Five people read my work before its ready for publication, and I solicit opinions from all of them: my wife, my agent, my editor, and my parents.
Jesse Kellerman
Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.
I ought to be more hardboiled; I'd like to be. I don't think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes... I can't do it, so why bother trying?
I had some trepidation about working with someone else, especially a family member. You don't want work to affect your personal relationship.
When I was four, we went to Oahu. It was the first time we celebrated Passover away from home.
Crime novels have a clear beginning, middle, and end: a mystery, its investigation, and its resolution. The reader expects events to play out logically and efficiently, and these expectations force the writer to spend a good deal of time working on macrostructure rather than prettifying individual sentences.
It's impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents.
It's always been a struggle to differentiate myself, but I like my parents. I enjoy doing events with them, and I don't feel I should purposely avoid something just for the sake of being different.
I don't intend to write the same kind of book for the rest of my life because I feel I would not be satisfied only writing in one mode.
I used to live in New York, and I know a number of people who have friends who work at galleries. I spent time hanging out with them, going to openings. It was a good way to do research, to hang out and to look at the art that was present.
All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.
I think everyone assumes that I talk to my parents a lot about writing, but I didn't - they're my parents. We didn't have constant workshops running in my household.
Being a member of the Nintendo generation, I've got a really short attention span.
I had some experience writing collaboratively when I wrote for the theatre.
The final product in a play is not just the written word. It's the production, the performance. The script is, of course, a very important piece; but it's only one element. Ultimately, yours is one of several voices. People can change your work in a play for better or worse.
It's not as though I decided to sit down and write a mystery novel so I could capitalize on my parents' success.
Writing is just something I've always done. It's just kind of the reality of who I am.
The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.
People are both more willing and less willing to talk to you when you're a writer.
People are interested in writing, and often there's an unjustifiable sense of people to believe my talking to them for the book is going to accord them any sort of fame. Which it won't. At the same time, they can be more circumspect if they know they're on the record.
All my books deal with the effect of intent upon action, how our understanding of good and evil depends heavily on context.
The most important lesson my parents taught me is that writing is a job, one that requires discipline and commitment. Most of the time it's a fun job, a wonderful job, but sometimes it isn't, and those are the days that test you.
Naturally, it was easier for me to envision becoming a novelist than it is for most people. I had two great in-house teachers; I had parents who considered a career in the arts a real possibility rather than a dreamy arrow shot into the sky.
I prefer to write about ordinary people who find themselves in a singularly bizarre situation - that is to say, the one moment in their lives when they are forced to confront danger or mystery.
We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice.
In general, the human race is still a young organism.
Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.
I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.
Art requires choices, the more specific, the better.
Trying to catch hold of yourself is a fool's errand. There is no you, only a series of former yous, created in one instant, deleted in the next.
Aside from a brief stint as a writing tutor during graduate school, I have managed to avoid respectable employment all my adult life.
There was a time, after I earned my graduate degree and before I sold my first novel, when it looked like I might have to get an office job.
It's much easier to identify and fix problems in language and timing when you hear the words being read.
