Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious writer, but he’s one of only a handful of American novelists who want to make the reader laugh. Whether he’s taking on religion in “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” or writing a funny book about death in “A Dirty Job,” there’s no writer quite like Christopher Moore
Fresh off “Fool,” a book which took him back to Thirteenth century England and told the story of King Lear from the point of view of the court jester, Moore returns to present day San Francisco with a sequel to his earlier books “Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story” and “You Suck: A Love Story” in “Bite Me: A Love Story.” What follows is an edited conversation with Moore, which was just as entertaining as his readers might expect.
ALEX DUEBEN: I really enjoyed
Bite Me and I was wondering, the ending of the previous book
You Suck deliberately echoed the ending of the first book in the series,
Bloodsucking Fiends. Were you planning the sequel when you did that?
CM: Yeah.
You Suck was left open to have a sequel and I wanted the three of them to stand as piece of work. I had originally proposed four, but I think this does it for me.
AD: What would fourth have been?
CM: I don’t know. I didn’t have a plot. I just had a title,
Foul Dead Things: A Love Story. (laughs) But I didn’t know what it was going to be about. And I’m not completely closed to it, but I’m done writing vampires for a little while.
AD: Each of the three books are very different
CM: I don’t want to write the same book over and over again. And even though there are some similar plot elements, as you might think there would be in the setting with the same characters. I just didn’t want to do structurally the same book over and over again. I’ve always tried to do something at least a little different.
AD: Do you enjoy writing Abby Normal?
CM: She still has the ability crack me up. She’s difficult to write because her stuff has to be very crafted. It’s not natural for me, a middle aged white guy, to write in the voice of a sixteen year old goth girl. It’s as hard as writing Shakespearean dialect in my last book
Fool. Abby’s stuff is every bit as difficult to write as that.
AD: Her dialogue definitely has a sense of structure and its own internal narrative logic.
CM: When you do these kind of dialect books you have to invent something that approximates the speech of either a sixteen year old goth girl or a medieval fool. You can’t actually write the way they would speak, or it’s not accessible to the reader. It has to be a little more clear and a little less stylistic, so its really a hybrid of normal diction and this hyper diction that these characters use. That’s what’s going on with Abby. Me trying to make the way a kid like that speaks, which can be wildly irritating, accessible to people who have to spend three hundred pages with her.
AD: When she first appeared in
A Dirty Job as a small character, did you know she would become such a big figure in later books?
CM: I didn’t actually. I knew that I was going to bring her back and
A Dirty Job foresees that
You Suck is going to be written because there’s a scene that is duplicated in both books but from different points of view. I knew that Abby was going to be in the book but I didn’t know until I started writing her voice how big she was going to be. When I went to write
Bite Me she had taken over. She had become such a strong part of the second book that
Bite Me became her book.
I don’t want to sound mystical and, oh the characters tell you what to do, but it’s very much like method acting. I can talk about how difficult it might be to craft the way she speaks, it’s also self-driven and you get into the character the way a method actor would. She just had so much energy that I kinda just gave the third book to her. At least voice-wise.
AD: I know you live in San Francisco and have written a few books set in the city. For you, what makes it a great setting?
CM: Geographically you can contain it fairly easily in a book. It’s smaller than most big cities. It’s a tenth the size of London or Paris or Los Angeles, so you can write about all the different neighborhoods, or many of the different neighborhoods in the city, and the characters never have to get in a car because everything’s so close. There’s this mystical gothic-y fog thing that goes on in the city. Architecturally it’s very pretty. It’s got a lot of things aesthetically going for it.
Most of the books take place in the North end of the city which is the Financial district, Chinatown, North Beach, which is an Italian neighborhood, and Russian Hill, which is right now young professionals and retired people. You have these clashes of culture. Chinatown is like a foreign country that’s four blocks by four blocks. Watching the interaction of all those different cultures is just interesting. I was a cultural anthro major so I get to do cultural anthro in my backyard more or less.
AD: My major complaint about
Bite Me is that there wasn’t enough of the Animals.
