Select Editions: For years, you had a very successful career at J. Walter Thompson. How did you find time to write while working in an industry as demanding as advertising?

James Patterson: I loved to do it, so it was never a problem. I would just discipline myself. I got up every morning around 4:30 or 5:00, and I wrote until 6:00 or so. I think if you love to do something, you find a way to do it. The nice thing for me is that fiction writing has never been a job, and it still isn’t. It’s always been an escape. When I go into a bookstore and see a novel by some author that I really like, I feel that sense of excitement, and that’s what I feel every day when I sit down to write. It’s the same heart-pumping "I can’t wait to just see how today’s installment turns out!" feeling.

SE: Did you learn anything from your advertising career that helped you with your fiction writing?

Patterson: There is one thing. In creating advertising you soon become aware that there is someone on the other side of the communication that you're putting out. You become very aware of an audience. And I'm very aware of the audience for my novels. I am respectful of them. I want them to have a good time. I want them to keep reading. When I sit down to write, I pretend that there’s one person sitting across from me. I don’t want them to get up until it’s over with. No bathroom breaks.

SE: What were some of your early influences as a young boy growing up in Newburgh, New York?

Patterson: My grandparents were huge role models for me. My grandmother was probably most responsible for saying "you can do anything you want to do." My mother taught grammar school, and my father drove a bread truck and then worked in insurance. My grandparents, who owned a restaurant, and my parents lived in the same house. It was divided, and my grandparents had half. We had the other half. At a certain point, the cook who worked in their restaurant, an African American woman, was having trouble with her husband, and she moved into my grandparents' side of the house because they had more room. She was always around, and I spent a lot of time with her and her family. I found they had a great sense of togetherness and great humor, and I used this when I created Alex Cross's extended family.

SE: Was it hard to write an African American character?

Patterson: I believe that this whole thing about the differences between gender, race, whatever, is way, way overdone. The similarities between most of us are much more than the dissimilarities. I think there's a lot of me in Alex and in a lot of other people. We all have a sense of fairness that we'd like to see practiced in the world, and we’d like not to be on the defensive. That's a trait of Alex's. That's a trait of mine.

SE: What have African Americans said to you about Cross?

Patterson: I get some very positive letters thanking me for creating a family that’s just a regular family, that isn’t sitting there composing rap lyrics at the dinner table, carrying ghetto blasters. That’s part of the reason Morgan Freeman took the movie role of Cross in Along Came the Spider-- it wasn’t stereotyped.

SE: How has your fan base responded to your non-Alex Cross novels, both 1st to Die and the romance Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas?

Patterson: Interesting to both myself and my publisher, 1st to Die and Suzanne's Diary For Nicholas have both outsold the Alex Cross novels.

SE: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas was a major departure for you in that it's a love story. What was the inspiration for this book?

Patterson: I have a young son, and my wife is keeping a diary for him. That was a piece of the influence. My wife, Sue, and I are older parents, so there 's a sense of mortality in what we do. A story came to mind as I was thinking about my son and Sue and the relationship that we have. It was a sad story. I was in my publisher's offices in Manhattan, and I said, "Let me tell you a story." I had the publisher there and the editor-in-chief, and they’re kind of tough New Yorkers, and when I was done with the story, they were both crying. I said, "I have to try to put this on paper." And they said, "Please do, because we would like to publish this story."

SE: It is such a tragic story.

Patterson: It is, and it isn’t in a sense. The dedication is for all those who have ever loved and lost and loved again. When I was younger, in my late twenties and just beginning in advertising, I lived with a woman with whom I was very much in love. We’d been together for about six years. One Saturday morning we were out having breakfast, and then we stopped at a post office in Manhattan. Jane suddenly fell over. It turned out that she had a brain tumor. She died two years later. The perspective we took during those two years was, Isn’t it lucky that we have today. Those two years were the most memorable and emotional of my life. It’s very difficult for people to recover from loss. It takes a lot of courage to put yourself back out there.

SE: Did it take you a long time to get over it?

Patterson:Yes. It was awful. I developed Bell’s palsy. I remember when my grandfather died--and I loved my grandfather. He was a great guy, yet I could not cry. This was years earlier. It’s what happens to men a lot, I think. They get the cry sort of knocked out of them. When Jane got sick, I cried every day for two years. And then I cried every day for at least the next year and a half after that. After she died, I didn’t want to have a second by myself, so I threw myself into my job at J. Walter Thompson. That’s what focused me in the business.

SE: What about your schooling. You worked your way through Manhattan College, majoring in English and graduating summa cum laude?

Patterson: Yes. In the summers I worked as a psychiatric aide at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. My family had moved to Massachusetts by then. I preferred to work in the youth hall, where you are kind of like a brother. You walked around and talked to people. There were certain rules, such as an aide had to be within arm's length of a suicidal person. That was kind of hairy. It was very emotional and a wonderful job.

SE: Did you ever think of becoming a psychologist?

