Bonding with Follett

On an average, he has been writing one book every two years since 1978 - all of them bestsellers. What makes Ken Follett such a sought-after author? And how much has he been influenced by Ian Fleming?

Ken Follett quite enjoys his success. Though it's barely a couple of hours since he got off a 15-hour flight from New Zealand, he's cheerfully in the thick of the half-dozen press interviews that's been lined up for him prior to a book-signing jamboree at Magrudy's later in the evening.

His latest book, World Without End, which was out only last month is already on the bestseller list ... and he is busy plotting his next one. It is evident that he is happy with the success and adulation that comes his way.

There's a glint in his eyes when he says in his plummy broadcaster's voice: "When they said they wanted to put up a sculpture of me in front of the cathedral of Santa Maria in the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of the Basque region of northern Spain, I felt honoured! I don't think there's a statue of any other living writer anywhere in the world, do you?''

He thinks for a few moments and shakes his great white leonine head. Then follows a three-syllable laugh that you realise he uses to punctuate all his sentences. 'Henh, henh, henh'. Much like an exclamation mark.

Immaculately groomed, with his shock of white hair arranged artlessly, he settles in for the interview in the private room at the One and Only Royal Mirage.

To simply say he is a celebrity author coasting on the success of his thrill-a-minute plots, as some critics are wont to judge his books, would be a disservice to the man.
He's written 16 novels after his first bestseller, The Eye of the Needle, was published in 1978. That amounts to an average of around one book every two years, each of which becmoes a bestseller. That's not counting the 11 books he published before Eye hit the bull's eye.

Follett obviously works hard, and is very good at what he does. Which is why, he says, the meltdown of the Cold War hardly mattered to him as it did to many other thriller writers like John Le Carre or Len Deighton.

"The Cold War was convenient for us (to use as a plot in our works) because half the world was threatened by the erstwhile Soviet Union and communism, so there was a convenient bogeyman for thriller writers,'' he says.

"Thrillers are basically about people in danger and writers will always be able to think of some danger. They have kept on writing even after the collapse of the Cold War.''

Just as he kept on writing thrillers post-Cold War, his books kept selling. For instance, his Pillars of the Earth sold 3.5 million in the US and Canada alone. The sequel to Pillars.., Night Without End, is voluminous at about 1,000 pages.

"Yeah, I do work very hard (for my success),'' says Follett as if to make a point.

"It was only Night Without End, which is a very long book - it took me about three years to write. But two years is about the norm for me. If it's a straightforward thriller with not too much research, I can probably write it a bit quicker."

He debunks a myth about writers - of the 'creative' people who can and will write only when the muse so decrees.
"Normally, I work five days a week,'' says Follett.

"I like to start early in the morning - at 7 am - and do at least an hour's work before breakfast. I usually stop at 4 pm. And then spend a couple of hours checking e-mails and (attending to) phone calls, and meetings. (Sometimes) I work on Saturdays and Sundays too,'' he says.

That's like an office job only more hours than most, I say.

"I think all writers are aware of the danger that if they don't work regular hours, they won't get any work done. Every day there will be some excuse,'' he responds. At least non-writers and Follett have that in common.

How to plot a novel
Follett offers a singular lesson in the mechanics of writing a novel. "On an average, I take about two years to complete a novel. Research is towards the beginning … though there are always things you have to find out along the way.

"I generally spend about a year planning before I write the first chapter. Most of the research is done in the early stages and then it is the question of plotting, getting the story right so that there will always be something that will make the reader want to read a little more to find out what happens next. It takes the form of a re-enactment.

"I start by writing three paragraphs on a page and the next day, I look at it and write it again and it becomes a whole page, and then it gets longer and longer with details of what happened before and what happened afterwards, who else is in the story, where do they come from … and so it grows like that.

"I show it to people who may say the beginning is a bit dull, the ending a bit predictable or a character not really likeable … so I continue to change until I think it is as good as it can be."

Follett says he always writes in sequence. "I find it difficult enough to keep the whole novel in my head. If I didn't write in sequence I am afraid I would get confused.'' He follows the statement with his signature laughter.

"If I get a great idea for a plot twist in one of the later chapters, I just jot it down to work on it later.''

Obviously Follett has had a lot of practice at it. "I was always good at writing,'' he says. That may sound like staing the obvious till you remember tales of authors who struggled to place one sentence after the other.

"I always got top marks for my compositions as they were called those days in school. The other important thing is, I always read a lot as a child, I still do. I think that's where you learn what a paragraph is or what a cliffhanger is, and how dialogue works. You learn a lot of things simply by reading."

So what drew him to the genre of thrillers? "When I was a boy, my parents believed movies were wicked. So I wasn't allowed to go to the cinema. Also, we didn't own a TV in the house until the time I left for university. So, reading was my only form of entertainment.

"When I got the idea of writing a novel, what I wanted to give the readers was the kind of excitement I experienced as a teenager reading Ian Fleming. I had been reading the thrillers on James Bond since 12 thinking they were just about the most exciting stories in the world.

"I wrote a thriller, my first novel, because I wanted to give that kind of excitement (to readers). It had a James Bond-like character ... you know, very well-dressed, successful with women, driving a fancy car, all that.

"And when it hit the shelves, it flopped. A) it was too imitative, B) it was nowhere as well-written as a James Bond (thriller).

"And it turned out that that kind of a thriller (where there was a serious character, a sort of a lone hero) was not my métier. I didn't succeed with that kind of story. (But) that was what led me to (writing) thrillers anyway.''

