Dick Davidson Interviews Marshall J. Cook, Part 1

Interview conducted by Dick Davidson, OCWW and www.davidsonbooks.com.

1. Q: In your many years of teaching at University of Wisconsin, Madison, you have influenced many fledgling writers. Have you seen variations and trends over time suggesting differences in the kinds of people who write and their levels of proficiency?

A: More and more people are writing—and publishing—fiction now, which I of course think is wonderful. Proficiency is and always has been all over the place, but pretty much every student I interact with is scared and doesn’t think he/she is any good at it.

2. Q: The last figures I saw showed you as the author of 21 nonfiction books and 6 novels. I believe that your mystery series contains your most recent works. You were once quoted as saying, “I love writing. Fiction, nonfiction, grocery lists, doesn’t matter.” Do you currently consider yourself more of a novelist, and do you plan on more mystery novels in the future?

A: You’re missing the most recent, Walking Wounded: A Wartime Love Story, my seventh published novel. (And by the way, I never stop being amazed and thrilled every time a new book comes out.) I’m definitely focused on the novel now; it was always my first love. I’m hoping for a fifth book in the Monona Quinn Mystery Series, and I have a couple of other things rattling around inside.

3. Q: I have read that Murder Over Easy was based on the real-life murder of a diner owner. Do you recommend basing a mystery novel on an actual event, or do you think authors do better when they use their imaginations without being restrained by headlines? (One television series deliberately characterizes its plots as being “ripped from the headlines”.)

A: We do better when we aren’t restrained by anything in terms of material to write about. The first two novels in the Monona series were based on real events. Three and four are not. All four are total works of fiction, meaning I made the stuff up.

4. Q: You once recommended that a query letter sent to an agent or publisher should pitch a single novel except for the situation where you are writing a series. How would you handle the situation where you are pitching the second novel in a series to a different publisher than the one who issued the first volume?

A: Same process, but you of course mention the existence of the first book (which should help rather than hurt your chances with the second).

5. Q: What do you think about some of the new technical trends in publishing? Will economic trends, better editing, and quantities of titles guaranty eventual parity of POD books with traditionally published titles? Will the numbers game of E-book publishing make it very difficult for any one title to stand out?

A: I LOVE the new technology (and that from one who reveres the book as a holy object). POD and e-books have opened up publishing incredibly and made book publishing much more economical and less wasteful.

That said, it has made it tremendously difficult for any one title to receive any attention and find its readers. (The problem has shifted from getting published to getting noticed.) When I first started teaching, there were 65,000 books published that year in America (about a tenth of them fiction). The number is now 10 times that! (with the same ratio of fiction to non-fiction). Average sale of a POD self-published book is 147—but millions of people are selling them, so the so-called tail of the marketing dragon has become huge.

6. Q: As online book sales become increasingly important, do you think that publishers will do away with the free return policy for bookstores? If they do, what will bookstores of the future look like?

A: Great question.

I think in the not-too-distant future bookstores will have display copies only. When you buy a book, someone pushes a button, and a computer publishes a single copy of the book, your copy, at a regional distribution center. You get your book within a day or so, and there are no returned/remaindered books.

7. Q: What makes British mysteries so special? Is it history, environment, humor?

A: I think every country has lots of “special” mysteries and tons of not-so-special ones. To the extent that there’s a national outlook and a collective consciousness, the mysteries reflect this.

The Brits gave the world the cozy. America and the French gave it noir. Nobody does hard-boiled better than America.

8. Q: The new technologies of publishing make it relatively easy to create a new publishing firm. Would the emergence of many new small, specialized publishers be a good trend? How do you see publishing developing in the future?

A: We already touched on this a bit. Len Fulton (Dustbooks) has been tracking (and nurturing) small press publishers for four decades (God bless him). I join him in thinking that the little indies have been and remain the source of incredible vitality and experimentation in our literature. I love the fact that publishing is becoming cheap enough for many more to do it. This really parallels the advent of the computer in terms of making publishing more accessible.

9. Q: There are genre mysteries, and there are mainstream novels that have mystery aspects to them. Do you think most mystery readers are specialists, or do you see a wider market for mystery writing in one form or another?

A: I think we pigeonhole novels and novelists, primarily because it’s a lot easier to market them that way. But there are and always have been writers who defy categorization and transcend genre. From Raymond Chandler to Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke, we have mystery/thriller/crime novelists writing great literature.

And tell me Ernest Gaines’ Long Day in November is ‘just’ a kids’ book and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is “just” a young adult novel.

10. Q: Are the better mystery and mainstream novel authors formally taught techniques, self-taught through trial and error, or just born to the art?

A: I think folks are born with the inclination, desire, and even need to write stories. It may even be that the stories pick the writers instead of the other way around. And certainly, just as some folks are born with greater natural athletic ability, some are born with more natural facility with language than others. But I’d never try to discourage anyone anywhere from writing.

