Lisa Lutz Quotes
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I was on a few surveillance jobs as part of a big team. I would be the person to follow the subject on foot when the need arose. But most of the time, we were sitting in a car doing nothing.
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I have certain rules for snooping, under which anything out in the open is fair game. But I also think, in light of some current trends in our culture, that privacy should be respected.
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There's no reason why a writer shouldn't explore and use different genres.
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I liked the idea of exposing the beams in collaborative novel. And there are many - especially in the crime world - there are many people working together: James Patterson and his stable of sub authors; and then there are like Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman and Jason Starr.
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Maggie is my sister-in-law, married to my brother David. She is a defense attorney who devotes 25 percent of her practice to pro bono wrongful-incarceration cases.
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I've got no business giving advice to anyone. Even a fictional character.
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While I had no intention of ending the series after 'The Spellmans Strike Again,' I did close many doors in that book and, with the fifth one, I was opening a lot of doors and not finding anything behind them and then opening another door and another until I found something. It was a while before I found my stride.
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You can't be suspicious 24/7. It's too exhausting.
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I'm always accused of being a crime novelist, but I'm not really.
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I'm not a huge fan of research, but sometimes you get an idea, and then you realize you don't know anything.
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I wrote the first draft of 'Plan B' the summer after I turned 21.
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I've always adored the filmmaker Sam Fuller. The first time I watched 'Shock Corridor' was such a magnificent discovery. I love his lack of subtlety, the way he tackles serious topics with bold and inappropriate humor.
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I wrote my first screenplay on a lark, because it was a storytelling format that felt like a familiar shorthand - we all watch movies, don't we? But even though I grew up in Los Angeles, my family was entirely unconnected with the movie industry, and I never truly believed that it would one day be my fate.
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I am a huge Mel Brooks fan. And I do think that not seeing his canon of classics is a bit criminal or clueless.
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To properly investigate a subject, we must investigate a subject's stuff.
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I love 'The Wire'. I can't think of a television show that I think is superior to it in any way. I was obsessed with it from the moment it came on the air. I do also love 'Doctor Who' and 'Get Smart'.
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The sense of not knowing where I came from let me be as smart as I wanted to be.
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My writing process is chaos. I usually start with an overarching theme. Then I establish several story threads, but I don't outline. I just start writing and keep notes for what may come. It's an organic process that's usually pretty flexible.
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I have certain rules for snooping, under which anything out in the open is fair game.
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I usually have a sense of where my characters are personally and ways in which they might transform throughout the novel. But I never know at the outset how the book will end, nor do I ever stick to my original plan.
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I don't feel like I'm a writer who works under any influence.
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We're all amateur investigators. We scan bookshelves, we ogle trinkets left out in the open, we calculate the cost of furniture and study the photographs on display; sometimes we even check out the medicine cabinet.
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For more than three months, I had been president and primary owner of Spellman Investigations, and I can say with complete certainty that I had more power in this office as an underling. My title, it seemed, was purely decorative. I was captain of an unfashionable and sinking ship.
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I investigate more directly. I tend to ask a lot of questions and don't feel satisfied until I have the answer.