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The sniper bullet of surprise, with Jeffery Deaver
1.7k Plays1 year ago
It’s that time of the year when many of us will sit down and write. It could be resolutions. It could be reflections. It could be that book that everyone has inside them. There's just one problem. It's really hard.
To crack the code of writing, Will is joined by one of the most successful crime fiction authors of all time, Jeffery Deaver. Jeffery has sold over 50 million novels in 25 languages, won numerous awards and counts Ian Rankin, Harlan Coben and Lee Child among his fans.
His latest novel, The Watchmaker’s Hand, has just been released.
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Buy 'The Watchmaker's Hand' here.
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Transcript
Introduction of Jeffrey Deaver
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. It's that time of year when many of us will sit down and write. It could be resolutions. It could be reflections. It could be that book that everyone has inside them. Although I'd note Christopher Hitchens' Addendum, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases remain.
00:00:36
Speaker
When I sit down to write, I have this romantic ideal in my head, Hemingway sitting in a prison café as the words flow out of him, or Jane Austen scribbling by a lake. Then the same realisation hits me that no doubt hit those great figures. It's bloody hard. I want to crack the code of writing.
00:00:55
Speaker
Fortunately, my guest today will be of some help. Jeffrey Deaver has sold over 50 million novels in 25 languages, won numerous awards, and counts in Rankin, Harlan Coben, and Lee Child among his multitude of fans.
Influence of Creative Upbringing
00:01:10
Speaker
His latest novel, Watchmaker's Hand, the 16th edition, to the incredibly popular Lincoln Rhymes series, has just been released. Jeffrey Deaver, welcome to Australia. Well, thank you, Will. Good to talk to you.
00:01:22
Speaker
I'm conscious that your mother was an artist and your father was a copywriter, which sounds to me like potentially the perfect combination to create a great author. How do you reflect on the influence of your parents? Well, my sister, who's a young adult author, Julie Rees-Dever, and I
00:01:41
Speaker
I grew up in a household where creativity was valued. To some extent, sadly, sports was not. I was a nerd when I was growing up, but I was a nerd in the real sense. Back then, no talent for sports. I was pudgy, clumsy, and somewhat inept. Now, of course, if you're a nerd, you've created an artificial intelligence app for dancing cats and a
00:02:06
Speaker
But sadly, I was the traditional inept nerd. But what that meant was I was drawn to books and to writing, and my parents had a curious rule in our household. My sister and I could read any book we could find in the house, indeed any book in the library, school library or public library, because reading was valued. There were some movies, however, we were not allowed to see, which was ironic because in the 1950s,
00:02:35
Speaker
in early 60s when we were growing up. I was born in 1950. There were no bad movies. I mean, as much as I as a schoolboy and my mates wanted to find some, there were none. You know, it was passed in America. We had something called the Hays Code and that H-A-Y-E-S and that was a kind of a self-censorship organization. It wasn't part of the government as such, I believe. But everything was quite tame.
00:02:59
Speaker
But books were, you know, Aeneas Nein was writing, Henry Miller was writing, you know, it was a pornography. No, of course not, but it was certainly risque. We could read that if we chose to, but who wanted that? I mean, men and women kissing? Oh, how awful was that? I wanted car chases. I wanted gunplay. And I wanted to read fantasy, Lord of the Rings, for instance, or Ray Bradbury's science fiction, Ian Fleming, John D. McDonald, the creator of Travis McGee. So I read and read and read, and my parents encouraged that.
00:03:30
Speaker
And I guess they say apples don't fall far. And my sister and I are examples of that. You said that creativity was valued in your household.
Cultivating Creativity in Writing
00:03:40
Speaker
Is creativity innate? Or can it be cultivated and learned? It can absolutely be cultivated and learned. But there are some qualities that are innate to the skill of writing. And I consider it a craft. I mean, I don't know what art is. I look at Rembrandt, Mozart.
00:03:59
Speaker
And Beethoven, Shakespeare, we consider them artists now, but they were craftspeople who worked on commission for pay. They delivered their, dare I say, consumer product on schedule. And within budget, I assume, I never saw any bills that Rembrandt submitted, but I assume he was paid by his patron a reasonable amount. Is that art? Well, I guess it is maybe,
00:04:27
Speaker
You know, that changes, that's a moving, moving target. So creativity is something that is, there's a kernel there, but it has to be expanded upon. And I, when I teach my course in writing, I tell my students, you need certain things to begin with. You need an innate curiosity. You need a command. I'm speaking of writing now. I can't speak to art. I was a musician a while ago, but I was not a really natural born musician.
00:04:54
Speaker
I was a good songwriter, natural born songwriter, but not a natural born musician. But you need a curiosity, you need somewhat of an innate skill in your medium, whether that's crafting words or whatever. And I think you need an empathy for two things, an empathy for the subjects you're writing about and an empathy for your audience.
