Clay Stafford Interviews Reviewer Maureen Corrigan: “I Want Good Books”

Maureen Corrigan interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Maureen Corrigan, the esteemed reviewing voice for NPR’s Fresh Air, is a figure whose influence I’ve admired for years. It was a true honor to present her with the John Seigenthaler Legends Award at the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. Her book-lined office in Washington, D.C., where we had the privilege of conversing, is a testament to her influence. She receives over two hundred books per week for review, a staggering number that underscores the weight of her opinions and influence.

“Maureen, all of us would like more reviews. I think like a writer. I think like a storyteller. I think the way that my brain works. But how can a writer step out of themselves and start thinking like a reviewer to get more of their books covered?”

“I don’t think a writer should think like a reviewer. I don’t think a writer should be thinking about reception.”

“Not at all?”

“I think a writer’s job is to be as loyal to the work at hand as possible, and that is where your focus should be. And thinking about reception is, in my mind, a killer. When I’m having trouble with a review—just writing because reviewing is writing—I don’t think, ‘Oh, I’d better write it this way because I know that’s gotten a good response,’ like jokes or some witticisms from Fresh Air audiences, or whatever. What I say to myself is, ‘Pretend you’re writing this for the Village Voice.’ That’s where I started out as a reviewer. Voice was the greatest independent newspaper ever in America. There’s a new anthology out of Village Voice writing that I’m very excited about. The Voice would let you do anything, and be as outrageous, or even offensive, or funny, or heartfelt, as you wanted it to be. If they felt like you were writing from an authentic place, if you had something interesting to say, let it rip. I need to give myself permission to really think about what I think of a work and write in the way that I think is appropriate to my sensibility. I cannot think about whoever is hearing it, or reading it, or how they may feel about what I’m writing.”

“This leads to my next question. You are a professor as well as a reviewer, and what do you think a writer should do to have a writer’s education?”

“For me, it’s still the traditional wisdom: read, read, read, read, read, read.”

“And read what?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yes. Read popular fiction. Absolutely read the canonical stuff. I mean, there’s a reason why we’re still talking about Hemingway, even though some of my students might roll their eyes and say, ‘Oh, you know, the deadest of the whitest, malest writers.’ Read him. Look at those Nick Adams stories. Hear that voice! Look at what he’s doing with those omissions, those spaces in his writing, and how he draws us in. You try to do it. See if you can do something like that. And, as a reviewer, to have a sense of the canon of Western civilization, you know, I wish I had absorbed more of it. I’m always trying to be able to make those connections to contemporary literature, or to even sometimes use an apt quote that opens out what a book might be trying to do. I’ve got some of that at my fingertips. So, I think being informed about the craft and the art that you’re working in is crucial. And I’ll tell you one other thing. I think the greatest advice is, ass in the chair. I am a little fed up with pre-writing. I think that the academy writing programs are way too invested in pre-writing exercises.”

“Can you define that?”

“I have an honor student right now who’s working on a thesis. And what that means at Georgetown is that she will have been in a yearlong class. All fall semester, she and her cohort were just talking about what they thought they wanted to do. That’s four months of talk, and then she would meet with me, and she’d say, ‘I think I want to do this and that.’ Being the sour puss that I am, I would say, ‘Well, I think I want to write a book about a whale and a ship. What do you think of that?’ But it’s not gonna be Moby Dick. Put it down on paper and see what it really is, and then we can work with this. I think that all these pre-writing exercises where students—they don’t even do drafts. They do outlines finally, but they’re theorizing their subject. And you know it’s just endless talking about what they think they might want to write. I think it amps up the anxiety of writing. Just sit down and write—as Anne Lamott says—the shitty first draft, and then the next one, and then the next one, and the next one. It is not fun. It’s hard to write. Keep doing it, keep at it, and maybe something will come of it. That’s the only way.”

“So, if a writer wanted to transcend just the normal, what would they do? How would they go about it?”

“They’d have to look inside themselves. They’d have to look inside themselves armed with all of that other language in those great books that I’m talking about, and they’d have to look inside themselves and say, ‘What’s my worldview? What’s the thing that when I think about it—an incident, a person, a situation—I get that charge of, ‘I want to get it down. I want I want to nail that.’ I think they have to start with wherever their creative spark is. That’s what they have to do.”

“Okay, last question. In your classes, teaching, and being around authors, your whole life, basically, even before you started a career, you were around authors your whole life. What do you wish that writers really knew? If you took a writer aside and said, ‘I just wish you knew this,’ what would that be?”

“Well, I hope they know that writing really changes people’s lives. I hear from listeners of Fresh Air who say, ‘I read this book or that book on your say so. It really touched me profoundly.’ My students still come in with Catcher in the Rye, and they want to talk about it. They feel such a strong connection with Holden. For many of us, those characters, those worlds that we meet on the pages of a book, they’re as real as anything that’s out there. I really do feel like there is a kind of sacred aspect to writing. So even if you’re writing—you know I love mysteries—even if you’re writing mysteries, my God! Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, that whole crew. I’m rereading the Spencer novels now, Robert B. Parker. I love those novels and I’m seeing the magic in them again—I haven’t read them in a long time—from back in the Seventies. Parker was writing from an authentic place. I think, late in the series he began to repeat himself and quote himself, but what a joy it is to read those novels and to enter that world! And I feel like you can feel that he’s having a blast himself being in that world. So, I don’t know. I think writers should know we’re all rooting for them. We want the magic to happen, too.”

