In beginning [research for a book], I'm always curious to investigate what psychological motives bring a certain person into his field or profession. Why is a surgeon a surgeon? Why does he enjoy cutting flesh? Why is a psychiatrist a psychiatrist? Why does he like to tune in on patients' private lives? Why does that woman like to teach, and why does this man like to dig into the earth? And so—for The Word—why did this man choose to become a man of God? And, indeed, how much of a man of God is he truly? Is his motive spiritual, one of pure faith, and a desire to make life more bearable, and the certainty of death more acceptable to others? Or is his motive a desire for power and authority? Or is his motive more crass, a decision to promote belief in God in order to make a livelihood or gain wealth? (pp. 185, 187)

By the time I was ready to write, I was writing about a subject as familiar to me as my own life. Indeed, the world of religion had become part of my life.

My earliest concept of The Word was to make it an inside story about the people who inhabit the world of Bible publishing…. But as time passed, my approach to this novel began to change, and in the end I discarded most of this Bible publishing research and concentrated more on churchmen, theologians, and ordinary people seeking faith.

And, of course, as I wrote, I found I was writing more and more about myself. I mean, as much as you research new backgrounds or people, you still wind up writing about yourself in a novel. You have no choice. (p. 187)

[The Prize] is the novel that has the most of me in it. The protagonist is an author, Andrew Craig, and the great part of the inner Craig reflects the inner Irving Wallace, as well as many of the external facts about Craig which are drawn from my own history. In short, I'm saying an author can't help but be a character in all of his books. The question is one of degree…. (p. 189)

My earliest books were nonfiction. But eventually I found this too restricting. The novel gave me a chance for more scope and variety. All of my novels, except my very first one, The Sins of Philip Fleming, and … [The Fan Club] have involved a good deal of research.

The Sins of Philip Fleming had no factual documentation and included no designed research whatsoever. The story, not the idea, simply was born out of my head, spontaneously, from what I'd heard from other men. On this knowledge I superimposed my own experiences, feelings, and above all, my creative imaginings. From The Chapman Report to The Word, but much more in the latter than the former, I had wholly invented and imagined characters and situations, but purposely set out to acquire factual information that seemed to belong in the narrative background and in dialogue. (p. 196)

This interspersing of fact with fiction gives most readers the feeling of absolute authenticity. I've had endless letters on The Word asking me if The Gospel According to James, which I had invented, really had been dug up by archeologists, translated, and where copies might be purchased. Well, I suppose it seems real because I created the text partially out of my imagination and partially out of long neglected very real gospels that were passed over when the New Testament was assembled and sanctified. Further, while creating my gospel, I drew upon the best research, archeological discoveries, theories and speculations of the finest Biblical scholars. This gave my fiction an added underpinning of realism. (p. 197)

The reader has too much to cope with in daily life to spend spare time studying, learning. The reader wants to relax or escape. So the reader might buy a novel of mine and hopefully become absorbed. In its pages he escapes, relaxes—but at the same time receives an almost subliminal input of off-beat, inside factual information. Education sugarcoated. Learning painlessly….

There have always been documentary novels. But I've been credited with—or blamed for—starting the whole cycle again. (p. 199)

[My readers] are as curious about the world and its inhabitants as I am…. [They] want to know a truth that is truer than reality through fiction, but want that perceived truth supported by clearly factual evidence drawn from life and its histories around us…. [There] can no longer be unadulterated fiction in the sense the purists would have it. The world is crowding us too much, flowing vats of information and experience into us at great speed. There are few earthly mysteries or wonders from afar. Unadulterated fiction can no longer compete with actuality. So fiction must absorb actuality, and then it must make an effort to exceed it to arrest and hold the weary through instinctive or carefully devised storytelling. (p. 201)

Perhaps the protagonists faintly resemble each other—but that is because each one, in part, reflects some part of my own character that is hidden…. [In] The Fan Club, there is no surrogate character representing me—there is no hero—there is only a heroine. And there is no research. I wanted to experiment, attempt a novel drawn entirely from my imagination, observation, experience, feelings—drawn out of my experience of years in this community—in Holly-wood, in Los Angeles. In The Fan Club, I'm not dealing so much with my psyche as I am with my perceptions of persons I've been involved with or whose lives I've brushed against …, whose frustrations and yearnings have fascinated me. (p. 203)

