This week's interview is with ITW debut author Brian Klingborg.
THE AUTHOR
Brian Klingborg works in the educational publishing field. He’s written books on Kung Fu, and he wrote for the Winx Club television series. Kill Devil Falls is his first novel. He lives in New York City.
You can find Brian on Twitter
THE INTERVIEW
You
wrote non-fiction books before you turned your skills to your first novel. How
did that process differ for you?
The
main difference between writing non-fiction and fiction is, of course, you
can’t just make stuff up for non-fiction!
My
first non-fiction book was on the Chinese martial arts. I wrote it as an homage to my teacher, Lai
Hung. In his youth, Lai Hung was a full-contact fighting champion, and famous
throughout Asia, but he was relatively unknown in the West. I felt it was an injustice that he toiled
away with a handful of students in relative obscurity, while many lesser
talents had huge schools and lucrative instructional video deals.
Presenting
factual information about kung fu was a challenge, however. There wasn’t much research material available
in English, and even the Chinese sources were full of apocryphal tales and
exaggerations. Secret techniques obtained
from mysterious mountain-dwelling hermits.
Abilities that bordered on the supernatural. That sort of thing. I did my best to separate the wheat from the
chaff and in those cases where I included an anecdote that seemed too
implausible to be true, I gave alternative interpretations.
But
even when I write fiction, I do a ton of research. Cars, weapons, clothing, equipment, geography,
architecture, flora and fauna, anything that features in the plot is looked up
and verified. I recently completed
writing a dark thriller set in 1901. I
included 85 footnotes. So, even though
my stories and characters are products of my imagination, I construct them on a
framework of facts.
Tell
us about your road to publication:
I spent
many years confident that I would one day be a successful author without
actually putting a single word on paper.
When I finally got around to writing, I first tried my hand at
screenplays. I had no industry contacts,
and the screenplays weren’t very good anyway, but I managed to get a couple of
minor producers interested in one of two of them. Of course, nothing came of it.
After
about ten years, I gave up on screenwriting and decided to write a novel. It took two years to finish the first
one. I sent it to thirty agents. Only one responded. He suggested a number of revisions. I dutifully made them. And then the agent was like, naaah.
So, I dusted
off an old screenplay, one that was designed to be filmed on a low-budget. I wanted something I could bang-out quickly. It still took me a year. I sent it out to another thirty agents, one of
whom I had been referred to by a mutual friend.
Guess which agent finally agreed to represent me? He sent the book to twelve or thirteen
publishers. One offered an advance of
$300. Another offered a little bit more (but not much). And thus, Kill Devil Falls was published by
Midnight Ink last April.
You
located your novel in a small, fictional town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
You grew up in the San Joaquin Valley. You now live in New York City and have
traveled extensively. How did your exposure to a variety of cultures and
communities impact you as a writer?
I suppose
wherever I’ve lived, I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider. I grew up in a small agricultural
community. Most of my classmates knew
from a young age what was waiting for them after school – the family farm or
the military. As for me, I had no
clue. I spent some time in Asia, where I
stood out simply by virtue of being a Westerner. But the culture shock of living in a foreign
land was nothing compared to what I felt when I moved to the northeast. People spoke with a strange accent and I couldn’t
always understand what they were saying.
You couldn’t get a glass of iced tea in November because it was seasonal. Restaurants served food like hoagies and grinders. If you wanted
cold cuts, you went to a deli, and if you wanted toilet paper, you went to a
market.
But
when you’re an outsider, you learn to observe.
You watch people. What they’re
wearing, how they talk, their interactions with one another. You take a mental note of what you see and
hear, and file it away.
And
that’s what writers do. They watch, they
listen, they observe, and then they use that information to add color and authenticity
to their work.
What
does "rural noir" mean to you?
The
word noir conjures up images of urban
landscapes rendered in black and white, trench coats, seedy bars, dirty alleyways.
In
contrast, we have the idealized small American town. Quaint, bucolic, folksy. Hard-working people making an honest living,
attending church on Sundays, adhering to old-fashioned values.
Naturally,
everyone expects to encounter bad behavior in a big city. Muggers, rapists, con-artists and
killers. But small-town America is no
stranger to sin. There is an
ever-present undercurrent of violence, racism, lust and greed lurking beneath
those green pastures and among those church pews.
For me,
setting a noir thriller in a rural setting was a way to subvert the myth of
small-town American wholesomeness. And
to suggest that, in my cynical opinion, even in the most Mayberry, USA of
towns, there’s a touch of Sodom and Gomorrah.
You
wrote Kill Devil Falls in third person, multiple. What made you choose
that POV?
I wrote
Kill Devil Falls with multiple points
of view in order to provide a window into each character’s motivations. I want readers to not necessarily agree with
what the characters do, but to at least understand why they are doing it. To empathize with them on some level – even
the villains.
What
are you working on now?
Currently
I’m working on a Neil Gaimanesque urban fantasy about a Taoist detective. It’s got Satanists! Black magic!
Cannibals! Monster sex! Kung fu fighting!
Final
words of wisdom:
Every
successful writer has received dozens, if not hundreds, of rejections. Failure is just the universe’s way of
separating real writers from people who think
they want to be writers. So, brew
another pot of coffee and get back to work.
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