Ken Follett, THE EVENING AND THE MORNING
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens and you're listening to the award-winning podcast Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:13]Please sign up for my newsletter at zibiowens.com for weekly updates about my podcasts, events, and more.
[0:20]Also, follow me on Instagram at zibiowens and also at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:26]And finally, join my virtual book club called Zibi's virtual book club, which meets every other Tuesday at 2 p.m.
[0:32]Eastern Time until 3 p.m. and features half an hour of book club discussion, followed by 30 minutes of Q&A with the author whose book we've just discussed.
[0:41]You can sign up on my website zibiowens.com under the virtual book club section or even on Instagram, under the link in my bio.
[0:49]I hope you'll find me in all these different channels and enjoy this podcast.
[0:53]The sponsor for this whole Labor Day Book last week is FirstBook.org. Obviously, the pandemic is
[0:59]crippling education for millions of students, especially those in low-income communities. The widening
[1:04]digital divide and extended quote unquote summer slide due to COVID is devastating. Apparently,
[1:11]40% lack access to reliable internet and functioning digital devices they can use for online learning,
[1:17]making the need for physical books and resources to prevent further educational
[1:21]backsliding absolutely critical. FirstBook breaks down the barriers to education for children
[1:26]living in low-income communities by providing its network of more than 475,000 educators serving
[1:33]children in need with free and affordable new high-quality books, educational resources, and
[1:39]basic needs items through the award-winning FirstBook marketplace nonprofit e-commerce site.
[1:44]They need your support to ensure these children have what they need to learn during this critical
[1:49]time. Visit FirstBook.org to help. I was so honored to interview Ken Follett,
[1:54]who is one of the world's best-love authors selling more than 170 million copies of his 32
[2:01]books. Follett's first bestseller was Eye of the Needle, a spy story set in the Second World War.
[2:06]In 1989, the Pillars of the Earth was published and has since become Follett's most popular novel.
[2:11]It reached number one on Bestseller List Around the World and was an Oprah's Book Club pick.
[2:15]It's sequels, World Without End, and a column of fire proved equally popular,
[2:20]and the King's Bridge series has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.
[2:24]Follett lives in Hartford, Shire, England with his wife Barbara between them they have five
[2:29]children, six grandchildren, and two labradors, and his new book is called The Evening and the
[2:34]Morning. Hello, Zibi. Hi, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. Thank you so much for coming on
[2:39]Mom's Don't Have Time to Read books. Pleasure. Well, I have to tell you that I grew up with
[2:46]your books all over my house, and I called my dad, and I was like, dad, guess what I made me like?
[2:51]He was like, oh, those are amazing. I read like he read almost all your books and thought they
[2:56]were just fast-paced and thrilling and amazing, and I feel like now that I have your new one,
[3:00]I can't wait to give it to him, so I'm thrilled. That's great. So how do you do it? How do you
[3:06]keep creating these new worlds and writing for a year, decade after decade in such a powerful way?
[3:14]Like, how do you come up with all these ideas? Well, I don't have to do anything else.
[3:23]I sit here all day and come up with ideas, so it's not like I'm trying to fit this in.
[3:29]It's been my job for 45 years, and of course, like all authors, I was born with a vivid
[3:38]imagination. Nobody becomes an author without that, and it's sometimes hard for people to
[3:44]understand. I mean, you ask me the question that we're always asked, where'd you get your ideas?
[3:49]And it's hard. The point is that they come to us all the time. When I was a boy,
[3:55]I was never myself. I was always a pirate or a cowboy, or the captain of a spaceship. I spent my
[4:03]childhood pretending to be somebody else, and now I've spent most of my working life
[4:10]imagining stuff, and it comes, you know, and it's these ideas come sometimes when you don't want
[4:16]them. You're having a nice conversation with somebody, and you send, do you think to yourself,
[4:23]what would happen if there was an earthquake now? What would we do? Where would we go?
[4:29]So the answer is they come easily, of course, the trick is, the more difficult thing is to share
[4:36]them with people, and that's important. You know, that's the craft, that's the skill of what we do,
[4:43]to write things down in such a way that when people are reading them, they can enter into what
[4:49]we've imagined, and it will be vivid for them, and they're care about it. Wow. And so how do you do
[4:55]that? How do you hold? How did you hone your craft? Like, when you started at the very beginning of
[5:00]your career, and you tried doing this, did it come out like this? Like, you feel yourself getting
[5:05]better over time? Did it all come naturally? Or did you have other tricks and tools in your toolbox
[5:13]that made it? What it is today? Well, I think for all authors, you learn nearly everything
[5:20]that you need to know by reading. All of us, I never met an author who was an evaracious reader
[5:26]from a very young age. I learned to read when I was four years old, and I learned, I made my mother
[5:32]teach me to read, because I loved stories, and I was always pestering people to read to me. I
[5:40]can remember this. It's my earliest memory, actually. And I, you know, both my parents, all four
[5:46]grandparents would read to me. I had lots of, both my parents come from big families, I had lots of
[5:52]uncles and aunts, and there were loads of people to read to me, and it was never enough.