00:05:15
Speaker
and I don't want to digress too much, but let me explain a little bit about what I mean. Empathy for your subject matter. I'm kind of a meat and potatoes pedestrian writer. I'm not a chronic McCarthy, you know, a great stylist, Jane Smiley, an Annie Proust stylist. Words come kind of hard to me. I put them together well, but it's kind of functional writing, but I was born with a sense of empathy. I can step into
00:05:43
Speaker
other people's shoes very easily. It's not hard at all for me to imagine what it's like, and I'm going to just run through some of my characters in the 45 or 50 books I've written. I've been a 16-year-old black girl living in Harlem. I've been an East Asian snakehead, a human trafficker. I've been a cartel boss. I've been a quadriplegic.
00:06:09
Speaker
I've been men, women of all ages. I've been good and bad. And with some research, I didn't come, I was not born fully formed as a Mexican drug cartel gun runner, but I learned that. And I could pretty easily step into his or her shoes. Now, that's the empathy that I was born with. I'm not saying that can't be learned, but I just have that facility. And maybe it's a certain sensitivity I have,
00:06:39
Speaker
I was just talking to my agent the other day and she said, Jeff, you know, you're too nice. We're negotiating a deal in Hollywood right now, about which I'm afraid I can't say too much, but it's the negotiations are going back and forth. And I said, well, to my agent, well, oh, don't worry about that. It's okay. You know, if they make the movie and she said, Jeff, no, you don't understand. You can't have that attitude because they'll run right over you. And I say, well, that's what I have you for. And she said, that's right.
00:07:06
Speaker
And part of that fairly affability I think goes hand in glove with this empathy to present characters that are real, living and breathing, and your characters have to be real. My definition of what I do is this. I create, and I tell my students, you create the most emotionally engaging story you can. That's your mission on Earth. And what is an emotionally engaging story? It's actually quite simple.
00:07:36
Speaker
It's a work of fiction in which living, breathing characters, good and bad, fully formed, fully fleshed out, confront increasingly difficult conflicts and questions throughout the book or short story, which conflicts and questions are ultimately resolved to the reader's satisfaction, not happily. The ending doesn't have to be happy. I tend to write happy endings, good prevails. You certainly don't have to do that, but it has to be satisfying
00:08:06
Speaker
to the reader.
Writing to Entertain
00:08:07
Speaker
And that experience that I've just described only works if you have characters that are rich, that are fully formed, that are people that we know. And I work very hard to do that. You know, there are caricatures of, let's say, villains. The drug company boss, the banker,
00:08:28
Speaker
And if you're lower in the food chain of bad guys, the henchmen, I don't know if this is going out visually or not, but people would see my hairline, which isn't much of a hairline, and a ponytail, and put me in a black leather jacket. And I'm a bad guy. No backstory. You know, there's, I'm talking about movies, not generally bad movies. No backstory to that character. No backstory to the drug, the drug czar, the pharma czar.
00:08:54
Speaker
Well, we don't care anything about those people. You have to fill out, you have to flesh out all your characters. So that's the one side of the empathy equation that is so necessary for writing books that relate to dot, dot, dot. The second part of the empathy equation, the readers. This is all about the readers. I've heard some authors say, I don't care about the readers. I have a vision and I, you know, I write it and out it goes.
00:09:24
Speaker
And if they get it, that's that's good. If they don't, that's their problem, not mine. Well, I don't believe in that. You know, there are authors that I find difficult to read. I mean, like David Foster Wallace, you know, brilliant writer. I've tried Infinite Just a few times and I.
00:09:42
Speaker
to be honest, I'm admitting this in public now. I haven't been able to get through it. Now, David Foster Wallace is someone who has, someone who had, sadly he's not with us any longer, you know, like let's say James Joyce with his more complex works. He had a vision and he wrote for a very specific audience, but that was his market.
Authenticity and Diversity in Characters
00:10:05
Speaker
I analogize what I do to making toothpaste. And I make mint flavored toothpaste. And you may have read that that's an analogy I use in my presentation on writing. And there are people who create books that are, we have a company in America called Tom's and it's a baking soda based toothpaste that I don't particularly enjoy, supposed to be quite good for your teeth. I kind of prefer mint or cinnamon to the stuff that may be better for you. Now Tom's has a very devout
00:10:35
Speaker
Audience, it's a very small audience and the people who do Tom's if there is a Tom I suspect there is Tom looked at that audience and said, you know, I don't need a broad audience I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna make my toothpaste ie write my books for a very small Audience that just isn't me and that's not what I want to do. I want to entertain as many people as I possibly can and so that means mint toothpaste and that means writing a book that I think will
00:11:03
Speaker
create empathy between me as the author and my book and the audience. I want people of all demographics, all gender orientations, all nationalities, ethnicities to enjoy my
00:11:20
Speaker
enjoy my writing. You mentioned Chris Hitchens, one of my absolute favorites, and he and I have about the same view of religion, so I can't say I was put on earth by any great deity, but whatever got me here, I think my mission is to write for as many people as I can, give them an enjoyable rollercoaster of a ride, and then at the end of the day, they close the book and smile, and then look forward to my next one.
00:11:48
Speaker
to use business jargon, that customer-led approach that you're so open about is fascinating. I don't think I've heard another author be so open about that and we will get there. Before we do, I'm keen to explore that mission statement that you mentioned earlier. I actually had it in front of me on my laptop and I was following the words as you said it and you said it almost word for word. This is obviously deeply ingrained.
00:12:14
Speaker
my lesson plan or something on your computer there.
