Clay Stafford talks with David Handler on “Character, Conscience, and Crime”

David Handler interviewed by Clay Stafford

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For Killer Nashville Magazine, I had the pleasure of chatting with David Handler—storyteller, observer, craftsman—to talk about the rhythm of crime fiction, the quiet power of character, and how to say something meaningful without ever preaching. What follows is honest, generous, and full of the kind of wisdom that only comes from doing the work. “David, let’s talk about thematic elements, which are so vital to your work. I grew up in a small town, so your latest book, The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home, really resonated with me. It felt different. Your novels often explore issues such as race, privilege, class, and pollution, weaving them seamlessly into the narrative. They never feel like lectures. How do you recommend other writers include meaningful issues in their work without sounding preachy?”

“For me, it starts with writing a lot of drafts. I usually let myself go ahead and write the lecture—get it all out. Then I step back and ask, ‘What do I really need here? What’s boring or extraneous? What moves the story?’ If something slows the momentum, I cut it.”

“So, the line is really about whether it’s boring?”

“That’s one test. But ‘extraneous’ is just as important. I always think like a reader. If my interest dips, something’s wrong. I’m the type who can read one page in a bookstore and know whether I’ll like the book. A lot depends on voice. If it reads like a Netflix screenplay in disguise, I’m out. I’m a fussy reader, which makes me a fussy writer. Pacing is crucial. Especially in crime fiction, you can’t give readers too much time to think, or the illusion might crumble. You have to keep them moving.”

“Like Hitchcock’s famous ‘icebox questions’.”

“Exactly. Hitchcock described those as questions people ask later, like when they’re getting a glass of milk from the fridge at midnight: ‘Wait, why was there a machine gun on that crop duster?’ It didn’t matter in the moment because he kept the story moving. You don’t want to push it too far, but forward momentum matters.”

“Lately, I’ve noticed more books focusing heavily on social issues, sometimes at the expense of story. It could just be what I’m reading, but it feels more common.”

“There was definitely a movement in the crime community a few years ago that leaned that way.”

“What you do differently, though, is include social issues without directing them. Your characters live within the issues. You’re not editorializing; you’re reporting, like a good journalist.”

“That journalism background helps. Whether I was writing criticism, doing profiles, screenplays, or columns, it’s all added up. But honestly, I rely a lot on instinct. After years of hard work, you develop a gut feeling for what belongs on the page.”

“And your tone helps. Some writers come to the page with anger. You bring a sardonic wit.”

“I do, but I don’t consider my books ‘comic mysteries,’ even though some critics label them that way.”

“I wouldn’t call them that either.”

“They have humor—Hoagy’s voice includes sharp observations, and the dialogue can be funny—but I think of them as serious novels. Early in the series, I pushed the humor harder. I was younger, trying to prove I could be funny. But then I took a twenty-year hiatus between the first eight books and the next set. Coming back, I was older, more relaxed. Now I let the voice come naturally. If it feels forced, I cut it. It’s like the difference between a twenty-two-year-old NBA player and a thirty-year-old one. The younger guy’s trying to impress, jump higher, run faster. The older player sees the game better, sets up the team, and plays the long game.”

“There’s a fairness to how you write. One character might view their world as totally normal, while another sees it as broken. You show both perspectives without judgment. That feels like your journalism again.”

“It probably is. I try to keep an open mind. I learn from my characters. One of the central themes in my work, and maybe my outlook on life, is that no one is who they seem to be. We think we know people, but we don’t. You might have friends who seem happy, then suddenly divorce. No one knows the truth of a relationship except the two people in it. I try to dig beneath the image someone presents and find out who they really are. People have layers. Vanity. Flaws. Strengths. And they’re more complicated than we realize. The older I get, the more I see how surprising they can be. I’ve had experiences in show business that would make your jaw drop, people you thought were friends turning on you. But I’ve also seen incredible kindness. For me, it always comes back to the people. The murder is an outgrowth of character and relationship.”

“That’s a powerful point. Social issues do reflect our environment. What advice do you have for writers who want to include them without being heavy-handed?”

“You can always tell when it’s heavy-handed or when a writer did a lot of research and refuses to cut any of it.”

“They throw it all in.”

“Subtlety matters. A little goes a long way. The issue should be organic to the story. Otherwise, it’s a distraction.”

“That’s what I felt reading your work. Pollution, dying towns, underfunded systems. They’re not soapboxes. They’re realities the characters live inside. You’re not explaining the cause of the decay; you’re showing what it’s like to live with it.”

“That’s the goal. Take the brass mill in the new book. One of the characters rarely talks about his father’s past, but the mill was a toxic place. Brass contains lead. The workers got sick. The groundwater was poisoned. It was non-union. Then it all collapsed when cheaper imports arrived from countries without environmental regulations. I’m not giving a ten-page lecture on it, but I want readers to feel it.”

“And we do—because your characters live it. Any advice for new writers?”

“Years ago, when I was doing celebrity profiles, I interviewed one of my childhood idols, Ray Bradbury. I was about twenty-six. I told him I wanted to be a novelist but didn’t know what kind of books to write. I had too many ideas and no direction. He said, ‘Sure you do.’ I asked, ‘I do?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. Write what you love to read.’ I got into the hotel elevator afterward, and I felt like I’d just spoken with the Dalai Lama. ‘Write what you love to read.’ It’s simple, but it changed me. Don’t think about the marketplace. Don’t chase trends. Just write the stories that move you.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, The Balanced Writer, and Killer Nashville Magazine. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

David Handler is the Edgar Award-winning author of several bestselling mystery series. He began his career as a New York City reporter. In 1988, he published The Man Who Died Laughing, the first of his long-running series starring ghostwriter Stuart Hoag and his faithful basset hound Lulu.

https://davidhandlerbooks.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Eric LaRocca on “Writing Transgressive Literature Without Apology”

Eric LaRocca interviewed by Clay Stafford

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In this bold, unfiltered conversation, horror author Eric LaRocca tells me about the purpose of transgressive fiction, the emotional truths behind unsettling storytelling, and the liberating power of pushing past boundaries. With a career built on polarizing reactions and visceral storytelling, LaRocca shares how discomfort, provocation, and empathy coexist in his work—and why that tension is exactly where his voice belongs. “Eric, I found your book quite immersive.”

“Thank you. That means a lot. I appreciate it.”

“I don't know that it was comforting—it didn’t exactly leave me feeling safe—but it was certainly immersive. Which, I think, was exactly your intention.”

“Yeah, definitely. I'm not interested in comforting readers.”

“And that's where I want to start—writing that challenges rather than soothes. I want to talk about the pleasures and perils of bold, transgressive literature. Most people don’t push boundaries like you do, and I think it’s worth exploring what happens when writers dare to go there.”

“I think so too. One of my favorite transgressive writers, Samuel R. Delany—who’s usually known for science fiction—once said something that really stuck with me. He wrote a book called Hogg, one of the most transgressive things I’ve ever read. In an interview, he said the point of transgressive literature is to move forward the barometer of what’s acceptable—what’s palatable—and I agree. Each time something outrageous is published, it shifts the line. It tests comfort levels. What was once brutal or grotesque becomes more accepted. That’s what I try to do with my work—move the line.”

“What drew you personally to this side of storytelling? What’s the creative reward in pushing those boundaries?”

“I've always been drawn to the dark, the macabre, the unsettling. Even as a kid, my parents noticed I leaned toward the grotesque. I grew up in a small, isolated Connecticut town and spent a lot of time at the library—reading Roald Dahl’s children’s stories first, then his adult work. Hitchcock. Agatha Christie. Poe. Hawthorne. Gothic fiction became a big influence. There’s catharsis in it—especially Gothic literature. It’s emotional, taboo, unconventional. And transgressive fiction builds on that—it’s a burst of energy, a pageantry of the grotesque.”

“You mentioned transgressive fiction as catharsis. Was there a writer who opened that door for you?”

“Clive Barker. In high school, his work showed me what fiction could really do. He was a gateway. From there, I discovered Poppy Z. Brite, Kathe Koja, Dennis Cooper—who’s one of my favorites. His book Frisk is unsettling in a way that stays with you. Bret Easton Ellis, too. That’s how I fell into this netherworld of depravity.”

