As someone who is more into writing science fiction than horror, it was an absolute pleasure to interview my good friend (and horror master) Jamie Ridenhour!
Jamie has a long, established career in writing, and you may know him from his popular audio drama, “Palimpsest”. He’s also the author of Barking Mad, a werewolf mystery published in 2011, and the writer and director of the award-winning short horror films “Corner Boys” and “The House of the Yaga”. His ghost play, “Grave Lullaby”, was a finalist for the Kennedy Center’s David Cohen Playwriting Award in 2012. Jamie’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in several publications.
And that’s just the beginning!
This week, I sat down with Jamie to talk about horror writing, what it’s like to have a Ph.D. in 19th Century Gothic Literature, how he deals with boredom as a creator, and his plans for the future.
We also get into his upcoming play, “Bloodbath: Victoria’s Secret,” as well as his ongoing work with “Palimpsest”. It’s an interview you won’t want to miss!
Here’s why:
Sarah Werner
I love it. You are a man of many, many projects and different genres. You do stage plays, podcasts, and you’re starting a novel. You’ve done short fiction. Can you tell us why? …But I don’t want that to sound judgy.
Jamie Ridenhour:
No, it doesn’t sound judgy at all. There is a sort of “jack of all trades, master of none” feel to it. I mean, there’s a couple of reasons. One is that I get bored, and I like the variation. It’s all a story to me. It’s all narrative, and it’s all ways to approach the themes that I work with and the things that I want to say. And different muscles come into play depending on the genre. So, it’s fun sometimes to figure if a story would be better as a stage play, or would it be better as a piece of fiction, or how can it be best expressed or experienced? And it just keeps things interesting for me. I like it.
Sarah Werner:
Absolutely. When you lose your motivation, do you stop writing for a while, do you push through it somehow, or do you not lose your motivation?
Jamie Ridenhour:
I jump projects. I try not to have deadlines overlapping, but if I’m stuck on a particular story, I like to have something else to jump to —especially if it’s in a different format. Like, if I’m stuck on a piece of fiction, I can jump to a play. It’s still utilizing the same kind of narrative muscles, but it just distracts me enough that, when I come back, I find out that I’ve discovered the work through the block.
Sarah Werner:
That sounds awesome. Now, you mentioned that you have an outline in your head. Do you consider yourself a plotter or a pantser?
Jamie Ridenhour:
I’m in-between. I’m scared to be a complete pantser. Unless I’m doing a short story, sometimes I’ll sit down and see what happens. But a big project feels scary. I usually have a loose structure or the base idea, and sometimes I’ll know the ending. Then, I usually have a couple of scenes. I know what happens there, but I don’t know how we got there. I don’t know what happens between these scenes.
To hear the rest of this incredible interview, check out Episode 128 of The Write Now Podcast!
You can also find Jamie and his works at (https://twitter.com/jmridenhour), (https://twitter.com/palimpsestpod), and (http://www.jamiesonridenhourwriter.com).
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Full Episode Transcript (click to expand!)
Sarah Werner:
This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner.
Sarah Werner:
Hello friends, I am back again this week. I have with me another amazing guest. I wanted to say who I cannot wait to introduce you to, but that ends a sentence in a preposition, and I think I should have used whom, so we’re just going to go right ahead and introduce you. Today, I have my good friend, Jamie Ridenhour, who is the creator of Palimpsest, that is how I know him. But Jamie also has this really long and established career in writing. And so, I have a nice bio. I’m going to just read real quick.
Sarah Werner:
Jamie is the writer and producer of again, the popular audio drama Palimpsest, as well as the author of the werewolf murder mystery, Barking Mad, published in 2011, and the writer and director of the award-winning short horror films, Corner Boys and The House of the Yaga. His ghost play Grave Lullaby was a finalist for the Kennedy Center’s David Cohen Playwriting Award in 2012. And Jamie’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, The Newer York, Across the Margins, Mirror Dance, and Architrave among others, and has been podcasts on PseudoPod, Cast of Wonders, and Radio Unbound.
Sarah Werner:
And he has a brand new play, Bloodbath: Victoria’s Secret, which is premiering in 2021. Jamie has a PhD in Victorian Gothic fiction, which is my jam, and in addition to publishing scholarly articles on Dickens, Le Fanu and contemporary vampire films, he edited the Valancourt edition of Sheridan Le Fanu, I hope I’m saying that right, Carmilla, 2009, and wrote a book length study of urban Gothic fiction called In Darkest London published in 2014. He has taught writing and literature for over 20 years and is currently at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. Oh my gosh. Wow. Welcome to the show, Jamie. I am so excited to have you here.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Thank you. I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sarah Werner:
Thank you. What a list of accomplishments.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Well, it’s just I’m old, and so eventually, when you list them, they rack up.
Sarah Werner:
They just build up. Well, you have to do them.
Jamie Ridenhour:
They just build up. Yeah, you have to do them.
Sarah Werner:
So, you’ve done them. You’ve accomplished them. They’re beautiful. Now you get to list them. And you also, I hear, are writing a novel as well.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I am about to start a novel. I finally am reaching a place where I’m going to be able to clear some space and … In the past few years, I’ve either been writing, play or writing palimpsest at any given moment. I guess I can thank the pandemic for this because the play that’s opening in October was supposed to open last October and it got COVIDed into next year. I’ll be directing it, but I don’t have … I was writing it last year, and this year I don’t … I don’t have anything scheduled. I’m not under deadline or commission for something, so I’ve actually got space once we finish this season of Palimpsest to begin or continue a novel.