[5:56]Was it, you know, I'd say, read me another one, and they say, no, that's enough for today, Ken.
[6:00]I said, oh, please, please, you know, you can imagine, can't you? And so I wanted to desperately
[6:06]desperately wanted to learn to read, and I learned to read young, and I've been doing it ever
[6:10]since. So by the time you get to your early 20s, and you sit down to try and write some fiction,
[6:17]you know a heck of a lot, you know, you know what a sentence is in a paragraph and a chapter,
[6:22]you know about dialogue, you know about describing landscape and describing people, because you
[6:28]read so much of that. Of course, it's not enough, but it's most of what you need to know. And
[6:35]if anybody ever says to me, I'd really like to be a writer, what advice can you give me?
[6:41]And I always say, do you read much? And if they say, no, not really, I say, I'm sorry, you know,
[6:50]if you want to be a concert violinist, you cannot start at the age of 21, and something similar
[6:55]is true of being an author. If you haven't read a few hundred novels by the time you get to
[7:00]your early 20s, it's too late. So that's a big thing. But on top of that, I mean, I had,
[7:07]I did have, I could do action, I could do dialogue. There were some things I had to learn.
[7:13]When I started, I wrote 10 unsuccessful books, by the way, before I had the needle. So I didn't
[7:19]clearly did not, even though I knew a lot, I clearly did not know enough at that point in my
[7:25]and I had to learn to emphasize the emotion. You know, I could do two people having an argument,
[7:32]quarrel. I could write their dialogue, but I wasn't good at saying how they were feeling about it.
[7:38]That was something that I had to consciously concentrate on, not don't just tell the reader what
[7:44]happens. Tell the reader how it feels, are they angry, indignant, scared, resentful, all of
[7:53]these emotions? Because, of course, and I now know, but I had to learn it for the book to be
[7:59]successful, the reader has to share the emotions of the characters in the story. So when a
[8:06]character is scared, the reader is like this, something sad happens in the story, there's a tear in
[8:13]the redesign. This is a miracle, of course, because the reader knows that this story was made up,
[8:18]followed, made it up sitting in this chair, in this room, but it doesn't make any difference,
[8:23]does it? If the scene is well written, the fact that you know it never happened makes no difference,
[8:28]you still feel with somebody's bullied in the story. You feel indignant, you want to bang the
[8:35]table, it's a hay, that's not fair. So the emotion of the reader's emotional reaction to the story
[8:43]is paramount. If you can do that, you've got a successful book. And if you can't do that,
[8:49]it won't be a bestseller. It might be, you know, it might still be a good book, it might be clever,
[8:54]might be witty, it might be brilliantly well-written, might be informative, but it won't be a best
[9:01]selling novel if readers aren't moved emotionally by. Interesting. So here's the whole secret,
[9:07]this is great. I think so. I think that's the basic secret, yeah. So I'm a little discouraged
[9:12]because only one of my four kids seems to be really into reading. And now I feel like
[9:17]I have no shot at having perhaps one author, I'm like, no, that's it.
[9:23]It's like that, though, isn't it? You know, I've got some grandchildren who are absolutely like,
[9:29]I, as I was fascinated by stories from a very young age. And others who would rather watch TV,
[9:37]I've got a son actually, step son who never read at all as a boy. And he is a very successful
[9:44]film editor. So, you know, all that time he spent in front of the TV, I thought he was wasting his time.
[9:50]My thought he should be reading a book. I was wrong. It all, you know, he got to the age of 21,
[9:58]and he understood the grammar of-
[10:00]television, the way I understood the grammar of language. So you can't, you know, it's the,
[10:05]it's the joy of evolution, genetic, I suppose, isn't it, that your kids aren't necessarily like you?