“Which brings us to something you said earlier—people can be uncomfortable seeing characters doing horrible things. There’s often pushback.”

“Right. There’s this idea that character representation needs to be clean, sanitized. And I get that there’s a spectrum, but I’m interested in the grotesque end. That’s where I live creatively. For a long time, we didn’t see unsanitized horror. It’s coming back, though, and I think it’s wonderful. There’s space now for graphic, messy, problematic characters—and I want to keep exploring that.”

“When you’re writing something deeply unsettling, how do you know whether it’s necessary or if it’s just shock value?”

“Sometimes it is shock value. I think of Harlan Ellison—his story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is one of my favorites. He got criticized for being shocking, and he said, ‘Yes, that’s the point.’ It’s supposed to disturb you. I feel the same. I want to provoke people—not harm them—but shake them up. That’s what books can do.”

“Unless someone gets hit in the head with one.”

“Right. But seriously, books have power. Especially transgressive ones. They change perspective. Broaden minds. I don’t want people finishing my book and thinking, ‘That was fine. Three stars.’ I want one star—'This is vile, I hated it’—or five stars—'This is vile, I loved it.’ No middle ground. I want intense reactions.”

“But how do you stay true to that artistic vision when you know it might alienate readers—or publishers?”

“I used to care. A lot. I wanted people to like me. But I’ve grown out of that. Most readers will never truly know me. I’m just a name on a book cover to them. And as for publishers—sure, there’s sometimes compromise. When I worked with Blackstone, there were things in the manuscript they wanted removed—too graphic. I wasn’t thrilled, but I understood. Publishing is a team effort. You have to protect your vision, but sometimes, a little compromise helps the book reach more people.”

“Did cutting those scenes hurt?”

“Yeah. It wasn’t easy. But I made peace with it. I could’ve refused, but then maybe the book doesn’t get out there the same way. You pick your battles.”

“Ever had a moment where you asked yourself, ‘Am I going too far?’”

“Not really. I might check in with my friends—'Will this upset people?’—but ultimately, I want to provoke. That’s my nature.”

“And when you refuse to play it safe, what’s the emotional reward for you?”

“Hearing from readers—especially young readers—who say, ‘Thank you for showing this.’ That’s the reward. Seeing themselves reflected, unsanitized, gives them permission to write their truth. That’s what Clive Barker and Dennis Cooper did for me. To be that for someone else is everything.”

“But the downside is that distribution becomes a hurdle. Big publishers don’t always embrace transgressive work.”

“Exactly. It’s niche, and publishers can be risk-averse. I was lucky—Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke went viral. Tiny indie press, but the book blew up. You can’t predict what hits. But transgressive fiction can struggle to find a wide audience.”

“Have you faced blowback?”

“Definitely. Especially online. People get upset. But that’s part of the job. You can’t write this kind of work and expect universal praise.”

“Have those moments ever made you second-guess your creative direction?”

“In quiet moments, sure. I’ll ask, ‘Did I cross a line?’ But it always comes back to: Do I want to write bold, honest work? Or do I want to write what sells? And there’s no wrong answer. Sometimes you need to pay the bills. I’m experimenting more now. I’ve got a book coming out with Saga Press—it’s still horror, still me, but more restrained. It’s okay to explore your range.”

“For writers who want to take risks, but are scared of backlash—what would you say?”

“Have a strong support system. Loved ones you can lean on. That’s everything. If transgressive writing is in your heart, it can be life-changing—but it’s not for everyone. You need grounding.”

“And when you’re writing these brutal characters, do you still feel compassion for them?”

“Absolutely. That’s something I’ve heard from readers—that there’s empathy in my work. Even when it’s violent and ugly. I try to understand my characters, even when they’re doing terrible things. That empathy needs to be there—or else it’s just gore. At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a brutal book, but I cared deeply for Ashley. He’s obsessed with horrible things, but I felt for him. That feeling matters.”

“I felt it too. Even amid the darkness, there was this little candle of hope. You never snuffed it out entirely.”

“Thank you. That means a lot.”

“What do you hope readers carry with them when they close the book?”

“A deeper understanding of humanity. Of themselves. The people I write about—they exist. And we’re losing compassion. We’re losing grace. I want readers to reflect. Think about grief, trauma, sexuality. I don’t write with a moral message in mind—but maybe, as Delany said, the line moves a little. Maybe compassion enters the chat. That’s the hope.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, The Balanced Writer, and Killer Nashville Magazine. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Eric LaRocca (he/they) is a 3x Bram Stoker Award finalist and Splatterpunk Award winner. He was named by Esquire as one of the “Writers Shaping Horror’s Next Golden Age” and praised by Locus as “one of strongest and most unique voices in contemporary horror fiction.” He currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts, with his partner.

https://ericlarocca.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Thomas Perry “On Crafting Unforgettable Characters”

Thomas Perry interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I was curious to talk with bestselling author Thomas Perry to explore the inner architecture of his characters—smart, flawed, fiercely independent—and how writers can create protagonists like his who feel as real as the people we know. I got the opportunity to speak with him from Southern California. “Thomas, let’s talk about characters. All is a strong word, as my wife always tells my children, but all your protagonists are strongly self-reliant and emotionally layered. How do you write those so honestly without them appearing forced or contrived?”

“There are certain things for each character. For example, Jane Whitefield is a character that I’ve written in nine novels, and she was probably most in danger of being a superhero.”

“She knows an awful lot.”

“She does. Part of the fun is that she knows things that we know how she knows, how she learned them, who told her or showed her, or what experience caused it. When I first started writing, I wrote one, and then at Random House, my editor was Joe Fox, and he called me up—as editors sometimes do—and they say, ‘Working on anything?’ and you say, ‘No, I don’t like to eat anymore. It’s okay.’ No, I said, ‘You know, I’m working on this Jane Whitefield character again. I finished with that first story, but I’m not finished with that character. I feel like I know more about her, having written her, thought about it, and read a lot of background information, anthropological books, and so on. I’m doing it, and it’s going well so far.’  And he said, ‘Okay, well, talk to you later.’ And then about fifteen minutes later, he called and said, ‘How’d you like to make it five?’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to do a series.’ And then he mentioned a number and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’ High principle. After I’d written five of them, I wrote many other books that were standalone novels because I had been thinking of them over the five years I was writing those other books. At a certain point, I started getting letters from people and then emails. I finally got one that said, ‘You haven’t written a Jane Whitefield book in a couple of years. Are you dead, or have you retired?’”

“What did you reply?”

“No, the best reply is no reply. They think you’re dead.”

“How do you develop these character backstories and make your protagonists intriguing and deeply grounded without boring? How do you avoid that info dump we often want to put into our stories?”

“That’s where you must learn to cross out. Do I need this? Is this information that everybody must have to understand, or to move the story along? Get rid of it. It’s great to write it. You understand it, and it helps you with everything else about that character you’re writing, but you don’t have to lay it all out on the table and make everybody read it. As Elmore Leonard said famously, ‘Cross out the things that people are gonna skip over.’ I think that’s probably still true.”

“I love the way that you introduce characters. On the first pages of any book, your characters come fully formed. They’re not developing. How do you introduce them like that? Is there a trick that instantly signals they’re competent and deep, without over-explaining? It seems like we turned our private camera into their living room, and they are real people right there from the start.”

“I’m glad they seem that way. I don’t know. I like to start by acquiring the reader’s attention, trying to get the reader to pay attention to what I’m doing. There are a lot of ways of doing that. One of them is to slowly build up over a couple of pages to see what’s about to happen, and then you see them in action. That’s ideal. But the craziest beginning I think I ever wrote was—I can’t remember which book it was; it’s probably Pursuit, so you may remember—very first thing, ‘He looked down on the thirteenth body.’ He’s a cop. He’s the expert, and he’s going through this crime scene. At that point, you realize that the action has started, and you must sort of scramble to catch up and find out what’s happening as he finds out. He doesn’t know yet, either. He knows he has his skills and this experience, but we don’t. We’ll try to hitchhike with him to find out what this is.”

