Matt Walsh and Andrew Klavan sit down to discuss Andrew's newest book and conservatives creating art. Order his book here: https://store.dailywire.com/products/a-woman-underground-by-andrew-klavan Today's Sponsor: Hallow: Try Hallow for 3 Months FREE at https://hallow.com/MattWalsh
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| - - Well, sitting here with someone you may have heard of, Andrew Klavan, this... | |
| Set is way too nice for an interview with you, I guess. | |
| I think it is. | |
| I'm actually out of my league here. | |
| We stepped it up way too much. | |
| We've got to dial it back a little bit. | |
| So, you have a book that just came out, A Woman Underground is what it's called. | |
| I wanted to talk to you about kind of the creative process. | |
| First of all, it goes into writing books because I'm just fascinated by that. | |
| And then some other things. | |
| But before we get into that, so what... | |
| And there's the book right there. | |
| Tell us about the book, first of all. | |
| Well, this is the fourth book in the Cameron Winter series. | |
| And it's kind of the crisis book. | |
| Cameron Winter's kind of unsteady mentally is kind of cracking up. | |
| And he finds that the woman that he... | |
| Loved his whole life, this kind of flame that he's kept and he's lost track of her. | |
| He finds her. | |
| He realizes she's still around and he starts looking for her and as he starts looking for her, he realizes that a killer is looking for her at the same time and he has to see if he can find her before that. | |
| It also takes place in the midst of riots and extremist politics and kind of an America like this America, but a little bit dialed up. | |
| So it's not a political novel, but it's a novel that has a lot of politics in it. | |
| So that book's probably, what, 280 pages or so? | |
| Yeah, it's close to 300, yeah. | |
| And I've written a few books. | |
| None of them were very good. | |
| But nonfiction, and I want to talk about that too, because we're talking off air a little bit about nonfiction versus fiction. | |
| I can't even wrap my head around writing a novel, like writing a story. | |
| I can't, I just can't even, I wouldn't know where to begin. | |
| And you've written, how many novels have you written? | |
| Over 30, yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So... | |
| I don't even know how to ask the question exactly, but how do you organize your mind to sit down and start writing that book? | |
| What's the actual process that ends with that book sitting there? | |
| Well, you start out a lot of times with a what if. | |
| What if this happened? | |
| What if the only woman you ever loved came back in your life but was in trouble? | |
| What if you walked in to look at your baby and make sure she was okay and she was gone? | |
| What if some wild thing just pops into your head? | |
| And you kind of let it just sit, you know, sometimes for years and until it finds the perfect person to be in the story. | |
| Which is one of the interesting things about writing a series is you have to have stories that actually resonate with the character. | |
| Because you don't care if a guy solves a mystery. | |
| You only care what happens to people internally. | |
| So for me, everything has to work perfectly. | |
| As a character thing. | |
| So even if I have a fight scene or a chase scene or something, it has to be important to the guy internally. | |
| Because it's a book, it's not a movie. | |
| It's like you can't just watch something and think, that's exciting. | |
| So as it unfolds, you think, what would happen if this? | |
| You usually come up with some kind of ending. | |
| And then you start to build the steps that go on. | |
| And it's always about the character and the story, for me. | |
| It's always like, you know... | |
| It's always, why is this hard for this guy to do? | |
| You know, not just why is it hard to do, but why does it challenge this guy? | |
| And so, Winter is a very psychologically oriented character. | |
| You know, he's kind of trying to fix his... | |
| He used to be a government assassin, essentially, and now he's come back to the country, and the country is kind of falling apart. | |
| It's corrupt. | |
| He starts to wonder, what was I doing? | |
| You know, what was I fighting for? | |
| And it makes him unravel, you know? | |
| So you have to really be dealing with the guy from the inside out. | |
| And that's the way it gets built over time. | |
| Do you outline it? | |
| I do, yeah. | |
| A lot of people just sit down and write, but I know everything I'm going to say before I say it. | |
| How long does it take you to write that? | |
| This one, it takes about a year from start to finish. | |
| Including editing and all that? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Including various drafts, yeah. | |
| And you've also written, of course, screenplays. | |
| Yep. | |
| Takes six weeks, and you get paid better. | |
