You can visit Shane's website and order his book here.
Dave Watson: Your writing career is off and running. Congratulations on another book in such a short time. How did the John Lago series start?
Shane Kuhn: Thank you. I feel inspired and privileged to be able to live my dream as a novelist and I owe it all to John Lago. He was a love child conceived in 2010 when my intense frustration with the movie business shacked up with my desperation to really express myself creatively in an authentic way. I had been hacking around Hollywood since 1992, with mixed and often very disappointing results, and I was at the end of my rope. I have always been a writer, but I sold my soul to the movies because I thought I was going to be the next Stanley Kubrick. When that didn’t happen, and I found myself having bought a first class ticket to Plan B, I decided to regroup and get back to my roots as a novel and short story writer. I wrote a novel in film school back in ’93 and wrote many shorts before that.
In thinking about what to write, I focused on a movie idea I was fleshing out at the time – about an assassin who uses internships as his cover. I started working on the concept in 2008 during the financial crisis. I kept thinking of how corporate America is the world’s biggest organized crime syndicate and it made sense that interns, like all of the other players in that world, are not what they seem. That was the concept and, of course, I was pondering all the ways I could compromise it to fit into the art by committee studio movie business when it occurred to me that I should just write it as a book and then I would not have to compromise a damn thing. So, that’s what I did and it freed me from my creative prison! I’m just sorry I didn’t do it sooner in my life. That just goes to show you that your first instinct is always right on the money.
DW: You departed from the John Lago series for now with The Asset. Why?
SK: I needed to step away from John’s saga for a bit because I felt like I needed a bit of a creative reset before diving into novel number three. I have a tendency to get into a groove with things and that’s not always a good thing. I think you always need to approach every creative endeavor from a position of discomfort so you commit yourself to innovating versus rehashing. The Asset was burning a hole in my frontal lobe so I decided it would be the perfect way to step out of John’s world for a while so I could refresh my thought process and come up with something epic for the third book.
DW: You convey enough of a visual sense in your books, just the right amount for me, but not too much. Is this something you pay particular attention to?
SK: Writing “visually” is very important to me for a couple of reasons. First, it’s part of my training as a writer. I have a masters Degree in Screenwriting from The American Film Institute and I look back very fondly on what I learned about crafting a story there. As a screenwriter, you must quickly paint a visual picture for a reader that enables him or her to immediately see the scene. If you don’t, your work goes right in the trash. It just makes sense to write that way, no matter what medium. People need to be able to “picture” what you’re describing and I pride myself on doing that in a way that is not only effective, but vivid. The second reason for this approach is due to how much I love it when it’s done well by other novelists. Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine comes instantly to mind as an all-time visual onslaught of a novel. I’ve never seen a movie with such a rich tapestry of images. And there are others who do this beautifully as well, like Chandler, Vonnegut, Palahniuk, O’Connor, Nabokov, Welsh, and the list goes on.
DW: Plot and character appear to unfold at equal rates. Do you agree? Are both equally important to you?
SK: Plot and character are very important to me, with character edging plot by a nose. I feel that you can have the greatest plot in the world, but if your characters don’t feel authentic or well integrated with the story, then it won’t matter. Character is avatar. Conversely, you can have absolute nothing plots, but if you have great characters, the story will still be engaging. And I agree that if you do it right, both unfold at equal rates of speed because they are driving each other in a perfectly integrated way.
DW: You work in the visual medium creatively as well. Did you start off writing or working elsewhere?
SK: My origin story is as a writer. I have been journaling since the age of eight because I found prose to be the most effective and exciting medium of expression for me (until I discovered music, of course, but that’s another story). It wasn’t until I got into photography in college that visual media made an impact on me – and boy did it make an impact. I instantly saw that I could marry my verbal and written expression with my newfound medium of visual expression in the form of filmmaking. That’s when I set out to be a director. I am not a film director today, but I produce and direct a lot of video and motion graphics for events and advertising and find that deliriously fun without all the BS of dealing with Hollywood.
