. We discuss how the real world always impacts fiction, especially the scary things. It turns out, facing fears can be frightfully productive. Already a writer’s writer, Wendig also explains why craft books aren’t necessarily bullshit. Let’s get to it.

We met at my first-ever writing conference in Fort Collins about seven years ago. You told the participants a story about your dad cutting off his finger. I have yet to forget this.

[laughter] True story.

You had the audience completely mesmerized. Not because of the creep factor—that would have been gimmicky—it was how you laid out the story. You did it carefully and slowly … you had us all there till the very end. How do you do this as a storyteller? Does it happen organically? Can we learn this?

Part of the irony is my dad was, himself, a fairly good storyteller. I don’t think it’s genetic or something you can’t pick up. Storytelling is like writing in general, you learn by doing it and often doing it badly. I used to run role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, so it’s kind of the same thing—you’re telling a collaborative story for people. You can see on their faces when you’re losing them or exciting them, or it’s time to drive the knife in, or flip it around so they don’t see what’s coming. You develop a rapport and rhythm. You get it by practice, practice, practice.

A lot of great storytelling in writing depends on voice. And to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of sci-fi or dystopian or horror genres. But I read your books because of the Wendig-esqueness of them all. Your voice establishes trust with readers in a very honest and inviting here-I-am-come-along-for-the-ride-we’ll-have-some-fun type of way. Did you always have this or has it developed over time?

It’s something I’ve always had but not something I always knew how to use. When you’re a baby writer you don’t know you have a voice. You’re always trying to find the voice of what the market will buy or other writers. We do things by imitation, which is a form of flattery obviously. Hey this sounds like the writers I like and they’ve sold books, maybe it’s a good thing. But I do think we chase our voice only to circle back around and realize we’ve had it all along. It’s who we are as people. And a combination of all our weirdness and our fears and the crazy things we like and love. It all gloms together into how we experience the world and then how we translate the experience onto the page.

You’ve had six books out in the past three years: Dust & Grim; You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton!; The Book of Accidents, Wayward, Gentle Writing Advice, and Black River Orchard arriving this fall. How do you stay so productive?

Some of it’s down to routine. I used to work freelance and if you don’t make the deadlines, you don’t get paid. And if you don’t get paid, it turns out there’s these things called MORTGAGE COMPANIES and they get mad when you don’t give them their money. That’s the sort of cold, calculated answer. But.… I really, really, like writing. I’m not one of those writers who says I don’t like writing, I only like having my book on my shelf. I just enjoy the process. I like it and editing more than I like having the book out. I mean it’s obviously awesome about an audience who reads it. The fact I get to do it is reason enough. But the pandemic was a challenge in that regard. It threatened my routine and expectation to commit words to paper.

A lot of writers were suffering—either you welcomed the opportunity to be at home and do something different or couldn’t conjure up a creative thing to save your life.

Yeah, that was me. I had nothing in the tank.

The energy for doing the work just fizzled?

It really had never happened until the pandemic. And it’s ironic because before the pandemic, I wrote a book about a pandemic. And then during the pandemic, I was supposed to write the sequel about what happens after a pandemic. It was emotionally jarring to go back to this thing. I went back to the page and I had nothing. It was a hard time—it wasn’t an energy issue so much as staring into a void.

In terms of that, you have a lot of contemporary issues …

Is that an accusation or …

No, [laughter] but we all have very long lists by now. What I mean is you include contemporary issues in your work—divisive politics, the environment, societal concerns, even A.I.—all significant concerns in our world right now. How important is this to you as a writer and your audience? Is this something you feel is a responsibility?

Not at all. It’s these fears. Things I’m worried about. Wanderers for me … I could’ve written about 10 books based on the anxieties I harvested with that. I took all my anxieties together to form this massive epic robot of a book. I call it my Anxiety Voltron. For me it’s not about any perceived responsibly, or feeling like I have to talk about these things, but it’s what’s on my mind. They worry me and entice in a weird sort of way. I can’t help but want to write about the things that fascinate me.

You’ve written about everything from sci-fi, fantasy, horror, dystopian, to paranormal. Why do you like to mix it up so much?

