Interview with writer Robert W Walker

The following interview with Robert Walker first appeared on the Erica Writes blog on Thursday, June 14, 2007

I first "met" Rob when I won a critique on an auction. At the time when I bid on the auction, I was finishing Witness, had just joined Mystery Writers of America, and thought I'd be pursuing a career in the suspense genre. By the time the auction ended, I was on to greener pastures--namely Touched and subsequently Trevor & the Tooth Fairy (now: Hi-Jinxed)--the latter of which I ended up sending him. Rob had some great feedback and didn't bat an eye about receiving a wacky Nether-Netherland romp instead of a suspense plot. (Or, if he did bat an eye, he did so on the other side of the fiberoptics cable, so we'll never know.) Here's a more formal blurb about Rob:

Robert W Walker, a graduate of Northwestern University, is the author of forty-three novels, including the acclaimed Instinct Series with FBI Medical Examiner Dr. Jessica Coran, and the Edge Series featuring Texas Cherokee Detective Lucas Stonecoat and psychiatrist Meredyth Sanger. He recently published the spontaneous combustion horror novel, Fire & Flesh, under the name Evan Kingsbury. City for Ransom is a historical thriller with all the atmosphere of turn of the century Chicago. Robert was born in Corinth, Mississippi, and currently resides in Chicago, IL. In between teaching, lecturing, and book touring, Robert is busy tackling his next novel.

Forty-three novels and still with a day job?

You're not the first to think 43 novels and a day job is the work of a work-a-holic. Yes, I do love teaching. You might get that between the lines here. I call it -- teaching that is -- "Stomping Out Ignorance." Teachers are always stomping out the same fires, cutting the same grass over and over, and at times it can get discouraging, but there's always the amazing moments, too, the closures. It comes back to you if you've got the right attitude. Knew a fellow teacher who showed up in my writing class, and she complained always that she had nothing left to give to her fiction --not after her studnets all day long "suck" her energy fom her. I thought this odd as I learn and relearn in teaching writing and am energized by my students. Attitude...like the book The Secret -- that rehash of Positive Thinking in a perfect "package". Think of it, wheneve you teach anyone any subject from re-wiring a house to math or English, you reinforce what you know. It is a win-win profession in that sense but sure would like to see the day when excellence in teaching is rewarded.
As I've gotten older, I have slowed down a bit, but when you get a contract for a SERIES this forces you to find ways to write faster. Robert Randisi is on his what 143rd book or more? But my novels are twice as thick as his!

Is there a secret to speedy novel writing?

Speed. Writing Fast is not a dirty word. In fact, when you are writing and you lose track of time, I submit to you that you are writing FAST. This is writing confidently and surely. There is an element of free writing involved, and doing it with dialogue is great fun, too. Often it will require rewrite and more rewrite but writing is rewriting. Back to Fast Writing. If you write on a schedule and keep to it, soon you turn a number of corners. You begin to teach yourself so much. You begin to be a party to your characters "taking over" and moving, acting, speaking for themselves. Let them run on even at the mouth -- dialogue can always be paired back. If you write often and a lot, like typing, you just get faster at it. You will learn turning one of those corners that CHARACTER driven stories are easier to fill up because a character fully understood, fully realized on a psychological level by you, the one who created him or her, will be your best partner in freeing up and trusting that he'd do that,yes, and he'd not only say that but say it just that way. The more I've written, the more I've moved away from plot-driven story to charcter-driven story. This means you do "reserach" on your charcters beforehand...you get to know them as fully as possible. This does nt mean you unfold ALL of the character on page one; the character still unfolds as in life, we get to know folks a little at a time. This is another important point about setting, charcter, plot. It can't all be shoved in at once but placed in pepper and salt fashion, just as with research. Twenty years or so ago Writers Digest published an article called Fast Writing is Good Writing. I take that to heart. Slow, laborious writing of the tooth-pulling variety is no fun. Have fun with it. Speed it up. Write that paranormal mystery as if it will read like TV's Medium on Speed -- like my PSI Blue title with Rae Hiyakawa.
Let me addd about Fast Writing...If you love your main character(s) and the book ends, quite often, if you think of their bedrock character traits, you can come up with another intriguing way to challenge these character traits. This is how a series is born, and to write in series, you gotta write fast, especially if you are under contract for not one but three books. Imagine your character and what awful challenges and tight spots you put him or her into in your first book; double and quadruple this in the next. The bad guy was awful in book one, but suppose Pauline or Paul has to face a DOUBLE threat in book two. Multiply the stones you throw at your protagonist. If his or her character at bedrock is stubborn, impetuous, and courageous--make these traits the Achilis heel. Challenge so strongly that his or her best traits are used against him. People do that to us all the time in life, right?

Any tips for keeping the research relevant and not letting it completely take over?

