About the Author

Anthony’s background as a trained stage actor with over 2,000 performances under his Actors Equity membership provides the primary basis for his critically acclaimed ability to empathize with a wide cross-section of personalities. [See his reviews at Amazon.com.]  His screenwriting experience is also of great use in telling narrative stories that are visually compelling, whether for the “screen” of a reader’s imagination or the screen of a theatre or at home.

He was selected for the prestigious American Film Institute fellowship in Screenwriting, and received his MFA in writing there in 1990 after winning AFI’s Paramount Studios Fellowship Award for his script, The Frog's Legacy. He was then selected out of 2,000 entrants for the Walt Disney Studios Screenwriting Fellowship, and spent a year writing for the Touchstone Pictures division.
 
His first nonfiction book, A Checklist for Murder, was acquired in auction by Dell Books as a mass market paperback and turned in solid sales.  Anthony adapted his book as a two-hour television movie script and sold it to NBC Studios for a movie of the week.  For the next several years, he worked as a freelance script doctor and story editor.

 Anthony was hired by the Discovery Channel to write a two-hour documentary entitled Deadly Spree, based on a true story.  His true crime writing was also featured on a one-hour episode of The Prosecutors for Court TV.

Anthony served as a national Judge for the Illinois Arts Council, writing individual evaluations for over 100 screenplays for their 2003 Writing Awards.  His screenplay, Tesla’s Best Secret, was a finalist in the Alfred Sloan Fellowship for Sundance.

In addition to his own writing, Anthony has served as a freelance editor for books and book proposals that have recently sold to Hay House, Vanderwyck & Burnham, Rodale Press, and Lyons Press.  He has also written book proposals for other authors who have gone on to garner publication contracts with Rodale Press, Random House, and St. Martin’s Press.

His nonfiction book Tiny Dancer St. Martin’s Press was selected by Reader’s Digest as their Editor’s Choice for August, 2005 -- their 1,000th Commemorative Issue.  The book has been internationally acclaimed, and as of 2007, received Best Seller status in Italy.  Kansas City Star named Tiny Dancer “one of the 100 Most Noteworthy Books of 2005.” 

Anthony also edited the first two manuscripts for a new series of humorous books written by gay and straight couples, called E-Musings, which have sold to Marabout for French translation.

Anthony’s first two novels of historical fiction are from Mortalis Books at Ballantine/Random House.  The first, The Last Nightingale, was released in June of 2007, with the second, The Hidden Man, published in June of 2008.

An experienced public speaker, Anthony frequently gives seminars on crime writing (brief syllabus available).  He is a featured speaker on writing for writers conferences and clubs.

Print Media Credits
Reader’s Digest Magazine
Stars and Stripes Newspaper [military paper sent to all U.S. combat forces]
Events Quarterly Magazine

Books written by Anthony Flacco
A Checklist For Murder Dell Books
Tiny Dancer St. Martin’s Press
The Last Nightingale Mortalis, Ballantine Books(June, 2007)
The Hidden Man Mortalis, Ballantine  Books (June, 2008)

Documentaries
Deadly Spree (2-hour) The Discovery Channel
The Prosecutors -- Court TV
L.A. Forensics – Court TV

Recent Editorial Credits -- Published Books
The Mommy Chronicles, Hay House
Front of the Class, VanderWyck and Burnham
But You Knew That Already, Rodale Press
The Postcard Killer, Avalon Books
You’ve Got Meal and He Typed, She Typed, Marabout Publishers, France
Bar Flower, St. Martin’s Press
Truth At Last… The True Story of the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Lyons Press
At Wits End, HCI Books

Asked about his philosophy of work, Anthony wrote:
With my screenwriting background, I make it a point to write in strongly visual terms. I do this to aid in establishing the most important part of any storytelling endeavor: getting into the heart and mind of the central characters.  Even the most diverse personalities will share various common traits, and those traits can be the keys for creating strong characters on the page, as well as for placing powerful images into the imaginations of the readers. 

