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This is the library of Dean Coons.
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We're at his house and he's written more than a 100red books and sold more than 500 million copies of them.
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And what makes him different is that unlike most mass market writers, he cares so much about the craft.
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He just loves the English language.
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We talked about why he stopped outlining his novels, how to create rich metaphors, and how to take characters and make them come to life, and how to do that systematically.
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But honestly, this interview is is so much deeper than that, and I think you're going to like it. All right.
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Well, we're here in your insane, insanely magnificent home library.
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And what I want to talk to you about, what I want to start with is why you decided to stop outlining and just get rolling with your writing.
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Well, I I had started at a time when uh you were encouraged to outline and then the publisher would buy the book based on the outline and pay you half the advance so you had money to live on what you wrote.
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Uh and uh I did that for a number of years.
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And at one point, nothing was working to the level I wanted it to.
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And I began to be dissatisfied with publishers reactions to the finished book.
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They would have the outline.
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If you're in a creative process, you're not going to stick to the outline because ideas are going to come up that are better.
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If you stick to the outline, you're going to produce less of a quality book than you would produce if you just let the creativity flow.
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So, I would get excited because the book would get better than the outline.
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But when I delivered it, the publisher would be disappointed that it wasn't like the outline.
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And I recognize this is a dead end.
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Uh they are now disappointed.
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Well, we thought we were getting this, but we're getting that.
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And I would say, "Yes, you're getting that, but it's better than this.
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You say you should be happy."
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But no, they weren't happy.
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So, it was then that I decided, okay, I I'm not going to work this anymore.
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I'm I at that point already, characters were beginning to drive the fiction for me.
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What do you mean by that?
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mean by that? that if I've said if you give the characters free will as we have free will which I believe they have then uh the characters go places you don't anticipate I have young writers will say to me how does that work you're creating these characters they don't have free
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will you're telling them what to do and where to go yes and no and if as a writer you stop telling them what to do and where to and just lay back, think about the story and all that might be forthcoming and then let them tell you, let them take the flow of it where they may suggest. And if the characters are
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And if the characters are actually characters, not just puppets, they do start having their own thoughts that surprise you.
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So, do you feel like sometimes your characters will say things and do things where you're like, "That wasn't me, Dean, that did that.
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That was actually this character." Yeah. You feel that?
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And that's when you know it's working. Huh.
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Uh and it can be quite exciting.
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Uh and and sometimes very strange.
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You get to a moment where a character you're typing along and the character because you're in the character uh the character says and you're typing and you laugh at the line. It's a funny line.
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But it implies a course of action you didn't see coming.
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And then I used to stop and go, "No, no, no.
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That's not what we can do because that's not where I've thought this story is going."
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What I learned over the years was trust the character.
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If that had hap happens and you go, "Well, that throws everything off the rails.
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I don't know where we're going now." That's better.
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let the character have that choice and now you think where this is going from this point.
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Uh it's it's in a way you're talking to your subconscious.
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I think uh I'm not so crazy.
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I am crazy but I'm not so crazy that I think it carries actually are real people.
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But if you treat them like they are real people and let them breathe and uh don't always try to preconceive what they will do, they do do things that I would have never contemplated and always it leads to a better novel.
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Now with the way that you write, you kind of go page by page and get this page right, then the next page right.
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You don't just go through the whole book and then begin to revise.
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And you know, sometimes if I'm hanging out with friends or whatever, I'll just start telling a story and I'll keep going with the story and I don't really like where the story's ended up. I'm sort of in a pickle.
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Does that ever happen to you or do you feel like you move slowly enough that that ends up not being an issue there?
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When I've I've known other writers who it is very unusual to work the way I work. Yeah, no kidding.
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Uh, and uh, I've had them say, "But you have no momentum if because I have so such self-doubt. I always have.
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I've never gotten rid of it." You still have it. Oh, yeah.
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And so I start the book, the first page, I have to get that page to what I consider perfection.
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Somebody better than me might not think of it as perfection, but I can't make that page any better.
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I can't make the language any better.
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can't make the imagery any better.
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I can't do anything to improve it.
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Then I move on to the next page.
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The self-doubt comes back and I go through that page the same way.
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I move very page by page through the book.
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Uh 10 20 drafts per page.
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Then at the end of a chapter, I go back and read print it out and read it because you're seeing a print out what you don't see in the screen.
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And I do that a couple of times.
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But then after that chapter, I rarely go back because of how I once said I move through a book like a a coral reef is built on all the dead bodies of these little creatures.
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Uh I just pile it up over time and it goes where it goes. Um it works for me.
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It's uh it's sometimes you feel like you're on a cliff's edge because is this I just delivered a book that uh my publisher is about to receive it today but my agents liked it. My wife liked it.
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So but it's very unusual.
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The uh the narrator is a man whose IQ is about 75.
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So I had to create and he's very admirable and very enchanting character or he should be if I do it right.
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And when writing about him I had to create an a syntax and a grammar for him that are commensurate with his IQ.
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Uh but it also had to be something that the reader would flow with would not be hampered by. Right.
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And it had to get beyond that there has to come a point because you want them to absolutely fall in love with his character.
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And to do that, they not only have to be able to follow his narration without effort, but it has to start to be more enchanting almost than regular English.
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And that was something I'd never tried before.
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It's always fun to try something you never tried before, but it's also like leaping out of a plane without a parachute.
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So, how'd you go about doing that?
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How did you go developing that language? Watch movies.
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You go to some state fair and talk to the stupidest people you can find. Like, what do you do?
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No, you get into the head of the character. You read. You do your research. Okay.
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Uh you uh you read about somebody in that position in life. Uh and it all depends.
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Uh one of the points of this book is even the lives that seem of no consequence to a lot of people do have consequence to the rest of us.
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And there is no life without meaning.
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uh you can throw your meaning away but uh by your behavior but uh simply because you've got an IQ of 75 which once would have been called a uh does not mean there isn't effect you will have positively on all the people around you and that's what this character does throughout the book.
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he sort of enchants people and changes lives without really quite knowing he's doing it, but it's because of who he is and how he sees the world that affects other people.
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Um, I will say it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
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I had to keep going through the book and saying, "Okay, that line does that go too is he too self-aware? Is he too this or that?"
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But it is challenges like that that really makes writing exciting.
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Otherwise, you're sitting in a room at a keyboard and that's not exciting.
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So, it's what you create that makes you excited and it has to be something you're afraid you're going to screw up big time.
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Make this concrete for me.
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like can you walk me through a scene or like a series of dialogues of like what that conversation would look like normally sort of the intuitive way versus now we got a 75 IQ person and what does that look like?
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I'd have to go get the manuscript and read it to you. Okay.
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Well, this is from page one.
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I don't know if it's necessarily the best, but I think you'll get the flavor of it.
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I'll skip the first paragraph.
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He's talking this whole novel into a machine because he can neither read nor write.
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And he says, "For a while back in the day, after it happened so terrible like it did, there was things I wished I could sweep out my mind, but mama would call that chicken thinking."
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When bad things happen, like when folks is mean to you and calling you names that aren't your real name, but just words said to hurt your feelings, then you want to forget.
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But when you want to forget, you need to think about a chicken and her eggs and don't fall into chicken thinking.
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The chicken lays her eggs and means to hatch a chick, but out of all of a sudden the egg is gone.
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She don't go looking for the egg.
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Maybe she wonders what the heck happened to it.
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Maybe she even seen us take the egg from the coupe.
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But it's easier for her to lay new eggs.
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So she says to herself, she says, "I don't want to know what happened to my little egg because I'll be sad.
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So I'll just forget about it and lay more."
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We keep talk taking away her eggs and she keeps laying more.
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She don't never hatch a chick, never has a brood of her own, and never known why.
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What kind of life is that?
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If we never known why things happen, we'll never be as happy as we could be. That's what mama says.
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Mama says finding out why things happen will for sure make you sad sometimes.
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But you have to know some sad if you're going to know what the why of things.
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You can't known the why of it all if you don't known being happy.
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If all you've known is being happy. That sounds hard.
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But it's just the way the world is.
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You can't change the world. So get over it.
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The story I've got to tell into this machine starts out hard and sad.
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But it won't never stay that way.
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It's grammar that we as we understand except the verbs and the tenses and the connections are very different.
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And uh but if they're consistent and the reader falls into that difference and I hope uh we'll see.
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But I fell in love with the voice and and he's very funny.
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Sometimes aware that he's funny and sometimes not. Yeah.
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But the key is you never laugh at the character otherwise that destroys everything.
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You have to laugh with him even in the the sort of sadness of his condition.
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The thing that struck me in that is these deeper points of wisdom that are just extremely simple.
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Do you know about the bell curve IQ memes? Mhm. You know what that is? Yeah. Yeah.
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I mean that's sort of what it's like, right?
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There's a deep wisdom on the left side of the bell curve that I think you're getting at there. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah.
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In fact, he becomes in many ways the wisest person in the novel. Yeah.
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When you write something like the intro to the big dark sky, in every life there are strange coincidences, occurrences that we find inexplicable and even moments that seem supernatural.
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On this occasion, in the lonely vastness of Montana, the heavens were moonless, the blind face of the night pressed against the windows, the only light in the room issued from a television, and a young girl sat in communion with the dead. Okay.
