David Baldacci (EXCERPTS)
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David
Baldacci is indisputably one of the greatest thriller
writers of the last decade. One of the most endearing
qualities of a Baldacci novel is the world he creates:
heroes with severe flaws, powerful men of influence who
are easily corruptible, or in the case of his most
recent novel, The
Whole Truth, a merchant of death, who runs a
philanthropic organization for children suffering from
incurable diseases.
Baldacci wrote his
first novel, Absolute Power (1996),
while working as a trial lawyer. Writing “at night, early in the morning, and on
weekends,” the book took him three years to complete. When it was finally
published, Absolute Power became an
overnight success and was adapted as a major motion picture starring Gene
Hackman and Clint Eastwood.
Following the success of
Absolute Power, Baldacci published
Total Control (1997) a thriller about
a high-stakes conspiracy involving a technology conglomerate. That was followed
by The Winner (1998),
in which an unwed mother is offered the chance to win $100 million in a
rigged lottery. Perhaps one of Baldacci’s most intriguing creations was the
Camel Club, a group of four eccentric men who investigate conspiracies in the
U.S.
capital. The Camel Club (2005), a
chilling thriller about a conspiracy to spiral the
U.S.
toward another tragic war in the Middle East,
inspired legions of new fans and was followed by
The Collectors (2006),
Stone Cold (2007) and
Divine Justice (2008).
Rather than write the same type of book several times,
Baldacci has repeatedly traveled away from his comfort zone, with astounding
results, starting with Wish You Well
(2000), a literary novel about two orphaned children who are sent to live with
their grandmother in rural Virginia. Then came
The Christmas Train (2002), a
poignant tale which is set to become a holiday classic, and two books for young
readers: Freddy and the French Fries:
Fries Alive! (2005) and Freddy and
the French Fries: The Adventures of Silas Finklebean.
Throughout the years, David Baldacci has been a tireless
advocate for several charitable causes. In 2002, he and his wife Michelle
founded the Wish You Well Foundation, which has raised millions of dollars for
the cause of adult literacy in the United States.
David Baldacci lives in Virginia with his wife and children. His
latest book First Family will be
released this April.
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AFG: I just
read The Whole Truth—a touch of
Graham Greene, a touch of Eric Ambler, I thought. It was great.
DB: It was fun
writing that book. It got me into a little different territory, which was nice.
AFG: What
inspired it?
DB: I’d been
interested in perception management for a couple years now. I read some articles
about it and talked to some people who’ve been touched by that area as well. And
then I just started doing some research on it and found out it really is quite a
big business. People who do it—there aren’t that many of them—do it quite well.
So, sort of extrapolating, I took it to what I thought was a logical conclusion
of how you could create the big lie and really make the world believe. The world
right now is set up to be very gullible. People don’t have the time to think
about stuff anymore. So if you immerse them in fact after fact after fact, after
a while, if you hit them hard enough and construct some events on the ground as
well, you can make them believe anything, really.
AFG: And tell
me about these people. Are they out in the open, or are they rather mysterious?
DB: Let’s put
it this way: they don’t give a lot of interviews. But they’re very
well-connected. The people who need them know who they are, how to find them.
These are the sorts of firms that are hired by governments—they are not your
mom-and-pop kind of operation. And they are what they are: perception
management. They do what they’re paid to do; they create this perception of
truth. They don’t need facts to work with, they just need you to tell them what
you need to have happen, and they build a scenario that would enable that to
happen.
It’s funny, the day the book came out,
The New York Times ran a piece on
perception management in the Pentagon. These military experts that had been
giving their expert opinions on TV and radio during the course of the Iraq war—we come
to find out that many of them had been spoon-fed these messages by the Pentagon,
exercising perception management. They told them what to say. And now, a lot of
these guys were defense contractors. Very much in their interest to do what the
Pentagon wants them to do, because that’s where the pipeline of money comes
from.
AFG: I would
love to read that article!
