Frank Peretti Interview, Part III

Frank Peretti's books have sold more than 12 million copies. He is the co-author of House, the author of Monster as well as the international bestsellers The Oath and This Present Darkness. The Oath (1995) has sold more than a million copies and was awarded the 1996 ECPA Gold Medallion Award for best fiction. Peretti lives with his wife Barbara in the Pacific Northwest. www.frankperetti.com.












Interview via telephone ~ April 2006


Gina Holmes: Is your hope to go mainstream Hollywood with your movies?

Frank Peretti: Yes, but I wouldn’t call it Hollywood. I’d call it mainstream independent.

Gina: The Passion of the Christ was such a high quality, but many Christian films look low budget compared to other movies. Do you see yourself matching the big movies’ quality?

Frank: We’ll go with whatever budget the movie requires. I want to do Monster and that won’t necessarily require a big budget. It doesn’t have a lot of explosions.

Gina: You’d need some excellent costumes.

Frank: Yeah, we’d have to work out the costumes and make sure that looks great. We might be able to do it for ten, maybe fifteen million, which is pretty small.

The set is mostly in the woods. The lab and the other monster is where most of the money would go. Other than that, it’s pretty doable without a whole lot of money.

Now, The Oath would take a pretty good size budget. You’d have to create the dragon, the town, and blow up a lot of the town. When you start breaking things [laughing] that’s where you get into the money.

With This Present Darkness, now you’re talking about a whole lot of money. You’ve got thousands of angels and demons flying through the sky and having battles. A lot of development.

Gina: Have you been approached to make that into a movie.

Frank: That’s an iffy story. Twentieth Century Fox owns the rights to that. They are pursuing making a film and I don’t have any influence over that.

I have found in the past that sometimes you get too many cooks in the kitchen who don’t really see the story the way you intended but we’ll see. Maybe Twentieth Century Fox is working on it but I don’t know anything. They haven’t told me. Most of what I’ve learned about it, I’ve got indirectly.

A friend actually emailed me and said they were going ahead with the project but nobody told me that so who knows?

Gina: The multiple rejections you received for This Present Darkness has become an antidote writers tell one another to encourage each other through their own stream of rejections. I’ve heard people say that story was rejected a hundred times but on the House promotional CD, you say fourteen. Was that the number?

Frank: That was about it.

Gina: Over what period of time was that?

Frank: A year or so. It was quite awhile ago, I don’t remember exactly. But I remember I had a little chart that I drew with columns and things. I had at least fourteen publishers on there. I had a column for query letters, one for responses, one for proposal sent and that type of thing. Publishers didn’t really reject it, they just didn’t respond. Most of them got past my query and then requested proposals and then rejected it.

It was tough finding a market for. Crossway books who was the publisher that eventually published it initially rejected it. They were the only publisher that actually wrote me a letter. I got form letters from everywhere else.

Then I wrote a kids book. I made up a story at a junior high bible camp one summer and someone said you should get that published. I didn’t even have it written down. So, I wrote it down, I sent it out and Crossway published accepted that one.
The Door in the Dragon’s Throat. In the same letter they said, by the way you sent us an earlier idea; we’d like to take a look at it.

Gina: Was that Jan Dennis?

Frank: Yes, he just had that vision. I had to finish the book. I had it all outlined of course. I knew exactly where I was going with it. I finished the book. That was back in the day with typewriters. Me and my dear wife and her mom. We had three typewriters going. Between the three of us, that was a newsroom. Seven hundred and fifty pages.

Gina: [laughing] Man, you WERE gabby.

Frank: [laughs] I sent it off in the church bulletin box to Crossway and a couple of months went by and then Jan Dennis called me on the phone and said they wanted to buy it. My word. My word, what a moment. The moment every author dreams of.

Gina: What would you say to a writer who is where you were at? They’ve studied the craft. They’re a good writer but they’re at that frustrating point where they’re sending their stuff in and getting responses like, ‘interesting but no thanks.’ What would you say to this person to encourage them?

