We have long been fans of Michael Koryta’s books here at Crimespree. Stephen King says AN HONEST MAN, which is out now, is his best yet, and who are we to argue with Mr. King?
Matthew Turbeville had a fascinating conversation with Michael about AN HONEST MAN–enjoy!
Matthew Turbeville: Michael, I’m so excited to talk to you about your newest novel, An Honest Man. This is a book about home, about fathers, about the family we’re born into and the family we help create. It’s incredibly topical and—to me, even more appealing—an incredible read. How did this novel start off for you, and how do you normally approach works in the beginning of your writing process?
Michael Koryta: Thanks for the opportunity and the kind words. The novel really came out of a singular image to me – the opening scene, when Israel Pike, a lobsterman on an island off the coast of Maine, spots a drifting yacht and goes out to investigate what’s wrong. That was all I had in the beginning, that scene. But the things you mention are questions that appeal to me as a writer (and reader). Those questions of identity and legacy and how your forge a future that both recognizes where you came from and isn’t defined by it.
MT: In An Honest Man, you give us in Israel and Lyman two honest people who withhold or omit the truth in order to serve a greater good. In a way, your own writing is often about omitting and slowly clueing in the reader into what they should know at appropriate times. What is your process for setting up a plot and the overall story, and how do you decide what to reveal when? How do you know when a reveal—and especially a big twist—is most appropriately brought into the light?
MK: My goal with this particular story was to be sure no character ever tells exclusively the truth. Good guys and bad guys alike. Villains and victims. Because this is the human story, right? People make choices – lie with impunity, lie with rationalization, or withhold a story or parts of it. Sometimes, the motivation is selfish, malicious. Sometimes, it’s in the (perceived) interest of protection. I’m fascinated by the unintended consequences that come with lies of omission. Protecting someone from the truth is a dangerous game.
My process is messy. I write a lot of drafts. I try to time a reveal based on a calculation of when the character would discover it organically. Pacing is in the back of mind, more instinctual, a reader’s mindset – “Uh, oh, this is getting slow” – but my greatest concern is what these characters would do and when they would do it.
MT: This novel deals with some heavy themes and topics that weigh heavily on the minds of Americans and the world at large, including issues of human trafficking and sex slavery. Did you set out to write a novel about human trafficking and sex slavery, or a novel about Maine, or a novel about Israel and Lyman? In other words: what comes first for you when developing a great story, especially a crime story?
MK: I certainly didn’t set out to write about human trafficking. I was well into the book before that element even came into play. I wanted to write a novel about a man and a boy from different families, burdened by different legacies, who shared a common question: can I escape my family, literally and figuratively? Then that broadened into the larger idea of community. How do you honor the past while not whitewashing it? How do we reconcile the greatness and the horror that can live within a shared community past? How do we reconcile deeply emotional and starkly contrasting views of the same place? Those were the driving questions. Salvation Point Island is a stand-in for a hundred communities in America in this moment. Ultimately, it boiled down to an exploration of a place works on people, and how people define home.
MT: You manage to make us like people other writers might make villains: there’s a man who’s killed his father, an untruthful cop, a young woman who may have killed several people, among a number of other characters, good and bad. What seems clear here is that there are no completely good or completely bad people, but characters colored different shades of gray. However, it seems like a difficult task to make us root for characters like these, no matter how complicated they are—how do you do get the reader to side with these characters, and why is it important for you to do so, other than to simply have a main character to root for?
MK: I’m really glad to hear this worked for you, because it is one of my primary goals as a writer. I love messy people and untidy situations with moral complexity. I think in any novel you should seek emotional authenticity. I don’t care whether it’s a historical novel about a real person or a mystery set in a fictional place; you need to deliver characters for whom the audience can feel an authentic connection. This means flawed characters, of course, but more crucially, it means characters who make decisions you may not like but always understand. I have no interest in whether the choice was “good” or “bad” – only in what happened after it was made. The characters throw the rocks in the pond, and I watch the ripples. That’s when it’s a lot of fun, when characters surprise me, or I see an unintended consequence to their actions.
You ask about a desire for the reader to side with the characters or root for them. That’s ordinarily the case, sure, but it’s not something I seek. I want the reader to invest emotionally. I want the reader to feel something. That’s it, and that’s all. A result of this may be that one reader leaves the novel liking Character A but disliking Character X, while another reader would reverse that. If I can pull that off, I’m thrilled, because it suggests that the novel is connecting at an individual level.
MT: Going back to the family we create, and the family we establish ourselves, there are characters in the novel who are loners, but ultimately everyone seems to want some sort of human connection in your novels. Inside this thriller, you have a tiny nugget of something akin to hope. What’s so important to you about applying this sort of lightness to a world riddled with crime, with murder, with devastation and revenge?
MK: Well, what’s the opposite of having hope? Hopelessness. I don’t think we want that for ourselves or humanity at large! I enjoy a good tragic story, but I still want to feel as if there was light in the darkness, the potential for selfless decisions, the extended hand for the person in need. In this way, Lyman Rankin is among my all-time favorites. The world has handed this kid a terrible situation. He refuses to let it define him. Risking spoilers here, but that’s also the journey of the character nicknamed Hatchet. You push against the darkness, you refuse to say, “I am my circumstances,” or, conversely, in Israel’s case, “I am my mistakes.”
