Steve: It’s my pleasure today to interview author and longtime friend Scott Dyson. We met via Joe Konrath’s blog long ago, and we’ve had lively email discussions ever since. He writes mostly horror a la Stephen King, but he has written stories in other genres too. His longer works include The Inn and Reciprocal Evil. He also has short fiction collections like The Cave, Die 6, The Striker Files, and The Never Ending Night.

Without further ado, let’s go to it. Scott, please tell us a bit about yourself.

Scott: By day I work as a general dentist, and I’m a husband and father to two boys. In my spare time, I write and self-publish tales of horror, mystery and science fiction/fantasy. I’ve been writing since grade school, but it wasn’t until the mid 1990s when I was helping to host a book and writing forum on Delphi Internet Services, called “The Book And Candle Pub,” that I became more serious about creating works of fiction.

Besides writing, my passions in life are my family, making music, reading, watching movies, and following Chicago sports, especially the Cubs and the Bulls. (Yes, I admit to being a long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan!) I play keyboards and enough guitar and drums to get by, and currently play in a local bar band. I’m a big fan of Disney films and theme parks as well!

Scott on Writing:

Steve: Why, how, and when did you start writing?

Scott: I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t write.  I wrote my first full length stories in 6th or 7th grade, but I was always writing something.  Throughout my college and professional school years, I didn’t have time to write that much, but I still harbored the desire.  As soon as I was out of school I started writing again.

Steve: Did you publish the first book you wrote?

Scott: If you count the things I wrote back in grade school (that I finished), the answer is no.  If you don’t count them, then my first finished book is a mystery hinging on a dental clue.  I think there is something good in there, but it’s as yet unpublished.

Steve: What is your biggest problem with the writing process. How do you tackle it?

Scott: I don’t know where I’m going when I start, and I often get lost along the way.  I have dozens of files of stories in various stages of completion, but I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out where to go with them.  So I suppose my biggest problem is plotting. [Note from Steve: I for one know there’s a really good YA adventure novel in your files. How ‘bout it? When are you going to publish it? No pressure.]

Steve: Do you feel writing is something you need to do or want to do?

Scott: More want than need.  I enjoy it, the same way I enjoy playing music.  I don’t often feel a burning NEED to write (and it shows in my productivity), but when I have time to do something I truly enjoy, as often as not I will sit down at a computer and write.

Steve: Have your personal experiences (or situations) influenced you creatively? If so, how?

Scott: My dental career helped me write that as yet unpublished first short novel.  I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer, and I was always strong in science and math, so my first love is probably science fiction.  That said, I have trouble writing it.  I can’t really understand why.  Horror and supernatural thrillers seem to come more naturally.

Steve: How much of your creative ability do you think is innate and how much is learned?

Scott: I think that most of my own creative ability is learned.  I watched a lot of Disney as a child, and I literally HAD to watch movies like The Wizard of Oz and The Ten Commandments every year.  Their airing on broadcast TV was almost an event for me.  I always read a lot.  It feels like a natural progression to go from reading fictional tales to making them up myself.

Steve: What is the last book you read? What are you reading now?

Scott: I am currently reading A Perfect Tenant by Steve Richer and Nicholas Gifford.  I just queue up my reads like they’re songs in my iPod.  The last book I finished was The Twenty Three by Linwood Barclay.

Steve: Whose writing inspires you the most and why?

Scott: I think I’d have to say Stephen King.  I’ve read writers who might be better than him, but his storytelling always grabs me and pulls me in.  It was his books as much as anyone’s that exposed me to the power of a short story, and it was his storytelling that showed me how a fictional place could become real in the reader’s mind.  I was also inspired by Asimov and Heinlein, but I can’t seem to do what they do with their stories.

Steve: Do you have a favorite genre?

Scott: Not really.  I have some I don’t like.  I read broadly in science fiction, mysteries, thrillers, and horror fiction.  I will step outside of those often into other genres if the premise of the story grabs me.  I love a well-drawn character in an immersive story.

Steve: Should writers read in their genre?  Should they be avid readers?

