julie wiskirchen: soi'm julie wiskirchen. i'm from the authors teamhere at google los angeles. and today i'm very excitedto welcome dean koontz. when dean was asenior in college, he won an "atlantic monthly"fiction competition, and he's beenwriting ever since. he's one of the world'smost iconic writers, with books publishedin 38 languages, and has sold over450 million copies.
14 of his novels haverisen to number one on the "new york times"hardcover best-seller list, making him one of onlya dozen writers ever to achieve that milestone. the "new york times"has called his writing psychologically complex,masterly, and satisfying. "rolling stone" has hailedhim as america's most popular suspense novelist. dean's new novel iscalled "innocence,"
and he's going todiscuss it with us today. so please join me ingiving a very warm welcome to dean koontz. [applause] dean koontz: thank you. i normally stand ata podium and speak, so this is a littlemore relaxed. i don't have mynotes in front of me, so it'll be more confusing.
but hopefully-- and we'll try tomake it more with some question and answer as we go. and maybe i canmingle some stories in about things thathave happened to me. normally when ispeak, i just talk about stupid things thati've done during my career, or stupid things thathave happened to me. and i have files andfiles of stupid stories of things i've done.
so i usually have noshortage of material. but i thought today,since this is different, i'd probably tell youa little about where i came from, a little bitabout where i grew up, and some things thathappened to me that probably drove me to be a writer. and by the way, i see goldenretrievers here today. we saw them out in the thing. and i brought mine,because we were
told we'redog-friendly territory. so maybe at some point,when people get done eating, i would release anna ifnobody has a dog allergy and let her wander around. she loves people. so we'll wait until peopleget through their food, because she won't bequite so people loving, she'll be foodloving until then. i grew up in the little townof bedford, pennsylvania.
and we lived in what wasthe next thing to a shack. it was two stories,but it probably was a total of 400or 500 square feet. it had a tar paper roof. there's a pictureof it i always keep to remind myselfwhere i came from. my dad had a seriousalcohol problem. and he was alwaysgetting in fights. and by the time hedidn't work anymore,
my wife and i counted howmany jobs we could remember he had had. and it was 44 jobs in 34 years. and there were periodswhere he didn't work. and the reason therewere so many jobs is he also had atendency to violence. and he had aproclivity to punch out the boss, whichisn't a career move, even at google, where they'reso good with their employees
that you can get away with it. and so there wereperiods of this time he didn't work at all. he was a gamblerand a womanizer. we never knewwhether we were going to have that roof over ourheads the next day or not. in addition to allthat-- and i didn't talk about my father for a longtime after i was successful. and then one dayi was asked to go
speak to a group ofwalden bookstore managers. walden and borders,no longer with us. and i just did mynormal speech, telling stupid things thathappened to me. and the audience was verywith me and it was wonderful. and then we got to theq and a. and somebody said, how did your childhoodaffect your writing career? your parents must haveencouraged you to read a lot. and i said, oh, no, books werenot really welcome in my house.
and books were considereda waste of time. and my father wasa violent alcoholic who made my childhooda kind of-- i had to escape into books. but i had to hide thefact that i had books, or that i was gettingthem out of the library. and that audience, suddenly,i lost them entirely. they just went dead. and they were alllooking at me, like-- i
realized, oh, i blew it. now they think i've hada terrible childhood. and it wasn't aterrible childhood. i always felt happiness isa choice, no matter what you're going through. and as a kid, therewere things i liked. one of them was books. and another was i got abike that an uncle gave me. and i could travel 30 miles,40 miles a day on that bike,
and go all over this littlefarm town where i was raised. and i could be awayfrom that house. my mother was a great person. but if my fatherwas there, the house was not place anybodywould want to be. then i said tothem, but you know, i don't mean to saymy childhood was bad. i told them happinessis a choice. and i said also my fatherhad a funny side to him.
he was a very good salesman. he could get people to investin inventions that he created. and he could actuallyraise significant money for those days toproduce the invention in a number of copies, hundredsof them, thousands of them, warehouse them. but they were neveranything that he could sell. you'll see why in just a minute. but he could get peopleto raise the money.
and it always amazed me,because we never saw the money. he gambled it away or spent it. and he often had investorstrying to put him in jail. and he couldn'thold onto his money. but he could invent thingsthat i thought were absurd, but some people thoughtwere good investments. one of the ones i rememberwas he had this big exercise machine. and this was inthe days-- he may
have been correctabout this-- he called it the first electricexercise machine. and it may have beentrue, that in those days, treadmills were actuallyrun by your own power, and they weren't electric. but it was about the size of anold console model television. i'm the only one here oldenough to remember those. they were about this high,and this wide, and that deep-- a huge box.
and this was all itwas, was this huge box. it had a little hole onone side, and a hook. and you pulled the hook out. and this rope came on the hook. and then you were supposedto, into a door frame, screw a little eye hook, sothat the hook could go into it. then you turned on theelectric jump rope. and an engine ormotor turned it. and it sounded like this.
