David Baldacci: ‘To stay motivated, move out of your comfort zone’

Ask bestselling thriller author David Baldacci what was the most memorable moment in his life and he will tell you it was when his first novel Absolute Power was optioned by Hollywood. It was in 1996 and David, thrilled that his book was being made into a film, was on a pay phone with his agent at the Penn train station in New York City, discussing numbers with his agent. (Remember, it was a time when mobile phones were yet to become popular.)

“A bidding war was going on… People at Paramount, Warner, Universal were throwing numbers at me that I could not fathom,” he says, in an exclusive video interview from his home in Virginia, US, the excitement of the day still evident in his voice.

“There were some 20 people behind me waiting to use the phone and I was like ‘what about Warner [Bros]? What about Universal?’ and the people behind me were thinking I’m totally mental to be saying these things. But that was the most surreal episode in my life.”

Absolute Power is a fictional political action thriller revolved around a jewel thief who witnesses the murder of a woman who was having a tryst with the president. The movie would go on to be made with a stellar star cast that included Clint Eastwood (who also directed it), Gene Hackman, Laura Linney and Scott Glenn, with the screenplay penned by William Goldman.

“It was crazy. It’s like your wildest dreams [came true],” says the author, who was a speaker at the recently concluded Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. “In two weeks, the book’s rights were sold, movie rights were sold, newspapers had features on me and people I didn’t know were throwing cheques at me as fast as they could.”

Twenty-six years later, the cheques are still flying in quick and fast, if the number of his thrillers that have zoomed up the charts is any indication.

Since Absolute Power, the attorney-turned-author has penned 43 novels, all of which have gone on to become national and international bestsellers; several of them adapted for film and television.

Was it easy to make the switch from law to literature, I ask the attorney who practised corporate law before becoming a successful  writer.

“I really started writing when I was a child and continued in school, college and law school,” says the 61-year-old father of two.

He admits that he always wanted to be an author but wasn’t sure if he could make a living as a writer so “had to collect all my strengths” before taking the plunge into the world of literature. “Actually a lot of attributes for being a lawyer and a writer are similar,” he says. “I was a good writer, researcher and speaker, could think on my feet… things that attorneys do.”

So, for 10 years, he enjoyed the “challenging and exhilarating” life of a lawyer. “The only weapons I had in my quiver were words- spoken or written.”

Not unlike an author, a lawyer too dabbles with words, he says. During a trial, for instance, he had to tell a story with the same set of facts that the opposite side had. Only his argument had to be a diametrically opposed version of their’s. And to do that you had to be creative. You had to put words together in a certain way and present a story.

“So really the transition from lawyer to writer – like [John] Grisham and Scott Turrow had done – was a natural one because as a lawyer when I went before a judge or a jury I was telling them ‘listen to my story it’s the right one’.”

Nevertheless, David, who was a successful lawyer, told himself and his wife Michelle, that in case he couldn’t craft a career as a writer, he would return and continue as an attorney.

He did not have to.

David spent close to three years working on his first book even while practising law – writing in the middle of the night or in the very early mornings, and enjoying those moments. “That was when I could write what I wanted to, not what a client was asking me to, and I felt liberated,” he says.

That said, David never really expected his first novel to sell, convinced the publishers might want him to write something else. So when his agent called to tell him that his book had been sold for ‘this enormous amount’, he was so delighted “I wanted to jump on the [meeting] table and do the electric slide all the way down the table.”

But since nobody he was working with or his friends knew about his second life, he wanted to first tell his close friends before announcing the good news to his colleagues. “So I had to go through the rest of the day as if nothing had happened although my life had been transformed.”

The evening he told his friends about his success in the literary world was a memorable one. “When I first told them that I had something important to share, some thought we were getting a divorce,” he says, laughing.

I remind David about another memorable moment when he met former US president Barack Obama. “Oh my gosh, yes. It was in Washington DC,” he recalls, eager to share the details.

David was helping out at a bookstore on a holiday in 2014 when suddenly a team of uniformed secret service personnel leading a couple of bomb-sniffing dogs burst into the store, followed a few minutes later by Obama and his two daughters. As the then president was walking around picking up books for himself and his daughters, the store owner went up to him and told him that David Baldacci was also in the store. 

“And Obama just stops in the middle of the store and asks ‘David Baldacci? He’s famous.’ I mean here is the most famous person in the world saying I am famous!” says David, cheerfully.

The author remembers shaking hands with Obama and chatting a bit with him. In the course of the conversation, David recommended a book to the president (All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten), and Obama laughed and said, “That’s right, in politics you have to learn to play nice in the sandbox”.

