So,
Terry, tell me a bit about yourself.
I'm an over-60, over-weight, over-sized former television
writer and producer who recently discovered that I hated wearing a suit
and tie everyday and wanted to find something I could do that could
be done in an Hawaiian shirt and Jeans.
My hope is that Writing Novels will fulfill this dream. So
far, it's been fun but not profitable but I believe that all the television
outlets in Washington DC have met and decided that I'm too dangerous to hire so
I may be stuck with this decision. However, the truth is that I sit in an
office with everything I could possibly need within arm's reach, my dog visits
whenever there is a thunderstorm, and my wife is usually around so it's really
quite pleasant. My children have made sure that I don't have any retirement
savings so I've really no choice but to become a massively best-selling author.
Well, I guess I could starve but the massively best-selling option sounds like
more fun.
A quick note on How I Got Here. I
came to Washington in 1973, intending to recover from college for a few weeks
until my girlfriend and I decided on a new and much more exciting place to
live.
Somehow, I'm still here. Starting as a
motorcycle courier carrying news film for ABC News back during Watergate, I
have spent most of my adult life messing about in television news. I spent 20
years as a producer at ABC, got bored, and subsequently have had at least 20
jobs over the next 20 years. I've covered the Civil War in Beirut, South Africa
before and after the release of Nelson Mandela, Tienanmen Square, the Fall of
the Berlin Wall, and the Roswell UFO landings. Oddly, it was more difficult to
believe the Chinese version of Tienanmen Square than it was to believe that
there was a coverup of aliens crash-landing in Roswell New Mexico. I've always
been thankful that "belief" doesn't play a part in the news business.
Just to keep things
interesting, I've also taken two online streaming media companies into
bankruptcy, produced shock jock Don Imus, became one of the first all-digital
editors, and wrote the Users Manuals for most of the equipment used in modern
newsrooms (which hasn't kept obnoxious kids half my age from scolding me for
not learning their particular flavor of newsroom wordprocessor every couple of
years.)
It sounds like an eventful life. As part of your plan to be a best-selling author, you recently had Courier was published
– what’s it about?
"Courier" was
the book that I--like every other journalist--was incubating in the back of my
mind for the past 20 years. In 2010, during a period of severe
underemployment, I decided to finally get around to writing it. It's a
political/motorcycle thriller based on my experiences flying around at
completely illegal speeds, touches on the real reason that President Richard
Nixon resigned, describes what a night run on a Kawasaki 500 triple through
Rock Creek Park feels like with a Datsun 240Z on your tail, and also
includes post-Vietnam depression, alcoholism, a tender love story, the
earliest computer hackers, and a crack government kill squad.
Clearly, it's not about MY life but
it does have the flavor of the paranoid, turbulent 1970s. (The odd thing about
all that paranoia is that it turns out that the US government WAS after us
and they WERE infiltrating all the protest movements and they WERE killing
people who disagreed with them. Trust me, no one except the
Weathermen really believed all that back in the day.)
If you want a Hollywood
"high concept" description, it's "Three Days of the Condor meets
Easy Rider."
Living with this book hasn't been
easy. It took six months to find an agent willing to take it on (a New
Zealand-based company, of course) and three years for the agent to find a
publisher (a British imprint run by a man with the impenetrable name of
"Emlyn Rees".) Finally, after waiting for 18 months for the crew of
unemployed monks they hired to hand-copy every page, Courier was released in
May of 2014.
Flushed with the excitement of this
ground-breaking event, the publisher ceased to exist a month later.
Really. They just disappeared. And,
here I'd already written the sequel ("Warrior,"
which begins with the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 and includes rides on the
Kawasaki Triple and a Vincent Black Lightning.)
They gave me back all the book
rights and the non-existent movie rights, tipped their hats, tucked their
forked tails under their arms, and vanished in a puff of sulfurous smoke.
Well, I am not
one to be discouraged (suicidal, sure, but not discouraged) so I've just kept
on writing stuff. TV Writers may not be very good but we are VERY fast.
Along with the two books in the
Freelancer series, I've completed "Day
of the Dragonking," the first book in the Last American Wizard
paranormal thriller series,
begun the first book about Angel Pearl, a private eye in
1930's Manila, ghost-wrote "Overreached:
Blood of Patriots" (a conservative fantasy about gun nuts
rising up against a liberal president,) self-published books on unemployment,
World War 1, and the first part of an autobiography. I might well
have written something else and simply forgotten all about it but I think that
about covers it.