[motor noises] and it turned this jump rope. and i stood therelooking at this machine. he actually got investorsto produce 200 of these. he never sold any. and i said, but dad, who wantsto buy an electric jump rope? and he got angry very quickly. and he said, everybodywill want to buy one. and i said, but when you'reexercising with the jump rope,
part of the exercise isthe arms, the upper body. it's not all about the jumping. and he said, this is forpeople who want to exercise, but not too damn much. [laughter] and i had no answer to that. and then, because he knewthat i wasn't really approving of this, he said, this isalso the only exercise machine that a blind man can use.
and i was reallybaffled at that. and then he pointed out tome that every time the rope hit the apex if itsarc, a bell rang. so a blind man would know whenit was starting to come down. and a friend ofmine, years later when i was tellinghim this, said, boy, i could see raycharles in the tv commercial already, singing"ol' man river," and the jump rope coming around.
these were always a greathorrible thing for my mother. because my mother knew that whenhe got people to invent things, or to finance hisinventions and produce them, that they would becoming after us. and we wouldn't have the money. and it would just mean hewasn't working at a job where he might actually succeed. and the only thing hereally succeeded at was insurance sales.
he could sell people anything. but he could neverhold onto the money, even to bring it home for food. another one of his was-- thiswas maybe the most mortifying. he invented-- wedidn't have dogs, but he invented a dog bed. now, it's not the dogbed that you think of, which we see in any dog supplystore or pet supply store. my father had an elevated dogbed that sat on a metal frame
and was sort of almostlike a hammock, strung kind of tightly. and i said, well,why do dogs want to climb up on somethinglike that to sleep? if they want to climb up,they'll sleep on a sofa or they'll sleep on the floor. and he said, no dogsdon't want to be down there wherethe bugs might be. and i didn't no dogshad a thing about bugs.
and he said, also, this is theonly dog bed that's heated. and i thought,well, dogs have fur. and i know somesmall breeds, maybe, need to be warm, becausethey don't have thick coats. but i said, well,how are you going to get a dog to sleep on this? i don't think a dog'sgoing to sleep on this. and he said, we're making these,and we're going to sell them. and they made them.
they always made thembefore they found out if there was a market. and he found out he couldn'tsell these everywhere where you would sell dog things. so then he knew a man who had aseries of 14 service stations. so my father decided thatthese would be a perfect object to sell out of aservice station. when you go to a servicestation to get gas, and you see thisdog bed, and you've
got dogs, well, ofcourse you'll buy one. google would be nowhere withmy dad as your marketing guy. so he had all these, buthe couldn't sell them. but he decided on this. and he talked to this guy whohad all these service stations. and this guy decidedhe'd look at it. and so my father setup a demonstration. this was after mymother had died. and my father had astring of girlfriends.
and the girlfriendhad this little dog. it was a mutt. but it was cute. and dog's name is fluffy. and my father--oh, i almost forgot one of the mostinteresting things. my father hadpamphlets printed up. and the name wasalso on the thing. and it was calledthe koontz komfy kot.
and my father thoughtit would be clever if it was spelled kkk. it never occurred tohim that he alienated 98% of the peoplewho saw the bed. and so the pamphletshad koontz komfy kot, and the k were biggerthan anything else, so you read it as kkk. and fluffy was there, andthe girlfriend was there, and my father wasthere, and i was there.
and they couldn't get fluffy--encouraging fluffy to get up on the bed, theycouldn't encourage him. fluffy wanted nothingto do with the bed, like i sort of suspected. so my father grabbedhold of fluffy, who was a nervous littledog to begin with. and in front of thisguy he's demonstrating it to, picked fluffyup, set him on the bed. and fluffy did whatnervous dogs tend to do.
he urinated. and that's when they foundout the heating pad was not waterproof. it was like a roadrunner cartoon. fluffy just wantedright off the thing. he wasn't electrocuted. but he was a verysuspicious dog thereafter. and of course, oncethat was revealed, the fella with 17service stations
didn't want to sellit there either. so then my fatherdidn't only invent, he also sometimesgot business ideas. and one of themthat he got was-- he thought it wouldbe a great idea-- he bought a usedsteam cleaning rig. it was all on wheels, andit was pretty unwieldy. and it was a thing thatgenerated steam and was gasoline powered.
and then you had the steamwand, which sent the steam out under high pressure. and he was going to start acompany to pressure wash truck engines. we lived in a town that had anumber of depots for roadway and a number of trucks. so they had a lot of trucksthere at any one time. why they wouldn'tnecessarily feel it was advantageous to themto have their truck engines
steam cleaned on a regularbasis, i have no idea. and as it turnedout, they really didn't find thatvery interesting. but he thought that wasgoing to be a big deal. and it was over the summer. and so i used to work at summerswhen i was in high school. but that summer, iwas not permitted to go back to the supermarketwhere i worked other summers. and i was to work with him.
and because he was the boss,he got the prestige job with the steam wand. and my job was to dowhatever he told me to do. but there was one thingthat had to be done and was really essential. and that was the release valve,pressure valve on this thing. when the pressure built upso far that it was dangerous, it was supposed to release. there was a pressurerelease valve.
except it sometimes-- in fact,a lot of times-- would stick. and what i was supposed to dowas when it stuck and started to whistle, i wassupposed to take a hammer and go up to thegenerator and smash it at the side of the thinguntil it popped loose. i thought i was goingto die that summer. but i'd go up and hammerit, and it would pop loose. and the truck thingdidn't last very long. and nobody seemed to want it,except the car crazy people
wanted their car engineto look really clean. but it wasn't enoughto make a business at. so then he got theidea that supermarkets would like to have their cartscleaned, because they care so much about you may betouching germs on your cart. well, he did get one supermarketto clean a couple hundred. but after they looked atthem and they couldn't see that much difference,that was the end of that. so the big deal he cameup with was cemetery.
it was his ideato go in and sell through the cemeterypeople a deal. if you have arelative buried here, we will come in once a monthand clean your tombstone of your relatives, and itwill always looks pristine. because, you know, motorsthrow grass up on the stone, and birds do theirthing, and there's dust. and so we wouldsteam clean these. so he did set upanother demonstration
for the people whoran the cemetery. and there were two men anda woman there for this. and he set up a stone. and this was back in thedays when we were first beginning to see these--the medallions that would have a picture ofthe dead person on it. and that was sortof a new thing. and it was sort of inset. and it was glued, ofcourse, [inaudible].
