Horror, Television, Pseudonyms, and Novels:

Will the real Naben Ruthnum Please Stand up!

A Conversation with Naben Ruthnum

Naben Ruthnum

is the author of the novel A Hero of Our Time and the horror novella Helpmeet, as well as the long essay Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race. As Nathan Ripley, he’s the author of two thrillers. Naben also writes for film and television, often in collaboration with Kris Bertin.

Managing Editor Tali Voron had the privilege of (virtually) sitting down with Naben Ruthnum, novelist, screenwriter, and 2022–2023 Writer-in-Residence at Sheridan College. This is their conversation.

Tali Voron: So, this is a question you probably get all the time. How did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Naben Ruthnum: As far as it being my career, I sort of backed myself in. It ended up being the only thing I was good at, at an age where I really needed to decide how I was going to make a living. I was attracted to reading first. I loved reading, and it still remains my preferred channel of entertainment and learning about anything, really. I wanted to join the life of books somehow, and I thought initially that would be as a critic or a literary journalist. But I also wanted to be involved in movies, things like that. I realized that the way to make all this make sense was to hone my fiction skills. So, I started doing that at a fairly early age.

TV: That’s really cool. How old were you when you started writing and entering the world of fiction?

NR: I guess I actually shouldn’t have said that, because usually when people say they started at an early age, they mean they wrote their first novel in crayon, whereas for me it was when I was fifteen and started writing poor screenplays. That was my first serious attempt at writing something at length. It was in my early twenties when I took a stab at a short story, and then started writing a novel when I was twenty-three, which was a big, baggy mess. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good, certainly. By twenty-five and twenty-six, I was trying to get really serious about shaping my skills through writing short stories.

TV: I would still say that’s very young! Can you share what your writing career has been like so far?

NR: Oh, pretty good. I think. It probably looks like it was more fortunate and blessed from the outside than it feels like from the inside, because once I started getting published, book-wise, it’s been pretty steady. My first book came out in 2017, and there’s been four since. It’s only 2022, so that’s great. But I would say ages twenty-seven to thirty-five were quite the grind. I didn’t know if I should give up or not. I didn’t have early fantasies of getting a short story collection published, and it making me a million dollars—nothing completely unrealistic like that. But I had begun to feel that the kind of writing I wanted to do was completely out of step with what the market, readers, publishers, and agents wanted. It was quite the uphill battle, and I still haven’t entirely shaken the notion that my writing falls outside of what people are looking for. But I think that doubt helps me stay grounded about even the good things in my career. And that career is still riddled with failure, with more projects that don’t get published or don’t reach the screen, or don’t get optioned.

And yeah, as a side note to that, I developed my screenwriting stuff alongside the book stuff. It opened up a whole new dimension of struggle and failure, as well as many more chances to make a little money here and there and also to work collaboratively, which I really love.

TV: That’s a perfect segue. I was going to ask you about your screenwriting; I’d love to hear how you managed the two side by side because it’s really fascinating; I cannot imagine doing them in parallel.

NR: I mean, I can’t imagine doing them separately. But in order to get any momentum in working on screenplays, I really needed my cowriting partner, Kris Bertin. We don’t write all our projects together in the screenwriting world anymore. But we certainly needed each other as a resource in those earlier days, when we were also very much struggling to make ends meet financially in our separate writing and working lives, and really concentrating on getting good, polished books out. We started by writing a spec script for a horror movie together and sent that out to whoever wanted to read it. From there we started getting a little bit of work here and there.

The early great stroke of luck I had was related to my novel. Find You in the Dark by Nathan Ripley [Ruthnum’s pseudonym] was my first thriller novel that was optioned by eOne up here, and they brought on a showrunner and a writer. When I told him that I write too, I wouldn’t be too controlling of the project, and would love to be involved, he got me a job in the writing room of his current show at the time, Cardinal.

Having the books granted me so much more credibility in the screenwriting world, as well as some very well-founded hesitation from TV and film professionals of a novelist making the jump. You have to first respect that you’re learning something different. And I continue to learn in those worlds.

TV: So, was it around 2017 when you were also getting into screenwriting, then?

