Andrew Klavan (Crime Novelist)

The episode you're about to listen to was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're still going to love these older episodes because the majority of each conversation focuses on how the Gospel influences the work of our guests. With that disclaimer out of the way, please enjoy the episode. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week, I host a conversation with a Christian who's pursuing world class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery and their daily habits and how the Gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work. Today's guest is Andrew Clavin. He is the author of such internationally best selling crime novels as True Crime, Filmed by Clint Eastwood, don't say a Word, Filmed and starring Michael Douglas, An Empire of Lies, Stephen King, no big deal. Called Andrew the movie. Most original novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich. I have no idea who Cornell Woolrich is, but that sounds like one heck of a compliment coming from the great Stephen King. Andrew and I sat down and we recently talked about how to cultivate originality in our work, why the Bible is the great code of art, and how Andrew came to understand the Gospels by reading the great poets of the 18th and 19th centuries. Now, please enjoy this conversation with my friend, Andrew Clavin. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Jordan. It's good to be here.

We're recording this on the birthday of your new book, the Truth and Beauty. Happy book birthday.

Thank you kindly.

Yeah. By the way, we were scheduled to share a book birthday. I got this children's book coming out called the Creator in youn, but it literally got stuck on a slow boat from China.

This is happening a lot.

This is happening a lot. So we had to push it back two weeks. Now, listen, you've had a lot more book birthdays than I have. What do you do on launch day?

I've gotten to the point where it's kind of one big flow of publication. I mean, first of all, Zondervan has done such a great job of this that they've had me kind of working publicizing it and writing things for a long time. So it all kind of flows together. I depend on my wife to sort of remind me that this is a special day and take me out for dinner. You know, it's like, because. Because it all just becomes one big blur of publication.

It does speak to the narcissism in writers though, that like, we celebrate launches by going out to nice dinners or whatever. I'm like, in what other profession do you like, go to a big dinner every year? Every two years? I guess we should.

You know the joke about how many writers it takes to screw in a light bulb? It takes one while the world revolves around. They're all a little bit like that.

I haven't been this excited about a book in a long time. I mean that I pre ordered this thing, I don't know, six months ago when I first saw it on Amazon. Got lots of questions about it. But first I want to talk a little bit about your backstory because you were this big time crime novelist long before you were a Christian, is that right? What's the story here of your conversion?

Well, it was a long, long journey. I mean, I was born a Jew, and I was not just a Jew, but I was really a secular Jew. I was really an unbelieving Jew. And I was, because I was an artist, I was living in places like New York and Hollywood and London where the default setting is unbelief. And if you actually were to say that you believe in God, you become suspect. If you say that you believe in Jesus, you become an outcast, criminal. Yeah, yeah. So I had a long journey. I sometimes joke that cradle Christians are born at their destination, whereas I was dropped in the middle of the wilderness with a paperclip and a string and had to find my way there. But it really was a long period of, first of all, finding that because I love the arts and because I love literature especially, and finding that the Bible is at the center of all of Western literature. And everything that I found beautiful, everything that I found true, emanated from the Bible. The poet William Blake called the Bible the great code of art. I found that to be the case even coming from a situation of non belief. I first started reading the New Testament. We didn't have one in my house. I bought one simply to find out what all these writers were talking about, where all these symbols in their literature came from. And by the time it began to seem to me that, wait, you know, some of these things had to be true in order for the things that I found moral and beautiful to be sustained. I was in such a state of pain and misery from a kind of a painful upbringing, I really started to go insane. I started to go crazy. I'm not exaggerating. I really went bats when my late 20s. And because I was in so much emotional pain and Because I'm a stubborn, proud guy. I didn't want to reach for a God, even a God who made sense to me, because I was afraid that would just be leaning on a crutch. How could I believe in something when I grabbed him in such misery? It's actually a pretty stupid reaction, but that was my reaction at the time. It was only later when, through what I'm now absolutely convinced was a miracle, a brilliant, brilliant psychiatrist made me go sane. He helped me go sane. I've never seen it happen to anyone else, truly. I've never seen anybody else go that crazy and become as well adjusted as this guy really brought me to be. And then I started to think about this. Over the next several years, I started to think, well, now I'm pretty happy guy. I'm joyful, I'm successful. My career, as you say, was going very well. I was writing thrillers. They were being bought for the movies, and they were doing well in the bestseller lists and things like that. I started to think, well, gee, now this logic that I thought of, it still holds. It still works. The logic that brought me to believe that God was a possibility. And at that point I started, almost accidentally, I started to pray. Not to any particular God, but just a sort of, you know, a vague God.

