Writer and musician Josh Malerman on finding the rhythm in everything you create

You write, you perform in a band, and you do live readings of your work. How do you weave between mediums?

I’d like to say if you finish one project, then you turn to the other, and that would be a reprieve from the first—but it’s actually really hard to step out of the sphere of writing a novel and step into the sphere of writing an album. Not to equate everything to body or sports or working out, but imagine you’re a runner—that’s the novel. Then you’re like, “Okay, I finished that. Now I’m going to start lifting weights.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, just because you were running, just because you’re in some sort of artistic shape doesn’t mean that writing an album’s going to be easy. You haven’t lifted weights in five months,” or whatever.

I think the key to it is a little bit of guilt of not wanting one or the other to vanish. Books are going well, but that doesn’t mean let the songs side of your life and your band vanish. Or the band is touring, but that doesn’t mean stop writing books.

I think it has to do with keeping an eye on the fact that you love both these things and being aware that it takes a few days to get into each, but once you’re into them, getting into writing shape, getting into music shape, getting into even the performance doesn’t take that long. That said, it does take a few days, and so you have to be aware of that so then you’re not like, “Ah, you know what? I don’t like this anymore.”

When I’m in-between things, I’ll have moments of waking up with ideas in the middle of the night, or will type ongoing notes into my phone. Do you have those kinds of sparks where your novel writing influences music or vice versa?

Absolutely. And while the other one is going on, same thing—you’ll keep voice notes, or whatever. I’ll be writing a novel and think, “Oh, here’s a good song idea,” or maybe you’re struck by something you wrote or something you read.

There’s also a real link between it all for me in rhythm.

For a while my band was a three piece and the bass player was our lead, kind of like The Who’s John Entwistle. So I would stay home with the drummer most of the time playing guitar. Now we have a lead guitar player. With Chad, the bassist, and Stephen, the lead guitar player, I’m still mostly staying home with Derek, the drummer. That sense of the backbeat: It’s almost as if I’m the bass player, but I’m playing guitar.

The backbeat is absolutely something I think of when writing a book. Bird Box was a very consistent straight beat; the entire novel felt like that the whole way through. Ghoul N’ the Cape felt like some sort of jet, like woody, wood snare, jazzy, not atonal, but weird time signature, that kind of thing. I’m aware of that.

The hard part of that is that unless it’s four-on-the-floor, unless it’s just 4/4, when you come back to a rough draft, you may be like, “What is this?” You’re not really in that same rhythm anymore, but once you find it, you rewrite it to that rhythm. So, in all of these things—and that includes the performances for the readings—I think is there a rhythm from this scene that we’re reading to this scene and between this segment of music and that.

I feel like the band has taught me that more than actually writing. In a weird way, I find that the most important part of a novel is…I don’t want to say rather than the language used or that kind of thing, but it’s important to find that spirit, that beat behind it, and ask, “Can you dance to it?”

I imagine, without even asking you, that we’re both into a bunch of different types of music.

Definitely. Music comes into my work a lot. I may start my day with a ’70s Japanese funk live stream station, and it’s like, “This is weird and esoteric, but poppy and enlightening, and a lot about emotion and love.” It’s a great way to get in touch with the day. Then, at night, it’s like lo-fi beat tape stuff. That’s my shift into headier stuff to locate a more creative or relaxing space. So, yeah, I know what you mean.

It’s interesting to think about what is the music you listen to, or make, as a creative.

100%. I also think that that’s in horror, and horror is home for me. In horror, rhythm is so important. Even if we’re talking about a crazy offbeat moment.

We all agree that fear of the unknown is the ultimate fear, but then that fear of the unknown can extend beyond, or go deeper than, the story and it can extend to the artist. Say you’re seeing a movie like Texas Chainsaw for the first time—when it came out, nobody knew Toby Hooper, nobody knew any rhythm of his, nobody knew his beat. You’re unsafe with this rhythm that you don’t know.

A lot of the time, a foreign horror movie will have moments that scare us to pieces because it doesn’t follow the Western rhythm arc. So you’re actually like, “Oh, oh man. I was… Wait, hold on. I thought we were only supposed to be scared at night. Now it’s the middle of the day. Next day I got scared again?” I think that’s another thing.

