Written By: Michael D. McClellan |
Write what you know.
That shopworn idiom has served many an author well, launching the prolific careers of modern-day novelists such as John Grisham, who pivoted from law and legislature to pen The Firm, and Agatha Christie, who grew up hooked on Sherlock Holmes, and whose 78 crime novels have sold 2 billion copies. It’s also a formula that John DeDakis has used to great effect, the journalist-turned-novelist drawing inspiration from time spent in Washington’s political orbit to craft a series of critically-acclaimed books that feature his strong-minded protagonist, Lark Chadwick. DeDakis also plumbs the unimaginable pain in his personal life – the suicide of his sister, and the loss of a son to an accidental heroin overdose – to infuse both plot and character with the kind of rocket fuel that makes putting down his books damned near impossible.
Scholarly in wire-rimmed spectacles, with a kind face and tufts of thinning gray hair, DeDakis’ 44 years as a journalist represent the foundation stone on which his literary career is built. His most recent novel, Fake, is a reflection of our nation’s politically-polarized zeitgeist, an America cut into two distinct halves, the news that we consume dismissed by the other side with immediate and overwhelming skepticism. If Trump’s four years in office did anything, it accelerated the growing divide between us, weaponizing social media to tear at the very fabric of our democracy. DeDakis cleverly taps into this mistrust. Fake opens with popular First Lady Rose Gannon dying suddenly (and mysteriously) during an interview with White House correspondent Lark Chadwick, thrusting Lark into a media-bashing frenzy fueled by fake news. As she works to uncover the truth, she soon finds herself the target of personal attacks. The book’s premise shines a spotlight on the disruptive power of fake news, and DeDakis proves himself up to the task: Fake is the rare thriller that lives up to the billing, a tension-filled page-turner that ups the ante in a genre overrun with hype.
Despite his literary success, John DeDakis is anything but an overnight sensation. He’s a grinder who got his start working in radio and television newsrooms in Wisconsin, Germany, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. He’s interviewed the legendary Alfred Hitchcock, covered President Ronald Reagan, and worked closely with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. His career as a journalist came first, an opening act that spanned four decades before transitioning into his current gig as an award-winning novelist. It took him 10 years to publish his first book, Fast Track, which would serve as the connective tissue between one career based on facts, and another steeped in fiction. Surprisingly, the neophyte novelist chose to write from a female’s point-of-view, even though he’d never attempted anything like that before.
“To my astonishment – and relief – I discovered that writing in a female voice wasn’t as hard as I expected,” DeDakis says. “Beginning with my mother, I’ve always found it easier to talk with women than with men because, in my experience, women are much more open and nuanced about expressing their emotions. I’m fascinated by the stories they tell, and the way they tell them. Lark Chadwick came to me naturally, which was a pleasant surprise.”
DeDakis is from Wisconsin. His father was a lawyer, and DeDakis cut an incongruous figure against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, dreaming of a political career despite his generation’s strong antigovernment sentiment. The investigative journalist in him was also apparent early on: DeDakis was equally comfortable debating how to remedy the forlorn landscape of Detroit’s drug-infested, decaying East Side, with its houses charred by arson, sagging porches, and front lawns turned to thickets of brown weeds, as he was weighing whether to send American soldiers to fight and die in the jungles of Vietnam. He took this curiosity with him to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he volunteered at a campus radio station. Not only did he get his first taste of reporting, he also tasted tear gas while covering an anti-war riot in the wake of the Kent State massacre. Vietnam, it seemed, was everywhere. With the prospect of being drafted looming, DeDakis decided to enlist in the Army.
“I figured it gave me more control over my future,” he says. “I might still end up in Vietnam, but there might be options available other than combat.”