Scott: I think so.  It’s sort of like music.  How can we be good musicians if we never listen to anything?  Reading broadly and avidly gives us a sense of how a story works.  You can read phrases and appreciate them, and they will find their way into your writing, not verbatim, but in the tone of your prose.  You get a sense for what works, what doesn’t, how it flows, and you appreciate the authors’ uses of specific words in specific situations.  It comes through in your writing unconsciously, I think.  You can always tell a writer who watches a lot of movies but doesn’t read by their exposition in their writing.  It’s not the same.

Steve: How do you find your plots?

Scott: They just sort of come to me.  Sometimes they are the outgrowth of some idea I have while reading someone else’s work.  Sometimes they just sort of present themselves to me.  I read something recently in a book about writing horror which asked a simple question:  What scared you when you were young?  That gave me an idea for a short story that I’m going to write at some point.  Maybe it will grow into more than a short story.

Steve: Are your characters based on real people?

Scott: I can’t lie; some have been.  Mostly they’re a composite of people I’ve come across.  As a dentist, I have pretty broad exposure to people, and I get to know a wide cross-section of people better than a lot of folks do.  I hear their voices in my head, and I use some of them to give my characters their own voice and keep them unique from the other characters and keep them from all sounding like me.

Steve: How do you name your characters?

Scott: Randomly.  I usually don’t have much symbolism attached to a particular name.  I might try to look up hot names at the time when a character was born.  Like, I might name an older character Esther, because I want her to be around my grandmother’s age, but I’ll name a high school kid after someone at my kids’ school.  I’ll name a middle-aged character after someone I went to school with.  I use my patients’ names as inspiration for names that go with appropriate ages (though I’ve never based a character on a specific patient).

Steve: Which comes first, plot or characters?

Scott: The beginnings of a plot.  Then I figure out what sort of character I want to put into that situation.  I’m currently writing a horror story that starts with an unlikely disaster scenario.  I thought,  through whose eyes do I want to start seeing the story unfold?  In this case, I decided on a couple of post-high school kids.  And I went from there.

Steve: Any comments about writing dialog?

Scott: I think it’s one of my strengths in writing fiction.  I love reading Lawrence Block’s dialogue.  I like the hard-boiled technique with conversations.  I try to emulate that.  As I said, I often try to put the dialogue in the mouth of someone I know and imagine how they’d say it.  In that manner, I don’t get everyone sounding the same.

Steve: How do you handle POV?

Scott: I don’t think about it too much.  I just write it the way it seems to roll off my fingers.  I’ve done first person, third person, and combinations of both.  I emulated your own C&C books (where Rollie’s parts are first person and other parts are third person) in a couple of my books, including the vampire novel I’m working on now.  (I work on more than one thing at a time.) [Note from Steve: I didn’t invent that. I saw it first in some Patterson books…and liked it.]

Steve: Do you do fact-finding for (AKA research) your books?  If so, how?

Scott: A little bit.  For example, recently I mentioned that I was writing a book about the moon hitting the Earth.  Someone mentioned the Roche Limit, so I researched that and found that it added a bunch to my story.  But generally I don’t do much research.  It comes out of the twisted part of my brain, I guess.  As I said, I do a little research on names, just to make sure that they go with the age of the person.

Scott on the Writing Business:

Steve: Do you use an agent?

Scott: No.

Steve: Do you self-publish or traditionally publish?

Scott: I self-publish.  I didn’t have the time or the patience to do it the traditional way.  I’ve submitted stuff before and, while I’ve received good feedback, it never went anywhere.  I can’t see myself going the traditional route.  If anything, I’d start a small press for myself and publish other indie authors someday.  I used to write an occasional article for my school’s newspaper, and I once had an op-ed piece published in the Chicago Tribune about the Challenger disaster.

Steve: What are your most effective marketing techniques?

Scott: As I don’t sell much, I don’t think I have any special insights about this.  Currently I have a Facebook page, an Amazon author page, my Goodreads page, and I’m relatively active on a bunch of book promotion sites on Facebook.  I also post some things on Reddit and I have my website and blog.  I try to network with other authors as much as possible, but that is hit-or-miss on finding new readers.