Yeah.

And over the course of the next five years, through prayer, and almost entirely through prayer, my life was transformed. I mean, I just became a different person. I was happier, I was more joyful, I was more involved in life. I was more realistic. And after five years, I basically turned to God and said, well, this has been so dramatic, such a dramatic change in my life, that I feel that I should respond, but you're God and I'm just some schmo. What can I do that answers what you've done for me? And the answer came back to me on the instant. Almost like a voice in my head, though it wasn't. I mean, it almost came to me on the instant, you should be baptized. And I actually was so taken aback that I said out loud, you gotta be kidding me. You know, because now I was working in Hollywood and, you know, my father and I, after having long, long troubles together, we actually were sort getting along in a distant but peaceful way. And I thought, wow, if I become baptized, that's going to hurt my career. It's going to hurt my. Blow my family up. It's just going to be an absolute nightmare. But I went back. I had been reading the Bible all my adult life as literature, and I thought, well, now I should Go back and read it as truth and see if that works. And of course, once I did that, I started to say, ah, now everything makes sense. Now all the things that I've been thinking make sense. And when I questioned my life, and it took me like five months of interrogating my life, I realized that all my conclusions did make sense and that just as a matter of pure integrity, I had to be baptized because I didn't want to have it be in secret. And it was a dramatic, dramatic thing. I mean, I thought it was going to be nothing. I had this kind of animus, this kind of hostility toward ritual. I thought, well, what difference does it make if I actually get baptized? But three weeks after I did it, my wife, who knows me very, very well, turned to me and said, you're a different person. I've never seen this kind of serenity come over you, this kind of joy. And it was true, and it has continued to this day. I had great fears that becoming a Christian was going to make me a simpleton. You know, I was going to lose my sense of reality. I was going to think that God changes everything. I was going to become one of those happy talk guys who is always blessed. I'm blessed and highly favored, even though my wife just left and I lost my job. You know, I'm so happy. But no, it turned me into more of a realist than I'd ever been. And it actually took my creative life, which I was afraid it would destroy, and gave it new depth and new creativity and new variety that it didn't have before. So it really, along with my marriage, was really one of the great, great moments of my life.

Yeah, go a little bit deeper on what you just said. You know, this story is in a small way reminding me of, of Lewis's story, who was already a very successful writer before he came to Faith in Christ. And post conversion, he didn't change his work, but he radically changed his relationship with. To his work. And the gospel obviously gave shape to the work he did post conversion. How did your conversion impact your perspective on work moving forward?

My stories, which were thriller stories, I was, you know, big mystery, hard boiled mystery and thriller fan, loved Hitchcock. I was frequently called Neo Hitchcock. And I was writing these stories and all of them had a similar theme, which is how do you know what reality is? How do you know whether the threat that you see following you down the street is indeed a threat or you're just going nuts or, you know, and how do you order your inner world? And that thought, which Is a result of being disconnected from your creator. It's a result of being a branch that has fallen off the vine. Is an interesting way of looking at the world. You get to dissect a lot of things, but ultimately you're like an engine that's just spinning its wheels and it's not going anywhere because you're not hooked to anything. And once I got past that, once I was baptized and I said, okay, no, there is a truth. You can connect with that truth. Then my work became much more varied and much more interesting. And even though I could write about a character who was searching for that answer, I had a sense that there was a place for him to go. And it meant that my work could branch off into a million different ways. It was quite hard to make the transition. Not in the sense of, you know, I don't want to write the things that I'm writing anymore. It was just difficult to recover, to not speak as if art dies. When you think that you know everything and you don't know everything and Jesus doesn't solve all your problems and God doesn't tell you all the answers to anything, Life remains very mysterious, very difficult, very tragic sometimes. And so you have to remember to catch hold of that and catch hold of the real drama of life, because that's what literature is about.

That's good. I reread on writing by Stephen King recently, and I was reminded in his story he was an alcoholic. And when he was coming out of recovery, there was this great fear of, like, what is my work without alcohol? Like, I don't know that I could be as great without the alcohol. Was there a similar fear going through your head at the time? Obviously not about alcohol, but in a post Christian me.

Right, right.

Post baptism me. Can I be as great at this craft?

