June 2004: This interview was supposed to go on Writers Online, but I heard today that the site is now dead. So, since I did all the work answering these questions, I figured I’d post it here.

Quoting from your message board describing “The Road to the Dark Tower.”

The Road to the Dark Tower will be a NAL trade paperback in November 2004. It’s an exploration of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, the first book to investigate the intricacies of the entire seven-volume epic that brackets King’s publishing career. He started work on the first volume, The Gunslinger, in 1970, prior to publication of Carrie, and will publish the final volume, The Dark Tower in 2004, after which he has announced his intention to retire from publishing.

This is quite an undertaking. What started you on this quest?

In some ways, I’ve been on this quest for twenty years. I first read The Gunslinger in 1984 after I was one of those people who discovered its existence from the author’s ad card in the front of Pet Sematary and was able to get a copy of the second printing hardcover. I loved the book for its dark, foreboding mood and it’s probably among the King books that I’ve reread most over the years. The Dark Tower series is also the only series fantasy that I’ve stuck with over a long release history. Generally I wait until a series is finished before I invest my time in it.

It’s also the one project that Stephen King has revisited over the span of his writing career. He’s had other books go bust or wither on the vine. The Plant, for example, was something he started in the early 1980s and tried to resurrect in 1999 but the story lost energy for him and I doubt that he’ll ever pick it up again.

Something about The Dark Tower continued to attract King’s interest at five-to-six year intervals. It’s different from most of his work in the way he has consciously and deliberately perfused it with influences from the works of many other writers. If something is considered “literary” when it has layers and depth and different levels of meaning, rather than being read purely for entertainment, then this series has serious literary merit.

I also saw it as a microcosm of King’s career, a way to explore something comparatively small and manageable and use it to reflect on the bigger picture of King’s accomplishments over three decades of publishing. It was an archaeological expedition of sorts. I wasn’t entirely sure of what I’d discover when I picked up the shovel and pleasantly surprised at the artifacts I found along the way.

How did you prepare for such a task?

The project started out as an idle notion that quickly took on a life of its own. When I conceived it, I expected it would take me several years to accomplish, because I thought I would have to wait for the final books to be published before I could even begin in earnest. After all, how can you start to discuss a huge series before you know how it’s going to turn out?

When King cooperated by providing the first draft manuscripts of the final three books, The Road to the Dark Tower took on a sudden urgency and vitality. My primary preparation involved pouring over the books themselves several times. I bought used trade paperback copies of the first four volumes and marked them up extensively with highlighters, penciling comments and questions in the margins. On each reread, I discovered something new, even though I’d already read these books several times each in the past.

I did the same thing with what I call the primary associational books, those other King novels or stories that are intimately connected with the Dark Tower mythos. While arguments can be made for or against certain of King’s books and their putative connection to the series, I concentrated on those that make a tangible contribution to the story. I filled notebooks with questions and references and comments. I also read what others have written about the series so far, which is less than you might expect. There are a few reviews of the individual volumes, but little about the series as an entity, which is understandable since it is as-yet incomplete. I had a unique situation that I wanted to exploit to the best of my ability – to be the first voice on the entire series and get my thoughts and ideas down before they were influenced by the opinions of others.

Finally, I did a fair amount of literary research into themes and concepts that I still can’t discuss openly because they pertain to elements of the series that haven’t been fully revealed via the remaining two novels, Song of Susannah, due on June 8th and The Dark Tower, which will finish the series, fittingly, on King’s birthday in September. Every now and then a quote or a reference would intrigue me, and I’d wonder where that came from so I’d hunt it down and all of a sudden it opened up a whole new dimension to a scene or the series in general. It was a cross between a treasure hunt and a detective investigation. I’m sure that I’ve missed a lot of literary allusions because of my unfamiliarity with certain books, but I’ve turned up some things that I hope my readers will find interesting.

I dove in right away, though, once I saw the project was going to take off, by working on a chapter that deals with the publication and writing history of the series, something I was fairly familiar with and had the resources on hand to research. So, I was writing and researching simultaneously, a process that continued through the very end. I still find morsels of information that I will sneak into the final draft, which I will begin to work on in March.