DW: Back to The Asset: this ties in world events. What was the inspiration for this? The news?
SK: My inspiration for The Asset came from my life as a frequent flier and how it pertains to current events. The more you fly, the more you become acutely aware of the inherent risks – not posed by our airlines, but by all the anonymous psychos out there looking to make a statement. It’s really kind of a wish fulfillment story. Ever since 9/11, I have felt an incredibly sense of helplessness just knowing there is nothing I can do to prevent these things from happening. I think a lot of people feel that way, but it comes out as dangerous, reactionary politics that won’t solve the problem. Kennedy is the voice of all of us “normal citizens” who wish we could do something positive to stop these people before they hurt anyone else. That’s why he isn’t some master spy, but a guy whose expertise in a certain field makes him a great candidate to help fight the good fight. I wish I were him!
DW: Alfred Hitchcock said the more successful the villain, the more successful the film, or in the writing cases, the story. Do you agree?
SK: I think this is very true because the villain is always the dark side of the hero. If you have a well- drawn hero, the law of yin and yang states that he or she must have a negative side that is equal in power to the positive. Otherwise, you have no ability to judge his or her heroism. So, the villain is the personification of this, the embodiment of all that is flawed in the hero, mashed up into a badass persona with the sole motivation of watching the world burn. When I write a villain, he or she is pulled from the DNA of my hero and that makes it more personal and powerful.
DW: You write with a presence of mind so that we think with your characters instead of about them. Do you write stories strictly from the characters’ point of view, from the inside out, or from a third-person viewpoint in mind?
SK: The Intern’s Handbook and Hostile Takeover are first person narratives and The Asset is close third. I love first person and many of my favorite books are written from this perspective, but it sometimes too constraining if you want to tell a bigger story with more moving parts, like The Asset. But even when I am in third person, it’s close third so I can do what I really need to do and get into a character’s head. Without inner thoughts, especially in a novel, you lose a massive layer of character dimension so I dish them out as much as humanly possible.
DW: What’s next for you?
SK: Many, many things! I am currently outlining a thriller called The Hunting Party – a dark revenge tale in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, the undisputed heavyweight champ next to Nabokov for me, that takes place in the mountains of my native Colorado. Additionally, I am working on a very interesting, and very top secret, Science Fiction thriller. Beyond that, I am finishing a proposal for a grief memoir about my intense experiences with death. Both of my sisters and father died young in different times in my life and I want to create a profoundly dark and beautiful work that will, hopefully, help people to process death in an authentic and cathartic way and learn to appreciate the fire of life that’s always there despite the ashes. And that book is actually called The Weight of Ashes. Finally, I am wildly motivated to produce a TV show. I feel that people in the TV world are taking much greater risks than those in cinema and TV is a lot more writer friendly than film. My dream is to have a half hour comedy in the vein of Californication or Peep Show (UK) that is fun to make and that people consume like a drug.
DW: What’s your favorite cinematic or literary moment? One that inspires you still to this day. It can be a scene, emotion, character or thematic moment.
SK: God that’s insanely difficult! I am going to go with something that moved me in a profoundly emotional way. It’s easy to make me laugh, but very hard to make me cry, and impossible to move to irretrievable sobbing. But I’m going to go there because it isn’t often that any artist can so deeply immerse me in his or her work that I utterly forget it is essentially a manufactured moment in time that he or she has masterfully captured and conveyed. I’m getting the chills just thinking about it, but here goes. It’s the famous shower scene in Schindler’s List when actual water comes out of the shower heads. I had to leave the theater. I was so inconsolable I sat in my car for an hour to recover. The incredible relief those families feel when the water rains down on them is so palpable and emotionally tied to our very core as human beings that it is unbearable. I would never pretend to really know what that feels like, but something in my heart can feel it because we are all so connected to each other. Thanks for the interview!
Clip: Schindler's List
Dave Watson is a writer and educator. He lives in Madison, WI.
