Author Interview: You are publicly pegged as...
You are publicly pegged as a mystery writer. But yet you have written other books in other genres. Tell me about how that came along.Well the first books I wrote...the first book I wrote was Gone Fishin', but it didn't get published. I would say it didn't get published because it was pre-TM--pre-Terry McMillan. And because of that, it was at a period of time where the publishers were uncertain what they would do with a black writer writing to black audiences or about black characters not necessarily interacting with white characters. And so that book didn't make it.
And then I wrote the next book about the same characters--Devil in a Blue Dress--which is my mystery, now that brings in Easy Rawlins and this whole jazzy scene of Los Angeles and also the detective genre which people latched onto. The next three books I wrote were mysteries. And then I published RL's Dream, which was my blues novel, and then another mystery, and then four books which weren't mysteries right in a row--one was science-fiction, one was coming of age, one was a collection short stories. But the thing was, people already knew me as a thriller writer and, you know, in America everybody's a specialist. Whether you work on the production line for Ford or whether you're writing novels. They say, 'This is this kind of novelist.' and 'This is that kind of novelist.' It makes it easier to sell but it doesn't necessarily indicate what the writer is really doing.
Your book Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned was a TV movie starring Laurence Fishburne, and now you're writing the screenplay for Walkin' the Dog, correct?
Yes, I just started writing the screenplay for the new book Walkin' the Dog.
I believe Laurence Fishburne has requested to be in that movie as well.
Well, if Laurence wants to do it, we want to have him. It's a big general love-fest there and we had a lot of fun making that movie and we'd like to make the next one.
How do you go about writing the screenplay? How does that really differ in terms of creating the characters and making things move?
Well you know, it's interesting. When you work on a screenplay, it's a collaborative process--so I have a producer, a director, Laurence himself, Laurence's manager, the cinematographer--everybody is making changes to it all the way along. And so the idea is that if I can let go of the property thing--the 'Well this is my thought, my idea, my thing.'--if I can let those notions go, then everything works fine. Actually, it becomes easier because people have ideas and they tell me. So if I'm sitting there at a loss for ideas, I just have to get on the phone. Which you can't do when you're writing a novel.
Is there anything else you'd like to add about your book here?
The only thing I want to say about Walkin' the Dog is that I'm actually very happy with it, which is a funny thing because usually when I finish writing a book, after I've written eleven, twelve, thirteen drafts of a book, I'm sick of it. And by the time it gets out, I don't even want to talk about it. But I'm actually very happy with Socrates and where he has come and I'm actually really looking forward to writing the next one.