Max Lury | No Ghosts | Weird Fiction | Ep. 22

Max Lury: it's interesting. as I'm sure everyone else has, a lot of, big conversations in in my life happen partially over text or

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: or maybe entirely over text or maybe the fallout is handled over text or

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: when people say that when they want to ask someone out, they get the whole group chat to help draft the message, or when you've just broken up with a partner and you want to send them a happy birth, you know, there's there are all these texts that are really significant that have

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: real, I don't know, real valence in the human world. And

Cory: Mm.

Max Lury: I think, yeah, I was kind of interested in in in how can we translate that in into a novel.

Cory: Our guest today is Max Lurie, here to talk with us about his debut novel, No Ghosts, which came out earlier this year from the UK publisher Peninsula Press. I came across this book through Jeff Vandermeer, author of Annihilation, among others, who is probably the most well-known contemporary example of a loose genre called weird fiction, writing with Fantastical or horror elements that's less interested in scaring you in any traditional sense and is more about leaving you feeling uneasy or off balance. Weird fiction loves when things are left unresolved, unexplained, when you have this lingering suspicion that things aren't quite as they should be. No Ghosts certainly checks a lot of these boxes. The book is about two 20-somethings, Harlow and Kieran, trying to grapple with the disappearance of their best friend. The book takes place in a very recognizable contemporary Britain that's full of technology, phones, the internet, and AI in particular. And yet in Max's hands, it feels like a weird place. Early on in the book, there's a televised news conference that's given by some paranormal society who announced that suddenly and unexpectedly the ghosts that they have been communicating with have vanished. This turn of events is described in the book. unusually. It's unclear exactly how literally we're supposed to take this news. The book never really commits to this is a world in which ghosts are real or not, and it's just one example of several quite odd things that happen over the course of the novel. You're gonna hear Max read a passage in just a moment about another one. No ghost does a remarkable job of keeping you stuck in this liminal space. It's a book much less about plot, I think, or at least how I took it, than about using the framework of this weird fiction. to raise interesting questions about modern life, AI and technology, and the experience of people, particularly younger generations, struggling to make human connection. So thank God we have the author here today, who I'm sure is going to clear all this up and give us really easy, straightforward answers. Max Lurie, welcome to the passage.

Max Lury: Thank you for having me. Yeah. The hope is I can give some straightforward answers, although I'm sure we'll see, yeah.

Cory: Yeah. Max, you're about to read a passage from your book. Is there anything that readers, listeners need to know in advance about anything that can help them understand what they're about to hear?

Max Lury: I think probably what's important to know is that the novel follows two characters, Harlow and Kieran, who used to be in a kind of trio best friends with a girl called Annie. She has gone missing. She's been missing for a year. This is kind of where we start the novel. and Harlow and Kieran have been kind of reunited. They've fallen out for a reason that's unclear. I and but they they were reunited at her memorial. after the memorial, Harlow is in her thoughts, in her head a little bit, and then she receives this strange email which she goes on to open and that's where the passage starts.

Cory: Cool. We're ready when

Jon: Awesome.

Cory: you are.

Max Lury: There were two files, which took less than a minute to download. In that time, Harlow tried to work out who might have sent them. They'd been sent the day of Annie's memorial, which could mean something, although she wasn't sure what. They could be spammed too. There were bots that could scrape for your name or find your details. This kind of thing wasn't uncommon. There were a dozen reasons for it, which she was sure would come to light when the download was finished. The small circle became one colour. Harlow opened the first file with VLC Media Player and clicked play. The film was shot from just inside a hallway, an open door framing a woman alone in a room. Harlow paused it and exhaled. She said fuck out loud. The woman on the screen looked like Annie, although not exactly. The image had her red hair, the same eye bags, the same freckles which clumped to make formless blotches, but it was still somehow an approximation, compiled from disparate elements. It was how Annie's face would look if she wore it as a mask. Harlow closed her eyes for a moment and pressed the tips of her fingers against her eyelids. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. It was still Annie, at least a version of her. Almost her. Harlow pressed play again. The woman sat alone on a sofa in a wooden cabin. There was a fur throw under her, and the window behind was white out. She folded small clothes, presumably a child's, in her lap, rocking ever so slightly as she did so. Her hands were half rendered, only meant to be visible in motion. The figure stopped what she was doing, her face going slack. And her fingers tapped one by one against her thumb. She looked up, and as she did, the scene ended. It cut and started again. The shot was in the same position, peering into the same room. Harlow took a closer look, trying to see if the woman really was Annie or if she was just projecting. It was the same figure again, red hair, and that big, ungainly mouth. But this time the woman on screen seemed distressed. Her lips were moving as if she was saying a word or a name over and over, running her hands through her hair. Eyes wide, something upsetting to it, that same mad panic Harlow had seen so many times with Annie in hospital waiting rooms and on bedroom floors. But it was, Harlow felt, undeniably Annie. Alone and afraid. Annie, or almost Annie, looked up. Her eyes came to rest above the camera, widening just a fraction

Jon: Okay, you don't want to cut it.