Steve: Do you release trade paperbacks or ebooks?

Scott: Currently, I am all Amazon and all ebook.

Steve: What do you think of publishing services like Amazon, Smashwords, etc?

Scott: Without Amazon, I wouldn’t be publishing any stories.  I like Amazon and shop there for other things.  I love my Kindle and ebooks in general.  I wish that I’d started earlier before there were so many self-published writers using the platform and before discovery became so difficult.  But I have fun with this, and when I remember that I’m in it for enjoyment first, I appreciate them giving me this opportunity.  I don’t know much about Smashwords, but I like the idea of other sites/services that allow us to get our work out there.

Personal questions for Scott:

Steve: What is your favorite place to eat out?

Scott: We eat out a lot.  I love many different ethnic foods.  I also love a good burger.  I like the Lettuce Entertain You restaurants in the Chicago area.  They are consistently good across the board, and you can go from French to Italian to a steakhouse and back to a burger place within their chain of restaurants.

Steve: What is your favorite drink?

Scott: I don’t drink much, but when I do I like a good dark beer or stout, and currently I prefer red blends as far as wine goes.  Honestly, most of the time I’ll take an iced tea.

Steve: What other interests do you have besides writing?

Scott: I’m interested in technology and entrepreneurship, but I don’t have time to devote to studying the subjects.

I love music, and I especially love the Beatles and the solo work of the individual Beatles.  I play keyboards, drums, and enough guitar to get by.  I used to sing, but my voice isn’t what it was when I was in my twenties and thirties.  I recently quit playing in a cover band, where I was playing keyboards, guitar and singing backing vocals.

I read whenever I can, and I love to watch movies, lately mostly Marvel movies with my sons.  We also enjoy live musical theater.  My favorites are Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera.

I follow Chicago sports, but not as avidly as I did years ago.

And last, I love Disney and theme parks.  I even wrote a guidebook on the subject of Walt Disney World, published by Theme Park Press under my real name (Scott Beallis).

Steve: What was the last movie you went to see?

Scott: In the theater, it was Captain Marvel. At home it was Bohemian Rhapsody.

Steve: What would I find in your refrigerator right now?

Scott: How would I know?  Whatever my wife put in there!

Steve: If you could trade places with someone for a week, famous or not, living or dead, real or fictional, with whom would it be?

Scott: Would I get their talent?  If so, I think I’d trade places with Paul McCartney for a week.  But I’d have to bring my family along for the ride.

Steve: What is your favorite (song) and why?  Piece of music?

Scott: That’s hard to say.  It will vary by mood.  I love Beethoven’s “Pastorale” Symphony if I’m just listening.

I love “Maybe I’m Amazed” by McCartney.  I love Lennon’s “Imagine.”  “Something” by Harrison.  Hmm.  They’re all by ex-Beatles.

Non-Beatles songs?  I like “Better Be Home Soon” by Crowded House a lot.  I love some early Cars songs.

There are songs in Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera that I am crazy about.  I love Ramin Karimloo, the Broadway star of Les Miserables and the star of the 25th anniversary performance of Phantom of the Opera.  His voice is phenomenal.

I’m all over the place, I guess.

Steve: I want to thank you Scott for all your candid answers. I enjoyed getting to know you better in this interview, and I’m sure readers have too.

Readers, you can visit Scott at his website where you can sign up for his newsletter, or you can visit his Amazon author’s page to see his complete list of short fiction and novels.

***

Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans. Last man alive? What about last woman alive? Penny Castro, LA County Sheriff’s Deputy and forensic diver, finds she isn’t alone, though—there are a few others who survive the contagion and want to kill her. And the remnants of a US government could be the greatest danger for her and the family she’s adopted. The post-apocalyptic thriller The Last Humans will be released by Black Opal Books in both ebook and print versions on March 30 and available at the publisher’s website, online retailers like Amazon and Smashwords and the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc), and bookstores (if they don’t have it, ask for it!). You can pre-order now on both Amazon and Smashwords.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

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