A Minute to Midnight

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

David Baldacci’s Inside Story: “It’s always a little bit butterflies-in-the-stomach when you introduce a new character like Atlee Pine. It was very different for me. It was a female lead, which I hadn’t done before and so I didn’t know how people would receive Long Road to Mercy. But thankfully, people obviously really loved her character, and so I wanted to make sure that we not only pick up from Long Road To Mercy but explore her character in greater depths. I wanted to keep evolving her and her relationship with Carol Blum and, obviously, go deeper into the mystery of what happened to her sister. I wanted something interesting to happen on every page. People have to see her character continue to grow and to see the demons that she had and how she’s trying to deal with them. I think I was able to navigate all that here and really set up a great opening to a third book.

“There’s pressure and fear with every book. I’ve been doing this a long time, obviously, and sometimes when I sit down, it feels like I’ve never written a novel in my life. I’m scared to death. I’ve been in this business a long time, and if you can’t keep bringing the passion, then the books are going to suffer because of it and you should probably think about something else to do with the rest of your life. Luckily for me, every time I sit down, I just get so excited about writing. It is hard and it is a lot of work, and frustrating at times, but I can’t imagine spending my life doing anything else. I feel very lucky to be able to do it for a living.

“I think one of the main things a writer can do to maintain that level of passion is just never lose a curiosity about life. I’m an information vacuum. I suck up information from across the world every day and I read everything I can get my hands on. I think with the mental energy that comes from being curious and really assimilating a lot of information and processing it, you’re bound to have ideas that pop through in your mind. I can write a book and bring together 15 or 20 different subject areas that I’m interested in, solely because I read and learn and suck up information every day of my life. When you sit down to write a novel, all of a sudden you have a wealth of information that you can bring the bear into a story. You don’t want to just go on and Wikipedia things. Anybody can do that, but if you really, really spend your whole life learning, I don’t think your creative bottle will ever empty.”