FB: I was transferred to San Francisco in September of 1993
because of my job as a copy editor for a newsletter for the oil
business. The company folded the following July, and that was when
I seriously decided to try writing a novel, and in January 1995 I was
accepted into the UC Berkeley novel-writing workshop, which is
taught here in San Francisco.
One of the ways the workshop helped me is to impress upon me the
importance of structure and story. This novel grew out of a personal
essay I had written about my time in New York that I hadn't been
able to get published. I had originally thought that I could simply
expand that to book-length, but I learned that you have to do more
than spout off for 200 pages; you have to build a story. The teacher
also gave me a lot of encouragement for the four months I was in the
class, and after I spent another six months working straight through
on it, I took the manuscript to her and she told her agent about it.
The agent took it, showed it around, and it was accepted by Simon
and Schuster in February of 1996.
RH: And in the time between acceptance and publication, you've
also worked on the screenplay. Is that complete?
FB: It's tough to say when anything is complete in Hollywood,
but I've written two drafts of the screenplay for New Line Cinema.
They're currently looking for a director and actors. That doesn't
mean that it will get made, but it's looking good at this point. Writing
a screenplay was a very enlightening process, a lot of fun, actually. I
think it helped that I had written the book, so I wasn't starting from
scratch. I read a lot of books on screenplay writing and a lot of
screenplays, trying to teach myself the craft.
RH: It probably helps that your story already has the rhythm and
pacing of a screenplay.
FB: People have told me that, and I think it's true. The
plotlines are pretty clear, and it can translate well to the screenplay
in that sense. But you still have to do so much compression for a
screenplay, to tell things much more quickly. It was a challenge to
ignore all the peripheral elements and get down to the essence of
this story. I decided not to use voiceover in the screenplay as well, so
instead of having Tom's tell the reader everything, I had to find a
way to show everything in the scenes by he does and says.
RH: The dialogue is fantastic, also very cinematic. In some of the
scenes with the other gamblers, the balance between humor and
tension is perfect.
FB: I'm glad you say that. Dialogue can be fun to write at
times, when it feels like it's just popping out of your head onto the
page. I'm sure that you're finding with your book that some parts of
more fun to write than others. To me, the worst part is all the
background information you have to find some way of getting in
without slowing things down too much. It's even harder when you're
writing in the first person, when you have to come up with some
excuse for the narrator to tell you what he knows or be told what he
doesn't know. You have to get at those things indirectly, to avoid
having your narrator say things like, "Then I met this new guy. He
was a loan shark and I needed ten thousand dollars."
RH: Now, I ultimately think Tom's a sympathetic character, but
he's also a jerk in some ways, and I know some readers would think
of him as an asshole.
FB: To me, the voice is crucial to a book. If you don't like the
voice or aren't struck by it, you aren't going to like the book. Skirting
that line between giving Tom an edge and making him
unsympathetic was dicey, and I think it's natural that some readers
will end up not caring for him at all. One of the things that I tried to
do with him was to create a young guy who thinks and talks the way
a lot of young guys really do think and talk, rather than the way
we'd like young guys to think and talk. He wants to have a good time,
he wants to get laid. I know that's going to rub some people the
wrong way, but what can you do? He's not a politically correct
character. Political correctness often becomes a way to hide from
reality to avoid upsetting or offending people, and I tried to resist
doing that every step of the way when writing this story.
One of the things that I tried to capture with Tom was the frustration
a lot of people feel a year or two out of college, when they can't stand
the whole 9-to-5 routine. It's a crisis of belief at a very young age,
when you start realizing that you really are going to have to work for
the rest of your life.
RH: A lot of people see what you and I do, writing full time, as a
great escape from the desk job. But we both know that it's as
grueling if not moreso than any office job they'll ever have.
FB: And it has the added disadvantage of being lonely. Your
workday is walking into your room, sitting at your desk, and being
alone for X number of hours every day. Sure, you're your own boss,
if you're good enough at selling yourself, but you're alone. That's
another reason that the novel writing workshop was so good for me,
in that I've stayed in touch with some of the other writers in the
program and we get together every six weeks or so to read each
other's material and talk about writing with other people who
understand what it's really like.
I was very lucky in that my wife agreed to work to support us while
I was writing this book, with the promise that if I couldn't sell it I'd
go back to working fulltime. The advance from Simon and Schuster
for Balling the Jack was good for a first novel, but it went
straight into paying for the bills that had built up while I was writing
it. It was the film deal that gave me extra money to be able to
continue to write fulltime and get my second novel to the point
where Simon and Schuster will look at it.
RH: It sounds like you've wanted to tell this story for a long time,
but it took the workshop to give you the opportunity to actually
write it.
FB: Yeah, but getting out of New York also gave me a chance to
take a step back and organize my thoughts. When I was there, I was
too busy and distracted. It was only when I came out here that I was
able to write the New York book that I had in me.
