Interview by Sandy McIntosh
I was a very shy and very fearful kid, afraid of a lot of things, and I think maybe that’s why I enjoyed writing so much. I started writing when I was nine. I dragged a typewriter into my room, and I’d be typing all afternoon, typing out joke books and little funny stories and things, but I don’t know why I enjoyed it so much. My parents didn’t understand it at all. My mother would stand outside my bedroom door and say, “What’s wrong with you? Stop typing, go outside and play.”
Go outside? Worst advice I ever got right. “Stop typing and go play.”
I’d say, “It’s boring out there, boring,” and I’d type, type, type.
In college at Ohio State, I edited the humor magazine, The Sundial. Every college had a humor magazine in those days, and I edited it for three years. That’s all I did. I just did that magazine, and it paid my way to New York from Ohio.
In those days, I thought, if you wanted to be a writer you had to live in New York. I didn’t know you had a choice. So, I packed up and moved to Greenwich Village from Columbus.
When I began, I wrote everything. I’ve written about forty joke books for kids and published a humor magazine called Bananas for ten years. Before we started the scary books. I wrote coloring books. I wrote Mighty Mouse coloring books. It’d be one line to write at the bottom of the page. I wrote for Bazooka Joe, the comics that came with the bubble gum. I was never in the army, never handled a gun, but I wrote GI. Joe books.
I never planned to write scary stories. It wasn’t even my idea to be scary. I just wanted to be funny; that’s all I cared about, and I thought, as I was writing for my humor magazine, that that was my life’s dream.
When that ended, I figured I would coast the rest of my life. I had no idea what was in store for me. Every project I took up after that seemed to come to me as an accident—one accident after another—but I always said yes to each. I don’t give much advice to younger writers except to tell them to say yes to things they meet because you don’t know where they will lead.
For instance, I was having lunch with a friend who was a publisher at Scholastic. When she arrived, she was angry. She had fought with an author who wrote teen horror novels. She told me she’d never work with him again. Then she looked at me and said, “You know, you could write a good teen horror novel.”
“How?”
“It’s simple: Go home and write a book called Blind Date.”
I thought about it. I had no idea what a teen novel was, but she had given me the title. So, without knowing anything about it, I said yes to her because I always said yes to everything.
After lunch, I ran to the bookstore to see what teen novels were. I bought books written by Lois Duncan and Christopher Pike, among others—there were many authors writing teen horror in the late eighties—because I wanted to see what they were doing and what a teen horror novel was! After I read them, I started right in and wrote Blind Date. The title was enough to get me to write the book.
Well, it was published, and Blind Date became the number one bestseller!
Nothing I had written before had ever been on that list. I kept going back and writing more in the same genre. A year later, I published another, Twisted, which also became the number one bestseller.
At that point, I thought, “Forget the funny stuff. I’m going to be scary from now on.” And I’ve been scary ever since.
When you think of it, there’s a close connection between humor and horror. For instance, when you go up behind somebody, you go BOOM! What’s the first thing they do? They gasp, right? And then they laugh. People have the same visceral reaction to both. I think horror is funny. Horror makes me laugh. I mean, the reaction is just very close. And I think that is why it was easy for me to switch over.
I also include a lot of humor in scary books, especially in the Goosebumps stories. Humor is important because I don’t want these stories to be too frightening for kids.
I want to give them a release from the tension. If the story gets too intense, I throw in something funny.
I’ve been writing Goosebumps for thirty-three years now. One after the other. I just finished one last week. And I still look forward to coming up with new finishes, new chapter endings, meeting new challenges, solving new problems.
Despite whatever is going on, whatever turmoil might be going on behind the scenes, I write every day. I’m a machine. I write from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM every day. I have a lot of publishing contracts with deadlines, and to meet those, I must turn out so much every day.
Those are the best hours of my day.
People may think that after thirty years of writing this stuff, it’s easier. They say, “Oh, he found the formula.” But my question is: What’s the formula? I wish someone would tell me.
In fact, after thirty years, trying to think of something you haven’t done before is a lot harder, a lot more challenging. For instance, all my chapter endings are cliffhangers. I don’t want to repeat myself. I want to come up with something that I haven’t done before. If I knew the formula, I’d probably get bored. Then, I’d ask Chat GPT to write the books, and I think that would be the end.
I have publicists. I have a wonderful full-time publicist who was publicity director at Scholastic for thirteen years. I also have publicists at all the different publishers that publish my books.
I manage my own social media, including Facebook, X, and Instagram. I enjoy that part.
People who want to write don’t need advice. They don’t need somebody telling them, “Read a lot and write every day.” They’re already doing that. Real writers, I think they’re like me, they know. That’s what they want to do.
But I’m often on author panels, and every time, some author will get up and say, “Writing is hard. I have to lock my kids in the garage, so I have time to write. Writing is just so hard!”
But if you go into writing thinking it’s hard, it will be hard for you. But if you adjust your thinking, and you realize with writing you’re accepting a real, worthwhile challenge, you suddenly find yourself having a great time. Wow! No heavy lifting, right? No hard hat, no nothing. It’s going to be a lot more fun. You’re creating a world. You’re developing people. You’re sitting there making up your whole universe. It makes writing a lot easier.
R.L. STINE is one of the best-selling children’s authors in history. His Goosebumps and Fear Street book series have sold more than 400 million copies around the world and have been adapted for movies and TV. Bob lives in New York City with his wife Jane, a former editor and publisher. His newest title is: Goosebumps House of Shivers: Say My Name, Say My Name! Available everywhere.