In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* Lee Child Revisited
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“That kind of self-confidence is the way to do it. The less you worry about ‘are they going to like [the story],’ the more they do like [it].” Lee Child, in his interview on “How I Write”
Lee Child Revisited
As I wrote a couple of days ago, my original intention was to post a series on the interviews I mentioned in Sunday’s TNDJ.
I’m not going to do that because I don’t want to cherry pick among all the interviews. But if you want to browse, you can find all of them here.
Still, as I watched the Child and Koontz interviews, I did make some notes. I didn’t want to waste those, so I thought I’d share them with you.
These are quotes I personally found important or enlightening or supportive, but you might find more or different ones if you watch the interview.
If you do watch it, I hope you’ll take notes on a pad of paper or maybe, as I did, in a separate open document in another window. If you type-in the quotes as you hear them, they will sink deeper and more quickly into your creative subconscious.
Here are the quotes I took from the Lee Child interview along with my own occasional notes:
“The reason you like Reacher is that even though you are good citizens, you are civilized people, you are all of the good things, you all have a list of ten people you would cheerfully shoot in the head.”
On stereotypes and clothing: “[Clothing] is a very quick way of describing a character. … [It’s a way] to sum up a character through a quick visual reference.”
“I’m pretty sure that writing is not teachable. … I think you absolutely can learn to do it, but you either are a novelist or you are not. You’ve either got those pathways in your brain or you don’t.”
Notes
- If you’re subscribed to TNDJ, chances are good writing fiction is your cup of tea.
- “You absolutely can learn to do it” is exactly why I primarily teach writers to leave worrying about ‘process’ behind, trust what they already know—even if they aren’t consciously aware that they know it—and simply believe in themselves.
“A lot of people assume that a book needs planning…. I’ve never done that. For me, writing per se, making it with words, is not really the issue. It’s the Story that I want. If I were to plan a story, even if I did a two-page outline with two lines per proposed chapter, I’ve told myself the story and I’m bored with it. I want the next story. So I can’t afford to tell myself the story. I have to just improvise it as I go along.”
Note—One commentor mentioned that with “40,000 hours of TV work and tons of reading under his belt, I can see why he doesn’t care or need to outline.”
But look at the last two sentences of Child’s quote: He “can’t afford” to tell himself the story before he actually writes it because he doesn’t want to become bored with it.
The key is that every one of us has absorbed Story all our lives without even realizing it from books, television, films, and even some commercials. Like Child, you have what you need. You only have to believe in yourself.
“John D. McDonald did 21 books in the Travis McGee series, which is really one of the most magnificent series, and pulls off a trick that I can’t explain. [In only one of his 21 books] does anything happen on page one. In the other 20 books, nothing happens on page one and nothing happens on page two, but you cannot put them down.”
Hmm. So maybe reading and studying McDonald is a good idea? And Raymond Chandler, of course, who believed it’s important to write “sentences that do more than one thing at a time.”
“I do a lot of it instinctively, but I spend a lot of time concentrating on rhythm, the rhythm of a sentence. A book is however many thousand sentences in a row, and you’ve gotta make it so that each sentence has a rhythm and that rhythm must always be tripping forward, forward, forward.”
“[Readers] don’t notice, but you’re driving them through [the book]. You do that by propulsion, and you do the propulsion by sentence structure so that the beat is always tipping forward.”
“Humans are hard-wired to want the answer to a question. [The cliffhanger/hook combination is] the easiest part of writing a novel. You imply a question, and people will stick around to find out the answer.”
On the POV character: “You can have characters that you ought to hate, but you kind’a don’t. You can’t have a character that’s designed to be hated. You equally can’t have a character that’s designed to be liked.”
“The more you ‘design’ [the character] the worse it gets. You’ve just gotta have an honest, authentic portrayal and then you’ve gotta hope for the best. … But the clue is I liked [Reacher], and if I liked him, chances are that many other people will like him too.”
On omitting details: “You can’t leave [a situation] too unexplained. Readers want your version. They don’t want a prompt. They want you to do the work and tell them the story.”
I’ll be back tomorrow with quotes I took from the Koontz interview.
Of Interest
A Fiction Side Hustle That Actually Drives Sales
Startup creates physical books with synchronized soundtracks
Crossing guard’s musings make her $14K per month
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 940
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for March……………………….…. XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for March.………………….…. 3360
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 46660
2026 consumable words………………… 46660
2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29