| Yeah, so I assume it's a quicker process, because there's a lot less writing that goes into it, but... | |
| Is even like the creative, the way you think about it, is that different too? | |
| Are you also starting with a what-if and building it out, or is it a different... | |
| You do start with that, but first of all, the characters... | |
| The first film I ever did was called Shock to the System. | |
| It was based on a novel by Simon Brett. | |
| And I... I was a novelist, so I wrote it like a novel. | |
| I did long, long character sketches, and what was he going to be like? | |
| They hired Michael Caine to be in it, and I saw the first day of Rush's, you know, the first rough cut of it, and Michael came in and I thought, what was I doing? | |
| Michael Caine creates the character. | |
| It's going to be Michael Caine. | |
| You know, it's going to be whatever he says it's going to be. | |
| So it's much, much easier. | |
| It's kind of like building the frame to something, and the director and the actors all put it together. | |
| And seriously, if it takes you six weeks to write a screenplay, It's probably because you were busy doing something else. | |
| There's very few words. | |
| It is kind of, every word that appears on screen has to be great. | |
| So every line of dialogue has to be great. | |
| But the descriptions only have to convince people in Hollywood to buy it. | |
| They don't have to be that good. | |
| So it's much easier. | |
| What drew you into novels, to writing novels to begin with? | |
| I just loved them as a kid. | |
| I just loved them. | |
| They formed a lot of my role models for what a guy was like, should be like. | |
| I started reading tough guy detective stories, Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe stories, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. | |
| And those are the kind of guys who kind of spoke to me because I was kind of living in this suburb, this leafy suburb and everything like this. | |
| And I thought, no, these are the guys who like never bend. | |
| They never bend. | |
| And like Raymond Chandler had this great essay about his character. | |
| He invented the phrase mean streets. | |
| And he said, down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean. | |
| And I must have been 15 when I read that. | |
| And I thought, bingo. | |
| That's what I want to be like. | |
| And so I just started creating stories about those kind of characters. | |
| I'm not like that, but I create stories about those characters. | |
| What do you think it takes to be a good writer? | |
| What does it require? | |
| The first thing is, some people have talent, and some people don't. | |
| You can just see it the minute you start reading. | |
| And I always had a gift for it. | |
| I always had an ability to do it. | |
| And then I did stuff... | |
| If you don't have the talent, you think it's just... | |
| There are some people, you just don't have it, and that's it? | |
| There are some people who have no talent, except that they know how to build crappy stories that people will buy, and they make a lot of money. | |
| And that's all good, but I can't get past page three, because the minute I start reading, I think this is garbage, you know? | |
| I won't name them, but there are a lot of them on the bestsellers list, you know? | |
| Why don't you name them? | |
| Name one. | |
| No, I can't. | |
| Okay. | |
| I can't even name one. | |
| But they know who they are. | |
| Well... | |
| I don't want to go off on a different tangent, but I think about this a lot too, about talent. | |
| Do you think, because this applies in many fields, especially in the creative field, and I think I generally believe that it's like you either have it or you don't. | |
| And if you don't have it, you never will. | |
| Is it possible to, you don't have it, and then to somehow gain it? | |
| No. | |
| You know, I have this magic touch because I grew up, my father was a famous DJ, and I grew up in radio, and I have a magic ability to hear broadcasting talent. | |
| So the first time I heard Shapiro... | |
| On the air, I actually got in touch with him and I said, you know, you could have a big career. | |
| He was on some little, you know, L.A. station doing a show with three people in it. | |
| And I said, they should take those other two people off the air. | |
| And, you know, you have it. | |
| Knowles can pretend to have it. | |
| I was just talking to Glenn Beck today. | |
| Glenn Beck is the greatest broadcaster alive. | |
| And before I went on the air, I was on the phone listening to his commercials. | |
| And I was embarrassed that I ever went near a microphone just listening to Beck work because he just has this thing. | |
| It just comes across the mic. | |
| And look, you know, in your movie, I can see it. | |
| I can see that you have this way of communicating through the camera. | |
| It's just something people have or they don't have. | |
| You cannot buy that. | |
| You cannot buy it. | |
| You can hone it, you know? | |
| Like Kevin Costner Doesn't work very hard. | |
