Lesson Summary

The conversation between Morgen and espionage thriller novelist Damien Hunter dives into various aspects of Damien's journey through the publishing industry.

Damien talks about how his interest in crime thrillers, political biographies, and espionage tales led to him becoming a writer of this genre, as well as working within a government field. The conversation also includes:

• Changes in writing styles focusing on character development
• Insights into Damien's writing process, especially in espionage thrillers
• Damien's early science fiction stories, which Morgen concludes that she hopes he might return to
• Damien's subsequent transition to espionage stories and their struggles with writer's block
• The challenges of book-to-movie adaptations and balancing detailed descriptions
• Damien's writing routine, mostly at the weekends and during vacations
• Managing creative process changes, unfinished manuscripts, and deadlines
• The requirement as an author of joint marketing efforts with his publisher, including setting up these interviews
• Choosing the perfect book cover, engaging a model (who Damien met at a restaurant! - this will be replacing the cover below), and planning sequels
• The exploration of real-life experiences influencing writing and scene visualization
• Damien's focus, as a reader, on espionage, detective and political biography genres

Other key points include:

• The importance of deadlines for motivation
• Working with editors to enhance manuscripts
• The challenges with grammatical changes in dictionaries
• Attention to detail and multiple editing rounds in publishing

Damien Hunter was born in California and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Absorbing the pop culture of the late 1960s as a child, he could not help but be fascinated by the tail-end of the spy craze triggered by the explosion of James Bond films and television shows like Mission: Impossible.

For Hunter, that world of fiction had real-life reflections of intrigue, mystery, and tragedy in the assassinations of multiple political figures – closely followed by the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. These formative events shaped Hunter’s view of the world and America’s role in it, leaving a sense that authority is deeply flawed, and good guys often lose without superior guile, abundant planning, superior firepower, and uncompromising unscrupulousness – a powerful combination that underdogs can rarely muster simultaneously –along with a belief that the end justifies the means, and if you’re squeamish about breaking eggs, then you have no business thinking about omelettes.

Growing up African-American in the United States, Hunter developed a keen sense of unfairness not just toward Blacks, but people of color in general. A searing experience that he witnessed at age four was his mother being wrongfully accused of shoplifting. He felt empathy toward the few Native-American schoolmates he had whose ancestors had their culture and way of life virtually destroyed by the U.S. government.

His education at home and at school was liberal in nature. His father, a formal naval officer, exposed the family to food from different parts of the world, and from a very young age, Hunter developed an appreciation for multiple cultures, and a profound distaste for all forms of racism.

His mother, a social worker, adorned the family home with art, sculptures, paintings, books, a set of encyclopedias, and a thick two-volume set of Webster’s Dictionary. As a child, when he asked how to spell a word, Hunter was often told to go look it up himself. Eventually, Hunter took to reading the dictionary, something that later led to his having a somewhat larger vocabulary than his schoolmates. His mother also instilled in him a love of books and reading, with weekly trips to the public library.

While a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Hunter spent a summer interning at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. During this time, at a luncheon with CIA officials interested in prospective recruits from top universities, Hunter asked questions about a then-recent agency operation in Beirut intended to eliminate a terrorist, but that had instead killed several bystanders, and about how the CIA maintained control over its contract operators, people with certain skill sets who were not actually agency employees. He got no answers, but was later the subject of what he called a “softball recruitment effort” by one of the officials present at the luncheon.

His Berkeley radical days long behind him, Hunter is today a career civil servant who never lost his fascination with the world of spies.

You can find more about Damien and his writing via…

• Damien Hunter | Bootstrap Publications
• Damien’s Amazon page

In his chat with Morgen, Damien talks about his book covers...