Sarah Werner:
I love it. You are a man of many, many projects, and this is something we were chatting about a little bit earlier through email is, all of these different genres you work in, you do stage plays, you do podcasts, you’re starting a novel. You’ve done short fiction. Tell us, I guess why? But I don’t want that to sound judgy.
Jamie Ridenhour:
No, it doesn’t sound judgy at all. Because there is a sort of jack of all trades master of none feel to it. I mean, there’s a couple of reasons. One is that I get bored and I like the variation. Yeah. The other is that it’s all story to me. It’s all narrative and it’s all ways to approach the themes that I work with and the things that I want to say. And there’s different, the right word is different muscles that come into play depending on the genre. So, it’s fun sometimes to figure out if I have an idea for a story is, would this be better as a stage play or would this be better as a piece of fiction or how is it going to be best expressed or experienced? And it just keeps things interesting for me. I like it.
Sarah Werner:
I love that. I am very much the same way. I know, it almost feels a little entitled to say, well, I just get bored with some things, but I do, and it’s true. Yeah, I have so many questions. So, you’re a professor, but you also do a lot of genre work. I remember very vividly in my own education, a little bit of maybe an incompatibility between what people would consider high literature and then writing about the fun stuff that you and I loved to write. So, I’m like a science fiction junkie and you are just this master of horror. Can you talk a little bit about … I mean, is there still a tension there? Do you get any feedback there or?
Jamie Ridenhour:
There’s not as much tension as there used to be. My PhD is in the 19th century Gothic. By the time I was doing my PhD, which is 2001 or so, I started working on the PhD, I don’t know, Gothic is sort of like a word you can use to slide them under the radar. At that point, it was fine to do academic work on Dracula or Jekyll and Hyde, or Dorian Gray, or Bleak House, or the things that I worked on in my dissertation in my book on London.
Sarah Werner:
I love all of those.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I do too. I love them very much. For me, there is a direct line of descendancy between that and Hereditary or Get Out or the great horror resurgence we’re having right now. I feel like that, I don’t know, I’ve just finagled it well. You go in doing Gothic and then slowly, over the course of my career, I began doing well … I’ve worked on Carmilla, which is the great lesbian vampire novel from the 19th century, my favorite vampire tale. I did an edition of that. So, it made sense then to write about the sweetest film, the Right One In, which is in some ways, a retelling of Carmilla, and that allowed me to be “academic,” but really, I just wanted to write about vampire films. So, you get away with it.
Sarah Werner:
I love it. Wow. You don’t get anyone like turning their nose up at you or anything that you create. You’re like-
Jamie Ridenhour:
Nobody that matters.
Sarah Werner:
Thank you for saying that.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I mean, yes, there is some academic snobbery out there, in the same way that there is cultural snobbery towards horror, or any genre fiction. Actually, I didn’t ask about the language requirements on your boat podcast. It’s bull. It’s insecurity masquerading as gatekeeping. I don’t have any interest in gatekeeping. But having said that, I have encountered very little of it. I’ve had very supportive academic communities. I’ve had very supportive listeners. If you don’t like it, then you don’t read it, or don’t listen to it. Right?
Sarah Werner:
Yeah. It’s not forever.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah.
Sarah Werner:
I’m one of those people who I did not discover or realize that I loved horror until probably I turned 30. I am new to horror, and I know you have suggested so many amazing books to me, and I’m very grateful to you for that, for really like bringing me into this world. What do you love most? What is it that draws you to horror?
Jamie Ridenhour:
I get asked that a lot because the … And this is not your implication. This is not what you’re saying, but oftentimes, you get asked that because the implication is, what trauma did you suffer as a child? Or what could possibly be wrong with you that you would want to be interested in this stuff? I mean, I’ve got two answers, and the one which I’ve talked about in other interviews is that, when I was 11, my parents divorced, and my mom is a huge fan of Gothic fiction and Rebecca and old universal horror films. Around that time, that would have been 1981, ’82, in my hometown of Florence, South Carolina, every Friday night was a horror double feature with a guy dressed up in a Dracula suit, doing an intro.
Jamie Ridenhour:
They would do an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker with Darren McGavin and then a Boris Karloff film or whatever. During the year between my dad leaving and my mom marrying my stepdad, my siblings were much younger, so I got to sit up late on Friday nights with my mom and watch these double features. It was a cool thing. It felt like an adult thing. And it was a comfort thing. It was something I did with her. That’s probably where it began. Then right after that, when I was like 12, I read the novel Dracula way too early to do it, but I did it.
Sarah Werner:
That’s really … I didn’t read that until college, I think. That’s a …
Jamie Ridenhour:
That’s probably when you should be. I wasn’t monitored in what I read, so I checked it at the local library. Then I was lucky enough to come of age when Stephen King was just hitting his stride, and so I was reading Christine and Cujo and It when they came out, and it was a good time.
Sarah Werner:
I love it. I love it. Well, and it sounds like that good time is coming back again. You talked about a horror resurgence.
Jamie Ridenhour:
It’s always been there, but yeah, we got great stuff going on. We have Jordan Peele and we have Ari Aster, and we have Paul Tremblay, and Tananarive Due, and Stephen Graham Jones. We have some amazing writers out there doing amazing work. I’m teaching contemporary horror fiction and film class in the fall. The idea of having to narrow it down to like the six novels I’m going to do in the seven films or whatever is just excruciating.
Sarah Werner:
Oh my God. Do you just pick personal favorites or do you tend to pick like what’s best discussion-wise?
