Lisa Dickey is a longtime ghostwriter and author who has collaborated on seventeen nonfiction books, eight of which became New York Times bestsellers. Her clients have included celebrities such as Herbie Hancock and Patrick Swayze, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, and many others with diverse backgrounds, from CIA agents to business titans.

Many of Lisa’s collaborations focus on national and international political events. She collaborated with Roberta Kaplan, the attorney for plaintiff Edie Windsor in the US Supreme Court case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act. Their book, Then Comes Marriage, was named a top-ten book of 2015 by both the Los Angeles Times and Ms. Magazine. In The World is Bigger Now, Lisa collaborated with Euna Lee, an American film editor and mother who was arrested and detained for five months in North Korea while working on a documentary film. Lisa also worked with Susan McDougal on her memoir The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk, recounting her eighteen months of imprisonment for refusing to testify against her partners in the Whitewater real estate deal, Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Lisa is the author of the 2017 nonfiction book Bears in the Streets, the story of three trips she took across Russia in 1995, 2005, and 2015. Bears in the Streets is an eye-opening and compassionate account of the lives of ordinary Russians whom Lisa interviewed on each of her journeys. Lisa captured their unique perspectives about their homeland and how they viewed economic and political changes over time.

I met Lisa Dickey in June 2017, when she was the guest “Writers at Work” speaker at the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program’s summer residency. We spoke by telephone on August 8, 2017, both about her own book, Bears in the Streets, and about ghostwriting. While Lisa was careful to maintain her clients’ confidentiality, the insights she provided about the world of ghostwriting are invaluable to any writer interested in this field.

Judy Gitterman: One of your ghostwriting projects is Then Comes Marriage, which is the story of United States v. Windsor and the defeat of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the United States Supreme Court. The Court found DOMA’s definition of marriage as restricted to a union of a man and woman to be an unconstitutional violation of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. You cowrote this book with Roberta Kaplan, the lead litigator for the plaintiff Edie Windsor. The book begins with Kaplan’s first meeting with Edie Windsor and the story then goes back through Roberta’s life from childhood through her career as a lawyer prior to taking on the case as lead attorney. We are back in that first meeting on page 114. How do you and the subject of a book decide on the chronology of a story, and do you prepare a detailed outline prior to writing?

Lisa Dickey: I am not completely comfortable speaking about the specific book, but my preference is to have an outline, a full outline of what the book is going to be and what the chapters are going to be, before we start. That’s my preference.

JG: The legal and procedural issues involving the Windsor lawsuit are explained very clearly. I’m a lawyer, but I think the story of the lawsuit is written in a way that non-lawyers can easily understand while, importantly, the prose doesn’t sacrifice the complex legal subject matter. In other words, there is no dumbing down. How were you and Roberta able to achieve this and did it involve research on your part?

LD: Again, I can’t really speak directly to a particular book, but I will say in general, I think there is a benefit in having a person like me come into a project that gets into some kind of specific detail about a topic that the general reader might not know. I think it is helpful to have someone who serves as a layperson and can say, “I don’t think the general reader is going to understand this,” or “I think this needs to be explained more clearly.” For example, I did a book about the career of Herbie Hancock, the jazz pianist. It was the same sort of thing with him as it was with Roberta Kaplan as it was with Bob Baer (I helped him to do a book about Iran). I was able to say to them, “Look, you are experts in your field. You’re an expert in that subject, this is second nature to you, but I’m here to tell you that as a layperson, I don’t understand this, and so I think we need to explain it in a way that people who aren’t lawyers or jazz musicians or experts in international relations are going to understand.”

JG: That makes a lot of sense. That’s how you’re able to work with people over so many different areas. I’m just fascinated by it.

LD: I will say, though, that the editor for Herbie’s book said to me, “Do you know much about jazz?” I said, “No, but I think Herbie has that covered.”

JG: Roberta’s distinctive personality comes through very well in Then Comes Marriage. You’ve also ghostwritten for Euna Lee, the American journalist who was detained in North Korea for five months in 2009. Euna’s distinct voice is evident in The World is Bigger Now just as Gavin Newsom’s story about how to use technology to get people excited about and engaged in government is recounted in his own voice in Citizenville. All of these are unique voices, different from your own. Is ghostwriting something like method acting? In other words, do you need to subsume yourself in your subject’s personality and, if so, how is that done?

