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Q & A with David Baldacci
David Baldacci is an international best-selling author who lives in Vienna. He just released a new book, "Stone Cold," and has another on the way for next spring. The 47-year-old Baldacci recently sat down with The Times and talked about his background, his writing and how aspiring novelists can break into the literary world.Q: When did you begin writing?
A: I've been writing since I was a kid. I started out writing short stories; I just love telling stories, both orally and in writing. I never thought I could make a living at it.
Q: You wrote your first book, "Absolute Power," on your own time while working as a lawyer?
A: It was an outlet for me. As a trial lawyer, it's a stressful existence. People try to beat up on you every day. So going home at night and writing stuff that I wanted to write was a terrific way for me to have a cathartic experience and get the other stuff out of my system.
I really did love it. I would write in the middle of the night. That was my time. My family was in bed, I would go down in my little cubbyhole and I'd be off in my own world.
Q: Where did the idea for "Absolute Power" come from?
A: When I practiced law, my law firm was only a few blocks from the White House. So sometimes at lunch I would walk down to the White House.
This idea was sort of generated by a president and a burglar. I had read a lot of books of Washington-based thrillers and they were always told from this insider's prospective. So I thought if I had this outsider, a burglar, who saw something really bad happening ... I flipped all the stereotypes. I made all the traditionally good guys bad guys and the bad guys good guys. And for me, it was just an interesting story to see how I could make it all work.
Q: Oliver Stone is a central character in the "Camel Club" books. Where did you come up with that name?
A: My Oliver Stone is this conspiracy theorist buff guy who doesn't trust anybody, and is convinced that everything the government says is a lie anyway. So what better name than Oliver Stone? He's directed some of the best conspiracy theory movies of all time.
Q: Who are some of your favorite characters that you have written about?
A: In a book I wrote called "The Winner," there was a villain [named] Jackson. He figured out how to fix the national lottery. He was a cool villain and he sticks with me because he just seemed invulnerable. He had a lot of neat elements to his personality. You never really loved him, but you loved seeing him on the page.
I love all the characters in "Wish You Well." They were just very near and dear to me, for obvious reasons. And in my thriller "The Camel Club," and King and Maxwell, obviously I've written a lot about them.
There's a guy I wrote about in "Last Man Standing," Web London. I get so many e-mails about Web London. "You didn't finish it at the end. He was gonna go off and find his father. And what about Claire? You gotta bring Web back."
Q: Talk about the process when you write a book.
A: As a thriller writer, you're a magician, writer and a psychologist. You have to write it. You're a magician because people try to figure it out before you want them to. As a magician, I have to be fair, give you all the facts and let you know what's going on.
And the psychologist part comes in. As a writer, you have to be very aware of how a reader is gonna react to something. If I want you to like this character, then I have to write it in a way that I think most people will like this character. If I want you to really hate a character, I have to write it in a certain way to draw that reaction out of you.
And the toughest of all is if I want you to be undecided about this character. That's the toughest of all because if you go one way or the other too much, and bam, you've lost it all.
Q: What do you tell people who are looking to break into novel writing?
A: I read a lot. That was important because you don't have to go and buy a self-help book on how to write; you can go to the library and check out the masters for free. So if you have favorite books that you really have loved over the years, you can almost break them down by game film.
You'll probably see at least three discrete areas why you love a book so much. One would be the characters, two would be the narrative, the story itself, and three would be whether the writer had a really good ear for dialogue or not.
Then I'd go out and listen to people, and I'd come home and try to write dialogue that sounded like people really talked. And I would go out and look at things and try to describe them as vividly as I could, with an economy of words and not going on and on and on, but hitting the marks precisely. Tell people just what they wanted to know. Not too little, not too much.
And the story ideas can come from anywhere. I think a writer needs to look at the world differently. They need to see what's out there just like everybody else, but they need to see the tension of what could be worthy of an ordinary event, and make it extraordinary by just throwing in little bits and pieces of the imagination.
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