Writers Chair - Fred Yager

What does a Navy journalist in Vietnam have in common with a corporate communications strategist for global brands? If you're Fred Yager, the answer is a lifetime of storytelling that spans war zones, Hollywood screening rooms, and the deep, silent forests of the mind. This week on In The Writer's Chair, host Lana McAra welcomes the award-winning writer and TV executive to discuss his multifaceted career and his latest leap into the "eco-thriller" genre.

Fred shares how a chance meeting with a Hollywood icon sparked a novel, the gritty reality of the "optioning" game in Los Angeles, and why he’s now rewriting his best screenplays into books.

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

• The Screenplay-to-Novel Pivot: Why Fred is digging into his Hollywood vault to turn unproduced scripts into "unputdownable" prose.
• The Seeds of The Asian Queen: How a real-life interview with actress Liv Ullmann and a blood-stained river boat in the Mekong Delta merged into a gripping historical novel.
• Writing Under Fire: Fred’s origins as a Navy journalist in the Vietnam War and how he learned to tell the truth when the military was accused of "smoke and mirrors."
• Psychology in Art: How a degree in psychology and NYU film training helped him "get into the mind of the killer" in collaborative works like Untimely Death.
• The "Wood-Wide Web": A deep dive into his latest book, Botanica, which explores how trees communicate through fungal networks to survive mass extinction.
• The Audio Revolution: Why Fred believes the growth of audiobooks is the best thing to happen to the modern attention span.

Instructive Insight: The "Wood-Wide Web"

In his novel Botanica, Fred relies on the fascinating science of mycorrhizal networks. This isn't just fiction; it's a real-world biological communication system.

• Communication: Large "Mother Trees" use this network to send excess sugar to smaller, shaded saplings.
• Defense: When a tree is attacked by insects, it can send chemical warning signals through the fungi to neighboring trees, allowing them to prep their immune responses.
• Mass Migration: As Fred discusses, these networks may play a role in how plant populations shift in response to environmental catastrophes.

About Fred Yager

Fred Yager is a veteran journalist (AP, CBS News), television executive, and screenwriter. He is the founder of the World News and Information Network and a prolific ghostwriter. Based in Tampa, Florida, Fred continues to explore the intersection of technology, nature, and human psychology through his fiction.

Connect with Fred:

• Books: Find Botanica, The Asian Queen, and Untimely Death on Amazon.
• Format Choice: Botanica is available in hardcover, softcover, e-book, and a high-fidelity audiobook narrated by the talented Smartwatch.

Connect with Lana McAra:

• Podcast: In The Writer's Chair
• Publisher: Vendela Publishing

Ready to hear what the trees are saying? Subscribe to hear more from writers who turn the world’s most complex issues into thrilling narratives!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In the Writer's Chair. Candid conversations about the writing life with Lana McCara and Vandela Publishing.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to In the Writer's Chair, where we pull up a chair to talk about writing craft, writing life, and what's possible for writers right now. I'm delighted today to welcome Fred Jaeger to the broadcast. Fred is an award-winning American writer, journalist, television executive, screenwriter, and communications strategist. He is the president and founder of the World News and Information Network, where he provides high-level strategic communications and narrative marketing solutions for global brands. Yeager began his career as a war correspondent in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, covering in-country Navy activity and producing stories for Armed Forces radio, television, and military publications. After his military service, he joined the Associated Press of New York, where he served for 13 years. After selling two screenplays, he left the AP and went to Los Angeles, where he spent the following year rewriting the scripts under development at MGM and Universal. And afterward, he returned to New York where he worked at CBS News and Fox Television. Fred earned a BA in psychology from City College of the City University in New York and a certificate in film from New York University. He currently resides in Tampa, Florida, and is married to writer and professor Dr. Jan Yeager. Welcome, Fred.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Well, thank you, Lena.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

I'm so curious. Did those two scripts get produced?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

No, but they got optioned many times, which is something that most is what usually happens to scripts in in Hollywood. They option thousands of them and they make a hundred. And I, you know, I still have I hold out hope that one day they will be made. It's uh not unheard of for studios to reach back deep into their vaults and take out scripts that they poured a lot of money into. And uh they did pour some money into both of these. And uh so we'll see. You know, I've written one of them into a novel, and I'm I'm gonna do the same thing with the other one, which is uh which I've been doing lately. My wife says you gotta rewrite all these screenplays you're written into novels because all you know you want people to read them.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Yes, yes, absolutely, and that is a job. That is a big job, turning a screenplay into a novel, or vice versa, whichever way you're gonna go. It's a totally different medium. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

It is. Yeah. It's much more freeing writing a novel.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Yes, yes. So um your book that you wrote that was based on a screenplay, what was the title of that?

