By Sean Tuohy
Three hunters stumble onto a crashed plane filled with cocaine in the Montana wilderness.
That’s the premise of acclaimed author Mike Bond’s latest thriller, Snow.
Bond recently took a few minutes out of his day to sit and chat with me about the new book and his advice for aspiring writers.
Sean Tuohy: When did you know you wanted to be a storyteller?
Mike Bond: By the time I was 10 I was writing poems and thinking of stories. To the young the world is magical and full of stories. All you have to do is write them down.
ST: What authors did you worship growing up?
MB: I never worshipped anyone, but I read everything, especially Hemingway, Edna Ferber, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Walter Scott, Jack London, Willa Cather, Poe, Camus, Sartre, St. Exupéry, Tolstoy, and many others.
ST: What is your writing process like? Do you outline or just vomit a first draft?
MB: I tend to write each book differently. Most I just pick up at the first sentence and write a lot of it without an outline. Or I outline only the next several chapters as I go along.
ST: What inspired Snow?
MB: I was bowhunting with a friend on a two-week horse trip back into the Montana wilderness. The constant snow and frigid conditions, plus several unpleasant encounters with grizzly bears, started the process.
ST: Snow follows four characters, but the breakout is a former NFL player named Zack. Where did this character come from?
MB: I played a lot of football, tried to make it into the NFL, but like so many football players I got so repeatedly injured that there was no way. I love playing football but have no use for watching it on the idiot box. (That’s the difference between living and being entertained.) I know a lot about the game and have a lot of friends who’ve played it, and I wanted to show it as it really is. Zack is the average football star today—multiple lifelong injuries, traumatic brain damage, constant pain, atavistic impulses, and lots of painkillers and other drugs.
ST: Snow is an edge-of-your-seat thriller but it has a fantastic human element to it as well. When writing, do you focus more on the character or the plot?
MB: I just tell the story as it is told to me. Often I can’t tell it right and have to keep rewriting it till the drama I’m seeing in my head is correctly depicted on the page.
ST: What’s next for Mike Bond?
MB: I’m finishing a 1,000-page epic on the 1960s, due out next year. And finishing the third in my Pono Hawkins series, also due out next year. This one is set in Tahiti and Paris.
ST: What advice do you give to young writers?
MB:
- Live deeply or you won’t have much to write about.
- Writing is developed from experience—from many places, lifestyles, experiences, relationships, dangers, fears and great joys. Write about that.
- Don’t write about what you don’t know about or haven’t lived through.
- Avoid creative writing classes, writing clubs, and any other collective self-reassuring groupthink.
- Don’t ever tell people what you’re writing about till it’s done, or you can kill the deep subconscious affinity between yourself and it.
- Expect to write a million words before you begin to get the hang of it.
- It’s very difficult these days to get published. But writing daily is a very good way to “Know Thyself” as they used to say at Delphi.
- Don’t expect too much of yourself. If the writing is fun, keep going. If it’s not, stop. If it’s boring to you it will be boring to the reader too.
ST: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?
MB: I love wild animals, wilderness, women, booze, fast cars, mountain climbing, and risk.
To learn more about Mike Bond, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @MikeBondBooks.