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10 Years of Writing Paid
00:05:15
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| One of the clearest thinkers and a profound man, Andrew Klavan of The Daily Wire. | |
| He has a podcast there. | |
| He is an international best-selling novelist. | |
| I very rarely have novelists on, but I'm having Andrew Klavan on A because my producer says this thing is absolutely riveting and because Andrew Klavan is a thinker. | |
| He's the host of the Andrew Klavan podcast on The Daily Wire. | |
| He's a screenwriter, author. | |
| The latest book is a detective thriller, A Woman Underground. | |
| And if you go to Amazon, you will read. | |
| Here's an example. | |
| A masterful combination of psychological insight, urgent literary detection, and ticking clock cat-and-mouse suspense. | |
| So let me just say this. | |
| You people who write novels, mysteries, etc. | |
| You have undoubtedly worked on your innate ability, but there is an innate ability. | |
| I have certain innate abilities, obviously, and I take no credit for it. | |
| I was able to speak well at a very early age. | |
| Okay, fine. | |
| But if you would say to me, write a short story. | |
| Forget a novel. | |
| Dennis Prager, we want you to write a compelling... | |
| 2,000-word short story. | |
| And remember, I write a column a week. | |
| I have 1,000 columns on the Internet, but it's all obviously nonfiction. | |
| I couldn't write something worthy of a 7th grader who had talent. | |
| So when did you know you had talent to write fiction? | |
| I was about 13 years old. | |
| I started to realize that I saw things in terms of stories. | |
| I even knew then that I saw... | |
| Big pictures in terms of stories. | |
| I mean, I think I could look at an entire group of people and think there's a dynamic here, interchange of personalities, and it all just sort of told itself in my mind by stories. | |
| I had been an addictive daydreamer as a little kid, and it always bothered me, but it actually turned out to be a talent. | |
| It actually turned out to be a gift, so I grabbed it. | |
| So you would daydream what? | |
| Plots of stories? | |
| Well, this was an interesting thing. | |
| I would have a daydream. | |
| All kids have daydreams, right? | |
| You want to be a hero, you want to be Superman, whatever it is. | |
| But I had this kind of quirk, which was that my daydreams had to make sense. | |
| They didn't have to be realistic. | |
| I could fly to Mars, but I had to explain why I could fly to Mars. | |
| And so before I could start my daydreams, I actually had to build up this entire story to get to the point where I could be what another kid would have dreamed about without even thinking. | |
| So if I wanted to be invisible, I had to figure out, how did I get to be invisible? | |
| How does that happen? | |
| You know, what's it like to be a little kid who can drive a car? | |
| Or what's it like to be a little kid who's, you know, a famous movie star? | |
| Whatever I wanted to dream about. | |
| And so that developed this sort of habit of building stories in my mind. | |
| When did you first write published fiction? | |
| My first publication was, I guess, when I was about 19 or 20 and I sold a short story I had written to a small literary magazine and saw it in print. | |
| I think the first time I was paid was probably when I sold a story to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, which was a tremendous, tremendous thrill. | |
| How old were you? | |
| Because I had read it all. | |
| I guess I started really publishing fiction when I was in my 20s. | |
| You know, you should have laminated that check. | |
| I'm not kidding. | |
| I'm not kidding. | |
| I'm sure you wish you had at least a picture of it today because it's got to have been a thrill beyond words. | |
| I was paid to write fiction. | |
| It was insane when I was paid to write fiction. | |
| Especially, I had grown up reading Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, watching all of Hitchcock's pictures. | |
| He shaped my imagination. | |
| All the mystery writers, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, they shaped my imagination. | |
| And to see my name in print on that kind of pulpy paper that they used was just unbelievable. | |
| It was like being in a dream. | |
| My first paid, I'm not sure I was paid, but it was equivalent. | |
| William Buckley published me in my 20s, like you. | |
| I was 25. And he published a piece I wrote on Poland, because that was my area of specialty, communist countries. | |
| And I just want you to know everything I wrote in that column turned out to be wrong. | |
| I am so grateful to William Buckley Jr. for publishing me. | |
| But I predicted that the head of Poland would fall any day now. | |
| He lasted another 10 years. | |
| 10 years! | |
| The book by Andrew Klavan is A Woman Underground. | |
| It is up at DennisPrager.com. | |
| We're going to talk about Trump derangement syndrome when we get back. | |