He was executive producer and head writer of CYBILL when it won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series and held the same positions on INSTANT MOM and THE JEFF FOXWORTHY SHOW.

Howard wrote and directed the feature film THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY LEFAY, starring Tim Allen, Elisha Cuthbert, Andie MacDowell, and Jenna Elfman.  Other feature credits include MR. 3000 and SHREK THE THIRD.

His play DIVA premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival and La Jolla Playhouse and was subsequently published by Samuel French and performed around the country.

He is the author of three satirical crime novels, LAST LOOKS, BELOW THE LINE and now PAY OR PLAY, all featuring tortured, eco-maniacal private eye Charlie Waldo.  

The first two were nominated for Shamus awards by the Private Eye Writers of America.

Norm: How did you get started in writing? What keeps you going? 

Howard: I think of myself as starting in high school. We had a 10-watt FM radio station, and by senior year I had worked my way up to program director.

It was the best toy a 17-year-old ever had. I gave myself a time slot for a monthly one-hour comedy show and wrote all the sketches, goofing on the school, the town, the radio station itself.

Then that summer before college I worked as a radio counselor at a camp for the arts, and a friend who was a little older and taught creative writing there suggested I try writing a play, and I was hooked.

I kept writing plays through college and beyond, one of which led to my first TV job, then ten years in TV, then ten in movies, then another ten doing a little of each plus theater and my first novel, and now I mostly write books but keep a finger in Hollywood.

I wrote the screen version of my first novel, which will be out after the first of the year, and I’m talking to some people about a new TV project. So maybe a finger and a thumb.  

What keeps me going is a trickier question. At this point in my life, to put a solid year into writing a crime novel, I need to have a story I’m truly hungry to tell.

Fortunately, I’ve got one right now, a fourth Waldo that I’m excited about.

Norm: How did your experience in film and television inform the novel-writing process?

Howard: I think about this a lot. It’s everything, really.

For starters, I didn’t come into crime fiction like most authors do, aspiring to write a book like Michael Connelly’s or Carl Hiaasen’s or James Lee Burke’s, or whomever.

I came up with LAST LOOKS (my first novel) as a movie first, and actually wrote it as a movie first, then did the reverse adaptation much later.

The result was a book – and eventually a series – that isn’t quite like anything else in the category, I don’t think, in that it aspires to both the weight of the straight mysteries and the humor of the lighter crime comedies, plus there’s a satirical side that lets me have at whatever is pissing me off.

In terms of process, I outline each book like it’s an overstuffed movie, basically the same contours.  And I work that outline for months and months, generally about half a year before the chapter writing begins.

And then I do draft after draft – three drafts of each chapter before moving on to the next, and then at least another half dozen drafts of the whole thing before it’s published.

Those are screenwriter habits; screenwriting is all rewriting. It’s all in service of making each chapter, each page, each sentence as entertaining as I possibly can make it.

That tenacity is the best thing I learned as a head writer of an A+ TV writing staff, where professional pride took over and we just didn’t go home until we got it as good as we could make it.

I’ve never written a book with a contract and a deadline, mostly because I’m willing to trade the security for the freedom to rewrite and rewrite until I feel I’ve gotten it where it needs to be.

Norm: What did you find most useful in learning to write? What was least useful or most destructive? 

Howard: Well, that: rewriting. As a baby writer, I thought it was all about what happened at the keyboard with a blank page in front of you. It’s not. It’s about the magic when the red pen starts moving.

The most destructive thing is, unfortunately, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living as a writer, and that’s listening to the marketplace, or the gatekeepers to the marketplace.

You have to do that, but you also have to fight the belief that pleasing them is the same thing as becoming the best writer you can be. 

Finding that balance between professional viability and your own true north is the fundamental paradox of most working writers’ lives.

Norm: How many times in your career have you experienced rejection? How did they shape you?

Howard: Rejection is the ongoing baseline constant for any Hollywood screenwriter. Even the hottest writers have directors or actors passing on their work all the time.

You’d like to think your best work is what cuts through that somehow and makes it to the screen, and maybe it works out that way for some lucky few, but my experience has been the opposite.

I’d happily stand on Mystery Dance, Law Man, The Handyman. You never heard of those scripts, of course, because none of them got made. Two of them I never even got paid for. 