“Your characters—whether it’s Jane Whitefield, or in recent Pro Bono—have a kind of intelligence and resourcefulness, where I wish I were that intelligent and resourceful. Your books are full of moments where characters outthink or outmaneuver dangerous situations and have the believable skills to do that. How do you show that without creating a caricature of sorts?”

“It’s fine-tuning. It has to do with whether I have gone too far. Is this sublime or ridiculous? You must be your worst critic because harsher ones will be along shortly.”

“Does that tie into the character’s philosophy or code of ethics? You put it in there, but you don’t preach it. You know enough to make it work.”

“It’s all about characters. Who is this person? One of the ways we find out who this person is, is what the furniture of their mind is. What’s their feeling about life and human beings? You must know who he is to have a character you want to follow through a book. Not all at once, ever. It’s always as you go, you come to know them better. You see them in action, the things that they worry about or think about, how they treat others, and so on.”

“You reference the furniture of life. Your protagonists rarely wait for someone else to move the couch. They do not want to wait for someone else to solve their problems. How do you ensure that growth and change come from within the characters rather than external forces?”

“I sometimes feel it’s necessary to have a situation where, for one reason or another—sometimes complicated and sometimes simple—if this character doesn’t step up, nobody will. He’s the only one with experience and knowledge about something or another, or he’s a person who does things that don’t involve the law. Like Jane Whitefield, everything she does is illegal. Everything. Since I started writing about her, it became more illegal, and they hired hundreds of thousands of people to make sure it doesn’t happen. Jane must change and trim back what she does, which is an interesting thing to play with, and introduce a character who is on the run and figure out how that person will survive if someone’s after them wanting to kill him.”

“You’re talking about Jane, and she’s one of my favorites regarding dialogue. You write dialogue very well. How do you use dialogue to reflect the characters’ self-reliance and hint at their backstory without making it that info dump?”

“Small doses. They’re the doses relevant at that moment. It’s something she knows, and we know how she knows, which is a helper. That makes it less crazy. Also, she must invent things on the spot. It’s like providing evidence. You’re trying to present a character you know can do these things and that others will accept can do these things.”

“Your protagonists aren’t superheroes. They make mistakes, they carry burdens, and they have flaws. How do you include those flaws that enhance rather than undermine a character’s strength and credibility? Because the flaws certainly add reality to things, yet you don’t want to do something disparaging to the character.”

“The flaws in Jane Whitefield, for instance, have often to do with the difficulty of what she does and still being somebody’s wife in Amherst, New York. You can’t be going off and having these fantastic adventures and expect your husband to wait for you and say that’s fine. There’s the constant where she’s trying to handle that, trying not to lie to him, but she can’t tell him many things that are going on, because if you tell somebody something, there’s a chance they’ll let it slip. If you don’t tell somebody something, there’s no chance. She has left home several times and is returning a few weeks later.”

“In your extensive experience, what separates a character that readers admire from one they never forget, like Jane?”

“Dumb luck. You know, we try. We do our best. Sometimes it works.”

“Dumb luck? Do you really think so?”

“I think you learn more as you go along. It’s a tough thing to do. Part of it is sincerity. I admire her. Therefore, there are probably subtle clues in there somehow that she’s someone to admire, because I don’t say anything bad about her—just stuff that’s a problem because of what she does. It’s odd to be doing, but it has a background in the Northeastern Indians’ history. It was a situation where people were brought into the group and adopted, particularly by the Haudenosaunee. The Iroquois were big adopters, partly because they were fighting a lot. They lost a lot of people. In the 1630s, a Dutch explorer came into western New York and noticed in an Oneida village that people from thirty-two other groups lived there. It’s a lot of people.”

“In some part of our schizophrenic brain, do you view a strong, memorable character like Jane as real?”

“Real to me. Yeah. I miss her when I haven’t written about her for a while. I miss that attitude, that self-reliance, and at the same time, that great concern for other group members.”

“She would be pleased to hear you say that. Is there any advice we haven’t discussed on building characters that would help writers build their own memorable and self-reliant characters?”

“If you’ve ever read it before, don’t do it. That includes things like occasionally, there’ll be an homage to somebody or other, and I think it’s a waste of time because the other person did it better—the one who wrote it first.”

“In all things, be original.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, The Balanced Writer, and Killer Nashville Magazine. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Thomas Perry is the bestselling author of over twenty novels, including Pro Bono, Hero, Murder Book, the critically acclaimed Jane Whitefield series, The Old Man, and The Butcher’s Boy, which won the Edgar Award. He lives in Southern California.

https://www.thomasperryauthor.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Andrew Klavan “On Cinematic Storytelling”

Cal Newport interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Andrew Klavan is not only a bestselling author but also a screenwriter. His thrillers in both media are tight, fast, and cinematic, driven by characters who feel real and plots that never let up. I sat down with Andrew to talk about how he crafts his signature style, what novels can do that movies can’t, and why writing at high speed doesn’t mean sacrificing depth. “Andrew, let’s discuss your fast-paced cinematic storytelling style. Your novels are known for their quick pacing, and they’re full of action. How has your background in screenwriting influenced the way you structure your books, if at all?”

“Actually, it’s not my background in screenwriting. It’s my background in watching movies. My great story about Alfred Hitchcock is that I used to watch his movies on TV when I was a little kid. When he died, some of his films were removed from the screen. It was something in his will or a stipulation that prevented them from playing his movies for many years. For many years, my father, who could bring home movies, would bring them home, and I’d see them in our basement, but you couldn’t see them at all. You couldn’t see Vertigo. You couldn’t see Rear Window. They were just gone, these movies that had shaped my mind and shaped what storytelling was. They kind of incubated in me. When this problem was solved and the movies returned, I went with one of my brothers to watch Rear Window in a movie theater because it had just been re-released. We came out, and I turned to him, and I said, ‘Boy, Alfred Hitchcock stole a lot from me’ because it becomes second nature to me, that story structure. And so, even though novels are different than movies, and they are more expansive, I try to keep that tight rope that Hitchcock brought to the movies. I try to keep a tight grip on that plotting rope. If I see, for instance, in my outline that I’m meandering or just going off on a tangent, I stop, cut it out, and ensure that the story remains really tight. That, to me, is the challenge of the American thriller. I’m a writer. I have a vision of the world. I want to put that vision into print, but you must do it at high speeds, and it’s a thrill to do it. One of the things I love about my character, Cameron Winter, is that he’s a thoughtful guy, so it’s implicit in the plot that he will bring that attitude to the story. But the story, to me, is everything in a thriller. You’ve got to keep it tight. It’s got to be fast, and the timing’s got to be right. A lot of what I learned from watching movies is that there’s so much less space in a film than there is in a book.”

“Are we maybe viewers and readers first, writers second?”

“Boy, if you want to talk about advice to give young writers, read everything, and read everything in your genre, and then read everything out of your genre. Sometimes I’ll be talking to my wife about a novel I’ve just read, and she says, ‘Boy, this is like a working holiday for you, just sitting back and reading a novel.’ But I just love them. I love novels more than movies. And I love watching the guy get it right. I can see when a guy gets it wrong, and that teaches you everything. Just watching what works for you on the screen and reading what works for you in books is the way you learn to be a writer, first and foremost.”

“Your books feel cinematic. You can read any of them and think that they could be adapted into a film in some way. Do you visualize that cinematic feel, or is that coming from your past knowledge bank?”

“It’s the way I naturally structure things, having grown up loving these thriller films as well as thriller novels. I often break with cinematic logic because certain things that happen in movies don’t happen in books. Movies are more literal than novels. You can get away with certain things in novels that, the minute you see them on the screen, would look absurd. Novels are closer to the human heart. They get at the inside of the human heart far more than a film can. And so, if I have a moment to expose the human heart without action, or any way—with action, without action, through dialogue, through thought—I will take that road. If I’m writing a screenplay, I won’t do it because it’ll slow down the movie. There are ways in which the movies taught me how to plot tightly, but I frequently break rules, because the novel is a different form, if that makes sense.”

“Your dialogue is to the point. I love the repeating thing: ‘I’m just an English professor,’ or whatever. I love those things. How do you craft this dialogue that’s snappy, authentic, and sometimes pithy, yet keeps the story moving forward all the time? There’s nothing there that shouldn’t be there. It’s tight.”

