It might not be appropriate or brief enough to fit such an introduction, but over the last 13 years of knowing Joe Monks he has been many people, talented, honest, outspoken, and interesting. He is also the human being who is constantly the most funny human I've ever interacted with. We don't live near each other, while I like Florida I'd never move there, and Joe hates the cold with such a fever, he feels warmed by insults to the weather of Minnesota. Having said that, I love Joe Monks, he is really amazing in his talents and drive to overcome the limits of existence.
What genres do you feel most comfortable writing within, and why do you think that is so?
I’m most comfortable writing horror, because that’s my passion. My first love. It’s the place where I want to be most. Doesn’t mean I can’t (or won’t) write other stuff—some of my most widely-available work is out there in a *lot* of adult publications. I’ll also drift into fantasy now and again, comedy, and I’ve got a concept that I think’d make a great Hallmark holiday movie, but horror storytelling is what makes me happy, so I camp out there the most.
How would you label the collection of all of your works? I've worked with writers who think genres are evidence of limited minds, that all work should have equal interest if well written. Would you agree with that? And for the record, I think people get way too proud and even defensive over things that don't matter, even a bit
I think there should be equal interest if you want to produce something high-quality, but that’s where I’d draw the line. I get hired to write stuff on a fairly regular basis that I don’t like whatsoever. Since I know the Ins-and-Outs of the various niches, I’m capable of producing work editors really like; those readers enjoy, and everyone is happy, even though it’s not my thing. Doesn’t seem to be a sign of any limitation, no different than me traveling to a city I’ve never been to before. I have no familiarity, I’m blind, I can’t navigate easily, but my attitude is: So? Doesn’t stop me from traveling. I do some research. I ask some questions. I get a feel and jump right in. I don’t find fiction all that different—you *can* go anywhere, you just need to be willing to deal with all the differences and things that don’t line up the way you expected.
Why do you write? Are writers born or are they forged in life experiences?
I write because storytelling has always been central to my life. When I was really young, we lived in a neighborhood without many kids, just off a main road. You really couldn’t ride your bike or play in the street, so you spent a lot of time keeping yourself busy. This was the early ‘70s, way before cable TV or video games or the internet.
One of my earliest memories is getting this hand-me-down box of books from my cousins. Whole freaking crate of kids’ hardcovers. The Bobsey Twins, some Hardy Boys, and most of the Nancy Drew books (the ones with the yellow spines for you collector’s out there).
I fell into that box and never escaped. I disappeared with books all the time. And it didn’t take long to envy Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon—who were heroes to me. A 6 year old kid doesn’t know it isn’t one really busy author, so I wanted to be them. I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. That may have put me into the ‘forged’ category, but I kinda think it’s a calling. I found a typewriter in the back of my Dad’s closet when I was nine. A full-size black beast with a 2-color ribbon (red and black), mounted in a suitcase for travel. Wish I could remember the model. Bottom line, though? Finding that case was my call, and I answered.
As a person who has directed film, as well as written for comics and prose, has your blindness led you to pursue writing differently than most writers, or, do you suggest, with technology, you are the same as any writer in ability and ultimate output?
For the most part, I’m the same guy who was pounding the keyboard the day before the lights went out, although instead of looking at a screen while typing, I listen to a screenreader. However, I realize there are things that do pose limitations. I’ve read about these 3-D video goggles gamers’re using? I can picture that, but I can’t really describe the feeling a gamer or film geek would experience in that headset. I wouldn’t want to take on an assignment from a fantasy mag editor about the first landing party on Mars, because while friends can describe all the cool new rover pics and the landscape? I’m not gonna be able to do that justice and wouldn’t want to try. I might co-write something if that needed to be the setting, but I don’t mind recognizing my limitations. I won’t fake it. And, I don’t mind. It’s not that big a deal, having some limitations. Like with the movie. I had naysayers—plenty of ‘em. When you attempt something that’s never been done before, there’s always people who try and shoot you down. Musk got laughed at when he said he was going to launch SpaceX. So, I directed The Bunker. Blind. Only filmmaker to do it, so far. Was appealing enough to distribs to pick it up. If you write and you want to be a pro, you put yourself on the line with every word. Every story. Every piece you release. Comes with the territory.
Tech makes using a computer, doing research, writing and editing fairly same-old, same-old, while navigating a smartphone makes it seem like I’ve just been transported onto the Enterprise, and Scotty can’t keep from looking at me like a tribble because I can’t figure out how to flush the toilet. So long as I can still bang out stories that get good reviews, that make people send me hate mail, that get me the occasional screenplay option and freelance assignments? Feels to me like I’m not any worse off than any other writer just because of the sightless thing.
I've read studies that suggest people across the planet have reduced reading for pleasure by an amount that is frightening. Do you think that people have stopped reading, or, has the culture changed in ways that reading happens differently, with different aims, and different results? Why is that? Is reading the base of all entertainment, that is, even should one be illiterate, the world revolves around an axis of knowledge created by someone, somewhere writing?
