Donald E. Westlake was born in Brooklyn in 1933. After serving in the U.S. Air Force he began his writing career with The Mercenaries in 1960. He has written dozens of novels over the past thirty-five years, under his own name and a rainbow of pseudonyms. Westlake's best-known alter ego is Richard Stark, a vehicle he still utilizes for his brilliant, under appreciated Parker novels. Westlake's flood of work also includes eight screenplays (including 1990's The Grifters with John Cusack, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston) as well as sixteen movie adaptations (including 1967's Point Blank starring Lee Marvin and the 1999 Mel Gibson movie Payback). Just how much Westlake has actually written is anybody's guess. "Sometimes even I lose count," he says. Named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master in 1993, he lives with his wife, the writer Abby Adams, in rural New York State. http://www.donaldwestlake.com

 

 

 

Writing the Hook
By Donald E. Westlake

 

All fiction writers are aware of an invisible line that shimmers in space and divides fiction from reality. Those who cross that line are mad, those who remain aware of it without crossing it are storytellers, novelists, screenwriters, playwrights.

For me, the line itself has always been fascinating, as though it were a cliff edge that could lure the soft-willed to jump. I have often been in conversations with other writers where I could see that line being bent, as one or another of us treated reality as though it were fiction, warping an anecdote about a friend or a piece of recent history into a story element, guessing what will happen next as though plotting out a novel. We are using the unreal tools of our trade to deal with the real. Fiction and fact change places in conversation, morphing into each other; but at the end, we walk away knowing which is which. Usually. This conflation of the real and unreal was not the starting point for [my novel] "The Hook".

The current dire constricted nature of the American publishing business was the starting point, and the strategies and stratagems various writers have undertaken in their efforts to remain aboard, as they find themselves in an increasingly harsh game of corporate lifeboat. But once I got my two guys talking, I saw how inevitably they would cross that invisible line. Fiction and reality mixed in their minds, and to a great extent, that's what the book became about. Bryce and Wayne evolved into a binary star, helplessly locked in one another's orbit. Fiction was the only weapon they had, but reality was the only arena they could work in.

A few people have told me they look on Bryce and Wayne as somehow being two halves of the same personality, which isn't quite the case. They're distinct people, but in their actions and desires they do flow into one another, they do to some extent become one another. In the simplest sense, Wayne, in more ways than one, becomes Bryce's surrogate, and something of the same occurs in reverse.

I find it hard to dislike either of them, though while I was writing the book I did worry about them a lot. When Bryce, in an early chapter, stood on his terrace at night and thought about jumping off -- the cliff edge I mentioned above -- I could sense that tug on him, I had to keep saying, don't do it, boy, you aren't finished. You have work to do. Come on, boy, no writer can leave before the end of the
story.

©2000 by Donald E. Westlake

--All rights reserved. Posted with permission from Time Warner
Bookmark (http://www.twbookmark.com)