An Interview with Douglas Kurtz

By Jenny Shank, 9-26-08

Boulder-based writer and writing coach Douglas Kurtz recently published his first novel, Mosquito, an action-packed literary thriller set throughout the American West, including stops in Boulder, Moab, Rocky Mountain National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton National Park, where eco-tour guide protagonist Ben Baxter leads his group in and out of peril.  Kurtz grew up in New York and Kansas, studied at the University of Delaware, and then at the University of Colorado, where he earned a master’s degree in Creative Writing (and I met him ten years ago).  Kurtz also earned his life coaching certification from the Coach Training Alliance, and specializes in working with writers through his business, Write Life Coaching. I recently interviewed Doug about how he blended thriller and literary fiction elements in Mosquito, his current novel, and how he helps other writers overcome “limiting thoughts and beliefs, self judgment, lack of direction, and anxiety.”

New West: I really liked the premise of Mosquito with this haunted leader of Outward Bound-type adventures as the protagonist.  It allowed you to take the story to a lot of beautiful wilderness settings throughout the West, and to describe them in an active way that involved the plot.  How did you come up with this idea?

Douglas Kurtz: For a couple of years in my twenties I worked as a tour leader taking foreign travelers on trips around the US, Canada and Mexico.  I knew when I started Mosquito that I wanted the story, or part of it at least, to revolve around this kind of travel, but I didn’t know until I was well into the writing that a cross-country tour would become the vessel for the entire thing.  Setting is very important to me, in fiction and in my life, so I wanted it to play a big role.  Wilderness settings are full of opportunities for combining action and danger and beauty, and this was appealing to me—the idea that I could get a fast-paced plot happening in these scenic places, without using a lot of static description, which tends to bog down the pace.  I also wanted the setting—or settings, I should say, since the tour passes through several—to be a strong psychological force on my protagonist, Ben Baxter, who’s experienced and competent in the back country, but is also haunted and terrified by things that can happen there. 

NW: I found that Mosquito was sort of a genre-hybrid.  You wrote it with literary-fiction-quality prose, but use thriller-type techniques in your plotting.  The story of the relationships between Ben Baxter and his group reads like literary fiction, and the parts about the embezzlement and the government conspiracy read like a techno thriller.  Did this blend come naturally to you?

DK: The idea to blend the two came naturally to me, but the execution was a struggle.  There were times early on in the writing when the literary aspects—the character relationships, Ben’s psychological difficulties, the prose itself, etc.—seemed to detract from the thriller aspects—the conspiracy, the investigation, the pursuit of the tour, etc.—and vice versa.  The novel seemed to have conflicting personalities, and they seemed to dilute each other.  But as the plot developed I realized that they were part of the same thing, that the thriller angle couldn’t advance without the literary angle.  Once I understood that the relationships on the tour and Ben’s reaction to them were informing and affecting what was happening in the conspiracy plot, and that the conspiracy plot was informing Ben’s psychology and how he was interacting with the characters on his tour, the “blending” became a lot easier and the story really started to move on both sides.  In the end there was synergy between the two, but it took a lot of work to get there.

NW: Part of your plot involves a character finding a suitcase of money and taking it, which leads bad guys to pursue her to regain it.  This seems like a classic trope, used in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, among many other stories.  Were you inspired by any novels or stories where the pursuit of a suitcase of money drives the plot?

DK: Not really.  In fact, I was a little hesitant at first about the money angle, because it seemed too thriller-like to be part of Ben’s story.  But, as I was saying before, once the two personalities of the novel began to work together—thriller and literary—the money turned out to be perfect, both as a motivating device for Poppy, the antagonist, and as a motivation foil for Ben, who’s driven by other things.  Without the money in play, these deeper forces behind Ben’s character would have been more difficult to illuminate.

NW: One of your main characters, Poppy, at first seems like a slightly flawed but potentially likeable character, but turns into a real villain over the course of the novel.  Did you know this was where she would go when you started out?  Was it fun to work with a villain?

