We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Howard Kaplan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Howard, appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
Reading, reading, reading. I taught writing at UCLA Extension for a decade but there is too great a proliferation of writing groups, writing support groups, beta readers. Some fundamentals of writing can be taught but soaking up the masters is a better avenue. I recommend people who want to write read novels twice: once for the story and the next time to see how the writer achieved it.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’ve been writing literary historical thrillers for over 40 years. My novel THE DAMASCUS COVER published when I was 26 was filmed forty years after it’s release and stars Sir John Hurt of ELEPHANT MAN and 1984, in his final picture. It also stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers of THE TUDORS and BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM. I typically, as in my latest thriller, THE SYRIAN SUNSET, about the Syrian Civil War, move fictional characters through lesser known periods of actual history. In this novel, as in others, all the events are true. I think a great novel educates as well as entertains as does the novel, alas not mine, A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW which about everyone I talk to has read or is reading. I have difficulty coming up with ideas to start a new novel but once I do I’m at it 6-7 days a week, though for less hours on the weekends when I like to hike in Temescal Canyon especially when the cacti bloom in the spring on the Rivas Trail.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I suppose I like to take risks. During the summer of my junior year at Berkeley, I met a professor there from Columbia University a guest lecturer. I guess he liked my questions and invited me to go for a walk. After an hour he said, and I really only remember this the last line of our talk: “what makes more sense, 4 years of rioting in Berkeley or 3 years of rioting and one year in Jerusalem. I’m leaving in two weeks to teach there for the year at the Hebrew University. They owe me a favor for doing so. (He was not particularly modest though I discovered later he was one of the great minds of his generation.) You will be that favor. I’ll get you in the junior year abroad program. You have until breakfast tomorrow to decide. After that I withdraw the offer.” I am not particularly good at math, but that didn’t seem like a very hard problem.
I went.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
My challenge is to tell an exciting story with rich characters about some subject that carries moral weight. For example, THE SYRIAN SUNSET is about how the West failed to aid the Syrian people and allowed Putin to control the country and how that inaction emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine. He felt after the West’s turning their back on the 500,000 Syrians murdered by the regime that the West was feckless. In that regard Putin mostly turned out wrong. The challenge in this particular work and elsewhere is humanity and humor. The first is not hard and the latter a bit more so. I didn’t intend to make THE SYRIAN SUNSET funny, but in the tradition of CATCH-22, it evolved that way. So unintentionally I have that balance between the barbarity and the humanity/humor. Two love stories in that one too, one of young love, and the other a longer more difficulty love story that spans decades. So I don’t produce a lot of books and am a bit envious, on occasion, of very fine writers who can turn one out yearly.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://howardkaplanbooks.com
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