Some writers are products of creative writing classes and MFA programs. Many are not. Take Louis L’Amour, who jumped a freight and hoboed around the country at age 15 and taught himself by stopping at the public library everywhere he went. He became our foremost writer of westerns and a true expert on the west.

If I had to choose whether to close down the writing schools or the libraries, I would without hesitation choose the former.

What to Write

One of the biggest problems faced by writers is the very basic one of what to write. I can remember many times when I felt like writing a poem and couldn't settle on a topic. That is one reason why my poetry writing is almost all produced for an occasion. I have written poems to comfort a family after the death of a child. I annually write a family Christmas poem based on a Frosty the Snowman cartoon, and that tradition has gone on for more than twenty years. I write poetic prayers for church publications.
Even prose requires more than just sitting down at the computer. Your thoughts have to be focused and a concept has to give you the incentive to write. My current book series makes it easy for me. I am writing a five-volume mystery series based on phrases from the Lord's Prayer. My overall concept of using the prayer phrases directs my plots toward demonstrating the effects of the title phrase upon the continuing set of characters. To date I have written Lead Us Not into Temptation (Volume I) and Give Us this Day Our Daily Bread (Volume II). I am currently writing Forgive Us Our Trespasses. The concept underlying your writing gives you a road map of sorts. Even when you introduce tangential subordinate plots, you have a basic direction in the story to which you are bound to return. This same technique can be applied to a series of short stories. Nonfiction works without an underlying concept lose their unity and coherence, two keys to good writing of both fiction and nonfiction.

Why Do You Write? Why Do You Publish?

Catherine Wallace has stated that there are many more reasons to write than to publish. I think it would be fun for each of us to put this postulate to the test. Here are my preliminary personal results (without sorting for importance): I Write to:

• Leave a record of my thinking for my friends and family.
• Try my hand at the kinds of books I've always liked.
• Prove that I have something interesting to say.
• Communicate with others beyond my immediate circle of family and friends.
• Give myself the satisfaction of creating something.
• Give myself the enjoyment of quiet and concentration.
• Exercise my powers of logic and deduction.
• Improve my writing through multiple experiences.
• Learn the craft.
• Put myself into my characters' heads and learn to think like other people.
• Vicariously experience events and situations that I would not otherwise know.
• Become part of the community of writers.
• Better understand the construction of the books I read and the thinking of their authors.
• Have fun with thoughts.
• Use my imagination.
• Take my capabilities and interests beyond just doing something to earn a living.

I Publish to:

• Share my work with others.
• Try to sell some books and make some money.
• Become known to others.
• Fill my bookshelves with books by an author who shares my thoughts.
• Have unique and personal gifts to distribute without shopping.
• Communicate as a peer with other authors.
• Add to my resume.

Conclusion: Catherine is correct. Not only did I list more reasons for writing than for publishing, but also I feel that it would be easier for me to add more entries to the writing list than to the publishing list. I suggest that this is the writer's version of Getting there is much more than half the fun.

What's the Value of Conflict?

Most of the effort we put into interpersonal relations, and most of the effort our governments put into international relations are aimed at reducing or eliminating conflict. The tensions in our lives are caused by the many conflicts we perceive and encounter. Obviously, conflict must be a bad thing because we always try to eliminate it. This statement is not necessarily true in life, because we gain most of our benefits from negotiations due to the conflicts that ensue during the bargaining process. When you write fiction, as I do*, you learn that nobody will want to read your book if it doesn't contain enough conflict. People find books that are all happiness and void of conflict to be boring and uninteresting. Thus, we have a paradox between life and fiction. In life, we try our best to avoid conflict, while in the selection of fiction to read, we go out of our way to search for it. To resolve this conundrum, we have to look at the impact of conflict. If conflict impacts or affects us during the course of our lives, we seek to avoid it because conflict costs us in many ways: money, sleep, friendships, etc. When conflict occurs in a novel, it impacts fictional characters, and we can find that interesting without working up a sweat over it. It is the same principle that lets us enjoy a football game between two teams that aren't our favorites without caring who wins. We have no stake in the outcome. When one of the teams comes from our home town or college, we go through a psychological roller coaster process when our team looks as though it is on the way to winning or losing. The next time you find yourself in a personal conflict with someone, tell yourself that the outcome really doesn't matter that much, and you will find yourself able to think your way through it more objectively. If you don't let conflict emotionally suck you in, you will be more likely to be able to work your way out of it.

*To enjoy some conflict, read my "Lord's Prayer Mystery Series", books out to date: Lead Us Not into Temptation, Volume I, and Give Us this Day Our Daily Bread, Volume II. (written as Richard Davidson) http://betterlifedecisions.blogspot.com/