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So, when you start some a book like that, did you you wrote that then you just kind of kept going throughout the whole book or do you come back and revisit that? Uh, no.
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I I well and there are rare cases where you get into a book and something occurs that will necessitate going back and adjusting certain things but because of the way I work uh rarely do I have to go back.
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Now that sounds like it's one draft but it's not.
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It's 20 30 drafts a page because of the way I work.
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It's the way that's worked best for me.
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The first time I worked this way was a book called Strangers, which was the first hardcover bestseller I ever had.
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And I began to find there there's this thing I sometimes say when I writers ask me for advice.
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One thing I say to them is that because we all do this when we're starting out in a career, we want to scope the industry.
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We want to know what is what we're supposed to do, what is supposed to work, what you're not supposed to do.
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Uh, and that's leads to a problem.
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And I've said there is an encyclopedia of common wisdom in publishing.
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All of it is common and none of it is wise.
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And you have to get aware of that and you have to go your own way and just stick with it because uh there's so many ways you can be sent wrong because that's the way we always do it.
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And if I've seen anything in my career, it's not mean arguments with publishers, but arguments over you can't do that.
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And then you say, why not? Nobody has done that. Nobody does that.
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or if somebody did that, it didn't work.
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What's an example of that?
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I'll go to a a novel of mine called Lightning.
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Uh I had Strangers was a hardcover bestseller, not at the top of the list, but then the next one, Watchers, went further up the list.
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And then I delivered a book of lightning.
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Now, my publisher had been telling me that I would never be a hardcover bestseller.
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I would only be a paperback bestseller.
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I never could get an explanation of why that was the case.
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Another common wisdom, I started out in paperback.
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I would stay there nine times out of 10.
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Um and um so I delivered Lightning and my publisher just hated it.
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I mean said she said we have to put this book on the shelf for seven years and if your career keeps building as it has been then we can publish it in seven years and it won't destroy it but if you publish it now it'll destroy your career and I thought I I just feel the totally opposite and I had to say what what is there about this book that well the first argument was it's got too much comic element in it and it's a suspense scary sort of story.
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Uh and that became a long argument for decades trying to say I can write humor inside what is meant to be a suspenseful story and it won't bleed away the suspense.
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But the big thing was your character is a child through the first third of a novel and then comes of age and whatnot.
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That makes it a young adult novel.
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Uh and I she said and you have an adult audience.
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They won't buy a novel if they think the character is a child.
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Uh and I said what about Oliver Twist?
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uh whatever and I just started naming off all the novels where the characters are children.
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Uh uh it didn't matter because the wisdom was that was a career killer.
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Uh and we argued for six months and I finally said uh look we're having success. We're moving up.
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It has to be the next book published or I have to go somewhere else and publish the book.
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It went to number three on the bestseller list.
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It went through 20 printings in hard coverver.
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Uh I think it became number one in paperback and the very next book after that became my first number one hard cover.
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So it meant people like that book.
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But the wisdom was what you're doing there is going to destroy your career.
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Uh so you have to and and you're dealing not with stupid people, you're dealing with people successful in the publishing world.
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So you have to get the ability to tell the difference between what is simply something they believe because they've always believed it and something that they're right about.
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And that's the hardest thing for a young writer. Yeah.
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To find where that line is.
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So how did you think about developing your voice as a writer over the years?
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And I mean obviously you've sold an insane amount of books, something like what 500 million books more.
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I mean, it's just it's ludicrous to think about, but how not from my perspective, I I mean, it's just absolutely bonkers.
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But so, how did you think about developing a voice and how much of that was like dictated by the market, so to speak, versus some sort of internal locus of taste? It it was all internal.
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I uh I started out as a science fiction writer in paperbacks because that's largely what I read as a teenager and young adult uh into my early 20s.
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Uh and I had no great facility for it.
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I would one day I realized I'm selling this but I'm never going to write at the top of this field.
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I just it's not who I am. Wow.
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Uh, so I have to move but I the first thing I did was write a comic novel and it was a book called Hanging On.
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It was published very good reviewers, but it didn't sell particularly well.
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And and we're talking the 70s, the 80s at this point, late7s. This was the early '7s. Early 70s. Yeah.
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And uh and I said to the publisher publisher said, "We love the book, but why would you expect it to sell very well?"
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And I said, "Well, you published it."
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and he said, "Yeah, we loved it, but we're looking toward your future.
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Uh, comic novels don't sell."
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And I thought, "Well, somebody should have told me that earlier."
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Uh, so then I moved towards suspense.
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That was moving with the market.
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But I also was now reading people in that field that I really liked and respected like Donald Westlake, uh, who wrote very serious suspense, but also very comic suspense at times.
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and uh and the whole Elmore Leonard before anyone knew of him his novels were selling at $4.
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95 in those days and uh he got to be mid to late 50s before he actually became a success.
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Uh but he was writing wonderful books then. So I was read John D.
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McDonald, my favorite modern author.
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Uh, and uh, uh, so I started moving that way, but inevitably because in high school I was a class clown, I've always been on that side of I have a sense of humor.
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It's why my wife and I've been married all this time.
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We both have pretty absurd sense of humor.
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Um, and it kept leaking into the books.
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And when I was being told you can't do that by writing this kind of fiction, the more I'm told I can't do these, the more I want to find a way to do it. Of course. Of course. Of course.
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And uh uh so how the voice evolved, it was almost out of rebellion against what I was supposed to be doing.
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And on I was aware of it on both a conscious and more extremely I think on a subconscious level cuz I would do things that if I stopped to think about it I would have known they're going to say we have a big problem with this.
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So I wouldn't think about it until the book was half done and then I'd start thinking about what I was getting into. Tell me about this.
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You've used the word enchanted a few times.
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You've used the word mystery.
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How did you go about developing that?
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Because even just being with you, you have a great appreciation.
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You even said the word magic earlier for these parts of the world and reality that are just absolutely real, but we can't reason ourselves into.
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You've exactly expressed something that I been hesitant to talk about.
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I've had things happen in my life that are so strange that they tell me and not just to me that I won't say what this was.
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There were several months in our lives where things were happening to me that I didn't even tell my wife about and our marriage has been, you know, long and fruitful and and wonderful.
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But I thought she's going to think I'm nuts.
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And one day she said to me, "Some things are happening I have to talk to you about."
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And it was the same things that were happening to me.
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And someday I'm going to write about this because what it said to me is we do not understand the world.
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There is something much stranger about it than we normally see and hear.
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And and when all this was happening, it passed.
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And it didn't happen again for a long time.
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And then it makes you start to think, did I imagine that?
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No, I know I didn't because fortunately we both had the same experiences um around it.
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And all my life I've had that sort of strange thing.
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Uh I think it it might have come from I haven't given a lot of thought to this but because I had such a bad childhood poverty, my dad's alcoholism, his violence, my mother's sickliness, uh uh I it took me until I was I think 40some.
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I used to say what really shaped me was the poverty and my father's violence.
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And in one point in my 40s, I had this sort of epiphany.
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And the real effect of all that was not his violence. It wasn't the poverty.
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It wasn't the fear of where are we going to have are we going to have a roof over our head. It wasn't any of that.
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It was the fact that being in a small town where everybody knows everybody's business to one extent.
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Everybody knew my dad was the town drunk gambler womanizer.
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It was the perpetual humiliation that was what really was the most powerful effect on my childhood and growing up.
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And and it was kind of an eyeopening moment to to realize that uh because it was it was constant humiliation.
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Everybody knew who your father was, what he was like, what he did.
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Even my aunts would always say to me, "You're just like your father."
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And I knew it was nothing like my father.
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Um, and so all of that I realized had a profound effect and drove me to live uh within myself very much.
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Uh because uh my mother was a wonderful person, but beyond understanding the things that that interested me as as a growing child and so forth.
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and why she put up with the life she had, I'll never know.
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Uh but uh as a consequence, I really grew up totally internal.
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I had a couple of friends, but not many.
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And both of those friends were a little strange as I was.
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And there's something about growing up internally and watching the world less than you participate in it that makes you, I think, start to see things and wonder about them that maybe you wouldn't. Right?
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Like if I'd been on the football team and and had all that uh been in the right clicks, I don't think I'd have had the same take on the world.
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But from a very young age, I began to see things about life that were very weird and didn't make sense to me.
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Uh, and some of it can be the behavior of people, but a lot of it can be those moments in life when things shouldn't go the way they go and they do.
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And it's to your benefit sometimes and you stop and think, what was that?
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Why would that happen to me?
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It's against the flow of reality or you have moments where something bad happens to you that shouldn't happen to you but it triggers some thought process in you that becomes very valuable and I just have come to believe uh that there is some kind of guiding influence in life if you just be aware of it.
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I know so many artists who good artists who would trade their art if they could write novels and I know a lot of novelists including me if they'd have had their choice would have been visual artists because when I was in college I could paint and sell my paintings and I thought for a period of time that's what I wanted to do but I didn't go that way.
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I I listened, in other words, to some of that guidance that I think we get, but we generally tend to ignore.
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Well, it's interesting that you say that because now I'm thinking about the writing that I've read from you and you're painting with words.