LD: That’s certainly the way I do it. I definitely get very immersed in the life and voice of whoever it is that I’m working with. I don’t do two books at once, because I think it would be very difficult to switch back and forth between subjects and between voices. I know there are some ghostwriters who do that, but that’s not something I’ve ever done. It is rather like acting in a way, because you just take on this voice and this person, and you kind of live it, to a certain extent.

JG: When ghostwriting, about how much time do you spend with your subject? Does it vary with each book? Do you usually do the bulk of the interviews in the beginning, or do you space them out over an extended period of time?

It is rather like acting in a way, because you just take on this voice and this person, and you kind of live it, to a certain extent.

LD: The short answer is, I take as much time as the person will give me. I always tell them, the more time they can give me, particularly in the beginning, the better the book will be. And yes, there’s definitely a lot more of that kind of thing at the beginning of each project, trying to understand how they think, and what the story is, and getting all the details of it. And then later on, when there’s the actual putting of the words onto paper, it doesn’t require quite as much face-time or phone-time or things of that nature. Definitely at the beginning, I always try to get as much time as I can with the person. It varies, of course, because all these people are very busy people and, depending on what they have going in their own lives, their work lives, their personal lives, some people are able to give me more time than other people. But I always try to get as much time as I can.

JG: When you’re ghostwriting, do you prefer to start a manuscript with your coauthor from scratch, or do you prefer to start with the subject’s own first draft? I imagine this also may vary and depend on the person whose story you’re telling.

LD: It definitely varies. I’ve done anything from starting from absolute scratch to the person’s having a full manuscript and presenting it to me, to work—or rework—as the case may be. There was one time when someone gave me a full manuscript, and I didn’t think it was particularly useable in the form it was in, so I would sort of pick and choose things out of it, and then we structured the book in a completely different way. So it really just depends. It often comes down to what the client’s preference is. Sometimes people really want to write it themselves and have me help out with some restructuring, and some people prefer not to do any writing at all and just are happy to hand it over.

JG: What advice do you have for a writer who is just starting out and wants to get into the field of ghostwriting?

LD: I would say the thing that’s interesting about ghostwriting is, as you say, it’s not simply that you can be a good writer and that means you will be a good ghostwriter. It really does mean subsuming your own voice to a certain extent. A lot about being a successful—and good—writer, generally, is finding the voice. In ghostwriting, you’re not doing that. You’re finding someone else’s voice. You have to be willing to subsume yourself to a certain extent in the service of doing that. So, think about whether ghostwriting is the kind of thing you’d like to do. I discovered I had a knack for it and enjoyed it really by accident. I was traveling after college, backpacking through Europe. I found that whenever I was writing letters home I would end up writing, just by chance, similar to the voice of whatever book I was reading. So, if I was reading Hemingway, I was writing these short punchy sentences in my letters. If I was reading Dostoevsky, I was writing longer more complex sentences. It struck me by chance. I thought, “Isn’t that interesting?” I didn’t even realize I was doing it; I just sort of unconsciously was doing it. That was the first time that I thought this might be an interesting tool that I have, an unusual skill that maybe I could use somehow.

JG: After ghostwriting seventeen books, earlier this year you released your first book-length piece of creative nonfiction in your own voice, Bears in the Streets. The book describes the three journeys you took across the entire expanse of Russia in 1995, 2005 and 2015. In 1995, you first met with and interviewed a diverse group of Russians in both major cities and remote villages, and in the subsequent years, you reconnected with the same people, and got their views about how their lives had changed and how the country had changed. After so many years of ghostwriting, what was different about writing Bears in the Streets in your own voice?

LD: It was a challenge for sure. Having done ghostwriting for so long and so many different books, I wasn’t really used to taking the lead on what the voice was in a particular book. I would spend time with the person and start to understand the rhythms, and then I would start to understand how the voice would unfold on the page. And so, certainly with my own, it was a process. It was very difficult in the beginning, in trying to figure out What is the rhythm here? What is the voice? I knew I was going to do this third trip in 2015 and then try to write a book about it. […] In 2013 or 2014, I’d been living in Los Angeles and I decided to take a class in stage storytelling, where you get up on stage and spend five or ten minutes telling a story. I thought it would be very interesting to do that as an exercise, to take a class and learn the basics of how you present yourself, how do people perceive you, what is your persona, what is your voice. And the class was actually extremely helpful; I started doing stage storytelling and that was very helpful. So, when I sat down to write my own book, there was definitely a little time at the very beginning where I thought, “I hope I can figure this out, I hope I can do this.” A couple times I even thought, “What if I was my own client, what would I advise myself to do? Let me see if I can write as if I’m ghostwriting my own memoir.” It was a truly weird exercise. In the end, I spent a lot of time getting that first chapter right, getting the first chapter in the voice that I thought reflected who I was and how I wanted the book to unfold. In my experience, once you get the first chapter right, the rest of it unfolds pretty naturally.