Writing led him to dabble in journalism, which in turn returned him to writing. "While I was working as a reporter, I was also writing fiction in my spare time."

The first short stories he wrote and sent off to magazines were never published. "I wrote 8 or 9 over a couple of years," he says.

"And then I wrote a thriller which got published when I was working for the London Evening News. It was not a bestseller but it was published. I got a little money for it, and I got a book on my hands! So I said to myself I am going to try again and see if this time I can write a bestseller."

To that end, he left the world of newspapers and joined a publising company as an editor. Eye of the Needle was born here.

For a mind satiated on James Bond's escapades, Eye of the Needle seemed an unlikely plot with its strong female character who takes on the German spy and succeeds.

He attributes it to the times he lived through. "I remember very vividly a movement in 1969 and 1970 I was involved in - what is sometimes called the counter-culture. You know, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam.

"I remember somebody saying we are supposed to be democratic, we are supposed to be equal. Then how come it is always the women who make the tea and do the typing?

"You know, at that time you would think nothing of walking into an ... office and saying to one of the women, 'Make a cup of tea, luv'. And she would! What gave me that right? I mean, she would never say to me, 'Make me a cup of tea, luv'! I'd be astonished!

"So, for me that was the beginning of modern feminism. Then in the late '60s, books by Germaine Greer, Erica Jong, etc, were published and suddenly there was this (feminist) movement."

It was around eight years after this that he conceived the idea of Eye of the Needle. Initially, the plot of the book dealt with two male protagonists - the German spy and the man on the island. The man would kill the spy. But after some thought, he changed the character of the man to a woman who is actually the spy's wife.

"And it was much more interesting as a novel because of that. Also commercially, a lot of women liked
the book. They might not have enjoyed it so much if I had concentrated on the two men.

"So, from a literary as well as a commercial point of view, it was a success. I haven't always had a female hero, but the women in my stories have always played very positive roles.

"There are interesting women in the James Bond stories, but they don't always change the course of the plot ... I was the first author to make the woman the hero in a thriller, although there have been plenty since.''

Like his 'hero' Ian Fleming, Follett started out as a student of philosophy. A philosophy student interested in rock 'n' roll and thrillers? Again the signature laughter.

"One of the good things of being a novelist is I can go where curiosity leads me. I got interested in espionage in the Second World War (The Eye of the Needle), genetic engineering (The Third Twin) viruses (Whiteout), cathedrals! It's true of journalism as well.

"That was the aspect of journalism that I liked - you could go from one interesting and intriguing subject to another. I think you have to have that kind of butterfly curiosity to be a writer of any kind."

Was it his love of philosophy that veered him away from the James Bond kind of thrillers he earlier wanted to write? "I don't know,'' he says. "But Ian Fleming was very interested in philosophy too! I studied philosophy because I was interested in (philosophical) questions as a young man.''

So how did the successful thriller writer attempt something as different as Pillars of the Earth?
"I've always been interested in cathedrals, I like to look at them, read about how they were built, the society that produced them, it became quite a hobby of mine,'' he says.

"And it pretty soon struck me that there was a great popular novel waiting to be written about the building of one, all the things that went into it, the conflicts that arose, the crises, the issue of money, running out of it, running out of stones, the architect falling to his death from the scaffoldings, as it happened in the Canterbury cathedral.

"I was not trying to win the Booker Prize ... but my publishers were afraid I might be! I could sympathise with that. But to their credit, none of them said you can't do this ...

"You know, it's quite a challenge to just write a book that long, covering that many years, keeping the story on the rails as the cathedral grows. It is the only book that had me exhausted at the end! Henh henh henh!''

His take on critics?
"The trouble with critics is that they don't read the book for the same reasons as the readers do," says Follett.

"The critic is always reading thinking 'what am I going to write about it?'. That skews his or her perspective. So I sort of don't trust them. But I pay a great deal of attention to people, readers, who write to me and say they liked or more importantly, they didn't like something (about the novel).

"Sometimes I write back to them and say 'I don't know what you meant by that, tell me a bit more'. So they are important because they're reading the book for the reason I want them to read it, not because they want to write an article about it.

"So, it's not that I don't respect (criticism), or despise critics or anything like that. But I can't generally discern much from them. In that sense I am an entertainer.''

And he's got of a statue of him (in the city of Vittoria) to prove that point. "Well, the Spaniards like to put up sculptures of living people and I have a little association with this town - I've been there a few times.

"There is a cathedral of Santa Maria there which is in the process of being restored and I made a little speech to help with their fundraising.

"Also the weakness of the tower in the cathedral in World Without End is technically based on the weakness of the tower in Santa Maria. So these people wanted to put up a statue of me in front of the cathedral. I was very flattered! It's going to be unveiled on January 28."

Which brings us to another of Follett's contemporaries - Jeffrey Archer. Can he connect the dots?
"Yes, Jeffrey was a high-profile Conservative Party supporter and I am a Labour Party supporter, and Jeffrey is a very popular story teller. In some ways he's not much of a writer, but he's a very strong story teller and he's loved by millions of fans all over the world."

His new books
What's his next book about? Or is it his next three books? "Yes, I've been working since April (after completing World Without End) on a new idea not fully formed. But it's a trilogy that will tell the story of the 20th century.

"Quite ambitious - three books, with the plot beginning in 1914 and ending in 1989. It'll be about three families, with a fresh generation in each book, so it'll have to be written one after the other. It'll take me a while to work out the details. But I am very excited about it.''

So, are thrillers easier to write than other kinds of stories? "Yes!'' he grins slyly. "If I were to be a lazy man, I wouldn't write nothing else. Henh henh henh!''