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Like, as I was reading, I was like, "Wow, you're so descriptive and really have a way of taking a scene and bringing it to life."
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And what I I I actually almost now that I know that about you see that kind of envy that you have for visual artists and you're like dang it I wasn't given that gift and now I'm going to put it into my language.
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I have counseledled some friends who who sort of their art career never goes where it should because they just don't appreciate it that they have this gift and the I've I've said to a couple of people, but it's it's the gift you've got, so go for it. Yeah.
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Do everything you can think to do with it.
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And uh I've said sometimes that talent of any kind is a gift. It's unearned. You're born with it. That's what's a gift.
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A gift is not something that you get.
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A gift is something that is given to you that you just receive.
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And I think that comes with a responsibility to use it to the best of your ability and to see what you can do with it.
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So if that's why I got out of science fiction, I realized I don't have what it takes to do this correctly, right?
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I can write and sell, but it isn't to the level I'd like to be working at.
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And it doesn't use the gift to the extent I can.
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And that becomes a search.
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How do you use what you've got to the best you can?
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Well, the other thing is you seem to be given not just on the scale of the macro of like what kind of writing should I do, but also certain ideas seem to just be air dropped to you like in dreams or whatever and you're like whoa, where did that come from?
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And then I guess you just become a steward or a custodian of an idea that's been given to you from a from from from God or something.
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Some ideas, you know, where they come from that they're still kind of inexplicable.
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They come from what they do.
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I've used this as an example before.
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I was coming home from a studio meeting that had not gone well.
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They almost never go well.
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So, I was not in a good mood. So, like a movie studio. Yeah. Okay.
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And I was in my wife's SUV and it was the days of six uh uh CDs in a and she had Simon Garfuncle and and Paul Simon and we both agree Paul Simon's maybe the greatest living songwriter uh and uh I can listen to him endlessly.
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So I was listening to it coming home in a mood and uh and a song came on I knew perfectly well called patterns and there was a line in it.
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My life is made of patterns that can scarcely be controlled.
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And that line just it was like an arrow.
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I had I was in the car and within 15 minutes I had an idea for a novel called Life Expectancy.
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And I think it's one of the best things I've ever done.
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My editor at that time thought it was the best thing I'd ever done. Sold extremely well.
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Uh, and I I love that novel, but I know where it came from, but there are others I have no idea where that idea came from.
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Uh, you I've had two that actually came from dreams.
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Uh, people think you get all of them from dreams. Not the case.
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But uh some of them come um from I have a novel coming in the first year called uh the friend of the family.
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I have no idea where that came from.
31:42
I was just at the keyboard and I started typing the point of view of this character not thinking it was a novel.
31:55
Uh, and it became a novel that uh, my wife is my first reader always and she gets at the same time as the agents, but she is quicker.
32:04
And, uh, all these years of marriage, she reads the book, uh, she comes to me, we talk about it, and I value her feedback.
32:14
And, uh, this was the first time ever I know how quickly she reads.
32:21
She got the book at uh like six o'clock on a Friday and I knew she couldn't finish it was almost 400 pages that day.
32:30
So I figured she'll finish it by noon on Saturday.
32:33
So I'm in my office doing things and noon comes and I don't hear from her 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00.
32:43
Now I'm starting to get worried.
32:46
Uh I think she doesn't want to talk to me about this book.
32:50
And now I hear pots and pans pans banging around in the kitchen.
32:54
It's a Saturday afternoon and I thought, uh, just deal with it.
33:00
So I went in the kitchen and I said, uh, well, you're finished. Yes. I said, is it that bad?
33:08
And she said, no, I just don't know how to talk about it.
33:14
And I I mean we've been married 58 years, 59.
33:20
And uh I said, "What do you mean you don't know how to talk about it?"
33:23
And she said, "I need more time.
33:25
I'll just say I used two boxes of Kleenex." And I went, "Okay." Wow.
33:34
It's meant to really shake you. And it shook her.
33:38
Uh, so it uh and where that came from, I'm not sure.
33:43
I was working on a book called The Face and into my head came along. My name is Odd Thomas. I lead an unusual life.
33:49
And I stopped and thought, what is that?
33:53
It has nothing to do with what I'm working on.
33:58
And I started to write down so I wouldn't forget it.
34:02
And the first and last time ever, I I wrote out 30ome pages by hand.
34:07
and it became the first chapter of the novel and I've never done it before since and I put it aside and finished the phase and said to myself that's going to be crap when I go back to it.
34:21
I mean I've never written anything by hand and it flowed.
34:23
Uh I went back and read it and I thought this is good.
34:30
Uh where did that come from?
34:33
Why did that name pop into my head?
34:33
Why did that whole story come to me in almost an instant?
34:38
That's the great mystery of this and it's one of the things that makes it so exciting to do when that happens.
34:46
It's like it it's it is mysterious.
34:48
Well, what's unique about you is both a great appreciation for the mystery of reality, but also like extreme discipline.
35:00
like you just sit down and you sit on your booty every single day and from sunrise to sunset and you just write and write and write and write and usually we see those two things as being completely uncorrelated with each other.
35:14
But you have them both in spades.
35:18
I think the reason I can sit there is because I love it. I love the process.
35:24
Uh there's there's writers who like having written and the whole process is painful and they get it done and then there's the interviews and there's the book signings and there's all the back and forth with your editor. I like the writing part.
35:41
The rest of it is less interest to me.
35:44
Uh but when I go in there in the morning, it's at my age, I shouldn't still be doing this.
35:49
Uh I I should have been burnt out because you can burn out in this.
35:54
Uh but so far the number of ideas just keep coming.
35:59
I think they're as good of a quality as the ideas I had before.
36:04
Facility with character I think only improves with time. Tell me about that.
36:09
A a great plot is important, but you can have a mediocre plot and if the characters are great, the book can be a huge success.
36:18
I think character is the center of good fiction.
36:25
If characters work, the character of Vod Thomas was so unusual that my publisher at that time hated the book so much that he wouldn't talk to me about it.
36:39
I he would only let me know what he thought through the editor which was not our relationship.
36:45
We spoke openly the publisher and I about things.
36:51
Uh he told me I said I so love this character and I think the story is so powerful.
37:00
I want to go on with him.
37:00
I think he's on a journey and I know what the journey is.
37:05
It's a journey to absolute humility.
37:07
And I said, "I have no idea what that's like.
37:10
I'm never going to be absolutely humble, but this character is going there, so I I want to see if I can take him there."
37:20
And he basically said, "I don't want to publish any more books of this character."
37:26
And I said, "I don't want to write only about this character, but I'm going to write more about it."
37:32
So we reached an agreement that I could write an auth.
37:45
Uh and then the book this was while the nobody else had seen the book except the my wife the editor and publisher.
37:53
Then the book came out in an advanced copy and book solvers loved it.
38:01
we had bigger orders than ever and then the reviews started coming in the advanced reviews and I don't think out ofund and some reviews we had more than one bad one.
38:11
Uh and the publisher finally came to me and said I was wrong.
38:19
I still don't like it but I'm obviously wrong. Yeah.
38:22
Uh, and uh, and that's that's the mysterious wonderful thing about it.
38:29
That character, I have no idea where he came from, but I ended up writing eight novels about him. Yeah.
38:36
And when you have a character like Odd Thomas or you're thinking about character in general, what are the elements of character that really matter?
38:43
What matters about character to me is the lead character.
38:48
Uh people say I write really terrifying villains and uh how do you get inside the head of a a sociopath?
39:02
Well, there again, I think that was in the strangest way a gift.
39:08
The la my father uh never could hold a job.
39:11
44 jobs in 34 years because he would punch out the boss. 44 jobs in 34 years.
39:17
My wife and I counted them up once.
39:22
Uh and uh he was an excellent salesman, but that wasn't his vision was he was going to become a millionaire overnight.
39:31
And uh that's why I gambled. Yeah.
39:35
and uh and came up with inventions that were so strange and or that but he could because he was a good salesman, he could get investors to put up money to make these things.
39:45
Then they wouldn't sell and then he would get in trouble for with the investors and it was we never saw any of the money either.
39:55
Uh but he was uh uh he became destitute the year after we moved to California.
40:03
And at last we didn't have him on a knocking on our door at 2:00 in the morning drunk.
40:08
And it was just such a relief to put 3,000 miles between us.
40:16
And then a friend of his, his only friend, uh uh called us up and said he's terribly ill.
40:23
He's not got a year to live. He's destitute.
40:26
Well, you can't send him money cuz he takes it to a bar.
40:31
He buys everybody drinks to play the big man and then tomorrow he doesn't have anything.
40:37
Uh so Jur and I talked and it was a real difficult decision, but we said he never supported my mother and me.
40:46
So now if I let him perish on his own, it's sort of the same thing he did to us.
40:53
So we have to take him control of him.
40:56
We brought him to California.
40:59
We uh got him an apartment. I got him a car.
41:02
I said, "The first time you're caught driving drunk, I take the car away."
41:06
It was like I became the father in the relationship. But it was very strange.
41:11
He used to drink a fifth a day and a six-pack of beer. That's a yikes. It's a lot.
41:17
And he smoked three or four packs of cigarettes a day. He lived to be 83.