JG: In Bears in the Streets, you recounted a number of uncomfortable conversations during the 2005 and 2015 trips. Most of the people you spoke with in 2005 and 2015 loved Putin and were angered by America’s actions in the Ukraine and imposition of sanctions. One woman, Masha, was particularly hostile, and you mention in your book that you felt like throwing the remains of your sandwich across the table when she told you she had heard that the American government was behind the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers, because it wanted to boost the stock market. What was it like to discuss these topics with your interviewees when you were on the receiving end of such different information? Did you feel for the most part that you could speak freely? If not, when did you decide to hold back?

LD: I did for the most part feel like I could speak freely, and that the people I was speaking with understood that I was there to hear what they had to say, and to a certain extent to tell them what I thought—although I would say that my goal in going over and having these conversations with these people was not to get into contentious discussions or disagreements or arguments or anything like that. My goal was to listen. There’s not that many American writers or journalists who go over and spend a lot of time talking to ordinary Russian people, and so my message to them was: I want to hear what you have to say, I want to know what you think, and I am going to report that, and that’s what I did. The lunch with Masha was frustrating because she was very, very far over on the spectrum, feeling like, essentially, everything the United States was doing was not good, and everything that Russia was doing was better. That was frustrating for me because I didn’t want to get into an argument with her. I didn’t want to be having such a contentious discussion, but at the same time she was saying things that I felt were untrue, I felt were unfair, and so that was a tricky one. But I’ll say this too, I come from a family that has a lot of members with very different political views from me, so just because she was Russian it wasn’t all that different from sitting down at the Thanksgiving table or spending time with my family and having a contentious discussion about politics here, too. It’s very similar.

JG: I think that’s happening at a lot of family Thanksgiving dinners these days. The country is so polarized politically.

And the people who are angriest, and most upset and vehement, often are the people who feel that, ‘No one is listening to what I have to say, nobody cares about what I think, nobody cares about the situation that I find myself in.

LD: I do think one of the most important things you can do, if you disagree very strenuously with something that someone is saying—I think it’s very important rather than to simply say “That’s not true and here’s why”—to say very clearly to the person, “I hear what you’re saying and I understand why you feel that way.” Because I think to a very large degree, and I think it’s very true right now particularly in this country, people want to feel like they’re being heard. And the people who are angriest, and most upset and vehement, often are the people who feel that, “No one is listening to what I have to say, nobody cares about what I think, nobody cares about the situation that I find myself in.” And I try to always take time to say to people, “I hear you and I want you to know that I hear what you’re saying, and I am listening. And now here’s the reason why I’m not sure that that’s true, or why I feel differently.” But I always try to preface it with: “I hear what you’re saying.”

JG: That’s important, I think, or otherwise people are going to be so defensive they won’t hear what you have to say.

LD: That turns it more into a discussion than an argument. It’s very disarming to hear someone say to you, “I absolutely hear what you’re saying. Whether I agree with it or not, I’m listening.” You know, everybody wants to feel listened to and you can always see people’s body language change when you say that.

JG: Would you consider discussing, or have you discussed by email or phone, the current topic of Russian interference in the US election with your interviewees?

LD: It’s funny, I’m actually Facebook friends with most of them, more than half of the people I’ve interviewed. I could have that conversation with them, but I’ve tried not to do that just because it is really contentious. I feel pretty certain that they’re going to have different opinions than I do about what it is that’s going on. It’s not something I have sought out, to have that conversation and to essentially get into it with them.

JG: And they haven’t brought it up with you, either?

