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David Beldachi came on the show and this is one of the most prolific writers in the world.
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Someone who's written 53 novels, seven children's books, writes two novels a year, and also has sold more than 200 million copies of his books.
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What is it that he's doing to tell great stories, develop great characters, create tension in his stories?
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But then also, how does he think about the business of publishing from his background as a lawyer and all the time that he spent in boardrooms around the world?
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[music] What is it that he does to get books to actually sell and to actually [music] be read?
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Well, that's what this conversation is all about.
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>> Well, I want to start with this idea of the big pop. >> Yeah. >> What is it?
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How do you think about that?
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>> So, when you, you know, when I start a story, I want to make sure that I have control over it and the reader doesn't.
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And your way you do that is to let the reader know that whatever preconceptions they have reading the first few pages, they sort of figure out what's actually going to happen coming down.
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They have a reasonably good idea.
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No, they're not even close to it.
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The way you do that is to open up a scene that has a lot of ambiguity and multiple directions it could go in and then just blow them out of the water by picking probably the least likely one. I had a couple examples.
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one I had an Amos Decker book where he was going into this murder scene.
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There was a dead body in the first floor and a dead body in the second floor and he's investigating it in early chapters and the reader's like, "Okay, you know, two deadest bodies in the house.
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He's got to be looking out for, you know, the killer and all that."
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So, that's the first assumption they made looking out for a killer.
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And they've also made the assumption that two murders are connected.
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And those are two assumptions.
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It's not grounded in any fact at all.
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So, uh, the big pop is all of a sudden they realize pretty quickly on that the deaths are unrelated and they're two separate killers, two different motivations.
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And when you learn that, then all of a sudden you're a reader like, I was totally wrong about that.
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I got to sit back and just let this story unfold.
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I'm not going to have any more preconceptions about it.
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And that puts me, the writer, back in control.
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Um, I had another story where I had a guy walking down the street and he sees two people walking towards each other.
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one is acting a little hinky and my character puts his, you know, thoughts on to I think this character is going to do something and as the two characters get closer and closer together, the one he actually thought was going to do something actually turned out to be the victim.
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Um, and that's another way because all the reader is doing is looking over my character's POV and sort of saying, "Yeah, I think that's a inky character."
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And then they're totally wrong.
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And then that's when the you allow the the writer to say to the reader, you're not going to figure any of this out.
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You don't know where this is going.
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So sit back, relax, don't second guess me anymore. And then enjoy to ride.
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>> Why did you say that you as the writer want to be in control?
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Like I'm trying to imagine what it would look like for the reader to be in control.
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>> Well, people particularly people who read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, they read, you know, there are so many ways to carve a plot.
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There's so many misdirection.
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There's so many red herrings you can have.
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And sometimes as a writer you can telegraph that stuff where a reader can look at it and go that seems familiar.
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I think I know where this arc is going to go.
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I do it with watching television shows and movies as well.
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I mean only so many ways to slice a plot right.
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So you have to add other ele elements taught to to a a reader to all of a sudden they didn't know that they had this weakness but all of a sudden they had this weakness where they were wrong about it and you know they went in one layer and you went three layers deep and they missed the other two layers and that made the assumptions they make wrong.
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I love to make readers I sort of cajol them into making assumptions about the plot early on.
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When they turn out to be wrong that's when I get their full undivided attention. >> Yeah.
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So, as you're thinking about improving your craft, do you feel like you went and built a bank of story archetypes and you have that bank that you could basically pull from?
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Or were you more intuitive about this reading a lot, studying the great and it's just kind of intuitive for you?
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>> It's much more intuitive.
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I don't plot out anything.
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I don't use lengthy outlines.
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I've tried to use outlines. I never work, you know. I always chuck them.
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Um, and I'm like, why did I waste, you know, three weeks writing this crap?
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Um, I like to write in the trenches and meaning that I like to write when the words actually count.
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Um, doing an outline is like Tom Brady in practice.
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He's going through the motions.
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Nobody's going to hurt him on the field.
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He's not at his sharpest because he doesn't have to be in a game.
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11 guys are trying to kill him.
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So, he has to see the field. Everything slows down.
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He has to be at the top of his game.
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And as a writer, I'm at the top of my game and I'm actually writing the scenes that matter.
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I have to make decisions that matter to the characters at that moment.
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There's no kicking the can down the road that you have with an outline.
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You can be in an outline, go through like, "Yeah, I haven't figured it totally, but I'll figure that one out later."
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If you're in the story, there's no figuring out later.
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You know, it's like your character's waiting around going, "Now what?"
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You know, tell me what I'm supposed to do.
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And when you're in the moment, immersed like that, I feel like my synapses fire off better.
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I see the whole field of possibilities and I make better choices.
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So I take it then what you're doing is you're kind of writing page one, page two, page three, page four and at every point you're getting further and further in the horizon.
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You write the next step and then you keep going the horizon keeps proceeding forward and forward.
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>> I'm very linear in that respect. I don't jump around.
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I don't write the ending and then try to come back and put all the other stuff that came before to end.
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Uh I go, you know, I take my first step and keep going.
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Um and then you get to the end and then you go back and that's where a lot of the the heavy lifting occurs is editing.
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there's moving things around or seeing what doesn't work, what's out of place, what needs to be added, what needs to be deleted.
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Usually what needs to be deleted.
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I think first drafts are usually overwritten.
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Um, and then that's, you know, that's my process and that's one I've developed over the years where, you know, if you outline and it works for you, outline.
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If you don't like to outline, don't outline.
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There's no set template or formula how to do this.
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It's the the best one for you is what in the moment for that particular story works best for you.
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If it's an outline or organic or something in between, you know, go for it.
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>> And then as you're developing a character, how does that work?
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And how do you know it's going well?
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Do you feel like you're getting to know the character?
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There's like a range of complexities and contradictions.
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What is the thing that you're feeling when it's going well and going badly?
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>> So, with with a character like I'll give you an examples of some of my series characters.
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They all have baggage unrelated to the plot that's going to be involved in that novel.
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My first series was uh Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, King and Maxwell, two ex secret service agents.
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They got booted because they both messed up and they had to restart their lives over again.
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So they both had baggage. They had failed careers.
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Amos Decker had, you know, he had died on the football field, had brain trauma, came out of it with hypermesia, senesthesia.
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Uh he had lost his family uh related to his work.
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So he had this terrible guilt and because his personality changed when he had a brain trauma.
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He was the same huge guy but he was a totally different person.
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And so he had to deal with all that at the same time he was trying to be a detective.
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At Leip Pine was an FBI agent. What was the baggage?
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When she was 6 years old her twin sister was kidnapped and she has no idea what happened to her.
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One reason she became an FBI agent to try to you know she wanted to fight for justice for people but she already had that in her background.
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And as a series, you're all you have to think about not just the plot that's in front of them in a particular novel, but what's the emotional layers you're going to keep unpeeling book after book after book.
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And that's where the baggage comes in because even throughout the series with Atly Pine, there are four books in that series.
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Each book, a little bit more was uncovered about her sister's disappearance, but also the disappearance's effect on Atly.
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You know, people, yeah, they want to have a plot that unwinds and who did it at the end, that's great, but they want to see the characters evolve.
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They want to see them suffer.
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They want to see them redeem themselves.
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They want to see them fight back and get back to a normal life, whatever that might be.
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So, it's a it's a two-layered fact, and that's why you have charact you shouldn't have a character just to be a robot going through the plot.
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You should have a character who's actually growing as a person during the course of the plot you invented for them.
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And how do you think about the different kinds of characters that you have?
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Maybe you could say, "Hey, there's the primary characters. This is their job.
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They're going to show up continuously.
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Then there's secondary characters."
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And I think of them as like a tool.
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So, for example, in this living room, a primary character might be the chairs and the couch.
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Like, I use them all the time.
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Whereas like a screwdriver might be a secondary character.
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It's like I use it for a purpose and then I put it back in the shed. Maybe it'll come out. >> Yeah.
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The peripherals are important.
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You know, like the NPCs in a video game, >> right?
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[laughter] So they're important and you had to build that team around them.
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You know, I have a series, the camel club series that had multiple members.
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Each of them were sort of primary, but at different points in the story, some of them would assume more peripheral secondary roles.
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And you have to keep that flexibility in mind as well.
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Um, but just because they're serving one purpose or a couple of purposes throughout the novel doesn't mean you have to give them a short shrift.
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You know, just what do they look like and what's a little bit of their background.
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You have multiple opportunities to deepen any character in a novel, whether they're a primary or secondary or even out on the periphery.
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I think the more you deepen all of the characters in the novel to a certain extent, it adds to the whole attitude of the novel itself.
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You know, people come away with it going, I really understood everybody in that novel, even the minor players, you know, and I think it makes more a deeper a more forceful read.
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At least for me, while I'm writing, I'm also thinking about being a reader.
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You know, what works for me in a novel as a reader.
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And um because I like stories, I like reading books, but you always have to keep in mind what is a reader's reaction going to be to the words I'm putting down on a piece of paper.
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You can't lose sight of that fact, >> right?
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I almost think of you like a hockey offense, like a master in the art of misdirection, you know, like blocking the goalie here and then they'll kind of watch the instant replay and see, oh, I saw how that play unfolded, but when I was experiencing it, it almost felt like magic where there was all sort of misdirection and stuff.
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>> That's a big part of it.
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I mean, you know, the misdirection and the twists and turns and the red herrings, they're all part of the genre that I write in.
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Um, and but you can't make it all about the twist.
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You know, some some writers do, and again, God speed to them, but I wanted to do more than that than just the twist.
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I wanted to have people going away thinking, I would never saw that one coming, but wow, what about the evolution of that character?
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you know, they came away from this either more broken or healed or somewhere in between at least some effect.
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That's why they call them character arcs.
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And arc means there's supposed to be some change that happens to them throughout the course of the novel.
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One complication in life can permeate throughout your entire soul, >> you know, and it comes out in lots of different ways.
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It come out in the fact that you maybe you picked a career that wasn't right for you because you didn't think you deserved it.
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Uh you thought you were a loser because your mother didn't think you were worthy of her time.
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um those things you you don't know.
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I mean, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I think I know human nature that those types of influences, you don't know how they're going to make their way through your mind.
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And you could come out of it in many different ways.
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You could come out of as a person who wants to be on the wrong side of the law because you don't think this system works for you anyway, so what does it matter?
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Or you could be someone who wants to be on the side of the law to correct injustices you thought were done against you.
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And so that's what's fascinating about human nature.
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Everybody has a different point of view about it and a different perspective.
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And somebody could have baggage in their background is the term I like to use and it could come up and permeate throughout them in just untold ways.
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Um but still make sense because we don't we have no idea how this thing works.
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You know, artificial intelligence say, "Yeah, we're going to replace this." Well, guess what?
