Best-selling author David Baldacci offers Amy Paige Condon some lessons in the art and craft of creative writing.

David Baldacci’s political thrillers are as taut and tension-filled as a high-wire act, and have earned him legions of fans.  His 24 young adult, crime and stand-alone books have sold more than 110 million copies word-wide.  A former legal eagle and lifelong Virginian, Baldacci closed out the Savannah Book Festival before a packed Trustees Theater, where audiences laughed along with his humorous and humbling recollections from the road.  Just before he took the stage, Savannah magazine stole a few moments to get his secrets to spinning a great story. Savannah Magazine: The biography on your website mentions that your mother gave you a journal, and you wrote all the way through high school and college.  When you are exploring ideas for new books—especially your young adult and stand-alones—do you ever return to those journals for inspiration? David Baldacci:  I keep them in my office—I have them all on a shelf—and you go back and realize, “Wow! I really was so bad.”  Those will remain the hidden journals that only I will see.  The one thing I’ve never lost from that phase of my writing is this youthful wonderment about things.  This curiosity—that’s what drives storytelling.  Your writing will always be better when you’re curious about what you’re writing about.  If you’re just going through the motions, it’s going to show in the pages.  I try to get psyched about a particular subject, dive in after it and have fun with it.  If you’re not having fun, sort of a kid-like wonder in a creative process like writing, you should go do something else, because that’s 99 percent of the joy. SM: How did you keep that up even while you were practicing law? David:  It was an outlet for me.  Practicing law, I was paid to write what other people wanted me to write.  Fiction writing was my outlet.  I would come home, kiss the kids, go down to my little cubbyhole and write away.  That was a catharsis—a terrific venue for me to get away from my daily job and write what I wanted to write, and I was able to dictate what I was going to jump into every day.  It was a necessary outlet, because as a trial lawyer I litigated cases all over the country and it burns you up after a while.  I’m not sure but for that outlet of creative writing, I might not have burned out a long time ago. SM: Did your creative writing ever creep into the briefs? David:  Some of the best fiction I ever wrote was when I was a lawyer.  (Laughter)  Truly.  You only have one trial record, one set of facts, and both sides have to take from that set of facts and come back with diametrically opposed views.  How do you do that?  You’re creative.  You emphasize facts that benefit you, and de-emphasize and deflect the ones that benefit the other side.  I was paid to tell a story as a lawyer.  I lost cases I should’ve won because the other lawyer was a better storyteller, and I won cases I should’ve lost because I was the better storyteller. SM: In an earlier interview you quote screenwriter William Goldman as saying that “Fear is a great antidote to complacency” for a writer.  Can you elaborate on that for a bit, because most people see fear as paralyzing, not freeing—yet a couple of other authors here at the book festival have mentioned how fear pushed them to write? David:  I find fear both liberating and inspirational … and motivating.  My precept on that is, as a writer, you have no idea what you’re doing, and every time you sit down to write a story, it’s as if you’re writing your very first story over and over again.  There are no rules.  No parameters.  Yeah, you might know how to research a little better, but you’re creating a brand new world again.  It takes faith in yourself that you can do it again.  You’re afraid.  Most jobs in life, you get better at doing them by doing the same thing over and over again. I fly a lot, and I would never want to be on a flight where the pilot says, “In 20 years, I never tried it this way, but today I am.”  Or a doctor who’s going to operate on you says, “I always operated with my right hand.  Today, screw it, I’m going to try it with my left hand and see how that works out.”  We’d never want that, but as a writer you can never say to yourself, “How did I do it last time?”  Because when you do that, you’re a hack, formula writer.  It’s that great unknown each time out.  How can I do it differently?  How can I forget everything I just did with that last book and do it differently with this book going forward.  And, that’s where the fear comes in, because you’re 10 years old again and trying to find your way. SM: With more than 20 books in an array of genres and screenplays under your belt, it’s hard for aspiring writers to imagine you ever encounter writer’s block—that the words spill forth fully formed from your fingertips to the page, some cosmic mind-body connection.  