Ask the Author: Dennis Lehane
Answered Questions (8)
Dennis Lehane
It’s about dislocation and the general un-rootedness of the country right now. Of feeling disconnected from a past that you suspect was probably a myth anyway. But that doesn’t stop you from yearning for it.
Dennis Lehane
That’s like asking who my favorite child is but, gun to my head, I’d say Elmore Leonard. Then James Lee Burke. Then James Crumley, James Ellroy, Daniel Woodrell, Richard Stark, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, and Jim Thompson.
Dennis Lehane
Well, my relationship to Boston is one of total love. Most people I knew who grew up in the city or its “spoke” neighborhoods (Boston is the “hub,” the neighborhoods are the “spokes”) are just goofy for it. It’s connected to my Dad, I think. He had an immigrant’s love of the place and he hated the highway, so he would drive me through all the neighborhoods to get where we needed to get, surface street after surface street through neighborhoods no one would drive through back during all the racial strife of the 70s. And it imbued me with both this irrational love of my city and a lifelong hatred of racism or anything that smells of it. As far as how geography helps me write a story, well, I can’t write about a place unless I understand the flavor of it. When I wrote about Oklahoma in THE GIVEN DAY, I was writing about a place that had gone from an outpost to a state in a few decades because of oil. Once I understood that, I kinda got it at a granular level. I’ve never written about Miami, even though I went to grad school there, but I did write about Tampa and, in particular, Ybor City. And what I grasped of Ybor in the 30s and 40s was that it was multi-racial and ghettoized yet thriving. And I could write from that place once I felt I’d brined it in my imagination.
Dennis Lehane
I don’t know. I’m truly flattered by the love readers seem to have for those characters. And I love them, believe me. But I have a rule that I will never write about them unless I’m truly inspired. I won’t plug them into a plot just so I can write a quick book. If they come knocking on my door again, most definitely I would dive right in. But if they don’t, I’ll let them live in peace.
Dennis Lehane
The idea for SINCE WE FELL came from an image—a guy refracted in the mirrored panes of the Hancock Building in Boston as rain sluiced down the glass. Within a few minutes, I had his wife as the one who sees that image. And an hour later I had the agoraphobia she suffers from. The next day I had the plot. It was pretty fast in that regard. The actual writing of it was another issue. No cakewalk, as my editor would surely tell you. Heh heh.
Dennis Lehane
Usually, I get character first. I’m very into flaws. I feel they define a person in a far more interesting way, dramatically-speaking, than strengths do. I honestly couldn’t give a shit about “heroic” characters if their “heroism” is their sole trait. I’m messed up, most people I know are messed up, and the ones who don’t seem to be are hiding something far worse than the rest of us. They’re the worst of all. So I double-down on the flaws. That’s my way in.
Dennis Lehane
You just sort of feel it out. I’ve been doing this enough that I can usually gauge within a few days of turning an idea over in my head if it has the legs to run the length of an entire novel. But there’s no process beyond that, at least not one I’m aware of.
Dennis Lehane
They’re apples and giraffes. Completely different, outside of their core narrative DNA. When you write a novel you’re God, in charge of the whole universe, from the farthest galaxy to the smallest pebble. When that book is published, everything in it was filtered through you and you alone (with some nudging and advice from your editor, of course). When you write a script, you’re like a house painter in a large mansion. You give the rooms their color but you don’t build the house or concern yourself with the plumbing. A screenwriter is one of, say, 140 people who contributes to the film. And your script is just a schematic to be interpreted by a director, actors, the director of photography, the set designers, costume designers, editor, producers, studio execs, and on and on and on. It’s much harder to be God; novels take way longer to write than scripts and are much more emotionally and psychologically taxing but they’re also—by a longshot—more fulfilling.
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