Surprisingly, DeDakis found himself shipped off to Germany at the eleventh hour. His time as a campus reporter paved the way for him to spend the next two-plus years working for the military’s radio and television wing in Frankfurt. It was here that he interviewed Alfred Hitchcock. The 40-minute one-on-one with the five-time Academy Award nominee sealed the deal on a career path. Returning stateside in 1974, DeDakis resumed his pursuit of a BA in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning the degree three years later. From 1976 to 1983, DeDakis was a reporter at WMTV (NBC-15) in Madison, a just-the-facts-ma’am journalist covering energy and transportation issues. Then, from 1983 to 1988, DeDakis was a General Assignment correspondent with CBN News in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Fortuitously, DeDakis was CBN’s White House correspondent during the last three years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. In addition to interviewing Reagan, he also interviewed former president Jimmy Carter.
“I might not have known it at the time, but that period in my life really set the stage for the fiction writing that I would do later,” DeDakis reflects. “Because I’d spent time in the White House, I knew some of the challenges that Lark would face in her own career.”
In 1988, DeDakis jumped at the chance to work as a writer at CNN, the network then in its eighth year of existence. He moved to Atlanta, and nine months later was promoted to editor. It was the start of a long and distinguished career at the news channel, one that would provide fertile ground for the development of Lark Chadwick.
“My time at CNN was invaluable when it came to character development,” DeDakis says. “Lark expects the truth, although she rarely gets it. There were so many things I learned at CNN that really fed into who Lark is. I started writing Fast Track in 1995 while I was at CNN, Atlanta. It took 10 years get that first book published.”
DeDakis moved to D.C. in 2005, taking the job of editor for Carol Costello’s show, CNN Daybreak. Daybreak was cancelled almost as soon as he arrived in town, and DeDakis was reassigned to a new show, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, which began airing around the time that Hurricane Katrina hit. The Situation Room found an immediate audience, and DeDakis found his groove. He worked his way up to Senior Copy Editor for the unflappable Blitzer, working on a daily basis with the man who’d reported on everything from the withdrawal of PLO and Syrian forces in Beirut, to the first Israeli-Egyptian peace conference in Egypt.
“It was a great experience,” DeDakis says. “Wolf was a well-respected name in the industry, and someone with a reputation for doing things the right way. He’s someone that I’m sure Lark would admire greatly.”
Write what you know.
When John DeDakis’ sister, Georgia, committed suicide in 1980, she was just 38-years-old. Bright and articulate, Georgia could have been a concert pianist or a surgeon. Instead, she decided to take her own life. This isn’t the sort of pain that DeDakis had expected to plumb when he started to write Fast Track, but he soon found himself drawn back to the Georgia’s death, revisiting that dark day and its aftermath.
Fast Track introduces the world to Lark Chadwick, a young woman searching for purpose as she solves the mystery surrounding the car-train collision that orphaned her as an infant. Because the novel deals redemptively with issues of suicide, DeDakis had no choice but to follow the breadcrumbs back to his past. Part of what makes Fast Track so compelling is DeDakis’ willingness to meet these demons head-on. Reading Fast Track, we’re reminded that suicide doesn’t discriminate: Fashion designer Kate Spade appeared to have it everything – worldwide appeal, a successful brand, and, most of all, a beautiful, 13-year-old daughter. She hanged herself anyway. That DeDakis would venture back to such a horrific event in his own life is at once brave and ambitious.
“It was an emotional journey,” DeDakis says. “Survivors of someone who commits suicide go through the trauma, which is overwhelming, and then are left to deal with the stigma, shame, and isolation that comes next. Once I got to the place where I was ready to tackle the material, the process of writing Fast Track became cathartic for me.”
The car-train collision in Fast Track also pulls directly from DeDakis’ past. In 1959, he witnessed a car-train collision in Chadwick, Illinois. The crash killed three people, including 11-year-old Raymond Stage, two years older than DeDakis at the time. DeDakis named his protagonist after the town.
“That first book really set the stage for everything that’s followed,” he says. “Lark has been at the center of the other books I’ve written. It’s been quite the journey so far.”
Write what you know.
In 2016, John DeDakis released his fourth book, Bullet in the Chamber, which draws heavily on his own experience as a White House correspondent covering the last three years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It also draws upon his grief following the fatal heroin overdose of his youngest son, Stephen, in 2011.