Max Lury: in what could have been recognition or panic. There was no way of telling.

Jon: Thanks for reading that, Max. that's a it's a really cool passage. and there's a lot there's a lot I think we can we can ask you about in there. But I'll start with an easy question, which is why did you choose that one when Corey reached out about coming on the show?

Max Lury: I think first of all, I think it sets the tone nicely for the novel. I think there's there's kinda some weird stuff going on, hopefully, that you can feel under the surface.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: but I think also it was it was something I came back to a lot when editing. And I guess thinking about a passage in particular, it's interesting because it was a passage I wrote very early on

Jon: Okay.

Max Lury: in the process. And I I really didn't expect as much of the initial draft to be in the final

Jon: Hmm.

Max Lury: novel as as actually ended up staying there. the the kind of descriptions of the scenes inside stayed very much the same. They became really core to the novel in a way I didn't anticipate. When I was writing it, I thought I'd have a chance to change it all. But actually as the novel relied more on those, they became more central. But it was also a passage that I edited a lot in very small ways. with my editor, Sam from Peninsula, because we were thinking about a lot of things to do with how we understand what we're seeing in a film that you're writing about, which is

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: which feels quite simple, but actually is quite complicated to get that in the flow of the prose. Like,

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: how do we understand how the shot is framed and how do we move between being kind of in the world of the film and then being with Harlow Watch, kind of jumping between those two points. So I thought it was a nice balance of edited quite a lot, but also quite similar to to how I started.

Jon: And what when you say edited a lot, what kind of things were you editing, if you can remember? What what were you tweaking to try to get it closer to what you wanted?

Max Lury: So initially, there it wasn't clear enough what we were meant to be seeing in the film. There were kind of just descriptions of the world of the film that makes sense, but it wasn't necessarily

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: through a particular lens, which I guess is how

Jon: Okay.

Max Lury: you watch the film. And I don't think we were jumping back and forth as much between Harlow and the films, and kind of as as the passage goes on. there's there's much more of that where we kind of have to keep coming back to how Harlow feels about the film and then jumping in. I think it was

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: much more just a a few pages of description of these films, which maybe would it would get monotonous, or I guess we're we're stepping away perhaps from the character for too long, and so we kind

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: of lose some the emotional impact, which

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: was difficult because I guess you're you're trying to create a very particular atmosphere with this film that feels

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: spooky and ominous, and then It's about that balancing act of how often do we pull back to the character, what tension does that release, and

Jon: Yeah. Yeah.

Max Lury: how can we reintroduce it?

Jon: Yeah, it's a really interesting exercise to think about. Like when you're writing a scene from a film, somebody watching something, you have to write

Max Lury: Mm.

Jon: the thing they are watching, but you also have to write them watching it. So there's like those two sort of levels you have to think about and how to balance

Cory: Mm-hmm.

Jon: those. I didn't think about that as I was reading this passage, but now that you talk about it, I see how challenging that could be. to pull off

Max Lury: Mm.

Jon: in a way that feels organic to the reader,

Max Lury: Yeah, and I I I think it's nice that you say that 'cause I think hopefully the idea is that you don't notice it, which I guess is one of the interesting things about it, is like you're trying to make those movements quite slick and so the reader just just moves along and can focus on on the kind of the content of the film and the content

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: of what's happening to Harlow. And so there's a bit of a challenge in yeah, not making it too noticeable that you're like, okay, this shot is framed like this and that

Jon: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Max Lury: and yeah, I think also what what what was slightly difficult sort of in trying to think about how much to let the reader in on and what they notice is that because these films are AI generated maybe,

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: there is no like technically there's no camera. If you see what they so there's there's the all these kind of little tweaks, you kind of to keep it just in the reader just has just the right amount of information.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: but yeah.

Cory: Max, I think I understood correctly that you said that the the content of the film that that Harlow is watching, when you had originally drafted it in your head, you were like, Maybe this is hold in place, I'm just gonna write through this and then later on maybe I'll kinda go back. So I'm curious, what did you feel was kind of hold in place originally and why when you had the opportunity to go back, were you like, actually what I've written here as the film contents that Harlow is watching works really effectively.

Max Lury: It's a good question. I think I think my my understanding was it's my it w it is my first novel, it was my first novel. and I think I kind of felt like, you know, eventually you're gonna come to a point where you're gonna come back to this chapter and change stuff around and move stuff. And I think what had happened is as the novel had gone on, the ideas that were in the film kind of became more and more central. And I think one of the key ideas is for me at least was that the film repeats, is that it's a kind of Approximation of Annie. And I feel like all of that is kind of in the initial draft. I kind of didn't need to rework those bits because they were already there. But then I think it was also just I think that was when I felt in that stage in the in the novel writing process, I felt quite like free. I was sort of able to do whatever I wanted. And so I there there were quite a few other versions of the film that got cut. In in a way earlier draft, she watches quite a lot more films. So I whittled it down. But I think it was one of those things where you're like, I trust that the the image of this scene that has sort of come to me has something quite hopefully potent and exciting in it that maybe if I rewrite I'm gonna lose. And so it so

Jon: Mm.