The Writing Process and Outlining
00:12:17
Speaker
That's right. My understanding is it is the only paragraph that you ask your students to write out. I'm interested in that piece around facilitating emotional engagement with readers. Now you've said that, you know, you don't necessarily need to be an evil person to write evil characters. You do it via research.
00:12:38
Speaker
Talk me through that process. How do you go about understanding a Mexican cartel boss or, you know, a 16 year old girl in Harlem or any number of characters? What's that look like? Sure. And just as a bit of an aside, I mean, your listeners are going to think, I'm never going to read his books. He digresses so much. I don't digress in the books. They're quite focused. When I chat with a, you know, a fun, you know, fun interview like this, I do kind of my mind to just jump around a bit. But the, um,
00:13:03
Speaker
We have a situation that has occurred in America, and it's a global life now, so I'm sure this is true probably in Australia as well, that it has become somewhat suspect for people to write about characters of other ethnicities, genders, nationalities, and so forth, races. And the concept of the umbrella, the penumbra of appropriation occurs.
00:13:33
Speaker
I have a lot of trouble with that. I feel that an author, now I'm not talking about other forms of art, the plastic arts or movies or anything. I'm just speaking of books. An author can write about anything he or she wants to. You've got a vision and, you know, you've heard my vision. That's what I like. Other people have other visions. That's fine. But if you have a vision that may involve other characters and situations of other, let's say, other ethnicities.
00:14:02
Speaker
Oh, hell yes. You can, you can write it, but you do your homework because it has to be true. Has to be honest. I mean, if I wrote every book, again, if this is broadcast, people will know I'm a 73 year old white bald man from a middle-class background. If I wrote every book featuring characters like that, I would be failing my, my quote mission. So, um, you can write everything you want now.
00:14:27
Speaker
Yes, you can appropriate inappropriately, but it's about, you know, creative integrity. That's the ultimate goal. And if you are, if you do your homework, if you study Mexican cartels or South Asian culture, as I did in a book of mine, Lincoln Rhine book called Cutting Edge, I had some characters from New Delhi, one from Kashmir, and I was
00:14:50
Speaker
very, very diligent to study that very, very carefully. And occasionally I'll speak to people of that from a different culture if I feel it's kind of it's tough. I'm having a little difficulty understanding it. And if I have too much difficulty, I abandon that character because it would not be honest. So do your homework. I mean, Wikipedia is great for a starting point.
00:15:13
Speaker
In America, I'm sure you follow our politics almost as much as we do. I apologize for that. We hear the phrase fake news and you as a journalist probably makes your palms sweat. I was a former, I'm a former journalist. It makes my palms sweat too, because the folks who are pointing to the fake news
00:15:31
Speaker
are in fact pointing to what I would call the true news. Our traditional media, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlanta Constitution Journal, ABC, NBC, CBS, you have your own ABCs, same thing, BBC in England. These are journalistic outfits that do their homework. They get multiple attribution. They don't publish a story unless they're convinced that it's
00:15:59
Speaker
accurate, with some exceptions, of course. Well, we're the same way. We should be the same way. Wikipedia is a Google starting point, jumping off point, and you go from there and make sure your sources are verified, your portrayals of the characters are accurate, and then you
00:16:17
Speaker
sit down in your dark room, which is what I do. I close my eyes. Well, if I'm in a dark room, I don't need to close my eyes. Either I close my eyes in a light room or I can open my eyes. That's optional in a dark room and picture myself as that character. And I write and then I, you know, we'll probably talk about craft in a bit, but I write very quickly, but then I rewrite, rewrite and rewrite.
Plotting vs. Pantsing
00:16:42
Speaker
So it's that going into a different space and that
00:16:47
Speaker
to be that character and, you know, the good guys too, the heroic cops, you know, the brain surgeon who is appearing in my book and she has a very, very risky procedure to make at the same time that there's a terrorist attack in the hospital. Well, what does she do? Does she carry on? What would I as that surgeon do in a situation like that? And I kind of picture that and see it.
00:17:16
Speaker
Now you hear sometimes, and I get this question quite a bit, how do you dwell with the demons? I'm being a little dramatic there, but you write about bad stuff. And well, yeah, I write crime books, serial killers, terrorists, nefarious actors. But you know what? I should add, then they say, how do you live with yourself that night? I mean, after you're finished writing those scenes, are you traumatized for days? And I say, well, the analogy is this.
00:17:45
Speaker
picture the pilot of an airplane. And he or she is flying along and look up ahead. Terrible thunderstorm, lightning, thunder, turbulence. And they yawn and say, oh, thunderstorm, OK. And they hit the seat belt sign. And then they go on flying. And maybe they take the yoke because it's a little bumpier than normal. Or they just watch, read one of my books, ideally, as pilots say they do, an autopilot. They get through the thunderstorm. On the other side of the thunderstorm is there's a beautiful sunset.
00:18:14
Speaker
And they look at the sunset and say, yeah, okay. And they go back to reading one of my books or punching the little video game things they have in the cockpit there. Well, why? Because their job is not to get emotional themselves. Their job is to remain calm so that the audience, that is the passengers, have what is their most engaging experience, getting from point A to point B safely. And so I have very little investment. I have no favorite characters.
