David Angsten was born in Chicago, attended Grinnell College in Iowa and American University in Rome and Paris, and graduated from the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana. He initially worked in Chicago, traveling internationally as a writer-director of videos, documentaries, fiction shorts, and animations. His half-hour drama, Notes From a Lady at a Dinner Party, was selected for competition at Cannes.

Since 1990, David has lived and worked in Los Angeles as a screenwriter and video director, and is a story analyst and senior editor for Atchity Entertainment International. His debut novel, Dark Gold, from Thomas Dunne Books, was followed in 2008 by Night of the Furies, the second mythic thriller of his "Night-Sea Trilogy."

Visit David's blog, BE HERE NOW

McNaughton Author Profile: David Angsten

1.   Where did your idea for Dark Gold come from? Do you have diver experience?

I’ve been diving for decades, but the idea for Dark Gold came to me while reading under the shade of a palapa on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. I was with my wife; it was Christmas.  All these beautiful people were strutting around in scanty swimsuits, flying through the air on skis, lapping up margaritas, staring out at the gorgeous ocean - which you never seem to tire of staring at - and being catered to by a battalion of barmen. Roman emperors vacationing on Capri were probably not treated so well. 

In contrast to this sunny confection of civilization, I knew that just south of the city, along the Pacific coast, there’s a wide stretch of mountainous jungle that’s mostly wild and unsettled, accessible only by boat. Most of it remains as it was at the time of the Spanish and Portuguese explorers, nearly five centuries ago. I had traveled down that coast and seen isolated fishing villages there that didn’t show up on any tourist map. So I wondered what would happen if you set a few of these pampered gringos down in one of those primitive towns. The idea had immediate resonance for me. I can’t look at the ocean without thinking of it as a metaphor for the unconscious mind. So I began to imagine my hero, not so much as a fish-out-of-water, but a fish in deeper, darker water. That idea, combined with several others I’d been toying with, gave me the foundation for a novel.    

By the way, mind your metaphors: That beach in Puerto Vallarta was wiped out by a tsunami shortly after we left. Like any healthy ego, it was quickly reassembled, and hopefully this summer all those vacationing gringos will be back under their palapas, sipping margaritas and reading my book.

2.  As most writers have expressed, there is no such thing as 'overnight success’ when you’re in the writing profession. How long did it take you to realize this success?

Hate to do it, but here’s another velvet-painting metaphor: Success is the bright snow capping a mountain of failure. After years writing and directing videos in Chicago, I moved to Los Angeles and started writing screenplays. My intention was to write something that would allow me to direct - otherwise it’s just a form of masochism. Well, I indulged in that masochism for ten long years. I had a few screenplays optioned, but nothing got produced. Finally my manager, Ken Atchity, convinced me I ought to write a novel. I’d ghost-written two previous novels, adaptations of other people’s work, and I’d been editing AEI’s fiction clients for years, so I had a good idea of what it would take. What surprised me was just how enjoyable it was. There’s a freedom to prose fiction that’s unavailable in screenwriting - it feels like a whole other world. But without all those so-called "failed" screenplays, I doubt I could have written Dark Gold.  They taught me how to tell a story, which a lot of would-be fiction writers never learn to do.

I started out wanting to direct movies; now all I want is to write another novel. Which brings me back to that velvet painting: You can’t be sure what mountain you’re climbing until you reach the top. And then all you see are other peaks to climb!

3.   We know from publisher supplied information that you attended Grinnell College in Iowa and American University in Rome and Paris. What course of study did you pursue at these places? Where did you graduate high school from? What type of degree(s) do you hold, and from where?