That’s a good question. I think ’cuz I’m greedy. I think I’m really greedy. I will always want the tasting menu or the buffet. I don’t need one whole meal—I want to taste a lot of different things. Also in my generation, we grew up reading multiple genres. It wasn’t like I’m a science fiction reader. I started off reading Douglas Adams and Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke and then Stephen King. Then I moved on to epic fantasy … Robin Hobb. Then crime fiction … I loved it all. So greedily, I’m like, Why can’t I have all of it? In fiction, we tend to silo writers. Especially if they get successful very early. Which is one of the weird fortunes I possess—I started slow and built a career which lets me play around a bit and establish a circuit board in multiple areas. It’s not like I’m hard-coded into one direction. For me, it’s a joy of getting to play in all those spaces. It’s too much fun not to do.

You’ve said the horror genre is a safe place to fight monsters. I love that idea—can you elaborate more?

Horror is a great place to contextualize all the things we’re actually afraid of. Sometimes you put them in the form of monsters, supernatural, or otherwise. It’s a place to conjure your anxieties and fears and deal with them in a way that’s removed from reality. It’s almost like a simulation and I can mess around with it. It’s a safe place to do that while still allowing you to grapple with the realities of things and treat the subject matter as seriously as you’d like.

That’s a great perspective for a writer, but what about a reader? Is it the same thing?

Yes. The same thing. When I was a kid—when we were told at any moment we could be obliterated by missiles in the middle of the night?

And hiding underneath my math teacher’s desk was going to save me from a nuclear bomb?

Exactly. I was notably not happy. Good night, you may be dead in the morning by nuclear fire. The first horror novel I read was Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, which is about people surviving an epic-horror-nightmare-nuclear-winter-hellscape, and it made me feel a lot better after I read it. People get in their heads they shouldn’t read things that scare them (different from trauma obviously), but you miss an opportunity to confront the fear in a safe place. For me it’s showing the subject matter I’m afraid of, but doing it in a way that tells me I’m not crazy. Because when I read someone else saying “This is scary stuff,” I’m like, Oh yeah, I also think it’s scary. So right there you feel seen. But also, they’re telling a story and the sheer existence of a story—characters surviving and talking and occasionally joking, moving from point A to point B—feels grimly optimistic. Even if the characters lose in the end, you feel, well, they had a shot. It’s comforting in a number of ways.

What scares you?

What doesn’t scare me? Just opening the news tab on any website will give me a doomscrolling infinity loop of anxiety. Wanderers is a pretty good encapsulation of it all. The politics, the social issues happening in the country, cruelty at local school boards. Artificial intelligence is freaking me out right now. Fungal diseases. I got a long list … we don’t have enough time.

Does writing help?

Yes, it absolutely does. And reading. Medieval sorcerers of old would summon demons into a summoning circle in order to control and extract favor from them. I’m definitely summoning demons with my books. I make them fight like Demon Fight Club.

“Horror is a great place to contextualize all the things we’re actually afraid of. Sometimes you put them in the form of monsters, supernatural, or otherwise. It’s a place to conjure your anxieties and fears and deal with them in a way that’s removed from reality.” —Chuck Wendig

Writer’s Digest

Earlier you mentioned you like the process of the writing. What part is your favorite?

It’s actually finding the weirder, slower moments. The plot stuff is good, but it always feels a little more on track. I know the story needs to move from A to B and there’s things I can do to mix it up. But it’s always in the quieter, stranger moments when the story does things you don’t expect. When it has a moment to breathe on its own … and the book gets to make its own decisions. Obviously, I know books aren’t literal, but there are times when it feels like literal magic.

Can you give an example from one of your books?

In the Miriam Black series, I learned very explicitly if I was writing a super, super, supplemental character (like a third-tier, z-grade nobody—a cab driver, or someone at a hotel), if I find there’s something interesting there or a relationship or dialog, I will turn them into a character who stays until the end of the book. Basically, I didn’t plan for you to be here but I really like you so I’d like you to stay.

You have this uncanny knack to write authentic characters, no matter their age, race, or gender. For example, in Wayward, characters Pete Corley, Ed Creel, Shana, and Benji—they couldn’t be any different. With such a diverse cast, what work do you do to get it right?

I try to treat them seriously—where they’re coming from and what their problems are. I bridge myself to them but knowing at the end of the day, there’s no way to write a character that isn’t in some way me. I would love to be able to conjure a literal new person.

How do you inform your characters? Do you have to be careful about well, only this person is going to be funny and only this person is going to drink whisky? How do you split the atom of you among all these people, or is it a calculus you don’t have to perform?

