TitleTales

Interview: Christopher Moore

Christopher Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of A Dirty Job and You Suck. In March 2010, his 12th novel, Bite Me, was released.

Before publishing his first novel, Practical Demonkeeping in 1992, Chris worked as a roofer, a grocery clerk, a hotel night auditor, an insurance broker, a waiter, a photographer, and a rock and roll DJ. When he’s not writing, he enjoys ocean kayaking, scuba diving, photography and sumi-e ink painting.

• Browse our list of featured titles by Christopher Moore

BWI: The end of the audio version of You Suck contains an interview with you, in which you talk about your research for that book and especially for the way Abby Normal speaks. You say you grew fonder of Abby as you wrote about her. Is she the reason for the third book in this trilogy? And, is this only a trilogy?

CM: Actually, the ending of You Suck seemed unsatisfying to me and I had wanted to do a third book in the series, so when You Suck did really well after its release I immediately asked my publisher if they were interested in my doing the third book. (It had been twelve years between the first and second books; I didn’t want it to be so long between the second and a third, if I was going to do it.) Abby is fun to read, but she’s damn hard to write, so while I like the character, she wasn’t the reason I went back to that story. I don’t have plans for any more stories in that cycle, but I’m not completely closed to it either.

BWI: What did you have to research for Bite Me? Did you find any surprises?

CM: Since Bite Me is set in San Francisco, in my neighborhood, there wasn’t a lot of research to do on setting, which is usually big for me, but there is a character in the book who is a Japanese woodblock printer, and I had to research that process, which I found very interesting.

BWI: Do you have favorite music that sets the mood for your Pine Cove and your San Francisco vampire type books? Does this change when you write books that bow to the historical like Lamb and Fool?

CM: When I was writing about Pine Cove I would listen to a lot of boogie-woogie piano music, hoping the stories might pick up that sort of steady bass note just below the surface, ready to bust out into a melody. In my other books, I usually listen to slow groove music or acid jazz, stuff that sort of disappears into the background as I work. (I tried listening to music from the 16th century for a bit when I started writing Fool, but mostly I found it annoying.) I use music primarily as noise abatement when I’m working, to drown out construction noises or whatever city noises might distract me.

BWI: You have said that you are a fan of cheesy horror movies. How do you balance in your mind the images in a movie vs. those of a reader’s imagination? Have you considered trying to write something deliberately for the big screen?

CM: I don’t think there’s much difference in the imagining part of a story. I tend to see the scene in my head, then write it down. I have written screenplays, and the biggest difference is that ultimately it’s going to be up to the director and actors to make the scene happen for the audience, so you can’t “direct” from the screenplay. You have to just describe, often flatly and in chronological sequence, what happens. In a novel you can take more liberty in painting a picture in the reader’s mind.

BWI: Which of your many characters do you like the most? Which one most resembles you?

CM: Biff and Pocket; Tommy from Bloodsucking Fiends.

BWI: Do you ever miss some of the eclectic assortment of jobs you had before you hit the big time?

CM: I occasionally miss being a DJ, because it was so spontaneous — you could make up material and it was out to an audience instantly, instead of a year or two later in the case of a book. Sometimes I miss working with people, but not often.

BWI: What kind of book do you like to read in your leisure time? Do you enjoy audiobooks?

CM: I read a pretty wide range of things. I like to read crime novels, but to be honest, the last few years I haven’t had time to read much that doesn’t relate to the research of a book I’m working on, so I’ve been reading a lot of Shakespeare, for my last book, Fool, or history and fiction for the book I’m about to start, which is set in 19th Century Paris.

BWI: When writing a character do you envision what they look like in your head or do they take on character traits first and then physical attributes?

CM: It depends on the character. I think it usually starts with personality, then it moves to physical attributes, but in the case of some characters, for instance my jester in Fool, his personality is informed by the fact that he’s small and athletic. In the case of Abby Normal in the vampire books, her Goth Girl fashion sense really informs who she is — it’s an expression of her personality and she talks about how she dresses and wears her make-up all the time.

BWI: What writer do you most like to be compared to?

CM: Charlotte Brontë. But only in the sense that I could probably take her in a cage match.

BWI: Did it take you a while to find your comedic timing or is that something you never had to consciously work on?

CM: I’ve refined it over the years, at least I hope so. I think I’m lucky enough to have developed a sense of timing by osmosis — by watching and listening to great comedians and playwrights. In prose you have to use narrative for your beats, and that’s a craft that can be learned and honed.

BWI: Are you as funny in person as you are on the page? Do people expect you to be funny all the time?

CM: I can be pretty funny in person I guess, but no one expects it all the time. When I’m on book tour, functioning as a public person, I think that people expect me to be funny because my books are, and I think it’s up to me to live up to that when I’m on. I’m lucky that my default reaction to the world is a humorous one, so it comes easier to me than it might to others, but I’m not out there trying to generate material all the time.

BWI: Are there any thoughts for a sequel to Coyote Blue?