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You don't even know how this works.
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So, how are you going to replace something?
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You don't even know how it works.
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So, that's the great thing about writing stories like this.
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It's just you can take a character anywhere.
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Um, you have to make it plausible.
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You have to give motivation.
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My rule of thumb is if I'm asking from for some character to do something that's an incredible act, either bad, good, somewhere in between, I have to have motivation to match that action.
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Otherwise, people are going to go look at that and go that never would have happened.
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Just because A happened, he did B.
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I don't think that's right.
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So, you have to match the the magnitude of both those positions.
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13:40
How do you think about revealing character?
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Uh maybe we can start with through dialogue like how do you use dialogue as a tool to reveal who somebody is, what they stand for, you know, with Amos Derek was a was a challenge for me because because the way his brain functioned he was basically on the spectrum.
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He did not like to socialize with people.
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He had been a gregarious outgoing football player and when he had brain trauma that all went away.
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So for him he was going to be a man of very few words.
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But when he spoke, it mattered, right? I hate lengthy dialogue.
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Um, and it just it's lazy writing because what you're doing is you're trying to put into words what you should be able to do in other elements of storytelling, either through action or, you know, interior monologue, something else other than dialogue.
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People don't just sit there and give speeches.
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Um, so dialogue has to move the action forward.
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It can reveal something about someone.
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Amos Decker when when he's reveals about him, he's a man of very few words, but when he speaks them, they are carefully chosen and they actually matter as opposed to someone who rattles off for half an hour and says nothing.
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It's like the Gettysburg Address, which is 277 words long.
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The guy who spoke before Lincoln at Gettysburg spoke for two hours.
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Nobody remembers who the hell he was or what he said.
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Everybody remembers a Gettysburg address because every word had earned its right to be there.
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I've adapted one of my books for feature film and I remember uh we had been hit by supertorm Sandy.
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So we lost two days of filming that we were never going to get back and one was going to be in a courthouse and we couldn't get the courthouse back because it was a functioning courthouse.
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So the day we had it and the storm hit there were no doovers.
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So, I'm sitting there with a hole in the plot and I'm in sitting outside at a farmard with like roosters and chickens crawling all over my butt on a wooden table with my laptop and I've got an Academy Award-winning actress inside this little farmhouse in full costume uh cinematographers ready to roll as soon as I finish the dialogue she's supposed to say, right?
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And I'm sitting there crafting the dialogue and everybody's just waiting for this page, right?
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And at first blush, I'm like, "All right, I'm going to she's going to say this, this, this, this, all this stuff."
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And finally, I just sat back and I looked at her through the window and I looked back and I said, 'You know, you got an incredible actor over there.
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And so I cut everything out except one line of dialogue.
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And then I let her do what she does.
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And you can still do that in a novel with a non-living character.
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If you've built up that character precisely so that people sort of know what they are and what they stand for, one line of dialogue can do the work of 10.
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And I've gotten to the point in my career now if I used to write it in a 100 words, I do my very best to write it in 10 because the hundred is just it's just it's lazy writing.
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What's interesting is to hear you say that and to basically bring that together with you're not sitting here writing short books that people are just going to like flip through on an airplane ride, right?
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You write books that demand to be read, not skimmed.
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And so how do you square those two things together?
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You know, I want people to understand that you can skim my books at your peril because and you're going to miss stuff and you need to know and don't come complaining to me that I didn't see that coming.
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One, because you weren't supposed to.
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But two, it's because you didn't read every word.
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If the if the word is imprinted on that page in one of my books, it's there for a reason.
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And if you choose to skip over it, then you do so at your own peril.
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But it's your decision, not mine, to do that.
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And even this day, people say, "It must get easier if you write books. You've written so many."
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I said, "No, it gets harder because I know how good it can be if you try a little bit harder."
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Um, if I could have written that scene a little tighter if got a if I could have made that character's beat a couple of few less beats but more meat in the ones that remaining.
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If I could have just done that, it would have been so much better.
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So, that's what drives me because now having done it for most of my life, you're never going to master it.
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That's why they call us apprentices, you know.
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Um, but you can get better with every book.
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Um, and that's what I strive to do.
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A lot of my earlier books, I'd go back and look at them.
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I said, I, you know, today myself, I would have edited the out of them.
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Um, and they would have been shorter.
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[laughter] Earlier you said, you just said what I want to know with the characters, who they are and what they stand for.
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Is that something that you want to have with every character?
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Like you name a character here, a character here, a character here.
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We can just go down the list.
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I know who they are, what they stand for.
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Those like the core things >> they are.
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Particularly if you are asking a character to play a certain role that people recognize and understand, whether it's an FBI agent or secret service agent, somebody in the intelligence field or just a man off the street, a businessman like, you know, Walter Nash, uh, who got, you know, his whole life was turned upside down.
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The key word for me is you can have core principles, core standings, core beliefs with flexibility.
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Because when you send a character through a novel, you've got to understand that human beings going through situations like this have to have the latitude to change.
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And if you don't allow that latitude, then all of a sudden that round peg is inserted into a square hole and nothing makes sense.
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So, you have to allow the reader to see that change because they're like, "Well, this character started out like this, and now this character is like this, and I don't see how they got there."
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So, the story should allow the reader to say, "I see how they got there."
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And would I have made that same decision? Maybe not.
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But I understand why that decision at this point in the story is plausible.
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Because that's the only thing I'm bound by is plausibility.
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And the reader thinks that it could have been a decision that could have been made by someone in that situation.
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they're going to say, "Okay, I'm going to keep going with the story. I understand that."
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Um, you don't want them to come up and say, "I have no idea how that person got there."
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And, uh, because of that, I'm just not enjoying the story anymore.
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>> I remember when I had Richard Powers on the show, I asked him, "Okay, so you have a character, and what do you do to bring that character to life?"
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And he said, "So often, what I'll do is I'll have a character with two values."
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>> So, it might be justice and loyalty, right? Okay. justice, good value. Loyalty, good value.
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But then he said that in order to really reveal who that character is, you push them to the wall and then you make them choose between one of those.
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So say it's your dad, you got to be loyal to your dad, but also maybe your dad committed a crime and now you put them in a situation where they have to choose and that inherently brings a character to life, break and makes a story dramatic.
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Whenever you have an opportunity uh where your character has to make what can be a lifealtering decision for themselves or someone else, that's a great way to flesh out a character.
20:23
Um and what you're saying in that is what's revealing about their character is yeah, they might value loyalty and justice and now they're in competition, but all of a sudden now what's being revealed is the person's core principle.
20:35
person's core principle. like okay I had these two things but one is going to win out over the other in this situation and that is because my core principle is this some people would you know in that situation people would say well loyalty actually overrides justice you know I
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could see you know if I'm writing a Godfather novel you know and might go that route as well for people like that sometimes loyalty is justice so I you know it's it's a lot of different ways to skin a skin a cat and to write a book And but you always you have to have conflict. You have to have opportunities
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You have to have opportunities where decisions have to be made.
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Um and you have to have consequences and stakes.
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If you don't have those then what does it really matter whether someone makes a decision or not?
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Um and but if you make a decision and the consequences are severe because of that and then you have to be held one held accountable and also suffer through those consequences then all of a sudden that person is a real it's a real person on the page and that's where you want it to be.
21:35
Can you talk to me more about the concept of stakes?
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Like I understand how you create stakes with, oh my goodness, a meteor is coming.
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It's going to be here in 1 hour.
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We need to figure out the situation.
21:45
Like Jack Bower and 24, I understand the stakes.
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They're kind of just readymade. >> Yeah.
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>> But how about the more subtle stakes like something about, I don't know, family drama or just the things that are less grand and dramatic?
21:58
Well, so in the the Walter Nash series, the first book, Nash Falls, Walter Nash is this businessman.
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He's not a police officer. He's not an FBI.
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He's he does no special skills like that.
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I like to say he's never lifted a weight in his life.
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He's never fired a gun in anger, but he's really good at business and he has achieved the American dream.
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The American dream is you work hard, get a good education, put the time in, financially successful.
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That's American dream, right?
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That's what we're we've always been told that, right, in this country.
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That is the American dream.
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So he did all that and then one night when he was suffering a very traumatic experience.
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His father had just died.
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He'd gone to the funeral and he'd been dissed by one of his father's Vietnam veteran buddies at the funeral.
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And out of the darkness, this FBI agent shows up and gives him sort of a fouian choice.
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He goes, "You know, you got this great life and you made a lot of money and you have a nice family, live in a nice house. Guess what?
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The company you've been working for all these years, they're actually a criminal organization. So here's your choice.
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One, you can work with us to bring them down and you lose everything you have.
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Two, you don't work with us and you lose everything you have. Those are your choices.
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[laughter] So those are the stakes.
23:09
So here's a guy and I thought the book was really thematic because these days that is our world.
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You know, you got people out there who spent their, you know, careers educating themselves, learning how to do coding or computer science and all this other stuff and now they're told you're superfluous.
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your education matters no more because we have this little software platform that could do all the stuff you used to do.
23:28
And by the way, they learned how to do it by stealing all your stuff.
23:31
So, how do you feel about that?
23:32
Um, and I thought it was thematic because, you know, they achieved the American dream.
23:37
They did what they were supposed to do, everybody told them to do, and they'd have a good life and then it was ripped apart uh having nothing to do with them at all.
23:46
And that's really why I set the I set the framework of the the Walter Nash series up just like that.
23:51
you achieved the American dream and then it was taken away.
23:55
>> And what is it about family?
23:55
Family themes that you keep coming back to.
24:00
>> Family is you don't you pick your friends, you don't pick your family, you know, so you're in it for the long haul, warts and all.
24:07
And um all families are dysfunctional.
24:11
Let's just make that statement, not just some.
24:13
Uh all families are dysfunctional on one level or another.
24:20
And I think that, you know, as a writer growing up, I remember my childhood.
24:22
I remember my, you know, my teenage years and my early adult years and my relationship with my parents and my siblings and all that stuff is so granular but so impactful on your life.
24:34
It's like you're you're a fresh paper and all the stuff that hits you early on, that's the stuff you most remember because that page was blank.
24:40
There was nothing else on there.
24:42
That's what you had to live with for years.
24:43
And then as you get older, lots of other stuff get added and everything gets started down.
24:48
for those first 18 20 years of your life that is that will define very much who you are and I love writing about that and I like writing about families because that is really the most impactful.
25:00
I write about siblings all the time, whether it's, you know, the John Puller series with his brother or Atly Pine with her sister, because that stuff really matters.
25:09
And I know growing up with my siblings and the relationships and dynamics that played out there were very impactful in my life.
25:19
Um, and I like sort of replaying that all out in fiction because I think instinctively when you write about that stuff, readers say, "I get that because guess what?
