Richard James Bentley. Photo courtesy of the author.
An introduction to Richard James Bentley, author of the novel Greenbeard (Exterminating Angel Press, 2013). Before writing fiction, Bentley was a technical writer, so it isn’t a surprise that he collects mechanical adding machines and dictionaries. When asked how his experience writing technical manuals influenced the way he approaches storytelling, he answered:
The written word has always been part of my environment, and the narrative always part of my internal landscape, which is to say that my head has always been filled with stories. In the end, I suspect, everything is defined by narratives. When I worked as a technical author, trying to pick engineers’ brains for the information that I needed to do my job, one of the psychological tricks I used was to get the guys to reminisce about the history of the project. Then, instead of a grunted list of facts and a bundle of paperwork thrust at me, I would instead get a coherent account of how the project had come to be its current state. A narrative. A story.
