Q&A with Novelist Thomas Young
Tom Young’s latest book is “The Warriors.” His previous books, which include “The Mullah’s Storm,” “Silent Enemy,” and “The Renegades,” have received high praise and starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and other publications. Tom served in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Air National Guard. He has also flown combat missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and additional missions in Latin America, the horn of Africa, and the Far East.
What do you do when you have writer’s block?
I have a little technique that, at least so far, has always kept writer’s block away. Each day, when I sit down to write, I tell myself I have to finish at least one page. It might take me hours to get it, or it might take 10 minutes. And on a good day, I’ll get a lot more than one page. But I don’t let myself do anything else until I’ve completed that one-page minimum.
Even on a bad day, pretty much any writer can squeeze out one solitary page. And even if that’s all you do every day, at the end of a year you’ll have a book of respectable length.
And here’s the good thing: When I go back and look at the pages I’ve written slowly and painfully, barely scratching out the one-page minimum, I usually find their quality equal to the pages that came quickly and easily.
In other words, don’t let writer’s block get started to begin with. Wrestle it to the ground. Stomp it. Bite it. Choke it. Get that one page.
Did you have a day job? What was it and how did it influence your writing?
I spent 20 years as an enlisted aviator in the Air National Guard. For most of that time, I flew as a flight engineer on the C-130 Hercules. After 9/11, my unit began flying combat airlift missions in Afghanistan. As I flew over the rugged, snow-capped mountains of Afghanistan, I found myself thinking: “Wow. This would be a really bad place to go down.”
Someone once said your best fiction comes from what hurts you the most or what scares you the most. On those missions over Afghanistan, what scared me the most was not the thought of getting shot down and killed. It was the thought of getting shot down and NOT killed. What kinds of challenges would you face on the ground? What if you had to evade capture? What if you couldn’t contact anyone to help you?
That fear became the plot basis for my first novel, “The Mullah’s Storm.” In that novel, my characters get shot down while transporting a high-value Taliban detainee. They must evade capture while holding onto a prisoner who really wants them to get caught by insurgents.
Where do you go to find your ideas?
Anywhere. That’s not intended as a clever or evasive answer; I mean it literally. You never know when a newspaper article, a story from a friend, even a song on the radio will give you an idea. So I keep a little pocket notebook with me everywhere I go. If an idea comes to me, I jot it down immediately–because if I tell myself to remember it and write it down later, I’ll forget.
The notebook becomes not just the source for broad plot ideas, but for little things, as well. For example, one day my wife and I were hiking in the Shenandoah National Park. As the trees swayed in the wind, some of them made creaking and groaning sounds. I found that interesting and made a note of it. Later I used it to describe the sound of trees moving with the wind in an Afghan forest.
What one book do you wish you’d written?
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway. One of the greatest war novels of all time. But there can be only one Hemingway.