25:28
I I had a brother just like that."
25:30
or sisters is like that or that's how my parents were to me.
25:32
And when you get that connectivity with a reader in the themes of the story, then all of a sudden you're going to have a reader until the final page. Yeah.
25:39
I mean, you said siblings, then I thought of my sister.
25:43
There's no one in the world that I adore more than her.
25:45
And I've also fought with her more than every other person combined. >> You know what I mean? >> It's often that way.
25:52
Well, when you, you know, caring and loving and all that are very deep emotions that have a two edges to them.
26:00
>> And to your point about, you know, what makes it so relevant, it's so universal.
26:04
It's so vast and it's so meaningful to the things that we value most. >> Oh, it is.
26:10
It's it becomes, it gets the level of instinct and intuition because we've all experienced it is it is, you know, imprinted into our DNA. It just is.
26:19
Nobody forgets their relationships they had growing up with their family. They don't.
26:23
>> And tell me about scenes.
26:23
What's the role of a scene?
26:26
>> You know, I was when I was writing screenplays, I was uh definitely told by every producer and director I work with that if a scene doesn't have at least two purposes, why is it in the movie? >> Two purposes. >> Two purposes.
26:39
>> Movies cost a lot of money to make.
26:39
So, if you only have one reason per scene, then that's not good enough.
26:42
And I I'm not I don't say that I bring that wholly into my novel writing, but I don't write gratuitous scenes because I don't have time.
26:51
You know, I have I don't have the time to throw in stuff there that doesn't matter.
26:56
And I like to say if a scene or even a line of dialogue doesn't advance the plot, doesn't flesh out a character or doesn't give the reader information they need to know to, you know, f follow the plot, then you have to ask yourself, why is it there?
27:13
Is it there because you did a lot of research and you're loathed to cut it out?
27:17
Then that's the wrong answer.
27:17
Um, research is important for a book.
27:21
You have to leave 99% of it out.
27:22
Otherwise, you're writing a textbook.
27:24
Nobody wants to read a textbook.
27:26
The textbook is a flip book.
27:27
You're just reading along and you flip past all the crap. >> Boring. Yeah. >> Yeah.
27:31
So scenes are, you know, they are the building blocks of any novel, but they have to have a connectivity.
27:36
They have to have a reason for being there.
27:39
And sometimes I've written novels when I've gone back and edited and rearranged the order of the scenes because they make more sense, you know, than the order I originally had them in.
27:47
because once you have the whole novel in hand and it's laid out in front of you and at least in your mind, um the puzzle blocks tend to fall a little bit differently and you're like, you know what, if A went before B, but if I put C before A, then that's the effect that I want.
28:03
Uh because it's almost like micro timing.
28:08
You know, you release that information just a few beats too soon.
28:11
if you'd held on to it for a little bit longer, that's the impact I want to have on the reader and on the story and on the characters as well.
28:19
So, it can be a a page difference, you know, as far as what's revealed or not can have enormous impact on the overall story.
28:29
>> This sort of a weird question, but it's the one that popped in my mind.
28:31
Do you have like a taxonomy of scenes?
28:33
Like, are there different kinds of scenes that as you look at a book or you're writing a book, you're like, I could go this way, this way, this way. >> Oh my god. all the time.
28:41
In fact, when I'm nearing the end of a novel, but I haven't figured out exactly what I want to do, I write what's called a pen ending. Pin. I put a pen in it.
28:49
And if I if I'm, you know, the deadline is tight, I'll send up to my publisher the manuscript and just tell them it's a pen ending. >> Okay?
29:00
And so they know it may not be the actual ending.
29:02
And then I in my mind, I go back through and I might have four or five different scenarios, all of which are plausible based upon what I've already buil built.
29:10
already buil built. which one is going to be the right one or will it be an amalgam of the ones, you know, where I take bits and pieces from the four or five different ones to sort of mesh together to build this the finale that I
29:22
actually want because sometimes you get too close, you know, you lose your objectivity, particularly when you're nearing the end of a novel, you're in this tunnel, you want to get to the end, u but you don't have everything figured out or in hand. And then so I do the pen
29:34
And then so I do the pen ending and while they're reading it, I go away and just work on something else.
29:41
But part of my brain is hammering away on that pen ending.
29:44
>> So when you say work on something else, you're working on the next book or like you're chopping wood in the backyard. >> It could be both. I could go for a walk.
29:50
I could be working on the next book, you know?
29:52
So it's something that will totally disassociate me from what that problem is.
29:56
But my subconscious is always working away on it.
29:58
I I solved more plot problems and pen endings in the shower than any other place.
30:04
kind of like the water falling on my head.
30:05
You be five minutes in there and bang, it's done and then I walk out, you know, with a big smile.
30:11
But yeah, you just have to you have to do that.
30:14
You have to Sometimes you get so close uh that your vision is a little obscured. >> Yeah.
30:20
>> And having a little buffer away from it, all of a sudden it's amazing how things start to slide into place and you and then you ask yourself, why in the world did I think of that before? It's so obvious. Mhm.
30:31
>> You've done crazy stuff for research, shooting guns, traveling to the places you're writing about. >> Yeah, it's important.
30:37
I mean, I know a lot of writers use research assistants and all that, but when I was a when I was a lawyer, I always I interviewed all my witnesses face to face, not over the phone or anything like that. >> Oh, really?
30:50
Cuz I body language counts for a lot with me.
30:52
I've had everybody lies to lawyers here.
30:54
Your other side, clients, other lawyers, everybody.
30:56
I just assumed everybody was lying to me. >> You're what? A lawyer for 10 years.
31:01
>> Yeah, everybody was lying to me.
31:01
You just have to assume that and you work back and if someone ends up telling you the truth, like, good boy.
31:05
[laughter] I appreciate that. Thank you. Um, but it's important.
31:12
I I will go to places and think of scenes and plot devices because I'm inspired of where I am and I can't get that third hand by someone else's interpretation of that.
31:23
else's interpretation of that. or you know you know find find me out of find me you go to this place and figure out what's there they're going to come back and they could tell me their perspective what's important which could be totally
31:37
different from what I would feel important people can look at the scene I could look at the scene out here and everybody in the room could look at the scene out there and we come with with multi you know multiple different versions of what you're seeing and
31:47
what's important what draws your eye so I've got to do it all myself I divide it between the hardware and the software the hardware is like you know jumping off of parachute towers, uh going through the army functional fitness training, uh going out on walkalongs
32:01
with police officers on high crime areas, and then the software part of it is when you sit down and actually talk to people who do those jobs away from the guns and all the other stuff like you're 18 years old, we're in the middle of a war in Iraq. Why are you
32:12
Why are you volunteering to go into the army when you know that you're not going to stay states side?
32:18
You're going to get your basic training and maybe a little bit of special training and you're on you bucked on a plane and you're going to be out of combat and you could you could die and you're 18 and I want to know why.
32:29
And then having that information allows me to build characters that are fuller, more robust and more honest.
32:34
I am curious to actually if you look at that scene I'm just curious to know what it is that you're kind of noticing and how you even think about the process of noticing in general.
32:47
I look out this window and I immediately thought of Emily Dickinson in Amherst looking out her little window onto the street and from which she drew all of her inspiration and it must have been a street very much like this.
33:00
It's got some green and it's got the old brick and I got a tree there and you know she was called the myth and in Amherst and she always dressed in white.
33:08
Uh nobody knew she was even a poet until she died.
33:12
Um, but she sat at a little window with her little desk with a one drawer and just watched the world go by and wrote some of the greatest poetry any person's ever written on a very quiet street, you know, and you wonder, one, she must have been had the hell of an observing observer.
33:26
And two, an incredible imagination, and three, she was able to take those two things together and write inspired poetry, which I had no talent in writing, but that's what I would imagine she would look out and see.
33:38
And that's inspiring just to me.
33:41
Now, another person could have looked at it and said, "Well, the brick need the brick needs repointing." [laughter] >> Yeah.
33:48
Do you feel like noticing is something that you do consciously?
33:51
Uh, do you have a process of reflecting on the things that you notice like journaling and stuff like that or is it just, hey, this is how I roll and somehow when I sit down to write on the page, the things I noticed are just there.
34:04
>> Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both.
34:06
If I'm if I'm out walking and I see something particularly interesting, I'll remember it.
34:10
But then I might come and I have a notebook I keep for every writing project.
34:13
You know, it's one of the black spiral notebooks and I just love writing in there everything that has to do with a particular story that I'm working on.
34:20
And I'll come in and jot down some thoughts about that.
34:22
It may not be exactly what I was seeing, but it'll be what I was feeling about what I was saying.
34:26
Um, which is sort of taking it to another level.
34:29
It's taking it to step A, B, C, instead of just staying at step.
34:33
Um, but I think that I, you know, when people say, "Where do you get your ideas?"
34:38
I said, "I wake up every day and I walk out the door."
34:41
>> You live somewhere rural or in a city.
34:42
>> Um, in a in a suburb, but it's seems rural.
34:45
I'm about 30 minutes outside of Washington DC, but you'd think I was sort of in the middle of farmland, uh, where we live.
34:50
And I, you know, I've gotten ideas for some watching two people talk and or watch a guy get on a bus with a package.
34:57
And then the questions are, where is the bus going and what's in the package?
35:02
and what's in the package? and then I can fictionally answer those and all of a sudden guess what I have an idea for a story for me very much writing story ranging questions that have not been answered yet I wrote a book called the 620 man series it was based on the Pandora and Panama papers where they
35:19
were talking about $30 trillion of dark money flirting around the world and the first set of papers proved that that was happening and the second set of papers who actually had that money was like kings and dictators and all the guards and people like that but But the question they didn't answer was what the hell do you do with $30 trillion? >> Ah,
35:37
>> Ah, >> so I wrote the 620 man and I was like, well, if I had that much money, I wouldn't buy the ninth yacht of the 10th jet.
35:44
I would use it to buy power and people at the lowest level up to the highest to tip the world even more in my favor.
35:53
And the the journalistic consortium that did those two papers, I mentioned them in the first 620 man.
35:59
And the guy who heads it up, he's based in Australia. He he emailed me.
36:04
He said he said, "I was reading the book. You mentioned us. I fell out of my bed."
36:07
I couldn't believe it that you had mentioned us in your book.
36:10
And he said, "You were spot on."
36:12
He goes, he goes, "Why do you think school board elections are costing $10 million now?
36:16
It's because the dark money is everywhere."
36:19
And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but it's important.
36:21
That book was done to answer the question of what do you do with 30 trillion bucks of money?
36:28
>> What is your self-conception?
36:28
Because we've talked about how sort of logical you are.
36:33
Then there's the artistic Emily Dickinson answer of, "Hey, that's what I'm seeing."
36:38
And sort of the writer, the reader in you, and then there's the lawyer in you.