Even a thing like Bird Box with four-on-the-floor—you suddenly throw a four-times-as-loud cymbal hit somewhere in there and even that cymbal rhythm informed the horror.

You mentioned fear of the unknown. One thing I’ve always been scared of is this idea of a forced transformation, where a character goes through something where either they’re made to change against their will or they become something they never thought they would become. I spoke with horror author, Jeremy Haun, and he talked about fear leading him to curiosity. What are you afraid of and how does that influence your work or how does that keep driving you to create new things?

That’s a hard one. I know that my love for the genres stems from a sort of cherished arrested development. What I mean by that is that who would you expect to be afraid of a vampire? Who would you expect to be afraid of a ghost? A kid. So if I’m able to at this age to be afraid for the duration of the movie, for the duration of the book, for the duration of the whatever it is, if I’m able to actually be afraid, that’s almost like smuggling childhood into adulthood, like a fountain of youth there. Because I’m reacting in a way that only a child’s supposed to.

It’s the believing in it and it’s the wonder, it’s the possibilities, it’s what’s out there. And so it’s less what I’m afraid of, and it’s more that I do cherish the feeling of being afraid itself, not just as a thrill but as an indication that I’m still capable of believing in these things, even if only momentarily.

What do you do when you aren’t producing? How do you recharge and find inspiration? I’d be curious here as well to hear more about how rhythm plays into that aspect of your life, if it does at all.

Well, I think in a general way, that’s probably something I need to be more aware of. Even recently, more than ever, it feels like. When I met my fiancé Allison I was writing two books a year, but I didn’t have a book deal yet, and I’d never written a short story. I’m still playing with the band. And then I meet her, I get a book deal. Now I’m still writing two books a year, but now I’m also rewriting two a year. Now I’m contributing short stories to anthologies and this kind of thing.

It almost snuck up on me how once you start to enter a quote, unquote, “career” arena is that you’re doing a lot more work than you were before and you don’t even realize it. Because to you, there was a long stretch of my life, it was 20 years of writing for, quote, unquote, “no reason.” There was no publisher, there was no editor, there was no interview of any sort. It was just me writing and I’m with the band.

So all of a sudden, there are all those other things, but you’re still so accustomed to anything that has to do with art or creation, you’re still so accustomed to it being completely a place of joy, and it is, that you kind of overlook the fact that, “Dude, now you’re doing about twice as much as you used to be doing.”

Allison pointed that out to me one day, thank god—this was probably eight years ago, she’s like, “Man, you’re doing more now than when we met.” And I’m like, “No I’m not. I still write two books a year.” And she’s like, “Yeah, but that’s not all you’re doing now.”

I’m a huge sports fan, which is a turn off to a lot of artistically minded people, but too bad. I’m a huge basketball fan, and if I’ve blurbed or read too much horror in a row, I’ll read a Magic Johnson biography, something to totally send me in a different space.

But I do think I could use more of it intentionally, whether that’s travel, whether that’s…Gosh, I don’t know. But I am definitely a prolific writer, at least two books a year, and with rewrites and this and that. And if I go too long without it I can start to feel, like I said before, some guilt and even some identity problems. Where, this is interesting, and tell me what you think about this, because in the early days, my agent wisely, or I justifiably said to me, “It’s dangerous for an artist to find their entire identity in what they produce.”

And I get what she’s saying because what if you had writers block, for example? Well, If this is entirely you, then where are you, right? Are you stuck? But I have found that what better place is there to find your identity than in you have an idea, you say you’re going to do it, and then you go and do it. To me, that’s the most confidence building thing I can imagine is being someone that makes good on their ideas and what they say they’re going to do.

What do you think? Are you consciously aware of stepping aside and that kind of thing?

I think more so now. There’s certainly an overlap in the comic space of sports fans. I don’t know if you know the website, SKTCHD, but there’s a prominent news creator named David Harper who has created this site that is all about comics and about the industry at large and all different types of people from publishers to retailers and whatnot. He recently did a podcast where he was talking about how he loves sports. He loves basketball and early on his dad set him up with a job with the Seattle Mariners, and he didn’t take it. He was a teen, he would’ve had to live in Seattle on his own, and his dad also said in that moment, “Be careful about making your hobby your job.” I think that rings very true. I’m in that space, where comics have been a big interest for me for a while, and it is also professionally what I do.

