The familiar trope of the woman in peril doesn't really interest me.
— Karin Slaughter
The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'
I always try to block out an hour or so a day to read. Being a writer is a job, and reading helps train my brain in the right direction.
I always want to make sure the book I'm writing is the best book I can deliver.
When you write as a woman, there's this feeling there's going to be a softness.
My sister lived in England for a while when I was 12, and I came to visit her, and I spent most of the time in her flat reading.
I'm just not a crazy, stay-out-all-night sort of person. I love writing.
It's a very Southern thing to be interested in dark stuff.
I grew up watching the 'People's Choice Awards.'
As much as we would like to deny it, reading is not vital to human survival.
I've never purposefully based a character on any one person I know, but I'm certain there are amalgamations that exist.
No crime lab in the world looks like the 'CSI' ones because there's simply not the money for all those fancy machines.
Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.
'Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Case,' 'The Secret of the Old Clock,' 'Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret,' 'Flowers in the Attic,' 'Gone With the Wind' - these are the books that defined my childhood. They thrilled me. They made me feel like I wasn't alone in the world.
No matter where you are on the political spectrum, libraries make sense. It's such a small investment. Every dollar supporting a library system returns five dollars to the community.
I grew up having the library as the best place ever. I spent a lot of weekends there as a kid - my parents would drop me off and leave me there all day. I would just sit in the back and read whatever I could find.
For many children, the library represents their only access to books, reading, and the Internet outside of their home. If you think about how far behind a child would be without access to these fundamental tools - tools that are vital to successful employment later in life - it's a travesty.
As a writer, I've always felt it's my job to be extremely careful when writing about victims, especially women.
A book I would take with me to a desert island is 'Paradise Lost,' which I studied in college and hated so much by the end of the class that I never wanted to see it again.
What I know is the characters in a Southern town. I know the cadence of the language and the voice of Atlanta because I've lived here for so long. And I know the neighborhoods, and I hopefully know the people, and I feel a connection to them. And I also feel like I'm honoring them when I talk about them.
That's why I love crime novels so much: When I write a crime novel, the conflict is built in.
In the South, we drink the Bible with our mother's milk.
I never really fitted in, because I've always been interested in really dark things.
Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see the - any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.
Readers are very, very savvy, and I don't want to insult them by making them think I'm too lazy to get it right.
Even if you live in a big city, everybody lives in a small town. We identify ourselves by our neighborhoods - 'I live in the Village, or in Chelsea.'
If there is still an American dream, reading is one of the bootstraps by which we can all pull ourselves up.
I'm over the word 'like' in conversation, and 'you know' seems to be the placeholder of choice, but when I'm writing dialogue, I tend to use those phrases because that's how people talk.
As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.
With 'Pretty Girls,' I saw the opportunity to talk not just about crime but what crime leaves behind.
When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you've just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes - those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.
I started Save the Libraries in 2010 by hosting a big fundraiser in my city library of DeKalb County in Atlanta. Through that, I learned that even with fundraisers, libraries often don't make money - they just barely break even.
Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, 'I want to do that.'
Libraries are the backbone of our education system.
I hate to badmouth any book or writer, because I know how it feels to be on the other end of that.
Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.
I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I've learned it doesn't get easier each time. It actually gets harder.
You can take risks with the characters and their development in a standalone novel.
Women who write thrillers are called 'dark.' Male writers are called 'powerful.'
I don't get hung up a lot on angst.
I have a superhero complex. If I see anything bad happen, I run towards it, rather idiotically because, after all, what could I do?
I read a lot of true crime growing up - 'The Stranger Beside Me' by Ann Rule about Ted Bundy.
Reading is exercise for our brains in the guise of pleasure. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them.
I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where for the first time in my life I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books. This was where I discovered 'Encyclopedia Brown' and 'Nancy Drew,' 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Rebecca.' This was where I became inspired to be a writer.
There aren't many people in the world who can say that they are doing the job they've wanted to do since childhood, so in that regard, I feel incredibly fortunate.
As the youngest of three girls, most of my childhood works were revenge fantasies against my older sisters, so of course the sisters in 'Pretty Girls' share some similarities to my own.
Though he was not a reader himself, my father understood that reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.
My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.
When I became a published writer, I said, 'Whatever I can do to help the libraries I want to do,' so all of my book tours since then have involved me coming to a library and talking about how important libraries are for a community.
Equal access to reading is fundamental to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
