Q&A with Rod Belcher
/R.S. (Rod) Belcher is an award-winning newspaper and magazine editor and journalist, as well as an author of short and long fiction in a number of genres. Rod has been a private investigator, a DJ, and a comic book store owner and has degrees in criminal law, psychology and justice and risk administration from Virginia Commonwealth University. He's done Masters work in Forensic Science at the George Washington University, and worked with the Occult Crime Taskforce for the Virginia General Assembly. The Grand Prize winner of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology contest, Rod's short story “Orphans” was published in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 9 published by Simon and Schuster. He is the author of The Six-Gun Tarot, The Shotgun Arcana, The Queen of Swords, Nightwise, The Night Dahlia, The Brotherhood of the Wheel, King of the Road, and The Ghost Dance Judgement. His novel adaptation of the film MiB International was published by Titan Books in the summer of 2019, and his original audiobook space opera series, The Queen's Road, is available on Audible.
What follows is a transcript of the audio interview that took place at Roanoke College in October 2019 between Rob Belcher and Kim Dalton, who at that time served as a co-managing editor of Roanoke Review.
Kim Dalton: So thank you for joining us and agreeing to do this.
Rod Belcher: Happy to.
Kim Dalton: Awesome, so I figured I would just kind of dive in, I want to talk about- so you write in a whole bunch of different fiction genres. What spurs you to write in those particular genres, just in general but also in like book to book?
Rod Belcher: A lot of it is my history growing up… I’ve always just been fascinated by science fiction, fantasy, comics, and then a little bit later, horror, and that’s sort of, you know, my baseline. And then I got a little bit older, I got into gaming, Dungeons & Dragons, stuff like that, so that was kind of like my base, bedrock of interests. So when I started writing, of course I wrote stuff that was kind of derivative from those sources. But you know, I did have a job for six or seven years prior to starting as a novelist, where I was doing journalism and nonfiction…. [A]s a kid and when I got older, westerns, detective fictions was a big thing, and true crime stuff, so the nonfiction, the journalism work kind of led into some of that. I haven’t done a great deal of that commercially, but I have managed to kind of find a way to blend some of that stuff into my science fiction and fantasy, urban fantasy…. I really don’t think in genres that much, actually…. My first book got called a “genre-blending book,” and at the time I remember I got a little bit of press from it, because that was sort of a new thing. It was a new buzz word… I didn’t go like, “I’m going to write a weird western, which is a derivative of steampunk, that’s going to have elements of this, and this, and this, and this,” I just was writing for pleasure, and I was kind of curious to whether it might get purchased or not. I was pretty dismissive, because I was like, “Who’s gonna want this freaky western?” But I had never heard of the term “weird western.” I was familiar with steampunk, but I would never in a million years, have considered what I was writing as part of the steampunk genre.
Kim Dalton: Right.
Rod Belcher: So, those kind of labels kind of came later, when other people read it, and they attached that to me and one of the things that’s kind of… interesting and a little unfortunate is there are not a lot of writers who can write whatever genre they want to…. If you get some success in a particular genre, you’re usually kind of stuck in that genre…. One of the things I’m working on right now is a suspense book. It’s got some supernatural elements in it, but I’m trying to tone those down and focus more on other elements of it… My agent was like, “Well, we might publish this under a different name,” and I’m like, “Why?” and she’s like, “Well, because you’re associated with these genres and people kind of expect those things from you.” So, I have a novel coming out from Audible that is a space opera. There’s nothing… supernatural in it, there’s actually quite a bit of like… super science, almost like—
Kim Dalton: Ooh, like hard science-fiction.
Rod Belcher: It’s almost science to the point of being almost indistinguishable from magic. So it is still fantastic, but it is a totally different thing, and that is being published under my name, because I had done some other work with Audible, and they published some of my print books as audio books and I’ve done pretty well for them. So, uh, this will be interesting to see how this gets received, because it is something that I have not done before under my name that is going to be coming out under my name, so we’ll see how it goes. It’ll be like a little experiment, it’ll be that and then the novel will be coming out under a different name… we’ll see how those get received back to back…. I don’t usually think about genre, that’s usually kind of the last consideration, and a lot of times I get told what genre I’m writing in by someone else because I’m not really trying for that….
Kim Dalton: Yeah, I think a natural follow up to that is then where do you start with your stories? If not genre, where do you tend to enter your stories in the conception?