41:22
He ate half a pound of bacon for breakfast every night.
41:28
That's a long life for habits like that. Yeah.
41:31
Uh and uh so we brought him out here uh and we okay, we'll take care of you.
41:35
He lived 14 years, not one.
41:38
So it became a much longer ordeal than we ever anticipated.
41:46
But during that time he ended up in the psych ward twice.
41:48
I won't go into all the details but then he had to have the first time he ended up it was threatening people and violence.
41:59
And the second time was coming after me with a knife in front of a lot of witnesses.
42:04
Uh, and I had to take a knife away from him and it was a pretty close go.
42:10
And uh, man, so first time he was diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic, tendency to violence complicated by alcoholism.
42:19
The second time that he was uh, uh, in the psycho word, uh, the diagnosis was sociopathic.
42:31
And so I say to people in the strangest way, I know how to write sociopaths because I grew up with one.
42:36
Uh, and that I wouldn't recommend to anybody, but when you look back on it, you think in a curious way, it's part of the gift. Yeah.
42:48
Uh, and uh, that's part of when you say an awareness of the mystery of the world and the strangeness of it.
42:58
That's one of the things I look back on often.
43:00
What seemed to me as a child about the worst thing in my life turned out to give me an insight into a certain kind of psychology that's been very valuable for the books I write. Yeah.
43:14
Growing up in a home like that seems like such a curse. Yeah.
43:15
I had certain fortunate things.
43:18
my best friend, his father was the town banker and uh and they had two cars and they lived in a nice house and I they would invite me over there often and I began to see a normal family and how different mine was.
43:38
And you when you grow up in a family that is highly abnormal and you don't have other examples, you come to think every house is this way.
43:49
So there were things that helped keep me, I think, sane.
43:54
Well, what I'm hearing you say is that you grew up in a very unfortunate situation and you had a lot that you needed to make sense of and you were up close and personal, very formative time with evil and schizophrenia and violence and anger and alcoholism and all of that.
44:11
And then also you've had these moments of seeing the mysteries and the enchantedness of reality.
44:20
And I really see how those two things just your life story combines in in your work.
44:24
It make makes a lot of sense actually.
44:26
Yeah, that's uh uh you you come to a certain point.
44:29
It takes most of my life to look back and say all of it was of value.
44:34
Uh it all depended on whether you uh but I when I finally started I didn't talk about my childhood or anything until I'd been writing for decades.
44:45
And then when I talked about it in interview, I was stunned that I suddenly was getting thousands of letters from people who had had similar childhoods.
44:58
Some not as bad as mine, some worse than mine.
45:00
And the question kept being, how did you get over this? How did you get past it?
45:06
I'm 50 now and I'm still in therapy and I'm this and that.
45:10
And it made me think, how do you get past it?
45:16
And what I said was, "This is not noble, but I think one thing that always motivated me was you have to get past it or the bastard won." Yeah.
45:26
You don't want the person trying to destroy your life to win.
45:31
And you have to have that kind of attitude. Yeah.
45:35
I don't know why this just popped into my mind, but I'm going to say it because it did.
45:39
I'm thinking of the story of Moses where Moses is he's talking to God and he says God says I want you to to be the leader and Moses says I can't do it.
45:47
I have a speech impediment. Like I just can't do it.
45:50
And God says you can do it. You can do it.
45:52
And there's a lot that we see throughout the scriptures around how it's just these ordinary people, but time and again with these great flaws, whether they're speech impediments, Paul being really short and sort of uh you know, the thorn in his in his spine or whatever it is.
46:10
And uh you just see it over and over again.
46:12
I was reading the story of Gideon yesterday of just these very ordinary people who have a lot of self-doubt who God raises up to do something kind of miraculous.
46:22
And it's sort of the we always think of the story of the David and Goliath, right?
46:26
Of like the spirit of God like leading David of like overpower Goliath.
46:30
But so much of the scriptures, what you're saying is just just ordinary people left and right who somehow find the courage to do something to do something meaningful.
46:42
And a lot of times what actually gives them the power to do what they do is something dark or difficult that happened earlier in their lives.
46:49
And it it's led for me uh I I've written some book wrote a series with the character Jane Hawk who is a a rogue FBI agent.
47:02
She's essentially the whole agency is against her and she's on the run.
47:06
Uh, but most of the people I write about are not like that.
47:11
I don't write series characters who are special agents or this or that.
47:16
My characters are bartenders or fry cooks or and that 70 IQ people with a strange amount of wisdom. Yeah.
47:23
Uh, and it's it's because in life I've sort of seen that's where a lot of good comes from.
47:32
Uh there's something to be said uh for suffering as long as it doesn't destroy you.
47:39
Uh and uh it it builds something else that and and gives you a certain compassion.
47:45
certain compassion. I think that uh you gives you the courage as a writer gives you courage to say okay this guy's going to I that was the thing about odd Thomas that caused some problem in my career is nobody is going to identify with the guy
48:01
who's a fry cookook as an action hero why not uh it's uh yeah it doesn't sound realistic I but he's not a guy who knows everything about weapons he's liable to use a mop uh instead of a gun, but he lives within his own world and and makes use of what he can get. So, yeah. So, So, yeah.
48:23
So, tell me about editing.
48:26
When you're editing and you're going through all those revisions, what do you feel like you're editing for?
48:30
What is the the kind of north star that you're driving towards? Fluidity of pros. Fluidity of pros. Yeah.
48:39
I want it to be I want it to what you said about vividness about Yeah.
48:43
Uh I want to use all the tools in the writer's toolbox.
48:48
Uh I think American fiction suffered a lot from the attempt to imitate Hemingway.
48:57
M Hemingway stripped it all down, but it was still the mystery and the underlying strangeness of the world is there by implication and all the imitations that came later stripped it down but didn't have that and uh and I think it did damage uh when I use so much metaphor simile and that in a novel that when I first started doing it got negative reaction.
49:31
That's not the way what people want to read.
49:35
And yet when I get mail, that is one of the things that people react to so strongly is is is the use of the language with all the tools that are there.
49:46
It's a beautiful language and it's just fun to bring it along and to keep smoothing it and making it more and more vivid.
49:56
So it flows and those metaphors and simileies don't pop at you like showmanship that they're there, but they flow into the uh music of the language.
50:08
And that's what I love so much is finding a way to say something that brings it along.
50:15
You'll sometimes suddenly realize you're writing in a poetic meter for a whole paragraph and you go, "Oh, I can't do that."
50:22
And then you stop and think, "Why can't I do that?
50:25
uh it's it's trying to bring the reader into it so that there there is this idea I think sometimes in academia academia that the harder it is the better it is.
50:39
I don't think that's true.
50:42
I I don't think u Dickens isn't hard to read.
50:46
Uh Dickens is easy to read but the depth is there.
50:51
So I uh I just when I it's polishing the pros uh and making sure that uh that anyone can read it and take something from it.
51:05
But I think that if you were to just cut out what you had said and said it's polishing the pros and making sure that anybody can understand it, you most people would hear that and say, "Oh, like Hemingway."
51:16
And you're actually rejecting that.
51:19
And so clarify that for me.
51:22
Yeah, I've I've written some books that are spare pros but also have more of of more figures of speech in it.
51:33
There are as many styles as there are writers.
51:37
Uh and so uh I'm just looking for a way that if I write a spare book, it nevertheless flows.
51:44
uh and the language kind of sings if at all possible.
51:53
Uh somebody I admire he he wrote two kinds of books.
51:59
First in his career he wrote a very dense kind of difficult to read. Not the pros. The pros was gorgeous.
52:11
But but the mysterious nature of historiousness is Cormarmac McCarthy.
52:20
Uh in the early books like the orchard keeper or those it's like whoa is this man's living on a different planet.
52:28
And yet the pros is so mesmerizing that you're pulled into this even if you're just saying what is going on here.
52:36
Then he moved to things like No Country for Old Men and The Road which is stripped down and just the opposite of everything in his first career.
52:47
And yet it reads, you know, it's the same writer, right?
52:53
And I think that's part of what I'm saying. You can move.
52:55
It doesn't all have to be dense and rich in its imagery.
52:59
It can be stripped down and still have the poetry of the English language in it.
53:09
And and that's sort of I just don't want the language is is a great and beautiful thing and I don't want to ever now that I'm older and can understand it better than I did when I started.
53:21
I I always want to do the best possible job with it.
53:26
When you think about trying to write with that beautiful language and find music that sings, I mean, I would bet that you're going to some sort of well, certain writers, certain styles, certain genres.
53:42
Where do you feel like the well is most lush where you can kind of go dig up that water and then kind of pour it into your own your own work?
53:48
There are different I think what you're saying is uh all of us are inspired by other writers. Exactly. Yeah.
53:58
And and sometimes you read writing that's just like it's like a springtime lush.
54:03
I mean, we're here in in in Newport Beach and I was telling you, you know, we're driving and it's it's late April and the poppies are just so alive and the the the the hills are green and like your mouth almost starts to like salivate as if there's water right in front of you.
54:23
And I feel that very much when I'm reading certain writers sometimes where I'm just like, "Oh my goodness, this well is endless."
54:30
and I'll go to those writers because it makes my own writing so much easier because I just feel this explosion of inspiration.
