About Writing
How do your books take shape? Where do you find the plots? Do the characters come to you full blown or do they develop along with the storylines?
They almost always begin with a blip of an idea, a scene, a what-if. Very quickly I'm thinking about characters. And then the plotting usually comes to me from my research. Plot ideas come to me from a number of places - something I read in the newspaper, something I learn from one of my sources, maybe a true story someone told me. Wherever it comes from, it has to grab me, shake me down deep. After all, that energy has to sustain me throughout the arduous process of writing.

What is the first step you take when you're about to start a new novel?
I ask myself, who are these characters? Who's the hero, who's the antagonist, who's the hero interacting with? And I try to get a sense of the biography of the people. Also, I generally like to get a strong sense of story before I start; I like to know where it ends and how it ends before I start to write it. Once I've got a basic plot, I start to do research, which could be a little or it could be a lot. The Zero Hour was almost two years of traveling around the world doing research.

Do you always know how the story is going to end before you start? Does it ever change?
I do know how it's going to end but I often change it before I actually get there. When I say that I change it, it's not that something is radically different, it's that I arrive at the same feeling in a different way. In Paranoia for example, I didn't know how I was going to end it but I knew what I wanted to have happen for Adam. I knew emotionally and psychologically what sort of feeling he should have, what kind of closure there would be but I didn't know how we'd get there exactly until maybe I was halfway into it and I thought ahh, I got it.

What does researching a novel entail?
Sometimes it's traveling, going to different places, taking a camera, taking pictures of different sites and locations, bringing a video camera now, I do that, and interviewing a lot of people. The people I interview are really in the realm of experts or they might be sort of role models for characters I plan to write, that is I spent a lot of time interviewing female FBI agents to get a sense of the heroine of The Zero Hour.

How do you get your inspiration for the villain, say for instance, Baumann of The Zero Hour?
In the case of Baumann, I spent a long time talking to friends in the CIA to put me in touch with a real professional terrorist and they eventually brought me to meet this guy in a restaurant in Virginia. So in this case, he was based on a real person.

In terms of characters, some authors say that as they're writing the characters become sort of real people, they start talking for themselves or speaking for themselves. Is that true for you?
You do hear writers say, "I just create the characters and they take over" to which I say "No way. I'm the boss" and they do what I tell them to do. As I write, the characters do become more and more real to me and the book only works if they do. That is I really get into them, think like them, talk like them, play music like them. When I'm writing each person's scene, I create my own little world in which that person exists, so the character comes to life more and more as I'm writing a book, they become more real but they don't really take over.

Are your characters generally based on someone specific?
In Paranoia, several of the minor characters were very closely based on people that I met in my research. I think that's why when people that work in companies read the book they say 'Oh man, do I know someone just like that!'

How do you pick the people's names and appearances?
I can't write my characters unless I know what they look like. Very often I'll clip out a picture from the newspaper or a magazine of someone who I think IS that character. I'll often pin the pictures up behind my desk and I'll stare at the characters until I get a sense of how he or she might act.

Do you ever go back to a finished book and wish you had changed something?
When it's done, I try to put it on the shelf … what's that quote 'a book is never finished, it's only abandoned.' I sort of feel that way, you're only done because a publisher says it's time. I always feel that I can improve a book.

What is the most difficult part of the writing process for you?
Getting started. Once I begin writing a book, it accelerates; I become immersed in it, taken over by it. I get up earlier and earlier - often 3 or 4 in the morning - and get in two long writing sessions a day. That's the part I love the most - the writing. I also love the research: talking to people, traveling around, finding out how things work, how people do their jobs. I could do that forever. That's the problem - I get intoxicated by the research. I often have to force myself to stop and get to work.

You graduated summa cum laude from Yale, majoring in Russian studies. You received your master's from the Harvard Russian Research Center and were on the faculty at Harvard. What drew you to the study of Russia?
When I was in high school I took a terrific seminar on Russia - the literature and history. Then I discovered the work of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, author of "The Overcoat" and "The Nose". I figured that any country that could produce someone as strange as Gogol was worth a closer look. In college I majored in Russian studies, and went right to grad school at Harvard, intending to become either an academic or a spy. Instead I became a writer - go figure.