“The book’s title and the cover image of a bullet in a syringe reflect my belief that a pusher who sells a fatal dose of heroin should be charged with second-degree murder, because it’s like selling a pistol with one bullet in the chamber to a person who will use it to play Russian roulette.”
Photo courtesy John DeDakis
In Bullet, Lark once again finds herself at the wrong place at the right time: Front-row center when the White House press briefing room is suddenly attacked. The president is missing, the first lady’s life is at risk, and Lark’s personal life is falling apart when the man she loves disappears. What unfolds is a story about journalistic integrity – and skullduggery – at the highest level. The tightly-written page-turner has received wide acclaim, winning numerous awards.
“In this book, I fictionalize Stephen’s story and pour it into a thriller about drugs, drones, and journalism told from the point of view of my long-time protagonist” DeDakis says. “It wasn’t something that I took lightly.”
Bullet reminds us that the opioid epidemic in the United States is no longer relegated to places like Atlanta’s Bluff neighborhood, notorious for its gangs and its open-air heroin market, where dealers swarm unfamiliar cars looking for new customers. Opioids have rolled through Middle America, decimating entire towns and snuffing out some of our best and brightest, killer drugs omnipotent in their reach and godlike in their sway over the addicted.
“Stephen had an emergency room experience that revealed he’d been using heroin, DeDakis says. “Up until then he’d hidden it very well.”
When Stephen borrowed his dad’s car and went missing in 2011, a parent’s worst fear was realized.
“When he disappeared, it was out of character for him, so I was pretty sure heroin was a factor,” DeDakis says. “As a parent, part of you goes into denial mode when something like that happens, but as each day passed it became harder to hold onto hope.”
Stephen’s body was found a week later, leaving DeDakis devastated. After years of grief therapy, DeDakis decided to incorporate the traumatic experience into Bullet.
“Part of the reason I wrote Bullet was for the catharsis of it. I found a way to take Stephen’s story and imbue it into the ongoing series that I’d written.”
Write what you know.
John DeDakis retired from CNN in 2013. He’s won an Emmy for his role in CNN’s coverage of the 9/11 terror attacks. He’s published 5 novels, teaches writing, edits manuscripts, and is currently working on his memoir. Oh, and Fake likely won’t be the last we see of Lark Chadwick. There are ideas rolling around, characters being developed, plot twists calling his name.
Photo courtesy John DeDakis
The journalist-turned-novelist is a natural-born storyteller, and his female protagonist is itching for more adventure.
That’s good news for the rest of us.
Let’s go back to your roots. What was life like in Wisconsin?
Life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect, and that’s what I tell all my writing students. In journalism, we call it a story. In real life, it’s usually a crisis. In fiction, it’s a plot twist. We all have those plot twists that cause our life to go in new and unexpected directions.
In my case, the plan was to go into politics. My dad was a lawyer, he and I were going to go into practice together, and I was going to use law as a stepping stone to a political career. And, if my career trajectory had turned out the way I had intended, I would have been the guy sworn in on the Capitol steps in 2008 instead of that guy from Kenya – or whatever country Trump falsely accused President Obama of coming from. But, for the good of the country, I changed direction and didn’t become our nation’s 44th president [laughs].
You came of age just as the Vietnam War was heating up.
In 1968, I went to the University of Wisconsin. The Vietnam War was a big deal. It was in an all the papers. Whenever I’d go to class, I was bombarded with viewpoints from both the left and the right, and I was pressured to take a position, either for or against the war. What annoyed me was that the rhetoric was so overheated. I just knew that whoever was trying to spin me was leaving out something salient that would undermine their position. So, I was always suspicious of both the left and the right.
I was in a lot of bull sessions about the war, and I always walked away with more questions than answers. I’d argue the right-wing line of my Nixon republican parents, and when I was at home on Thanksgiving, I’d argue the left-wing line I was hearing in school. When I was alone, I was confused. I volunteered at a campus radio station, because it seemed to me journalism was a good perch to sit on to sort it out. I covered an anti-war riot after Kent State and got tear gassed. When my parents learned that their little boy had gotten gassed, they encouraged me to transfer to a smaller school.
