Brian Knight is the author of Feral, Dragonfly, Broken Angel, Hacks, Apocalypse Green, and 1200 AM Live. He is an inmate of the great haunted northwest, where he lives, writes, and daydreams of warmer places.

DNW: You’ve been writing for a while now. You’ve done Dragonfly, Black Day, Feral, Heart of the Monster, Broken Angel, At the Foothills of Frenzy, King of Souls, and Hacks, and all were well received. Now you’ve
got 12:00 am Live out, shorter work. Where do you feel most comfortable writing? Is it novels, or the medium length, or the short story? Why? Do you have a different process or methodology for each? This is your chance to go on and on about how you handle different challenges, and what you see yourself pursuing in the future.

BRIAN: I prefer the novel for a variety of reasons, they are more popular, more saleable, a hell of a lot more fun to write, but most of my ideas simply won’t support a novel length story. My biggest challenge when writing a novel is sustaining my own interest in it long enough to complete the damn thing. I could probably slog through a novel I’ve lost interest in writing, but if the story isn’t compelling enough to keep me interested in it, why would I expect a reader to stay interested in it? Black Day is an example of that kind of book. I wish it would just slink away and die somewhere dark and forgotten, never to be read again.

Short stories require a set of skills I don’t think I’ve fully developed, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how to use them. There’s not much of a market for shorts anyway.

Novellas are probably my least favorite form, but I seem to produce more of them than anything else. That’s not to say I don’t like the novellas I’ve written, but I always feel like I should be doing something more. They’re a good way to make yourself accessible to new readers (a 50 page novella is a lot less of a commitment to make for someone you’ve never read before than a 300 page novel).

I gave copies of two of my books (a novella, Apocalypse Green, and a novel, Broken Angel) to a favorite Big Name Writer during the last World Horror Convention, and the next day received feedback on the novella. He may or may not read the novel now, but I think there’s a much better chance that he will after reading, and enjoying, the novella.

I am trying to get away from novellas for a while. I have a few shorts going, a novel in it’s final rewrite, and a few novel ideas I’m now launching into. I seem more novels in my immediate future than shorts or novellas.

DNW: Having read Feral some time ago, and then very recently “Toys in the Attic,” the short story in your lettered edition of 12:00 am Live, I wonder about the voices of your children. You write young characters with authority…the two children in “Toys..” are heartbreakingly real. Is this something you feel an affinity for? I know Stephen King has an almost uncanny knack to capture the thoughts and voices of young characters…you seem to share that in part. What characters move you, compel you, and why?

BRIAN: I think in some ways I’ve never really grown up. I find it shocking that I now have children of my own and a job where I’m held up to very high standards of responsibility. I’m not sure if it’s a case of arrested development, or if I’m just very young at heart (I’d like to think it’s the latter, but I’m afraid the former is more likely), but I’ve always felt at home dealing with the fears of the young.

The fears of young people are more varied and complicated these days than when I was young, but at the core they are still very simple. Whether it’s gangs, drug dealers, perverts, the creepy adult family member, or the crazy guy who endlessly walks the streets of our town, screaming incoherencies at you as you cross the street to put a little more space between the two of you (we all have one or more of these in our pasts, I think).

Kids are mostly at the mercy of the adults in their lives, and though most kids are thankfully ignorant to the true depth of human monstrosity, they do understand that there are bad adults. In fact, I think kids have a sensitivity to them that dulls over the years. They’re probably better at detecting the bad people than we big people are. This is probably a defense mechanism the young have, but all to often detecting the monsters among us doesn’t guarantee their safely against those monsters.

Young characters also compel me because there are so many things, both good and bad, that they’ve yet to experience. They have so much more potential for growth.
DNW: You live up in the cold rainy northwest. Does that setting play heavily in your work, or do you draw your settings more from places you’ve lived in your past? What influences you more, character, or setting? Where do you feel most comfortable, in a plot driven, or a character driven tale…and why?

BRIAN: Most of my fiction is set in familiar territory, i.e. the Pacific Northwest, but some stories demand a different setting. I can research as well as the next guy if I have to (thanks to the internet and Google Earth) but I prefer to set my stories in country I’ve walked.

My stories usually start with setting and situation, but if the characters don’t take over at some point and make it their story, I’m usually not happy with the results. I almost never plot. I have an idea, a start, and some vague notion of where the story will end up. Sometimes I end up close to where and how I thought the story would end, but usually not.

My novel Broken Angel was one of my best writing experiences. I never knew what would happen from day to day. Each page, each action and reaction was a surprise. The characters were mostly out of my control. They would change, move, or die, and at the end of each writing day I would look back over the material in surprise, sometimes shock.

Some folks complain that they don’t like the ending to Broken Angel, and their opinions do matter to me, but there was nothing I could do about it. Where and how the story ended was mostly out of my control. I could have put a leash on those characters, reigned them in and made them behave, but then those same people would have been unhappy with the entire book instead of just the ending.

DNW: You have taken some interesting twists and turns along your writing road…what’s ahead? Do you have projects in the works, or some that you’re just poking with sharp sticks? What would make you happiest to work on, why, and when can we expect to read it?

BRIAN: Twists and turns is a polite way to put it, David. I simply have never got a grasp on my career trajectory. I’ve never been able to get an agent to help me with my choices, so consequently I’ve made some bad ones. I am branching out into young adult, adventure, and mystery. We’ll see if that turns out to be a good decision, or another bad one.

What would make me happiest is to see my debut young adult novel, first in a planned series, sell, and sell well enough to justify the completion of the full story, which I see running at least seven books long.

DNW: Standard question…you have one day to get the inspiration for a new book or story. You can spend it in a library with access to all the world’s books, a studio with access to all the world’s music…or you can go anywhere in the world for the day. What do you choose, and why – and if you take the last option, WHERE and why.

BRIAN: I would spend a day wandering the deserts of Nevada and visiting some of it’s little gambling towns. I spent some time there when I drove over the road for a living, and I simply loved everything about that area.