David Goodman’s first novel, A Reluctant Spy, is a story about how a man makes a deal and gets more than he bargained for.
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David Goodman’s first novel, A Reluctant Spy, is a story about how a man makes a deal and gets more than he bargained for.
A Reluctant Spy is about a man who “is recruited to be the identity for a thing called the legends program. At the start of the novel, he’s at Cambridge, and he’s not sure what he wants from life. He’s approached by MI6 who say, ‘We’ll make you this deal. We’ll pay off your student loans, we’ll make sure you always have a job, and in return, you will give us your identity at some point in the future.’”
Many years later, when it’s time to make the change, he thinks he’s going to spend a vacation in Costa Rica, but things go wrong. “He ends up in a sticky situation in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, and then has to go and play himself in a very dangerous situation where there was supposed to be a fully trained covert operative.”
This concept is a great vehicle for telling a story. “One of the reasons I wrote about this idea is because it is very fertile ground for storytelling, in large part because of the sheer number of ways it could go wrong.”
The legends program that David describes sounds like it could be real, but he said, “The thing about about that kind of program is that if it works well, you’ll never know that that it happens unless it gets declassified, and that’s going to be decades after the fact.”
David Goodman’s day job is designing software for banks, and, even though he has just published his first novel, he is an incredibly prolific author. After getting an agent in 2021, he wrote two novels that didn’t sell, but one editor said, “‘I really like this guy’s writing. Has he got any other ideas or any other finished books?’ I was on a writing retreat in Wales with a couple of friends in a cottage at the bottom of a valley, with lots of rain and feral goats outside.” After a Zoom call with the editor, David sent a few pitches. The editor came back and asked if he could write a sample quickly, and David thought, “Well, I’m on a retreat right now, so I absolutely can. And I sat down for about a week and wrote the first 15,000 words.”
We discussed how fast he wrote, and David said, “One of the things that frustrate me is that there tends to be a discourse around writing quickly; people use phrases like ‘churning out’ and they inherently devalue anything that happens to be written quickly. I really dislike the bias in our language that tends to assume things written quickly are poorer. For me, I’ve come to see drafting like throwing clay on a wheel. It’s producing the raw material, and the real writing, for me, gets done in the editing process.”
Two of David’s novels were turned down because the publisher said, “One of them is too similar to something I already have, and one of them, not sure it’s the right time in the market for that book.” We discussed the idea of “list fit” in publishing, the limitation of “books fitting into a catalog of books that are coming out in a given year.” When trying to sell a book, “you are competing with other very, very good writers for a very limited number of slots.” David said, “I’ve seen people who say they prefer to be the lead title at a small publisher than a mid-list title at a big publisher.”
David has been using Scrivener since its first version, and, as a software designer, finds certain features extremely useful. “The one I make the most use of is custom metadata, which I use to keep track of things. It varies from project to project, but the label and type fields let me do some light project management within the project so I can see who’s POV I’m in, I can see what draft of a particular document I’m on.”
But it’s Scrivener’s display options that David really loves. “I think the feature I use more than any anything else is composition mode. I live in composition mode. I write in composition mode. I edit in composition mode. And the only time that I use the default view or split views is when I’m comparing two scenes or referring to something. I use focus mode so the sentences I’m not working on are blurred out slightly. And I use typewriter scrolling when I’m working so the text is always bang in the middle of the screen.”
We discussed outlining, and David talked about how he works with an outline, but how things change unexpectedly. A character popped up when he was writing, who eventually became fairly important. “I think leaving that kind of space for serendipity in the drafting process definitely helps make the book more interesting than if you very rigidly follow an outline. I like to have the benefits of both. I like to know where I’m going, but also leave time and space to take little detours if I need to.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.