One of
the best things to come out of getting a publishing contract for Grind Joint was getting to work and
become friends with Rick Ollerman. He’s among the few people who excel both as
a writer and as an editor, two activities that are not as similar as a lot of
people think. In addition, Rick is a master at the reprint introduction, with
an uncanny ability to place a re-discovered work into context.
Rick’s
newest book is Truth Always Kills,
which is about—nah. It’s better if you hear it from him.
One Bite at a Time: Tell us about Truth
Always Kills.
Rick Ollerman: Truth
is my third novel, and I wrote it in the first person, and made it
intentionally darker than my first two books. It’s definitely noir-ish, but not
quite what I’d call full on Postman. I
never want to write the same book twice and if my first book was my “Florida”
book (even though they all take place in Florida—so far) and the second was my non-serial killer
“serial killer” book (it’s about what happens to people caught up in the edges
of that type of crime), Truth is a
deeper exploration into a more complex and tormented character. I’d probably
call it my “protagonist trapped in his own hell” book, surely a category ripe
for its own sub-genre label.
OBAAT: Where did you get this idea, and what made it worth
developing for you? (Notice I didn’t ask “Where do you get your ideas?” I was
careful to ask where you got this
idea.)
RO: I got this book by asking a series of “what if” questions.
For instance, the FBI tells us that stalking is the only reasonable predictor
we have of murder. What if you saw your significant other being targeted with
these behaviors? What do you do? Go to the cops? Not only does it often fail to
work, you bring yourself to their attention and in case “something happens”
down the road, that may not be good. And even if you get something like a
restraining order, that oftentimes makes the situation worse.
Another
question had to do with search warrants. If a violation occurs, one where clear
evidence is discovered but that was found some place other than where the
warrant gave permission to search, why must the evidence be thrown out (the
character asks)? Use the evidence, he says, but prosecute me, too. Of course,
it doesn’t work that way, probably for good reason, but he’s having a bad day
and his disappointment overpowers his self-restraint.
And how
come in a court of law, the only people not
sworn to tell the truth are the lawyers?
Why is
prostitution illegal but pornography not?
Coming
up with answers to all these questions led to the formation of the characters
and the plot of the novel. What made it interesting to me to write was that I
wanted to address all these things (and a few more) from the perspective of a
man who is essentially so rigid in his desire to do the right thing but that,
in order to protect the person he loves, he’s forced to do something other
people say is wrong. His life gets complicated in the worst ways and I wanted
to convey a sense of his pain to the reader.
OBAAT: How long did it take to write Truth Always Kills, start to finish?
RO: First draft took about ten months, and then there was
another two months of revising and deepening a relationship triangle that made
for a better story, and a reworking of the first part of the book to make the
pace what it needed to be.
OBAAT: Where did Jeff Prentiss come from? In what ways is he
like, and unlike, you?
RO: The creation of Prentiss himself came out of the sort of
questions I asked when developing the idea for the book. What kind of person
would recognize the stalking behavior for how dangerous it can be? What kind of
person could theoretically have the skills to disappear someone and possibly
not get caught? A cop was the natural answer. So in addition to his problems on
the job where he’s awaiting a disciplinary hearing when he’s taken the blame
for one of his guys looking in the wrong place as specified by the search
warrant, he has to be very careful the issue of the missing stalker doesn’t
come up. In the meantime, he’s trying to investigate a new case with a new
partner.
It’s the
complexity of the nature of those initial questions that forged Prentiss’s
creation. Add to that the fact that it was his wife that was the stalker’s
target, and having the stalker be her ex-con first husband, he was forced, or
so he believes, to do something in
order to protect his wife and adopted daughter. He really felt he had no choice
but in the aftermath, it costs him everything.
How is
he like me? I have a tendency to say what I think is the right thing, and
sometimes it’s not always politic to do so. Prentiss does it almost to an
extreme degree, though, and it’s the conflicts and consequences to both his
professional and personal lives that hopefully make him a compelling character.
