Hope Rises
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David Baldacci on Hope Rises
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
When a standalone wouldn’t stay standaloneBaldacci began the Walter Nash series with no plan for a sequel. By the time he was deep enough into the first book, Nash Falls, to see what it was actually doing, the architecture of a single volume had already broken down under the weight of what he needed the Nash-Steers relationship to accomplish.
I had initially considered that this would be a standalone novel. As I got more into the story, it occurred to me that what I was going to do with the relationship between Nash and Steers and the latter’s arc would require a second novel. I suppose I could have done it in one novel, but I’m not sure readers would have enjoyed the doorstop book that would have been required to do the story justice.
The structural necessity of a second book coincided with a personal pull. The father-child questions threaded through Nash Falls weren’t finished with him, and he was candid that those questions don’t stay inside the fiction.
Family is the most dramatic, complicated thing we have. I raised two kids—now grown—and those relationships inevitably influence what I write. Fiction lets me explore questions I still ask myself: Did I do the right things? Was I there enough?
That restlessness had an obvious destination. Hope Rises was where those questions could be pushed harder, and he said so directly: in the sequel, he digs even deeper into those same dynamics.
How he wrote it
Fear as the engine, craft as the disciplineBefore Hope Rises could go anywhere, Baldacci had to make the decision that let it exist at all: give the Nash-Steers relationship a second book rather than force it into one. Every craft choice that followed sat on top of that structural call. Once the space existed, he moved into his standard working posture, which is one of deliberately manufactured discomfort.
I ask myself, ‘How can I scare myself? How can I take on something I haven’t done before?’
He is precise about why fear is functional rather than paralyzing. The discomfort isn’t an obstacle he works around; it is the condition he tries to recreate with each book.
I write best when I’m afraid I can’t do it, because that’s what lifts your game.
On the practical question of whether Nash would ever become a series, he had long held a position rooted in the same anti-planning instinct: decide nothing in advance, let the story’s own pressure tell you what it needs.
I think you have to be flexible. I don’t think you should go in with any preconceived notion that it’s going to be a series or not a series. Let the story flow, and then see what you feel like as you get towards the end.
The Nash books are the principle in action. The sequel wasn’t designed before Nash Falls was written; it became necessary as Baldacci followed what the story was still asking for.
He keeps no fixed daily word targets and no set hours. His rhythm runs until the creative resource is spent, then he steps away, and he frames the whole enterprise as one he expects never to finish learning.
Writing is a craft, and you’re always a lifelong apprentice. You’re never going to master it, so your job is to, with each work, try to get a little bit better.
The personal thread
What he stripped from one man to ask about himselfThe emotional architecture of the Walter Nash series began with a specific act of authorial severity. When Baldacci set up the first book, he gave Nash nothing to fall back on, which meant the sequel would have to answer whether anything was left to recover.
When I wrote it, I wanted to strip everything from this man: career, family, reputation—and see if he could rebuild. It’s about resilience, about what’s left when everything’s gone.
That question of resilience, and of what a man owes the people he raised, runs through the series as something Baldacci is still working out for himself. He named the two father-child stories inside Hope Rises with unusual specificity, identifying what each is really about.
In the sequel, Hope Rises, I dig even deeper into those dynamics.
The dynamics he means are the ones he had already laid out: Walter and his father Ty’s story as a reckoning with missed chances, and Barton and Rhett’s as a study of what power and money do to the bonds between generations.
What he wants us to sit with
Resilience as a question, not a conclusionWhen Baldacci describes what the Walter Nash series is doing at its core, he keeps returning to family as the site where the most serious dramatic pressure lives. He is not talking about family as background texture; he is naming it as the sharpest thing he knows.
Family is the most dramatic, complicated thing we have.
The question Hope Rises is built to answer, whether a man can rebuild after losing everything, was not settled cleanly in the first book. Baldacci planted it there deliberately, knowing it needed a second novel to carry the weight. What he wants readers sitting with after Hope Rises is not resolution so much as honesty about the cost: how much does resilience actually require, and what does it leave behind.
About the only time I’m uncomfortable is when I’m between books. I don’t feel relief, I feel uncertainty. Where’s the next story going to come from? It’s an addiction — a good addiction.
That restlessness is the engine behind a body of work now thirty years old, and it is why Hope Rises exists at all: the story wasn’t finished, he knew it, and he kept going.