Max Lury: it has all the the beats I need for it to do its job in terms of the more formal structure of the novel. But then the kind of like images in there, I'm like. Well, I I like these and I'm I was clearly drawn to them and they feel like they work and so to rework them, it might become a bit overworked, I felt.

Jon: Mm.

Max Lury: if I really knew what I wanted them to achieve exactly and I created the right kind of spookiness, it it might feel too deliberate, whereas there's something nice about how or hopefully that you know, there's something nice about how they kind of they they're alluding to this world that maybe we never quite get our hands on.

Jon: Mm.

Cory: Yeah. What I like about the content of the films and what I think about works so well is this sort of less is more principle. For example, her hands were half rendered, only meant to be visible in motion. A very small detail, but I think that's part of the kind of unsettling nature of the film, in that there's there's not a lot happening in it. And I was wondering as I was reading whether you'd ever imagined a version of some of these films where there's a lot more plot happening or something much more significant happens. You think of found footage in movies or something like that. I can think of a couple examples in in books that I that I've read, and they go back and forth between not very much happens at all, and it's the little details that really make it seem eerie or wrong or unsettling, or something more significant happens in them, they're they're much more plot driven.

Max Lury: Yeah, it's it's interesting. The the question made me think of when I was a teenager, I must have been fifteen or sixteen, I read a lot of creepy pastas, if if you guys know what those are, the internet

Cory: yeah, totally.

Max Lury: folklore and internet horror stories. And there is one that always really stuck for me, stuck w stuck with me. and I think it's called Normal Porn for Normal People. and it's someone finds this website called Normal Porn for Normal People, and The videos eventually get quite disturbing, but the initial five videos they watch are really simple. I can't remember what it is. It's like they're they're just very subtly odd. And it's re there's something really disturbing about it. Because I mean, obviously the title of the kind of creepy pastor or the story is kind of giving away that something bizarre and disturbing is happening. But something about how restrained they are always really stuck with me because there's there's this idea of of kind of more beyond and I think Don't know if I ever really toyed with introducing much more, because I knew I wanted them to raise a lot of questions and to feel like I think transmissions from another world that that don't quite make sense

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: and and leave us uncertain, on uncertain ground. and and I I kind of like that feeling when reading weird fiction or reading horror fiction, just the the sense. That you're interfacing with this other world that doesn't quite have the rules of ours.

Jon: Mm-hmm. Max, you said something earlier that I that I wanted to ask you about. So in the in the editing process, like there's this line you have to walk where editing can editing and revising l let's say can really improve a a draft, like substantially improve a draft. but then at a certain point, I don't know, you reach like a tipping point and it can start to like kind of deaden a material. And it sounds like you were trusting your instincts that this early version or something close to an early version of what you had written was the was the way to go. Like it didn't need a ton of of work after that. How do you how do you manage that kind of push and pull? How do you trust your your instinct of whether to over edit or under edit something as you're working through drafts?

Max Lury: It's a really good question. I mean, I think in particular with with these the the films, I think d David Lynch maybe talks quite a lot about just if you receive an idea and it comes kind of fully formed, trusting

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: that. And I and I thought quite a lot about that, that these I I did kind of they just came out fully

Jon: Mm.

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: formed, the the kind of snowy world of the video and the girl feeling very nervous and kind of carrying out these slightly domestic chores, but the world is empty.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: That came to me not entirely fully formed, but but enough that I was like, I'm gonna try and trust that image. In in general though, I it's hard to know. I think you can feel I can kind of feel there's a point in the draft where I I am just kind of moving things around arbitrarily. And

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: I think I I actually after the book came out, for about a month or two, I couldn't open a page and read it. 'Cause I I would just think like

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: God, what if I what if I'd moved that or what if

Jon: Yeah yeah, for sure.

Max Lury: I why did

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: why did this and I've the the rhythm of this paragraph is off. now I I'm a bit bit better at it and it and it feels

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: less awful to open and look through. But I think

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: you can kind of you you really can detect when when it's kind of pointless and you and you don't really have a coherent goal maybe for what that particular edit is doing and and it's so easy to do because I guess on some level There's no such thing as perfect. There's there's there's never

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: gonna be a paragraph that you're really one hundred percent happy with. And sometimes when you are a hundred percent happy, when you really do feel like maybe this is as good as it's gonna get, you come back to it later and it's lost something or a bit that originally

Jon: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Max Lury: gave it a bit of energy or made it exciting to the reader.

Cory: Yeah. You talked about the David Lynch quote, the kind of receiving this idea and just sort of trusting it. Do you remember what the idea was for this passage? Was it w was it inspired by the creepypastas? Is that where the idea for okay we're gonna have some sort of possibly AI generated videos that form part of the plot of the story?