LD: No, they haven’t brought it up with me. We’re talking a lot about Russia in the United States right now, but we pretty much always talk about Putin and the Kremlin and what’s going on at the highest levels of government, and that includes the hacking, and all of the things going on that affected our election, and all of those various elements. What I really wanted to do with this book was talk about what is the “real” Russia, and not what’s going on between the Kremlin and the White House. A line I use when I give talks is that there’s 144 million Russians not named Vladimir Putin. Those are the ones I want to talk about. And not that their political opinions don’t matter: of course they matter. But I was more interested in, “What is your life like? What do you think about day to day?” Some people wanted to talk about politics but most people didn’t. So, it was more, “How is your life? Can you afford to do the things you want to do? Do you worry about your children?” Day-to-day things. What is it that occupies people, what do they think about? That’s what I was more interested in.

JG: In the news, there’s talk about Putin and the spymasters and Russian oligarchs, but your book really got into the roots of the Russian people themselves. That’s so important. In regard to that, I was struck by how consistently the people you met with were of the opinion that Americans did not respect them or take them seriously—for example, thinking there are bears roaming the streets in Russia. Do you have any suggestions about what actions Americans, and specifically, American writers, might take to help repair relations with the Russian people, notwithstanding this current political situation?

LD: I spoke at a conference in New York a couple of months ago and a guy came up to me afterwards and said: “I’ve been invited to go to St. Petersburg to host a roundtable discussion about such-and-such topic. But given everything that’s going on politically between our countries, I guess I probably shouldn’t do it.” And I told him, it’s the opposite. Now is exactly the time we should be going over there, accepting invitations to go to conferences, go speak, be tourists, or any of these kinds of things. I think it’s not a bad idea. The more that we are able to have connections between our people and the Russian people, the better off we’re going to be. Some people might think that’s really a Pollyanna point of view. But I can say that after spending three months in 2015, going through the country and sitting down and having dinners and talking: there’s so much connection that can be made just on a human level, and I think we have to be open to that.

JG: Have any of the people you’ve interviewed read your book, and if so, what has been their reaction?

…there’s so much connection that can be made just on a human level, and I think we have to be open to that.

LD: A few people have read the book, and I sent it out to several [others], and I’m waiting to hear what they have to say about it. The ones who have read it so far seem to be pretty pleased and okay with it. There’s a few I haven’t heard back from yet. We’ll see what they have to say. A lot of them don’t speak English and it’s not been published in Russian, so that definitely makes it more difficult for them to read and understand it, so it might take a little time.

JG: Are you planning a trip back to Russia in 2025, or do you have another personal project for a book on the horizon?

LD: I absolutely want to go back in 2025. I would love to go back and see everybody again and see how they’re doing. An interesting subtext and thread was how drastically technology has changed over this whole time period of the three trips, from this very basic crude website that we did in 1995 through being able to post to Facebook and use Facetime. So I’m also interested in that thread of it. I may well do another book before I go, on a different topic. There’s a couple of things I’m kicking around. For the moment, I’ve just gotten a new client for ghostwriting so I’m back doing that a little bit.

JG: I have to say that after reading your book I’m inspired to go to Russia myself. I had no idea about these various locations you talk about. The lake with all the scientific exploration, the Jewish homeland set up by the government. I’d never heard of those places.

LD: This is the thing. I gave a talk at a university and I said, “What do you think of when you think of Russian people?” And all of the students in the class said they think the Russian people are cold, unfriendly, and unhappy. And as you can see from having read the book, nothing could be further from the truth. There were so many fun and funny moments I had with people, and so many moments of joy. Of course, there were moments of difficulty and there were moments of pain, and there was everything: the whole gamut of the human experience. But for some reason, we just think of Russian people as these weird, cold automatons, which is just not true at all. So I’m glad to hear that it piqued your interest in going there. It’s a place that has amazing history, and there’s just so much to it. Obviously, the situation between our governments is very difficult right now. But I think that’s not a reason not to go, not a reason not to engage. I think we should definitely engage as much as we can.

JG: Thank you very much, Lisa. It’s been great speaking with you. Good luck to you on your next adventure and ghostwriting project, and I’m looking forward to reading more of your work. 

LD: Thank you so much, I appreciate it.

 

Judy Gitterman is a writer who lives in Santa Monica, California. She is an MFA candidate at Antioch University Los Angeles and a practicing attorney. She has served as co-lead fiction editor of Lunch Ticket, and as assistant editor for writing for young people/YA.

 

 

 

I first met Joe Ide in February 2017. I had gone to hear Joe read from his debut novel, IQ, at Chevalier’s Books in Larchmont. IQ had been assigned for me to read during my first semester in Antioch University’s MFA program in creative writing.