Absolutely. I had one big advantage which having gone mad and having thought the same thing about madness, that I thought unbelief, which is, if I lose my madness, I'll lose my talent. I had seen that that wasn't true. I had seen that. Actually, it's the same thing with alcohol. Like you said, a lot of writers feel that if they give up drinking, they'll lose their talent. I felt if I gave up my madness, I would lose my talent. Then I found that in going sane, my talent got richer and better and more productive. So I had that clue to go on. But still, at the same time, I was not very pleased with modern Christian fiction, modern Christian movies. It seemed too happy to me, kind of in that smiley face way you know, that yellow smiley face that everything was fine as long as you believed that, you know, yes, a guy could get hit by a car, but we all know he's going to heaven, so it's not really that sad. And I would think, really, I mean, can we not like cry for the guy first and then reflect on eternity? And I was afraid that would happen to me, but I rapidly saw that no, you know, it was very much different. It was very much that I became more realist and I became more of a realist about people's state in the world when I started to be able to feel face my own brokenness. Because when you are dealing with a forgiving God, it gets a little easier to look at yourself and say, wow, this is really a ruin of what was supposed to be a noble creature. When you start to do that, you start to see other people the same way, but with compassion. And it just makes your characters come to life in a fresh way. You're not judging them, but you are showing them as they really are. Your heroes don't become square jawed, perfect people. In fact, they become deeply flawed like all of us. It just made life a lot easier to look at in a real way because you are actually seen in a real way. It's only when you acknowledge that there is a you that you're supposed to be that you are not, that you see the you that you are clearly. And I think that that helps you see everybody clearly. I mean, how many times have I had moments since my conversion when I looked around and suddenly saw people as I think God sees them with a great deal of tenderness, but also a great deal of honesty. Just makes it a lot easier to be an artist when you see things like that.

Yeah, Amen. Well said. So I was reading that after your conversion you decided to learn Greek. Why tell us about this?

Well, this was one of the things that happened to me as I felt that I was understanding Jesus better. I also found that there were things about the words that he said that I didn't understand at all. And I have a very specific relationship with to God and to the Gospels, which is that I'm happy to talk about theology, I'm happy to talk about trinitarianism, I'm happy to talk about the end of days and sin and all this stuff. But I'm not worried about those things because it's not my job to judge other people's sins. It's God's job and he's going to do it absolutely perfectly. So I don't have to worry about it at all. I'm constantly asked, do you think we're coming to the end of days? I have no idea. Not only do I have no idea, it says in the Bible that I have no idea. And so I take that for granted.

And psychology, it doesn't have that much practical impact on.

That's what I'm saying. Exactly.

In the end, we win. There you go.

Exactly Right, right. But the thing that I am deeply, deeply interested in, because I do have an impact in it, is what God wants from my life, what he wants me to do today and every day. And when I started to look at the words of Jesus specifically, I started to think, like, some of this I don't get. You know, love your enemy. Sounds really pious and good when you say it, but I don't even like my enemies. I mean, do I really want to love them? Does that mean anything? Me? Does it mean anything to turn the other cheek when I know that if someone attacked my wife, I would do everything I could to knock him out the door? I mean, I was talking to my son about this. My son is a very brilliant scholar. And I said to him, you know what? It's all out of focus to me. And he said, well, I think the problem is that you're trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man. And the minute he said that, I thought, oh, obviously, that's obviously the smartest thing anyone's ever said to me. Because, you know, because when you know somebody, when you really know someone, like you're parents or your wife or your kids or your siblings, whatever, your good friend, you don't think, oh, this is his philosophy. What you think is, oh, this is what dad would say if he were here. You know, this is how he would see this. And so I decided to pull an experiment, which was that I was going to reread the Gospels, but I was going to read them without any theology at all. Not even. I was going to just push from my mind the words of Paul, the words of any church, the words of any sect, all of it. C.S. lewis, all gone. And just listen and try and get to know Jesus the way you might get to know the main character of a novel or the subject of a biography or a memoir or something like that. And to do that, I taught myself Greek. I have to say, I'm not very good at it now. I'm not even sure I could remember half of it, but at the time, I was.

It served its purpose.

Yeah, yeah, I Was able to translate about five sentences a day of the Gospels. And I went through all four Gospels, reading them like that. And it changed my perspective deeply. I mean, it really did.

But you say in this new book, the Truth and the Beauty of that. It really was the moment where you were starting to explore the work of history's greatest poets, that you really started to understand Jesus. Tell us about that.