I agree that for all forms of narrative entertainment, there’s a writer to be credited. Even video games have a central concept and storyline. The RPG gaming industry is making a huge comeback thanks to Stranger Things. But I do think people have cut back on reading, and that’s a shame. I’ve been researching print publishing again because we’re launching the Fright Unseen imprint to go along with the Sight Unseen films banner. I know what it costs to print a paperback, comic book or hardcover. The prices publishers are charging is one of the big problems. You can’t expect, with or without the impact COVID had on our economy, people to spend $50 for a hardcover they’ll read in a week, when they can subscribe to Netflix or Hulu for far less.
How do publishers expect to compete? Hmnnn, let me see. I can subscribe to this streaming service for half the price of one book, select from eight trillion movies or TV shows, and binge until I pass out if I want to. I mean, who’s going to choose a book compared to that? And, ebooks? Why are publishers charging ten bucks or more for a file transfer? Talk about slapping your readers in the face. ‘Here, if you buy the ebook, we spend *nothing* on printing, you don’t get to turn a page and can’t get it signed if you go to a convention, but we’ll still charge you ten or fifteen bucks because it’s a big-name author.’ Really? True, the big guys have contracts, they expect to make coin, I totally understand. But don’t tell me that if you need to charge $50 for a Stephen King/Joe Hill hardcover, and you eliminate the entire cost of production, that you still need to charge double digits for an e-copy. I don’t blame people for abandoning reading given the cheaper alternatives out there.
If publishers don’t want to see their customers continue to drop off, they need to entice readers back into the fold with not just affordable products, but rock-solid stories. Stop publishing quota-fiction that’s based on anything but excellent content. That’s not to say you can’t do a women’s anthology or a collection of speculative fiction from Latino authors, no one should confuse that. Just being a Latino/ Hispanic author, as I am, however, shouldn’t get you *in*.
Unfortunately, that’s happening a *lot* these days. I have thrown away .99c on too many themed horror anthologies to count in the last year. I think a number of editors have gotten so wrapped up in producing titles for a certain audience, *that’s* their only concern. They’re willing to accept borderline tales from writers claiming to be underrepresented just to fill slots in the ToC, and it’s resulting in some really poor offerings. I don’t expect a lot of these publishers to be around in 5 years, and the industry will be better off without them, but that’s also causing readers to look elsewhere.
In 5 years, will Covid still leave a shadow that lingers over our lives, or, will there be a new more dangerous world issue for us to fear? How does Covid and the like, leave an impact in the writing of the day?
Keeping politics out of this, I think a dismal aspect to the COVID-19 outbreak has been the ease with which governments—our own and internationally—have seen how easy it is to control people and restrict freedoms due to fear. I think that will linger whether or not a cure for COVID is found or if a true vaccine eliminates it—the way polio and smallpox were technically eradicated. If a COVID 21 or 25 pops up, though, that’ll be the societal flavor-of-the-day, and it’ll seep into a lot of work. My novella, The Weeping, uses the pandemic, although I didn’t refer to it by name. It’s just a handy plot device to get someone who has underlying conditions out of his apartment in Manhattan and into a small town up in the mountains where he has a complicated history. That’s it. I gave a character a convenient reason to leave town, nothing more. But, it definitely puts readers into the now. It gives them something we can all identify with, and I think that’s a great advantage for writers. I’ve always thought one of Stephen King’s best tools was the way he could describe something, and it didn’t matter where you’re from, what your racial or ethnic background is, what your financial status is—you *recognized* that place. You had been there. A small town convenience store. A thrift shop. That ball field on the outskirts of town where the teenagers smoke weed under the bleachers. He did that better than anyone for a while.
Now, as writers, we have this huge commonality we share. We’ve all faced some form of lockdown. We’ve all known someone who’s had COVID and recovered, or passed. We all have some experience of how the news covered the pandemic, and so on. That cuts beyond skin color or religion or gender—everyone who lived through the past year has something they share. So, my bet is, stories about COVID or a COVID-esque pandemic will be circulating for a long time to come. It’s up to us to find ways to go beyond just “I can use this!”, though.
In a similar way, did the Black Death leave a ghost in the minds of creative people, or a major war or horrific famine or anything similarly frightening? Do we as writers have a duty to address such things? Or, are we duty bound to write, and try to not be moved or changed by enormous events? Why is that?
As DEVO would say, “Freedom of Choice”. A duty? I don’t, and won’t, feel obligated to make my fiction conform to anything. As mentioned, I’m using COVID, but not naming it. Fifty years from now, if COVID is as passe as Zika, it won’t take a reader out of the narrative. But, if other authors want to write a COVID-centric novel? Cool. A Gulf Wars/terrorism novel? Have at it! I think a lot of writers have used, if not the plague-plague, their own versions to conjure fear. How can anyone not look at a zombie apocalypse story as not having *some* ties to the biggie? I hate to keep beating the dead horse, but for me, as both a reader and writer, I want characters that are well-developed (or grow through the work), a taut storyline, and something that keeps me engaged. I just want work that makes me feel I invested my time well in reading *this*. If it has a social message subtext? Don’t beat me over the head with it. If it has a historical component, just make the story accessible whether or not I know about that event in detail.