“It’s all character. You want the dialogue to sing, but you want each character to speak in their unique way. You and I have different ways of speaking. Everybody has a different way of talking that I just try to capture. Once I’ve got the character going, I can capture the way he talks. Once you do that, you can sort of craft the dialogue so that it’s entertaining and snappy and really pulls the reader in, but also expresses character, which is the first thing you want to do with dialogue.”

“The opposite of snappy and quick are these slower moments where you’ve got this exposition or character development that you’ve got to have. What techniques do you use to keep those moving forward at a clipped momentum?”

“My friend, Simon Brett—who’s one of the great mystery writers in England—and I adapted his book Shock to the System for film, and he’s a fantastic writer and a wonderful guy. He said to me once, ‘The terrible thing is that not only can everything be cut, but everything can be cut and made better.’ I’ve always remembered that. I would let a character deliver a monologue for 40 pages, but there is a moment when you think, ‘The audience is ready for about two paragraphs, so I’m just gonna throw out all this beautiful prose out the window.’ Maybe I’ll read it to my wife one day, so she’ll be impressed.”

“She’s like my wife. She can edit quickly.”

“There have been times when I’ve given my wife a pen and said, ‘I can’t watch this, but go ahead.’”

“Has she ever told you, ‘Not your best work, you might just throw this away?’ My wife has.”

“Yeah, mine, too, and she is also. She also saved one of my best books because the first draft was terrible. I can remember, to this day, her waking me up—I was fast asleep—and saying, ‘If you throw this away, it’ll be the biggest mistake of your life. You just have to fix it.’ Yes, I receive great editorial advice from my wife. I’m not sure she enjoys it, but I get it. I always say we have a perfect system. She tells me what I should do, I yell at her and tell her she’s wrong, and then I do it.”

“Same thing here. You always start right at the very beginning with these high stakes, and then things don’t drop, which usually happens after an opening like that. They continue to escalate quickly. How do you determine the right balance between the action-suspense and developing your characters?”

“The characters must move within the story, and the story is going to be tight and fast. That’s the thing. When the Golden Age of TV came and The Shield was on TV, and all those great crime dramas—The Sopranos and The Wire—were all on TV, I tried writing for TV, but it was hard for me, because TV never ends. It goes on forever, so the characters never change. Only the stories change. For me, a story is that one thing that happens to a character that will change him in some way, which is why, with my character Cameron Winter, I’ve extended the line of his journey, so that I can go through the number of books that I want to go through. I’ve been careful not to have him have this revelation and then go back to being who he was in the next story. It’s this idea that the story is the place where he will exist. He’s going to exist at the high speed and the high stakes of a good thriller, but he’s going to be real. I’m very proud of my action scenes. If you asked me if I were a top action writer, I would blush and then say, ‘Yes, I am. I am a really, really good action writer.’ However, when I have an action scene, I always ask myself, ‘How is character being conveyed in this scene?’ These are two people punching each other, shooting at each other, chasing each other. But what is it telling me about these people? And that’s, to me, what every scene should be like, because you don’t have much space. As Otto Penzler once said, there’s no such thing as a 900-page thriller. I think a thriller is going to be tight, so you want everything to express character and express character through his interplay with the plot. It’s not a question of judging how much action, it’s making sure that everything is an expression of character.”

“We were talking about action. Your descriptions are always right on. There’s not too much. It doesn’t slow things down. What’s your approach to writing this immersive, efficient prose that you do?”

“That’s a tough one. I think that it has to do with living in the story. It’s almost a method kind of thing. I submerge myself in story, sometimes painfully. Like actors are always telling you, ‘Oh, it was such a hard role. It broke my heart.’ That actually happens when you write and get into a story.”

“You’re a method writer.”

“It’s an unhealthy way to live. I always say I take a lot of spiritual time putting myself back together every time I write something, but I think that you must be immersed in the story. You must love the story. I think that’s the answer. If you love the story, and you write the story that you love, and you’re honest about it, and you cut out the stuff that shouldn’t be there—as much as you might think it’s the greatest sentence you ever wrote because it doesn’t serve what you’re doing—you’ll write immersive prose because you’ll be immersed, and then the audience will be immersed as well.”

“One of the things that you did, especially in the Winter novels, is these scene transitions. There are two points of view, but it’s almost like three different points of view, because we’ve got the present, and then Winter’s past in italics, and then we’ve got the psychologist’s point of view following each of those sessions. How do you handle those scene transitions to keep the reader engaged and informed, and ensure that the story never loses momentum?”

“That’s the danger. I personally love a slow build. I love a story that just slowly, slowly goes off. Modern readers don’t have as much patience for it, so I can get away with some of it, because I do like to establish a world in which people are living before that world blows apart. Because of the structure of the Cameron Winter books, especially, I have to be really, really careful not to slow build myself into the ground. There’s the story that’s taking place in the present, there’s a story that Winter’s telling in the past, there’s the relationship between him and his therapist, which is part of the story, so you have to be very careful to get where you’re going in good time. It can be a bit of a juggling act because you don’t want someone just sitting around mouthing off when people are going, ‘Wait a minute. Where is this going?’ I’ve worked hard on that. I don’t even know how to describe it, but I work extremely hard before I start writing to make sure that’s not going to happen.”

“Do you ever write with film adaptations in mind as you’re writing, or do cinematic elements come out naturally?”

“I never do that. I never think about the movies.”

“Just stay in the story.”

“I just stay in the story. Yeah, because there are these branches, where you come along, and a movie should go one way, and a novel should go the other. You want to make sure you take the novel path. It really is interesting. I was talking about Simon Brett and Shock to the System. It’s a wonderful novel. I just loved it. It was made into a movie because I brought it to someone and said, ‘You should make this.’ However, as I was writing it, I was constantly discarding content because a movie is a distinct form. It has a different shape and a different structure. I try, when I’m writing a novel, never to fall into, ‘Oh, I want this to be in the movie’ business, because, frankly, I love books more, and I want the book to be what I want it to be, because after it goes to the movies, you’ll never have the same control over it again.”

“Going back to those action sequences, how do you ensure clarity and realism, while still keeping that pacing tight?”

“That is the thing. I read a lot of action scenes where I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t understand where the guy is standing, why the bullet missed him. I try really hard to establish that structure so that the audience can see what’s going on and experience the excitement, danger, and terror of some of those scenes. Part of it is slowing it down. In a movie, to have a fifteen-minute fight scene, the guy has to throw every piece of furniture in the room. But you can write a thirty-page fight scene with three punches in it because you’re experiencing it from the inside, so it’s really what’s going on in the guy’s mind that matters. You don’t have to worry so much about how I'm going to get that wonderful sequence in Die Hard where the guy has to get up on the roof, and then he has to jump off the roof, and then he’s held at gunpoint. You don’t have to get that clever because you’re seeing it internally, and that’s where the excitement comes from.”

“For writers who are trying to add that cinematic Andrew Klavan feel, that fast-paced style, what are the lessons that they can take from film writing or novel writing in their reading, and apply to their novels?”

“I think there are two things. One is, slow it down. Even in a movie, you can slow down the action by just including a lot of little things that keep the scene alive. The second thing is that, in a novel, the most important thing is what’s happening inside the character. It might be fun just to read a description of somebody punching another guy repeatedly in the face, but I want to know what that’s like. I want to know what that does to the guy who’s doing it, what it does to the guy who’s having it done, or whatever position your point of view is in. The question is, what is happening to this guy in the scene? As a kid, I was in a lot of fights. Those are very dramatic experiences that brand you for the rest of your life. I can remember them to this day. I had a karate instructor once who read one of my books, and he came in and said, ‘Well, I can tell you’ve been in a fight.’ I want that to be there, that inner life thing. The two things are, don’t be in a hurry, do the work to make it clear to the audience, and then make sure it’s an expression of character, even though it’s action.”

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Empowering Writers. Creating Stories That Matter.