SPEAKER_01 3:12

The Asian Queen.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

The Asian Queen.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

And it sort of you know reflects back to my time in Southeast Asia, obviously. Uh and the story stems from two things that actually happened. One was an interview I did with actress Leah Ballman while I was at the AP, and uh she had been a UN refugee volunteer who had visited a refugee camp in Tambode, Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand, where she was hearing all these horror stories about what was going on in Cambodia. This is long before anybody ever heard of the killing fields or Pol Pot or Cameroos. Um so I took that and just sort of wrote an article about it, sort of percolated in the back of my mind. And one day I'm sitting in a screening room waiting for a movie to start, and this idea pops into my head, and it sort of connected that story with a story I I covered when I was in Vietnam about river patrol boats in the Delta, and how one boat came back uh empty, full of blood, and apparently all the people who were in it had been killed. And I said, What if one person survived and uh and pretended to be dead? And that's what that's what Agent Queens about us. Uh one of the gunner on the PBR plays to be dead, plays dead, waits for the Viet Cong to go off, and takes the boat and goes away from the war, just drives it right out of Vietnam into Cambodia, into Thailand, and spends the rest of the war drinking his life away and having a grand old time on the boat in Thailand until he meets this UN refugee volunteer who hires him to take her into Cambodia to gather evidence on this new this holocaust that's going on that no one knows about.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Wow, what an interesting story. Do you um primarily write foreign, you know, and international um stories, or are some of your books set here in the U.S. as well?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Most of them are set in the U.S. This is the first uh historical novel I've ever written. This is a I'm not sure it's the first international. I think it's well, my most recent one goes international, Botanica. That that actually goes to Davos in Switzerland during the uh economic World Global Economic Conference. Um but most of my other books are set in the U.S.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Okay. Um so going back, yeah, I I got all curious when I was doing your intro there. Um so what got you started to be a writer? Did you always want to be a writer?

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Um I think I always had an active imagination. I I grew up in the northern tip of Appalachia in upstate New York in the small town called Queenman's Hollow. So there wasn't a lot to do there, you know. So I spent a lot of time in the woods making up, you know, stories and in my mind and you know. Um and when I got into high school, and when you had to write essays for, you know, I think it started in the 10th grade. I used to write these really weird, strange essays that would baffle my teachers and they wouldn't know what to make of them. Uh so I think it started there, um actually. And then when I got into the uh, I was drafted and I went into the Navy. Um and uh funny story about the Navy, um, they didn't they didn't know what to do with me, basically, because you take an aptitude test at the end of boot camp, and I was guaranteed a school, so they weren't going to send me to foreign language school. But in order to do that, I would have to extend my enlistment for two more years, which means instead of four, I'd have to stay in for six. And I wasn't really willing to do that. So I turned it down. And they thought I said, you you know, you don't just turn things down when you're it's not like you're in college. You can't just drop courses, you know. I said, Well, look, I'm not gonna extend my enlistment, so it's a moot point. So they sent me to another place that had another school that I would they thought I might be interested in was cryptography, code, you know, breaking. And I wasn't all that keen on that either. So uh one they this the head of the commander said, what is it you like to do, Fred? And I said, Well, I do like to write poetry. And they said, We don't have a call for poets in the Navy, but we do need writers. You think you'd like to be a writer? And um, so I took the test to become a writer, and I pay, I got rated as a Navy journalist. And then he said, you know, we've got we're just the Defense Department starting this new school where they're gonna send members of all the each branch of the military to teach them how to cover the war in Vietnam because we're not doing a really good job of it. And so how you know, let's see if we can get you in there. So I they did, and I applied for that, took it another, had to take another test, wait a more, you know, write some more essays and stuff. Got accepted and went to the Defense Information School for Journalism. And while I was there, I I took an audition for broadcasting. So when uh the a slot opened up later on in my Navy career, I went back and did another stinted the naval, um the the uh Defense Information School broadcasting, and then they sent me to Vietnam as a war correspondent with this small group of journalists and combat photographers called Detachment Charlie. And uh there's never been anything like it. There was none of the other services had anything like this. And it was an experiment, and uh it paid off because uh the press really treated the Navy well in Vietnam. They didn't like the Army too much, or a lot of the because I think they were feeling like they're being, you know, it was smoking mirrors with them, they weren't being told the truth. And we actually tried to tell them the truth. Um and that's where I kind of learned how to write, under fire, in the in Vietnam.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

