On Framing: Guest Post by Chris Pavone

CHRIS PAVONE:
ON FRAMING

For the past dozen years, I’ve been a professional writer. But for three decades now, I’ve been doing the following things on a regular nonprofessional basis: painting walls, framing pictures, and arranging clusters of framed pictures on walls that I painted.

Why? They’re all things that are enjoyable for me to contemplate doing in the future, and soothing while actually doing them, and satisfying afterward. I like working with paint rollers and brushes, flat and glossy, walls and trim; I like cutting matts and stringing wire and using a special tool to insert little metal points into wooden frames; I like arranging and rearranging pictures on the floor into the right pattern, then measuring and hammering, hanging and aligning. I love how it all looks when finished, and it was me who did it. This is not highly skilled work—there’s no real expertise involved—and that’s one of the things I like about it, similar to cooking daily supper for my family: the main requirement is merely a willingness to chop onions.

But why do I like doing some things with my hands—brushwork on crown molding, dicing carrots—but dislike others? I think it’s related to the sorts of the sorts of things I like to do with my mind.

Not only do I love real-world physical framing. I also love imaginary stories about framing—I love reading them, and I love writing them.

In THE PARIS DIVERSION, I tried to create layers of framing: within the story, where characters make one another look guilty of things they’re not; and also as a reading experience, making readers question who’s innocent, and who’s guilty, and of what. I tried to construct each character within similar frames (as a parent, and as a professional, and as an American in Paris), and then arranged those individual pieces into a pattern that when finished looks clean and elegant, all set against what I hope is a beautiful backdrop that I very carefully painted—

Wait a second: am I talking about the book, or the wall?

I also love crossword puzzles, boxed into their own frames, which I’ve also been doing for more than thirty years, beginning when I’d lounge on my university’s arts quad with the Daily Sun. In New York, my first full-time permanent job was as an editorial assistant at Dell Puzzle Magazines, which published mostly crosswords. For my whole adult life, I’ve been doing the Times puzzle religiously (in ink, thank you very much), partly because I enjoy it, also because it’s a fantastic exercise for my brain, not just figuring out the puzzle, but also exercising language muscles generally—vocabulary, synonyms, puns, double entendres. The crossword is like going to the gym, for the brain.

My favorite sort of puzzle is one that tricks me on two levels. With individual clues that set me up to think the answer is going to be one sort of word or phrase, but turns out to be something different. And with an overall theme that begs this question throughout the solving experience: what exactly is going on here? In a good puzzle, my first guess is almost never the right one. Nor the second. The more wrong guesses, the more fun, and the more satisfaction from the eventual solution.

Which is exactly the same sort of pleasure as reading a story about framing, the tension of not knowing what’s really going on, the fun of guessing again and again, readjusting your guesses to accommodate new clues, the excitement as you near the solution, and the eventual satisfaction of finally knowing everything, that moment when you can see the whole puzzle’s solution, every element in place, hanging right there, deftly arranged on that perfectly painted wall.

Photo Above: My wall of black-and-white wall with red in the middle, including a very old map of New York and another of Paris, various 19th-century works on paper, one photo of the kids and one of our first dog Charlie Brown, a piece of charred paper picked up downtown after 9/11, a few mid-century etchings by a distant relative, a vintage photo and a contemporary one and one excised from a damaged book, a Raymond Pettibon drawing and, the red bull’s eye, Steven Sorman’s 1978 collage “Letter to Matisse.”

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CHRIS PAVONE is the New York Times–bestselling author of the international thrillers The Expats, winner of the Edgar and Anthony awards for best first novel, The Accident, The Travelers, and most recently The Paris Diversion.

Research Trip: guest post by Chris Pavone

CHRIS PAVONE is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Accident and The Expats, and winner of the Edgar and Anthony Awards for best first novel. He was a book editor for nearly two decades and lives in New York City with his family. With The Travelers (Broadway Books, January 10, 2017), which has been acquired for film by DreamWorks and is now in paperback, Pavone has crafted a jet-setting, fast paced thriller that transports readers from the beaches of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and the bustle of Barcelona to the isolation of northern Iceland—all beautiful places that are hiding a darker story of surveillance, lies, and espionage. 

