Michael Robotham says that ghostwriting a dozen or more autobiographies was great experience for writing his first novel because once his character was inside his head it was as if he was writing his autobiography.
This interview is reproduced with the kind permission
of ShotsMag.co.uk. The
interview was conducted by Ayo Onatade.
For readers that don't know much about you, would you
like to start off by giving us a bit of background information about yourself? I
know from my research that you have ghostwritten a number of well-known
autobiographies and you have been a journalist. How did this start?
I'm 43 years old, I'm married with three beautiful daughters, and I
live in paradise. The northern beaches of Sydney - just a few minutes away from
the beach, but I spent ten years in London as a journalist and was a ghost
writer before that. I grew up in a very, very small country town in Australia,
and when I say small we're talking a few hundred people, maybe at least three
hundred people, five hundred dogs and three million flies and where they still
deliver the mail by horseback! When I came to Sydney for my first job interview
as a cadet journalist I had never been in a building more than three floors
high, I had never been in a lift and I had never seen an escalator. So I was an
absolute hayseed. I started out as a journalist at the age of seventeen on a
newspaper called The Sun in Sydney, and in 1986 I came to London to try and
break into Fleet Street eventually becoming a feature writer for the Mail on
Sunday. In 1992/3 I left the Mail on Sunday to freelance for The Sunday Times,
The Tatler and a lot of magazines and I also began ghost writing. So basically
my ghostwriting career spanned ten years and I did fourteen biographies.
When did you decide that you wanted to concentrate on writing novels and
was there a pivotal event that persuaded you?
I wanted to write novels from the age of twelve and it was almost as
though back then Mark Twain had stolen all the best plots. It's growing up in a
tiny town - I thought that there was nothing to write about. Obviously you
discover now that you can write about anything, but back then it just seemed
that there was no adventure or excitement or drama in what was a very idyllic
childhood and becoming a journalist was one step along the way of becoming a
writer. For a long while I thought journalism would satisfy me. I traveled the
world, met fascinating people, and did some amazing stories. But I kept on
coming back to this desire to write and ghostwriting was the next step, because
I met someone who was a ghostwriter and I thought wow, great lifestyle. It's
like a writer's lifestyle. If you wake up with a hangover you don't have to work
that morning and if you want to work at 2 o'clock in the morning you can work at
2 o'clock and you work from home. But it also lets you discover whether you have
the discipline to be totally on your own to produce the writing and do a certain
number of words a day, and to have spent a career writing very few pieces with
more than a thousand words then suddenly you have to write something with over
one hundred thousand words - it's a whole new ballgame.
Can you give us some background as to how your book (Suspect) came
about?
One of the very first ghostwriting projects that I did was a book with
Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, who uncovered the child migrant
scandal. From around 1850 through to 1960 around a hundred and fifty thousand
children from Britain and Ireland were sent to America, the Colonies, and
supposedly to a new life to be adopted. They were coming out of children's
homes; they were products of single mothers, in an era where there was great
shame. They were told that they were going to be adopted, have a new life with
loving families. In fact most of them went on to be almost slave labor. Young
girls were put on farms and the boys were kept in institutions and were made to
build churches. They were physically and sexually abused. It was a terrible sort
of stain really. It was a piece of social engineering that went horribly wrong.
I was working on Margaret's book, and she told me a story about having to take a
new born baby from a mother who was deemed to be too unfit to care for the
infant. This baby is literally straight out of the womb and the mother's
screaming and Margaret is walking down the corridor (it is a scene that is
actually in the book) and she looks down at this young baby and thinks to
herself, one day are you going to come looking for me and are you going to thank
me for saving your life or blame me for having ruined it. That was the sort of "what
if" moment for me. When she told me the story I think that's what stuck in my
mind. That was ten years ago she told me that story. As a novelist, or a
would-be novelist, I thought that there is a story in this.
But isn't it those kind of things that give you a germ of the idea?
