This is a completely bonkers interview with James Patterson about creativity and ambition and I really think everyone should read it. Quotes I highlighted:
- Mind you, Patterson didn’t start publishing in earnest until after he’d finished a decades long career at J. Walter Thompson, an advertising firm. Though his productivity is due in large part to a stable of co-writers that he works with, it’s also a result of a daily routine that includes about eleven hours of reading and writing, one hour of golf, and many chats with his wife Susan. Here, he explains how he can re-work a draft of a novel in half an hour, how co-writing works, and why he prefers funerals to weddings.
- If you can write beginnings and ends, you can make a nice living as a writer. If you write middles, you win Pulitzers and Nobel Prizes and stuff. But with beginnings and ends, you’re going to do okay.
- I’m very lucky because my wife and I, we love each other. We love hanging together. In my autobiography, I write, and this is true, every night, we go to sleep holding hands. And one of my comedic lines about her, which is also true, is, “If Sue ever leaves me, I’m going with her.” That’s another habit, another routine, but it’s a really good one. We are best friends, we love to talk to one another, and people who get together who don’t like to talk to together, that really makes it difficult. It’s just like, “You know, you’re really pretty….” That’s not enough.