Jamie Ridenhour:
I’m a little bit of both and I’m theming it. We’re going to talk about how race and colonialism is represented. There’s films that suggest themselves to that more than other things.
Sarah Werner:
Wow. What I wouldn’t give to sit in on that class. I bet that’s going to be amazing.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I hope so. Fingers crossed.
Sarah Werner:
If there’s people out there who are a little anxious about horror, and I’m speaking here as a former version of myself who was like, everything is just like torture and gross and scary, like where would you recommend people get started if they’re interested in dipping in their toe?
Jamie Ridenhour:
Well, one of the things that I love about this genre is that it is incredibly varied. The same way that you would … You can say I write science fiction, but does that mean you write hard science fiction, where you’re actually describing how the hyper drives work, or does it mean you write Star Wars? Which is basically a space fantasy. There’s all kinds of levels. I don’t tend to write really gross over the top stuff. Although, lately, I’ve dipped my foot into it. This is a much more horror, heavy season of palimpsest. I just played the new episode, which I’ve just mixed to my wife last night over dinner, and she had to quit eating.
Jamie Ridenhour:
She’s like, I’m just going to stop eating [crosstalk 00:11:01]. Sometimes it happens, but you can have … I’ve mentioned the novel, Rebecca. I mean, that’s a horror story and that’s a great way to begin dipping your toes in, I think. There’s psychological horror and there’s thrillers and there’s gentle, cozy ghost stories. You don’t have to go slasher.
Sarah Werner:
I love it. Yes. Boy, now that you mention it, and I feel like even I read Rebecca when I was in high school and I just fell in love with it. Yeah, it’s beautiful. Beautiful horror.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah, There’s beautiful horror out there. A lot of beautiful horror.
Sarah Werner:
Oh man. Gosh, I have so many questions for you. I think, gosh, where I’d like to go is, can you tell us a little bit about your own writing life, your own creative life, and maybe even secondarily, if that ever clashes or if you have to prioritize between that and the work that you do?
Jamie Ridenhour:
I’m lucky in that … I mean, the short answer is yes, obviously it clashes, I mean, life intrudes. Because I am like, probably most writers, I would think, I mean, I know we all do it differently, but it’s not like, oh, I’ve got 30 minutes free, I can write. I’ve got to have a half hour to clear my head, am I caught up on emails? And reread, what was actually happening in this story? What am I doing now? Then, once I’m in the zone, I can write. You need a few hours anyway. I mean, one of the advantages of being an academic is that I have four months off every year. A lot of my, and I write during the year too, but a lot of my writing is done during the summer, is when I’ve got free time.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I don’t consider myself off in the summer. I just switched what I do when I start my day. During the school year, it’s just a scheduling time in. I mean, for me, it’s important to not say, well, when I find time, I’ll get this done. It’s saying, I know that I don’t have classes at 11 o’clock on Wednesdays, and so from 11:00 to 1:00 on Wednesdays, I’m going to shut the world out and that’s when I’m going to writ. Deadlines help. One of the things I love about, I love a lot about audio drama, but once we start, and we have promised an episode every two weeks, it’s got to be ready. That’s helpful to me.
Sarah Werner:
Absolutely. The accountability. Yeah.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah. Having a play come and you knowing that it didn’t work. But when I was writing Bloodbath, the theater company I worked with asked, I didn’t write it and submit it, they asked me to write it, and like, we’re opening in October. Well, I better have a script by September. That’s a motivator. It’s a good motivator.
Sarah Werner:
Absolutely. Speaking of motivation, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, when you lose your motivation, do you just stop writing for a while, do you push through it somehow or do you not lose your motivation?
Jamie Ridenhour:
I jump projects. I mean, you asked earlier about the different genres. That’s one of the things I like about it is, if I’ve got more than one project operating … I usually, I try not to have more than one project urgent. I try not to have deadlines overlapping, but if I’m stuck on a particular story, if I have something else to jump, particularly if it’s in a different format, like if I’m stuck on a piece of fiction and I can jump to a play, it’s still utilizing the same kind of narrative muscles, but it just distracts me enough that I can often, then when I come back, I find out that I’ve discovered the work through the block or whatever.
Jamie Ridenhour:
But I love it. I mean, I love writing. The process of just sitting down and trying to figure out words is … I always have motivation for that. I just don’t always know where the words ought to be.
Sarah Werner:
Gosh. I love speaking with writers like you who are just so very … You just seem so calm and so measured and so put together. Is there anything that you struggle with or that you’ve been wrestling with?
Jamie Ridenhour:
Well, I’m glad you perceive me that way.
Sarah Werner:
Okay.
Jamie Ridenhour:
No. I mean, I struggle with the same things that we all struggle with. Right? It’s not good enough. This draft is crap. I can’t believe that … It doesn’t matter how, if I’ve done anything that’s been successful or what people have said about previous things, the new thing, I’m like, oh, well, geez, clearly, I don’t know how to do this. Why am I even here? I compare myself unfairly to other writers. I’m trying to keep that in check, but the impulse is there. You get a hundred excellent reviews on your show, and then one person just comes in to say, well, this is amateurish and crap, and the sound design is horrible. And that’s the guy I remember. Right? I can quote those reviews to you. Yeah, I do all that stuff, but I don’t know, we keep doing it.
Sarah Werner:
Yeah. Do you have a big support network that continues to cheer you on?