CM: No, I think that book works just fine the way it is.

BWI: Is there a real town that you model Pine Cove after?

CM: Yes, I modeled Pine Cove on Cambria, California, where I was living when I wrote my first book, Practical Demonkeeping. It was a great place to set a story, and when I was under deadline or couldn’t afford to go somewhere to research a setting, I returned there (in The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove and The Stupidest Angel.).

BWI: Vampire stories have always been popular, but the last few years have seen a flood of paranormal books. What do you think of the trend, and has it caused you to write Bite Me differently from your first two vampire books, Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck?

CM: The popularity of vampire fiction waxes and wanes. Anne Rice was quite a phenomenon unto herself during the ’80s, and people might have asked the same thing. Now it’s the Twilight books, which have found a huge audience among teenagers. Honestly, it doesn’t really affect how I write my books. I set out in 1994 to write a funny vampire story where a completely normal secretary has to deal with vampirism without the benefit of an instruction manual. The subsequent books are just continuations of that story, with elements of the sort of silliness of Goth and Internet culture thrown into the last two.

BWI: You were reacting to a Publishers Weekly article on your blog and said that “because I write humor, the work has a pretty strong voice, and people really get a sense of someone being there telling them the story…” Do you think there is more of a connection between the readers and the story with a humorous book as compared to a more serious one? Why do you write humor?

CM: Yes, for that reason — because humor is usually written with a strong authorial voice, so there’s an authorial presence, and I think the reader gets the sense of the personality (real or constructed) behind the story. I don’t think you can read, for instance, a Bill Bryson or Dave Barry essay without a sense of the guy behind it. I write humor because I’m better at it than I am at other stuff. It’s that simple. Not that it necessarily easy for me, but it’s apparently easier for me than it is for other people, otherwise there’d be a lot more funny books.

BWI: You have now written twelve books. Has your writing process changed at all since you wrote Practical Demonkeeping, your first book? Are your writing deadlines becoming more or less stressful?

CM: The confidence I may have gained from writing a dozen books is probably offset somewhat by the deadlines and demand. At first I didn’t even know if I could finish a book. Every paragraph was blazing a new trail for me, and I’d second-guess it, wonder if I should write some dialogue now, or maybe have some description. It was really just a lot of guessing and hoping. Now, I make most of the decisions on auto-pilot. I can just write, but because there’s always a deadline, sometimes the feeling that I won’t be able to fix anything that’s broken in a book can undermine my confidence. In short, I’m still completely freaked out most of the time that what I’m doing will suck, but now it’s because I have to hurry, and before it used to be because I just flat out didn’t know what I was doing.

BWI: What was your inspiration for Lamb? How did you do your research for that novel?

CM: Initially, I was set on the idea of Lamb by a PBS special called “From Jesus to Christ,” wherein they talked about how thirty years of Christ’s life weren’t covered in the Gospels. So I thought I’d write those thirty years. The research took a couple of years, and required reading literally hundreds of books on archeology, history, and theology, as well as three weeks in Israel, looking at historical sites. By the time I was finished, I had pretty much memorized the Gospels as well, but I’ve since forgotten most of that.

BWI: What made you want to parody, of all things, “King Lear,” and how challenging was it?

CM: It started out because I wanted to do another historical book, the story of a Fool, and it was the suggestion of my editor, Jennifer Brehl, that it be Lear’s fool. It was a tremendously difficult book to write, largely because I had to create a diction — something that sounded like Elizabethan English, but was much simpler, less archaic, and transparent to the modern American audience. The plot of “Lear” is complex, and there are a lot of characters, but that’s just like solving a math problem. You just have to move stuff around in your head until it works and after trying to get the four Gospels to agree when writing Lamb, only having to reconcile one source wasn’t that hard. It was the language and comedy that took the concentration.

BWI: How often are you confused with the detective novel-writing Christopher Moore, and have the two of you ever met?

CM: About once a week. Usually ex-pats in Asia email me to say that we met in Singapore, or Bangkok, or someplace else I’ve never been. I’ve never met Christopher G. Moore, but we’ve emailed before. Actually, I think there are about six guys named Christopher Moore who write books. I’ve also been mistaken for the Christopher Moore who wrote Santa and Pete, a kid’s book. It’s funny, because people have brought that book up for me to sign and I always turn to the dust flap and the author photo and ask, “Are you sure you want me to sign this?” That Christopher Moore is a good-looking African-American guy and I am a pasty white guy.

BWI: What are you never asked in an interview that you think your fans would like to know?

CM: What kind of pie do you like?

BWI: What might we find in the future (near and distant) from you in your works? Are you considering doing any more ‘period’ pieces like Fool or Lamb?

CM: Right now I’m working on a book set in 19th Century Paris, so yes.

• Browse our list of featured titles by Christopher Moore

Collection Development

It's like having your own personal assistant — with an MLS degree

Working together, we'll help you build a collection that will inspire you … and your patrons.