Dave Watson: Your writing career is off and running. Congratulations on another book in such a short time. How did the John Lago series start?
Shane Kuhn: Thank you. I feel inspired and privileged to be able to live my dream as a novelist and I owe it all to John Lago. He was a love child conceived in 2010 when my intense frustration with the movie business shacked up with my desperation to really express myself creatively in an authentic way. I had been hacking around Hollywood since 1992, with mixed and often very disappointing results, and I was at the end of my rope. I have always been a writer, but I sold my soul to the movies because I thought I was going to be the next Stanley Kubrick. When that didn’t happen, and I found myself having bought a first class ticket to Plan B, I decided to regroup and get back to my roots as a novel and short story writer. I wrote a novel in film school back in ’93 and wrote many shorts before that.
In thinking about what to write, I focused on a movie idea I was fleshing out at the time – about an assassin who uses internships as his cover. I started working on the concept in 2008 during the financial crisis. I kept thinking of how corporate America is the world’s biggest organized crime syndicate and it made sense that interns, like all of the other players in that world, are not what they seem. That was the concept and, of course, I was pondering all the ways I could compromise it to fit into the art by committee studio movie business when it occurred to me that I should just write it as a book and then I would not have to compromise a damn thing. So, that’s what I did and it freed me from my creative prison! I’m just sorry I didn’t do it sooner in my life. That just goes to show you that your first instinct is always right on the money.
DW: You departed from the John Lago series for now with The Asset. Why?
SK: I needed to step away from John’s saga for a bit because I felt like I needed a bit of a creative reset before diving into novel number three. I have a tendency to get into a groove with things and that’s not always a good thing. I think you always need to approach every creative endeavor from a position of discomfort so you commit yourself to innovating versus rehashing. The Asset was burning a hole in my frontal lobe so I decided it would be the perfect way to step out of John’s world for a while so I could refresh my thought process and come up with something epic for the third book.
DW: You convey enough of a visual sense in your books, just the right amount for me, but not too much. Is this something you pay particular attention to?
SK: Writing “visually” is very important to me for a couple of reasons. First, it’s part of my training as a writer. I have a masters Degree in Screenwriting from The American Film Institute and I look back very fondly on what I learned about crafting a story there. As a screenwriter, you must quickly paint a visual picture for a reader that enables him or her to immediately see the scene. If you don’t, your work goes right in the trash. It just makes sense to write that way, no matter what medium. People need to be able to “picture” what you’re describing and I pride myself on doing that in a way that is not only effective, but vivid. The second reason for this approach is due to how much I love it when it’s done well by other novelists. Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine comes instantly to mind as an all-time visual onslaught of a novel. I’ve never seen a movie with such a rich tapestry of images. And there are others who do this beautifully as well, like Chandler, Vonnegut, Palahniuk, O’Connor, Nabokov, Welsh, and the list goes on.
DW: Plot and character appear to unfold at equal rates. Do you agree? Are both equally important to you?
SK: Plot and character are very important to me, with character edging plot by a nose. I feel that you can have the greatest plot in the world, but if your characters don’t feel authentic or well integrated with the story, then it won’t matter. Character is avatar. Conversely, you can have absolute nothing plots, but if you have great characters, the story will still be engaging. And I agree that if you do it right, both unfold at equal rates of speed because they are driving each other in a perfectly integrated way.
DW: You work in the visual medium creatively as well. Did you start off writing or working elsewhere?
SK: My origin story is as a writer. I have been journaling since the age of eight because I found prose to be the most effective and exciting medium of expression for me (until I discovered music, of course, but that’s another story). It wasn’t until I got into photography in college that visual media made an impact on me – and boy did it make an impact. I instantly saw that I could marry my verbal and written expression with my newfound medium of visual expression in the form of filmmaking. That’s when I set out to be a director. I am not a film director today, but I produce and direct a lot of video and motion graphics for events and advertising and find that deliriously fun without all the BS of dealing with Hollywood.