00:18:41
Speaker
I'm very reticent to kill a character. I'll never kill a main character. Culture Shaw, my character that'll be in this new, from the Never Game, he'll be in the CBS show Tracker coming up next year. Lincoln Rime, who's been in the movies and is the 16th book, I guess, The Washmaker's Hand.
00:18:59
Speaker
I'll never kill them. But what would be the point? People like them. Why would I disappoint readers? Now, I may create the fifth crewman of the Starship Enterprise. We've got our core of stars who go down to the planet. And there's a fifth crewman that goes with them. And he's an attractive guy or an attractive woman. And they weren't on last week's show. And we have a feeling they're not going to be on next week's show because the creators
00:19:27
Speaker
Now you've got a target, somebody that you might or might not kill off. So I'll create characters like that. But I'm not going to mess with my readers in a way that would give them that kind of harm. But aside from killing folks like that or endangering them in some way or another, I have no emotional engagement at all in the characters and the story. My emotional engagement, and I'm sorry, it is an intense emotional engagement.
00:19:57
Speaker
after 100 short stories and 50 books, I still wake up. As I did this morning, I'm on book tour, so the time zones are a little messed up, but I got up at 3.30 this morning, kind of semi-panicked about a plot point in my new book I was working on, something I was thinking about last night, and I fell asleep thinking about it, woke up this morning thinking about it. I've got a solution, I think it will work, but that still bothers me. Every day it bothers me that I'm going
00:20:25
Speaker
somehow fail. So, a long way of saying that, do I dwell with the demons? No. Hell no. You know, five o'clock, it's time for a beer. I put it aside. I'm the pilot that lands, passengers get off, my characters do what they're going to do, and you know, when I, next morning I get on the flight again, and I'll, you know, be very focused on making sure the passengers, i.e. my readers, have a safe and enjoyable trip.
00:20:49
Speaker
Freaking hearing you explain your formula like this, there is a real pragmatism to it. You know, in some respects it is detached from, from the characters themselves, which almost is counterintuitive where it goes against kind of the ways a lot of authors or creative types speak about their art or their, their craft. Does that attitude that you have lead to resentment or a level of snobbery from some more purest style authors? Yeah, it does to some extent, but, um,
00:21:19
Speaker
I'll tell you some practical matter. The world is divided into two categories of writers, pantsers and plotters. Pantser refers to seat of the pants. That is, they would sit down with a blank screen or blank sheet of paper and start writing. The plotters outline, and I outline extensively before I write a single word of the prose. And we can chat about that in a bit if you want, but just in response to your question, I'll spend eight months doing the outline before I write a single word of the prose.
00:21:49
Speaker
somebody would say, well, that's that's not I'll use the word art again. That's not creativity. Well, I'm sorry. But was it Michelangelo or Da Vinci's whenever conceiving of a sculpture basically planned it out by hundreds of sketches first and didn't touch a single bit of marble until the sketches were done. In fact, the sketches were sometimes as good as the as good as the final sculpture.
00:22:18
Speaker
Well, I'll use another analogy of the airplane. You know, I'm not getting on an airplane that has not been built according to engineering diagrams and schematics. You know, those blueprint things, they're done for a reason. And I suspect even those, I will not say that all people who are pantsers are snobs. Heavens no, there's nothing more subjective than writing. And if it works for you, it writes. Some of the authors you mentioned, Lee Child, Michael Connolly, George RR Martin, they don't outline. However,
00:22:48
Speaker
They have the sort of mind I'm convinced that does an outline in their head prior to their writing. They know where the story is going to go. People who don't know where the story is going to go often end up in a very difficult position. And I'll give you an example. And this is why some books are published when they ought not to be published. And, you know, you've read books that should not be published.
00:23:11
Speaker
all your listeners have read books that should not be published. I have read books that should not be published. Well, I'll tell you how that happens. Let's say you come up with a brilliant idea for an opening chapter and recall those set pieces as in movie set pieces. And it could be like a car chase, something that just grabs your attention right away. And it doesn't need to be action. It could be an emotional scene like a husband and wife arguing or a child, a teenager saying,
00:23:37
Speaker
to the parents, I'm leaving home. I can't stay in here anymore. And it's very tense. And the author envisions this chapter from start to finish. It blossoms fully formed in their imagination. And they're not going to let this one go. They sit down and they start to write. And out comes that chapter in about two hours. And it's brilliant.
00:23:58
Speaker
And then, they're not gonna stop now, so they keep going. Chapter two, chapter three, chapter three, well, we're not quite sure where we're gonna go. Okay, chapter four, hmm, let's think. They write something down, five, six, complete stop, bang, writer's block, run into that brick wall. And they, for the life of them, cannot figure out what to do from there on. After they have written maybe 150 pages of good, solid prose, just without a story,
00:24:28
Speaker
And, you know, prose without a story is pretty useless. So what the author then is looking at is the middle of the book, we sometimes call it the dreaded middle, and they can see nothing but cliches in there. You know, things like, well, the captain berates the detective, kind of renegade detective, and demands the badge and gun and puts him on leave. Seen that a thousand times. This is a car chase. The husband's wife,
00:24:58
Speaker
who's the detective says, I can't concentrate on you and the case, so I'm leaving you. And he's in despair. And then you look at the beyond that at the ending and there's no ending. You know, you have no ending. And, you know, I'll go so far as to say that I think every book should have a type of surprise ending. In other words, it has to be that springboard that kind of boosts the reader into a different dimension. It doesn't have to be exciting, but it has to be emotionally fulfilling.
