interview with glen david gold

First, please let me say that Carter Beats the Devil is one of my three favorite books of all time.
This is more than an honor to interview you.
Thank you. Nice to hear you dig Carter.

Start to finish, how long does it take you to craft a novel?
Hard to measure, but Carter took five years. Sunnyside took eight. All the unpublished ones took three to four years but
they were really, really bad. I'm hoping the next one takes two years, though that might well be wishing it takes fifteen
minutes.

What scenes or pieces do you find most difficult to write?
Everything is hard. The easiest things, relatively, are dialogue and seduction; the hardest are probably rewriting
something -- anything -- for tone. Or writing a scene you know you have to for expository reasons. You always have to
find something to lift yourself above it.

The hardest scene I've written to date -- in the sense that I actually finished it and it worked -- was the Hugo/Princesses
scene in Sunnyside. It's about sixty pages and it took me almost a year. I ran into every conceivable trouble, from tone
to action to not knowing why the hell the scene was compelling to me to having early readers seriously dislike it to
realizing it needed to be fabulously simple on the surface and diabolically complex below, as it's sort of a metahistory of
narrative, going from fairy tales to film. Finally I figured out one small, tiny change that made it work pretty well, and I'm
proud of how it reads now.

Never managed the same for a scene in which Ironside defends a field hospital, only to accidentally kill everyone inside
with him. That also took months and months and it never ended up being any good.

You once said that: "From the audience point of view, Carter had far less competition (television,
for instance, or [Industrial Light & Magic's] digital effects, or the Internet) in the amazement
department." Do these "competitors," perhaps, say something about the state of literature right
now? In other words, does the publishing world have a chance?
I think the general opinion is that fiction is screwed. It's screwed every few years and screwed massively every
generation. We're going through that once-in-a-generation thing right now. I know nothing about publishing, but as far as
reading goes, I really worry about attention span. I'm not sure people really can tune out cell phones, e-mail, Tweets
and Playstations long enough to disappear into narrative for hours. Maybe I'm wrong about that, or maybe I'm just
talking about myself. But,I think patience has flown out the window.

Not too long ago, I picked up an anthology and I was thrilled to find one of your short stories in it
("The Tears of Squonk"). How do you approach short fiction versus, say, Sunnyside? How is the
process different for you?
I rarely write short fiction, but I wish I did. A teacher of mine said I can't clear my throat in 5,000 words, which is partially
true, I guess. I have trouble not wanting to delve into a whole world. I wrote the three or four short stories that I've
published as dares, more or less. The most obvious connection between Carter and Sunnyside is that both novels deal
with high-profile entertainers.

Are you naturally drawn to entertainers, or the time period?
That was sort of an accident. I just dug the magic poster on the cover of Carter, which conscripted me into writing about
the 1920s. It just turns out that I have some affinity for the time, both in history and diction. Entertainers are great
because their accomplishments are naturally dramatic, in the sense of there have always been turns and third acts and
conflict and applause. That turns out to take care of a great deal of work.

Where in the writing process are you comfortable sharing your work with others?
I'm a workshop kid, so there's always a moment where I need other eyes and opinions. Sometimes that happens pretty
quickly, when I have just a couple of pages, and sometimes much deeper into it.

Do you share your work with your wife [ed. Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones], and vice
versa?
All the time. She's my first reader and likewise.

Is it ever difficult to have two novelists in the same house?
Only in that neither of us can properly use drywall screws. I wish one of us used a circular saw on a regular basis.

What is the single best piece of advice you've ever received about writing?
Either treasure literary friendships, or give up.

Carter Beats the Devil spent nearly a decade being developed into a feature film. How involved
were you with the adaptation, and can you fully describe what you (and the book) went through? What
happened?
Fully describing it would take about six weeks of typing. In short, Tom Cruise optioned it for Michael Ardnt to co-write
and Robert Towne to co-write and direct. They did a few drafts but couldn't crack it, according to them. I never saw the
screenplay that [they] did. Because the book is secretly four acts. No way around it. They had it for four-and-a-half
years. My sole artistic collaboration was when I said "Yes," when Towne offered me a macchiato.