What do you do besides write?
I work so much that I have very little life outside. I'm able to spend time with my family, drive the carpool, work out, go out to dinner once in a while. Not much else, I lead a very boring life. I think that most full-time writers have very boring lives.

What authors and books inspired your writing?
The writer who most made me want to write was Frederick Forsyth. I read Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File. Also, a very different kind of writer that I read but was very intimidated by was John Le Carré, especially his The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the Tinker Tailor series. Forsyth's approach is much more documentary, journalistic, it was much less intimidating. He's more about fact and authenticity.

Nelson De Mille, particularly The Gold Coast, really sort of bowled me over because it was so non-formulaic and so much a novel while still being suspenseful and funny. And I remember thinking that I couldn't be funny. It wasn't really until Paranoia that I began to say, 'Yes, I can be funny."

What do you like to read?
I sort of divide my reading into stuff that is in my field in some way that I feel I can study and learn from and stuff that is not what I do at all. What I find is that I much prefer reading the stuff that I cannot do at all and don't do at all. I don't read Saul Bellow and ask myself how did he do this and why did he do this whereas I can't help but dissect works in my genre.

What is your day-to-day schedule like?
When a novel is really starting to move, I find I get up earlier and earlier to try to grab several morning hours before the workday starts, then I go to the office and write for another four or five hours. I get up earlier and earlier until pretty often the time that I go to bed and the time that I wake up kind of almost meet.

How often do you think authors write with movies in mind?
Good question, but a complicated one. Some authors write their novels with the thought that they'll be made into movies - but the thing is, Hollywood is so capricious that you can't count on anything. If you write a novel that's really a beefed-up screenplay, you're writing a deficient book, and there's no reason to believe Hollywood will ever buy it - or make it. In fact, some of the most successful movies recently have been made out of books that have so much texture and characterization that they don't seem like likely movie candidates. Like Lehane's Mystic River. The Da Vinci Code - I can't see how that can be a good movie, as much as I loved the book, because the excitement is all intellectual and interior; the exterior stuff, the action and so on, is pretty standard; we've seen it before. And it's not about characters. On the other hand, the folks who are making The Da Vinci Code into a movie are the folks who did A Beautiful Mind so maybe they'll pull it off after all.

Also, movies and TV have so pervaded our culture that they can't help but influence the literature and fiction that writers write. You see it in the short scenes, the faster plotting, the kinetic descriptions and so on. We writers watch movies and TV, after all.

Here's the bottom line as far as I'm concerned. Some of my books I know will make good movies when I start them, but that's not why I write them; I know anything can happen. I mean, my novel The Zero Hour would have made a far more exciting movie than High Crimes, I always thought - but although Hollywood bought both of them, they never made The Zero Hour. When I told my Hollywood agent about the idea for Paranoia, he flipped - loved it. I thought: great - and then I wrote a book - using all the literary techniques I knew would make a strong novel (first person narrator, characterization, observation) but which would have to hit the cutting room floor if they ever made it into a movie. Paramount bought the rights to Paranoia, but who knows if they'll ever actually make it - and if they do, they'll take the basic plot line and make all sorts of changes. That's OK - they have to be faithful to the medium, not to the book. If they make a movie, I want them to make the best movie they can. My book will always be there, on the shelf. That won't change.

What in general do you want readers to take away from your novels?
Most of all, I want readers to be completely absorbed and entertained. It's a failure if people find it boring, because the point is to divert and entertain, to take people away from their lives and bring them into a different world. I want them to meet characters who they can identify with or find appealing in some strong way. I want readers to learn something new, experience something new, even when I'm writing about a familiar area, I sort of want them to see it in a new way.

Paranoia is about corporate espionage and it's also about the corporation, life in the corporation and what that's like, the corporation in America and how powerful that is in our lives. High Crimes is a novel about the military justice system but is also a story about whether you can ever trust the person you marry.