00:25:27
Speaker
And in my case, it's a surprise ending. Like, oh man, I never saw that coming. And in fact, then I have several surprise endings because readers are really smart. They tend to get one or two of them, but I'm always going to try to have that third one that really gets them. You absolutely have to have to have
Structuring a Narrative
00:25:41
Speaker
that. But now this is the, remember the author I'm talking about with the great set piece and he or she dreaded middle and beyond that complete emptiness.
00:25:49
Speaker
nothing. They don't know who the villain is. They don't know how the detective is going to solve the crime. And, you know, it's like it'll be a deus ex machina ending, you know, some something from completely out of left field. Well, so you're confronted with two solutions if you're that odd. One is and you're going to get my take on it, the morally courageous thing and throw it all out every single word. Because if you wrote it, you know, a good set piece beginning for a bad book,
00:26:18
Speaker
Think of the great set piece beginning you can write for a good book. So that's the morally courageous thing. The other thing is the morally dishonest thing, and that is to fill in that cliche-ridden middle and the deus ex machina ending and put it out for your readers. And that's a sin. You can't do that. We owe readers everything, and we cannot give them anything less than the best. Now, I have stumbled. I have written books that just haven't done well at all, but not for want of trying. Sometimes you misread.
00:26:48
Speaker
the audience, sometimes you take a chance, who knows? But you know, I certainly try. And so you kind of write yourself into a corner that way. But imagine if you had that great set piece beginning, and you didn't sit down and start to write, you wrote it on a post-it note that said, great set piece beginning, put an exclamation mark on it if you want, stick it in the upper, or I'm a little distracted, upper left hand corner of your work board, your bulletin board,
00:27:17
Speaker
and then take more post-it notes to start to figure out where the book is going to go and outline it. And you know what? You're going to realize after a week, oh, there's no middle. There's no ending. Okay. You wad up those post-it notes, throw them out. You've wasted, what, a dime's worth of post-it notes, five cents worth, and a week of your time. But you have not put yourself in this bind of, you know, wasting, either wasting time or,
00:27:44
Speaker
doing something intellectually dishonest for your fans. So why not outline? The book has to have structure at some point. All these books, especially commercial fiction, is about structure. You know, the point-counterpoint, the fugal approach, you know, the Bach.
00:27:59
Speaker
I love classical music. The Beethoven, look at Beethoven, a classical symphony. There's a introduction of the theme. That's your prologue. The alternating adagio and andante or vivace movements. Those are your ups and downs of the book. And then the crescendo, the big exciting climactic scene. And then ideally in my books, at least a coda, that soft reconciliation at the end, reconciliation of themes.
00:28:24
Speaker
You need that structure for it to work. It's just easier if you do the outline. How do you maintain structure without structure turning into hackneyed and formulaic cliches? I imagine it is something of a fine line. Well, there are two concepts there, if I can break your sentence apart, formulaic cliches. Now, formulaic is good.
00:28:49
Speaker
Again, the airplane built according to a formula. I write according to a formula. A Deaver book is this, and you're never going to get anything but this. A novel that takes place over two or three days at most, with a few exceptions. There are many internal reversals. Now, a reversal for your listeners are going to be familiar with them. They may just not know that term. That is, when you come to chapter three and it's revealed suddenly that the good guy's assistant is actually working for the
00:29:19
Speaker
the terrorists. That's a big reversal. Or we come to chapter 17 and the guy we think is the hero, bang, gets shot in the head. Oh my God, never saw that coming. And the story carries on. And then there's the big surprise ending followed by multiple surprise endings. And then there's a hook of some kind. And the hook is the material that I've learned through research and I present in the book that I think the readers will find interesting. And I'll give you an example.
00:29:47
Speaker
My book, The Broken Window, a Lincoln Rhine book, I wrote 15 years ago about data mining. It was about data mining before we knew what data mining was, certainly before the AI.
00:30:01
Speaker
Now, I did not write about artificial intelligence. To some extent, I did. You know, it wasn't Sam Altman's chat chief PT, but 15 years ago, I was writing about it because it was a concern. The burning wire about the fragility of the power grid in America may be true in Australia as well, both as far as terrorists go and also economic and then simply climatic issues. You know, a terrible flood could take, you know, a major city's power grid off out of commission for a long time.
00:30:30
Speaker
My book, The Stone Monkey, was about immigration, undocumented immigration. So, you know, deal with those. The Watchmaker's Hand is both about corruption in the construction world and about affordable housing, both problems in America. And, you know, these are somewhat universal. The books are sold throughout the world. Now, that's a formula, and I'm not changing from that ever. When does it become cliched? Basically, the test is the reader, when they say, I've seen it.
