MEET MISTER WIZARD

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The rub here is that seeing the new digs makes visitors think of money, and talking about money, as we have seen, makes Crichton sore. In fact, he is tight with a buck and says so. The little software company he formed in the early '80s came about because he saw movie man-hours being squandered on tasks computers could dispatch in minutes. (One more entry for the give-us-a-break file: he won an Academy Award for technical achievement for this assistance to studio accountants.) He wonders crankily about society's fierce curiosity about how much money people make, and all these Top 10 lists of what movies the nation spent its leisure dollars on last week. He points out--enviously--that we do not know what Clint Eastwood was paid for The Bridges of Madison County.

Though smart enough to beat your brain to the finish line twice before breakfast, Crichton is self-effacing sometimes to the point of disingenuousness, gracious to the point of ingratiation. Yet all the while you sense that if things weren't going his way, things wouldn't be going at all. After a day or two in his company, one gathers that Crichton would choose, in a fair world, to be treated like the next fellow; he would prefer that we acknowledge his genius, but make no fuss. ("How smart is Michael?" his wife was once asked. "How smart did he tell you he was?" she replied. It's a sly family). A fair world, he would say, would omit his private life from any public discussion.

Once, though, just once, Crichton hung his personal life out nakedly--in an autobiographical book called Travels, published in 1988. In it he talks of his five-year attack of writer's block in the late '70s and early '80s. He wrote: "My subjective feeling every day was, it's hard, and it's not working." So he didn't work. He traveled like a fox on the run, racking up exotic locales, exploring the world and the mind, the squirrelier the better. He went through every bent-spoon, aura-fluffing, New Age, past-life, talk-to-plants, Aquarian-karmic investigation one can imagine. "The thing is," he said, "I was having a really interesting time." The clouds lifted in 1985--no explanation--and he went back to work.

Since then, his working process has varied little. Each book takes about 18 months. "I'm not an everyday writer, and I never have been. I have continued a pattern of intermittent, very intense effort, and that's the way I still do it." Routine is key. He eats the same lunch every day: while writing Rising Sun, it was buckwheat noodles; during Congo, mashed potatoes, gravy and an open-face turkey sandwich; for The Great Train Robbery, heavily peppered tuna sandwiches.

"I start with a fairly well-worked-out plan that has been percolating for some while, maybe five years. I turn things over. I solve a lot of problems far in advance. I don't usually refer to anything; I've done all the research and reading in advance. The first draft takes six to 10 weeks, working seven days. I first wake up at 6 o'clock in the morning. Then it's 5:30, then 5. It keeps moving back. After a month of work, it will start to be uncomfortable. It becomes earlier than 4 o'clock and eventually 2. And I begin to feel sleep deprived. I either finish the draft or I have to stop."