See, I want to learn something new with every book that I write. I can't write the same book over and over again so the added value of my books is that when you read something I want the reader to know that it's real, that it's authentic, that it's solidly researched, that what they're learning is real information. I don't want my novels to be just brain candy, I want there to be something more to it.

Do you have your next book in the works? Can you tell us about it?
I never talk about a book that I'm working on until I'm well into it. I sort of think of an early stage novel as being like a newly hatched chick… very, very vulnerable. You have to keep it away from cold air and withering sarcasm. In fact, when I was first trying to write fiction, what I found myself doing is I'd go to parties and I'd say 'I'm writing a novel' and people would say 'what's it about' and I'd start talking about it on and on and what I found is that I was just talking myself out. You've got to leave all that pent up so that you want to write it. The writing is the telling of the story, if you talk it out too much you're not going to want to do it. So I rarely talk about it.

Do you have any advice for writers or novelists?
The main thing is that you actually have to write the book. This surprises a lot of people. They often think that they can come up with an idea for a book and try to get a publisher and then the publisher pays them money and THEN they write the book. It never works that way; you actually have to write the book.

To do that, you have to read and study the sort of novel that you want to write and read it several times and tear it apart and analyze it. You've got to grip people at the beginning of the book, right at the beginning. More and more with television and the movies, people's attention spans are attenuated. If you don't get them from the start, chances are you won't get them at all.

What most beginning writers do, I find, is spend a lot of the opening pages setting up the action, setting up everything so that the action can happen. That's not the way you do it, you plunge your character right in and then introduce us to the character. Grab us first, as early as you can and then you have the leisure to show us around your world.

A lot of the people who actually end up advancing the genre or breaking it out in new ways are people who've met with a lot of rejection in the beginning, so that's one thing to keep in mind, that just because you've been turned down all over the place doesn't mean that what you've got to sell is not worthy. It might well be. At that point, you've got to listen to your gut instinct and it will tell you if what you've got is worth working on.

The secret of success of a lot of writers especially in fiction is just stubbornness, is just keeping at it. Because a lot of people don't ever finish writing a whole book or give up after the first rejection or give up after the first book is rejected and those that make it are those that keeping writing, going back to the computer and writing another book until they actually make it.

In order to be a writer, you have to be obsessed. All writers are obsessive. There is sort of a self-selection process involved. The people who eventually get published are those who are determined to get published because they really want to write. So if you are hell bent on getting published, the odds are in your favor that you will.

What advice would you give a first-time writer trying to find an agent? Publisher?
A couple of things. You've got to be extremely persistent - stubborn, even. Publishers are always looking for new writers, but paradoxically the system makes it hard for a beginner to break in. There are high walls you have to climb over. But the fact is, there are a lot of agents, a lot of good ones, and they're always looking for fresh blood. The question is how to get to them. If you're a novelist, you have to write the damned thing. Far too many writers think they can get an agent on the basis of a chapter and an outline. No way. You have to write the book. That in itself separates the weak from the strong. Once you've written the book, you have to give it to someone whose judgment you trust - which doesn't necessarily mean a friend who's going to tell you how great it is - or a not-so-good friend who's going to discourage you (they're out there too, you'll see). The main thing is, you have to learn to listen to your own instincts. If someone tells you a scene doesn't work, or a character doesn't ring true - you'll know, deep down inside, if they're right. I lost count of how many times I rewrote my first novel, The Moscow Club; but the rewriting was part of my education. Then you've got to write a scintillating precis of the book, roughly akin to jacket copy, and an alluring description of yourself, and then try to hook an agent, get him or her to ask you to send the book. And again, be persistent. If you believe your book is any good, you have to keep at it. Keep in mind that John Grisham's The Firm was turned down by everyone in New York at first. That nobody wanted Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October until after it was published, successfully, by the Naval Institute Press. That Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal was rejected all over the place. They kept at it. You too may have to.