DK: I loved writing Poppy, because I never quite knew what she would do next.  Somehow, her personality and intelligence and psychology added up to a kiss-you-or-kill-you sort of character that I could have taken in any direction.  She’s disturbed and angry, but she’s also very lovable in a kind of inaccessible place, and these two sides of her are always in conflict.  I always intended her to be a villain, but I didn’t know until later drafts of the novel whether or not she would get redemption or fall prey to her own self-deception.  In the end, she lets negative forces drag her down, whereas Ben uses them as motivators to lift himself up.  This is the fundamental difference between them, which is why I think their chemistry works in the novel and they suit each other as protagonist/antagonist.  If things had gone differently, I think maybe they could have loved each other, but the onus was on Poppy to make it work, and she didn’t. 

NW: I have to ask if the Boulder bar you feature in Mosquito, the “Brick Miner,” is based on a real bar.  It kind of reminded me of the Sundown Saloon.

DK: The Brick Miner is a transplant from L.A., based on a bar I would go sometimes when I was leading tours.  But I agree, it definitely has elements of the Sundown Saloon. 

NW: How did your book deal for Mosquito come about?

I took the standard path, through an agent to a publisher.  Getting an agent was no problem, but publishers seemed a little skittish about a first novel that crossed genre lines, so it took a while for someone to bite.  I think with books like Mosquito that walk the line, marketing can be a bit of a challenge.  But that said, I think there’s a largely untapped market for well written books that have a backbone, books that can appeal to both genre and literary readers, that have well developed characters, well integrated plots and engaging prose.  More of these books seem to be showing up, like Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, which I just read and really enjoyed, on both levels.  Hers is a fast-paced mystery, with great characters, complex relationships and excellent prose.  With novels like this, you can have your cake and eat it, too.

NW: In addition to writing fiction, you write a column for Writers News Weekly.  How did you first start doing this, and what do you write about in your column?

DK: The Writers News Weekly column, called The Write Mind, is an offshoot of my life coaching practice.  In the column I talk about different challenges that writers face, and try to address them from a coaching perspective.  The goal of the column is to give writers practical tools they can use to function at their best and overcome the attitudes, behaviors, habits etc. that often hold them back.

NW: How did you get started as a coach for writers, and what kind of situations have you helped writers get through?

DK: I’ve always been invested in helping people, myself included, overcome whatever obstacles are preventing them from reaching their potential.  Since I’m a writer, and know firsthand the personal and professional challenges that writing presents, I was naturally drawn to helping other writers.  For a while I tried teaching, which I enjoyed, but I quickly found that what holds a lot of people back isn’t a lack of skill or knowledge in writing, but a host of other obstacles, most of which are internal and have to do with limiting thoughts and beliefs, self judgment, lack of direction, anxiety, etc. 

Writers who are experiencing problems on the page—procrastination, lack of inspiration, motivation issues, whatever—also tend to experience them in the larger arena of life, and vice-versa.  Coaching is a great way to push through the blocks caused by these issues and move forward on both fronts.  It asks people to leave their comfort zone, think big and take action, and holds them accountable for doing so.  So that’s basically what I do with my clients, get them to define their intentions and hatch a plan for seeing them through.  Sometimes that means dealing with big life issues, other times it means working on writing technique or tackling problems inside a specific project.  And sometimes it just means providing a good kick in the butt. 

NW: I’ve read some of your current project, Hunter’s Island, and it seems like a departure from Mosquito in that the parts I’ve read, at least, don’t have the thriller elements that Mosquito did.  Are you aiming for straight literary fiction with the new book?

DK: Definitely not.  Hunter’s Island has a sharper literary edge than Mosquito does, but the suspense and plot elements are still there—although maybe not quite as blatantly as in Mosquito.  At least that’s how it seems to me now, towards the end of the second draft.  I like to think of Hunter’s Island as character-driven suspense.  I never want my readers to stop wondering what’s going to happen next.  I want conflict developing and resolving all the time, on every level of the book.  I want to pull multiple threads through every scene, chapter and section, to keep momentum cooking all the way to the end—but I also want the prose to be involving in and of itself.  While I’m writing I try to think of it like this: If a tired reader can put the book down without missing her bedtime, then I haven’t gotten something right.  I want to create engagement in every sentence and put my readers in a deep, exciting, suspenseful, mysterious, disturbing, elating dream.  Whatever category that puts me in—literary, mystery, suspense, thriller, etc.—I’ll take it.