Andre
Jute, the man, the myth
How
do you strike the balance between writing something you want to write and
writing something that people want to read, in terms of the compromises you
make, if any?
Oddly
enough, for a marketer and a professional communicator, none. It just never
occurred to me that a writer should, or could, give readers what they want
until I met all these genre writers in indieland.
D’you
see, my formative years as a writer and particularly as a novelist were spent
under the influence of the last of the great cosmopolitan gentlemen publishers.
They published the books they liked, which were the same books I liked to
write. Our standing arose from the quality of our books, not the quantities we
sold. It’s a peculiarly American idea that one can measure the worth of a
writer by how much he earns. (I doesn’t even strike me as ironic that my books
sell so much better than those of many writers who are in it primarily for the
money. Justice isn’t ironic, it is fair.)
I
suspect that my readers would be insulted if I pandered to them as shamelessly
as some of the genre writers do. I take it for granted that my class of reader
follows me to new ideas and approaches, and forgives me the inevitable failed
experiments, because they love the excitement of the challenges as much as I
do.
What excites, attracts or appeals to you about the genre(s) you write in.
I’m
not a genre writer except by the accident that I like to read thrillers, and
therefore anything I write has a good deal of tension in it. When I have a
compelling idea, I just write a novel, without considering what genre it will
fit into. It has helped that all these years I never wrote a book on spec, that
my books were always commissioned (that is, contracted and paid for by the
publisher before I wrote a word of them), so I could be as surprised as anyone
else at where the characters drove the novel!
Do you have a box, drawer, folder etc where you keep thoughts and ideas for
future stories? Such as names you have come across, bits of dialogue, ideas,
characters - even if you have no idea when you might use them?
Small
stuff like that I make up on the fly. I do have a purple steamer trunk full of
sheets with ideas. I give other writers sheets at random when they run out of
ideas. But I have so many ideas, I never use the Purple Cornucopeia, as one
thriller writer who has had recourse to it five or six times christened it. I
can’t remember when I last didn’t have half a dozen books on the boil.
How much of you is in your characters? Which of your characters is the you that
you’d most like to be? Or be with?
Christ,
what a horrid idea. In my youth I was dangerous. As a soldier and a
revolutionary I was more feared by my own side, who knew how badly I shot, than
by any of our enemies. I sailed around Cape Horn twice in a ship of my own
construction, and, let me tell you, I’m no woodworker! I raced cars and planes
and offshore speedboats; when the man from Porsche saw that I raced on rear
track control arms I bent up in Black & Decker Workman from soft aluminium,
he fainted dead away. I was a professional polo player until a rival team owner
put a prize on my head for winning too often and I got shot. Nobody would
believe such characters! Nor would my life as a writer make anything but a dull
character. I work 14-16 hours a day. My friends are mostly housewives who
cycle, which is what I do for exercise. I’m not even a drunk.
Do
you become so wrapped up in your writing that your spouse wonders if they're
married to you or one of your characters?
No.
We never discuss my writing. I haven’t even mentioned that yesterday I
published a new novel.
I’m
not one of those “authors” who spray their “artistic” anguish over everyone
they come into contact with. It’s only amateurs who cannot leave their work
behind when they rise from their desk. Most people I meet never discover that
I’m a writer.
What
type of book do you like reading? Is it the same genre as you write?
Well
written thrillers, badly written thrillers when no well written ones are
available, history, biography, farce, the classics, physics, electronics, superior
literary novels — by “superior” I mean with a storyline and characters who
develop, not formless kitchen sinkers and suchlike crap that their “writers”
fondly imagine must be “literary” because they are utterly devoid of any
novelistic characteristic or the slightest storytelling appeal.
What lengths do you go to convince us readers that your book has the X factor?
I
suppose I have the background from my time in advertising to invent something,
but fortunately my subjects and my treatment of them are usually so far outside
the mainstream that nothing promotional needs to be invented. The London
Evening News described one of my books as “so bizarre, it’s probably all true.”
After that one needs tell no lies, just smile enigmatically!
How do you feel when a reader points out the spelling mistake(s) you have made?
Nauseated.
New books, written on computers, are easily made respectable. But my experience
with republishing books only available in print, and recovered by optical
character recognition, has been — there is no other word for it — sickening. I
despair of ever getting a clean book.
What do you like most about visiting KUF?
That
Lou keeps out the schoolyard bullies who make the Amazon fora so unpleasant.
What
is on your near horizon?
A
great deal because I’m privileged to be the beneficiary of much volunteer help.
(Anyone who is irritated by misspellings and poor grammar, and who has time,
can be an editor; write to me, andrejute at coolmainpress with the commercial
extension, if you want to volunteer). In a couple of weeks I publish the
screenplay and the radio script adapted from my novel, already published, AN
ELECTION OF PATRIOTS. In October we publish the first of the dozen parts that
make up COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS, a saga of seven interconnected Russian,
American and British families that spans 75 years. We continue to edit my protégé
Dakota Franklin’s RUTHLESS TO WIN series;
she’s a winner in the Best of the Independent eBook Awards. OCR permitting, we
shall eventually reissue enough of Andrew McCoy’s Lance Weber novels to permit
us to slot in the two exciting new novels he has written especially for the
uniform ebook reissue. There are also my own books to be OCR-ed, of which
several are timeless and, people think, should be reissued. My next writing
project is a fictionalization into a multi-part saga of my family’s
antecedents. (Try the Brittanica for our history.)
Where
can we find you for more information?
More
than you ever wanted to know about me, including a list of places where you can
contact me directly: http://coolmainpress.com/andrejute.html
My
blog, Kissing the Blarney: http://coolmainpress.com/ajwriting/
My
recent books, and books I edited too:
Thanks for having me, Joo.
ReplyDeleteGreat interview, Joo.
ReplyDeleteNice job, Andre.