and he chose toclean one of these. and when he took thesteam wand across the disk with the picture onit, it popped loose and flew like a martialarts killing star. and everyone went, ah! and it goes across the cemeteryand smashes into another stone. and as that thing istearing loose and flying, my father goes, whoa! and he pulls thewand up like this.
and there's a tree overhanging. and he blows leavesoff the tree. it's summer. he kills the tree. the leaves areblown off the tree. and birds come explodingout of the tree. and the demonstration's goingvery badly, at this point. even he knows this. and at that moment,the valve sticks.
and i grab up the hammer. and i go over andstart hammering on it. and this is the one timethat the hammering on it isn't working. and my father hasalways told me, if it doesn't come lose inso many times you hit it, then just run. so i'm hitting itand hitting it. and it's not coming loose.
and so i not onlyrun, i yell, run! and i turn and run. and now these people, thesetwo men and this woman with the cemetery,they start running. and we're all runningaway from the generator. and the woman falls,trips and falls. and i'm a polite young man. and i stoop overto to help her up. and i-- let me help you up.
and i take her by her arm. and she looks around at me. and i've got thehammer like this. and she goes, no! we didn't get that. and that was the end ofthe pressure washing event. so somehow i survivedthat childhood. and there were many nightswhere-- we had one car. not much of a car.
but we'd be called at aquarter to 2:00 in the morning, because bars closed at two. but we'd have towalk to the bar, because he wasdrunk on the floor. and there were all thosehumiliating things. and so i always feltlike an outcast as a kid, and pretty much was. i said, my fatherwasn't the town drunk. but he was one of them,and widely known for that.
so books saved me. it was books thati could escape, and i would know thatpeople live different ways. and it's kind of funnywhen you're a kid, and you're living inthat kind of environment. and you can come tothink that everybody lives this way whenthe doors closed. and so books showedme that that wasn't the case, that there wereother ways to live lives.
it also helped me to escape. my mother was thesweetest person. and i don't know why she putup with this all those years. but she also was notmuch about books. and she used to say to me, booksare a total waste, especially as i got to be 13, 14. and i said, well they'renot a waste of time to me. she said you could bespending that time learning to fix your car.
well, i didn't have a car. and she said, one dayyou're going to have a car. and nobody in ourfamily is ever going to be able to afford a mechanic. so you better learnto repair your car. and i said well,then i'm just going to have to be thefirst one in the family ever to afford a mechanic. the irony of me isit was books that
helped me afford a mechanic,and a pretty good car, too. so i was a happy toget out of that house. and i worked my waythrough a teachers college and taught in the povertyprogram for a year when lyndon johnsonwas president. and that was an eye-openingexperience for me. i was in a programwhere the teachers were supposed to pick studentsin their class that were highly intelligent, had lotsof potential and desire,
but who came fromextremely poor families and would benefit, therefore,from having almost a tutor program for the day. so teachers were supposedto pick 16 children out of all their classes. they were to come to me forenglish in small groups. and i got this job because ihurried my way through college. i wanted to getmarried to gerda, and so i took extraclasses and got through
in three and a half years. and i was graduatingand going into this job in a school districtin late october. and it never occurredto me to think, well, wasn't this job filled atthe beginning of september? yes, it was. but the fellow whohad the job, which i didn't learn until theday i showed up for work, had been run offthe road by students
and beaten up so badly he wasin the hospital for six weeks, and decided he didn'twant to come back to work. so they filled the job with me. and i thought, well, that's odd. it's just teaching english. it's not like hewas-- you know, i might have wanted to dothat to my phys ed teacher, but never to my english teacher. and so then i discoveredthat what happened
was the teacherstook this differently than the program intended. what they wanted todo was not yet rid of their mostintelligent students, but their mosttroublesome students. so they got rid of the oneswho'd been in reform school or had policerecords or whatever. so that was a veryinteresting year. and at that, i said, you know,i don't want to do this either.
and i managed toget through the year without getting beatenup and put in a hospital. but it was onlybecause i realized that these kids hadhuge amounts of energy. so we would do things like i'dbring a rubber ball to school. not a hard one, but nota super soft one, either. these days, i'd probablybe put in jail for this. but when we weretalking doing lessons, i had the license toask you a question.
if you couldn't answer it, icould throw the ball at you. and if i missed, you could throwit at me anytime you wanted. you could keep it fora half hour and do it. so we did things likethis to keep it energetic. and by the time they weredone at the end of the day, they didn't want tobother beating me up. and then i taughtregular school. and then my wife said, iknow you want to write. i was selling short stories ina couple of paperback novels.
and she said, i know youwant to write novels, so i'll support you for fiveyears while you try to do that. she was working at a creditbureau in those days. and so i took her up on it. i tried to bargainher up to seven years. but she's got sicilianblood, so she always wins those arguments. and it took fourand a half years before she was ableto quit her job
and go to work runningthe business side of mine. and we've now beenmarried 47 years. and it's been the greatestrelationship of my life. but that's how igot into writing. and i wrote paperbacks, alot of things over the years. and finally i gotto the point where books started toactually sell, which was a whole new idea for me. i mean, i'd sell them,but very few people
would buy them for many years. and royalties were not great. but we could live on them. and then suddenly one day,things started to change. and people startedto find the books. and i had a publisher thenwho didn't, let's just say, have a lot of faith in me. but when the books startedto work a little bit, then she said, i wonder.
and i had this bookcalled "strangers." and it was a big bookwith 12 leading characters and lots of different stories. and it all has to dowith these characters all experience somethingin the same place at the same time afew years before. and they've all beenbrainwashed to forget it. but the brainwashingisn't holding. and different things arehappening to all of them.