DB:
It came out, let’s see, The Whole Truth
came out April 22nd, and
The New York Times article was published on a Sunday, because it was a huge
article. So April 20th, that Sunday. It was one of the longest
articles I’ve ever seen in the New York
Times; it covered three pages. It was pretty in-depth. You know, most the
information actually came from the Pentagon; they got the Pentagon e-mails and
interviewed some of the military “experts,” who sort of since started feeling
some conscience about doing what they did. But it was business as usual.
AFG: But the
press just lets them get away with a lot. Wouldn’t you say they’re responsible
for allowing themselves to be spoon-fed this misinformation?
DB: Yeah, but
in their defense, I guess, they’re at a disadvantage. These days, nobody wants
to wait for the morning paper anymore; they want to know the news now. So these
guys don’t have a lot of time. The in-depth reporting that the
New York Times reporter did is almost
unheard-of these days. Who takes months to do anything anymore and write a story
about it? So the perception management people count on that. They only have one
agenda, whereas reporters are chasing lots of stories, so they can take their
laser beam of facts and innuendo and blow it right out there. The journalists
look at it and they’re overwhelmed, thinking, “I don’t have months to think
about it, I’ve got to write the story right now.” They do a little bit of
sifting, but perception managers know that, so they cover those bases as well.
Once you hit the people the first time hard with something, it’s very difficult
to dislodge that conclusion later on.
AFG: Exactly!
Like the lies that got us into the Iraq war. Those made headlines as
facts, but the retraction gets like two sentences at the bottom of the
newspaper.
DB: Right, and
then the explanation is, it really doesn’t matter because we took down a really
bad guy. Everybody should be happy about that. And for the most part, people are
like, “Oh, okay, I’ve got bills to pay, I’ve got a job, I’m worried about my
house which is in foreclosure; if that’s what they say, fine, I don’t really
care.”
AFG: When did
you decide to become a writer?
DB: I guess, at
least consciously I was always wanting to do stories, when I was a kid. I loved
telling stories orally, then I started writing them down in a little blank
page-book my mom bought me when I was in elementary school. And I just loved
writing stuff down and coming up with these big yarns. I never thought about
having a career as a writer back then, but once I got into high school and
college I started focusing on writing short stories. I loved reading short
stories in high school and college, and I liked writing them. I wrote a dozen or
so over the course of a number of years. And at that point, tried to get
published. There’s very little market for short stories in the United States
any more.
AFG: Well,
The Strand is there!
DB:
The Strand is there, yes. But I sent
it out to Atlantic Monthly and the
New Yorker, where I had no chance of
being published.
AFG: Yeah, they
publish one short story per issue and then it’s only, like, William Trevor or
John Updike.
DB: And my name
was none of those, so I couldn’t really get in there. [laughs] But I still
enjoyed it. Then when I was in law school and then practiced law I got
interested in other types of mediums and I started writing screenplays, writing
scripts for films. Got an agent in L.A.,
and actually had some producers interested in my work. I’d always wanted to
write a novel, and an idea hit me in the early 90s about the president and the
burglar and all of that. I spent three years writing at night while I was
practicing law, and I thought it was a good story. I sent it out to agents, and
my life changed. I think when I was in high school, trying to get short stories
published, is when I first had this idea that maybe I could be a writer. But
even back then I thought, this is only a hobby, a sideline; you’re gonna have to
get a real job in life, and this is something you’ll do at night or early in the
morning and maybe sell a story here and there and that’ll be pretty much your
career.
AFG: How
important was your family in encouraging you to continue writing?
DB:
They were very supportive. Very few people knew I was writing during those
years: my mom and dad, my brother and sister, my wife. That was it. Not even my
in-laws knew. It was a very personal thing for me I was pursuing. My wife
obviously was very instrumental. We had a family, and she took on more of the
labor of that, allowing me to write at night, early in the morning, and on the
weekends. My mom and dad obviously instilled the love of reading in all three of
us siblings; we went to the library every weekend and checked out lots of books.
But for my love of books, I
wouldn’t have ended up being a writer. But I could open a book and explore
different parts of the world without ever leaving the city where I grew up. It
was a fascinating thing, and I became mesmerized by the power of language.
That’s really what started it for me.
AFG: So did
your work and your career in law help you with your writing—you know,
meeting a
lot of people who are, let’s say, on the wrong side of things?
