ERIK LARSON with E.C. MURRAY

“Soon afterward, I got married—blind date, of all things—and my wife and I moved to
Baltimore, where I wrote a couple of unpublished novels, did some respectable
free-lance pieces, helped raise some babies, and wrote my first book, The Naked Consumer, about how
companies spied on individual consumers.”

I’m always intrigued by the jumping off point, when one decides, “I’m going to
follow my passion.” Why Baltimore? Were you able to write enough freelance articles
to support yourself?  What was the discussion between you and your
wife about taking this leap?

It was truly a devil's bargain. My wife, a neonatologist, was offered a great job at Johns Hopkins University's medical center. I was
working in San Francisco at the time, for the Wall Street Journal, and, being
very much a place-centered person, I did not want to leave a city I loved. But,
marriage is a trade-off. So, in return for my wife being able to take that job
at Hopkins, I was able to quit my Journal job, with the idea of writing novels.
It was a jarring shift. Too jarring. We did too much, in two short a time, and
it was unecessarily stressful: We got married, and boom, next day were on our
way to new lives in Baltimore. The bargain did not work the way I'd hoped. I
knew no one in Baltimore, and frankly felt as though I'd disappeared from the
landscape of national journalism. So, I started free-lancing, just to keep my
work out there, and make a little money. I did okay—in fact, I made a tidy income,
and wrote for some great magazines, including Harper's and the Atlantic. But I
quickly realized that for all the effort I put into writing long-form magazine
pieces, I might as well have been writing books. And so, I pitched my first
book to a number of agents, one called me back, and I was on my way. Of course,
I expected that my first book would be a huge best-seller—the next "Hidden
Persuaders"--but it didn't quite happen. Still, I loved working on that
book, and that's what made me decide to do another. 

How many rejections did you receive and
what you did you do with them?

To tell you the
truth, I didn't get that many rejections. My Journal experience was worth gold
in getting me assignments at magazines, and in winning the attention of agents,
though there was an annoying tendency on the part of magazine editors to assume
that writing for magazines was far more complex than writing for newspapers. It
was a kind of snobbery, really. As I tell my kids, it never stops—you always
have to keep proving yourself, no matter where you are in your career.     

What do you think happened when you started getting published? Do you think your
writing gradually improved, or did something else happen?

I was very lucky in my daily journalism career to work for
two newspapers that gave me lots of room to burnish my skills. My first job was
at the Bucks County Courier Times, in Levittown, Pa., where I covered the
police on Saturday nights, but spent most of my time writing "Sunday
Specials," full-page features for the Sunday edition on whatever I wanted
to write about. That was great fun, and allowed me to experiment with narrative
journalism and the use of fictional techniques to tell non-fiction
stories--tactics like withholding and foreshadowing. I jumped from there right
to the Wall Street Journal, where I had a fantastic first bureau chief who was
an editing genius and taught me the technique of literally cutting up my work
with a scissors and rearranging it to find the most natural structure. It's a
technique that I've modified and improved and now deploy on all my books. As I
wrote longer and longer pieces, for the Journal and, later, for magazines, I
did find that my writing improved. I have banished adverbs and most adjectives
from my work; I always read everything aloud, the best way to spot stumbling
points; and I choose only nonfiction stories that have a beginning, middle and
end.       

Did you switch from fiction to non-fiction? Why?

I can't really say that I switched from fiction to
non-fiction. I've always done both. I wrote my first novel when I was 13.  It was 75 pages long, and had a sex scene,
though I knew nothing about sex. As a teen, my main interest was in trying to
get my cartoons published in the New Yorker. Ha! Those cartoons seemed to end
up back in my mailbox within 24 hours. I've always had a novel in the works. I
just finished one, in fact—a fairly traditional ghost novella, starring a real
character from history, and with a few twists on the genre. Lots of fun. Will I
try to publish it?  Probably not. The
writing of it kept my skills polished while I searched for my next nonfiction
book idea. In my dark past I've had two other novels under contract with
mainstream publishers, but each time I withdrew the book, because my nonfiction
career simultaneously took a big leap forward. I just couldn't bear to publish
a mediocre novel, while my nonfiction books were doing so well.  

Will you give us a time line for 1.) when you foggily conceived your idea (say,
for In the Garden of Beasts) 2.) when the idea
became crystallized 3.) your research (which I'd guess overlapped #1 and #2) ,
4.) writing the book, and 5.) finally your publication?

Conception: c. 5 years ago, when I read The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich, by William Shirer, who had been in Berlin from 1934 until the
U.S. entered WW II. I found myself wondering what that would have been like to
have met people like Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels at time when no one knew the
rest of the story. 

The idea was rather vague and broad, and other ideas arose
that briefly gave it a run for its money. I did a lot of reading into the early
Hitler era, and stumbled across William Dodd and his daughter, Martha —which is
when the idea really began to come together. I find there's always one key
thing that makes an idea come alive, and in this case it was the sheer wonder
of the fact that Martha, daughter of the U.S. ambassador, slept with the first
chief of the Gestapo. Getting to this point took maybe six months, at which
point I wrote a very detailed proposal, including sample chapter, brief
exposition of what I planned to do, and a chapter-by-chapter outline. That
exercise took a couple of months.

The research took three-ish years in all, but with part of
that time consumed by writing the proposal, part by writing the book itself.
The book took about a year, but again, that year overlapped with the research
phase.

The manuscript went to my editor in summer, 2010. I  never use the term "rough draft,"
by the way; I turn in only what I consider to be my best work, in a form that
I'd feel comfortably seeing in bookstores the next day. Maybe that's a hangover
from my newspaper days. My editor saw room for improvement—which is why god
made editors, to save us from our own delusions. I did a good deal of rewriting
and obsessing. The final manuscript was completed early the following fall.
(2010) Within a month I received the copy-edited manuscript, and then soon
after that, the first-pass proofs. Then came the second-pass proofs, and even a
third-pass proof. The book was published on May 1, 2011. 

The Devil in the White City could pass as fiction. How have you improved your
writing skills, including fiction techniques, since graduate school?

The only way to improve writing skills is to write, and of
course to read. I tried to mine the techniques that novelists use to move their
stories along, and apply those techniques to nonfiction. I found, for example,
that John Irving is very obvious in his use of foreshadowing, and his placement
of cliff-hangers at the end of chapters, sub-sections, etc. You can't adapt
such techniques to just any historical topic, however—you have to have a
subject that lends itself to being retold as a contiguous, forward-moving
narrative. A story. And that's why it
takes me so long to find my ideas.

Who writes the Index?

No
clue, but it ain't me.

You close the book with a cautionary note by Isherwood. When you write a book, how
much do you think about its relevance today’s world?

I try not to think about its relevance at all. I gave that
up when I left the Wall Street Journal, where we always had to have a
"significance graf" within the first three paragraphs. In fact, I
wrestled with this a lot when I wrote my first really successful book,
"Isaac's Storm." I kept asking myself, why write this now? What's the
point? Why should anyone read it? Until I gave myself a metaphoric slap in the
face and said, here's why: Because it's one hell of a story.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Write every day, including weekend days, and always stop at
a point where you know you can readily pick up the next morning. Often I'll
stop in mid-sentence, even when I'm going strong, because I know that when I
sit down the next day, I'll be instantly productive. I'll finish that sentence.
But here's the thing: I know from experience that because of the magic of the
human brain, that unfinished sentence will be swirling around in my head just
out of conscious awareness for the rest of the day and all night, and that by
morning my mind will not only have completed that sentence, it'll likely have
finished that whole page, or the next five pages.