NR: Around 2017 is when Kris and I finished our first script together. I’d made attempts before. Like, I cowrote a college-comedy-type movie in my midtwenties with my friend Simon McNabb, who’s since gone on to become a successful TV writer.

Anyway, that spec was my first serious run at a script as an adult, and Kris and I have a good combination of sensibilities. We can also argue productively and advance things without hurting each other’s feelings. So, it was a good relationship, and it remains one.

TV: That’s incredible. Have you done any writing collaborations outside of the screenwriting world?

NR: I wrote a short story with the writer Andrew F. Sullivan. I found it both really cool and also something that I’m not sure I could ever do again. I don’t know if it’ll ever work—Andrew has since gone on to collaborate with Nick Cutter (Craig Davidson’s pseudonym), and they have a novel coming out with a big American publisher. So, ha, I really should have stuck to that with Andrew. He had the right idea. But Kris and I have actually thought about taking some of the original screenwriting ideas we had, and sort of inventing a new pseudonym, or just a collaborative name and writing them as novels, because, like I said, I think the reason I got credibility and noticed at all in the screenwriting world was because of the books. It can be a very roundabout, frustrating way to develop something from an original screenplay if you’re not somebody with a reputation in screenwriting, which we certainly are not. Whereas, just having a book gives you some sort of weird automatic credibility.

TV: Is there one of your novels that you’d be especially excited to see turned into a film or TV show?

NR: Well, it’s hard to pick … my last two books have recently been optioned, and I’d love to see them both make it. Helpmeet I’m super excited about because it’s a crazy body-horror type concept. And if all goes well, Kris and I will be very involved in working on it. A Hero of our Time is a novel that would best be adapted by a different writer and production team, with me weighing in as needed. That’s actually a really exciting feeling, too. Watching someone make something quite different out of the thing that you envisioned in book form would be interesting to see.

TV: I’m going to keep my fingers crossed that we see both of them on the big screen soon.

NR: That’s another thing. Not succeeding all the time has been very helpful for me in this specific lane as well. I think a lot of writers when they get a book option, you’ll see them announce it as though their movie is coming out soon. Your movie is not coming out soon, even if everything goes well! It can be a while. It’s good to be reconciled to that in advance.

TV: For sure, and it must be great to be familiar with that side of the industry. I’m really glad that you mentioned Helpmeet and A Hero of our Time. Congratulations on both books by the way; two books in one year is huge and must be super-duper busy.

NR: One of them is very small—Helpmeet is 18,000 words or so. A novella, but still a book, technically, so yeah, I’ll still take the compliment. Thank you.

TV: I wonder if first you could tell me about what inspired Helpmeet. When I was reading about it, it just seemed so different from everything that you’ve written before.

NR: Horror is huge for me, and I think that’s the reason people really responded to this one. It’s probably been my most well-liked thing I’ve done, and I think it’s because in those few pages you can tell that this is a person who’s been obsessively reading the past two hundred years of horror fiction since he was a little kid. There’s a lot of Henry James in it, and David Cronenberg, and Clive Barker. There’s a historical backdrop and the prose reflects that, but it’s also really visceral, modern, nasty body horror. The idea just really came to me. It’s one of those things where I can pretend to overly intellectualize it, but it’s a story that I saw the shape of pretty early on. Initially I was thinking about it in terms of film. So, in that first iteration, there was an earlier introduction of a villain, and a sort of third-act faceoff, which actually might be, if it ever appears as a film, stuff that might all come back.

In terms of the way it turned out as a book, I really just sat down and typed it for five nights. Because I had an idea of where it was going, it was my fastest written thing.

TV: Out of curiosity, from an editorial perspective, if you wrote it in five nights, how long did it take you after that to get it to where it is?

NR: Unusually, and I don’t want to use this as an example to anybody else or myself in the future, but I ended up writing it at night, and editing it in the morning for like an hour. By the time I reached the end of that fifth night and sixth morning it was almost ready to go.

