Why We Write (4 page)

David Baldacci is a nice guy. He and his wife run a literacy foundation called Wish You Well. He supports a host of charitable organizations. And he’s a nonsectarian president-pleaser. Bill Clinton called
The Simple Truth
his favorite book of 1999. George H. W. Bush signed a note to Baldacci, “Your number one fan in Houston,” and invited his favorite author to Kennebunkport for a sit-down.

David Baldacci

Why I write

If writing were illegal, I’d be in prison. I can’t not write. It’s a compulsion.

When the sentences and the story are flowing, writing is better than any drug. It doesn’t just make you feel good about yourself. It makes you feel good about everything.

It can go the other way, too. When you’re deleting page after page, and you just can’t make the characters work, and you’re running up against deadlines, it’s not nearly as euphoric. But actually sitting there and conceiving story ideas and plotting—it’s the coolest profession in the world. I’m paid to daydream.

When I was a kid I read a lot. I imagined worlds all the time—little worlds I’d lose myself in. I told my stories to anyone who would listen, and a lot of people who wouldn’t. Finally my mom gave me a blank-page notebook. She was trying to shut me up, hoping for a little peace and quiet, and she told me to start writing my stories down. I got hooked.

When you have a bit of imagination and the desire to use words to tell stories, writing takes on a life of its own. When I’m out and about, I can’t help but throw the people I see into whatever
I’m writing. They have no idea. They’d be scared to death if they knew that I’m walking down the street and they’re shooting at me, or I’m shooting at them.

When I go out and talk to schoolkids, I tell them, “All of you are amazingly creative, whether you know it or not. It’s adulthood that beats it out of you. If you never lose that, you can go places no one’s imagination has ever taken them.”

I can’t write
Sophie’s Choice
. I’m never going to write a book that wins a Pulitzer. I don’t think that’s what I do, or where my talents lie.

Novels that win prizes like that have great depth. The language, the prose, and the story hold equal power. You can have a sentence that runs for sixteen lines separated by commas.
Sophie’s Choice
, for example. That’s a thing of beauty.

Could I ever spend five years of my life working on a book, instead of writing a quote-unquote commercial novel in seven, eight, ten months? I don’t know if I have the background or the talent to do that. People who write literary fiction are more disciplined. They spend years and years and years and years of their lives on one project. They bring to bear everything they have on that one story.

I spent three years on
Absolute Power
while I was working full-time. It’s not a literary novel at all. I tried to develop the characters as much as I could, but it’s certainly plot driven. From me, readers want the twists and turns.

AFL versus CIO

This divide between literary and commercial fiction just kills me. It’s like splitting a union in half. We have the AFL over
here, the CIO over there, and we want you guys to battle against each other because that’s going to help…oh! Who’s that going to help? Big business.

I’ve gone to book events all over the country, and I’ve met some terrific literary novelists who welcome commercial writers like me with open arms. It’s like, “Hello, comrade!” But I’ve also seen a lot of animosity. The commercial side complains, “I write books as good as yours, and I never win any prizes.” The literary side says, “I write books that are better than yours, and I never sell any books.”

Someone once asked John Updike, “Why don’t you write a mystery?” And he answered, “Because I’m not smart enough.” Here’s a guy who’s written brilliant fiction, won two Pulitzer Prizes, but he has a different skill set, just as I couldn’t have written
Rabbit, Run
. Writing a mystery takes planning and plotting. You lay a bomb on page nine; it doesn’t explode till page four hundred. Even a bad book takes some talent and work to put together.

Everyone thinks they can write a novel. They know they can’t slam-dunk a basketball because they don’t have the height or the athleticism. But people think, “I’ve got a brain, I’ve got a laptop. How hard can it be?” Those who attempt it learn that it’s very hard to do.

Lawyers are storytellers

Some of the best fiction I ever came up with was as a lawyer.

You know who wins in court? The client whose lawyer tells better stories than the other lawyer does. When you’re making a legal case, you can’t change the facts. You can only rearrange
them to make a story that better enhances your client’s position, emphasizing certain things, deemphasizing others. You make sure the facts that you want people to believe are the most compelling ones. The facts that hurt your case are the ones you either explain away or hide away. That’s telling a story.

Lawyers work incredibly long hours, and we sell our lives in half-hour increments. Until I finally stopped lawyering in ’95, my writing schedule was similar to that. For ten years, I wrote from ten p.m. to two a.m., six nights a week. Draconian, yes, but you find the time where you can. It wasn’t hard for me. After a day at work, I had so many stories in my head, I couldn’t wait to get home and write them down.

