Pitching, like a travel publicist.

"Come murder someone in our town," Cameron says from the middle of the van.

Billy Bob Thornton and Colin Hanks (season one) Copyright © ©FX Networks/Courtesy:Everett Collection / Everett Collection Ted Danson and Patrick Wilson (season two) Copyright © ©FX Networks/Courtesy:Everett Collection / Everett Collection

Hawley is busy these days, but he's busy in a manner that makes you not worry for him if things dry up a little, if there's a correction toward the norm. Because he's been there before; that's where he lived for decades. Hawley grew up in New York City's West Village and went to college at Sarah Lawrence, and there, in the late ’80s, he got hooked on his first storytelling medium: songwriting. His band sold self-made CDs in New York post-graduation and in San Francisco after that, and it was in SF that he backed off music ("It's tough to be a rock star when you're not a night person") and started writing fiction. He wrote two novels that failed to find publishers and then a third that ultimately did. "I remember thinking: What if that's the last great idea I ever have?" During the ’90s and ’00s, he proved he wasn't out of ideas, bouncing between San Francisco and Los Angeles writing novels and scripts and pitching TV and movie ideas. He ran two shows that didn't make it a full season and published three more books to little fanfare. But then people started saying yes.

These days, though he spends countless weeks on location and dutiful hours taking care of business in L.A., Austin is home. But this house we're in isn't even his real house—he and his wife are building a little Hawley compound in the modest neighborhood they've lived in since 2008, and this is the rental place down the block. The back house at the rental place is already outfitted with bookshelves that he dips in and out of ("In order to generate a lot of output, you have to have a lot of input") and photocopies of Don DeLillo's notes to himself (DeLillo's papers are in Austin, and Hawley's a mega-fan; he got to interview the often interview-shy novelist at the Texas Book Festival earlier this month) and nice coffee tables with Kubrick and Coen brothers coffee-table books, plus a standing desk, at which it's easy to imagine a writer getting down to business and cranking shit out.

"It's a craft," he says. "When you're shooting and prepping and editing and breaking story, you look at the calendar every morning with your assistant and go: 'When am I writing today?' And if it's three to five, you go: 'Okay, that's when I'm writing.’”

Consider the process by which he cobbled together Before the Fall. The week after the 2014 Emmys, in a stretch of peak Fargo fever, Hawley's agent dusted off 150 pages of a manuscript Hawley had set aside when season one got picked up. She sold the book and ﬁlm rights at auction that fall, which was great, except Hawley had to somehow pump out the rest of the novel in little gaps before, during, and after the production of Fargo' s second season. His editor gave him a publication date before they'd even read a full draft—"It was a huge leap of faith on their part that I was going to stick the landing," Hawley says—but the gamble was exactly the right one. Before the Fall spent 14 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and was a runaway book of this summer.

“I write stories because I have to write them. It’s a sickness on some level. It’s a compulsion.”

Before the Fall is a useful example of Hawley's charge to himself: Take conventional storytelling archetypes—a mystery novel, a crime show—and tweak them just enough, infuse them with just that much more intelligence and that much more surprise, so that the experience is familiar right up until it isn't. "More pieces on a collision course than you can predict which ones are going to collide," Hawley says, at which point the story grows unpredictable and sticks in the brain. "I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It's that question: Do we think in pictures or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing and the filmmaker believes another thing—and I'm fascinated by that balance."

In Before the Fall, the plane crash off Martha's Vineyard has just two survivors—an artist who doesn't seem to belong among the Cessna's fancy company and a little boy, whose cable-news-exec father, mother, and sister perish. Neither man nor boy knows enough to be helpful with the investigation into the circumstances of the crash, and so their heroes journey is more emotional, more interior, less about simply cracking the case. Still, Hawley plays with the structure and peels back the concealed histories of each passenger and crew member in an effort to cast suspicion onto their potential involvement in the crash. It's unorthodox, to run a book forward and backward in that manner. But it works on a reader the way the most manipulative and satisfying shows do. Which makes total sense: It's a book that feels like a limited series of television.

Such is the case with his previous novel as well: The Good Father, a book about a doctor whose son assassinates an Edwards/Obama–esque Democratic presidential nominee. It, too, is a mystery turned on its head: There's a gun fired on the first page, almost certainly by the son—but what sort of journey do we go on if the conspiracy the father is looking to unveil isn't a conspiracy at all? What happens if the mystery at the center isn't about a setup but, rather, about the gradual, harrowing, impossible-seeming transformation of a normal teenager into a political terrorist? (Not nothing: This is territory similar to Philip Roth's 1997 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel American Pastoral—a book and a writer Hawley admires tremendously, and a novel that served as the material for Ewan McGregor's directorial debut last month; Hawley and McGregor had plenty to talk about when they first met about doing Fargo.)

Despite the ambition and a lot of genuine support from the publishing house, when The Good Father was released in 2012, it was barely reviewed, Hawley says. "And it was this thing where you begin to feel like, 'Should I give this up?' And having felt that feeling only contributes to the buoyancy of what happened with Before the Fall. No, we don't give up. I don't write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It's a sickness on some level. It's a compulsion." It's armor. It's artillery. Stories at the ready like bullets. "If you only do one thing, that thing owns you. If you're only a novelist, and people don't want to publish or review or buy the book, then you're stuck. But mostly it just comes from the fact that I love all these things. Part of this whole multitasking identity just came from not wanting to wait. You write a book, it takes forever, and then you send it out, and then you wait. So the best thing to do is start something else—you get up every morning and are looking forward to today's problem to solve. It was a defense mechanism early on to keep me from focusing too much on the part of it I can't control."