A week or so ago I pointed you to The Daily Beast for an interview with Robert Harris about his new novel, An Officer and a Spy… and before that, to a killer interview with Michael Connelly.
I’d like to thank The Daily Beast for doing all this work for me, all I need to do is provide the link and we’re all in this together.
Here’s another one. Another peek behind the curtain of a writer currently making the most of his Big Break.
His name is Nic Pizzolatto, a writing teacher who published his first novel a couple of years ago, Galveston, A Novel. It was a fine debut, putting him in the cross-hairs of opportunity on several fronts, the most visible of which his is new television program, True Detective, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey.
If you haven’t seen it, and the raw tough stuff is your cup of strong tea, by all means run to your On Demand and play catch up. The fourth of eight episodes airs this Sunday, and as the writer tells us here, things are about to get heated up.
The writing on this program is stellar, both in terms of dialogue and narrative storyline. It liberally relies on the type of character monologues that have made Aaron Sorkin an icon in the scripting business, and it’s something we should all notice as writers, as well as viewers. Because it’s something that, when all else is right, can really differentiate a novel from the middling crowd.
As with the Harris article, there’s lots here for writers. Enjoy.
One Response
Many(!) worthy(!) “sound bites” competed for attention here, but … this one finally won out:
That’s when I start to know when I’m off to the races—when I’m in love again. And it’s not in love with an idea. I’m in love with a character. A character just did something on a page that made me sit up and go, “Now you’re becoming a dimensional human being to me, and I’m interested.”
All of us, as we strive to invent characters out of thin-air in our stories, dream of that magical moment in which they “do something [by gawd, independently …] on a page that make us sit up and go.”