Max Lury: I think that the creep bastard kind of just lodged itself in my mind. I don't even know if I like consciously thought about it really. Like I just feel it had su I had such an impact on me. It really disturbed me as a teenager. And also because you n you're 90% sure it's not real, but it's just randomly you find it on the internet. So you're like, there's a ten percent chance this is real. So I think yeah, and then with with the images, I think I knew I wanted these strange films. That were maybe generated by a machine to appear. and I think I sat down and I just wrote out a bunch of them in a Word document one afternoon. And there were there were lots more. I'm actually trying to remember which which ones I I keep in, but I I did cut quite a few. But there was always, I think the thing I kind of came back to was yeah, the sense of these abandoned places. This strange loneliness and then a kind of theme which I look at a bit later in the novel of these kind of objects, these domestic objects, but that have no people with them and how that can make them feel alien or spooky. and I kind of later I think those all kind of became clear that they were fixations or things I was really thinking about during the novel. But I guess this was a really early part where clearly I was preoccupied with that, but I hadn't quite disentangled all of it and it just came out like that.

Cory: Was it one of the first ideas that you'd had for what would eventually become no ghosts, these disparate things that you had to bring together? where did the genesis of of no ghosts really come from and how early or how much a part of it was was this passage?

Max Lury: Good question. I th the the idea for no ghosts came to me I don't really know why. I just kind of one day started thinking about just the phrase no ghosts, and then about a world where the ghosts had disappeared and then what that might look like. And originally I wrote a short story from the perspective of one of the bouncers who joined a seance community. but it was it was perhaps the the story was kind of I was reading a lot of George Saunders. I think I was tr trying to do a George Saunders. So it was a lot lighter in tone and more playful, maybe. And then I was also really obsessed with at the time, it's it's kind of funny 'cause a at the time I was really convinced that it would there would be this big sci-fi twist at the end of the novel where I would reveal that there was a an AI, a technology that could generate films. And that to me, I don't know when it was five, five years ago, felt sci-fi. And obviously during the writing of the novel, that just became more and more a part of our reality. I was

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: being chased. I don't know if they were actually chasing me, but you it felt like these big tech companies were chasing the the novel in in developing this tech. and I think the kind of hopefully the the end novel kind of reflects ha maybe how banal some of that feels. But I think I I knew I wanted something about Ghosts being caught up with technology. and then to to kind of have that I knew that I had to have one of these characters being drawn into the world of the technology. and I n I kind of knew I wanted a scene where someone watches a creepy film.

Jon: whenever we do these these interviews and I and I read the passage that the author has sent, there's always like one or two lines that I have to read a couple times because either they I don't know, they just sort of strike me as strange or they strike me as especially good or different from the rest of the passage. And and The one in in this one is the small circle became one color. where where did that come from? I love that line.

Max Lury: I think I was I was just trying to find ways to describe the experience of using technology. And and and in my mind it's kind of that that circle you get in the top right

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: hand corner for a download. But it's just i I again I guess it's about how you deploy information about characters using technology if you described every step of Harlow's process,

Jon: Right.

Max Lury: opening the email, you know, she moved her cursor over the thing and clicked in and

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: then you kind of You lose some of it, but but because technology felt really central to the novel, I wanted to show characters interfacing with technology. And also I think for a long time I was I really s strayed away from writing about technology. Because I found that I didn't know if there was an interesting way of doing it. And it felt like

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: such an essential part of everyone's life that for some reason it felt boring to write about. So I perhaps enjoyed trying to find ways of bringing in just a hint that we know we're in a user interface or or we know we're on a laptop that don't necessarily o overplay their hand.

Cory: Yeah.

Jon: Yeah, but it's a great image because it's immediately recognizable to the reader, but at the same time, I I've never thought of it in that way. it's a

Cory: It's a bit abstract for sure.

Jon: it's it's just abstract

Max Lury: Yeah.

Jon: enough, yeah.

Max Lury: Yeah, and I think that's that's also part of the fun is is 'cause I think kinda later in the book, there's stuff about how weird it feels to be o be on like old abandoned forums and stuff like that. And I do

Jon: Mm.

Max Lury: think user interfaces do carry a kind of charge. Like you know when see a Windows XP that that UI again and you kinda you get flashbacks to how you know, for me it's like using the family computer and

Jon: Right. Right. Sure.

Max Lury: this big beige thing that would hum and groan when you turn it on and I just feel like there there really is a lot of that in technology that maybe not that we don't talk about enough 'cause we don't need to talk about it, but that that really is latent in technology that is just quite

Jon: Sure.

Max Lury: fun to explore.