I’m good if you’re entertaining me. That’s why I’m reading fiction in the first place—escape. I want to be on the edge of my seat; to feel the way I did when I first saw THEM! when I stayed up to watch it on late-night TV behind my parents’ back. I’m gonna pick up a book like ‘The Best Of Zombie Face-Eater Chainsaw Splatterpunk’ because that’s what I want. Zombies and chainsaws. Lots of face-eating. I’m not going *there* to read about how some bullied HS kid stays home all day due to bigotry and racism and at the end sees one of his victimizers running from a zombie on the news. That’s a story I would have rejected. I can already find *that* content in anthologies, same as I can find great fiction about race-relations, about gender identity, about interstellar travel—all that. I applaud anyone efforting to expand the titles available in sub-genres like that, and I hope they find their audience. I just want titles to be full of what’s promised, what’s really well-written, and which makes me excited about my purchase.
If people want pandemic anthologies and COVID novels and XXX virus-fetish? Woo-hoo! Enjoy. If it works in a story I want to write? Bonus. I won’t ignore it, I won’t deny it happened or seek to remain unmoved, but I like our options as writers. Space isn’t the ‘final frontier’ and never has been (although the line is incredibly cool and I love it). Fiction is. Space we can explore. So long as there’s intelligent life, species will continue to travel and investigate as their technology allows. But…vampires? If they don’t exist in the great ‘out there’? We *own* that bitch! Humans made it up. Orcs? Vulcans? Krypton? We, the writing collective, did that, trapped here on our single little planet, never having set foot on anything beyond a moon in the neighborhood. We can get to Mars, we can get out of the galaxy someday, we can possibly get everywhere given enough time. But *we* created The Blob, which might not exist at all, and there’s the beauty of it. We have *no* limits as writers. We can make up anything. We’ve been doing it our entire existence, and some of the good stuff has survived for centuries. You do a good enough job? An HP Lovecraft/Victor Hugo type job? Your work can outlive you indefinitely. Those guys and millions like them had all sorts of heavy-duty real life events to borrow from and still went far beyond. I like to think of anything we face as useful—but not necessarily defining.
As a writer do you have the ability to write despite not having a whole knowledge of an event? I am wondering how writers can be judged upon the whole of their presentation, when even the most studious and comprehensive study of any issue leaves holes and missing portions of experience and data? Are writers being asked to complete a work that cannot be complete and thereby are being judged by a false standard?
To answer the end part first, yes. In that context regarding history, writers are being judged by a flawed standard. But, no different than sailors and settlers back in the days before maps, ya work with whatcha got, right?
I’ve never been a big TV watcher, but I did see some episodes of Quantum Leap when it was on. Loved the concept. What I also enjoy, even now, is the idea that you could take a tiny piece of history, give it to a screenwriter, and say, “Here, make this an exciting hour so we can hand it off to the next guy.” You could be talking MLK, Gulf of Tonkin, the first PRIDE parade in the country, anything. And, you could weave a tale around just that little piece, and possibly hit it out of the park. I appreciate that. I can’t know everything about the Miracle on Ice 1980 olympic team, despite watching every game that year and too many interviews and look-backs to count, but listening to that game when it gets replayed and hearing Pav knock that puck down and Eruzione moving into the slot to fire that shot? I can still picture it. I remember being in the basement with the family gathered and us absolutely freaking out when Eruzione hit twine. But the game and interviews and Al Michaels’ call and stories told later can never give us the entire picture. But, is that really a limitation? Heck, any member of that team missed a practice or hung out with different guys the night before one game or another. *All* their ‘histories’ are slightly different and would have holes. I see that as opportunity, not a deficiency. As writers, being able to use history, to explore those holes, and find places to set up shop is fantastic. Unless an author really blows it, or intentionally distorts history, I’m not going to judge him/her/them harshly. You try and rewrite history, then I will. It’s that simple.
There was this show on ABC back in the early ‘80s called DARKROOM. Didn’t last long, maybe a season or two, but one of the stories that stays with me to this day was about a dad who buys his son a crystal radio kit. Only, when they get it working, it starts picking up radio broadcasts from the ‘40s. Then, the dad starts intercepting WWII morse code messages, including one from the ship his father served on during the war. I won’t spoil it, but man, if you’ve never caught the show, I think this was one of the stories in the very first episode. History and horror and a timeline that’s 100% believable? You *want* to track this down, trust me. Very Twilight Zone. To me, that’s the kind of tale that wraps up your last question perfectly. Can a writer do it? Nope, no way. Can a writer still carve out territory to tell a historical tale that blows the roof off the arena like an Angus Young solo? Hell yeah. That sort of payoff transcends any judgment, IMO.
You can find me online at:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joemonks
Parler: https://parler.com/#/user/joemonks
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-monks-5a449324/
Or at SightUnseenPictures.com
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