Jeffery Deaver Quotes

Rule one: Write about settings you're familiar with.

Readers are paramount. I live to write books for them.

Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about.

It means working harder to do the research but I don't really mind - I don't think I have what it takes to chase criminals through back alleys and wade through blood at crime scenes.

In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures.

If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say.

Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

I write pretty much anywhere - on planes, in hotel rooms, anywhere in my house.

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book.

I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.

Hardcover books are fairly expensive these days and to read one requires a significant commitment of time in our busy society. So I want to make sure that when readers buy one of my books they get something they're familiar with.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

When you work alone, you need to socialize at some level.