Author Interview ~ Paul McCusker

PAUL McCUSKER has been writing since 1979. His work includes over 40 published novels, full-length plays, dramatic sketch collections, screenplays and lyrics.

As a producer, writer and director for Focus On The Family's Adventures In Odyssey radio series, he has written over 200 half-hour episodes. His work for Odyssey includes eighteen novels, including the Passages series, and two screenplays for the best-selling animated videos.

Additionally, for Focus On The Family Radio Theatre, he adapted and directed the audio dramatization of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and was the writer/ director for the Peabody Award-winning Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Cost of Freedom.

He is the author of The Mill House, A Season of Shadows and the Gold Medallion-nominated Epiphany for Zondervan Publishing and You Say Tomato (co-authored with the best-selling British writer Adrian Plass).

He has written a variety of popular plays including Pap's Place, The First Church Of Pete's Garage, The Case Of The Frozen Saints, Snapshots & Portraits, and the Dove Award-nominated A Time For Christmas with renowned composer/ arranger David T. Clydesdale.

A lyricist as well, Mr. McCusker collaborated with Michael W. Smith for "Without You" and David Maddux for "Billy On The Boulevard". Mr. McCusker lives in Colorado Springs with his wife Elizabeth and two children.


What book or project is coming out or has come out that you’d like to tell us about?

I have two books with Zondervan – The Mill House and A Season of Shadows – that I wouldn’t mind drawing people’s attention to. The Mill House is a “relational mystery” that spans fifty years and two continents. A Season of Shadows is set in London during the Blitz (1940) and centers around an American woman working for the Embassy there.



Tell us about your journey to publication. How long had you been writing before you got the call you had a contract, how you heard and what went through your head.

My first published book was called Sketches of Harvest, a collection of dramatic sketches published by Baker’s Plays of Boston. The journey to get there wasn’t a long one. I had written the sketches for my church, collected them, sent them to Baker’s Plays upon the recommendation of a friend, and a few weeks later they said they wanted them. It was a huge thrill for me, particularly since I thought I would encounter instant stardom as an author.

(Later I learned that Christian drama is not only virtually unknown, but it isn’t lucrative at all – we call it our cookie-jar money.)

My entrance into the world of novel-writing came through my work with Adventures in Odyssey. I had been writing the audio dramas when the idea came up to do companion novels, but with original stories. Focus on the Family asked me and I said yes, if only for the experience to try my hand at it. That was 16 years ago and those novels are still in print. In fact, they have just been re-released as A Strange Journey Back and Point of No Return.

Because of Odyssey, my agent was then able to pitch some of my grown-up novel proposals to various publishers who said yes. In one summer, I wrote three teen novels (Time Twists) and then Catacombs for Tyndale. Unfortunately, Catacombs got washed up on the beach when the Left Behind tidal wave hit. Timing is everything, I suppose.

Do you still experience self-doubts regarding your work?

I’m probably too over-confident to have self-doubts about myself as a writer – I’ve been doing it for nearly 26 years, so I don’t think about it much anymore. But I sometimes have doubts about the project I’m writing. Have I found the right voice? Is the story compelling? Will anyone believe the characters? Those doubts come up all the time. But I’m usually too busy trying to beat the deadline to second-guess myself about them. I trust my wife and my editors to help me see what I can’t see because I’m too close.

What mistakes have you made while seeking publication?

I’m probably too easily pleased, in some ways. I’m so happy that a publisher wants what I’ve proposed that I don’t ask the really hard questions: is the publisher experienced with publishing and marketing fiction? Will they dedicate any real time or money to the marketing effort?

Every author now needs to ask those hard questions. And, apart from simply delivering the manuscript, what does the publisher expect from me?
Had I asked those questions while seeking publication, I may have made some different choices about who I publish with.

What’s the best advice you’ve heard on writing/publication?

Be more demanding about the marketing of your book and be prepared to participate. Here’s why: if the book doesn’t sell, it’s only one in a catalogue of books by that publisher that didn’t. In other words, the publisher isn’t necessarily penalized in the industry’s or public’s perception of them unless they put out a whole truckload of bad books over a long period of time.

However, the author is penalized if the book didn’t sell – even if the author really had written a great book. When your agent goes to other publishers to pitch proposals, those other publishers will want to know how all your other books sold. If they haven’t, they’re less likely to want to publish you, no matter how good the proposals might be.

What’s the worst piece of writing advice you’ve heard?

Write for yourself and ignore what others think of what you’ve written.

What’s something you wish you’d known earlier that might have saved you some time/frustration in the publishing business?

The reality of marketing, as I’ve mention elsewhere.

Do you have a scripture or quote that has been speaking to you lately?

Luke 1:38 has been speaking to me a lot lately. There’s this girl – maybe 14 years old – saying, “Let it be to me according to your word” after having been told that she’ll become scandalously pregnant by the Holy Spirit. That says a lot to me about my own lack of trust in God.