54:37
You know, when my wife and I were married, we didn't have a TV for 10 years and we couldn't afford one.
54:46
When we first married and then after a number of a year, we decided we didn't want one.
54:50
Uh and we each read about 200 novels a year.
54:57
Uh because that was our evenings.
55:00
We'd sit down each of us with a book and we'd read.
55:02
So I've read literally several thousand novels over the years and I've read so many different people that each writer I admire has a book or two I most admire.
55:15
That's an area of non-fiction and biography and then that's that.
55:21
But it's like there's certain writers I admire generally, but when I want to be inspired in my own, I keep going back to the same one or two of their books.
55:31
Uh the screenwriter William Goldman was a pretty darn good novelist.
55:36
Uh but his claim was writing Butch Cassidy and a Sundance Kid and all those movies.
55:42
Uh but his novels were very very well done.
55:45
But he had one uh novel in particular that is absolutely haunts me.
55:54
Uh the whole impetus of the novel is to to show you the folly of following certain rules about writing.
56:05
The character in this starts out he's in college. He's at Oberlin. Yeah.
56:10
and he's being claimed as a college student as having writing ability and his best friend is the son of a publisher.
56:20
So they become friends and they be they stay throughout life.
56:26
But this character is so brilliant because what Goldman did was have this character become so committed to the idea that you only write about what you know and misunderstands that.
56:38
I mean you can learn anything you know I don't know about uh well I just had a novel in which a character has lives by a place or mine which is gemstones that are flowing down out of the mountains buried in the soil in certain areas and if you sift the soil you can find gemstones.
57:00
So I had to learn about all that.
57:02
But you can write about it convincingly.
57:05
But there are people who come out of academia who think it means they have to write only about personal experience when they're writing fiction.
57:16
Uh and this character in Goldman's novel does that exactly.
57:22
And as a consequence, he keeps screwing up his life almost unconsciously so that he has something vivid and exciting to write about.
57:30
And he ends up putting himself in the most unimaginably worse hellish place at the end of this book.
57:40
And it's all for this reason that he's not really quite aware of.
57:45
It's one of the most brilliant things.
57:46
And I often go back to that book because the character, you know, it's so charming.
57:52
You're watching him destroy himself, but you kind of just love him.
57:58
And how is how do you do that?
57:58
What makes you love a character?
58:01
Because you were talking about that with 75 IQ guy.
58:05
Uh you're talking about that now.
58:05
Like where does that love for character come from?
58:10
Uh I think there are various human aspects that if the character has them uh makes the character more appealing.
58:20
Uh I said about odd Thomas that he goes on a journey to absolute humility.
58:23
Uh, and that humility is in this character in this novel who's got the lower IQ that his mother says to him, "You'll be all right if you do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly."
58:38
Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly. Yeah.
58:42
And uh and and he does he does those things.
58:49
And uh I tend sometimes people will say, "Oh, your lead characters are are too good.
58:56
They're they have too few flaws."
58:59
I don't think that's true at all. We're all flawed. They're flawed.
59:02
Uh except I don't think you just say about a character, okay, he's a he's a drunk and this or that and that gives him interesting flaws.
59:13
No, that just makes him a drunk or or the other.
59:16
Uh the flaws in a character can be much more subtle than that and then they're more convincing.
59:25
I think uh Thomas is in his humility almost too naive and it's the navete that gets him into trouble over and over again.
59:38
uh they have these problems but they're more on a scale of human problems instead of the problems of drama.
59:44
I want to talk about suspense and what what in a book creates suspense.
59:52
What are the elements of that?
59:56
Well, uh you have to I think we come back again to character.
59:59
You have to care about the character.
1:00:00
You have to care about what might happen to them.
1:00:03
uh if you're engaged in that level uh then I think the suspense works a great deal better than otherwise and uh and uh and a sense of not knowing where it's going uh what is commonly called twists and turns of the story line uh uh that matters a lot to people once the trick happens the reader has to look at it and say I should have seen that coming.
1:00:41
I I as a writer I don't like the tricks that just are thrown at you out of nowhere because they make for a nice plot development.
1:00:50
Um I'm speaking for myself that as how I write but uh it comes back I think again to character uh paying out the history of that character.
1:01:02
Often times uh there are things that you're hiding that you need to conceal about the character or the character needs to conceal from the reader.
1:01:13
Uh maybe not consciously.
1:01:17
Sometimes characters discover things about themselves in the course of the story.
1:01:24
Um, I never give that much thought to suspense.
1:01:27
I I I just uh get the character into a naughty situation and I'm pretty sure it's going to keep being naughty. So then what's going on?
1:01:35
Like do you feel like you like the phrase I've seen is low boredom tolerance?
1:01:41
So does it come from that that it's just natural for you to to to be like, "Okay, I'm bored.
1:01:47
this needs to go faster and also as fast and slow.
1:01:50
Is that the right dichotomy to think about suspense? Not necessarily.
1:01:53
I've written some novels that are, you know, 300,000 words and multiple story lines and uh and yet they if I can believe reviews and readers, they move quickly.
1:02:08
Uh it's it's how much event uh you're you're actually asking. It's so strange.
1:02:16
I don't think anyone's ever asked me before about how my thoughts on suspense.
1:02:23
I guess because it's such a natural part.
1:02:25
I have said that uh I think suspense is the key element of all good fiction, literary fiction as well because suspense is the key ele one of the key elements of our lives.
1:02:37
We never know what's going to happen to us between now and tomorrow between now and an hour from now.
1:02:44
Uh, and so suspense that is life.
1:02:47
Uh, and so a novel without some element of it probably isn't properly portraying what life is like.
1:02:57
Um, so I think of suspense that way more than I think about it as a suspense novel.
1:03:04
I don't think about what do I have to do to juice up the suspense for this character.
1:03:09
A perfect example of this probably is a novel I wrote called Intensity. Mhm.
1:03:13
And it's a woman who goes to visit a friend on a weekend and a psychopathic killer enters this house in the wine country and kills everyone in the house except her because he doesn't know she's there and then takes the body of her friend whom she doesn't know is dead and puts it in his motor home and drives away.
1:03:36
and she thinks the friend is alive and she leaves the house to get her friend out of the motor home, discovers the friend is dead and the killer comes back and gets into the motor home and now she's in it and he doesn't know she's there.
1:03:52
Uh, and that's that's the beginning of the novel.
1:03:58
Uh, and she has opportunities to get out of that.
1:04:02
Uh, and the biggest opportunity is, I think it's probably a quarter to a third of the way through the novel.
1:04:11
It's been so long ago I can't remember.
1:04:14
He stops for gas up the coastline.
1:04:18
It takes place in California and Oregon.
1:04:24
and he going up the coastline and somewhere north of Santa Barbara at one of those roadside sort of stops he pulls in to get gas and he goes into the uh there's a convenience store associated with it and when he goes into the convenience store and everything, she uh she gets out of the uh motor home but he comes back sooner than she thought.
1:04:52
And she's hiding under it now. And he's putting gas in.
1:04:57
And she thinks, "All I have to do now is get into the the convenience store and hide out until he goes away."
1:05:07
And she goes into the convenience store to hide.
1:05:09
And he comes into the convenience store and kills the clerks.
1:05:14
And now she's in the convenience store with him.
1:05:17
Uh, and he doesn't know she's there either.
1:05:20
And here becomes the this this has to do with suspense and character also.
1:05:25
You I won't go into her background, but she had a very difficult childhood and a very inconstant mother who had a very bad taste in men.
1:05:36
And this girl has this this chant when she's in trouble.
1:05:42
She's had it since childhood.
1:05:44
Her name is China Shepherd.
1:05:46
China's Shepherd untouched and alive.
1:05:49
She says it's like a mantra that when she's in trouble because of one of the men, her mother is currently with and she always gets herself through without being touched or or harmed.
1:06:03
And she uses that mantra throughout this.
1:06:06
Well, she's in the store.
1:06:09
He kills the people, but in conversation with them beforehand, he reveals that he's going home where he has a young girl that he keeps in the basement.
1:06:20
He taunts these people before he kills them and tells them and she realizes she can leave here or she can get back into that and go save that girl.
1:06:33
Now, would she do that or would she not?
1:06:36
uh if the characters develop properly, I think she would and that's where the story comes from.
1:06:43
I have to tell you when I wrote that, I didn't know what was going to happen, right?
1:06:47
I knew she was going to get out of that s that motor home.
1:06:52
She's going to go in there, but I didn't realize he was going to kill the clerks and then I realized he was going to kill the clerks. he was going to reveal.
1:07:01
He kidnapped the girl and he kept her in the basement of his own that he was returning to and she has a moral choice and that makes the entire novel.
1:07:12
So the image that just popped in my head is you're kind of like the bulldozer of writers.
1:07:16
You just go really slowly and you kind of just and then the novel just kind of reveals itself at every point. Yes.
1:07:31
And I guess what's going on is day by day in your head is you're just kind of crawling through this novel in the sub I think a lot of it subconscious too because you get surprised by the developments yourself.
1:07:42
I have said to people who other writers I know who say but how do you keep momentum you're going so slow. Yeah.
