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ArticlesDoing it all is the best "Revenge": Tim Green loves the hectic lifeUSA Today, 2005 By Bob Minzesheimer 
Of all the jobs Tim Green has had—National Football League player, lawyer, TV commentator and novelist—he says the one that most stirs his passion is writing fiction.
Just don't ask him to do it full time. He says he did it for six months. "I know it's a writer's dream to just write. But it didn't work for me. I wasn't busy enough." "Busy" is an understatement. Green's 12th book and 10th thriller, Exact Revenge, will be published today. He's also host of A Current Affair, the nightly TV news-magazine, and a commentator for Fox Sports and National Public Radio. And yes, he still practices law, but he says, "I've had to cut back on that a bit." He's also the only author on People magazine's list of "The 50 Most Beautiful People," of which he has little to say beyond "That's nice." Green, 41, whose athletic career ended in 1994 after eight seasons with the Atlanta Falcons, has written two non-fiction books: The Dark Side of the Game, about drugs and other problems in football, and A Man and His Mother, about his search for his biological mother who gave him up for adoption. But it's writing fiction that gives Green "an escape from my hectic life. I know some writers describe it as painful labor. I've never felt that way." "It's not easy, but it's pleasurable work. You feel like you're building something, something that lasts." Exact Revenge, which is about a promising young lawyer who is framed for a murder he didn't commit, is a modern version of Alexandre Dumas' classic The Count of Monte Cristo. Green says he discovered the book when he was 13. Green did research at Auburn state prison, not far from his home in upstate New York. Correctional officers served as his tour guides and suggested how a prisoner might "theoretically" escape, which in real life hasn't happened in more than 70 years. In his novel, the worst prisoner is left in the dark in solitary, without any light for 23 hours a day. At the real Auburn, "that's not supposed to happen," Green says, "but maybe someone just happens to forget to change the light bulb." As a child, Green read everyone from Charles Dickens to Stephen King and dreamed of becoming a writer. He knows that his thrillers, which have been praised more for plot than character development, will be seen by some as commercial fiction, not to be confused with literature. "My obligation is to entertain my readers," he says. "I want them to keep turning the pages. Just because something is commercial doesn't mean it can't be literary." Green's first novel, Ruffians, about a football player pressured into using steroids, took four years to write and was rejected by several publishers before it was released in 1993. Now, he's trying to write a novel a year and says he's not only more prolific but better. "I look back at my first book, and it seems clunky in spots. Some of the dialogue is stiff. I've worked at that." In an ideal world, Green says he'd write more like Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain) or Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses). "They tell great stories, but with a kind of poetry," he says. Green is most poetic when describing the natural beauty and rough winters of central New York, where he has lived most of his life and which he uses as a setting in his novels. He grew up in suburban Syracuse, majored in English at Syracuse University, attended Syracuse Law School and now lives on the shore of [one of the lakes] in the Finger Lakes region. Last year, Green was approached about hosting A Current Affair, a pioneer among TV's tabloid news-magazines. He says he warned the producers that he wasn't interested in celebrity gossip and "raunchy" stories. He says the producers assured him that the show was shifting to stories about "real people." He also told the producers he wouldn't move his family from [his hometown], although the show's studio is in Secaucus, N.J., about 250 miles away. They agreed to work around a commuting schedule that lets Green tape the 30-minute show every day at 3 p.m. and still see his wife and four children, ages 7 to 15, at breakfast or dinner. He flies to New Jersey on Monday morning, is home for dinner Tuesday, returns to New Jersey Wednesday, is home for dinner Thursday, and flies round-trip Friday. When the weather is too bad for flying, Green's brother drives him. All that commuting time is not wasted: Green is using it to write his next thriller.  |
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