Ask the Author: Erik Larson
Answered Questions (124)
Erik Larson
This is crucial. For starters, just set out about two hours a day, say from 8 to 10, and be there seven days a week, even if you never write a word. Writing is like erosion. Write one page a day, and in 360 days you've got a novel.
Erik Larson
I'd love to do a book about Magellan, but there just isn't enough surviving material to let me write my kind of narrative account.
Erik Larson
The research continues pretty much through the whole process, though the most crucial and intense phase lasts about two years, minimum. As to how I know when I'm done with the research: By now it's an instinctive thing. Documents start to repeat themselves. Revelations begin tapering off. But one thing is crucial: I need to accumulate about 100 percent more material than will ever actually make it into a book. Only the best stuff makes the cut.
Erik Larson
Well I can't say it's surprising, but what I've learned is that writing is all about hard work. You might think it's not a typical job, but in many ways it is. You need to check in each day, seven days a week, and do it. Be there. You don't have to write for eight hours a day, necessarily. Larry McMurtry wrote for an hour and a half each day. But you have to be there, at your desk, every day. If you wait for inspiration, you'll be waiting a very long time.
Erik Larson
Ah. As E.B. White once wrote, and I paraphrase: I decline to answer for secret reasons.
Erik Larson
A perceptive question: I'm a father of three daughters, and that relationship tints every book I do, in some way. With Dead Wake, for example, I found myself wondering what it would have been like to be aboard the Lusitania, with my wife and daughters. What would I have done? One family, the Cromptons of Philadelphia, included father, daughter, and six children. At the time the torpedo struck the ship, all of them were in different places aboard. What do you do, as a parent? What do you do, when the ship sinks in 18 minutes? The entire Crompton family perished. A chilling thing to contemplate.
Erik Larson
In writing narrative nonfiction, research is crucial. Because you can't fake it. You need a lot of really fine-grained archival material, and if you don't have it, you can't tell the story. Part of what persuaded me to write Dead Wake, about the Lusitania, was that the archival base was richer and deeper than for any other book I've written. It gave me the material to infuse the book with maximum suspense. Real-life suspense.
Erik Larson
Ha! My favorite failure. An oxymoron? Actually, I like it when ideas fail to become books. I often say that hunting for a book idea is a lot like looking for a spouse. You need to kiss a lot of frogs before one becomes a prince or princess. Having said that, as to failed ideas, I don't kiss and tell.
Erik Larson
Just about everything surprised me, frankly.
Erik Larson
The Tiergarten, the Reichstag building, and the Wall of Terror--an exhibit on the Gestapo, built against the remaining wall of its headquarters.
Erik Larson
Characters and detail are everything. If you don't have both, you don't have a book. At least not a nonfiction book. And Devil, like my other books, is wholly nonfiction--as unbelievable as some of the details may be.
Erik Larson
I am ashamed to admit that when I came up with the title for that book I had no idea AC/DC had done a song by the same name!
Erik Larson
Here's where things stand: Leonard DiCaprio holds the option to turn the book into a film. Recently he recruited Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Billy Ray to join him. A dream team for sure. Whether a movie ultimately gets made is entirely up to them, and to the cinematic fates.
Erik Larson
I've been delighted to find that whenever I give a big talk, a substantial portion of the audience is under 30. This gives me a lot of confidence that books will endure. And that maybe I'm doing something right.
Erik Larson
As to the USS Liberty: No. In fact, I have zero interest in the 60's. Been there, lived that.
Erik Larson
Unlikely. The Civil War is pretty much overworked, in my view. Though I have to confess, I do find Gen. W. T. Sherman a compelling and fascinating character.
Erik Larson
I was delighted to find the submarine captain's war log--it made the book, frankly, because it provided the framework of suspense.
Erik Larson
No. Never. In fact, my secret weapon is to stop early in the day, while I'm ahead--sometimes in mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence. By doing so, I guarantee that the next morning, when I sit down to write, I am almost immediately productive. It helps keep the terrors at bay. Binge writing, as I call it--or pulling all-nighters--can all too easily exhaust whatever that inner engine is that we writers rely on.
Erik Larson
I'm not sure there are three lessons. But if there is one lesson, it is that excess confidence in technology is almost always misplaced.
Erik Larson
Each book has a structure that is organic to the underlying concept. I don't seek out parallel stories. In the case of Devil, I would not have wanted to write a book just about Holmes; nor would I have wanted to write only about the fair. It was the juxtaposition of good and evil, light and darkness, that made me want to proceed.
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