At the heart of creativity is innovation — that is, the ability to originate, or to act on the impulse to make something new.
I recently was interviewed by my friend in the creativity business, author Matt Betts, who I think of as an innovative writer because he channels his fannish glee for genre literature and movies into some very fresh takes on familiar tropes, often by mashing them together and seeing what happens. He’s written some wildly imaginative novels for Raw Dog Screaming Press, is authoring a sasquatch series, and is continuing the saga of Carson of Venus from the Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe in new novels.
Betts just launched a brand new podcast called “Something From Nothing: Talks with Creatives about Creating“ — an interview series that’s part of the Ship It Studios fandom network, all about creativity and innovation in popular genres — and it was a joy to catch up with him and talk shop about this strange business called creative writing.
LISTEN TO “You Got Monsters in My Podcast” HERE:
https://www.shipitstudios.com/somethingfromnothing/episode/281c267e/you-got-monsters-in-my-podcast
If you liked this interview, you might also want to dial back to my talk last year with Brain Squalls — co-hosted by Matt Daigh and another horror writing friend of mine, EV Knight (who, incidentally, just won the Bram Stoker Award for her first novel!). Brain Squalls is another creativity podcast, which invites listeners to “brainstorm” alongside them as they unfold story ideas and respond to prompts, revealing the strange networks of thought that authors follow when they plan out their tales. I was honored to be their first guest, as we talked about my book Instigation, and collaboratively created a hilarious story plot on the spot related to those Toys for Tots donation boxes you often see in American post offices (which I found out later, are sponsored by the Marine corps). For convenience, here’s the stream of that conversation on youtube:
