Ask the Author: Howard Michael Gould
Answered Questions (8)
Howard Michael Gould
Right now the mystery is whether anybody reads these questions and answers on Goodreads at all. If the answer is yes, please comment here or through my website.
Howard Michael Gould
Thanks for the question. Answering a similar question below, I said that I don’t think in terms of inspiration, I think in terms of process and treating it as a job. But having experienced the release of my first novel, I’d like to amend that.
Hollywood writing is always conditional: your script may or may not get produced, and even if it does, you’re at the mercy of so many collaborators and overseers and by the end it may bear no resemblance to what you intended.
But as a novelist, especially with the positive response LAST LOOKS has gotten, I now sit down to work every day believing not only that what I’m writing is going to see the light of day, but that it will reach readers essentially unmediated, and that there are even people who’ll be looking forward to it.
If not actual “inspiration,” that’s at least giving me an unexpected and very pleasant tailwind.
Hollywood writing is always conditional: your script may or may not get produced, and even if it does, you’re at the mercy of so many collaborators and overseers and by the end it may bear no resemblance to what you intended.
But as a novelist, especially with the positive response LAST LOOKS has gotten, I now sit down to work every day believing not only that what I’m writing is going to see the light of day, but that it will reach readers essentially unmediated, and that there are even people who’ll be looking forward to it.
If not actual “inspiration,” that’s at least giving me an unexpected and very pleasant tailwind.
Howard Michael Gould
There’s an online short film I highly recommend called “The Story of Stuff,” which my daughter showed me almost ten years ago. It’s brilliant -- it’s about how we’re depleting the Earth to perpetuate a planned consumerism, which in the process is also making us miserable. It got me thinking a lot about the way we live. For that and other reasons, I got fairly aggressive about shedding possessions, giving things away and buying less.
As it happened, not long before that, I’d written my first TV detective pilot, for a cable network. (My prior television work had mostly been in sitcoms.) I liked the format, a private eye drama with some comedy laced in, and I was looking around for an idea for another one. I started toying with the idea of a character who was not just aggressive about shedding possessions, like I was, but obsessive about it, and what would make him that way. Then I started thinking about contrasting characters to surround him with, what kind of case would be the biggest affront to his sensibilities, and so on.
I ended up developing it as a movie rather than a TV script, and later reverse-adapting it into what became my first novel, LAST LOOK.
As it happened, not long before that, I’d written my first TV detective pilot, for a cable network. (My prior television work had mostly been in sitcoms.) I liked the format, a private eye drama with some comedy laced in, and I was looking around for an idea for another one. I started toying with the idea of a character who was not just aggressive about shedding possessions, like I was, but obsessive about it, and what would make him that way. Then I started thinking about contrasting characters to surround him with, what kind of case would be the biggest affront to his sensibilities, and so on.
I ended up developing it as a movie rather than a TV script, and later reverse-adapting it into what became my first novel, LAST LOOK.
Howard Michael Gould
I’m moving among several projects, generally spending a few weeks at a time on each: polishing a second Charlie Waldo novel, beginning a free standing comic novel (outside of the detective thriller genre but with a crime story at its heart), plus a bit of television and feature work.
The latter is how I’ve made my living for most of my life, but I’m finding fiction much more gratifying and it’s been my primary focus the last couple of years.
The latter is how I’ve made my living for most of my life, but I’m finding fiction much more gratifying and it’s been my primary focus the last couple of years.
Howard Michael Gould
If I relied on inspiration, I’d be lost. I think about it as going to work, and I go to work pretty much every day, seven days a week unless I’m traveling, usually four or five hours a day, fewer on the weekends.
There’s almost always a task in front of me: outlining, fighting through a first draft, revising, maybe preparing for a meeting if I’m doing TV or movie work.
On the rare days where there’s no task in front of me, when I truly don’t have any idea what the next novel or script is going to be, I still hold to the same schedule, and sit with an open Word document and start talking to myself through the keyboard until I start to light on something.
I’m all about demystifying the process. The idea of inspiration kind of scares me.
There’s almost always a task in front of me: outlining, fighting through a first draft, revising, maybe preparing for a meeting if I’m doing TV or movie work.
On the rare days where there’s no task in front of me, when I truly don’t have any idea what the next novel or script is going to be, I still hold to the same schedule, and sit with an open Word document and start talking to myself through the keyboard until I start to light on something.
I’m all about demystifying the process. The idea of inspiration kind of scares me.
Howard Michael Gould
Set a regimen for yourself, a time and a place and a method that you write, and follow it. If you can, do it every single day, even if just for an hour or two.
Even on days you feel like you don’t have it and nothing’s coming, don’t knock off early. Sometimes the whole trick is just keeping your butt in the chair. The days you do that and end up catching a wave are the days you feel best about yourself.
Learn to love outlining. It’s your very best friend.
Learn to love revising. It’s your second best friend.
Learn how to do those two things, and the entire process -- even the blank page part that comes between -- is no longer magic or mystery or waiting for the muse; it’s just work. And anyone can put in a day’s work.
Even on days you feel like you don’t have it and nothing’s coming, don’t knock off early. Sometimes the whole trick is just keeping your butt in the chair. The days you do that and end up catching a wave are the days you feel best about yourself.
Learn to love outlining. It’s your very best friend.
Learn to love revising. It’s your second best friend.
Learn how to do those two things, and the entire process -- even the blank page part that comes between -- is no longer magic or mystery or waiting for the muse; it’s just work. And anyone can put in a day’s work.
