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/