Interview (Part 1): Don Winslow (“The Cartel”)
One of the joys of having hosted this blog for over 7 years and being an active Twitter participant is getting to know writers I would never have met if I were just shut up all day in my office. I am particularly glad to have become acquaintances with Don Winslow, novelist and screenwriter.
Don is a New York Times bestselling author who has written 17 novels including The Kings of Cool, Savages, The Winter of Frankie Machine and the acclaimed epic The Power of the Dog. A Raymond Chandler award recipient, his latest novel is The Cartel which has been receiving fantastic reviews. For example, here is a quote from the New York Times: “‘The Cartel’ is a big, sprawling, ultimately stunning crime tableau.”
The Cartel goes on sale today and Don is embarking on a nationwide book tour, but I was fortunate enough to grab him for an interview.
Today in Part 1, we talk about Don’s background and his fascination with the “war on drugs” as exhibited in The Power of the Dog and The Cartel:
Scott: Let’s start with your background. Son of a sailor and a librarian. In school, studied journalism, African studies, and military history. Lived in California, Idaho, Montana, New York City, Kenya, and traveled all across Europe, Africa, and Asia. Wide variety of jobs including movie theater manager, safari guide, private investigator, and trial consultant. How much of that was intentional and how much was serendipity?
Don: Intentional in the general, serendipity in the details. From the time I was a kid, I knew I wanted to travel, especially to Africa. Not coming from ‘money’, I also knew that I’d have to find a way to make the trips pay for themselves, so most of the travel you allude to was for work. I got a job as a research assistant to a professor at the University of Cape Town, and made extra money as a stringer to newspapers. As you know, I went to Kenya and worked as a guide on photographic safaris. NYC, I managed movie theaters and was a PI. Idaho, I stripped logs, herded cattle and, are you ready for this, drove vans of salad dressing to towns in Montana. I got a gig at Oxford, England, directing Shakespeare for international students in the summers. China, I was leading groups looking for pandas. Most of these jobs were just opportunities that came up and I took them. I had no real plan except to experience the world while I was trying to be a writer.
Scott: Amidst all of those various adventures, how did your desire to become a writer emerge? Was it always there and you were just waiting for the right moment to take the plunge or did the instinct suddenly just hit you?
Don: I always wanted to be a writer. From the time I was a young kid. I grew up around storytellers — my dad was a sailor and would have his buddies over to the house and I’d sit literally under table and listen to their tales. My mom was a librarian, so we always had books in the house and were encouraged to read. (My older sister is also a writer.) But in all the travels and jobs you mentioned, that ambition got a little lost. It was always there, but I was so busy doing what I was doing that I couldn’t find the time to write. Finally, a friend at Oxford (he’s a professor of literature at Columbia now) told me I should just get on with it. Around that same time, I heard Joseph Wambaugh (now a friend) say on a radio interview that when he was a cop trying to be a writer, he decided to write ten pages a day, no matter what. I didn’t think I could do ten, but I thought I could do five. One pre-dawn in Kenya, I was sitting at the fire, shivering from malaria with a dysentery kicker, and I thought I’d better finally get on it. I wrote five pages a day no matter what or where — in tents, on planes and trains, in hotels, in rooms at Oxford. Three years later, I had a book.
Scott: Your first novel was “A Cool Breeze On The Underground” which was nominated for an Edgar Award. How long did it take you to go from first draft to the manuscript you submitted to publishers?
Don: I think it was about three years. Listen, I had no clue what I was doing, other than having read the greats of the genre — Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy and others. I knew nothing about structure, I was just typing away at a story with no idea where it was headed. And doing it while I was working as a PI, or directing plays, or running around a bamboo jungle looking for cute little black-and-white bears. So it took a while.
Scott: You tweeted something a few weeks back that “Cool Breeze” was rejected by, I believe, over 40 publishers. Did receiving those responses create any doubts in your mind and if so, how did you fight back those voices of negativity?
Don: Actually, I think it was 14 publishers, but it probably felt like forty. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t create doubts, sure it did, but I had to make a clear decision that I was right and they were wrong. So I was writing my second ‘Neal Carey’ book while everyone was rejecting the first. How’s that for arrogance? I wasn’t one of those guys who collected rejection slips — I crumpled them up, threw them away, and went back to writing. When St. Martin’s accepted ‘Cool Breeze’, they wanted a two-book deal and asked me how soon I could have the second one ready. I said, “Next week.” They thought I was kidding. I wasn’t.
Scott: Subsequent to “Cool Breeze,” you’ve published many other novels as well as written both TV and movies. Looking back at your first novel and your latest “The Cartel,” how has your approach to writing changed over the years?
