PS Publishing’s collection for StokerCon features a number of collections of short stories, including Warts and All, by Mark Morris. Recently perhaps best known for his award-winning audio adaptations, Morris has been writing for three decades, and to mark that milestone curated this collection of his own work. He chatted during lockdown to Paul Simpson…

 

Where did the idea for this collection come from? You did one for ChiZine not that long ago…

I did, yes, but this is the 30th anniversary collection. I just liked the idea of having a 30th anniversary collection with the stories in chronological order starting right back at Warts and All, the title story, which was published in Fear Magazine in 1990.

I don’t write a lot of short stories, to be honest with you. I’ve had a lot out there but that’s because I’ve been around for 30 years, I’ve probably only published or written about 100 short stories, so an average of around 3 a year maybe. What I wanted to do was go back and choose my 30 favourites but have a reasonable span over the 30 years.

One of the things I love about Doctor Who is the fact that you can watch the history of TV just by watching the series. You can watch how writing has developed, how the pacing, the direction, the cinematography, the effects, everything has developed. Rather than this being a collection of maybe the last 7 or 8 years’ stories and I choose a selection of those, then the next one would be the next 7 or 8 years, I just liked this idea of having a collection of stories from my whole 30 year career up to this point – and not editing the older stories either, leaving them as they were, warts and all, and seeing if people could see a progression. Maybe they can’t. Maybe they just read them and they don’t pick up on things like that; maybe they just purely read the stories, as I know a lot of people do.

Graham Joyce had done 25 Years in the Word Mines with PS and I thought it would be a nice idea to just do a big career-spanning 30 year anniversary collection. I put it to Pete [Crowther, at PS Publishing] and as Pete quite often does, straightaway he said ‘yes that would be great’.

Did you go back and re-read a lot of the other stories and go, “No, I don’t think this one works for what I want to do with this” or did you have a pretty good idea in mind of what they would be?

I had a reasonable idea. I went through all the stories. I have a list somewhere of all the stories I have published – I thought it was getting to the stage where I really needed a comprehensive list – and literally just went down that and said, “I like that, I’ll have that one and I’ll have that one” but not counting them at the time. When I got to the end I think I had something like 35-36 stories. So then it was a case of which ones should I skim out? That went partly by whether I liked the story, or if I liked certain stories more than others and partly if I’d chosen two or three stories from the same year then I thought it’s probably best to get rid of one of those, rather than have three stories from one year and then nothing for the next three years. I wanted a reasonable span.

There’s a couple of stories that I’m a little bit regretful that I had to kick out but in the end I wanted a good selection. I didn’t want it to be all horror or all one type of story. There’s a few stories in there that probably some people won’t have read – I wrote a couple for a couple of football anthologies for instance. I did debate putting both of them in but they were within a year or two of each other, so they would have been together in the book and I thought that might look a bit strange or slightly unbalanced. So, I just decided to go with the one I liked best of those two.

Has your taste in your own work changed over the years?

Do you mean would I still write the same stories now that I was writing back then?

No, I’m thinking more, if this was a 20th anniversary book compiled in 2010 would you still choose the same 20 stories from the first 20 years?

Interesting. Probably. I don’t think I’ve written as many short stories in the last 10 years as I wrote in my first 20 years. In fact I probably wrote more in my first 10 years.

But would you still choose the same ones in 2020 as in 2010?

Possibly. There might have been a few that I liked more after 20 years, some of the later ones that I like more now, 10 years further down the line

I think when I do write short stories, it’s always been a case of knowing whether they’re good or not. Quite often I get commissioned to write a story and some work out really well – you just know that you’ve nailed it or almost nailed it; other stories you think, “I didn’t quite get what I wanted to get there but I’ve got no choice but to send it in. It does the job and I haven’t got time to write another one before the deadline.” So, I’ll send it and see what they think. There have been stories where I’ve sent them along thinking “I’m not that keen on this story but I think it’s OK” and they’ve been accepted.

It’s a funny thing as well: sometimes editors will reject stories that you really like and then they’ll take stories that you’re not as keen on. There’s been that in the past with non-themed anthologies. Back in the day, in the first 10 or 15 years, I had a little stock of unsold stories and I would send editors stories that I really liked or what I thought was my best unsold story and they would say no. Then I’d think, “I’ll just dig out this one and send them this one as well in case” and they’ve accepted the second one. You can never quite tell sometimes.

