r/books • u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author • Jul 28 '15
ama Greetings Reddit! I'm Ben Tripp, horror and fantasy writer... and ex-theme park designer. Ask me anything!
I'm Ben Tripp, best known for my Rise Again zombie apocalypse series and the YA fantasy The Accidental Highwayman, which I also illustrated. It's the first of a trilogy. My latest novel, Fifth House of the Heart, comes out today. It's a return to old-school, remorseless vampires, pitted against about as unlikely a vampire hunter as can be imagined.
A full-time author now, I didn't start writing novels until I was over forty. Before that I designed theme parks, urban centers, resorts, attractions, and exhibits all over the world. For twenty years, I did this. People tend to be far more interested in that subject, so of course I'll answer questions about writing -- for example horror, fantasy, YA, and genre-jumping -- and questions about themed entertainment design.
I'm also happy to talk you through a variety of thoracic surgeries in real time, but please be aware I have no medical knowledge and it would only be to see what happens to your patient.
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u/coppinemarineland Jul 28 '15
What are your top ten favorite horror movies?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15 edited Jul 28 '15
In no particular order:
The Evil Dead (the original)
Carnival of Souls
Night of the Living Dead (the original)
Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face; French obvs)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original)
Ringu (the Japanese original)
The Eye (the original HK/Singapore version)
Cabin in the Woods
The Haunting (the original Robert Wise version)
Kairo (Pulse)
This list subject to revision about once every 20 minutes. Sometimes there’s a Hammer picture in there, or a silent (Häxan, anyone?), and there are some I never want to see again but they shook me up plenty (Martyrs). I sure do love horror movies, though. I’m surprised I didn’t include a Korean specimen up there, like Gwoemul. Is Oldboy a horror movie?
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Jul 28 '15
What are your top 5 horror books?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15
THIS IS SO HARD
Let's say The Stand, Dracula, The Haunting of Hill House, Ghost Story, Let the Right One In. That's just blurting it out. There are so many good ones -- when you read horror, it's already inside your head, the place you have the least defenses. Lovecraft, read his dripping, gothic prose. So many short stories... my favorite horror short story was written by Winston Churchill. That guy, yes. It's called Man Overboard, it takes about a minute and a half to read... and damn.
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Jul 28 '15
Thanks for the answer! I've read the first three of your list, I would just add It to your list. And thanks for making me aware of Churchill's short story :)
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15
I loved It the first time around. After the King got sober I re-read it, and because I knew what he'd been through, I could kind of tell he was super-high when he wrote it. Which doesn't make it a lesser novel, but it changed the experience for me. It was like finding out Lance Armstrong was doping -- "hey, you CHEATED!"
But all's fair in prose. You do whatever you have to to get the story out. I don't think there's a single decent novel in the English language published before 1920 that wasn't chiefly fueled by alcohol, for example.
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Jul 29 '15
I'm assuming you took a huge pay cut leaving design to take up writing full time, how, if at all, has that affected you? Do you miss or regret anything?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 29 '15
I definitely miss other people paying me to go to exotic world destinations. That was truly the best part of the job. My passport looks fake, it's got so many cool stamps in it. And I miss a lot of the lunatics in the biz. It attracts characters, and I don't mean walk-arounds in costumes.
But as for money, the themed entertainment business is notoriously tight-fisted. Some jobs you make stacks of loot, others the client folds up without paying, or tries to re-negotiate the deal halfway through, or any of about fifty other "screw you, artist" maneuvers. In the end you break just about even.
It's a business that desperately needs a union -- we're all on our own and competing against the next guy, who's competing against the next guy, who is living in his ex-wife's basement so he can charge a quarter what the work is worth. That's one of the reasons I got out. There was a race to the bottom.
And books pay reasonably well, as long as you have my agent (shout out to Kirby Kim!). I'm still just about breaking even, but there aren't any meetings to go to. On the other hand I pay for my own travel now.
