David Morrell, SCAVENGER, and the Creative Journey. An interview with Mark Terry
Bestselling author and ITW co-founder David Morrell has a new thriller, SCAVENGER, about to hit the shelves. In this nail-biting story, the heroes-or perhaps survivors is a better word--from CREEPERS, Frank Balenger and Amanda Evert, return, caught up in what Morrell calls "a desperate, high-tech scavenger hunt for a 100-year-old time capsule." It could also be compared to TV's "The Amazing Race" if the contestants were wearing plastic explosives that could be detonated by remote control. Yeah, it's that kind of book-high tension, high concept, and creepy.
Morrell took time to talk to ITW staff contributor Mark Terry about SCAVENGER, promotion, and the creative journey.
MT: Is there any particular reason you wrote a sequel?
DM: When I had the idea for SCAVENGER, I decided that the people forced to hunt for the time capsule would be chosen because of their amazing ability to survive: mountain climbers who endured a harrowing ordeal on Mt. Everest, a woman who floated for 3 weeks with a little girl in a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean, a marine aviator who was shot down over Iraq and hunted for weeks by insurgents. 
I got to thinking that the main characters in CREEPERS, Frank Balenger and Amanda Evert, had shown they were in this league by surviving the nightmare of the Paragon Hotel, and hence they too would be logical candidates to be conscripted into the hunt. In a way, SCAVENGER's premise insisted that I include them. But the two books are different. The primary emotion of CREEPERS is the claustrophobia of the hotel whereas SCAVENGER emphasizes agoraphobia and the overwhelming expanse of a mysterious valley with a sky so wide that the characters feel small and vulnerable.
MT: What was your research like for this book?
David: For a change, I didn't need to do a lot physically. I read a newspaper article about time capsules, and I got so interested in the subject that I started doing Internet searches for time capsules and learned about the Crypt of Civilization and the Westinghouse Time Capsule in Flushing Meadows, New York. They're not scheduled to be opened for almost 6,000 years. But at least their location is known. In contrast, thousands of time capsules have been lost. One town alone lost 17 of them. What's in them? What did their creators think was important enough to send to the future? An expression kept occurring to me: "Sometimes the past is buried for a reason." The more I learned about time capsules, the more excited I got about doing a novel in which I could try to communicate my enthusiasm about this amazing, eerie subject.
MT: What are your views on book promotion?
DM: I've noticed that many writers, having joined ITW to help their careers, don't take the opportunities that the organization provides for them. One exciting idea that I thought was underused involved David Hewson's explanation about how to do one's own podcast and post it online. I don't think enough writers took advantage of that. Writers ask, "What can I do to get ahead?" But it's my impression that many are passive about their careers, and then they can't understand why their work doesn't get noticed.
I've taken a cue from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said that he expects to spend as much time promoting a movie as he spends to make it. So that's basically 3 months. Now, I don't expect any author to spend a year promoting a book that takes a year to write, but I don't know why 3 months in chunks would be unreasonable. That is, in fact, what I found myself doing.
I look back to when my first novel FIRST BLOOD came out in 1972. Authors weren't expected to do anything. We wrote the book, and then we worked on the next book, and we hoped for the best. Then in the late 1970s somebody said that authors should go to bookstores and do signings. That was a new thought. Later, in the 1980s, going on a publicity tour was another new thought, and maybe visiting wholesaler warehouses if that opportunity arose. In this decade, the Internet became a marketing opportunity. New tactics are being invented all the time. But we need to realize that we can't rely on our publishers to promote us. They do their best, but in recent years, publicity staffs have been downsized, and there aren't enough publicists to handle all the work.
When I teach writers' workshops, I tell all my students that when they submit books to agents and editors, they need to attach some sort of marketing plan. This plan should address the non-fiction subject of the novel in such a way that it indicates the audience for the book and how that audience can be informed about it. If you Google the book's subject, how many hits do you get? How can you use the Internet to promote the book on sites devoted to the non-fiction subject of the novel?
Using the same logic, when I do interviews, I almost never talk about plot. Journalists and media people hate it when authors talk about plot. Summarized plot is boring. What interviewers want is a subject that can be discussed almost as if it's a topic in a magazine or a newspaper. The non-fiction topic of SCAVENGER is time capsules. Those mysterious messages to the future so fascinate me that I can talk about them for hours, especially the Crypt of Civilization at Oglethorpe University. My hope is that I can make readers curious enough to pick up the novel and learn how time capsules function in the story.
MT: What keeps you writing?
DM: I have these persistent stories that keep coming into my head. They demand to be told. I get so excited about them that I want other people to share them. It's an obsession really, and I don't know how to shut it off. I'm really riding high on the adrenaline rush of the creativity.
MT: You've had a long and successful career. Do you have any suggestions about how we other writers can survive-and I'm putting an emphasis on the word "survive"-a writing career?
DM: This is my thirty-fifth year as a published author. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about Clint Eastwood and the remarkable stages in his career. He started in TV, and then he went into the spaghetti westerns, and then he was Dirty Harry, and then he decided to be a director. I'm stunned that he recently directed a subtitled Japanese movie. The guy is what, 76 years old? I think he's a role model to us all because he sees his career as a creative voyage. Things that interest him make him go in various directions, and he's always evolving. I think this is very important for a writer to bear in mind. It's tempting to keep repeating something that's successful, but I believe that eventually readers say, "I get the idea. I guess I've read enough of that." For our psychological benefit as writers, it's important to keep things fresh.
For example, all of my fiction involves action and suspense, but there are clusters of books in which I looked at thrillers in very different ways. I did THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE series, for instance. That was a serious attempt to write spy novels. And then I did a couple of thrillers in which artists were the main characters. In BURNT SIENNA, the main character is a painter who finds himself in a life-and-death conflict with an arms dealer. In DOUBLE IMAGE, the main character is a photographer who falls in love with a woman in a photograph taken all the way back in 1933. It's my only explicitly sexual book. Now, in CREEPERS and SCAVENGER, I'm writing mixed genre novels that are thrillers with the eerie tone of horror novels but without anything supernatural in them.
I'll evolve from that, too. One day I'll say, "Gee, I did that, but I wonder what else I can do." In fact, after more than ten years, I'm about to return to the spy novel, but with a difference. Next year's book will be THE SPY WHO CAME FOR CHRISTMAS. It's a modern action thriller that reinterprets the traditional Nativity story from a spy's perspective. Meanwhile, I also wrote a six-part CAPTAIN AMERICA comic-book series that explores the serious theme of the burden of being a superhero in today's troubled world. The first issue comes out this fall. I loved using the stop-action technique of comic books to learn a new way to tell a story.
What I'm saying is that to go the distance, to be around a long time, you need to change and adapt, to morph in ways that keep you interested and make readers curious about where you'll take them.
That's one theory. The other is never to be complacent. I'm always mindful that the person most in charge of my career is myself. Agents, editors, and publicists, as helpful as they are, have other people to take care of. Each author is a fraction of their clientele. But our careers happen to us one hundred percent, and ultimately we need to try to assume as much responsibility as possible for what happens to our books.
David Morrell is the award-winning author of FIRST BLOOD, the 1972 novel in which Rambo first appeared. Co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization, he has written numerous best-selling novels, including THE FIFTH PROFESSION and THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE (the basis for an NBC miniseries that premiered after the Super Bowl). His LESSONS FROM A LIFETIME OF WRITING discusses what he learned in his thirty-five years as a published author. To learn more, go to www.davidmorrell.net .