| He strolls on and he's handsome. | |
| There are a lot of people these days having a fair amount of success in creative fields, even though they have no talent for them at all. | |
| They suck, yeah. | |
| Because we don't... | |
| We don't reward talent. | |
| People reward stuff that fits in with the narrative and all these things. | |
| It's really interesting for me, because the other thing now, after all these years, I can tell a good writer when I see one, and you can read one paragraph, and you just think, this is garbage. | |
| But it might have something that the audience is going to like, and it is a business, and if you sell copies, you sell copies. | |
| What tells you in one paragraph, so in one paragraph you can tell if someone's a good writer. | |
| Yeah. | |
| What are you looking for in a paragraph? | |
| It's not something you're looking for. | |
| It's a kind of magic that just comes across. | |
| The scene leaps to life. | |
| One of the things that people keep saying about this is they start it and they can't finish it. | |
| That's because I'm good at what I do. | |
| You can see it immediately that I'm in the story. | |
| I see the things that they're describing and they're kind of Resonate with me. | |
| And then you can see somebody who's just phoning it in or working really hard but just doesn't have what it takes. | |
| We were talking off air a little bit about non-fiction versus fiction. | |
| You were saying it's the challenges of not only writing fiction but also getting people to read fiction. | |
| Wow, especially in the right, yeah. | |
| Yeah, and I'm totally a culprit here because I generally only read non-fiction. | |
| I'll go through weird phases. | |
| I went through a weird phase like Eight years ago where I just got into Russian literature and I started reading Dostoevsky. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Tolstoy. | |
| And then I'm not interested anymore and then I go on to nonfiction. | |
| But I also recognize that that's a problem. | |
| I know that there's real value in reading fiction and this idea that you should only read nonfiction because you're learning. | |
| You're learning about a thing that actually happened. | |
| Right. | |
| There's only value in that. | |
| I think that's kind of the thought process, especially if conservatives only read nonfiction. | |
| That's sort of my thought process, but I also recognize that that's not right. | |
| What's the value of fiction? | |
| Fiction grows your life. | |
| There's just no question about it. | |
| If you read really good fiction, and it can be genre fiction, be fantasy, mysteries, all these things, if it's really good, it grows your life. | |
| You get to turn off all the things that are usually on in life. | |
| Your moral sense, your anxiety, your worries about things. | |
| All of a sudden you just can observe the world and experience the world. | |
| Fiction is an experience. | |
| It's not an actual thought process. | |
| You read something and you live it. | |
| Somebody dies. | |
| You cry. | |
| Somebody murders somebody. | |
| You're afraid. | |
| You're horrified. | |
| So it's an actual experience. | |
| And then you have an experience that you would never have had in your life. | |
| And you get to live it without having to make decisions about it. | |
| And somehow, like I've read a lot of fiction, I've been reading it all my life, and somehow you just know life better afterwards. | |
| It's an amazing, amazing thing. | |
| And conservatives are very practical people a lot of times and also very suspicious people. | |
| Why are you telling me this if it's not true? | |
| And it's really interesting. | |
| And men read less fiction than women, and I'm kind of a man's writer. | |
| And so it really is a challenge. | |
| I've written a couple of nonfiction books, and you can get interviews on every conservative... | |
| there is, you know, they know who I am, they wanna talk to me, and here I am talking about a subject, they have a book, they get that. | |
| But if you have a book that's fiction, a story, they don't understand, unless it has a news hook, they don't understand what it's about. | |
| There are a few exceptions, Glenn Beck is one of them, Glenn Beck reads fiction, so when he talks to you, you actually know, he actually knows what you're doing. | |
| Rush Limbaugh used to read a certain kind of fiction. | |
| But most conservative guys are like, you know, we're moralists. | |
| And so fiction is beyond morality. | |
| It's kind of a meta thing. | |
| The morality you get from it is understanding life better. | |
| And so that's a moral enterprise. | |
| but fiction can have bad guys who win and good guys who lose and unfair things that happen and drives conservatives crazy. | |
| You know, we talk a big game about traditional values, but how many of us are actually walking the walk when it comes to prayer? | |
| Let's be honest with ourselves for a moment. | |
