Q30:26R.L. Stine: Goosebumps, writing advice, and how he stumbled into writing horror for kids
R.L. Stine has maintained the same routine for decades. Every day, the author of the phenomenally successful Goosebumps and Fear Street series writes at least 2,000 words, which explains how he’s been able to pen more than 350 books over the course of his career.
“I used to be twice as fast,” Stine tells Q‘s Tom Power in an interview. “I’m old now. I used to do 4,000 a day.”
The 80-year-old master of fright has now released his first non-fiction book, There’s Something Strange About My Brain: Writing Horror for Kids, in which he shares everything he knows about crafting a scary story that kids will love.
But Stine never actually intended to get into the horror genre. As a fan of Mad magazine, he was more interested in writing joke books as a kid.
“I’ve always just been funny,” says Stine. “I never planned to be scary or anything. My ambition in life was to have my own humour magazine — and I did that. I had a magazine at Scholastic for kids called Bananas for 10 years. It was my own Mad magazine.”
I said, ‘Forget the funny stuff! Kids like to be scared.’ And I’ve been scary ever since.– R.L. Stine
The author’s switch to horror happened completely by accident, which he finds a bit embarrassing now. Back in the ’80s, Stine was having lunch with Jean Feiwel, an editor at Scholastic, who told him about a fight she’d had with an author of teen horror novels.
“She said, ‘I’m never working with him again. You could write a good teen horror novel, go home and write a book called Blind Date,'” Stein recalls. “I didn’t know what she was talking about. What’s a teen horror novel? I went running to the bookstore, and I bought books by Christopher Pike and Lois Duncan and Diane Hoh and Richie Tankersley Cusick — all these people who were writing teen horror back in the ’80s. I read their books so I could find out what they were doing, and then I tried to figure out what I could do that would be a little bit different.”
When Blind Date came out a year later, it was a No. 1 bestseller. “I’d never been close to that with my funny stuff,” says Stine. “A year later, I did a teen horror novel called Twisted, and it was No. 1 bestseller. And I said, ‘Forget the funny stuff! Kids like to be scared.’ And I’ve been scary ever since.”
Bad advice
Some of Stine’s best advice for writers has more to do with what advice to avoid. He says there are two things he hates when it comes to the generic guidance typically doled out in schools. The first is that writing is difficult.
“You don’t have to wear a hard hat” he says. “There’s no heavy lifting. You’re in there having fun. You’re creating your own people, your own world.
“The other thing I hate [is] when authors go into schools … and they say, ‘Write from your heart. Write what you know. Always write from your heart!’ Those kids will never write another word. I’ve written 350 books, believe it or not, not a single word from my heart. That’s the truth.”
So what does Stine think aspiring children’s novelists should do?
“You figure out what people like and what’s fun for them, and you deliver it,” he says.
“You entertain. Books are for entertainment. There was always this rule in children’s publishing that kids’ characters in a children’s book always had to learn and grow. That was a strict rule. And I thought, ‘Why? I don’t read books where the characters have to learn and grow. Why can’t kids read books, too, where they’re just entertained? Where they just have fun reading?’ And that’s what I’ve always tried to do.”
The full interview with R. L. Stine is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with R. L. Stine produced by Vanessa Greco.
