A Conversation with New York Times Bestselling Author F. Paul Wilson

JONATHAN MABERRY: For the two or three readers left in the world who may not know him, tell us about Repairman Jack.

F. PAUL WILSON: He’s an urban mercenary in Manhattan, a self-made outcast who lives in the interstices of modern society.  A ghost in our machine: no official identity, no social security number, pays no taxes.  He has a violent streak he sometimes finds hard to control.  He hires out for cash to “fix” situations that have no legal remedy.

JM:  Who hung the nickname on him?

FPW: The name Repairman Jack comes from his gunrunner pal, Abe.  Jack’s not crazy about it, but he lives with it.  He’s not a vigilante, not a do-gooder. He’s not out to right wrongs. Nor is he out to change the world or fight crime. (He’s a career criminal, after all, as are many of his friends.) He’s not Batman.   He’s just a guy with a devious mind who likes his work best when he can help what goes around come around. If you read him carefully you’ll see he gets a real jolt out of running a scam or setting up someone to be hoisted on his own petard.

JM: You’ve never allowed yourself to be shackled to one genre and yet a lot of folks that genre hopping isn’t a good idea for writers. What do you think?

FPW: Back in the old days, I never thought of it as genre-hopping.  I don’t think the term existed.  I simply wrote the next novel. I couldn’t settle into a groove of writing one kind of book. THE TOMB is nothing like THE KEEP and neither of them is like THE TOUCH and nothing in the world is like BLACK WIND. And then I did a few medical thrillers like THE SELECT and IMPLANT.

JM: I imagine that went over great with the publishing houses.

FPW: The marketing departments didn’t know what to do with me. Every time I built up a following for one type of book, I’d switch to another genre. I have a hard core of devoted readers who’ll read anything I write, but I’d lose less loyal groups, attached to certain types of fiction, when I switched.

JM: What do you think the effect of this was on your career?

FPW: I don’t know if the hopping hurt my career.  Because the medical thrillers were so different from my usual supernatural fare, I tried to do them under a different name (they’re by Colin Andrews in the UK and Europe), but my US publisher wanted someone they could send out on tour.  On the whole, though, different names for different genres lets readers know what they’re getting when they pick up a certain name.  With the way the Internet spreads information, your readers are going to know it’s one guy behind those names, and they’ll either hop with you or stay put where they’re most comfortable.

JM: Which genre do you feel is the best fit for you?

FPW: I don’t have an answer as to which is best, but I’ve found the perfect solution for myself.  I brought Repairman Jack back in 1998 with LEGACIES and the response was terrific. It was a fairly straight thriller with a science-fictiony maguffin. The next book I wanted to do was going to be different, dealing with conspiracy theories and finding the ultimate conspiracy at the heart of them all. It was going to be wild and somewhat supernatural. Here I go again: another genre hop.  Wait. Why not make it a Repairman Jack book?  Jack’s fans will gladly follow him into conspiracyville. After CONSPIRACIES came ALL THE RAGE which is at its heart a medical thriller. But with Jack there, it’s a Repairman Jack book. I’d found the solution to my genre-hopping and genre-bending and genre-blending: make Jack the protagonist.

JM: You’ve been doing for a while now and established that you don’t live in a creative pigeon hole.  With Repairman Jack as the vehicle, are you free now to go where you want?

FPW: Now I can write the novels I want without worrying about leaving my readers
scratching their heads.  It’s not horror, it’s not SF, it’s not a medical thriller, it’s a Repairman Jack book. The marketing department is happy for the same reason.

JM:  But…?

FPW:   It looks like a perfect solution. Of course I’m still going to throw curves every once in a while like Sims, which was pure sf, and Midnight Mass, which is a purebred horror novel.

JM: You have a new book coming up.  What’s the lowdown on SECRET CIRCLES?

FPW: Readers want to know more about Jack than I’m willing to tell.  His last name, for instance.  Truth is, even I don’t know his last name because I’ve never given him one.  They also ask about his childhood – what sort of upbringing did he have? (The child being father to the man, and all that.)

JM: So…you’re going to start telling Repairman Jack stories for kids?  Is that something you’ve been planning to do?

FPW: Never saw myself writing for kids, especially since I already have a fair number of teen readers, mostly sixteen and up. But a motley array of forces converged to goose me into writing a novel geared toward the under-fifteen crowd.  If I’m going to write a book about Jack as a teen, why not aim it at teens (and maybe hook some new readers in the process).

