I don’t know whether it was a bad day for him or he was just mean-spirited, but he said, “You can have them for nothing. I remember one case where we went to the publisher of four of my books that I’d written under a pen name and asked to buy them back. Two, we felt the other books would have ongoing value if I became a bigger seller. So by buying those titles back, we were eliminating that danger. Once they label you, it takes years to get past it. One, I had written a number of science fiction novels, and we knew that if they stayed in print, I would forever be a science fiction writer in critics’ minds. Publishers would sell them back to me, but often at what they’d paid me for them, which meant that I had essentially done the books for nothing. We had to stretch ourselves, and other writers thought I was insane. So in the late ’70s or early ’80s, my wife and I decided to buy back the rights to many of my books. I wasn’t a best-selling author yet, but we were getting 30 or 40 letters a week, instead of three or four.
Then gradually I saw that something was happening around the books under my own name. In my early days, every time I did something a little bit different, which was most of the time, agents and publishers would say, “You must have a pen name.” I was naive, so I did. When did you realize that your name carried currency? Language is so flexible and beautiful and offers so many techniques to a writer. I can’t believe you pulled this off.” And I said, “You know, I loved writing from that character so much I thought about doing an entire novel from the point of view of someone with Down syndrome.” She was silent for about half a minute, then said, “There’s such a thing as too much genius.” But I think you can pull off anything if you put your mind to it. My agent at the time, after reading the manuscript, called me up and said, “The Thomas character is pure genius. I wrote a book many years ago called The Bad Place, with a character, Thomas, who’s a boy with Down syndrome. How do you gauge the right level of creative risk to take?
The challenge is a medicine against boredom. When an idea comes to me, and it seems too big to write, too complicated to convey to a reader, that’s when I’m most energized. On the other hand, doing anything for as long as I’ve done this can lead to boredom, and change-going for something you haven’t gone for before and that you’re terrified you’re going to fail at-is how I avoid it. It’s more difficult to market a book that’s not like the book that everybody bought and enjoyed before. The advice has been not to do that, not to mix genres, not to try different kinds of storytelling, and I understand that. It’s a formula-driven business-if you’ve written one book about a bricklayer, they want you to write 1,000 books about a bricklayer-but I’m constantly changing things up.
If I wrote the same book every time, which is what publishers prefer you to do, I would go profoundly nuts. So there’s never been a time when you’ve thought, I can’t keep doing this anymore? I’ve never stopped being excited about books and the potential of them. I realized that you can make what you want of life, and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped feeling that way. And that was plenty of motivation to change my destiny. They showed me the level of success the world offered. Books were both an escape and a lesson that other lives were different. Koontz: It goes back to what books meant to me when I was young. HBR: Where do you find your creative energy and stamina?
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