This is one of the many author interviews I conducted in the mid- to late 1990s.
John Gilstrap worries about falling asleep. He’s afraid of waking up and finding out that 1995 was only a dream.
That extraordinary year was when Gilstrap sold his first novel, Nathan’s Run, to Harper Collins Publishers. His book earned a $400,000 advance with Warner Brothers snapping up the movie rights just two days after the book sold. The movie rights and paperback rights earned Gilstrap another $500,000, and the book will be translated and released in 13 foreign countries in 1996.
When asked how his life changed, Gilstrap answered, “How hasn’t it changed? The money is certainly life changing, but then there’s also my identity. A year ago, when someone asked me what I did for a living, I’d say safety and environmental engineer. Now, I’m a writer.”
“I’ve achieved a lifelong dream,” he added. “Nothing in the world prepares you for that.”
Gilstrap said he and his family are making a big effort not to change much about their lifestyle. “We want our friends to remain comfortable around us,” he said. “Having said that, I’ve been interviewed by People Magazine, Writer’s Digest, and Publisher’s Weekly, getting tons of good press. It’s hard to work that into a conversation subtly!”
Some of that good press includes praise from Jeffrey Deaver, author of A Maiden’s Grave and Praying for Sleep. “A top notch thriller,” Deaver writes. “Welcome John Gilstrap to the ranks of superior suspense—writers we have to thank for making us miss work and cancel our dinner dates because we’ve got to keep turning those pages. Nathan’s Run will leave you breathless.”
Marcia Muller, author of A Wild and Lonely Place and Till the Butchers Cut Her Down, has this to say. “If you like to root for the good guys and appreciate a tense tale of courage in the face of extreme adversity, you’re going to love Nathan’s Run. From its deceptively quiet opening to its heart-wrenching conclusion, this novel is an impressive debut for a talented new writer.”
Nathan’s Run follows the “electrifying and achingly poignant story of a 12 year old boy, accused of murder, who becomes the subject of a nationwide manhunt and the target of a professional killer.”
After calling into a popular national radio show, however, Nathan slowly starts turning outrage into waves of sympathy towards his plight. The book starts with quick, suspenseful chapters, enveloping the reader into Nathan’s dilemma. Gilstrap quickly hooks you into the story and doesn’t let go until you’ve read that final page.
A clever device is the set of pictures of a running boy on the left hand margin, one on each page of the book. Every picture is in a slightly different position, so if you rifle through the pages, you’ll get a visual image of a boy running for his life.
Although Gilstrap’s first novel is obviously an overwhelming success, this isn’t his first attempt at writing a book. “Since high school, I wanted to be a professional writer, but unfortunately, no one wanted to pay me for my fiction efforts,” he said. “A brief stint as the managing editor of Construction Magazine didn’t exactly stir my juices, either.”
“Thanks to a burgeoning interest in the local volunteer fire department, I decided to pursue a career in safety management,” he added. “Currently, I’m president of Compliance Services, Inc., a safety and environmental consulting firm in Virginia, with hundreds of clients throughout the country.”
“With all the trappings of success under my belt, I realized the dream to write still languished, unfulfilled. After over a decade of memo-writing, I finally decided to climb back into the literary saddle, producing a novel in 1992-1993,” he said. “My third attempt, like the first two, went nowhere.”
Then, Nathan arrived on the scene. “Nathan is me, in many regards,” Gilstrap said. “Emotionally, not in terms of any events. That period of life has always intrigued me, with so many things going on inside and outside my body. A 12 year old is almost an adult in a child’s package. So, when I needed a character to pull off the story, Nathan just evolved. I feel a very paternal pride for him, too.”
He first pictured the ending of his tale. “I had this image of a confrontation of a career hunter, a cop, and a prey that he didn’t really want to capture,” he said. “From there, I worked backwards.”
Working backwards included creating a cop who had lost his own son recently. The officer begins comparing Nathan with his son, and it makes it difficult to continue searching for Nathan.
“It’s an emotional book,” Gilstrap said. “Certainly, it was to write and I hope it is to read. But it was the parental conflict that really intrigued me. I took a grieving father and put him in the position of having to do his job. And in the process, he had to perpetuate a child’s misery. That posed a wonderful conflict, I thought.”
GIlstrap also used research from a long ago Psych 201 project, when he visited a juvenile wing of a mental hospital years ago. “The images of that place never left me,” he said. “Kids shouldn’t be made to grow up that fast.”
He’s now working on a second novel, finding it a little intimidating. He has a sense of having to do a better job with number two, although he realizes “as good” is what he really needs to do.
Gilstrap said that while writing is art, selling books is pure business. “Unpublished authors don’t always seem to understand that editors and agents are overwhelmed with submissions from people who take their writing very seriously,” he said. “To think that someone will respond to a posting, for example, is a little wishful. It’s a common attitude, though, because writers think of themselves as artists, and artists are notoriously poor business people.”
Instead, he suggests writers “rewrite until their fingers bleed.”
“Good enough is simply not good enough at all,” he said. “An author has to have professional pride in what he does. A heart surgeon is expected to be perfect every time,” he said. “So are engineers, for that matter. Writers should hold themselves to that same standard. Some passages can literally take hours to write. It’s like wrangling a snake, but you’ve got to keep at it until it’s done.”
“I hope that new writers realize that the fairy tale can come true,” he added. “This is such a discouraging business, but I want them to see a ray of hope.”