Continued from Part Two, in which screenwriter and multiple-award nominated novelist Phil Nutman took us behind the scenes of JACK KETCHUM'S THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. I decided to switch gears and delve into Phil's approach to journalism and how his spirituality affects the way he lives and writes.

How does your extensive background in journalism affect your fiction-based world, and vice versa?

My experiences as a journalist have taught me to sharpen the blade and know when to cut.

Starting my writing career as a journalist taught me two things: how to write to a word count, and appreciate the gravity of a deadline. You've got to do the work and you've got to deliver the goods on time. There's no margin for error. There's no screwing around. There's no fancy-shmancy-pantsy stuff that allows you to wax lyrical. It is as you say, Lieutenant Joe Friday posing the question, "Just the Facts, Ma'am." I learned that early, and I think that discipline helped me very much when I was coming to not so much write, but re-write.

For example, the Wet Work short story and other stories that were early in the body of my work such as Churches of Desire . Every word has to carry its weight; a writer should always aim for lean muscle mass, not flab. But that said, I'll contradict myself - as usual! - and admit that when I write feature articles for, say, FANGORIA, I do tend to wax lyrical. After over 25 years of writing 100-plus set reports, I break the mold and straddle both the position of objective observer and participant.

The first time I did this was writing up my set visit to the first movie written by Clive [Barker], UNDERWORLD (1985; aka TRANSMUTATIONS). Since the film was partially inspired by Clive's love of film noir, I instinctively started to set the scene through the eyes of a post-modern Philip Marlow, the protagonist of Raymond Chandler's archetypal hardboiled detective. And it just flowed off my fingers. But, to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing, and subsequently broke the golden rule of journalistic ethics and faxed Clive my first draft before sending it to my editors. That's what led to a friendship and Clive verbally kicking me up the arse, telling me I should be writing fiction. Needless to say - and to cut a long story short - I didn't argue with the author of THE BOOKS OF BLOOD, which had blown me away and reconfigured my notion of what horror fiction was or could be.

Writing the original "Wet Work" short story, I was highly fortunate that editors [John] Skipp and [Craig] Spector liked the story so much and wanted to give me my first shot at being a published author that they invested considerable time to help me focus on the core of the story and strip it down to what exactly it should be. It was a steep learning curve for a self-taught would-be fiction writer. I was also blessed that my second editor was Thomas Monteleone, who is a fine fiction writer with many page-turning novels and short stories to his credit, and also believed so strongly in my nascent talent and the story "Churches of Desire" that he, too, took time out of his busy schedule to sit down with me and go through the story, line by line, with a red pen, and share with me his experiences as a writer, point out the details which were necessary and cut the crap out. Having that kind of editorial input that early on in my writing career was an absolute blessing.

Have you ever taken a formal writing class or enrolled in any sort of structured writing program yourself?

No. I've never taken a creating writing or journalism class in my life. I'm entirely self-taught.

So there's hope for guys like me.

If you can read, you can learn to write. Talent is another matter. You can't teach talent. When I started writing for FANGORIA, I scrutinized exactly how their articles were written and learned through trial and error.

One of my dictums is: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, criticize.

In a recent conversation we had you stated you felt it was time to go public with your spirituality as a significant part of your life although you didn't expand on whether you might be referring to organized religion, an intimate connection with nature or perhaps even an overall understanding of your inner being. Care to elaborate?

When it comes to the subject of the word "religion," I immediately think back to my favorite Charlie Brown Peanuts cartoon - a classic Schultz four panel strip. It's just Charlie with his little stubby arms standing on top of the pitcher's mound with one hand in his glove. He stands there looking like a putz from panel one, to panel two, to panel three, and then in the fourth panel Charlie says, 'I love humanity. It's Mankind I can't stand.' That's the metaphor for me that perfectly sums up my feeling in this regard. I can't stand "religion," but I love spirituality. Religion is a social construct that's designed to control the masses. I'm not interested in religion. In fact, I have a complete aversion to organized religion of any stripe.