Jamie Ridenhour:
I have a good support network. My wife is amazing. She’s always been a big cheerleader for my writing. My kids are supportive and often read the stuff I do. And my son is a collaborator. He’s the composer for Palimpsest. Oh, you’ve met him. So, yeah, I have a big network. One of the things I like about playwriting and making audio dramas is that I am not in isolation like you are … I enjoy novels, I enjoy writing fiction, but it can be a very lonely kind of, this is just me and the page. I love in theater in particular, the collaborative effort of it, that this script is just the beginning and now we’re going to work together to talk about interpretation and set design and all that stuff.
Sarah Werner:
Absolutely.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah, my partner in Palimpsest is a tremendous person to work with, the actor that I work with. I do the writing, but we do a lot of character development together. So, we get together and I’m like, well, this is what I’m thinking, and Hayley says, “Well, here’s what I think her background is, or why would she say this? Let’s figure out why she would say this. I feel like that’s a nice kind of direct writing support, that you’ve got people giving you feedback.
Sarah Werner:
I love that. I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, and this has really stuck with me. We’ve been talking a little bit today about working within these different genres, and you talked a little bit about using different muscles for different genres. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah. Well, I mean, on a simple level, audio drama is all sound. Depending on how big a scale you do it on, and we do it on a fairly modest scale as far as story. We’re primarily a single voiced audio drama. Occasionally, we’ll bring in other actors, but we’re not like Wooden Overcoats, right? We don’t have like 15 people in a studio recording at once and directing. That’s pretty big. We mainly dialogue. we’re mainly spoken word. The writing of theater is largely dialogue. You’re the director and the set designers are going to do the spectacle of it, but you’re writing dialogue. That’s one of my strengths.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Another reason I played so, or write a lot of theater is because I know I’m a good dialogue writer, but the other thing is fiction versus performance-based writing, fiction can be interior in a way that you can’t on the stage. You can do an internal monologue in the way that you can’t in a stage play. You can have entire piece of fiction with no dialogue at all. It’s all on somebody’s head. Mrs Dalloway, it’s all in somebody’s head. Whereas, it’s very hard to do interiority in theater, unless you want to be Eugene O’Neill and step out and do a soliloquy as a strange interlude.
Jamie Ridenhour:
But if you’re just doing realistic theater, you have to show what’s happening in a way that you can get away with fudging and fiction. That’s one of the ways I decide, like which story is going to work best in what format. Is this something that takes place largely in a protagonist head where there’s a lot of internal reactions and things? Well, that’s probably not going to translate to the stage as well. Does that sort of answered the question? That’s how I think about it.
Sarah Werner:
It does. It goes into, oh, how do you know which story is going to be presented in which medium? I’m also curious, I keep going back to your email here. You say that you think about story in different ways for different genres and formats. Is that kind of what you meant there, is just how the story is told, or are there other considerations as well?
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yes, sort of how the story is told. It also has to do with the shape and depth of the story. I mean, you also can’t … You’ve got limitations on the stage of, unless you want … You’re not going to find an audience that’s one-on-one to sit for four hours and watch something, right? You know how the beats work and you know the structure. One of the things that I learned when I started audio, actually I’ll be interested your thoughts on this as a writer who pivoted to audio drama. I learned so much about pacing when I started Palimpsest.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Because we decided early on, it’s a single story each season. There’s 10 episodes per season. Each episode is about 20 minutes. So, about 2,500 words. That means I have to hit very particular rhythms and I’ve got a certain themes I want to do, I’ve got an overarching story, but each episode has to have a little mini story in it, or at least a suggestion of a climax that makes people want to come to the next episode, but it’s got to move the big story forward.
Jamie Ridenhour:
And learning how to hit that pacing, I think really helped my fiction writing because I learned a lot about the structure of rhythm and beats within a narrative. I like that too. I like the way different genres inform the others genres, what you can steal from other things.
Sarah Werner:
I love that. Oh, I love that. Okay. I’m curious, I want to go back to, you’re talking about learning about writing with pacing and beats and developing tension and all of that with Palimpsest. Is that something where you started writing it, stood back and say, wait, we need some beats in here, or was it planned out ahead of time, or did you just feel your way through it?
Jamie Ridenhour:
Season one was planned a little more in that way than the other seasons were. I feel like we were better prepared in later seasons in terms of like, I had learned how to make a good audio drama. I had learned like, what kind of character do we want here and how’s this going to work? What I did for Palimp through season one was I had some ideas about how ghost stories worked, largely drawn from the opening chapters of an amazing novel by Caitlin Kiernan called The Drowning Girl.
Sarah Werner:
Wait, I read that because you recommended it to me.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I told you to read? Okay.
Sarah Werner:
Yup, I was like, why have I read that? Okay.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Early on, and the plot of Drowning Girl has nothing to do with Palimpsest, but early on in that, there’s this little meditation where the character goes off on ghost stories as memes, ghost stories as replicated ideas through culture and how memories are replicated. I had some themes that I wanted to work with, and they’re the themes that I work with in almost all of my writing. I knew that it was a woman who had lost someone close to her, and it was very quickly, we got to sister for that. I knew that she was haunted by her own personal loss and that she was moved, going into a space that was literally haunted by something else. So, I was using that as a metaphor, which is not original horror.
Jamie Ridenhour:
We actually wrote out, every episode, there were three things that we wanted to do. We wanted to do work with the actual haunting. We wanted to work with Annalisa’s memories of Claire, and we wanted to work with some kind of philosophical ideas about the idea of haunting or the idea of memory and how it functioned. That was my goal. Every 2,500 word episode, I had to hit at least briefly on all three of those themes while moving the plot forward. Yeah, it seems like a tall order, but I like that kind of structure. When I write poetry, I like to write in form, because I like rules.
