Bestselling Author of Novel of Papal Intrigue Finds Timing Is the First Secret

May 17, 2005

Steve Berry photo credit: Joel Silverman

Some young people have visions that change their lives -- like the trio of youngsters in Fatima, Portugal, who were visited by the Virgin Mary in 1917.

Others -- like Steve Berry, author of The Third Secret (Ballantine), a June Book Sense Pick thriller about present-day Vatican figures involved in intrigue surrounding those youngsters' Fatima revelations -- hear voices.

"A little voice in the back of my head just said, 'Keep writing, keep writing, keep writing,'" Berry recalled the other day by telephone from his office in Georgia.

The voice first began prompting him when he was in his twenties, said Berry, who has been a practicing attorney for two and a half decades. "I can remember that little voice being in my head for many years, and I ignored it," he explained. "I just ignored it. Finally there came a point when I said, 'Damn, I can't ignore you anymore! I have got to do it.' ... And that little voice, by the way, doesn't say, 'Write a bestseller, be on the New York Times bestseller list, make a million dollars'; it doesn't say that. It just says, 'Write.' It just says, 'Write. Write. Just write.'"

Long before he heeded that command, Berry was a voracious reader. Born in Atlanta, son of a still-active salesman and a housewife, Berry devoured the Hardy Boys chronicles as a youngster, then went on to other mystery and suspense tales. His first "adult" novel, read at 14 or 15, was James Michener's Hawaii. As he got older, the international-thriller became his preferred sort of book. "I loved Ludlum and Cussler and Follett -- and David Morrell, who remains my favorite thriller writer of all," said Berry. "And, of course, I read a lot of history, too. So it seemed inevitable that I'd merge those two at some point."

But in the meantime, Berry went to college and then to law school, and then began the quarter-century law practice, which continues to this day.

In the summer of 1990, when he was 35 years old, Berry finally gave in to that voice that had nagged him for so long.

"I wrote a novel," he said, "and it took me a year to do it. It was horrible -- terrible! But I did it; I wrote it."

Then Berry wrote another. And another. "Those first three books," he said, "will never see the light of day. They were just horrible books that were learning experiences."

Having learned from them, Berry persisted. Writing in the morning before office-hours, attending a weekly evening writers' group for six years, he produced five more novel-length manuscripts. "And I quit several times, during the process," he remembered. "But that little voice, after about three days, said, 'What are you doing? Get back to work.' And I always listened to it."

Berry soon learned not to follow the old adage, "Write what you know."

"That's not good advice," he said. "'Write what you love' -- that's what you need to do. If what you love and what you know are the same thing, then you're in great shape; but for me, it didn't work that way. I knew the law, but I didn't want to write about it. You see, I live a legal thriller every day; I do domestic work, criminal work, trial work all the time, and I did not want to sit down for a year and write about that.

"I've always loved the international flavor of books where you're over in foreign places, in unique locations, dealing with ancient secrets and conspiracies: things from the past that have a direct bearing on today ... David Morrell was writing those kinds of books in the '80s, and I just loved those things. And that's what I wanted to write.

"Finally, on the fourth book, I said, 'That's what I'm going to write about.' ... I started doing what I loved."

Berry refers to the five manuscripts he produced after his first three learning-experiences as "books four, five, six, seven, and eight." Each was submitted to New York publishing houses. All were rejected a total of 85 times.

"There was nothing fun about it," the author said of the several years when he failed to sell any of his works. "It's a miserable experience when you're constantly being rejected and constantly being told 'no' and constantly being told, 'Do it this way; do it that way.' ... It's very much like being in a maze that's revolving: You're not only walking around not knowing where you're going, but everything's churning and you're getting dizzy at the same time. There's nothing really pleasant about it, but you just have to hunker down, and keep yourself focused, and keep plowing.... It's all about timing, really: right time, right place, right story. And the trick is to hang in there long enough 'till the timing's right."

Berry was determined to succeed. "I made up my mind, he said. "Somebody's name was going to be on a book, and it might as well be mine."

The would-be novelist's main problem: he was writing a type of book no one was interested in printing.

"The international thriller died in the early '90s," Berry said. "By the late '90s, it was buried and cold in the grave. Editors were not buying those kinds of books. That was when the techno-thriller, the military thriller, the medical thriller were all big; the legal thriller was big then, too. Well ... I had talked to my agent many times, and I kept telling her that the international thriller was going to have to come back ... because: What were we going to write about? You know, the Cold War was over; if you were going to write about those kinds of stories, it had to come back. And I always felt like the kind of story I was writing, with that little bit of secret and that little bit of history and that little bit of conspiracy, would make a resurgence."

Finally, with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code in production and looking to do well, publishers were once more open to the sort of tales Berry loved to read and write. "I kind of started over again," he said.

He resubmitted his "book four," The Amber Room. It was bought and published by Ballantine and made the New York Times bestseller list. Ballantine then acquired Berry's "book five" -- The Romanov Prophecy -- and it too became a bestseller.

Now the same house has high hopes for Berry's "book six," The Third Secret.

"The story that you'll see in print," Berry said, "is 99.99 percent the book I wrote in 1999. I made a few changes to it afterwards, because the secret was released by [Pope] John Paul [II] in May of 2000, and I tweaked it a little bit after that. But other than that, it's basically the same story: My German Pope and everything I have there, was conceived in 1999. The book was rejected by 18 publishers; it sat in a drawer until 2004, and that's when it was sent in to Ballantine."

Good luck, great timing, being in the right place at the right time with the right story: credit what you will, Steve Berry's hard work and persistence -- his act of faith -- paid off; his inner voice was vindicated.

And with The Third Secret, he likes to think there may be even a little something extra at work, for a book that grew out of his lifelong fascination with Fatima (begun when, as a young altar-boy, he read a nonfiction paperback about those events).

After all, the protagonist of The Third Secret is named Michener, in honor of the author of one of Berry's still-favorite works of fiction. And The Third Secret is dedicated to Berry's late aunt Dolores Parrish (1930 - 1992): "She thought of me almost as her son, and I know she would have been just tickled to death over this book. I always knew it would be dedicated to my aunt."

Of the novelist who helped inspire him and the loving aunt who nurtured his spirit, Berry said, "From day one, they were there. I'm hoping maybe they're up there saying, 'Well, let's give him a little push, with this one.' You never know. Perhaps I am getting a little help.'" --Tom Nolan

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