Rod Belcher: … Stephen King on writing refers to it as “Bang, Pow,” this kind of comical collision of things in your brain. For example, one of the examples he gives is when he was thinking about Carrie. He was working at a high school at the time, as a janitor in the summers of this high school that he taught English in during… the fall and the winter. So he got an idea about doing a story about a teenage girl, and he had also been reading a considerable amount about ESP and psychic phenomenon. And he literally said “Bang, Pow, these two came together and I had the little kernel of the idea for Carrie.” Something similar for me… I try very hard to read a lot of nonfiction, or I also enjoy reading a lot of fiction like crime fiction and stuff like that, which is usually set in the “real world” to a degree. I will go off on little mini-binges of nonfiction reading on different subjects, something just like, grabs my attention. I tend to watch a lot of the historical channel, Discovery and stuff. I enjoy that stuff because you find out things that literally you have no idea they ever existed.
So, when an idea hits me, well for example, for Brotherhood of the Wheel, I had been watching a… I think it was like a Discovery documentary or something on the Knights Templar. And I had already had this idea for doing a story about truck drivers because my daughter was in the hospital for over a year, and it was about a four-and-a-half hour drive up to see her and a four-and-a-half hour drive back, and I was doing that a couple times a week. So I was on the road a lot, and I’d had [another] idea even before my daughter was ever born, before my son was ever born… I really liked the idea that truck drivers were like these… almost like a secret society. They had their own kind of coded language which they spoke in over the radios, and they had their own little places and truck stops, and truckers had their own little areas, and they had showers—which I always thought was fascinating, you know, they had facilities for these guys to just live this nomadic lifestyle—and… a lot of them knew each other if they ran the same routes and stuff like that… So I got the idea for like this “trucker secret society,” and then I was watching something on Discovery and they were talking about the initial… charge of the Knights Templar… The original charter was to protect pilgrims and merchants on the holy roads, on the roads in the holy land… By the end of things the Knights Templar were immensely powerful [with] secular power, [and] if you believe that sort of thing, occult power. They knew where all the bodies were buried, they invented banking, they invented checks, but in the beginning, you know starting out, it was very humble. They didn’t even have enough horses for all their members so they had to double up on horses. And it was kind of a “Bang, Pow” moment. It occurred to me, you have these guys who… were out protecting people traveling the roads, and then it just… crashed into the idea for the truck drivers. So that became the basis for one chapter in Nightwise [that] introduced [a] character, and then my agent really liked the character so she was like, “Can you do some more with him?” and I was like, “Yeah,” and that turned into Brotherhood of the Wheel, which turned into—there’s two books in the series now, and I’ve got a third one plotted… But, I mean, that’s a pretty general idea of where things come from…. I’ll have some idea, I’ll try to scribble it down if I can…. I was actually talking to the class earlier, I mentioned that idea may be kind of thin for a book, but if you just let it sit for a while and maybe you’ll have another idea and those two ideas will merge together into something that’s a little meatier and then you have…enough of an idea to go forward and try to do a novel… even if the idea’s kind of thin, you might be able to do a short story out of it.
Kim Dalton: That’s really interesting! So from there, what does the rest of your writing process look like? Once you have that idea, how do you start working on it?
Rod Belcher: The two philosophies of plotting [are] “pantsing” (fly by the seat of your pants) and “plotting” (which is to write everything down). I have tried both over the course of many projects. And what works for me, is I’m about an 80% pants-er and a 20% plotter. When I try to pants, I do nothing else. The first novel I ever wrote… will never see the light of day, but there are elements of it [that show up elsewhere. As a] matter of fact, the truck driving character who’s in Brotherhood of the Wheel was in this first novel, just as a germ of that character. What I did with that, I just wrote. I just wrote and I knew kind of where I wanted to go sort of, and the story ended up being very meandering.… The chapters were long, and sometimes they really didn’t go anywhere. And I was very unsatisfied with that. But I’ve also done projects where I had tried to map out the plot meticulously, map out every character, map out all the interactions… I had heard someone say you could take 3x5 cards for each scene, and then lay those out, and you could move them around… I tried all of that stuff. What happened when I tried to plot meticulously was I got overwhelmed. I would reach a point of almost like… stasis because… I had this enormous, granite thing that I’d made that was the story, and I couldn’t find a way into it. I couldn’t find a way to move through it. And that was very intimidating and very hard to start. So a lot of times those projects would end up just laying fallow. So what I found that worked for me best is I will have my general idea of the story and then I will build it one chapter at a time. And I do a synopsis of that chapter, what’s gonna happen in the chapter, who’s introduced… The one thing that I do that is a little plottery is—Plottery? What’s plottery?—
Both: It’s a word now.