DB: It helped
me build my view of the world. In some degrees I’m optimistic and positive, and
in other degrees I’m very realistic and I’m not naive about how the world works;
I’ve seen it in action. As a lawyer, I was paid to write persuasively. I was
paid to take the same set of facts the other side had and make you believe that
my version of it was true, while the other side was doing the exact same thing,
hoping you would reach an opposite conclusion if you were a judge or a jury.
Also as a lawyer, I had to keep the big plot points, if you will, on a case in
mind, and had to know all the little details. When you’re in trial, you really
have to be master of those little details when you’re questioning people in
argument. And a writer does much the same thing; they do a lot of research. I
did a lot of research as a lawyer. I spent years on a project as a lawyer;
writers spends years on books. And as a writer, you not only have to know all
the big details of all the plot points you want to make, but you have to know
all the millions of details that go into creating that story and building the
characters creatively. So those attributes are very similar.
AFG: That’s
interesting. I read that you recently visited your ancestral home in Barga.
DB: We had a
great time, I took the whole family and some friends too. The mayor of Barga
e-mailed me and said, I’d read in an Italian magazine that you were coming to
vacation in Tuscany
and we wanted to know if you wanted to come by Barga, where your grandfather was
born. And I was planning to take my family there anyway, because I wanted to see
it. I’d never been to that part of Italy before. I just thought we were
going to have lunch with the mayor and that would be it. So we went there,
everybody in a couple of cars. It’s a walled city, like
Lucca, and it’s way up in the mountains of
Tuscany. When we got there we knew we were in the right
place because they had this huge poster of me on the wall of the city! And they
had my picture plastered all over town, they had American flags, they had
paparazzi, they had a huge crowd waiting. Basically it was David Baldacci day!
AFG: National
holiday!
DB: It really
was! It was absolutely amazing. It ended with a huge ceremony in the center
gardens of the city, where it seemed like the whole town was there. There was a
band, I gave some remarks, the mayor gave a speech, they presented me with a St.
Christopher’s medal—that’s the patron saint—and made me an official citizen of
Barga. You know, they gave me the Italian flag and olive oil.
David Baldacci is indisputably one of the greatest thriller
writers of the last decade. One of the most endearing qualities of a Baldacci
novel is the world he creates: heroes with severe flaws, powerful men of
influence who are easily corruptible, or in the case of his most recent novel,
The Whole Truth, a merchant of death, who runs a philanthropic organization for
children suffering from incurable diseases.
Baldacci wrote his first novel, Absolute Power (1996), while working as
a trial lawyer. Writing “at night, early in the morning, and on weekends,” the
book took him three years to complete. When it was finally published, Absolute
Power became an overnight success and was adapted as a major motion picture
starring Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood.
Following the success of Absolute Power, Baldacci published Total
Control (1997) a thriller about a high-stakes conspiracy involving a technology
conglomerate. That was followed by The Winner (1998), in which an unwed mother
is offered the chance to win $100 million in a rigged lottery. Perhaps one of
Baldacci’s most intriguing creations was the Camel Club, a group of four
eccentric men who investigate conspiracies in the
U.S.
capital. The Camel Club (2005), a chilling thriller about a conspiracy to spiral
the U.S.
toward another tragic war in the Middle East,
inspired legions of new fans and was followed by The Collectors (2006), Stone
Cold (2007) and Divine Justice (2008).
Rather than write the same type of book several times, Baldacci has
repeatedly traveled away from his comfort zone, with astounding results,
starting with Wish You Well (2000), a literary novel about two orphaned children
who are sent to live with their grandmother in rural Virginia. Then came The
Christmas Train (2002), a poignant tale which is set to become a holiday
classic, and two books for young readers: Freddy and the French Fries: Fries
Alive! (2005) and Freddy and the French Fries: The Adventures of Silas
Finklebean.
Throughout the years, David Baldacci has been a tireless advocate for several
charitable causes. In 2002, he and his wife Michelle founded the Wish You Well
Foundation, which has raised millions of dollars for the cause of adult literacy
in the United States.
