Urban Waite is thirty years old. He lives and writes in Seattle. The Terror of Living (Book Review) is his first novel. He took time out of his busy writing schedule to sit down and tell me about himself, his books and his infectious characters – it goes without saying that I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to Urban for his valuable time in making this interview possible.[Back to Author Interviews Index]

Urban, when did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

The Terror of Living

I feel like I fell into writing. I don’t know if I ever wanted to be a writer, I just somehow became one. When I was sixteen I had the opportunity to take several college classes and when the grades came back it was English I excelled in. I also didn’t care so much for grades at that point and really when it comes down to it I don’t think I really do now. I just always wanted to put out my best work. I always wanted to be entertained and to feel something about the work I was creating, and that I think has been my major motivation for becoming a writer. I just wanted to create something that I felt moved by and hopefully would move other people. In this way writing is a surprise everyday and it always has been.

How long did it take you to write The Terror of Living?

Writing Terror took me about a year from start to finish. I like to say I wrote it in thirty days but it’s not the whole truth. I did write the basic skeleton of the thing in thirty days, trying as best I could to put down ten pages a day till I was done. Most of it was bad but enough of it was good that I decided I could keep going with it, and over the year I did just about everything possible to make sure the rest of it came around.

What books/authors have most influenced you most and why?

I think if we’re talking influences we’d have to talk about Raymond Carver. When I was a kid growing up in Seattle he was kind of the local guy to me. He was writing about jobs I understood, about professions that seemed accessible to me. While most others around that time seemed to want to elevate themselves, Carver was writing about the types of people I knew. This changed something in me and made me really want to read more of his work. Which led me to many other great books and writers I had no idea about. Books like Richard Ford’s Rock Springs and Ron Hansen’s Nebraska.

What was the hardest part of writing the book?

Finding time. I think this is always the tough part of writing anything. After I’d gotten my draft down and sent it off to my agent, all I wanted to do was work on it, revise it, and of course make it better. I was working some strange hours then, waiting tables at a restaurant in Boston and working private parties for the Hotel Commonwealth as well. It was a tough schedule to make any sense of, as each day seemed to be different one day to the next. But I found that if I could manage to get a steady three or four hours in before I had to head off for work I could make good progress on the novel.

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?

Tough decision here but if I had to choose right now I’d say it would be John Casey. I read his book Spartina a few years back and ever since then I’ve just been going back to it time after time to see how he handles situations, how he deals with conversation, the turns and twists of his prose.

What book are you reading now?

I’m reading a great book by this guy, Jess Walter, The Financial Lives of the Poets. I’d never read any of his stuff before and I’m really having a great time. It sort of feels to me like the Sportswriter, but on a much more humorous and crazy level.

What’s the one question you wish you were never asked?!

“Is your name really Urban?” I get that one all the time. But I’ve been getting it for a long time now. I remember when I was in sixth grade and it was my first year at this new school, everyone thought it was my street name. I thought that was pretty cool for a bit.

Do you find it hard to motivate yourself during the writing and ideas stage and what is your work schedule like when you’re writing?

Some days you just wake up and everything is clicking and you know it’s going to be a good day. Other days it’s very much the opposite. The trick of the thing is just to sit down in front of the computer and start in on the work. You can always go back to it later on and delete it or revise it. In the long run no one needs to know if the work is bad, or good for that matter, it’s really just about you and the story at that point in the process.

As for when I work best, I always do my best work in the morning. Luckily for me I’ve always taken work that allows me at least a few hours everyday to get the writing done. Usually this means getting up early and fixing myself something to eat, possibly even zoning out in front of the morning news. Then getting down to business by reading back through my own work from the day before, trying to revise what little I can before the blank page moves onto the screen, and then just diving in.

Where do you get your information or ideas for your books/stories and how much time do you spend on research for a project like The Terror of Living?