When you put a character on that journey – where the world says one thing about them, but they say another – you find rich storytelling ground.
MT: What is your writing process like? Do you outline heavily, especially with a novel with as broad a cast as this, or do you give yourself more freedom by mapping your stories out in other ways? What drives you as you write, and how do you keep yourself compelled to stick to a particular novel or set of characters?
MK: I wish I could outline. I would love to be able to do it. I’m able to see only a few scenes out in first draft, so it becomes a messy process with constant, heavy revising. This novel is roughly 320 pages long and I wrote around 1,000 pages to get there. It’s painful, but it’s the way that works for me. Some books put up less of a fight.
I know I’ll stick with an idea once the characters begin to creep into my mind in quiet moments. If I’m working in the yard, or on a hike, or at the gym, and my mind suddenly is transported to those characters and that world, it suggests something that might work for the reader too.
MT: Who are your first readers? How do you decide when something is ready to go to an editor or agent? You’re a prolific writer, but even well into your career, are there novels you decide to go ahead and scrap rather than pursue, even far along in the process?
MK: I’ve scrapped more than I’ve written. I scrapped a book that I was well along with to switch to this one, in fact. I have a wonderful editor, Joshua Kendall, and I’ve worked with him long enough that I don’t hesitate to bring him in early. Sometimes, I’ll show him rough chunks, ask him for a phone call, and talk through the situation. Other times, I’ll simply deliver him a book. Same is true for my agent, Richard Pine, who delivered great reads on early drafts of this one. The only person who is always seeing the work in progress is my wife. She knows her stuff – she has a master’s in creative writing – and she’s the best barometer I have for whether a story is working. In early drafts, she won’t offer much specific feedback, but letting her in on the process gives me someone to talk to, which is very nice. Once I’m committed to the book, though, I stop sharing it even with her. It’s a funny thing. There’s no conscious choice or strategic timeline for that. Eventually, the current gets strong enough that I simply stay in it until the end.
For a long time, I wrote all my first drafts “with the door closed” as Stephen King says. That works well – but it’s nice to let someone else inside, time to time. You simply need to be very careful about who it is and what you’re asking of them, to remember that it is demanding and often unfair to be the first reader. If you get the dynamic wrong, you’ll end up feeling either defeated or overconfident. Either one of those is poisonous. I’d recommend writing with the door closed unless you feel you’ve got the perfect reader.
MT: What books and writers inform you most as you work to perfect your craft? What are the books you return to time and time again, both inside the crime/mystery/thriller genres, and outside of these genres as well?
MK: Everything you read is grist for the mill. Books that I’ll return to, that’s an interesting question. I touch base almost annually with The Great Gatsby, The Shining, and A River Runs Through It, an odd but inspiring trifecta. I listen to audio versions of many favorites, maybe not the whole book, but just enough to check in and hear the cadence again, remember the unique magic. I return again and again to The Paris Review’s four-volume set of writer interviews. That’s a wonderful resource, a treasure.
MT: What was it like to work to produce a film like Those Who Wish Me Dead, based on your novel of the same name, especially with a major star like Angeline Jolie (among other big Hollywood names) attached? Are there any unexpected ways working in film might differ drastically from writing novels?
MK: It’s an entirely different medium. There’s very little about a script that feels like a novel to me. It’s funny, but I’m the last screenwriter you’d want to hire if you desired a faithful adaptation. If it’s not different in some major ways, why would I want to do it? I’ve already told that story. So I enjoy digging in with fresh eyes. But then you get the painful reminders that your script might be used as nothing more than a blueprint for the next version or vision. Or you might write something you love that dies in the development pipeline, as most scripts do, and will never be seen by the audience. It is such a massive industry – there are always mergers happening, corporate restructurings, and your studio champion might move on, or the actor who was attached takes another project, whatever. A lot of stars must align for anything to be made, let alone made well. You get paid for your work, of course, but you often never get to see the product. It’s an exercise in humility. Until the WGA strike began in May, I was working on a TV series adaptation of An Honest Man with the production team who did Mare of Easttown among others, and I’m eager to return to that, excited about what it can be.
MT: What are you working on next, and what can we expect as far as further adaptations and productions of your novels? How many projects are you currently working on?
MK: Well, if the tech companies and studio companies that forced us to strike over what amounts to a rounding error for their annual budgets will come back to the table, I’ll return to work on An Honest Man and hopefully further work on Never Far Away, which is a movie, not a series. I’ve got a couple other pitches in the mix on the film side. On the novel side, I’ve completed my next book under the Scott Carson name, and I loved that one – hands down the most fun I’ve had writing in years. That book comes out in the spring. Now I’m completely immersed in the next book under the Koryta name, which has the working title of Silver Gate and is a fast, gritty, and emotional crime story that also brings back a character from a book I wrote years ago called Envy the Night. It has been a blast.
MT: Thank you so much for taking the time to let me pick your brain. It was a pleasure reading An Honest Man, and I hope readers everywhere will race to the bookstore (or to their ebook store) to pick up a copy!
MK: I truly appreciate the opportunity and your thoughtful read of the book.