[10:12]Yeah, I know. I feel that way when my kids say they want to watch TV, this and that, and I hear
[10:17]about people like Simone Biles, the Olympic gymnast who would watch hour after hour of gymnastics on
[10:22]TV. And that's really how she was teaching herself. And then when I'm like, oh, no, 30 minutes today,
[10:27]I'm like, what if, what are these Simone Biles? If I just let them watch more gymnastics or
[10:32]something. But anyway, so my husband is stepdad to my four kids. And I know he's always looking for,
[10:40]you know, advice or a friendly ear for other stepdads. And since you referenced your stepchildren,
[10:44]I was wondering what you think some of the hallmarks and success of being a good stepdad might be.
[10:49]So I can give him some pointers.
[10:52]Well, my philosophy was you don't need your stepchildren to like you, but you want them to trust
[10:59]you. They want them to see you as the person they can go to and say, I've got a problem.
[11:04]You don't want to be their friend, because it's not that, of course, of course, they,
[11:09]they become hugely important in your life. And you love them and they love you.
[11:15]But you don't try to be their friend. You don't say we're going to be pals, son, aren't we?
[11:22]That's correct. But you need to have the advil. Okay. Can I've got a headache, try taking a couple
[11:30]of these. And then if it doesn't go away in about half an hour, we'll think again. That's the kind of
[11:35]thing you've got to, you've got to have the cold remedy. You've got to have the tampons, actually,
[11:40]because, you know, when they're teenage girls, things happen suddenly. And all they've got to
[11:47]bring any. And okay, what am I going to do? Okay, I happen to have some in my suitcase.
[11:52]That all of that condoms, I'm afraid. You are the one. You've got to be the go-to person.
[11:59]When mom isn't there, because they're those a number, you've got to be the go-to person
[12:04]for a problem. And you've got to be equipped for that. So anticipate, make sure that what
[12:10]anything that's likely to go wrong, that comes you with a problem, you're going to be able to
[12:14]help. And then they'll think, you know, without even thinking about you, that's how you sort
[12:20]of grow into the parental role with your step children. It isn't about being liked, it's about
[12:25]being trusted. Oh, no. Wow. I feel like it's a mom. I'm a total failure. I don't always have all those
[12:31]things on, on hand. Well, certainly not the latter, but I guess it's good to defer that to somebody
[12:37]else's responsibility tree as if you will. Wow. I had a question actually about the beginning.
[12:44]What's not even technically the book, but in the beginning of the evening in the morning,
[12:49]you say in the morning, he asked, and I was just wondering who is EF and why dedicate this
[12:55]book to this person? He was my son and he died. Oh, he died two years ago at the age of 49, he had
[13:02]leukemia. Oh, I'm so sorry. And so this is the first book that I've published since his death.
[13:08]And so that's why it's dedicated to him. It is the worst thing that can happen to you
[13:13]to have a child die. It's the worst, you know, you expect, you know, your parents are going to die.
[13:18]You expect that. It's sad when it happens, but it's not a shock. But when a child dies, it's
[13:24]absolutely terrible things. And I didn't want to make a big fuss about it, but I did want to dedicate
[13:30]his memory. Oh, I'm so sorry. Thank you. I'm so sorry. Did you find it hard to get back into writing
[13:36]or is it more that, you know, you're so used to doing it? This is just what you do. Was it an escape
[13:41]for you to help? Work is an escape for me. It's always been like that. If anything is going wrong
[13:48]in my life, then I can lose myself in the imaginary world. And it's some kind of relief and
[13:54]consolation. Yeah. Of course, you never get over the death of a child. It's with you. It's always
[13:59]with you. And I think, and, you know, I was 19 when my son was born. I was very young father. And
[14:06]he's still in my life. I think about him every day. I think of things. I hear a pop song on the radio
[14:11]and I think he'd like that. He'd want to, he and I would talk about what the courts were
[14:16]that kind of thing. And all the time, all the time that happened. So he's still in my life,
[14:22]even though he's passed. Oh, I'm sorry. I recently lost nothing to compare in any way,
[14:27]but just grief in general from COVID. I recently lost my mother-in-law and step-grandmother-in-law
[14:33]or mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law both in the summer. And my husband, whose mother
[14:38]it is and his sister, you know, they keep reaching for their phones and trying to call her. And it's
[14:44]only been a couple of weeks for us. But, you know, everything he thinks of, he wants to tell her.