36:41
Like, how much do you think of yourself as the artist, the businessman, something else?
36:46
>> I walk around not necessarily conflicted, but always in competition in my head.
36:51
You know, what what part am I playing today?
36:53
Am I the business person? Am I the lawyer?
36:56
Am I the dreamy artist thinking of plots and characters and all that?
37:00
I've gotten to the point where I won't say it was compartmentalization, but it's like I know when to pull the trigger on one part of my personality and then when to let the other one slide a little bit.
37:09
Uh like I had a I had a meeting with my publishing team today and that was me as uh the writer business person where I'm going over not over stories or anything.
37:19
I'm just going over, you know, how the books did in the past, how they're doing now, what we're all going to do in the future to make more people read them and read just in general.
37:29
So that's that was my role at that time when I'm sitting in, you know, in my office conceiving stories and my books, that part of my character fades away and the dreamy person comes in that saw Emily Dickinson's house over there.
37:44
So it's just everybody every person plays roles in their lives and it could be from second to second depending on what the need is.
37:53
>> Yeah, that was one of the things that really stuck out with me as I was learning about how you go about things and prepping for this was the disciplined got to get this done.
38:02
I mean, early in your career, just writing from 1000 p. m.
38:06
to 2 in the morning every single night.
38:08
And then that, but also the sort of how much writing you do away from the keyboard, thinking up characters, so that once you sit down to write, boom, you're ready to go.
38:17
You have a bunch of fuel in the tank so that you can just crank out ideas that you've already thought about. >> I I do.
38:23
I mean, I'm I'm the sort of writer when I'm finished a book, if I have nothing else to write about, I'm at my most miserable.
38:29
I have a lot of writer friend bestsellers who when they finish a book they are like yes I'm not I'm out of here for six months and go and have some fun.
38:37
Um but that's what that's always driven my that's my motor that that the belly fire for me is what is the next story I'm going to write about if I don't have one to work on.
38:46
It's like I'm the vacuum in space. I'm lost totally.
38:48
Um and I I think I'm so prolific is because I just never turn it off. I can't turn it off.
38:55
So, wherever I go, I'm thinking about stuff and I can't wait to get back to be able to put it down on a piece of paper somehow some way. And I write everywhere.
39:03
I swear to God, it's like I have, you know, the hotel notepads.
39:07
I've got them from every hotel I've ever been in because I'm always I'm always pull them out.
39:10
I always writing notes down.
39:11
I went to I went to George HW Bush's funeral when he when he passed away.
39:17
We had been friends with the Bush family because of literacy. Mrs.
39:21
Bush had a literacy foundation and my wife and I formed one.
39:26
So our friendship was not based on politics.
39:27
It was just being on good human beings trying to get more people to read.
39:30
And so I went to his funeral and you got to, you know, it's at the cathedral in DC and you had to get there like four hours before the service because of all the security, you know, getting through the metal detectors and all that stuff at four hours.
39:39
So, they had a program and I said, I took a program and I got my pen and I wrote a couple of chapters of the book I was working on just around the edges of the program while I was waiting there because it was in my head and I needed to get it out.
39:55
I love putting stuff down on pieces of paper.
39:57
It just uh that's what rocks me, you know.
39:59
And I say even when I was a lawyer, look, the only arrows I had in my quiver were words.
40:03
I just gave the commencement speech.
40:05
I went to the University of Virginia School of Wall.
40:08
Uh I graduated from there 40 years ago and I was trying to tell the graduating class that words matter and telling some of my experiences about the choices of words that I made just single words that mattered turn the case around because that's how powerful words can be.
40:24
Words are powerful if you can get the person who's reading them to have a visceral reaction to them and if they do then mission accomplished because words can do that.
40:36
Look, words of, you know, I don't think Abraham Lincoln u ever said that, you know, Uncle Tom's Cabin um to the author that you're the little lady that started this great war.
40:47
He probably didn't say that.
40:49
That's sort of apocryphal, but he could have said that because that's how powerful words are.
40:55
And you know, there are many examples of great books that have been written um that have started movements.
40:59
You know, Rachel Carson, Silence Frank, >> of course.
41:03
Um, and when people read that and have a visceral connection to it, you know, bombs can eliminate mountains, but books can move them.
41:13
And I'd rather move mountains than eliminate them. >> Mhm.
41:19
You know, one of the things that's really I was reflecting on two and a half years of doing this and one of the if there's any change in perspective I've had is I've come to really admire writers who can just reach an absolutely mass audience.
41:33
Like when I was talking to Lee Child and just getting a sense of just how many millions of books he's read, it astonishes me.
41:41
And you were talking earlier about being at Grand Central Publishing.
41:44
Talk about how you're going to reach more people.
41:46
I'm curious to hear how you think about doing that from the writing to the marketing to the distribution.
41:51
What is it that you're trying to do there?
41:53
>> So, I think that you have to look at the marketplace as it is now as it could be changing um and what's coming down the pike with like new technologies and things like and where are where are potential readers these days.
42:03
You know, now we're doing a lot more work with Spotify and audios audio downloads are huge right now and you know, you have to have an electronic device in order to do that.
42:14
So, that's a market that we're all sort of focused on.
42:16
And >> would that change how you actually write?
42:19
>> No, it would not change how you write.
42:21
It's change how they will market the books.
42:22
Um, I'm always the point if a good story will sell, you just have to find the readers to read it wherever they might be.
42:28
And if they don't pick up hard coverver books or even soft cover books anymore and they want to listen to it or they want to do it on an ebook, then you need to find them there in their in their space.
42:36
You can't force them to read in a format they don't want to read in.
42:40
So, a lot of the marketing and all that goes to that.
42:42
They have to find out where those readers are and what sort of marketing speaks to them, you know, and then how do you deliver the book in whatever format they need as efficiently as possible and then how do you get them to come and pick up the next one as well.
42:56
And so that's a lot basically, you know, what the whole meeting was about.
42:59
And it's gotten a lot more complicated.
43:01
20 years ago, you know, nobody ever used the word metadata because nobody knew what it meant.
43:05
Uh now everybody uses that word and that term and you have a lot of other things to think about.
43:11
Uh there weren't any ebooks when I first went out.
43:13
There weren't you the audio books on CDs.
43:16
Okay, that whole thing has changed completely.
43:18
Um so it's you know businesses change and you have to change with it.
43:23
And what would you tell to writers about how to think about money because it doesn't seem like the core thing you've prioritized but obviously you've done very well financially and when it comes to negotiating royalty rights like you're a tough negotiator.
43:41
So, it is something that you value.
43:41
It doesn't seem like it's the end- all beall thing.
43:43
So, like what is your relationship with money as an author?
43:48
>> I I think it all comes down to fairness.
43:51
Um, and you know, I spent, you know, 10 years building a fan base up and I went everywhere.
43:57
You know, even when I wasn't on tour, I did my own travel, publicity, marketing.
44:02
I would people wanted me to come somewhere and speak, I'd go.
44:04
You know, I kept building my fan base up.
44:08
And I got to the point where I'd written a lot of books and I had a big fan base and the publishers was making a lot of money and you look at the distribution of that and I have one simple mantra.
44:15
No one should make more off of the book than the person who wrote it. No one.
44:23
And if you have that then you're in a good position.
44:26
Unfortunately for a lot of writers in this country it's the flip of that.
44:28
You know the publisher makes the lion share and the author doesn't.
44:33
So when I go when I have my fan base and I had leverage and you go and negotiate a new contract, you know, I said, "Okay, this is how we're not going to do, you know, royalties anymore.
44:42
We're going to do we're going to be partners and um and you're going to get a 30% return on your money and I'm going to get the rest.
44:51
And if you can find a place where you can get a pretty much a guaranteed 30% return on your money, feel free to go for it."
44:59
[laughter] and they were like, "Well, we'll do the deal."
45:07
And it's not to say that they're making a lot of money, too, right?
45:09
And everybody's happy and I'm happy and I'm productive.
45:14
They're getting, you know, all the books for me that they need.
45:17
We're both building, you know, a good business together.
45:19
But the distribution of it in my mind is is a lot more fair because look, they have hundreds or thousands of authors.
45:26
I just have me, you know, so this is the means of my livelihood.
45:30
So if you're making a very very acceptable return on your investment, which is me, and I'm making a very good return on my investment, which is me, then we walk away happy.
45:39
Um I and I, you know, I I've done a master class online where I talk about the business aspect of publishing and all that.
45:49
And you just you don't have to hyperfocus on it, but you have to know what it's there.
45:53
And you have to know when you go into meetings, um, you should know just as much, if not more than your agent does or whoever's negotiating your deal for you so that you can ask intelligent questions so that years later you won't be surprised when things are not going the way.
46:09
Why am I not in those stores anymore?
46:10
Why are my sales declining?
46:10
Why are my royalties going down?
46:12
Why am I not making as much money?
46:14
It's because you've been writing the books and you've been ignoring everything else.
46:17
You writing the books is the most important thing you're going to do.
46:21
The second most important thing you're going to do is understand how the business works for you or doesn't.
46:25
And I know a lot of writers who, you know, had good careers and they went down the toilet because they took their eye off that ball.
46:34
>> And what mistakes have those sorts of people made >> where they don't hold their publishers feet to the fire of why has your marketing plan not changed in the last 10 years, >> right?
46:46
>> Why am I not in these outlets I used to be in?
46:48
uh they don't ask those questions because they didn't know to ask those questions, right?
46:51
Um and you're marketing me as this when I think I'm really that.
46:56
Um and why are you bringing me out at this time of the year when I should be coming out at another time of the year?
47:03
Whether either, you know, you want to come out in the in the Christmas season, you got to be a heavy hitter with a big fan base, otherwise you're going to get creamed because that's where all the big guys come out.
47:11
or is it better for you to come out because of what the book's content is about to come out in the spring and the summer, you know, and if you're just your publisher is not making good decisions about that and you don't even know to question them, then bad things are going to happen.
47:25
Um, you're not it's you're not doing it in scenario.
47:28
You're still a creative person.
47:30
You know, I know people like I'm creative person, I'm not a business person. No, you have to be both.
47:35
If you want to do this for free, live your life in the dream state and just write your books.
47:39
And if you have a trust fund that pays for your expenses, fine.
47:42
If this is your livelihood, you have two hats you have to wear.
47:44
You have to be the content creator and you have to be the business person.
47:48
And if you don't do both, then at the end of the day, you're not going to be the happy person.
47:54
And what are the core vectors that negotiations happen on?
47:58
So, we're talking about royalty rights.
48:02
Like, whenever I come into something new, I'm like, what are the points of disagreement that the fault lines that I should know?
48:09
And if I can actually know what those are, then I can look out for those things.
48:13
But often if I approach something, I don't know what those are.