How did you propose this to Mr. King?

I sent him a two-page proposal in October 2002 outlining my concept and why I wanted to tackle it. I gave him my argument, but I also built in a number of easy outs, saying that if he had any problems or issues with the book, I’d drop it in a heartbeat and move on to something else. I know that he’s not always been fond of some of the books written about him and I didn’t want to be an addition to that list. I made it clear that the book would not be about him, per se, but about his work, which he has always felt is what people should pay attention to. In closing, I hinted that my work would easier if I could see the manuscripts for the final three books, never expecting he’d agree. One thing I’ve learned, though, is that the unasked question is rarely answered. Also rendered as “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” To my surprise, delight and honor, he agreed.

How did publishers react to your proposal?

Having King’s tacit endorsement gave me a great deal of credibility with publishers. I only dealt with two. I initially queried Scribner, King’s current publisher, thinking they’d be the logical choice for such a book. However, they’d already committed to doing Robin Furth’s Dark Tower Concordance and couldn’t envision doing two associational volumes, even though the books are complementary rather than competitive. So, my next query went to NAL, a division of Penguin that holds the reprint rights to the first four Dark Tower books. I believed they would see this as a way to generate some excitement in the Dark Tower backlist. It would keep them actively involved in the publicity surrounding the release of the final three volumes. Their response was rapid and enthusiastic.

Ultimately the two publishers ended up doing a lot of collaborative cross-promotion for the series, which is a rare event in the publishing industry. When was the last time you saw the first chapter of a book by one publisher included in the back of a book by another as an advertisement, as was done with Wizard and Glass/Wolves of the Calla?

As it turned out, my editor at NAL, Ron Martirano, is a big Dark Tower fan, too, which helped me immensely. He became my sounding board and the only person I could discuss the series in depth with for nearly two years, as no one else had read the final three volumes.

Did you have or find an agent to assist you in finding a publisher?

When NAL responded favorably to my query letter, my next task was to prepare a full non-fiction book proposal: a detailed outline, individual pages that discuss the book in overview, the market, the author’s credentials, competitive works and so on, along with a sample chapter. The total package ran to forty or fifty pages.

While NAL was considering my proposal, I started to worry that I was getting in over my head and that my lack of understanding of the industry would lead me to do something that would skewer the deal. Time to find an agent, I decided.

The first one I queried by e-mail never responded at all. I had better luck with the second agent, who quickly agreed to look at my proposal. With an editor and an agent considering my project simultaneously, I had my fingers crossed that things would happen in the right order. It was one of the more stressful periods of the project, because I wasn’t confident I was doing things right. I was also out of the country at the time visiting my parents in eastern Canada when all of this started coming down to the wire. As it turned out, Michael Psaltis agreed to represent me the day before I expected to get an offer from NAL.

I put Ron and Michael in touch with each other and let them work things out. Michael and I discussed the merits of shopping the book to other publishers, but we got a good preliminary offer from NAL and decided to stick with them. In a way, I did a lot of the legwork an agent normally does by getting to the point where an offer was on the table, but Michael ran with it from that point on and did the work that requires an expert. He negotiated the advance much more aggressively than I would have had the courage to do (I asked him if he’d come along with me when I buy my next car!) and he retained foreign translation rights, which we now get to sell independently of the publisher. I would have signed on the dotted line after the initial offer and been none the wiser.

In addition to having someone negotiating with the publishers on my behalf who knows how these things are done, I now have someone else with an active interest in the future of my writing career. It’s a great feeling. My agent continues to work on The Road to the Dark Tower and has thus far sold it to Italy and Holland based on my proposal and outline. We expect more foreign markets to come on board once we have a finalized copy of the manuscript to show around.

At any time did you feel like giving up on this project? This must have been a great deal of stress for you.