JM: Is that a trend you’re following or establishing?

FPW: I’m told I’m the first author to do this – take an adult series character and do young adult novels about him.  I don’t know if it’s true.  I do know George Lucas did it with young Indy, but that was film, not prose.  Now I hear Robert Parker’s hopping on the train with young Spencer books.  Whatever.

JM: Who’s putting these books out?

FPW: I pitched the idea to Tor, they hooked me up with one of their teen editors, and gave me a contract for 3 so-called Young-Adult novels. I say “so-called” because the writing process wasn’t much different from my adult work and the style is virtually identical.  I’ve striven over the years for a clean, lean style, tailored to the pace of the thrillers I write. To my delight I found it fits a younger audience equally well. At least that’s what a focus group showed: Kids who often took up to a month to finish a book were polishing off JACK: SECRET HISTORIES over a weekend and looking for more.  So now here comes the second, JACK: SECRET CIRCLES.  The books are set in 1983 when Jack is 14.

JM:  Are you drawing on any personal experiences for the series?

FPW: I remember my own last summer before high school as a turning point in my life.  So that was where I decided to pick up Jack’s story.  Since I’d already established his birth year as 1969, I pretty much had to set the story in 1983.  Not a bad year – lots of new technology (Atari games, VCRs, and early Apple computers), disco was dead, and MTV was on the rise.

JM:  Where’s it set?

FPW: As luck would have it, I’d already placed Jack’s hometown in Burlington County, which juts into the mysterious and fabled Jersey Pine Barrens.  Perfect. I could work all sorts of magic in a million acres of wilderness with places no human eyes have ever seen, where strange lights jump from tree to tree, and the Jersey Devil supposedly roams.  I peopled his town with weird characters and places – like an old woman (with a dog) who’s supposedly a witch, and the town drunk who’s rumored to be able to heal with a touch but always wears gloves, and USED, the store that sells old…stuff.

JM:  I just sold a couple of Young Adult novels, too.  I expected shifting from writing for adults to writing for teens to be jarring, but I had a blast.  What about you?

FPW:  What surprised me most was how much fun I had. I delighted in peeking into Jack’s past and populating it with people who would play parts in his later life, or arranging cameos of characters from other novels.  The books practically wrote themselves. Like taking dictation.

JM:  You happy with them?

FPW: JACK: SECRET HISTORIES made a number of recommended lists and I think Jack: Secret Circles is even better.  The third, JACK: SECRET VENGEANCE tops them all.

JM:  Any chance we can get a peek?

FPW: Sure.  Here’s an excerpt from JACK: SECRET CIRCLES: http://us.macmillan.com/jacksecretcircles

JM: What’s your process from “Hey, I have an idea!” to “I just sent my manuscript to my editor!”

FPW: You know how it is – some stories come in a Eureka! moment while others result from a process of accretion.  In some I’m simply telling a story, in others I’ve got something else going on.  In The Keep I was determined from the outset to deal with different levels of evil, ranging from the human venal to the supernatural.  In The Haunted Air it was the war between reason and belief.

JM:  Are you an outline guy?

FPW:  Whatever the story, I’ve almost always outlined.  During my first 20 years as a selling writer I was a part-timer.  Every page I was turning out was precious and I couldn’t imagine getting halfway through a book and realizing I couldn’t finish it. That’s why I outlined: to avoid dead ends and blind alleys, to avert the horror of dumping hard-earned pages into the wastebasket.

JM: I meet some writers –few of them professionals—who insist that if they know how something is going to end then they lose interest.

FPW:  I want to know in advance if the story is worth telling, if it’s going to stand up to lengthy treatment, and most of all: Can I bring it to a satisfying conclusion?  That – the satisfying conclusion part – is, I believe, the best reason for an outline.  How many novels have done this to you: You’re sailing along, digging the prose and the plot and the characters when, about three-quarters of the way through, you start to notice it falling apart, finally to end not with a satisfying bang, not even with a whimper.  It doesn’t really end, it just seems . . . to . . . dribble . . . away . . .   If I’m not sure I can end a story, I don’t start it.  I feel I owe you a good ending.  Not necessarily a happy one, not necessarily a neat tying up of every loose end, but at the very least a catharsis, a release of all the narrative tension I’ve been building.  If I don’t do that, I’ve failed you.  I haven’t done my job, and you haven’t received your money’s worth.

JM: What about the organic component to storytelling?