and they don't understandwhy these things [inaudible]. some are having nightmares. some are havingmoments of fugue. others are having all kindsof different problems. and gradually they findtheir ways to each other. but in the beginningof the book, there is the onelead character who keeps waking up fromnightmares and finds he's been sleepwalking.
and he wakes up atthe back of closets. he wakes up indifferent places where it's clear he'shiding from something. but he can neverremember the dreams. and he doesn't knowwhat he was hiding from. in the first part of the book,he wakes up at one point. he mentions that he wakesup behind the furnace in the garage. and it so happenedwhen i delivered
"strangers," mypublisher said, i think you should nothave a commercial editor. i think you shouldhave a literary editor. and i'm going to giveyou a literary editor. and i though, thisis going to be great. it's like thomas wolfeand ernest hemingway. i wonder what a literaryeditor would be like. this is going to be fun. and so i reallyliked this fella.
he was a great guy. his name was alan. and i delivered this book. and it was 940 manuscript pages. and my publisher came back,said, i love this book. but you're going tohave to cut in half. it's too big. and i could see noway to cut in half. if any of you'veread my stuff, i
tend to write prettytightly structured books. and i said, i don'tsee how i can do that. and she said, alan is goingto show you how to do this. so i thought, well, thisis going to be amazing, because i don't thinkit's possible to cut 400. she said, just cut 430 pages. you don't have to go halfway. so alan said, i'mgoing through it. i've read it.
i love it. but i can show you howto cut it and everything. and he said that the wayit's probably going to happen is, you've got 12lead characters, and we'll just cutthem down to nine. and i thought, yeah, but all thestories kind of move like this. and what happens ifhe pulled this thread? isn't this going tounravel over here? he's going to show me.
he's a famous literary editor. so ok, i'll bite my tongue andwe'll see what happens here. but then he said,you know, there's something that reallybothers me in this book. you know that moment early onwhen the lead character wakes up behind the furnace? and i said, yes. he said, the furnaceis in the garage. what would the furnacebe doing in the garage?
and i said this is southerncalifornia where where he's living, and most furnacesare in the garage. some are in the attic. but they're mostlyin the garage. well, why aren'tthey in the basement? i said, see, insouthern california, very, very few houseshave a basement. they're built onslabs of concrete. oh, still, people, whenthey're reading it,
who don't know that,are going to say, what's the furnacedoing in the garage? and they're going to losetrack of the story right away. and i said, i don't think so. if the story isn'tgripping enough to get past the furnace-- and he says, well, i don't know. i'm going to haveto think about this. but he said,meanwhile, i'm going
to show you how tocut these pages. which i said, ok, we'llsee how this goes. so about six weeks go by. and the manuscript lands for me. and it comes with a letter. and the letter said, dear dean,i have redlined some things i think we can cut. and you'll see thati have redlined 10 pages worth of cuts.
now all you need to dois find the rest of them. he was joking alittle bit, because he was trying to tell me,without dissing the publisher, that this wasn'tgoing to be possible. but then it was around that timethat my publisher learned this. she said, ok, i guess alanknows what he's talking about. but if you everwrite a book again like this with allthese characters, please write it sothat some of them
can be pulled out withouthurting the story. and i tried toimagine doing that. yeah, i'm going to spendan extra three or four months on the book,writing all this stuff in, so they can pullit out and it won't affect the rest of the book. but i didn't say anything. so alan also when he calledme to say he knew i had it and he called me and said, yeah,find how many pages you can.
but you're never goingto find what is wanted. just do the best you canand see what i've done. i said, ok. he said, but i'm stillreally upset that furnace and you know, i justrealized, there's another moment where there'sa furnace in a garage later in the novel. and i said, well, alan, ican't do anything about it. because it issouthern california.
and that's the way itis here in california. and a few days go by. and i'm working on the script. and i get a overnightmessenger thing from him. and it's a high-endreal estate magazine. and there's apost-it on one page. and it's a post-it for a bigmansion in san francisco. and it's like on nob hillor somewhere like that. and he's underminingthe description
about it having an 11,000square foot basement. but see, that's amansion in san francisco. this is a tract homein southern california. it still bothers me, he said. and then when i ended up cutting30 pages out of the text, out of 940. and we sent it off to them. and it went to typesetting. and when the typesettingcame, he said,
dean i'm sending you thetypesetting tomorrow. and you'll proofreadthe typesetting. and you just pleaseunderstand there's still time to fix thatfurnace problem. so at that point, and ihated to dis an editor, so i tried to do it with humor. i wrote him back,and i said, alan, i've written a paragraph i hopewill fix the furnace problem. and this is theparagraph i sent him.
"in the garage was a furnace,but not just any furnace. an immense furnace, ahuge bastard of a furnace, so enormous thatnatural gas needed to operate it could have heatedthe homes of 1,236 families. a furnace of such flagrantexcess and ungodly dimensions that no room wasleft in the garage for cars. a furnace so complexin its engineering and so formidablein its mechanisms that while performingroutine maintenance,
three repairmen had been killed. a furnace into whicha clever murderer could jam the bodyof his editor, with every confidencethat no speck of evidence would survive the flames." and he came back to meand said, point taken. and the furnace stayed in it. that book went on to be myfirst hardcover best seller. and the next bookwas "watchers,"
which had a golden retrieverin it in a major way. and that book didmuch, much better. and the next book, "lightning,"almost went to number one. and i could seethis progression. and it was veryexciting, because i had been working for 20 ormore years, trying to get here. and very next book after thatwas a book called "midnight." and it was my firstnumber one best seller. and this is absolutely true.
my publisher, phyllis grann,she was a very good publisher for a certain kind of thing. i always irritatedher, because i didn't do the samebook every time. and she really likedpublishing writers who did the same book everytime, because it was a product and she knew how to sell it. so we already were atodds with each other. but i had a lot ofrespect for her.
