Note: This is the second part of a two-part interview. Part one can be found here.
Big Hollywood: Where did the idea for “The Last Thing I Remember” come from? I know there’s an evolution to a good story, well told. How did this evolve from that first spark to final draft?
Andrew Klavan: Some of it in this case was a matter of putting my money where my mouth is. For years, I’ve been complaining that there are no books with real boys in them, that when we want to write about manhood or patriotism or battling evil, we suddenly have to write about fantasy lands and dragons or Gotham City or whatever. There’s real evil in the world, real people who do real evil, and they need to be fought and there’s no appeasing them. So I started from that point of view. Let me just speak plainly about what we’re fighting for, what kind of people do the fighting and what they believe that empowers them and why. And I guess it started from that.
BH: I know the secret to your success is having your wife read everything first. Are you like me? Do you get angry at her criticism, especially when she’s right?
AK: LOL. I know your wife, you have the sweetest wife on earth and shame on you for getting mad at that good, good woman when she’s only trying to help. But yeah, I do exactly the same thing. You know how it is. We pour our hearts and souls into these things and at the point when we show them to our wives, we’re still raw with it, the wound is still bleeding. And she says, “This is the greatest novel I’ve ever read but on page 116, you misspelled whirligig,” and you’re, like, “How dare you, you harridan! Don’t you realize I’m an ARTIST??? I meant to spell it that way!!!” Luckily, my wife knows I worship the ground she walks on.
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BH: The writing “process” fascinates me. What’s yours? Do you set aside specific times each day, only write when you’re inspired? Long walks?
AK: I’m all discipline all the time. I’m at my desk between 7:30 and 8:00 and work at least till noon, sometimes more. Then I take a long lunch and get some exercise, tennis or karate or something, then I go back and do different types of writing chores, research and so on. Then at night I do my reading, which is very important. I think inspiration is misunderstood. Inspiration is what you start with. You wouldn’t be a writer if you didn’t have moments of inspiration, stories that appear out of the blue, fresh ways of seeing things, expressing things. In the moment, the work is a matter of craft but the inspiration informs that. It’s not like a light bulb goes on over your head and you have to rush to your keyboard. Not usually anyway.
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BH: Last year you wrote “Empire of Lies“, a brilliant novel that hit number one on the Amazon.com thriller list. You’ve been a best-selling, critically acclaimed author for a couple decades now. What was the reaction from the critics to “Empire,” as compared to your previous novels?
AK: Well, thank you for that. The reaction was pretty dramatic. I’ve been writing novels for years and have won, if I may say so, multiple awards and have gotten generally terrific reviews in hundreds of venues. Suddenly Empire of Lies comes out and the hero is a political conservative who finds Christ and you could’ve heard a pin drop. I think I got one mainstream review. Called me “a right wing crackpot.” That was it. The rest was pretty much silence. Luckily, though, a lot of good people stepped up and helped me publicize the book: Glenn Beck, Mike Gallagher, the people at NRO and, oh yeah, some guy named Nolte. I wonder whatever happened to him. I heard he ripped off some public funds and went to Venezuela to work with Hugo Chavez. Oh no, wait, that was Obama. I always get those two confused.
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BH: It’s amazing how this works. A writer like Stephen King can overstuff his novels, especially some of his later stuff, with left-wing talking points, speak out on politics regularly through his Entertainment Weekly column, and elsewhere – but he remains “Novelist and Storyteller Stephen King.” And there are many other examples. But you do the same thing on the conservative side and the AP writes you off as a “crackpot.”
AK: You know what? It is amazing. And you know what else? We have to stop being amazed. We have to just take it as given that the mainstream venues are against us, the awards won’t go to us, the reviewers will attack us-sometimes without even admitting why. We have to speak up for ourselves, we have to review each other, honestly and fairly, we have to buy the books that stand up for what’s right-assuming they’re good, assuming they do what they’re supposed to do, entertain, tell good stories. We have to understand that the media is our enemy-the enemy of the American idea, our founders’ ideas-and we have to make our own arts, and celebrate our arts and reward our arts-and then we’ll see who wins in the marketplace.