Sarah Werner:
Yeah, and you mentioned limitations before too.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I’m happy to break them if I need to, but just … That way, you’re not … If you get lost, you asked also about getting blocked or losing motivation. That was another thing I could go back to. I’m not really sure what to do here. Well, let me go back to my list. Have I actually talked about identity and memory yet? How does that function in this scene? So, it allows me to have some parameters that I could take or leave, but at least I was never lost at sea completely.
Sarah Werner:
That’s so interesting. How do you feel about, you talked a little bit about the limitations and the structures within stage plays within audio dramas, jumping into a novel, what is that going to be like? I feel like that’s more of a formless void, or are you imposing your own sort of restrictions limitations there?
Jamie Ridenhour:
You just impose your own restrictions and limitations. This will be published one short novel with a small press. I’ve written four … Sorry, I’ve written five that didn’t get published, that my agent valiantly tried to publish and it did not happen, which is the way it works. I mean, that’s what everybody has, drawers full of unpublished novels. What that means is even though nobody wanted those, I got better as I was doing, and I learned something from each one of those. The novel I’m planning on writing is something I’ve had notes on going back almost 10 years and I didn’t think I was really good enough to write it when I first started coming up with it.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I’ve just, every once in awhile, add some notes or think, sketch something out or whatever. I think I’m ready to do it. In typical me fashion, I mean, it’s like a triple narrative in three different time periods that all intersect, so we’ll see.
Sarah Werner:
So, not tricky or difficult at all.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Not tricky or difficult at all. We’ll see if I … Talk to me in November and I’ll tell you whether or not this was a good idea. But I’ve got it. I’ve worked on it and thought about it long enough that there is a sort of a loose structure. I understand the outline of it and I know the plot, and I just need to see if I can make it do what I want it to do. It’s a rock and roll ghost story about a band from the ’70s. So, we’ll see.
Sarah Werner:
That sounds awesome. That sounds amazing. I want to ask a couple things about this. You mentioned you kind of have an outline in your head. Do you formalize that outline? Do you put it on paper? How formal is that outline? Do you consider yourself a plotter or a seat of your pantser?
Jamie Ridenhour:
I’m an in-between. I’m scared to be a complete pantser. Unless I’m doing a short story, sometimes I’ll just sit down and see what happens, but a big project that feels scary. I usually have a loose structure. I usually have the base idea, and sometimes I’ll know the ending. Then I usually have a couple of scenes, often an early scene, and then often I’ve seen like three quarters of the way through where like, I can see this clearly. I know what happens there. I don’t know how we got there. I don’t know what happens between these scenes.
Jamie Ridenhour:
That part is sort of I’m pantsing it as I get in there. What I hope happens, all writing comes from character for me. Once I know the characters really well, you get in, you probably, I’m sure you’ve felt this X and [inaudible 00:26:45] space. Once you know the characters really well, they almost take on a life of their own, like you’ll be writing and I’ll just know, well, this is what she says to this because I know who she is and this is how she reacts to this kind of a situation. Sometimes plot, I mean, I’m writing it, I’m all those things [inaudible 00:27:00]. I’m not being mystical or woo-woo about it, but it feels like I’m just watching it happen and recording it as it goes. But I have to really know my character before that starts to roll.
Sarah Werner:
How do you develop your characters going into something like this? Do you do worksheets? Do you put together Pinterest boards? What do you do?
Jamie Ridenhour:
Well, I started doing Pinterest board. I never did Pinterest boards before because there wasn’t Pinterest when I was first starting to do this. We do Pinterest boards for palimpsest, and I think Hayley started that, but it’s really effective. For palimpsest, we do Pinterest boards, we do Spotify playlist, and we do a lot of just frantic texts back and forth where like, oh, last night at midnight, this occurred to me, and don’t you think this is what happened to her and this is why she acts this way. And I’ll be like, holy shit, yeah, of course.
Jamie Ridenhour:
We do a lot of that. I do a lot of writing long hand, so I’ve got this little, your listeners can hear it, but I’ve got this little notebook here, and it’s basically, I mean, it’s one of the thick mole skin. So, it’s not like the little flat flexible ones. It’s the hard back. If you could see what it says in it, it’s all little disconnected paragraphs of just ideas as they come to me.
Sarah Werner:
I’m going to hold up the exact same thing.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Oh yeah.
Sarah Werner:
Except mine has stickers in it, but I have a mole skin here, which is disconnected. Yeah.
Jamie Ridenhour:
For this novel that I’ve been taking notes on for so long, I’ve got a notebook that’s just one of the smaller ones upstairs on my other desk, in my writing room, and over several years, I’ve just been writing as ideas about character comes to me, as I get thoughts about how things are connected and how people have done things in the plot. They’re all written in there. They’re not in any kind of order. It’s not going to be fun to organize. But when I sit down and create my Scrivener document, I’ll make notes on the side. I’ll organize it all.
Sarah Werner:
I’m very curious. I want to go back. I talk in circles, so I’m going to go back.
Jamie Ridenhour:
No, it’s fine.
Sarah Werner:
You mentioned that, 10 years ago, you weren’t ready to write this yet. I have so many ideas that I put aside and I say, I’m not ready to write this yet. I don’t know enough, or I don’t feel like it’s the right time. How did you know that this was the right time to start this project?
