AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Marshall Karp, part two

Communicating with mystery novelist Marshall Karp is a bit like reading his books.  You never know when the joke will reach out and slam you in the gut until you realize you’ve been chuckling for the last half hour.  Karp allows his keen sense of humor to infuse his novels.  His latest release, FLIPPING OUT, picks up the lives of L.A. cops Lomax and Biggs, and the repartee between the two flows fast and furious.

Karp honed his craft in the cutthroat world of advertising and television writing, so it comes as no surprise that his novels focus on character development and getting the reader to sympathize with the protagonists.  Karp’s plot unfolds seemlessly, but we writers know it’s hella-hard work to make it look effortless.

Want another opportunity to win a free autographed copy of FLIPPING OUT?  Be the first in our mailbox at writerunboxed at writerunboxed dot com.  Only those who live in the continental U.S. please.

****UPDATE***** We have a winner!  Thanks for playing, everyone!

In addition to writing, Karp also supports Vitamin Angels, which is dedicated to providing nutrition to children in need.  Find out why below the jump.
Enjoy part two of our two part interview with Marshall Karp.

Q:  What should writers keep in mind if they hope to write a successful series?

MK:  I learned this in the TV business, and I believe the same thing applies to books. Readers expect your plot to be new and inventive, but they come back to your series time after time, because they know that the characters will give them a predictable emotional experience. Characters drive a series. Listen to your characters. They may know what they want to say or do before you do. Sometimes my characters will take over in the middle of a chapter. When that happens, I just sit there and type and let them do all the work.

Q:  What’s your writing process? Are you a plotter, or do you fly in the mist?

MK:  I am the consummate index-cards-on-the-corkboard plotter. For me writing a book comes easy. It’s like painting a house. Plotting it out is like designing one. You don’t know what you want to build, but you know you have a deadline to get it done. I need the structure of a tight outline. But structure doesn’t mean I can’t fly. Once I have the blueprint, I can approach each chapter knowing what I want to accomplish, then trying to figure of what’s the most innovative way to say it.

With three titles under your belt, how have you evolved as an author? Did you have an ah-ha! moment which helped you put it all together?

Did you say I was an author? I always told people I was a writer. Only after three books do I occasionally refer to myself as an author. I think that’s called the early stages of confidence. I think you might see how I evolved by reading Book 1 then jumping to Book 3. I kept a lot of the good stuff, but I write leaner. As for an a-ha moment, it happened early on. I had written the first fifty pages of THE RABBIT FACTORY, and I showed it to my freelance editor. She said, “It reads like a movie – all dialogue, very little description.”

“But that’s the part I skip over when I read,” I told her. But she was right. Writing for the screen isn’t the same as writing for the page. When you write a film script, you can say something as simple as:

GLADYS enters bedroom.

GLADYS:  I can’t find my bra.

Then you have your scenic designer and your set decorator to help your audience see the bedroom, your casting agent to find the perfect Gladys (depending on whatever the producer’s criteria du jour is), and a director who will help the actress understand and convey just how critical the missing bra is to her life. Or if the actress is flat chested, he might say, “You’re not in a panic. Go for the laugh.”).

A novel is different. It’s intimate. It’s just me and the reader, and our collective imaginations joining forces to paint a picture. If that last bit sounds too pompous, feel free to change my answer to “I have no idea.”

Q:  Why do you think genre fiction receives so little respect in literary circles, despite the fact that the majority of fiction sold is genre?

MK:  Why do rappers get so little respect in philharmonic circles? Circles, by their very nature, tend to be insular. They’re a bunch of people who share a common love. I don’t mind if they don’t do what I do, or read what I read, but I do mind if they think they’re better. The biggest hypocrites are the people who read genre fiction, and then say things like, “I read everything — even shit like murder mysteries.”

When you say a book is genre fiction, you’re already labeling it as having a specific style — something the reader can count on. There’s nothing wrong with that. Structure doesn’t have to be the enemy of creativity. Let me dig a hole here and go for a metaphor. Did you ever eat a fantastic hamburger? Or a really bad filet mignon (think airplane)? So what’s better? Burger or filet? What deserves more respect? Literary fiction or a genre horror book? And by the way, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula a horror book or an enduring classic of literature?

Genre, schmenre. I proud of what I write, and I love hanging with the people who enjoy reading it. If you don’t happen to read what I write, and you don’t trash the genre, I’ll still invite you over for dinner. How do you like your burgers cooked?

Q:  What is the best advice you have ever received during your writing career? The worst?

MK:  Best: There are a lot of people who can prevent you from becoming an author, but only one person who can stop you from being a writer. I don’t know if someone said that to me or it just took shape in my head, but it’s something I tell every aspiring author who is ready to throw in the towel because they’re not yet published. Some of them are inspired. Occasionally some idiot asks me who the one person is who can stop him from being a writer.