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference and The Balanced Writer. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/

Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood; Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas; Empire of Lies; Werewolf Cop; and the Cameron Winter series. He also hosts a popular podcast, The Andrew Klavan Show, at the Daily Wire. https://www.andrewklavan.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Abbott Kahler “Advice for Writing True Crime”

Abbott Kahler interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I love nonfiction and fiction, and I had an opportunity to read Abbott Kahler’s new upcoming book, Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia, at the Dawn of World War II. Great title, of course; pulls everyone in. The amount of research Abbott put into this nonfiction book intrigued me, so I had to speak with her from her home in New York about how she put it all together. “So, Abbott, you've got all this research coming in. How do you make it useful and organize it rather than just putting it in a big Word document full of notes? I love research, probably too much, and my notes become a glorious mess that I must always go back and untangle. What's your organizational process? Anything you can share with me to make my process go smoother and more time-efficient?”

“I'm a big believer in outlining. I think it's essential. I use a tool called Scrivener that helps outline.”

“I’ve got it. I use it. But I’m not sure I use it well.”

“It allows you to move sections around, and it's searchable to find sources there. If there's a quote you want to remember, you can make sure it's in there, and you can find it just by searching. I think the outline for this book was 130,000 words…”

“The outline was 130,000 words?”

“Much longer than the finished book. The finished book is about 85,000 words, so I over-outline. I think it helps get a sense of narrative. I do a chronological outline, and I can see where I might want to move information and where I might want to describe someone differently. I think outlining extensively lets you see the story, making it much less daunting. Here you are with all this information, but if you have it formatted and organized, it will be much easier to tackle it piece by piece. You know, bird by bird, as Anne Lamott says. I highly recommend outlining for anybody who will tackle a big nonfiction project.”

“Well, even in fiction, there can also be a great amount of research depending upon the topic, setting, or even the personalities or careers of characters. Compare and contrast the writing of a nonfiction book versus that of a novel because you’ve done both.”

“Writing fiction was a surprise to me. I thought it was going to be easy. I thought, ‘Look at all this freedom I have. I can make my characters say and do whatever they want. If I want somebody to murder someone, goddammit, I am going to let them murder someone.’ You can't do that in nonfiction. That freedom was a lot of fun, and it was exhilarating, but it was also terrifying. I was always second-guessing my plot points. Does this twist work? Should there be another twist here? Is it too obvious? Do I have too many red herrings? Do I not have enough red herrings? And in nonfiction, you don't have those issues. What issue you have in nonfiction is that I am dumping information.”

“Of course, writers do that maybe too much sometimes in fiction, too.”

“One of the things I talk about with fellow nonfiction writers is how you can integrate backstory and history. You always have to give context. How do you integrate that context and still keep the momentum going forward, still keep the narrative moving, and still keep people invested in your story when you have to explain who Darwin was and what he did, you have to explain who William Beebe was and what he did, you have to explain what the Galapagos are, and what the history of the Galapagos is before you get into what happened there with these crazy characters. It’s different approaches and different skill sets.”

“I can see parallels, though, in both fiction and nonfiction here. Which do you like best?”

“It’s fun to go back and forth, and I think writing fiction teaches me a lot about nonfiction. You know, what you can get away with in nonfiction while still sticking to nonfiction. It allows you to be a little bit more inventive with your process in a way that's a lot of fun.”

“Interesting. Returning to Scrivener, do you start in Scrivener right from the beginning and start putting your notes in there?”

“I'll open Scrivener, and I'll start organizing by source. Say, I have Friedrich Ritter, a character in the book, and here's everything I know about Friedrich Ritter. I'll have a Friedrich Ritter file. Then I'll have a Baroness file and a Dore Strauch file, just getting into the characters in these separate ways. Their files are always accessible, and I can refer to them easily when I want to. ‘Oh, wait a minute. What did Dore say at that time? Oh, here it's in my Scrivener file on Dore.’ I draft in Word. I'm just an old-school person who uses Word to draft. I don't like Google Docs. I don't like drafting in Scrivener. I like Word because it lets you see the page count and feel like you're gaining momentum because the file is growing. It's a satisfaction that I think I—and probably many other people—need to see as they go through a big project like that.”

“I started with a typewriter, so for me, it seems to make sense.”

“I get you. I started with the word processor, which I don't even know if they make anymore. But you know, word processors were the rage back in college.”

“The narrative of a nonfiction book, then, is pretty much the same as that of a fiction book, in that you've got a traditional beginning, middle, and an end with all the conflicts, arcs, etc., that you find in fiction manuscript, correct?”

“For nonfiction writers, one of the greatest compliments we receive is that ‘it reads like fiction.’ That's something a lot of nonfiction writers strive for. They want to write something so immersive that you forget you're reading facts. It probably goes back to the fact that history is boring if you had a bad history teacher. A lot of people grow up thinking history is boring. It's irrelevant and boring. I'm here to try to tell you that history is fascinating. History is full of blood and guts and death and murder and striving and ambition and pathos and all kinds of interesting interactions between people. You must tell the story so people can relate to it. That's the challenge with nonfiction and what many of us go for.”

“My wife asked, ‘How is this book?’ And I'm like, ‘Well, if I wrote it in a story, no one would believe it.’ But these are real people.”

“It’s so funny you say that. I call it stranger than fiction. And I once proposed to one of my old editors who turned down this book, ‘Well, why don't I write this book as fiction if the publishers are not going to let me do it as nonfiction?’ And they're like, ‘Nobody would believe it.’”

“With nonfiction, you can't put words in their mouth. You can't change the characters’ life trajectory. How many creative liberties can you take in a book of true nonfiction? Are there liberties?”

“I wouldn't say liberties. I would say techniques. You can use foreshadowing, and I was fortunate in the sense that Dore Strauch, one of my main characters, not only wrote an incredible memoir in which she was very free about her feelings and her thoughts—so I was able to include feelings and thoughts authentically because they were documented in her memoir—but she always had a sense of foreboding. You know, she said things like, ‘I had a great ominous feeling that murder was just around the corner.’ She said these things constantly because that island was creepy and bad things were happening, and I don't blame her. There was a sense of foreboding.”

“Pirate ghosts everywhere.”

“She was the pirate ghost, and so it was great because sometimes it can feel heavy-handed if a nonfiction author tries to make too much sense of foreboding and foreshadowing, and all this ominous, you know, ‘Wait till you see what comes next.’ It could feel a little forced and strained, but I had a character doing it for me here. And it was so much that my editor said, ‘I think you can cut about fifty percent of the foreshadowing,’ which I didn't even take insult to because it wasn't me doing it. It was the character doing it.”

“The real person.”

“Yes. So, you can do foreshadowing. You can do cliffhangers. You cut off a chapter when a lot of suspense is going on, and then you cut it off when you might find out what happens, and you go to another point of view and pick up that point of suspense in a later chapter. You can use techniques, but you really can't make up anything. You can't make up even gestures. You can't make up the way somebody looks. You can't make up feelings. All those things must come from sources.”

“Very interesting. From the acknowledgments at the back of the book, there seem to be several people who've helped edit, verify, and vet. You're the person with all the information there in Scrivener. How involved can they be in transforming and vetting what you write?”

“They don't have any say one way or the other, but in the interests of accuracy, I wanted to reach out to people who knew this story or the character, who knew Galapagos in particular, especially in the chapter about Galapagos history. I contacted Galapagos specialists, people who live there, work there, and conservation efforts. People have been there helping me with this book the whole time. Old sources aren't always accurate. There are probably ten different accounts of how many islands are in the Galapagos Archipelago. For things like that, you must double-check. Also, a lot of those people were translators. I got French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, and a lot of Spanish documents. My rusty Spanish wasn't good enough to do it independently, so I had many translators helping me out. A lot of those people are from that. Whenever I could have gotten something wrong, I had to check with somebody else.”

“I saw one thing you did; you'd say they wrote this in one person's diary. In another person's diary, they wrote that. And they were conflicting in their points of view.”

“That was a challenge because I didn't want to give credence to one diary. I had suspicions about who was lying and when, but I also think that what people choose to lie about and omit is just as important sometimes as the truth, and I thought it was interesting. When you're dealing with a murder mystery, people will be lying.”

“Even a nonfiction murder mystery.”

“It's part of the genre. It's part of the game. And I wanted people to have their debate about it. Who do they think is lying? I had to include all those conflicting accounts to do that.”

