My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don’t populate them with characters that readers can care about.
In the shaded portions where the two spheres of different lives meet, certain fundamentals- moods, loves, fears, angers- can’t be hidden. That’s the contract.
Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.
Hardcover books are fairly expensive these days and to read one requires a significant commitment of time in our busy society. So I want to make sure that when readers buy one of my books they get something they’re familiar with.
I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.
Readers are paramount. I live to write books for them.
The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that’s the easy part.
She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.
We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets – and oh how we squander those moments.
In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.
Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there’s yet another surprise.
When you work alone, you need to socialize at some level.
It’s becoming apparent that I like bad boys. That’s one of my problems. They’ve all been bad boys. You’re one too. You’re a bad boy. But, I think you’re a good bad boy.
People with children and people with their own business always pick up a ringing phone.
People want to avoid the past. I suppose that’s natural. When we tally up all we’ve said and done over the years, despite the wonderful memories, the regrets may be fewer but stand out more prominently, glowing coals that we can never quite extinguish, try though we might.
For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.
But one does not make living writing poetry unless you’re a professor, and one frankly doesn’t get a lot of girls as a poet.
I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book.
I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.
I also try very hard to create characters – both heroes and villains – with psychological depth.