Lee Child Interview by Bryan E. Robinson, Ph.D

Lee Child Interview

by Bryan E. Robinson, Ph.D

As a writer, you probably recognize Lee Child by name unless you've been living under a rock. But you will certainly recognize his billion-dollar brand: Jack Reacher, portrayed by Tom Cruise on the big screen. Child is the author of 24 New York Times bestselling Jack Reacher thrillers with 14 having reached the #1 position and the #1 bestselling complete Jack Reacher story collection, No Middle Name.

All his novels have been optioned for major motion pictures—including Jack Reacher (based on One Shot) and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Child’s latest novel is Blue Moon. Foreign rights for the Reacher series have sold in 49 languages and 101 territories. With more than 100 million books sold, the series has commanded over a billion dollars in global sales. In addition to books and movies, there is a Jack Reacher custom coffee blend, songs by Child and Naked Blue from Reacher’s perspective on CD and digital download and now a soon-to-be television series on Amazon. A native of England and a former television director, Lee Child lives in New York City.

I sat down with him to talk about how he balances his billion-dollar business with his personal life and his own self-care. We talked about mindful productivity, wellness and how he describes his “workplace.”

Bryan Robinson: Great to talk to you, Lee. I wanted to begin by asking how you would describe your workplace.

Lee Child: The physical locale doesn’t matter that much. As a writer, your workplace is inside your head in your imagination. You need a certain amount of resources such as a desk, keyboard, Internet and reference books. Inevitably you end up with an office somewhere, and I have one in every one of our houses. That’s where I work.

Robinson: Is there any particular place you prefer to write either inside or outside?

Child: At a desk inside. Although there’s the usual thing with writers when you go for a walk or take a shower, you get the ideas you need. It’s quite a skill in tricking your mind into relaxing and therefore giving you what you need.

Robinson: So how does Lee Child relax?

Child: Mostly reading or music. And TV third. I rarely get too far down the list because normally I’m either reading or listening to music.

Robinson: You’ve done some music with Naked Blue from Baltimore.

Child: Yeah, we have a CD out. It was a weird coincidence. If you put it in a book, nobody would believe it. I was independently a fan of theirs, they were a fan of mine and we found each other out about 15 years ago. I wrote the lyrics, and they wrote the music.

Robinson: Do you sing or play an instrument on the CD?

Child: I don’t. I probably could have, but I felt like it was more respectful to let the professionals do it.

Robinson: I understand that you have a coffee brand.

Child: Yeah, we do. Reacher’s famous for liking his coffee, and that was about the only thing we could merchandise for a guy who owns nothing. We were approached by a coffee roaster, and we did a deal. Jack Reacher coffee is for sale worldwide online.

Robinson: So you got the coffee, the books, the movies, the band and now Jack Reacher will be a TV series on Amazon.

Child: Yes. We switched away from the feature film world to streaming television. We plan to reboot it with Amazon starting pretty soon I hope.

Robinson: Do you know who will play Jack Reacher yet?

Child: We don’t. That’s the next big decision, and obviously it will be a crucial decision in light of the movies. The casting was never thoroughly approved of among the readers in the feature films, so we’re going to be very careful this time.

Robinson: With all the irons in the fire, what would you say are your biggest pressures?

Child: Deadlines always. Not so much the books because it’s the primary function. I’ve never run into too much stress with that, but it’s everything else. It’s the promotion, endless interviews reading books for blurbs. Everyday has 10 things that have to be done. I’m probably a bad subject for this article because I don’t do anything to mitigate pressure. I don’t look after myself in any way. Thinking about it deeply from my point of view, it is a kind of toxic masculinity. To admit weakness or anything like that. It’s unthinkable. I grew up with the catch phrase which was, “I’m not afraid of stress; stress is afraid of me.” It’s not very mindful or certainly any part of this modern wellness thing. I’m aware deep down I’m reacting against my own interests. But it’s part of being a man of my age. You can never admit anything like that.

Robinson: Do you think that works for you? In a way, it sounds like that is a form of resilience because you consciously have that mindset.