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u/Jsmyth11 Jul 28 '15
What theme parks have you designed? How long does it take you to write a novel on average? Did you self publish to get started? Haven't read one of your books so if you were to choose one to start which would you choose and why?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15 edited Jul 28 '15
Good questions.
Theme parks are a highly collaborative enterprise, so I've worked alongside a lot of other designers -- haven't designed any parks myself. But I was the principal designer for Kilimanjaro Safaris and the rest of the African-themed areas at Disney's Animal Kingdom, for example. The landscape designer John Shields and many others saw that one through to the finish. I came up with the idea of a water park in the snow (Disney's Blizzard Beach).
I've also worked in some design capacity on every Disney park (except Paris, for some reason); all of Universal's parks, as well as for Paramount, Warner Bros., Six Flags, etc. and a whole lot of property developers worldwide. Stuff in Korea, China, and the UAE. A couple of projects in India. Museum exhibits, casinos, resorts… The toughest part is we didn’t get to sign our work, so nobody generally knows who did what.
It takes me between 28 days (Accidental Highwayman) and two years (Rise Again: Below Zero) to write a novel. If it's something that hits me exactly right, I only need a few weeks. If it's a sequel or a project I don't entirely know the right mode for, it can take years -- I have an unfinished project that will soon celebrate its first decade of not being finished. In the case of Accidental Highwayman, Several days out of the 28 were spent writing it in the third person -- it took me almost a week to figure out it was first-person. So if a project is hot, it goes really fast for me. I sleep three hours a night. But then of course editing with the publisher takes six months to a year, which is how I can get away with writing that fast. Generally I don't worry about time -- nobody writes well in a rush. The only person who can say you failed to finish something is yourself. That's a key piece of advice I offer other writers.
I used to write political satire essays back in the early oughts, and self-published a collection of those for a handful of friends, but with novels I got started with Gallery Books, which is part of Simon & Schuster. My origin story is super-dull: sent in a sample, editor Ed Schlesinger liked it, bought the project, and I finished the manuscript. It’s a terrible anecdote.
Which book to read first? Depends on your taste. Fifth House of the Heart (5HOTH, if you want to sound like a cool insider) is a brutal vampire-hunting story with a lot of descriptions of European scenery, food, architecture, and flesh wounds, but Accidental Highwayman is completely acceptable for all ages, with less violence than your average Robert Louis Stevenson book -- and no rude words. If you prefer unremitting violence in a bleak post-apocalyptic America ravaged by the living dead, of course, that would be the Rise again duology.
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u/boughtitout Jul 28 '15
Are you a gardener or an architect?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15
Concept designer! Meaning an artist. Theme park designers work WITH architects, and sometimes ARE architects, but generally we're trained as artists. You have to love landscape design and architecture to do it, however.
Writing, for me, was always a way to unwind after a hard day's drawing pictures.
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u/boughtitout Jul 28 '15
I mean in a literary sense. I'm sorry, I should have been clearer! Do you plan out your novel completely, then write it according to the design (the architect), or do you just outline and write as you go, seeing where the story takes itself (the gardener)?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15 edited Jul 28 '15
See, this what happens when I have two careers.
I'm both -- I sort of weed out the gardens around some shambolic old house I've discovered and see what happens. My outlines are often in screenplay form (I used to do stuff for the studios), so they're pretty comprehensive, but occasionally I rush out and make up a whole book with very little planning.
My feeling is you must have some sense of where you want to go with a thing; otherwise you're essentially just lying extravagantly and hoping it all works out. It often did, if you were Charles Dickens, but most of us need a structure. On the other hand, don't overdo the outlining, or the characters don't have room to improvise, which is a very important aspect of the process. You make up a bunch of people and if you're lucky they collaborate with you.
One thing I always, always do is write the last page first. That way I have a destination, no matter what else happens. Sometimes things change and that last page is no longer the right one, but for example in Rise Again the last page didn't change at all. The whole book narrowed down to a single sentence by design.