I arrived at Chevalier’s excited, but with a reasonable amount of skepticism. IQ was released in October 2016 and by February had a pile of accolades. The reviews suggested that Isaiah Quintabe (long for IQ) was the next great character in the storied history of detective fiction. I wanted to see for myself. Cut from the same urban cloth depicted in IQ, I would know if Joe were perpetrating a fraud.

During Joe’s reading of the first paragraph, it became clear why IQ had become a hit. The voice was sharp, genuine, and carried the same authority Joe admires in Elmore Leonard.

I met with Joe on July 17, 2017, near his home in Santa Monica. We sat on a park bench overlooking the Pacific Ocean on a cloudless day. It was two Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley fans talking story. Joe gave me an autographed copy of Righteous, his second novel in the Isaiah Quintabe series, that would be released on October 17, 2017. And, he offered to read my novel when it was complete. It was damn good day.

Andre Hardy: Welcome, Joe. Why don’t we just jump right into this thing. I want to be a writer. Give me your best advice.

Joe Ide: Well, let’s see. Aspiring writers assume that because they’ve finished the book, they know how to write a book. Which couldn’t be less true. It’s multiple skillsets that you not only have to learn, you have to master while you’re leaning. It’s a really difficult process and aspiring writers, most of the ones that I’ve read, don’t understand that. They don’t understand that it’s a profession and they have to take it as seriously as a med student takes med school. There is no established writer out there who hasn’t taken years to master their craft. So, somebody hands me a novel and says, “Well, you know I worked on the weekends.” [Laughter] Keep working.

AH: That brings up an interesting question. How did you develop your skillset?

JI: I was a screenwriter before I wrote the book, so I had some grounding in writing. And screenwriting taught me to be visual and brief, succinct and to capture a scene in very few words. But when I started to write long-form prose, I discovered that I was just terrible! It was embarrassing! I had to go back to the beginning. I was reading On Writing Well and Elements of Style just to try and learn to write good, clear, straight-up prose. And it took me a year. I’m writing the book all this time, but I’m also working on working on my prose itself. It took a full year before I was confident that I could write prose. And then another two years to finish the book. And in that process, I developed my own style. It took that long.

AH: How long did you have the concept of IQ (Isaiah Quintabe) in your in your head?

JI: I grew up loving Sherlock Holmes. I’d read all fifty-six stories and four novels multiple times before I was twelve years old. And he represented power to me. I mean, I was a small kid in a big neighborhood. And I wasn’t a badass. But language just seemed like a form of power. Intelligence seemed like a form of power. To know that Sherlock Holmes could control his world with just a brain seemed amazing to me.

…language just seemed like a form of power. Intelligence seemed like a form of power.

And so, he was always my alter ego. And then I grew up where I grew up; I grew up in South Central, LA. And you know the hood is the hood. And when it came time to write the book, all those elements sort of came together by themselves. I never considered writing any other character but a Sherlock Holmes character. And then I used my own background as the setting. And you know, I didn’t actually choose to write it; it was the only thing I could write. It was the most accessible—within my wheelhouse, it felt comfortable—so that’s what I wrote.

AH: Stephen King said that his characters are always infused with some part of him, particularly his fears—he doesn’t like spiders or snakes. What part of Isaiah is you that shows up on the page?

 JI: A lot of Isaiah is what I want to be, what I always wanted to be. Cool, under control, all kinds of competencies. You know to have that kind of presence where you don’t say much, but people know you’re in the room. So, it wasn’t so much about what parts of me are in him as much as he has things that I wanted to be. He does have elements that are similar to me. He is a loner; he doesn’t have any trouble being by himself, which fits me. I’m not, at this point in my life, as troubled as he is, but there are those things that are recognizable.

 AH: In the epigraph to your book, it says: “Saving you is the only thing that will bring me peace for all the wrong I have done. That is my truth” [from TigerLily, by Jillian Peery]. How does that relate to Isaiah?

JI: Isaiah, as a young man, did a lot of terrible things. He’s done some terrible things. He’s hurt a lot of people. He’s hurt his community. And later on, when he becomes this sort of unlicensed private investigator, every case he takes is really penance for the things that he has done. He is always trying to make up for a debt that he can never really pay back. And so, [in] “saving you,” as it’s written in the forward, Isaiah is really him saving himself.

AH: Is his relationship with Flaco an extension of that concept? [Flaco’s character is wounded in gang crossfire. IQ, because he feels responsible, visits him in the hospital and is moved to become his benefactor.]