Did you fight in the war?
There was a draft back then, which was one of the reasons that the Vietnam War was so controversial. If your draft number was below 150, then you could get plucked from campus and thrown into the jungles of Vietnam. My number was 14, but I had a student deferment, which meant that I was okay for a while at least.
I transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Playboy magazine had voted it the No. 1 party school in the country, and I saw it as my personal mission to be the No. 1 partier [laughs]. I didn’t succeed, but I did such a good job of trying. My GPA was so low that I lost 20 credits and my student deferment when I transferred. That’s when I decided to enlist in the Army to avoid the draft and have more control over what I could do.
Two weeks before I was to be shipped out to Vietnam, my orders were changed to Germany. I spent the next two-and-a-half years at the headquarters of the American forces’ radio and television network in Frankfurt, Germany, doing interviews for a special events radio unit. One of the first interviews I did was with this guy named Alfred Hitchcock. I discovered what I was good at and what I loved, so when I got out of the Army and went back to journalism school.
You worked as a White House correspondent. How did that help you in writing your most recent book, Fake?
Well, it helps to have been there. You understand how much of a bubble the president is really in, and how tightly controlled the access is to the president. I mean, not every reporter can get into the Oval Office. When there’s a presidential event, it’s handled by a pool of reporters that rotate. I don’t think a lot of people realize that. There’s someone from a wire service, someone from a television network, someone from a radio network, and a still photographer. It’s a very tightly held group of people, and it rotates on a daily basis. Access to certain things is tightly controlled and extremely limited.
There are other things I observed from having been there. For example, the briefing room is very small. It only seats 50 people, and anything else is standing room only. If you spend any time there, you learn that the briefing room was built over the old White House swimming pool. FDR had the pool built when he was president because he had polio, and he swam in the pool as a means of therapy. Then, when Kennedy came along, he would swim in the pool fairly regularly, but he would also cohort with some of his paramours. Then, when Nixon came along, he built the press room over the pool. Reagan was president when I covered the White House, and videotape was only beginning to be used. Over the years it’s evolved. Instead of just being a big living room with chairs and a microphone, they’ve incorporated theater seating and wired it for radio, television, and the Internet, so now it’s really high tech. A big part of writing Fake was updating my knowledge of the technology that’s changed over time. I had to rely on some of my friends who still cover the White House, or who did at the time I was writing the book, to get an update on how it’s done now.
Your next big career move was to CNN.
I was pretty much behind-the-scenes at CNN. In 1988, I started as a writer at the CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Within nine months after I got there, they made me an editor, and editing is what I did for the rest of my career. It’s analogous to being a hockey goalie. Nobody ever sees the great saves in journalism. They’re only aware of you when something bad makes it on the air – factual errors, bad writing, misspelled words, bias, that kind of stuff. My job was to protect the anchor from saying anything bad.
How did you end up in Washington?
I transferred to D.C. in 2005 while working with Carol Costello, who was the anchor for the early morning show, CNN Daybreak. They canceled the show right after got there, and that’s when they reassigned me to a new show called The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, which started airing around the time of Hurricane Katrina. My schedule flipflopped completely. It changed from working overnights to prepare for a show that went on the air at five in the morning, to working through the morning and afternoon to prepare for a show that started at 4PM. The environment was interesting. This was before they remodeled the newsroom, so you had all these people were crammed into this tiny space – it felt like the engine room of the Titanic – people on top of each other [laughs]. Then, they built a new newsroom a couple of floors above the D.C. Bureau, which allowed us to spread out.
You were one of Wolf Blitzer’s editors at CNN. What’s it like working with Wolf?
Wolf is smart enough that he can anchor the whole show without any script, but we had a stable of writers that was probably the best in the business. It was amazing to see how fast they wrote, and how clearly – all I usually had to do was look it over and turn it in.