Cory: Are there writers that you've read that write about current technology well? I I'm curious, because I really found No Ghosts interesting in the sense of how much it leans into the technology. It's something that I feel like a lot of writers shy away from a bit. This is the first novel I think I've ever read that name-drops VLC Player. Did you feel like you were out on your own there? Were there other examples of writers that you've read that you feel like know have figured out, have cracked how to incorporate current technology into a novel

Max Lury: there's a writer called Sam Byers, who's a British writer, who wrote

Cory: Mm mm. Okay.

Max Lury: a book called Idiopathy, which I thought a lot about when writing No Ghosts. And I think he has some quite nice, very brief descriptions of characters interacting with technology, but in a way that signals he knows exactly what the tech is. that he knows, and so you have complete faith that he we only need to get a detail or two to buy into it. more recently actually the new Ben Lerner transcription has some really great descriptions, I think,

Jon: Hmm.

Max Lury: of just very brief but just nice descriptions of of technology and and anxieties around it. I obviously wasn't reading it at the time and reading No Ghosts, but I read it the other day and that really stuck with me. Kind of how deftly he's just able to bring stuff like that in.

Cory: I d I just read that a couple of weeks ago and completely agree with you. It it felt like a very contemporary novel in a way that I hadn't really f seen a lot of authors try to tackle.

Max Lury: Hm. And I think what what I really liked about it was it's a novel about technology, but it's not too about technology, if you see what I mean. It's not about the kind of tech, it's just about how technology impacts our lives. But it it does that very definitely, and it's much more about people in technology than maybe a more sci fi look at at the tech or whatever.

Cory: A lot of times, even current novels, sometimes it feels like the author is trying to shy away from the rea the reality, for example, that everyone is on their phone all the time and how much that shapes our experience, how much the technology shapes just the way that we live. And transcription to stay on this topic felt like it was confronting that head on, that this was a novel very informed by the way that Technology is so ingrained in our in our lives that I thought was was very unique.

Max Lury: Mm. And a I mean it is really hard because if you're writing a scene of people hanging out, you know, people are gonna be on their phone all the time. And how do you you know, how do you draw attention to the fact that you're aware that that's happening? Or if you want

Cory: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: a kind of nice moment of realism or a little detail to break up some dialogue, you know, how how are you how do you deal with that in a way that doesn't become monotonous and boring? And I think yeah. Yeah.

Cory: Yeah. And just how to handle back to your book, how to handle character interactions, because you have scenes where people are texting each other and y I I got the sense that you understand the difference between awkwardness in text conversations and how those dynamics play out very differently than they would if the people were having kind of an in-person face-to-face conversation. They're not governed by the same rules or principles. there's something very different and distinct about them. and I liked that you just dove right into that.

Max Lury: Mm. it's interesting. as I'm sure everyone else has, a lot of, big conversations in in my life happen partially over text or

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: or maybe entirely over text or maybe the fallout is handled over text or

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: when people say that when they want to ask someone out, they get the whole group chat to help draft the message, or when you've just broken up with a partner and you want to send them a happy birth, you know, there's there are all these texts that are really significant that have

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: real, I don't know, real valence in the human world. And

Cory: Mm.

Max Lury: I think, yeah, I was kind of interested in in in how can we translate that in into a novel.

Jon: Max, this was your first novel published. Did you write a novel any novels before this that have not seen the light of day?

Max Lury: I've star I started a lot.

Jon: Sorved a lot.

Max Lury: I I mean like e from when I was quite young I would sort of try my hand at it and I would always get about halfway. I think I have a few a handful of novels, about thirty thousand-ish words in. And I think it's interesting that I I I got to that point. I was talking about it with my tutor at UEA, Andrew Cowan, who's brilliant, and he I remember he he said to me, he was like, J just finish this one. He was like, just say and if it if you really hate it at thirty thousand words, just do yourself a favour. And no matter how bad you think it is, just finish it. And I think that that point in the draft is where it goes from being really fun and free and creative and exciting and literally anything can happen and you can just throw in a random character for absolutely no reason or

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: kill someone off. You can just you can literally do whatever you want to

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: suddenly, okay, I've thrown all of these balls up in the air. How do I catch them now? And I can't introduce someone else because we're halfway through the novel. But now I have to work out. So if they've gone this way, they're gonna have to c you know, and you've you

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: it's all kind of coming back. And that is so much more painful because the initial burst, you're full of ideas and you're discovering things and everything feels quite exciting. And then towards the end I think it's much more challenging and it's much more like it's less of a creative exercise and almost more of a structural exercise. Okay,

Jon: Yeah, yeah.

Max Lury: well we need a resolution and we need the character to have changed and and we need this question I raised in the second chapter to be answered or you

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: know and all and all of that kind of starts coming into play. And then when you get to the end, then it's like, Okay, well now this can kind of be fun again 'cause now I've actually written a novel and now I can edit it and wait, okay, suddenly this is an exciting connection I didn't realise

Jon: Uh-huh.

Max Lury: or this is a possibility. And then you really feel like you have a kind of I'm hesitant to use the word product, but let's

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: go. You've got a product that you can kind of a finished product you can kind of start tinkering with and that and that

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: feels exciting. And there's kind of a new burst of energy then.