and she called me up. and you learn about the bestseller list-- your first week, you learn about it 10 daysbefore it appears in the "new york times," because thebook review comes out, they have to print that earlier. and they do the calculation. so you find out early. and she called me up and said,i have very wonderful news for you.
you're going to debutwith this book at number on in the "new york times." and before i couldsay a thing, she said, i just wantyou to understand, this will neverhappen for you again. you do not writethe kind of books that can go to number one. we had five numberones in a row. and every time ihad a number one,
she told me the same thing. and i'm a little slow,but not that slow. i said, you know what, ineed a different publisher. and i moved on from there. so that's beensome of my career. and we want to leave time inthis for-- i can babble on-- but for somequestion and answers. i assume you havesome questions. audience: sobasically, i've been
reading your books for years. i've really enjoyed them. and it's exciting whena new one comes out. but one of thethings i like to do when i go to talks byauthors that i really like is ask them who they're reading. so do you have any people,especially up-and-coming people who you think are writingreally good and exciting books right now that i might useto expand my reading list?
dean koontz: i like this--now i'm going to draw a blank. michael michael koryta is a verygood suspense writer, young, starting up. i don't have a lot of timeat this point in my life to read fiction like i used to. if you've read mybooks, you know there's a lot ofresearch in them, because i learned early thatif you screw up a detail, there are people readingyou who will know that.
and then they'll write you. and then you'llfeel like an idiot. especially if it's a gun detail. oh my, you will get mail. so i make sure alldetail in it is right. and i just tend tobe writing subjects. when i was a kid incollege and high school and i had to go to thelibrary to research something, i hated that.
i hated research. this is mortifying toadmit now, but it's true. so in high school,i would always just-- when i had to doa paper on something, i would make up the titles ofthe books that i referenced. and i would make up the authors. and i'd assigned the book todoubleday or somebody else. and i'd cite the pageand chapter number. and nobody ever caught me at it.
and i got good grades. and so i could have goneinto a life of crime. but when i went tocollege, i fell in love with pinochle in myfirst year in college. and it turned out iwas pretty good at it. and i met this otherguy who was good at it. and we became the two to beat. so we'd have all-nightpinochle things. and i wouldn'toften go to class.
and so i took up the habitof faking my research papers. and i never got caughtat it in college either. you should never bring yourown children to one of my-- and then when i was a junior,at the end of my junior year, a professor of mine hadsubmitted a short story i'd written to the"atlantic monthly," for the college writingcompetition they did. and it won theshort story prize. and after that, i reallybecame a slacker in college,
because my final year wasnothing but english classes and literature classes. and i was the firstperson at the university ever to win one of these. and i could do no wrong. it was just fabulous. so i played more pinochleand made up more papers. but when i became a novelistand i had to get it right, i found out i loved research.
and so now i do so muchof it, outside of michael, i love this-- shewrites kids books, but adults will lovethem-- kate dicamillo. and she has this book called"the tale of despereaux," and another one. adults will laugh theirheads off at these books. kids do love them, butthere's humor in them that only adults will get. for instance, she has thisone "the incredible journey
of edward--" i can'tremember the second name. but edwards is aceramic rabbit that's clothed and has bendableears and is an antique doll. and he's not animatedlike other kids. he thinks, but he can'ttalk and he can't move. so edward is simplythe victim of what happens to him in his journeys. and it's hilarious and moving. and i just think she's great.
and she writes books, "themagician's elephant," a little short book. and it's a wonderful,absolutely wonderful book about how our life-- and iwrote a really long book called "from the cornerof his eye," which takes quantum mechanics,spooky effect at a distance, and says that that not onlyworks on the subatomic level, it works in human relationships. everything we do has spookyeffects at a distance.
when we do something good inour lives or something bad, it affects other people. it changes what they mightdo to somebody else that day. and it ricochets througheverybody's lives. and years later, ifyou are able to see it, you would see, if you wereable to pull back and look over the years, how what youdid had this effect. you did it in pittsburgh,it had this effect in san diego three years later.
i took like 800 pages of this. kate dicamillo does itin this little kids' book that any adult willlove it as well. so those are people. but mainly i read researchand philosophy these days. audience: thank you. dean koontz: sorry,that's a long answer. audience: hi. first i just wantedto thank you,
because i hadisolating childhood. and at age 13, iread "whispers." and i escapedthrough your books. and so i just wantedto thank you for that. also my question is, you areone of if not the most prolific author i've ever heard of. and it brings yourreaders great joy to be able to keepreading stories, like you said, like yourpublisher pointed out, that
aren't all the same. so i was wondering a littlebit about your process. i know everybody, whenthey're falling asleep has a million ideas. and i can't even imaginesomeone who has so many ideas they have the bookthat you have. do you have stuff justcome at you all the time, and you have toprocess it in a way? or do you just sit down?
dean koontz: each book isdifferent to some extent. some i can tell youwhere the book came from. and it was a struggle,or it wasn't. i was coming home from ameeting at a studio in la on a film developmentproject with a bunch of studio executives. and you always comeout of those meetings in a psychopathic frame of mind. and i had driven my wife's suv.
and so the deck was filledwith simon & garfunkel, because she likes that,or paul simon on his own. and i was coming home, anda song came up, "patterns." and there's a linein it. "my life is made of patterns thatcan scarcely be controlled." and at that moment i thought,there's a novel in that. somebody knows that there'sa pattern of things going to happen in his life, andhe has no control over them. what would thatmean in his life?
