Who will want to write if writing doesn't pay?
— Chris Pavone
There's always something at least a little smug about self-reference - magazine articles about idealistic journalists, TV shows about TV actors, ironic films within ironic-er films: all this meta-media populated by thinly disguised characters making oblique inside jokes.
What is it we want out of travel? Is it to take snapshots of ourselves in front of famous monuments, surrounded by other tourists? To eat unfamiliar food chosen from unintelligible menus? To earn frequent-flier miles? No. It's to glimpse what life is like somewhere else.
As an unpublished, nonprofessional writer working on my first novel, I nevertheless had access to extremely talented people who would help make my manuscript better, people who've made careers out of providing careful, constructive criticism to writers. I'm tremendously grateful to them.
At home, I tend to read print, and most of the time, that means recently released hardcover novels. I enjoy the feel of paper and board; I like turning pages, dog-earing my spot, jotting notes in the back.
Whatever's good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.
If you can't figure out how to make the beginning of your book compelling, you're probably not writing a compelling book.
In most espionage novels, the characters risk their lives trying to save somebody or while protecting a nation from some threat. In 'The Travelers,' that's not what's going on. I used espionage as a device to heighten the characters' personal dramas.
Everyone has secrets, and I think some people flee from home - far from home - to try to keep those secrets.
After years of working on books, I eventually took a more business-oriented job, for the same sorts of reasons that most people take most new jobs: fancier title, higher pay, opportunities for advancement.
Any setting can be a good setting for a novel.
I live in Greenwich Village in New York City, but I rarely write at home, where there's too much else to do.
I loved editing, and being a cookbook editor is a really a great job.
Writing is a solitary occupation; we don't really have any colleagues.
I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.
'The Expats' would not exist without e-books.
Every book that doesn't first have to get past a gatekeeper or two, or 10, before being put in front of the public will be worse.
Although I did admire David Foster Wallace's final unfinished novel about boredom, I'm no DFW, and I want my books to be exciting, not boring.
There's so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don't have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books - and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them - that's just overwhelming to me now.
I always wanted to write. But honestly I'm glad I didn't do it back when I was twenty-five or so, when it's now clear to me that I was a very poor writer and could've ruined my career before it even started.
I use an e-reader when I'm traveling: I love carrying dozens of books on a small lightweight device, and I'm still amazed every time I purchase and immediately start reading a new title without leaving my hotel room - in another country!
Before I wrote my first novel, 'The Expats,' I spent nearly two decades at various arms of publishing houses such as Random House, Workman, and HarperCollins, mostly as an acquisitions editor. But a more accurate title for that job might be rejection editor: while I acquired maybe a dozen projects per year, I'd reject hundreds upon hundreds.
In 'The Travelers,' everyone is defined by his or her relationship to work. I put each character on a different rung of the ladder: from the lowliest assistant to a powerful man in the world of media.
We all live in a universe in which we're either asked to or are forced to accept certain premises about our employment without having the opportunity to verify them.
As a book editor, you need to pitch every one of your books again and again, dozens of times, for months on end. From a quick conversation with your boss or a letter that'll be read by just one person, to a five-minute speech in front of 50 colleagues or cover copy that'll be in front of millions of eyes.
I worked as a draftsman for the Department of Environmental Protection, and as a teacher, in N.Y.C.; at a big bank and a small ad agency, a tiny law firm and a few giant ones; as a cashier and a dishwasher; preparing deli sandwiches and stringing tennis racquets and pruning evergreens into conical Christmas-tree shapes.
There are plenty of paths to becoming a writer, but I think the most reliable ones involve total commitment: writing for magazines and newspapers, teaching writing, editing books, representing authors.
'The Expats' is a thriller, but one that tends more toward general fiction than toward breathless pulp.
I had been very dismissive of popular fiction - in fact, I'd refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren't the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way.
After college, I was burdened with student loans to repay, no financial cushion, so I wasn't in a position to bet everything on a creative-writing career - neither the writing-workshop academia life nor the freelance-writer version, trying to scrape by on short stories and house-painting gigs.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I was a copy editor at Doubleday, and for a brief period, it was my job to help shepherd Pat Conroy's 'Beach Music' into the world.
I'd had 12 different job titles in publishing before I typed 'The End' at the bottom of a manuscript page. I thought the manuscript was in great shape; I was pretty proud of myself. Then I sent it to some publishing friends, and they tore it apart.
I know that 'The Accident' is not a completely accurate reflection of the reality of the book publishing world, which, like nearly any other business, consists mostly of people sitting in small offices staring at computer screens or reading or trying to stay awake in meetings.
Having 'The Expats' not be 'wholesale-y' rejected by the world made it possible for me to write the second book and have a publisher buy it before it was entirely written. And it made it easier for me and my publisher to get 'The Accident' out into the world without trying to convince people to pay attention to it the way you do for a first novel.
I give tremendous weight to my positive reviews and none whatsoever to my negative ones.
I'm concerned, as I guess all middle-aged people are, about the younger generations' level of literacy.
Although no one loves a typo, it's close to impossible to eradicate every single little mistake in a manuscript.
I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme - core tensions shared by the characters.
Expats are a self-selecting group of outgoing, confident people - if you're not those things, you probably don't choose this adventure - and the lifestyle is very conducive to making fast, close friends.
Sometimes, I had very little - if any - idea for whom I was really working: at the end of the day, who reaped the profits? Was it a privately controlled German foundation or a global array of stockholders? A middle-class guy on the Upper West Side or Rupert Murdoch? Were we pursuing mere profit, or self-perpetuation, or something bigger?
Nearly all of us work, a lot: many people spend more waking hours working than doing all other things combined. And nearly all of us spend our lifetimes working for someone other than ourselves.
I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'
Eventually, I realised that I wanted to try to create something myself, and that's what writing novels is. Not because I wanted to put myself in front of the world, but because I wanted to create something that would go out into the world.
One of the epiphanies I had was that I got into publishing because I love literature.
A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'
I'd sometimes go to Paris by myself - it was an easy two-hour train ride - to get a break from the everyday grind, to walk around a big city, ride a subway, feel the energy of a world capital.