| Most of us are about as consistent with our prayer life as Congress is with balancing the budget. | |
| We've all been there. | |
| Prayer feels so daunting to get started. | |
| We end up not doing it at all. | |
| Make excuses. | |
| I'm too busy. | |
| I don't know how. | |
| I'll do it tomorrow. | |
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| What do you say to the argument that the novel has been replaced these days by shows and films and that's sort of our version of the novel? | |
| Yeah, I think... | |
| Is that the same value? | |
| No, there's nothing as intimate as the novel. | |
| There's nothing like... | |
| There's nothing at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're alone, you can actually connect with another mind in a novel and it's just incredibly direct. | |
| Michael Caine creates a character, but now you're no longer reading me. | |
| I wrote what he said, but now you're getting it interpreted by Michael Caine. | |
| Where this, you're getting something direct. | |
| You're getting a vision of life direct. | |
| When you pay attention and when it's done well, it's a remarkable experience. | |
| And people who love novels will tell you that you just get carried away in a way you don't anywhere else. | |
| And so the novel is now no longer what it was when I was a kid, which was the major form of entertainment. | |
| I mean, that's the movies. | |
| Actually, even when I was a kid, it was still the movies. | |
| But it's still different. | |
| It's like theater. | |
| You know, theater is not the main form of entertainment, but there's nothing like going on and seeing a live play, seeing an actor work live. | |
| It's remarkable. | |
| And there's nothing like picking up a story that's going directly from one mind to another. | |
| Do you think there are any television shows that have almost made it to the level of a novel in terms of the intimacy of the storytelling and the depth of it? | |
| Nothing is intimate, but there are some that have been as complex, like The Sopranos, I think, was up there. | |
| When I watched The Sopranos, I knew I was watching a work of art. | |
| When I watched a couple of seasons of Game of Thrones, I thought that. | |
| TV has just gotten so much better than it used to be. | |
| When you go back and look at television, it's amazing how bad it was. | |
| And it really has gotten better. | |
| But it still hasn't got that utter engagement that you get with a book, for me. | |
| Now, I hate to pay you a compliment, but you're a real writer. | |
| You're a good writer. | |
| I'm an actual writer, yeah. | |
| So you're an artist? | |
| Yes. | |
| There's not a lot of company. | |
| You don't have a lot of company on the right, especially among conservative commentators. | |
| A lot of conservative commentators write books, and 99% of them are just god-awful terrible books. | |
| Why is that? | |
| Why is it so rare? | |
| You know, actually, this book is a good answer to this question. | |
| This is a book in which it's about American life now. | |
| And so it has to have politics in it, right? | |
| It has to have people on the right and people on the left and the kind of tensions that we're all living with now. | |
| You can't write about contemporary America without writing about politics. | |
| But the main character has no politics. | |
| He doesn't care. | |
| It's one of the running gags. | |
| People keep trying to convince him of their politics. | |
| And he just says, I don't care. | |
| I'm just looking for this girl. | |
| I just want to find this girl. | |
| To do that takes a lot of discipline. | |
| You really have to understand what the novel is about to not tell people what to think, but to let the experience live. | |
| And conservatives want to tell you what to think. | |
| And so do leftists. | |
| That's why so much left-wing art is crap. | |
| It's like they want to preach to you about what's right and what's wrong. | |
| And I just want each character to sort of make his case in the story. | |
| I mean, this has a main character and you live in his head. | |
| But there are a lot of characters and they're very different. | |
| And every time one of them opens his mouth, you're getting an entirely different consciousness and an entirely different way of looking at the world. | |
| And that's not something political people are very comfortable with. | |
| I mean, it is the way I look at the world. | |
| Even when I'm talking about politics, I kind of look at the world like I understand there are people who disagree and see it from a different way and all that stuff. | |
| And they should be in prison, of course, but that's not the way I write a novel. | |
| When I write a novel, I put it all aside and just let the characters live in the story. | |
| It's hard to do. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's true that the extreme left has the same problem, which is why they do terrible art these days. | |
| But also, you don't have to go back that far to find a time when liberals were... | |
| Making great art. | |
