Bookreporter.com - Author Profile: Colin Harrison

Colin Harrison

BIO

Colin Harrison is the deputy editor of Harper's Magazine and the author of BREAK AND ENTER, BODIES ELECTRIC, MANHATTAN NOCTURNE, and AFTERBURN. He and his wife, Kathryn Harrison, live in Brooklyn.

INTERVIEW

Februrary 4, 2000

If you think that the words "literary" and "thriller" don't go together then you haven't read Colin Harrison, who has mastered this niche. In his latest work AFTERBURN readers will quickly bond with his three riveting main characters --- former fighter pilot Charlie Ravich, Ivy League math wiz Christina Welles and her former lover Rick Bocca --- as their lives careen, intertwine, and occasionally collide. Dianne Day, TBR Writer and author herself, was excited to talk to Harrison about his latest book. Find out where and why Harrison spends his late nights, what he does in his spare time (besides being a dedicated author he's also an editor at Harper's Magazine), what he sees as the future in book technology and much more in this interview.

TBR: In your prologue of AFTERBURN, when your main character Charlie Ravich is suiting up for a flight in his fighter plane over Vietnam, I was reminded of descriptions I have read of medieval knights being dressed in layer after layer of battle armor and then going out and getting on their horses, much the same way he gets into his plane. Did you consciously invoke that image for the reader?

CH: No, but it's apt. He is going into battle, and his fear would be no less than that of a medieval knight. He has a wife and children, and knows that he could die --- maybe today, maybe an hour from now. He's superstitious and careful and professionally anxious.

TBR: Thrillers are generally plot-driven. AFTERBURN is notable for being equally driven by both characters and plot. In your creative process, which comes to you first --- the plot or the characters? Do you have to work harder on one than the other to achieve the kind of thoroughly meshed results you have here?

CH: I usually get a vague sense of characters first and then later ask myself what is it that they want. In the case of Rick Bocca, one of the main characters in AFTERBURN, I imagined a large naked man swimming in the ocean, emerge from the water, put on a pair of scratched, broken eyeglasses, and then look up at the sea cliff to see a police car waiting for him. If you know what your characters want, you often can figure out what will happen and what their actions will be. In this sense, character and plot are indivisible, or should be. That said, I always go back and back again and tinker with both elements to get that meshing to which you refer.

TBR: AFTERBURN is notable for its complexity and layers of meaning, yet it is a fast and compelling read. Can you tell us your secret to achieving this remarkable feat?

CH: There's no secret. Or if there is, I don't know what it is. I just work and rework the text until I am (temporarily) satisfied. I want the story to move, but remain textured and vivid. Each of the book's three main characters are nuanced, contradictory people, often difficult and problematic. Their sufferings and the question of their morality and immorality should bother or even haunt the reader --- that's my hope, anyway.

TBR: How long did it take you to write this book, and how much of that time was research, how much actual writing time?

CH: It took about three years to write, and the research was conducted throughout. The ratio of research time to writing time is about one to one-thousand.

TBR: You also are an editor at Harper's Magazine, is that correct? And if so, do you find that being, as it were, professionally on both sides of this process is a help or a hindrance to your own writing?

CH: Harper's Magazine is a national monthly journal of politics, letters, and prose. I've been at the magazine more than eleven years, and count myself enormously lucky for the literary education I've received. My work at Harper's reduces the time and energy I have to write fiction but is a great help to my awareness of language and story. I read terrific stuff by terrific writers all day long, and then work with some of them through the commas and paragraphs and everything else that goes into a magazine piece. As much as possible, I try to impose the same discipline of editing on myself that I impose on the work of those who write for Harper's Magazine.

TBR: How long have you been writing novels? How long have you wanted to be a writer?

CH: I've been writing seriously since I was seventeen, and I've wanted to be a novelist since about the age of twenty-two. I published my first book when I was twenty-nine, so there were seven years of hard labor just to get out onto the field, so to speak.

TBR: Would you care to say anything about your take on the future of print publishing vs. electronic publishing?

CH: I think that sooner or later electronic publishing will solve the technical, legal, and economic challenges. People will become more accustomed to computers and what they can do, but many, many readers will still require that their most important reading experiences occur with book in hand. Paper feels pretty good, you know. All that said, the nature of stories and what we seek from them will not change. Narrative will not change, because, despite the nonlinear nature of our mass-media culture, human beings still --- at this late date --- live narratively. Which is to say, we are born, we live, and we die.

TBR: If the Great Writing Muse were to come down from the sky (or wherever) and grant you only one wish, what would it be?

CH: This is sort of a perverse question, because it's not going to happen. I'd probably like to spend a little time with the Muse first --- to see what her talents are, exactly.

TBR: What writers and/or books have particularly inspired you?

CH: All the usual people you read in school and college, plus John O'Hara's early novels, the Paris Review interview series, William Styron's SOPHIE'S CHOICE the theory books by John Gardner, Updike's Rabbit series, Batman comic books, my wife's books, a few movies, the songs of Tom Waits, the "Pulp Fiction" soundtrack --- many things have inspired me.

TBR: What is your writing process like? Describe a typical writing day for you.

CH: I do my best writing at night, jacked up on caffeine, utterly alone. But I also have done a great deal of writing in restaurants and coffee shops in New York City, during the day. You see a lot in these places, actually.

TBR: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

CH: Be honest with yourself. If you don't have to write, don't bother. Do something else. Really. If you do have to write, don't give up --- ever. Be defiant in the face of rejection and disinterest, yet be humble about the craft. It takes time. Study the masters, learn technique and structure. You only live and write once. In the words of Willy Loman, "the woods are burning."