Wow. That is so fascinating. Have you written any while you wrote The Asian Queen, was that and remind me, that was in Cambodia, Thailand?

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Well, it involved a Vietnam, but it takes place in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam because he has to take in there once they gather the evidence, they get trapped behind, you know, you can't get back into Thailand. So they have to go back through Cambodia, through T through Vietnam, and out through the Saigon Harbor area there in order to escape. So he has to kind of be retrace the steps that he took years earlier when he was leaving. He's one of one of 1,500 Americans still listed listed as missing in action in Vietnam.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

So you went you took the story to screenplay first.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

I didn't. I actually I I had her I wrote it originally for an actor named David Carradine, unfortunately, who's since left past, um, as a sort of comeback role for him. This is before Kill Bill when he was younger. Uh they wouldn't they wouldn't do it with him because he had he was having problems with the studio. You you know uh I won't get into that. Um but then uh a producer picked it up and he wanted to do it for this some young actor that he was liking at the time named David Keith, who uh uh was was uh just starting to you know rise up through the ranks, let's say. And he was Sissy SpaceX cousin. I know who Sissy SpaceX is. And he was a real good actor, and I thought he'd make a really good lead character. And so he optioned the script and we started working on it. And then can't then, while during the process of development, the Killing Fields comes out. And suddenly, nah, they don't want another movie about Cambodia. Yeah. So he says, Can you rewrite it to Central America? So I did. So now I have the sequel already written. You know, now I have another move, another movie, sort of similar setup, but it takes place in Nicaragua. And instead of the uh the uh Camarouge and uh you know being being the bad guys, it's uh it's the people trying to exterminate the mosquito Indians in uh in uh Nicaragua.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Very interesting. What why did you choose uh screenplay first? What what took you that direction?

SPEAKER_01 11:42

Um I I sort of think cinematically. I went to NYU film school, as you mentioned. Uh I got a degree in psychology, but uh, you know, I I was I really was bent on being a psychologist. I thought that's really what I wanted to do. Um but then when I got into graduate school, I I tended not to have the patience for the patience, you might say. Um and then I sort of thought, well, you know, what what's the most psychological art form there is? And I think it's movies. And uh so I sort of took my my talents for you know being sort of psychologically oriented, let's say, and cinematically oriented, and put them two together and uh decided I wanted to make movies.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Yeah, that makes total sense. I mean that that really is key when you're writing a screenplay aura or novel. You have to know people, you have to know what makes them tick. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

You have to know people, you have to know you have to get into their minds. Uh the first novel um I co-wrote with my wife Jan called Untimely Death. Uh she she wrote she wrote the original version. It came for her in a dream. And uh for my she said, for Mother's Day, I want you to write the screenplay. This is back in 1998. So I said, Well, do it under one condition, that I can make any changes I want, I can add any characters I want, and do whatever I want with it, you know, to make make a part mine. So she said, Okay, go ahead, do it. So I did, and I created what what her story lacked was it was a real a killer. Her her killer didn't come into the book until the last chapter, and I said, You can't really do that. So we got into the mind of the killer early on. No, we don't reveal who it is, but we sort of get into the person, the the person's thinking, even though you don't reveal their identities right away. And we sold the screenplay. So then Jan said, well, since we sold the screenplay, you've got to rewrite the novel to make and match the screenplay. So that's how I got co-writing credit for that.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

One thing does lead to another, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Yeah. But we that was a very good first novel. Sold out, first printing. Um, I think it was like four or five thousand copies of hardcover back then. That was pretty good. You know, for an unknown. And um got a great review from the AP. Now, of course, I did used to work for the AP, so that but but they're not they don't get give good reviews away, I'll be honest with you.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Did you have connections in Hollywood in order to get your screenplay optioned? How how did that work? I know there's going to be a lot of people wondering, how did that work?