I was raised as a Protestant in the Church of England faith, but my family never rammed religion down my throat. We went to church every Sunday, but I used to take whatever novel I was reading at the time and slip it inside my Bible. As a child, I was more interested in reading the adventures of Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators than listening to our vicar giving a sermon about Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Other than the fact it contains lots of juicy stories about sex and violence, I don't like the Old Testament. The wrathful God of old is not my God. I believe God is love, and love is a manifestation of the Divine Spark which is the foundation of creativity, so when I write, I am celebrating the essence of God, I am communing with the Divine Spark and exploring inner truths through the process of storytelling. Writing is an act of love for me - it is not a job, it is not a career; it is an essential act of being, as necessary as breathing. To quote James Ellroy, "a dog's gotta scratch; I gotta write."

"Religion" doesn't matter to me. Going to church on Sunday doesn't mean you're spiritual. I know a lot of people who go to church on Sundays and say that they're religious - but that doesn't mean they embrace their spiritual side. Everyone has a spiritual side to their being whether they believe in it or embrace it or not. The Divine Spark is in everybody, and I could talk for hours on this subject, but I won't because I don't want to sound like I'm preaching. This is a subject that that's deeply personal for me, and I don't feel I can fully articulate what I feel. In fact, it's not so much a feeling as something I know.

And in case anyone thinks I am a Christian in the generally understood sense - no, I'm not. While the foundations of my personal spiritual beliefs derive from the foundations of Christianity, I also relate to Zen Buddhism and the Tao. I draw my spiritual strength from a number of philosophies. What makes sense to me is what works for me but doesn't necessarily have the same meaning for someone else. All I'll say is, if you deny the existence of the Divine Spark - call it God if you want - then you're denying yourself the opportunity to water the spiritual plant inside which would constantly be reaching out and growing.

Has your sense of spirituality always there with you or is this a more recent development?

I think it's been there all along, but I'm just feeling at this point in time that it's becoming more important to me and I think it's infusing the stories I'm in the process of telling, the characters I'm exploring. I'm aware - and I don't like to be particularly analytical of my own work; as the poet Keats once wrote, "We murder to dissect." -- there are times when I have a monkey on my back riding me and I don't know where it's trying to push me. I've learned over the years not to argue with it, but if I'm going to screw up, I'm going to screw up by not listening to my inner voice, or my intuition, or however you want to phrase it.

Spiritual elements are seeming to come more to the fore right now with the way that I'm perceiving character, whether it's characters I've created or characters created by somebody else such as David in THE GIRL NEXT DOOR by Ketchum. Looking back at the current body of my work, which giving a number of interviews as a result of the interest in THE GIRL film has encouraged me to do - and I've been rereading stories (of mine) for the first time in fifteen years - I think the spiritual nature has always been there in a number of my characters be they antagonists or protagonists. I think nearly all of my fiction one way or the other has been apocalyptic in the true meaning of the word, meaning revelation. I think all of my characters go through a personal apocalypse to a lesser or greater degree because something is revealed to them that they were blind to. I used the reference in WET WORK, the novel with regard to Corvino's narrative arc, that of the anti-hero/protagonist. He has a Saul on the road to Damascus experience where's he's been blind for all these years--or rather he's been struck blind and then all of a sudden he can see again, but he sees with a sharper clarity then he ever had before. I think--although it's not for me to decide, it's for others to analyze if they're so interested to do so--that all of my characters have gone through that and perhaps I'm going through (it, too). We all go through cycles like the snake shedding skin. Y'know, a snake sheds its skin every seven years if I'm remembering my herpetology correctly, and the thing is, as humans, we shed our skins every seven years or something like that.

Yeah, I've heard the same philosophy too.