This not only applies to historical research but any research--including forensic sciences, future world science fiction gizmos, or any research-based fiction. I call my stuff "reserach-based" or "reality-based" horror if it is a horror novel, reality-based suspense if it is suspense, etc. I love the research as it provides me with actual dialogue lines. In reading the non-fiction, I begin to "hear voices" and characters crawl to the surface. No matter how great the research is, however, it must be kept harnessed. One way to do this is to do one complete autopsy in the book ahd the others are given shorter shrift. Frankly in a Reichs book, I think she uses too much science and too many full autopsies. Think of Gone With The Wind and picture the scene where Rhett and Scarlet are fighting their way out of burning Atlanta. There is this epic moment when they and the horses and wagon are silhouetted before the huge, huge flames and it looks like the Walls of Jericho are falling down around them. We are less interested in the fire and flames than "Will they make it out alive?" That scene in the film is a visual example of Keep the Research in back of the players. It is after all the stage walls, the props, and fascinating as the Civil War is Gone With the Wind is about a single woman's war within it. Drama and actors at center and front of stage, research to the rear. At times you will want to break this rule and your editor will argue and be right, but at times some historical element, as with photography in City for Ransom, I simply fought to keep as I believed it too fascinating to cut and I rewrote it to sift it clearly through the photographer's love of the new science.
Hope this communicates how I do it. It is always a balancing act but again think sift through the characters and do not separate these elements out from one another but rather think hand and glove.
Remind yourself often, "Whoa, where is Lucas in this scene? Where is my Jessica gone? Where's Alastair standing or is he fallen?"

How do you decide the setting for your novel, and how much of that decision is influenced by the plot?

A lot of what I said on meshing character and plot applies to setting too. The setting can be at odds with characters or characters can be in sync with the setting, and some yes, some no. I decide on a setting I am either extremely familiar with and have much to say about it, or one that I am fascinated with and spend time researching so I gotta find it fun. By the way FUN is important in writing. I try never to stop the forward moving dynamo of my story, the drama, to describe a Person, Place, or Thing. See if you stop the main character;s movements for any length of time say to describe the city streets of wherever, say Atlanta, then you lose...you lose sight of the fact that Lucas or Jessica is moving through these streets and feeling them, smelling them, seeing them, hearing themm, tasting them. In other words SIFT all impessions not thorugh your narrator but through your character. This is Ransom's Chicago, warts and all...a certain pride taken in the degradation and ceertainly the corruption in City for Ransom and Shadows in the White City. My Jessica Coran character holds dear the one place she feels safe, her home, until it is invaded. Each book she travels to another setting, FBI jets, etc., and for her she finds the beauty and the dark side, the underbelly, even in Hawaii. Hope this helps with your question. A fine book or two every author should read that handles setting are Making Shapely Fiction (stern) and Tips for Writing Popular Fiction (carr) both out of print. ugh!

How do you balance plot with character development?

All your storylines should come out of your characters, and all your characters should have mroe than just a goal that differs and conflicts with others' goals. They should all harbor secrets. Things they don't want to admit to, mistakes, possibly some secret that got someone into trouble or killed at an earlier time in life. Things that define them as differnt from other charcters in the story. If all your characters are driven by their experiences, their pasts, their scars, and so their psychology, this is good and it will arrange a marriage beetween character and plot and subplots. Don't think of character and plot as separate items like you see in textbooks. In writing fiction they are hand and glove, and so is setting which we'll get into next. But by all means see my blog on Psychology 101 for Writers and Character at my blog -- www.robertwwalker.blogspot.com I have had a lot of folks tell me this article really made sense to them.
Don't create characters who speak for paragraph-long lecture style comments, even if you feel you've got to get this or that fact or the research IN. Don't shove it in in page-long remarks by Professor so and so who has all the answers. have other characters interrupt the blowhard...ask him questions, make exclamations...hand him a cup of coffee or a mic or...etc. Break it up with actions and speech of others in the room. Noise from the window, etc.

How many books had you written before your first was published? And since you "write fast" did you always do this? How long did it take you from start to finish on the your published novel?

I wrote my first novel while at the strange "Wells" high school. Novel was a sort of sequel to Huckleberry Finn. Learned a GREAT deal by imitating/emulating Mark Twain. A good exercise for anyone using his or her favorite author(s). After this fledgling novel-- writeen longhand over a number of months, maybe three and typed and bound as my rare book, as I never expected to ever sell it--I wrote my University dissertation as a novel on Salem Witchcraft. A far more ambitious work which took a year to write. I couldn't sell either the Twain sequel or the Salem book anywhere. All I got was "too turgid" language is "stilted" etc. I wrote a lot of small pieces during this time but nothing with a satisfying ending, found shorts harder to write than chapters. Then I threw all to the wind and sat down to intentionally write a spoof of men's adventure, science fiction, horror all rolled into one and this I wrote in two months, sent it out to Tower Books, now Leisure/Dorchester and the unimaginatife editor bought it as a straight men's novel. This was 1979 and the book was Sub-Zero. After seeing that THIS is what THEY wanted, fast, loose, fun, commercial, I yanked out my Twain novel, The WrongWay Railway and rewrote it, sent it out and it sold immediately because I had turned it into less of an historical coming of age tale and more of a mjaor mystery, the underground railroad was a huge mystery. I had not been treating it/writing it as a mystery. The twist or angle had changed and made it a sellable product. This was 1982 and a nice hardcover from Oaktree Publ., San Diego. Then it took me 3 years to sell my next novel...racking up rejections became a way of life. Brain Stem crossed genres and was a lot of fun. Fun became the common denominator for books that sold, and I wrote them fast. Genre-directed, often tongue-in-cheek but often I was the only one who got the joke...but I also got the check. Salem's Child followed along with a few other horror titles because i began asking editors what they needed NOW and telling them I could prouce it in a couple of months. So in essence, I had written only two novels before I sold my first, but that first was like day and night from my Great American Novels. I still have not sold my college dissertation but using the same research, I created Salem's Child. One is a dissertaion, the other is a fun novel.
I have taken up to 3 years to write a book (Floaters now an E-book on FictionWise.com), and then selling it, the editor wants the sequel in six to nine months...yikes. Each book requires more time depending on subject and purpose. The more serious work, the more researched, I have found the harder to sell. The "fun novel" market is a great deal larger than the market for something like AZTEC, a novel of the AZTEC Empire, you see? At least that has characterized my checkered career. I try to do something liteary and it bombs; I do a fast and loose mystery and or horror novel and it sells!