David Baldacci lives in Virginia with his wife and children. His
latest book First Family will be released this April.
√AFG: I just read The Whole Truth—a touch of Graham Greene, a touch of Eric
Ambler, I thought. It was great.
DB: It was fun writing that book. It got me into a little different
territory, which was nice.
AFG: What inspired it?
DB: I’d been interested in perception management for a couple years now. I
read some articles about it and talked to some people who’ve been touched by
that area as well. And then I just started doing some research on it and found
out it really is quite a big business. People who do it—there aren’t that many
of them—do it quite well. So, sort of extrapolating, I took it to what I thought
was a logical conclusion of how you could create the big lie and really make the
world believe. The world right now is set up to be very gullible. People don’t
have the time to think about stuff anymore. So if you immerse them in fact after
fact after fact, after a while, if you hit them hard enough and construct some
events on the ground as well, you can make them believe anything, really.
AFG: And tell me about these people. Are they out in the open, or are they
rather mysterious?
DB: Let’s put it this way: they don’t give a lot of interviews. But they’re
very well-connected. The people who need them know who they are, how to find
them. These are the sorts of firms that are hired by governments—they are not
your mom-and-pop kind of operation. And they are what they are: perception
management. They do what they’re paid to do; they create this perception of
truth. They don’t need facts to work with, they just need you to tell them what
you need to have happen, and they build a scenario that would enable that to
happen.
It’s funny, the day the book came out, The New York Times ran a piece on
perception management in the Pentagon. These military experts that had been
giving their expert opinions on TV and radio during the course of the Iraq war—we come
to find out that many of them had been spoon-fed these messages by the Pentagon,
exercising perception management. They told them what to say. And now, a lot of
these guys were defense contractors. Very much in their interest to do what the
Pentagon wants them to do, because that’s where the pipeline of money comes
from.
AFG: I would love to read that article!
DB: It came out, let’s see, The Whole Truth came out April 22nd, and
The New York Times article was published on a Sunday, because it was a huge
article. So April 20th, that Sunday. It was one of the longest articles I’ve
ever seen in the New York Times; it covered three pages. It was pretty in-depth.
You know, most the information actually came from the Pentagon; they got the
Pentagon e-mails and interviewed some of the military “experts,” who sort of
since started feeling some conscience about doing what they did. But it was
business as usual.
AFG: But the press just lets them get away with a lot. Wouldn’t you say
they’re responsible for allowing themselves to be spoon-fed this misinformation?
DB: Yeah, but in their defense, I guess, they’re at a disadvantage. These
days, nobody wants to wait for the morning paper anymore; they want to know the
news now. So these guys don’t have a lot of time. The in-depth reporting that
the New York Times reporter did is almost unheard-of these days. Who takes
months to do anything anymore and write a story about it? So the perception
management people count on that. They only have one agenda, whereas reporters
are chasing lots of stories, so they can take their laser beam of facts and
innuendo and blow it right out there. The journalists look at it and they’re
overwhelmed, thinking, “I don’t have months to think about it, I’ve got to write
the story right now.” They do a little bit of sifting, but perception managers
know that, so they cover those bases as well. Once you hit the people the first
time hard with something, it’s very difficult to dislodge that conclusion later
on.
AFG: Exactly! Like the lies that got us into the Iraq war. Those made headlines as
facts, but the retraction gets like two sentences at the bottom of the
newspaper.
DB: Right, and then the explanation is, it really doesn’t matter because we
took down a really bad guy. Everybody should be happy about that. And for the
most part, people are like, “Oh, okay, I’ve got bills to pay, I’ve got a job,
I’m worried about my house which is in foreclosure; if that’s what they say,
fine, I don’t really care.”
AFG: When did you decide to become a writer?
DB: I guess, at least consciously I was always wanting to do stories, when I
was a kid. I loved telling stories orally, then I started writing them down in a
little blank page-book my mom bought me when I was in elementary school. And I
just loved writing stuff down and coming up with these big yarns. I never
thought about having a career as a writer back then, but once I got into high
school and college I started focusing on writing short stories. I loved reading
short stories in high school and college, and I liked writing them. I wrote a
dozen or so over the course of a number of years. And at that point, tried to
get published. There’s very little market for short stories in the United States
any more.
