Articles/Interviews

The Twilight Zone Magazine (February 1983) Article

TZ: Then why did you begin to write for children?

Dahl: Ah, that's a whole different thing. After having done my twenty- five years of short stories, the three volumes, I think I probably ran out of. lots, and that's the hardest thing in the world. If you write the sort of short stories I write, which are real short stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, instead of the modern trend, which is mood pieces. I'm judging right now a short-story competition, a very serious big one, and there's not one single short story I've read so far with a plot. They're all mood pieces. You know: I went down to the kitchen and my wife was there and she had a saucepan and we had a little row and threw the carrots out the window and the dog came in and–they're concentrating on their writing, and not on the content. Well, the average reader doesn't care about the writing. They want something which will keep them reading, wondering what's going to happen next. None of these stories says what's going to happen next. And then to finish it satisfactorily, so the reader says ha ha, I wouldn't have guessed that, how fantastic, how fascinating, ooh, golly! That's jolly hard.

I found about thirty-five plots, and then I probably ran out of them. I don't know many now. I don't know any, I don't think. I couldn't sit down and write a short story now–it's very hard. And these people who are writing them now, they don't have any plots, they don't bloody well have them. Maupassant had them. Salinger had them. That's why they were so sparing. Salinger found eleven.

TZ: But to turn to children's books because you couldn't find plots–

Dahl: Of course you've got to have plots there. But it was a whole new field, and the brain started going into another gear. I'd been into the adult thing for so long ... and it was great fun! It still is.

TZ: Do you find much difference in the way you approach writing for adults and writing for children?

Dahl: An enormous difference. Yes. You've got to write for your audience. You've got to go into a completely new gear. One almost goes into another frame of mind, all through the day, when you're doing a children's book.

TZ: 1 thought that your one novel, My Uncle Oswald, was very like your children's books, except that it was for adults and all about sex. If it had been for children, the subject would have been something other than sex, but the style was very similar.

Dahl: Well, it was jokey. It was a send-up. I find it hard to be serious, even in the adult ones, for too long. There are one or two serious, very serious stories, but not many.

TZ: How do you feel about the television adaptations of your stories in Tales of the Unexpected?

Dahl: Within the limits of television, and this was commercial television, it wasn't badly done. One or two of them were especially well done; a few were cocked-up. But, you know, one comes to expect that, and ride with it.

TZ: How much did you have to do with the series?

Dahl: I had nothing to do with it. I didn't want anything to do with it, although they would send me the scripts and I would glance over them and put a great red line around some bloomer, and then have a little fight over it. But otherwise I kept well away. I never went to the sets or anything.

TZ: You didn't want to write any of the scripts?

Dahl: Oh, no. I could have written all of them if I'd wanted to. I didn't want to do any of them.

TZ: But you have written film scripts before.

Dahl: I used to do it for money, yes. Because it is a lot of money. And it's such a beastly job, that no one would ever write film scripts except for money. Or unless you wanted to defend your own property. And even then you can't, because they get hold of it and do what they like. I did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; I thought I was defending it, but in the end they buggered it up.

TZ: They changed your script?

Dahl: Yes. Here you have a best-selling book, an enduring book, and they bugger the film up. Well, there's no excuse for that–it's just bad film-making. I hate film directors. The only nice experience I had was doing a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. I liked that. It was a nice director, and they left you alone, and they followed the script. It was lovely. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was ghastly. Once you get a rotten director, or an egocentric director, you're dead. But they pay a lot, so you take the money and run.

TZ: Would you do another film script?

Dahl: If my book Danny, Champion of the World is done as a film, as I think it will be pretty soon, I would ask to do that. To defend it as best I can.

TZ: You mentioned at lunch that as soon as I leave you're going to go upstairs and read for the rest of the afternoon. What are you reading?

Dahl: At the moment I'm reading–very slowly, and I hope it will last me a year–five volumes of the diary of a country parson. Mid-eighteenth century. I love the mid-eighteenth century because that's when all the great furniture was made. That's for slow reading. I also love thrillers. And I've got Portrait of the Artist as Young Man beside the bed, which I'm dabbing into again, because when you've read something twenty years ago you must dab into it again because you'll find it's something completely different. And I love Ed McBain–I'm reading the new 87th Precinct novel. I've read all the classics; I'd read them all by the time I was fifteen, I should think–everything you can think of from the nineteenth century. We read voraciously at my school–had to, no television in those days, no radio. So I've read them all, but it's fun to look at them again.

TZ: Do you read many short stories?

Dahl: No. I don't like them much because they're lousy. I've read all the good ones. So have you. All of them. I've also read every ghost story that's ever been written. Which produces a very interesting result. Because it turns out that women, females, excel in two phases of the arts–in literature, I should say. And that's children's books and ghost stories. And they're both very difficult to do; that's why there are so few good ones. In the ghost story, they've got this light, fascinating touch. Ghost stories are very difficult to do; I've never succeeded.

TZ: Who are the ghost story writers you like?

Dahl: Oh, let me think. I've got them all written down. Most of them are not very famous, the women. I'm going to bring out a collection of ghost stories of my choice, and there won't be any of the famous ones. We're all fed up with M. R. James and F. Marion Crawford and Algernon Blackwood and the rest of them.

TZ: Who will you have instead?

Dahl: I could give you the list. Let me see ... Edith Wharton wrote a very good ghost story. And there's Rosemary Timperley, Mary Fitt, Mrs. Gaskell, E. Nesbit–she also wrote brilliantly for children. She may be the best example of a writer who wrote for adults and for children, although today it is her children's books which are remembered. I love her short stories, myself.

TZ: I think myself that ghosts work best in short stories, rather than novels.

Dahl: Oh, yes. Couldn't sustain it. First of all, you're right on the edge of unbelievability; at any moment the reader's going to say, I don't believe this trash. The moment you see a ghost, you've lost it. You've got to suggest it. You can't say, a white thing fluttered across the room or down the street. Then you're dead. It needs a very delicate touch.

TZ: You said you'd never succeeded in writing a ghost story?

Dahl: Yes, I started one and couldn't bring it off, so I turned it into something else. It was called "The Landlady." The young man knocking at the door, and the woman opening it– I was thinking, well, this is going to be a lovely ghost story; she'll be a ghost, really, and she'll let him in and something's going to happen. But I just couldn't bring it off. So I got a new ending, and made her just a murderess. Which was fun, but it wasn't the same; it wasn't a ghost story.

TZ: To go back to something you said earlier, about people today writing mood pieces rather than real short stories: I think there are real, plotted short stories still being written, and you find them mostly in the genre magazines. This magazine, The Twilight Zone, which isn't available in England, is full of real short stories, and so are the science fiction magazines.

Dahl: Ah, yes, they are, and I hate science fiction, actually. But they've got to have plots, you couldn't write science fiction without plots. My advice to people writing for your magazine would be–well, we assume you can write a bit, but remember that writing is only half the battle. The plot is the other half. And then putting it right. People who can write very well, like John Updike or Virginia Woolf, think they can get away with just writing. But you've got to have the plots, or people won't care.