I generally try to turn the screw so there is enough away from me. Build the artifice. But my experiences in the world certainly inform. It’s difficult not to. But still, I’m not someone who works with rats at the CDC … it’s an opportunity for me to research and talk to people. I think the notion ‘we must write what we know’ is a dubious one. It has value at a simplistic level, but after unpacking it, there’s a lot of nuance that goes into a piece of writing. For me, it’s building characters out so they’re serious and I’m taking them seriously only as much like me as they need to be.

You said you were fortunate to build your career slowly. Was it helpful with setting future expectations?

For people who get six or seven-figure advances, they have to sell a lot of books. As a new author it’s very difficult unless you’re getting the full weight and scope of the publisher behind you and happen to hit a certain zeitgeist. An underperforming book can kneecap your career right out of the gate. But then, even success essentially brands you as the cow who has to stay on that farm because you wrote a hard, sci-fi epic. And if it succeeded really well, what if the next thing you want to write doesn’t? Good luck, but it’s what you do now and that’s what they’re going to want for the next 10 years of your life, if not forever. So, expectations are set and you’ve been branded.

You have several popular craft books: The Kick-Ass Writer, Damn Fine Story, and the recent Gentle Writing Advice. Yet, you’re the first to say any craft writing advice is bullshit. So, why write craft books at all? Why bother?

I like to read craft books myself and I find value in them. Whether you’re talking Stephen King, Lawrence Block, Anne Lamott … these are books that even if I don’t agree with every piece of, that’s fine. It’s weird that people who don’t agree decide it’s bad advice. It’s just advice that isn’t for you. When I started my blog TerribleMinds over 20 years ago, it was me yelling at me about writing. It was a way to vent and talk about the challenges I was facing. Putting my thoughts into a form I understood. You don’t always understand what you’re thinking until you get it out. Like magnetic poetry, you need to barf out those words and put them in order. But, when I saw people were reading, it was terrifying. It was like turning on the lights in a dark room where you’ve been talking for an hour and you realize you aren’t alone.

And you’re naked.

[laughter] Yes—but the advice was ultimately for me and by me. I don’t know what works for anyone else. There is no guaranteed way. Writing isn’t math where you plug in the numbers and get a result … it’s squirrely. It’s not how you do it. But this is how I do it today and it might not be the same tomorrow. Ultimately, it’s to have people think about what they’re doing. Anything to help people write and read more intentionally. That’s the whole point of the craft books. Give them a perspective, not the perspective.

What advice would you give to new writers or those struggling to break in?

The advice is stupidly simple … you just have to keep going. Trying to become a published writer is like putting a bucket on your head and trying to headbutt a wall. Either the wall is going to fall or you are. You have to love what you do because there is no promise of reward beyond the doing. So, if you find love in the doing, it’s probably why you do the thing in the first place.

In You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton!, you talk about “Do the Thing.” It basically sums up all writers’ struggles to move forward. Why do we need this constant motivation? What is it about us as human beings and creatives that we need this? Do we have a finite well?

It’s because IT’S REALLY HARD. Writing and telling stories, painting pictures, making songs. I think the myth is that somehow art is easy … it just comes to you … the muse moves you. But it doesn’t. It’s like moving narrative earth, it can be hard and challenging because there’s no instant result. As a writer, you get questions like: Is your book a bestseller? Being made into a movie? Is it like Stephen King? Huge questions. And if the answer is no, you feel like you’re failing.

I get it. So, writers need to laugh and get lots of hugs?

There’s definitely a lot of feeling lost in the woods. And we can use a flashlight. And a hug when we get out.

We talked earlier about fears and I want to end with it too. You have a great line in The Kick Ass Writer I’m going to paraphrase, “Fear will kill you dead … you have nothing to be afraid of that a little preparation and pragmatism cannot kill … fear is nonsense.” On that note, can’t fear be helpful when it comes to writing and publishing?

This is the heart of what Gentle Writing Advice is about. It challenges some of these things like why you can’t have self-doubt … kick self-doubt in the butt and move on. But self-doubt is incredibly valuable. If you didn’t ever doubt yourself, you’d be a psychopath. Sometimes doubt is what helps me as writer say, This isn’t working right. A little bit of fear is good, too. Fear in general—well, there’s a good reason we have it. Hey, you should be scared of that van with the clown driving in it. DON’T GET IN THAT VAN. Only when fear stops you from writing, stops you from doing what you want, is it toxic. It can be paralyzing.

Like self-sabotaging? I’ll never be a bestseller, so I won’t write at all?

Yup. It’s easier not to try. And that’s scary.

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