CM: The story didn’t want to keep them engaged. I understand what you’re saying. I have the same feeling, but I couldn’t get them more engaged and develop their characters more in the context that I had because of turning so much of the book over to the new members of the cast, which were Abby and Fu Dog and Jared. In a three hundred page book the cast can only get so big and I found myself saying can I go down a road with this subplot or can’t I? I thought, I’ve got to have them show up. The Emperor, too. I would have loved to have had the Emperor more engaged in what was going on, but the book didn’t have enough room for them.
AD: I definitely understand and you didn’t want to just fulfill a checklist of things from the previous books included that people enjoyed.
CM: It was tough for me to write a third book in a series and not make it formulaic. There’s an arc to any book you write that is just the arc of the story. There’s the status quo, something happens, and then you return to status quo and consequently when the characters and the setting were the same, there was going to be a similarity to the books. I was trying to avoid that, but yet satisfy readers who want the same thing over and over again. I mean I get asked ten times a day when are you going to do a sequel to
Lamb. My answer is, it’s the life of Jesus, you can’t do a sequel to it. (laughs) Pretty much everyone knows how that story ends.
AD: Is there the possibility of seeing more of Abby and Tommy and the Emperor?
CM: Probably the Emperor. I would at some point like to do a book with the characters and premise from
A Dirty Job, the death merchants, that would probably be set in San Francisco. It had the Emperor and it wouldn’t be a difficult stretch to put Abby and Tommy in it. I don’t have a plan for that but I do want to do a book with that premise again and that would almost undoubtedly be set in San Francisco.
Of my San Francisco books, there’s no doubt that
A Dirty Job is my best. It was also way more ambitious. It’s a comedy about death. When I did
Bloodsucking Fiends I thought, it’s a vampire book it’s not a vehicle for big themes. It needs to be entertaining and funny and that is all I should shoot for. Hopefully it is.
A Dirty Job I had big themes to deal with that were pulled from caring for my mother when she was dying and caring for my girlfriend’s mother when she was dying. There was experience to put in that I had to bring through the comedy.
AD: A Dirty Job is one of if not my favorite of your books and I think it’s one of the most successful because that’s where the sensibility and voice and the structure and complexity of the book all came together.
CM; When I teach it’s something that I try to tell students, but it’s a really big thing to hand someone, a project or a book is often defined by its ambition before you start it. That’s what I think for any artist is what makes a difference. Are you stretching to do this? Are you trying to do something that’s actually hard to do and might be beyond your abilities. I could really fuck the dog one of these days doing that. Continually putting those hurdles in front of myself. That’s why it’s kind of fun to do a book like
Bite Me. The book I’m working on right now, I’m completely freaked out about being able to ever finish it.
AD: All your books have a comic sensibility in common. Is that you and your perspective on the world?
CM: I think so. That’s kind of my default setting. I really don’t think you can teach anybody to be funny and I know having taught a little bit that when someone comes in and says I want to write like you and you talk to them for ten minutes and go you’re just not funny. It’s just not how you think. It’s not something that I learned. My dad was a funny guy. It’s just how I react to the world. I actually tried to write quote serious stuff unquote and I haven’t been able to pull it off. I get about ten pages into something and I go, something funny has to happen, this is boring.
AD: How much of say,
Fluke, is you wanting to write a science fiction story, but it just comes out in this fashion?
CM: Fluke is the perfect example. The reason I wrote
Fluke is because I wanted to get in the water with humpback whales. Bottom line. A friend of mine had come back from this island called Rurutu--I call it the Scooby Island cause it’s called Rurutu. He had been in the water with singing humpback whales and he described it. I thought, that’s awesome, I need to do that. In US waters the only way you can do that is if you’re on a whale research permit and you have to get permission. I started writing letters and sending my books to scientists and these guys in Hawaii said sure come on over we’ll put you on the research permit. It started more with wanting to live a life. One of the things you find pretty early on when you write books for a living is you realize I could live my entire life within this room by myself making click-y noises on a keyboard if I don’t make some effort to go do stuff.
That book was completely motivated by wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with whales, and as I started doing the research, it turned out that the scientists were much more interesting than the whales. That’s what the book ended up really being about. The people who study whales much less than the whales themselves. But it all started with just wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with a humpback whale. Which was awesome by the way.
AD: Do you do a lot of research?