I make tabletop role-playing games. A couple of years ago, I wanted to do games full-time and create a pipeline of “There’s a bunch of comics properties, can we turn them into role-playing games” and have that be my job. I came to appreciate that most of the games I’ve made and produced are really solely for me. They’re not for anybody else. There’s something I find freeing about that experience, when I’m making something because I see a clear vision in it and I’m not going to compromise for a larger audience.

Yes. For a long time, I wouldn’t check the actual sales numbers on books. The book I just put out, I think it’s my 13th published book, and for a long time I would not look at the numbers because it’s similar to what you’re saying in that I didn’t want them to be represented in that way where the job of it, like, “This book sold more than that book, that means it’s better. This has done better than that.” Then, at that point, your career is eclipsing your passion versus, “I just love all of them and I don’t care.” Now I feel like I’m in a safe spot where I can check that and I feel that way still if nobody’s interested in one, I love it as much as all of them.

But that is interesting because I know some fellow authors who it’s clear to me that they’re setting out to write a bestseller, but they’re also good at it. I don’t do that, but they are, and that’s okay. They’re good at it. Imagine someone’s setting out to write a pop hit, like The Beatles tried to write pop hits, and they’re brilliant songs. So setting out to do that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to lose the artistic or the passionate side. But personally, in my own existence, it has so far been no, it’s like, “What’s turning you on? What’s this or that?” And if it does well, whew.

It’s a tricky and interesting game to play. Going back to the core question—getting rest is the difficult part. For me, it’s knowing when to absorb as much as I am needing to create. When you get to a point of burnout and you’re like, “I feel like I’ve told all the story that I wanted to tell, what can I now ingest and learn from?” It’s hard to make time for depending on what your life is, or where it’s at.

You have two kids?

I have a two and a half year old and an eight month old.

That probably gives you a natural—I don’t want to say break from it—but you naturally must have distractions or breaks from it. It’s not like a solid block of time.

Yeah, a thing that I relish about parenthood in the creative space that I’m in is that I get to introduce my kids to stuff that I’ve been interested in or I think they would be interested in and there is an element of revisiting childhood classics. Or we have this Pokemon book where it’s just a wall of illustrations of Pokemon, and I get to teach my kid, “Hey, this one is named this. This one is named that,” and it’s fun to be able to share and exercise a lot of that, in my case, printed material with my kids and help them feel comfortable at that taste.

That’s one thing that’s always attracted to me about parenthood, is just the ability to have that level of influence over somebody’s media or worldview, not in a domineering way, but in a way where you can very thoughtfully just be like, “Hey, we’re going to watch this or that.” We watched Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, which is a really great practical effects Muppet movie. My son loved it. It’s like, “Oh, instead of whatever’s popular in the animated space, let’s sort of revisit this movie you may not normally come across because it’s not as popular right now.” I think that’s really interesting to see what they glean towards.

That’s another fountain of youth, too. Sometimes I wonder, because I don’t have a kid, and I have an idea for a book where there’s two guys, maybe they’re friends, maybe they’re not. Either way, we alternate their stories. One doesn’t have a kid, one does. The one that does has to literally explain to the kid, “This is a sidewalk, This is a tree.” And the other guy, the one without the kid, is actually missing that sort of rudimentary reminder of what everything is. It’s like, okay, obviously I don’t need to be told what a tree is, but at the same time, maybe I do. Maybe I need that reminder by showing someone else what everything is. And here you’re saying in a much more colorful, elaborate way, when you show your kids something, you’re experiencing it again yourself.

What’s your history with comics and what made you want to take a step into this world?

The very first thing I ever tried to write was a novel in fifth grade. I didn’t finish it and it still bothers me that I didn’t, because how amazing would that be to tell that story? After that, though, it’s hard to call them comics, but it would be a unified 20, 30, 40, 50 page book, but with a new character on each page. It was almost like just coming up with characters drawn and a description and then saying, whatever.

