Word: novels
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...writer, but he didn't find it necessary to starve along the way: he had a highly successful career in advertising, including a six-year run as chairman of J. Walter Thompson in North America. But he never gave up on his dream. In 1977 his first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, won an Edgar Award, the Oscar of the mystery world, although it wasn't a big commercial success. His evolution into James Patterson, The Man Who Only Writes Best Sellers, had yet to to be fulfilled...
First came the creation of the Patterson style, which dispenses with any flowery bits or extraneous details. A typical Patterson novel might have 150 chapters, but each one is just two or three pages long. His paragraphs are short too, often just one or two sentences. It's an approach that emphasizes action over style and pace over everything. "It was a little bit of an accident," he says. "I was writing a book called Midnight Club, and I'd done about 100 pages, and I was planning to really flesh them out. And I read the 100 pages...
...things that's fascinating about Patterson is his total lack of interest in received wisdom; another is his complete confidence in his own judgment. With 1992's Along Came a Spider, the first novel in his Alex Cross series, Patterson knew he'd written a best seller--so he took control of the way it was designed and marketed. When his publisher told him it wasn't interested in running a TV campaign, he called in a few favors at J. Walter Thompson and shot the ad with his own money. He wasn't jazzed about Spider's cover...
...done. He wanted to re-engineer his own creative process. He's never had a problem with writer's block, but there were just too many ideas piling up in his head. So when he and journalist Peter de Jonge came up with an idea for a golf novel, Miracle on the 17th Green, he thought, Why not just write it together? "Peter's a much better stylist than I am, and I'm a much better storyteller than he is. It's another way to do things...
Since then Patterson has co-written eight of his novels. He'll whip up a detailed outline, then ship it off to his collaborator for a first draft. "I may talk to them on a couple-week basis," he says. "And then at a certain point I'll just take it over and write as many as seven drafts. There were a couple of them that really were a mess," he adds ruefully. "At least twice it's been, 'I wish that I just started this thing myself.'" It's rare for big-name authors to use co-writers...