David Baldacci
Thriller novelist with 53 novels and seven children's books, former lawyer and screenwriter
Where to hear and read about David Baldacci1 episode or test
David Baldacci is a former lawyer and screenwriter who has written 53 novels and seven children's books, publishes two novels a year and has sold over 200 million copies. The habit most worth learning is writing a couple of chapters at a time with no outline, then cutting hard so every scene, line and detail earns its place.
If I am fascinated by what I'm writing about, everyone else will be fascinated too.
Everything They Don’t Tell You About Being a Writer (David Baldacci Interview)
David Baldacci: the story and the lessons
1How David Baldacci went from lawyer to bestselling novelist
Baldacci tried to sell short stories while his law school classmates chased law review. At UVA, while classmates tried out for law review and moot court, he tried to sell short stories to Playboy. He wrote short stories for 15 years, then screenplays, then his first novel.
Absolute Power was the first thing he ever sold. He compares starting with a novel to attempting an 800 lb squat on day one at the gym.
Books saved him growing up in segregated Richmond. He calls books body armor against bigotry, because reading about other people answers the boogeyman argument.
He read To Kill a Mockingbird as a child as an adventure story and in college saw it was about racism and justice. He believes the best books grow with the reader.
His lawyer years taught him that words can move mountains. As a lawyer his only arrows were words, and single words turned cases. He interviewed witnesses face to face because body language counts, and assumed everyone lied.
That habit of seeing things in person carried straight into how he researches novels.
He writes so much because the next story is always pulling at him. With nothing to write after finishing a book, he is at his most miserable, while bestselling friends take six months off.
He has hotel notepads from every hotel he has stayed in. At George H. W. Bush's funeral he waited four hours through security and wrote chapters around the edges of the program.
He learns craft by reading masters for pleasure, not writing manuals. After a great story he asks why it worked and rereads to find the moments where a character changed.
He thinks this teaches more than being told how to build a story, and he has nothing against self-help authors.
2How Baldacci builds a thriller without an outline
Baldacci writes in the trenches and throws his outlines away. He has tried outlines and always discarded them, wondering why he wasted three weeks. Writing linearly from page one forces every decision while it counts.
He compares outlining to Tom Brady in practice: nobody is trying to hurt him, so he is not at his sharpest. He adds that outline, organic or a mix can each suit a different story.
He writes a novel as a series of small pieces. He writes a couple of chapters, sees where they go, then writes a couple more, like firming up the edges of a puzzle. Later he knows what happens on page 120 and what the scene on page 315 must do.
"I'm not writing a novel. I'm writing a series of short stories that have this connectivity between them."
He plants every thread in the opening chapters so the story feeds itself. The Absolute Power setup holds a presidential murder, a cover up and one unlikely witness, so the writer never lacks a direction.
He likens it to a store-bought plant that comes with its own food. Aspiring writers who email that they are stuck at 50 pages have usually not planted enough.
He opens with a big pop that overturns the reader's first guess. He sets up an ambiguous scene, lets the reader settle on the obvious reading, then takes the least likely path. In an Amos Decker book, two bodies look like one killer's work but there are two separate killers.
"When they turn out to be wrong that's when I get their full undivided attention." The reader went one layer deep and he went three.
Baldacci waits until his passion tank is full before he starts. He lets an idea percolate because starting too soon made him write himself into a wall. He measures progress by energy, not page counts.
He admits he started too early more often in the past than he would have liked. He wants to run to the desk, not dread the next five pages.
He writes a placeholder ending and lets his subconscious solve the real one. With a tight deadline he sends the publisher a stand-in ending and keeps four or five possible finales in mind, blending pieces of them.
He works on something else while his mind keeps at it, and solves more plot problems in the shower than anywhere else.
He slows down the few big moments in a novel. A novel cannot stay at the top of the roller coaster, so he saves a few peak scenes and stretches them. He cites the five-minute death scene in Unforgiven.
Like Hitchcock in Psycho, he builds anticipation and leaves the worst to the reader's imagination.
He breaks down each finished book like game film. After every book he reviews which setups worked and which he telegraphed too early, using reader emails and friends' reactions.
If enough people read it differently than he intended, he treats that as his problem.