But I don’t think that approach is good for a full novel, at least for me. It worked for this length, the novella, very well. I’m not a superb short story writer. I’ve written some good ones, but I don’t think I’ll ever break through to that higher level. A novella makes better use of the things I’ve learned as a novelist, but you can write it at a sprint. It’s just short enough to sort of contain the whole thing in mind and I feel like when you can hold a whole story in your head it’s easier to write a first draft or a draft that is quite close to the final draft. With Helpmeet, I’m sure the length helped a lot.

TV: Let’s jump back to A Hero of our Time. Its description as “a vicious takedown of superficial diversity initiatives and tech culture, with a beating heart of broken sincerity” gripped me right away. You’re tackling such incredibly timely and important topics, and I would wonder how this novel came together for you. How did you know that the approach you took was the one that you wanted for these issues?

NR: I realized that the matters in that little blurb, and others, were all things that bothered me, and my discussions of them were always private. And I thought, how do I write about this in essays and in non-fiction? Because finding that line of ambiguity where it’s clear that you’re not being, you know, some silly “anti-woke” crusader who’s pretending that everything progressive is hypocritical, nor are you saying everything that’s progressive must naturally be correct, and there can never be anybody who’s exploiting the system for power because to say that would undermine everything and we’ll lose all the progress we’ve made.

The answer was obvious. It just didn’t immediately occur to me that this is what a novel does; it’s how you have this extremely complex conversation and discussion where you let the reader sort of feel that imbalance of rectitude and power grasping, and how they can sometimes exist in the same person, and how that person can be good or bad. I felt that the thing that I’ve done right in it is that there is, as the “hero” in the title ironically makes clear, no hero in the book. Heroic is how Osman, the protagonist, might feel on this crusade, and he may be tilting at someone that we recognize as an antagonist, that we recognize as exploitative: but this villain also has goals that actually might end up helping people. Whereas Osman doesn’t. He just has this very hollow mission and a ton of hatred, and he’s a person who can’t even spend time with himself. I think that was sort of key to making this not a manifesto, which is not something I could even do, because I don’t have a long-organized list of fixed values and moral credos myself. Beyond a few dozen that are, you know, just normal ones like not killing people.

TV: That does make a lot of sense.

NR: There’s just some things that you can do in fiction that you can’t do in other genres.

TV: This is a great time to turn to talking about genres. Do you have one that comes to you most naturally or that you prefer to work in?

NR: It’s in that baggy world of literary fiction. That’s where I usually go, and I think that’s the reason why what I’m working on now is a horror novel or horror-leaning literary novel. I think they occupy the same space a lot, especially in today’s market.

I love thrillers and crime, and I feel like fifty years ago they had a lot of overlap with literary fiction. I think the thrillers that do the best today are so page-turning and propulsive, and readers’ expectations have become quite fixed on driving plot.

I feel less at home in the thriller genre than I did five years ago. I like those books, and I continue to read thrillers. I find that more often than not, I’m reading thrillers from 1978. Not that year in particular, but you know.

TV: That’s interesting. And you said you’re working on another horror novel?

NR: Now, yeah. I have two novel ideas in mind, one of which I really want to push through. I’m excited to get to the end of that horror novel so I can start on my other project, and actually that’s something that the time that being Writer in Residence at Sheridan is really going to help.

TV: I was just going to ask you, when do you find the time to write in between everything you’re doing?

NR: A lot of writers do talk about what a struggle it is, and of course it can be a struggle. But I have friends who become parents, and have seen them thrive even with this new, seemingly all-consuming demand in their lives. There’re other ways that demands are introduced into a human life, of course, like a full-time career aside from writing. But I’ve seen writers who used to get a thousand words done over four or five hours, cope with a more constricted schedule by squeezing in the same word count into the hour they now have to themselves between 5:30 and 6:30 in the morning, or late at night. I think that’s a function of your subconscious helping you when you’re not at the desk much because you know that your time is becoming more and more restricted. I try to do that as much as possible. It’s not exactly discipline; it’s just to not fool myself. Knowing that I wrote eighteen thousand words in five days just a few months ago shows me that I can do that. So, when it comes to why my current project isn’t advancing even in a month as busy as this, I have to admit I’m just taking too many breaks. I don’t necessarily inflict that sort of “don’t be easy on yourself” philosophy on other writers, especially student writers. But I find it’s useful for me.