OBAAT: In what time and place is Truth Always Kills set? How important is the setting to the book as
a whole?
RO: My first book was a throwback to an earlier day of
technology, essentially an early version of white collar crime performed with
computers before we had the sophistication to make that sort of thing very
difficult to accomplish today. New technology makes it difficult for writers to
find new ways to commit certain crimes. But Truth
is completely contemporary, with cell phones and everything. As for setting, I
think it’s extremely important. If done well it can give a sense of the story
that a reader can’t get only from the characters. Ross Macdonald is said to
have used southern California as a character in his books, and I think that
helps his novels immensely.
OBAAT: Do you have a specific writing style?
RO: That’s an interesting question. I know that I want to be
easy to read, but not be simple. Years ago I picked up my first Dick Francis
book from a grocery store checkout display (no, really, they used to have
those). It was Proof and it made me
feel like an idiot for staying away from his books because of the horse racing
label that he was both fairly and unfairly (dare I say it?) saddled with. I
loved the book and passed it to my father to read. When he was through, I asked
him how he liked it and he said it was “easy to read.” I felt vaguely let down,
taking that as a negative. It’s not, he said. It’s a good thing, and it turns
out he liked the book very much as well (which turns out to be more about a wine
merchant than a horse).
That
made an impression on me. I want to be surprising, à la Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (What? He ate the painting? Ate it? I gotta read that part again…),
and clear and concise. I love James Lee Burke and don’t understand when people
say he’s too dense and flowery. He’s a freaking genius and he writes poetry in
crime novels. But I fear if I tried to write like that I might come off as a
second-rate Burke imitator. Probably won’t stop me with a book in the future,
though, but for right now, I want to be easy to read, engaging, and as hard to
put down as Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity.
But I don’t consciously copy anyone so hopefully whatever I bring to the
writing table is unique to me.
It does
bring up an interesting question, though, one you probably have an opinion on
yourself. Once you have several books under your belt, don’t you ever wonder if
you really can change your voice or your style in any substantive way and still
remain original? I wonder about that. (Editor’s Note: Good question. Look for a
blog post on this in the near future.)
OBAAT: What kinds of stories do you like to read? Who are your
favorite authors, in or out of that area?
RO: Good god, I read everything. Well, almost. I’ve almost
utterly missed the Scandinavian crime fiction movement, but like yourself am a
great fan of Ireland’s finest. I think Declan Hughes has taken the American PI
novel and put himself in front of that sub-genre’s line. I’m a big fan of
exploration books (search for the source of the Nile, or the Northwest Passage,
General Sir John Franklin’s disappearance, mountain climbing, the Mahdi
uprising and Chinese Gordon), a fan of Custer books (not famous for being
massacred but famous for being a famous figure who got massacred), and other
sorts of non-fiction. I love pulp fiction and greatly admire writers who could
and would crank out a forty thousand word novel every week, like Edmond
Hamilton writing virtually every monthly Captain Future story.
What
Jack Vance does with language in his mysteries, science fiction and fantasy
stories will never be duplicated. Adrian McKinty. Philip Kerr. John D.
MacDonald. Harry Whittington. Gil Brewer. Dan Cushman. E. Phillips Oppenheim.
Rafael Sabatini. Richard Matheson. Harlan Ellison. Donald E. Westlake. Lawrence
Block. And on and on. I have a TBR library, not a pile. I am a bit lacking in
many of today’s genre bestsellers. This is probably a weakness on my part but
I’m too often disappointed with a hollow, by the numbers feeling when the books
are over.
OBAAT: How do you think your life experiences
have prepared you for writing crime fiction?