CM: I actually do. For
Fool I spent a month in England and France. For
Lamb I went to Israel for almost a month. I didn’t go to the Himalayas or India and other places that take place in the book. I quite frankly ran out of time and money. I couldn’t go to those places and actually get the book done, so all that’s done from my imagination. I always try to go to the places I’m writing about. It adds dimensions to the book that I would never have been able to anticipate. If I hadn’t gone to Israel and seen how desolate Judea is, where the Dead Sea is and where a lot of the gospels take place and seen how rough the land is from Nazareth to Jerusalem and sort of gotten an idea of what the geography of the place is like, it would have been a completely different book. So yeah I always try to go to where I’m writing about. Even it’s harder with the historical stuff.
I’m writing a book now that takes place in nineteenth century Paris and the city is in many ways the same but the culture’s not. It’s weird because it’s closer to our culture than medieval england or first century Palestine were and that actually makes it more difficult because I can’t just make shit up. (laughs) There was this huge hole in the Jesus story. I could do anything I wanted. With
Fool, which was set in the Thirteenth Century, it was kind of the same thing. There’s so much that people don’t know about what went on in those days that I was able to fill it in.
AD: How do you work. Do you outline your books, because in
Bite Me, especially, there’s a lot going on.
CM: I do a sort of diagram that’s less a “category one subcategory a” outline and more of a circles and arrows thing. Because it’s a visual representation it’s hard to describe it. The short answer is I do a very rough outline and then I try to plug in scenes that I know are going to be there and stay about five scenes ahead of myself. I mean I obviously write in scenes. That’s how I learned to write, it’s what is effective, and it’s how drama happens. For instance I know that in the next scene we’re going to meet the old vampires and then I’ll get there and decide whose point of view I need to do that from. As far as the outline goes, all the outline will say is, meet old vampires. And then as I approach that I’ll figure out that they had to get somehow and I’ll research the ship.
As the years go by I outline more for a couple reasons. One, I’m on deadline all the time so I can’t afford to be stuck. With
Lamb I was stuck for six months. I got up to Antioch and I remember the proposal to the publisher said, and then they’ll have adventures, or something like that. I figured I’ll figure it out when I get to it, and then when I got to it I went, fuck I have no idea what happens now. And I’m stuck in Antioch going I don’t know what’s I didn’t think it through, so I do that now. What I do is outline a little bit more and know where I’m going so that my writing time is more efficient. But then when I write, I write it page one, “once upon a time,” right to the end. I try to write a little bit every day. I have goals which I always fall short of. I try to write a thousand words a day and then I’ll do eight hundred. I try to write for four hours a day and I’ll write three. What happens is the story tightens up as you get to the end, by the time you get to what would be the third act of a book you don’t have a lot of flexibility in what you can do. You sort of set all this stuff in motion and you can’t go very afield to do any exploring. Any goofing around you have to do it in the first half of the book. It becomes necessary to outline as it tightens up. Like braiding a rope or something.
AD: Reading the books, you seem to enjoy the first two acts more than last part, it’s much looser and feels more relaxed in the beginning and the end is very much about wrapping up the plot.
CM: You mean actually doing the process? The first hundred pages are so fucking hard I can’t even tell you. I hate that part. This was the first time I ever said that out loud because it’s not a good thing to say things like that, but the first hundred pages of a book are miserable. You’re establishing the world and you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t have the characters set and every day you’re making just a million decisions and I’m awful at making decisions. It takes me three hours to figure out where I’m going to have dinner if I’m going out to dinner. All those decisions have to be made and they set the path for the rest of the book in those first hundred pages. It typically will take me six months to write the first hundred pages and I may write the next two hundred pages in two months.
As far as what I enjoy writing the most, probably the middle third of a book is the most enjoyable you’ve got things running but you still have some room to move around in and you can make decisions that go a little farther afield a digress a bit. But the first part’s miserable and largely because even if you’ve done it a dozen times like I have you still go shit I have no idea what I’m doing. This is like the first book all over again.
AD: I don’t know if you want to say anything about the next book you’re working on. You mentioned it was set in 19th Century Paris.
CM: I can tell you about all I know about it. It’s about Nineteenth century French painters. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s going to have weird supernatural stuff in it. It’s going to include a cast of characters that’s a laundry list of the most famous painters of their day, the impressionists and the post-impressionists. It turns out, that’s really hard to do, so don’t try that at home. (laughs)