Jon: you think it was just somebody who had been in that place before who had to

Cory: Mm.

Jon: say like, look, this isn't unique to you. You just

Cory: We've all been here.

Jon: yeah, we've all been here. You just have to like keep going.

Max Lury: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I I think it was also someone who I looked up to and respected. Yeah, saying, I've been here and also you have permission to like do this. 'Cause I think there's also a feeling of when you really hate it and without any external validation, it's quite easy to be like, Well this is kind of shit and this is this is unusable and This is really bad, who did I think I was? Wait, actually this isn't as interesting as I thought it was. It's actually deriv and you get into this spiral and then you write it off. But actually having someone say, Well just having that permission to be like, Okay, I'm not wasting my time, I'm I'm I'm doing this, I think was also really helpful, yeah.

Cory: How long did it take you to write no ghosts from start to finish?

Max Lury: I would say maybe two to three years to have a draft that was somewhat cohesive and I was kind of happy with and then probably worked on it for two more years with the my agent and publisher. I started I must have been twenty five, I think. So about five five years ago. and I think the first two years it kind of wasn't finished. And not that it was finished in the second or third year, but it was much closer to how it is now than any of the previous drafts. And it was more cohesive and it was like kind of I was sort of ready to start thinking about taking it out into the world. But I mean like until maybe f even four months before publication, you know, I was still making small small edits here and there. So it's difficult to say when it was finished. but yeah, in in some ways kind of five years, in some ways maybe more like three.

Cory: Yeah. It just going back to our conversation about writing about technology, it would make me incredibly nervous, especially writing about, say, AI, a space that is changing so frequently to spend five years. the worry that what you are writing about when you're writing about AI or what that space looks like, will it be recognizable when it eventually publishes in in six years? Will the space have changed so much that it it it immediately feels very dated or antiquated. Did you have to wrestle with that at all as you were going through the editing or the revision process of like I need to update some of these technological things because it no longer feels in in conversation with what's going on with technology now?

Max Lury: Yeah, absolutely. I was I was really worried about it. And the the ver one of the first drafts, I wouldn't even really actually call it a draft of no ghost 'cause it it had a different title, it had a really different sensibility. but it was more sci-fi and I kind of envisioned this twist of as I saying earlier, this AI that can make films. and a and at the time, the technology, which was quite niche, I remember talking to people about it and people hadn't it wasn't something like, you know, an LLM where everyone now knows about. But there was a there was an AI that could make images that were very vaguely recognizable as images that might hold a person like shape. And they

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: were kind of these almost like foggy, if you squinted at a really foggy landscape, they kind of looked a bit like that. that when I started, that was where the technology was. And then as I wrote, LLMs became a thing maybe two years, three years into that. But tech was clearly developing really fast. But I think I A, I think what ended up working quite well is I think I wasn't necessarily interested in the tech for itself. I was kind of interested in the effects maybe it had on people. And I think Part of the feeling in the book is maybe there's there's quite disturbing stuff about what it's doing to us, but also it's very banal. And I think that maybe hasn't changed.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: and then Spike Jones, the the guy who directed her.

Cory: Yeah. a great movie.

Max Lury: Yeah, fant fantastic. And Yeah,

Cory: Super ahead of its time too.

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: yeah, yeah. And and he has this really nice phrase when he's talking about the writing of it, I think. Where he says he wanted to set it ten minutes into the future. And I think some of No Ghosts is kind of that kind of crystallized something in in my mind. a sci fi novel built around teleportation where we're meant to

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: understand this as a really exciting plot point that is part of the hook. what if we lived in a world where you could teleport from I think if if it had been portrayed a bit more like that, then I actually might have struggled a bit. But I think

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: I kind of wanted to just build it into too quietly into the world of the novel. So we we kind of feel like, yeah, that's you know, that technology could exist. It doesn't, but it's not inconceivable that it would if

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: you know, two years into the future.

Jon: What what was your day or what what is your day to day writing practice these these days and when you were were working on the book?

Max Lury: I was lucky enough to start the book when I was doing a master's program, a Creative Writing Masters at UEA in the UK. So I had quite a lot of time to work on the beginning of the book, because you just you you know, a lot of your time there is spent writing. and then to kind of get the first draft done, I stayed in Norwich, where UEA is, for a year and worked odd jobs, like c worked in a covert test centre and there's a rooster and all sorts of weird stuff. but I'd say as it went on I then moved to London and got a nine to five. and I kind of I'm basically awful at waking up in the mornings. I always have been. I've tried everything. It's just never gonna happen for me.

Jon: Yeah.

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: so usually I would say I I try three if not if I can get it four, but usually perhaps two to three nights a week right after work for a few hours and then try and find weekends where you can just stay in and and get on with it as much as possible.

Cory: Yeah.