RO: My wife once told me that when she was talking to people
about bucket lists she realized I’d already done most of the things she was
hearing. I was a prolific and record-holding skydiver, I’ve been an extra in a
movie, had books published, been a tournament (though not professional) tennis
player, coached high school sports, been in national magazines, appeared in
documentaries and on CNN. I never did anything with the idea of building up any
sort of “life resume” but just sort of did things. I’d always wanted to write,
though, but was nagged for years by the thought that I just didn’t have
anything to say. That all changed at
a writers’ retreat in the Everglades with two-time National Book Award winning
Peter Matthiessen and Randy Wayne White. Randy came up to me at some point and
asked where I wanted to go as a writer. I wanted to be like him, I said, with
his monthly column in Outside
magazine, a publication I used to greatly admire before it started publishing
so many shirtless men on the covers and lionizing Lance Armstrong. Anyway, he
gave me his phone numbers, told me he’d help me any way he could, and that did
it, that unlocked the key that allowed me to believe in what I was doing enough
to start finishing things.
(Incidentally,
I only called him once, and then no more. I’d see him at conferences always
followed around by the same few people. I’d look at them and say, I don’t want
to be that guy. So I wasn’t, but I
probably should have been.)
OBAAT: What do you like best about being a
writer?
RO: To me that’s a more difficult question than most people
think. When you publish your first book, people jump up and down for you and
say how exciting that must be. Well, kind of. But as soon as that thing is out
there, you can’t take it back, you can’t make it better. Would I write Turnabout the same way today as I did back
then? Of course not. I may not even write it at all. But it’s there. And when
it’s new, you wonder: will it be reviewed? How will it be reviewed? Who will
buy the book? Will they like it? It’s nerve wracking. Fortunately the reviews
were good and the publisher wanted more. Ultimately that’s the success, at
least the first level of it, that we can hope for. At conferences you always
hear how nice a community crime writers are, and that’s true, but I think that
anything built on such a fickle thing as public opinion and book sales can’t
help but keep the majority of writers humble.
So all
that being said, what I like best about being a writer is the completion of a
work. It’s done, it’s out there, and then you wait to see where the chips fall.
Truth is getting some very good
notices but will that translate into the popularity I hope it deserves? Beats
me. There are definitely two sides to this question. What I like best about
being a writer comes with the fear of the flip side of the coin.
On the
other hand, it’s a damn special feeling when someone you’ve never met presents
you with a copy of your book and asks you to sign it for them. As single
moments go, those are hard to beat.
OBAAT: Who are your greatest influences? (Not necessarily
writers. Filmmakers, other artists, whoever you think has had a major impact on
your writing.)
RO: I don’t think in terms of influences as far as writing
style goes. In other words, I don’t try to write like anyone else. I’ve done
that for a page here and there during the restoration of some older manuscripts
with missing pages (page 32 of Peter Rabe’s The
Silent Wall is all me) I can’t imagine writing a whole book that way. None
of the spark of the original writer could survive an entire book. (This is one
of the reasons the only Sherlock Holmes stories I read are by Conan Doyle.)
(Editor’s Note: Ditto.) Good writing inspires me, I don’t care who it’s by.
Entertaining writing inspires me, like the stories of the Black Bat or Secret
Agent ‘X’ with his endless though wholly unbelievable ability to disguise
himself. I appreciate the effort, the craft, of other writers.
As for
films and television shows and whatnot, I can love shows like The Wire but I actually think that too
much TV or movie watching detracts more than adds to my accretion of skills as
a writer. Other media is too much of a time eater, and while I love the
storytelling in a good show, I don’t find that it carries over into my writing
work. The written word provides the images in the readers’ minds. When the
images are already given to me, that makes the process so different from
writing that I’m not sure that as enjoyable as those shows may be, they take
away more than add to my writing. That being said, the incredible ending to the
remake of Leonard’s 3:10 to Yuma
gives me no end of rumination. Watch closely, the other guy shoots first. But
if you don’t see that, the entire movie takes on a different meaning.
OBAAT: Do you outline or fly by the seat of you pants? Do you
even wear pants when you write?
