In Laymon's Terms

Simon Clark

Here is another tough truth: the first novel you write probably won’t sell.

The Woods Are Dark was a disaster...it blasted away my career in the United States.

Most authors, most of the time, have absolutely no control over the artwork or written material that appears on the covers of their books. They’re lucky if they get to keep their titles.

HIS IS RICHARD LAYMON telling it how it is in A Writer’s Tale (Deadline Press, 1998), a limited edition of five hundred copies. What I want to howl from the rooftops is that this is one of the most honest books about writing ever produced. It’s certainly the most honest I’ve ever read.

This is no glitzy show biz tale of how to make a million bucks then go squander your days on a Caribbean beach. No, Richard Laymon takes you on a step-by-step guided tour of the underbelly of life as an author and the world of publishing. He glosses over nothing, describing his own sometimes painful climb to bestsellerdom. It’s a book that lists plenty of facts and figures. Richard’s first novel, The Cellar (Warner Books, 1980) sold at least 250,000 copies. You smile reading the autobiography, sensing the man’s delight at this hard won success. But his second for Warner, The Woods Are Dark, crashed and burned. He believed that his American writing career had been truly destroyed. Such is the man’s skill you find yourself living those highs and lows with him. How early success petered out into a welter of rejections. This succession of bloody noses might drive other writers to find an entirely new career but Richard Laymon merely gritted his teeth and carried on writing and writing and writing, like a bloodied and exhausted heavy-weight boxer, taking more and more blows but never quitting. Never beaten. And, of course, phenomenal success for him waited just around the corner.

Richard Laymon and I shared the same agent, the brilliant and amazingly shrewd Bob Tanner of International Scripts, so I heard a lot about Richard before I met him in the flesh at a World Horror Convention in 1999. You’ll read everywhere what a nice guy he was. That is the truth. Those who were fortunate to meet him still cherish him in our hearts. You’ll hear many an anecdote about him, about his good nature and his encouragement of new writers (me included), but if you can find A Writer’s Tale read about his life as he wrote it in that perfectly razor-sharp style of his. And to round off this piece I’ll close with Richard Laymon’s own words that appear in A Writer’s Tale. It’s good advice. Remember it.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

TO

EVERYBODY WHO WANTS

TO BE A WRITER

PERSIST AND PREVAIL!