Giving up never crossed my mind. This was a labor of love from beginning to end. Writing isn’t my day job – I go to work like everyone else, so this was something I had to squeeze in during my off hours. Early in the morning, evenings, weekends. But it was such a clearly defined project and something that interested me greatly, so each day’s work was fun. I could see the big picture from the beginning and had developed an outline that kept me focused on the target. If I momentarily lost energy for one section of the book, I could always set it aside and move over to another chapter.

That’s not to say I didn’t have periods of insecurity. Those came primarily near the end of the first draft, when I knew I was soon going to have to say “I’m done” and hand it off to my editor, who had his own set of expectations for the book. Would he hate it? Had I failed to accomplish what I set out to do? After working on the draft for six months, I had to come to peace with the idea that if there was anything major wrong with the book, I probably wasn’t going to fix it the weekend before my deadline to send it to New York. But I poured over it a hundred times that weekend and I probably wasn’t much fun to live with the day before I entrusted it to the UPS folks.

But I never felt like quitting – it was too much fun. And when the editor’s report came back, I took his detailed comments and criticisms to heart and attacked the book with renewed vigor because he’s as much a fan of the series as I am and his ideas and very specific suggestions helped me strengthen the book.

Would you take on another lengthy project?

Sure, in a minute, if I could find something that captured my interest to the same extent and would also be interesting to others. I’m not sure I could generate this level of enthusiasm for a project if I wasn’t truly fascinated by the material myself.

You have an interesting dichotomy with your writing. You write novels and short stories. You coauthored many scientific publications. How do you deal with writing science technology and then change to fiction? Is there a “shifting of gears”, so to speak? Have you ever worked on writing in both areas at the same time?

I’m no longer actively involved with writing journal articles but science is still a big part of my life – I’m a member of an international committee on crystallographic software development and I work in the marketing division of a company that sells high-tech scientific instrumentation. A couple of years ago I made a deliberate transition from doing science and scientific software development on a daily basis to a part of the company where I make more use of my writing skills.

I do have to change gears but a lot of it has to do with environment. At work, I’m writing brochures and editing press releases or web content. At my nice big rolltop desk at home – a Christmas gift from my wife in 1999 – I’m writing books and stories, interviews, reviews and columns.

I’m always flipping back and forth between non-fiction and fiction. I multi-task very well. I write a lengthy column for Cemetery Dance magazine every two months that is a continuously ongoing process between deadlines. In the three-plus years that I’ve been writing News from the Dead Zone, I’ve probably written over a hundred thousand words of non-fiction for Cemetery Dance.

However, while I worked on The Road to the Dak Tower, I wrote almost no fiction. Not because it would have required changing gears but because I had deadlines that I wanted to meet. We had a very practical reason for getting this book out in late 2004 – that’s when the final volume of the Dark Tower series comes out and having this book on the shelves soon thereafter has obvious benefits. I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize that schedule. In the first half of 2003, when I wrote the first draft, I might have written one or two short stories. I continued doing book reviews for the local paper and my Cemetery Dance column, but nothing else.

On the hiatus between turning in my first draft and when I got it back for revisions, I returned my focus to short stories and I was very pleased with how they turned out. One of them was accepted for Borderlands 5, an anthology containing stories by King, Whitley Strieber, Bentley Little, David Schow and many others. That success encouraged me to keep fiction going as a viable mode of expression, too, in spite of my success in the non-fiction realm. A few years ago, I would never have predicted that my first book-length publication wouldn’t be a novel. My agent has also read over a dozen of my stories and is encouraging me to explore that venue.

Can you talk about your writing style? How has it grown?

I’m not sure I’m the best person to address my style because that would require me to be more analytical about it than I’m comfortable with. The way the words end up on the computer screen in front of me is something more akin to magic than science. It’s a fairly subconscious process. I believe that I do have an identifiable style – I’ve been told that by colleagues who critiqued some of my early fiction – but I’m not sure I could define it or explicate it to anyone’s satisfaction.