48:16
There's just so much data being thrown at me that I don't actually know what to prioritize and dep prioritize.
48:19
Well, if you look at a if you look at a basic deal, I tend to do u multi-book contracts.
48:26
So I usually do six book contracts.
48:28
I for the last 15 or 16 years, I've done two books a year.
48:31
My my time is spring and fall.
48:33
So I come out in April and I come out in November.
48:34
And I've done that for the last 16 years.
48:36
So the uh sixbook deal will last for three years, two books a year.
48:43
So when I sit down, first of all, I'm thinking, okay, is this a regular thriller?
48:48
You know, I'm all the books going to be thrillers, so it's going to be a regular six book deal, same advance, same profit sharing requirements, or like I do a hard detective series set in the 50s.
48:58
Um that's not a thriller per se.
49:01
Um, so that's going to be priced at a little bit different.
49:06
Uh, because the sales are going to be different on that one.
49:08
So, can I be inventive or imaginative about, okay, you're going to pay me a little bit less upfront, but I have more robust profit sharing on the other side.
49:16
Maybe it's not split equally.
49:19
Maybe I get more than you get because you're paying me less upfront.
49:22
Um, so, and you may not want to do a sixbook deal.
49:25
Do I want to do I want to go book to book to book?
49:28
You know, do I want to do a two book or three book deal?
49:30
Where does that land in my creative arc?
49:32
my creative arc? and do I feel like I can gonna be able to write you know three books over the next three years or whatever it might be and then the compensation obviously it is what it is is what you negotiate I the royalty
49:46
rates you know they haven't varied in forever so it's a 15% royalty rate on a hard coverver which is really a 30% return on you and this is why a 30 a $30 book retail price book the publisher sells that to the wholesaler for 15 bucks okay or 1450 they don't the full $30. Nobody gets $30 for that. So if
50:04
Nobody gets $30 for that.
50:04
So if you're getting but you're getting as a writer, you're getting 15% of that $30 even though the publisher is only getting $15, not $30.
50:12
So your 15% turns into a 30% return on that book, which is fine.
50:19
Publisher has to print the book, distribute the book, and all that.
50:21
There are expenses associated with that, but they're working on they're keeping 70%.
50:27
Now they have given you an advance. Sure.
50:28
And you got to earn that advance back before you know you're going to get any royalties.
50:32
Whatever that advance might be, it might have been a big advance or a small advance or somewhere in between.
50:36
So it's just the math you have to understand.
50:38
But the problem is if you're working on that 50% hardcover royalty and I've done this with my book, my earlier books when I just were working on royalties, I know how much money revenue wise been brought in and how much the expenses the publishers made.
50:52
I know how much money the the publisher made off those books.
50:56
But if I just gone by the 15% royalty, I never would have earned back my advance, you know, they could have made $30 million in one book and I never saw another scent of that.
51:05
So if I had not 20 years ago gone in and said we're not going to do this anymore, you know, I would have left nine figures on the table, you know.
51:19
you know. So, it just was not something me as a lawyer and me as a business person who I negotiated a lot of deals on behalf of clients is a lawyer and I tell young writers look work your ass off build your fan base up and then when it come time to renegotiate just say we're not doing the royalty
51:37
thing anymore you know you and we're partners in a business so I need to be treated like a partner and this is and they may not agree on the same deal that I have but it's not going to be that deal anymore it's going to be you know you're not going to make 70% off of every book and I'm going to get my 30. That's not fair anymore. So, That's not fair anymore.
51:52
So, and if you don't, and I'm not saying every publisher is going to agree to it, but they have no chance to agree to it if you never raise it. >> Right.
52:02
And what is it that what is the number one lesson that you've learned as the business guy?
52:07
And what is the number one lesson that you've learned as the lawyer?
52:10
I think the number one lesson I've learned as a business guy is that um one, no one's going to care about your career more than you do.
52:18
Um and if you don't if you don't get the the business side of it right, it can also affect the creative side because you're like, "Wow, I'm really really getting screwed on this deal."
52:29
You know, and they're making the line share of the money and that that makes people upset and upset people don't tend to write as as best as they can.
52:37
And and also you want to have a happy partnership, you know, and I tell people if the publisher asks a lot of you or if you ask a lot of your publisher, then don't be surprised when the publisher asks a lot of you, you know, go to Iowa, go to Nebraska, go to these small places and we need you to do these things for us.
52:54
Instead of saying no, you go to them because you're together, you're building something.
52:58
So I was never never forget that part of the business that you're in a partnership and you have both benefits and responsibilities.
53:05
And as a lawyer, read the damn contracts, you know, because um there's a lot of stuff in there that you need to know.
53:13
And uh ignorance is no excuse once you sign the document, you know, and there's no going back from there unless you want to hire a lawyer to sue who wants to do that.
53:21
So for me, it's attent bring the same level of detention to detail to the business side of it as you do to your books.
53:31
>> If you do that, you're gonna be okay. >> Yeah.
53:33
Getting back into the writing, how do you think about the premise of a novel?
53:39
Like how you explain it because you were talking earlier about maybe you're talking to the publisher and you don't feel like they're actually framing your book properly.
53:47
So, how do you think about coming up with the premise in the first place and then actually framing the present the the premise for the front jacket? >> Yeah.
53:54
So, I mean that's important.
53:54
I mean the cover is important, the artwork and the graphic.
53:58
the jacket copy is important because that's the first less people go into the bookstore and they look at the cover and they open up and they read the jacket copy down there and it's that going to entice them or not.
54:08
Um, and so I spend time on that.
54:08
God knows we spend a lot of time on covers.
54:13
We go round and round and round and the jacket copy is is I look at the jacket copy.
54:18
I've rewritten jacket copy because I want it to present the best face forward that I possibly can because that'll be the first thing that people will see and will read. It's hard for me. I hate it.
54:28
You know, I've got a lot of stuff in development in Hollywood all over the board.
54:32
And, you know, they use the, you know, the short pitches where they're trying to this is, you know, X plus Y plus Z and this is the premise, you know, this television series, that movie, blah, blah, blah.
54:46
You know, I was like, okay, that's so superficial, but I guess I understand why you have to do it.
54:50
>> I'm in it right now and I've been working and working and working on it. >> Oh, I know.
54:53
And it's it's like it it's it doesn't tell enough, you know.
54:56
It's just it's it's too shallow.
54:58
This is I don't want to compare my work to other stuff, you know, but that's what people want to hear.
55:04
It gives them a context anyway.
55:05
So, for me, it's like you got to you got to whittle it down to something that has meaning to people.
55:11
Uh, when I was talking about the Nash, you know, the premise is this guy did everything right and he still got knocked on his ass, you know, and he had no control over it because I feel like I like to write books that resonate with people in the moment and I thought that book would because I just feel like a lot of people felt like they done all the right things and they still didn't get knocked on their butt.
55:35
>> H and >> so you do think about the zeitgeist. >> Oh yeah, I do.
55:37
Absolutely I do because I want when I want people to read when they read my novels, I want them to feel like they're all in and that it resonates with their life today.
55:46
You know, I write about topical things.
55:49
You know, my next book that comes out in the fall has some AI stuff and it might take on AI.
55:55
When you put all your eggs in one basket, that makes for a very big target, >> right?
56:00
>> Um and an easier target than it were dispersed everywhere.
56:02
But I want people to feel like when they read the story, they're not they're not just reading it for pleasure, but they're reading it like this matters for my life right now.
56:12
I can see where this is going.
56:12
And after reading this book, I might make some different decisions about my life going forward because I feel like there's a connectivity there that I didn't anticipate maybe being in the novel.
56:24
That for me, I when I read books, I want to have that connectivity.
56:26
I want people, damn, I get that.
56:27
And maybe in tomorrow instead of doing what I thought I was going to do, I'm going to do this instead because I think it makes more sense because this character just went through this and I saw what happened to him.
56:39
People connect I want people to connect with the pages.
56:44
When you write a premise, do you use that as the writer or is it more that you're writing the first few pages and then you use the first few pages as the frame for the rest of the story?
56:57
>> Yeah, I think it's pretty much both.
56:57
Um, >> so do you write the premise early or does the premise come later or like on the uh on the the book jacket >> that comes later? >> That comes later.
57:06
>> When I I'm always itching once I get an idea in my head.
57:10
I've learned over time to let it percolate a little longer.
57:14
Sometimes I would pull the trigger too soon and I'd write and write myself into a wall and everything just did not work out.
57:18
So now if I have an idea for a novel, I let it percolate for a while, but I'm always itching to death to write those first few chapters.
57:27
People ask me, "What's the most fun part of writing a novel?"
57:31
And I always say it's the first few chapters because everything is new.
57:35
You have no idea really where you're going.
57:36
You don't know if it's going to work out, but it's exciting as hell.
57:37
You know, that for me is that first blush.
57:42
It's why I want to get to the starting line as fast as possible. >> Yeah.
57:45
I was looking through different premises and even the one from Absolute Power just Do you want to read it? I have it here. It's really good. >> Yeah.
57:54
Set in Washington DC, this fascinating thriller of unparalleled suspense dares to explore an unthinkable abuse of power and criminal conspiracy.
58:02
A vicious murder involving the US president in a cover up orchestrated by his zealously loyal chief of staff in the Secret Service.
58:07
But unity the president is lackey one unlikely witness saw everything.
58:11
his one unlikely witness saw everything. >> Yeah.
58:16
>> I mean, I feel like you could almost deconstruct that and teach six things about writing thrillers and telling good stories.
58:24
>> Yeah, it is because it it in that one, you know, that one premise, it creates every facet you need to write the story.
58:30
And people always complain about when I get sometimes aspiring writers, people working, they'll email and they'll say, I wrote 50 pages and I don't know where I don't know where to go.
58:39
And I'm like, you know what?
58:40
If you It's almost like, you know, when you buy a new plant at a at a store, it comes with all the food it needs for the growing season.
58:46
And when you put it in there, you don't have to give it any more food, just some water.
58:51
If you can build into the first few chapters of the novel, every plot thread that you need, you will never lack for where this is supposed to go.
59:00
And you think, well, how in the world can I do that?
59:01
Well, just reading that premise, you can do that.
59:03
You know, you have a crime, you have high stakes, you have a witness, you're off to the races, man.
59:09
[laughter] Yeah, that was a funman. Who knew?
59:14
President of the United States, not a good person.
59:15
[laughter] It was 30 years ago I wrote that book.
59:22
>> Why do you think that there are so many so many lawyers who've become successful writers?
59:28
>> Well, you know, I talked to I've known John Gisham for 25 years.
59:30
I've known Scott Trove for even longer.
59:32
Um well it's because you know our world were all words before that and um a lot of them were English majors and decided they wanted to go into law because it involves a lot of reading and researching writer um putting stories together.