3Baldacci on characters, stakes and dialogue
Baldacci gives every series lead a wound unrelated to the case. Atlee Pine's twin sister was kidnapped when she was six, and each of the four books uncovers more of that loss. Amos Decker died on the football field, came back with hyperthymesia and synesthesia, and lost his family.
Readers want to watch characters suffer, redeem themselves and fight back, so the baggage can be unpeeled a little more with each book.
He prefers a character arc to a twist. He wants readers to say "never saw that coming" and also "what happened to that character." An arc means the character ends more broken, more healed or somewhere between.
Red herrings belong to the genre, but he does not want a book that is only the twist.
He makes a character's motive match the size of the act. When a character does something extreme, he makes the motive as big as the act, or readers decide it would never have happened.
He says plausibility is the only thing he is bound by. "I have to have motivation to match that action."
Baldacci pushes characters through the wall to see what comes out. He wants them vulnerable, fragile, uncertain and full of doubt, and he writes how they respond and get back up.
His model is the military, which breaks a recruit down and rebuilds him. You never know the real person from good times alone.
He builds stakes from a broken promise, not only a ticking bomb. In Nash Falls, businessman Walter Nash did everything right, then an FBI agent tells him he loses everything whether or not he helps them.
The story mirrors the American dream of working hard, getting educated and succeeding, then having it ripped away. It echoes coders told their education is superfluous by software that learned from their work.
He cuts dialogue to the line that does the work of ten. He calls lengthy dialogue lazy because action and interior thought can do that work. He used to write 100 words and now aims for 10.
On a film he wrote, a storm cost two shooting days. He cut Ellen Burstyn's scene to one line and let her eyes and expression do the work of nine lines.
4Baldacci's research and the discipline of cutting
He researches in person, both the hardware and the software. The hardware is jumping off parachute towers, army fitness training and police walkalongs in high crime areas. The software is asking people why an 18-year-old enlists in wartime.
A researcher would report what seemed important to them, not to him. The first gives scenes and plot ideas, the second gives fuller and more honest characters.
He turns an unanswered question into a story idea. The 6:20 Man came from the Pandora and Panama papers, which showed where $30 trillion of dark money sits but not what its owners do with it.
The head of the journalists' consortium emailed to say he was spot on, citing $10 million school board elections. Baldacci keeps a black spiral notebook per project and records what he felt, not only what he saw.
He researches a past era by walking his character through one day. For his 1950s detective Archer he followed one day of his life and researched the clothes, food, streets and stores. That gave him about 90% of what he needed.
He bought a 1958 Los Angeles Sunoco gas map on Etsy and watched a 25-minute 1953 Las Vegas Strip video frame by frame, finding a mechanical cowboy that was dismantled because it scared people.
He limits atmosphere to three or four sentences and leaves out 99% of research. Past that, readers turn the page. He admits to stuffing in research because he did not want to cut it, and calls that ego writing.
He sometimes writes the passage just to get it out, knowing it will be cut or moved in the edit.
Baldacci makes every scene do at least two jobs. He learned from screenplay work that a scene should advance the plot, deepen a character or give needed information. He does not apply the rule fully to novels, but writes no gratuitous scenes.
Producers and directors kept asking why each scene had to be in the film, and "I don't know" was not a good answer. A single line of dialogue faces the same test. After a draft he rearranges scenes, since the blocks fall differently once the whole book is laid out.
5How Baldacci runs the business side of writing
Baldacci insists no one should earn more from a book than its writer. After ten years of doing his own travel, publicity and marketing, he told his publisher to take a 30% return and said they were free to go if they could find a surer one. They took the deal.
He says a 15% hardcover royalty is really a 30% return, and that staying on royalties would have left nine figures on the table. The publisher has hundreds or thousands of authors, he has one livelihood.
He shapes each book deal around the books it covers. He signs six-book deals, two books a year for three years, released in April and November for sixteen years. For a 1950s detective series he may take a smaller advance for a richer profit share.
A shorter two or three book deal depends on whether he can write that many in the time.
He tells writers to read the contracts and learn the business. He expects a writer to know as much as the agent, since careers have collapsed from not asking why sales fell or why a book left the stores.
A publishing deal is a partnership with duties on both sides, and ignorance is no excuse once you sign. Anyone living on writing wears two hats, content creator and business person.
