Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You. Hi, there. This is April Wallace, associate features editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. R. L. Stein has been haunting children for decades, ever since the release of his Fear Street series for young teens in 1989, and later, the first Goosebumps novel, welcome to Dead House, in 1992. More than 200 Goosebumps books have been published, and in its 30 years, the series has sold more than 400 million books. But the author is not slowing down. In fact, he says it's been his busiest fall yet. Zombie Town, his latest movie, was released on Hulu on October 6. He's got four books coming out, including one that imparts writing tips for adults and a recently released horror comic book for adults, Stuff of Nightmares. I spoke with the award winning author by Zoom today, Thursday, October 19. Locals can hear Stein speak this coming week as a part of the True Lit Festival. An Evening with R. L. Stein will take place starting at 06:30 p.m on Thursday, October 26, in the Event Center at the Fayetteville Public Library. For more of the story, see Hidden Gems and Profiles this Sunday.
Well, I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. I know you have a lot on.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Your plate, as always, but outlining a comic book, actually.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: You are?
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm doing comic books. I love it.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Great.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Having a great time with it. Doing horror comics for adults.
Really nasty.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: And so you have one that you are releasing soon, or it just came out.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Well, one just came out. It's called Stuff of nightmares. And then there's a really ghastly Christmas one coming out. Wonderful sleigh ride.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Is this your first for adults?
[00:01:58] Speaker B: First comic books for adults? Yeah, I've written four novels for adults, but no one noticed.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Well, as I understand, you also have more books coming out at the same time, too, right?
[00:02:15] Speaker B: I've never had a fall like this. I don't get it. I should be by the pool or something, right?
No, I have four books come out this fall.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Well, congrats.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: No, it's insane. Who would do that?
That's just crazy.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Someone who can't take a vacation, I guess.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Someone who I wouldn't know what to do all day.
What else would I do?
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Well, tell me about these comic books for adults.
[00:02:46] Speaker B: It's called Stuff of nightmares. And when I was a kid, there were these great horror comics called Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. And they were ghastly. I just loved them. They were bloody, and they all had wonderful art, and they all had funny twist endings. So, you see, they're a very big influence on me because I do the same kind of thing with twist endings.
So it's kind of fun. I was a comic book freak when I was a kid. People always ask me, what books did you like when you were a kid? I didn't read books. I only read comic books.
And so it's kind of nice to be sort of a full circle to be writing these now.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Well, I heard in an NPR interview years ago that you also told your brother scary tales. Did you kind of get your influence from those comic books and use it.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: To tell him yes, and from scary radio shows, scary TV shows.
I was always into horror when my brother and I were kids. The local movie theater. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, suburb, and the local movie theater, every Saturday morning they would have a festival of Tom and Jerry cartoons and then they would show a horror movie. So I got to see all these great horror movies of the brain that wouldn't die and the creature from the Black Lagoon and it walks among us and all the films. And I always loved horror. I never planned to write it.
I was never interested in writing scary stuff, but I always enjoyed it.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Well, did your mom ever encourage you not to watch those horror films or did she?
[00:04:42] Speaker B: My mom never encouraged me to do anything, but she absolutely didn't understand why I was in my room typing all the time because I started writing when I was nine years old, and I'd be in my room just typing stories and little joke magazines and typing, and my parents just didn't get it at all. And she would stand outside my door and she'd say, what's wrong with you? Stop typing. What's wrong with you? Go outside and play.
And I'd say, It's boring out there too. Boring type.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Well, you said you found a typewriter. How did you get a hold of that?
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Don't tell anyone. That's kind of mythological the finding the typewriter in the attic thing. My autobiography. I found this typewriter in the attic and then I sent the book to my mom after it came out, and she said, what's wrong with you? We didn't have an attic.
There wasn't a typewriter. What's wrong with you?
It's kind of made up.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Actually, the typewriter was at my aunt's house.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Got you.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Wasn't really true. Yeah. I don't know. Why did I think it was so interesting? I don't know. Why did I like it so much? I was a very shy kid and very fearful of a lot of things, and maybe that's why I like staying in my room and just writing all the time.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: So what were you afraid of? What were some of those things?
[00:06:22] Speaker B: All kinds of things. I had this just weird I would ride my bike around the neighborhood in the evening and I'd be dark by the time I got back. And I always thought something was waiting for me in the garage. I always thought something was lurking in the garage.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: That's fair.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: And I would just take my bike and heave it into the garage and run into the house.