Jon: Are you r ritualistic about any of it or is it just sit down and and write?

Max Lury: one of the best bits of writing advice, I don't know who said it, but I read it, I read it online. if you write when you're feeling really inspired and you write when you're not feeling inspired, if you do both of those in a document and then you come back to it and read it after a week, you're not gonna be able to tell when you were feeling inspired and when you weren't. And I actually

Jon: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: I try I actually tried it. I remember sitting down once and feeling amazing about an idea. And then coming back to the day, not liking it, struggling through it, went back in after a week or two, really couldn't tell the difference. And if anything, when I wasn't feeling inspired was maybe slightly better, because it was a bit less I don't know, it's just a bit more, it's got to the point a bit more.

Jon: Mm.

Max Lury: and because of that, I kind of really just try and sit down and just get the words out. and sometimes feeling kind of inspired or or feeling kind of excited about a project really does help. But often actually you come back and you need to remove a lot of it 'cause you're you're so desperate to get through it that it's almost not thoughtless, but you've got a bit carried away or you've really zeroed in on this moment you think is exciting that actually for plot reasons could be shortened. So I wouldn't say I'm I'm ritualistic about it in as much as I just try and do it as much as possible.

Cory: Max, one question that we ask everybody that comes on the show, if you could hear any author talk about their process in the same way that we're asking you questions, dead or alive, doesn't matter, who would you choose?

Max Lury: I think it would probably be someone like there's a writer called Steve Erickson. he wrote

Cory: The the f the fantasy author?

Max Lury: not not the high fantasy author, not the Malazy guy. Yeah, Zeroville, yeah, yeah.

Jon: The zero the zero bill guy? Yeah. Yeah. I love his stuff too.

Max Lury: and yeah, I'm a I'm a really, really big Steve Erickson fan. I I think he's amazing, but I think I would like to hear him talk about his process because he brings in a lot of big ideas and reality is very malleable in his novels. And there is always this weird undercurrent of other worlds that we get the very briefest glimpse of. and so there's I'd love to hear how he thinks about structuring that because I think it's that kind of how we were talking about at the beginning of our chat, that balance between plot and structure and making sure things make sense for the reader. But then also trusting these images as they come or these ideas and giving them space to be weird and impactful. I think sometimes does involve retreating a little bit from conventional ideas of plot or resolution, just to let these things breathe. And I I really am drawn to that and love that. And I'd I'd love to hear how he balances it, whether it's something he consciously thinks about, whether, I maybe there's a world in which he's really, really thinking about it on the sentence level, or maybe

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Max Lury: there's a world in which he's like, I just kinda let it fly and rein it in a little at the end. I I don't know.

Jon: Max, one of the things you you made me think about is that in all the conversations we've had on this show, it's really difficult to know if a passage has been worked and worked and worked or if it's

Cory: Yeah.

Jon: just

Max Lury: Mm.

Jon: sort of clo close to a, you know, first draft inspiration kind of thing. It's just very difficult to know what the author was doing when they were thinking about writing this passage or what they were working on in the passage itself. and it's something that I sort of think about more and more as I'm reading now, just for for fun. Like, how close is this to an original idea or how much has this been edited and re edited and re edited?

Max Lury: when you're really in the hands of a really, really, really competent stylist, I don't know, Dr. Lillo, I think there are passages there that are just so brilliant They're so incredible that you're like, okay, there must have been some work going into this. And

Jon: Right.

Max Lury: a couple of actually Don Dalillo's passages I've like written out on Google Docs to see what they look like in the font I write in. And then printed them out. And having read some of them loads of times, I think you do notice that there are There there are ways the sent like these long sentences will follow something and kinda go macro and micro that actually is very controlled and feels like really panoramic and exciting when you're reading it.

Jon: Yeah. Yeah.

Max Lury: And you're like,

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: How the hell is he doing this? And then you're like, Okay, he's kinda zoomed in and followed this one beam of light and then that's a you know but on on first reading, yeah, I think it is it is really hard.

Cory: I like the exercise,

Max Lury: Yeah.

Cory: Max, of literally typing it out in the font that you would use, as if to sort of bring it down to earth a little bit. Like, look,

Jon: Yeah. Yeah.

Cory: it is possible that I could just write this

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Cory: combination of words or a sentence that I like to this extent. It's a psychological

Max Lury: Mm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean like there's also something

Cory: thing.

Max Lury: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And there's I mean, I kinda wanna get a feel for it, but also I think sometimes the text in a book, like the literal font, can feel a certain way. And it can feel and I think just seeing it in like Times New Roman, size twelve, one point five spaced, you're like, Okay, like ac yeah, it do it makes it feel a bit more human and you're like, I can kind of see that and I can draw this connection or it feels less like in a really crisp, nice font in a new book. If you read an amazing delivery passage, you're like, There's there's just no way that I even begin to understand how someone could do something this amazing.

Jon: Yeah.

