A Writer’s Flashback: My 2005 Interview With Clive Barker

I interviewed Clive in 2005 for a motivational non-fiction book, How to Survive a Day Job. My intent was simple: I would interview a number of successful writers, actors, and others who have worked in a given creative arts field, to motivate those of us who had not yet attained our own artistic career goals.

Of all the interviews (over 70) in that long out-of-print volume, I have always found Clive’s to be particularly inspiring. He graciously consented to this interview with one proviso: that I understood going in that he had never held a day job.

“I refused to become a wage slave,” he explained.

I agreed, and we were off to the races…

Clive: In order to tell a story with real conviction, I think, you need to be inside the personalities of everybody — from the major characters to the minor characters to the dog that’s in the street — who pass through your narrative. And you have to be willing to extend your imagination to people whose point of view you might not necessarily sympathize with were you not a writer.

So it’s particularly true, obviously, of my villains. My villains tend to be given pretty decent reasons for doing what they’re doing, though decent is the wrong word. Pretty complex and believable reasons for what they’re doing. I also…