1:07:51
And I say in the strangest way it builds it in your head.
1:07:58
You're denying yourself the easy answer to things by going slowly.
1:08:01
You're giving the best way I can say is there comes a point where you realize sometimes it's you think okay I see where this is going to go to a certain extent.
1:08:15
This character is going to have to end up here and that is going to cause a narrative problem.
1:08:25
What do I do to get that character out of that moment?
1:08:28
Uh, and it looks like you you're tying a knot that can't be undone.
1:08:33
Uh, but because you're moving very slowly, you have a lot of time to think just what you said.
1:08:40
And what over the years I've learned as you get to that moment, you not only have figured out how to solve it, you've got two or three or four options.
1:08:50
And it makes the story richer, I think.
1:08:54
And just what you said, you're always moving forward.
1:08:57
And you've got time on a on a conscious and a subconscious level to think how do how do I get the most out of this situation I can instead of just how do I get the quickest thing out of it I can. Yeah. So, tell me about this.
1:09:15
This is one of your four rules of writing.
1:09:17
I'd love to go through them.
1:09:19
And you say never go inside more than one character's mind in a scene.
1:09:22
Each scene is from a singular viewpoint and therefore a metaphor or simile should be in the voice of the narrator of the scene. Yes.
1:09:31
Uh I think it's one of the worst things that's happened to fiction.
1:09:37
Uh that that doesn't get taught.
1:09:37
Uh and when you are reading a book where in one scene you're going into different characters thoughts and heads right then it's not a novel anymore.
1:09:49
It's the author talking to you.
1:09:51
Uh you've sacrificed the illusion of reality because you're showing your hand.
1:09:58
Now I just divert a book in which I break the fourth wall repeatedly but that is with intention and for the humorous effect of it.
1:10:09
Um, and uh uh as a consequence uh I find that I've I've said that to a number of writers who don't want to do it and and I've said it to some younger writers who it's like a light going off and they realize that forces you into an intimacy with each character that you otherwise lose.
1:10:37
If you can go into every character's heads in every scene, you're not actually doing that.
1:10:43
You're being a puppet master.
1:10:45
Uh but if you force yourself to live within that character in that character scene, you get more intimately involved with that character, you're not just manipulating anymore.
1:11:00
You're living within the character.
1:11:00
I think it's a very important rule.
1:11:02
And if I had a literature writing class, that would be the first thing I'd try to teach. How about this one?
1:11:09
Metaphors aren't meant to dazzle readers, but to seduce them into a more intimate relationship with the story. Yeah.
1:11:18
Things come to you and you go, "Wow, that is cool.
1:11:21
That is a cool metaphor."
1:11:24
And then you look at after a while and you say, "Yeah, that's really cool."
1:11:26
But it pops us too far out. it.
1:11:28
You have to get to that point where you recognize it's within the uh perspective of the character you're writing to have thought or or said that u and um it's anything that's hard is also interesting.
1:11:47
It makes the job more interesting.
1:11:50
Uh writing becomes a more interesting task if you set up these parameters that you have to obey.
1:11:57
Seriously, I know dazzling and Oh, you can dazzle, but it has to be felt within that character who's narrating the scene.
1:12:06
Well, you say that this means that every figure of speech should be consistent with the mood of the scene that it appears in. Yeah.
1:12:11
And that becomes difficult if you're trying to sustain suspense and humor at the same time.
1:12:18
Uh but you can figure that out also.
1:12:21
But if you're writing a very tense scene, then the metaphor should have tension in it uh in some manner or form. How about this?
1:12:30
Metaphors and simileies describe a scene more colorfully than a chain of adjectives and they reinforce the mood. Yeah. What does that mean?
1:12:39
Instead of just saying the scene is bathed in moonlight, uh uh that sets the mood.
1:12:45
But you can also suggest in a metaphor of of the face of the moon wrapped in cloud clouds that began to unravel like the like the wrappings on a mummy or something of that matter and using a and that's not a good one but that's what I'm but by describing it more metaphorically than just blunt adjectives uh you start bringing it. It's what poetry does.
1:13:20
It uses words uh one of the things it does.
1:13:24
It uses words to say more than the word itself says that to create moods and and states of mind and that's what is the value of metaphor simil. Yeah.
1:13:36
How has faith kind of been incorporated into your work over time?
1:13:42
Because one of the things the word that just kept on popping up was just love and there's like the Christian love of the love of the Holy Spirit and that has seemed to become more and more prevalent.
1:13:54
But then also it's in the word faith itself that there's faith, right?
1:13:58
There's there's there's where logic and reason can take you and then there's where the structure of reality is and there's a gap between those two things.
1:14:07
And I think you're saying of course that's how reality works.
1:14:10
To think that we can understand reality is just foolish beyond belief. Uh is that right? Yeah.
1:14:16
Uh it's uh I I read a great deal of science. I always have.
1:14:23
Uh if I go over into science books will be all kind of books about quantum mechanics because I find it fascinating.
1:14:33
But when you look at quantum mechanics or molecular biology, uh you're discovering a world that can't see a world that responds easily to reason alone.
1:14:47
There's other depths to it.
1:14:47
Uh and I am friends with a number of scientists, very good ones.
1:14:55
uh and they will tell you that if if scientists in these fields in quantum mechanics in molecular biology are together and know each other as friends and they will tell you that it is a creative world but they will not say it publicly because careers are on the line and that I find fascinating.
1:15:25
uh and some will come forward.
1:15:28
Uh there is a Stephen Meyer who's written a couple of books uh that his publisher actually came to me and asked me to give a blurb.
1:15:38
All the other blurbs are by the scientists and then here's his blurbs. There he is.
1:15:42
And I said you you don't want that'll just cut into the value of all the other things on there.
1:15:51
and they said, "No, we think you understand what he's saying uh here."
1:15:57
And it's it's pretty difficult stuff, but he he's making the argument that science showing us if we only are willing to look at it that the world is more complex than just numbers and formulas, that there's something going on at greater depth.
1:16:16
Um, and he makes a fabulous case for it.
1:16:20
Well, if you go to Darwin, Darwin thought the human cell was what he called a blob of carbonized albumin.
1:16:30
He didn't know there are thousands of parts in every human cell.
1:16:32
That there are chains of proteins that go on and on and on.
1:16:39
Uh and that that cell doesn't function without all of that.
1:16:42
Uh so in other words, how did the cell evolve into that great complexity?
1:16:51
uh if it doesn't function with irreducal complexity, you can't reduce it and still function.
1:16:58
In other words, it can't function here then gained these other attributes.
1:17:04
It always had these attributes.
1:17:04
Uh that throws a big monkey wrench into everything we think we know.
1:17:10
Uh it's I just had when people say how can you be so positive?
1:17:17
How can you act about life uh when you came from where you came from and how can you be uh so certain it has meaning and that we have free will and it's a created world and I say you know what if if I came from where I came from and I have gone through everything I've gone through and all of this has happened to me I'd be an idiot to think there wasn't something going on here.
1:17:47
Uh because I didn't on my own make this happen.
1:17:54
There were so many moments in life that things happen and click Yeah.
1:18:01
that if it had gone the other way and when you start to be aware of that and you're willing to say, "I'm part of something that I don't understand."
1:18:11
Uh and it's mysterious and it's wonderful and I just have to do the best I can.
1:18:17
But if I do the best I can, things will happen that you have to seize the moment.
1:18:23
It's opportunity that's given to you and and it is given to you.
1:18:29
And it's not because of who your parents were in all cases. Certainly not mine.
1:18:34
And uh uh I I can't imagine a world that I would take just that reason alone can answer everything for because well we know it can't. So square this for me.
1:18:49
On one hand you love writing.
1:18:53
You love to sit down at the computer every day and just and just work and work.
1:18:57
And on the other hand you have this self-doubt.
1:19:01
And how do those two things come together?
1:19:07
How do you reconcile the two? I don't know.
1:19:09
Uh it's uh I think it comes partly the doubt is there.
1:19:14
Uh the sense that I need to overcome the doubt that that it's been put in my way for a reason.
1:19:26
Uh if you have no self-doubt then you you might not have any self- judgment.
1:19:33
Uh if you have no self-doubt then perhaps I would see every word I wrote as a golden and that would be a mistake.
1:19:41
Yeah that would not be good. That wouldn't be good.
1:19:42
Uh so the self-doubt is a tool just like metaphors are a tool.
1:19:48
And uh and you shouldn't be afraid of self-doubt.
1:19:52
Some people get eaten up by it.
1:19:54
Uh but uh and I often have said all writer's block is self-doubt.
1:20:00
You may have other things you think are the cause of it, but it always comes down to when you sit down and you can't get those words to come.
1:20:09
It's because something inside is saying you can't do this.
1:20:11
What is the doubt that you feel?
1:20:13
Is it I'm not good enough?
1:20:15
Is it that people won't like this?
1:20:16
Is it internal, external?
1:20:16
I think now there's a question I've never been asked also.
1:20:21
This is and it's make it just made me think the self-doubt is I can't do this as well as I want to and I'm going to make a fool of myself and I don't want to make a fool of myself and that's odd too because I frequently choose a book or a subject or a way of telling it that everybody in my professional life tells me I'm going to make fool of it.