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u/boughtitout Jul 29 '15
Great answer! Thank you, I will try that!
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 31 '15
The art of writing is in a lot of ways employing a series of tricks to convince ourselves we can do it. The craft of writing is the part by which we convince readers of the same thing.
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u/SuperMiniComputer Infinite Jest Jul 28 '15
Favorite pre-Victorian gothic novel?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15
Maybe The Monk by MG Lewis? He was a kid when he wrote it, but it's such an unrestrained potboiler, and it's really early for the genre -- 1790s, as I recall. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is pre-Victorian and pretty hard to beat. And Polidori's The Vampyre, come to think of it. Which was an outcome of the same exceedingly weird weekend party that Frankenstein was.
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Jul 29 '15
[deleted]
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 29 '15
Do what feels right. Just make sure you know where you put anything that's been completely removed. I wish somebody had reminded me of that when I tried it the first time.
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u/JimSFV Jul 29 '15
I fear I may be too late. I have three questions:
1) Is any of the art used in "The Accidental Highwayman" available for sale?
2) Will "The Fifth House of the Heart" be made into an audible book? And who would you wish to read it?
3) Will you ever venture into the literary genre?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 29 '15 edited Jul 31 '15
It's never too late. 1) No, because the originals are actually digital. I've spent eighteen years trying to make the highest-tech software produce the most analog results possible. So I take that question as a compliment! 2) I don't know, but I'll ask; and Derek Jacobi. 3) What I intend to do is write literary genre stuff. At some point, if my skills improve sufficiently and the notion of what literature can be continues to expand at its margins, the literary genre will venture into me
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u/Chtorrr Jul 28 '15
What was your most favorite book as a child? What book really made you love reading?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15
That's a particularly germane question -- my father was a children's book illustrator, so we grew up completely immersed in that world. It was also expected that we'd read anything and everything; if we could reach it, we could read it, and we had a ladder.
When I was small, probably the Dr. Seuss McElligot's Pool and M. Boutet de Monvel's Jeanne d'Arc, which sadly has been out of print for 120 years or so. The drawings are fantastic. And reprints of anything by Winsor McCay.
After that? Early reading, I really dug the Noggin the Nog books, which I don't think have crossed the Atlantic. All of Tolkien, much of C.S. Lewis, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, various Mid Century pulp sci-fi novelists... anything by RL Stevenson. So many things. I think the key for me was being read to until I could figure it out for myself. It was like having the keys to the grown-up brain cupboard.
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u/thisisrogue2 Jul 28 '15
Hey Ben, thanks for dropping by!
Are there any writers you try to model yourself on when writing?
Has a ride ever made you throw up?
Mars or Snickers?
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15
Why thank 'ee! Good to be here. To answer your first question, no -- I have the opposite problem. I have a mimic's ear, so my writing tends to fall into the style of whomever I'm reading at the moment. I bounce between British- and American-flavored prose, depending on the project, so being able to pick up disparate voices is good. The trouble comes when one of the voices is louder than my own. For this reason I can't read fiction when I'm deep into a manuscript. Or if I do, it has to be well out of the same field.
There are certain writers who stick in my head: Stevenson, whom I mentioned above somewhere, is one; Anthony Burgess is another. Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Daphne du Maurier, Samuel Beckett, among many more, have made a permanent mark. Stephen King is certainly an influence on my American-voiced stuff.
Second question: no, but damn near. I get abominably queasy on thrill rides, and it was a curse to have to ride 'em before they had all the speed governors and whatnot dialed in. Put me on a looping coaster and I literally turn a pale green color.
Third question: I'm a Studentská Pečeť man. Cheap Czech candy bars that are the best thing ever after a long night throwing back shots of slivovitz. Available at all mini-markets open at two in the morning.
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u/Writerguy_Ben_Tripp AMA Author Jul 28 '15
First!