Starving writer: not an option

Growing up in the South, we had some really fine short story writers, like Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Lee Smith. I naturally gravitated toward that form. I started trying to get my short stories published in high school and continued on through college. I collected a lot of rejection letters.

So I bought a book about how to write scripts, and I managed to get an agent, which wasn’t easy to do, coming from Virginia. In 1991, while I was billing two hundred dollars an hour as a lawyer, I had a script, and everyone in Hollywood was loving it. My agent said it was going to be a big sale.
Big.
He called me back at midnight and told me that Warner Bros. had passed, which made all the other studios figure there was something wrong with it, so they all passed on it, too.

That was a crushing blow. There had been so much hype,
and I’d believed it. By then I’d been writing a long time. Not that I ever thought I’d make a living as a writer. Even when you got a short story published, the most they’d give you was free copies of the magazine. Not much help for the bank account.

Once our first child was born in 1993, I knew the starving writer route wasn’t ever going to work for me. I was the breadwinner, and if I couldn’t make any money off the writing, I had to keep making a living as a lawyer. I thought, “It’s not going to happen for me. I’ll be one of those writers who writes for fun and never gets published.” But that didn’t mean I was going to stop writing.

I took my best shot

I studied the book industry. I read lots of thrillers and mysteries to see what I was up against. I knew I needed an agent, so I started watching for news stories about first-time novelists signing big book deals. Then I’d go to the bookstore and read that book’s acknowledgments page to see who the agent was.

I got seven agents’ names that way. I wrote each of them a short query letter: Dear Sir or Madam, I’m a lawyer in DC, I wrote a political thriller, and I guarantee that if you read the first page, you won’t stop till you get to the last page. Sincerely, David Baldacci. I thought half of them would read the manuscript just to prove me wrong.

I was hoping to hear back from just one of them, but I heard back from all seven. I went up to New York and met with them. The agent I found is still my agent today.

I did a couple of days’ worth of revisions, and then, on a Monday night, my agent sent the manuscript to a bunch of publishers.
On Tuesday morning, I was sitting in my law office, and he called me up and said, “Hey, if I sell this manuscript, are you going to be able to quit and write full-time?”

I said, “Well, I’ve been waiting to do that for the last sixteen years. So yes, that would be very nice.” And he said, “Hey, that’s good. Because I sold the book.”

The chairman of what was then Warner Books had read it overnight and faxed in a preemptive offer: a multimillion-dollar advance for one book. It turned out to be a great deal for the publisher, and a great deal for me as well.

A baby called book

It was surreal. You have to realize that nobody except my wife, my parents, my brother, and my sister knew I’d been writing all those years. My wife and I called our friends and said, “We have something special to tell you.” They thought we were having another baby. I said, “Actually, we are having another baby. But I’m the one delivering it. It’s called a book.”

All I’d known to that point was rejection, so for the next year I kept my day job. Finally my wife and I sat down and I said, “This is something I’ve been working for my whole life. I’d like to have my shot.” We agreed I’d quit, and if the book flopped I’d go back to practicing law. It was nerve-wracking, waiting for the book to come out. I knew if it didn’t sell, with a big advance like that, I was done.

This sounds a little corny, but the day I felt I’d made it as a writer was the first time I saw a book of mine on a bookstore shelf—in the Borders in the World Trade Center. After that I stopped waiting for the publishers to say, “We’ve had a change
of plans. You have to give the money back.” I realized the writing career was working out.

Scared to death. Every time.

Every time I start a project, I sit down scared to death that I won’t be able to bring the magic again.

You’d never want to be on the operating table with a right-handed surgeon who says, “Today I’m going to try operating with my left hand.” But writing is like that. The way you get better is by pushing yourself to do things differently each time. As a writer you’re not constrained by mechanical devices or technology or anything else. You get to play. Which is terrifying.

William Goldman, who wrote the script for
Absolute Power
, gave me some great advice. He said, “Write everything as if it’s the first thing you ever wrote. The day you think you know how to do it is the day you’re done as a writer.” He was right. If writing ever becomes a job for me—if I start thinking I’d rather be out playing tennis, so I start taking shortcuts, doing it this time the same way I did it last time—I’ll hang it up.

Sometimes I envy myself twenty years ago, sitting in my little cubbyhole with nobody knocking on my door, writing stories without worrying about the touring, the money, the foreign travel. But every day I try to face the screen as if there’s no commercial world out there, as if I’m doing it for free, for the pure joy of telling my stories, the way I did it for the first sixteen years.