1:20:50
So, so I guess I choose them because there's that risk.
1:20:53
Uh, and uh, but yeah, I think it it really comes to personal and it may go back to what I said about humiliation, but having lived and grown up childhood adolescent in a constant bath of humiliation and and I don't want to humiliate myself.
1:21:15
Uh, a lot of people do that for me.
1:21:15
Uh, so I think that's probably where it comes from.
1:21:21
It's it's you you just don't want to be a fool if you can avoid it.
1:21:25
I just want to go through a few writers that I know you really like and just get a quick take on how they've influenced you, what you took from them.
1:21:34
And let's start with John D. Macdonald.
1:21:39
He was the first writer who ever showed me that character can be as interesting as plot.
1:21:47
uh he's was a suspense writer, but he also he he wrote a series with a character named Travis McGee.
1:21:53
They're good books, but his best books were not in the series.
1:21:57
Uh he wrote a whole body of work about s about running a motel about this or that about being a real estate agent as the and it's a suspense story that's involved in that.
1:22:11
But his books are maybe the best record ever of fiction has given us of the 1950s and60s of common America.
1:22:22
And I I just loved he would he'd be taking along in book you're just compelled to get page to page and he would stop and tell you about this character and he would go on for five pages.
1:22:36
and that when he when I first was reading him and he did this, I would I would be like, just get on with the story.
1:22:44
Get I don't need to know all this about the character.
1:22:49
And you get to the end of the four or five pages and you get back into the story and you go, wait a minute, I want to know more about this character.
1:22:57
So, he made that as much gripping and interesting and appealing as the actual plot.
1:23:03
And that there was a great deal to learn from that.
1:23:06
But uh he was very he had as a writer he had tremendous charm and and he was a cynic but it it didn't put a bitter edge to his work as it does with some huh you don't usually hear the words charm and cynic.
1:23:23
Yeah it's an interesting well look Twain there was a certain charm and cynicism mixed there too. Mhm. All right. TS Elliott.
1:23:32
The use of languages are just mindblowing. Mind-blowing. Mind-blowing.
1:23:42
I I I've actually traveled here with one book and it's the selected poems of TS Elliott.
1:23:47
You can read the same piece a hundred times and there's something new the language gives you the 101st time you've read it.
1:23:56
And I don't know of any other writer that managed.
1:24:02
He buries so so much within the surface uh pros uh that it's almost impossible to describe.
1:24:11
But I remember when I first found him and uh read the uh four quartets and you read and read and read and it's just mesmerizing, you know.
1:24:26
I think it's TS Elliott who wrote it, but it reminds me of you.
1:24:27
He has a line I really like.
1:24:29
Here or there does not matter.
1:24:31
We must be still and still moving.
1:24:33
And the reason that reminds me of you is there's a I don't know if you've always been like this, but uh you seem remarkably at peace in terms of just your disposition of just spending time with you, but then also incredibly prolific.
1:24:52
We must be still and still moving.
1:24:52
I always think about that. Yeah.
1:24:56
It's uh uh I I think I've learned more from Elliott than I realize because I think you absorb stuff that comes into you and changes you.
1:25:08
I think the thing that I most love about his is the the surrendering to the way of the world. This this is the world.
1:25:18
This it is a it is a created world.
1:25:22
We do not control the world. We make our way. We fall fail.
1:25:29
Uh but we go on and going on is the purpose.
1:25:34
and you just accept there's a certain acceptance in him of of of all that's problematic in life that is I think way beyond Buddhism uh and uh and is very appealing once you start feeling it uh it it I've never been I was just thought of an interview I had with Linda laughed when They asked what what make how often do you get angry and what makes you angry?
1:26:11
And you actually laughed and cuz we couldn't think of any time I've ever been angry. Really?
1:26:16
I just don't get angry and it's uh it used to bother my wife that because she'd say they're ripping you off and I Yes, I know, but it's uh we'll get past this.
1:26:31
I get disturbed by people's bad behavior, but I can't say why I don't get angry.
1:26:37
But I also think that in Elliot, there's no point. Yeah.
1:26:40
Uh we live in the still point of the turning world and it's all there is.
1:26:46
So here or there does not matter.
1:26:49
It must be still and still moving. Yeah. How about Ray Bradbury?
1:26:54
Oh, I read much when I was young younger.
1:26:57
Uh there is that uh uh Bradbury just wants you to be as delighted with everything as he is.
1:27:12
You know, he's he's such an imulient writer.
1:27:15
Uh well, unless you read Fahrenheit 451, uh which is a dark dark piece.
1:27:22
Uh but uh my favorite thing of his is something wicked this way comes which is just a wonderful wonderful book about fathers and sons and the right kind of father-sons relationships and uh things.
1:27:39
Uh and yeah he from Bradberry probably started to have as a reader uh less fear about colorful language.
1:27:49
I don't mean foul language.
1:27:52
I mean just letting letting the language get however flowery you want it to as long as you feel in control of it.
1:28:00
What do you mean by feel in control of it? Spell that out.
1:28:03
Well, you you're just not ending up uh I was sent a book or a blurb recently and uh I started to read it and there was absolutely no control of metaphors.
1:28:19
the more elaborate and fantastic they could get, the better.
1:28:22
Well, the that isn't a good metaphor.
1:28:24
Um, and uh, Bradbury will push all of that kind of writing as far as he can and sometimes tremble on the edge of it, but he never loses control of it.
1:28:36
So there was a lesson uh to run it out and to and to get there is I actually read once he said that he never wrote anything except in a state of joy and I believe that's probably true.
1:28:52
uh he wrote mostly short stories uh which takes away the angst of am I going to live long enough to finish this 400page thing uh which is always in your mind you've only young uh and uh uh he said he wrote many short stories just going outside and sitting on the patio in a lawn chair and spending a few hours and he had a story and it was because of the joy with which he approached her you know He had a sign over his desk that said, "Don't think."
1:29:24
And there's this great interview.
1:29:26
He says, "You must always surprise yourself at the page."
1:29:29
And when you think, you start to lie to yourself, but you must always surprise yourself at the page.
1:29:33
And I think that there's similarities between between the two of you there where he saw writing as a almost like an act of surrender to your self-conscious.
1:29:44
And you were the leash and it was the dog.
1:29:49
M I it I do say often I have to entertain myself when I'm working. Yeah, exactly.
1:29:57
If I'm not entertaining myself, then and it's more than entertaining.
1:30:02
I have to move myself too.
1:30:05
If if it's a book meant to take you somewhere emotionally, uh that also has an intellectual side to it, then I have to feel that when I'm writing it.
1:30:16
And uh I can easily move myself to tears when writing or or laugh out loud and that's when I know it's working.
1:30:26
Uh that's when I'm sure it's working.
1:30:29
If I get choked up then okay, this is this has got it without really twisting the heartstrings. Yeah.
1:30:39
I was writing something a few weeks ago and I was balling.
1:30:40
I was balling and it was uh I sent it to a friend and he said uh he said that moved me to tears and I hadn't uh I was actually crying so much that I uh I had to speak it out. I just couldn't type. No.
1:30:57
And uh it was a strange feeling because I'd always kind of thought of emotions as I don't know sometimes I've resisted emotions and it was kind of a challenge to myself to just like feel this one and the act of writing kind of turned up the volume on him and it was it was I was very sad in this particular point but it was strangely delightful. Mhm.
1:31:20
To feel the emotion of sadness to the absolute extreme.
1:31:26
And I think, you know, if you watch a musician, they're making music to to do that.
1:31:30
And I think that we can do that as writers of how do I feel this emotion as intensely as possible?
1:31:34
And there's something strange and very nice about it. Yeah.
1:31:38
Well, you listen to certain things of Mosart and you're absolutely sure he was crying as he wrote it. Yeah. Let's do one more. Dickens.
1:31:48
I didn't read Dickens in high school or college.
1:31:52
I was uh I was always I'm not going to read what they want me to read.
1:31:55
I'll fake it and I'll read what I'm going to read because I always had my own desire.
1:32:01
The rebellion strikes again. Yes.
1:32:01
And I was I also read you didn't like research at all when you were a kid.
1:32:06
You know, you hated that. Now I love it. Yeah.
1:32:08
So it's uh but uh yeah, I uh I could fake book reports and things so I would do that.
1:32:18
Uh, but then I was I don't know what I was late 20s, early 30s.
1:32:24
I'd have to go back and look, but I said, "Well, I ought to read this Dickens guy."
1:32:30
And uh, I chose Tale of Two Cities.
1:32:34
And uh, I just became utterly captivated with it.
1:32:38
And when I got into the latter part, I couldn't stop. I had to read it.
1:32:43
I was reading the end of the book.
1:32:45
It was like 3:00 in the morning.
1:32:48
I was in bed sort of sound asleep and she woke up and I'm in just in tears.
1:32:56
And the end of that novel u it's you know it just is maybe the big most emotional ending to a novel I can ever think of.
1:33:06
Whereas this attorney who is a drunk and who's messed up his life but is in love with this woman who's in love with another man and he goes to the guillotine under the identity of that man.
1:33:26
So he's sacrificing himself for the woman he loves that she can be with the man she loves.
1:33:32
And then he say he gives compassion to a woman. I'm just getting vacant.