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BH: You have stepped up your profile as a kind of “Culture Warrior” through your editorials in the major newspapers and your work at Pajamas Media, but I think it’s harder for our side to do this, as opposed to a George Clooney or Gore Vidal, who are allowed to compartmentalize their activism and creative work.
AK: Yes, it is easier for them that way. But it’s harder for them too because they’re talking absolute nonsense and we’re telling the simple truth: that liberty is a great good and worth defending, that right is right and wrong is wrong and moral relativity is merely a form of cowardice, that the individual is more important than the state, that our rights come from our Creator. See, they can attack us, try to silence us, maybe crush us-but they can’t beat us because we’re right and they’re wrong. The truth is not so coincidentally a lot like Jesus, dude. You mock it, you torture it, you kill it-and yet there it stands. I try not to worry about what they “allow,” or what they say is permissable. I try to hitch my wagon to the truth and hold on.
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BH: As one of the first out there calling on conservatives to get seriously engaged in the culture, how are we doing compared to a few years ago?
AK: Good. Better. But not good enough. We got guys like you and Andrew Breitbart and you are both, I flatter you not, mighty warriors, cutting a way through the evil minions. Every time I come on your site and see IowaHawk and Steven Crowder or go over to PJTV and see my colleague Alfonzo Rachel there doing his thing, my heart leaps up. This is new, fresh stuff and it’s paving a way. On the negative side, I’m still seeing too much complaining and not enough creating. Not enough novels reviewed in conservative venues, no awards for novels and movies from conservatives, no new cultural infra-structure to oppose the left, no money to make films that defend individualism and American values. The left-and by the left I mean all the so-called mainstream venues-the left is not going to help us, they’re not going to reform, they have to be opposed and outdone. We have to turn our backs on them-stop trying to win their Oscars and Emmys and Pulitzers-and begin to make a new American culture.
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BH: For lack of a better term, since “coming out” what’s the best thing that’s come of it, or happened?
Oh, that’s easy. I wrote a piece for City Journal called the Big White Lie, about what a relief it was to stop paying lip service to liberal lies. To stop pretending that men and women are the same, for instance, or that all cultures are morally equivalent and so on. For an artist to be chained to a system of dishonesty is, in some ways, more destructive than being put in prison. At least in prison, you know you have to resist the power. PC hogwash gets into your head, infects your thinking. Once I freed myself from it, once I broke out of the Matrix, I think I started writing the best stuff I’ve ever written, thinking with greater clarity, seeing life more precisely as it is. I’ll put what I’m doing next to anything anyone’s doing in the field. And that’s pure joy.
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BH: What’s the worst?
AK: Money. It’s a lot harder for me to make money. I can’t just pick up screenplay work in Hollywood like I could before-I can’t work in Hollywood at all. I’m doing the best work of my life and, because the reviewers ignore or attack me, I have to work twice as hard to publicize it and get the word out. But I haven’t lost a moment’s sleep over it. I know I’m doing the right thing.
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BH: Who should read “The Last Thing I Remember”? Who should we be buying this book for?
AK: Well, I’ve shown it to both boys and girls as young as ten and as old as 25 and have yet to get anything but an ecstatic reaction. A friend of mine over at NRO told me he found his two sons, 12 and 14, fighting over it because both were so wrapped up in it. I had to explain to him the whole buy-another-copy concept. Also, Charlie has ambitions to be in the military, so if you have friends overseas, they might like it, they might see themselves in it. And hey, you told me you really liked it and you look like you’re pushing 90, at least, so maybe it can skew older too, I don’t know. But between 10 and 25, so far I’m batting a thousand.
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“The Last Thing I Remember” is published by Thomas Nelson and scheduled for release April 28th. You can pre-order it today at Amazon.com.
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