I finally started a love story, a saga with mystery elements. Halfway through my initial draft, I experienced my first and only bout of writer’s block. I couldn’t get my head or, especially, my heart into the novel. Even after it was finished—and I mean finished—I never submitted it to publishers. Eventually, I destroyed the pages. And no, I don’t regret it. And yes, I really did shred the original. I don’t remember anything about the story, not a scene, not one character, not even the book’s title.
As I’ve said, I finally threw myself into the Mad Men world and rose from copywriter to creative director to CEO. I was done as a novelist. I wasn’t a writer anymore. It was the late 1980s and three years since my previous novel had been published.
But honestly, I couldn’t help myself. I finally took up my pencil and wrote a mystery novel called The Midnight Club, which was how I got back to Little, Brown. It was also how I met the producers David Brown and Joe Wizan. They optioned the book and promised me they would get the movie made.
Next, I started a very pacey thriller about a Washington, DC, homicide detective, Alexis Cross. Sixty pages in, the story wasn’t working. More writer’s block? That was my fear. Then Alexis became Alex, and suddenly the novel, Along Came a Spider, seemed to write itself.
I think I know why. When I started to conceptualize Along Came a Spider, I wrote a full-length outline of the story. Several hundred pages. When I went back to start the novel itself, I realized that I had already written it. The short chapters in the long outline seemed just right to me, a way of keeping Along Came a Spider bright and hot from beginning to end. This reminded me of a story I’d heard from my editor Michael Pietsch about Bruce Springsteen: When Springsteen was writing Nebraska, he put down a demo, just him and his acoustic guitar. He eventually realized that the demo was the record. In the same vein, I came to understand that my long outline for Along Came a Spider essentially was the novel. It was also the birth of a new writing style for me. I had discovered that the pace, the drama, should never stop.
When I submitted Along Came a Spider, Larry Kirshbaum was the head of Time Warner Books, which included Little, Brown. Larry had a really good feel for commercial fiction. He and his team discovered David Baldacci, Nicholas Sparks, and me.
Larry read Along Came a Spider on a plane headed to London. As soon as he finished, he handed the manuscript over to his number two, who was sitting beside him. When they arrived in England, Larry called Fredi Friedman—my editor at the time—and they made a seven-figure offer for two Alex Cross novels, Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to get star treatment at Little, Brown. When a publisher offers a writer seven figures, the execs go all out to make the book work.
And it worked beautifully for Along Came a Spider. The reviews were very good, especially one George Pelecanos wrote in the Washington Post. Along Came a Spider made it to number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.
I didn’t feel particularly deserving of this sudden fame and fortune, but I was sure liking it. There’s nothing like walking by a bookstore and seeing a couple of your novels staring back at you from the front window.