It was very fast-paced, because the basic premise of the show is that it’s happening now. Even though we had an idea of what the day was going to look like, things would always change. As a result, there was always writing that was going on during the show, and updates that would be happening a nanosecond before Wolf would get the script. It was nerve-racking. Wolf is amazing – he’s unflappable. They throw changes at him all the time, and he just rolls with it. He’s not a diva. It was amazing to watch.
The Persian Gulf War made Wolf a household name.
A lot of people seem to think that Wolf was overseas and reporting from under a table, but that’s not actually true. Wolf was the Pentagon correspondent at the time, had been on the job for a few months, and had commented to his wife that this CNN thing wasn’t working out. She said, ‘Just give it a little more time, Wolf.’ And then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Wolf was on the air hour after hour after hour. He’s said that he owes his career to Saddam Hussein.
Let’s talk about your first book, Fast Track.
When I first started experimenting with writing outside of broadcast journalism, I was doing research for a biography of a friend of mine who had been murdered. I had access to his widow, his mistress, his writings, and some very interesting tape recordings. During the course of my reporting, I was digging up information about him that even the family didn’t know, which prompted his widow to request that I put it on hold. I respected her wishes, but eventually took a lot of the things that I learned in my research and poured those details into my first novel.
Where did the idea for Fast Track come from?
I was teaching myself the craft, and one of my exercises was to write a story about a personal experience. I started out with recounting of a car-train collision I’d witnessed when I was nine years old. I was in the dome car that was near the front of the train. It was the middle of the night, and I had a vantage point where I could look down past the engine to see the tracks ahead. Out of the corner of my eye, this automobile came out of nowhere and didn’t stop for the crossing. It just drove right in front of the train. We hit it. In my mind, I can still see the impact. All this debris came down on the dome, and we came to a stop. The collision killed everybody in the car.
Well, as I was writing about this during my exercise, I remembered back to a radio news report about a similar car-train collision in which an infant survived. I thought: What if that kid grew up and wanted to find out more about her past? This was about 15 years after my sister had killed herself, and I suddenly found myself revisiting what had happened to her. Those kinds of things don’t just leave you, so the thoughts and emotions just came flooding back. I ended up taking elements of her story and combining them with some of these other things from the collision. That really became the beginning of the story.
How long did it take you to get Fast Track published?
I started writing Fast Track in 1995, while I was still an editor at CNN in Atlanta. It took 10 years to get the agent that I have now – I was passed up by 38 others – and the manuscript went through 14 major revisions along the way. So, it really took a long time to figure it out, hone my craft, and find someone who felt that it was something they could make money on. Fast Track finally came out in 2005, right as I made the transition to D.C. I didn’t leave CNN until Troubled Water came up.
Lark Chadwick is the lead protagonist. Why write in a female voice?
There are really two reasons that I write as a female. One is a superficial reason; when I was starting to write this character, someone suggested that I should write in a way that stretches who I am, and since I’ve never been a woman before – at least in this life [laughs] – I thought I’d give it a try.
Did you find it difficult?
It wasn’t as hard as I expected, because emotions aren’t gender specific. We all have the same emotions. While I discovered that I could still draw from my own life, it also helped that there were a lot of women in my life at CNN – young women who worked as interns, young women in their mid-20s – who would tell me stories about their boyfriends, careers, families, and things like that. I would just listen to their stories, to the point where their voices became embedded in my subconscious. It also helped to have beta readers who would read early drafts of the story. A lot of these young women would give me their feedback on what was working, and, more importantly, what wasn’t working. That became invaluable to me.
I didn’t realize the deeper reason until I went through grief counseling after my son died of an accidental heroin overdose. I worked through things with my grief counselor for nearly two-and-a-half years, and then the grief counseling center invited me back a year later to give a speech at a fundraising banquet. As I was writing the speech, I discovered that I write as a woman because I’m trying to create a character that I wish my sister had allowed herself to become. Lark does not let a guy define her. She’s not a victim. She still falls for the bad boys, but she’s going to figure it out and not get trapped by her circumstances. That’s the spookiness of the subconscious. The deeper reason for writing Lark was hidden from me until I wrote Bullet in the Chamber.
