Chapter Fifty-Seven
David Baldacci
Absolute Writer
While many authors struggle to find time to write, for David Baldacci it’s more of a struggle to find time to do something other than write—and an unwelcome one at that, as there’s clearly nothing he’d rather be doing.
Since splashing onto the scene with the 1996 Presidential thriller Absolute Power (swiftly snatched up by Hollywood for a feature film starring Clint Eastwood), he’s written more than thirty novels for adults and five for young readers.
Although he’s known best for his books of action-packed suspense and his vibrant characters, such as secret agent Shaw, Army special agent John Puller, government assassin Will Robie, and Amos Decker, a man with total recall of his life who debuted in 2015’s Memory Man, he’s also penned a wide range of well-received stand-alones, among them the family drama One Summer, the Appalachian historical Wish You Well (the indie film adaptation, which Baldacci wrote and coproduced, was released in 2015) and the holiday tale The Christmas Train.
A former lawyer, Baldacci still attacks his writing career as if preparing for a high-stakes defense. His typical day currently involves several hours a day on one or more manuscripts, and another few hours on a screenplay. “During the course of the day I might work on three or four different projects, but only when I run out of gas on one do I move on to another,” Baldacci says. “I write until my tank is empty each day. I don’t count words or pages or whatever—that seems like an artificial goal for me.”
Clearly it’s a big tank, powering an energy-efficient engine with a lot of horsepower. And while he now has an office staff helping with the day-to-day admin that comes with such success (maintaining his website and responding to the hundreds of reader letters he gets every week), he still rolls up his shirtsleeves for causes he believes in, serving on the Mark Twain House & Museum board of trustees (where he is the benefactor of the $25,000 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award); cofounding, with his wife, Michelle, the Wish You Well Foundation to foster and promote family literacy, and advocating on behalf of authors during the much-publicized dispute in 2014 between Amazon and his publisher Hachette.
Baldacci broke away from his computer screen for an hour with Writer’s Digest—unhurried, down to earth, insightful, and inspiring.
Memory Man is a huge hit—4.5 stars on Amazon with some six thousand reviews. Where did the idea for Decker come from? Is his videographic memory a real condition you researched, or is it of your own devising?
Hyperthymesia is a very real [but very rare] condition. Most people are born with it—the most famous example is the actress Marilu Henner, who starred in Taxi. It’s very easy for her to memorize her lines! [Laughs.] I’ve been fascinated by the brain for a long time. The brain is our most critical part of what we are and also controls our personality. So to delve into that, I wanted to take it to the extreme and have this guy who had been a normal person and had suffered a debilitating injury and came out of it as someone else. I wanted to create a character who had some baggage that I could explore dramatically in the course of the novel, and also give him this unique attribute that would work very well for him as a police officer and a detective—but there are lots of things in his life that he’d prefer to forget, and for him time doesn’t heal wounds. Putting him into a mystery that challenged his strengths and his baggage at the same time was an interesting challenge. Usually I write about characters who are in an agency, or a police office, or the federal government—hard charging, ambitious, fit. He was the exact opposite, and I just wanted to get out of my comfort zone and chase something that would make me stretch and do something different.
How do you keep an emotional distance when writing a character like Decker? A lot of stuff in this book—losing a child, a school shooting—falls into the “worst nightmare” category. Yet to write this I’d imagine you’d have to put yourself in Amos’s shoes, and for a lot of the story, they’re an awful place to be.
Absolutely. You want to try to keep a bit of a distance just because you’re sane, but I had to sort of personally live that horror through Decker. You have the choice—you don’t have to write about these types of subjects. But if you do, it’s almost like being an actor playing a role—you just have to immerse yourself and go for it. I needed to feel what he was feeling and project my emotions through him onto the page, because it had to be a big thing to move Decker in the way that I needed him to move. It’s uncomfortable, but if you take it on, you have to jump in with both feet.
Did you always intend for Decker to be a series character?
Yeah, I always intended him to come back. There’s just a lot left to him. He was one of the few characters that I knew sitting down with the first book that he was going to be part of a series. Some of the others, like The Camel Club and even King and Maxwell, I wasn’t really sure until I got to the end of the book that I was going to bring them back. But with Decker I was pretty certain.
When The New York Times asked you about the key to a great thriller, you said a “contortionist writer at the helm who manages to stay a step ahead of even the most astute/cynical story gobblers. You make it look easy and seamless, when actually it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life and the whole thing seems held together by fraying duct tape and spit.” What are your favorite contortionist techniques?
If you can take a little slice of the world and a little piece of dirt and really focus on details, you can drive large, seemingly spectacular movements. Memory Man was a great example. It was a very small stage that I created. It was this teeny town, and Decker lives in this Residence Inn, and most of the action takes place in a school. So the contortionist in Memory Man was, Okay, I’ve got this very intimate stage, and I’ve got a very few number of characters, and mostly you’re going to see this big lumbering fat guy walking around, and a lot of it is this interior monologue of how he sees things in that school, walking those corridors. … It was like a Hitchcockian film set, and you’re trying to figure out where the parts are. So for me it was very much in those little details that are really hard to assemble properly. You want to show everybody everything, but you don’t want them to say, “Oh, I know where that’s going,” and then go on Amazon and say, “Predictable. One star!” [Laughs.]