I’ll tell you how thirty years of disappointment shaped me: it’s made me grateful for this surprising twist my career’s taken.

Pay or Play was the best writing I had in me for the year or so that I worked on it, and now it’s out in the world, exactly as I intended it, available to anyone who’s interested in reading it.

I understand now that that’s a gift. I wouldn’t have appreciated that when I was 29.

Norm: Why have you been drawn to writing satirical crime novels?

Howard: Novels for all the reasons I’ve just mentioned, crime because mystery is inherently propulsive, and satirical because I need somewhere healthy to put the anger. 

Norm: Are there aesthetic advantages and disadvantages peculiar to satirical crime novels? Does it have a particular form? 

Howard: Remember, this was the first prose fiction I’d written as an adult, and I hadn’t come up as a voluminous reader of the genre, so I had to approach it as kind of an outsider and figure it out.

I devised some hard formatting guidelines for myself: all the Waldo books are exactly thirty chapters and come in at seventy to seventy-five thousand words.

Other crime authors seem to think this is odd, if it comes up in conversation, but I find having those parameters makes the task clear, without compromising creativity.

That probably comes from my network TV background, where I’d be responsible for filling up, say, twenty-two minutes and fifteen seconds, not a second more or less, so the job was to do exactly that as well as I could.

Norm: Do you think about your reading public when you write? Do you imagine a specific reader when you write your satirical crime novels?

Howard: I read a great answer to a similar question years ago, from Jules Feiffer, who said that he came to realize he had about a dozen friends who’d really understood his work over the years, and he found himself writing for them.

That’s about right. With these Waldo books, I find myself thinking about the very smartest people I know and try to write the book they’d want to read for fun.

Norm: What did you enjoy most about writing Pay or Play?

Howard:  Finishing, man. That’s always the answer.

Norm: Was there anything you found particularly challenging in writing Pay or Play? 

Howard:  Well, I sweated over this one the most. Even more drafts than the others. I don’t know whether it’s because there was more stop and start to it, since I was simultaneously working on the Last Looks movie production, or whether I’d just grown a little more aware of my craft, which made me less satisfied.

But there was a moment when I was finally finished on the movie set, and had written ¾ of the book, and I printed it all out to re-read it on the long plane trip back to California, hoping it would give me the momentum to drive to the end… and I just hated the whole thing. It was a miserable flight.

After I got home, I tore into it again, started at the top and did another three or four hard, sharpening drafts of every single chapter. I think it paid off because people really seem to be enjoying this book.

Norm: How did you create the characters Charlie Waldo and Lorena Nascimento?

Howard: I originally thought of them as a TV show, a romantic detective comedy.

I was interested in a private eye who lived as a minimalist out of self-punishment for a case from his past that went horribly wrong, and then I gave him a girlfriend-slash-partner who’d be the biggest challenge for him, a shameless materialist.

Norm: Did you know the end of your story at the beginning?

Howard: There’s not really a “beginning.” I poke around and outline for half a year before I type the title page of the actual manuscript. You pretty much have to, with such intricately plotted books.

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and Pay or Play?

Howard:  MY WEBSITE has lots of links and information about the books and other work I’ve done over my career. I’m on Instagram at @HowardMichaelGould, and Twitter and Facebook at @HowardMGould.

Norm: What is next for Howard Michael Gould?

Howard: The Last Looks movie is coming out early in 2022. Charlie Hunnam plays Waldo, and Mel Gibson plays Alastair Pinch, a big Hollywood star who’s a violent alcoholic and who may or may not have killed his wife during a blackout drunk, and Waldo gets hired to figure that out.

They’re both terrific in the movie, and the director Tim Kirkby did a great job. The release got delayed by the pandemic, but I’m excited that people are finally going to get to see it.

Norm: As this interview comes to an end, what would you like to say to writers who are reading this interview and wondering if they can keep creating, if they are good enough, if their voices and visions matter enough to share? 

Howard: I have a young writer friend who finished a poem and said to me how grateful she felt to have written it.

At first that struck me as a curious emotion, what a very small thing it was to be grateful for, and all her own doing, of course… but slowly it dawned on me that holding onto that thought really is the key. 

Norm: Thanks again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.

Howard: Thank you, Norm.

Follow Here To Read Norm's Review of Pay or Play