Don: In some ways, it’s still the same, in other ways it’s changed drastically. Since about 1996, I’ve had the economic leisure to be a full-time writer, work mostly from an office in my house, and have a routine. (The book that got me to that point, I wrote on a commuter train — a chapter going up and a chapter coming back.) So, in a sense, that has changed my approach. But my approach to the work itself really hasn’t changed that much — I still believe in the same elements of story and character, I still believe that you have to sit down and get to work, I still write fast on the first draft and slowly on the last. Of course, you evolve — I haven’t read my early stuff in years, but I’m sure my style has changed. At first, I’m sure I either subconsciously or maybe consciously imitated my heroes. Later on, I think I found more of my own voice. I think it’s probably leaner. I’d like to think that I know more what I’m doing than when I started, but there are some days I’m not so sure about that. I have a routine, but I’d hate to get to the point where the writing itself is routine. I want to be open to surprises. I want to try different things.
Scott: “The Cartel,” a sequel to your 2005 best selling novel “The Power Of The Dog,” has been described as “a gripping, true-to-life, ripped-from-the-headlines epic story of power, corruption, revenge, and justice spanning the past decade of the Mexican-American drug wars.” Several of your books deal with the so-called “war on drugs”. Why is that particular area of interest for you?
Don: It’s the most important issue in the world of crime, if not in the world itself. It’s a gigantic story with a few hundred moving parts. It’s a story of tragedy, treachery, honor, loyalty, love, struggle, good, evil, power, helplessness. It can take you from the streets of New York, to Mexico, to the jungles of Guatemala, the five-star hotels of Europe, the corridors of Washington. Also, I live close to the border. It has proximity for me — both physical and emotional. And once I started writing about it, learning how it evolved, learning about our role in it, I think I just got angry. And anger is a hell of a motivation. I want people to know what’s going on, I want Americans to know what the real human consequences are of both our insatiable appetite for drugs and our so-called ‘war’ on them.
Scott: I would imagine that for both “The Power Of The Dog” and “The Cartel,” you did a lot of research. How extensive was that and did you find yourself using any of your private investigation chops to facilitate that process?
Don: Well, you imagine right. The two books together, comprising something like 1300 pages, tell a forty-five year story. So the research behind that is immense. I’m not bragging about that — that’s the way it should be. You can’t just look at what the cartels are doing, or what DEA is doing, you have to look at deeper social, cultural, economic and political developments that drive what we see in the headlines. That’s the ‘macro’, if you will. Then you have to get down to the individual stories — not just what they did, but what they thought and how they felt. As for my PI experience, it helped in the sense that a lot of investigative work is going through documents and trying to organize them into a pattern. That definitely helped in doing these two books. The other big help was the experience in interviewing people. Now, you’re doing it for entirely different purposes, with a different endgame, but many of the techniques are the same. You learn to start broad and then narrow your questions, you learn to let the ‘witness’ talk and not interject your own preconceptions, you do develop a kind of bullshit detector for lies and evasions, you learn to compare witness statements against documentation.
Scott: Let’s talk about two of the main characters in “The Cartel”. On one side is Art Keller, a Vietnam vet-turned DEA agent. What are some key dynamics going on with him?
Don: Keller was a true believer in the War on Drugs — he really wanted to take the drugs off the street that he had seen destroy his neighborhood. He went to Mexico with that mission, then saw his best intentions corrupted by the Barrera family, and his partner brutally tortured and murdered. After that, it was personal — although he had lost a lot of his belief in the War on Drug, as well as his faith, his new mission — his obsession really — became revenge against the Barreras. He was willing to do anything to bring them down.
Scott: On the other side is Adan Barrera, head of El Federacion, the world’s most powerful drug cartel. What’s the nature of his connection to Keller?
Don: Adan and Keller started as friends. In fact, Keller saved Adan’s life from brutal Mexican cops and DEA personnel. But it turned when Adan blamed a raid of Keller’s for the birth defects of his daughter. And Keller blamed Adan for the murder of his partner. Now the two men are locked into a blood feud — they are connected by the drive for revenge
Scott: Among your screenwriting credits is the adaptation you co-wrote with Shane Salerno and Oliver Stone for your novel “Savages” which Stone also directed. How do you compare the experience of writing a screenplay to that of a novel?
Don: I’m not one of those novelists who looks at screenwriting as a lesser form — it’s an extremely demanding art that requires incredible creativity. The experiences are quite different — writing a novel is basically a solo experience, writing a screenplay is usually collaborative. I had the luck to collaborate with my good friend, Shane, a gifted writer, so that was less of an adjustment. Shane has worked with the best — Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Michael Mann, William Friedkin, Ron Howard and so many other great directors. He really took the lead on the script and the script was the subject of an aggressive three-studio bidding war. Much later Oliver made some changes I didn’t particularly agree with at all. But the two forms have such different needs — the clock is always running on a screenplay — you have to compress scenes and characters. In a novel, a chapter can do just one thing if you want, in a screenplay a scene has to do several things at once — move the story forward and develop character. It’s also kinetic — experienced in a continuum, while the reader of a novel can pick the book up, set it down, and pick it back up again. So the experiences were very different for me as a writer. The learning curve is steep. It’s an enjoyable experience, certainly educational, but at heart I’m a novelist. I think that’s what I do best.
Tomorrow in Part 2, Don talks about his unique partnership with Shane Salerno and answers a number of questions about the craft of writing.
Twitter: @donwinslow.