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[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm a suburban Texas dad raced in the
North who writes novels.
I was a teacher for many years.
I'm the author of now four novels.
My first two were "The Summer Guest" and "Mary and O'Neil,"
which I'm very proud of, but the one everybody seems to
know about is "The Passage," which was the
first look in a trilogy.
We're calling it The Passage Trilogy.
The second book is called "The Twelve," and the third should
come out in another two years.
It's kind of the big canvas project of my life, sort of
the grand opera.
I'm obeying the orders of my daughter, who asked me to
write it when she was nine years old, which was to write
a story about a girl who saves the world.
And that's the project.
I would meet her at the end of her school day dressed in my
running clothes and with her bicycle.
We lived just a couple blocks from her elementary school.
And we'd spend an hour together.
And I was really just trying to improve her bicycle riding
skills, which were a little on the sketchy side.
And to sort of pass the time in the Texas heat, we played a
game called let's plan a novel, and it
was just for fun.
But eventually, it became such a good story that I was
writing something else that was sort
of gasping for breath.
And so I put that aside and took this up and
decided to write it.
I mean, it's sort of like it just--
one day I said, you know, this stuff you
don't get very often.
This is great material.
It's a huge story.
I think it would be a gas to write.
So I did.
The women are the main characters.
It's very much about the women in this book.
I was taking different aspects of traditional female power
and strength and dispersing them amongst the characters.
So Amy has the mystical strength that women possess,
the intuitive strength.
And Alicia has the kind of physical warrior strength,
which any man who's watched a woman have a baby knows about.
And there are two others who I cannot name who embody a sort
of maternal strength and then it's sensual strength.
So gradually, the women have emerged as the primary actors.
As a writer, you're thinking, OK.
How would somebody with these particular characteristics,
including the fact that they're female, how would they
feel in that moment?
What would they do, and what's on their mind
when they do something?
And so you have to be really alert.
And you can't just kind of slip into easy assumptions.
And it actually makes your writing go up a level, just at
the level of writing.
I also feel it actually enriches your humanity.
So it's a really good exercise.
And that's also for readers too, you know?
Like when you read a novel in which-- when, as a man, I read
a novel that is from a woman's point of view, or some of it
is from a woman's point of view, it's kind of an
education, and one we could all stand to have.
The first book, the main group of characters have been living
in a state of almost completely hermetic isolation.
They really don't know what the past is even.
They're the descendants of children who escaped from
Philadelphia into a FEMA-created compound with the
idea that they would take temporary refuge there, but
then of course the world was overwhelmed.
The war was lost.
And so they've lived in a state of complete isolation
with only sort of local reference points for things in
terms of how they organize themselves, what kind of
family structures they have, what kind of government they
have, how they view material objects.
In the second book, the major setting of that book is a
community that actually has a very strong
connection to the past.
So in this place, history has
actually flowed in a continuum.
So my characters who were-- and this was sort of a relief
to me because I could indeed make a few more assumptions
about things--
they are a little more like you and me, in a sense.
They still have massive constraints on their lives
because it's such a dangerous place.
They're down to just under 100 people, and people are not
getting married, and they're not having children.
And the whole thing's beginning to have an
atmosphere of utility, and their technology's collapsing.
Whereas in this one, they have, in a sense, an
indefinite source of power.
They have all the crude oil in one of the salt domes of the
Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is where we keep massive
amounts of crude oil in these natural domes on the Texas
coast and one in Louisiana.
And so they have access to this resource.
And so the people who live there, not just view
themselves as connected to the past, but they are part of a
continuum that could indeed move into the future.
So they built a more complex society.
They have money.
One of the decisions I made was to not pretend, as many
writers do, that they're writing a
brand new story, right?
I mean, we've pretty much worked out
every story, you know?
So you're always operating in, not just sort of the
tradition, say, of genre, but actually of sort of archetypes
of characters and plots and circumstances.
And so that requires you actually to--
I think you should acknowledge that material, and then of
course try to do something new with it, to bring a new
sensibility to it that is yours in particular and seems
connected, say, to your cultural moment, right?
But the other thing it does is it invites you-- or at least,
it invites me--
to be a complete book nerd in a sense while
I'm writing a novel.
I mean, "The Passage" was full, and "The Twelve" is
full, of references, some of them oblique and subterranean,
and some of them just like way out sitting there on the page
to lots of different works of literature of quite a range.
"The Passage" had a lot to do with "King Lear." Even, as it
was, I thought, a thoroughly contemporary novel meant to be
read by a general audience with a very strong plot.
But it did owe quite a debt to "King Lear," which I saw in
high school, and I realized that it was a play about the
end of the world.
It was an apocalyptic play.
Every meaningful human bond and institution is destroyed
in five acts.
It's the end of the world.
And that has stayed with me because I grew up reading
books like "Alas, Babylon" and "Earth to [INAUDIBLE]" and all
the sort of Cold War classics that expressed our general
anxiety about our ability to destroy ourselves.
And I found in "Lear" the same investigation.
So you'll find all kinds of things.
You'll find references to "Night of the Living Dead,"
and "Dawn of the Dead," which I love, but you'll see
Shakespeare and, in this one, Emily Dickinson and Dickens,
and all these writers that were part of my
education as a novelist.
As a teacher, I can say it's really nice to get a thank-you
note from a former student.
And so the book is, as "The Passage" was, full of
thank-you notes.
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