Blowing Smoke: A movie about poker, cigars, women, and getting screwed

Thursday
November 16, 2006

The AV Club interviews Donald Westlake

Male Jim Treacher | Category: Media

Here. I'm currently working my way through his Parker series, written under his "Richard Stark" pseudonym. Twenty-two books! And a new one this month. The only thing slowing me down is finding some of the older ones without paying exorbitant amounts of money.

Even if he didn't intend it as such, he's got some good advice for today's young novelists:

If your subject is crime, then you know at least that you're going to have a real story. If your subject is the maturing of a college boy, you may never stumble across a story while you're telling that. But if your story is a college boy dead in his dorm room, you know there's a story in there, someplace.

And amazingly enough if you've read him, he doesn't do outlines. He just makes it up as he goes. Which helps him avoid writer's block:

It's different when you make it up as you go—that means you're going to get stuck. I wouldn't call it writer's block, I'd say, "I don't know where the hell this story is going." And that can go on for two, three weeks, during which I become increasingly difficult to live with. But then I either find where it's going to go, or I find what I did wrong 20 pages ago that made the trouble form.

Westlake Fun Fact: He wrote the pilot for Supertrain. I believe that's what they call "the exception that proves the rule."


Trackback URL for this entry:
http://blowingsmokethemovie.com/cgi-bin/mt-app/mt-tb.cgi/584
Comments

Have you ever read the Flashman series? If not, do it. It's by George MacDonald and the more you know of history, the funnier they are.

Comment by Zelda on November 16, 2006 9:31 PM

Maybe I'm missing something here, but when I read a Parker novel and when I watched "Payback" I wondered why I was supposed to be rooting for this guy.

Comment by Mike on November 18, 2006 6:16 PM

If you have to ask...

Comment by JT on November 19, 2006 12:23 PM

Don't forget: in addition to the Parker novels, you also have his Grofeld books. As I recall, there's only four of those (so far: I wonder if he's thought about bringing that character back).

Those books may be harder to find than the early Parker, but I believe Hard Case Crime has reprinted *The Sour Lemon Score*.

Comment by Dwight Brown on November 23, 2006 8:38 AM