Jess Walter
Jess Walter
Jess Walteris an American author of six novels, a collection of short stories, and a non-fiction book. His books have been published in twenty-six countries and translated into twenty-eight languages. He is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, among others, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth20 July 1965
CountryUnited States of America
assign cops criminals genre itself minority spies stories suppose suspense
I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.
writing writing-stories stories
I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.
thinking stories pops
The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.
years stories firsts
The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.
stories
All we have is the story we tell.
art together stories
I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.
publicists
With Facebook and Twitter, we're all our own little publicists in a way.
I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.
ask book books building cast filling furniture house people thinking time
People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.
asked dexter dive fewer great joan less likely maybe mourn people piano pick played playing programs route
I teach in M.F.A. programs now, and I think that's a great way to become a novelist, but I mourn that Pete Dexter and Joan Didion's route is maybe less likely because there are fewer of those jobs. I always liken it to playing piano in some great dive jazz bar. You didn't pick the songs, you played what people asked for, but you got your chops.
explode flames
I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.
bills calling certainly drinking fiction further immersed kids life pay pull routine tends walk wrong
I don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names.
compared dazzling feats literary page pages paul pulls sounds
Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,'... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book.
adapted buddy cbs couple few lives pilot ruby since sold wrote
My first book, about Ruby Ridge, was made into a miniseries on CBS in 1996, and since then, I've dabbled in Hollywood, pitched a few things, sold a couple of screenplays and a pilot that I wrote with a buddy from Spokane, flirted with seeing 'Citizen Vince' as a film, and most recently, adapted 'The Financial Lives of the Poets' as a script.