I graduated from Hinsdale Central High School, just as Jack Duran did in the novel. Only Jack, I think, was smarter than me.  At these various other places - Rome, Paris - even Iowa - I was not pursuing a course of study, I was pursuing girls. Ever been to Paris in the springtime? I was only twenty years old. I hitchhiked from one end of Spain to the other, and trekked through Italy and Germany and Austria. I wound up my academic career back at the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana - a terrific school. I was very happy there. My interests were highly eclectic. I remember a film course on Ingmar Bergman, another course on the Chinese oracle, I Ching, and an excellent course on statistics that I aced. I ended up with a degree in - of all things, advertising - but by then I was head-over-heels with the movies and spent all my time shooting films.

4.   We know that you were born in Chicago. Can you give us a few more stats about yourself? Age? Do you have siblings? What was your parents’/siblings’ response when you expressed a desire to be a writer? Are you married? Do you have children?

My parents were German-Irish Catholics from the south side of Chicago. My grandfather was a bootlegging teetotaler who owned a tavern/"soda fountain" at 36^th and Damen - still there, last I checked. My parents were practical, down-to-earth people, steeped in common sense. You don’t grow up just south of the old stockyards and have your head in the clouds.  The suburbs are a different story. I had an ideal childhood. As a kid I spent all my time exploring the woods or up in my room with a book. I developed an "active imagination" - in other words, I daydreamed. As I got older I sought out a creative life, but it’s always been in conflict with that inherited practicality. This explains, I suppose, the degree in advertising. It also might help to explain my writing. There’s an airy, philosophical bent to it, along with a hard-nosed skepticism.

I’m happily married to a clinical psychologist - highly advantageous to a writer. We have two grown kids from my wife’s first marriage, and lots of nieces and nephews from my two older brothers in Illinois and California, and my beautiful younger sister in South Carolina.

Age?  I work in Hollywood.

5.   As with most of us, you probably held various other jobs along the way to where you are today. What is the best and worst job you’ve ever held and what life lessons did you take away from these jobs?

This kind of question gives me a headache. A job doing anything other than pursuing what you love is a job and nothing more. I haven’t always succeeded, but I’ve always tried to do what I thought was fun.

6.   What type of organization is Atchity Entertainment International and what are your responsibilities as a story analyst and editor? How long have you held that position?

AEI is a literary management and film production company. They’re currently producing the Paramount movie "Ripley's Believe It Or Not!" starring Jim Carrey and Gong Li.  I’ve been working there for ten years, helping writers shape their stories into something that can be published or produced. That can mean re-working the basic concept, developing new characters or conflicts, helping to lay out the story points, all the way through to editing the final work. It’s the perfect job for me, in that it combines my creative and practical sides, as I was explaining earlier. And I learn a lot in the process, which hopefully has helped to improve my own writing.

7.   We have been told that you also write and direct? Can you give us examples of some things you have written or directed that you’re most proud of?

I wrote and directed a half-hour screen adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s Notes From a Lady at a Dinner Party, which was one of six shorts selected for competition at Cannes (I lost out to a film by John Sayles). I also did a number of travel films which won awards - one on New England, one on San Francisco, and my favorite, a film on New Orleans (pre-Katrina), called Big Easy.  I was involved in the writing and producing of a couple children’s animations, one based on a book by Chris Van Allsburg, and another by New Yorker cartoonist James Stevenson. Beyond that, I’ve written, produced and directed countless business, medical, and documentary films.

8.   How does writing for the screen differ from writing a novel? Do you think writing a novel is harder or easier? Explain why.

All good writing is difficult, but writing a screenplay is hardest of all. I’ve been writing them for years, have gotten fairly good at it, but still I find the process arduous and unpleasant. It’s not because of the screenplay’s dependence on the visual - I have a strong visual imagination; and it’s not because of problems with dialogue - that’s more often to do with character and story. The difficulty is with the inherent restrictions of the form:  the act breaks, the page count, the terseness, the speed. It’s highly, highly concentrated - more like poetry than prose. There’s little room for abstraction, subtlety, ideas, aesthetics. It’s a blueprint. It’s all about structure, and construction of emotion. Most screenplays fall far short. Look at all the terrible movies out there. Writing a great one is hard!