[One] of the two things I'm interested in is people, yes—which translates into creating characters when writing. But the other thing I'm interested in … is ideas. I'm interested in the novel of ideas, the book that grows out of an unusual approach or notion, the book about something. (p. 206)

I like to have characters that I—and through me the reader—can identify with. Certainly, for the reader, a familiar character, one whose life resembles his life or the lives of others he knows, can be reassuring. You believe in a character who reacts to certain things the way you do, and it makes you feel better to read about a fictional character who secretly has your sexual hangups or perversions or who has your enthusiasms or doubts. The reader is very interested in such characters, and feels at home with them. And I attempt to create such characters because I feel at home with them.

There is one more point to be made about the value of familiar characters…. [The] reader may watch a small part of himself, or of someone close to him, perform—and know how it will come out, as he will seldom know how it will come out in real life.

On the other hand, I suspect most readers also like to read about characters they can't identify with, yet characters about whom they are very curious to know more.

You may choose to call such characters unique, but they are actually characters who are larger than life—certainly larger and far removed from the average person's life—the kind of characters the average person may read or hear about but will never come to meet or know intimately. (pp. 209-210)

[A] novel will be better and will last longer if it develops out of character. An idea can date, be wiped out fast by changing times and mores. But a book growing out of a memorable character—be it Robinson Crusoe or Emma Bovary or Sherlock Holmes—will be timeless and survive all change. (p. 214)

[Some] readers might avoid a novel about racism written by a black because they'd feel they were buying propaganda for the blacks, from a black. Those same readers, who know me as a storyteller with no single axe to grind, would more likely buy my novel on blacks [The Man] because they don't feel I'll be lecturing or propagandizing them. They know me, from the past, as a writer of suspense and entertainment, and they'll hope for more of the same, and indeed they'll get what they bargained for. But they'll get more. They'll get [a message, as well]….

[My] mail from readers has been incredible—white readers admitting they'd been intolerant or bigoted but finding themselves caught up in The Man, well, it worked profound changes in their racial attitudes. That's been the most important thing of all to me, in terms of that novel and some of the others. The fact that what I've written has not only entertained people, but has actually changed them, educated them, made them better human beings by my standards. (p. 217)

I think writing for movies can be useful for most novelists. A remark like that is literary heresy, or at least it used to be. Years ago, the literati regarded movies as canned, contrived, glossy junk, the opposite of pure creativity…. Movies are no longer an anathema to the literati. With the death of the big studios, after television, movies became more freewheeling, creative, a burgeoning art form. So I guess it is less heretical for me, as a novelist, to say now that novelists have something to gain from movies other than money.

I'll tell you what a stint as a screenwriter can do for a novelist. For one thing, in working on screenplays, you learn to write a scene, to dramatize a confrontation, a conflict, or even a romantic meeting. You learn you can't have it happen off-stage, or condense it in exposition, or dust it off in past tense. (pp. 280-81)

Readers of my books often castigate me, in the mail, for allowing my stories to be changed in the film versions. They can't understand why I don't go along with the book, write the screenplay, and at least to see that the film is faithful to the book. They feel the movie is an extension of the book. I always write and tell them that it isn't, that the book is a separate thing, and my full and final statement. It would be too difficult for me to take materials I've lived with so many years in one medium, and attempt to condense and adapt them to another medium. Further, if I went along with each film, it would cost me, through loss of time, another book, and yet another. I prefer to stand on my book. The book represents me. The film is a different matter. I want the film to be good, of course, but if it is disappointing, it has nothing to do with me. The book is me. The film is them. (p. 327)

Irving Wallace, "Irving Wallace Speaking," in Irving Wallace: A Writer's Profile by John Leverence (copyright © 1974 by The Popular Press), Popular Press, 1974, pp. 183-360.