Clive Cussler's cash? It's in his cars, baby!
Cussler: Yeah, eventually. When we got out of the service, a buddy of mine and I bought a gas station in L.A., and we did pretty well. I was making $240 a month pumping gas when I married my wife. We chopped up this old '39 Mercury and put big truck tires on it and took off the doors and we would tow it out in the desert and drive around. It was one of the early dune buggies -- back in 1956 -- and we would look for lost gold mines and ghost towns and stuff like that. Later on, that urge -- I used to say if it's lost I'll look for it -- went over into shipwrecks.
Bankrate: You went on to become a successful advertising writer in Hollywood. What was that world like?
Cussler: Yeah, I was in it about 15 years. I never made big money at it or was a vice president or anything, but I did pretty well. I remember when I started writing fiction, I thought well, I can't do the literary type after all those years writing short, snappy ad copy. We were living in Costa Mesa and my wife went to work for the local police department in the evenings, so I would come home and feed the kids and put them to bed and, since I had no one to talk to, I thought well, I'll write a book. Not having a great American novel in me, and not being able to write really literary, I thought it would be fun to write a little paperback series.
Bankrate: Writers such as yourself, James Patterson, Elmore Leonard and Stuart Woods who come out of the ad game seem to have a natural knack for writing books that sell.
Cussler: Yeah. I looked at it that way. I always looked at it from the standpoint of writing for the reader, unlike some writers who write for themselves. I never did that. Even writing today, I stop and think, what would the reader like to read at this point?
Bankrate: How did Dirk Pitt enter the picture?
Cussler: I tried to be different. Before I even wrote a word, I researched all these continuing series heroes -- Edgar Allen Poe's Inspector Dupont was the first, then Sherlock Holmes, Mike Hammer, Travis McGee, and of course James Bond -- and I thought, what can I do that's different? So I took my hero and put him in and around water. That's how Dirk Pitt was born.
Bankrate: He appeals equally to men and women.
Cussler: People always have an adventure in the back of their mind, but maybe for the cost or being lazy, not that many people get involved in it. I was always surprised that almost 50 percent of my readers are women. But women like adventure. They dream about it. They would love to find some adventurous guy to take them off to Tahiti. People fantasize about it. I just create and offer them fantasy that they enjoy.
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Bankrate: Were you able to support yourself initially?
Cussler: No, no. I wrote evenings and weekends for the first two manuscripts, then got an agent and decided I wanted to do that full time. So since I could write anywhere, we sold the house, stored the furniture and moved from Southern California and wound up in the mountains of Colorado. I wrote a book up there for a year and a half, going through the savings, still not getting published and went back to work in advertising. Then I broke through with "Raise the Titanic!" I remember when people would congratulate me on my overnight success and I would think, yeah, 11 years from the time I wrote the first word until the breakthrough.