Greg Iles: Be Honest With Yourself About Your Talent

Greg Iles has spent most of his life in Natchez, Mississippi. His first novel, Spandau Phoenix, was the first of many New York Times bestsellers. His Natchez Burning trilogy continued the story of Penn Cage, the protagonist of The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, and #1 New York Times bestseller The Devil’s Punchbowl. Iles’s novels have been made into films and published in more than 35 countries. He is a member of the lit-rock group The Rock Bottom Remainders, and he lives in Natchez with his wife, and his three children. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Greg Iles

In this interview, Greg discusses how the current political climate and his personal battle made their way into his new thriller novel, Southern Man, his advice for other writers, and more!

Name: Greg Iles
Literary agent: Dan Conaway
Book title: Southern Man
Publisher: William Morrow
Release date: May 28, 2024
Genre/category: Thriller/ Fiction
Previous titles: 17 other titles
Elevator pitch: A young military hero makes a remarkable third-party run for the Presidency in 2024, as a polarized America begins to splinter along racial lines. Police misconduct in the candidate’s hometown throws Penn Cage—the hero of Greg Iles’s award-winning Natchez Burning series—and his Black physician mentor between white militia and power brokers and Black crowds wracked with grief and surging toward race war.

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What prompted you to write this book?

Our nation’s descent into dangerous polarization, with half of white America’s willingness to cast aside democracy in order to cling to power and privilege. I also happened to learn that more than 50 enslaved men were lynched in 1861 only a few miles from the house I grew up in, and I had never been told a thing about it. The true reason for this mass lynching over a short period of time is far from clear, even today. I had been writing fictionalized versions of Civil Rights cold cases in my area for more than a decade, and I didn’t know about that. So that set me digging …

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process? Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Four years. I almost never write more than one draft of a novel. I wait until I’ve “lived” almost all of the story in my head. Then I push myself into a sort of “peak state” of the kind you hear athletes describe, where I’m almost taking dictation at the computer, writing at light-speed for up to 18 hours at a time. Near the end, I write 24 hours straight, or even 30, on very little sleep. But this time, I actually completed the first draft, then threw 200,000 words straight into the trash can. Why? I had become so angry and frustrated by where Trump was taking the country that I had produced a novel that did not work as a thriller.

Then, I happened to see The Dead Zone late one night. And I realized that structurally I was missing a major character. I needed a Greg Stillson to make Southern Man work. Not a character like Stillson, because Trump was already in the book. I needed a dark mirror of Penn Cage, a guy you’re not sure in the beginning whether he’s a second protagonist or an antagonist. Once I had created that character, I was off and running. “Robert E. Lee White” became the dark messiah of my novel. But I was blind to that need for two years. Remarkable, really.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Yes. I was diagnosed with incurable cancer during the writing of that first draft. I’d actually received my first diagnosis at age 36, but I’d outlived every prognosis while somehow keeping my illness secret. But about three years ago, my cancer “switched on,” and I had to make a choice. Get an immediate bone-marrow transplant or finish the book. I thought I could finish in about eight weeks. In the end, it took more than two years, all while enduring what they call “double chemo.” But now I’ve finished the book, and I’m glad I made the choice did. It made the struggle against my cancer much tougher, but it was the right thing to do.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope I get some white Americans who otherwise might not question their own fundamental prejudices and beliefs to reconsider them. That holds true about the present as well as the Lost Cause perception of Civil War history. The truth is most whites don’t even realize the degree that the “textbook history” they studied was intentionally warped by the effort to inculcate historical lies in the minds of most white Americans—not just Southerners—after the Civil War.

I don’t have anything to teach Black people about Jim Crow that they don’t already know, although I have found when speaking about my Natchez Burning trilogy that younger Black people are sadly ignorant of many of some of the worst crimes that took place during the 1960s. By the same token, many white people are ignorant of those same crimes, even though they took place only a few miles from the homes those people grew up in. I was one of those white people, I’m afraid. The media did us a great disservice then, in a different way than they do now.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Be honest with yourself about your talent. The business of writing is a tough one, and it doesn’t always make sense. A lot of bad books get published, and even sell, while some decent or even good ones never do. In general, though, if you have the goods as a writer, your work will get noticed and sell, at least to a publisher, if not to millions of readers. Cling to that as you go through the lean parts of waiting, but be ready when you get your chance. Give them a book no sane editor would reject. Make the ones who reject you go through the rest of their lives feeling like the record executives who turned down The Beatles.

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