RO: Don’t outline. If I flesh out the story in advance, the
energy dissipates and I want to find a new project to work on. This presents
challenges and if you’re a pantser, you have to develop a toolbox and a methodology
that works for you, one that won’t leave you tossing out 44,000 word
manuscripts like, um, I did a few years ago. One trick is to write a scene but
know what the next three to four are going to be. They can change but you
always know where you’re going next, though not necessarily where you’re going
to end up. You have to throw out enough strings, and crucially, enough
suspects, so that when you start to gather them up in the latter stages of the
book that you have logical options on where you’re going to take your story.
You have to stay true to your characters and their motivations, you don’t want
to create something early and not have it matter later, etc. It can be easy to
get stuck and I find the best thing for me to do is to write about the scene I’m going to work on
next; what’s going to happen, what needs to be revealed, etc. That frequently
turns into the scene itself, especially once you start putting the dialogue
down. Then you can go back to the beginning of it, revise, and add it to your book.
I do
wear pants, especially in the wintertime. It’s cold in New Hampshire. Shorts in
the summer, though.
OBAAT: Give us an idea of your process. Do you edit as you go?
Throw anything into a first draft knowing the hard work is in the revisions?
Something in between?
RO: Revising sucks. That’s the hardest part of the process for
me. I can’t imagine what people are dong to themselves when they say they’re
working on their seventh draft or some such thing. I learned a long time ago
that for me, as a beginning writer mind games will kill you. You ask yourself
questions like, is this too slow here? Do I need more action in this part? Is
this boring? Am I too clumsy in introducing this back story here? Too much
exposition?
I think
as a writer the first thing you have to do is be able to let go enough and just
write the book that’s in your head. In other words, if you write ten thousand
words, then go back and read it and become horribly disappointed with what
you’ve done, you will effect what you write going forward. So don’t do it. It
was fine in your head before you read it, so just keep writing. Because that
way you can maintain your enthusiasm and your excitement without derailing your
momentum. Go back later and fix it because, you know what? It needs it. You
have to. You just can’t let the knowledge of that act as a drag on you as you
progress or you’ll drink Scotch whiskey and never finish.
I like
to edit a little as I go, but only a little. I’ll typically write for a day, go
over that stuff, and move on. Like I said earlier, writing about the book
without writing the book itself can be very helpful. And actually right now I’m
laying off at 70,000 words and doing an editing pass from the beginning in
order to better line me up for the best possible ending I can get out of the
book. Because of course, at this point, I’m not sure what that’s going to be
yet. I know the things that have to happen to each of the major characters, how
I want them to be scarred and affected by the end of the book, but I want to be
sure I get the best plot out of all that has come before so the ending—which is
always the hardest part to do well—can be the best it can be. I want the book
to leave you with something other than a sense of relief when you’re done.
OBAAT: As a writer, what’s your favorite time
management tip?
RO: Butt in seat. Find a time that you can write best—morning,
afternoon, middle of the night—and make it your lifestyle. You can’t enjoy
having written unless you’ve actually, you know, written.
OBAAT: If you could give a novice writer a single piece of
advice, what would it be?
RO: Read everything. Read everyone. Care about nothing but your
book. Once you finish writing it, you control absolutely nothing. Will someone
buy it? Not up to you. If they do, will it succeed? Don’t be ridiculous. It
takes a dozen years to be an overnight success in this racket. Bottom line:
when you finish one book, take two weeks then write another. Because that is
the only control you truly have.
OBAAT: Generally speaking the components of a novel are
story/plot, character, setting, narrative, and tone. How would you rank these
in order of their importance in your own writing, and can you add a few
sentences to tell us more about how you approach each and why you rank them as
you do?
RO: I look at this as a trap question. You call those things
components because that’s what they are, they make up your novel. Take one
away, or de-emphasize one, and you end up with an unbalanced something. Barry
Eisler once pointed out that characters are more important than plot. He said
he could prove it, and he did. He pointed out that the day before there’d been
an earthquake in China that killed hundreds of people. Did we care? No, we had
no connection to them. But damn, that sonofabitch that cut us off in traffic
this morning will be reviled all day long. That
guy was real to us.