AFG: Well, The Strand is there!
DB: The Strand is there, yes. But I sent it out to Atlantic Monthly and the
New Yorker, where I had no chance of being published.
AFG: Yeah, they publish one short story per issue and then it’s only, like,
William Trevor or John Updike.
DB: And my name was none of those, so I couldn’t really get in there.
[laughs] But I still enjoyed it. Then when I was in law school and then
practiced law I got interested in other types of mediums and I started writing
screenplays, writing scripts for films. Got an agent in
L.A., and actually had some producers interested in my
work. I’d always wanted to write a novel, and an idea hit me in the early 90s
about the president and the burglar and all of that. I spent three years writing
at night while I was practicing law, and I thought it was a good story. I sent
it out to agents, and my life changed. I think when I was in high school, trying
to get short stories published, is when I first had this idea that maybe I could
be a writer. But even back then I thought, this is only a hobby, a sideline;
you’re gonna have to get a real job in life, and this is something you’ll do at
night or early in the morning and maybe sell a story here and there and that’ll
be pretty much your career.
AFG: How important was your family in encouraging you to continue writing?
DB: They were very supportive. Very few people knew I was writing
during those years: my mom and dad, my brother and sister, my wife. That was it.
Not even my in-laws knew. It was a very personal thing for me I was pursuing. My
wife obviously was very instrumental. We had a family, and she took on more of
the labor of that, allowing me to write at night, early in the morning, and on
the weekends. My mom and dad obviously instilled the love of reading in all
three of us siblings; we went to the library every weekend and checked out lots
of books. But for my love of books, I wouldn’t have ended up being a
writer. But I could open a book and explore different parts of the world without
ever leaving the city where I grew up. It was a fascinating thing, and I became
mesmerized by the power of language. That’s really what started it for me.
AFG: So did your work and your career in law help you with your writing—you
know, meeting a lot of people who are, let’s say, on the wrong side of things?
DB: It helped me build my view of the world. In some degrees I’m optimistic
and positive, and in other degrees I’m very realistic and I’m not naive about
how the world works; I’ve seen it in action. As a lawyer, I was paid to write
persuasively. I was paid to take the same set of facts the other side had and
make you believe that my version of it was true, while the other side was doing
the exact same thing, hoping you would reach an opposite conclusion if you were
a judge or a jury. Also as a lawyer, I had to keep the big plot points, if you
will, on a case in mind, and had to know all the little details. When you’re in
trial, you really have to be master of those little details when you’re
questioning people in argument. And a writer does much the same thing; they do a
lot of research. I did a lot of research as a lawyer. I spent years on a project
as a lawyer; writers spends years on books. And as a writer, you not only have
to know all the big details of all the plot points you want to make, but you
have to know all the millions of details that go into creating that story and
building the characters creatively. So those attributes are very similar.
AFG: That’s interesting. I read that you recently visited your ancestral home
in Barga.
DB: We had a great time, I took the whole family and some friends too. The
mayor of Barga e-mailed me and said, I’d read in an Italian magazine that you
were coming to vacation in Tuscany
and we wanted to know if you wanted to come by Barga, where your grandfather was
born. And I was planning to take my family there anyway, because I wanted to see
it. I’d never been to that part of Italy before. I just thought we were
going to have lunch with the mayor and that would be it. So we went there,
everybody in a couple of cars. It’s a walled city, like
Lucca, and it’s way up in the mountains of
Tuscany. When we got there we knew we were in the right
place because they had this huge poster of me on the wall of the city! And they
had my picture plastered all over town, they had American flags, they had
paparazzi, they had a huge crowd waiting. Basically it was David Baldacci day!
AFG: National holiday!
DB: It really was! It was absolutely amazing. It ended with a huge ceremony
in the center gardens of the city, where it seemed like the whole town was
there. There was a band, I gave some remarks, the mayor gave a speech, they
presented me with a St. Christopher’s medal—that’s the patron saint—and made me
an official citizen of Barga. You know, they gave me the Italian flag and olive
oil.
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