APB: All Points Between Science and Literature: James Patterson on reading and writing

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

"Sorry, moms and dads, but it's your job -- not the schools' -- to find books to get your kids reading and to make sure they read them."
"The more kids read, the better readers they become."
"Drop Everything and Read schools devote one period a day to kids -- and their teachers -- doing nothing but reading, and mostly reading what they want to. The results can be dramatic."
"The best role models are in the home: brothers, fathers, grandfathers; mothers, sisters, grandmothers. Moms and dads, it's important that your kids see you reading. Not just books -- reading the newspaper is good too."

"He will publish 15 books this year alone."
"It's story, story, story. I'm a storyteller."
"It's a combination of pace and then trying to make sure that the characters I'm writing about hold people's interest and they want to be involved with them."
"[Y]ou're only going to hear about the architecture if it really is relevant to the story I'm telling."
"[W]riting and rewriting is a matter of "getting better.... "I'll put "Be there" on a top of a chapter sometimes. I need to be in the scene. I need to have put enough detail in there where I'm seeing it, I'm certainly feeling it. The dialogue needs to be somewhat true. It needs to be moving the thing forward instead of marching in place."
"[C]ollaboration workflow: The outline will be 60 to 80 pages.... I want their ideas. I want them invested.... They are into it emotionally. I insist on seeing stuff every two or three weeks....This is going well, remember this. Hold it, we're off the tracks. We got to stop it and figure out where this went."

"I try to be there... to put the kind of detail in stories that will make people experience what the characters are experiencing, within reason."