Well, what happened was, as I was reading the gospels, rereading them in this very specific way, with no theology whatsoever, just who is this character? The words that kept coming back to me were the words of these great poets, the Romantic poets. Not all of them, but a certain group of them kept coming back to me. And I kept saying, oh, that's what that poet was saying in this poem. He was saying what Jesus is saying here. And I realized that these poets who were born in a time that was very much like our time, a time of great turmoil, a time when people were tearing down the statues of great men, beheading great men, the French Revolution was going on. A time when they thought that politics could solve all their problems, but were rapidly finding out that, no, that wasn't true. A time when people were questioning gender roles. This is the late 18th, early 19th century. People were saying, well, marriage is like a prison. I don't believe in marriage anymore. Maybe women should be able to sleep around just like men. Why is there this double standard? And most importantly, science was on the rise, and so people were losing faith. And when you lose faith, a very specific thing happens to you. You lose your sense of yourself and what your inner self means. And that is what these poets were starting to deal. They started to deal with who is the self and is he real, and is his morality real, and is his sense of beauty real? And when I looked at Jesus, he was talking about very much the same thing. He was saying, I want the joy that's in me to be in you. I want you to be. I want you to love your enemy because it will make you like your father. It will make you see the world as your father sees it. Most importantly, he said, you have to be a branch of the vine. You have to be a part of the spirit that is outside you in order to bring fruit to the spirit that's within in you. And all of these poets were rediscovering this as if they had never seen it before, because most of them had lost their faith. And the book is not about poetry, because I know a lot of people don't know poetry, and they don't understand poetry. It's just about the journey of these men. And one woman, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. The journey of these people as they found their way back to certain core truths that were first spoken and best spoken by Jesus Christ. And a lot of them didn't know it, but some of them did. For instance, Coleridge, who wrote Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, from which we get a sadder but a wiser man. And water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. I mean, a very famous poem. He was the most brilliant man of his generation, and really one of the most brilliant men who ever lived. And though he was a drug addict and he was an absolute emotional mess, he never lost his faith in Jesus. And he thought that Jesus was the core of how we understand our inner life. He was the model for how our inner life interacts with the world. And Coleridge's mind, because he talked endlessly, touched each and every one of these poets and transformed each and every one. He turned Wordsworth into the greatest poet of his day. He got Keats out of a time when he couldn't produce anything. He was so depressed, he couldn't write anything in. One conversation with Coleridge freed him to write some of the greatest poetry since Shakespeare. And Mary Shelley heard his poem when she was a little girl. He read the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner at her house when she was a little girl, and that informed Frankenstein. It's all throughout Frankenstein. It's quoted all throughout Frankenstein. And so slowly, Coleridge's vision kind of infected all these people, and Wordsworth actually became a Christian in the end. Mary Shelley became much more religious. Keats died so young that we don't know what he would have become. But C.S. lewis, who had a lifelong relationship with William Wordsworth's poetry, said, if you start with Wordsworth and you follow his trail, you will come to faith. And that actually happened to Wordsworth himself. He followed the trail of his thought and he ultimately became a Christian. So I thought, like, you know, in this moment, when we're tearing down statues and when we are trying to solve all our problems by politics and when we are questioning gender roles and when science is undermining some of the old ways of understanding our faith, we have to maybe start at the beginning again if we're going to understand this. And so I thought it would be helpful to people, especially people who don't read poetry, to take a look at this and say, oh, wait, this is a different way of seeing Jesus. Because I feel too much of Christianity simply by tradition. Has become about be good so you don't get punished, and be good so you get a reward. And that's not really what Jesus was saying. What he was saying was, do these moral things so you can clear the path to a new understanding of life, which is life in abundance, which is the joy that is in God, in you. And that's a very different way of approaching Christianity than I think a lot of standard churches approach it. And it has changed the way I look at it and made me. Has taken my joy up a big step. I thought maybe it would do the same for others.

I love it. This is hitting on a theme I think a lot about. You know, these poets are very rarely mentioning the name of Jesus explicitly. Right. But it's the thought process, it's the breadcrumb, it's the trail of breadcrumbs that lead and communicate these spiritual truths. Right?