Do you ever get to that point where you say, “I’m at my wall.” David:  Sure.  Absolutely.  I tend to work on multiple projects at a time, two or three different things.  It might be a young adult book and an adult book or a script, and if I get blocked on one—right now, I’m blocked on one that I’m working on, the new book based on the characters King and Maxwell.  And I’ve got to figure out an important plot point before I can move forward with the story, and I’ve haven’t really worked my way through it yet.  So, I’m working on another project that I needed to work on, but part of my brain is thinking about that issue as the same time I’m working on this other story.  So, by the time I’m finished with this story, I’ll be ready to go back to the King and Maxwell story. Any writer that tells you they don’t get writers block is just lying.  It’s a natural part of the creative process.  Our minds aren’t perfect.  For me, if you don’t get writer’s block, it’s almost as if–it sounds counterintuitive—you haven’t thought through the all possibilities enough.  If you’re on this straight-and-narrow path following this outline you wrote, you haven’t explored from this block.  That’s why I don’t write from detailed outlines.  It’s so constraining to me … If I can surprise myself through writing, then I can really stun the reader. SM: You are a master at pacing and hooking readers from the first sentence. Do you work those first and move forward, or do you come back to them at the end of that first draft? David:  I continually come back to the beginning.  Every time I sit down to write the book again, I’ll go back to the opening.  That probably gets edited and refined and finessed more than any other section of the book.  But, I also get to the point where I’ve thought about an idea for the next novel, done a little research and jotted down a few plot points that I’m itching to get to that first page.  Then, you’re like, I’m done with the prep work now, and you sit down and—Boom!—you hit it.  Sometimes I think some of my best openings are just right like I’ve written them out the first time.  It’s almost like a racehorse in the cage just ready, ready, ready to go and the door pops—and you’re never going to be as fast and as good as that second. SM:  How do you get into the zone? David:  It’s not a nine-to-five kind of thing.  Some days I’ll go to the office and not really write a thing because I’m not in the zone.  And I haven’t really thought through what I want to write that day, it’s not crystallized, and I don’t even feel like trying something … It’s mental preparation, of thinking it through, maybe jotting down a few bullet points you sort of mull over for a bit, but you’ll know because it’s almost like filling a glass with water and the tipping point comes.  It’s when your fingers and your mind just can’t stay away from the pen or the keyboard … you have to get it out.  And, when you have to get it out, you know you’re in the zone and you don’t stop until there’s nothing left in the glass. SM: Wish You Well, that’s also the name of your foundation to combat adult literacy.  How did adult literacy, and those strong connections among poverty, nutrition and the ability to read and write become such a passion project for you? David:  Early on in my career I would go everywhere—a lot of them were library-affiliated, literacy-based, book festivals and you run into a lot of people who are in the literacy field because they go hand-in-hand, you learn a lot. So over the years, I really educated myself on the dire need of adult literacy in this country where half the adults in this country read at too-low levels where we’re fast becoming an illiterate nation rather than a literate one—which is a tough sell, especially in the D.C. area where I live and everyone has three Ph.D.s.  They’re like, “Really?  Where are you talking about?  Afghanistan?”  No.  I’m talking about the United States. So, we formed the foundation 12 years ago and we fund programs in virtually all 50 states—literacy programs, both public and private.  The Feeding Body and Mind program came about because we were getting lots of requests from literacy organizations for a food component, dollar component, because a lot of times patrons seeking literacy assistance, you get them in there with the promise of a meal.  Poverty and literacy go hand in hand.  People seeking assistance from food banks are also literacy challenged.  Our plan was that when I was out on book tour I would collect books and donate them to the food banks—there are 240-odd ones across the country.  We partner with Feeding America.  Over three years we have collected and distributed over a million books. David Baldacci’s The Forgotten is in bookstores now.  King & Maxwell, a TNT series based upon two of Baldacci’s characters—both former Secret Service agents—premiers after Rizzoli and Isles in Summer 2013.  An independent production of Wish You Well hits the film festival circuit this fall.