59:46
Um you know Scott when he wrote um his first novel Presumed Innocent you know he had a lot of experience you know he was a lawyer in Chicago uh did a lot of criminal defense work and that was right up his alley.
1:00:01
you know, he knew a lot of prosecutors and Rusty Savage was his prosecutor in that novel and he was writing what he knew, what he had lived.
1:00:07
Um, but he did it with I think I think Scott, you know, was an English major.
1:00:12
Um, and had always been interested in writing as well.
1:00:17
John, you know, John's Mississippi and um, he was a he was a criminal defense lawyer and he just wanted to write a story.
1:00:24
You know, he wrote A Time to Kill his first novel and was deeply autobiographical in the region where he grew up.
1:00:29
you know, he had seen a case just like that one that was depicted in the novel.
1:00:34
Um, so I think that's why is because we all come from a world of words.
1:00:38
Um, and but I had been writing since I was a kid.
1:00:42
You know, I when my classmates in UVA were trying out for law reviewview mood court, I was trying to sell short stories to Playboy magazine, [laughter] you know, which which published a lot of the great writers of the day because uh I always wanted to be a storyteller.
1:00:56
I couldn't make any money which is principally the reason why I went to law school and you know while I was practicing law I was still writing I wrote short stories for 15 years and I write started writing screenplays and I eventually wrote my first novel but it was that evolution you know >> so basically nothing no real money came in before Absolute Power. No, no, not at all.
1:01:18
It was really absolute power is really the first thing I ever sold.
1:01:19
But yeah, I'd been I just been writing since I was a kid and and I was I think I like to write because I was a voracious reader and you can ask any writer were you a reader early on and 99% of them will say they just ate books up.
1:01:34
>> What is it about short stories you think that presumably they did help you for the novel?
1:01:40
Like is that a good kind of training ground? in a short story.
1:01:44
>> Short form fiction has all the elements of long form fiction.
1:01:46
Has a plot, it has characters, has dialogue, and has narrative.
1:01:52
But seven pages is a lot less daunting than 400 pages.
1:01:57
And you can't get ahead of your skis.
1:01:59
If you get over your skis, you're going to tumble down the mountain.
1:02:02
And so many people start out trying to write a novel and they're overwhelmed.
1:02:06
They're like, I've written 20 pages.
1:02:08
I have no idea what to do now.
1:02:10
And I always tell them, write a five-page short story. See how that goes. Don't count words. Don't count pages.
1:02:16
Just sit down and write and see where it goes.
1:02:19
Don't worry about trying to write a 400page novel with 80 chapters.
1:02:23
Cuz would you try to go in and lift, you know, do a 800 lb squad on your first day in the gym? >> It's the same notion.
1:02:32
>> And what is the thing that makes novels so much harder than short stories?
1:02:34
Like I had the image as you were saying that of basically like you start here at this specific point and then you have all these tentacles that go out and with a short story you only have a few and then you can kind of bring it back together but with a novel there's just so many that spread out and out and I'm just imagining you're 80 pages 100 pages in and you're like how in the world am I going to bring all these things back together?
1:02:55
Like what is the actual mechanism that makes it so much harder? >> Yeah.
1:02:59
It's it's basically you're going from multiplication tables to physics.
1:03:03
You know, you're no longer in the shallow end of the pool where you can feel the bottom.
1:03:05
With a short story, pretty much anybody can see to the end of five pages when they start to sit down how it's going to go.
1:03:12
It's much harder to see to the end of, you know, 12 feet in the water.
1:03:16
You don't can't see the bottom.
1:03:18
You're terrified you're going to drown.
1:03:19
So, for me, um, you have to you write the big stuff by making it smaller as much as you can.
1:03:27
I don't think about everything I need to put in the novel from day one.
1:03:32
I'm starting like I'm going to do a couple of chapters and see where it goes.
1:03:36
And then after I write those chapters, I'm going to write another couple of chapters and see what I feel like.
1:03:42
And then I start to learn my characters, what I think the story is going to be, what other characters I need to create to be involved in this, where the plot is actually going to go.
1:03:52
And it's almost like, you know, you're firming up the edges of the puzzle.
1:03:56
you know, you're getting those pieces in place and then once you get the pieces in place, you have an idea of what it might look like.
1:04:04
And as you start working, you know, in crime in in real homicide investigations, they go from the inside out.
1:04:09
They start with the family who usually the ones who killed their other family members and they if they eliminate them, they keep going out until they find out who the real killer is.
1:04:17
writing a novel, you start around the edges and you work your way in and you work your way towards the ending of the novel and you then overwhelm yourself by trying to think of all of it all at once and then you're kind of like, nobody can do that.
1:04:30
You know, you just can't.
1:04:32
You're like, oh my god, I can't figure this out.
1:04:33
There's too many factors.
1:04:34
Yeah, they're way too many factors if you try to do it all at once.
1:04:39
And so for me, I try to slow it all down and shorten it.
1:04:42
And all of a sudden, I'm not writing a novel.
1:04:44
I'm writing a series of short stories that have this connectivity between them.
1:04:47
And at some point when you get a firmer grasp on what the story is going to be about, uh, then all of a sudden things start to gel.
1:04:56
And then all of a sudden your mind becoming more like a computer.
1:04:58
I know what happened on page 20.
1:05:00
I know what's going to happen on page 120.
1:05:02
And I definitely am thinking about the scene I'm going to write on page 315.
1:05:06
That's going to bring all this stuff together because now I I'm in my groove. I know where I'm going.
1:05:13
It's a lot like, you know, it's a lot like research.
1:05:15
I with my Aloish's archery, he's my gum shoe in the 1950s.
1:05:20
A lot of people write historical fiction, they're like, "Oh my god, what do I I got so much I need to know about and write about that world, you know, all the details.
1:05:26
I never even lived during that time.
1:05:28
And so, where do I start?" Well, here's what I did.
1:05:29
I'm not going to overwhelm myself.
1:05:34
I put Archer to bed and I woke him up in the morning and I took him through one day.
1:05:38
I was like James Joyce, right?
1:05:38
I took him through one day of his life and everything he encountered in that way.
1:05:44
In that day, I researched clothes, food, how he got from point A to point B, the stores, the streets, whatever, in one day of his life.
1:05:53
And that gave me pretty much 90% of the stuff I needed to create that world of the 1950s.
1:05:58
>> So, explain this to me. Okay, 1950s close.
1:06:01
Let's go do the research.
1:06:01
I need to learn about this.
1:06:03
Like, what am I actually doing to learn about that?
1:06:08
>> I'll give you So, I'll give you an example.
1:06:09
So, this last Archer novel is set in [clears throat] 1958 and it's set in Los Angeles.
1:06:14
So, I've been to LA many times, but not in 1958.
1:06:17
So, I went on Etsy searching for a map of Los Angeles during that time period. And I found him.
1:06:26
It was actually a like a not as like a Sonokco gas map. >> Oh, cool. >> 1958.
1:06:31
And that became like my Bible geographically.
1:06:33
And I loved pouring over the hell notes and stuff all over the map.
1:06:38
And I where Archer went, everything was right on that map.
1:06:41
And as I'm looking at the map, I'm seeing his car drive down these roads and these canyons and all that where I'm the paces I'm putting him through.
1:06:48
In another Archer novel, um, he was in Las Vegas in 1953. So, I went on YouTube.
1:06:55
I've read books about Vegas and all that, but I wanted to see stuff.
1:06:59
So, I went on YouTube and I searched and searched and searched.
1:07:03
And finally, there was this guy in 1953 had one of those old big video cameras.
1:07:07
He was in a Cadillac convertible and he was driving down the strip in 1953 and he was filming everything in front of him and you look over here and I think it was the the um Sands Casino just opened and he went over here and it's on the strip and it's desert.
1:07:21
There's nothing there except sand.
1:07:23
You know, this is 1953 and Vegas was still being built out.
1:07:26
So I I slowed that I was I went like frame by frame by frame on that video.
1:07:32
It was like 25-minute video and I'm just taking notes all the way down and then I sat and thought about it and I sort of you know manipulated the facts and all that and I built you know that into the story what I needed but I was like an eyewitness.
1:07:46
I was there in 1953 walking down that street and I could see the little details.
1:07:50
They might seem insignificant, you know, but they were important to the story.
1:07:55
Like they had a mechanical cowboy, you know, it was on the side of a building.
1:07:59
he would come up and the cigarette would come back come go come go come go come go come go come go come go come go come go come go back down and he made this noise every hour that scared the out of everybody so they they dismantled part of the robot because it was like people were having heart attacks in the middle of the street.
1:08:11
Um but just that little detail you know that all of a sudden you can throw that in and people what you want to do with that is give the people a sense of okay I can suspend disbelief and I'm actually in 1953 in Las Vegas because I know enough to feel like I'm there.
1:08:25
At what point do details bring a story to life?
1:08:28
And at what point do they actually kill a story?
1:08:32
>> Oh, well, if you're going to go more than three or four sentences where you're describing stuff like that to set an atmosphere and a mood and a time period, you're going to get the page flip. You know, you just are.
1:08:45
People are going to I I get it.
1:08:47
And they're going to turn the page.
1:08:49
Um, and that's when that's when the ego writing comes in.
1:08:54
You know, you've done this research.
1:08:54
you don't want to take it out.
1:08:55
You just want to find a spot and stick it all in.
1:08:57
And I' I've been guilty of doing that.
1:09:00
But when I go through my later passage on any book in the editing process, I already know I'm going to cut that stuff.
1:09:09
Sometimes I just have to write it to write it and I know it's not going to end up in in the novel itself, but I just wanted to get it out of the page.
1:09:16
And sometimes what I'll do is, you know, I might I might not cut it out, but I'll slash it [clears throat] and might move it to another place where it makes more sense for me.
1:09:23
But I'm never gonna leave it all in.
1:09:25
Uh because that's just my ego.
1:09:27
And egos, you get have to leave that at the door when you're writing a novel.
1:09:32
Everything has to, you know, prove itself, prove its intent to be there.
1:09:37
And if you don't, if you don't have that, if you can't answer yourself, why does it why does this need to be in the story?
1:09:42
When I would be in sessions with producers and directors on some of the script work that I did, I was constantly baras, why does it have to be why does it have to be in the film?
1:09:52
Why why does that scene have to be in the film? Explain that to me.
1:09:53
And if you can't explain them, then you have to ask yourself, why the hell does it have to be in the film then?
1:09:59
You know, because they want to know.
1:10:01
And the answer I don't know is not a good one.
1:10:07
What is writing screenplays give you that writing a novel doesn't?
1:10:08
And what does writing novels give you that writing a screen screenplay doesn't?
1:10:13
>> Screenplay writing really shows you how to be economical and efficient and be a little more clever.
1:10:18
just like for movies and stuff.