That's exactly right. It's exactly right. I mean, in order to understand the stories of Jesus, and Jesus was a storyteller, he told parables, you have to start to understand why somebody would speak in parables. I mean, people sort of say, like, he's trying to confuse people. And Jesus says, you know, I want people, only the people who can hear, to hear. But there's a reason for that. There's a reason that stories can only be heard by certain people. There's a reason that stories communicate truth in a way that simple statements don't. A lot of people think, well, a story has a moral, and if you can get to the moral, then you understand the story. That's not true. If that were true, Jesus would have just delivered the moral. Why waste your time with the story? A story is an experience, and that experience is meant to transform you. It's like a seed. It's like a mustard seed is planted inside you and meant to grow into full life because it's endlessly resonant, Its meanings are endless. And this is one of the things that these poets were writing about. Why are we writing. Why are truth and beauty connected? Why do those two words go together? I mean, what a really interesting question. Because one of John Keats greatest poems, and this is where the title of the book comes from, ends with the line, beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. That's all you know on earth and all you need to know. And you think about that and think, well, that's kind of a weird thing. Does that mean, like, if I like pink flowers, that's the truth? Or if, you know, if you like yellow flowers, you Have a different truth? No, that's not what it means. What it means is there is this deep resonance in the human soul that responds to truth by feeling it to be beauty. In the same way, you know, you respond to the woman who's right for you by feeling love. You respond to the truth by experiencing beauty. And that has big ramifications because it means your inner life properly lived right in proper, what the poets called collaboration with the one great mind. You have to collaborate with reality. You can't defy reality. You have to collaborate with it. But that your inner life, working in collaboration with reality and truth, is actually a machine for picking out the truth of life. And right now, I mean, I'm sure you've noticed this. I think we've all noticed that we don't know what our inner life is. We sometimes talk as if our inner life meant nothing. So if I happen to live in a country where women are treated with respect and given full rights, and someone else happens to live in a country where women are clothed in black and aren't allowed to go out without an escort, those two cultures are just two separate cultures, and one has no right to speak about the other. Your inner sense of morality is deceptive, and you don't know right from wrong. So on the one hand, we think our inner life means nothing. On the other hand, we think our inner life is absolutely sovereign. So if in the middle of this conversation I decide I'm a woman, you suddenly have to refer to me with a whole different set of pronouns. You have to treat me as if I'm a woman. You have to proclaim that I'm a woman because my inner life tells me that neither of those things is true. Your inner life is neither nothing nor is it sovereign. It is a collaboration with the inner life that created you, the spirit that created you. And that's what these poets had to rediscover. And they did it in some of the most beautiful poetry ever written. For one thing, and also with a certain depth that speaks to the modern mind in ways that sometimes we have to work at to get to in the Bible.

I think a lot of times it is art that plants that seed for truth in our hearts. Right? It moves us, it stirs our souls, and only then can it lead us to logical implications of that seed until it germinates into an acceptance of spiritual truth. Do you know the story of Hannah More, the great poet?

Yes, but go ahead. What specifically?

I think Hannah More and William Wilberforce are great example of this. Right. Wilberforce wants to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire. But he knew he couldn't force this top down, right? He knew it couldn't just be legislated. So he enlisted the help of Moore, as I understand it. And Hannah Moore just started creating this beautiful poetry that changed people's hearts to the issue of slavery. And over time, that changed people's minds about the topic and it led to legislative change.

Right.

I just think it's a beautiful example of this, that art, that poetry, that literature, whatever, can communicate truth and lead people to long for truth as defined by Jesus Christ.

It is so fascinating. Even if you just go to a movie that is a mystery story and you watch the movie, you come out and you say to your friend or your wife or whoever you went to see the movie with, you say, well, that didn't make sense. That guy wouldn't have done that, or he couldn't have done that. And you start to parse the story and find out the way that it makes sense. And that should tell you something. It tells you that life actually does make sense. You walk north, you get to Canada, you walk south, you get to Mexico. Not just on Thursdays, but every single day. So when people start telling you that a baby in the womb isn't a human being, or when they start telling you that, you know, abracadabra, I've changed my sex, you can actually say, no, that's not the truth. That doesn't make sense. You have to work that out. You are responsible to the logic of the world, including moral logic. And the fact that we can get things wrong. The fact that we can get things wrong. The fact that we can say, oh, I think I'm in love with somebody, but no, it just turns out it's infatuation. Or we can say, yes, slavery is justifiable. And then, you know, we start to find out, no, it's not justifiable. The fact that we can get things wrong means that we can also move toward the truth. And that, I think, is the thing that we lose when we lose our faith. What we lose when we lose our faith is our sense that this inner life has a purpose, it has a direction, it has a north star that we can follow. And we'll get. Get everywhere by half measures. It's not going to be easy, but we will have a purpose in our life in developing that person and becoming the person that we were meant to be. And I think that that's something that art can help you do. And obviously, if art leads you to the Gospels, then you will be taking even another giant step. Totally.

You say in the book that the Gospels led you to a life that is the most creative, most joyful, and most true you've ever experienced. I'm curious how the Gospel has led you to be more creative. What's the connection there?