and in about 15minutes, i had the idea for this guy who'san ordinary baker. and he comes froma family of bakers. and they're proud oftheir expertise as bakers. and the book would openthe night he was born. and his father would be in thehospital to witness his birth, but was also in the hospitalbecause his father's father is dying after a stroke. and he's going back andforth from death the birth
in the hospital. and in the fathers lounge,expectant fathers lounge, which in those days wouldhave done it a different way. our lead's father is waitingto be told he's been born. and the only otherperson in there is this angry, chain-smoking--and when i was writing it, i wrote clown. and i stopped. i never do outlines.
so i just take apremise and go with it. and i stopped and said, clown. that's too ridiculous. and then i wrote him as whatan emmett kelly clown is. not somebody with the giantshoes, but a sad sack. might have a funnynose on, but he's a different kindof clown than that. and it turned out that ifi hadn't written clown, that novel would neverhave been the novel
it was, because itbecame everything. because it became apsychopathic family of clowns. and it's a comic novelthat's also a suspense novel. that wrote almostitself, because i was having so much fun. certain other books are harder,maybe because you're not having as much fun. and then every greatonce in a while, you write one in a flow state.
the reason prolific is becausei get up at quarter of 6:00 in the morning. i shower, walk the dog. i eat breakfast at the desk, andi'm at the desk by, 7:00, 7:15. and i work through until dinner. and i do that atleast six days a week. if i'm on a deadline,it goes to seven. and so there's alot of time put in. but if you get into aflow state, which athletes
call being in the zone, i do,like, 20 drafts a page or more. but i don't go on topage two until i've done that many on page one. i just refine ituntil i feel that-- i have a lot of self-doubt. so i have to feelthat the page is really good beforei can move on. and i go througha book that way. it's sort of likecoral reefs are
built with all these deadlittle calcareous skeletons. and mine are done with all thesedead little abandoned sentences that i've piled upuntil the book is right. but there's some times thati'll still do those drafts. but they fly by, becauseyou're in this place that you can't makeyourself go to. and "innocence" wasa book like that. "innocence" justflew. "watchers" was a book that hada lot of that in it.
so you're not in control. i say to young writers,the best thing you can do-- and i have a lot of problemwith writers understanding, even writers i know and respect. i say, i neverplanned the character. i know a little bit about him. i know what his centralproblem will be. and then i give him free will. god gave us free will to dothe right thing, wrong thing,
screw up, not. and i give thecharacter free will. but people say,but no you don't. you're creating the character. and i say, thestrangest thing happens. if you don't think it ahead,and i don't think ahead what's coming. i just let the charactersinteract with each other. when i'm writing, if it'scomic element in the novel,
i'm often laughingout loud in my office. at other times, i canbe moved to tears, and be sitting therecrying at the typewriter. my assistant is here today. i think people whowork in the house who pass my office door think ishould be in an institution. and there's manyother good arguments for that, but not just this. but that's how i work.
and it all gets done. and i'm always amazed thatthere's a new book done. but it does. and i think you haveto love it to be able to stay at itall these years. and i do love it. i love the process. audience: well, welove that you love it. we're always amazedby the end product.
and i'm halfwaythrough "innocence." i preordered it. i was like, yeah! so thank you, so much. dean koontz: no, thank you. you buy my shoes. audience: thank you forcoming, and thank you for telling us aboutyour writing process. i was interested inwhat you had said
about your very earlyresearch process. i'm just wondering if you couldmaybe say a little bit more about how you research now. i mean, it mustbe very disruptive compared to yourregular writing style. so can you tell us a little bitmore about how you research, and how it's changedover the years? dean koontz: well, in manyways, it hasn't changed for me. from the day i could start toafford to buy hardcover books,
i went completely nuts. and if i was in abookstore and i saw a book on a very bizarre subject,you know, like-- i can't even think of a bizarresubject right now. but if i saw a referencebook that i thought, i'll never see that subjectagain, i would buy it, until we got alibrary that probably has something like70,000 books in it. and i built this librarythat almost anything
i want to know about i've gota number of books about it. then this other thinghappened as books became more and more successful. i would get letters fromreaders in the mail. and some of them would be peoplewho say-- well, one example i can give, thisfellow wrote me, and he was in the marine corps. and he taught actuallynot just marines, but helicopter pilotsin all the services.
and he ran all thesimulators for them. and he said to me, if you everneed a military helicopter in this and youwant to know what it's like, i cangive you details. and also you can come andrun through the simulator. so at that point,i realized there's some value in keepinga drawer in my office where i just keep all thesepeople with specialized knowledge.
and there's nothing betterthan calling somebody like that and asking him,or going and being put through the simulator, whichi crashed over and over again. and it's why i don't fly. i think even as a passengeri'm going to crash the plane. but i don't go onlineto do the research. because you'd be amazed atwhat computer i'm working on. i'm on dos yet. and the reason is ihave to first windows.
isn't that windows? first windows. and i didn't like windows. i liked the wordprocessing enormously. that's all i do on it,is write letters or text. i didn't want to begoing through windows. and linda, my assistant,took windows out of it. well, in later versions, youcouldn't take the windows out of it.
so now i'm stillworking-- i still have that logic unit,as they called them. i still have oneof those towers. we have a sparein the other room. i have a new keyboard,but new keyboards won't work with myantique arrangement. so we have one that will,if that one breaks down, and a printer that will work,and another one to back it up. and i'm so stickin the mud, i don't
want to learn new software,which will slow down my writing more thanthe research would. so i just want to stay with it. and when somedayit all explodes, then my career is over. or i have to learna new software. i did an interview with anthonymason for cbs "sunday morning." and he's a wonderfulinterviewer. and they were therefor a couple of days.
