James Patterson: Don’t need to be a great writer if you tell a good story | Forward Progress

0:00Hey, it's Thursday, which means we're coming at you with a short feel good story from a past guest. Hope you enjoyed the clip. This week, James Patterson.

0:14Vanity Fair 2014 wrote about you that rumors are that success has mellowed you some, that you no longer are so insistent and demanding. Their words, your thoughts. Rumors. You know, I don't even know what that means. I don't know who they spoke to. You think you've mellowed? Yeah, probably a bit, but I think I'm better as a writer and a thinker than I've ever been. I think the last couple of years, a lot of the books are, I think, the best I've done, commercial books. The autobiography made me a better writer for sure. How so? Because I didn't want to mess it up. So I really paid attention to the sentences, which I hadn't been doing as much of.

0:57That's important. That's useful. Well, it's interesting you say that. Another quote that I know you've referred to before, perfection is the enemy of progress. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Your view of that and how it applies to you. It just gets in the way of stuff. It's just, you know, these people that, oh, I've been working on it for nine years. Just do it. Just send it in, blah, blah, blah, blah. Does it get to a point where you just recognize it is... This is good. Let's do something else. Time to move on. Yeah, yeah. No, but the perfect stuff, you know, you get in Hollywood, and it drives me crazy.

1:31I was sitting in these meetings on a Zoom call where they're torturing the screenwriter. And, you know, there'd be 20 people in a meeting, and they're all these little footnotes, which should be footnotes, but they all think they're important. And it's just like, no, that's getting in the way. This process is taking five times longer than it should. It's taking, and the lawyers, and the, it's insane. The Hollywood process is totally insane. It needs to be blown up. It makes no sense. It should be a limited number of people involved at the studio level, at the production level. It doesn't get better because you had 10, 12, 15 people in there.

2:10And they all have to look like they know what they're talking about. So that's a mess. I was talking to your buddy, famed writer also, Mike Lupica, yesterday. Famed in his own head, yes. He told me, working with you as a master class in storytelling, He pointed out one of the things he finds most remarkable about you is that you know the finish line from the start. What's the writing process entail for you? Well, I know what the core is. I know what the core of the story is. I interviewed Michael Connelly. He's a very good mystery writer. And Michael said, you know, I have a hunch about the story.

2:51I'm doing the thing with Mr. Beast now and I kind of know a novel and I kind of know it has it has it has the pieces I know it has the parts I know it I'm not sure exactly how it's all gonna go but I know but I know I have it and the ending could change but but I know I know what the I'm doing a book I think it's this year the first Nazi which is a Hitler historical and it's a really cool thing it's a story that that I I'm not going to reveal it here but it's a story that hasn't been told about Haley, which is a mind blower. And I know, I know I have the parts. I know I have the pieces occasionally.

3:25And I know I have the voice. That's another thing. People will think my voice is short chapters. That's not a voice. Short chapters just recognizes that a lot of people don't have a lot of time. And it can really help the pace of things. We just keep chugging along and you know, it's scenes. It's like scenes in a movie for me. And if everybody wrote that way, be a disaster but they don't although a lot of people have ripped me off but that's okay rip away yeah that's i feel honored by that sure they steal plots from the books out in hollywood well there are two on the air right now i go like oh my god i can't believe they stole the plot you go after no no because it's hopeless you were doing one of your book tours with uh lupica yeah guys do a week a year or whatever it is you're staying at some inn uh on the jersey shore the The two of you were going for a walk with your wife Sue.

4:15At some point you're like, I've had enough of this. This was crazy. By the time he got back, you had your next book. It was raining like hell. It was awful. And they go, do you want to go for a walk? I go, no. Come on, come on, come on. All right, fine. So we all go around. And it really is raining like crazy. So we walk about 100 yards or something toward the ocean. I go, you know what? You guys go. I'm already soaked. I don't need this. So I'm walking back toward the little inn that we're in. And there's a road and there's this little old guy and a bicycle. He's riding into the wind, you know, whatever.

4:48And one word popped into my brain. And I went back into the hotel and wrote a five-page outline of another novel, which Mike and I have since finished. And it's coming out when? It's coming out next year, I think. But he came back and I said, you gotta read this outline, it's really cool.

5:33And you always have a white legal pad than the number two pencil white or yellow yes from idea to turning it into a book entails what uh outline i'm i'm a huge outliner interestingly uh in my interviews like mike connelly is not an outliner baldacci is not an outliner but i am what uh i just every chapter boom i you know i just did one it's 90 chapters or 90 paragraphs uh which gives you the idea for what that chapter is supposed to, what's gonna drive that chapter. But I'm not a slave to it. And almost invariably the ending changes. And as you're writing, certain characters get more interesting, or I was gonna kill the bad guy, but I really like this bad guy.

6:20He's gonna make it through here somehow. I love figuring out the story. And I have so many of them. Upstairs, I mean, there's a pile of, cool, with the clever ideas on it, you know. It's about, you know, thick. And that's where sometimes I'll have an idea and I'll start to write the outline and go, I can't really, I can't make the story work. If you tell a good story, you don't necessarily have to be a great writer. Frida, whatever, not a great writer, but really good stories. A lot of my stuff, Grisham probably, I don't mean to demean John, but, you know, not, let's say not a great stylist, but good stories.

6:58When the outline, those like 50 to 80 pages, Why then hand it off to a co-author? I can't do them all. I can't do nine hours. I can do one or two a year. Which is an extraordinary amount. The criticism of you that you wrote about in your memoir, when people bring up my practice of writing with co-authors, they usually aren't thinking nice thoughts. What are they thinking in your mind? Look, if we're ever going to save this world, it's going to be because we learned to collaborate. Sistine Chapel, 20, 30, whatever, really good painters doing the Sistine Chapel. Most music, films, collaborative.

7:44And fiction, it doesn't have to be all the time. I mean, Stephen King has collaborated in the past. Advertising is all collaboration. Tends to be writer, art director, maybe producer. So that was in terms of, oh, yeah, well, this works pretty well. But once again, if it's not for somebody, it's not for somebody. But mostly people, people just, you know, well, that's not the way I do it. Well, okay, so what? You do it the way you do it. You know, that's fine. Why do you think you've been able to make it work so well? I think a piece of it was in the advertising I experienced that the collaboration can be just fine.

8:19So I wasn't afraid of it. And then the first one, actually, a friend of mine, Peter DeYoung, and we wrote Miracle on the 17th Green, a short book. And we had finished a round of golf, and we were just shooting the breeze, and I said, I have this idea for this story, and I, blah, blah, blah, I said, you want to write it together. And it was fun. It was fun, it worked out well. And both of our strengths, Peter's a, I'm a better storyteller, he's a better stylist, so the novel worked pretty well. And I only work with people who, and when I did the book shots, which were these novellas and that was that was insanity what we're doing like three a month and that was just i had but i had to go out and find this is once again in terms of problem solving i had to find a bunch of writers in in a hurry and so one of the things i did is there's there books just come out every year best um short stories mystery short stories of the year and i would just start reading them and i would find these guys that i thought men and women who who just wrote good scenes.

9:21And then I would just call him up. I'd call him over the phone. Hi, it's James Patterson. Yeah, right, sure. No, no, no, no, for real. I just read your story, blah, blah, blah, blah. Would you be interested in working on a novella with me? I'll send you an outline if you are. And you can improve on the outline, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how we just did that. Boom. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week and every week sharing long-form interviews on Mondays and shorter, uplifting stories on Thursdays and then trending clips on Fridays.