SPEAKER_01 14:32

Yeah. Right. Well, yes, I did. And so uh before I became a screenwriter, I was a film critic and entertainment reporter for the AP. However, once I started writing screenplays, I had to stop doing that. Uh, but I did know a lot of people. And I would ask them, you know, I said, look, uh, would you be interested in reading a screenplay I wrote? You know, I'm not trying to sell it to you, I just want you to read it and give me your feedback. And I did that. And what I what what I do is I got a lot of great feedback, and I kept rewriting the scripts with their input until I got to the point where when I showed it to this one producer director, he said, Hey, I want to buy this. And that's how it started. No, I didn't have an agent, so yeah I had to use his agent, which is unfortunate because I mean I got really screwed on the deal. But it was a start, so I got me into the writer's guild and got my foot in the door. And that's how that started.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Yeah, contacts are so important in every area. Okay. Yeah, it is key.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Publishing too.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

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SPEAKER_01 16:24

Oh, that's a good question because they come from all over the place. Um a couple came from be just being a writer for hire. Um the second screenplay that I sold uh started out as just being offered a a j uh a ri uh a uh uh so I guess it would be a gig to sort of develop this this guy's life story into a movie. He was a real character uh uh who's when I met him, he was a limousine driver. But uh one of the one of his, I guess, clients was a very wealthy guy who'd heard his story and wanted someone to write it, so he hired me to write his story because during in the mid-60s, the guy was famous as the gentleman bandit, who was a bank robber who never got caught, who'd robbed maybe 50 or 60 banks in New York City, and he got away because he's very polite. And we'd go into a bank and sit down next to a bank manager and we'd chat a little bit, and he says, by the way, I've got a gun here and I want to withdraw about $5,000. Nothing's gonna happen, you're not gonna get hurt, your bank's gonna be okay. Just you know, let's just get this over with. And that's what he did. He did and uh he was about to get caught when he when he decided to get out of the business. But he in order to stay free, he got connected to this garment district mobster named Red Levine, and Red Levine had ties to the Queen's DA, and so they direct they they decided not to indict him. Uh but they were about to arrest him. So, but but he he figured he managed to get out of there by getting connected to a uh master who had something on the Queen's DA. So I wrote that. Uh I didn't write it exactly as it was because you know I didn't really have the rights to his life story. But I re- I rewrote it as sort of like a buddy movie comedy, and I sold it to the guy who produced uh 48 hours with Eddie Murphy and uh I guess it was Nick Nulty. And they were looking for another property for Eddie Murphy to star with Joe Piscopo because they were both like really partnered up since Saturday Live. So they thought this would be it. You know, never got made. We got real close. The studio loved it. Studio actually exercised the option on it, paid me a ton of money for that. And then Eddie Murphy signed an exclusive deal with Paramount. Joe Piscopo signed an exclusive deal with 207 Fox, and Universal had the script and didn't know what to do with it.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

So when did it turnaround? Yeah, yeah. So are you a plotter or a pancer? Now those are technical terms.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Plotter or a what? Panter?

SPEAKER_00 19:15

Plotter or a pancer, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

What's a panther?

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Panzer is when you uh write by the seat of your pants. You don't have a plan, you just sit in the chair, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

Yeah, a little bit of that, and then the plot often sort of evolves from there. Like Botanica, I've been working on botanica for over 10 years. Um and I didn't know what was gonna where it was gonna go, how I was gonna finish it, I didn't know what the outcome was gonna be. All I knew was the star of the book was gonna be the world of plants and how angry they are what we're doing to the planet. Now, what's what we're doing to the planet obviously has changed over the years. You know, we've gone through all these different cycles. So this is and this is beyond climate change. It's not a climate change book because I got bored with climate change, but that was in there for a while. Uh this is something even more drastic. And it came to me, I did a lot of research on trees. And trees are like the lions of the jungle of the plant world. They've been around for thousands of years. If you're gonna talk about who's the wisest in the in the in the world, it's the plants or the the trees, because they've stored all this information and they have and what they do is they communicate through fungi in the in the soil to all the other plants in the forest. And they let them know when there's problems, and they they do deal with these problems. You know, there's four you know, they can't really do much about forest fires. They kind of come up on them suddenly. So there is they can do a little bit to protect themselves about that, but not a lot. And uh but other things they they can do mass migrations of various plant forms and stuff like that if things are going on. And they detect that we're on the verge of another mass extinction event. That was that's gonna wipe every every everything that has to breathe is gonna die. Basically. And that's because too many trees are being cut down.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Yes. Uh deforestation, huge, huge thing, huge issue.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Only gonna get worse. It's only gonna get worse because of rare earth minerals.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

Yeah, yeah. So is this book out or is this one that's in progress?