He goes where readers are, since format changes delivery and not the writing. Audio downloads are huge now, so his team works with Spotify. Twenty years ago nobody said metadata, there were no ebooks and audiobooks came on CDs.
You cannot force readers into a format they do not want. Release timing matters too: Christmas suits only heavy hitters, and other books may do better in spring or summer.
Everything They Don’t Tell You About Being a Writer (David Baldacci Interview)
Baldacci explains how a prolific thriller writer builds stories by planting false assumptions, giving characters real baggage, and cutting everything that does not earn its place. The technique worth hearing is his habit of writing in the trenches, a couple of chapters at a time with no outline, then cutting hard in the edit.
Baldacci tried to sell short stories while his law school classmates chased law review. At UVA, while classmates tried out for law review and moot court, he tried to sell short stories to Playboy. He wrote short stories for 15 years, then screenplays, then his first novel.
Absolute Power was the first thing he ever sold. He compares starting with a novel to attempting an 800 lb squat on day one at the gym.
Books saved him growing up in segregated Richmond. He calls books body armor against bigotry, because reading about other people answers the boogeyman argument.
He read To Kill a Mockingbird as a child as an adventure story and in college saw it was about racism and justice. He believes the best books grow with the reader.
His lawyer years taught him that words can move mountains. As a lawyer his only arrows were words, and single words turned cases. He interviewed witnesses face to face because body language counts, and assumed everyone lied.
That habit of seeing things in person carried straight into how he researches novels.
He writes so much because the next story is always pulling at him. With nothing to write after finishing a book, he is at his most miserable, while bestselling friends take six months off.
He has hotel notepads from every hotel he has stayed in. At George H. W. Bush's funeral he waited four hours through security and wrote chapters around the edges of the program.
He learns craft by reading masters for pleasure, not writing manuals. After a great story he asks why it worked and rereads to find the moments where a character changed.
He thinks this teaches more than being told how to build a story, and he has nothing against self-help authors.
Baldacci writes in the trenches and throws his outlines away. He has tried outlines and always discarded them, wondering why he wasted three weeks. Writing linearly from page one forces every decision while it counts.
He compares outlining to Tom Brady in practice: nobody is trying to hurt him, so he is not at his sharpest. He adds that outline, organic or a mix can each suit a different story.
He writes a novel as a series of small pieces. He writes a couple of chapters, sees where they go, then writes a couple more, like firming up the edges of a puzzle. Later he knows what happens on page 120 and what the scene on page 315 must do.
"I'm not writing a novel. I'm writing a series of short stories that have this connectivity between them."
He plants every thread in the opening chapters so the story feeds itself. The Absolute Power setup holds a presidential murder, a cover up and one unlikely witness, so the writer never lacks a direction.
He likens it to a store-bought plant that comes with its own food. Aspiring writers who email that they are stuck at 50 pages have usually not planted enough.
He opens with a big pop that overturns the reader's first guess. He sets up an ambiguous scene, lets the reader settle on the obvious reading, then takes the least likely path. In an Amos Decker book, two bodies look like one killer's work but there are two separate killers.
"When they turn out to be wrong that's when I get their full undivided attention." The reader went one layer deep and he went three.
Baldacci waits until his passion tank is full before he starts. He lets an idea percolate because starting too soon made him write himself into a wall. He measures progress by energy, not page counts.
He admits he started too early more often in the past than he would have liked. He wants to run to the desk, not dread the next five pages.
He writes a placeholder ending and lets his subconscious solve the real one. With a tight deadline he sends the publisher a stand-in ending and keeps four or five possible finales in mind, blending pieces of them.
He works on something else while his mind keeps at it, and solves more plot problems in the shower than anywhere else.
He slows down the few big moments in a novel. A novel cannot stay at the top of the roller coaster, so he saves a few peak scenes and stretches them. He cites the five-minute death scene in Unforgiven.
Like Hitchcock in Psycho, he builds anticipation and leaves the worst to the reader's imagination.
He breaks down each finished book like game film. After every book he reviews which setups worked and which he telegraphed too early, using reader emails and friends' reactions.
If enough people read it differently than he intended, he treats that as his problem.
Baldacci gives every series lead a wound unrelated to the case. Atlee Pine's twin sister was kidnapped when she was six, and each of the four books uncovers more of that loss. Amos Decker died on the football field, came back with hyperthymesia and synesthesia, and lost his family.