00:31:00
Speaker
I've seen it before. You know, cliches are a cliche for a reason, to some extent. You know, avoid this phrase like the plague. Well, it's a cliche, and they say you shouldn't do that, but there's something to be said that readers get. You know, the plague is something I want to avoid. Okay, got that. There's a certain sense to it. But when the reader says, oh, man, I saw this in a, who knows what, a Lee Child book, or a Harlan Coven book, or
00:31:27
Speaker
you know, a James Phelan book to mention one of your great authors, you know, then the reader thinks, oh, you know, I'm just not going to keep reading. So you have to guard against that, you know, make it fresh. There's this joke in Hollywood, which as in many things, often in Hollywood is both a joke and a truism. And the story is this.
00:31:47
Speaker
that when a producer is looking for a product, and they call it products too, that is a book or a script to turn into a movie, they want something that has never been done before, is wildly original, and has been incredibly successful in the past. We laugh at that, but it's true. In other words, the readers want something familiar, they want something familiar, but also something new that gets their juices flowing. I occasionally rarely take a chance.
00:32:16
Speaker
And I had this idea, having seen Stephen King's, Stephen Sondheim's musical, Merrily We Roll Along, this is eight, nine years ago, again, and it put me in mind of like Martin Amos' Times Arrow and certain other works that have gone backwards in time. It started in the present, and then as the story progresses, we move back in time. I thought, could you write a thriller that way? Excuse me, the end result being, can I write
00:32:44
Speaker
book that has a surprise beginning. And I thought, I'm going to try this. And that book became the October list, which I think, and I can't recall the reviewer, it was a UK reviewer, I think the Daily Standard. And the review went something like this, a work of pure genius, and one which he must never ever do again. I love that because it was true. And it was my second book that year, it was a short book,
00:33:10
Speaker
Did I have my readers in mind? I held their hand every page of the way. I had charts and notes and timestamps. Some people have said the best thing I've ever written. They absolutely love it. And some have said they couldn't get through it, for which I apologize. But I certainly tried to do something a bit different. At the same time that year, I gave them a book according to the DVerb formula. But even that, even the October list took place over three days.
00:33:38
Speaker
lots of internal reversals, they just went backwards. So we didn't know they were reversals until we got to the next chapter. And then we got to chapter three and saw that everything we'd read up until then, and I was very careful to play fair about it, was entirely different. All the characters had different roles. Chapter two turned chapter three and I said chapter one, everything was entirely different.
Short Stories vs. Novels
00:33:59
Speaker
And I had so much fun writing it. And the people who read it are huge fans. And oddly, just before I jumped on our call here, I got an email from a
00:34:08
Speaker
a film studio that had just finished a major feature film with two major stars. Of course, can't mention anything here, but they want to option the October list. You mentioned that that was one of two books that you wrote that year. You are known as being prolific. You will generally pump out a couple of books a year as well as several short stories. So I think you're particularly well qualified to answer this question.
00:34:34
Speaker
The biggest barrier for most people is the fear of the blank page and getting started. How do you personally address the fear of the blank page? Outline. Outline. It's very simple. Let's be honest. Not everybody is meant to be a writer. That's all there is to it. I look forward to the act of writing. I enjoy it.
00:34:57
Speaker
I always have. I started writing when I was 12 years old. And I knew I was not, there were no prodigy writers even then. I knew I had to wait 15, 20 years or so to write. So I did other things that kind of, that were adjuncts to writing. I mean, I wrote as a journalist. I wrote a lot as a lawyer. I wrote more as a lawyer than I did as a journalist actually. But, you know, I knew that would take a little,
00:35:20
Speaker
a little while. In my course, I have my students come up to me. And these, by the way, I'm not a tenured professor. These are courses in commercial writing. I teach in conjunction with writers conferences, with libraries, with literacy groups and things like that. And anyway, I have students who come up to me and say, I want to write, but I just can't find the time. Do you have any suggestions? And I say, well, you know, all you have to do is find an hour a day.
00:35:47
Speaker
hour every few days. At the end of a year, you will have put together, you can write a page in a few hours, but I would say be sure to outline first so you know where you're going. And I know, would never tell them this, of course, but they're not going to be writers. They're just not going to be writers. They want to have written a book. They want to be J.K. Rowling now. They want to be Michael Connolly now, with the books under their belt, and they struggle
00:36:17
Speaker
with writing. The ones who I know are going to be writers are the few and far between who come to me and say, well, you know, Jeff, I've got kind of a problem at home. I missed the kid's soccer practice the other day. I cut class because I had to work on my book. They're going to be the writers. I mean, that's who I was. And I know that for a fact. So when it comes to confronting the blank page,
00:36:40
Speaker
I'll give some advice because I'm sure some certainly don't want to discourage writers. They're probably among your audience. And I'm sure given your the nature, given yourself and the nature of your your program, you have a lot of creative people out there. But I'd say this just some writerly advice. Write in the genre that you have read that you're passionate about. Don't think that, OK, boys, boys, zombies in an English boarding school are going to make me a million dollars. Just forget that. Write what you enjoy.
00:37:11
Speaker
reading. If you like cozies, write cozies. If you like fantasy, dystopian fantasy, write that. So write in the genre you're accustomed to and you like, you're passionate about. Plan out what you're going to write ahead of time and don't do my outlines by any means. That will discourage you. I happen to like it. Mine are 100 pages long.