“You’re talking about characters. You’re still not over Gatsby.”

“Oh, how could you ever get over Gatsby? I was just in New York. I had the privilege of meeting with some of the folks involved in one of the two Gatsby musicals that are about to open. It was so much fun talking to creative people who were not, you know, academics. Yeah, who were musicians, who were producers, directors. What’s Gatsby about? What’s this about? People who are just as obsessed as I am with that novel. It has a hold on many of us, and it’s so wonderful to have Gatsby regarded that way, but also to think about why, what is the magic here? You know it hasn’t gone away in 100 years.”

“Was Fitzgerald telling an inward story, or was he trying to change a life, or what?”

“He was telling an inward story. He did both. He was also telling a story about America and the dream of American meritocracy, and how it lets us down. In that 185-page little novel, he managed to vacuum-pack his own story—a lot of it is about class anxiety and that’s Fitzgerald’s story—and it’s also the story about America and the promise of America.”

“So, it’s personal and bigger.”

“That’s right. And it’s hard to do that. And he managed to pull it off.”

“But that’s what we all should strive for. Thank you.”

“I’m flattered and honored that you want to talk to me. You’ve probably heard enough of my spiel about Gatsby and writing and everything else, but I really do believe all this stuff. I want the good books. I want the books that surprise me.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer and filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2019, Corrigan was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle; in 2023, she received the John Seigenthaler Legends Award from The Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. Her book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures, was published in 2014. https://maureencorrigan.com/

“Dean Koontz: The Secret of Selling 500 Million Books”

Dean Koontz interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Dean Koontz is and always has been an incredibly prolific writer. He’s also an excellent writer, which explains why he’s had such phenomenal success. When I heard he and I were going to get to chat exclusively for Killer Nashville Magazine, I wanted to talk to him about how one man can author over one hundred and forty books, a gazillion short stories, have sixteen movies made from his books, and sell over five hundred million copies of his books in at least thirty-eight languages. It's no small feat, but surprisingly, one that Dean thinks we are all capable of. “So, Dean, how long should a wannabe writer give their career before they expect decent results?”

“Well, it varies for everybody. But six months is ridiculous. Yeah, it’s not going to be that fast unless you’re one of the very lucky ones who comes out, delivers a manuscript, and publishers want it. But you also have to keep in mind some key things. Publishers don’t always know what the public wants. In fact, you could argue that half the time, they have no idea. A perfect example of this is Harry Potter, which every publisher in New York turned down, and it went to this little Canadian Scholastic thing and became the biggest thing of its generation. So, you just don’t know. But you could struggle for a long time trying to break through, especially for doing anything a little bit different. And everybody says, ‘Well, this is different. Nobody wants something like this.’ And there are all those kinds of stories, so I can’t put a time frame on it. But I would say a minimum of a few years.”

“I usually tell everyone—people who come to Killer Nashville, groups I speak to—four years. Give it four years. Is that reasonable?”

“I think that's reasonable. If it isn’t working in four years, I wouldn’t rule it out altogether, but you’d better find a day job.”

“I was looking at your Facebook page, and it said on some of your books you would work fifty hours a week for x-amount of time, seventy hours a week for x-amount of time. How many hours a week do you actually work?”

“These days, I put in about sixty hours a week. And I’m seventy-eight.”

“Holy cow, you don’t look anywhere near seventy-eight.”

He shakes his head. “There’s no retiring in this. I love what I do, so I’ll keep doing it until I fall dead on the keyboard. There were years when I put in eighty-hour weeks. Now, that sounds grueling. Sixty hours these days probably sounds grueling to most people or to many people. But the fact is, I love what I do, and it’s fun. And if it’s fun, that doesn't mean it’s not hard work and it doesn’t take time, because it’s both fun and hard work, but because it is, the sixty hours fly by. I never feel like I’m in drudgery. So, it varies for everybody. But that’s the time that I put in. When people say, ‘Wow! You’ve written all these books; you must dash them off quickly.’ No, it’s exactly the opposite. But I just put a lot of hours in every week, and it’s that consistency week after week after week. I don’t take off a month for Bermuda. I don't like to travel, so that wouldn't come up anyway. When you do that, it’s kind of astonishing how much work piles up.”

“How is your work schedule divided? I assume you write every single day?”

“Pretty much. I will certainly write six days a week. I get up at 5:00. I used to be a night guy, but after I got married, I became a day guy because my wife is a day person. I’m up at 5:00, take the dog for a walk, feed the dog, shower, and am at my desk by 6:30, and I write straight through to dinner. I never eat lunch because eating lunch makes me foggy, and so I’m looking at ten hours a day, six days a week, and when it’s toward the last third of a book, it goes to seven days a week because the momentum is such that I don’t want to lose it. It usually takes me five months to six months to produce a novel that’s one hundred thousand words.”