Absolutely. That was the absolute seed of the idea. And then it is a
bit like over ten years it grew a little bit. There are other seeds that grew
along side it, but the strongest one ultimately is the one that grows the
tallest and overshadows all the others. Other ideas fed into it and I worked
with and used psychologists. I suppose people asked me why it's a thriller. My
agent calls me the reluctant thriller writer. I've read very few in my life. It's
not that I don't like thrillers, it's just that over the last ten years if I
have had time to read then I feel that I should be writing. So I don't read a
great deal. It was almost although it was natural to tell it in that genre and
which is why I chose to tell it in that way.
Can you tell us about the characters and where they came from?
This is where people often ask me the differences between writing
non-fiction and fiction. It is much harder writing fiction, much, much harder,
because with non-fiction you have all the material in front of you. The point in
ghostwriting, the point in which it works, is when you capture the voice of your
subject so completely that you are inside their head, you think the way they
think, you can write the way they would write if they could write that way. Not
even their closest friends or family would recognize the ghostwriter's
fingerprints on the story. Now in many ways Joseph O'Loughlin was the same deal.
I created this character and captured his voice and then it became like writing
his autobiography. I was writing his life story and he was real in my head. The
moment I captured his voice I was reading a story in a magazine about a sufferer
of Parkinson's disease. A journalist who had Parkinson's disease; and it was
almost a single line in the midst of the story when he said, "I know when it's
going to be a good day when I can bend down and tie my shoes". There was just
something about that line, and I suppose the self-deprecating sense of humor
that he portrayed; and I thought there's my voice. That's where he came from.
What about the others? For example DJ, who I felt was really hard, in
some ways I felt sorry for him, but on the other hand I really, really hated
him: I thought how could you do this, because he was such an angry person.
It's a great truth, and even though I was a journalist for a lot of
years and worked on cases like Fred and Rosemary West, what you'll uncover
invariably behind even the very, very worst people that commit the worst crimes
is that they were not born evil. Psychologist friends of mine say that it is
very rarely in life that someone is born evil - occasionally someone is born
lacking any empathy or the ability to empathies, and therefore is a psychopath.
The vast majority of psychopaths are created by circumstances, e.g. society, in
which case if you bear that in mind when you look at horrible people like DJ,
somewhere in the background there has got to be someone that turned him this way
and therefore you have to give him a little sympathy. I know that it is hard to
sympathize with someone like Fred and Rosemary West, but if you know the
background not every abused child turns out to be a monster. Some of them don't
and some of them have other facts that come into play and other figures in their
lives that socialise with them and teach them right from wrong. With Bobby and
with DJ I wanted there to be an element where they too were victims. Because I
think that's real life, you don't have these monsters out there that just get
born monsters or just for the sheer hell of it decide to be a monster. So I
wanted there to be some sympathy or at least people to empathize with how they
may have reached that point.
The Suspect is a mixture of a psychological thriller and a love
story but it also deals with the theme of alienation and social isolation. Why
these two topics in particular?
Good question. Again it stems from my fascination with this idea about
the butterfly effect. That is, the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian
jungle causes a tropical storm to wipe out Southern China three weeks later. But
everything is so interrelated and I suppose I was trying to create a story that
had as many layers as real life has and people always talk about creating three
dimensional characters, but the thing is the fact of life is that characters are
not just three dimensional, they are multi dimensional. Every single individual
has so many dimensions it is almost impossible (and I know that for having
written all those autobiographies). When you think that someone's life can fill
a library and I just have to condense it down to a book. I was trying to create
a book that had enough themes to make it realistic so it wasn't just some sort
of formulaic, two or three plots, or characters. I wanted people to understand
the cause and effect of the idea of the butterfly effect. But when something
happens here or someone makes this decision there, like Bobby's mother who all
those years ago made that decision to allege that her husband had abused them,
then that butterfly flapping of wings ripples all the way through their lives so
you fast forward and suddenly it is causing a hurricane all those years later.
