An interview with Ashley Stokes

Ashley Stokes story, 'Under the Tower That Fell', appears in forthcoming Dark Lane Digest #2. He is the author of Gigantic (Unsung Stories, 2021) and The Syllabus of Errors (Unthank Books, 2013). He lives in the East of England where he’s a ghost and ghostwriter.

What are your working methods?  Do you sit down every day to write?  Do you have a designated place to work?

Nowadays I write every day from around 7am to 10am. I have an office in my flat and I do nearly all my writing at a desk facing the wall with the window behind me. I am very much a creature of habit and have a process I go through before I start writing creatively: complete a language exercise (I am learning Swedish at the moment); post a picture to Insta; keep a journal and plan what I am going to do later in the day; read my Tarot and photograph the spread; then plan my creative writing or write about the story I am currently writing. Then write 250 – 1000 words. I do sometimes write in cafes or might walk out to somewhere to sit in the quiet, but I’ll be writing notes or plot-frameworks, or just busk and play. I am either very organised or have severe mental health problems.

Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

Of course, whatever I choose, I reserve the right to unchoose, revise, swap or recant in an hour or so. I suppose if I think about a story that stands out above others – and I read a lot of short stories – I think about those shorts that open up imaginative space and possibilities for the story, esp the weird story, that I had not explored before, where I might like to go. One such inspiring story that had a great effect on me was Nathan Ballingrud’s Wild Acre, which you can find  in North American Lake Monsters. I already understood from the earlier stories in the collection that Ballingrud was writing horror stories in a pained, melancholy, dirty-realist type of voice, with echoes of Carver and Yates and intimations of Faulkner and Steinbeck. Wild Acre pairs this vivid and plaintive vocal style with a compellingly centred plot structure, the horror front-loaded, most of the story dedicated to its real-life ramifications. A cast of building contractors up against it, on the brink of bankruptcy because tree-hugging environmentalists are trashing a site they are developing half way up a wooded mountain has a bloody encounter with what the wider world can only explain as a wolf. A steadfast, armed man should have been able to ward off a wolf, right? I loved this story, with its long consequential tail of grief, silence and PTSD. It’s certainly a different take on the werewolf story. Undoubtedly for me it was an example of the special effects the weird story can deploy and the depth charges it can lay. Other stories I really love, off the top of my head, are: The Colour Out of Space by Lovecraft, Where the Summer Ends by Karl Edward Wagner, Dr. Locrian’s Asylum by Thomas Ligotti, and Kuobiko by Georgina Bruce. I also like the stories of Linda Rucker.

Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (done by you).

I have a bad mental habit of thinking that only the last two things I’ve written are any good and everything before it dogmuck. Sometimes I think writing is like boredom in that you never quite remember doing it, hence the disconnect I can experience with my work once it’s been out of the fridge a while. At the moment, the story I most like is called How Beautiful You Are. It will appear in the latest in Steve Shaw’s Great British Horror anthologies from Black Shuck. It’s about a dilapidated sixties-concrete housing block that’s being overwhelmed by a strange mould. It’s kind of trippy. If I go back, I have stories that marked some sort of milestone or gear-change for me, so Hardrada (Shadow Booth 4), Things Break Down (Phantasmagoria 23) and The Hinwick Effigy (Cloister Fox 2).

 

Where do your ideas come from?  Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

They come from all over, in stabs, glimmerings, mental pictures, a hanker, a flash. I get them reading other stories. I have them daydreaming in the shower or out walking with my headphones on, or when I’m working out. I usually have some sort of primary glimpse that I title and add to an Ideas List I have on my desktop. Over time, I’ll add other ideas and developments to the title on the List as they strike me and record the notebook page reference so I can access all the references later. Eventually the story floats to the surface, becomes urgent, or fits with a call for submission, and I’ll spend some time planning it in detail before writing a couple of drafts. I doubt I’ll live long enough to write all the stories left on my list.

 

Are you a full-time writer? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time writer if you could?

Sort of. I am a ghostwriter, so write books for other people. I also run online and face-to-face workshops as the Unthank School of Writing. I would love to work full-time on my own stuff but that gig is tough.

What is the most difficult part of your creative process?

Quite possibly the overstretching of my bandwidth, the balancing act that has me often writing a novel, shorts, ghosts and collaborations all at the same time. Constantly waiting patiently is also difficult.

 If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming a writer?

Please look after yourself better. Don’t listen to commissars. Don’t pretend to be a realist or a theorist. Write what no one else could write. Be hip to your jag. Accept wilderness forever.