[14:48]And that's the most frustrating, not the, maybe not. But it's high on the list of frustrations for
[14:53]him. They're not being able to reach her anymore. And just thinking of her constantly. And
[14:58]not bel losing a child. I'm sorry. Do you feel like your personal things going on in your personal
[15:04]life affect? Like, do you have that seep into your characters in some way? Do you channel those
[15:10]emotions? You said that was something you struggled with earlier. But obviously, as life has progressed,
[15:14]you've developed more and more experiences and emotions yourself. Like, do you feel like you
[15:20]now infuse your characters with even more of that just because of life experience in a way?
[15:25]I think that does happen. I don't do it consciously. I don't consciously use things that have happened
[15:31]to me. But I find that almost without my noticing it, parts of my life do creep into the story,
[15:38]for example, when I first married Barbara, which is now gosh, 35 years ago, I had never before been
[15:45]in what we now call a blended family. And so I married Barbara and she brought along with her,
[15:52]three children, two teenage girls and a little boy. And that this was a new experience for me.
[15:59]And soon afterwards, I wrote the pillars of the earth, which and Tom Builder has a blended family.
[16:06]And I couldn't have, it wouldn't have occurred to me to do that earlier. Until it had happened
[16:12]to me, it's not that, I mean, I suppose I could have made it up, but it just didn't cross my mind
[16:17]that that would be an interesting thing to do and an interesting kind of family to have at the
[16:22]heart of a story. And once that had happened and I knew about some of the challenges and joys
[16:28]and disappointments of that kind of family, then I could put one in a book. So yes, they do.
[16:36]these things creep in and eventually every major thing that happens to you will end up
[16:42]in some form in a book, maybe heavily disguised and quite possibly in a form that nobody else
[16:48]will recognize, but you'll think to yourself as the author, you'll think to yourself, I know why
[16:53]that occurred to me. It's because something similar happened to me. I know that there are a lot of
[16:58]authors who have a lot of success at the beginning of their careers and then feel sort of this
[17:02]pressure to continue turning out just as great product as in the start. And sometimes that anxiety,
[17:09]I feel like gets in the way even from a big successful first book to a second book. How do you
[17:15]manage all of that? I mean, how do you ever like have a morning where you're like, that's it? Like
[17:21]my talent has run out. This book's going to be terrible. Like, do you ever have that self-doubt
[17:26]touchwood, not yet. Certainly after I've needled my first success, I thought about that a lot and
[17:32]I really wanted to have another success. And I was aware of course, but quite a lot of people
[17:38]write one book, good book. And I knew that I have the needle might have been my one good book.
[17:44]And I really didn't want it to be the one. I wanted to spend my life doing this. I'd lucked it so
[17:49]much. And so I was aware of that danger. And then triple was a bestseller, but I thought, yeah,
[17:57]but people bought that because they liked I have the needle. And I thought, I'll believe it if the
[18:01]third book is a bestseller and the key to Rebecca was very successful. And at that point, I said,
[18:07]okay, I am going to be a writer now for the rest of my life. That's going to be my career.
[18:12]It's going to be my life. And I was very glad. I was very glad because that was what I wanted.
[18:16]There is a certain amount of pressure. I don't mind it. It's good pressure. It's the thought
[18:23]that occurs to me if I'm tempted ever to be a bit of a slacker to say, that seems not really
[18:30]very good, but it's good enough. I'm tempted to think that. Then I think of all the people who
[18:37]really liked my last book and are looking forward to the next one. And I think, okay,
[18:42]am I going to risk disappointing them? Heck no. And so it makes me be more of a perfectionist
[18:50]than I might otherwise be. I'm never oppressed by it. But you know, I mean, it takes a lot to
[19:00]discourage me. You know, I'm an optimist. My inclination always is to say, oh, let's not worry
[19:09]about that. That'll be okay. Don't worry. One of the, with my stepchildren, they soon learned,
[19:15]they came to me and said, I really don't feel good. I think I should go to the doctor.
[19:22]I would say, you'll feel better in the morning. And they, they, of course, would then go to
[19:27]Barbara. And she would say, I'll take it to the doctor. But my inclination was always to say,
[19:33]no, it can't be that bad. You can't be that bad. So the idea that I've got this responsibility,
[19:38]which I do have. So all those readers looking forward to the book, all those people
[19:45]in the publishing houses all over the world, you know, in all the different countries,
[19:50]all of those people, all those booksellers who are thinking, oh, great, we've got to
[19:56]can follow itself. This awesome, that'll help all of those
[20:00]people to let them down would indeed be terrible. But what I think is, yes, that would be
[20:06]absolutely terrible. So I must make sure that this is a good story.
[20:12]Well, what would you have done do you think if you hadn't if the books hadn't taken off
[20:16]what career might you have had? What was your fallback?
