New York Times bestselling author Chris Pavone returns to the podcast to discuss THE DOORMAN, a pulse-pounding, perceptive, sensationally good novel that explores class, privilege, race, sex, and murder through the eyes of a doorman in a luxury New York building. Chris shares the moving real-life inspiration behind the story—a beloved doorman named Johnny—and opens up about his writing process (including writing flap copy before even starting the novel). The two dive into questions of grief, humanity, and what makes a novel truly compelling.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Chris. Thank you so much for coming back on my show to talk about the doorman. Congratulations. 

Chris: Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me too. 

Zibby: We just joked about how we should have done this podcast in person, in, in my lobby or your lobby or some random lobby across the city. So sorry, next time. 

Chris: But this is easier. 

Zibby: This is much easier, faster, easier. Yeah. We are all about productivity. 

Chris: Wardrobe is easier. 

Zibby: Okay. The Doorman, please tell listeners what this book is about.

Chris: Uh, The Doorman is a thriller about race. Class and privilege. I think it's the modern day bonfire of the vanities that revolves around a doorman and a fancy New York apartment who gets caught up in a web of adultery. Robbery and murder. 

Zibby: Wow. That's a good, it's always good when authors say, it's not like about a guy named Chickie who dah, dah, but it's about race class and these big issues in the world.

I need to steal that for my own work. 

Chris: But it's also about a guy named Chickie. I mean, you're right. A lot of people do begin with the protagonist, and that's an important part of this book is I think where it comes from. I think it's sometimes pretty boring to listen to authors talk about why they wanted to write a book.

Because really sometimes who cares? Like that's not really the important thing about reading a book is not why the author wrote it. It's why you wanna read it as a reader. Um, but I think as a reader you do wanna read a book about this guy. Uh, did, what did you think of this guy? 

Zibby: Well, at first I'm just reeling from the fact that you said that was boring.

'cause that's sort of the whole premise for this show. So I feel like I'm just gonna like, turn off my mic and pack up my things and, uh,.. 

Chris: No. No. I. I don't, I'm sorry. I don't mean that it's boring. I think it's, it's for authors to talk about and for people who really care about books to listen to. I think it's fascinating.

It's always the thing that I wanna hear when I go to a bookstore or when I go to every event. It's really, I wanna hear why the author wrote the book and what are the behind the scenes of it and what was the motivation and what were you trying to do? But that's because I'm a writer and you're a writer and we're in the book publishing business.

I think for people just reading slap copy in a bookstore. That's the thing that they want is you know, what's in it for them. 

Zibby: Interesting. Okay, so what's in it for these readers? What's in it for them? 

Chris: I mean, I think it's, first and foremost, it's a thriller and it's a Paige Turner, but it's also about all these other parts of our lives that sometimes thrillers just sort of gloss over that.

The story about a cop pursuing a serial killer, whatever. I mean that they're, you've seen that a lot of times you've read that. A lot of times that could be entertaining, that could be scary, that could be tense, but it's not really about anything. More and more, at least I am interested in reading books that are really about something more than just the plot.

And this one is about a lot of things. It's about almost everything. Um, but it's still there from a point of view of a thriller and there from a point of view as a page turner and the, the, even though I, I just described how most people don't really care I think about the author's motivations for writing a book.

I think that's probably not at all true for the people on your podcast, and so I will tell you. 

Zibby: Okay. 

Chris: When we moved into this building five years ago, one of the first people we met, the daytime doorman named Johnny, who worked in this building for 37 years. He ever had greeting the people who live in this building and plenty who don't.

The neighborhood people, the tourists, their kids, their dogs. Johnny had a warmth that you could feel from across the street. People who moved away from this building came back just to visit him. Then he got sick. He spent a few months in the hospital and as soon as he was able, he returned to work and for the next two years he held the front door.

He carried bags and he hailed cabs while also definitely dying. Before his illness, we'd stand out on the street and talk about sports and anti-inflammatories and classic r and b of the 1970s. Now we are out there on the sidewalk talking about God and the meaning of life and death. At the end of one shift, another doorman asked Johnny how he was feeling and he said, I'm so tired, man.