Let’s talk about your second novel, Bluff. Did you know that you were going to write a second book with the same protagonist?
No, because I didn’t know I was going to be successful writing the first book. I can’t even remember when I thought about writing a second book, but I’m sure it was right around the time when Fast Track was published.
Bluff is set in Wisconsin, but Peru plays a big part in this novel.
One of the women I used to work with at CNN was an anchor, and we would play tennis after work. She told me about how she and her boyfriend went hiking along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, in Peru. In Fast Track, one of the characters is Lionel Stone, a newspaper editor who becomes Lark’s mentor. As part of his backstory, his daughter dies in a mountain climbing accident, so I embellished that and created a mountain climbing accident in Peru. I just went with it from there.
Why did you visit Peru?
I’d written about seven drafts of the novel, and I was working from online pictures of the Inca Trail. I realized that I couldn’t fake this, that I really needed to go there and see it for myself. So, I booked a trip and spent 10 days in Peru. It was a great experience. I came back with so much material that could be used in the rewrite…anecdotes, texture, descriptions, things like that. The trail had been hidden from the Western world for centuries – it’s only been discovered in the last 100 years – so, I think just having gone to Peru and walked the Inca Trail made the book so much better.
Your third novel, Troubled Water, is set in Georgia. Why there?
My second son, James, was a student at Columbus State University in Georgia. We visited the school and the setting just seemed perfect for a book.
Tell me about Troubled Water.
In the first two books, Lark is a reporter at a weekly newspaper in southern Wisconsin. In Troubled Water, she becomes the cops-and-courts reporter in southern Georgia. It’s a daily newspaper, but it’s a troubled newspaper, so she’s getting into a bad situation – she just doesn’t know it.
As she is heading to this new job, she stops by the side of the road to relieve herself, and she discovers the body of a young woman who’s been strangled. It turns out to be the first victim of a serial killer who later strikes again. Lark has the inside track because she discovered the body, so she thinks she knows things about the crime that no one else knows.
Does Lark get in over her head?
The story explores the dynamic of working with the cops while she’s also navigating her new journalism job. The photographer that she has to work with is a little manic, but she’s also attracted to him, so there’s a little romantic flirtation going on. And then there’s the presidential race that she gets in touch with as well. So, there are a lot of things going on at the same time.
A Bullet in the Chamber has received critical praise. It’s also a very personal story for you in many ways.
Bullet is another book that came to me in a way that I didn’t expect. My son was missing for over a week, and I knew that heroin was likely going to be a factor in my son’s disappearance. I woke up from a dream with an image of a bullet in a syringe. That stayed with me, and eventually became the idea for the title.
The bullet being a metaphor for a lethal drug overdose.
I felt that if the cops could make the connection between the sale of the hit that killed my son, then they could charge the pusher with second-degree murder. In my opinion, it’s like selling a pistol with one bullet in the chamber, knowing that the buyer is going to play Russian roulette. The pusher doesn’t care about the consequences, he only cares about making the sale. It’s not first-degree murder. He doesn’t intend to kill anybody, but he still knows that it’s a distinct possibility.
As I was writing the book, I soon realized that it wasn’t as clear cut as that. I talked with everyone from prosecutors to cops, and I realized that it’s not so simple for the police to make that kind of connection. That’s something that Lark struggles with in the book, because a person who’s close to her is addicted and dies of a heroin overdose.
Was writing this book a form of catharsis for you?
I had Lark as a character, but it’s still based on the collateral damage that surrounded my life when Stephen went missing, and then was found dead. So, a lot of those scenes are ripped from reality, and yes, I was writing them as a catharsis. They’re also subplots to the bigger picture; I was also trying to create a story that was entertaining, and something that someone would want to read, even if they didn’t know me or cared about my personal story.
