Written Interview: Howard Gordon (“24”)

Today’s written interview is with TV writer and now novelist Howard Gordon. The interview is hosted by TheWrap in a new series they’re calling The Writer’s Room. Some background on Gordon:

Former “24” show runner Howard Gordon, who just released his debut novel while working on two new shows, writes the way Jack Bauer saves the world: in minute-by-minute bursts of action.

Gordon’s “Gideon’s War,” which the New York Times calls “not only a gift to conspiracy theorists, but also to anyone with pedal-to-the-metal taste,” follows two brothers. One is trying to start a war, and the other to stop it.

Gordon wrote it while wrapping the final season of “24,” and co-writing Showtime’s much-anticipated “Homeland,” starring Claire Danes as a CIA agent who thinks a returned P.O.W. is plotting against America. He may also executive produce the pilot of NBC’s “REM,” about a man who wakes up from a fatal accident to find his life split into two equally tragic realities.

And he’s working on a followup to “Gideon’s War.”

Some excerpts from the interview:

Where did you find the time to finish a novel?
I think I have some sort of highly productive ADD where I tend to split my focus and like a collage, eventually things get written. … It’s a fractured accretion of effort.

I do little microsessions of 20 minutes or a half an hour and then maybe I’ll take a phone call or jump to another. Sometimes juggling helps. One [project] informs the other or you have a block or you run out of energy on one thing but the other is still pretty vibrant. They actually help feed each other. …

It helps to have a contract and and something and have someone that you owe something to. I think left to my own devices I would be still working on the first page of the first script I ever wrote.

Can you walk us through your day as a writer?
When I’m really under the gun I tend to wake up at 4:30, 5 in the morning. When I’m really on deadline I do very little sleeping. I tend to wake up and do a good four hours. It is project-specific and when I’m starting a project I try to be monomaniacal about that project. Once it’s on its feet I can jump around a little bit.

For more of the interview, go here.