One can't help feeling sorry for Joseph O'Loughlin, the clinical
psychologist, as he is in an insidious position where not only his life, but
also all he holds dear is put in jeopardy. After reading it I thought that the
lie was the crux of the matter. Was this deliberate?
I don't know whether it is deliberate. The lie was necessary. Alfred
Hitchcock was brilliant at taking a very ordinary man and just having him in the
wrong place at the wrong time. North by North West is an amazing example
as it is a case of mistaken identity. I suppose what I was looking at was that
sort of idea with Joseph; the wrong place at the wrong time, or the small
mistake that just snowballs. I don't think I was trying to create the idea of
the big lie or the small lie or some philosophical context. A lot of women who
have read the book talk about the fact that they liked Joe right from that
opening chapter and they didn't want him to have slept with a prostitute and not
used a condom because they said he wouldn't do that. But I am saying that he
would, because everyone makes mistakes. It is impossible to suddenly create
someone who is perfect. Nobody is perfect. This is again what I am trying to do
by making him human in their reactions to things and their ability to make
mistakes.
Some crime writers will say that their characters just get away from
them. Is this the case with you?
That surprises me if they are crime writers because I think that one of
the big problems with crime writing is often the characters aren't strong
enough; that the plots are what drive the book. I suppose good crime writing has
great characters and to a degree they can. But if it is a crime book it involves
a murder and you know that at the end you have to unmask someone; so you do sort
of know which way it is going. But it may be with some writers that they don't
know who the killer is going to be.
I have heard some say that sometimes they don't always know who the
killer is going to be when they start writing, but most of them do know, it's
just that it doesn't always go according to plan when they are writing the book.
It's a bit like having a chassis of a car; a structure that you have in
your mind a rough idea, but you can build that car anyway you want. You can
accessorize it any way possible. You can put mag wheels on it, fluffy dice on
the window. And that's what you build up, what you go back to and add extra
clues in and I suppose try to create the twists or leave little landmarks behind
that someone is going to trigger further down and people are going to gasp and
understand why that was there.
This leads me back to The Suspect again. Did you have trouble
letting go of your characters once you finished writing the book?
No, but I'll tell you what I did have trouble doing is that I don't
think you know the background of this book. It was actually sold right round the
world on one hundred and seventeen pages.
You did a synopsis?
What happened was that I had written a hundred and seventeen pages when
I was asked to do write Lulu's autobiography, and then Ricky Tomlinson's came up
after that. I was having lunch with Ursula McKenzie, the head publisher at Time
Warner, and she just asked about the novel I was writing. I told her a bit about
it and she became very enthusiastic and badgered my agent. My agent had read it
and said we want you to finish it and we will take it to the Frankfurt Book Fair
in October. He said I think people will want to buy this and what happened is
when Ursula finally read the hundred and seventeen pages she made an offer for
the whole book which was beyond what we expected. Then two months later the
London Book Fair came around, all the European and American publishers descended
on London and they all got word of the rumor about this book that had been sold
on one hundred and seventeen pages. And the more they asked about reading it,
the more they were told no, you have to wait until the whole thing is finished;
the more they said no, no, we want to read it now, it was almost like they were
bleeding money just to read the hundred and seventeen pages. So in the end we
had three American publishers bidding against each other and three Dutch
publishers, four French, German, and Italian. The thing is, not a great deal
happens in the first hundred and seventeen pages. I always liken it to buying a
house when you've only seen the photograph. Not once did they ask me how the
book finished. Not once did they want to know the plot, they were just happy to
buy this thing because they loved the characters and obviously thought I could
write. Going back to your original question as to whether or not I could let go
of them, because no one knew the ending except me when Joseph O'Loughlin got
into all this trouble, I suddenly had this fear. Because he lived and breathed
in my head, he was alive, he was sort of my best friend. But if something
happened to me and I got run over by a bus, no one could save him, he would be
stuck there. So there was this absolutely manic period for several weeks where I
was getting up at ungodly hours and just writing to get the story down because
if I had a heart attack or I died in my sleep, no one would be able to save him.