[20:20]Well, for a while before I have the needle was published for a while, I was a sort of
[20:27]jobbing writer. I got a publisher would ask me to, for example, I turned a movie script into
[20:35]a novel for a publisher. And that, you know, it was quite well paid. I think I got £2,000
[20:43]for turning Capricorn one into a novel. And, you know, that would pay the bills for three or four
[20:52]months. And I knew I could do that. And I could do it well. And I thought, you know, I may have
[20:58]to go back to that, having written, I'm having, you know, taken my shot and written one best seller
[21:04]and unable to do it anymore. Then I could probably still make a living as a writer. I thought
[21:10]that was plan B anyway, which fortunately never got tested by reality.
[21:15]And then how involved are you? I know the pillars of the earth became this eight-part mini
[21:21]series and everything. How involved are you in adapting your work and how much would you like
[21:27]to be doing that in the future? I'm not in very closely involved. They invite me to the set,
[21:33]which I enjoy. It's wonderful. Meet the actors. And of course, it's, you know,
[21:40]pillars of the earth. I arrived in Budapest. This is not. And there is this medieval English village
[21:49]with a half-built cathedral in the middle of it. And all of these guys with hammer and chisel
[21:55]pretending to build a cathedral. It was marvelous. It was absolutely marvelous. I loved it.
[21:59]It was a thrill. It was a real thrill. And it is that. It's a thrill. You're also very nervous.
[22:04]And I have had some, I've had some bad shows made out of my books, but mostly good,
[22:10]mostly good. And so, and I think, you know, there are good authors and not so good authors.
[22:16]There are good filmmakers and not so good filmmakers. And I've got to trust these people.
[22:22]Because one thing's for sure, I don't know as much about making a television drama as they do.
[22:28]So I shouldn't try and tell them what to do. I should let them do their best. And I should just
[22:33]cross my fingers. See, I tell stories in words and they tell stories in pictures. And it is a
[22:39]different skill. So that's been my practice is to say great over to you. And I'll come and see
[22:47]how you're doing. But it'll just be like a social visit. I won't try and I won't say, no, you can't
[22:53]do it that way. And by and large, that has worked for me. That's great. Are you already at work
[23:00]on your next book? And how long do these take to write? I mean, this is like, I'm just a thousand
[23:04]pages. How long does each book take you? Three years is the norm. And actually, the evening in
[23:10]the morning was a little bit shorter than that. I spent a year planning a year on the first draft
[23:14]and a year on the rewrite. And that's my normal timetable. People think it's a long time. It seems
[23:20]a bit short to me. It's a lot of work to get into three years.
[23:25]Where are you at the beginning stage of the next one? Or where are you?
[23:29]Yeah. Well, I've more passed that. I finished the evening in the morning about a year ago.
[23:35]So I've been working on a new story since then. I don't stop. I'm not ready to talk about
[23:40]the new book yet. And that's partly because it may well change. You know, the story I think it is
[23:46]now may be something different any years time. Have you ever thought about writing some sort of
[23:51]of life advice book? You have such great advice and such a wit about you and all that. Maybe
[23:56]you should do like a little, you know, advice to graduates or to parents. I don't know. Something.
[24:01]I don't think that's my talent. I'm not telling you. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.
[24:09]When you're procrastinating from your main work.
[24:13]Well, if the books ever, if the novels ever become unpopular and I can't sell them, then I may
[24:19]think about your advice. Okay. You did that plan, you know, in the next two decades or something.
[24:26]Well, thank you. Thank you so much for talking to me on mom's and her taintry books and for sharing
[24:31]more about the evening in the morning, which I know I'm sorry we barely even talked about, but
[24:35]readers, I'm of yours who are huge fans will undoubtedly enjoy just as much as every other,
[24:40]especially because it's the prequel to one of your most popular books ever, the pillars of the
[24:45]so thank you. Thanks for, thanks for all the advice, even if you don't write a book about it.
[24:50]Well, it's it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for having me on the podcast
[24:56]and I also hope I'll see you again. Okay. Sounds great. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye.
[25:01]Thanks so much to firstbook.org for sponsoring this Labor Day book last. Please consider giving
[25:07]to firstbook.org to help their network of 475,000 educators serving children in need.
[25:14]Thanks for listening to this episode of mom's don't have time to read books. Don't forget to
[25:18]follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at mom's don't have time to read books. Also sign
[25:23]up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors
[25:28]on zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the Sound Editing
[25:33]and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.