Why We Write Page 3

  • Baldacci is a contributing editor for Parade magazine.

  • Baldacci’s 24 adult novels have been translated into 45 languages, with 110 million copies in print in 80 countries.

  Website: www.davidbaldacci.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/writer.david.baldacci

  Twitter: @davidbaldacci

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Novels

  Absolute Power, 1996

  Total Control, 1997

  The Winner, 1997

  The Simple Truth, 1998

  Saving Faith, 1999

  Wish You Well, 2000

  Last Man Standing, 2001

  The Christmas Train, 2002

  Split Second, 2003

  Hour Game, 2004

  The Camel Club, 2005

  The Collectors, 2006

  Simple Genius, 2007

  Stone Cold, 2007

  Divine Justice, 2008

  The Whole Truth, 2008

  First Family, 2009

  True Blue, 2009

  Deliver Us from Evil, 2010

  Hell’s Corner, 2010

  One Summer, 2011

  The Sixth Man, 2011

  Zero Day, 2011

  The Innocent, 2012

  Film Adaptation

  Absolute Power, 1997

  Children’s Books

  Freddy and the French Fries: Fries Alive! 2005

  Freddy and the French Fries: The Mystery of Silas Finklebean, 2006

  David Baldacci

  Why I write

  If writing were illegal, I’d be in prison. I can’t not write. It’s a compulsion.

  When the sentences and the story are flowing, writing is better than any drug. It doesn’t just make you feel good about yourself. It makes you feel good about everything.

  It can go the other way, too. When you’re deleting page after page, and you just can’t make the characters work, and you’re running up against deadlines, it’s not nearly as euphoric. But actually sitting there and conceiving story ideas and plotting—it’s the coolest profession in the world. I’m paid to daydream.

  When I was a kid I read a lot. I imagined worlds all the time—little worlds I’d lose myself in. I told my stories to anyone who would listen, and a lot of people who wouldn’t. Finally my mom gave me a blank-page notebook. She was trying to shut me up, hoping for a little peace and quiet, and she told me to start writing my stories down. I got hooked.

  When you have a bit of imagination and the desire to use words to tell stories, writing takes on a life of its own. When I’m out and about, I can’t help but throw the people I see into whatever I’m writing. They have no idea. They’d be scared to death if they knew that I’m walking down the street and they’re shooting at me, or I’m shooting at them.

  When I go out and talk to schoolkids, I tell them, “All of you are amazingly creative, whether you know it or not. It’s adulthood that beats it out of you. If you never lose that, you can go places no one’s imagination has ever taken them.”

  I can’t write Sophie’s Choice. I’m never going to write a book that wins a Pulitzer. I don’t think that’s what I do, or where my talents lie.

  Novels that win prizes like that have great depth. The language, the prose, and the story hold equal power. You can have a sentence that runs for sixteen lines separated by commas. Sophie’s Choice, for example. That’s a thing of beauty.

  Could I ever spend five years of my life working on a book, instead of writing a quote-unquote commercial novel in seven, eight, ten months? I don’t know if I have the background or the talent to do that. People who write literary fiction are more disciplined. They spend years and years and years and years of their lives on one project. They bring to bear everything they have on that one story.

  I spent three years on Absolute Power while I was working full-time. It’s not a literary novel at all. I tried to develop the characters as much as I could, but it’s certainly plot driven. From me, readers want the twists and turns.

  AFL versus CIO

  This divide between literary and commercial fiction just kills me. It’s like splitting a union in half. We have the AFL over here, the CIO over there, and we want you guys to battle against each other because that’s going to help…oh! Who’s that going to help? Big business.

  I’ve gone to book events all over the country, and I’ve met some terrific literary novelists who welcome commercial writers like me with open arms. It’s like, “Hello, comrade!” But I’ve also seen a lot of animosity. The commercial side complains, “I write books as good as yours, and I never win any prizes.” The literary side says, “I write books that are better than yours, and I never sell any books.”

  Someone once asked John Updike, “Why don’t you write a mystery?” And he answered, “Because I’m not smart enough.” Here’s a guy who’s written brilliant fiction, won two Pulitzer Prizes, but he has a different skill set, just as I couldn’t have written Rabbit, Run. Writing a mystery takes planning and plotting. You lay a bomb on page nine; it doesn’t explode till page four hundred. Even a bad book takes some talent and work to put together.

  Everyone thinks they can write a novel. They know they can’t slam-dunk a basketball because they don’t have the height or the athleticism. But people think, “I’ve got a brain, I’ve got a laptop. How hard can it be?” Those who attempt it learn that it’s very hard to do.

  Lawyers are storytellers

  Some of the best fiction I ever came up with was as a lawyer.

  You know who wins in court? The client whose lawyer tells better stories than the other lawyer does. When you’re making a legal case, you can’t change the facts. You can only rearrange them to make a story that better enhances your client’s position, emphasizing certain things, deemphasizing others. You make sure the facts that you want people to believe are the most compelling ones. The facts that hurt your case are the ones you either explain away or hide away. That’s telling a story.

