“You can’t really plan your life because things don’t just work out the way you think. You always end up somewhere else.”
R.L. Stine has been one of the most beloved children's authors for decades, possessing the talent to both spook and entertain his readers at the same time. After publishing hundreds of Goosebumps and Fear Street novels combined, the author is now reaching a whole new generation with the revival of his Fear Street series.
BuzzFeed had the chance to catch up with Stine and discuss his latest book, Don't Stay Up Late, the details of his own personal writing routine, and Twitter.
David Bertozzi / Via BuzzFeed
How did you get into writing horror stories?
RLS: It was an accident, seriously. Actually, nothing that's happened to me was my idea. So I always say when I talk to young people and talk to people in school, you can't really plan your life because things don't just work out the way you think. You always end up somewhere else.
But I never planned to write scary stuff ever. I liked it when I was a kid, but I always wanted to be funny. I wrote like, 100 joke books for kids and I did a humor magazine for Scholastic called Bananas for 10 years. My wife had the biggest kids magazine in the country then, it was called Dynamite and it was a huge, huge thing. That's what I thought I would do with my life, and then the magazine folded and Scholastic fired me and one day — it was a total accident — I was having lunch with this woman Jean Feiwel who works at MacMillan now, she was a friend and editorial director there and she was really angry. She came to lunch and she had a big fight with a writer, a guy who wrote teen horror novels who shall go nameless — Christopher Pike — and she said, "I'm never working with him again. You can write a good horror novel for teenagers — go home, write a book called Blind Date."
So she gave you your first title?
RLS: She was the one who told me to be scary and even gave me the title, and at that point in my career — you know there's this point where you don't say no to anything. You just say, "Yes, fine." And I said, "Sure." I didn't know what she was talking about, and I ran to the bookstore and bought all these Christopher Pike books and Lois Duncan and a bunch of other writers to see what it was. And I wrote Blind Date, and when it came out it was a number one best-seller on Publisher's Weekly. And a year later I did one called Twisted for her, another number one best-seller, and I thought, forget the funny stuff. [Kids] like to be scared.
How do you keep coming up with ideas for hundreds of books?
RLS: I kind of work backwards from most authors, and my trick is to think of a title, not an idea. A year ago I was walking my dog in Riverside Park and these words flashed into my head: Little Shop of Hamsters. It's a great title, right? So then I think, Well how do you make a hamster scary? This was the challenge: Do you have maybe a thousand hamsters somewhere, or do you have a giant hamster? And it sort of leads me to the story; it's what happens almost all the time. I did an old Goosebumps story called Say Cheese and Die, and then I had that title and you start thinking, Well what if there's an evil camera, and what if some boys discover the camera? What if it takes pictures of bad things that happen in the future? And you just build the story that way. Also, I'm really lucky, I think, because every time I need an idea I have one.
Some people might call that talent and skill, but if you want to call it lucky…
RLS: I think it's luck.
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R.L. Stine Explains Why He Won't Stop Writing Anytime Soon