and the second day, wewalked into my office. and they hadn't seen it. and he looked, and he said,what the hell is that? and i said to him, it'samazing it isn't steam driven, given how anti-technology-- notanti-technology, but how slow i am to pick up technology. so if i want to use theinternet now for research, i go to linda overthere and say linda, here's what i need to know.
and it's amazing to me howquickly she gets it to me. so i know it must be anamazing world out there, but my world is inner. fiction is a veryinternal thing, and you have to get lostin yourself to write it. and yes, you also have tolove people and the world. but when you'rewriting it, you have to separate yourself from that. and i have to turn off theworld when i'm doing it.
and as linda willtestify, it gets so bad toward thelast few weeks of it that i'll get up in themorning, and i'll forget. for like threedays, i won't shave. i won't shower. i'll think i showeredyesterday, but i haven't. i pull on a baseball cap. and i go down. and what does everybodyin the house call it?
linda: i call it troll mode. dean koontz: troll modeis what she calls it. and i probably prettymuch look like a troll by the end of that. but i get so caught up in it,i just want to get back to it with no interruption wheni'm right at the end. that's as much asi can tell you. although i will saythere's one other change. a lot of what i donow with research
is not researching anything. more and more, i've beenreading all kind of philosophy, because philosophy can drivedifferent kind of ideas, then you get other ways. and it can drive thesort of subtext of books in ways you wouldn'totherwise think about. so there was thissociologist but philosopher called phillip "reef" or rieff. he was out of princeton.
i've never heardhis name pronounced. and he's writtena number of books. died not too long ago. and they're cultural criticism,but they're also philosophy. i have gotten numerous ideasout of just reading those books. they're very difficult, butthey're also very illuminating. so that's it. dean koontz: we probablyhave some time for a few more questions.
we don't want to-- audience: hey, dean. how you doing? thanks for comingout and seeing us. but seeing around hereall the golden retrievers, i think this is going to bea very relevant question. the first book i actually everread in my life was "watchers." |t was given to be my mother. and i think i wasaround 10 years old.
and i think my questioni have for that is-- this is more particular. where did the idea for theantagonist, a creature, as well as the otherantagonist, like vince nasco, where did that stuff come from? and i'm assuming sinceyou're a dog lover, that fueled the einsteinportions of the book. but my main question is wheredid that book in its entirety come from?
dean koontz: that goesback such a long way now. people assume i had goldenretrievers, or i had dogs. i didn't. i'd never had. when i was a kid,my father got a dog for a very short period of time. he was going to teachto be a hunting dog. he kept it on achain in the yard. it's the worstthing you could do
for a dog is tie it up outside. they're pack animals. and the dog only lasted aweek, because i went out to play with it, and itwas so enthusiastic it wrapped its chainaround my neck. and if my motherhadn't looked out, it probably wouldhave strangled me. because when she came outand managed to get it off, for days, i had the imprints ofchain lengths around my throat.
and then we had a little dogfor a week or so that somebody gave us because theycouldn't take care of it. and it died shortly thereafter. so i'd never had a dog. but i loved golden retrievers. and i had an aunt whodidn't have a retriever, but a dog i loved. and i just loved dogs. and where the idea camefrom that i would write
a novel about geneticexperiments and enhanced intelligence, and theywould be working on a dog, and it would be agolden retriever, i can't tell youwhere that came from. but i do know thatbecause you have to have conflict inany work of fiction, it came to me pretty quicklythat this same outfit might have been doing experimentson a new kind of soldier for the battlefield.
it would be agenetically-engineered creature it would be completely obedient,just a killing machine. and then that these two wouldbe too smart for the people who built them and made them,this very intelligent golden retriever withhuman-level intelligence and this creaturewould both escape. and the creaturehates the golden, because everybody loved thegolden and everybody was fearful of the creature.
and then the idea thatthe creature-- you know, this frankenstein monsteris pretty pathetic when you actually look,especially in the movies. there's this pathos in it. and i thought this should bethis very frightening monster, but it should also besomething that when you get to the end of it,you have such pity for it, you almost hate tosee it be killed. and then when it comesto my human bad people--
the question orthe thing-- my wife used to go to booksignings a lot. and i never knewwhy she would put up with this, becausesometimes there will be 2,000 peoplein line, and it would take seven hours or eight hours. and she would stand besideme and open the book to the right page,or fold it to me. and at one point, i saidto her, i know what it is.
you think if one of themturns out to have a gun, you want to be there totake it away from them. because you know i'mnot capable of it. and she said, that's part of it. my wife's 5 foot 2", but you'llagree she could probably do it. but people at thosebooks signings would say to her-- theone question most often was, his villains-- howdo you sleep at night? because they think all thisis actually part of who i am.
and maybe it is, but sofar i haven't acted on it. having grown up ina house-- my dad lived-- he drank afifth a day, plus beers. he smoked three to fourpacks of cigarettes a day. he ate a very high-fat diet. he did everything wrongyou can imagine in a life. my mother died at 53. my father died at 83. and he was healthy up untilthe last couple years.
but he began to developdegenerative alcohol syndrome, which is the hollowspaces in your brain that are filled with fluid andserve a purpose in your brain begin to enlarge. people with this beginto lose brain tissue. and my father later in lifewas diagnosed as a sociopath. he'd been diagnosed as aborderline schizophrenic with tendencies to violence,complicated by alcoholism, which is a very bad thing.
that he didn't get diagnoseduntil he was in his mid to late 70s. then one day a friendof my father's called. i'm a little off thesubject, but not. i'll get back to it. a fishing buddy of myfather's called me up. we had moved to california. and finally wedidn't have to worry that there would be apounding on our door at 2:00
in the morning and itwould my father, drunk. but we were out hereless than a year. then a friend of his calledup and said, he's destitute. which he always was. and you could sendhim money, and he wouldn't have it the nextday, because he'd go to a bar and buy drinks for everybody. and he said, he's destitute. and he's in terrible health.