1:33:45
It's if if you haven't read that book, you have to read it. Get to the end. Yeah.
1:33:56
Uh he he had no I don't like all dads.
1:34:00
some goes a little too his making up of names and stuff can sometimes get a little difficult but uh but uh because they're so over the top strange and uh but uh uh Oliver Twist Great Expectations Tale of Two Cities uh he wasn't afraid of emotion uh he wasn't Uh you know what what has happened in a lot of literature courses is sentiment is is confused with sentimentality.
1:34:45
Sentiment is confused with sentimentality. Sentimentality.
1:34:46
You want to avoid genuine sentiment.
1:34:49
You want to have as much of in a book as you can get. Spell that out for me. What do you mean?
1:34:56
Sentimentality is uh um well the character let's just say it has to do in the way you're writing it also can be in the events itself.
1:35:09
You have a character dying of cancer say and uh at the same time as she's dying of cancer she discovers uh the child she has may be dying as well.
1:35:21
Okay, we're we've gone from something to appeal to to our genuine human feeling to something going so far over the top that even though it can happen in life, you have to be awfully careful about doing it.
1:35:36
Uh sentimentality is also in how you write about it.
1:35:42
If you go so far as to push and push and push to get that emotional reaction, you shouldn't have to.
1:35:50
Actually, it comes back to that point about it being easy. Yeah.
1:35:52
about it being easy. Yeah. If you don't have to push for the reaction, it simply comes from the condition of the character and where they are in their life and it's such that you can identify it as a human being without a lot of flowery language and it moves you that
1:36:10
that is sentiment but I have seen where that almost an attempt to drive sentiment out of fiction just let's do it straight and cold and and this is life and it's the way it is I I'm sorry, but that doesn't move people and it doesn't inspire people to deal with the problems of their own lives. Uh
1:36:31
Uh sentiment connects us.
1:36:34
It's the source of sympathy and pity.
1:36:37
We can recognize the in the feelings and hopes and dreams of other people ourselves.
1:36:43
And if that is stripped out of affection, there's somebody as proud as I like, but I find completely accepting one book with so emotionless that I I can admire the cold clarity of it and that's Joan Digging.
1:37:02
Very cold, very clear, but I don't really want to read it because the closest she comes to real sentiment is in the book about losing her husband.
1:37:14
Uh, and even that you can see we don't want to go too far here.
1:37:18
I don't want to talk too much about she will just say she was devastated, but we need more than that.
1:37:29
We need to venture into sentiment a little.
1:37:31
Just don't go over the top.
1:37:31
This is my most self-indulgent question.
1:37:36
Sorry listeners, but how do you feel that surrounding yourself with the these Japanese influences, these art deco influences, how is that shaping your creative work?
1:37:48
Uh, well, for those who just didn't walk, okay, let me give the pitch. This house is awesome. This house is awesome.
1:37:55
I walked in and I just lit up.
1:37:58
I mean, I feel maybe I share some photos on the screen here, but it it's just it's this like mix of like classical Japanese with art deco paintings and doors and uh curved lines, sort of like the streamline mod.
1:38:21
And then right here in front of you, you have this collection of art deco radios.
1:38:26
It's like there's there there's nothing of the plainness that you see in so much of contemporary life.
1:38:31
Oh, I think that plainness in contemporary life is is destroying souls.
1:38:36
I I've thought about this because I I grew up in poverty.
1:38:40
Uh uh but that doesn't mean you can't have beauty around you, but there was no sense of it in the families I grew up with.
1:38:51
Everything was kind of ugly.
1:38:51
And uh I I gravitated it toward uh things with some beauty to them.
1:39:00
Uh I'm doing notes now for a book that might be about why I write, how I write, not trading in your character.
1:39:11
Oh, I feel very threatened right now.
1:39:14
But I but I started with uh just notes to myself about the families my father's family which was dysfunctional in the extreme.
1:39:23
He had two brothers that committed suicide.
1:39:26
He always talked about suicide but always that he would kill all of us at the same time. Uh oh my goodness.
1:39:33
And his all of his family was dysfunctional into a second generation.
1:39:40
And uh and when you would go there, there was there was nothing of beauty in the house or uh or or in the lives you were there with.
1:39:50
Uh he had a brother whose uh died of burst dependence because uh their mother uh decided she was a Christian scionist and a week after she decided that u he got pendicitis and she wouldn't allow him to have any treatment. He died. Oh man.
1:40:14
Two months later she gave up Christian Science.
1:40:19
that was sort of that whole family and my mother told me never go near them over if anything happens to me do not get involved with that family.
1:40:28
Uh and so as I grew up there was I think a kind of yearning to be around peaceful things, beautiful things and beautiful things, art deco, Japanese art, some Chinese art.
1:40:44
you go through the day and just seeing it there.
1:40:47
Uh just walking past it calms you.
1:40:51
I think uh it does me and uh so I like to have things around me that give me a sense of continuity of life uh of reason and meaning and uh and that's all in uh uh Japanese and Chinese art of the best kind.
1:41:16
And uh if it's there, I'm I'm much calmer.
1:41:21
I hate that this is going to be the final question, but I just to talk to you for the next 12 hours and uh I have to just respect your time.
1:41:28
So, you say that metaphysics is the ink in my pen.
1:41:33
Whatever is going on here, it is the central issue of our existence, and it seems to me that it begs to be the central issue of a writer's career. Wow, I said that.
1:41:43
I [Laughter] guess I must add a little wine.
1:41:48
I guess what you what were you talking about there?
1:41:56
Uh it's uh I I have said uh if what you're going to write uh is and and it's your conviction uh uh that life has no meaning or purpose.
1:42:10
Uh that we're all just animals who came to think too much. Uh you have one book.
1:42:16
Once you've said it, what do you have to say?
1:42:19
There's nowhere else to go.
1:42:21
Uh you can keep writing the same story about the meaninglessness of all things, but what a dead end that is.
1:42:29
Uh I have found that the more I'm aware that there is deep mystery in life.
1:42:36
uh and things happen that are that you would somebody may say, "Oh, it's coincidence or it's or go so far as to say it's synchronicity," which just is a way to cover up the fact that it's all too coincidental to be coincidence, right?
1:42:54
So, they have to have some better word for it.
1:42:56
Uh when you uh when you open your mind and eyes to that it's kind of that life becomes much more interesting.
1:43:09
It becomes fascinating and that's where you have something to write about.
1:43:16
Every life then becomes every life of every character becomes a great adventure towards something meaningful.
1:43:24
And this it isn't just somebody who is thrown into all kind of violence and everything and either triumphs or doesn't. They're going somewhere.
1:43:37
Uh and that's what makes that book different from the others. How did they get there?
1:43:43
How what did they learn along the way?
1:43:45
It's not that the work becomes didactic.
1:43:48
It doesn't that it starts preaching to you or anything.
1:43:50
It just opens you to all the different ways lives live are lived and all the mystery that are evolves out of every single life if you're able to look at it and think about it.
1:44:04
Um and so yeah that's that's always there when I'm writing because I I'm always thinking about it.
1:44:12
Um it's so many very strange things have happened in uh my life.
1:44:19
I was uh I was standing right next to somebody who was shot and killed and the person who shot them turned the gun on me and I was looking right down the barrel of the gun.
1:44:30
Uh and they didn't pull the trigger. They just walked away.
1:44:35
Uh and I ended up having to talk to police and that kind of thing.
1:44:42
So you always wonder what was there?
1:44:42
you if you would kill one person and there's the witness and you don't take the second shot, it makes you start to think, wouldn't it?
1:45:00
Uh trying to think of I don't want to go into some of the really strange things because people say, "Boy, he's weird."
1:45:08
Uh but if you open your eyes to things, you you see coincidences in life and you say that's a lot more than a coincidence.
1:45:15
Uh and when you open to it, the strangest thing is it seems like it happens more to you.
1:45:21
Uh that uh more more you're aware of it, the more it happens.
1:45:28
Uh, and it's it's as a writer that's inevitably fascinating and sometimes can carry you out there to someplace where some readers just can't go.
1:45:41
I wrote a book called Breathless and some people love that book and some people say, "Boy, this is a little too out there for me."
1:45:52
Well, that's that's okay, too.
1:45:52
But uh I always want to reach an audience because that's why you're here and that's why they allow you to keep publishing.
1:46:02
If you don't reach an audience, you don't get to publish.
1:46:06
So, but uh but but just conveying your sense of the mystery of life, I think, is useful because we're living in a world where uh as we get old, we all always think it was better then.
1:46:20
But there's there's things that you can look at that didn't exist then that I don't think do us a lot of good.
1:46:28
Social media is a beneficial thing, but it's an enormously destructive thing also.
1:46:33
And uh I look at the coming of AI and what that's going to be, you know, what it's going to do to people's self-esteem.
1:46:41
uh because a lot of jobs are going to get lost and a lot of things are going to change and uh uh it's worrisome.
1:46:51
I won't be here to see the worst of it if it goes really downhill.
1:46:57
Uh but you concerned about the the fate of the race is how how will the human race go on? Thanks for doing this.
1:47:07
Well, you do an interesting interview. So, a little different. It was fun. Thank you. Thank you.