Like many of my protagonists, David Miller, of my latest novel, TWISTED CITY, has a little of myself in him. Not that I'd ever make the decisions David makes in the book--thank God!--and I've never been in the situations he's been in, but David is financial reporter for a fledgling financial magazine in Manhattan, and I've worked as a reporter/researcher for several fledgling magazines.
It isn't the first time that I've drawn on my past work experiences for a novel. My first book, COLD CALLER, is about an ex advertising exec who is forced to take "a survival job" as a telemarketer. I worked for a telemarketer for many years and a couple of the work situations in the book come from my life. In a later book, HARD FEELINGS, I drew on my experiences of working for a couple of computer networking companies in New York. FAKE I.D., NOTHING PERSONAL, and TOUGH LUCK I didn't deal with my own employment situations, but I drew from my life in other ways. FAKE I.D. is about a struggling actor who is trying to join a race horse syndicate and I've been a big horse racing fan for years. NOTHING PERSONAL is a dark satire about two New York couples, and a couple of the characters have bits of me and people I know in them. TOUGH LUCK takes place in 1984, in the neighborhood in Brooklyn where I grew up, and Mickey Prada is 18 years old in the book, the same age I was in 1984. Many of the locations in the book are right out of my life.
I rarely set out to write about my own experiences. Naturally, I'm more likely to write about what I know best, but many of the parallels to my life seem to just wind up in my books. I'm often surprised when I look back on my writing and see anything related to myself in my books, because I'm always caught up in thinking about plot and dialogue and action. The personal stuff just seems to work itself in unconsciously.
In TWISTED CITY, however, the decision to make David a financial reporter was purposeful. For years, I'd been meaning to write a novel about a journalist and when I came up with the plot for TWISTED CITY, making David a financial writer seemed like a perfect match for the material. When the story begins, David is at a crossroads in his career, caught up in a petty conflict with his editor. David has written three positive stories in a row and his editor has demanded that his next story be negative, whether a negative story is warranted or not. David is miserable and tormented because of this; it's an early clue into the desperation of his character and a hint of much bigger troubles to come.
Jason Starr is the author of several novels and the winner of the 2004 Barry Award for Best Paperback Original.
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