TV: I’ve heard that a lot. There’s definitely something to be said for when you have less time to spend on something, you can get it done faster. When you have an endless amount of time, you’ll use it all to get something done. So, when you have a smaller window, you just make things work within it. At the same time, it does take a lot of discipline to know that.

NR: You know you’ll use that window to sit down and work. The more that my entire income becomes attached to being able to produce writing, the easier it is to put that pressure on myself. Again, it’s not that I definitely think it’s a good thing, or the right way to be a writer.

TV: I mean, is there a right way?

NR: Absolutely not. In fact, in many ways, the only-writing-as-a-career way is arguably the wrong way. Unless you’re quite comfortable financially coming into it, or you have the promise of financial security ahead of you, I think you can actually damage your relationship to the enjoyment of writing by tying it to cash. And also, you know, lead yourself into possibly some pretty bad places financially. Unless you’re willing to do a ton of things and really work at it all the time.

TV: I really appreciate that. I feel that only until quite recently that aspect of being a writer was never really spoken about.

NR: The thing is, you often find writers who say it’s impossible to make a living writing, and well, I have made a living writing for a few years, but I also know what they mean. It’s very difficult and improbable to lay down a secure foundation for a future with just writing. When I’m talking to younger writers, I like to remind them that they can have a very full and happy writing life in conjunction with a day-job career that involves writing, or doesn’t, but that allows their creative output to not be the foundation of their subsistence. That can be a really happy and good way to live, I think.

TV: What kind of work were you doing outside of writing?

NR: I’ve had all kinds of jobs. The most recent job before books and screen money picked up, was social-media-writing-based. It was a lot of scheduling and editing and organizational work. I also had a long stream of customer service jobs and a lot of secretarial office jobs.

TV: Very cool.

NR: I was an ESL teacher many times as well. One-on-one, that was good, but I finally had to face the fact, which is tough for me, that after getting a master’s in English, I’m not a great classroom teacher. I’m good at doing a one-off seminar. I think I’m good at working with students one-on-one, going over manuscripts, but teaching a semester-long creative writing seminar seems so high pressure and difficult. I’ve been guesting in classes recently, just watching the teachers teaching. It’s not just a gift or an act. Of course, there’s a bit of that, but there’s actual work that goes into it. It’s a lot and it’s an impressive feat. I realized pretty late that I couldn’t really do that for a living. It caused me to think about a different backup plan, which ended up being really serious about TV and film.

TV: Wow, so initially you were planning to go into teaching, and then you switched to TV and film.

NR: That was my thinking while I was drafting my first thriller, and I was at McGill doing my master’s, thinking, “Well, I’ll teach college and then I’ll also write. But the college teaching will be a steady source of income, whether it’s sessional work or not.” I taught a couple of semester- long courses at a college and didn’t think I did a great job at them. I thought that the students who were already pretty good continued to do well, but in terms of pulling students who were struggling with essay writing up like 10 percent or 15 percent, I felt that I just wasn’t good enough, and it was not a good feeling. I didn’t really know how to improve because of course, I hadn’t really learned any pedagogical skills. I did learn how to analyze literature, and to some degree write it.

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TV: I wonder if you could share what your writing process looks like, and if you have any habits or rituals that you follow.

NR: I have to boringly say no, but something I do that I think not everybody does is when I’m writing something long, I tend not to outline at all and just sort of plow forward on momentum until about page one hundred of the book, and then at that point put it aside, or put it aside very briefly, and then pick it up as if I’m doing a redraft of it—usually a full second draft. That’s when my thinking about outlining happens. Not before the project.

TV: So, you usually don’t know what the next one hundred pages or the end will look like?

NR: Usually I don’t really plan out every step until the end. My planning stage is during that redraft of the first chunk of the book.

TV: Wow! That’s really, really cool. So, do you ever find that what you’re working on ends up taking you in a completely different direction than you initially expected?