Jamie Ridenhour:
I think a lot of the things that I’ve been saying about structure and pacing, I have learned from writing … For a while, I was just going to be a novelist, right? When I was 10, I read The Lord of the Rings, and I was like, oh, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to write The Lord of the Rings, and I did. When I was 13, I wrote a script for the Fellowship of the Ring, like a 50 page script on my little electric typewriter.
Sarah Werner:
That’s awesome.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Long before Peter Jackson did it. My script wasn’t quite as good as his, but I did it page by page through The Fellowship of the Ring translating into a script.
Sarah Werner:
That’s awesome.
Jamie Ridenhour:
That was what I was going to do, and I sort of fell into … I was a theater major in college, and so I took a playwriting class then, and then later on decided, when I was … My longest job I had teaching was in North Dakota at a school in Bismarck, and I was co-director of the theater program there and I tried my hand at writing a play for them, and that was Grave Lullaby, which went on to do pretty well. I really loved it. I loved the whole process. So, I started writing more theater. Then I sort of, because of theater, fell into audio drama, like directly because of the play, started my audio drama.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I feel like I learned a lot of stuff that I wasn’t learning just sitting on my own writing fiction. When I went back to the notes on this loose baggy monster of a novel that I’m wanting to write, I, for the first time, instead of saying, God, it’s all these different the band in the ’70s, and one of the members dies, and then there’s something that happens in the ’80s with the daughter of that member, and then there’s a guy in the 2000 who was trying to write a book and he’s haunted by that … It’s like, I don’t even know how to put that together. When I went back to it, after doing all this other work in other genres, I just knew.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I looked at it and I was like, oh, I see how this narrative is structured. I see how to put these parts together, and I even know a little bit about the back and forth of which chapter does what. Once I could see how the parts fit together, then I thought I could try to write it. I still don’t know if I’m good enough to write it. We’ll find that out next year, but I’m not afraid to try it now, and I was afraid to try it before.
Sarah Werner:
Oh, yes. Not being afraid to try it. Those spheres are very, very, very, very real.
Jamie Ridenhour:
They’re very real.
Sarah Werner:
Very real. It’s interesting. Sorry. I was just like, that was a very drawn out sentence, because my mind immediately went to, oh, the horror writer being afraid of the word and the project. I was like, this is so meta. Of course, that’s where my brain was sailing off too before I reigned it back in. No, thank you for sharing that. Knowing when you’re ready to tackle something, I appreciate you saying that, maybe I’m not ready. Maybe it won’t be “good enough,” whatever enough means, whatever good means, but it’s time.
Jamie Ridenhour:
It’s time. And it might not … One of the things that I learned through not selling the other novels, because that process is a lot of … It’s not just bleak. It’s intense hopefulness followed by bleakness. It’s your agent emailing you and saying, oh, these five editors at these big houses asked to read … They want the full, we’re going to send them the full. Awesome. So, we’re going to wait six weeks for them all to tell me no, or three years for them to never answer you at all. It would be one thing if it was just like, oh, nobody wants my books.
Jamie Ridenhour:
It’s like, everybody wants your books. No, nobody wants your books. But one of the positives that comes out of that is I feel much more confident in writing something without an end goal in mind. Like, well, it’s not worth doing if it’s not going to get published or it’s not worth doing if somebody is not going to read it. It was totally worth doing these book. I learned a lot from these books, and I love some of those characters still, even though I’m the only person who will ever know them. I don’t feel as much pressure going into this novel that it may or may not work. People may not want it once I’m done with it, even if I like it, and that’ll be okay. I’ve got other venues for people to look at the things that I write.
Sarah Werner:
That’s such a good way of looking at that. I can see so many writers and hopeful writers who pin their hopes, the hopes get dashed, and then they’re kind of done.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah.
Sarah Werner:
What kept you going? Was it just love of the craft?
Jamie Ridenhour:
Love of the craft. I like it. I enjoy doing it, and small successes. I didn’t sell the novels, but I published short fiction and I published poetry, and my animated horror films won awards at film festivals. I had plays. Plays are great, because if they’re good, people … One of the things that I wish we could have as novelist, people come to your play, watch it performed and then applaud immediately. They’re like, I just heard that and I’m going to tell you right now that I like it. And I dig that, man. I tell you, you can get addicted to that.
Sarah Werner:
Oh, I love that.
Jamie Ridenhour:
They also tell you immediately if they don’t like it.
Sarah Werner:
As well, so you can’t hear a person not clapping.
Jamie Ridenhour:
No, but they’ll find you to tell you in person. It’s a career and you’re in it for the long haul, and it’s a craft and you’re learning the craft. Sometimes you get rejections that are very helpful. We like the story, but this particular thing didn’t work. One of my novels in particular, there was … Multiple editors said things about the dialogue, feeling too young, for it was a young adult novel, but they felt it was too young for the audience and/or the themes, because it was a horror novel, were to advance for the … There was a disjoint between the characters and the plot I had put them in, and that was valid.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Looking back, I was like, yeah, you’re absolutely right. I get that. So, I learned from that. Then sometimes you get like, one editor says the prose is beautiful, but we don’t like the plot. And another editor says, great plot, but your prose could use some work, and you’re like, well, if you guys don’t matter.
Sarah Werner:
I like that it comes down to that.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Right. You got to learn how to take that, but it’s not just all horrible. There’s also successful things happening too.
Sarah Werner:
I like that. I love your perspective on this. I love your perspective that you’re not just producing content. You’re not just turning things out that can then be judged as good or bad. What you’re working on is your self as an artist, you’re working on your craft, you are a craftsman and that takes time. Yeah.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah. We all feel that. I’m sure you’ve felt that. You look back at stuff that you wrote early on and you’re like, oh my God, I thought that was okay?