A lot of fears like that.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Very natural.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Kind of it's a terrible way to be a kid. It wasn't a good way to grow up, but later on it came in handy. When I started writing the scary stuff, I could remember what that feeling of panic. I could remember what it felt like.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: And you use that in your writing?
[00:07:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I could bring it to my stories.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: Well, on your website, you say that you weren't very good student growing up, so I wondered how that played with you becoming a writer. I mean, you said that you enjoyed writing.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's all I wanted to do. I wasn't interested. I was very lucky because I could get B's. I could get a B grade without much work at all. So that's what I did.
I was a solid B student.
I never got a report card where the teacher didn't say, bob isn't working up to the best of his ability. He should try harder. Every report card all through school, did.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: They ever latch on to the fact that you were developing your writing?
[00:08:08] Speaker B: No.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: No, they didn't.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: So how did you decide I remember.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Steven Spielberg was a D student.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: How did you decide to study writing in college, then?
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Well, I was an English major.
Worthless, worthless major.
So we're all English majors here, my son.
It's worthless.
But when I was in college at Ohio State, every single college had a humor magazine.
Every school had a humor magazine. And that's all I wanted to do. I was editor of the humor magazine three years in a row, and it's basically all I did in college.
I did this magazine hardly ever went to class.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: That's how you training?
[00:08:58] Speaker B: I learned how to do a magazine and how to work with a staff and how to write really quickly. And it was great.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: So when you thought of what you were becoming for a career, your thought was, I'll be a humor writer.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I wanted to write funny novels for adults, which, of course, nobody wants.
Nobody know. I moved to New York as soon as I graduated from school. I moved to New York because I thought if you wanted to be a writer, you had to live in New York. I didn't know in those days, there wasn't a choice. You couldn't email your manuscript to somebody.
Right. And I moved to New York and started getting publishing jobs and got into that's, you know, sort of how I got started.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: What did you learn in those early years?
[00:09:59] Speaker B: My first job in New York was making up interviews with the stars.
This woman had six movie magazines that came out every month, and she had to fill them up. And there were three of us. This was a great job. There were three of us writers, and we would come in in the morning and she would say, do an interview with Diana Ross.
Do an interview with the Beatles. Do an interview with Jane Fonda. These people back then, and I would sit down and do write an interview. We never really interviewed them, we just made them up.
She had to fill up her magazines, right? And I would do write two or three interviews with stars a day.
It was great training. One, you had to be very imaginative, it was very creative, and you had to learn to write really fast. You had to be efficient.
It was great training.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Did those stars ever track you down and say, I didn't say this was.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Before People magazine, before any of that. And in those days, all they cared about was being written ever. They didn't care what you said.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: Then I answered an ad and I became an editor at Scholastic, and I was assistant editor of Junior Scholastic magazine writing social studies and geography and stuff like that. And I stayed. That's my first writing for kids.
I never planned to do any of this, and I never planned to write for kids, but I was working at Scholastic and got to know how to write for kids and got to meet a lot of children's editors, and there I was.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: And so the connection was that they asked you to write a horror book, is that right?
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Yeah. What happened was I was funny. I wrote joke books, and I did a humor magazine for ten years called Bananas. And I was a funny guy. I was Jovial Bob Stein. That was my name.
And I was having lunch with this woman, Jean Fiwell, who was the editorial director at Scholastic and a friend of mine, and she came to lunch. She had just had a fight with an author who wrote Teen Horror, and she said, I'm never working with him again. You could do it. You could write a good teen horror novel, go home and write a book called Blind Date. She even gave me the title.
It was all her idea. I didn't know what she was talking about. What's a teen horror novel? And I had to run to the bookstore and buy up Christopher Pike and Lois Duncan and all these people who were writing Teen Horror to find out what it was about.
And then I wrote blind date. It came out, it was a number one bestseller.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: And I thought, Wait a minute, forget the funny stuff.
I've been scary ever since.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: That's so great. So you read others just to see kind of the style that people were.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Reading, see what the books were about, and to see what I could do different.
I read what they were doing and I decided that I would be a little less scary and write a little younger, aim my stuff at a little younger audience and not be quite so scary. That was my decision.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Okay, what led to that? What made you think that was going to be what got to just a hunch.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: I didn't know what I was doing when I first started out, I'd go to schools and I'd say, why do you like these books? Why do you like them? And every single time, the kid would say, we like to be scared.
And pretty much I figured out, I mean, everyone likes to be scared, right? If you know you're safe, at the same time, if you know it isn't real, we all like to be scared.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: So how do you balance scary but not too scary?
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Well, what I do in Goosebumps books is I make sure the kids know that it could never happen.