JI: Yes, very much so. Flaco was the kid that was hurt in the gang war that Isaiah felt partially responsible for starting. And so, a lot of his energy, a lot of his guilt, a lot of his compensation is directed towards Flaco.

AH: In the first chapter, Isaiah saves a young girl who’s been kidnapped, then disappears. The girl’s father wonders why Isaiah didn’t stick around to be a hero and to get his name in the paper. Do you consider Isaiah a hero?

JI: I do, but he doesn’t. He’s driven by his past. He’s not thinking about the heroic aspects. He feels as if he’s doing what he has to do for his community. He doesn’t want the adulation. He wants to rid himself of his burden of guilt.

AH: That leads me to the next question. Walter Mosley says, “I write about black heroes.” Why do you think it’s important that these kinds of stories get told?

JI: You know, I think it’s part of raising awareness about diversity—that people of color, black people, which are what mostly populates my book, are not a monolith. That they are a range of different kinds of people, as there are in in any ethnic group. And I wanted to write someone who was heroic but not by wielding a gun. He didn’t find his courage in violence.

He didn’t want to be a criminal. He’s not one of those [stereotypical] people, and that’s one of the reasons I wrote him the way he is. I wanted somebody thoughtful and quiet and watchful and who did things out of a sense of good, out of a sense of decency and serving his community. I think it’s important to have those kinds of characters of color. You rarely see that. Unfortunately, the character is either gun-wielding or in some way a criminal, and not especially heroic. There’s always collateral damage; I mean not just heroes of color but across the board with fictional heroes. So, I thought it was important to contribute a character who was a good, honest, decent man.

AH: Once you completed the novel and began the process of trying to get it published, because Isaiah was a different take on a black hero, how was it initially received?

JI: The first six publishers it was given to, passed. But not because of Isaiah’s ethnicity or even the setting. They passed because they didn’t know how to market it. It did not fall into a neat niche. It wasn’t entirely within the conventions. It wasn’t procedural, it wasn’t noir, it wasn’t a heist book. They simply said they didn’t know how to market it (although [they said] we think Joe is very talented). But Little Brown got it [Little, Brown and Company, New York]. They developed a marketing plan around the book instead of trying to fit the book into some pat publicity campaign. And God bless them.

AH: How did you secure your agent?

I wanted to write someone who was heroic but not by wielding a gun. He didn’t find his courage in violence.

JI: Man, it was absolute luck. It’s one of those stories that never happen to anybody. I finish the manuscript, and I have no connections in publishing. None. All my screenwriting connections are over and done and I just, I’m sending it out to readers. And I have this cousin, his name is Francis Fukuyama. He’s a world-class political scientist. He’s the guy who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. He runs the Center for Democracy at Stanford. He’s on the board at Rand. The last time I talked to him, he was in Shanghai consulting with the government. [Laughter] You know he’s one of those guys where you just don’t believe you can share DNA. I asked him if he would read my manuscript. He is a very kind, generous man, and somehow he found time to read a crime novel written by his cousin. And lo and behold, he liked it. Then he asked if I had an agent. I said, “No, I’ve got to get one.” He said, “Well let me introduce you to my agent,” who turned out to be a woman named Esther Newberg. Esther has been the head of literary at ICM in New York for twenty-five years. She is arguably the top literary agent in New York. So, it’s like my entire writing life came down to what I call my Esther moment. [Laughter] It was about Esther sitting down, opening up my book, and starting to read. That was my journey to an agent. And I still don’t believe it.

AH: How long did it take you to write IQ?

JI: Three years.

AH: How many drafts?

JI: Somewhere around twenty. I knew that I would have a very narrow window with which to impress my Esther, whoever that turned out to be; I [didn’t] know at the time. These people are very busy; they have to read books for a living, and so they have no patience whatsoever. Most of the people I’ve talked to said that they will not read any more than twenty-five pages before they close the book. If they’re not happy, that’s it. I met a woman from Amazon. She is one of the people responsible for the ten best books of the month. She said she knows right away, within five, ten pages. You have to give that person reasons to keep reading. If you don’t smack them in the face right off with something, with your writing or your character or whatever: if you don’t slap them right away, they pass. It’s over that quickly. The prologue in IQ is six pages long, and I rewrote that forty times. It was all riding on that. I crafted each and every sentence. I selected each and every word. And every time I went back I asked myself, “Can this be better? Can this be more vivid? Can it be more colorful? Can it be more interesting? Is this the best anecdote I can think of?” Yeah, and over and over and over and over again. That was my window. I knew it. And looking back, I mean at the time, my wife thought I was a little insane. But yeah, it was the best decision I made.