Is there a particularly difficult set back that you’ve gone through in your writing career you are willing to share?

I’m there now. I have a full-time job, a full-time family – and somehow I’m going to find the time to write full-length novels? It’s not possible, as I learned while writing The Mill House and Season of Shadows back-to-back while carrying out my responsibilities as a husband and father and as a Vice President at Focus on the Family. Yikes!

And while I appreciate that my books tend to be critically acclaimed (albeit by Agricultural Digest and Animal Husbandry and other prestigious journals), I’m not impressed with their sales. If I do the math correctly, not even my family has bought my books. :)

What are a few of your favorite books? (Not written by you.)

That depends on what you mean by “favorite.” Books I’ve enjoyed or books I’ve appreciated because they were so well-written?

I really enjoy mysteries and thrillers by authors like Michael Connelly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, and the like. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman was a fantasy I really liked. A couple of books by Dean Koontz. And Father Elijah by Michael O’Brien, too. The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I loved reading Mark Twain and Stephen King in another period of my life.

On the well-written side, I have to point to authors like Chaim Potok, Ray Bradbury, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Graham Greene (again) – and the acknowledged “classic” writers like Dickens, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck.

For non-fiction, I enjoy CS Lewis, Frederick Buechner, Henri Nouwen, JB Phillips, Adrian Plass, Richard Foster, and a handful of others.

Strangely: I almost never go back and re-read books (except the Bible), no matter how much I love them. I’ll read sections for inspiration, but never the entire book.

What piece of writing have you done that you’re particularly proud of and why?

There are certain books where it feels to me as if everything clicked in all the right places. Epiphany was like that. So was The Mill House. (I’d say it about A Season of Shadows, but it was written during a difficult time and so I can’t think clearly about it.) Others have sections in them that surprise me, if I happen to go back and look at them. I read them and wonder where in the world those words came from. The very last chapter of The Faded Flower strikes me that way now.

Do you have a pet peeve having to do with this biz?

Oh, I suppose my pet peeves are every author’s pet peeves: why hasn’t the world figured out how brilliant my books are – and why don’t publishers understand that I’m the only author they should care about and market – and isn’t it unfair that the best-sellers aren’t as good as my books and… and… oh well.

One very legitimate pet-peeve is the amazingly short lifespan for a book these days. A new book might be out for only a few weeks before its relegated to the backlist limbo.

Can you give us a view into a typical day of your writing life?

On a day dedicated to writing, I may go out to one of my favorite local restaurants for breakfast and get “warmed up” by reading, journaling, doing personal devotions, or something along those lines. Then I’ll head over to Barnes & Noble and sit in their café with my laptop and get properly started, sometimes spending the entire day there.

If it’s a novel requiring a lot of research – where I need access to my reference books or the Internet – then I’ll work in my home office. A year ago working at home wasn’t possible because of my two small children who were home a lot of the time and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t play with them.

Now that my son is in first grade and my daughter is headed for kindergarten, it’s easier to work at home.

Wherever I work, I’m fairly disciplined to work until at least 5 in the afternoon.
If I travel to write and can hole myself up in a hotel, I can write all day and well into the evening – sometimes late into the night. I won’t say that what I’d written was polished and ready to be published, but it was written.

If you could choose to have one strength of another writer, what would it be and from whom?

I’d love to have greater economy of description – saying more with less words – to evoke rather than describe. Ray Bradbury does this so very well. Fitzgerald was pretty good, too.

Do you have a dream for the future of your writing, something you would love to accomplish?

I’m actually grateful to be published at all. And in spite of my complaining about incidentals, my hope is to write books that will communicate a Christian worldview to our culture as creatively and effectively as possible.

Was there ever a time in your writing career you thought of quitting?

Now.

What is your favorite and least favorite part of being a writer?

My favorite part is to write and to have written. My least favorite is to have written and not to have sold.

How much marketing do you do? Any advice in this area?

I’ve jabbered about this too much already. In the end I hope that I – and my publisher – can say we did the very best we could do at the time. The rest is God’s business.

What do you think about the argument that CBA writing is substandard compared to ABA books?

I think any writing that is clearly agenda-driven tends to be substandard, whether it’s Christian or Political or Buddhist or Conservative or Liberal or whatever. People want fiction with compelling stories and characters, not tracts.

But we also have to give ourselves as Evangelicals a little break. Evangelical Christianity has, for many many years, been about proclaiming the Gospel through preaching, not through the arts. The Evangelical sub-culture is now trying to play catch-up and, I think, getting better all the time.

I don’t mean to make excuses for poor work. I refuse to let us off the hook from doing the very best we can as writers, by the way. Though God can redeem anything we do, we shouldn’t keep putting Him in a position where He has to.

Parting words?

If I offended anyone with anything I've said here, let me know.