Readers want to watch characters suffer, redeem themselves and fight back, so the baggage can be unpeeled a little more with each book.
He prefers a character arc to a twist. He wants readers to say "never saw that coming" and also "what happened to that character." An arc means the character ends more broken, more healed or somewhere between.
Red herrings belong to the genre, but he does not want a book that is only the twist.
He makes a character's motive match the size of the act. When a character does something extreme, he makes the motive as big as the act, or readers decide it would never have happened.
He says plausibility is the only thing he is bound by. "I have to have motivation to match that action."
Baldacci pushes characters through the wall to see what comes out. He wants them vulnerable, fragile, uncertain and full of doubt, and he writes how they respond and get back up.
His model is the military, which breaks a recruit down and rebuilds him. You never know the real person from good times alone.
He builds stakes from a broken promise, not only a ticking bomb. In Nash Falls, businessman Walter Nash did everything right, then an FBI agent tells him he loses everything whether or not he helps them.
The story mirrors the American dream of working hard, getting educated and succeeding, then having it ripped away. It echoes coders told their education is superfluous by software that learned from their work.
He cuts dialogue to the line that does the work of ten. He calls lengthy dialogue lazy because action and interior thought can do that work. He used to write 100 words and now aims for 10.
On a film he wrote, a storm cost two shooting days. He cut Ellen Burstyn's scene to one line and let her eyes and expression do the work of nine lines.
He researches in person, both the hardware and the software. The hardware is jumping off parachute towers, army fitness training and police walkalongs in high crime areas. The software is asking people why an 18-year-old enlists in wartime.
A researcher would report what seemed important to them, not to him. The first gives scenes and plot ideas, the second gives fuller and more honest characters.
He turns an unanswered question into a story idea. The 6:20 Man came from the Pandora and Panama papers, which showed where $30 trillion of dark money sits but not what its owners do with it.
The head of the journalists' consortium emailed to say he was spot on, citing $10 million school board elections. Baldacci keeps a black spiral notebook per project and records what he felt, not only what he saw.
He researches a past era by walking his character through one day. For his 1950s detective Archer he followed one day of his life and researched the clothes, food, streets and stores. That gave him about 90% of what he needed.
He bought a 1958 Los Angeles Sunoco gas map on Etsy and watched a 25-minute 1953 Las Vegas Strip video frame by frame, finding a mechanical cowboy that was dismantled because it scared people.
He limits atmosphere to three or four sentences and leaves out 99% of research. Past that, readers turn the page. He admits to stuffing in research because he did not want to cut it, and calls that ego writing.
He sometimes writes the passage just to get it out, knowing it will be cut or moved in the edit.
Baldacci makes every scene do at least two jobs. He learned from screenplay work that a scene should advance the plot, deepen a character or give needed information. He does not apply the rule fully to novels, but writes no gratuitous scenes.
Producers and directors kept asking why each scene had to be in the film, and "I don't know" was not a good answer. A single line of dialogue faces the same test. After a draft he rearranges scenes, since the blocks fall differently once the whole book is laid out.
Baldacci insists no one should earn more from a book than its writer. After ten years of doing his own travel, publicity and marketing, he told his publisher to take a 30% return and said they were free to go if they could find a surer one. They took the deal.
He says a 15% hardcover royalty is really a 30% return, and that staying on royalties would have left nine figures on the table. The publisher has hundreds or thousands of authors, he has one livelihood.
He shapes each book deal around the books it covers. He signs six-book deals, two books a year for three years, released in April and November for sixteen years. For a 1950s detective series he may take a smaller advance for a richer profit share.
A shorter two or three book deal depends on whether he can write that many in the time.
He tells writers to read the contracts and learn the business. He expects a writer to know as much as the agent, since careers have collapsed from not asking why sales fell or why a book left the stores.
A publishing deal is a partnership with duties on both sides, and ignorance is no excuse once you sign. Anyone living on writing wears two hats, content creator and business person.
He goes where readers are, since format changes delivery and not the writing. Audio downloads are huge now, so his team works with Spotify. Twenty years ago nobody said metadata, there were no ebooks and audiobooks came on CDs.
You cannot force readers into a format they do not want. Release timing matters too: Christmas suits only heavy hitters, and other books may do better in spring or summer.