Dan Pollock
Writing What You Don't Know
Have you noticed? There’s a new
breed of techno-thriller writer. More and more explosive page-turners are being
churned out by ex-Delta operators, SEAL Team Sixers, Recon Marines, you name
it. These guys have actually been there, done that and lived to tell about
it—in gritty and convincing techno-detail.
I’m not one of them, alas. I’m a bookish,
sedentary guy who conjures up macho heroes for fun and profit. Which means I have to research almost everything I write about.
That’s okay. I like to research. And I relish the
challenge of making cumbersome research vanish in sheer narrative excitement. The
way Mario Puzo did:
“I wrote The Godfather entirely from research. I
never met a real honest-to-god gangster. I knew the gambling world pretty good,
but that’s all. After the book became famous, I was introduced to a few
gentlemen related to the material. They were flattering. They refused to
believe that I had never been in the rackets. They refused to believe that I
had never had the confidence of a Don. But all of them loved the book.”—Mario
Puzo, The Godfather Papers, p. 36
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My first published thriller was
set in exotic locales I’d never laid eyes on (and still haven’t)—Istanbul and
the Eastern Mediterranean. 'Lair of theFox' was published in 1989, before the era of online, on-the-fly research,
so my desk was piled high with National
Geographics, maps ordered from around the world, travel books and magazines.
I sent an advanced reading copy
to Eric Ambler (d. 1998), whose 1939 masterpiece, A Coffin for Demetrios (also set in Istanbul) was my inspiration
for Lair. Ambler promised to read my
fledgling novel, then added that he, too, had not had a chance to visit
Istanbul before writing about it. Eventually,
he said, he came to know the city quite well and applied this knowledge in
several works, especially The Light of
Day (filmed as Topkapi).
Interestingly, Ambler confessed,
some “old Stamboul hands” later told him that the “atmospherics” of the magical
city were far more convincing in Demetrios
than his subsequent works.
Those convincing atmospherics
were compounded of equal parts free-flowing imagination and painstaking
research.
“I try to research
whatever I write about. I think writers who don’t are lazy. I just stop reading
when, especially if it’s a book about cops or crime, it’s written by someone
who does no research and just wings it. Especially Hollywoodish writers. I
close the book. It shuts me down, and I can’t suspend my disbelief any longer.
It’s just all cartoons.”— Joe Wambaugh, interview, San Diego Reader, 11/4/93
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If you read a swashbuckler by C.S.
Forester or Patrick O’Brian (as I hope you will), you’ll find yourself awash in
authentic, briny detail. Both were masters of nautical and historical research.
As was that master craftsman Rudyard Kipling:
“I embarked on a
little book which was called Captains
Courageous… I reveled in profligate abundance of detail—not necessarily for
publication but for the joy of it.”— Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 139)
Kipling’s zeal for authenticity
contrasts starkly with the following example of lazy non-research. The
perpetrator is John Grisham. In his breakout blockbuster, the otherwise gifted
storyteller simply copies a list of sailing terms to explain how his characters
learned to sail:
“They listened to and
memorized words like spinnaker, mast, bow, stern, aft, tiller, halyard winches,
masthead fittings, shrouds, lifelines, stanchions, sheet winch, bow pulpit,
coamings, transom, clew outhaul, genoa sheets, mainsail, jib, jibstays, jib
sheets, cam cleats and boom vangs. [They were] lectured on heeling, luffing,
running, blanketing, backwinding, heading up, trimming and pointing.” —John
Grisham, The Firm
Another brand-name bard, Stephen
King, admits to a similar sin in one of his pseudonymous Richard Bachman novels:
“There are some places
where they’re talking in Romany, the gypsy language. What I did was I yanked
some old Czechoslovakian editions of my works off the shelves and just took
stuff out at random. And I got caught. I got nailed for it [by the readers],
and I deserved to be, because it was lazy.” (Writer’s Digest, 3/92, p. 26)
Today, thanks to the instant
omniscience of Google, an opposite temptation confronts the fiction writer—larding
up the narrative with too much impressive-sounding research. The trick is to
select the telling detail and to discard the dross tonnage.
“With each new draft,
I throw out my research, taking out anything that hinders the story.” —Sidney
Sheldon, Los Angeles Magazine, 10/79
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In the techno-thriller, a genre more
or less created by Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October (with a nod to Ian
Fleming), the temptation to indulge in information overload is almost
irresistible. High-tech is king, after all, and readers fully expect to be
bombarded with military acronyms, barracks jargon and the latest in operational
paraphernalia.
But in the wrong hands “high-tech”
is a virtue that can quickly turn vicious. Here’s a sample from the
blood-and-guts oeuvre of ex-Navy SEAL Richard Marcinko:
“My black, knee-length
Pakistani ‘pasha’ tunic covering the carbon-colored, custom-suppressed Heckler
& Koch USP 9mm in its ballistic nylon thigh holster, a titanium-framed
Emerson CQC6 combat folder clipped to my waistband next to the Motorola beeper…”—Richard
Marcinko (Rogue Warrior: Green Team, co-authored
by John Weisman, p. 3)
The passage rambles on in this
indigestible vein, inviting comparison to Grisham’s nautical cataloguing.
“The novelist is
ill-advised to be too technical. The practice of using a multitude of cant
terms is tiresome. It should be possible to give verisimilitude without that,
and atmosphere is dearly bought at the price of tediousness.”—W. Somerset
Maugham, The Summing Up, p. 69
“There’s such a thing as too
authentic,” writes David Poyer, an ex-Navy officer who has penned dozens of
nautical thrillers. “The problem with doing a Navy book is that the average
reader can’t understand what you’re talking about.” Poyer’s solution is to
introduce technical language gradually and in context. “By the last third of
the book,” he says, “the non-naval reader is in tune with what’s going on.” (Publishers Weekly interview, 7/5/93)
As a final note, Clancy, the
master of technical verisimilitude, enjoyed occasionally taking liberties with
facts and indulging his fancy. An example occurred in his 1989 thriller, Clear and Present Danger. Clancy wanted
a bomb that exploded silently. When the latest in weaponry wasn’t up to his
standards, he simply invented his own hardware. He called it the “Hushaboom.”
“I got the idea from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show,” Clancy
told an interviewer.
(Philip Morris
Magazine, summer, 1991)
Bio:
Dan Pollock was born in New York
City to a family of writers and grew up in Laguna Beach, California. A former
syndicate editor with the Los Angeles
Times, Pollock is the author of six thriller novels— Countdown to Casablanca, Lair of the Fox, Duel of Assassins, Orinoco (originally published
as Pursuit Into Darkness), The Running Boy and Ringland —and a specially
commissioned “logistics” thriller, Precipice.
With his wife, Constance, Pollock edited and published three literary,
inspirational volumes: The Book of
Uncommon Prayer; Gospel: The Life of
Jesus as Told by the World's Great Writers; and Visions of the Afterlife: Heaven, Hell and Revelation as Viewed by the
World's Great Writers. The Pollocks live in Southern California with their
two children.
When not writing nail-biting thrillers, Dan can be located here:
Email: dbpollock@gmail.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/danielpollock
Website: http://www.danpollockthrillers.comThank you, Dan, for the superb advice and a fascinating analysis that breaks with one of writing's most often-repeated adages... a superb breath of fresh air!
Eric @ www.ericjgates.com