Then AMC picked it up to be their next TV series. Wesley Strick wrote a pretty rockin' pilot that I liked a lot. The idea is
that the book would be the first season. They didn't have a season two, but asked if I had any ideas. Yes. Yes, I did.
Pretty much I had seasons two and three mapped out for them, and that was tremendous fun until a new AMC
president came in and killed it. They made The Prisoner instead. I didn't get a macchiato out of that deal, but there was
some Thai food and a couple of bagels, as I recall.

Currently, Carter isn't a project for anyone, but as a consolation prize, every third movie that comes out will be about
rival magicians.

[Editorial Note: Shortly after this interview, Carter was optioned by Warner Bros. as a future film
project. We re-approached Mr. Gold about it.]
I was very happily surprised by Warner Brothers' offer. There are a couple of executives who have been after the book for
eight years, so this is pretty cool. As for the rest, I always look at film as a long shot, so I took my pleasures with the
process fairly easily. Again, I read the script Wesley Strick wrote for the pilot, and it was awesome. I really liked it. That
would have been an interesting venue. We'll see what happens next. People seem to feel fondly about Carter, and it
would be sweet to see an interpretation of it beyond my own.

What frightens you as a writer?
Mediocrity (my own). Yammering on.

Your work demands a high level of research, while your subjects seem particularly daunting. Do
you have a particular research process when it comes to sorting through newspapers, magazines,
and books?
Nope. I'm incredibly disorganized. And the research thing isn't nearly as hard as the need to keep people emotionally
invested. Facts on a page, no matter how cool, are just for trivia buffs. What slays me is trying to make them feel
relevant.

You originally wanted to put Chaplin (the subject of Sunnyside) in Carter when you found a
photograph of Charles Carter and Chaplin hugging. What is something you discovered while
researching Sunnyside that you wished you'd been able to include, but didn't or couldn't?
Good lord. I really wanted to talk about the rival Russian film producers who ruined the final days of Leo Tolstoy by
trying to film him. The story is hilarious and is only told in one academic text. The history of the benshi, a Japanese
silent film aid. The threat to move MGM to Oakland in 1924. President Wilson's obsession with The Birth of a Nation. A
second picnic between Chaplin and Fairbanks in which the latter unveils his new device of self-promotion, The
Searchlight.

You've written for comic books, including The Spirit. On a creative level, what about comics or
graphic novels appeal to you?
That's a tough one in that I really came to those as a complete fan, taking off my tie and putting down my briefcase to
turn off my brain and not analyze. One odd thing is that there are a great many people my age, who read the same
2,000 comic books I did, and who also all remember only the same twenty to thirty comic books fondly. This, before
reviews could be spread by the net. We all went back to our lonely, miserable lives after visiting the drugstore and we all
independently decided certain stories were worth remembering thirty years later. This indicates those might have been
good in a Once and Future King/Star Wars kind of way.

We're going through a funny phase right now where people are falling all over themselves to discover funny books as
literature. And there's truly some great stuff out there, and I'm happy that there are things like Fun House and Scott
Pilgrim and Fables being written, because they really couldn't have been ignited in any other medium. But mostly I like
them less as a creator than as a consumer. They're cool.

As a writer, what can't you live without when it comes to your process or daily work?
I'm a workshop kid. My writing only improved when I understood the role of early readers. The first draft is for the writer
and every later draft is for the world, and it's critical for me to have the audience. I like caffeine, the gym is essential for
my brain, generally, and the Internet is both blessing and curse, but the feedback thing is the difference between good
and bad.

You've written novels and screenplays. Are there any other creative areas you'd like to explore?
I'm writing a play and the libretto to an opera right now. I'll probably write more comic books when I have a good enough
story in mind. I have some nonfiction that's pretty urgent, and a couple of pieces of memoir.

What's next for you?
As far as I can tell, being creative is like a big turning wheel and when it's on the upswing, you feel confident, and when
it's down, you're lost and humbled. I'm on the "humbled" side of things right now, and am going through that thing where I seriously wonder if I can do anything -- no, really -- again. But that will pass and I'm sure I'll catch some thundering wave again. In addition to the play and the libretto I have a really weird novel idea that's chewing on me that will either be great or terrible.