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 Interviews Cindy Dees: “You Can Write Espionage”

Cindy Dees interviewed by Clay Stafford

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As a fan of Cindy Dees' espionage novels, I've always been drawn to their realism, pace, and relatable characters. So, when the opportunity to discuss her work arose, I eagerly seized it. A former spy, Cindy brings unique and unparalleled authenticity to her espionage novels. Her firsthand experiences in the field make her one of the best in the genre. “Cindy, let’s delve into the art of writing espionage thrillers.”

“Yay, I love those. I love a good spy thriller. Always have.”

“Tell us a little bit about your background.”

“I was a Russian and East European studies major in college. I came to that because I had studied several languages in elementary school, junior high, and high school, and I needed to take a language class at my university. I didn't want to study languages I was already familiar with, so I decided to try a new language. I randomly picked Russian because it doesn't seem to be a language many Americans study. My teacher was a spy who had gotten caught, and he had to leave the business. For lack of anything else to do, he became an instructor of Russian at a university. He could manage to get through grammar for about three-quarters of a class, and then he would get so bored he couldn't stand it anymore because he wasn't a teacher at heart. He would turn a chair around backward, sit it down in front of the class, and tell us war stories about being a spy in the Eastern Bloc. It was a fascinatingly different culture. And I just got interested. And so, hence my degree. Once I left college, I went to pilot training in the Air Force and showed up at my first base of assignment after pilot training. After pilot training, I flew a business jet that flew generals to their business meetings. One of the other pilots in my squadron was a native-born Russian speaker, and he introduced me to a program that the United States had at that time where U.S. pilots escorted, at the time, it was Soviet flights, then later became Russian flights into and out of U.S. airspace. He recruited me for the program, and I was eligible because I was both a pilot and a Russian speaker. We figured out very quickly that the Russian crews I flew with didn't think I was a pilot. I was a, you know, 23-year-old blonde, and they didn't take me terribly seriously. If I acted dumb enough and blonde enough, they would tell me anything I wanted to know. I could walk right up to them and ask them about information that they no-way-no-how should have told me, and they didn't think I would understand it, and not only did they think I didn’t have the Russian language for it, but they didn't think I had the technical understanding. I became a very effective gatherer of information. Most of my intelligence career boiled down to me walking up to Russians and going, ‘Oh! Look at all those dials! I can’t remember what they all do. How can you possibly remember all these dials and switches?’ And then they would go, ‘Oh, well, I remember all of them.’ ‘Really, what does that one do?’ And I could point at something that I knew very well to be something classified, and they would go. ‘Oh, well, it does this,’ and then, ‘What does that do?’ ‘Oh, it does that.’ And they would tell me everything I wanted to know. It was insane. And so, I laugh about how my job was to be the dumbest spy on the planet and then come home and write reports and tell people what I heard.”

“It's incredible how the pretty girl thing will work for you. Philip Marlowe found that often.”

“I don't know how pretty I was. I was just young and blonde, and they were old and grizzled, and it works. But yes.”

“You’ve started writing a nonfiction series on tropes. What are the tropes associated with the espionage thriller?”

“I would have to pull up the whole list to give you all of them.”

“But just in general.”

“The nuclear threat, the spy defects, the piece of information that is fake, like fake intelligence. In a book like Gorky Park, which is an old espionage classic, the low-level spies must save the world from the high-level politicians. The search for the mole. The double agent. I could go on and on. I mean, there will be dozens of traditional espionage-style stories.”

“And for someone such as myself who has never interacted with any Russian dignitary or anything, how would I ever go about researching to write this? Or is it even possible for me to write this realistically?”

“There are any number of terrific books written by former spies, some of which will have terrific war stories. And it depends on the time you want to write about. What's fascinating to me is what's old is new again. Right now, we're in a period of heavy Russian espionage so that you can go back to the espionage of the war stories and the ex-spies like the Seventies, the Eighties, and the early Nineties. And a lot of those stories are going to apply to today. There's then a whole other class of manuals and books that are how-tos of tradecraft, and government agencies put some of them out. Former spies themselves put some of them out. Some are put out by wannabes and aren't all that good. But if you read enough of them, you'll get a relatively good overview of what the actual tradecraft would look like. If you're reading a book by a spy, and it reads as if about 90% of the job is tedium and silent stress while nothing happens, and about 10% of it is running for your life and maybe being interrogated and having to dodge questions and fearing for your life, that's about the right percentage of it. That's probably somebody who did the job because the vast majority of the job is stressing over getting caught, not getting caught, and very tedious, very time-consuming collection of mostly useless information, mostly just trying to get to know sources trying to gain their trust, doing nothing of great value for a very long time punctuated by individual moments of a single critical piece of information coming across your feed, or getting a tidbit of information from somebody that's incredibly important, or then having some unpleasant run-in with a foreign government. So those are the people that when I read a book, and it reads like that, I'm like, ‘Okay, this person is real. I'm going to pay attention to how they described it.’”

“I don't think I'm doing a Barbara Walters or Geraldo Rivera reveal like I'm outing you here. Is there any danger in the fact that you go around saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I was a former spy’?”