And he went home and died. He'd lived his whole life in Harlem, but he held his memorial a couple of blocks from our building so that the people he worked forcould attend easily. He was buried in his full doorman uniform, including his hat. The only non reregulation item was a New York Mets pin on his neck tie, and that just broke my heart and all of Johnny broke my heart and I wanted to write a book about this sort of relationship, this upstairs, downstairs environment in which people who work for other people are also friends and see each other every day. And I think a doorman is a very different type service provider and that a lot of, there are a lot of jobs out there in the world where you're doing something for somebody and a lot of those are in food service and hotels and things like that, and you're just explicitly doing a task.

And I don't think that's true for doormen. They're not there specifically to do a task. They're there, I think specifically to be a person. And their lives aren't just about making the resident's lives easier. Making the residents lives better, and I think for a lot of people in New York, much more so than holding the door or hailing a cab, a doorman is a relationship and it's somebody who you speak to and somebody who knows you and your family and your children and your dog, and you know things about them, and you see them every day and you talk to them in a way that's not about service, it's just about humanity.

Is that enough background? 

Zibby: And you are gonna withhold that amazing, powerful story, you know? Oh, like, that's why this I find personally, like knowing that changes how I view the whole book because it comes from a place of deep caring, right? Like, you care so much, it's a, it's someone you essentially love in a different way, right?

We all have all these people in our lives who come in and out and we don't. It doesn't sound like, oh, my doorman died. Like, are you allowed to grieve that? But what you, you are losing also a piece of yourself and all those memories and times together and what does that mean? And your own mortality, of course, you have to think about when someone in your day-to-day life, all of a sudden is gone.

So, I don't know, I think raises far more interesting issues, I think. 

Chris: Well, thank you. 

Zibby: Well, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for. That story, but that's, it's very compelling. My gosh. Even that he was buried in his uniform. My gosh. Okay. So you get these glimpses, glimmers of ideas inspired by maybe something in your life.

Yeah. Taking this to the other extreme, like right when you, when the book opens and Chicky is sort of standing there and worried and they're, they're, you know, it feels very. True to life and how the city has felt lately when you just don't know what some of the sounds are. There's a elevated fear I feel in the city now with protests here and this going on there and sounds, and, you know, post nine 11 I, any sound I hear outside, I'm still, I'm always nervous.

Like, so you, you show us like what does it mean to sort of be on the front lines of that and. Yet had, and also like what he brings from his own life into just standing on the sidewalk versus you and me maybe standing on the sidewalk. What is it? What from his past can come back to, you know, interfere. So tell me how you go from this personal event in your life to crafting the book and also how you.

How you introduce us in such a compelling way that you do not wanna put the book down. 

Chris: Those are big, important, hard questions and I, I'll tell you that first about the how to, how to start writing a book and then translating life experiences into something. I, as a rule, do the same thing for every book before I start writing a novel, I sit down and I write the flap copy. It's a few hundred words of mini book proposal that touches on everything important, the protagonist, the antagonist, the central conflict, the setting, the twist, the themes, the plot, uh, the ending. This is a brief description of the whole thing, and I do this for a couple of reasons.

And one. Is that after I finished writing a book would be a very, very bad time to discover. But I don't know how to describe it. I don't know if you've had that experience, but I, I think a lot of authors do. Like, you know, you really wanna write something and you start writing it and writing it, and then at the end it comes time to pitch it and you think, oh my God, what is this book about?

And that's horrible. Um, because if you can't describe a book, then you can't pitch it. And if you can't pitch it, no one else is going to be able to pitch it. And if it can't be pitched, it can't be sold. I think if you can't justify why a book should exist in the world. Honestly it shouldn't. But pitching the truth isn't my main motivation, which is that life is short and getting shorter.

I spend three or four years on a novel writing and revising and publishing and promoting, and I want, I feel like I need each book to be my best effort and producing a document like this is a way of making sure that I know what I'm doing before I start doing it, so I don't waste precious years on the wrong thing and writing this is really not easy.

This is not something that I just open up a document one morning at nine o'clock and bang it out before lunch. This is something that I revisit for months or years at a time, fiddling around and coming up with new ideas and refining them. And I have a bunch of these going at any given moment, and they're in various stages of realness and some as short as a title and some are a.

In truth, when it was time to start writing this book, the Doorman, we were in the middle of COVID. I was working badly for reasons that are obvious now, but I didn't see at the time. I had in my brain what I thought was a very solid book idea. I had a setting, I had a few characters. I knew what themes I wanted to explore, and all of that is a lot, but it's not everything.

And instead of writing my one pager. I did what I promised myself I would never do. I just started writing the manuscript in the back of my mind. I knew it was a bad idea and I knew I was doing it because I didn't have a plot. I didn't know where the characters were going or how they were gonna interact.