NR: That’s what happens almost every time. For example, with A Hero of our Time it wasn’t as ambiguous. The main character was never heroic, but the antagonist was definitely way more black-and-white bad. And then I realized that was such a shallow way to approach not just humanity, but a complex political issue like this. I thought it would be interesting to suggest that Osman just doesn’t have enough insight to see that this person is being evil and manipulative on an everyday level in service of a very lofty goal. It becomes an ends-justify-the-means story, and I thought that was both something I didn’t have to delineate and I could just suggest. It made the character so much more interesting to me.

TV: It’s always so fascinating how writing can take on a life of its own as you go through the process.

TV: Let’s go back to your work with TV and film. I wonder if you can speak to how it’s similar and different to writing a novel.

NR: There are two big differences that come to mind. A screenplay is always way more structured from the beginning. I think if you try to write the screenplay freehand without a structure, you’re going to run into many problems. I do a lot more outlining with screenwriting. When Kris and I work together, or if I’m working alone, I know what every scene is and it’s in an outline before I actually write it. The other big difference is that with screenwriting, it becomes collaborative and other voices get in at a much earlier level. I think that’s because it’s a mass-audience-facing form: you know that in order for these things to exist, for them to actually ever achieve investment and screening, even if it’s the strangest, most esoteric artistic idea, it’s still going to cost more than a million dollars. This idea needs to have an audience for it to get made, so you’re letting those other eyes in much sooner.

TV: Does that sort of perspective influence whether an idea you have will be written as novel or a screenplay?

NR: Absolutely. A lesson I learned has been that if you have a really strange idea, or something that you really want to keep distinct and strange, it might be best to write it as a book or story first, even if your ultimate intention is for it to exist in film, because you can prove that it works on the page. So, there’s a strong argument that the way it was first envisioned might actually be correct.

TV: Would you say it’s easier to get a book published, or to get something turned into a TV show or movie?

NR: Neither is easy, of course, but getting a book published is easier. I don’t have a ton of evidence for that. But I think if you just look at the financials it takes just to get somebody with the power to push the button to make the TV show to look at your script, there’s a higher chance of success with turning a manuscript into a book that somebody else publishes for you.

TV: I’m really curious to learn more about your pseudonym, Nathan Ripley. You’ve written two thrillers under the name. Can you share why and how you chose Nathan Ripley?

NR: I always knew I wanted to write literary fiction, ever since I was a teen. But then I also like werewolves, and action movies and Stephen King … so I assumed, like a lot of authors, it makes sense to have more than one identity. Just so you can write as many different things as possible, and I was always very transparent about the pseudonym; on the back cover of those books you’ll also see Naben Ruthnum.

As for why I did it, it was to make sure my audience, not that I have one or necessarily have one right now, knew which kind of book they were getting. And that’s why I said, you know, horror and literature being a little close together, I can definitely imagine somebody who enjoyed A Hero of our Time possibly being into Helpmeet.

But I have a harder time picturing a lot of my readers of Find You in the Dark enjoying Hero of our Time. So, there’s a little more bleed between that sort of horror and literature category. I just don’t want someone to pick up my book and be disappointed by what kind of book it is. So that was the thinking around it; basically, it’s helpful for readers and it helps to not lose them.

TV: Do you think if you chose to write in a completely different genre that you would adopt another pseudonym for that?

NR: No, I don’t think so. But if I get another idea for a psychological thriller, I will write again as Nathan Ripley. You know, for better or worse, my branding has not been awesome except for the two thrillers. All the books I’ve written have been quite different from each other, including the first non-fiction book. The good thing that’s come out of it is now whatever readers I do have or whoever looks to review a new book of mine knows at a glance that this is a person who writes many different kinds of things. I feel like it initiates a hesitation in the reader like, “Well, what kind of book is this by him?”

TV: Yeah, that makes sense. And we haven’t spoken about your first book at all. Let’s talk a bit about Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, which was published by Coach House Books in 2017. How did it come to be? It’s also very different from your other work.