AH: So, twenty drafts. Wow. How did the story change from draft one to draft twenty?

JI: Everything, from completely rewriting a chapter, to moving chapters around, to adding and subtracting characters, to taking out whole segments of dialogue and rewriting it, and cutting. I cut at least as much as the book itself. The book is three hundred pages; I cut three hundred pages. It was just a process of never being satisfied.

AH: What was your gauge, your beacon of what you thought would make them keep reading? How did you know?

JI: By comparing myself to the great writers. I don’t think aspiring writers do that at all. I would read Elmore Leonard side by side with my book. And when you begin that process of comparing yourself to other writers, the discrepancy is appalling. [Laughter] And I think before you consider giving a book to somebody important, you have to be at least credible. You have to be at least not embarrassed by what you’ve written—that you would be comfortable giving it to Elmore Leonard. You have to be confident enough to do that. That was always really my standard. Would I be comfortable giving my book to Elmore Leonard? You know he and Walter Mosley are my guys. And that really gives you pause. If Walter Mosley was to read your book right now, would that be okay with you?

AH: You made a craft decision to write IQ in third person. In a classic sense, these stories are often told in first person. Why the creative decision to write it in third person? What advantages do you think that gave you?

JI: Well, I took it from Elmore Leonard, one of the many things I shoplifted from the way he writes. What he says is that by taking a character’s of point of view, you not only can put the expository information out there, but in doing so, you can also reveal the character.

You’re writing from that character’s point of view, and he may have a whole different take on what’s happening emotionally with the other characters, or on the situation itself. And so, as you’re revealing the scene, you’re also revealing that character—what’s happening in his head. And from his point of view, not from the outside looking in. For me it was about texture, having different points of view looking at the same events right now.

AH: The novel switches back and forth between 2013 and 2005. Talk about that choice and why you decided to structure it that way.

JI One of my pet peeve[s] in the detective genre is that many of the characters just show up fully formed. They have all these skills, and they’re just there. And they are being incredibly smart and clever. But they never tell you—well, almost never tell you: how did the guy get that way? Where did all this stuff come from? You know, and if he’s so damn smart why is he not working for NASA? And so, I wanted to write Isaiah’s backstory. The writing problem is that if you write it chronologically, you end up with the “A story” being right in the middle of the book. And you really want to start off, especially in our genre, with that A story. So, structurally, I really didn’t have a choice except to go back and forth, so I could start that A case at the beginning of the book and then go back.

AH: As opposed to doing it in flashbacks?

JI:  Yeah. The backstory is half the book. I wanted to separate it from the present story and give it its due. It is the reason why Isaiah does what he does.

AH: I just fished reading an interview with Salman Rushdie. The interviewer asked whether artists should be politically correct. What is your take?

JI: I don’t really think in those terms. I think anybody should write whatever the hell they want to write. And then we’ll all decide whether we like the book. I mean, I don’t think that there should be any restrictions on what’s written and who writes it. If David Duke wanted to write the biography of Jesse Jackson, that’s okay with me. Because it’s okay if Jesse Jackson, you know, writes the biography of David Duke. I think I have an idea which book I’d like the most. But write what you want to write. That’s how I feel about it. I just don’t put those kinds of boundaries on things. Write whatever the hell you want. I’ll read it and decide if I like it.

AH: In our world of Rachel Dolezal and political correctness, did you ever consider that IQ might be viewed as racial appropriation? 

JI: [Pause] It never occurred to me. I was writing a story that had black characters. They just happened to be black. And I had to put myself in their shoes and ask myself what would they say and how would they say it? That was the only consideration. And from my own experience, I was pretty convinced that that’s how they would say it. They would use the word “nigger” in that situation, often multiple times. If anybody has actually been on the streets, and talked to some gangsters, you’ll hear that word more than pronouns. And so, it just wasn’t a restriction. I just wrote the character, and there were no other considerations.

AH: I’m with you on that. I thought it was ridiculous that people wanted to sanitize Mark Twain.

