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MEET DEAN KOONTZ (4/2011)
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

Dean Koontz

Goof off. I was a superb goofer-offer. I had no sense whatsoever of the finite nature of time. I was going to live forever; therefore the smartest thing I could do was start early to find fun ways of wasting time. Because I came from a very poor family that didn't value books and had none in the house, I identified reading with rebellion, as a form of goofing off. One day, after I had read hundreds of books, I discovered that books had changed me. I didn't want to goof off any longer. I wanted to write. I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. Books saved me from a life as a slacker.

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

Probably the young-adult novels of Robert Heinlein, which I read and re-read, then his adult novels, and then many other science-fiction writers like Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon. By my late twenties, I was burned out on science fiction, but by then the classics of the genre had inflated my imagination from the size of a birthday-party balloon to a dirigible.

Did you write stories when you were growing up?

At the age of eight, I was writing stories on tablet paper, drawing cover illustrations, stapling them into booklets, and selling them to relatives for a nickel each. After a while, they got together and agreed that none of them would buy any more because I was becoming such a pest. I think this is called "restraint of trade." You can go to jail if convicted of that. But I was merciful and didn't complain to the authorities.

When you were a child, did you ever have moments when you decided that you were going to be a writer when you grew up?

Not really. We were poor, my dad was a violent alcoholic, and on some level I believe I expected not to live to adulthood. I existed very much in the moment, which is how I managed to have a happy childhood in exceedingly unhappy circumstances. In my last year of college, I won a prize in a national contest for college writers and sold that story to a magazine. At that point, at twenty, I began to think of writing as a possible career.

Was your first book accepted immediately? Or did you experience a number of rejections.

My first novel was accepted as a paperback--in fact my first three. But then I went through a period of rejection. Of the next eight novels, four never saw publication, and the other four were rejected by a variety of publishers before I placed rewritten versions of them. That was a desperate period, but thereafter I never had another
rejection. In any writer's life, perseverance matters.

What kind of things inspire you to write?

Anything. Everything. Life. Ideas come from sources as different from one another as a line in a pop song, an overheard conversation in a restaurant, a concept discovered in a book of philosophy.... The initial inspiration must generate in you a sense of enchantment or  wonder, or at least delight. From enchantment, wonder, and delight come passion, the commitment of heart and mind and energy to the story that evolves from that moment of discovery.

Do you write every day and do you have set hours that you work?

I write six days a week. My usual schedule is -- arise at 5:45 a.m., shower, walk the dog, have breakfast at my desk, start writing at about 7:30, and write straight through until five o'clock, with no lunch or a small lunch at my desk. During the last month of a book,  I write longer hours than that. Writing is not merely a job; it is also a mission, a calling. Writing talent is an unearned grace in which a writer can take no pride, but what he can take satisfaction from is the craftsmanship and the purpose that he or she brings to each work. I believe the talent comes with an obligation to use it well and exhaustively.

Do you work on more than one book at a time?

For me, that's impossible. A novel requires a very tight focus and the ability to fall away into the created world as if it were real. Falling away into more than one fictional world at a time...well, that probably would lead to being institutionalized.