Word: patterson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Patterson probably outsells Toni Morrison 10 books to 1, but his success comes at a price. He will never get respect from the literati. Most reviewers ignore him. In a culture that values high style over storytelling, pretty prose over popularity and pulse-pounding plots, he's at the extreme wrong end of the spectrum, and he knows it. And, yes, it irks him a little. "That's probably my biggest frustration," he admits. "There's something going on here that's significant, and it's not easy to do. If it was easy to do, a lot of people...
...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...
...Patterson still wasn't 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...
...collaborator, Andrew Gross, used to run the sports-equipment company Head, but his dream was to write novels, and he couldn't get any traction with publishers. One day he got a call: Patterson had seen his manuscript and wanted to have breakfast. "Basically what he said was, I've got a lot of stories to tell, and nobody has the resources to tell 'em all, and would I like to talk about a project with him?" That was the beginning of a seven-year partnership, a highly educational one for Gross--he jokes that it's the equivalent...