[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is bad for my horror image,
but one of my favorite writers is
PG Wodehouse, who wrote the Jeeves and Wooster books
and a whole lot of other books.
And I just--
I've read-- well, he wrote 92 books, and he lived to be 92.
And he wrote 92 novels and they were all exactly the same.
They all took place in the same world,
they all took this wonderful world you want to be in,
and all the same zany characters in book after book.
They're basically the same plots and I love them.
And I think when you're writing something,
you have to think about that, and think about,
how are you going to get people to feel that way about you?
How are you going to get people to think, gee,
I want to read the next one.
I want to be back in that world.
And as a series writer, I mean, that's what you try to do.
That's why you write a series.
You want people to like the world you've created
so much that they'll come back.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I think readers like series because they
know what to expect.
They're going to go back in the world that they know,
they know exactly what's going to happen in the book
but it's going to be a little different.
They know they like these characters,
and I think this is why they--
series have always been popular.
But as far as writing a series, I would say don't count on it.
Don't start out by thinking you want to do a series.
Let's say you have a book that really catches on.
You have some characters that people really like,
and the first book is a bestseller.
Then think about doing a sequel, doing a second one.
Then think about, maybe I can keep
going with these characters.
Maybe I can keep going with these stories
and then have it develop into a series.
But I think it's very hard these days, especially,
to start out saying, I'm going to do a series.
Publishers aren't looking for series
and it's kind of a dead-end for beginners and for people.
Publishers, they don't want series anymore.
In 1992, we took "Goosebumps" to Scholastic, and we said,
we'd like to do this scary series.
Here's a bunch of titles we'd like to try.
A scary series for 7 to 12-year-olds.
And they said, all right, well, let's try it out.
We'll buy four of them.
Let's start out with four.
That would never happen today.
No one buys more than one book, or maybe two.
It just doesn't happen.
It's publishing.
It's just changed, and they're much more careful and much more
cost-conscious, and they're not going
to buy 12 books unseen, without knowing.
They're going to buy one and see how it does,
and if the first one catches on, then they'll buy another one
and try that.
The thing is with "Goosebumps", if we had tried it today,
it never would have worked.
We put out the first "Goosebumps".
No one noticed it.
We put out the second one, there were two of them,
no one-- they sat on the shelves.
And today with bookstores, with computers and everything,
they would have been gone.
But when we got four books out, and there were four of them
on the shelf, suddenly kids found them.
Somehow kids discovered them.
But it took four, and that's very hard,
to get anyone to do four books these days.
After four books, kids just started telling other kids.
There's a secret kids network of kids talking to kids,
and there was no advertising for "Goosebumps"
no hype of any kind, no one really knew me.
It was just kids just finding it, and liking it,
and then telling other kids.
And I think that's how all book crazes get started.
"Harry Potter," I think, started the same way.
"Hunger Games," "Twilight."
You can't force kids to buy books,
and advertising doesn't get them to buy books, either.
They have to they like it and tell each other.
So it's very hard to talk these days about starting a series.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There are two types of book series, of course.
One is-- the easier kind, I think--
where you have a character.
You have Harry-- you know Harry Potter, and he's going to be--
this is going to be the same cast in all seven books,
or it's going to be--
any book series, almost every book series,
it's the same cast and the same kids, or the same people.
And the author can then develop them and turn them
into real characters and readers get to like those characters,
and readers get to identify with them,
and look forward to seeing them in book after book.
I don't do that.
I make everything hard for myself,
and "Goosebumps" is what's called an anthology
series in that it's a different-- it's
sort of like the Twilight Zone.
Every episode is completely different.
The "Goosebumps" books don't continue.
You don't have to read them in any particular order,
and that's one nice thing about an anthology series.
You can come in anywhere.
You don't-- you're not following the same people.
I start over again with every book.
I have to come up with a whole new cast of characters,
a whole new situation, usually a whole new location.
Everything is new.
It's like just starting over, like doing individual books,
but doing them one after the other, after the other.
Which is-- I enjoy that.
I like that.
But it's a lot harder, I think.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When you're thinking of creating a series,
it's an important thing to think about--
creating your world and creating something,
if you're interested in a series,
that people will want to-- a place, a feeling, a location,
anything-- that people will want to come back to.
The "Goosebumps" world is basically everyone's backyard.
It's everyone's kitchen.
It all-- it's very suburban, for one thing.
The world is very suburban, and when I picture it,
I kind of picture my neighborhood back in Columbus
when I was a kid, and I started--
I just do that suburban kind of thing
because I think most kids can identify with it.
They can see what it looks like, they know what it is,
and it's a world they can come back to and come back to.
I live in New York City.
I've been a New Yorker for years and years,
but I've never written one about New York City
because I think kids--
it's hard to picture New York.
If you haven't been there, if you
haven't spent some time in New York City,
I would think it very hard for a kid to just picture what it is.
And it would be harder to write, too, so that they
would be able to see it.