Have you ever been tempted to write the story that you wanted to write without worrying about the editor’s taste?

Oh yes. Yes, I always do that. I never particularly think about who the editor is. All I think about is the theme they’ve given me and then I come up with a story for the theme. I don’t write to try and please that particular editor because I always think that, unless it’s a very specific thing, if I write the story and they don’t go for it, which has happened and still does happen, then I’ll have it in hand to send somewhere else. I always just come up with the idea and then write my own story. I never think, “Jon Oliver likes this type of story or Steve Jones likes this type of story.” It’s surprising; sometimes you just can’t predict what people will like and what they won’t like.

And you’ve been precursive to yourself as well.

Exactly. You put far too many restraints on yourself.

When you were reading through the stories again were there any that surprised you either in terms of the way that you used language or in the way that you constructed it?

I don’t want to sound conceited but I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well some of my older work stood up, especially the stuff I wrote in my mid to late 20s. The thing with a lot of those stories though is they’ve gone through a lot of editing processes over time, and they may even have been reprinted a couple of times, so obviously I was using the files that were on my computer. They may have been even the kind of second or third generation re-edits of them.

I didn’t fish out my old Fear Magazine for instance and look to see if it’s exactly the same version. It was just the version I had on my computer so that was the one I used. I know Warts and All has, for instance, been reprinted in a couple of things; I think I’ve even had it in one of my previous collections. It’s possible that I may have edited it again.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by how well they read. There were a couple of little naive comments and naive phrases here and there, and things that made me wince a bit, but I resisted the temptation to change them.

You’ve also done quite a bit of collection editing yourself; has that experience helped you in choosing your own work and given you a different filter to look at stories through?

It’s helped me in the sense of getting a good balance of stories, I think, especially when it came to deciding which ones to keep and which ones to chuck out. That’s one thing that’s really important as an editor and it always frustrates me when people say when they get an anthology, “Oh I just read the shorter ones first and then I read the long” or “I dip in and out”. An anthology is like a novel in that it’s arranged very very carefully so that the stories complement one another, bounce off one another.

For me, there’s a perfect balance with an anthology which is why I don’t like anthologies – this used to happen a lot in the olden days but doesn’t happen quite so much now –where the stories were arranged alphabetically by the author’s surname or something like that.

It did help in that sense of getting a good balance but obviously I was only working with my own material and I wanted to do it chronologically. There were some restraints but within those I think it did help.

Of the ones in there, do you have a personal favourite? Either for the connections to when you were writing it or just as a story.

I always find ideas are the hardest things to come up with, especially because I tend to overthink ideas. If I come up with an idea, my immediate response is “has anyone ever done this before or something like this before?” so I always feel as though I have to come up with something completely new and original which is almost impossible.

I do read lots of short stories where I think “That’s a great short story” but when I break it down and think about what it was about, I think that if I’d have come up with that idea I don’t know I would have been confident enough to write it, because I wouldn’t have thought it was a strong enough idea – but it’s in the writing that it really shines.

There’s a story called Waiting for the Bullet which I really like; it’s about famous gunfight sites. I think that works really well in terms of character as well. It all just kind of clicked together.

I also liked the football one, Some People are on the Pitch, because I like the voice of it. Also a story called Vicious that I wrote from the point of view of Sid Vicious. I did lots of research for that: I looked at lots of footage of Sid Vicious and interviews and read lots of stuff about him and I felt that was really easy to write. I thought it would be really difficult but once I got into the voice it came really naturally, and when I read it back again I still felt as though it worked really well

Has compiling this inspired you to sit down and pen some more short stories?

I’d love to write more short stories. I always say that I would love to spend a whole year writing short stories. I haven’t written a short story for a while. The last one I wrote was the one for this collection, which is probably now over a year ago.

I would like to be in a position where I’m writing four or five short stories a year like I was back in the day. I just never have the time, that’s the problem. I love short stories. I love short fiction. It’s nice because it means you can send stuff out there so you’re always waiting. It’s a bit exciting waiting to hear back from people – and obviously you get your name into a lot more books.

The short answer is, yes I would like to write more short stories but whether I’ll find time or not I don’t know.

Warts and All is available to order now from PS Publishing.