Cory: It feels d chiseled in stone or sent down from the gods or something, as opposed to

Max Lury: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.

Jon: Yeah.

Cory: somebody had to sit down at a typewriter

Max Lury: Mm.

Cory: or a word processor or in a Google Doc and just put these words on the page.

Max Lury: Yeah. Chiseled in Stone is such a good description. That's exactly it. And it and then when it's in Google Docs you have the little the bar above with your Outlook open in one and

Jon: Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

Max Lury: YouTube video open in one and and you're like,

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: okay, this th they this this can be worked at. This is something I can yeah.

Jon: Yeah, totally. all right. Yeah.

Cory: Let's do some rapid fire. This is this is how we close up every interview. We've got a bunch of questions. We're just gonna throw them at you and just give us a short, whatever the first answer that comes to your head is. The

Max Lury: Nice to do

Cory: first question is, what's one aspect of writing you think you're particularly good at?

Max Lury: So I know this is meant to be rapid fire and I'm really

Jon: No no no, we we like to start with a hard one.

Cory: Yeah.

Max Lury: atmosphere.

Jon: Hmm. What's one aspect you think you're bad at?

Max Lury: Interiority.

Cory: What's harder to write the first line or the last line?

Max Lury: First line.

Jon: What's the first thing you edit out of a draft?

Max Lury: I tighten dialogue. Just moving words so it feels more like a human would say it. So instead of I am maybe I am going to the shop, I'm

Jon: Gotcha.

Max Lury: going to the shop or I am

Cory: And that's something you're particularly paying attention to is the dialogue, not just any of the other writing, but what people are saying and does this sound natural?

Max Lury: Yeah, the rhythm of the dialogue. yeah.

Cory: Max, what's a word you always misspell and autocorrect saves you?

Max Lury: There are a lot. Dissatisfied. Anything with a double S or maybe a single S

Jon: Yeah. Right.

Cory: Yeah. Yeah.

Max Lury: hopeless.

Jon: how many titles did the book go through before landing on this one? You said that it was like kind of the genesis of the book itself,

Cory: Yeah.

Jon: so

Cory: Did you ever

Max Lury: Yeah.

Cory: did you ever waver or

Max Lury: There was maybe a day where I thought I had a another good title for it but the title was awful. It's always been no ghosts. Yeah.

Jon: And the publisher, nobody on the publishing end tried to get a different title or anything?

Max Lury: No, I think I think people quite like the title. I think hope

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: hopefully the title's quite weird and quite not maybe the most conventional title structure, if that makes sense.

Cory: Mm mm.

Jon: Yeah, yeah.

Cory: Yeah, I like it. I like the the cover two. Where did that come from? Just the peninsula team?

Max Lury: the cover is done by this amazing designer called Tom Etherington and he absolutely nailed it. I r I really love it and a lot of people who've picked it up say they did so because of the cover. he did really, really amazing work. it's just slightly spooky. the eyes are or or the sort of puncture holes that they play for, I think it's so great.

Cory: When you're putting down notes or anything like that, where do you store those? Is that just in the notes app on your phone or how do you how do you keep track of ideas?

Max Lury: Notes up on my phone. I sometimes will WhatsApp myself if the note feels more urgent. I might want to include it in tomorrow's writing so that I see it. And then I have yeah, a bunch of notebooks where I where I write other stuff.

Jon: what's playing in the background when you're writing? Music, T V, podcasts like this one?

Max Lury: I can't I can't listen to anything when I'm writing, unfortunately it distracts me. But occasionally there's an ambient artist called Abul Mogard who makes really cinematic but quite sort of dark or melancholy ambient. And sometimes if I was editing a certain passage and I and I that mood was really channelled. I think his album called Works, I really wanted to channel that feeling in no ghosts so I'd sometimes listen to that while editing.

Cory: Interesting. John, that is a horrifying suggestion that somebody might be listening to you and I while trying to write

Jon: You never know. You never know.

Cory: their a masterpiece.

Jon: There there's a lot of advice in these podcasts, so

Cory: all right, Max, last question. What's your go to procrastination method?

Max Lury: there are so many that it's really hard to pick. like a YouTube a good YouTube rabbit.

Jon: Yeah.

Max Lury: Opening opening several tabs, finding some Reddit threads that give you a bit more context, maybe a few wikis and back to the original video. yeah, a few hours like that is great.

Jon: Yeah, it's endless.

Cory: Yeah, and all all all of a sudden it's eleven PM or twelve PM and you're like, Where the heck

Max Lury: Yeah.

Cory: did the evening go?

Max Lury: Yeah, exactly. Those two hours I set aside to write were, four YouTube documentaries deep.

Cory: Yeah.

Jon: Mm-hmm.

Cory: Yeah, definitely. Cool. That's all the questions we have, Max. It was a pleasure to chat with you. We had a lot of fun.

Max Lury: Likewise, thank you so much for having me on, guys. That was very fun.

Cory: Yeah.

Jon: So our pleasure.