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John Michael Klawitter
  • Male
  • Woodland Hills, CA
  • United States
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Meet John Michael Klawitter

Café Spotlight Interview With Author John Michael Klawitter

John Klawitter has produced documentaries and TV Specials for network and cable television. He currently writes novels, books and screenplays and develops projects for television and cinema release through his Indy Company, Dancing Bear Enterprises. He also produces two or three books a year through his DoubleSpin Publishing Company. He has won numerous awards, including an EMMY, a CINE Golden Eagle, and The Hemingway Short Story Contest. Tinsel Wilderness won an EPIC Author’s award for Best Non-Fiction, and Hollywood Havoc for Best Action Thriller. He lives and works in Southern California where he frequently adapts his novels into screenplays and pitches them around town.

 

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Interview:

What makes you proud to be a writer from Hollywood? Being a writer in Hollywood isn't a high station. Ask any producer. Or, ask any New York agent. We are not authors, per se...we are scribblers. The pride, I suppose, comes from surviving. 

What or who inspired you to become a writer? I think mostly Hemingway. I figured if he could get away with run-on sentences like he did, it couldn’t be that hard.

When did you begin writing with the intention of becoming published? I became serious about writing after I came back from Vietnam. Of course, by that time I was working as a copywriter on Kellogg’s and Nestles. Most ad biz writers start at the bottom, writing catalog copy. I lucked into a job at the bottom of the top, cub copywriter, writing TV ads for national accounts. Six months back from Vietnam and my cubicle was filled with cardboard cut-out planets, chocolate villages and dancing chickens.

Did your environment or upbringing play a major role in your writing and did you use it to your advantage? Yes, probably. I was one of those overeducated people with no inclination toward the popular professions such as lawyering, doctoring or politics. As I used to apologize to my long-suffering mother, 'I have descended by slow degrees to the semi-profession of advertising.'

Do you come up with your title before or after you write the manuscript? Usually before, and then I change it during and maybe again after.  This plays hell with my computer storage because drafts are often misplaced under some forgotten title. 

Please introduce your genre and why you prefer to write in that genre? I usually write a story and then figure out the genre after. Most of my earlier novels are action/thrillers or mystery/suspense, but lately they have been more mainstream or crossovers. My novel The Freight Train of Love is a ' ...classic War Romance, action thriller, suspense, murder mystery, sort of...'

What has been your most rewarding experience with your writing process? There have been some moments of triumph, figuring out various formats...commercials, documentaries, short stories, short films, screenplays, novellas, novels, biographies. And the awards are nice. I won an EMMY in 1969 and two EPIC Authors awards in 2009 and lots I forget in between.

Have you had a negative experience in your writing career? If so please explain how it could have been avoided? Many books are not published for the exact reasons they were written. I don’t believe there is any one way to avoid this. The best thing to do – and it’s not foolproof – is to proceed with what you believe to be a good idea for a story, write it as true as you can, and then evaluate your finished manuscript and try to analyze where to send it and who to send it to. For instance, I wrote a sports bio, HEADSLAP: The Life & Times of Deacon Jones. I wrote it because Deacon was one of those brave black pioneers who pushed their way into the NFL back when it wasn't allowed, and I thought it was important and interesting social history.  Here we've got a player of immense talent and he has to room with other black guys or he can't play. Well, I burned out two agents, one in NY and one here in LA, but all publishers wanted to hear about was booze, broads and drugs. In a way, the same was true of Crazyhead, my first novel. The publishers didn't want fiction based on reality, they wanted anti-war crap. Not just one or two publishers...two dozen, if we can believe my agent at that time, the legendary Olga Weiser. I tell how I finally managed to personally get Crazyhead published in my book Tinsel Wilderness.

What has been your most rewarding experience in your publishing journey? Paying the mortgage, keeping my kids in good schools, doing work I find interesting. 