Child: Yeah, I very much do. I imagine other people might disagree. It’s both selfish and aggressive in that I won’t be beaten, certainly not by something like stress or overwork.

Robinson: So you do have a mindful approach to this. You have an intentionality about it. Do you feel like your life is pretty balanced?

Child: I find that to be almost a circular question. Part of being masculine in my generation is you just knew that you’d go to college and work really hard the rest of your life. So to what extent is work different from life? In a lot of ways life is work. Therefore, the balance thing is almost an empty question. What else am I supposed to be doing other than work? So in a lot of ways the balance thing is a non-question. You’re going to work so you just get on with it. The idea that you have these other activities that you should be balancing doesn’t really come into it.

Robinson: A lot of people are talking about work/life integration instead of work/life balance. Work is where some people have their significant relationships, friends and social connections. Does that resonate?

Child: Yeah it does. Looking back, I would say you generate almost all your friends and your ongoing relationships through the job. I don’t have any friends who are not from those worlds.

Robinson: You’ve written so many books. Do you still love writing as much as you used to?

Child: That’s part of the fascination of it for me. On the one hand, it’s an absolute joy and pleasure. When you’re making up a story and it’s going well–which it is most of the time–and it’s sometimes unbelievable that you get paid for that. On the other hand, there is the fact that it’s a job and career. At a certain level if you get as far as I’ve been lucky enough to do, you’ve got a lot of people depending on it: publishers, the book trade, agents and lawyers. So it’s a very real career–a real job with multiple people planning their bottom line that year. You got to be 100% aware of that and 100% blind to it so that the joy and fun continue. You don’t want to be sitting there writing aware of the stakes. I think that’s the main trick to me.

Robinson: Of all the contributions you’ve made, what are you most proud of?

Child: I’d have to go to family for that. My daughter, I think, has brought me the most happiness. I’ll be leaving behind a number of books that will quickly go out of print and be forgotten. But I’m also leaving a human being who will endure and carry forward her values into the future which is the thing I’m most proud of.

Robinson: Is there any wisdom you want to share, based on your experience, with mystery writers trying to make it?

Child: That’s a tough one. I’ve been successful in one narrow field, but I think overall if it’s a question of what would I tell my younger self, I think I would say, “Trust your gut a little bit more than I did.” I can pick out a couple of times when I should have done something differently, but because of conventional pressures or advice I didn’t. None of them were particularly fatal or disruptive, but I can see afterward I should have trusted my gut. You know we live in a data-automated age where everything is researched to the nth degree, but there’s still plenty of room for those gut decisions which can be superior to all that. Data is great and research is great but at some point you must make a decision on it. Your subconscious decisions betray an analysis of that information that is made more sophisticated than the conscious mind.

Robinson: Is there anything else you would like to share with the members of Killer Nashville?

Child: Sometimes I wonder where all this wellness stuff came from. I think it is possibly explained that people of our age are going through issues with their elderly parents. You see these decrepit old people and think, “Oh, my God. I don’t want to get like that.” And that spurns this wellness mania amongst the second generation. they’re trying to avoid that fate. But my approach has always been different. I don’t want to get that old in the first place. I’d rather burn out and have fun at a younger age. My attitude to wellness is to avoid it rather than to indulge it.

Robinson: Well, that’s a refreshing approach. You’re saying there are different ways to live fully.

Child: Yes, exactly. My internal motto has always been, “I’ll have more fun in 60 years than you’ll have in 90,” and that’s how I’ve lived. Now I’m over 60 and living on borrowed time.

Robinson: When you’re on vacation, do you work or do you take time off?

Child: I have a writing season where I write every day until the book is done. That’s usually six or seven months of the year. Vacation comes after that, and I never, ever work on vacation. I also never work on a day when I’ve got something else to do because I have a mental block where if I know I’ve got to finish at a particular time, the day is useless because I’m always feeling it’s not worth getting into that now because I’m going to have to stop. It handicaps me. I’m not one of these guys that works on a plane or in the airport. I need to have a completely dedicated day in the office to get anything done of quality.