Just to deal with the question of joy? Because it's a word that comes into my mind a lot, because it's in the Gospels, and I experience it a lot. When I say that, I don't mean happiness. You know, on a bad day, I'm unhappy. On a good day, I'm happy. When I say joy, it's what the poets called gusto. It's this complete immersion in life. It is this sense that it matters. Even when I walk down the street, something new is happening. My experience of walking down the street has never been had before, and it'll never be had again. It's unique. It's part of God's creation. And that leads me back to answer your question, which is that my sense of my job as a creator. And I see, I think everybody. I don't think everybody's an artist. I think everybody's a creator.

Amen.

I think your experience of life is new, it's original. It's never been had before. And it's why you are here. You are here to have that experience. And when you start to understand that, you understand that this is part of creation. God created a creation that creates. This is again what the poets rediscovered. They rediscovered that they were creating something. And that really changes a lot of things. I talk in the chapter on Mary Shelley, I talk about motherhood a lot. And it really deepens for me, my appreciation of motherhood and the meaning of motherhood. The idea that you create not just a body, you don't just turn matter into life. Women, women, mothers specifically, also turn that life into an individual. It's only through mothering that people actually become full and complete individuals. And that changes the way we talk about mothers and the way we talk about what women do in the world. And it makes it all the more important that we have respect for and elevate what women do when they do that job. It also means that each of us in every moment, is creating something. And so that requires attention. And I think that that's just a huge thing that I don't think enough of us talk about paying att, paying attention to this moment. Even if you're just mowing the lawn, whatever you're doing, you pay attention to this moment, you will find it is a much richer, much more creative moment than you thought. And in my work as a guy who actually tells stories, it means that I am much more serious. Joyful, yes, but serious about what it is my story is doing. I'm not writing stories as parables. My stories are not parables. They're just stories. They're not here. They can't be reduced to a meaning. They're meant to be an experience. But I can ask myself, as I do frequently, you know, can I create that experience in a different way where it's more meaningful, where it opens up in some new, fresh way? When I was a very young writer, I mean, I'm writing these crime stories, I wrote one of the most, probably the most violent scene I ever wrote. And I was so violent and disgusting, I actually had to get up from my desk and kind of walk around after. And after that experience, I said to myself, you know, every time I come to an action scene, and to be honest with you, just being blunt and not trying to brag, I consider myself one of the best action writers alive. I think it is a real talent of mine, you know. But I thought, from now on, every time I come to an action scene, it's not that I'll refuse to write it, it's that I'll ask myself, is this the best way to do this scene?

It's an issue of excellence. You have a higher standard for excellence in the world.

Perfectly put. That's exactly right. Can I elevate this by playing not to my immediate strength, which is action writing? Can I play to another strength, another part of my creative mind? And that does. When I talked about becoming more varied as an artist, that's part of what I'm talking about. And when you have this certainty that you're working in collaboration with creation, it just gives you a lot more. A little more swagger, if you will. A little bit more like, yeah, I can do this well.

And confidence too. Not just working with creation, but working with the creator. God, Right. If I understand that I'm an image bearer of the source of all creativity and originality, it gives greater purpose and I think, a greater pursuit of originality to the work. I read this quote.

I love this.

Stephen King has called you, quote, the most original novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolridge. End quote. That's a crazy quote. How do you cultivate originality in an intentional way? Or is it not intentional?

I don't think you can cultivate originality per se. I think that you can Reject cliche. And you know, cliche is a word that comes from. It's a printer's word. It was words that were frequently put together would be linked in the printer's hand. And so if you come to something where you think like, you know, I've seen this before, I've seen it before, it's done all the time. Even a phrase that's done all the time. I don't want to make something so fancy just to make it fancy or anything like that. I just think like, am I going down a path that is well trod without thinking about why it's well trod. Not all well trod paths are the wrong path. But you just want to say, like, what am I really seeing here? What am I. If Andrew Clavin walking down the street is a new and original thing, right. What is it that I'm actually seeing when I see this scene unfold? And that's where I think you get originality. You get originality. When you think about originality, then you get kind of fancy stuff that looks original, but it's really just cliche in another term. But if you think about, how do I see this? Do I really see it the way everybody else sees it? Do I really see it the way it's always been seen before? Or am I seeing something new because it's being seen by me? Then you start to develop your voice, which of course is the writer's main task, is developing a voice so that after a while you don't really have to think about it. You think, no, I'm going to write what I see, not what anybody else tells me to see. And that's how you get originality.

This is really good. So the first step is recognizing that you're on a well worn trail, right? You're like, oh, this sounds familiar. Right? And then step two is questioning, why is this familiar, should this be familiar? And just questioning your surroundings. I think what I heard there was the third piece of this is saying, okay, I'm on this well worn path. Look around me. How do I view this scene objectively? Not how have other people described it, but how do I see it with my unique. Is that right?

