Loner in the land of conspiracy theorists: David Baldacci
DAVID Baldacci is one of the best selling writers in history, with 110 million copies sold in 45 languages. With the release of The Hit, the second novel in a series about a professional assassin, he is in the enviable position of simultaneously occupying three slots in USA Today’s Top 50 list and the coveted pole position on The New York Times fiction list.
Baldacci is remarkably prolific, writing at least two books a year in genres as disparate as thrillers, romance and children’s. Most blockbuster novelists stick to tried and trusted formulas. It’s not only safer than innovating with each new title, it’s also more efficient. Many big-name authors sit at the head of writing enterprises, with researchers, co-authors, and ghost-writers bustling like worker elves to pour words into the magical template.
When I ask him about his antipathy to what he once scathingly referred to as “the book manufacturing process”, Baldacci is diplomatic. “I am not saying it’s right or wrong, but it’s not for me. I don’t play well with others when it comes to writing. I just don’t think anyone could write a story that I have come up with, better than I could. After all, it’s my motivation, my interest. That’s why I play alone.”
This leitmotif of the driven loner runs through both Baldacci’s life and his books. He describes his first 15 years of writing, before Absolute Power was published and shot to the top of the charts, as an isolated, alienated existence.
“I was a litigator, a gladiator in a suit, going to battle for my clients. So the outlet for me was that little cubbyhole in my house to which I could escape at the end of every day to write my fiction. It was catharsis and it kept me sane.”
Both his new series are about loners. In the Will Robie series, the protagonist is a professional assassin trying to make connections in a world of interpersonal relationships that is foreign to him. The second series features John Puller, a military cop who is bereft of familial interactions. His father is a retired general with dementia and his brother is serving a life sentence in a military detention barracks.
“The success I now have is terrific, but that’s not what it’s about for me. I was once on a panel with a dozen writers and each was asked who they write for. The answer was always the same, ‘the reader’. But when they came to me I said that although it makes me sound like a jerk, the truth is that I write for myself.
“I don’t worry about the business side because I assume that if I am enthralled by something, the readers and the publishers will also be. I never want to be predictable. I spent the first 15 years writing short stories of all different types, and then moved to screenplays of all different types. I genuinely love storytelling and it has always been the story that challenges me . . . trying something I’ve never done before, living in different worlds and being forced to go off in different directions. Any other way would be deadly dull and I think I would just stop writing.”
Baldacci takes a philosophical view regarding the hard road that has to be travelled to become a successful writer. “I tell aspiring writers that it is a natural sort of Darwinism. It’s an evolutionary process and every writer goes through it and if you get published that means that you are really meant to be a writer.”
Perhaps another aspect of Baldacci’s success is that in the land of the conspiracy theorist — a recent national poll found that 51% of Americans buy into some conspiracy theory — his novels deliver more than their fair share of dark plotting by secret cabals. In The Hit, it is a traitorous club within the US intelligence community that is attempting to manipulate events in the Middle East through the murder of various leaders.
Baldacci admits that he “could write a book” about the crazies who respond to the conspiracies he invents in his novels. “I have to point out to them that I write fiction and am only bound by plausibility. That said, previously unthinkable actual events have shown that the plausibility bar is set pretty high. I recently wanted a military intelligence friend’s view on a scenario that I fretted might be too out of the box. He reassured me: ‘If you can think it, we’ve probably already tried it.’ That scared the hell out of me!” —
@TheJaundicedEye