Urban Waite by Sean Hunter

I have no idea where the ideas for my stories come from. Sometimes it seems that all is lost and there isn’t another idea left that’s worth anything and then out of nowhere something pops into my head and I’m rolling with it again. A lot of it really does come from my life and the things I do and the people I meet. It’s hard to say what is going to click and what isn’t. These days I get a lot of people coming up to me saying, “You should write about________” and I’m just thinking that’s about the surest way to get me not to write about whatever subject they’re trying to sell me on. Not that I get a lot of bad ideas, usually they’re actually very good, but the thing of it is I’m not connected to this idea in the same way these people are.

When I start out writing something it’s usually based almost solely on some concept of human desire. Who is this person? What do they want? Where have they been? How has that one thing they want most brought them to the point they now find themselves? And this is usually the point in which I would start the story.

Writing Terror was very much like that for me. I didn’t have much more than an idea about my main character, Phil Hunt, and the history he’d already been through, and where he wanted to be by the end of his story. And as I started writing his story I knew I had to start writing these other stories about Nora Hunt, and Bobby Drake, and Grady Fisher because they all in a way begin to say something about Phil Hunt. The simple answer about this is that it all started to grow, the characters claimed their own lives from me and suddenly I find I’m doing research on the fly, looking up boat engines, and findings the specs for an AR-15 assault rifle, and many other things that I’m sure I’m still being monitored for. I made some very strange phone calls and ran some very questionable web searches while writing this book.

In the book, Grady is a rather sinister and violent character and as I mentioned in my review I did find him strangely endearing as a character. Did you have fun creating him and did you feel you had to rein him in at all for audiences?

I’m really glad you said that thing about Grady in your review. For quite some time now I’ve been wondering if maybe there was something wrong with me. I mean, he’s my creation and I thought writing him that I would have a very hard time sympathizing with a character like this. But I didn’t, I actually really liked writing his scenes. They were so crazy and off the wall from anything I’d ever written before that I surprised myself a little and had this very scary thought that I was in a way making my own Frankenstein monster.

I like Grady because he goes his own way. In my mind he’s not out of control by any means, he’s very much in control and it’s just the crazy way he goes about it that endears him to me.

What was one of the most surprising things you learned in writing The Terror of Living?

Personally, that I could scare myself. I don’t want to reveal anything to anyone who hasn’t read the book so I’ll just say there’s a certain scene in the book dealing with hose clamps that will forever make me queasy.

“The Terror of Living” is available from Amazon (UK) & Amazon (US).

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but given the opportunity to have discovered a word in the dictionary what would it be?

Acrid. It’s abrupt and jarring and I love the way it comes off the tongue. It pretty much says all it needs to just in its pronunciation.

Can you give the readers a sneaky peek at your next novel?

I’m curious to see how fast it takes my publishers to give me a call after I say that the book, Dead if I Don’t, is done. I’ve been having a really good time with this one. It revisits a lot of what The Terror of Living dredged up in my mind. The book traces the path of a hit man in the American southwest, right around when the cartel violence starts to seep over into the US.

Part of the problem of writing a book like this is—like the character of Grady Fisher—it’s been a sort of odyssey finding something endearing about this character. He’s not exactly the nicest fellow, but he’s not out for blood every minute either. The problem of his character and the reason I’ve really been having a great time with the story of this book is that he doesn’t want any part of being a hit man anymore. He just wants out, but he’s forced to keep working. And I think the best part for me, and probably the worst part for him, is that he’s never quite sure exactly who he’s working for, the American drug families he’s always worked for or the incoming cartels.

So perhaps I was a bit quick to say I’m done with the book. I’m still working on it. I’m still getting all the conversations just the way I like them, and making the characters come alive in their own individual ways. In short, I’m doing all the things I did to make Terror a book I loved to write.

A wonderful author and a gentleman – I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to Urban for giving his time for this interview. “The Terror of Living” is available from Amazon (UK) & Amazon (US).

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