Have you had a negative experience in your publishing journey? If so please explain how it could have been avoided? After my first novel (Crazyhead) was published by Random House/Ivy Press in 1990, my editor felt my work wasn’t anti-war enough, and tried to convince me in the popular direction of that time. I wasn’t able to avoid the parting of the ways that followed, though if I was a different person, I might today still be in their stable of acclaimed authors.

What one positive piece of advice would you give to other authors? When you write for money, do it their way. When you write spec, do it your way.

Who is your favorite author? Hemingway and Leonard, both for clarity of voice.

Is there anything else that you would like to share with us? Read Elmore Leonard, Janet Evonavich, Ann Tyler, Anne Proeulx, Robert B. Parker, Dick Francis, early Stephen King. Read the poets, the philosophers, the social thinkers. Read history, anthropology, archeology, cosmology. Read of other cultures, other places, other times. Think a lot. Then write your first sentence.

Please add questions (and answers) that you think your readers would like answered. Which books of yours would be of value to young storytellers? Tinsel Wilderness is a decent bunch of stories of what it is like to start out and then to survive as a creative person, and Vidmaker 101 is a good how-to guide to the process of creating short storytelling videos.

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The Save Your Planet Show - by John Klawitter

A group of elderly people quietly living out their lives in a retirement home in Southern California are contacted by a slick stranger who claims to be an alien being from another world.  They are worried because of the extreme unlikeliness that this might be true, and by the fact that their retirement home has an Alzheimer’s Ward and a director who is aggressive in his efforts to fill it. It seems unbelievable that an alien would contact them, of all people – particularly when this odd fellow reveals that he is enlisting them to save their planet.

The stranger reveals his name is DoubleSpin (named after a sub-molecular particle that goes around twice to complete one 360-degree spin), and that Earth has been selected as a contestant in the Save-Your-Planet Show, a galactic charity event beamed to all sentient corners of the Milky Way.

Even as the group of dubious humans, who dub themselves “The Old Bunch,” begin to believe they are not imagining things, religiously motivated anarchists in Nigeria are carrying out plans to ship a nuclear device half way around the world and into Los Angeles harbor.  And just when it seems they will accomplish their mission, DoubleSpin is jerked from the galactic survival show and the Old Bunch can no longer rely on his somewhat sketchy powers to help them save the planet.

Genre: Science Fiction, Action Thriller

Amazon Print Purchase Link
Amazon Kindle Purchase Link
Barnes & Nobles Purchase Link

A Selection Of Author John Michael Klawitter’s Published Works
Codes & Decodes
Crazyhead
Devils
Foul
Headslap
Hollywood Havoc: The Trouble with Fat Boy – (Episode One)
Hollywood Havoc: The Llama Goes Up (Episode Two)
TANS: The TANS Collection, Volume I
The Book Of Deacon: The Wit and Wisdom Of Deacon Jones
The Devildogs Of Old Sauk Trail And Other Tales Of Hope & Horror
The Freight Train Of Love
The Heart Of Desire
The Rogue Pirates Bible Heretical
The Save Your Planet Show
Tinsel Wilderness
Vidmaker 101

Enjoy Reading Some Free Short Stories – by John Michael Klawitter

The Short Stories:
Home Free
True Patriot
Hard Sell
The Dancing Nazi
Three On A Match
The Moon Air Boys
The Adventures Of Jack Cheese

Author John Michael Klawitter’s Website and Blog
http://www.johnklawitter.com
http://www.johnklawitter.blogspot.com/
http://www.amazon.com/John-Klawitter/e/B001K8FQJ6/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1405030550&sr=1-2-ent

Cold Coffee Café Author John Michael Klawitter

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Something About Me and My Book:
I am a long-time Southern California writer/producer/director. I have written both non-fiction and fiction. My novels are mostly published by Double Dragon. My business format is to write a book, get it published, adapt to screenplay, pitch it around town, then on to the next book. My latest book is The Save Your Planet Show. It's about old people and terrorists and aliens and a galactic survival show where 30 planets compete and only one survives.
Website:
http://www.johnklawitter.com
 
 
 

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