1:10:19
>> For movies, a little more clever about how you get from point A to point B.
1:10:24
Instead of saying it in a page, you say it in a paragraph or instead of saying it at all, you just say it with something that a character does.
1:10:29
Um, and that could be more important than anything else.
1:10:34
I think that from books to to screenplays because everything is so streamlined in a screenplay and people want action moving forward all the time sometimes the characterizations are not as fully developed as they could be.
1:10:49
Novels you look at a novel where they often are very fully developed because you have more time you have more pages.
1:10:55
You know 100page screenplay versus a 400page novel.
1:10:57
You know, it's not hard to do the math on that, but there are ways to do it so that if you're clever, you can do a few words, but also know that unlike in a novel, you have help.
1:11:08
You have an actor who's going to say this stuff.
1:11:10
So I had uh in that movie I was talking about before Ellen Burston, you know, Academy Award actress.
1:11:16
I could give her one line of dialogue and not Tim and allow Ellen to just have, you know, a facial movement, an expression, just focus on her eyes, let her act, let her emote.
1:11:28
And that did the work of nine lines of dialogue.
1:11:30
You know, you don't have that with a novel, but you do have that with a screenplay. >> Yeah.
1:11:35
Yeah, I went down a big Gatsby rabbit hole and it struck me how much more Nick Carowway's characters developed in the book cuz he's the writer, but then there's a lot of parts about Gatsby that really come through in the DiCaprio Gatsby movie because they really made that visual and there's just this grander of Gatsby's house and the scene where they're throwing all the shirts and stuff like that.
1:11:57
It kind of didn't come alive for me in the book actually in the way that it did come alive for me in the movie.
1:12:02
Well, you know that book, uh, Fitzuro wrote that book.
1:12:07
He was a great observer of the society he was born in and lived in.
1:12:09
And so much of his stuff is visual.
1:12:12
I'm just rereading his collection of short stories.
1:12:15
A lot of people don't know that Fitzgerald was one of the greatest short story writers this country's ever had.
1:12:20
Um, Bernice bobs her hair.
1:12:20
You know, it doesn't sound like much, but trust me, it's a lot in that nom in that short story.
1:12:25
>> You know, Benjamin Button, one of my favorite stories.
1:12:26
Uh, Eric Roth took that and turned it into the movie. >> Yeah. With Brad Pip. Yeah, I know.
1:12:30
And he's like, "Ah, you know, the the the short story is not that great, but the premise is so good."
1:12:35
>> The premise is spectacular. >> All time premise. >> Yeah.
1:12:37
And it's a pretty long short story, too.
1:12:39
Wasn't it was on a few pages.
1:12:41
Fitzgerald wrote long short stories.
1:12:42
He did it, too, because back then he would publish some, you know, in the major publications.
1:12:46
A lot of times they paid by the word as well. >> That's right.
1:12:50
So, but I I think that uh the Great Gatsby, it was a very visual story and um as good a writer as Fitzgerald was seeing it, you know, that that was a director's catnip that book because the visuals on that that a director create were just stunning.
1:13:06
And then when you have the caliber of actors like, you know, DiCaprio, then that just adds it on top.
1:13:12
It was just um that that was uh that'll continue to be filmed over and over again. Mhm.
1:13:17
Tell me about why you value character over plot.
1:13:23
>> One, I think because character for me is a lot more interesting to spend my time with.
1:13:28
>> H So for you as the writer? >> Yeah.
1:13:30
For me as a writer, I don't I'm not necessarily looking at from the reader's point of view at that point because the reader is not writing a book. I am.
1:13:35
And if I'm if I lose interest because the plot is not all that fascinating to me without characters, then I'm not doing my best stuff.
1:13:46
And as a human being, we relate to characters more because we're writing about us.
1:13:51
You know, plots are plots and plots are fine.
1:13:53
I spent a lot of time in my plots, but I can write a great plot.
1:13:57
If I don't create fascinating characters to go through those plots, people aren't going to give a crap and they're not going to ah let them die. I don't care.
1:14:04
You know, that's not what the reaction you want.
1:14:06
You don't want that reaction.
1:14:08
So, for me, it's more fascinating. It's more fulfilling.
1:14:11
And it keeps my interest.
1:14:13
>> And what is it that you're going for in a character?
1:14:15
Or is it like, "Oh, I love that character so much."
1:14:16
Or like, "Hey, I understand that character.
1:14:18
I see them, you know, I see them in my aunt."
1:14:20
You know, there there's there's a lot of similarities there.
1:14:22
What is the analogy that you're trying to get?
1:14:25
>> Um, I want to get away as far away from perfection as I can. >> Away from perfection.
1:14:29
I want people to be vulnerable and fragile and uncertain and doubt themselves.
1:14:36
>> You know, I give the analogy when you go into the military, you go in as yourself.
1:14:41
And I know my dad was in the in the Navy and I have a lot of friends in Northern Virginia who are in all branches of the military.
1:14:47
I hang hang out with those guys.
1:14:49
And so the military's job is to take you and make you vanish.
1:14:54
Everything you brought to the military, they break it down and it's gone.
1:14:59
You're no longer you because you as yourself have no value to them.
1:15:05
They need to vanquish everything that made you you and then rebuild you as the war machine.
1:15:09
they needed that you will follow orders and you will have these special skills and you will think differently about yourself, other people and the world.
1:15:17
And so for me, I don't want to put people against the wall.
1:15:21
I want to put them through the wall and then see what comes out the other side.
1:15:27
And for me, the best novels are where people have been suffered egregious loss um have gotten knocked flat on their ass multiple times.
1:15:36
and the real character comes out of how they respond to that, how they get back up on their feet and move forward.
1:15:44
Um, it's almost like, you know, you never know, you never will know the real person if you've only seen them in good times.
1:15:50
That's it's easy to be in good times.
1:15:53
It's when the times are not so good.
1:15:55
That's when the real person comes out.
1:15:57
And that's what I try to find in my characters and my novels.
1:16:01
You know, the bad stuff is the interesting stuff.
1:16:03
The good stuff is just bananola.
1:16:05
And how deliberate are you about planting mysteries?
1:16:07
It feels like character is a little bit more is is quite intuitive for you like you just have a deep understanding of how to build good characters.
1:16:15
Do you feel like you have that same intuitive understanding of planting mysteries? >> I think it varies.
1:16:20
My my degree of success um varies from book to book.
1:16:26
I've looked at some of my plots and I thought I really nailed that one. That was a game, Dave.
1:16:32
Um, and others I'm like, I think I telegraphed that one.
1:16:36
I think people probably would have figured that out before I wanted them to, and it was not as strong as it could have been.
1:16:41
And the answer could be that I just whiffed on that ball.
1:16:47
Um, my mindset was not where it needed to be when I was writing that particular setup.
1:16:52
Or, you know, maybe the character wasn't right for that particular plot. I don't know.
1:16:57
You know, sometimes the the answers are not crystal clear.
1:17:00
But you know after after every book I do try to kind of break it down like game film and think and also based on like reader reaction emails I get from people from to our website people I know who you know friends of mine who they read the book and they come back and talk to me about it and get their reaction.
1:17:18
That's important to me because I'm like this is how I intended it but if enough people say this is not how they saw it then I'm like that's that's my problem.
1:17:25
You know there's something that wasn't working there.
1:17:29
I'm trying to figure out how much you think about writing because you've talked a lot about this is what I like.
1:17:35
I enjoy these things and I've noticed you probably said three or four times, I do it because I like doing it.
1:17:39
That's what keeps me interested.
1:17:40
And so let's hold that there as one premise of this question.
1:17:44
But then the other one is this desire to reach a lot of people.
1:17:46
And how much do you think of your books as a kind of product, a kind of experience that you're giving people?
1:17:54
Yeah, I I always start from the square one is that if I am fascinated by what I'm writing about, everyone else will be fascinated too.
1:18:08
And if I'm not interested in it, I don't care how well I write it, nobody else is going to be interested in either.
1:18:13
So, I have to really make sure my creative tanks, my passion tank is full before I sit down and make a full commitment to write it.
1:18:20
>> And that's why you kind of wait a little bit longer. >> I do.
1:18:22
I mean, I I have made that mistake uh more often in the past than I would have liked to.
1:18:26
And so, when I'm ready to pull the trigger, I'm all in.
1:18:29
You know, I am committed to this and I think that I'm going to see it all the way through to the very end.
1:18:34
And I'm excited about it.
1:18:36
You know, I'm not dreading sitting down and oh god, how am I going to turn off five page?
1:18:41
That's why I don't count pages or words.
1:18:42
I I I some of my friends who are huge bestsellers and they do the five pages a day or 2,000 words a day and I was like, why is this you know?
1:18:52
>> [laughter] >> I mean, what if really you're writing five pages?
1:18:55
Are you writing 2,000 words?
1:18:57
What if they all suck, but you had the next word was going to be just awesome?
1:19:01
You just going to leave and go play golf or whatever. But, you know, whatever.
1:19:05
You know, everybody has their own way of dealing with it.
1:19:06
But I, you know, if I am running to my desk to write, that is a good thing.
1:19:12
If I write fast, that is a good thing because it is crystallized and I know where I want to go.
1:19:15
So when I when I write fast, I write well because that means that every all the cylinders are clicking where they should be.
1:19:21
But I it has to start with a premise of if am I excited about this?
1:19:26
If I'm excited about it, I can bring some great stuff.
1:19:30
And then I don't have to worry about gee, is this a trendy thing?
1:19:32
Is this what people are reading these days?
1:19:34
You know, is this the latest romantic or whatever.
1:19:37
No, it has to start with what's in my heart.
1:19:40
If am I excited about this?
1:19:43
If I'm not, then don't write it because there's no way in the hell that anybody's gonna enjoy reading it because you're not going to bring it.
1:19:49
It's not going to be there.
1:19:49
The words are not going to be there, the characters, the plot.
1:19:51
It's just gonna it's going to be So, the the biggest question is you have got to find something that interests you.
1:19:57
And what I try to do every day of my life is to learn things I didn't know that day.
1:20:01
And I try to learn as much about the world as I can.
1:20:06
And I have all these little knowledge pots, I call them, across this huge spectrum.
1:20:10
And when I think of an idea, I reach over to this knowledge pot and then this one and this one and this one and maybe this one back here.
1:20:16
And all of a sudden, I put it together and it's totally original because nobody else's knowledge pots are like mine.
1:20:24
And because I've remembered them, they're part of my knowledge base. I'm interested in them.
1:20:28
But it's like nobody's ever taken a C 164 and something in cerillic and put them together into a story.
1:20:36
But I just did that because I had that knowledge base and I and all of a sudden it struck me that if I took these elements together, this could be quite fascinating. >> Right.
1:20:46
That's what I always start with.