I make sure kids know it's a fantasy. And if I establish that, I can go pretty far with the scares because I'm not really going to scare them. They know it's not real.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Yeah. What was the biggest challenge that you had in the early days of writing? Horror.
What was something that you had to work out for yourself?
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Well, for me, it was the balance between horror and humor.
I didn't really want to terrify kids. The idea was to get kids reading, give them something that would really entertain them. And like the very first Goosebumps book, welcome to Dead House, I think is too scary for the series. I hadn't quite figured it out. It doesn't have the humor and the teasing. Goosebumps is mostly teasing, and then there'd be some kind of shock ending at the end of every chapter, some kind of funny punchline at the end of every chapter. And I hadn't quite figured that out in the first one. It took me a while.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: So you had to rein it in a little bit as you moved on?
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Yes, right away. I did.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: When did you realize that it was really connecting with here's?
[00:15:45] Speaker B: When I realized my life was getting weird. Okay.
When Goosebumps was taking off, I was in my hometown, Columbus, Ohio, and I was doing a book signing at a bookstore in town, and I was in the car, and I was stuck in a traffic jam.
This is a true story, and I hate being late. I hate it. And I was really worried people would be waiting for me at the store, and I'm stuck in this traffic jam, and it's taking forever to get to the store. And I look around at all the cars, and they're all filled with kids. I'd caused the traffic jam.
It was my traffic jam.
Right. That's when I knew. That's when I realized that we'd caught on, something had happened.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: Did you just get out and start talking right there?
[00:16:40] Speaker B: I should have. No.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Well, what's one or two of your favorite characters that you've been able to create over the years? Do they hang out in your mind for a while after you've written them?
[00:16:56] Speaker B: I have the slappy the evil Dummy, which is exciting for me, because this Halloween, I mean, thousands of kids go out as slappy the dummy.
It's very amazing thing to a I gave a talk at a theater in Toronto a few Halloweens ago, big theater, and 40 people came dressed as Slappy.
It was amazing. I brought them all on stage. I looked at them and I thought, gee, I should be in the red bow tie business.
They're all wearing I sold every red bow tie in Canada. I think he has to be my favorite character. He's so popular, I think largely from the two Goosebumps movies, jack Black playing me. And he's also my least favorite character because I've had to write 15 books about him that's try to come up with a plot for a dummy comes to life and no one realizes it. And then they do 15 books. It's too many.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: Have you ever used an idea that initially came from a.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: I was where was I? I was in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last week and a kid said, I have a really good title for you. He said slappy slumber party.
I thought, yeah, that is a good I might actually use that. Kids ideas are usually too gruesome. Kids ideas are usually too horrifying. I would never do it. So I've never really used a kid's idea, but that's a pretty good title.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: So maybe in the future.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Who knows?
[00:18:51] Speaker A: I'm curious about the adaptations, the TV and the movies.
In that NPR interview, you mentioned that you feel lucky that it happened within 20 years of the books first coming out.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: It took 23 years to get the Goosebumps movie out.
23 years?
[00:19:12] Speaker A: Yeah. What has that experience been like for you?
[00:19:14] Speaker B: Did you ever I've been so lucky because the two Goosebumps movies with Jack Black, they were good.
They were actually good. They didn't have to be. I have very little input. Nobody wants the author around when they're doing movies or TV shows. Nobody wants me around.
But I got so lucky. They were actually I'm very proud of them. They're very good. And I'm enjoying this. I didn't have much to do with this new Goosebumps TV series that just started this week on Hulu and Disney Plus, but I'm really very pleased with it.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: Well, good.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: What is it that's lucky?
They happen to have good people who knew how to do it right.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Well, what's it like to sit there and see on screen these characters that you invented from your mind?
[00:20:08] Speaker B: It's really fun and saying, I didn't have to do the work.
I love it when they take my stuff and then they go off in their own directions and everything. That's exciting for me.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Is there anything that you haven't been able to do in your career yet?
[00:20:28] Speaker B: I've done everything. I'm beyond my wildest dreams. I never planned and thought I would do all this stuff TV and movies and comic books and books.
No, I don't have anything else. I like to continue on with what we're doing.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: I'm sure you've had a lot of really interesting fan experiences, but what's one that stands out in your mind know?
[00:20:57] Speaker B: No. The best fan experiences are the mail.
The mail I get is unbelievable.
The letters are just fabulous.
A couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from a girl saying, dear R. L. Stein, you are my second favorite author.
That was the whole letter?
That was it.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: And you're like, who's the first?
