Three Questions and a Cover — a short interview with one of my favorite authors, along with one of the author’s covers.
David Hunter is a retired police detective, a former Op-Ed columnist for the Knoxville News Sentinel for 27 years, the author of 18 books, and numerous magazine articles from Jack and Jill and Mad Magazine to Readers Digest. He lives in Powell, Tn, a suburb of Knoxville, Tennessee. He is an inductee into the East Tennessee Friends of the Library Hall of Fame and holds a life-time achievement award from the Knoxville Writers’ Guild. His books have been nominated for the Edgar Award and Best Appalachian Book Award. You can learn more about David and his books on his website.
1. You’ve written non-fiction as well as fiction. Do you decide in advance which will work for your story, or do you let the story come first?
With nonfiction, the story is already there and the only decision is where to start the narrative at a point that will that will most effectively grab the reader. Otherwise, I don’t find a lot of difference in the actual work.
With fiction, I don’t work from an outline because I don’t know what’s going to happen. I use the Stephen King method of “excavating a story,” but I was doing it for 30 years before I read Stephen King’s book on writing, On Writing, and had a word for my process. King is an excellent craftsman whether you like him or not.
As an example, 20 years or so ago, I read a story in my local paper, The Knoxville News Sentinel, about a burglary in the nearby resort town of Gatlinburg at The Museum of Witchcraft that piqued my interest. Witchcraft stories were in abundance in those days, so I thought what if it had been a museum devoted to werewolves?
So, with the germ of an idea, I brought two detectives together and started a conversation between an excitable rookie detective and and a veteran about a burglary in The Museum of Werewolves (which never existed). When a victim turns up with a silver bullet in his heart, the two detectives start an investigation and I “excavated” what didn’t fit and left everything pertinent. I didn’t know “whodunnit” until the last few chapters. The book was published as A Whiff of Garlic.
I once wrote a book based on a single line I had written in a story that was never published as “Cops Don’t Cry for Killers.” I sold it in mass paperback to Berkley in New York and a month before publication, they changed the title to Homicide Game because the marketing department said “anything with homicide in the title” would sell that year. By the way, if you ever tell a New York editor you don’t like a change they’ve made, the editor probably will stop answering your calls,
In New York publishing, writers don’t have a lot of say after turning in the manuscript – unless they also are getting a hundred grand advances.
2. When they make a movie based on your writing/law enforcement career, who is going to play you? And who is going to play your loyal but not-too-bright sidekick?
Once, when I almost had a movie of the week and a television series called “The Moon Is Alway Full,” with a gig as technical advisor and options for writing scripts, I fantasized about being played by Gary Sinese with John Malkovich as my partner. Then the production company decided two Southern cop shows would be too much. (In The Heat of the Night had just been renewed.)
3. What can you tell aspiring writers that they’ve probably not been told before?
Advice you may or may not have been given as young writers: Don’t count your chickens before they are fried. A lot of things over which you have no control, talent sometimes being the last consideration, will affect what you sell.