Yes. This is where the big problem we have in society right now, and it's a problem that stems from unbelief, is we talk about the subjective world as if subjective meant unreal. It doesn't. It means an individual collaboration with reality. And that's a very, very important. You know, I mean, I wrote this memoir, the great good thing about my conversion. And here I am a secular Jew, and I'm from the coasts and I'm living as an artist, and I can't tell you how many letters I get saying, your story is my story. You know, I am a farmer in Nebraska and I, you know, found Jesus when. When I was 17. And I felt like, well, gee, that's. That's actually not my story. But. But somehow if you tell your story truly, it is everybody's story. Yeah, that's how that works.

That's super interesting. One of the great challenges I have as a writer is this tension between staying focused on the craft and all the work I'm doing, but also opening myself up to other inputs outside of my lane in order to get new creative ideas. I don't know if this makes sense at all. I guess the question here is, like, how do you ensure that you're intaking a lot of different ideas that can inspire creativity in the core work?

I read continually when writers come up to me and they say, is there a book I can read? I say, yeah, all the books, all the books, all the books. That's what you gotta do. And I never turn a book away because I disagree with it. This is a facet of modern American life that drives me absolutely up the wall. Disagreeing with me is actually not a felony in most states, and it oftentimes charges something. Just arguing with somebody in your mind can give you better arguments for what you believe. One problem I think Christians have a lot is they're told that atheists are demonic or they don't understand anything, or they're fools. And then the first time they meet an atheist with a good argument, their faith collapses because they've never heard these arguments before. Well, no, that's not the way that works at all. People have very good arguments, even when they believe something untrue. And so I'm happy to read books by people that I am completely opposed to. I'm happy to have conversations with people I'm completely opposed to and just say to myself, I am ready to take this argument on and accept it. When I read a book, I don't. I don't argue with it. I let it flood me, you know, and then after it's over, I think, well, how do I feel about that? I start to talk back to it. And sometimes its arguments crumble, and sometimes they actually have an effect on me. I mean, many, many, many years ago, I got into an argument about abortion when I was still in favor of abortion with a Catholic friend of mine. And we argued vociferously, but in a friendly way, you know, till about two in the morning. And I remember just going to bed and thinking, he won that award argument. You know, he won that argument. And it took me years, years of dealing with the fact that he won that argument before I thought, oh, he won that argument because he was right and I was wrong, you know, And I think that that's just how else are you going to grow? I mean, it's amazing to me that they teach college students to riot if somebody comes in and disagrees with them and gives a speech that disagrees with them. And I think if you're a college student, you literally know nothing. You literally have not lived, you haven't read, you have no idea what's going on. Shouldn't you be listening to everybody with a completely open mind? And when somebody tells you not to listen to them and that they're hateful or they're bigoted or whatever, shouldn't you be thinking, why don't you want me to hear someone who disagrees with you? So I think being very broad minded and even open minded. And when I say that, I mean open minded without ending is a good thing to begin with. Obviously after a while you start to say, well, I don't have to hear that, I've heard this argument before, I don't have to hear it again.

Guess so you read stuff you disagree with. But on the fiction side, when you're getting into the mode of writing the next crime novel, what else are you reading? I'm assuming you're reading other fiction, probably inside and outside of the genre. What does that look like?

Yeah, no, I read everything and I'm always reading some fiction, but I read things going back. I mean, right now I'm reading a 16th century epic poem, you know, so like, you know, that's, that's the fiction that I'm reading right now. Your reading life has to have some organization and some flexibility. Yeah. Because sometimes you just suddenly think, I must read this thing. I went through a period many years ago where I just read ghost stories. I love ghost stories. But suddenly all I was reading was ghost stories. And it was because without my knowing it, I was preparing to write a novel that was about ghost stories. But I didn't know that was happening at the time. So you have to follow your instincts to some degree. But also right now I know I'm researching a book, so I read books in that kind of genre that I'm researching. Your reading life is a spiritual enterprise. There's no question about it. And the only thing is, is that you shouldn't be afraid of ideas that disagree with you, because you are well capable of standing up to those ideas if they're wrong and of getting what's good from them if they're right, and of changing your mind if they're right. And I think all of those things are good for you.

I've been starting to read a lot about play and joy and work. It's interesting. When I started out writing for play for fun, right? To scratch my own itch. And now it's become the main thing, right? It's become the thing I get paid to do. I would imagine you've got a similar story, right? You start writing for fun now it's the thing. Like, how do you ensure that the thing stays fun and playful?