SPEAKER_01 21:40

This came out. We're gonna start marketing it next week. We're gonna do one of those um 99 cent deals for a week on Amazon to try to kick start it. Um so we'll see. We uh it was supposed to get marketed, marketed in the end of 25, but I had a health event, so we can. I've had to put things on hold. So we're going to restart it in February.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Okay, okay. We're filming this the last week of January. I believe it's going to be posted probably in March or maybe early April. Um so it'll definitely be out by then. So check it out. It's called Britannica.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

Britannica. B O T I I'll call the copy up. See, it is upside, it looks like it's upside down. We can read it.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Uh it's gonna be out in yeah, it's out. It's available now for, you know, you can order it in all forums, hardcover, softcover, ebook, and audiobook. The audiobook is great. Uh and um the guy we got to do the voice is just marvelous. So we're looking forward to selling a bunch of audiobooks. In fact, audiobooks are being are the most popular type of book we're selling these days. Which is interesting.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

I've heard that. I've heard that uh more than 50% of the books on Amazon are sold through audiobook.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Yeah, it's a it's a it's been the trends, it's been around, it's been growing steadily, you know. In the beginning it was just a real small portion of them, but now it's like gang, it's it's like nobody wants to read it anymore, they just want to listen to it. Plus, there are so many ways to do that. You don't you don't have to buy a C D or a tape anymore, you can listen to it over your your over Spotify or all these other digital platforms.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

It's so interesting because uh someone m sent me a book recently, it was a gift, and I got it in the mail, and the minute I opened the gift, I went over to Audible and got the audiobook. The same title. All right, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

Yeah, and if you and if you subscribe to Audible, you could probably read it for very little money.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

Yeah, that's that's exactly right. I I listened to audiobooks in the car.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I and a lot of people do, and a lot of people do it listen to it in the car or on the subway or traveling, or you know, or just before they go to sleep. It's been a real boon.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

It makes uh driving enjoyable. Instead of thinking, oh, I've got 90 minutes to Jacksonville, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna get four or five chapters.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Yeah, you can only listen to so much serious radio, you know, and the songs start repeating themselves, you want to throw up.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

Yeah, exactly. It gets old fast. Uh, I love it on a long trip because you can do a whole book in one trip. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. So do you have something to offer, uh free gift or some something uh to offer our listeners?

SPEAKER_01 24:54

Well, uh unfortunately you you said you're coming, it's not gonna be uh posted until March. Uh I was gonna offer that uh that that that 99 cent deal, but what I can do is offer anybody a a money-back guarantee on anybody who buys the book, Botanica, or if they don't like it, I'll pay it, give them their money back. How's that?

SPEAKER_00 25:14

Hey, that's pretty great. Um so where would they find you? Uh do you have a website or maybe social media?

SPEAKER_01 25:22

Amazon. Mostly Amazon. Um social media I usually use for my other work, my uh consulting business. Um I might I have an author page on Amazon, but uh my website, World News Information Network, is purely for uh communications consulting uh and ghostwriting. I do a lot of ghostwriting. Get a lot of clients uh through that. Ghostwriting affords me the time and and money to be able to write my own books.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

That is so interesting because that's exactly how I earn a living too. I earn a living ghostwriting, and it gives me uh the what I need for my own expenses so I can do what I love. Which is right fiction. Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. Um, Fred, did we meet each other at the Sunshine State Book Festival?

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

Okay, okay. I thought so. But I do a lot of events and sometimes I get them confused.

SPEAKER_01 26:26

Right, yeah. No, you you gave me your card there and said uh, you know, click on the that little QRQ code, and I did and reached out.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Yeah, yeah. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for being with us today. It's been great. Wonderful talking with you.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Oh, it's my pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks for pulling up a chair with us. See you next time.