Anyway, the fact is I feel I'm going through a tremendous growth period right now. I'm listening very carefully to what my inner voice is speaking, and the spiritual side is something which is going to come even more to the fore in the coming months or years or whatever. I'm not saying I'm seeing my work go in a new direction and I certainly have no desire to preach, but I think the clues will be there if people want to look for them. The bottom line is we're all on the road to self-discovery. We're all on a journey and that's what characters in fiction should experience, otherwise they have no arc. Storytelling is about change, about transformation. That's why storytelling is so fundamental to human nature. As Stephen King has written, "fiction illuminates the truth behind the lie."

Well, on a physical day-to-day sense in terms of how I conduct myself in the outside world, that is where the spiritual aspects are really making themselves manifest. I'm a lot calmer, a lot more centered, a lot more focused and a lot more considerate of other people. I've always tried to be that way, but sometimes your damn ego will get in the way. I have been accused by people in the past of being a completely egocentric motherfucking prick, not necessarily all in one sentence, and I will say guilty as charged. Not because I want to be that way, but sometimes when the creative takes hold you become so embroiled in it, so immersed it, so absorbed by it, that sometimes it puts the blinkers on and you become insensitive to other people's needs.

Now, I imagine some might speculate, albeit respectfully, on how your spirituality might hinder or improve upon your creative endeavors; limiting your inhibitions or forcing you to hold back in favor of honoring your spiritual belief system, etc. So let me ask you this: How does your spirituality get along with the creative animal of your horror-based muse?

How is it influencing my fiction? I see that the characters I'm interested in writing at this stage in my life are more likely to be aware of the spiritual side of their lives than perhaps before. Most of my characters die, either literally or emotionally, because they can't deal with the truths they discover about themselves or other people. I'm getting a feeling that deeper hidden emotions and wider notions are becoming more important to the characters I'm writing or I'm planning to write about.

To answer your question, do my spiritual beliefs influence or inhibit what I'm writing? Fuck no. When I write, all bets are off. I write as I see, as I feel, as it has to be. I've said it before and this is how it really is for me: Once I really connect with a character forget method acting--I method write. This is why writing can be so draining for me emotionally however much I'm enjoying the process. There's nothing better than when you're on a roll, but I become the character and since I tend to write about very dark, haunted characters--now, this doesn't turn me into a miserable old sod, but when you are going through that process, you will become the thought process of somebody else who is alien to you. It is like becoming possessed. I'll use, for example, an old short story "Memories of Lydia Leaving," which is a ghost story without a ghost about a young struggling writer who is haunted by the memories of a great love, a woman who he believed was his soul mate and committed suicide. He's riddled in guilt and he's drowning himself in booze and he's smoking himself to death.

And yes, there were certain elements of autobiography in this story written and inspired by a--well, I wouldn't call it tragic, but an inevitably doomed romance--the kind where you have the license and the freedom to indulge yourself when you're in your twenties. It was never written as a therapy piece, but God, I go back today and it makes me want to fucking puke because I have moved on so far in my life from feeling those wretched feelings of self-pity, self-loathing and guilt. I'm the kind of person who whenever, I broke up with a girlfriend, even if she was nuts as more often than not they were {laughs}, I would always beat myself up going, "what did I do wrong?" This is the way I was brought up, in a Christian household which was that you were meant to give and give and give to others. Well, screw that shit. There comes a point when you have to draw the line in the sand and be selfish and decide "No, I'm not giving up my soul to some crazy person"--be they friend or lover. Misery loves company; I don't. Not anymore.

The thing is, I look back on old stories and my attitude is, "That was then, this is now." To quote Harlan Ellison, "I curse the lesson and bless the knowledge."

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In the concluding installment of The Nutman Chronicles, Phil debunks some myths involving Stephen King's RIDING THE BULLET film adaptation and discusses Mick Garris, as well as the world of dark culture journalism, comic books, how he introduced Clive Barker to America, and the future of the horror industry.