While laying the groundwork and foreshadowing and trying to be fair, I try to do something else, almost like a magician—I’m showing you what you need to see, but with my other hand, I’m doing a trick and drawing your attention away. So while Amos Decker is lumbering through the school, piling up deductions and inductions and conclusions, other bits of action are flaring all over the place. People interrupt him; something else happens … not just to distract and deflect but to keep the action moving forward and keep the readers on their toes, going, I thought I knew where this was going, but all of a sudden there’s something else totally different, so I need to pay attention.
You’ve said you do a lot of writing in your head without doing strict outlines in advance. How can writers with similar approaches fill their tool kits with the right “duct tape and spit” to pull these kinds of plots together?
You have to retain a sense of childlike wonder. You know, there’s nothing wrong with outlines. I do many outlines as I’m working through the book, but I don’t plot everything from A to Z. When I first started writing Decker, how could I outline the guy? I had no idea who he was. I had to get on the page and kind of feel around and talk to him and see what he could do.
There is sort of some type of structure even though you’re flying by the seat of your pants with duct tape and spit. I always have an idea of where I’d like the story to go, where I think I might end up, though that could change. It depends on you exercising your full imagination. Daydreaming a lot. Sensing what possibilities are out there. Not being afraid to change your mind on something. And that’s why I think sometimes these full-book outlines are counterintuitive and even destructive. Even if it doesn’t feel right as you’re writing it on the page, you feel like, I spent four months writing this outline, I’m sticking to the damn thing. But as a writer, it’s like you’re a fighter in the ring. You have to bob and weave and juke and move and change direction and tactics all the time based on what your instincts are telling you about what’s happening on the page, and I can’t emphasize greater how important that is. That is going to determine whether the story turns out well.
There’s a perception that sometimes when writers get to a certain level they start kind of phoning it in. You’re obviously not—the phrase “hardest working guy in showbiz” comes to mind. Why work quite so hard?
Certainly financially I don’t have to do this anymore. I spent fifteen years of my life writing short stories, because I love short stories—and trust me, I’m sure you well know this, you’re never going to make a living selling short stories. That’s one reason I went to law school. I never thought writing was going to be my occupation—it was going to be my curious sort of hobby, and I wrote because I couldn’t not write. To this day, people ask me, “Don’t you ever take a break?” and I’m like, “My whole life is a break!” [Laughs.] Because I get to do exactly what I want to do every day, and I actually get paid to do it. As a lawyer I spent enormous amounts of my life billing my time out in increments of thirty minutes—and I didn’t dislike being a lawyer, I think it gave me a lot of good skills and discipline, but it wasn’t how I wanted to spend my life—so I had a very big dose of, Gee, I’m going to spend my life doing something I really don’t love. Now the fact that I am a storyteller and I’ve always been a storyteller and I did it for free for a long chunk of my life, and now I get to do it every day—it’s amazing. I work hard because I just love what I’m doing. And once it’s not a job, then it just doesn’t seem like you’re working anymore.
I know there are some writers who get to a certain level and then they start turning out a lot of books, and they have other people’s names on them, too. People ask: “Would you ever write with someone else?” and my standard response, and it’s true, is that I do not play well with others. [Laughs.] For me to have somebody come in and I give them an idea and they write the story—that takes all the fun out of it. I want to be the one seeing it through.
You’ve avoided being pigeonholed as a thriller author. Yet you wrote your first fantasy while hitting all your thriller deadlines and without even mentioning it to your agent until you were finished.
Here’s how I approached The Finisher: My wife gave me this blank journal on Christmas Day in 2008—and I tell people, “Never give a writer blank paper on a major holiday, because you will never see them again for the rest of the day!” So off I went to my little cubby, and I started writing Vega Jane. That took five years: Four-and-a-half of sweat equity, trying to figure out what the story was, and then six months of just enormous spurts of writing.
But I didn’t want people to publish it [just] because it was me. So I sent it out to lots of different publishers under a pseudonym, Janus Pope—Janus is the Roman two-faced god. And Scholastic was the publisher that seemed so excited about the book. I showed up at their headquarters to meet them—and I’d written years ago a book for them in the 39 Clues series—and they were like, “Oh, why are you here?” and I said, “Well, you just bought my book.” And, “What book is that?” “The Finisher.” And they were like, “Holy shit! What? Where’s Janus Pope? We thought he was a Brit!” [Laughs.]
So that was really more of a challenge to yourself?
Absolutely. I had no interest in going to Hachette and saying, “I want to write a fantasy, and I’ll have it to you soon, and you’re going to publish it.” I wanted people who really knew fantasy to look at this book, think it was by an unknown person, and render their judgment. And if nobody had bought it, then it would have been five years of my life gone, but that’s okay, because I’ve had lots of ups and downs in the writing business. You know, early on, where you get thousands of rejections and everybody’s telling you [that] you should do something else because you’re never going to be a writer—so I was kind of bulletproof on that stuff. But I wanted [to know], “Hey, is this good, or not good?”