Rod Belcher: It’s a word now! —is uh, whatever characters of significance that are showing up in that chapter, I will tend to fully flesh them out in that synopsis. So I go into their backstory. Oftentimes, there have been characters that I’ve gone into their backstory and some of that material hasn’t shown up for several books. You know, later on in the series, this will come up. The fourth book in the Golgotha series, there’s something that I wrote initially when I was describing one of the characters in the first book, and describing their background and that thing is finally coming up in the books now. So that I think is important because it gives me a good solid handle on the characters, and I believe characters are more important than plot. I believe if you know where your character’s coming from right out of the gate, that does help you with moving them forward through the story. So I’ll do a barebones description of the things I wanna hit in the chapters so it’ll keep me on target, and I do the background of whatever major characters are showing up in that chapter, and then I write the chapter. And then I repeat, wash, rinse, repeat. I just do the same thing with the next chapter: write the summary. And sometimes I may take a day, working on the summary, but it’s worth it to me because it’s still less time than trying to plot everything out. And it’s more- there’s more breadth to it. I know I can meet the goals of that synopsis[—]what I need to get hit in this chapter, so it makes the chapters a little more cogent. But, if it doesn’t get to exactly the same spot in the summary, which oftentimes it does not, … I’ll look back at [the summary] and I’m like, “Well, I didn’t do that; it’s a good thing I didn’t do that.” So basically, it gives me a little bit of a roadmap, but it also lets me go off the road if I want to. But it keeps me on track for what I want to hit in every chapter, and that flows into the next chapter. And sometimes, you know, I’ll still move chapters around and things like that, as a book progresses. You’ll hit a certain kind of critical mass, and then you can kind of start playing more… A lot of times, you know, [at] the end of a project, or the end of a book, I write the summaries after the fact.… I got out of that process for Queen of Swords, and I was very concerned about it, but halfway through the book I got back in, I got it back under control, but I felt like some of it was meandering, and I managed to address that before I got too far into the book. So… that’s my process, as it is, but that’s kind of how I try to take that idea and make it into something with some form to it.
Kim Dalton: So, you do write both novels and short stories? Does the process change when you approach short stories versus your novels?
Rod Belcher: Yeah, it’s almost like day and night… [Writing a short story is] hard to do after you’ve written some novels. It’s actually difficult because you’re used to being able to like, it’s like sleeping on a queen-sized bed and then you’re sleeping on this little, like, loveseat. You’re used to being able to stretch out and take your time, and build, maybe go off on a few little cul-de-sacs because you want to, and it sorta relates to the story, but it adds to the rest of the story…. It’s funny because I just did a short story, not too long ago, … a Brotherhood of the Wheel series story, that’s gonna be in an anthology called Predators and Petticoats, which comes out in like a week or two…. The whole premise of the anthology is women as the antagonist, the villain, or the hero but being in a very, in a dominant sort of a role through the whole story. And there’s some really cool writers in there. So I did this Brotherhood story for that, and after novel writing I’m like, “Eh, short story, that’s only like 20,000 words, something like that,” and I’ve done for some markets where 20,000 words would be okay for a short story. Some magazines, like I did one for Amazing and it was… close to 20,000. But they wanted like, if I remember right, I think they didn’t want more than 15,000, 10,000, so I literally had to rein myself in. I still had to get to all the points I wanted to…. One of the downsides of being character development heavy is it’s much easier to develop characters in a novel than it is in a short story. So you have to learn to shorthand it; you have to learn to give a good description of the character with very little space, which is… it’s challenging, which makes it fun. I mean, I do enjoy doing short stories. I’ve done a lot of them in the last couple years. I had invites to a lot of anthologies and magazine work, but yes, [it’s] very different process.… Stephen King actually did a book called, uh, I think Past Sundown or something like that [editor’s note: Just After Sunset]. It was basically a series of short stories, and he wrote them because he hadn’t written short stories in so long, and his books are massive, so he wanted to see if he could still write short stories. And I got to admit they were more like novellas, they were not short stories.
Kim Dalton: He tried.
Rod Belcher: They were good, they were really good, but they were not, you know, a 15,000-word short story. But yes, they’re very day and night, very different.
Kim Dalton: So, shifting tack a little bit… the genres you write are mostly within the realm of speculative fiction, and I know that you’ve talked a little bit about how that, not as much anymore, but used to be… looked down upon in, like, the literary circles. What do you think the advantages are of writing in the types of genres you write, in terms of storytelling?
