Follett's car broke down & he didn't have the funds to fix it. An idea was born after a fellow journalist
published a thriller and his advance was the amount of money Follett needed.
Since Follett saw himself as a "so-so newspaper reporter," he was now interested to explore life as a novelist.
Early in his career, Follett's agent Al Zuckerman said, "You know, your only real problem as a writer is that
you're not a tortured soul." Follett sees himself as a cheerful being, who is not motivated to write out
of inner pain or difficulty.
In his first books he wrote under a pen name, wanting to distance himself from these earlier attempts. He
wrote as Simon Miles and Zachary Stone, to name a few of his pseudonyms. His earlier attempts were
published but failed to become best sellers, and he learned from them. But life was about to change, with his next attempted novel, a novel that was published in England as STORM ISLAND. You may recognize it
as THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE.
We'll take a look at this book, published in 1978 that won the Edgar Award, next time.