The writing ethic was influenced – when you have to write every day, there’s no such thing as writer’s block.
You know you’re going to get burned from time to time. It’s just part of the game. So when it happens you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and forget about it because they’re about to snap the ball again.
Everybody counts or nobody counts.
I’ve been able to write at least one book a year for 20 years, and I don’t think I would’ve had that kind of drive if I hadn’t come out of the journalism business.
There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren’t enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.
I’ve sold 11 of my books to Hollywood. There are all kinds of my books on shelves in Hollywood because the scripts didn’t capture the characters.
The character can never be static from book to book. People might think you just come up with a new plot and stick this guy in. Well, he has to be as new as the plot every time.
Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.
That’s the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else’s worst.
Can’t complain because nobody listens.
I was enamored of detectives as a teenager. I liked what they did – piecing things together, thinking about situations. But to get there? Eight to ten years in a patrol car? I didn’t have that in me. I didn’t want to tell people what to do.
Now I’m writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.
No Way Back is my kind of novel – a tough, taut thriller – Mofina knows the world he writes about.
I’m always looking at ways of shaking up the writing experience because I think it helps.
When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books.
The characters I write about are very internal.
Action and adventure on land and sea-you can’t ask for more. But Robert Kurson raises the ante in Pirate Hunters with an array of mystery and a fleet of colorful characters spanning four centuries. This is a great summer read!
I’m going to have to be impressed and feel confident in the people I’m handing a book to – or I’m not going to do it. Once you hand it to them, you’re out. You have no control over it.
I think there’d be huge losses if there weren’t newspapers. I know everything’s shifting to the Internet and some people would say, ‘News is news, what you’re talking about is a change of consumption, not the product that’s out there.’ But I think there is a change.
The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.