Where Joy and Tragedy Meet

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: You may have noticed I haven't been here much over the past couple of days--my work as a reporter was blasted into fast forward by the horrible hideous unbelievable events in Boston. I announced it live, as it was happening...before we even knew anything for sure. I have no idea what I said..although I seem to think it began--"Breaking news now, we're getting word there was some kind of explosion at the finish line of the Marathon...."

 I've seen swat teams and armed guards stalking the empty streets, carrying assault weapons with their fingers hovering at the trigger. I've  interviewed everyone from vicitms' families to departing runners to law enforcement to the Governor. I said to him--"Someone is out there who bombed the Marathon. How do you tell the public everything will be okay...when you don't know that?"

My husband was inside the federal courthouse when it was evacuated for whatever happened. (And  what's actually pretty funny, he was live on the phone on Channel 7 reporting what was happening! )

Boston is--on edge, careful,  suspicious, and everyone is trying to pretend they're not terrified.
Normal is such a wonderful thought. We're all wishing things could go back to the way they were. But they won't.

And that's one reason I am so thrilled to have Andrew Gross here today. He's the nicest, most comforting, most normal guy you can imagine. Yes, a terrific writer. And also thoughtful, and compassionate and funny and loving. Exactly the perfect person to come to Jungle Reds today.



WHERE JOY AND TRAGEDY MEET

                         by Andrew Gross

Writing this, a day after the heartbreak in Boston, it feels a bit petty and mercantile to put together something charming and witty that every writer knows is basically a veiled promotion of my new book. It somehow seems fitting that Hank asked me to prepare something for this particular week, she being a TV reporter from Boston, me from New York, and that it happened to converge with the horrible events up there.

 In a similar way to how the extremes of joy and tragedy came together up there too. Colliding at that finish line. Joy. Tragedy. I’ve written of those things many times; it’s basically what I do. Take a likeable, everyday person, someone you’ve met a thousand times, a doctor on his way to a conference or a yoga mom, and through one fallible or ill-fated moment, rip apart their happy lives. I wrote on Facebook that the image of that eight year old boy, who at first was said to be reaching out to cheer on his dad crossing the finish line, will stay with me a long time. Maybe a bit shamefully perhaps-- at least for a while-- because I’ve drawn up such similar images in my books so many times.

But every writer will tell you its hard for fiction to keep up with reality in recent times.

When I’m asked, “Why thrillers...?” I always answer that in my view thrillers are absolutely the most relevant form of fiction being written today, as they best reflect the real issues and crises that mirror our world. Thriller writers are rarely MFA candidates; they’re journalists, and ex-CIA agents; and doctors and lawyers and cops whose broad experiences inform their craft—and then I say that I understudied for a career writing about crime by spending twenty years in the women’s apparel business.

That’s my only yuk, but I do feel I probably got the better education.

How I made that transition s a story in itself, but my point here is that thrillers matter. And they matter by not just taking stories off the front pages, but also in how those stories grab the heart. It’s my goal to invest the reader in the plight of my hero within the first ten pages—something I learned from writing with Patterson, who understood early the intersection between joy and tragedy. Likeable, everyday people who on a hundred other days would just go on with their lives, but today will be different. And I choose to write about families, because family is the universal back story, isn’t it?

 And I always go for an emotional affirmation at the end. After the bullets stop flying and the chase cars screech to a stop, what I want you to take away from one of my books is a dad who had to save his family, not such himself; or a suburban mom who slipped in a moment of weakness and now, when accused of two murders she didn’t commit, doesn’t just have to just prove her innocence, but has to regain the trust of her kids as well. What I always go for, I realized, as I watched the newsclip from Boston over and over, is that eight year old boy.

Which brings me again to yesterday’s events one more time.

There is a moment in NO WAY BACK (just out this past week by the way—couldn’t resist!), where Wendy Gould is at a hotel bar waiting for a friend where an attractive stranger starts up a conversation, thinking she’s got her eye on an overhead baseball game.

“Yanks or Red Sox?” he asks.

“Yanks, of course,” she says. “Born and bred. South shore.”

“Sox,” he replies. “South Boston. Okay, Brookline, if you beat it out of me.” That random start leads to a one-in-a-million series of events in which Wendy’s happy, suburban life will never be the same.

As a New Yorker who grew up hating the Red Sox, Celtics and the Bruins, I guess we share a common bond with Bostonians right now.

Thanks for inviting me to share these thoughts.

HANK: Thank you, Andrew. And thank you all. And I can tell you--everything will be okay. 

 

**************************

Andrew Gross is an incredibly successful New York Times best-selling author. (You know this, right? And before he started writing on his own,  he wrote six books (at least) with James Patterson. Whoa.) Of his new book, NO WAY BACK, Publisher's Weekly says" "A fevered stand-alone. Tense, false clues, narrow escapes. The action spins to an exciting ending."  And if you've read this far, thank you. And lucky you.  Leave a comment.and you'll be in the running for a free copy from Jungle Red!

Marathon Day

JAN BROGAN - Tomorrow is a big day in Massachusetts. Patriots Day. That is our celebration of Paul Revere riding through town and alerting everyone that the British were coming and, of course, the first shots of the Revolutionary War. 

 Once, I celebrated the holiday by actually going to the reenactment of the battle on the Lexington Green, which was followed by a fabulous brunch (Thanks Cynthia), but mostly I celebrate the way everyone else around here celebrates: By going to the Boston Marathon.

Yes, tomorrow is Marathon Day in Massachusetts, a holiday I hold dear to my heart because during college  I worked at the Eliot Lounge, formerly "the running bar."  I always made a lot of tips in Marathon Day and once I even often got free sneakers.

Today I'm going to celebrate Marathon Day at the blog by explaining how I used a running book to help me write.

Recently, I did an interview for the Boston Globe with Catharine Utzschneider, a professor of competitive performance at Boston College, running coach, and the author of MOVE!: How Women Can Achieve Athletic Goals at Any Age.  

Anyway, in our interview, she mentioned that a number of her  friends  had used her structured approach to motivation to tackle the marathon of writing a book. So I thought, okay, what the heck? I used to run. It's almost as grueling as writing. 

Turns out there are a number of really good suggestions that applied, including breaking goals into short term and long term goals, re-assessing, picking yourself up after injury, and keeping motived by enlisting the help of a buddy who will push you on days you don't want to be pushed.

I will talk about the two points that most helped me.

First  was keeping a "training" journal. I've  had a journal for  each novel I've written but it was mostly space to work out character traits or plot points. Now  I started a daily calendar journal - to keep track of how much time I was spending actually writing and where I was frittering time away.  It was illuminating. I frittered less than I thought, but certain projects took more time than I realized.

Most importantly though,  I  stumbled upon  a new trick to help fight my Internet/email addiction. (which, by the way, I learned last night at a panel discussion at Mass General Hospital, is considered a serious problem in China, so I have LOTS of company).

As part of keeping track of the where I'm spending my time, I forced myself to write down every time I check my email or the Internet.  And viola! It works the way keeping a journal about  how much food you eat keeps you from eating so much.  

In other words, it's really sort of embarrassing when you see in your own handwriting just how often you click on that MAIL icon in the corner. Shame is a really good incentive NOT TO DO IT.

My buddy Barbara also suggested jokingly that I award myself little gold stickers for every day I work uninterrupted for four hours. We laughed over that.  Little gold stickers - hah! -  like we used to give the kids

On the way home from the gym that day, I stopped at CVS.

It may not be as exalting as running through the finish line, but you might be surprised  how satisfying a little gold sticker can be!