Another best: Writing is all about re-writing. I know, I know, we all hate to kill our darlings, but not every word, paragraph, page or chapter in your first draft has to be seen by the world. There’s a reason God made editors and Delete keys.

And finally, the best piece of advice I passed on to everybody and never paid attention to: If you write a page a day, in a year you’ll have written a book. I thought that was just some kind of fortune cookie inspiration, but one day a friend I only saw occasionally called to thank me. For what? That page a day thing you told me last year. Dude, I just finished writing a book.

Apparently some of this bullshit actually works.

Worst: (this was said to me back in my sitcom days, when a bunch of us were working late in the writers’ room) Sure it’s fresh, dude. That’s just the way shrimp salad smells.

Q:  You are associated with Vitamin Angels, an effort to help eradicate childhood blindness as a result of Vitamin A deficiency. Tell us about it, and how you became involved.

MK:  At 8:46 on September 11, 2001 my daughter, Sarah, was at Ground Zero. She was on a bus that had just pulled up to the base of Tower One. She heard and felt the first plane hit, and looking out her window, she saw a truck lift off the ground from the impact.

Her bus emptied quickly and she joined the crowd waiting outside the tower for instructions from the police. Fifteen minutes later she watched the second plane hit, and was an eyewitness to the aftermath that followed.

By that time, I was glued to the TV and realized that she might well be in the middle of all that horror. I’ll spare you the details, but after 90 agonizing minutes, we got the phone call. Sarah was safe.

Over the next few days I adopted a new approach to life. Live every day like it’s September 10th. It doesn’t mean live for the moment, for tomorrow you may die. It means our world as we know and love it can change in an instant. I don’t remember a thing about September 10, 2001. I didn’t want any more days to pass as anonymously as that one did.

Searching for something meaningful I discovered Vitamin Angels. It was founded in 1994 by Howard Schiffer. He would ask vitamin companies to donate vitamins, and then with the help of volunteer organizations distribute them around the world where vitamins and nutrients could literally save lives. Howard did it all in his spare time. He was unpaid and had a full time day job.

I called him, and I was immediately captivated by the mission — providing basic nutrition to people in need. I told him I didn’t know companies who could give away vitamins. But I knew some who might donate money. He had never thought about that, so we decided to give it a try. I was struck by a few basic facts. Millions of children go blind from a lack of Vitamin A. Half of them die. All it takes to prevent that is one megadose of Vitamin A, administered twice a year. Total cost — twenty-five cents to save one child from going blind.

And so, Operation 2020 was born — a campaign to eradicate childhood blindness on the planet by the year 2020. We found our first corporate sponsor. Then we began to attract others, and schools, and individuals, even kids willing to part with tooth fairy money to save another kid’s life.

Last year Vitamin Angels reached (and saved) over 7 million children. We are operating in 40 countries. We are distributing 100 million prenatal vitamins a year. In one country our newborn initiative shows that by giving one dose of Vitamin A, two days after birth, we can reduce infant mortality by 20%.

As for me, I’m still deeply involved in the organization. And somewhere over these past eight years I wrote six words that are as meaningful to me as the 130,000 words in my first book.

Be an Angel. Save a life.  Join us. https://www.vitaminangel.org/.

Q:  What are you reading right now?

MK:  I seem to have developed some kind of adult ADD. I have trouble focusing on reading a book when I’m writing one, so I’m reading much less these days, and I’m taking yoga lessons, which I was told by a reading specialist, would help. I think it does.

I did recently read three books by the late Donald Westlake, written under the name Richard Stark. The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, and The Outfit. They were brilliant. Mr. Westlake left a legacy of over one hundred books. He will be sorely missed.

I have also just started J.A. Konrath’s classic mystery Fuzzy Navel, and Robert Ellis’s latest thriller The Lost Witness. I met both authors recently, and they are wonderful writers and genuine cool guys.

Q:  What’s next for you?

I’ll be on this cyber tour hopping from blog to blog like Carmen Sandiego during the month of April, and the first draft of the next Lomax and Biggs is due May 15. Then I’ll finally be able to get to some of the things I haven’t been able to do for the past ten months. Laundry is high on the list.

After that, I plan to stick up one of those banks we bailed out, and use the money to go on vacation with my wife. Then I plan to blah-blah-blog at www.lomaxandbiggs.com because a lot of people seem to want to see more of me between books. (I won’t know if my wife is one of them till after the vacation.)

Wasn’t that awesome?  FLIPPING OUT is available at bricks ‘n mortars and online shops everywhere.