Huh? That's interesting. I mean, I've always loved it. I know successful writers who do not like writing, who find it painful. If I found writing as painful as they find it, I would do something else.

Yeah, seriously, that sounds terrible. It's way too hard of a craft.

It's so hard. I know. I know. You know, that's what gets me. It's like, why would you do that? It's a hard, hard thing to do. So I've always enjoyed it. It is work. It's playful work. It's fun work. It's deeply engaging work. But, you know, I have to do what every writer has to do. I have to think, like, you know, do I want to start this, my work today, or do I want to do the crossword puzzle? You know, and you really have to use discipline to get to work, you know, but it remains deeply satisfying. And I think every writer feels this. I mean, you can check me on this. But if your writing life is going well, your day goes well, you know, like, that's what really is the thing that you're about. And so to me, it's so much a part of my personality. Being a writer is so much what I am, that if I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't enjoy life at all.

Yeah, I love it. I haven't hit that yet. Like, I love everything. I sit down to write. I love the process, but I'm hedging against that. I. I fear that that day might come because I've heard it from so many other people, which I don't understand, I don't have firsthand experience with, but I want to mitigate against that because I love what I get to do. All right, Andrew, three questions I love to wrap up every conversation with, number one, which books, on the whole, this is such a hard question, but which books do you find gifting most frequently to others?

It's probably Crime and Punishment. I mean, it's not a book for everyone if you're not a reader. It's a complex, difficult read. You know, it's a Russian novel, obviously by Dostoevsky from the 19th century, but it changed my life when I was 19 years old. Just this moral relativism that now has taken over intellectual life. Was just first rising up into the academy. And when I read Crime and Punishment, I thought, oh, no, they're wrong. This thing that is rising up in the academy is untrue. It's a book about the fact that there is a moral universe and you are responsible to that moral universe. It's a novel about that. It's a great mystery story, a great murder story, a great police story. It's probably where every television scene you've ever seen of a cop interviewing a suspect comes from that book. That's the book. When people ask me, what is the most meaningful book to you? That's the book that I said, I wouldn't say I have a favorite novel, but that's the most important book to me.

I just read a mini biography on Dostoevsky and his faith. What a fascinating story.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. We don't have side eye packet today, but go check it out if you're listening and interested in this. Andrew, who would you most like to hear talk about how their Christian faith shapes the work that they do in this world? Maybe on this podcast.

Who would I like? Oh, so you mean a living person?

Yeah, sure. Or dead. Hey, whatever. We can have this podcast on the New Earth. Whatever.

I would love to have been part of the conversations between Lewis and Tolkien. Yeah, they actually came from really different perspectives. I think Tolkien was by far the better fiction writer than Lewis, although Lewis is nonfiction is some of my favorite writing in the world. And also Owen Barfield. Owen Barfield is the forgotten inkling, but he has changed my life and his work. Barfield's work deeply informs the truth and beauty. My book. Because Barfield understood the Romantics better than anybody. He understood Coleridge, who was very difficult to understand better than anybody. So just to sit with those guys and have that conversation, I would pay a lot of money.

Me too. Andrew, what's one thing from today's conversation you want to reiterate to our listeners before we sign off?

To not be afraid to go back to the Gospels and interrogate them so often. I feel that we are so used to saying these things as if we know them to be good because we read them in the Gospel. So they must be good. And to some degree, there's truth to that. But also, if they're not in your heart, if your heart isn't responding to them, they don't exist. And so this book, the Truth and Beauty, started with an experiment. It started with the idea that I would go back, I would set aside everything I thought was true about Christianity and just meet Jesus himself. And I think that that, that experiment, that idea that we can see Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. But we're not. We change all the time, and our world changes all the time. And the language we use changes all the time. And it's not a bad thing to go back and say, wait, do I really believe this? What do I think this means? How does this affect the way I live now? Because that, to me, is what it's all about. It is about the way you live and what you see and what you. You feel right now. And I guess that's the thing. I want to leave you. And that's the reason I wrote the book.

It's good. Andrew, I want to commend you for the exceptional, eternally significant work you do. Thank you for reminding us of how our work can create these thin places in the world. Right. That helps other people see spiritual truths. Guys, the book is the Truth and Beauty. It's on my reading list. I've started reading it this morning when it came out. I highly recommend it. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us today today.

It's been a real pleasure. Jordan, thanks a lot.

I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. Hey, if you did, do me a favor, go leave a review of the call to Mastery on whatever podcast app you're using right now. Guys, we love making the show for you. I hope you love it, too. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'll see you next week.