1:20:49
>> And then later on in the process as you're thinking through a scene, I saw you talking about the emotional sequence of a scene and I thought that was really piqued my attention.
1:20:57
You have a finite number of setups in a novel where you can just go for it.
1:21:04
And you can't miss those opportunities because there aren't many of them.
1:21:11
Any novel, I can't keep you up here all the time at the top of the roller coaster.
1:21:14
I got to bring you back down at some point.
1:21:16
And then the tension is built is when you I bring you back up slowly and you're at the top waiting.
1:21:21
You're like, "What the hell is going to happen?" And there you go.
1:21:24
And there goes the stomach up into your throat.
1:21:25
those moments are, you know, they are few and far between.
1:21:28
And when I'm writing and in the middle of a novel and I'm writing a novel and I know the potential for a scene like that is coming, it's electrifying. It's it's giddy.
1:21:40
You're like, I'm going to in just three days from now, I'm going to unleash this and I've been waiting 300 pages to do this.
1:21:47
And then when it's over, you know, it's almost like you're you're you know, you just took a pop of meth and you're coming down. Never done meth.
1:21:57
I just want to use that as, you know, [laughter] um but it's like it's like this high and then you hit hit a low because it's on the paper and it's done.
1:22:06
And every book should have a few of those, at least one.
1:22:10
Um and you have to one have the balls to go for it.
1:22:14
Um and two, just know that the opportunities are very few.
1:22:19
It's almost like when you when you're raising your kids and they have the special moments in their life, you know, it could be if you're Catholic, it could be a first communion or confirmation, college degree, law degree or whatever.
1:22:32
Those are few moments in time when all good stuff comes together.
1:22:35
And when that happens, when I write those scenes, I don't rush through them. I slow it all down. I want it to last.
1:22:43
I want it to have meaning for me.
1:22:45
And I want to make sure that when I'm executing on a particular scene, I'm doing it to the best of my ability.
1:22:50
And I don't do that by rushing through it.
1:22:52
I do it by slowing it down.
1:22:53
I >> think you've written 53 novels. >> Yeah.
1:22:57
>> But also seven children's books, >> right?
1:22:59
>> So, how are the lessons of writing the same and different when you're writing a children's book?
1:23:05
>> You know, the only difference between adult fiction and writing for younger audiences is word choice.
1:23:08
all the rest is the same, if not even more heightened, because kids are incredibly sophisticated these days.
1:23:16
Um, and you write down to them at your apparel.
1:23:18
Um, just because they might be 10, 11, 14 doesn't mean that they're don't know what a good book is. They do.
1:23:26
And the other thing, too, is, you know, kids have a lot going on in their lives, and you have to capture their attention quickly and then keep it.
1:23:35
It's not like I can have a 50page buildup for, you know, a 14-year-old.
1:23:39
that's just not going to work.
1:23:40
Unless I write to, you know, 50 perfect pages, which is really hard to do.
1:23:44
So, you have to know what your audience is and where you want to go with the story.
1:23:48
Um, but you want to keep people's attention.
1:23:51
And, um, the way I do that is not necessarily by blowing stuff up or somebody dying.
1:23:55
It's by writing about interesting characters, interesting things they're doing.
1:24:00
And also building suspense up like the reader can sense that something significant is coming.
1:24:06
they just have to hold on a little bit longer, you know, and go through some of the more pacing that I need to do to get my characters where they need to be.
1:24:14
But they know that all of this is moving towards ahead where something really fascinating is going to happen.
1:24:20
You know, Hitchcock did that beautifully in all of his films.
1:24:21
He never showed you the smash. He led your imagination.
1:24:26
You know, we never saw, you know, in Psycho, we never saw Janet Lee die, but when you see that, you know, the fake blood going down the drain, you know what happened.
1:24:36
and it was the leadup and then I try to leave stuff to the imagination of my readers.
1:24:40
I don't have to spell everything out for them.
1:24:42
I tell you, you know, one of the best westerns I've ever seen, this this this movie sort of changed the way I I write some stuff is Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood. It came out in 1992.
1:24:52
And I'm watching that film.
1:24:55
There's a scene where Eastwood shoots some another guy in the gut and the guy is slowly bleeding to death.
1:25:00
And Eastwood is they're far enough apart where they can't hurt each other, but Eastwood spends like five minutes on that scene where he's and they're talking back and forth and the guy knows he's dying.
1:25:09
He got he's belly shot and there's no hospital.
1:25:13
It's like, you know, this is the West. Couple of things.
1:25:14
One, it showed Eastwood had to go through knowing that he had just killed a man and he was not yet dead, but he was going to die.
1:25:23
And then also knowing the audience could look and say, you know, this is not one of those movies where guy comes in and shoots 12 people and they just die quickly and then you move on.
1:25:33
There's like nothing happened.
1:25:33
You watch this guy die for five minutes, you know, in agony.
1:25:37
And like that action by Eastwood had repercussions, [snorts] consequences for someone, not just for the guy dying, but for Eastwood, you could tell he was changed by what he had done, too.
1:25:48
So when I tell people when you write action, I know it seems counterintuitive.
1:25:52
When you write action, the best action is when you slow it down. Huh?
1:25:56
Not when you speed it up.
1:26:00
When you speed it up, people miss the impact.
1:26:02
They miss the consequence. There's no consequence. 12 guys are dead. So what? We moved on.
1:26:05
Now we're in this scene over here.
1:26:07
When you watch it happen, and you watch it happen, and you keep watching it happen, and you're like, damn, that guy's dead.
1:26:14
you know, and then you remember that and all of a sudden the whole story is given a gravitas that maybe it didn't have before.
1:26:23
>> Well, what's wild is that's kind of how the human mind works, right?
1:26:25
Like you ask someone about, hey, tell me about a car crash.
1:26:27
What is the first thing they say?
1:26:29
It's like time slowed down. >> Yeah.
1:26:31
>> And they remember all of these things.
1:26:34
It's like the movie in our mind is exactly that.
1:26:35
It is, you know, it's it's a it's a marvelous way to leave an impact on someone um by slowing it down so they can just burrow down in what you're trying to do and live it for as long as possible because then they remember.
1:26:52
People don't remember snapshots, they remember longer form stuff.
1:26:56
>> You're talking about Hitchcock. I pulled up this quote.
1:26:57
There was no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. >> Correct.
1:27:02
Pretty much every movie you ever did, that's was the basis for it. Let's end here.
1:27:05
You talk about not really reading writing books, but no, it's important to actually read the masters. Read the masters. Why do you say that?
1:27:14
>> Well, you know, self-help books, it's like, well, I can't write a real book, so I write a self-help book.
1:27:18
No dis against people who write those self-help books.
1:27:21
They, you know, there's an interest for that and a demand for that.
1:27:24
I'm just saying from my personal experience, it's not just learning how to, it's not reading a book to learn how to write a book.
1:27:32
It's reading a book just to read a book and getting the pure pleasure out of reading.
1:27:37
And then at some point for me, this is my again my personal experience reading novels and I look at it and I like god that was a great story and then I and I then I would ask myself why was it a great story?
1:27:49
And I started going back to the novel.
1:27:51
Well, this this one particular character they changed so much.
1:27:55
You know, they started out here and they got and they were here and how did that happen?
1:27:58
And you go through the story and you're like, now I see these significant moments how it changed this person and wow, that was just incredible.
1:28:06
And what you're doing by doing that is not a self-help book telling you, okay, you got to start out with this premise and have this really great thing happen early on and they keep people's attention, blah blah blah blah blah.
1:28:15
You're actually seeing the movie for real, you know, while it's being acted out by great actors and you see the impact and you see what could be if you put the words together just right.
1:28:27
It's not this discreet learning experience like you're in school.
1:28:29
It's the unspooling of a story in front of you.
1:28:33
You know, I read I read Mockingbird like most people read Mockingbird when I was a kid.
1:28:37
And back then it was just an adventure story with kids roughly my age and I thought it was so cool.
1:28:41
And then when I was in college, I read it again and I realized this is about all about racism, you know, about justice.
1:28:50
The best books grow with you because the maturity in the books is always there, but it's not in you yet.
1:28:55
You're not mature enough yet.
1:28:57
But as you grow, all of a sudden more of the story comes out to you and says, "Hey, here I've been here all along.
1:29:02
Now you're ready to receive me." You know, enjoy. Right?
1:29:03
So that's why great books, you should go back.
1:29:07
So for me, reading was a way for me to understand how special stories could be and the opportunity that I could have when I wrote my own stories because the impacts they had on me, I wanted to have those same impacts on other readers in the future.
1:29:19
And that's why reading the masters for me is the way till you sit down and you're not just being told how to build a story.
1:29:29
you are reading a story that someone already wrote and and they and whether it's worthy or not at the end if you're like that was a hell of a story and all of a sudden it was worthy of you to use that as motivation if you want to be a writer at some point in the future and that's exactly what happened to me.
1:29:45
I read so many great books I was like I want to do this you know I want to make other people feel like I'm feeling like it right now after I just finished that novel because why?
1:29:52
Because it's like the greatest feeling in the world.
1:29:56
>> I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. in Richmond, Virginia.
1:29:58
And when I was born, segregation was the law of the land.
1:30:02
Civil Rights Act had not been passed.
1:30:04
So I I grew up in a black and white world.
1:30:05
And I was told by everybody that's how the world should be ordered.
1:30:10
And the one thing that saved me were books.
1:30:12
You know, Mark Twain once said that travel is fatal to prejudice.
1:30:14
He traveled the world a couple of times on his book tours.
1:30:17
And what he meant was if you see people where they live, you find out one thing really quickly.
1:30:20
They're just like you and me.
1:30:22
Well, I couldn't travel when I was a kid, but I like to think I travel the world without a plane ticket or passport through reading books.
1:30:28
And when people would come to me and they'd use the boogeyman argument, you need to be afraid of those people.
1:30:33
See, they look different from you.
1:30:33
And my answer to that was, I read all about them in lots of books.
1:30:37
So, what's your what's you have another argument because that one's not going to work with me.
1:30:43
So, I grew up in a world full of racism and I turned out as a not being a racist because of books, you know, because those arguments no longer work with me.
1:30:53
And I, you know, I always like to say that books are like body armor against bigotry because they are.
1:30:56
Books are like body armor against every bad thing in the whole world.
1:30:59
They just, they just are, you know.
1:31:01
So, that's that's my view.
1:31:04
Anyway, >> I'll tell you what, I've done almost 150 of these.
1:31:07
I there's not many where I feel like I learn more than in this conversation. Holy cow.
1:31:10
That's what happens when you write 60 books.
1:31:13
Just a machine gun of things I'd never thought about before.
1:31:19
It was great to meet you. Thank you very much. >> I'm Same here.
1:31:21
I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah.