CHILD: Here is the fundamental reality about the writing business. It’s lonely. You spend all your time writing and then wondering whether what you just wrote is any good. You gave me instant feedback. If I write a nicely balanced four-word sentence with good rhythm and cadence, most critics will skip right over it. You not only notice it, you go and write a couple of chapters about it. I liked the chance to discuss stuff that most people never think about. It’s weird and picayune, but obviously of burning interest to me. Previously only my daughter Ruth ever got it. Once we spent a whole drive to Philadelphia talking about a gerund we saw on a billboard.
MARTIN: And the way you care about commas – almost Flaubertian! I tried to be a kind of white-coated detached observer. But every observer impinges on the thing he is observing. Which would be you in this case. And I noticed that everything around you gets into your texts. You are an opportunistic writer. For example, one day the maid was bumping around in the kitchen and in the next line you used the word ‘bucket’. Another time there was some construction work going on nearby and the next verb you used was ‘nail’. We go to a bookstore and suddenly there is Reacher, more unexpectedly, in a bookstore. I couldn’t help wondering, for example, if I influenced the ‘home invasion’ scene? Sneaking past your security downstairs, pen and notebook in hand.
CHILD: I don’t know, to be honest. It was a logical development, for a thriller. It gave me a set-up for a set piece. But it could have been subconscious. I could have gone other ways. Or heard other things. Because you’re right, that’s my method. Like the thing with the bucket. In one ear, straight to the page. But not the name Wittgenstein [see page 398, Make Me]. That was a private joke.
MARTIN: The funny thing is you are clearly a frustrated academic. For starters, you have officially seen Waiting for Godot thirty-nine times. And you are good at the professorial analysis. Be it of Shakespeare’s ‘stony limit’ (Romeo and Juliet) or your own onomatopoeia. All I had to do was quote you. It was like watching Lionel Messi running rings around the opposition and providing simultaneous commentary.
CHILD: I believe it was Kant who said something like, Newton knew what he was doing and could take you back through the steps logically, whereas Homer had no idea and couldn’t possibly explain it either. I sort of thought: maybe I can explain it, I’ve been doing it long enough. Lots of readers ask me how I do this or that. I thought this was an opportunity to tell them. Or at least to figure it out for myself. Which was the main thing, to be honest. Normally I operate in a fog of instinct. I wondered if being required to explain as I went along might actually be more illuminating for me than for you.
MARTIN: That was the thing that drew me in: you never knew in advance what you were going to be writing about. You really were making it up as you went along. I can certify that. I remember what you said when we started off down this road: ‘I have no plot and no title.’
CHILD: The beginning of a new book feels like stepping off a cliff into the abyss. A long free-fall. One of these days I’m going to end up flat on my face. Or not, as the case may be.
MARTIN: Sublime confidence. And no rules.
CHILD: Elmore Leonard had rules. Made to be broken. ‘Never use an adverb.’ Never is an adverb! If you want to start with, ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ go for it. I mean, suppose it really was a dark and stormy night? What are we supposed to do? Lie?
MARTIN: Do you think you learned anything from watching me watch you for a year?
CHILD: Well, I learned that line about Kant and Newton and Homer, that was one of yours, so thanks to Cambridge for that. It was like having a coach in baseball or tennis – you’re forced to reflect on what you’re doing, and maybe therefore you do it better. And certainly I think Make Me came out well. After this I reckon every writer is going to want a meta-book to go with their book – a boxed set. What about you: did you learn anything of value over the last year?
MARTIN: I remember one of the first things you said to me. ‘This isn’t the first draft – it’s the only draft!’ Actually, you do finesse things a lot; ‘churning’, as you call it. But you trust your own voice. Maybe that’s what I learned above all: don’t try to sound like someone else. But, looking ahead, I know you’re starting the next one on 1 September. The annual ritual. Any ideas?
CHILD: Pure déjà-vu for you. No title, no plot, nothing. Starting from zero.
MARTIN: How about Remake Me?
CHILD: That reminds me of my life in television. The endless sequels. Make Me Again, Make Me One More Time … What about you? You going to watch Jonathan Franzen next?
MARTIN: I’ve done Reacher Said Nothing. I see a series. Reacher Said Something. Then maybe Reacher Said a Load of Stuff, Reacher Said Way Too Much …
CHILD: You’re not watching me again. So what are they going to be about?
MARTIN: No idea. Your influence. I thought I might steal your schedule. Start September 1st. Finish March or April. I had to learn something from the master. I’m like a sorcerer’s apprentice. Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop. And drink a hell of a lot of black coffee in between.
1 THE GORGEOUS FEELING
It begins (whatever it is). Or it should do. 1 September 2015. New York. Twenty-one years to the day since he went out to buy the paper and the pencil he would use to write Killing Floor, his first Jack Reacher novel. Twenty novels later, it is time to begin the twenty-first, the successor to Make Me. 1 September: a date he cannot miss. Kick-off. Ignition. Genesis.
It is a ritual with him: a superstition, a good luck charm. So long as he starts a new book on the first day of September he knows that, infallibly and inevitably, he will complete it, some time around April, May at the outside, in the following year. It was a completely reliable system, like a chronometer, keeping the ship steady and heading in the right general direction rather than falling off the edge of the world. All he had to do was sit down at his desk in his office in his eleventh-floor apartment on Central Park West and switch on his computer and type. Pausing only to light another cigarette. ‘It’s not rocket science,’ he would say. ‘It’s not curing cancer.’ Writer’s block was pure myth. He had nothing in his head, almost nothing, but something would come to him. It always did.
So long as he got going on 1 September. It was in the diary. What could go wrong?
Of course he had to have his traditional summer break, recharge the old batteries, hang with the family. He had spent a couple of weeks on a ship cruising around Norway; he loved all those fjords, and the bright sun at sea-level and then the snowcapped mountains right above. Crisp and clean. Cut off, remote from the world, no wi-fi. He was off the grid again, on the loose, roaming free, almost like Reacher. (Albeit with more stylish kit – and Reacher on a ship …? One way or another he’d probably have to sink it, after locking antlers with the captain, in reality a drug smuggler or people trafficker, and the second-in-command, and the third … .)
As he looked up into those mountains – not so high after all, eminently climbable – and visualized himself up there, looking back at the ship a couple of thousand feet below, and peering out over the abyss, he couldn’t help but recall the idea, which a friend had put to him in the Union Square Café, one year before, and that had fallen on fertile ground and grown and blossomed into Make Me, that when the time