When I started writing short stories, I tended to be superficial. Readers weren’t allowed very deep within the story and my descriptive presentation was dominated by the visual. I hope that I’ve learned that readers become more engrossed by a story when they feel like they’re doing more than observing something being played out in front of them. Part of this involves the full use of all of the senses. Invoking a smell or a taste rather than just a sight goes a long way toward bringing a scene to life.

Allowing readers inside the mind of at least one of the story’s participants so they can sympathize or empathize is something I’m still working on. I think beginning writers are reluctant to do this because they’re afraid that they are allowing readers inside their own heads. Afraid of being too self-revealing. However, once we learn to understand our characters and create them as entities who aren’t mostly ourselves, we become more permissive about letting the reader in on their thought processes.

In what new directions are you trying to push yourself?

It’s time for me to return to writing a novel. I only have one under my belt, and it resides in the metaphorical trunk where it is destined to remain. Writing it was an important process because it was like completing a marathon. No records were set and I’m not bragging about how quickly I ran, but I made it to the end alive, crossed the finish line and I now know that I can do it. That confidence alone bolsters me greatly as I prepare to tackle the next one. I know I can plow through to the end. The trick this time is to do it better, and I think I’ve learned a lot about writing since my last effort, which was written in 2001.

What part of novel writing comes easiest to you? Plotting? Characterization? Theme?

I’m not sure any of it comes easily, but theme might be the easiest on the surface. I have an idea of what point I what to get across and perhaps even a metaphor to convey this idea. Plotting comes in increments. Sometimes I see no further than the end of today’s writing session. Other times I can see the broad arc of the story and where I need to get to without being entirely sure of the road along the way. Plotting is sometimes an obstacle and I’m trying to be less willful about pushing the characters where I want them to go in favor of sitting back to allow them to take me for the ride. I don’t think about characterization much on a conscious level but I know that a lot goes on in my subconscious that ends up on the page without me being too analytical about it. So, perhaps that’s ultimately the easiest because my mental computer processor does a lot of the work offline.

What role has the Internet played in your writing?

The earliest critique group I joined was Internet based. We exchanged short stories and then posted our comments on a semi-public bulletin board. I learned a lot about editing through that process. I now tend to be a rather ruthless editor of my own work but also of anything else put before me.

The Internet also provides writers a sense of community. We tend to work in isolation, so having a place to go to share successes and failures and to get feedback or have questions answered or debated, alleviates some of that isolation. The Internet is also a wonderful source for research, once you figure out how to tell the reliable information from the questionable.

It’s also a wonderful marketing tool. I maintain a message board at www.BevVincent.com where I carry out an ongoing conversation with my readers. I’ve talked about the process of writing The Road to the Dark Tower at each step along the way and opened up the curtain that sometimes exists between writers and readers. It’s a freewheeling environment where people feel like they are witnessing the process behind the scenes where they aren’t normally permitted.

Has anyone influenced you in your writing?

Everyone I’ve ever read. I don’t consciously model my writing on anyone else ’s style or approach but I enjoy observing how writers handle particular situations and see if there are lessons I can bring into my own work. For example, I was fascinated by how Ian McEwan handled point of view in Atonement and I always look at the way Graham Joyce does dialog. Take a look at the book reviews section of my web site for a sample of what I’ve been reading over the past five years. Most of it is crime fiction or suspense, which surprises a lot of people. I don’t read much in the horror genre these days, but every now and then you discover a wonderful novel like The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan and realize how truly lyrical someone can be in the genre.

Is there any one aspect of writing you enjoy the most?

That sensation when you sit down at the computer with only a vague idea of what you are about to do and suddenly a story comes to life and the words seem to be flowing out of your fingertips without being filtered through your conscious mind. When that happens, it is truly like magic. Then, when you go back later and reread what you’ve written and find things that weren’ t placed there deliberately – connections, allusions, and references – it’s a joy of discovery.

Thank you for your time…

And thank you for your interest! I hope your readers will drop by my web site to find links to some of my writing projects and hang out on my message board for a while. The Road to the Dark Tower will be on a bookshelf near you in October.