Howard Michael Gould
The best thing about being a novelist, as opposed to the other types of writing I’ve done professionally over the last thirty years (TV, film, theater, advertising) is that I sit down at the computer thinking about, and only about, how to make the day’s work the best it can be.
In every other medium you're conscious at every moment about the need for someone else to respond -- a studio, a network, an actor, a producer, a client, a theater company -- and enthusiastically enough to put resources (usually money, but at least time and effort) into the project. Then you have to hope that this patron's or more-important collaborator's "input" -- which will surely be a condition of that blessing and investment -- will enhance rather than diminish the project. (It often does, but not as often as you’d hope.)
Maybe many novelists feel the same inhibiting pinch. Maybe I’m just lucky that my first time out I got an agent right away and my manuscript sold to an excellent publisher. Maybe all of that has given me the temporary illusion of freedom; maybe my book won’t find an audience, and in a couple of years I’ll be flailing and seeing the whole enterprise differently.
But for the moment, I’m telling the stories I want to tell and in the ways I think will be most entertaining, choosing how to challenge myself with each book to do something I haven’t before and then trying, again by my own lights, to live up to that challenge.
I haven’t been able to write like that for many, many years, not since before I knew better.
In every other medium you're conscious at every moment about the need for someone else to respond -- a studio, a network, an actor, a producer, a client, a theater company -- and enthusiastically enough to put resources (usually money, but at least time and effort) into the project. Then you have to hope that this patron's or more-important collaborator's "input" -- which will surely be a condition of that blessing and investment -- will enhance rather than diminish the project. (It often does, but not as often as you’d hope.)
Maybe many novelists feel the same inhibiting pinch. Maybe I’m just lucky that my first time out I got an agent right away and my manuscript sold to an excellent publisher. Maybe all of that has given me the temporary illusion of freedom; maybe my book won’t find an audience, and in a couple of years I’ll be flailing and seeing the whole enterprise differently.
But for the moment, I’m telling the stories I want to tell and in the ways I think will be most entertaining, choosing how to challenge myself with each book to do something I haven’t before and then trying, again by my own lights, to live up to that challenge.
I haven’t been able to write like that for many, many years, not since before I knew better.
Howard Michael Gould
The blank page (well, screen) terrifies me. I know many fine writers start with a grain of an idea and just start writing sentences and paragraphs and “let the characters surprise them” and see where it all goes. Their process is based on a sort of mystical connection with the muse, or at least the unconscious. Many books far greater than my own have been written that way, of course, but if I tried to work that way I’d be so debilitated by inferiority and self-hatred that I’d never produce a page.
For better or worse, I spent much of my early career writing for series television, where unproductive days are an unaffordable luxury. It was there that I learned the value of extensive outlining and then extensive rewriting, both habits which I brought with me when I turned to fiction and which have, for me, completely eliminated writer’s block.
On my second novel, in fact, I spent as many months outlining as I spent “writing” the first drafts of the manuscript. I’m addicted to an index card software program called, as it happens, Writer’s Blocks, on which I play around with my story until I truly believe that every problem is solved and every question is answered and the character moves within every chapter have been arranged. Then I transfer those rough cards (hundreds of them) into Word, where I turn them into present tense prose, “pre-writing” each chapter, each scene, including bits of dialogue and any details I happen to think of. (The present tense is no doubt another vestige of my years in Hollywood, where formal outlines as well as screenplays are written that way.)
Anyway, this isn’t prose that I’d ever share with anyone, but it’s functional, more or less grammatical, and clear enough that I could put the file away and pick it up ten years later and still understand how the entire novel would work. And it’s thorough: for my second novel, the outline came in at 67 single-spaced pages, or about 40% as many words as the manuscript it yielded.
The “real” sentences and pages come last. At that point I’m just fleshing out and giving life to the hundreds of bits of story which I’ve already assembled. I try to write each paragraph as well as I can as I go, but I know that when I’ve gotten through the chapter I’ll go back and do a second pass on the computer and then a third with red pen on a hard copy before moving on, and that later on I’ll no doubt take several more passes before I ever show it to anyone. So I never find myself crippled by perfectionism, either.
For better or worse, I spent much of my early career writing for series television, where unproductive days are an unaffordable luxury. It was there that I learned the value of extensive outlining and then extensive rewriting, both habits which I brought with me when I turned to fiction and which have, for me, completely eliminated writer’s block.
On my second novel, in fact, I spent as many months outlining as I spent “writing” the first drafts of the manuscript. I’m addicted to an index card software program called, as it happens, Writer’s Blocks, on which I play around with my story until I truly believe that every problem is solved and every question is answered and the character moves within every chapter have been arranged. Then I transfer those rough cards (hundreds of them) into Word, where I turn them into present tense prose, “pre-writing” each chapter, each scene, including bits of dialogue and any details I happen to think of. (The present tense is no doubt another vestige of my years in Hollywood, where formal outlines as well as screenplays are written that way.)
Anyway, this isn’t prose that I’d ever share with anyone, but it’s functional, more or less grammatical, and clear enough that I could put the file away and pick it up ten years later and still understand how the entire novel would work. And it’s thorough: for my second novel, the outline came in at 67 single-spaced pages, or about 40% as many words as the manuscript it yielded.
The “real” sentences and pages come last. At that point I’m just fleshing out and giving life to the hundreds of bits of story which I’ve already assembled. I try to write each paragraph as well as I can as I go, but I know that when I’ve gotten through the chapter I’ll go back and do a second pass on the computer and then a third with red pen on a hard copy before moving on, and that later on I’ll no doubt take several more passes before I ever show it to anyone. So I never find myself crippled by perfectionism, either.
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