[00:21:22] Speaker B: I know, talk about suspense, right?
No, the mail is the best part. Maybe you've heard me tell my all time favorite letter. I've told it a lot in all these years. Here's my favorite letter from a boy. Dear RL. Stein, I've read 40 of your books, and I think they're really boring.
The perfect letter. It's perfect, right?
[00:21:49] Speaker A: That is so great.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Maybe he thinks number 41 will be good.
[00:21:55] Speaker A: Reading.
How do they reach you now? Do they always email you? Do they send?
[00:22:01] Speaker B: They can't email me. They can't do send. I get snail mail. I get mail and I hear from them on Twitter and Facebook and like that. We still get a lot of mail. It's a wonderful thing. That's why this is the best audience. The seven to eleven year old audience is the best audience there is. Because they want to know an author. They want to meet you, they want to buy stuff, they want to see you. I get them the last time in their lives they'll ever be enthusiastic.
No, it's true. They turn twelve, they discover sex. They have to be cool from then on. They have to be cool. They're gone. They're lost seven to eleven. They're the best.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: Well, speaking of which, I had a fifth grade class write in and ask me if I'd ask you a few questions for them.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: Is that okay? Yeah, good.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: They ask and these are fifth graders, they say, Why was your first book The Giggle Book?
[00:23:06] Speaker B: No, I wrote that as a kid. I did joke books when I was a kid. That's what I started out doing. What a horrible title.
I was, like ten years old when I wrote that. What a weird question.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: What would you name it now?
[00:23:25] Speaker B: I have no idea.
I'm not funny anymore.
Now I'm scary.
[00:23:33] Speaker A: Another one from these fifth graders. Say, what other countries have you been to?
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Oh, a lot. I've been really lucky. The Goosebumps books were really popular in China. Chinese kids just love them.
I did Five Cities in China, and the kids were just wonderful.
Australia. The kids were wonderful. We did a lot of book tours in Australia, and the books are very popular in France.
Sold millions in called over there. They're called share de poole chicken skin.
Good, right? That's about right.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: All right.
They also ask, what book did you enjoy writing the most?
[00:24:29] Speaker B: I love writing goosebumps. I just have fun. I still enjoy it. After all these books.
I don't think I could pick one book that's my favorite series. And I do a lot of other stuff, but yeah, goosebumps is still my favorite.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: They did ask what inspired you to write horror books, but I think we covered that.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we did. You can say I just like to scare kids.
That's my standard answer.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: Can I ask what you plan to talk about during the True Lit festival?
[00:25:06] Speaker B: What am I going to do? I'm going to tell a ghost story, a true ghost story that I made up. I'm going to read from some scary read some scary story. I'm going to read my letters from kids.
I don't know what else I'll do. I'll figure it out.
Probably just talk about myself.
That's my only topic.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: If you have two more, but it's.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: Halloween time, so tell some Halloween stories.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:25:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: I'm curious about the book you produced about writing tips for adults.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it's 65 tips and tricks, actually, for writing for young people. It's all my secrets. It's like everything I know and everything I don't know tricks for how to get ideas, how not to get writer's block, how to plan in advance, how not to get stuck.
It's taken mostly from my Master class.
I have a masterclass from MasterClass.com.
It's 5 hours of me talking.
It's a five hour course that I did, which actually I'm very proud of. And we took the book mostly from the Master class.
Many people ask me for writing advice all the you know, on Instagram. They'll you I'm just starting out. Can you give me advice? Well, no, I can't. How am I supposed to give you advice on Instagram? Right? What am I supposed to say? So it's all those people who've been asking me for advice. Here's the book.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: And so, from what I've read, you set a goal for yourself and you tend to write 2000 words a day or something like that, right?
[00:27:18] Speaker B: I try to write ten pages a day.
I pretty much do it. I have great hours. I work from ten to one.
Those are good hours, right? People would kill for those hours.
Really?
[00:27:36] Speaker A: Well, my last question for you is just about your legacy. What would you like to be remembered for?
[00:27:44] Speaker B: I guess he got boys to read, I guess.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: Good thing. And I think you've done it.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a nice thing. Something good.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Definitely.
Well, I've definitely seen it in my circles growing up.
People who proclaim they didn't like to read would read your books all the way to the end.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: Nice.
We like that. We like that. I really enjoyed talking with you. This was fun.
[00:28:17] Speaker A: You too. Was there anything I didn't get to.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: That you wanted to perfect?
Very good.
[00:28:24] Speaker A: So much for your time.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Thanks so much. No, thank you.