But if
you have strong characters and a weak plot you have literary fiction, the kind
where critics complain nothing happens. You need it all, and there’s no reason
not to have it. The trick is in how to get them all. Give me interesting
characters with a fascinating plot in a setting that I can smell through the
page, and do it so the voice keeps me reading sentence after sentence, and
you’ve given me a book I want to read. A fascinating character that does
nothing doesn’t mean anything to me. Likewise a brilliant plot with characters
I don’t like. I want it all, baby.
OBAAT: If you could have written any book of the past hundred
years, what would it be, and what is it about that book you admire most?
RO: I’m going to give it to Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. I’ve read it seven times
and it’s absolutely wonderful but it has something of an experimental yet
accessible structure that leaves me with a sense that I know exactly what
happened in the book and am always blown away. And then ten minutes later I
begin to doubt and ten minutes after that I begin to wonder what exactly it was
that just happened. Again.
OBAAT: You’re also an established editor, as
I know well from working with you when Grind
Joint came out. What I remember and liked best about you as an editor is
your collaborative attitude and light touch. What do you think are the key
elements of the author-editor relationship, and how do you approach them?
RO: Tough question. As an editor you have to be very careful to
understand the goals of the writer you’re working with. On a more surface
level, you want to be sure a book works, and that if there are any holes or
repetition that you can point those out to the author and have them work on
those. Deeper than that, a good editor wants that writer to succeed and be the
best writer they can be, so you want to encourage the writers to know their
characters as well as they can: what motivates them? What do they want? What
keeps them from getting it? Perhaps most importantly, why do they do what they
do, or why are they who they are? These questions are particularly important if
you’re writing a series; you need to keep it fresh and alive, and without that level
of knowledge of your characters, that’s a difficult thing to do.
You
always have to remember this is someone else’s work you’re helping with. If I
see a problem, I need to be able to make the writer see my concern, because
ultimately it’s their book, not mine, and I may think the answer would be to do
this, unless the writer asks for that
sort of specificity, they need to fix it themselves, the way that makes sense
to them.
It’s a
bit of a tightrope. Sometimes an author just wants to be told their book is
good when it’s not. Sometimes they miss simple things, like a gentleman’s book
I looked at where really, chapter four should be chapter one. The really good
projects are the ones where the books are already really good and careful
reading and two-way discussion leave the writer feeling that they have improved
their books because of the work they’ve done with you.
OBAAT: Do you have anything specific to say
to your readers?
RO: Other than an honest and heartfelt “thank you,” I’d probably
say, “Come on, a bunch of us are going to lunch. You should come, too.”
OBAAT: Favorite activity when you’re not reading or writing.
RO: You’ve just cut off my legs with that one. If I can’t do one
or the other, it’s hang out with my kids or go to writing events. I love
reading at Noir at the Bar events. I’ve been fighting a bad knee for a year and
a half now and I may be looking at a second surgery. That’s cut down on the
physical activity I used to enjoy, like hiking and skiing and biking. Hopefully
that will turn around at some point.
OBAAT: What are you working on now?
RO: I have an April deadline for the next book. It’s my “P.I.”
novel called Mad Dog Barked, and like
Truth Always Kills, is written in the
first person. I’m missing the sort of structure I can use in the third person
to build suspense and work with multiple narratives, but I hope this one turns
out as well as I think Truth did. I
just finished an introductory essay for the first ever paperback edition of
Malcolm Braly’s autobiography, False
Starts, and if I have time I have a short story or two I’d like to get
done.
Thanks
for giving me the opportunity to spout off, Dana. It’s been an honor.
* * *
The honor
has been mine, Rick. I sometimes feel a little guilty, sending out twenty questions
to authors I know are already overwhelmed. I get over it, sure, but there’s
always that moment. Many thanks to Rick for taking the time to get into some
detail. It’s much appreciated, and I will follow up on his question / challenge
as soon as I can.
