John Sandford Quotes
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Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.
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I spend a lot of time wandering around the countryside just looking at people, seeing how everything fits together.
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When you're writing two books a year, you really need some time off and don't want to use that down time for touring. I do like talking with readers, though; they can tell you important stuff.
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I've always thought of myself as a journalist; that was what I did.
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I was a newspaper editor in the Army, and I know something about the Army PR culture.
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Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me.
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When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'
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With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop.
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Women just make interesting characters, especially when you're working against cliches.
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I'm an outdoors kind of guy.
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People in California don't live in a place so much as they do a condition.
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People ought to be slapped up side of the head, not always get what they expect. That's why sometimes the bad guy gets away.
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Combat stress isn't the only problem for soldiers isolated in Iraq - there are family issues, re-integration issues when soldiers go home on leave, loneliness.
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As a journalist, I interviewed people, and you begin to feel different rhythms in speech, and you can use those things to help carve out a character.
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A lot of my friends were retiring from the newspaper business, and the newspaper pensions are not enormous.
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Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.
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Things fall apart and happen out of stupidity and carelessness.
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They don't have a lot of crime in the countryside other than theft. But every once in a while, things turn ugly, and when they turn ugly, they turn very ugly.
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If you do outline, you have to be aware of the problems that that kind of thing can cause.
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If readers tell you that stretches of dialogue or narrative were too long, that they couldn't tell who was talking, that's something that can be fixed.
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Virgil Flowers fishes in the St. Croix where I fish for muskies near my house.
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I once paddled a canoe the length of the Mississippi River all the way from Itasca to New Orleans.
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That's my sense of how crime works: that it's not any kind of calculated evil driven by the devil, but just control disintegrating.