Sarah Werner:
Or you don’t look back on your old self because you know it’s not good.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Or you don’t look because you’re scared of it. That’s true. And it’s not. I mean, I’m sounding all … I’m speaking with equanimity here on the podcast, but it doesn’t mean that you’re not devastated when you get the bad reviews or when people don’t want it, or that I spent two years on this book and now we’re 18 months in and your agent says, we’re going to pull it. This isn’t going to go. You put the file in a folder and walk away, and that’s no fun either. It does not mean it doesn’t suck because it sucks, but it’s a separate thing from the writing.
Sarah Werner:
Yeah. I’m still learning, I think, to separate those. I’m still, I think, learning and understanding what it means to create and to have people digest what you create.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah.
Sarah Werner:
Yeah. There’s a lot there. I think it’s this, at least for me, it’s been a slow process and realizing that your work is not for everyone as well.
Jamie Ridenhour:
But also realizing that you have an audience when you didn’t expect you would have one, for me anyway. I mean, the audio drama world, the reach is so immediate and far in ways that you don’t … I’m making my little story and … I did a play in 2017 about a punk rock band, and Hayley Heninger was in the play. That’s how I met her.
Sarah Werner:
Wow, I didn’t know that.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah. After the play was done, we connected during the performance. I asked her if she’d ever been interested in doing audio drama because I was thinking about it, because I was listening to Alice Isn’t Dead. And I was like, that’s one actor and one writer, and I bet I could do that. And I just loved it. Her response was, “Yes, I’ve just been listening to Alice Isn’t Dead and I was wanting to do something like … So, it was like [crosstalk 00:37:58].
Sarah Werner:
Oh, that’s perfect.
Jamie Ridenhour:
We should do this. So, we started it. It was just this little like two friends in my basement. Let’s see what we can do, and then you start getting emails from people. We got one from someone in Venezuela who was like, I just want you to know how much I love your podcast, and we’ve got fan art from Russia, and we got … It’s just a weird feeling that you put it out and it goes out. There are people out there listening to it who’s not my mom. It’s not like my friend’s reading. There’s strangers who are buying our t-shirts, and that feels … It’s awesome. I’m not knocking it at all, but it’s hard to wrap your head around sometimes. I’m just sitting here in my basement recording with … The mic you’re looking at is the mic that we use, and that it just goes out to the whole world.
Sarah Werner:
Which is beautiful.
Jamie Ridenhour:
It’s beautiful. Oh, it is beautiful.
Sarah Werner:
That distribution, that immediate. Oh, I love it. I got a little addicted to it maybe.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah, I know.
Sarah Werner:
I don’t know if I could go to writing a novel where, yeah, you wait and you wait for people to read it, and yeah, absolutely.
Jamie Ridenhour:
The novel will … The other stuff continues, so that’s doing both things allows me to have my cake and eat it too, I guess. Because it’s not like I’ll quit podcasting when I write the novel.
Sarah Werner:
Please don’t, yeah.
Jamie Ridenhour:
No, I won’t.
Sarah Werner:
You’re too good.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah. No, we’re in it for the long haul. We’re doing a live show in October or in August and have a new live. It’s going to be a choose your own adventure live show, I think, that we’re going to do. Audience gets to vote at various points on what the character does and we’re both excited about it. There’s all these different ways to overlap the media and the genres too.
Sarah Werner:
Oh, that’s going to be amazing. That’s going to be so cool.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah. We’re live streaming it, I think. I’ll look it up.
Sarah Werner:
Yeah. Speaking of wrapping things up, I want to be sensitive of your time, but I also want to ask for … I’m not sure if I want to ask your favorite piece of writing advice that you’ve received or the favorite piece of writing advice you like to give or if they’re the same thing.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I teach writing as well. I teach creative writing. I’m actually teaching an audio drama writing course for teens this July, and I’m teaching a course right now called Writing Ghosts that I’m having a blast with.
Sarah Werner:
Oh my gosh.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I don’t have a pithy like embroidered on a pillow piece of advice, but the thing that keeps me going is that for me, writing happens in revision. So, the biggest thing I see one, because I work with a lot of beginning writers, like student writers, writers in their teens and early twenties who are just like, and even some of the adult writers I work with, they’re like, I’ve always thought I should write and I’ve never done it so I’m going to give it a shot. How do I do it, and then they expect me to tell them how.
Jamie Ridenhour:
One of the biggest obstacles I think to us as writers is this fear that, [Aira Glass 00:41:03] talks about this. Our taste is a barrier sometimes, by which he means that we’re … You read beautiful writers, you read the best, and we’re able to discern what’s the best. We have good taste, and we can tell what’s good writing and what’s bad writing, which means that we then expect that when we write that we’re going to be at the level of those people that we emulate. And that’s an unfair expectation because those people have spent a long time developing their craft. The challenge is to write even when it’s not as good as you want it to be, to actually just get it on the page, even though …
Jamie Ridenhour:
Anne Lamott’s shitty first draft, it’s going to be shitty. That is its job. If it’s on the page, you can revise it. You can revise for style. You can fix the things that are wrong with it. You can make it pretty or you can throw characters out or whatever. You can’t do anything until it’s on the page. So, you have to write, and you have to be unafraid of it being a little crappy, a lot crappy.
Sarah Werner:
Yeah. What do about that fear? Do you just embrace it? Do you just dive into the sea of fears or?