I credit a lot of the pace in that second half of the book, where it absolutely
rockets along, to that feeling. I could let him go afterwards but I'm just
giving you an idea how real he was during the process.
If you know you have a good book in you when you're writing it, isn't it
the case that you need to get everything down otherwise you begin to think you
may have missed something?
Sometimes, when things are going well, you just want to keep writing
and don't want to stop once you're tired because you're thinking no, I'm on a
roll here. You know that there are days when there is going to be nothing in
your head and all the ideas would have dried up. Particularly when you know what's
ahead. Often people talk about the book they are going to write and leave their
ideas in the air instead of putting them on the page. It's very much like this,
seeing that the idea was over ten years ago and during that process other things
came into totalize the idea; I took notes, sometimes mental notes, to build up
the ideas and when I came down to it, the writing probably only took eight
months but I had to spread it over three years because I had two other
ghostwriting books to finish in between times.
How did you feel once you had finished writing the book?
I felt a tremendous burden of expectation of all these people who had
bought it on only a part manuscript. I felt all these people now owned a part of
this and they had all taken this enormous risk because they didn't know how it
ended. The big fear when I delivered it was Christ, if they don't like it they
are going to think we have blown our money here. And so that delivery was very
nerve-wracking when they finally got a chance to read it. As it happened,
because I have written so many other books, everyone just assumed I was really
cool about it. They didn't realize the difference between writing your own and
writing someone else's is enormous. So no one even asked me about it, they just
assumed they could relax and read it, and even after they finished reading it no
one jumped on the e-mail saying how much they liked it. For a month I sat back
in Australia and honestly, I was a pain in the ass to live with. To my wife I
was saying, "they hate it, they hate it, no one has e-mailed me, and they hate
this book". Even the BBC bought in on only a hundred and seventeen pages. They
bought the rights to make it into an extended drama that runs over a Sunday and
a Monday night, then they are taking the characters on.
I am not sure if you have seen the Val McDermid Wire in the Blood
series?
That sort of thing or like Prime Suspect where each story runs
over two or three episodes and a few months later you do another special.
This brings me on to a question that I was going to ask you later. As
Joe has Parkinson's, was this intended to be a standalone novel or were you
intending it to be a series?
It was intended to be a standalone. And, oddly enough, as much as I
wanted to give him Parkinson's because it made Joe that little bit more
vulnerable as when his life is disintegrating, so is his body, in the back of my
mind I thought the only really good thing about it is that it could be
standalone because no one is going to ask me to carry him on if he's got
Parkinson's. It doesn't work that way! The BBC jumped at it. Their scriptwriters
said, "Listen, Joe's got ten to fifteen more years with Parkinson's. There is
new genetic research, new operations, there are all sorts of things we can do to
prolong all this". So the BBC jumped at it. And I suppose that I did like the
idea of selling it to the BBC because that means that they can carry the
character on and I get some control with what they do with the characters. It
takes the burden off me. I was under a lot of pressure from people wanting me to
carry the characters on, so I have made Detective Vincent Ruiz the narrator and
it is all told through his eyes, and Joe comes into it but it's not his voice,
it's Vincent's voice. Things have happened since then. Initially I was adamant I
wanted to do a standalone because I could see the perils of people like Patricia
Cornwell. The thing I would hate most about it is as much as Joe is a very
strong character and because of his skills you could write any number of novels
with him as the central character, but having to re-tell the back story in a new
interesting way for those readers who are picking up the books for the first
time would be so tiresome: having to think of a new way to describe his family,
Parkinson's and all that. So I was totally adamant that I was going to do a
standalone, but since then Dennis Lehane, a guy that I really admire a lot and
one of the few thriller writers that I have read (Mystic River), has
managed to write a number with the same group of characters and then move on.
