Barry Eisler
Barry Eisler
Barry Mark Eisleris a best-selling American novelist. He is the author of two thriller series, the first featuring anti-hero John Rain, a half-Japanese, half-American former soldier turned freelance assassin, and a second featuring black ops soldier Ben Treven. Eisler also writes about politics and language on his blog Heart of the Matter, and at the blogs CHUD, Firedoglake, The Huffington Post, MichaelMoore.com, The Smirking Chimp, and Truthout...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
bad kinds love rule since stories thrillers thumb
I've loved thrillers and spy stories since I was a kid. It's probably not a bad rule of thumb to write the kinds of stories you love to read.
jobs essence stories
The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.
cia seems
From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'
ambiguity bad drawn good great heroes moral sure villains
I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.
aspects became forbidden foreign interested knowledge policy various
When I was in college, I became interested in various aspects of foreign policy and international relations. Even as a kid, I was interested in what I call, loosely speaking, forbidden knowledge.
difficulty novelists realizing screenplay trying
The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.
influenced number poetry
I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.
breaking few government interest knowledge lock methods select wants
I have a long-standing interest in what I like to think of as 'forbidden knowledge:' methods of unarmed killing, lock picking, breaking and entry, spy stuff, and other things that the government wants only a few select individuals to know.
vehicle whether
Publishing, legacy or indie, is a vehicle, and you can't opine about whether someone has chosen the right vehicle if you don't know where she intends to drive it.
humor inspired job king truth
Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.
blame others problems
Psychologically, it's always more pleasurable to blame others for our problems than it is to acknowledge our own responsibility.
books brand impulse low maximum position purchases results sales spot support sweet versions
I want to position my books as premium-priced versions on the reasonably-priced scale, if that makes sense, to find a sweet spot between the high-end of what my brand can support and the low end that results in impulse purchases and maximum sales volume.
government involving somehow
When I think of a story, somehow it just always seems to come out involving spooks and spies and government skullduggery.
awful business corruption great japanese politics setting sort spy
There's an awful lot of corruption in Japanese business and politics, corruption of the sort that can make for great setting for a spy story.