  Lawyers work incredibly long hours, and we sell our lives in half-hour increments. Until I finally stopped lawyering in ’95, my writing schedule was similar to that. For ten years, I wrote from ten p.m. to two a.m., six nights a week. Draconian, yes, but you find the time where you can. It wasn’t hard for me. After a day at work, I had so many stories in my head, I couldn’t wait to get home and write them down.

  Starving writer: not an option

  Growing up in the South, we had some really fine short story writers, like Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Lee Smith. I naturally gravitated toward that form. I started trying to get my short stories published in high school and continued on through college. I collected a lot of rejection letters.

  So I bought a book about how to write scripts, and I managed to get an agent, which wasn’t easy to do, coming from Virginia. In 1991, while I was billing two hundred dollars an hour as a lawyer, I had a script, and everyone in Hollywood was loving it. My agent said it was going to be a big sale. Big. He called me back at midnight and told me that Warner Bros. had passed, which made all the other studios figure there was something wrong with it, so they all passed on it, too.

  That was a crushing blow. There had been so much hype, and I’d believed it. By then I’d been writing a long time. Not that I ever thought I’d make a living as a writer. Even when you got a short story published, the most they’d give you was free copies of the magazine. Not much help for the bank account.

  Once our first child was born in 1993, I knew the starving writer route wasn’t ever going to work for me. I was the breadwinner, and if I couldn’t make any money off the writing, I had to keep making a living as a lawyer. I thought, “It’s not going to happen for me. I’ll be one of those writers who writes for fun and never gets published.” But that didn’t mean I was going to stop writing.

  I took my best shot

  I studied the book industry. I read lots of thrillers and mysteries to see what I was up against. I knew I needed an agent, so I started watching for
news stories about first-time novelists signing big book deals. Then I’d go to the bookstore and read that book’s acknowledgments page to see who the agent was.

  I got seven agents’ names that way. I wrote each of them a short query letter: Dear Sir or Madam, I’m a lawyer in DC, I wrote a political thriller, and I guarantee that if you read the first page, you won’t stop till you get to the last page. Sincerely, David Baldacci. I thought half of them would read the manuscript just to prove me wrong.

  I was hoping to hear back from just one of them, but I heard back from all seven. I went up to New York and met with them. The agent I found is still my agent today.

  I did a couple of days’ worth of revisions, and then, on a Monday night, my agent sent the manuscript to a bunch of publishers. On Tuesday morning, I was sitting in my law office, and he called me up and said, “Hey, if I sell this manuscript, are you going to be able to quit and write full-time?”

  I said, “Well, I’ve been waiting to do that for the last sixteen years. So yes, that would be very nice.” And he said, “Hey, that’s good. Because I sold the book.”

  The chairman of what was then Warner Books had read it overnight and faxed in a preemptive offer: a multimillion-dollar advance for one book. It turned out to be a great deal for the publisher, and a great deal for me as well.

  A baby called book

  It was surreal. You have to realize that nobody except my wife, my parents, my brother, and my sister knew I’d been writing all those years. My wife and I called our friends and said, “We have something special to tell you.” They thought we were having another baby. I said, “Actually, we are having another baby. But I’m the one delivering it. It’s called a book.”

  All I’d known to that point was rejection, so for the next year I kept my day job. Finally my wife and I sat down and I said, “This is something I’ve been working for my whole life. I’d like to have my shot.” We agreed I’d quit, and if the book flopped I’d go back to practicing law. It was nerve-wracking, waiting for the book to come out. I knew if it didn’t sell, with a big advance like that, I was done.

  This sounds a little corny, but the day I felt I’d made it as a writer was the first time I saw a book of mine on a bookstore shelf—in the Borders in the World Trade Center. After that I stopped waiting for the publishers to say, “We’ve had a change of plans. You have to give the money back.” I realized the writing career was working out.

  Scared to death. Every time.

  Every time I start a project, I sit down scared to death that I won’t be able to bring the magic again.

  You’d never want to be on the operating table with a right-handed surgeon who says, “Today I’m going to try operating with my left hand.” But writing is like that. The way you get better is by pushing yourself to do things differently each time. As a writer you’re not constrained by mechanical devices or technology or anything else. You get to play. Which is terrifying.

  William Goldman, who wrote the script for Absolute Power, gave me some great advice. He said, “Write everything as if it’s the first thing you ever wrote. The day you think you know how to do it is the day you’re done as a writer.” He was right. If writing ever becomes a job for me—if I start thinking I’d rather be out playing tennis, so I start taking shortcuts, doing it this time the same way I did it last time—I’ll hang it up.

  Sometimes I envy myself twenty years ago, sitting in my little cubbyhole with nobody knocking on my door, writing stories without worrying about the touring, the money, the foreign travel. But every day I try to face the screen as if there’s no commercial world out there, as if I’m doing it for free, for the pure joy of telling my stories, the way I did it for the first sixteen years.