The Who, What, When, and Where of a story are covered in the journalistic approach.  But I believe that it is always in the Why of any person’s behavior that we uncover a mother lode of fascinating twists and turns in human personality.  Popular culture bombards us with reasons to become quick and harsh judges of others, of ourselves, but it is so much more satisfying to understand.

Working in fiction or nonfiction books and book proposals, I focus on stories that make genuine and powerful statements about the positive side of human nature.  Today’s trend in much public writing tends toward nihilistic reportage posed as enlightened realism, but I believe that it is more often the product of cable news mentalities who are writing for ratings on a 24-hour news cycle.  There is a more deeply considered reality that is just as valid. Reaching it often means delving long and hard into very dark places, in order to understand the story’s conflict.  But I am only interested in pursuing stories with an honest and compelling expression of hope for the reader – not a manufactured sentiment, but an imparted sense of fulfillment at the end.  Literary expressions of despair are an easy way for a writer to affect a worldly appearance, but I see such points of view as failures of insight generated by writers with unbalanced life experience.

A Talk with Anthony Flacco

Interview by Mark Combes, Contributing Editor to ITW newsletter, who is an avid sailor and Scuba diver and travels extensively in the Caribbean  pursuing his passions. He works in book publishing and RUNNING WRECKED is his first novel.

1.  Alzheimer's as an obstacle – sounds brilliant.  But is it also confusing for you to write?  What is real – what is imagined – for your characters?

The line of reality gets danced across from time to time throughout the story, in order to reflect the confusion of one who suffers from this illness, particularly in the early stages when the ability to reflect upon one’s situation is still strong and an afflicted person still mounts a mighty struggle to remember and to make sense of things.  Duncan’s plight represents what the great mythologist Joseph Campbell called the “inmost cave.” The inmost cave is any character’s absolute pit of despair. It may be a physical place of doom, but it may also be psychological in nature. Crushing despair, for example, is an inmost cave for the sufferer. And for me, the salient aspect of the inmost cave, and the way that you can determine whether or not you or a story character has entered their inmost cave, is to look for the loss of inner ability. In the inmost cave, you are not only stripped of your alliances, perhaps faced with rejection and ridicule, but you are also afflicted with the loss of your internal abilities. Confidence goes, memory falters, mood plummets, suspicions buzz through your brain like mosquitoes.  In the inmost cave, I believe that there are only two possible outcomes: (A) death, or (B) spontaneous evolution. I see the inmost cave as the engine of evolution, whether for an individual or an entire civilization. Duncan is a character pushed to his limits, whose prodigious abilities are failing him in an internal and irreversible cave-in. Duncan’s particular cave is one from which he will not emerge, this time.  But at the end he makes a very bold choice, the result of his own evolution, and employs his death as a force of healing.

2.  You are a screenwriter as well.  How does that skill translate to writing novels?  Two very different vehicles – screenplays and novels.

Filmic writing differs from narrative writing mostly in terms of how visual image alters storytelling. Although the fundamental elements of storytelling are the same in any medium of communication, a narrative writer is always asking how to best describe a moment to tell  the story; a screenwriter comes from another angle and asks how to best show the story. In other words, the screenwriter always has to be telling us what the audience is seeing at one moment, then the next moment, then the one after that. It may be a close up shot of a tiny object that is shown in a level of detail the human eye cannot ordinarily perceive, or a wide angle pan of the galaxies and stars in our sector of the physical universe. Either way, the eyes have it.

You still need a compelling story and charismatic characters, but a screenplay can communicate the same amount of story information that would require pages and pages of narrative in a book, simply by turning the camera upon anything that it visually striking. Consider the way that thirty seconds of shots showing a tornado hitting a house, tearing it apart, and making everyone inside disappear can inform an audience to a depth that will require far more time for reading a book’s description of the same thing.

But let’s talk about descriptions. Because I have to tell you that as a reader, I have always been in it for the descriptions. Sure, I love a good story, a real page turner, but a good story is a good story in any form. The narrative author does it with word play.