NR: Yeah, it was part of Exploded Views, a non-fiction series that kind of took the form of the novella to the non-fiction world. It’s too long to be an essay, but too short to be a non-fiction book. So the editor, Emily Keeler, reached out to me to ask if I had an idea, and a few days later I realized that my interest in food culture could blend with my ideas of how I think South Asian writers get funnelled by the industry into writing a certain kind of thing—and that’s also something that can be said about women writers or queer writers or Black writers, etc., etc. So, I could stay in my lane and also talk about pop culture and food and a ton of different books, and I felt that that was the way I could fill up one hundred pages and make them interesting and linked together. But it had never really occurred to me that I would write non-fiction. I certainly never dreamed that my first book would be non-fiction. I got into it through writing book reviews, and then arts essays. It was a surprise to me, but I realized that this was something I could do.

TV: Let’s talk a little bit about publishers and the publishing industry, because of course, you’ve worked with some of the Big Five, and also independent presses. What was your experience like?

NR: I’ve learned that it’s impossible to guess where the advantage lies. For example, Helpmeet came out with a micro-press called Undertow Publications, which has a lot of direct contact with people in the horror community, and huge respect. I can’t imagine a major publisher doing a better job. As the book market shifts, it becomes less imperative, advance aside, for you to think of the success of your book being entirely rooted on finding a big corporate publisher. I’ve had really interesting experiences with all the publishers. You run into some really idiosyncratic and strange personalities, but I don’t have any horror stories, thankfully. All of my publishers and editors have been pretty great. But there are sometimes petty tyrants in the world of publishing.

There are bad experiences to be had in the small press world that may not necessarily echo the bad experiences to be had in the major publishing world for writers. The bad experience with a major publisher, probably, tends to be some variety of indifference. If you’re unlucky with a big publisher, you get the sense that nobody knows what to do with your book. But I haven’t had that experience either. It’s been great so far and hopefully it stays that way.

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TV: Being a writer is incredibly challenging and of course I feel like that in and of itself is an understatement. I was listening to an interview the other day that you gave back in July, where you mentioned that you only started your full-time writing career six to seven years ago, and you alluded to that as well earlier in our conversation. So, what does it take to lead a writerly life?

NR: I’ve learned that there are so many different ways to lead a writerly life. My friend Andrew F. Sullivan is a great example of someone who’s such a committed writer, who has great books in the world, and will continue to have great books, but he also works a very serious full-time job. I think making a writing life work takes being open to the idea of doing more than one thing, and probably accepting that you are not a genius who is owed a living.

I think if you get in the mindset of only writing being what you value, you’re going to shrink the number of opportunities you have and readers you have, and also the excitement you get out of writing because unless you really strike a certain chord like Elena Ferrante or Sally Rooney, you might find yourself not really able to put together the other parts.

The life part of the writerly life is how you’re going to subsist and continue creating the work. So for me, variety has been how I managed it.

TV: That’s a really great answer, thank you.

TV: What are you currently reading?

NR: I’m finishing The Satanic Verses and I’m also reading Jim Harrison’s Brown Dog: Novellas, which are literary fiction, but also really fun, light reading. He’s one of my favourites; he has a very flowing, first-drafty style, but with countless superb poetic lines.

TV: So, you’re also reading two books at the same time.

NR: Yeah, I often do that. And the latest one I read just before that was this horror novel that was pretty great: Cunning Folk by Adam Nevill.

TV: What is the best piece of advice, writing-related or not, that you’ve ever received?

NR: You’re not too good for anything. I know that sounds grim and perhaps sinister, but I think it’s a good way to think of life.

TV: I agree. That’s a good one. And one final question, as a writer, what is your least-favourite question that you’ve received?

NR: I tend to be so open to questions, but it would have to be, “Why, don’t you write more of X kind of book?” and that’s really what Curry is all about in terms of people. So there are many variations. That question for me specifically would be like, “Oh, why don’t you write more stories like ‘Cinema Rex’” early in my career where like that was the one story I’d written about Mauritius, where my parents are from, and brown people.

But even that question isn’t that bad, it just means somebody really liked something you did, or thinks you’d be really good at writing a certain kind of thing, and they just wish you would. It can feel critical but really it’s saying, “Oh, I really liked this thing you made. I wish you’d make more like it.”