00:37:33
Speaker
you need two or three pages, that's all. Joyce Carol Oates said, you can't write your first sentence until you know what the last sentence is. That's all you really need. Do more than that, you know, fill it in, say, okay, there'll be a killing here, we need a murder here. You know what, no, this is BS, no, wad it up and throw it out, start over again. So anyway, do your outline, then write your draft in any order you want. You know, the outline is very easy because it's hard to, you come to chapter six and if you don't know what's next,
00:38:02
Speaker
You've got to figure out, oh my God, what comes next? And then you may go to write chapter seven and think, well, this is okay, but then I have to go back and rewrite chapter three. No, no, no, you've got your outline. You don't have to worry about that. And you can write the ending at the beginning, the beginning at the ending. So you've got your outline, you write the book, and then rewrite. Rewrite a lot. And don't think it's finished, ever, frankly. I'm convinced my publisher doesn't want to tell me when the book is going to be printed, because I'll go to the printing plant and make changes on the press.
00:38:32
Speaker
being a little facetious there because nowadays it's all electronic and you can't do that. I mean, even the printing press, they don't let you into the room where these plates are being made. So anyway, rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite, and then just ignore criticism. It just doesn't exist. Keep sending it out and wait. In other words, take your time in all things about the process. Take your time in writing the book and take your time in selling the book. I've seen
00:39:02
Speaker
authors who are talented, but they are impatient, too impatient. I still get rejected. I do short stories. I do eight or nine short stories a year. So I'm on spec and they get rejected. I dust them off. I change them. I listen to the criticism and I change them and they get published. It's a business. It's the nature of the business.
00:39:22
Speaker
Patience and handling rejection is a recurring theme from the authors that I speak to. I spoke to Jeffrey Archer a few months ago.
Adapting for Modern Readers
00:39:30
Speaker
I think he said that his first novel was rejected 17 times before, I think it's not a penny more, not a penny less, rejected 17 times before an agent, finally, or a publisher took him up on it. You mentioned short stories and like Archer,
00:39:44
Speaker
You're one of the relatively few authors, I would say, who straddles both short stories and novels, which I think is quite a rare skill. What appeals to you about short stories specifically? They are very different. You're absolutely right. And a short story is not a short novel. And a novel is not a long short story, entirely different genres. And the difference for me is this. A novel involves what I described before, that paragraph that you
00:40:11
Speaker
you were following along about creating the emotional engagement with characters living in real, as if they were real, living and breathing as if they were real. And, you know, tugging on the emotions of the readers throughout the story, throughout the novel. That's not a short story. A short story exists for one thing and one thing only. And that is the sniper bullet of surprise. And it should elicit a gasp at the end.
00:40:38
Speaker
I've written a couple that are humorous, like a guffaw, a huge laugh, but it's a joke, but more likely the big surprise. I'll give you an example if I may. Here's a situation, a story I wrote some years ago. A girl in high school is plagued by a stalker, and this young man, also a high school student, is clearly troubled, and he fancies himself a soldier.
00:41:04
Speaker
And I don't know if you had in Australia, you probably did these little plastic, well, probably not of your era, but my era, they had these little plastic post-World War II, plastic soldiers, green soldiers, and you buy them by the bag and the kids would set up little battlefields and so forth. Well, one was a kneeling soldier and he was holding his gun and he was kneeling. Well, he affected that pose as he,
00:41:27
Speaker
stalked her and he kneel outside her gym gymnasium and kneel outside her room and in a public area her room at home in a public area where he could not be kicked off but clearly he was you know causing consternation to her and to her family her father in particular who was extremely protective and he said no honey i'm sorry you can't you can't go to the mall with your friends and she said but daddy i want he hasn't hurt me
00:41:55
Speaker
He said, it's only a matter of time until he does something. She said, but the prom, I want to go to the big prom, the big after school year dance. And he said, oh, well, you certainly can't go to that. And she's very upset by that. And then a few things happened in the story. And then she comes crying to her father and says, Daddy, Daddy, he was in my room. He opened up my dresser. He looked at my clothes. The window was open.
00:42:21
Speaker
Father goes absolutely ballistic. Cut to the scene where the police find the young man's body. He's been bludgeoned to death. And then it's hidden, but not very well, the Father's Golf Club. And he's arrested, tried for murder and convicted, but he nonetheless is a hero because people say he stood up for his daughter. He saved her. It's a shame he's got to do the time. Maybe it'll be out on early parole, but he's still got to serve his 10 or 15 years. And so the final scene of the story is this. The girl is now dressed up in her prom dress.
