A good love story always keeps the pot boiling.
— James Patterson
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
It's our job - as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles - to find books our kids are going to like.
People always come up to me and say, 'you should do standup.' It's nice to discover things about yourself. That keeps everything lively and fun.
I love to tell stories. It's a delight for me.
I was always a good student, but I didn't read that much until I was 18 and I was working my way through college.
For many years I had heard about an underworld consisting of people who act out a vampire fantasy while I was living in New York. Fortunately for me there are also several books on the phenomena.
This summer, I'll be bringing out a mystery that involves a young lawyer and a court scene the likes of which I don't think you've ever seen. Hollywood said this is James Patterson meets John Grisham.
My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.
I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.'
I don't get a chance to be funny with the thrillers. I like to be funny, and I think I am really funny. So with 'Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life', it was fun to let loose.
I'm not a writer's writer. I'm not a craftsman. I could be, and that would be a one-book-a-year operation.
It seemed to me that I could write commercial fiction. I wasn't sure whether I could, or whether I wanted to write serious fiction at that point. So I said, 'Let me try something else,' and I wrote a mystery - but I didn't know much about it.
I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.
I read some, and then visited with people involved in this curious, exciting and somewhat misunderstood sub-culture. I met with a fang maker, who offered to fit me for an exquisite pair.
I grew up in a house full of women: my mother, grandmother, three sisters, and two female cats. And I still have the buzz of their conversations in my head. As an adult, I have more female friends than male ones: I just love the way that women talk.
When I was 26, I wrote my first mystery, 'The Thomas Berryman Number', and it was turned down by, I don't know, 31 publishers. Then it won an Edgar for Best First Novel. Go figure.
I didn't care for most of the books I was being asked to read in school. I started reading like crazy right after high school when I got a job in a mental hospital. I was working my way through college, and I did a lot of night shifts, and there was nothing to do. So I read like crazy, serious stuff, all the classics.
Commercial books don't even get covered. The reason why so many book reviews go out of business is because they cover a lot of stuff that nobody cares about. Imagine if the movie pages covered none of the big movies and all they covered were movies that you couldn't even find in the theater?
I have a number of writers I work with regularly. I write an outline for a book. The outlines are very specific about what each scene is supposed to accomplish.
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
Always expect the unexpected. Right around Thanksgiving, when the new Alex Cross will be out. It's called Four Blind Mice and it's a pretty amazing story about several murders inside the military.
The vampire underworld is much larger than most people could imagine. It exists in all the cities mentioned in the book, but also in many, many more. Teenagers, especially, seem to like to act out vampire fantasies.
If I'm writing and a chapter isn't coming, I just move ahead.