FPW:  But I’ve never been a slave to my outlines.  I put them in a drawer and pull them out now and again when I find myself stuck.  More often than not I’ll deviate from them when an idea hits, but I always know where I’m going.  (Even in THE FIFTH HARMONIC, the only novel I’ve written without an outline, I had a pretty good idea where I was going, but only a vague idea of how I’d get there.) As the Repairman Jack series winds to an end, I’m outlining less – mostly using a list of story beats that I organize for the best dramatic effect.

JM:  Do you write straight through or rewrite as you go?

FPW:  Once I start writing, I never look back.  I reread what’s gone before only to check and incident or description for consistency.  I do no rewriting until the first draft is finished.  The reason is simple: narrative momentum.  If I keep tweaking and retweaking before I’m finished, I’ll lose the drive.  Once I’m finished, I’ve got no qualms about doing a major overhaul here and there, because I’ve got a streamlined skeleton to flesh out where needed.

JM:  Do you write chronologically?

FPW:  I start at Chapter One and go from there.  That works best for me.  I have key scenes visualized ahead of time but I like to see events unfold in sequence because I can monitor motivation and causality as I go along, and make sure each scene builds from the last and reaches for the next.  (And avoid run-on sentences like that one.)  That way I often find that what worked well in outline doesn’t hold up in fully fleshed text.  If I wrote scenes out of sequence and connected them later (as do some writers I know) I’d miss this, or find I can’t use a scene I’d spent a lot of time on.

JM:  When do you pause to get other eyes on the manuscript?

FPW:  I send my second draft out to a few beta readers I trust, consider their comments, and make changes according to the suggestions I think will make it a better book.  It’s important for beta readers to be on the same wavelength, and more important that they know they can’t anger me or hurt my feelings, no matter what they say.  Complete honesty is necessary if the process is going to work.

JM:  Most readers don’t think pros use beta readers.  They think books spring in finished form from our heads.

FPW:  People seem surprised that a guy in the racket (as F. Scott called it) this long would use beta readers.  Listen, when I start to believe that I can’t get any better, that I’ve got nothing left to learn, and that my deathless prose can’t be improved, please shoot me.

JM: Will we be seeing more of the Adversary Cycle?

FPW: Well, the Adversary Cycle ain’t what it used to be – a self-contained series of 6 interconnected novels: THE KEEP, THE TOUCH, THE TOMB, REBORN, REPRISAL, NIGHTWORLD.  The first three novels were intended as stand-alones.  Completely unrelated.  Then I went to work on a novel called THE CHADHAM CLONE.  It too was meant to be a stand alone, with no relation to anything else I’d written. I wanted it to look like a ROSEMARY’S BABY or an OMEN but be something different (just as THE KEEP looks like a vampire novel for a while, but it’s not).  I wanted to use an evil entity other than the tired old Antichrist, but who?  Then I realized I already had that entity in Rasalom from THE KEEP.  I needed a suburban setting convenient to Manhattan, and realized I already had one in Monroe where THE TOUCH took place.  I became intrigued by the challenge of tying those two novels, and THE TOMB as well, into Rasalom’s reincarnation, bringing the books full circle.   It worked so well that I suspect my subconscious might have been linking them all along.

JM:  So, this ‘happened’ rather than being the end result of a long-range plan?

FPW:  Things grew from there.  The result was an outline for a novel of 1,000 plus pages.  Nobody was going to publish that, so I broke it down into a trilogy (REBORN, REPRISAL, and NIGHTWORLD) and sold it that way.  But in my head it remains a single, generation-spanning novel.  (This was the first time, by the way, I’d ever sold anything on outline.  Until then I’d always written the book, then peddled it.)  And so the 6 books became the Adversary Cycle.  Cool.  Then I went and ruined it by writing a bunch of sequels to The Tomb and connecting all sorts of novels and stories to the Cycle until I had to absorb it into my Secret History of the World.

JM:  Is there a link where new readers can go and get some info to catch up on this?

FPW:  Yes. Go to http://repairmanjack.com/works.htm#secrethistory.  It’s the cornerstone of the Secret History, and there’ll be no seventh AC novel, but it’s now part of a bigger picture.  As for the Secret History – yeah, I’ll be adding to that.  It’s my opus vitae.

JM:  Fans tend to mythologize writers. How has that affected you over the years?

