Interview: Shaun Hamill
Equal parts generation-spanning family saga and darkly fantastic horror novel, Shaun Hamill’s masterful 2019 debut, A Cosmology of Monsters, is brimming with vibrant, complex characters, beautiful prose, and enough chills that you’ll definitely want to sleep with the lights on for a few nights after finishing it.
Shaun’s debut novel is so self-assured and so well-written that Stephen King himself blurbed the cover, saying: “If John Irving ever wrote a horror novel, it would be something like [A Cosmology of Monsters]. I loved it.”
Yeah. It’s that good.
I knew as soon as I finished reading the book that I wanted to interview Shaun about his writing process, just to learn anything I could from him about writing, so I’m really excited and honored that he so generously agreed to this interview.
Shaun holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently hard at work putting the finishing touches on his next novel, which he graciously took time away from to answer the following questions:
What is your personal writing process like?
It’s pretty basic. I usually work with a pen and yellow legal pads when I’m writing new material (i.e. a first draft, or new scenes to insert in a subsequent draft). I try to write 1,000 words a day, at least six days a week. I don’t always manage—I find the process very draining for some reason—but that’s the goal.
The drafting pattern that seems to be emerging as I get older is that I write a chaotic mess of a first draft, then go back and outline a better, more organized version of the book. That’s what I’m doing with the novel I’m writing now. I wrote the first draft in the spring and now I’m painstakingly fixing it. I might try to start from an outline next time, see if I can eliminate some needless labor.
How big a part does reading play in your writing life?
Reading is a huge part of my writing life. Usually (aside from personal and professional obligations, like reading for blurbs or reading friends’ books) whatever I’m reading has to do with what I’m writing, either as factual research or as a sort of invocation of tone/voice/theme/etc. which sounds pretentious when I write it that way, but for example, when I wrote Cosmology, I read all of Lovecraft in the space of a few months, as well as sampling a lot of the other American horror writers. For the book I’m writing now, I’m reading a lot of fantasy novels—everything from Tolkien to Robert E. Howard to Le Guin and N.K. Jemisin and Brandon Sanderson.
It also usually means that I’m reading about 3-15 books at any time, which isn’t something I’d necessarily recommend.
How do you cultivate your ideas?
The brainstorming process is as chaotic and mysterious as you’d expect. Ideas flow in their own time, and the trick is usually to wait and let them percolate into something interesting. For example, A Cosmology of Monsters started from the seed of an idea I had when I was twenty (the book came out when I was thirty-six).
Usually, before I write I’ll make at least some notes, sort of interrogate myself about the story I want to tell. This is how I find out if there’s anything of substance there. If the idea continues to evolve as I talk to myself, I’ll keep following it. Sometimes it gets no further than this, which means it needs more time to percolate or that it’s not strong enough to support a whole story yet.
How do you get "unstuck" creatively?
I don’t have a great answer for this. I’m still looking for advice to help me when I get stuck. If I had an answer to this it wouldn’t have taken me three years to write a second novel. I can tell you what I’ve tried: reading new things, watching new things, listening to new music, getting more physically active. But when I’m really stuck? I don’t have a great solution except to wait and get unstuck. That’s why I’ll probably never be a “two novel a year” kind of writer.
What's your "go-to" piece of writing advice?
There’s a great passage early in Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook that essentially says that you need to make a standing appointment with the page. That some days the muse will show up and some days it won’t, but the best way to guarantee its presence is to show up every day at the same time. She says it better than I do, but maybe that’s the only real advice for getting unstuck in the middle of a project. Keep showing up, keep putting in the work, and you’ll get there.
What story or book or poem inspired you to become a writer?
I don’t know if there’s any single thing that turned me into a writer. I was always a storyteller, even as a kid, and I was fascinated by “behind the scenes” or “making of” documentaries on cable. I loved movies, comic books, and books, so I think the question was just what sort of storyteller I would become. I tried writing movies for a while, but what I figured out was that I liked writing the scripts better than bringing them to life, so I switched to prose.
I think the first book that got me thinking about being a novelist in a serious way was [John Irving’s] The World According to Garp, which I read over Winter Break when I was sixteen. I’d never read a book like it before, and it really showed me some things that novels do better than other art forms—particularly telling long stories that take place across decades rather than days, or weeks.
Where can people find you and your work online?
I’m in all the usual places—Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I’m most active on Twitter, so that’s probably the best place to find me from day-to-day. I also have a website, shaunhamill.com, that I ought to do more with. My book, A Cosmology of Monsters, is available from most retailers. I also have a couple of short stories out there online—one in Carve Magazine, and another that was part of Tor Nightfire’s “Come Join Us By the Fire” audio anthology this year. I’m hard at work on what I hope will be my next published book now! More to share soon, I hope.
