Alex DeMille on carrying on his father, the late Nelson DeMille’s legacy
My father and I had an odd workflow. I’d write the first draft of a few chapters on my
computer and email the Word file to his assistant. She, in turn, would print the pages and
put them on my father’s desk, where he would then pick up his #1 pencil—the same
implement he had used to write his books since the 1970s—and make his edits. Then his
assistant would scan the marked-up pages and email them back to me. It was an awkward
marriage of analog and digital, but for us, it worked, and it has left me with a wonderful
archive of our collaboration across three novels. Every word replacement and inserted
paragraph break. Every smiley face next to a joke he liked—and every strikethrough of an
attempt at humor that didn’t quite land. Every ‘X’ across a paragraph containing selfindulgent
tangents, and every hastily scrawled passage he would insert into the tangents
he liked and wanted to run with. Every question mark next to one of his own edits he was
unsure of, every exclamation point next to a plot turn he didn’t see coming. If our alpha
male protagonist thought or did something not quite alpha male enough, he might write
“WEAK” in the margins (that one always hurt.) On a rare occasion, he’d add in a joke so
vulgar that he’d write “sorry” in parentheses next to it—as in, sorry your old man just
grossed you out, but I had to get this down for my own amusement, and you shouldn’t
include it. It was an evolving dialogue of printer ink and graphite across thousands of
manuscript pages—the most rigorous and granularly detailed master class a writer could