“No. So there’s kind of a code, a gentleman's code in the community that people who are out of the business, they and their families are left to their old age and their retirement and, you know, whatever guilt they have for whatever bad things they might have done during their life. It's not unusual for people who are retired from the business to mention that they were in the business at some point. And yes, there are some things that I was involved with that I don't feel at liberty to talk about: individual situations or individual pieces of information I might have brought back. There might still be people in the business that might be put in danger, so sure, I stay away from that stuff. But in general, it was known that their guys would try to collect information because they had pilots on our diplomatic flights. It was a known thing that we would try to get information from them. So, it's not anybody's big secret. What would be secretive is some of the information I managed to get that I'm a bit stingy about talking about. But the fact that I was running around with Russian air crews, the Russian government knew that. That was not secret to them. In fact, and again, I won't tell you a lengthy war story, but I did have a flight where the Russians did not think the Americans had time to get pilots to the airplane. It was a very last-minute flight that was ginned up. We had about an hour's notice. It just so happened that I lived close to the airport that plane came into, and you know, my people were able to call me and say, ‘Hey, are you home today? Can you get to that airport fast and jump on that plane?’ And so, when we landed in Moscow, the Russians didn't expect there to be an American on the plane, and the KGB detained me. I was hauled over to KGB headquarters, and it was very pleasant. They generally knew about the pilots; they didn't realize I was there, and I didn't have a visa to come to Moscow because there hadn't been time to generate one. They let me call the American Embassy, and the American Embassy was going to drive somebody over to pick me up, and it was all pretty pleasant. But while we sat there—because it was rush hour—for the hour plus waiting for somebody to come pick me up, the officer minding me got bored. He'd already given me a cup of tea, and he asked me if I'd like to see my KGB file. I, of course, said yes, so I got to see my KGB file, and there was a lot of wrong information in it. There was some information in it that led to somebody inside the U.S. having some problems with the U.S. government because there was some information in the file that could have only come from one source, and that source got tracked down. It turned out to be very interesting. But, you know, they were casual about me, and again, within the business, it's understood. I think that code may be changing some. I believe that is something that has happened in the last decade. I think gentlemanly understanding is becoming less the case and becoming more violent and dangerous to be human intelligence. They call it HUMINT, which is human intelligence, human gathered intelligence. That's becoming much more dangerous, and because of that, the intelligence services rely a lot more heavily on technology now—spy satellites and listening devices and hacking computers—to get information than they would from people. The problem is people are incredibly valuable sources of intelligence. It's becoming more and more challenging to do human intelligence, but that is where you get just that ineffable: somebody has a Spidey sense that something isn't right, or somebody has a Spidey sense that something might be about to happen, or that you know, for example, right now, if there were human intelligence, if I were in the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, I would be very interested in which high-level generals inside the Russian military are acting nervous. Because just about a week ago now, the number two guy in the Russian army was abruptly arrested and charged with an $11,000 bribe. In terms of corruption in Russia, that's pennies on the dollar of what they do on a day-in and day-out basis in corruption. It was a warning shot across the bow by somebody to people inside the Russian military to stop doing something. If I were in Russia right now, I would want to know what my human sources are saying about the high-level people inside the Russian military, their thinking and feelings, and how nervous they are. And have they gone into a bunker? Have they quit talking to anybody? Who are they talking to in private? That would all be incredibly important, and the only way to gather it would be with human intelligence.”

“So, if you're sitting there drinking tea and see these inaccuracies in your dossier, do you correct them?”

“Oh, oh, no, I'm the world's best dumb blonde, like, ‘Oh, look at that! That's so cool!’ You know, give them a little giggle, and you move on. I've had a couple of situations more recently in my life since I left the military, where I had an opportunity not to do any intelligence work, but I was in a situation where I was around some security people, and I needed not to acknowledge their presence. After the situation ended, the only debrief I got was they could not believe how good I was at looking one of them right in the eye, acting as if I had no recognition of them whatsoever and had no idea they were there, and just went on, you know, with my dingbat life. I was like welcome to the dumb blonde act. I refined it over many decades.”

“For the readers, do you think someone can write a plausible espionage if they do the research?”

“Absolutely. You know I was not—well, I was chased a few times—but it was not the norm in my career to be running around making deaddrops and assassinating people because I've never killed anybody. I’ve never dropped sarin poison in somebody's coffee. I didn't do any of that, but I can certainly write about it just as a function of the widely available research materials. And yes, I have the advantage of there being a few people I could maybe pick up the phone and ask for a little bit further information, but I try not to bother those contacts with stuff that I can find out by doing my own research.”

“And there does seem to be a good bit of material going on right now in our present-day society from which you can pull things.”

“Yes, I'm a little cautious of Reddit feeds and the internet, just in general. Try to go to a primary source. I want to get a book published by somebody or an interview where I know the interviewer and who was interviewed. Occasionally, somebody will be on YouTube, someone I know is a reputable source. But honestly, the vast majority of it you can get in print. I will look for other primary sources if I find something interesting online. I may look for footnotes or citations and look those up to verify something. I try to be cautious in verifying if I hear something that doesn't sound logical or reasonable.”

“And between your experience and research methods, that’s why your espionage tales ring so true. You’ve inspired me. I might even give it a try. Do you think there is hope?”

She laughs. “I think there is hope.”

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

NYT and USA Today bestselling author Cindy Dees is the author of 100+ novels. A former U. S. Air Force pilot and part-time spy, she writes thrillers, military romance, and bestselling non-fiction, writing how-to series using tropes. www.cindydees.com