How do you think you’ve grown as a writer?
I think I’ve gotten better at understanding the story. I always do a lot of research—I think in my earlier books I kept too much of it in. These days a month of research might end up being two sentences in the beginning, a paragraph in the middle, and a sentence at the end. I think I’m better at moving the narrative of the story forward at a good clip. I go back and reread some of my earlier stuff and go, I could’ve said that entire page in a sentence and a half. You get a lot more economical. My plots are sharper. Earlier on I had too much going on. My agent would lament [when] I’d turn in a book, “This is a fantastic book. You know, it could be three books …” [Laughs.]
Do you ever have to scrap a project that’s just not working, or have you moved beyond that now?
Earlier on, yes, I’ve had to scrap projects. These days, I really have crystallized it enough where it’s gotten to the level of development in my head where I know it’s a go. It’s like when pilots are going down the runway, approaching takeoff speed, and then the co-pilot will tell the pilot, “V1!” V1 means you’re going up, whether you want to or not. We’re at the point of no return; you can’t abort the takeoff anymore. So I’ve gotten better at waiting until I’m at V1 and I know I’m going up before I sit down and I start to spend enormous amounts of time on a particular project.
But even given that, it’s that latitude where you might have written a lot of it, but if it’s not working, you’ve just got to say, “You know what, it’s not working. And I’m pissed! And I’m going to go have a drink. [Laughs.] But I’m going to come back, and I’m going to cut the hell out of this, because I have to.” You can’t take so much pride in ownership of something that you are unwilling to do what’s right for the story. You just have to be brutal.
You spoke out during the Amazon/Hachette dispute and have expressed concern about trends in digital publishing damaging authors’ profits. What do you think newer authors should be most wary of in today’s publishing climate? And what’s your best advice?
The first thing is that no one on earth is going to care more about your career than you. Not your agent, not your publisher, not friends in the industry. At the end of the day, you need to take responsibility for your career. And I know it’s hard when you’ve got your first book and you’re so excited that you’re like, “I’ll let other people take care of the royalties and all that—I’m just so excited, there’s my book on the shelf!” But at the end of the day, everything matters.
As a lawyer I never wanted to see people taken advantage of. You need to be your best advocate. You need to understand the financial side of the business, because if you don’t, then you by default are going to be taken advantage of by people who do pay attention to those details.
I’ve always maintained that no publisher should make more money off of a book than the writer does. They publish thousands of books a year—but this is the only one (or two) I’m going to do. This also applies to the Amazons of the world. We the writers should be king of the hill because we provide the content. Kindles, Nooks, e-readers are great devices—if you have something to read on them.
So writers need to lead from a position of strength that we are a special commodity, and people need to be fair to us. But just because people should be fair to you does not mean that people will. We got a good dose of that, even veteran writers, with this thing with Hachette and Amazon. And the industry really can’t survive too many more of those episodes, I don’t think.
On the plus side, there are opportunities for self-publishing now in a way that gives you a platform that was never available before—but the caveat is, if it looks too good to be true, it often is. So put on your business hat and your writing hat. You have to have both these days.
You’re on the board that helps protect Mark Twain’s legacy. What do you hope your legacy will be?
I’ll tell you this story. In the early nineties, before my first book sold, I had this hot script, kind of like Die Hard in the White House, and I had an agent in L.A., and it was going to make it around to the studios. Everybody was like, “This is going to be huge, Warner Bros. and Paramount are all over this, could be a bidding war, blah blah blah.” I was up in New York—I was practicing law and our client was buying a bunch of banks, and I’d been sent up there to review leases. So I spent all day reading stuff that would make you want to slit your wrists after ten minutes. And I went back to my hotel that night, and because it was L.A. time versus East Coast time, around 11:00 I get a call from my agent. And he goes, “Well, Warner Bros. passed on it, and because they passed all the other studios thought there must be something wrong with it, so everybody passed. I’m sorry.” I remember looking out the window and thinking, Okay, I’ve been doing this for seventeen years—trying to get stuff sold and published—and I just spent three days of my life reviewing bank ground leases, and maybe this is going to be it. I’m going to have my little hobby, and I’ll write for me only.
But I went back to D.C., and I had an idea for a book. I remember thinking, I’m going to be the only one who ever reads it, because obviously the breaks are just not going to happen for me. But the drive, there it was. I spent the next three years writing Absolute Power because it was a story that I wanted to tell.
So I guess my legacy is, I’m a guy who’s always had a story that he’s wanted to tell. And that’s all I ever think about. And trust me, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that Absolute Power was going to take off. When I sent Absolute Power out to a bunch of agents, I had already started writing my second novel, because I figured, I’m not going to hear back from these guys, I’ll just write another novel and have some fun with it. That’s me—just a guy who’s always chasing the next story.
Jessica Strawser is the editor of Writer’s Digest magazine.