Who: Jeffery Deaver
Claim To Fame: Jeffery Deaver is an international number-one bestselling author. The author of over thirty-five novels, three collections of short stories and a nonfiction law book, and a lyricist of a country-western album, he’s received or been shortlisted for dozens of awards around the world, his books are sold in 150 countries, have been translated into over twenty-five languages, and have sold 50 million copies worldwide. His The Bodies Left Behind was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers Association and his Lincoln Rhyme thriller The Broken Window and a stand-alone, Edge, were also nominated for that prize. His book A Maiden’s Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. His latest work is The Never Game, the first novel in a thrilling new series.
Where To Find Jeffery: His Website, Amazon, Twitter
Praise For Jeffery: “Jeffery Deaver creates insanely devious plots calculated to make your head explode.” — The New York Times Book Review
Anywhere I can write on airplanes in hotel rooms and of course in my office or kitchen at home. I tend not to create prose when it’s busy and bustling around me as in the Starbucks or restaurant, but I will certainly work on my outline there and do editing. I would prefer peace and quiet, but I enjoy the process of writing so I make sure I write whenever I get the chance. Also, one of my rules is never missed a deadline and that requires me to be able to write whenever I can.
No rituals or habits. For me, it’s a job. That would be like a surgeon or an airline pilot having a ritual or something that is a bit superstitious.
I don’t really have writer’s block as such because I plan the book out ahead of time. I will know in the outlining process if it’s not worth the book. I do think that it’s important for authors to look at writer’s block though because it’s usually an indication that you’re headed in the wrong direction. It’s like pain in the body. It’s telling us that something’s wrong. We don’t like it, but it’s very helpful. I generally will throw out an idea if after a week or two the outline is simply not going to produce a book.
About deciding what to write, I look at Mickey Spillane’s comment that people don’t read books to get to the middle. They read books to get to the end. I firmly believe that it’s our job to grab the readers by the lapels in the opening scene and race them kicking and screaming through the book until the very end. So the ideas I come up with give me the chance to create a plot with lots of cliffhangers and gives me the opportunity to have three surprise endings. Sometimes I’m able to get a fourth surprise ending in. Because I write crime books, that means there has to be the core crime story—the main plot. But I also include tension in subplots with what I call the soap opera elements. Those would be personal relationships, love, romance, family issues. And then I include a third subplot that has to do with like a geopolitical matter. In my book The Never Game, I have a subplot about video games and whether they’re good, bad or have no effect whatsoever on gamers.
I’ve been writing now for 35 years and I have a pretty good idea of what my fans want. I write every book according to that standard. I have, I would say, an innate sense of what is going to work and what isn’t. If I moved out of my genre into say fantasy, horror, or science fiction, I would have much less certainty. I would have to study the market, study reader’s response, and then try my hand at it, but since I’ve got the chops down, you might say for crime fiction, that’s what I’ll stick with.
Yes, I do spend eight months on each book before I write the prose. That’s eight months of outlining and research, as you point out. It’s vital to do that. Joyce Carol Oates said, “you can’t write the first sentence of your story until you know what the last sentence is.” I firmly believe that. I tell my students when I teach that writing is very subjective and some people have been quite successful by simply sitting down and going, as they say, by the seat of the pants. I, however, think a book should be planned out the same way an automobile is planned out before it’s constructed or an airplane. Or for that matter, a surgical procedure planned before the surgeon and patient meet in the operating room. So I do an extensive outline. My outline for The Never Game was 150 pages long. It includes every element of the plot. All the clues are seeded in. I know when each character enters the story and when they leave. I start with post-it notes on the bulletin board in my office and move them around after about two months when I have all the scenes and chapters figured out with a small notation as to what’s going on. Then I move to the computer and I adjust the outline again and again and again. Finally, at the end of that seven or eight months, I have the outline. I know exactly where the book’s going to go and I put it in front of me along with the research and I write the book very quickly. I can write 110,000-word book in about a month and a half or two months. Then, of course, there’s a great deal of revising because, with the outline, I write very quickly. I am never slowed up by having to figure out what I’m going to say.
Oh, I just like to look at a project I’ve had. It might be creating prose, it might be adjusting the outline, it might be editing and then reading what I’ve done. So success simply means being able to write all day long. I don’t really have a set schedule and the way I work, having the outline, that means that I can simply generate maybe 5-6,000 words a day because I know what I’m going to say.
I’ve read so many writers. You don’t get into this business without loving writing. I think the big influences in my life, as far as crime fiction goes, have been John Le Carré, Ian Fleming, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John D. McDonald. Those are the greats of the past. And then, modern-day writers, I like Michael Connelly. I like Lee Child. I like Karin Slaughter. I like, in England, Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. These are people who have given me a sense of what is really great crime writing. As far as general writing, I think Lord Of The Rings is a remarkable study in multi-plotting and also character development. It’s also a great fun read. I think Saul Bellow is one of the greatest novelists, the Nobel Prize winner, and I studied all of his books to get a sense of how to actually say something rather than what to say. The author, Annie Proulx, who wrote The Shipping News and the short story that became Brokeback Mountain is also one of the great stylists.
My advice to aspiring writers is this. Plan out everything you’re going to write ahead of time. Make sure that you deal with rejection as if it were a speed bump, not a brick wall. And finally, give everything to your book. It has to be absolutely perfect. Assume that when you finish writing it, it will move right from that draft into finished form. You will, of course, be edited, but I think it’s very important for every writer to aspire to create the most perfect book he or she can.
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