he's not going to last a year. so my wife and i sat down andhad to figure out what to do. and it was the hardestdecision of my life, but we decided we couldn't. he was never therefor me and my mother. and my wife wasa saint for this. she knew what shewas getting into. we moved him west, got himan apartment, paid his bills. but we said, thisis only for a year.
he lived 14 years. and it was 14 very bad years. but my wife dealt withit in a fabulous way. but i grew up with thisexample of evil in their life. i mean, my father wasa pathological liar. he would lie to yousitting across the table from you, knowingyou know he's lying. and he'd get thissmile on his face, just to see how longyou'd put up with this.
and there was no reasonnot to put up with it, because all he'd do if youcalled him on it was explode. and he'd cause a scene. and when we'd take him outon father's day for dinner, we'd go to a restaurant andwe'd be sitting across from him. and he'd startthings like telling gerda about my uncle ned. now, i don't have an uncle ned. and gerda, the first timethis happened, she kind of
looked at me. and she said, i didn'tknow you had an uncle ned. and i though, oh, just wait. my father would go into allthese stories about him. and they'd be colorful stories. and at some point, gerdawould start to get it. and i could seewhen she'd start. oh, no. none of this is true.
well, when you grew upwith all that and saw it, i just have anunderstanding of people who are that way, who'd ratherlie than tell the truth, even if telling the truthwould be better for them. and when he wasdiagnosed as a sociopath, it was after he madean attempt on my life in front of a bunch ofwitnesses with a knife. and you had to go intoa psychiatric ward. and he later endedup-- we got him
on anti-psychotic medication. and they were able to takehim into a retirement home setting which hadnurses, so that he would get the anti-psychoticsevery day. and he was there a year. and there was atrouble, but he was the best behaved he'd ever been. but when they called me up--the doctor in the psych ward called me up afterhe'd been in there.
and he said, are you ableto talk about your father? and i said, sure. and he said, wouldthis be painful to you. and i said, not talking about. living through it was painful. and he said, tell meabout your father. and i said, well,what you want me to--? he said, no, let me tell yousome things about your father. when you wereyoung, he threatened
to kill you and yourmother, didn't he? and i said, ohyeah, all the time. and he said, and you believed hewould do that sooner or later. and i said, oh yeah. i'm amazed he never did. and he said, your fatherwas never a religious man. no. and he said, but when thingswent really bad for him, he'd go buy a bible, and he'dsit reading it by the hour.
and he'd make youread it with him. it was like this manhad been in our home. and he went through behaviorafter behavior like this. and they were all thingsthat my father had done. and i said, you're aboutto tell me something. you know what my father is. and i've been told he's aborderline schizophrenic with tendencies to violence,complicated by alcoholism. and he said, no, yourfather is a sociopath.
he has no ordinaryfeelings, as we, but he's very goodat faking them. and it was one ofthe most-- it may be the most amazingmoment of my life. all of this stuff clicked. all of the thingsyou wondered about, you couldn't understandwhy these things happened, why somebody would be that way. it just suddenly clicked.
you're living with hanniballecter, except he never went that far. he was always in fights. he ended up in jaila number of times. and he was very violent. but it never wentthat extra step. and so we were very fortunate. but that's where i have thisaffinity, which people tell me i do, to write reallybad, bad characters.
and i do research on that, too. the character and theintensity is actually based on a genuineserial killer. and i had to tame it down. because if i had writtenwhat this guy really did, nobody would wantto read about it. so it's life experience,but also research again. so did that answeryour question? audience: yeah, it's interestingbecause the worse that
character does, the strongerhe gets, presumably. he perceives himself. we don't know. you write it in such a way whereyou don't know if he's just crazy, or he's got somesupernatural ability to absorb people's-- dean koontz: i'm tryingto lead you along that. but he's not. he just thinkshe's supernatural.
audience: but you couldinterpret it both ways. but i always thought it wasjust him being a psychopath. and the worse i do, themore innocent the victim, the stronger i get. dean koontz: i'll tell youone funny thing about that. well, i think it's funny. he's a particularlynasty character. and there's a point in the bookwhere he kills a scientist. he's assigned to killthese people who's
been involved in this. and he kills this womanscientist with a hammer. and i do not write gore. i just don't. i never have. and i would have people comeup in book signings to me and say, oh, i love your books. but when it getsto the gory scenes, sometimes i just i can't.
and i'd say, the gory scenes? tell me one. i heard this awhile. and often, when i wouldstart to ask where, i found out it wasthe same scene, often. and it was this hammerscene in "watchers." and i'd say to them, howlong do you think that is? how long is it from themoment he picks up the hammer until she's dead.
how many words? how many paragraphs? and the answer wouldalways be, oh, it's like two or four pages,or something like that. and i said, no, he tellsher what he's going to do. and then he undressesbecause he doesn't want to get bloodon his clothes. and we know he's crazy. but from the moment he picks uphammer until he's killed her,
it says, "the firstblow struck her kneecap. 80 blows later, she dead." that's all. but in your mind, you'reseeing the other 80 blows to some extent, that'show the mind works. you imagine it. and so you don'thave to do the gore. you just have to setthe situation up and let the imagination ofthe reader take it.
but it's interestingyou brought that up, because that's theone that often people find that just too chilling. audience: it's a chillingbook, but if you are dog lover, it's something very specialabout friendship and connection to an animal or to,particularly, dogs. that's why i connect with it somuch, because i love animals. i love animals and dogs. dean koontz: the book isultimately about love,
and love for each otherand for the animals. you have to go through hellto get to the love part. audience: i just wanted togive the golden retrievers a shout out for that. you were great.
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