What a star the man is, such a nice writer. That made me realize that yes I can
do it. So I am quite happy and I'll do the next one through the eyes of Vincent
Ruiz. You don't get the impression from the first book but he is actually a
fascinating character and so I can do two or three with Joe and Vincent and then
move on to something else.
What were you looking for as a novelist that made crime fiction or
thriller writing so attractive?
As I said I was a sort of reluctant thriller writer - I didn't set out
to write a thriller. I suppose I was a realist from the point of view of having
several practice novels in my bottom drawer as most people do. I realized that
the story was best told that way. Also I was realistic enough to know that
having spent ten years earning a very good living as a ghost writer and
supporting my family doing it, if I was going to be a novelist I couldn't live
like Hemingway on a bag of oranges in a freezing garret in Paris, I was going to
have to earn my way. And so I thought to myself that the thriller genre was
clearly quite popular and, while I don't read many of them, the ones I have read
I can understand why people read them, it is real escapism. I think the story
lent itself. The idea lent itself to being a thriller, the whole idea of other
people playing God with other peoples' lives.
Who were your influences when you started to write as a journalist?
I'll tell you the people that influenced me the most, and what I aspire
to be. People like Donna Tartt and The Secret History, or David Guterson
with Snow Falling on Cedars or Peter Høeg with Smilla's Sense of Snow.
They are beautifully written books, but in their hearts they are mysteries or
thrillers and I love them. That's what I would aspire to write one day not
simply write a thriller where it's just a plot driven, almost formulaic, bang,
bang sort of airport thriller. But something that people could pick up and say
that's actually really well written.
One of my favourites is Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.
Absolutely, again a mystery story. Critics now are realizing, for a
long while there was this very snooty attitude towards crime writing. But every
so often a book comes out which straddles the whole mystery thriller/crime genre
as well as being seen as literary. Even something simple like Vernon God
Little in its heart is a story about a crime and it's so much more. But that
could have been labeled as a crime book.
Have you noticed that crime books have never won a major writing award?
And I am not talking about a crime writing association award.
Smilla's Sense of Snow was the Time book of the year. There are
books that every so often come out and Secret History probably won some
award somewhere along the line. But again I don't think they were labeled crime
books, that's the thing, and partly that's just the publishers. You get labeled
and nowadays they label you as a thriller writer or a crime writer or a literary
writer. So maybe if Donna Tartt or Peter Høeg had been labeled crime writers
they wouldn't have won the awards. It is perhaps a problem with the labeling of
writers more than the quality of the writing, I think, and again the snootiness
of the critics. There are some wonderful writers working; like I said, Denis
Lehane's Mystic River. That was a beautiful piece of writing and characterization
and with hair absolutely standing on the back of your neck. Even though you pick
the ending very early on in that book it doesn't matter. The quality of the
writing is such that just you have to get through it.
So what are the last five books you have just finished reading?
The last five books! You've got My Little Friend by Donna Tartt,
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre, Atomised by Michel Houellebecq, A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers and Mystic River.
What's your work schedule normally like?
I'm very much a workaholic. I start at 9:00 in the morning, an hour for
lunch, work through till five and go back in the evening and work again until
eleven. I suppose in terms of writing schedule I do most of my best writing in
the morning and at night when I am tired I do a lot of the research using the
internet, which is powerful stuff. It's amazing when you want to find out little
pieces of information such as is it possible to tell from a human hair whether
it came from a dead person or a live person. In the old days when you needed to
find that out then it would be a trip down to the British Library or a phone
call to a forensic laboratory and trying to get someone to call you back. But
now in twenty-five seconds you can have that information.
Writing a fiction novel is totally different from writing a non-fiction
novel. Has The Suspect turned out how you expected?
Yes it has, and you are right, it is more difficult to write as I
explained earlier. On a good day as a non-fiction writer I can write five
thousand words. On a good good day as a fiction writer, five hundred words. Some
days a single line. There is a line in the opening page of The Suspect
when the boy, the little cancer patient, is on the roof about to commit suicide
and the line that just says "chemotherapy is a cruel hairdresser", I remember
spending a whole day coming up with, and I still thought that's a good day. You
have to trash so much material.
