re: #113 HoosierHoops

Great quote from the hunt for red october…I read that book like 6 times over the years.. Did you know That because a 120 pages of the book Jack Ryan wasn’t even mentioned that had to do a major rewrite of the screenplay?

According to Tom Clancy himself (in an interview with Martin Harry Greenberg in The Tom Clancy Companion) The Hunt For Red October didn’t originally start out intended to be a Jack Ryan novel. Clancy had already written Patriot Games (the novel that was in fact the first in the series) and had shelved Red Rabbit (the actual second novel) half-finished because he couldn’t decide where to take the story. Red October was essentially a follow-on thematically to Red Storm Rising (which Clancy co-wrote with Larry Bond), albeit set in a different “world” (one where there is no Sir John Hackett-style Third World War in Europe). His original intention was that Marko Ramius, Red October’s Captain, and Bart Mancuso, the CO of USS Dallas, were to be the heroes of the book. But after the first third, he realized he needed an intelligence officer to “put together” the clues that would lead Mancuso to take the risk that Ramius was not (as advertised by the Russians) a renegade getting ready to salvo his nukes.

And Ryan already existed, ready to take on the job.

Clancy used a phrase I’ve heard, and used myself. “The story was writing itself”. It happens more often than you might think in fiction writing.

And sometimes, the story, and characters, go off on tangents that the writer doesn’t see coming.

cheers

eon