Jamie Ridenhour:
Well, eventually you get better at doing it. For beginning writers, for younger writers, I usually, in a writing course, not doing it with this … The Writing Ghost class is a grad course, I’m teaching and I’m not doing it with these folks because most of them are older than me, and they’re okay with that, just getting stuff down and making mistakes. But for younger writers, I very often do free writing exercises at the beginning of every class, where they are required to write … The rule is you write, there’s no prompt, you write for five minutes without stopping.
Jamie Ridenhour:
The only rule is you cannot lift your pen from the paper or your fingers from the keyboard. I don’t grade it, I don’t take it up, I don’t look at it. You don’t have to do anything with it. It doesn’t have to even make sense, but to begin to break down that barrier, that police in our head that stops us from doing it, to get used to just vomiting the words on the page so that you can clean it up later. I think sometimes you just have to do it, get criticized for it or have to throw it away or do … Just learn that, that’s not the worst thing that can happen. Now you’ve survived that and you’re you’re okay, and you’re going to go on and be all right.
Sarah Werner:
You’re going to be okay.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah.
Sarah Werner:
And that’s beautiful to remember.
Jamie Ridenhour:
And it’ll probably get better.
Sarah Werner:
It will get better. If you keep doing it, it’ll get better. I love that you said you had nothing pithy to say, and then immediately, you’re like writing happens in revision, and I’m like, that’s so pithy. That’s so good.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah. Well, that was lucky.
Sarah Werner:
I’ll cross-stitch that and put it off on my wall. That’s so good.
Jamie Ridenhour:
But it does that. That’s where the pretty stuff happens. That’s where the beautiful prose, I don’t know anybody that just sits down and perfectly constructed sentences pours from their pen. Every writer I know who I respect talks about drafts and throwing things out and agonizing over words and structures. And should I use an independent clause here? All of that has to happen, but it can’t happen in the first draft.
Sarah Werner:
Thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that. I think even I personally needed to hear that right now, so just thank you.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I will say that, in practice, I’m bad at that, so I need to remind myself of it. I’m really bad at frantically doing a first draft of a episode before we’re about to record it when I know I’m going to have revise it in the recording session because I didn’t take the time to do it here. Yeah. Does that ring, probably rings?
Sarah Werner:
All the bells. All the bells are ringing.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Rings a bell somewhere. Yeah. There’s such good writing happening in the audio drama world too. I think, probably those people would say the same thing. You craft it. You think upon it.
Sarah Werner:
Yeah, you do. You’re wonderful. This has been …
Jamie Ridenhour:
Oh, thank you. So are you.
Sarah Werner:
Absolutely amazing. I want to make sure that people know where to go to find your work and to find you and to do all the things, to join your live show, where do they go to find you?
Jamie Ridenhour:
The best place to go is … Well, the clearing house is two places. The website for the Palimpsest is thepalimpsestpodcast.com. Palimpsest, for all the trouble people have saying it and writing it down, it literally is exactly as it sounds and pronounced exactly as it’s spelled, P-A-L-I-M-P-S-E-S-T, palimpsest. So, thepalimpsestpodcast.com. My website is jamiesonridenhourwriter.com, J-A-M-I-E-S-O-Nridenhour.com. Writer, jamiesonridenhourwriter.com.
Sarah Werner:
Perfect. I will have links to all of those in the show notes, so if you’re driving in your car right now and you’re frantically trying to write this down, don’t worry. It will clickable.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah, do the show notes.
Sarah Werner:
We’ll make it easy.
Jamie Ridenhour:
And also, Precision Media, I mean, Twitter is where we live, and Palimpsest and me, Twitter is my main social media. That’s the place to follow us.
Sarah Werner:
Wonderful. I’ll make sure I’ll have your Twitter handles in there as well. Then just real quick, the live show.
Jamie Ridenhour:
The live show is going to be in, if you want to come to it in person, it’s going to be at the White Horse in Black Mountain, North Carolina, which is my favorite music venue, and it’s right down the road from my house, on whatever that first Saturday, the Saturday of labor day weekend. When is that? The 4th maybe, September 4th at eight o’clock. It’s going to be a two-hour show. We’ll be on stage. We’re probably going to be giving away … We’re going to be doing a raffle. It’s the 4th. September 4th. We are going to be around that time, if things keep steady, hitting half a million listens.
Sarah Werner:
Nice.
Jamie Ridenhour:
I’m pretty excited about. We’re probably going to be doing, this is the first time I’ve said this in public, we’re probably going to be doing a raffle giveaway of some Palimpsest merch, some handwritten postcards from Josie, our season three protagonists, and some other kind of surprise things that we were going to do. Those will be announced at that live show as well.
Sarah Werner:
And it’s just going to be an amazing show.
Jamie Ridenhour:
It’s going to be a fun show. Yeah. Choose your own adventure haunted house story.
Sarah Werner:
Oh, I love this. Fantastic. I’ll have information about that in the show notes for today’s episode as well. Jamie, you’re one of my favorite people to talk to you. I’m so happy that you were on the show today.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Oh, thank you.
Sarah Werner:
This is just such a delight.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Yeah, me too. It’s so good to see you again. I can’t wait to be in the same place eventually again, but it’s nice to do it virtually anyway.
Sarah Werner:
It is. It is exactly just as nice, except it would be nicer if we were in person.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Exactly, so cool.
Sarah Werner:
Well, thank you again, so much. I’m going to let you get back to your very busy schedule.
Jamie Ridenhour:
Okay. Thanks Sarah.
Sarah Werner:
Thank you so much, and we’ll talk soon.