Since publication, it’s provided me with opportunities to talk with people about things like addiction and suicide. These are still stigmatized issues. The saving grace for me is that I’m able to write and talk about them. I think that it helps people realize they’re not alone. Grief is so isolating. You feel like you’re the only person who feels this way, that the world is going on without you and you’re stuck in this moment that will never go away. So, I try to help people understand that it’s possible to get through it, learn from it, and heal.
Let’s talk about Fake. Lark finds herself in D.C.
Since Fake is part of a series, you have to live with the characters that you’ve already created. In my third novel, Troubled Water, Lark is working as a cops-and-courts reporter in a fictitious Georgia town. She’s covering Will Gannon, the Governor of Georgia, who’s running for president. The dynamic continues in Bullet in the Chamber, where he’s become the new president and she’s started covering the White House.
Where’d you get the idea?
I was actually going in a different direction, but then Trump was elected president in 2016. The reason I wrote it this way is that I was troubled by Trump’s criticism of journalists, his portrayal of them as the enemy of the American people, and his assertion that they make up stories. I know from having been behind the scenes for nearly 50 years, making up stories is a firing offense at any reputable news organization. Although I resented Trump’s criticism and felt it was gratuitous, I didn’t set out to write an anti-Trump polemic. What I’ve always tried to do in all of my novels, is to give people a behind-the-scenes glimpse as to how journalism really does operate. Sure, there are some scoundrels. But there are also plenty of people who really try to play it straight.
Lark herself is a victim of fake news.
As journalism has evolved, social media has become much more front and center, and there’s a downside to that. We’re all journalists now because we have a smartphone and a social media account. Anytime you post something you’re a publisher – and yet, there is no editorial oversight. There’s no one saying, “Where’d you get that? How do you know that’s true?” People can post anything they want as ‘the truth,’ and in some cases it reaches millions of followers. There are real consequences to false information. So, one of the things that I tried to depict in Fake is the downside of being the victim of fake news.
Let’s talk about your creative process. Do you set daily quotas on how many words or pages you want to write?
I’m really good at procrastination. I mean, that’s part of the process [laughs]. The thing I tell my students is that if you’re ruminating about your story, you’re still writing it, even if you’re not banging out 1,000 words a day. I try to help them realize that it can be a trap to set some of these goals. As a writer, how do you feel about yourself if you only do 800 words a day, or 250, or even zero? If you’re not careful, you can begin to feel that you have no business being a writer because you don’t have the discipline it takes to meet a self-imposed quota. You are human, so you need to allow for that. I share that advice with my students.
What is your creative process like?
One of the things that I really try to do is turn off my internal editor and write the first draft all the way through. I found that I can write a first draft in about nine months. I may not always know where I’m going, and I may not know exactly how I’m going to get to Point K, for example, but I know that I need to get to Point C first. Along the way, I allow for serendipity. I allow for not knowing where I’m going and just writing by the seat of my pants, to see what shows up. And I don’t look back; the story is going to keep going forward, and I’ll fix things during the rewrite.
There are times when I’ll compromise with my internal editor. I’ll sit with a chapter for a day or two, proofread and copyedit it, and then rough it in so that it’s decent. Then I’ll lock it in and move on, as opposed to constantly looping back to the first chapter. I’m a firm believer that if you keep going back to the beginning, you never make any forward momentum. Finishing that first draft is a real psychological hurdle, but you have to trust that you’ll get there. At that point the manuscript is this steaming pile of clay, but at least you’ve got something that you can really start to shape.
How do you deal with writer’s block?
I’ve learned that writer’s block is basically fear; fear of making a mistake, fear of getting it wrong, fear of not being good enough. This may sound counterintuitive, but the cure for writer’s block is to write. It’s not gonna be perfect the first time. There are times when it’s gonna suck. At least you’ll have something that you can look at objectively, and then you can make it better.
Being stuck in a rut is hard to escape, especially if you allow yourself to keep digging. I learned that as a radio reporter; when you’re on a deadline, you’ve got to write.