I didn't know the twist. I didn't know where the story was aiming. I couldn't write a compelling one pager, so I didn't write any. And instead I buried my head in the sand and I just started writing, hoping that I could bluster through. And I couldn't. I wrote myself into dead ends and I developed characters in the wrong directions.

I wrote all sorts of unproductive texts. I just kept pushing past my lack of focus, procrastinating by writing more and more. I was writing every day, but I wasn't advancing the plot because I didn't know the plot. 

Zibby: Hmm. 

Chris: And eventually I forced myself to stop, to put the damn thing down, to step away. It was easy to write hundreds of pointless pages.

What's hard? Is writing the one page that encapsulates everything. Articulate exactly and clearly some things that you think you know, or I, I can't speak for you. Some things I think I know in my brain, ideas that are vaguely in there about what the book is about, but the exercise of getting those ideas onto the page and making them specific forces me to figure out what I don't know and to find it out.

And I've come to believe that writing is not just for me a mechanism of communicating. It's a mechanism for thinking. And until I write the idea of the book down on the page and put it into sentences, I don't really have a book. 

Zibby: Wow. This is like masterclass on novel writing. 

Chris: I don't know about that. No.

It's what I do and I, in truth, I, I. Wasted. I don't know about wasted. I spent an extra year of my life writing this book that I wouldn't have needed if I would've been able to write this page and get going in an organized fashion from the start. And that's a little bit frustrating to look up back on.

And it was frustrating to be in, in the moment, but at the other end of the journey, I actually think this is my best book. And so I have to wonder. Was it a mistake or was it worth it? Was it worth it to spend that frustrating year writing into dead ends and figuring out what I don't wanna write about?

As much as what I do wanna write about. 

Zibby: Well, when you said hundreds, it's easy to write hundreds of pointless pages. I was like, wait a minute. There are no mistakes. Like think about all the quote unquote pointless books that writers have to write to get to the novel that they want. That becomes the novel they sell, right?

They're not, pointless. It's sometimes we have to do all those things to get where we're going. Not everybody can jump right to the perfect thing and, and dive right in. 

Chris: Yeah, I agree. Um, it's, it does, it's maybe not pointless is not the right thing, but it's, it's frustrating to spend a lot of time writing things and then throw them away.

Zibby: I agree. 

Chris: Um. To spend, not really moving forward, but just sort of moving sideways. But I, I've told myself over and over, you know, that it won't make any difference at the end of my life whether I've published 15 books for 10, the world is not clamoring for more books. There are plenty of books. What I think everybody is looking for are better books.

And whatever gets me to the best book, I think it's probably the right path. And I'm not in any rush to publish more and more books. There are people who write, especially in the space that I write in suspense fiction, who produce a book every year. And I've never been on that plan. And I don't wanna be on that plan.

And that looks like a job I absolutely don't want. And once you don't write a book a year, it doesn't really matter how frequently you write a book. Nobody's expecting a book a year from you. Your readers aren't expecting it, Your publisher expecting, your family's not expecting it, your bank account is not expecting it.

And so if you're not doing that, then 2, 3, 4 years, what's the difference really? 

Zibby: In fact, sometimes when an author has a book come out, and it's been a minute, I'm even more excited 'cause I'm like, oh my gosh, no way. I didn't know they had a new book and what's this gonna be? And they must've been working on it all this time.

Chris: Right. And I, I, I, I feel like if I. If a new book, if an author has a new book and I can't remember whether I read their last book or not, that feels like something's wrong in their career, that if it, if it's not an event, if it's not a moment, if it's not distinctive, then it's not working for me as a reader.

Zibby: Well, obviously all writers have their own agendas and you know, some, for some people that's the best way for them to write and they love that and they can do it easily. And you know, we all have to find our path and I'm glad you found what works for you. Right. It might not work for Joe Schmo over there who, you know, I just interviewed somebody who was like, oh, well, I just interviewed Wally Lamb who finished a book and was like, I'm not gonna write again for a while. I handed it in and like he said, he was wandering around his house and like the next day he is like, well. I better just sit down and write because, like, what else am I gonna do? Um, and then of course he comes out with like this, this new like 400 page book.

So look, everybody, everybody has to find their way through the creative life. But what you said about the flap copy, I did try that once I, that was advice I got early on when I was trying to write a novel and I was like, oh, that's an interesting idea. And so I wrote the flap copy and I was like. I wouldn't read that book.