“Oh yes it was one of the most terrific moments of my life and I remember getting home later that afternoon and looking at my Twitter feed and there were like some 250,000 tweets about that incident at the bookstore. He is quite an incredible writer himself and so to have him as a fan was pretty cool.”

The author can also count another former US president as his fan, Bill Clinton, who listed David’s crime novel, The Simple Truth, as his favourite book of 1999.

So, how does he craft his thrilling novels? Does he have a typical writing process?

“My day is typical for being atypical,” says the 61-year-old, whose favourite writers include John Irving, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, and Patricia Cornwall. “First, I don’t count pages or words. I write every day until my tank is empty. I will stop mid sentence if I think I have not thought up the scene completely.”

At such moments, he prefers to go out and potter around near his plants or go for a walk to get his creative juices flowing again. “Or I take a shower. I think I’ve solved more problems when under the shower than I can think of.

“I tell you, there’s something about water… everything just washes away. Your mind is focussed and you [are able to] dig down like 12 layers and find what you are looking for.

“The other thing is that because of all these showers I am incredibly clean all the time,” he says, guffawing wholeheartedly.

He suggests aspiring writers find ‘the groove that works’ for them. Also, they should not think twice about considering changing the process of doing something if it means gaining new perspectives. Flexibility, latitude and being open to new ideas can help creativity, he believes.

Is writing an outline important before sitting down to pen a book?

David mulls the question for a moment. “It is like planning a battle and being in a battle,” says the author, whose most recent book Daylight, a mystery tells the tale of an FBI agent in search of his sister.

Despite planning, things could happen that are going to surprise you, or not go the way you expected. This might require you to react to it quickly. “So, I like writing in the trenches... being in the moment. When I write a sentence, I know it is going to be a sentence in the book so it has to be the best. That’s what works for me.”

It surely worked – four of his books – Absolute Power, Wish You Well, The Finisher and The Christmas Train – were also made into movies – while King & Maxwell was made into a TV series.

When writing, does he keep in mind that it could potentially be made into a movie?

“Never,” says David, without a moment’s thought. “If you sit down as a writer with that mindset, you start thinking about certain actors who will play certain roles and you think ‘Is this going to work on film?’ as opposed to ‘Is this going to work in [print]?’. The result is you end up writing a fairly disguised screenplay. And a book that is a thinly-disguised screenplay is always a bad book. Really you are doing a huge disservice by attempting to do two things at the same time.”

Nevertheless, David admits that writing for film or TV – he has worked on four projects – has helped his novel writing. “It has made me more economic with words and made me write things more clearly.”

To underscore the importance of being succinct he points to Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, said to be the greatest and most powerful speech ever delivered by a US president. It was just 272 words long. “He thought through every single word, and every single word deserved to be there,” says David. Cut the flab, leave the prose as lean as possible. “That’s what I do with every book,” he says.

A common thread that appears to run through almost all of David’s books is of an incident that happened long back in the character’s life and how it returns to haunt them. So, old sins cast long shadows, don’t they? I ask the master thriller writer.

“Absolutely,” he says, with a smile. “I think this line is probably the basis of half the books, TV series and films ever written.”

Everything we say, every interaction we have with someone else can come back to haunt us at some point, he warns. “We might do things in the past and think we escaped from them… that we moved on and that they no longer have a hold on us. Then, all of a sudden, we get pulled back in... in an explosive, extraordinary way.”

David believes people like to read stories or watch movies with this plotline because they can relate to them in some way. “See, everybody has done something in their lives that they are not proud of. Perhaps you slipped something into your pocket that doesn’t belong to you while at a store, or told a lie, or didn’t do something for someone when you should have. You might have made friends or enemies. You might  have regretted it and it may have passed. But it could come back to grab you in some very shocking ways.”

Keen to cater to younger readers, David has started writing fantasy fiction – The Finisher, The Keeper, The Width of the World and The Stars Below to name a few. What led you to writing for the youth? I ask the author who has been writing for the past 26 years.

“To stay motivated,” says the man People magazine once listed among the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. “And a great way for a writer to stay motivated is to scare the hell out of himself. And you do that by starting to do things you are not comfortable with... getting out of your comfort zone.”

Another reason he started writing fantasy is simply because he enjoyed reading it while growing up. “I was doing something I love, but in a different way and scaring myself [in the process]. It also gave me a certain sense of confidence.”

In this context, he recalls getting some excellent advice from William Goldman who wrote the screenplay for Absolute Power, which won two Oscars. “He said ‘look, the moment you know you are doing things as a writer, the moment you figure it out, that’s when you have lost it and you will never be a writer again. To be a [good] writer you need to get up every day in stark fear that at some point everybody is going to figure out that you have no idea what the heck you are doing’,” he says, laughing loudly. “As long as you keep fear in your life for your entire career, you will be a writer till the day you die.”