“Do you have thoughts, recommendations, or advice for those thinking about writing their first nonfiction book?”

“Find something you're passionate about and willing to sit with for years. Look for primary source materials. Do they exist in a way that will allow you to tell the book the way you want to tell it? You need details if you want to write nonfiction that reads like fiction. I think that's the most important thing. And then I would say, sit your butt in the chair. The most important thing about writing anything is sitting your butt in a chair, making your fingers move, and getting the words down on the page. Everybody writes bad first drafts. Everybody writes bad third, fourth, fifth drafts. You keep honing and rewriting. Rewriting is probably the most important thing you can do. And make sure you have people around you who believe in what you're doing. Find a writing group where you think the people there are better than you. Always surround yourself with people you can aspire to.”

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

Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park. She is also the host of Remus: The Mad Bootleg King, a podcast about legendary Jazz Age bootlegger George Remus. A native of Philadelphia, she lives in New York City and Greenport, New York. https://www.abbottkahler.com/eden-undone

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/

“Bruce Robert Coffin: Using Your Life to Write a Police Procedural”

Bruce Robert Coffin interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Bruce Robert Coffin has been coming to Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference every year since its early days, so it’s only fitting that we feature this incredibly talented writer as our cover story. To give a little backstory, Bruce wanted to be a writer, but after going to college and not necessarily receiving the encouragement or success he had hoped for, he chose a career in law enforcement. Little did he realize he was laying the foundation for the outstanding writing career that was to follow. I had a chance to speak with Bruce from his home in Maine. “Bruce, when you were a police officer, a detective, did you even think about writing again, or did you miss writing as you went through your regular job?”

“There’s nothing fun about writing in police work or detective work. Everything is bare bones. There’s not much room for adjectives or that type of stuff. It’s just the facts, ma’am. That’s what they expect out of you. So, everything is boilerplate. It’s very boring. You’re taking statements all the time. You’re writing. If there was one similar thing, and it certainly didn’t occur to me that there would ever be a time that I would write fiction again, but it did teach me to write cohesively. Everything that we did had to make sense. You know, you do one thing before you do the next. Building timelines for putting a case together, doing interviews with witnesses, and then figuring out how they all fit together, and making a cohesive story or narrative out of that to explain to a judge, a jury, or a prosecutor. As far as story building was concerned, I think that might have been something I was learning at that point because that’s exactly how a real case gets made. I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of writing later, but I think it’s something that helped me because I think my brain works that way now. I know how cases will work, I know how cases are solved, and I know why cases stall out. I think all those things really allow me to better describe what real police work is like in my fictional novels.”

“When you retired from detective work and started writing again, how much of the police work transferred over, and how much was fiction from your head?”

“I made a deal with myself when I started that I wouldn’t write anything based on a real case. I had had enough of true crime. I had seen what the real-life cases had done to people: the survivors, the victims, the families, and I didn’t want to do anything that would cause people pain by fictionalizing something that had been part of their lives. I made a deal with myself that I would write as realistically as possible, but I would never base any books on an actual case I had worked on. And I’ve so far, knock on wood, been able to stand by that. I think the only exception would be if it were something that had a reason. Maybe the family came to me and asked me to do that or something like that. There had to be a reason for it, though. And so, when I started writing, I could draw from a well of a million experiences, things that we tamp down deep inside, and you don’t think about how that affects who I am and how I see the world. And I think in my mind, I imagined I would be making up stuff, and that would be it. There’s nothing but my imagination. There would be nothing personal about what I was writing, and it would just be fun. And like everything you delve into that you don’t actually know, I had no idea I would be diving into the real stuff, like dipping the ladle into that emotional well and pulling out chunks of things from my past. There were scenes that I wrote that emotionally moved me as I was writing them. And it’s because what I’m writing is based on something that happened in real life. And I’m crafting it to fit into the narrative of the story I’m writing. But the goal of me doing that is really to evoke emotion from the reader, which I think is the most important thing any of us can do. You want the reader to feel something. You want them to be lost in your story. And I really didn’t think that was going to happen. But it’s amazing what I dredged up and continued to dredge up as I write these fictional police procedural stories.”

“Some of the writers I talk with view writing as therapy. Did you find it cathartic coming from your previous life?”

“I did. I think that was another shock. I didn’t think any catharsis was involved in what I was doing. But like I say, when you start delving back into things that you thought you had either forgotten about or thought were long past, it really allowed me to deal with things. It allowed me to deal with things I wasn’t happy about when I left the job. The things that I wish I could unsee or un-experience. As a writer, I was able to pull from those. I think you and I have talked about this in the past. I honestly think the best writing comes from adversity. Anything difficult that the writers have gone through in life translates well to the page. And I think that’s one of those things where, if you can insert those moments into your characters’ lives, your reader can’t help but identify with them. So, I just had the luxury of having the life we all have, the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the death and the love, and all those things we have to experience. But added to that, I had thirty years of a crazy front-row seat to the world as a law enforcement officer. So, using all of that, I think, has made my stories much more realistic and maybe more entertaining because it gives the reader a glimpse inside what that world is really like.”

“So, you have this front-row seat. And then we readers read that, and we want to write that. But we haven’t had that experience. Is it even possible for us to get to that point that we could write something like that?”

“It is. And I tell people that all the time. I say you have to channel your experiences differently, I think. Like I said, we all have experiences, things that are heart-wrenching, or things that are horrifying, or whatever it is in our lives. They just don’t happen with as great a frequency as they would happen for a police officer. And we all know what it’s like to be frustrated working for a business, being part of a dysfunctional family, or whatever it is. Everybody has something. And so, I tell people to use that. Use that in your stories and try to imagine. You know, you can learn the procedure. You might not have those real-world experiences, but you can learn the procedure, especially from reading other writers who do it well. But use your own experiences. Insert that in there. You know, one of the things that I think is the easiest for people to think about is how hard it is to try and hold down a job. Like, you go to work, and you may see the most horrific murder happen, and you’re dealing with the angst that the family or witness is suffering, and you’re carrying that with you. Then you come home and try to deal with a real-world where other people don’t see that stuff. Like your spouse is worried that the dishwasher is leaking water under the kitchen floor, and that’s the worst thing that’s happened all day, right? That the house is stressed out because of that. And it’s hard to come home. It’s almost like you have to lead a split personality. It’s hard to come home and show the empathy that your spouse needs for that particular tragedy when you’re carrying all those other tragedies from the day. And you won’t share those with them because you don’t want that darkness in your house. I tell people to try to envision what that would be like and then pull from their own life the adversity they’ve experienced or seen and use that to make the story and the characters real. You can steal the procedure from good books. Get to know your local law enforcement officer, somebody who’s actually squared away and will share that information with you. Don’t get it from television necessarily. Some of TV writing is laziness. Some of it’s because they have a very short time constraint to try and get the story told. So, they take huge liberties with reality. But if you can take that stuff and try to put yourself in the shoes of the detective and use your own experiences, you can bring a detective to life.”

“You think anybody can do it?”

“I do. I do think that you have to pull from the right parts of your life. And again, as I say, if you spend enough time with somebody who’s done the job and get them to tell you, it’s not just what we do. It’s how we feel. And the feeling, I think, is what’s missing from those stories many times. If you want to tell a real gritty police detective story, you have to have feeling in that. That’s the one thing we all pretend we don’t have. You know, we keep the stone face. We go to work, do our thing, and pretend to be the counselor or the person doing the interrogation. But at the end of the day, we’re still just human beings. And we’re absorbing all these things like everybody else does. So yeah, you have to see that. Get to hear that from somebody for real, and you’ll know what will make your detective tick.”

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

Bruce Robert Coffin is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. A retired detective sergeant, Bruce is the author of the Detective Byron Mysteries, co-author of the Turner and Mosley Files with LynDee Walker, and author of the forthcoming Detective Justice Mysteries. His short fiction has appeared in a dozen anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories, 2016. http://www.brucerobertcoffin.com/

“A Casual Conversation with Susan Isaacs”

Susan Isaacs interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I had a wonderful opportunity to just chat with bestselling author and mystery legend, Susan Isaacs, as a follow-up to my interview with her for my monthly Writer’s Digest column. It was a wonderful conversation. I needed a break from writing. She needed a break from writing. Like a fly on the wall (and with Susan’s permission), I thought I’d share the highlights of our conversation here with you.