Patterson: In retrospect, maybe I should have thought about it, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me. I think I made the right choices.

SE: Was there anything about your experience at McLean that you used in your writing?

Patterson: I used a little bit in The Thomas Berryman Number, my first novel. There's a little bit in Roses Are Red, and the last Alex Cross novel takes place in a hospital. Cross is a psychologist. I stayed in touch with several of the people at McLean, and I would talk to them. The nice thing with the psychology is that I get a lot of letters from psychologists, psychiatrists, whatever, who say that it all rings very true.

SE: You’ve taken some heat from the critics for the spareness of your writing.

Patterson: Yes, but Michael Connelly said something about me in an interview that I think is great: "Patterson boils a scene down to the single telling element that defines a character or moves the plot along. It’s what fires off the movie projector in the reader’s mind." I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but I think there’s a lot of truth in terms of boiling scenes down to that simple, telling element. It’s not Dickens; it’s not all this incredible detail that somehow adds up or people think adds up. I write stuff that’s larger than life. I’m not trying to write real life. Every once in a while somebody will say, "Well, this isn’t very realistic." I always think about someone looking at a roller-coaster and saying it isn’t very realistic. No. It’s a roller-coaster.

SE: You said in an interview that many of your ideas come from day-mares you have, as opposed to nightmares.

Patterson: Whatever strengths I have, have to do with being in touch with my emotions. I will feel certain things, and when I do, I’ll make notes and say, This hit me. Maybe there's something here to be investigated. The idea for Kiss the Girls came from when I was down in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It has a wonderful college-town atmosphere, very idyllic. I was wandering down the main street and kind of thinking that the atmosphere was terrific, and I came to a little kiosk. It had the usual kinds of notes posted on it, "Buy my guitar," "Come see my jazz group." But there were also four mimeographed sheets with pictures of missing women. In the context of the other things I was seeing, it seemed very scary and wrong and tragic. Then a couple of days later I was flying out of Raleigh/Durham Airport and there were more pictures of the missing women at the airport. On the way home I was going, ’Where are they?" That's where that day-mare came from.

SE: Did you get any ideas from reading tragic stories in the newspapers?

Patterson: Occasionally. I’ll read The Times and The Wall Street Journal and USA Today and Palm Beach Post. I usually read four or five newspapers a day.

SE: You left advertising in 1996. What finally made you leave?

Patterson: What really drove me out of advertising finally was not my writing. It was that I said I have to go out and try to see if I can find somebody to love.

SE: That's wonderful. And you met your current wife. Was that your first marriage?

Patterson:Yes.

SE: So how did you make it happen?

Patterson: I went out. I met a lot of people, which is a difficult thing to do, I think, at that age—I was in my late forties. Strangely, I had hired Sue seventeen or eighteen years before. She had been married, and we met up again. She was not married then. You know the funny thing was, I remember when I was dating Sue—she’s Catholic—and we went to Mass one Sunday, and I was sitting in this church, which just felt very traditional. I was thinking back to when I was a teenager and how I thought I would have a traditional lifestyle. And it just didn’t happen. It wound up being this adventure.

SE: Do you have time for anything else other than your work and your family?

Patterson: That takes up a lot of time. The great thing for us—and it really is wonderful and special—is that we’re home with our son. We get to watch him grow up, and it's really rare that two parents get to do that. The other nice thing -- and you never know until you do it -- is that we like being around each other. We’re around each other a lot. It's worked out really, really well.

SE: Back to books. You’ve been diversifying in several new directions lately, and you write two or three books every year. How do you come up with fresh ideas for that many stories?

Patterson: I have a big thick folder of story ideas, far too many for me to actually write. I’m incredibly fascinated by how a story will turn out once I begin to write it. That 's my chief motivation for doing two or three books a year.

SE: What does the future hold in store for Alex Cross?

Patterson: There is a rumor around that the next Detective Alex Cross novel, Four Blind Mice, could be the last. Stay tuned. I will guarantee readers this: If Alex returns, he’ll be very different from the way he is now.

SE: How do you reply to people who say your books are not realistic?

Patterson: Although there is a lot of realistic detail in my books, I’m not trying to be realistic. When someone occasionally says that one of my stories isn’t realistic, it makes me think of someone looking at a roller-coaster and proclaiming that it’s "not very realistic."

SE: Who among today's authors do you enjoy reading?

Patterson: There are so many incredibly good writers. Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, George Pelecanos, Tracy Chevalier, Alice Sebold, Stephen King, Richard Russo, and on and on and on.

SE: Two of your Alex Cross mysteries--Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider--have been made into movies. Have you participated in any way in filming?

Patterson: I’ve cashed two checks.

SE: Would you ever do a cameo in a movie based on one of your books?

Patterson: No way. I’m holding out for the romantic lead in Suzanne's Diary For Nicholas!

Home | Get Your Free Book | What is Select Editions? | Preview Current Volume | Exclusive Interview

Copyright © 2005 Reader’s Digest