Robinson: It sounds like you’ve got good boundaries between work and play. When you’re on vacation, you take that time to relax and have fun. One last question. Who are some of your favorite writers?

Child: Oh, too many to mention. All my peers and contemporaries. I like to catch up with what they’re thinking and doing and also a completely random selection. When I was a kid, of course there was no Internet or structure for recommendations, none of these algorithm that if you like this you’ll like that. Every discovery was to some extent random. And I try to replicate that whenever possible. For instance, when I do go on vacation, I forget that I’m in the business and try to look at everything just as a normal consumer, so I will choose books randomly based on how they look, how they feel just to get the filter out of my bubble.

Robinson: I appreciate your taking the time to talk with me, Lee.

Child: It’s a real pleasure.

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Bryan E. Robinson is a licensed psychotherapist and author of two novels and 40 nonfiction books. He applies his experiences to crafting insightful nonfiction self-help books and psychological thrillers. His multi-award winning southern noir murder mystery, Limestone Gumption, won the New Apple Book Medal for best psychological suspense, the Silver IPPY Award for outstanding mystery of the year, the Bronze Foreword Review INDIEFAB Book Award for best mystery, and the 2015 USA Regional Excellence Book Award for best fiction in the Southeast.

His most recent release is Daily Writing Resilience: 365 Meditations and Inspirations for Writers (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2018). He has written for Psychology Today, First for Women, and Natural Health, and his blogs and columns for writers appear in Southern Writer’s Magazine. He is a consulting editor for The Big Thrill, the online magazine for International Thriller Writers. His long-selling book, Chained to the Desk, is now in its 3rd Edition (New York University Press, 1998, 2007, 2014). His books have been translated into thirteen languages, and he has appeared on every major television network: 20/20, Good Morning America, ABC’s World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, NBC Universal, The CBS Early Show, CNBC’s The Big Idea. He hosted the PBS documentary, Overdoing It: How to Slow Down and Take Care of Yourself.

Killer Nashville Interview with Tony Vanderwarker

What happens when Tony Vanderwarker, the founder of one of Chicago’s largest ad agencies, decides he wants to write fiction? He connects with author John Grisham and learns to do-in his ugly babies. Here is a wonderful story of mentorship and the trials and errors of being a writer. Thanks to Beth Terrell for conducting this interview.Enjoy…and be inspired!

Clay Stafford
Founder of Killer Nashville 

Tony Vanderwarker

KN: Please welcome Tony Vanderwarker to the Killer Nashville blog.  Tony, could you tell us about your path to becoming a professional writer? When did you know you wanted to be one? How did you get started?

I’ve always wanted to write novels, I think as far back as a teenager. When I was in the Peace Corps in Africa in my late teens, I wrote oodles of ersatz Rimbaud poetry and three or four meandering novels – all of which I burned when I came upon the disasters some years later. But I did get interested in film through working with the government’s film unit and went to film school at NYU. I ended up making a major motion picture, which got minor attention, so I decided to write shorter films. I then went into advertising and cashed out of the business in my late forties. I’ve been writing novels ever since.

KN: Did you always write thrillers? What drew you to the genre?

I began writing comic novels, but they didn’t sell, so I tried thrillers figuring I’d imitate my friend (author) John Grisham. Wrote a couple and got lucky. John offered to take me under his wing and teach me the secrets of thriller writing. So the novel I have coming out, Sleeping Dogs is the one I wrote with him over a period of about five years.

Sleeping Dogs by Tony Vanderwalker

KN: John Grisham was instrumental in helping you come up with the idea for that novel, wasn’t he? Could you tell us about that?

At our lunch when Grisham offered to mentor me, he said, “Okay, we need a plot. You said you had a couple ideas, let’s hear them.” I pitched the first, swing and a miss. The second he shot down also. So I pitched the third as I began to sweat.“So there are actually seven unrecovered nukes scattered around the U.S. as a result of mid-air accidents and collisions during the Cold War,” I told him.“You’re kidding,” he said.“No, all over the place, Georgia, North Carolina, Oregon – the Pentagon claims they are harmless.”“Whoever heard of a harmless nuke? What if the bad guys got a hold of one?”So with Grisham engaged, we began a long and arduous process of crafting a novel together.And the interesting part is, when Sleeping Dogs ran into a glut of similar thrillers on the market, I pulled it and wrote a book about writing with John calledWriting With The Master. It got picked up and the publisher also decided to publish Sleeping Dogs. So both came out on Feb 4.

