David Baldacci Meet the Author

constituency, but you know, how is he going to do that? Never a dull

moment. Agnes Poirier Thank you for coming

in. Now its time for Meet

the Author with Rebecca Jones. The thriller writer David Baldacci

has enjoyed the kind of success most His first book, Absolute Power,

became a bestseller and it was turned into a film,

starring and directed David Baldacci has gone

on to write 30 novels, which have sold more

than 100 million copies His latest is called The Fix

and it's his third book about the detective Amos Decker,

who witnesses a seemingly senseless and random murder outside

the headquarters of the FBI, David Baldacci, I'd like to start,

if I may, by rewinding the clock back to your childhood,

when your mother gave you a notebook Had you always wanted

to be a writer? I was probably about seven

or eight years old. I was telling tall tales

all the time, usually to get myself out of trouble with school officials

and other parents. And my mom came and

brought me a journal. And she said, "Honey,

you know, some of the stuff you've been talking about,

why don't you try writing it down?" So my pen hit the paper

and I was kind of like, this epiphany just went off

in my head. I can take my imagination,

put it down on paper, and people can And years went by and I went back

to my mom and I said, "Thank you for such a gift, Mom,

for this, it changed my life. And she said, well, I'm so glad it

worked out for you but, quite frankly, I just wanted

to shut you up! You know, because moms need

a little peace and quiet. I will always love you,

but you just never stop talking. So, there you go, it

worked out in the end. It worked out in the end,

but in the interim, Well, for, like, 15 years,

I wrote short stories only, and you can't make a living

selling short stories. Maybe you could if you were

John Updike or John Irving, but not David Baldacci,

so I never even got paid They would give me a bunch of free

copies of the magazine and said that So I became a lawyer

and I did very well. I practised for ten

years from Washington, High school, college, law school,

ten years of practising law. I wrote short stories, novellas,

screenplays and then finally novels. And Absolute Power just really

was the turning point for me. And then you were able

to commit to it full-time. Fast-forward now dozens of novels

later to your latest novel, The Fix, and this tells the story

of a man who shoots a woman outside the FBI headquarters and then

turns the gun on himself. So it's a whydunnit,

rather than a whodunnit. Well, this is the third instalment

of my Amos Decker series. He is.

We first saw him in 'Memory Man'. And he has a perfect memory,

hyperthymesia, because of a brain And he is the most

unlikeliest of heroes. He is not your knight

in white shining armour. He is a big, sloppy, obese guy

who has no personal skills, ticks everybody off,

nobody really gets along with him. And I thought, yeah,

that'd be a great series guy! He wants to find out the truth,

no matter where it takes him. And so he looks at the scene.

He was a witness to this crime. He was walking down the street

and the guy pulls out a gun, shoots a woman, then turns

the gun on himself. And he keeps going

back to that scene. He keeps going back,

his mental frames flipping through. Did he really see

what he thought he saw? And so constantly, throughout

the entire novel, the reader - over his shoulder -

going back and looking I wanted to make it really

claustrophobic, you know. I wanted people to be hammered

with that scene over and over again. Because, look, as a lawyer,

I know that eyewitness accounts People can't remember

anything they saw. Or even if they do remember

it, it's all wrong. So I thought it would be

kind of cool to put that As you say, Amos Decker

isn't your typical hero. What appeals to you

so much about him? So many of my other characters

are kind of like, you know, they're fit and well trained and,

you know, they're sort As a writer, I think if you don't

expand and challenge yourself, So I wanted to write a character

totally different from anything I mean, he is not your typical hero.

I channel him so easily, though. You know, he's really

weird and quirky. And my wife will say, yeah,

I can understand why you channel him so easily,

cos you're that too! I was very struck by how

topical the book is. The murder turns into an issue

of national security. You also deal with Isis,

cyber hacking, cyber security. How important is that to you,

to make the book feel current? Plausibility, I'm

bound by plausibility. Fortunately for me, it

seems like these days, So I can write about anything

and people will say, yeah, I think I read that

in a newspaper last week. So for me, it's to take

life as we know it now. And I'm very curious

about the world. I try to read everything

I can possibly read. So take life as it is now

and try to extrapolate it out, so I can say,

OK, what is it gonna be And so I can sort of push

the envelope and see what's I had an intelligence

guy one time tell me... I'd written a scene

and I thought it was gonna be I said, read this, let me know

if I need to pull it back. I said, no, just read it and let me

know if it's too much. He said, because if you can imagine

it, we've already done it. And it's interesting you say

you had a conversation with an intelligence guy,

because I know you talk to members of the FBI

and the Secret Service, don't you? What kind of things

do they tell you? It's funny, they're

wonderfully helpful, Sometimes, they'll say,

I'm gonna tell you this, And it never does,

cos I do play fair. So they've got a lot of stuff that,

you know, I would not want to be them because it must be hard

to sleep at night sometimes. I was struck by how

meticulously plotted the novel was and I wondered,

do you start from the outset knowing exactly what's going to happen,

or does the story evolve I've never known the ending of any

book I've sat down to write. I've always thought that

if I knew the ending, I wouldn't be creating a novel,

I would be typing to the end, you know, a manuscript,

not really writing. I might sit down in front

of the computer and think, er, Oh, my God, OK,

let me just try this. And if it doesn't work,

I can always go back, hit the delete So that spontaneity is an integral

part of creativity. So for me to plot along an outline

that I've thought about before I've even created a character,

I mean, how dull and And I think that boringness

would come through in the pages. So for me to discover the page

as I'm writing it, for the reader, I think it's gonna be

stunning to them. But that must be even more difficult

because you sometimes have more than one novel

on the go, don't you? I mean, you have a

phenomenal workload. You write two, sometimes

three novels a year. This is what I do and it's

what I love to do. I think if I didn't love

to write, I probably I've written a lot of books,

and maybe I would just But every day, I get

up thinking to myself, it's so fortunate that I can tell

another story today. I'm an eight-year-old kid,

with a piece of paper and a pen, and I'm just using this in my head

and putting it down And I tell an aspiring writer,

I say, make sure you're in it If you can live without writing,

go do something else, Because that will get

you through all the bad times. That will get you through all

the rejection and criticism It's like bullet-proof armour you're

putting around yourself, that joy of writing,

because no matter what they hit Nonetheless, how difficult

is it to keep coming up I think the one attribute a writer

needs to have is this non-stop curiosity about the world and life,

and I certainly am. I go to places, I talk

to people all the time. I just absorb knowledge

and information like you wouldn't believe, because I think if you know

a lot about a lot of different things, you can bring those

disparate elements together and, all of a sudden, you're writing some

really unique stories. Writing is not a job,

it's not a hobby, it's not even a passion for me,

it's a lifestyle. This is who I am and it permeates

throughout my entire life. I'm sitting here right

in the studio, but I'm also thinking about,

you know, I'm looking around and seeing stuff

and ideas are coming to me. Well, you know, I love to write.

I relax by writing. I love to read.

I love to go out on the water. I'm a big boater, I like to do

all the watersports and stuff. It's just nice, you know,

I have a nice family But at the end of the day,

it's that book and the pen My wife gave me a journal

on Christmas Day. I tell people, never give a writer

blank paper on a major holiday,