  David Baldacci’s Wisdom for Writers

  Whatever genre you write in, familiarize yourself with what’s current in your genre. What thrilled the reader even ten years ago doesn’t necessarily thrill today. Check out the competition.

  Whether you’re writing a novel or a cover letter to a potential agent, shorter is always better. Remember what Abraham Lincoln said, paraphrasing Pascal: “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have time to write a short one.”

  The upside of the current state of publishing: it’s a lot easier to self-publish than it ever was. Publish on the Internet, or on demand, or self-publish in print—but whatever you do, if you want to share your story, publish it.

  “Writing for your readers” is a euphemism for “writing what you think people will buy.” Don’t fall for it! Write for the person you know best: yourself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jennifer Egan

  It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall….

  —Opening lines, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010

  How is Jennifer Egan exceptional? Reviewing her 2006 novel, The Keep, the New York Times counted the ways. “Jennifer Egan is a refreshingly unclassifiable novelist; she deploys most of the arsenal developed by metafiction writers of the 1960s and refined by more recent authors like William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace—but she can’t exactly be counted as one of them. The opening of her novel The Keep lays out a whole Escherian architecture, replete with metafictional trapdoors, pitfalls, infinitely receding reflections, and trompe l’oeil effects, but what’s more immediately striking about this book is its unusually vivid and convincing realism.”

  But it’s not just the way Egan writes that makes her one of a kind; it’s what she writes. Journalism in the New York Times Magazine, among other venues. Short stories. Book reviews. Novels, each one dramatically different from the last—most notably A Visit from the Goon Squad, the book she refuses to classify. “It was scary, pouring time and energy into a project that didn’t have a clear genre identity and might therefore fall through the cracks,” Egan told me in a 2010 interview for Salon. “The economy had crashed since I’d published my last novel. I thought my publisher might say, ‘This isn’t the moment to publish an odd book.’ Or that even if I sold the novel, it might come and go without a whisper.”

  It was that brave, odd book that won Jennifer Egan the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: September 6, 1962

  Born and raised: Born in Chicago, Ilinois; raised in San Francisco, California

  Current home: Fort Greene, Brooklyn

  Love life: Married to director David Herskovits

  Family life: Two sons, ages 9 and 11

  Schooling: University of Pennsylvania; University of Cambridge, England

  Day job?: No

  Honors and awards (partial listing): National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Guggenheim Fellowship; Fellow at the New York Public Library; finalist for PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction; National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction; Pulitzer Prize for fiction; LA Times Book Prize

  Notable notes:

  • Jennifer Egan grew up in San Francisco, where she graduated from Lowell, the city’s most academically competitive public high school.

  • Explaining why she included a PowerPoint presentation as a chapter in A Visit from the Goon Squad, and why she doesn’t classify the book as either a novel or a short story collection, Egan said, “My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different…I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you should also break it!”

  Website: www.jenniferegan.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/jennifereganwriter?ref=sgm

  Twitter: @egangoonsquad

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Novels

  The Invisible Circus, 1995

  Look at Me, 2001

  The Keep, 2006

  A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010

  Film Adaptations

  The Invisible Circus, 1999

&
nbsp; The Keep (in production)

  Fiction Collection

  Emerald City, short stories, 1996

  Jennifer Egan

  Why I write

  When I’m not writing I feel an awareness that something’s missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There’s something vital that’s not happening. A certain slow damage starts to occur. I can coast along awhile without it, but then my limbs go numb. Something bad is happening to me, and I know it. The longer I wait, the harder it is to start again.

  When I’m writing, especially if it’s going well, I’m living in two different dimensions: this life I’m living now, which I enjoy very much, and this completely other world I’m inhabiting that no one else knows about. I don’t think my husband can tell. It’s a double life I get to live without destroying my marriage. And it’s heaven.

  Especially when I’m writing a first draft, I feel as if I’ve been transported out of myself. That’s always a state I’m trying to achieve, even as a journalist—although when I’m working on nonfiction I’m almost never actually writing. I do months of research and then write the piece in a few days.

  When I’m writing fiction I forget who I am and what I come from. I slip into utter absorption mode. I love the sense that I’ve become so engaged with the other side, I’ve slightly lost my bearings here. If I’m going from the writing mind-set to picking my kids up from school, I often feel a very short but acute kind of depression, as if I have the bends. Once I’m with them it totally disappears, and I feel happy again. Sometimes I forget I have children, which is very strange. I feel guilty about it, as if my inattention will cause something to happen to them, even when I’m not responsible for them—that God will punish me.

  When the writing’s going well—I’m trying not to sound clichéd—I feel fueled by a hidden source. During those times it doesn’t matter if things are going wrong in my life; I have this alternate energy source that’s active. When the writing’s going poorly, it’s as bad or worse than not writing at all. There’s a leak or a drain, and energy is pouring out of it. Even when the rest of my life is fine, I feel like something’s really bad. I have very little tolerance for anything going wrong, and I take little joy from the good things. It was worse before I had kids. I appreciate that they make me forget what’s going on professionally.