JI: I don’t think anybody owns history. It’s a real slippery slope. I mean, if I can’t write about somebody else’s ethnic group, does that mean that a black man can’t write about a Japanese man? Or a Jewish man? Does that mean Spike Lee can’t direct a movie about white people and suburbia because he’s black and he lives in Brooklyn? That logic falls apart really fast.

AH: What was the Edgar experience like? [Each spring, Mystery Writers of America presents the Edgar Awards, widely acknowledged to be the most prestigious awards in the genre. IQ was nominated in the category of Best First Novel.]

I think anybody should write whatever the hell they want to write. And then we’ll all decide whether we like the book.

JI: First of all, you read about the Edgar Award. You see it on the book covers of all these really fantastic writers. Then somebody calls you up and says you’ve been nominated for an Edgar? [Laughter] I was completely and totally incredulous. I wrote that book in utter isolation. And so, to go from the mindset—where I’m just hoping I don’t have to self-publish, and sell copies in the doggie park—to go from that mindset to somebody talking to me about an Edgar Award… [Laughter] It’s like cooking dinner for your family and winning the James Beard award. It does not compute. They flew me to New York. I go to this big reception. I was, the whole time, incredulous. I kept thinking, What am I doing here? Why do these people want to talk to me?

AH: So you never expected any of your success?

JI: No. I had very low expectations. My highest hope was some quirky publisher would give the new guy a break. That was the biggest thing that I thought could happen to that book. So yeah, everything has been a damn surprise.

AH: I also heard you’ve sold the TV rights as well?

JI: Yeah. The book sold to Little Brown and then it was like, I don’t know, six weeks later, that it got optioned for TV. Again, I had worked as a screenwriter. And I worked a fair bit. I worked for the majors, I did rewrites, wrote pilots and all kinds of stuff. But I never got anything made. And that was one of the reasons that I wrote the novel. I mean, I was living a pretty good life. But to work that hard, and then have twelve people read it, some studio executive development people, and then it gets put in a vault. That just got to be too humiliating.

AH: What should readers expect in the sequel, Righteous?

JI: The plan from the outset was to have the characters grow from book to book; that is, there would always be a big story, the A story. There would always be backstories to enrich the characters. At the end of IQ, for example, Isaiah lays down most of his guilt. He unburdens himself of the guilt he’s been carrying around since he was a teenager. And so, in Righteous, he realizes that because he’s been bearing that cross, he’s lived an incredibly isolated life. He has no friends. He’s dated once in a blue moon. He realizes that he’s lonely.

Righteous is a lot about him trying to reach out, trying to come out of his shell and join the rest of the world. So that’s his journey from IQ to Righteous, personally. Dotson, at the end of IQ, says that he and his girlfriend are having a baby. Now Dotson is a combination of every hustler I ever knew or knew about. In book two [Righteous], there’s Dodson trying to deal with having a baby—being a father. Those are the kinds of things that are the most interesting. There are always big cases to write about. There always new bad guys to write about. But those are some of the things the reader can expect. They can expect the same kind of action but they can also expect growth from the characters.

AH: Will we learn more about his relationship with Marcus?

JI: We will. He restarts his investigation into Marcus’s death and learns it wasn’t an accident. Marcus was killed. That’s the “B story” through Righteous, Isaiah trying to hunt down the killer of his brother. To go back all those years and find evidence and piece together what actually happened to his brother Marcus.

AH: Last question. How long did it take you to write Righteous?

JI: Eight months. What happened after IQ was—once the book got all these positive reviews, and lots of people liked it—it gave me so much more confidence. I wasn’t sitting on my own shoulder second-guessing myself every sentence. I could just feel comfortable writing. This is how I write. I’m comfortable with it, and so are the readers. I could just write unimpeded. I could get out of my own way and write. And I also found that in the process of writing IQ, and in the process of writing Righteous, that I had more command over the tools of the trade. Things occurred to me faster; I could come up with that simile quicker, and I could see the images quicker. I was not in a hurry. I could just write faster. I also have the luxury of writing full-time, all day, seven days a week. And that’s a real luxury.

 

Andre Hardy is an MFA candidate at Antioch University Los Angeles. He is a graduate of St. Mary’s College of California, and was the fourth pick of the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1984 NFL draft. Inspired by Chester Himes, Clarence Cooper Jr., and Walter Mosley, he writes hard-boiled, gumshoe stories with an urban twist. His essays and short stories have been published in Lunch Ticket and TribeLA Magazine. He lives in Los Angeles, where his day job is executive director of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society.