CHRIS PAVONE:
RESEARCH TRIP

I realize that it sounds a bit like bullshit: “I’d like to go to Mexico. For research.” It’s a frigid midwinter day in New York City, and what I’m telling my wife is that I want to fly someplace warm, by myself, to quote-unquote work. This certainly seems like a flimsy excuse for an indulgent vacation.

There are all sorts of ways to travel: on the cheap or in the lap of luxury, for business or pleasure, adventure or enlightenment, seeking art or food, activity or relaxation, for a day or a week or a month, for a year and a half. I’ve done all, with every sort of companion and their combinations—parents and grandparents, wife and children, in-laws and colleagues, friends and strangers, all by my lonesome.

I think every style of travel presents a different opportunity, enriching in a different way. For me, traveling solo is the least fun version, the most demanding. But it’s also the most rewarding for my current purposes. Removed from my daily routine, from all the people who inhabit my life, from repeat experiences, this forces me not merely to see the world in a different way, but also to become someone a little bit different myself, at least temporarily, at least in my imagination. More cosmopolitan, perhaps, or maybe more provincial. Richer, or poorer. Bolder, or more timid. More exciting, maybe more dangerous, sexier; it’s the rare hotel room that doesn’t make me think of sex, part and parcel of an overall sense of possibility, of adventure.

Wherever I’m traveling, I can’t help but wonder this: Could I live here? What would I do here? Who would I be?

Nine years ago, I found myself wandering the cobblestoned streets of Luxembourg contemplating exactly these questions, but this time in the concrete, not the abstract: my wife had just started a job in the Grand Duchy. I was forty years old, and except for college I’d only ever lived in New York City; never even considered anywhere else. I’d spent nearly all my adult life working as a book editor, surrounded by a rotating cast of similar characters.

But now suddenly I was a stay-at-home parent to twin four-year-old boys, living in an unfamiliar little city. I cooked and I cleaned, I planned our travels, I attempted to integrate myself into a community of utter strangers. I was an expat trailing spouse.

Nothing in this life was familiar. I didn’t know how to do anything I needed to do—speak French, take care of children, make new friends, fill my days in satisfying ways without a job. I had grown very comfortable, very competent, being the me who lived in New York among friends and family and a lifetime’s worth of accrued local competence. Now I was incompetent.

I realized that I needed to become someone different. Friendlier, more outgoing, more accepting; a more disciplined housekeeper, a more patient parent, a more supportive husband.

I also had to find a new career, and I needed to pursue it in a more self-motivating fashion. I started writing a novel, a story about someone who moves to Luxembourg, doesn’t know how to do anything—speak French, take care of kids, make friends, fill days in satisfying ways. That protagonist is a very different version of me: she’s a woman, I’m a man; she’s an ex-spy, I’m an ex-editor; she occasionally kills people, I never do. But I invented her as an alternative me, living a life very similar to mine.

That Luxembourg adventure came to an end, and we returned to a variation on our old life in New York. But I’d learned some important things about myself. I could become someone different enough to live a different life. I could become a full-time parent, and like it. I could imagine myself as someone else, and turn that someone into the protagonist of a novel. I could write a novel, all the way to the finish.

But sometimes I have a hard time doing it sitting here in New York, surrounded by everything that’s familiar, everything that’s the same old me I’ve always known. Here in New York, the thing I see mostly clearly is me in New York. And that’s not what I want to write about.

So I get on a plane.

DreamWorks Acquires Chris Pavone's The Travelers

From Deadline:

DreamWorks has acquired The Travelers, the latest thriller by NYT best-selling author Chris Pavone. Picture Company partners Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman will produce.

To be published in March, the book is a Hitchcockian thriller with shades of Mr. And Mrs. Smith and North By Northwest. Will Rhodes is a Gotham-based journalist who unknowingly works for a spy agency posing as a luxury travel magazine called Travelers. After meeting a mysterious and beautiful woman on his latest international assignment, Will finds himself drawn into a tangled web of global intrigue, and it becomes clear that the network of deception ensnaring him is part of an immense and deadly conspiracy — and the people closest to him, including his wife, might pose the greatest threat of all. Pavone also wrote bestsellers The Expats and The Accident.