Like I wouldn't buy the book I'm writing, and so I didn't write it. So it is a good exercise. 

Chris: Well, I think that's when you discovered it beginning.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Chris: I mean imagine like spending a few years of your life and then getting to that point of writing slap copy. That's true to the book that actually you wrote it. It's definitely reflective of the book and you don't even wanna read that book. That would be horrible.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Chris: But the interesting thing about this slap copy that it's that although I write it. Initially, and primarily for me, that one page description that begins with me or you in your living room alone years before the book is published, that very well may be the description that the book lives and dies on.

For its whole life, and here's how every book works, basically, or certainly from every, every first time author, you will need to write a concise pitch in order to query agents, and they're either gonna consider your manuscript or reject it based first and foremost on this one pager, which you wrote. Your agent is then going to send a one page query out to editors, and they're gonna respond the same way.

They're gonna open the manuscript, or they're not gonna open the manuscript based on the agent, one page letter, the editors are going to bring it to an editorial meeting and then maybe, hopefully an acquisitions meeting, and they're gonna pitch it for about a minute, which is again, one page after acquisition.

Your editor is going to present it at a launch meeting and someone else is going to give a presentation of the sales conference. All of these are gonna be about the same length. They're all gonna be about a one page description, which is also gonna be used for catalog copy, for bound galley, copy for flap copy for the letter that the publicist sends to every media outlet in the world.

For the presentation that sales reps give to every bookstore that foreign agents give to foreign publishers. That's fed out to every online retailer or social community, Amazon, good read Barnes and Noble. All of that is gonna begin. The previous incarnation, all everybody who needs to produce one page is gonna look back at the previous page they got.

Sometimes the process is gonna be as simple as the editorial assistant cutting and pasting from the agent's letter, and that becomes the catalog copy. If it's not broken, nobody needs to fix it. They can just keep pushing 300 words down the long crowded publishing highway, a million new books in America every year.

All of them carried along on a one page description that begins with the author writing the one page description. So. 

Zibby: So no pressure. 

Chris: Definitely. 

Zibby: No pressure. 

Chris: Right? No pressure. And like I, and you know, I do it, I don't necessarily ever give that page to anybody in my publishing house, but catalog copy, lap copy ends up looking remarkably like it, because that's how it moves along.

And that's how I've pitched the book. That's how I talk about the book in the one page. That's how it moves through its life. So, yeah, there's a tremendous amount of pressure and there's a tremendous amount of value in it as well, that if you get it right, if you nail this, then doors open. And if you get this wrong, then doors close.

Zibby: Wow. And actually as a publisher, we have our sales meeting today where we pitch exactly what you're saying. You know, that this is, you know, this is a world I didn't know as much about until I got into the side of the business. But yes, we're always refining the catalog copy what you put on the back of the book, how it looks, how it reads.

Is it short enough? Is the first sentence interesting enough? And is there 

Chris: Yeah. 

Zibby: How you started out. It's about race and class and dah, dah, dah. Like is there a sentence? I feel like every book needs that one sentence that is like,.. 

Chris: Yeah,.. 

Zibby: Captivating. Like what if you could da dah, dah, or a, you know, just the, the tagline essentially.

Because every book is really a product. 

Chris: Yeah. 

Zibby: It's a product. Like the doorman is,.. 

Chris: Oh God, yes. 

Zibby: It's a creative thing, but it is also a, a product that has to sell based on even less than the one-pager. 

But just a concept. 

Chris: Oh, so much less. And I, it's a very strange business that we work in where we are definitely producing, on the one hand what some people would call art, but it's definitely creative.

On the other hand, in commercial publishing. These are commercial products for that we want consumers to buy. And in America alone, it's more than a million of these new products published every year, which are in a lot of ways indistinguishable. I mean, they're the same price. They're providing the same sort of experience in writ large, like, and how do we as authors and publishers, how do we distinguish one of these from the other?

There are a lot of different ways to do it, and so many of them I think are not paid enough attention to. And one of those is the title, which first and foremost is what every book is. And in truth, I have struggled mightily with titles my entire career. I was a book editor for about half my career and the second half a novelist and when titles are wrong from the get go, they are always a problem, and that problem almost never ends up getting really solved, like if the author doesn't have the title when the book is sold. I've never really had a successful experience where the title ended up being exactly the right thing.