What do you enjoy doing when you're not writing?
I live in a beautiful part of the world and I've got three wonderful
daughters and I enjoy spending time with them down the beach. In the summer we
spend a lot of time down at the beach. And there is always the beauty about the
freedom of being a writer as there are the ballet lessons and tennis lessons and
swimming lessons and so you are forever going from one to another. But I enjoy
spending time with them.
What do you find the most difficult when you're writing?
Plotting. Developing character is the most enjoyable part, as
multi-dimensional as I can make them and as real as possible and with great
believable dialogue or stuff that will make people smile when they read. I love
all that. But the plotting I find the hardest bit of the whole thing.
Do you have any foibles when you are writing?
I talk to myself when I write because it is a bit like having
conversations with your characters, you are actually speaking the dialogue.
Oddly enough, earlier you were talking about psychopaths and people playing God
with other people's lives and I think writers are borderline psychopaths in the
sense that we create a fantasy world just like psychopaths do. Psychopaths do it
because they are all powerful; writers create fantasy worlds in which they are
all powerful, they can kill off whom they want to kill off, they can marry whom
they want to marry. Psychopaths hear voices in their heads - psychotics do any
way - and writers hear voices in their head. All of these sort of things come
into it so it is a wonder the white van and straitjacket are not waiting
outside. But I think my only foible is really spending so long in this other
world. Living in two other worlds, this fantasy world of the book which sort of
takes over to the extreme; I'll be driving the girls to school and I'll totally
miss the school turn off and they'll say dad, dad school was back there and it's
because I'm in the book. I'm actually in the book at this time. It's a bit like
my wife always says to me "I can't wait for you to finish so we get you back"
because she feels that she's never got me completely when I'm writing.
Do you miss the world of journalism?
No I don't. For a while I thought I would every time a big event
happened - the reason I came from Australia to London to work is because all the
major events in the world happen in the northern hemisphere. At that point you
had the Berlin wall falling and Eastern Europe changing so dramatically. For a
long while after I quit journalism and a big event was happening and I knew the
journalists that were reporting it, I was reading their bylines and I would
think "Oh God wouldn't it be great to be in Kosovo". The turning point came with
September 11 and I don't know whether it was because it was so horrifying or
whatever but I had no desire to be reporting it. I actually thought I am so glad
I'm not there, I'm so glad I'm not a journalist.
Is there a book out there you would have liked to have written?
I would loved to have written Smilla's Sense of Snow. It's got a lousy
ending though. Great book, great character. When I read I dissect books and I
can often say that this book would have been better if they had done this or
that. But every so often you read something that is so heartbreakingly good that
you think I don't want to be a writer any more because I'm not going to be that
good. I suppose I felt that when I read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, which is just beautiful, that is the book that I wish I had
written.
We did mention it earlier, but what are you currently working on?
I am working on another novel, a psychological thriller. It's going to
be called Lost and the main character is Vincent Ruiz. It's about a seven
year old girl who goes missing and someone is convicted of her murder but three
years after they go to jail, and at the same point Vince Ruiz is telling the
story, he is lying in a hospital bed having lost his memory after being shot
while delivering the ransom. So the ransom is missing, he can't remember how he
got shot and its Joe's job to try and help him recover his memory.
Would you go back to ghostwriting?
Not if my novels sell well, no. My agent says never say never but I
think far more successful novelists than people realize do ghostwriting in their
spare time when they want to take a break because fiction is so tiring. But
people don't realize that they are doing it and so maybe sometime in the future
I might just publish something if they want me to.
One last question, if you were on a desert island and you could take
five authors with you who would they be?
Not books, they have to be authors? John Irving would be my first
novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest
Hemingway because he would probably punch Salman out or take him to the
cleaners!
Copyright Ayo Onatade 2004
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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