I was still a boy when John Steinbeck shook me out of my stupor of childhood – first with Cannery Row and then with Tortilla Flat and so many of his books – and he did it with description. By coincidence, I had been to “cannery row” in Monterey, California shortly before stumbling across the book, so I thought that I knew what the place was like. Then he reintroduced me to it. Steinbeck transformed a narrow shoreline avenue of factory buildings covered in rusted sheet metal and stinking of dead marine animals into a magical place of heightened reality. In both Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat he actually made it seem believable that a bunch of hobos and stumblebums living in the area chose to treat one another with courtly gallantry, to uphold a common code of decency, and even to regularly lapse into fake Elizabethan terminology with one another in noble but absurd attempts to sound Shakespearian. Steinbeck uses his descriptive narrative in such a way that all of this is not only acceptable, but in the dialogue, their failures at imitating the Bard make their consistently repeated attempts seem all the more engaging. 

Speaking of dialogue, it can run for longer patches in the narrative form, while if a film does that it begins to feel like a play, since the theater is a medium utterly dependent upon dialogue. The need for powerful and evocative dialogue is strong in all three forms.

3.  Why historical?  Are you a history buff?  You could have set your story in any time period, why 1915 San Francisco? 

The time setting of The Hidden Man is controlled by its predecessor, which was set against the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Moving the next book to 1915 allowed me to advance the ages of Shane and Vignette, who are twelve and nine, respectively, in The Last Nightingale, to that of a twenty-one year old young man and a young woman of nineteen for The Hidden Man. This gave each of them substantially more ability to affect the story with their actions. The nine year leap ahead in time also placed the setting at the beginning of San Francisco’s glorious coming-out party after the decimation of the 1906 quake. The Panama-Pacific International Exhibition made for a grand story backdrop.

As for being a historical writer, I just love working with good story material and am quite happy to go wherever it leads, into the past or here in the present time.

4.  You’ve placed a young girl in your series – Vignette Nightingale.  You don’t see that very often.  Why a young girl? 

Thank you for asking about her, Mark. I love Vignette. She is my homage to Huck Finn. As a young girl, as an orphan with absolutely no backup behind her, as a sexually abused child, and as a runaway, she is a symbol of ultimate helplessness against the extremely rough and dangerous backdrop of the story’s setting.  I love her firecracker-y, take no prisoners personality. I love the fact that she will lie, cheat or steal with absolutely no compunction from a stranger, but is instantly willing to defend someone she loves, even at risk to her life. She is my statement of hope that the essential goodness of the human spirit can find a way to persevere and triumph even in the most outrageous of circumstances.

Readers of my nonfiction books Tiny Dancer and A Checklist For Murder know that I love to work with the character of a young female, because of the fascinating ways that many of them use to gain some measure of control during a time of life when they have so little.

5.  You’ve got this triumvirate working in your series.  Again, not common.  How do you balance the three page-time-wise?

Well, I’m one of those writers who really likes to use outlines. I know that many writers avoid them like the plague, but I wonder if there isn’t an element of revulsion left over from college term papers at work there. Because I find that the story balance that you mention is the main benefit to that particular work method. Of course, because we have control of our story, the outline is not rigid at all. Anytime that you make a creative discovery that requires changing it, you change it. There is never an aspect of being trapped into writing anything or to writing it in some certain way. What you have in the type of outline I describe is a road map. You can take all of the detours that you want, and trust the map to keep you from wandering so far off course that the story structure falls apart. Or that the story ceases to have a coherent structure at all.

As for this particular trio, I love all three of them. My heart goes out to them. And now that Shane and Vignette are grown, I wish I could have all three of them over for pasta and soup and a nice dry red wine. I would give Blackburn the night off and do the cooking and the cleanup, and start the evening by taking him aside and assuring him that he’s ten times better off without Miss Freshell in his life. Over dinner, I would see if I could get Shane to reveal whether or not he will ever let himself fall for a woman. And after dessert I would try to get another glass of wine into Vignette in hopes that she might loosen up enough to teach me something about that weird “moving things around” thing that she does. 

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