The Practice of Creativity

Dear readers,

I’ve missed you. It’s been more than a month since my last post—extremely unlike me. I will have lots of wonderful writing updates to share shortly—which will explain my absence. And, I expect to resume my weekly posts. In the meantime, I am excited to share the interview below.

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In 2016, I became a fan of Jake Bible, a writer and the host of the ‘Writing In Suburbia’ podcast. Writing In Suburbia is geared toward pro-writers, but is chock-full of great information for writers at all levels. The podcast is irreverent and speaks to the less glamorous side of the writing life (e.g. embracing housework chores of the day). Jake’s a prolific writer across many genres. He typically writes a novel a month. You read that right, a novel a month!

One of the features that Jake hosts on his website is ‘Friday Night Drabble Party’. Drabble was a new term to me. A drabble is a 100 word story. He writes a new one just about every Friday. I enjoy reading his drabbles and that got me interested in microfiction.

I’m grateful that Jake is always encouraging writers to look at our self-limiting beliefs and challenges us to prepare for success. Check out his ‘Prepare for Success’ episode on WIS.

I didn’t believe that I could write a drabble, or rather a good drabble. But, I decided that such a belief was really limiting. What was it based on anyway? I had never even tried to write a compressed story. So this spring, I challenged myself to write several drabbles a week for fun. I read a lot of micro and flash fiction and got very inspired. I got into a rhythm with writing drabbles and thought some of them were good enough to submit. One has already been published in the Thing Magazine and another has been accepted for publication (news forthcoming). This happy turn of events would not have happened with being inspired by Jake’s fiction and podcast.

When I heard that his new novel was in a genre he hadn’t written in before and with a new publisher, I figured that he would have valuable insights to share.

Jake Bible is a Bram Stoker Award nominated-novelist, short story writer, independent screenwriter, podcaster, and inventor of the Drabble Novel. Jake is the author of the bestselling Z-Burbia series set in Asheville, NC, the bestselling Salvage Merc One, the Apex Trilogy (DEAD MECH, The Americans, Metal and Ash) and the Mega series for Severed Press, as well as the YA zombie novel, Little Dead Man, the Teen horror novel, Intentional Haunting, the middle grade scifi/horror ScareScapes series, and the Reign of Four series, which he calls “medieval space fiction” for Permuted Press. As of 2017, he also publishes with Bell Bridge Books and will be releasing three books, starting with Stone Cold Bastards.

I’m delighted to welcome Jake Bible to ‘The Practice of Creativity’.

-Tell us about your new novel, Stone Cold Bastards. What inspired it?

The title. I came up with the title one night and wracked my brain trying to figure out what story would go with such a cool title. It came to me eventually, since it’s kind of in the first two words: stone and cold. What are stone and cold? Gargoyles!

-Can you tell us about some of the characters that we meet in this work?

The novel centers on a rag tag team of misfit gargoyles that have been tasked with protecting the last of humanity from the demon-possessed hordes that have taken over the world. This is a novel that has a lot of characters. You have the gargoyles, you have the humans being protected, you have demons, you have other survivors out in the ravaged landscape. My favorite of them all has to be Mordecai. While not the leader of the gargoyles, he is the one the others turn to when things are about to go down. He’s kind of the rock of the group, no pun intended. He’s a gruff bastard and constantly has a cigar clamped between his stone teeth. Yet despite that hard exterior, he does have a soft spot inside for the humans he’s been given the impossible task of keeping alive. He works his stone butt off and takes his job very seriously. I really dig Morty.

-You’re known as a writer who crosses many genres. This novel is urban fantasy, a genre that you hadn’t written in before. What did you learn about yourself as a writer while completing this novel?

I learned that while genres matter, and make a difference in the tone and setting of a novel, in the end all novels come down to the story and the characters. Once I got into the swing of the story, just like I do with all the novels I write, the setting fell away and I was able to concentrate on the characters. I was able to focus on action and dialogue. The fact that it was a new genre was more daunting in the beginning, but after a couple of chapters I said to myself, “You’ve got this. It’s just another novel. Do your thing.” So I did my thing and was able to relax into it.

-What aspect of the writing craft felt the most difficult for you to understand and execute when you were a beginning writer?  How did you overcome this?

The mechanics of writing was tough for me. I do not have a college degree. I didn’t go through a creative writing program. I am 100% self-educated, so I had to apply everything I’d learned as a reader to my writing. Simple mistakes in grammar that sound good coming out of my mouth, were not so good on the page. I had to unlearn a lot of my verbal affectations so that my writing could come across as something other than illiterate garbage. The way I overcame this was to write my very first novel in a drabble format. A drabble is a piece of micro-fiction where the entire story is exactly 100 words, no more, no less. I wrote Dead Mech in 100 word sections. That forced me to go back over what I wrote and edit on the spot. I quickly saw my mistakes, fixed them, tightened up the prose, and moved on to the next drabble. By the end of the novel, I was a tight writer. The grammatical mistakes I was making when I started were corrected by the end. I’ll never write another novel that way again, but it gave me a crash course in the craft that I’d missed by not going to college.

-If you could invite three living writers to a dinner party that you’re hosting, who would you invite and why?

Living writers? Yikes. Uh, Cormac McCarthy because Blood Meridian is one of the greatest horror novels ever written even though people call it a western. It’s not. It’s horror. Robert McCammon because he has been a huge influence on me as a writer. Also, I want to pick his brain about going from a career writing horror novels and into writing historical mystery novels in his Matthew Corbett books. Jeez, picking a third writer is hard. All my heroes are dead. Maybe Christopher Moore. I love his writing and the guy is hilarious. He’d help keep the dinner talk from getting too morose and serious.

-What’s your best writing tip that you’d like to share?

Never quit. Sit your ass down and do the work. Writing is work. The vast majority of people who are not writers think it’s fun and being a writer must be a dream come true. It is fun and it is a dream come true, but the fun and the dream happen because you sit in your chair and work until you can’t work anymore. Then you do the same thing the next day. And the next. You never quit. You do the work and keep doing the work until you get to where you want to be.

Born Jacob David Bible pre-Microsoft in Bellevue, WA, Jake was whisked away to the Beaver State when he was three and raised fundamentalist pagan. Fed a steady diet of Doritos, Fritos Bean Dip and Chinese herbal tonics, Jake had so many vivid hallucinations that he was writing and binding his own books by fifth grade. True story.

He grew up fascinated with the speculative and the macabre. He spent many summers on his grandparents’ lake reading a leather bound, Franklin Library Edition of The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. No, it wasn’t a haunted book. And, no, it wasn’t a haunted lake. Yes, his grandparents were actually re-animated corpses that had been accidentally murdered and then raised from the dead when a cocktail party got just a little out of hand. And they drank gin and tonics. True story.

Jake currently lives in the Asheville, NC area with his wife, two kids, and two dogs. And although he writes about zombies and cannibals, Jake does not eat of the flesh himself (that means he’s a vegetarian, son. I say, I say, stop bein’ so dense, ya hear?). But, he will eat the non-homicidal animal foodstuffs because pizza is its own food group and soy cheese just ain’t gonna cut it.

True story.

Visit him at https://jakebible.com/