Writing a novel is no piece of cake either, but I find more pleasure and satisfaction in the process. There’s a tiny reward that comes with each sentence, with the crafting a complete and lucid thought. Another reward comes with the completion of a paragraph, and another at the end of a satisfying chapter. There’s also the continual thrill of discovery. With Dark Gold, I never knew where the story was going, except in a very general way. Surprises for the writer become surprises for the reader. That’s largely absent from screenwriting, where the plot is usually outlined in advance and then carefully executed. And in a novel, of course, your "camera" is your mind’s eye: It can go anywhere, express anything. A film director’s dream. You are in complete control. I found it incredibly liberating.

9.   Without giving away too much, can you tell us about your sea creature from Dark Gold?

This question goes back to that element of surprise. If I had my druthers, there would be no jacket copy, no cover art, no mention of a creature at all. I didn’t know what the thing was myself until the moment it finally appeared. I just knew there was something down there. It’s part of why - my first time out - I chose this kind of story. The monster story is probably the oldest mythic tale in the world. In fact, the oldest recorded story - carved on cuneiform tablets - is the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s the tale of a man obsessed with death, who slays a monster, and reaches the bottom of the ocean to find the secret to eternal life. It begins with the words: He who saw the deep. You find similar monsters in Homer’s Odyssey, and later in the Bible. What was the "great fish" that swallowed Jonah?  Shark?  Whale? An 18^th-century Swedish naturalist thought it was a giant grouper. What was the "leviathan" in the Book of Job? Whale again?  It has scales, and fire coming out of its mouth. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. For most of human history, man himself was prey. The monsters in these stories embody something primal, the deepest memories of our species. We see them again and again, in stories told and retold over many thousands of years, from Tiamat to Beowulf to Moby Dick to Jaws.

10. While the publisher info refers to Dark Gold as "the perfect beach read for guys" and "a male adventure book," do you see it also as a book women would enjoy?

This isn’t the story of a square-jawed action hero battling clichéd villains while spouting Tom Clancy techno-talk. The "hero" of Dark Gold is its narrator, Jack Duran, a bright, thoughtful English major headed for graduate school. He falls in love with Eva, the daughter of a Brazilian navy admiral, multilingual, highly educated, extremely articulate, a skilled sailor and an expert in nautical history, with an Olympian physique, a powerful sexual presence, and absolutely stunning eyes. Their romance is at the center of the novel. They have incredible sex. Don’t women enjoy reading about powerful women having incredible sex with young, virile, intelligent men? I’m guessing they do. (In fact, I think for men and women readers alike, you take an extra interest when a love scene is written by an author of the opposite sex: you want to know what their fantasies are.)

Dark Gold is a genre novel, I suppose, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which genre exactly.  Leviathan fiction? Treasure hunt tale? Mystery? Although my book is more of a thriller, Yann Martel’s LIFE OF PI would make a happy partner - it’s a similarly harrowing fable, what I like to call a "mythic thriller."

A large segment of readers, and probably more women than men, will never pick up a genre novel, of any kind. For the most part I don’t blame them, but I also have to admit I’m bored with a lot of "literary fiction." Unless the author is a brilliant stylist (e.g., Nabokov), or writes incredibly lucid and insightful prose (e.g., Ian McKeown, Atonement), I can’t get through another day-in-the-life gripe about problems with relationships or the supposed horrors of American life. As a writer and a reader, I want a strong story, with high stakes, vivid characters, and a sense of danger. I also want a perceptive sensibility, an emotional connection, and a full engagement of the mind.

Dark Gold isn’t high-brow lit, but it’s not pulp fiction, either. Dasheill Hammett said he was trying to apply a literate sensibility to the cheap detective novel. I’m trying to do a similar thing with this modern take on the monster tale. I’ll leave it to readers to decide if I succeeded.