Frank: I guess most publishers won’t even deal with an author anymore. They have to go through an agent. Do you find that true?

Gina: I have an agent, but in the past a lot of editors have talked to me directly. There are some though that will only look at agented submissions.

Frank: It seems a reasonable thing to do to get an agent and then the agent can recommend readers.

I had a student who went to a book doctor. And they sent her back a multi-paged critique that was very humbling.

Gina: Critiques always are.

Frank: I thought that was a pretty good idea. They recognized my student’s talent but also where she needed to grow and improve.

Gina: Have you had a mentor?

Frank: My mentors are usually my publisher and editors. They’re the ones that have helped me develop my ideas. For Monster, I had two editors and they were real helpful. Not only did they correct my grammar but we worked on the concept and the characters. I usually am honed and sharpened by the editors I work with.

Gina: I hear writers will get as many as twenty-five pages of suggestions on a book. When I asked Ted (Dekker) that, he said he’d freak if he got that many. Do you get pages of suggestions?

Frank: Yeah, sure.

Gina: Twenty-five pages?

Frank: Yeah, I might get that many. It’s discouraging but…

Gina: I think that’s good for novelists who are just starting out to know. If I didn’t know that was the norm and I received a stack of changes, I’d think I was awful and wonder why they even bought my book.

Frank: I think every writer should expect and welcome that. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to take every suggestion. Sometimes a suggestion is clearly contrary to what I’m trying to do. I just work down the page and cross off each suggestion as I fix it.

Generally the suggestions are good and I get a better book for it. Sometimes the suggestions are humiliating and I think I can’t believe I did that. Every writer should be ready to work hard for their editor. The editor is your friend. Unless they’re a really bad editor.

I did work with someone once who crossed out the whole big battle scene in This Present Darkness. I wrote back and said, “Leave that in.” And so they got me a new editor. I think she was old school. She wouldn’t let me use any contractions.

Gina: [laughs] Oh no.

Frank: Erin Healey is an editor who worked with me on House and she was a stellar editor. She brought order out of chaos. We had shotguns floating around that kind of thing and she had to wade through all that stuff. She got paid over time.


Gina: You had said that people can tell the journey you’ve been on by the book you had written. I think that’s so true of probably all writers. We really do bear our souls in our books.

With House being co-written is it true of that book? Can we see your journey in House?

Book Description

"A mind-bending supernatural thriller from the creators of This
Present Darkness and Showdown.
Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker - two of the
most acclaimed writers of supernatural thrillers - have joined forces for the
first time to craft a story unlike any you've ever read. Enter House - where
you'll find yourself thrown into a killer's deadly game in which the only way to
win is to lose...and the only way out is in.
The stakes of the game become
clear when a tin can is tossed into the house with rules scrawled on it. Rules
that only a madman - or worse - could have written. Rules that make no sense yet
must be followed.
One game. Seven players. Three rules. Game ends at
dawn."

Gina's comments

HOUSE is a beautiful blend
of the styles and voices of Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker. Even without knowing
who'd written it, I believe readers could guess. The novel reads at breakneck
speed. I have something to point to and say, "Now, THAT's a thriller." As
someone who writes in this genre, I will reread this book to study their craft.
The book is exciting, well written and a wonderful allegory. I can't wait to see
this on the big screen. I hope the movie maker will do it justice. Though these
authors say they found collaborating difficult, I thought the end product is
fantastic. Absolutely wonderful!

Frank: No. Not at all. Maybe it was Ted’s journey. It was more of his concept.
The Visitation was so much a reflection of my journey. House is more of an allegory. I can relate to it, anybody can, the struggles within your own heart.

I did learn how to work with somebody else in a book though.

Gina: Advice for novelists in your genre?

Frank: Don’t go the path that I’ve gone. Don’t copy me or anybody else. Write what the Lord has laid upon your heart. My biggest frustration is when I write trying to please what other people think the market demands. I need to put Jabez in or it won’t sell. What’s the market doing? It’s like having your finger in the wind. Write from your heart.


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