Dennis Prager Show - Dennis Interviews Andrew Klavan
Aired: 2024-10-21
Duration: 05:15


=== 10 Years of Writing Paid (05:15) ===

[00:00:00]  One of the clearest thinkers and a profound man, Andrew Klavan of The Daily Wire.
[00:00:04]  He has a podcast there.
[00:00:07]  He is an international best-selling novelist.
[00:00:12]  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.
[00:00:23]  He's the host of the Andrew Klavan podcast on The Daily Wire.
[00:00:27]  He's a screenwriter, author.
[00:00:29]  The latest book is a detective thriller, A Woman Underground.
[00:00:34]  And if you go to Amazon, you will read.
[00:00:37]  Here's an example.
[00:00:39]  A masterful combination of psychological insight, urgent literary detection, and ticking clock cat-and-mouse suspense.
[00:00:49]  So let me just say this.
[00:00:51]  You people who write novels, mysteries, etc.
[00:00:58]  You have undoubtedly worked on your innate ability, but there is an innate ability.
[00:01:07]  I have certain innate abilities, obviously, and I take no credit for it.
[00:01:12]  I was able to speak well at a very early age.
[00:01:15]  Okay, fine.
[00:01:16]  But if you would say to me, write a short story.
[00:01:21]  Forget a novel.
[00:01:22]  Dennis Prager, we want you to write a compelling...
[00:01:27]  2,000-word short story.
[00:01:30]  And remember, I write a column a week.
[00:01:32]  I have 1,000 columns on the Internet, but it's all obviously nonfiction.
[00:01:36]  I couldn't write something worthy of a 7th grader who had talent.
[00:01:41]  So when did you know you had talent to write fiction?
[00:01:46]  I was about 13 years old.
[00:01:48]  I started to realize that I saw things in terms of stories.
[00:01:51]  I even knew then that I saw...
[00:01:54]  Big pictures in terms of stories.
[00:01:57]  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.
[00:02:08]  I had been an addictive daydreamer as a little kid, and it always bothered me, but it actually turned out to be a talent.
[00:02:14]  It actually turned out to be a gift, so I grabbed it.
[00:02:17]  So you would daydream what?
[00:02:20]  Plots of stories?
[00:02:23]  Well, this was an interesting thing.
[00:02:24]  I would have a daydream.
[00:02:26]  All kids have daydreams, right?
[00:02:27]  You want to be a hero, you want to be Superman, whatever it is.
[00:02:29]  But I had this kind of quirk, which was that my daydreams had to make sense.
[00:02:33]  They didn't have to be realistic.
[00:02:34]  I could fly to Mars, but I had to explain why I could fly to Mars.
[00:02:39]  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.
[00:02:48]  So if I wanted to be invisible, I had to figure out, how did I get to be invisible?
[00:02:51]  How does that happen?
[00:02:52]  You know, what's it like to be a little kid who can drive a car?
[00:02:55]  Or what's it like to be a little kid who's, you know, a famous movie star?
[00:02:58]  Whatever I wanted to dream about.
[00:02:59]  And so that developed this sort of habit of building stories in my mind.
[00:03:04]  When did you first write published fiction?
[00:03:08]  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.
[00:03:19]  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.
[00:03:28]  How old were you?
[00:03:29]  Because I had read it all.
[00:03:31]  I guess I started really publishing fiction when I was in my 20s.
[00:03:36]  You know, you should have laminated that check.
[00:03:42]  I'm not kidding.
[00:03:43]  I'm not kidding.
[00:03:45]  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.
[00:03:52]  I was paid to write fiction.
[00:03:55]  It was insane when I was paid to write fiction.
[00:03:58]  Especially, I had grown up reading Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, watching all of Hitchcock's pictures.
[00:04:03]  He shaped my imagination.
[00:04:05]  All the mystery writers, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, they shaped my imagination.
[00:04:10]  And to see my name in print on that kind of pulpy paper that they used was just unbelievable.
[00:04:16]  It was like being in a dream.
[00:04:18]  My first paid, I'm not sure I was paid, but it was equivalent.
[00:04:25]  William Buckley published me in my 20s, like you.
[00:04:29]  I was 25. And he published a piece I wrote on Poland, because that was my area of specialty, communist countries.
[00:04:39]  And I just want you to know everything I wrote in that column turned out to be wrong.
[00:04:44]  I am so grateful to William Buckley Jr. for publishing me.
[00:04:56]  But I predicted that the head of Poland would fall any day now.
[00:05:02]  He lasted another 10 years.
[00:05:04]  10 years!
[00:05:05]  The book by Andrew Klavan is A Woman Underground.
[00:05:09]  It is up at DennisPrager.com.
[00:05:11]  We're going to talk about Trump derangement syndrome when we get back.