Do you think it's okay to plot a book where the reader doesn't meet the villain until the end? In other words, the villain has under villains, but the reader doesn't get to the top dog until the protagonists figure out who he is?

AHA The AntiChrist antagonist -- Susan's question is intriguing but off top of my head --YES, by all means. Fact is anything can be done if well executed. Execution is extremely important, precisely HOW you pull it off, how you keep the top dog bad guy in the shadows. It has been done in films, in TV drama, and in books and I do believe comic books. The use of underlings is nothing new; perhaps if you made each underling so terrified of having failed the "boss" that they'd rather commit suicide than to face this monster and each one does just that when caught...maybe. One trick that is useful in creating a great villian is to give almost as much time and energy and words on the bad guy as the good guy...to round him out, to make him the "equal" of the hero/heroine. Most folks don't give their villians enough thought, do not "fully realize" all the sides or facets of the killer or killers. I see a great opportunity here for you...make each underling someone--a real person with his or her own weakness which the larger villain has them on the hook for. They are not doing it for hire, not just automatons or goons but real people who've gotten in over their heads or owe a debt or have an Achilis Heel like a child who was sold into slavery by the bad guy and only he knows where the kid is and unless the job is done, the kid will never surface....that sort of thing. In film all we'd see is the back of this monster's head, telling the underlings what he wants and expects of them. Keeping the reader in the dark about who the guy is, his identity can be tricky but it is done all the time. In City for Ransom, oddly enough, the killer is in many scenes but he's invisible to all of us. I planned it out that way. Readers don't know he's the Phantom of the Fair until very near the end. So yeah, it can be done.

After a website and if you had four thousand dollars to spend, what do you think is the most effective way to promote a book?

4000 Dollar Splurge on Marketing -- Again an interesting question....hmmm, how about spending that money on promoting my book? LOL. I wish. I have never had that kind of ready cash to try it but if I did, I'd find a good publicist wtih a great track record in marketing books and authors. If I had any leftover funds, I might do a mass mailing with a 3-fold brochure about the book to bookstores, libraries, clubs, etc. Soon be out of money, but if I had anything left over, I'd defintely go to a writer's conference, as many as I could to soak up the advice and wit and wisdom of old guys like Rob Walker who just asks you to buy him a beer. If I had unlimited funds, I'd start my own damn publising company and never see a rejection letter again. Got two projects turned down same day yesterday and it still hurts....

What is your opinion on mentioning series in a query letter?

That is the problem, all advice seems to conflict with at least some ohter advice from conference goers, panelists, workshops, agents, editors, small and large publisheers. I would concentrate the query on the one title, making sure this is the most exciting story you will ever write--the story about your story. To get some distance on how to write your own "back-jacket copy"--that is what you'd like to see on the back of your book, you need to READ as many back copy copy as you can stand until you can "think and write" like a salesperson, a copy writer whose only interst is in selling the premise. Notice that in most good copy (premise, pitch, log-lines, whatever you call it) the main character's name and profession, the time period and setting are up front...often in the first sentence. Concentrate on selling the one title. Add your brief biography...toward end of your query leter add the fact you are working on an additional tite using the same characters. That's all you need say and really, honestly, truly you want to sell the one book one at a time. Once "they" come back at you with a contract, it may be that "they" will have written it up as a 3-book deal, maybe not. The selling of fiction is a lot like being on Wheel of Fortune except that you, the author, are lashed to the wheel. And one more thing, make your biography interesting. You may not think being an RN is exciting or of great inteerest but it certainly is as is teaching, honored professions right up there with being a stay at home mom. If you have a degree, if you are a psychologist or ME....it plays well. Play up yourself, sell yourself, and include a photo? YES. Disregard all the nay-sayers on this.
One way to get a reading fast? Using a legal sized envelope -- business envelope just send them your premise, bio, and photo. That is all. Let them come after you.

The previous interview with Robert Walker first appeared on the Erica Writes blog on Thursday, June 14, 2007

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