There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.
— Harlan Coben
I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.
And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.
Life may not always fall into neat chapters, and you may not always get the satisfying ending you're looking for, but sometimes a good explanation is all the rewrite you need.
Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.
Children learn much more from how you act than from what you tell them. There are times this worries me - we parents are rarely the role models we want to be. True for life. True for driving.
Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.
I'm a little bit of a control freak.
Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.
The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time. I don't do too many notes. I keep it mostly in my head. I usually start writing a new book around January, and it's due October 1.
The preparation for building a series of thrillers based on a single character is kind of like the preparation for becoming a parent: The best part is the idea - wink, wink.
I'm not a fan of self-help books - how can something be 'self-help' if the book itself is purportedly helping you?
You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!'
In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.
This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too.
Being a parent is not for the faint of heart. I may joke about knowing fear, but the fact is, the first time I ever knew real fear was the day Charlotte, my first child, was born. Suddenly there is someone in the world you care about more than anything.
I'm 48 years old, not a kid anymore by any definition, but here is a universal truth that every adult at some point will realize: We are all always 17 years old, waiting for our lives to begin.
I always think the insecurity is going to go away, but it's always there. Only bad writers think they're good.
I never bought the excuse of not having time to write. If you really want to do it, you're either going to find those hours or eventually decide not to be a writer.
If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills. Clearly I'm not meant to do anything else.
'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work.
I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.
More than once, I've wished my real life had a delete key.
You can't have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front - or a happy without a sad.
I am, after all, a thriller writer. I routinely delve into the darkest chambers of the human heart. I've written about murder, kidnapping, depravity, horror, violence, and disfigurement.
The most annoying and full-of-crap thing a writer says is, 'I write only for myself, I don't care if anyone reads it.' A writer without a reader doesn't exist.
I'm not very happy idle. There's always this voice in my head that says, 'I should be writing.'
I'd never had money growing up, and it's never been that important to me, except maybe to take our kids on a nice vacation or something like that.