But with a nice backyard in a suburb, a nice block of houses,
they walk to school--
that's a world that they can enter really
easily and quickly, and a world they
will want to come back-- they identify with and come back to.
The "Goosebumps" universe is not like the Marvel universe.
It doesn't hang together at all--
everything's all separate, it's all crazy.
Take the monster blood books.
Sometimes it's blue, sometimes it's green.
I'm not consistent about it.
But I try to be-- you know, it's important to be consistent
in every book, inside the book, but I don't really
follow that kind of rule where it
has to be the same every single time.
And I think there are some books where monster blood comes out
of the jar and comes out and has other powers
that it didn't have in the earlier books, things
like that.
I'm not-- I don't know.
I'm not big on consistency at all.
But here's the big rule, and I guess is good advice--
you don't mix ghosts and werewolves.
You don't mix-- you never mix two things together.
You always do one or the other.
You don't-- you can't mix ghosts and invisible.
That's what my editors always tell me.
You can't mix it-- and when I do it,
you know, without realizing it, they write on the thing,
you can't mix ghosts and invisible.
You can't do both.
The story's not going to work.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I will tell you the origin of "Goosebumps" and, of course,
it's--
like many of my stories, it's embarrassing.
I was doing "Fear Street," the teen series, and it was--
we were doing "Fear Street" every other month
or so, killing off teenagers, and it was doing really well.
It was a very successful YA series.
Eventually, we sold 80 million "Fear Street" books.
It was just doing great.
And my editors came to me and said, you know,
no one has ever done a scary book series for 7
to 12-year-olds.
We should try one.
And I said, no, I'm not interested.
That's the kind of businessman I am, right?
I didn't want to do "Goosebumps".
And they said, no, we should try it,
and I said, no, it will mess up "Fear Street."
The younger audience-- the kids will be confused.
I didn't want to do it.
And they kept after me and kept after me,
and finally, I said, OK, if I can
think of a good title for the series, maybe we can try a few.
One day, I was reading "TV Guide Magazine," and in those days,
in the middle of the magazine they
had all the TV listings, everything that
was on that day for a week.
And I'm just thumbing through the TV listings,
and just going through, and there on the bottom of a page,
is a little tiny ad and it says, it's
"Goosebumps" week on channel 11.
They were showing scary movies, and I just stared at the ad.
I just stared at it and I thought, I knew,
this is perfect.
We'll call it Channel 11.
That's a really bad joke, isn't it.
Now I have to apologize.
I apologize for that joke.
But, no, that's where the name came from.
There it was, and I knew it was perfect--
"Goosebumps".
It's funny and it's scary, right?
And so I said, OK, we've got a good name for it,
we'll try a couple.
That was 25 years ago.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In the beginning, I wrote a bunch of individual novels.
Horror novels.
The very first ones I ever wrote--
"Blind Date," "Twisted."
I did one called "Beach House."
A bunch of novels.
And we were trying to figure out how to do a series,
how do you do a horror series that people will want
to come back to again and again, and no one had ever really done
a teen horror series.
And we thought, well, we'll have these two kids--
these two teenagers-- and they'll move somewhere
and terrible things will happen to them.
And then you realize you can't have the same two
kids in a horror series.
These poor kids, over and over again,
they have these horrifying adventures.
It's just-- no one would buy it.
Who would believe that?
So then we thought, well, it's got to be the location.
If we have a scary location, then we
have any number of characters can come in and out,
and it will make more sense.
And then we thought, what if there was like a normal town
and it was just a normal small town,
but one street in that town was cursed?
One street had a totally evil history, and anyone
who moved to that street, or walked on it,
or went over there for some reason--
went over-- terrible things would happen,
and the horror would take place over there.
And that's how we got-- and then I sat down.
I said, we need a name for the-- we need a name for it.
This is a good idea because you can--
if it's just a place, you can do 100 books,
and you know, all different characters,
and you could create the history of the street.
Why was it cursed?
Why-- what was the evil on that street?
And I said, try to think of a name for it,
and I sat down with a yellow pad.
So I was going to try to think of a name for the series,
and I wrote Fear Street.
Just came to me.
It was Fear Street.
That would be the street, and then there
would be the Fear family.
It was cursed because of the Fear family.
And then we started to create a whole history of how
evil the Fear family was, what horrible people they were,
and how--
what dark powers they had, and a rivalry that they
had with the Goode family--
G-O-O-D-E-- the Goode family, going back to witchcraft times,
going back to colonial times.
And the terrible things that happened, and burnings,
and we created a whole history.
It went back generation to generation of Fears,
of the Fear family and all ending up
on this street where--
and then we wrote characteristics of the street.
We figured this all out.
We had it all--
there was a big woods, the Fear Street woods.
No birds would ever go into the Fear Street woods,
and that was-- this was part of the legend.
And in the early days, three girls
were found dead in the woods.
Three little girls were found and their bones were missing--
just their skin-- and no one ever knew what happened
or how that could happen, and that
was part of the legend, part of the legacy.
And we figured this all out and then
we started to write "Fear Street" books.