“Does this include your editing, any kind of research you do, and all that? Is it in that time period?”

“Yeah, I have a weird way of writing; though, I’ve learned that certain other writers have it. I don’t write a first draft and go back. I polish a page twenty to thirty times, sometimes ten, but I don’t move on from that page until I feel it’s as perfect as I can make it. Then I go to the next page. And I sort of say, I build a book like coral reefs are built, all these little dead skeletons piling on top of each other, and at the end of a chapter, I go print it out because you see things printed out you don’t see on the screen. I do a couple of passes of each chapter that way and then move on. In the end, it’s had so many drafts before anyone else sees it that I generally never have to do much of anything else. I’ll always get editorial suggestions. I think since I started working this way, which was in the early days, my editorial suggestions take me never a lot more than a week, sometimes a couple of days. But when editors make good suggestions, you want to do it because the book does not say ‘By Dean Koontz with wonderful suggestions by…’ You get all the credit, so you might as well take any wonderful suggestion.”

“You get all the blame, too.”

“Yes, you do, although I refuse to accept it.”

“Do you work from an outline, then? Or do you just stream of consciousness?”

“I worked from outline for many years, but things were not succeeding, and so I finally said, you know, one of the problems is that I do an outline, the publisher sees it, says ‘Good. We’ll give you a contract,’ then I go and write the book and deliver it, and it’s not the same book. It’s very similar, but there are all kinds of things, I think, that became better in the writing, and publishers say, ‘Well, this isn’t quite the book we bought,’ and I became very frustrated with that. I also began to think, ‘This is not organic. I am deciding the entire novel before I start it.’ Writing from an outline might work and does for many writers, but I realized it didn’t work for me because I wasn’t getting an organic story. The characters weren’t as rich as I wanted because they were sort of set at the beginning. So, I started writing the first book I did without an outline called Strangers, which was over two hundred fifty thousand words. It was a long novel and had about twelve main characters. It was a big storyline, and I found that it all fell together perfectly well. It took me eleven months of sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, but the book came together, and that was my first hardcover bestseller. I’ve never used an outline since. I just begin with a premise, a character or two, and follow it all. It’s all about character, anyway. If the book is good, character is what drives it.”

“Is that the secret of it all? Putting in the time? Free-flowing thought? Characters?”

“I think there are several. It’s just willing to put in the time and think about what you’re doing, recognizing that characters are more important than anything else. If the characters work, the book will work. If the characters don’t, you may still be able to sell the book, but you’re not looking at long-term reader involvement. Readers like to fall in love with the characters. That doesn’t mean the characters all have to be wonderful angelic figures. They also like to fall in love with the villains, which means getting all those characters to be rich and different. I get asked often, ‘You have so many eccentric characters. The Odd Thomas books are filled with almost nothing else. How do you make them relatable?’ And I say, ‘Well, first, you need to realize every single human being on the planet is eccentric. You are as well.”

“Me?” I laugh. “You’re the first to point that out.”

He joins in. “It’s just a matter of recognizing that. And then, when you start looking for the characters’ eccentricities—which the character will start to express to you—you have to write them with respect and compassion. You don’t make fun of them, even if they are amusing, and you treat them as you would people: by the Golden Rule. And if you do, audiences fall in love with them, and they stay with you to see who you will write about next. And that’s about the best thing I can say. Don’t write a novel where the guy’s a CIA agent, and that’s it. Who is he? What is he other than that? And I never write about CIA agents, but I see there’s a tendency in that kind of fiction to just put the character out there. That’s who he is. Well, that isn’t who he is. He’s something, all of us are, something much more than our job.”

“What advice do you give to new writers who want to become the next Dean Koontz?”

“First of all, you can’t be me because I’m learning to clone myself, so I plan to be around for a long time. But, you know, everybody works a different way, so I’m always hesitant to give ironclad advice. But what I do say to many young writers who write to me, and they’ve got writer's block, is that I’ve never had it, but I know what it is. It’s always the same thing. It’s self-doubt. You get into a story. You start doubting that you can do this, that this works, that that works. It’s all self-doubt. I have more self-doubt than any writer I’ve ever known, and that’s why I came up with this thing of perfecting every page until I move to the next. Then, the self-doubt goes away because the page flows, and when I get to the next page, self-doubt returns. So, I will do it all again. When I’m done, the book works. Now, if that won’t work for everybody, I think it could work for most writers if they get used to it, and there are certain benefits to it. You do not have to write multiple drafts after you’ve written one. What happens with a lot of writers is they write that first draft—especially when they’re young or new—and now they have something, and they’re very reluctant to think, ‘Oh, this needs a lot of work’ because they’re looking at it as, ‘Oh, I have a novel-length manuscript.’ Well, that’s only the first part of the journey. And I just don’t want to get to that point and feel tempted to say, ‘This is good enough,’ because it almost never will be that way.”

“No,” I say, “it never will.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Dean Koontz is the author of many #1 bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies in thirty-eight languages, and The Times (of London) has called him a “literary juggler.” He lives in Southern California with his wife Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens Trixie and Anna. https://www.deankoontz.com/