James Patterson
speaker
661 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 5 Jun
James Patterson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You get used to it. Yeah. Yeah. Read the flap copy. You should be able to get a few questions out of that. So Alex is in trouble again. Alice Cross. Oh, yeah. What a surprise. Oh, yeah. Wonderful. Did he make it? Is this the end of the Alice Cross series?
It's a lot of self-help books or books where somebody's written a neat article in The New Yorker or something, and then it publishes this, turn it into 300 pages. And they do, but really the article in The New Yorker would have sufficed. Yes. So there is that, yeah.
Yeah, I pretend there's one person sitting across from me and I don't want them to get up until I finish the story. to always believe that our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness, or at least frequently. And I get people to turn the pages. That's a strength. The weaknesses sometimes don't go as deep as they should.
And I got into this a little bit when I went to the screening for the Alex Cross that's going to be on Amazon. And I got up there and I was with Aldous Hodge, who's the star and then the showrunner, Ben Watkins. And I said, I feel in the series that they got deeper. They got deeper into Alex. And I thought that was great. I thought he's more contemporary. He's not as perfect. He's more flawed.
It's more of the reality of Washington, D.C. and what it would be to be a cop there with kids. I'm very happy with the way it turned out.
No, you kind of know. Yeah, that line actually is Elmore Leonard. Somebody asked him, how did he all of a sudden go from not selling much to selling very well? And he said, I just started leaving out the parts that people skim.
Well, I mean, part of it is you're talking to somebody. It's the same thing. Oh, my God, I don't need every single detail. Get to the good parts or you start somewhere. It's a beginning, middle, and end. It's a basic thing. And for some people, the middle is really long and there's no beginning and no end.
Yeah. If you can write beginnings and ends, you'll sell well. If you actually write middles, too, you'll get to a Pulitzer, maybe. Yeah. This was on Chris Wallace's show. Okay. That was something, too. because he wanted it, and I get it. He thought that a hook of the show would be that you go for whatever the time was, 45 minutes, or there's no editing, no blah, blah, blah.
And I just wouldn't play it. I wasn't trying to be unpleasant, but I just wouldn't let him do that. I wouldn't let him cut me off and stuff like that. So it was going to go over, and I knew there were going to be things, because I was cursing occasionally, that he'd want to cut. And he turned to my wife, Sue, who was in the studio. He said, is he always like this? And she said, yes, unfortunately.
Listen, I mean, that's one of the issues with network television with fiction shows, where the scene has got to work so that it's time for a commercial break versus when you're writing for Netflix or Amazon or whatever, and you don't have to write to commercial breaks. That's really good.
Pretty much. I probably could show off a little bit, but I don't want to do that. And a lot of writers really, I think they want to show off or they want to talk to their friends more than tell an honest story or try to tell stories as well as you can. I'm on Substack now and I do interviews and they're short. They're 20, 30 minutes. And it's been cool. I did President Clinton.
I did Baldacci and Ellen Hildebrand. And it's been fun. I enjoy it. I just did Dolly Parton, which was really great. That was fun.
And it's true with President Clinton and Dolly, and now I'm working with Viola Davis, and they've all become friends.
Well, it's, you know, when I interviewed David Baldacci, he doesn't use outlines at all, which is interesting. He just wings it. And some writers do. I'm big on outlines. Interestingly, the first Alice Cross, I really wanted to do it differently than what I'd done before then. And the outline was something like 350 pages. That's like the whole book. It wasn't, but it was close.
And I read it, and that's where the short chapters came from, the colloquial writing. And I said, I like this. I did expand it another 100 pages or so, but that's where that whole style came from, that very long outline. But in general, I'll have 60 to 80 page outlines. And I'm not a slave to them. And sometimes the villain will be really interesting.
And I don't want the villain to die at the end of the book because I want to write about the villain again. Or a character gets more interesting than I thought. Or one of the drafts that I'll do, I'll go through and just look at every chapter and go, well, I went here. What if I go somewhere else? If I do this twist, what will it do to the story? Will that be fun? I like that.
That draft is one of the things that makes the books interesting because you surprise people, which I think is important for my kind of book.
100%.
Yeah, what I'll usually do is there'll be three or four or five different things. It might be a couple of storylines. So I will just write scenes down for that storyline and then for the next storyline and then scenes with Alex and his family in no particular order. And then at a certain point, I'll sit down and try to do the outline where I'll put the scenes in some kind of order.
That's a really good example because directors do that. A lot of the young Turks now, they just go, well, I'll just go shoot it. You get somebody like, who's the guy that did Black Hawk Down? His brother died, Brett. whatever. But what he does is he's famous for it. He's a really good illustrator and he draws all the scenes. Like it actually draws like a comic book.
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