KN: Two books on the same day? That’s pretty impressive. What does your writing schedule look like?

I write from 9-12 in the morning, that’s usually when I run out of gas and my dogs get tired of lying around in the studio. They are lousy on plots and terrible spellers, but they contributed the title of my novel.I take off weekends and holidays. Otherwise, it’s rigorous. I’m lazy and have a dread of the blank page so if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t get any work done. I do two to three pages a day, many of my ideas come to me when I’m half-asleep in the middle of the night. In the morning, my bedside table ends up looking like a bunch of stickies were shot at it.

Writing With the Master by Tony Vanderwarker

KN: But you’ve worked hard to make the technical details authentic. How much and what kind of research do you do?

Lots, Siri is with me constantly. I’m always asking her crazy questions like, “What did Mussolini have to do with the Mafia?” or, “What’s the difference between an mk mod 47 nuke and some other one?” She’s a tireless co-worker. But it really depends on what kind of book you’re working on and how familiar you are with the territory. Bubonic plague is something I know nothing about (fortunately) so Siri and I are spending a lot of time on that. Reading up on nukes took months. But the ad agency stuff comes flying out of my head faster than I can get it down.

KN: And how about your personal experiences? How do they inform your work?

My life seeps into everything I do. I was having lunch with my publicist a couple weeks ago and she asked about my kids. I described my daughter, who is a theatre director, as a tough and resolute person who is not afraid to tell anyone to go jump. And Sharon said, “Could she have been the model for the lead female characters in Ads For God and Sleeping Dogs?” I hadn’t realized it, but she was right on. Probably included a bit of my wife also since she comes in the same size.

KN: What do you hope readers will take away from Sleeping Dogs?

That nuclear weapons are scary as hell and we ought to pay more attention to how they are stored and handled before we create a catastrophe. Sleeping Dogs brings to life the possibility of terrorists recovering one close to a major population center and coming close to detonating it, immolating millions and making the Eastern Seaboard uninhabitable for centuries.

KN: That does sound scary—and is a message a lot of people probably ought to hear. So how do you get the message out? What sort of marketing and promotion do you do?

The whole nine yards: social media, website, writing websites, email lists I’m on, Kickstarter, plus I have two publicists, one at my publishing house, the other a freelancer I’ve hired. I began marketing this book back in June 2013 and I’ll continue until I’ve bored everyone to tears and is begging me to stop.

KN: What’s next for you? 

Two directions: First, I’ve resurrected two comic novels I wrote years ago and am bringing them out later in the year, probably from a publishing house I’ve started with a friend. So Ads For God and Say Something Funny will be coming back to life. I’m also writing new comic novels as well as another thriller. The comic novel is titled Client From Hell and is about the Mafia taking over an ad agency. The thriller is a sequel to Sleeping Dogs.

KN: You have some pretty eclectic interests as a writer. What authors have inspired you?

The list is endless, but particularly Ford, Franzen, Updike, Kesey, Grisham (for his stories), Hiassen (for his humor) and above all, Cormac McCarthy.

KN: Any advice for aspiring authors?

Be patient. Words are tricky characters and don’t always do what you want. And slow down, speed kills good writing. And about your work, ask yourself the question one of Fellini’s characters posed in 8 ½, something like: “Is this really remarkable or just the foot of another cripple in the sand.” Ruthlessness is as much a part of writing as imagination. You have to be able to do-in your ugly babies.

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Tony Vanderwarker is the founder of one of Chicago’s largest ad agencies, and is the author of the memoir Writing With the Master: How a Bestselling Author Fixed My Book And Changed My Life about his experience being mentored by John Grisham while writing the thriller Sleeping Dogs (both released by Skyhorse in 2014). He has also penned the forthcoming novels Ads for God and Say Something Funny.