An Epiphany: A Guest Post by David Baldacci
Walter Nash lived an ordinary life until the FBI showed up at his father’s funeral. David Baldacci delivers an action-packed, razor-sharp race for the truth. Read on for an exclusive essay from David Baldacci on writing Nash Falls.
Hardcover
$16.00
$32.00
Nash Falls
Nash Falls
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$16.00
$32.00
When Walter Nash is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network his life is turned completely upside down in this thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci.
When Walter Nash is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network his life is turned completely upside down in this thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci.
Walter Nash came to me one day, nearly fully fleshed out. I had his name, his background and his potential pretty much in an epiphany that I can’t fully explain. It just happens when all synapses are firing and you’re drawing on numerous sources of inspiration. Sometimes it feels effortless, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that often appears to be intuitive. Whatever the case, it’s wonderful when it happens.
Nash could be any one of us, an everyman just minding his own business. He works hard, provides for his family, and is a nice guy who cried when his dog died. And then life throws him not a mere curveball, but a cyclone of all cyclones, that he has to somehow survive.
I always have goals with my characters. With Amos Decker, my “Memory Man,” it was to see if a former football player who suffered a traumatic brain injury granting him perfect recall, while simultaneously subtracting every bit of who he used to be, could not just survive but thrive.
With Nash I wanted to take a man who’d never fired a gun in anger, never lifted a weight, never harmed anyone, never broke any rules, and see if I could transform him, plausibly, into a man who did all of those things. It’s not like he had a choice, because I really gave the man no good options. But when a person loses everything, they’re capable of anything. And during the course of the story Nash does indeed lose everything he ever cared about. And the abyss he falls into seems impossible to climb out of.
Yet he has to try.
Although Nash Falls is a fully fleshed-out story where you will come to know Walter Nash and his world in vivid detail, it became evident to me fairly quickly that this story was far bigger than I had initially thought. Thus, when Nash Falls ends, Hope Rises immediately begins. You can read the first three chapters of that novel at the end of the hardcover edition of Nash Falls.
And with another character in Hope Rises that you briefly meet in the first novel, I do something I’ve never done before. Whether I pull it off or not will be up to the individual reader.
But truly, I shocked myself with what I was attempting.
I hope you will agree that Walter Nash’s story is one that will stand the test of time and rank as one of my best.
Happy Reading.
David Baldacci
