{"id":1715097,"date":"2022-10-28T12:17:57","date_gmt":"2022-10-28T16:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1715097"},"modified":"2022-10-28T12:18:15","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T16:18:15","slug":"an-interview-with-klavan-crime-novels-writing-habits-and-why-reading-dostoevsky-was-like-a-map-of-my-psyche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/an-interview-with-klavan-crime-novels-writing-habits-and-why-reading-dostoevsky-was-like-a-map-of-my-psyche\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview With Klavan: Crime Novels, Writing Habits, And Why Reading Dostoevsky \u2018Was Like A Map Of My Psyche\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">38<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fan-interview-with-klavan-crime-novels-writing-habits-and-why-reading-dostoevsky-was-like-a-map-of-my-psyche%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1715097&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Ask Andrew Klavan about his work at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/\">The Daily Wire<\/a>, and he wastes no time, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be excellent all the time, and I couldn\u2019t be four times a week. But once a week is manageable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Klavan\u2019s sharp wit is what keeps his audience laughing.<\/p>\n<p>By Wednesday of each week, Klavan is working on his opening satirical monologue for \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/show\/the-andrew-klavan-show\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Andrew Klavan Show<\/a>\u201d podcast which publishes every Friday. He writes and rewrites, he says, up to broadcast time.<\/p>\n<p>Keeping up with political figures is a big part of his fourteen-hour workday. He consults RealClear Politics, the Wall Street Journal, Instapundit, the Daily Beacon, which in turn offer hyperlinks to other stories.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m always looking for the cultural angle,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n<p>He pores over Op\/Eds from liberals and conservatives alike, which forces him to take a stroll down \u2018Knucklehead Row,\u2019 Klavan\u2019s moniker for the Op\/Ed writers at The New York Times \u2014 a publication he now calls \u2018a former newspaper.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>He listens to Ben Shapiro, Victor Davis Hanson, and watches Brett Baer on Fox News. And of course he devours books, lots of books.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Daily Wire has been unlike any experience I\u2019ve ever had.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After podcasting for several years, Klavan spoke at a conservative conference. \u201cI was mobbed \u2014 like a rockstar.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That certainly doesn\u2019t happen when he sends off another manuscript to his publisher.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Great Literary Writers<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As an English major at UC Berkeley, Klavan dutifully bought every book his professors assigned. And kept them. What he didn\u2019t do was read them.<\/p>\n<p>He had no interest in pretentious, long-winded, \u2018literary\u2019 fiction. He did, however, enjoy reading hard-boiled detective stories, crime novels.<\/p>\n<p>That all changed the day he read a William Faulkner novel. He knew he was wrong. Faulkner, and the other great writers from history he had snubbed, wrote superb books. In fact, he became so enamored with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Dostoevsky, he began to look down on his coveted crime novels.<\/p>\n<p>He even tried his own hand at literary fiction, but something didn\u2019t quite fit. Looking back on this period of his life, Klavan says, \u201cWhen I was young, I wanted to be Raymond Chandler, but during my dark period I wanted to be Shakespeare.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>An Edgar Award<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As he recounts his writing journey in his memoir, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Great-Good-Thing-Secular-Christ\/dp\/071801734X\/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&#038;qid=1666887994&#038;sr=1-6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Great Good Thing<\/a>, when he abandoned thoughts of writing literary fiction, he was reminded of an old Victorian era crime novel by Wilkie Collins: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/5890.The_Woman_in_White\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Woman in White.<\/a>\u201d He realized he could write about serious subjects through mysteries and suspense.<\/p>\n<p>Out of desperation he quickly wrote his first crime novel titled \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Mrs-White-Andrew-Klavan-ebook\/dp\/B00WRYEQNE\/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&#038;qid=1666888477&#038;sr=1-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mrs. White<\/a>,\u201d calling on his younger brother for help. When they finished, Klavan, embarrassed by writing something he still considered beneath him, decided to use the pseudonym Margaret Tracy.<\/p>\n<p>And then, \u201cMrs. White\u201d won the 1984 Edgar Award \u2014 the most prestigious award for crime writers \u2014 for Best Paperback Original. To win the first time out is no mean feat.<\/p>\n<p>Once Klavan understood the work he was born to do was worth doing, he stopped using pseudonyms and began writing in his own name. And work he did. To date, he\u2019s written thirty novels.<\/p>\n<p>Klavan\u2019s average workday lasts fourteen hours. Rising around 5:20am, he begins writing around 6:30am and writes for a solid four hours.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI write and rewrite again and again. At least three \u2018page-one\u2019 drafts, but often more or more in parts. I\u2019m a slow writer because I\u2019m always rewriting. If I get 1,500 words of fiction or 1,000 of nonfiction, I\u2019m happy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Every Story Starts With A Question<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Klavan approaches each new novel with a question: What if?<\/p>\n<p>For instance, for \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Dont-Say-Word-Andrew-Klavan\/dp\/0765341522\/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&#038;qid=&#038;sr=\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Don\u2019t Say a Word<\/a>,\u201d the \u2018what if?\u2019 is: What if my child were kidnapped?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Or, in \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Identity-Man-Andrew-Klavan\/dp\/0547243286\/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&#038;qid=1666969984&#038;sr=1-1\">The Identity Man,<\/a>\u201d the \u2018what if\u2019 is: What if a man were offered the opportunity to change everything about his physical identity \u2014 from his face, to his fingerprints to his DNA? What would he do with such a second chance?<\/p>\n<p>These are not the sorts of questions writers of suspense or crime or YA novels often wrestle with. But Wilkie Collins did, Donna Tartt does, and so does Klavan.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dostoevsky: \u2018A Map Of My Psyche\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If Collins showed him the possibilities that thrillers offer, Dostoevsky\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Crime-Punishment-Volokhonsky-Translation-Classics\/dp\/0679734503\/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&#038;qid=1666969894&#038;sr=1-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Crime and Punishment<\/a>\u201d altered his view of the power of fiction altogether.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt changed my life, and I know how,\u201d says Klavan. \u201cI first read it in college when I was around nineteen.<\/p>\n<p>I was immersed in relativism \u2014 Foucault, Derrida. When I finished \u201cCrime and Punishment\u201d I remember burying my face in my hands and thinking they [the moral relativists] were wrong. Without my knowing it, Dostoevsky turned me toward God, turned the ship in a different direction.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I read it again after my conversion, it was like a map of my psyche. Only after my baptism could I understand it. Now when I reread it, I can see how incredibly deep it is, but before my baptism I couldn\u2019t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ask Andrew Klavan about his work at The Daily Wire, and he wastes no time, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be excellent all the time, and I couldn\u2019t be four times a week. But once a week is manageable.\u201d Klavan\u2019s sharp wit is what keeps his audience laughing. By Wednesday of each week, Klavan is working on &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1715100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[541],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1715097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-daily-wire"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1715097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1715100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1715097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1715097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1715097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}