“Susan, I just finished Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown. I loved it. And I now have singer Jim Croce’s earworm in my head.”

“Me, too.” She laughed.

“I love your descriptions in your prose. Right on the mark. Not too much, not too little.”

“Description can be hard.”

“But you do it so well. Any tips?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I do. Two things. First, I see it in my head. I’m looking at the draft, and I say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s nothing here.’”

I laugh. “So, what do you do?”

“Well in Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown, the character with the problem is a college professor, a really nice woman, who teaches film, and her area of specialization is big Hollywood Studio films. When she was five, her parents were murdered. It was an arson murder, and she was lucky enough to jump out of the window of the house and save herself. So, Corie, who’s my detective, a former FBI agent, is called on, but not through herself, but through her dad, who’s a retired NYPD detective. He was a detective twenty years earlier, interviewing this little girl, April is her name, and they kept up a kind of birthday-card-Christmas-card relationship.”

“And the plot is great.”

“Thanks, but in terms of description, there was nothing there. But there were so many things to work with. So, after I get that structure, I see it in my head, and I begin to type it in.”

“The description?”

“Plot, then description.”

“And you mentioned another thing you do?”

“Research. And you don’t always have to physically go somewhere to do it. I had a great time with this novel. For example, it was during COVID, and nobody was holding a gun to my head and saying ‘Write’ so I had the leisure time to look at real estate in New Brunswick online, and I found the house with pictures that I knew April should live in, and that’s simply it. And I used that house because now April is being threatened, someone is trying to kill her twenty years after her parent’s death. Though the local cops are convinced it had nothing to do with her parents’ murder, but that’s why Corie’s dad and Corie get pulled into it.”

“So basically, when you do description, you get the structure, the bones of your plot, and then you go back and both imagine and research, at your leisure, the details that really set your writing off. What’s the hardest thing for you as a writer?”

“You know, I think there are all sorts of things that are hard for writers. For me, it’s plot. I’ll spend much more time on plot, you know, working it out, both from the detective’s point-of-view and the killer’s point-of-view, just so it seems whole, and it seems that what I write could have happened. For me, I don’t want somebody clapping their palm to their forehead and saying, ‘Oh, please!’ So that’s the hard thing for me.”

“You’ve talked with me about how focused you get when you’re writing.”

“Oh, yes. When you’re writing, you’re really concentrating. We were having work done on the house once and they were trying to do something in the basement, I forget what it was. But there was this jackhammer going, and I was upstairs working. It was when my kids were really young and, you know, I had only a limited amount of time to write every day, and so I was writing and I didn’t even hear the jackhammer until, I don’t know, the dog put her nose or snout on my knee and I stopped writing for a moment and said, ‘What is that?’ and then I heard it.”

“But it took your dog to bring you out of your zone. Not the jackhammer.”

“You get really involved.”

“Sort of transcending into another universe.”

“The story pulls you in. The weird thing is that I have ADD, ADHD, whatever they call it. I know that now, but I didn’t know that then, back when the jackhammer was in the basement. In fact, I didn’t know there was a name for it. I just thought, ‘This is how I am.’ You know, I go from one thing to the next. But people with ADHD can’t use that as an excuse not to write because you hyper-focus.”

“That’s interesting.”

“You don’t hear the jackhammers.”

“So things just flow.”

“Well, it’s always better in your head than on the page,” she says, “as far as writing goes.”

“I’d love to see your stories in your head, then, because your writing is great. As far as plotting, the book moves along at a fast clip. I noticed, distinctly, that your writing style is high with active verbs. Is that intentional or is that something that just comes naturally from you?”

“I think for me it just happens. It’s part of the plotting.”

“Well, it certainly moves the story forward.”

“Yes, I can see it would. But, no, I don’t think ‘let me think of an active verb’. You know,” she laughs, “I don’t think it ever occurred to me to even think of an active verb.”

“That’s funny. We’re all made so differently. I find it fascinating that, after all you’ve published, your Corie Geller novel is going to be part of the first series you’ve ever written. Everything else has been standalones.”

“Yes. I’m already writing the next book. Look, for forty-five years, I did mysteries. I did sagas. I did espionage novels. I did, you know, just regular books about people’s lives. But I never wrote a series because I was afraid I after writing one successful mystery, that I would be stuck, and I’d be writing, you know, my character and compromising positions with, Judith Singer goes Hawaiian in the 25th sequel. I didn’t want that. I wanted to try things out. So now that I’ve long been in my career this long, I thought I would really like to do a series because I want a family, another family.”

“Another family?”

“I mean, I have a great family. I have a husband who’s still practicing law. I have children, I have grandchildren, but I’m ready for another family.”

“And this series is going to be it?”

“It’s not just a one-book deal. I wanted more. So, I made Corie as rich and as complicated and as believable as she could be. It’s one thing to have a housewife detective. It’s another to have someone who lives in the suburbs, but who’s a pro. And she’s helped by her father, who was in the NYPD, who has a different kind of experience.”

“And that gives you a lot to work with. And, in an interesting way, at this stage of your life, another family to explore and live with.” I look at the clock. “Well, I guess we both need to get back to work.”

“This has been great. When you work alone all day, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone.”

We both laughed and we hung up. It was a break in the day. But a good break. I think Susan fed her ADHD a bit with the distraction, but for me, I learned a few things in just the passing conversation. Writers are wonderful. If you haven’t done it today, don’t text, don’t email, but pick up the phone and call a writer friend you know. I hung up the phone with Susan, invigorated, ready to get back to work. As she said, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone. As I would say, it’s nice to talk to someone and remember that, as writers, we are not alone, and we all have so much to learn.

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

Susan Isaacs is the author of fourteen novels, including Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, Takes One to Know One, As Husbands Go, Long Time No See, Any Place I Hang My Hat, and Compromising Positions. A recipient of the Writers for Writers Award and the John Steinbeck Award, Isaacs is a former chairman of the board of Poets & Writers, and a past president of Mystery Writers of America. Her fiction has been translated into thirty languages. She lives on Long Island with her husband. https://www.susanisaacs.com/

Author Amulya Malladi on “Research: Doing It, Loving It, Using It, and Leaving It Out”

Amulya Malladi interviewed by Clay Stafford

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“I’m talking today with international bestselling author Amulya Malladi about her latest book A Death in Denmark. What I think is fascinating is your sense of endurance. This book—research and writing—took you ten years to write.”

She laughs. “You know, it was COVID. We all didn’t have anything better to do. I was working for a Life Sciences Company, a diagnostic company, so I was very busy. But you know, outside of reading papers about COVID, this was the outlet. And so that’s sort of how long it took to get the book done. I had the idea for a long time. I needed a pandemic to convince me that I could write a mystery.”

“Which is interesting because you’d never written a mystery before. Having never worked in that genre, I’m sure there was a learning curve there for you.”

“A lot of research.”

“You love reading mysteries, so you already had a background in the structure of that, but what you’ve written in A Death in Denmark is a highly focused historical work. It’s the attention and knowledge of detail that really made the book jump for me. Unless you’re a history major with emphasis on the Holocaust and carrying all of that information around in your head, you’re going to have to find factual information somewhere. How did you do that?”

“Studies.”

“Studies?”

“You’ll need a lot of the studies that are available. Luckily, my husband’s doing a Ph.D. He has a student I.D., so I could download a lot of studies with it. Otherwise, I’d be paying for it. Also, I work in diagnostic companies. I read a lot of clinical studies. So these are all peer-reviewed papers that are based on historic research, and they are published, so that is a great source, a reference.”

“But what if you don’t have that access?”

“You can go to your library and get access to it as well. If you’re looking for that kind of historic research, this is the place to go.”

“Not the Internet? Or books, maybe?”

“Clinical studies and peer-reviewed papers, peer-reviewed clinical studies, they’re laborious.”

“And we’re talking, for this book, information directly related to the historical accuracy of the Holocaust and Denmark’s involvement in that history?”