Then that led to short stories and this and that, and also reading comics, of course, and being interested in them. But not until From Hell, and a lot of Alan Moore because I went on that bender that a lot of newbies must go on, that was when I started. Then Junji Ito. I mean, oh my god, you might want to put him as the fourth on a horror Mount Rushmore. But, yeah, just starting to see things in those terms.

Honestly, also [graphic novel author] Dirk [Manning] approaching me…. Dirk had been at a few readings and with other friends we went and saw John Carpenter live, playing music. And I saw him at a convention or two. It led to discussions about other books, and I have a lot of stories.

I had one that’s unpublished that I had talked to him about, and he was like, “Man, I would love to make that into a graphic novel.” As someone who had experienced not only how rich, but how cinematic it could be… I read Jonathan Maberry graphic novels, and just like truly it felt as if the entire essence of the novel had been parlayed, had been taken care of, had been expressed in a graphic novel. That to me was like, “Wait, we don’t even have to truncate the spirit of this for this medium?” Where you kind of do with a film.

I think that Dirk bringing it up, that led to me and my manager talking, “Well, should we send him this story?” And then we did. Dirk, he delivered the first script for it, and I immediately saw, number one, “Okay, this dude is really good.” But number two, I had an understanding of the fluidity, again, the rhythm of the graphic novel form, as opposed to had I written it myself, it’d probably be just endless blocks of text. It would just be a book in lettered.

Sometimes it just takes the right person to see the potential in another medium in your work. I know some comics writers who had a whole other life in television writing and tried to sell a show and turned it into successful comics. That’s a great indicator of what the medium is capable of. Like you said, film, in some ways, will truncate the experience, or there’s only so much time that someone can sit around and absorb the atmosphere, there’s a bit more space in a graphic novel.

What I love about comics is the reading experience is largely up to the reader. They can stay on one page for as long as they want to. They can skip over, they can revisit things. The ability to augment your experience, both as an author and as a reader, is my favorite thing about the medium.

You’re right. You could literally just sit and study the artwork. You can just sit there with it as long as you want before moving on. It is so thrilling, again, as someone who’s written a lot of stories and novels, and it’s just to see it in this form. And I’m going to say this again because it really means something to me, to see in Dirk’s script, to see it fully expressed, the full story expressed is like, “Okay, this is something here.” Because I think that if you didn’t know better and you walked up to an author and said, “Hey, I want to make a graphic novel,” the immediate thought would be like, “What are they exorcizing? What are they cutting out? What are they…”

No, no, that whole arc is there. And it makes me want to do it again. I’m a little scared of trying my hand at a script because, I mean, Dirk’s good. And just writing a script for a movie, I think I’ve written probably 10 now, which maybe sounds like a lot, but believe me, there’s people that write hundreds, and I’ve written about 10, and I feel myself getting better.

But for me, the novel is home. It’s just home for me. So meeting someone like Dirk, where the graphic novel was home, and Josh Ross, the illustrator, to see them work on this idea is like, “Okay, I want to do this again.”

It’s nice to work with people who are well-oiled machines in their craft. When somebody is skilled and able to speak eloquently to the decisions that they made and back up why they did what they did, it makes the experience all the better. You feel like you’re being taken cared of, right? I think it’s a big part of the creative exchange: “Here’s my idea, and let’s translate this into something I’m less familiar with.”

Right. It would be directing a film and having full confidence in your cinematographer, having full confidence in your actors. And even your storyboards. Where at some point you’re like, “We got it all, now let’s just film it.”

After seeing Dirk’s script, obviously knowing this story and the potential illustrations, it felt like, “All the pieces are here. Now let’s just film it.” And yeah, it is thrilling, and it makes me want to dig way deeper into the whole world, into the whole medium.

Last question: If you could have your pick of any character or property to work on that is not your own, what would it be?

The first one that comes to mind is Jekyll and Hyde. As a horror fanatic and a horror purist, it’s one of the most brilliant creations to me: You’ve got the studious, industrious, knowledgeable man who, when he downs this potion, becomes a raging Id running around town. To me, that’s always been even a little bit more interesting than the werewolf-within—because Hyde is a man, too. Hyde’s just a bad man.

In a weird way, Jekyll and Hyde is kind of… I don’t want to say an alcoholic story… but it’s like it’s just two guys, and there’s something really thrilling about that.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.