Michael Connelly part 1

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author Michael Connelly spoke in the House of Representatives at the Texas Capitol in Austin during the Texas Book Festival. He shared freely, and he sincerely wanted to help other writers.

Some real gems here from a “master storyteller in peak form.” (From Playboy’s review of City of Bones.)

Connelly learned a lot as a crime reporter, and it shows.

I’m going to break these gems up into two blog entries, so your eyes don’t glaze over like mine do when reading voluminous blog entries.

Connelly wasn’t arrogant or self-effacing, but he was true. Sometimes he was more confident than at other times. Close to when he started talking, he took a drink. Then he joked that in speech class he had learned that when you run out of things to say, you take a drink of water.

He said he wanted to be as good as he could in one thing and that thing for him is writing.

“I love writing crime novels. I love the crime novel because I love the form.”

“When you’re writing, you’re spinning a lot of different plates.”

“There’s comfort in the basic format of the crime novel.” He discussed that a crime novel travels a line from A to Z and that gives him the freedom to worry about other things like character and to a lesser degree to explore something of interest to him.

He thinks he can say anything as a writer through Harry Bosch.

For those that haven’t read any of his series, Hieronymous Bosch is a detective with the LAPD.

Connelly said, “What a gift to get to take someone [Bosch] across time and see how he’s tried to make sense of himself and his place in the world.”

I think that would be quite a gift.

He does tape notes with quotes on them around the edge of his computer monitor. He switches them out over time, but three stood out to him. I actually have them on video, but I have to figure out how to upload them.

The Quotes and Notes

From an interview with Richard Price…”When you circle around a murder long enough, you get to know a city.”

“Not so much how a cop works on a case, but how a case works on a cop.” –Joseph Wambaugh

Connelly tries to do this with Bosch. He sees the whole series of Bosch books as one big picture and wants Bosch to change and grow with each case.

In an interview, Kurt Vonnegut was asked what was the most important thing he could tell a young writer. He said, “Make sure that on every page you write, that every character wants something, even if it’s only a glass of water.”

Every page.