00:42:52
Speaker
She has the corsage on and her mother comes to the door and says, honey, you know, your your golf instructor just called and said, do you want to have another lesson on Monday? And she says, no, no, I've learned everything I need to know about golf. Thank you. And of course, we realize she had taken her dad's club, beat the kid to death herself because she wanted to go to the prom. And and he's he's doing time for it. Now, do we like anybody in that story? No, not really. But it doesn't matter because we got this
00:43:21
Speaker
a chill of surprise. Now, had that been a novel, that wouldn't have worked, because, you know, the girl, oh, little, you know, 17 year old Tammy, oh, no, how could she possibly do this? And the kid, we'd have to have his psychiatrists involved, and so forth. And then dad would be, you know, confronting these, he'd seen a John Wayne movie,
00:43:40
Speaker
once too often and wants to go get the bad guy, but he's conflicted about it. So as I say, short stories of Sniper Bullet, I love writing them. And in fact, I'm doing a series with Amazon now. I publish with traditional publishers, Harper UK, of course, published in Australia, but I also do Amazon original stories that are available worldwide, I guess. Well, I'm sure they have worldwide rights. And those are,
00:44:09
Speaker
I do about five or six of those a year. And I think one of those series of those may be not that the writer's strike is over. I'm hoping it will be a prime video streaming show. So we'll see about that. But, you know, turning a short story into a streaming show works for me because it's a it's multiple stories, but it's the big surprise twist, surprise twist.
00:44:34
Speaker
You mentioned
The Future of Reading
00:44:35
Speaker
streaming there. It provides a segue to what will be my final question. We live in an age now where there has been an explosion in the popularity of true crime podcasts, Netflix-style crime documentaries and series. At the same time, it feels like the attention span of young people is getting shorter and shorter. Are you concerned about not just the future of crime fiction, the genre that you are best associated with, but are you concerned about
00:45:04
Speaker
future of raiding more generally? In answer to the first question, no. Crime is perennial. What's Hamlet but reservoir dogs where the characters are wearing tights and using rape years instead of guns? Well, Greek drama for that matter. Crime has always been with us. And the proliferation of crime podcasts, for instance, I think the number one, I listen to a lot of news podcasts and history podcasts, but I think
00:45:34
Speaker
true crime podcasts are the most popular. So no, crime will remain popular. However, you bring up a very good point. And that is that the both attention span and the proliferation of, you know, I'll put it politely rear end in the in the armchair seat with a remote control is becoming a much more prevalent form of entertainment. And why not? It's easier than reading a book. But
00:46:04
Speaker
A book still is the most emotionally engaging experience. I say artistic or cultural experience of any creative experience of any. Why? Because the readers participate with the author. I read Lord of the Rings when I was several times. So probably 10 or 11 when I read it the first time. And I still picture that. I don't picture Peter Jackson's imagery.
00:46:34
Speaker
It was very accurate. You know, he was, he was, he hewed to the, both the spirit and the descriptive elements of the book, but that doesn't matter. I can still picture Bilbo and Frodo and Gandalf and Ergon and the, Ergon and the other characters, Galadriel, in my mind from back then. And I could hear, I could hear their voices, I could smell it. And that's what a book does. And, you know, I'm convinced that emotional experience
00:47:04
Speaker
is valid and good and superior to other forms of, let's say, storytelling entertainment. And, you know, okay, the plastic arts are the plastic arts, but let's be honest. You know, you go to the art museum, all right, maybe after 25 minutes, aren't you really thinking about where you're going out for drinks and dinner afterwards? You know, okay, maybe not. I know there
00:47:28
Speaker
true aficionados of the plastic arts, but nonetheless. But a book, I think it should grab you. You know, it should grab you and stay with you long after you've closed the final pages. And so accordingly, what I have done is, you know, you can complain that it's not what it used to be, or you can try to do something about it. So what I have done for the last few books, notably the Colter Shaw books, The Never Game, Goodbye Man, Final Twist, Hunting Time,
00:47:57
Speaker
which will be Tracker. Those are the characters who become Tracker, our CBS TV show. What I try to do in those books and The Watchmaker's Hand, my most recent link in my book, is adopt what I call a streaming style. I want readers who may not be familiar with my books or books in general to maybe listen to this and pick up the book and read it and see, you know what, this is not dissimilar from
00:48:24
Speaker
you know, Breaking Bad or The Queen's Gambit. Of course, it's a crime book. And why is that? Well, because my books are shorter now. They used to be 130,000 words. Now they're 95 to 100,000 words. The chapters are shorter. I used to have 30 chapters. Now I've got 80, 80 chapters. The paragraphs are shorter.
00:48:42
Speaker
much less introspection, a much more dialogue. They really are like scripts in a way. I can't say there's more action. There's just as much drama because I believe that the soap opera elements of a story are as valid and exciting as the car chase. It's frankly even more exciting because ideally none of your listeners have ever come face to face with a serial killer.
00:49:07
Speaker
But they've all come face to face with a difficult mother or father or spouse or partner or child. And that's why I want those dramas to resonate. And so at the end of the book, which I hope they will read in a single reading, that's what I'm aiming for, maybe two days at most, they'll say, you know what, these books, these books, they're cool things.
Conclusion and Recommendations
00:49:28
Speaker
I like them. I'm going to find something else.
00:49:31
Speaker
Jeff, it's such a privilege for me to be able to speak to people who are masters of their craft and you are undoubtedly a master of yours. Congratulations on this most recent book, more generally on a superb career in crime fiction. I'd strongly recommend to everyone listening to go out, get all 16 of the Lincoln Rhymes books and stuff them in the Christmas stockings. You will not be disappointed. Jeff, thank you very much for coming on Australiana.
00:49:58
Speaker
Well, thank you so much. A pleasure talking to you. I could go on for another hour, but I guess we have to end it somewhere, don't we? We'll wait till the next book comes out. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.