If the title is perfect from the get go, it's perfect. It's perfect. And I think for me, in truth this, this title I think is perfect for me. I had this great experience about a year ago. I was at a cocktail party talking to the CEO of one of the big publishing houses. Who knows the types of books I write in general, and asked me what I was working on next.

And I said, the doorman. He's a New Yorker and he knows that I write thrillers and he's also a publishing professional and he thought about it for a second and he said, oh my God. I can't believe nobody's ever done that before. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Chris: And he could immediately see in his mind's eye the entire thing. Like he didn't get every detail right, but he got enough.

Right? Because you know that if this is a thriller and it's called the doorman, you yourself, as a reader can extrapolate a lot before you've even gotten to the cover design, before you've read those all important 300 words of of description, you can gather a lot in the same way that I think I mean a much more effective than shorthand version, which I mention a lot, is zombies.

I don't read zombies books, and I don't particularly watch zombie entertainment, but zombie tells you a lot in one word. There's a lot that you. As a reader, as a watcher of a film, know going in as soon as there's a zombie, you know that you're in a post apocalyptic environment. You know that it's a life and death situation, you know that it's gonna be tense.

You know, a bunch of stuff that's been communicated to you already just by the fact of this one thing, and that's such a. Thing to have and for when I was an editor, I was a cookbook editor for a while, and one of the books that was my responsibility to bring through the publishing system was a baking book that provides best author title combination ever.

It's such a luxury to be able to stand in front of a room full of salespeople and marketing people. Whatever meeting you're probably about to have now and be able to utter three words, Martha Stewart Baking and then basically drop the mic because everybody in the room knows what that book is, and there's no reason for me to have a second sentence, much less attempt.

There's no need for the 300 words of description. Everybody could already basically picture the price point, the package, the paper, what was gonna be on the cover. Like everybody got everything. For fiction, that's a lot harder and the fiction titles need to do a lot heavy lifting. And I think it's very important to pay attention to that because for me, uh, definitely for me as a browser, I don't know about you as a bookstore browser.

I definitely put down, don't even pick up 99% of books just because of their title and their cover. That combination of things. If it's not the right type of title and not the right type of cover, something is being communicated to me that this book is not for me. 

Zibby: Hmm. Wow. This has been such an interesting publishing conversation.

I feel like we've veered away from the book, but man, this is, uh, I feel like we could sell this one. We could sell this one. This is great. 

Chris: Thank you Zibby. 

Zibby: Uh, because it is, no, it's the stuff that people don't necessarily talk about. It is part of the commercial. It is part of the commercialization of, of creativity, and.

What we have to do to crystallize our own ideas about what we're working on before we go down different rabbit holes. And even though it's not a linear line, it ends up in a very linear pipeline. And so how do we, you know, twist ourselves into the, the right way to, to fit our products through it and also channel our own energy the right way?

Chris: I couldn't agree more and for me, one of the things that I was trying to make sure that this book communicated with the cover with the title of the copy is that it's a New York novel, and I've been reading New York novel my whole life, and a lot of those have been much bigger than New York. It's John Dos Paso, an Invisible Man and Bright Lights Big City, and Jonathan Letham and Jazz and Bonfire of the Vanities and Pineapple Street.

And I think these New York novels are not just novels that happen to be set here. There are books that revolve around the themes and the issues that our city, that define our lives here. Its race and its class, and its money and and ambition and crime and sex, and the thing that New York people love to talk about above all other subjects.

And this book is about all of those things. And I've been meaning to write a New York book before I was ever even a writer. But it wasn't until I started living in this sort of upstairs, downstairs environment that I figured out what mine could and should be. And it's a contemporary bonfire. The vanities mixed with some white lotus.

A hint of only murders in the building, and I love this book and I was so glad to get to write it in this environment, and I'm very excited to bring it out into the world and to to be done with this process of writing the book and out to the process of sharing with people. 

Zibby: Well, it's really fantastic.

Congratulations, you, I still go back to what, what I said to you at my most anticipated party, which is you need to give a copy to all the doorman up and down. You just need to like have a really cool video and you know, keep getting out of the car and handing the doorman and having everybody. I can just see the whole reel.

So get to work. 

Chris: Thank you. 

Zibby: Okay. 

Chris: And thank you for sharing it with your doorman. It was great to see you, Zibby. 

Zibby: Okay, you too. Thanks. Bye Chris. Thank you.