Rod Belcher: It’s its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. We are the court jesters of literature. We can say very truthful, very scathing commentaries on our society and no one really takes us seriously. If they did, it would be like the king… listening to what the jester’s saying and saying, “Lop his head off.” So, you can make a lot of social commentary and I think good science fiction, especially. That’s our responsibility. I really do believe, you know, you can write something just for fun or pleasure, but we have a lot of that, especially in genre fiction, there’s a lot of stuff that’s just, “Oh, it’s just fun, it’s just a ‘popcorn movie,’” you know, and there’s actually an interesting thing that just came out in the last couple weeks or so. Francis Ford Coppola… who’s the fellow that did the Godfather movies? Was that Francis Ford Coppola?
Kim Dalton: I- I don’t know.
Rod Belcher: Yeah, I’m trying to remember. Basically, two very prominent filmmakers… both say basically that like the Marvel superhero movies, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is not cinema. It is a ride at an amusement park. It is an event. You go, you eat crappy food, you scream and whee and there’s all sorts of moments that make your heart jump fast, but it’s not cinema. And they got a lot of clap-back for that, but they also got a lot of people supporting them. Like, Quentin Tarantino jumped in on their side on that too, [and] Alan Moore, who made his name as a comic writer. Basically, he quit superhero comics—he quit comics pretty much in general—because he said they were ruining our culture, because they’re not really speaking to the things in our society that are more important.
Kim Dalton: Which is interesting given what he’s written.
Rod Belcher: Yeah! I mean Watchmen is definitely political commentary.
Both: V for Vendetta.
Rod Belcher: Yeah, V for Vendetta,
Kim Dalton: That’s all it is!
Rod Belcher: Yes! Yeah, I mean, exactly, but what he’s seeing is escapist fun, [and] there’s nothing wrong with escapist fun, but there’s plenty of science fiction, space opera, things like that, [which are more than escapist fun]. That was one of the things that made Star Wars so popular initially…. We’re coming out of… the Nixon era and Vietnam, the economy was kind of in the tank, everyone was really depressed, and that’s the reason things like disco and Star Wars—
Kim Dalton: Right, it was like the simple good and bad.
Rod Belcher: Right! It was just something to go… have fun and not think. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s plenty of times where not thinking is not a bad thing. So basically, I do feel like genre fiction does not get as much appreciation sometimes, because there is some really good genre fiction that addresses some very powerful issues, some really interesting philosophical and political issues. But there are folks that just won’t even read it; they won’t even consider it. If you go to Barnes & Noble in town…, they have it back in the corner; it’s like in the “dirty book” section. You know, it’s like that’s where they keep the that stuff and you know, if you look through it a lot of it is—there’s a book on Halo, there’s a book on Star Trek—
Kim Dalton: And the covers are all very pop culture.
Rod Belcher: Yeah, exactly, so a lot of it is kind of mindless, but there’s a lot that isn’t, and I feel that if someone dismisses it just because of the genre, they are doing themselves a disservice.
Kim Dalton: I feel like well-written anything has something to say.
Rod Belcher: Exactly. Exactly, and that’s the thing, but it is, again, if you look back there and all you see is stuff based off of video games and TV shows, you have to parse a little bit more to find [the more substantial stuff]. And what’s interesting is like, for example, Stephen King writes horror, [but] he’s not in the horror section. He’s in the literature section. And part of that is simply because the powers that be made a decision, and part of it is I think because it took him a long time to get that recognition, but he got it. So you know, there are classics of science fiction that I think should be in “literature,” not be in the science fiction section. And to dismiss them is to do yourself a disservice.
Kim Dalton: And I think it’s starting to change in our culture too.
Rod Belcher: It is.
Kim Dalton: I know [at Roanoke College] at least we have classes on science fiction [and] classes on contemporary fiction, looking at what makes genre what it is.
Rod Belcher: And I mean, by the same token, folks who just avoid classic literature like the plague, they are doing themselves a disservice, because there’s amazing stuff there… Someone was talking to me about horror in the last class, and Lord of the Flies came up. And that is absolutely a horror story!
Kim Dalton: Oh yeah!
Rod Belcher: It’s terrifying! And it’s terrifying in the way that I like horror to be. It’s very kind of claustrophobic and existential; there’s a great deal of existential horror in there. But there would be some folks who would just be offended by just the notion of that. It is a classic book. It’s classic literature. How dare you drag it down into the mud with horror.