Sadly, none of
these worthy tomes is making a dime in sales.
Oh! I knew there was something. I
also wrote a documentary about Jewish refugees in Manila which was just
shown at Malacanang Palace. I was fired immediately after completing that
one. No idea why.
You say it's not about your life, but you were a courier yourself at one stage. Where did
the idea come from?
The cool answer is that
"Courier" came from my own experiences in 1973. The rather nerdy
answer is that I got the initial idea of Richard Nixon really being a traitor
from an article that Renata Adler wrote in 1976 (and I had to wait for the
internet to be invented to find again) and then backed it up with Fred
Emery's brilliant book, several BBC documentaries, and all six of the Nixon
books that just came out in July where Nixon's treason in 1968 was laid out and
clearly proven. Oddly, you won't find a mention of Nixon in
"Courier." All of this stuff is in the backstory. Really, it's about
racing motorcycles through DC, escaping through subway tunnels,
hacking the earliest computers, and other far more interesting stuff.
It sounds like it would make a great action movie. Who would you choose to play your characters?
I initially used myself as the hero in"Courier." That
lasted for a day and then I realized how boring my real life was.
Subsequently, the entire book was based on a picture of Nicolas
Cage on a motorcycle I clipped from something. Obviously, I'd like Nic to
be about 30 years younger, Ellen Page (the star of "Juno" and
that roller derby movie) as his girlfriend, Eve Buffalo Calf, Humphrey Bogart
as the Gray Man, and Steve Jobs as the leader of the computer geniuses who are
the hero's roommates. (Oh yeah, I forgot that I also completed the screenplay
for Courier last fall)
So how long did it take you to write the book?
Well, as I said, I learned to write in television with it's
ridiculously short deadlines. I completed the first draft in 8 weeks but I
was slowed down by a freelance job for Bloomberg TV (where I was writing
Finance--for me the functional equivalent of writing in Swahili.) Of
course, I rewrote it 5 or 6 times before I could stand to read it.
When I began the first 5 rewrites, I could be heard screaming "Who wrote
this drivel!"
When I stopped saying that, I sent it to the agent.
Eight weeks isn't long to write a novel. Did you know where it was going? Are you a "Planner" or a "Pantser" when it comes to planning a novel ahead of writing it?
Totally a "pantser" (which is a
terrible name, by the way.) I usually have an opening scene, a hero, a
fairly good idea of the backstory which won't appear in the book, and a few
cool things to write about. After that, it's "Mary, bar the door and
the Devil take the hindmost." I generally have no idea what anyone is
going to say, no clue where they're going, and no clear villains. What's worse
is that I have SIX books on classic plot outlines on my desk.
Eventually, things seem to sort themselves out, I discover
links between people and things I never intended (EVERYONE in Courier is
involved with the US Army Seventh Cavalry, as it turns out) and eventually
batter the manuscript into one of the classic forms. Usually, the Killing of
the Minotaur.
What advice to you have for writers who are just starting out?
I think that the best way to learn to write is to write.
Write a lot, it really doesn't matter what, and then read it aloud. (That
works better when no one is listening). You'll hear the "clunks" as
the wrong word or a clumsy description goes by. I will readily admit that I'm
not a classy writer--frankly, I wish I was. If I could take up more room with
descriptions of moonlit nights on the moors or the delicate emotions that run
through the hero's mind, I wouldn't have to have so many THINGS happen in
my books. It also helps if you like to read. I try not to read anyone
whose fiction runs close to what I'm doing so that plagiarism won't lurk in my
unconscious but I spend a good deal of time weeping because James Lee Burke or
Lee Child or Darian Smith just write so damn much better than I do. I also
really enjoy researching so a good deal of my ideas come from arcane articles--newspaperarchive.com
is a wonderful place to read news from 1972 or 1872 and see where the
holes are that you can run a plot through.
The one thing for a new writer NOT to do is worry. The odds
are that everyone is going to hate your books anyway and it's almost a dead
cert in the beginning. Don't try to write the Great ANZAC novel or the
Great Antipodean Poem right off the bat. Just write something and then try
to make it pretty good and send it off to make it's way in the world. You will get
better.
Where can we find out more?
Www.terryirving.com and www.tiredoftalkingaboutmyself.com
Courier is available here.
For some of Terry's other work, check out his Amazon author page.
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