Ask the Author: Chris Pavone
Answered Questions (57)
Chris Pavone
Hi! Thanks for asking. Until this virus changed everything, I had the same routine for a decade: I leave home every day after breakfast, spend the morning on new writing without interruption, and then the afternoon doing other things. But now I never leave the house, and my whole family is here with me, and my desk is in the kitchen, so I need to figure out a new routine. It's a work in progress.
Chris Pavone
If I can’t figure out what should happen next, I set aside the manuscript, and return to writing the ancillary documents that I maintain for a book: outline, character sketches, plot notes, random bits of dialogue, scenes whose time has not yet come in the narrative. I create a tremendous amount of this material that will never be read by anyone, which allows me a different type of freedom: the freedom to write poorly, to pursue incoherent plot twists, to invent unnecessary characters—that is, the freedom to be wrong. I feel like writer’s block comes from the paralyzing fear of being wrong, of making the wrong decisions. For me this is a problem that can be solved by removing that fear.
Chris Pavone
There are very few professions where you’re completely in control of what you produce—from the big-picture structure of years’ worth of work down to every little individual decision about vocabulary choices and punctuation. I think every novelist owes it to our readers to solicit editorial suggestions from a variety of voices, but all the final choices are still ultimately the writer’s. That’s a remarkable freedom, one that defines not only how I feel about my work, and how I spend my days, but one that informs my whole life. It’s a freedom for which I feel grateful every day.
Chris Pavone
I think that writing a novel is not something you can know how to do until you’ve actually done it. And as with nearly any endeavor, it’s also not something you can rationally expect to do well on your first try. Writing an unpublishable first draft of a first novel is not a failure; it’s an essential part of learning how to write a novel.
Chris Pavone
Another novel inspired by another trip abroad, to Lisbon.
Chris Pavone
I leave home. On a daily basis, I leave the apartment and go out into the city to interact with other people, to observe them, to be a part of the rest of the world, not separate from it. I also leave New York, sometimes just a few hours’ drive, but I also get on a lot of planes. All my books have drawn inspiration from travel, whether that was living for a while in Luxembourg (EXPATS), or visiting Switzerland on book tour (ACCIDENT), or roaming remote Iceland on vacation (TRAVELERS), or the 2016 trip that led directly to THE PARIS DIVERSION.
Chris Pavone
When I visited Paris in 2016—the year after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the horrifying November attacks, a city sieged by the expectation of more terrorism—I was immediately struck by the similarities to NYC after 9/11, when the whole city seemed to have PTSD, and the terror looked like it might be permanent. I wanted to write a book that would capture some of that anxiety, so familiar to me, so powerful.
Chris Pavone
A big stack of crime novels by friends: THE BETTER SISTER by Alafair Burke; GIRLS LIKE US by Cristina Alger; LADY IN THE LAKE by Laura Lippman; THE SWALLOWS by Lisa Lutz; and RUN AWAY by Harlan Coben. They were all terrific.
Chris Pavone
My goal is to write big books, with big plots, and big themes, and big characters who are full of everything that real people are full of--loves and hates and ambitions and fears. These characters feel strongly about many things; strong feelings are what makes characters big. They feel strongly about power dynamics in marriages and workplaces, about tensions among social and economic strata, about race, about all the things that we group together under the umbrella "political," and my novels feature characters whose politics are both liberal and conservative. I sincerely hope that ALL readers are able to hear the voices of fictional characters with whom they disagree, just as I hope that all citizens can hear the voices of real people with whom they disagree. Because I believe that the contrary is the fundamental cause of all the problems in the world: our unwillingness to listen to voices that are not our own.
Chris Pavone
Maybe they did! But what are they going to do about it? They're meeting with a co-conspirator, in an outdoor cafe in a busy intersection: a completely non-controllable environment. The only thing they could do is not participate in the conversation.
Chris Pavone
Yes! But I'm not sure when exactly.
Chris Pavone
To get out of slumps: instead of trying to write the next page of the book, I write ABOUT the book--some irrelevant back story, some sketch of a minor character, some version of a plot summary. This is a way of returning my focus to the book (when I'm stuck, it's often because I'm distracted) while also allowing my imagination to roam around other corners of the story. This exercise doesn't always get me to the next page of the manuscript, but it always accomplishes something. Sometimes that's realizing that the next page ought to be something different that I'd been planning.
Dialogue: thank you! I don't really have an answer to this question. I just write dialogue the way I think really people speak. I'm glad it works for you!
Dialogue: thank you! I don't really have an answer to this question. I just write dialogue the way I think really people speak. I'm glad it works for you!
Chris Pavone
Thank you Cathy! My approach to pacing is to create peaks and valleys: moments of relative quiet (of internal monologue, of back story, of atmospheric description, etc.) that interrupt the primary action and tensions, making readers impatient to find out what happens, creating a general aura of expectation and anxiety, while constantly withholding full resolution. I think this requires that readers care about the characters, so early in the book I try to devote some space--efficiently, I hope--to defining these people, making them credible, worthy of our emotions.
Chris Pavone
Thank you! I was 40 years old when my wife got a job in Luxembourg, and I left behind my life in New York--career, family, friends, hometown, nearly everything that made up my identity--to become this completely unfamiliar character, a trailing-spouse expat, a stay-at-home parent to little kids, someone not very competent. That experience was what inspired me to write the novel. Luxembourg just happened to be where we were living, and in some ways I think it's the perfect location for a story of isolation and alienation and reinvention, but I probably would've written the same book had we moved to Singapore or Dubai or Buenos Aires.
Chris Pavone
Thank you! No, I don't think my writing is patterned after anyone in particular. What I've always admired are the strongest, most distinctive voices, those writers whose prose is immediately recognizable, and that's what I'm trying to work toward not only in style but in plot and character and themes and, I guess, everything; I hope that when you're reading any passage from any one of my books, you know who wrote it.
Chris Pavone
Thank you so much! I start by knowing who the protagonist is, as well as some other important characters, those relationships that create the protagonist's primary tensions. (In my novels, the main plot line is something that's personal to the protagonist.) I also know the general parameters of the plot premise, and I think I know the ending too, though I've always been at least somewhat wrong about this. Before I type "Chapter 1" these elements have all spent a long time swimming around in my imagination, and in a document called Notes. Then I outline, and writing other material that's for my benefit only--character sketches, plot explanations, back-story history. I think all this helps me not just figure out what's going to happen, but also what secrets I'm going to keep from the reader, as well as when in the narrative I plan to reveal them, which I think for my sorts of books is extremely important.
Chris Pavone
Of course! Please email chris@chrispavone.com. Thanks!
Chris Pavone
I've read a lot of books--memoirs, history, fiction--about the CIA and intelligence operatives, providing me with enough facts to make me comfortable just making things up.
Chris Pavone
Thank you very much! I feel like it's incumbent on novelists to pick which sort of book we want to write--which sort we love, which sort we think we're in a position to deliver something special--and then try to create the best possible version of that novel, one that's uniquely ours, and to keep at it, working on different variations, trying to get better and better. After four novels, I definitely feel like I'm still working my way toward something; I think PARIS is my best book, but I'm also confident that my next one will be better. I haven't yet arrived at my current destination, so I'm not yet contemplating heading off in another direction.
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