After seven seasons (92 episodes) of Mad Men, friends advised writer Matthew Weiner, the series creator, to take a break. “They said, ‘You know you should just stop and refill your tank and take things in.’ That turned out to be really scary because as a writer, you’re always worried if you’re ever going to write again. At the same time, it was transformative,” Weiner says.
At a friend’s suggestion Weiner, who also worked on The Sopranos, went to Yaddo, the artists’ retreat in upstate New York, to figure out what he wanted to work on next. “I had a play that I could rewrite [and] a movie idea, and then I started working on what I thought was a short story. It was inspired by something I had seen a few weeks beforehand and had written down,” Weiner says. “I walked past this beautiful schoolgirl going into a building under construction, and I saw a man working there stare at her with threatening intensity. I don’t have any daughters, but what I wrote down was, ‘What if her father saw that?’ I thought I’ll just see if I can write a little bit on this, and then it took off. I came back from Yaddo, and I was on fire with it. It was a chance to tell a story in a way that I had never told it before.”
The result is Weiner’s debut novel, Heather, the Totality (Little, Brown, Oct.), and his enthusiasm about it is palpable. “This is my childhood dream come true,” he says. “I don’t want to diminish my experience in film and TV, but writing fiction—prose really—is what I perceived as writing when I was a kid. And writing this novel and actually finishing it, I was in a very different expressive environment than my previous work.”
While Weiner’s work on The Sopranos as well as on Mad Men was a collaborative effort, writing a novel is very different. “When I write for the screen,” he explains, “I work off an outline done in a group. After I finish a script, it goes back into the writers’ room. The writers give notes without me there, and they can be brutal. Then the writers’ assistant brings back the script for a rewrite. It always makes things better. But with this novel, everything was done alone, including sitting down at the computer for the first time in years. The writing became linguistically more intimate and internal.
“There’s also no budgetary constraint on where you go in the story: location, casting, sets,” Weiner adds. “Another difference: you may not have distribution when you’re done with a novel, but the thing you’re working on is the final product. A script is a blueprint for a product, and a great script will frequently result in a good product—but it’s not the end result.”
A first-time attendee at BookExpo, Weiner is delighted to be here. “This is all new to me,” he says. “And because I’ve been a professional writer with some kind of success, everyone’s kind of laughing at how excited I am about this. This is my first book, my first time in this world. I’m very excited for people to see it and read it.”
Today, 3–4 p.m. Matthew Weiner will sign at the Hachette booth (2502).