I was working at a radio station in Madison, Wisconsin, and the studio and transmitter was in a cornfield. I remember going outside and getting down on my knees and saying, ‘Lord, help me to write fast.’ It was almost as if the prayer itself needed editing, because it sounded like I was telling God to make me write fast, and that I was demanding it right now [laughs]. Well, I got up and went inside, and I never really looked back. I was able to write pretty fast after that, and since then I don’t usually get hung up.
Photo courtesy John DeDakis
When you’re working on a novel, do you have self-imposed deadlines?
I didn’t impose deadlines on myself when I wrote the first four novels. That’s probably because there were so many other things going on in my life that took priority. Writing fiction was gravy – it was what I did when all of the dad-stuff was done.
The only time I really imposed a deadline on myself was when I was writing Fake. That’s because, as I was writing it, Trump was president and he was just doing crazier and crazier things. I realized that in order for this book to really be effective, it needed to come out before the 2020 election.
Around November, 2019, I said to my agent, “I need to have this book come out in 2019. When do you need the manuscript?” She said, “Two months.” I hadn’t even finished the first draft yet. November to the end of January was a mad dash to finish the first draft, get it to my beta readers, and then make revisions. I got it to my agent by the end of January, so that it could come out in September, 2019.
How did you handle working under a deadline?
That was a real rush for me to get it done, but I already knew how to write under deadline. To put it in perspective, my normal writing day when I’m working on a novel is between two-to-four hours. Anything beyond that and I become less effective. During that two-month period, I was writing much longer than that. It wasn’t frantic, it was just intense.
Are you an introvert or an extrovert, and do you enjoy promoting your work?
I am a shy extrovert, with introvert tendencies. One of the things I discovered is that I liked marketing more than I thought I would. I think I always pictured marketing as analogous to being an obnoxious used car salesman. The idea of shameless self-promotion is anathema. I just really cringe at it. And yet I discovered that marketing isn’t selling, it’s telling. All you have to do is just tell someone that you’ve written a book, and then tell them a little bit about it. If they’re interested, great. If they’re not, they’re not. You’re not responsible for the outcome, you’re just responsible for letting them know. I’ve also discovered that there are endless ways to connect with people, even more so now with the Internet. It can be a tremendous time suck, so you’ve got to have a good marketing team. That’s when I decided to hire Lisa Strickland, the founder of Brava Creative Group. We make a good team. She does a lot of the stuff that I don’t want to do. And she’s able to do it extremely well.
How long have you been working with Lisa?
We met when I was still at CNN. I was taking the Metro one day, and she got on and sat next to me. Nobody talks on the Metro. The train came to a stop and the door opened, and it looked like she was getting ready to lunge out the door. I said to her, “Do you know where you’re going?” She told me the stop, and I said, “That’s the next one.” That broke the ice. So, between that stop and the next one we started talking. My stop was her stop, so we got off together, grabbed a drink, and have been talking ever since. It’s cause and effect. That’s how life is lived.
What are you working on now?
The working title of my memoir – and it could change – is Pivot Points – A Life of Plot Twists. The basic premise is that life doesn’t turn out the way you expect. The book will highlight the plot twists in my own life, and the lessons that I’ve learned from the choices that I’ve made and have been forced to make. It will tell the story of my journey: Covering the presidency, then moving into journalism, and then getting into fiction after my sister committed suicide – which is something that deepened after my son’s death. I hope to tell it in a way that inspires others who’ve had to cope with grief and overcome their own struggles. There is always hope.
You’re enjoying retired life. What else keeps you busy?
I was still at CNN when I started editing people’s manuscripts. So, over the course of having written several novels, I now teach people how to write novels. My career has taken another twist to where I am now, as a manuscript editor and a writing teacher and a writing coach. That’s what I do in my retirement right now.
Last Question: If you had one piece of advice for others, what would that be?
Don’t give up. There is always a reason to hope. That’s true when it comes to writing, and it’s also true in living, too. I think that there are certainly times when things seem hopeless, but it’s important to see the bigger picture, the bigger possibilities. There are many types of advice out there, but I really feel that refusing to give up is the best advice I can give.