| At least films and shows and even music. | |
| And it does just seem that like... | |
| Only liberals were doing it. | |
| It's like almost all the great artists... | |
| Certainly in modern American culture have been liberals and probably if you go back historically all the great ones were liberal by their own standards. | |
| But liberal is different than leftist. | |
| I think you're right that you have to be liberal in the sense that you allow each person to be himself. | |
| You know, I don't know about you, but I always get these letters. | |
| How can I convince so-and-so to believe so-and-so? | |
| And I think, you know, just leave them alone, you know, just be who they are, which is what art is about in a lot of ways is letting people, you know, I don't think Shakespeare was a villain, but when he wrote Macbeth, he let Macbeth be this complete person who had motives for what he was doing and a reason for being in a way of looking at things. | |
| And so it is, you do have to be liberal in that sense. | |
| But there are plenty of political conservatives that keep their heads down who have been great artists. | |
| I mean, Cormac McCarthy just died. | |
| I'm absolutely positive he was a conservative. | |
| And, you know, he never came out about it. | |
| I don't know if you saw that thing with Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick, where they were objecting to the fact that Donald Trump used Full Metal Jacket in one of his ads. | |
| And Kubrick's daughter came out and said he voted for Reagan. | |
| He would have loved Trump. | |
| And he just kept it quiet. | |
| So there are a lot more politically conservative artists But you can't be conservative in the sense that you believe there's only one way to live or that anybody who disagrees... | |
| I mean, for instance, I'm an ardent anti-feminist, but this book has a feminist in it who's an absolutely lovely person and who the hero, who's a very patriarchal guy, he loves her. | |
| He thinks she's a wonderful person, even though he can't stand anything she writes or says. | |
| You have to be liberal in that sense, I think, to create art. | |
| We've got to wrap it up. | |
| How do you think we get conservatives more involved in art? | |
| Well, I've been banging this drum for 20 years. | |
| This is why I started talking about this. | |
| Because when I lived in England for a long time and I came back and found our culture so sickened and twisted that I was shocked. | |
| And so I started giving speeches to conservative groups saying, you know, this is about the movies. | |
| This is not about winning elections. | |
| This is about talking to people about what life is really like and showing them what life is like. | |
| 20 years ago, when I started doing that, they looked at me like I was nuts. | |
| Like, they kind of thought I was cute because I was working in Hollywood, and I dressed all in black, and they thought, like, wow, this is cool, you know, Hollywood guy. | |
| But they had no idea what I was talking about. | |
| Today they do. | |
| Today they get it. | |
| They still think that what we need is more propaganda movies that'll sell, you know, conservatism. | |
| But it's starting to change. | |
| I mean, this place, look at this place. | |
| I mean, you made two cultural things. | |
| I know they're nonfiction, but they're still cultural works. | |
| Jeremy understands, obviously, that movies have to be created by people like us. | |
| That's the important thing. | |
| It's not that we write conservative things, it's that conservatives make stuff. | |
| So I think it's changing, and I think I would describe it as a field of ice with little... | |
| Spriggs, you know, popping up through it. | |
| So I'm kind of hopeful about it. | |
| And I just think you've got to keep explaining to conservatives what art is and the fact that conservative art is not like conservative life. | |
| You know, I live a conservative life. | |
| I'm a married man, a family man, a religious man. | |
| I, you know, love my country. | |
| That's the life I live. | |
| But that's not what art is about. | |
| Art is about, like, you know, dramatic things that happen because of clashes of personality. | |
| And that's a very different thing. | |
| And it's like I said, it enlarges your life. | |
| The people who wrote The Constitution and the Declaration read Shakespeare, they read Euripides, they read the Greeks, they read art. | |
| That's why they had that broad way of looking at life that helped them to form a government. | |
| And if you read the Federalist Papers, those were written by people who understand what people are like, and people like that have read the arts. | |
| Where can people buy the book? | |
| Anywhere? | |
| Anywhere. | |
| If you get it, you can get it at our shop, the Daily Wire shop, so I should say that out of loyalty. | |
| If you get it on Amazon and move it up the list, that helps it a little bit. | |
| Good talking to you. | |
| It's always great talking to you. | |
| Have you met my wife? |