“You have to read through a lot to get to it. And it’s not fiction. They’re just throwing the data out there. But it’s a good source, especially for writers because we need to know about two-hundred-percent to write five-percent.”

“The old Hemingway iceberg reference.”

“To feel comfortable writing that five, you need to know so much more. I could write actually a whole other book about everything that I learned at that time. And that is a good place to go. So I recommend going and doing, not just looking at, you know, Wikipedia, and all that good stuff, but actually going and looking at those papers.”

“Documents from that time period and documents covering that time period and the involvement of the various individuals and groups.”

“When you read a paper, you see like fifteen other sources for those papers, and then you can go into those sources and learn more.”

I laugh this time. “For me, research is like a series of rabbit holes that I find myself falling into. How do you know when to stop?”

“The way I was doing it is I research as I write, and I do it constantly. You know, simple things I’m writing, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he has to turn on this street. What street was that again? I can’t remember.’ I have Maps open constantly, and I know Copenhagen, the city, very well. But, you know, I’ll forget the street names. That sometimes takes work. I’m just writing the second book and I wanted Gabriel Præst, my main character and an ex-Copenhagen cop, to go into this café and it turned into a three-hour research session.”

“Okay. Sounds like a rabbit hole to me.”

“You’ve got to pull yourself out of that hole, because, literally, that was one paragraph, and I just spent three hours going into it. And now I know way too much about this café that I didn’t need to know about. Again, to write that five-percent, I needed to know two-hundred percent. I am curious. I like to know this. So suddenly, now I have that café on my list because we’re going to Copenhagen in a few weeks, and I’m like, ‘Oh, we need to go check that out.’”

“So you’re actually doing onsite research, as well?”

“Yes. I use it all. I think as you write you will see, ‘Okay, now I got all the information that I need.’

“And then you write. Research done?”

“No. I was editing and again I was like, ‘Is this really correct? Did I get this information correct? Let me go check again.’”

“Which is why, I guess, your writing rings so true.”

“I think it is healthy for writers to do that, especially if you’re going to write historical fiction or any kind of fiction that requires research. Here’s the important thing. I think with research, you have to kind of find the source always. You know? It’s tempting to just end up in Wikipedia because it’s easy. You get there. But you know, Wikipedia has done a pretty decent job of asking for sources, and I always go into the source. You know you can keep going in and find the truth. I read Exodus while I lived in India. One million years ago, I was a teenager, and I don’t know if you’ve read Leon Uris’s Exodus, but there’s this famous story in that book about the Danish King. When the Germans came, they said, ‘Oh, they’re going to ask the Jews to wear the Star of David,’ and the story goes, based on Exodus, that the king rode the streets with the Star of David. I thought that was an amazing story. That was my first introduction to Denmark, like hundreds of years before I met my husband, and that story stayed with me. And then I find out it’s not a true story. You know? You know, Marie Antoinette never said ‘Let them eat cake.’ And so it was like, ‘Oh.’”

“Washington did not chop down the cherry tree.”

“No, and the apple didn’t fall. I mean, it’s simple things we do that with, right? With Casablanca, it’s like you said, you know, ‘Play it again, Sam.’ And she never said that. She said, ‘Play it.’ And you realize these become part of the story.”

“Secondary sources then, if I get what you’re saying, are suspect.”

“Research helps you figure out, ‘Okay, that never happened.’”

“When you say that you’re writing, and you’re incorporating the research into your writing sometimes you can’t, you’re not in a spot where the research goes into it. So, how do you organize your research that you’re not immediately using?”

“I don’t do that. I’m sure there are people who do that well. I’m sure there are people who are more disciplined than I am. I’m barely able to block my life. I mean, it’s hard enough, so you know if I do some research, I know there are people who take notes. I have notes, but those are the basics. ‘Oh, this guy’s name is this, his wife is this, he’s this old, please don’t say he’s from this street, he’s living on this street…’ Some basics I’ll have, so I can go back and look. But a lot of the times I’m like, ‘What was this guy’s husband doing again?’ I have to go find it. I won’t read the notes in all honesty, even if I make them. So for me, it’s important to go in and look at that point.”

“And this is why you write and research at the same time.”

“And this is why maybe it’s not the best way to do the research. It takes longer, like I said, you spend three hours doing something that is not important, but hey, that was kind of fun for me. I was curious to remember about Dan Turéll’s books, because I hadn’t read them for a while.”

“Some writers don’t like research. You like research. And for historicals, there’s really no way around it, is there?”

“I take my time and I think I really like the research. I have fun doing it.”

“Does it hurt to leave some of the research out?”

“Oh, my God, yes. My editor said, ‘You know, Amulya, we need the World War II stuff more.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, really? Watch me.’ So I spend all this time and I basically wrote the book that my character, the dead politician, writes.”

“This is an integral part of the story, for those who haven’t read the book.”

“I wrote a large part of that book that she is supposed to have written and put it in this book. I put in footnotes.”

“Footnotes?”

“My editor calls me and she’s like, ‘I don’t think we can have footnotes and fiction.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’ And she goes, ‘You know, you can make a list of all of this and put it in the back of the book. We’ll be happy to do that. But you can’t have footnotes.’ I felt so bad taking it out because this was really good stuff. You know, these were important stories.”

“So it does hurt to leave these things out.”

“I did all kinds of research. I read the secret reports, the daily reports that the Germans wrote, because you can find pictures of that. I kind of went in and did all of that to kind of make this as authentic as possible, and then she said, ‘Could you please, like make it part of the book, and not as…’ She’s like ‘People are going to lose interest.’ So yeah, it does hurt. It really didn’t make me happy to do that.”

“You reference real companies, use real restaurants, use real clothing, use real drinks. You use real foods. Do you have some sort of legal counsel that has looked over this to make sure nobody is going to sue you for anything you write? Or how do you protect yourself in your research?”

“When I’m being not-so-nice about something, I am careful. I have not heard anything from legal. Maybe I should ask tomorrow. I think Robert B. Parker said this in an interview once: ‘If I’m going to say something bad about a restaurant, I make the name up.’”

“Circling back, you do onsite research, as well.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve been to Berlin several times, so I know the streets of Berlin. I know this process. I know what they feel like. It’s easier to write about places you’ve been to, but the details you will forget. Even though I know Copenhagen very well, I still forget the details. ‘What is that place called again? What was that restaurant I used to go to?’ And then I have to go look in Maps, and find, ‘Ah, that’s what it’s called here. How do they spell this again?’ But I think, yes, from a research perspective, if you are wanting to set a whole set of books somewhere, and if you have a chance to go there, go. Unless you’re setting a book in Afghanistan, or you know, Iraq, then don’t go. Because I did set a book partly in Afghanistan and I remember I talked to a friend of mine. She’s a journalist for AP and she said, ‘Oh, you should come to Kabul.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t think so, just tell me what you know so I can learn from that and write it.’ She’s like, ‘You’ll have a great time on it.’ And I said, ‘I will not have a great time. No, not doing that.’ But I think, yes…”

“When it comes to perceived safety, you’re like me, an armchair researcher. Right?”

“Give me a book. Give me a clinical study. Give me a peer-reviewed paper, I’ll be good.”

“What advice do you have for new writers?”

“Edit. Edit all the time. I’ve met writers, especially when they are new, they say things like, ‘Oh, my God! If I edit too much, it takes the essence away. I always say, ‘No, it just takes the garbage away.’ Edit. Edit, until you are so sick of that book. Because, trust me, when the book is finished and you read it, you’ll want to edit it again because you missed a few things. I tell everybody, ‘Edit, edit, edit. And don’t fall in love with anything you write while you’re writing it because you may have to delete it.’ You know, you may write one-hundred pages and realize, I went on the wrong track and now I have to go delete it.”

“And take out the footnotes.”

“Yeah, and take out the footnotes.”

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

Clay’s book links: https://linktr.ee/claystafford

Amulya Malladi is the bestselling author of eight novels. Her books have been translated into several languages. She won a screenwriting award for her work on Ø (Island), a Danish series that aired on Amazon Prime Global and Studio Canal+. https://www.amulyamalladi.com/

Amulya’s book link: https://linktr.ee/amulyamalladi