DW: Back to The Asset: this ties in world events. What was the inspiration for this? The news?
SK: My inspiration for The Asset came from my life as a frequent flier and how it pertains to current events. The more you fly, the more you become acutely aware of the inherent risks – not posed by our airlines, but by all the anonymous psychos out there looking to make a statement. It’s really kind of a wish fulfillment story. Ever since 9/11, I have felt an incredibly sense of helplessness just knowing there is nothing I can do to prevent these things from happening. I think a lot of people feel that way, but it comes out as dangerous, reactionary politics that won’t solve the problem. Kennedy is the voice of all of us “normal citizens” who wish we could do something positive to stop these people before they hurt anyone else. That’s why he isn’t some master spy, but a guy whose expertise in a certain field makes him a great candidate to help fight the good fight. I wish I were him!
DW: Alfred Hitchcock said the more successful the villain, the more successful the film, or in the writing cases, the story. Do you agree?
SK: I think this is very true because the villain is always the dark side of the hero. If you have a well- drawn hero, the law of yin and yang states that he or she must have a negative side that is equal in power to the positive. Otherwise, you have no ability to judge his or her heroism. So, the villain is the personification of this, the embodiment of all that is flawed in the hero, mashed up into a badass persona with the sole motivation of watching the world burn. When I write a villain, he or she is pulled from the DNA of my hero and that makes it more personal and powerful.
DW: You write with a presence of mind so that we think with your characters instead of about them. Do you write stories strictly from the characters’ point of view, from the inside out, or from a third-person viewpoint in mind?
SK: The Intern’s Handbook and Hostile Takeover are first person narratives and The Asset is close third. I love first person and many of my favorite books are written from this perspective, but it sometimes too constraining if you want to tell a bigger story with more moving parts, like The Asset. But even when I am in third person, it’s close third so I can do what I really need to do and get into a character’s head. Without inner thoughts, especially in a novel, you lose a massive layer of character dimension so I dish them out as much as humanly possible.
DW: What’s next for you?
SK: Many, many things! I am currently outlining a thriller called The Hunting Party – a dark revenge tale in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, the undisputed heavyweight champ next to Nabokov for me, that takes place in the mountains of my native Colorado. Additionally, I am working on a very interesting, and very top secret, Science Fiction thriller. Beyond that, I am finishing a proposal for a grief memoir about my intense experiences with death. Both of my sisters and father died young in different times in my life and I want to create a profoundly dark and beautiful work that will, hopefully, help people to process death in an authentic and cathartic way and learn to appreciate the fire of life that’s always there despite the ashes. And that book is actually called The Weight of Ashes. Finally, I am wildly motivated to produce a TV show. I feel that people in the TV world are taking much greater risks than those in cinema and TV is a lot more writer friendly than film. My dream is to have a half hour comedy in the vein of Californication or Peep Show (UK) that is fun to make and that people consume like a drug.
DW: What’s your favorite cinematic or literary moment? One that inspires you still to this day. It can be a scene, emotion, character or thematic moment.
SK: God that’s insanely difficult! I am going to go with something that moved me in a profoundly emotional way. It’s easy to make me laugh, but very hard to make me cry, and impossible to move to irretrievable sobbing. But I’m going to go there because it isn’t often that any artist can so deeply immerse me in his or her work that I utterly forget it is essentially a manufactured moment in time that he or she has masterfully captured and conveyed. I’m getting the chills just thinking about it, but here goes. It’s the famous shower scene in Schindler’s List when actual water comes out of the shower heads. I had to leave the theater. I was so inconsolable I sat in my car for an hour to recover. The incredible relief those families feel when the water rains down on them is so palpable and emotionally tied to our very core as human beings that it is unbearable. I would never pretend to really know what that feels like, but something in my heart can feel it because we are all so connected to each other. Thanks for the interview!
Clip: Schindler's List
Dave Watson is a writer and educator. He lives in Madison, WI.