FPW: Wait a sec while I fold my cape and stow Mjollnir away with my trident and my lightning bolt.   As you know, we’ve got writers out there who think they have to wear fangs because they write vampire fiction, or wear a top hat and goggles if they write steampunk.  I spend enough time living in the world of my work in progress while I’m writing it.  I don’t need to carry it over into the real world and live my stories.  They’re not real – that’s why we call it fiction.

JM:  So, you’re okay being a normal guy.

FPW:  Pople always seem surprised by – and comment on – how “normal” I look.  But the weird stories don’t come from the haircut or the clothing, they rise from deep within, where you can’t see.   If you check my Facebook profile photos you’ll see a shot of me in a blue blazer and a collared shirt at age 10.  I haven’t changed.  I even part my hair the same.  I’m oblivious to fashion.  But after THE KEEP I met people who expected me to wear a cape.  Now that I’ve been writing Repairman Jack novels for over a decade, people expect me to be carrying a Glock, or at least an ankle-strapped backup.  I might be armed, but not in any way you’d expect.

JM:  You don’t play the part of the ‘great writer’.

FPW:  No.  The other recurring comment is how laid back I am – as if to write a bad-ass character, you’ve got to be one.  Truth is, I spew it all onto the page.  If I’m pissed, I kill a character, and then I feel better.

JM: You’ve been at this for a while. What keeps it fresh?

FPW: Fresh, shmesh.  Trying to make each book at least as good as, if not better than, the last is an ongoing challenge that keeps you sharp. I can see, however, how a series could become a chore.  I sidestepped that with Repairman Jack by deciding from the start that it would be a closed-end series – I would not run Jack into the ground.  The stories would loop out from The Tomb and end at Nightworld.  I’m just starting the 15th and last novel in the series and I’m as psyched as ever.

JM:  So, it’s still fun?  The fire is still there?

FPW: The truth is, I can’t imagine not writing.  Yes, it’s work, and it’s frustrating at times, but so is anything worth doing.  For me, writing is an obsessive-compulsive disorder.  If I won $80 million in the lottery today, you know what I’d be doing the very next morning?  Well, I’d be in a CCU recovering from the heart attack winning caused me.  But as soon as I got out, I’d be writing.

JM: Which book was the most fun to write?

FPW: Different books were fun for different reasons.  SIBS because after thinking about it for 15 years, I found the crucial final twist and it wrote itself in 62 days.  THE FIFTH HARMONIC because leaping without the safety net of an outline was exhilarating.  THE SELECT because I found writing under a pseudonym strangely liberating (and it netted me the biggest advance of my career).  And CRISSCROSS because of the elegant way the unrelated plotlines intersected and resolved each other at the end.

JM: What’s next?

FPW: Well, JACK: SECRET CIRCLES is a February 2010 release.  The third YA, Jack: Secret Vengeance is written and delivered and awaiting publication next year.  The penultimate Repairman Jack novel, FATAL ERROR, has begun the in-house copyediting process.  A signed limited edition will be forthcoming from Gauntlet Press and the trade edition will appear in the fall.  This summer I’ll have an essay on Day of the Jackal in ITW’s THRILLERS: 100 MUST READS, and a few months later, a young RJ story called “Piney Power” in FEAR: 13 STORIES OF SUSPENSE AND MYSTERY, a YA anthology.  Toward the end of the year, a lightly revised trade paperback edition of THE KEEP in the same format as THE TOUCH and REBORN last year.

JM:  Wait…you said ‘penultimate’ Repairman Jack story?  You’re wrapping the series?

FPW:  I’m starting the last Repairman Jack novel – working title: THE DARK AT THE END.

JM:  What about young Jack?

FPW:  I may start a 4th (and absolutely last) YA Jack novel and use it to spin off another YA series (contemporary and not involving Jack) that I’d love to do.

JM:  So…if not Repairman Jack, then what?

FPW:  I’m thinking of doing a few straight crime/noir novels involving Jack’s early years in NYC, showing how he met the regulars in the novels and established himself as an urban mercenary.  I’d also like to do a hard-edged fantasy series set way back in the First Age, where all the mythology of the Secret History was spawned.  (Did I happen to mention how writing is an obsessive-compulsive disorder?)

– JM

Connect with F. Paul Wilson:

www.repairmanjack.com
http://repairmanjack.com/works.htm#secrethistory
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=697081684
http://twitter.com/fpaulwilson
Jack: Secret Circles excerpt: http://us.macmillan.com/jacksecretcircles