Kim Dalton: I mean you look at a lot of the stuff, especially like pre-1900s or early 1900s blurs the line with genres so much. I mean, Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite classic novels, and it starts with a ghost story. Like, Catherine comes to the narrator as a ghost. And there was so much blurring before we had sorta this idea of what classic literature looked like. I mean Frankenstein—
Rod Belcher: Yes!
Kim Dalton: —is literally a science fiction.
Rod Belcher: It actually is, like, considered the first—
Kim Dalton: The first—
Rod Belcher: Science fiction book. And it’s beautiful, it’s an excellent book, and… you know, Frankenstein is just as relevant now if not more so—
Kim Dalton: If not more, yeah—
Rod Belcher: —than when it was written, because we are constantly struggling with, you know, … AI stuff now…. Every one of those [AI developers] should be made to read Frankenstein.
Kim Dalton: And Asimov.
Rod Belcher: Oh yes! Yes, the Laws of Robotics, absolutely! So yes, I do think it still gets a bum rap, I do think maybe that’s starting to change, but it is… I don’t know if that will ever go away…. What’s interesting is, you know, really, Shakespeare was considered by his contemporaries to be basically a populist hack, who was just churning out crap.
Kim Dalton: And dick jokes—and oh, I don’t know if I can say that on the podcast—
Rod Belcher: Expletive deleted.
Kim Dalton: Editor, please do magic.
[Laughter]
Rod Belcher: Basically, now he is considered the pinnacle of literature in the western world and that is just a matter of time and perspective. Changes in the culture, changes in how we perceive the past. So maybe, you know, someday there will be that blur. And to be honest, a lot of science fiction, even now there’s a lot of science fiction that if you read it now it’s already dated. It’s very dated.
Kim Dalton: I mean, the books that have like, “Oh, this is existing in the year 2000”—
Rod Belcher: Yes!
Kim Dalton: With like flying spaceships and—
Rod Belcher: Where’s my flying car? I’ve wanted my flying car since I was a kid. Where’s my flying car?
Kim Dalton: Yeah, oh goodness. Okay, so I think we should start wrapping it up a little bit. I think as like, the final question, what is your favorite monster that you’ve ever written about? Cause you’ve written quite a few…
Rod Belcher: Hmm… That threw me; that’s a good one! Very good! Let’s see… I’m fairly pleased with the bad guy in Shotgun or Cannon, which is the second book in the Golgotha series. I’m really pleased by that book in general. I think it’s one of my better books, but the main villain… spoilers, if you haven’t read this and you have any intention of reading it, turn this off or turn the page or something—
Kim Dalton: Go read the book first and then come back.
Rod Belcher: Yeah, go read the book and then come back. I think that the main character, he’s this guy named Ray Zeal, who is a smiling, arrogant cowboy, and he actually turns out to be the angel Raziel, who has been stuck on Earth, and has kind of gone a little crazy. And basically, I tried to go a little bit like—if you’ve ever seen the movie The Prophecy with Christopher Walken as an angel, which is just the best casting ever—
Kim Dalton: Oh yeah.
Rod Belcher: Scary, crazy angel… tried to go a little bit with that. I was also thinking a little bit about Preacher, the comic series Preacher, and the TV show Preacher. Just the idea of an Old Testament style angel, who just has… no appreciation and no real care for the people in this fragile little tissue paper world he’s walking through. He was a pretty good antagonist and I’m pretty proud of him… I’m trying to think of any others.… I try to put a lot of work into my villains, like last night when I did that reading [at Roanoke College], I wanted to come up with something for that chapter that was some kind of a bizarre monster but I didn’t want to use something that had already been used, so I kind of came up with the Carriage Ghoul. Again, my idea of horror is very claustrophobic, and the idea of something that could kill a lot of people within a few feet of each other and they not know it is, I think, just terrifying.
Kim Dalton: And then lay eggs and it’s, it’s gross. [laughter]
Rod Belcher: Yeah, I tried to go a little overboard with that… I hate symbiotic, the whole notion of—well not even symbiotic just…parasitic things. Alien, I just ew, you know, it just freaked me out. So yes, and I think Ray Zeal might have been a good villain. One of them, one of my better villains.
Kim Dalton: Alright.
Rod Belcher: I gotta make a better one after him.
Kim Dalton: Gotta keep raising the bar. [laughter]
Rod Belcher: Yeah exactly, to be continued.
Kim Dalton: Well, thank you so much for this.
Rod Belcher: Oh, thank you, I appreciate it, I’ve had a wonderful time here. Students have been amazing, the professors have been amazing, hospitality’s been wonderful, and I’ve had a great time. I hope I get to come back.
Kim Dalton: Yes, we hope so too.
