Janet Evanovich
I think that some books are more successful than others to certain readers. People who read my books for the humor, they're going to love one book. People who read my books for the mystery, they might not like that book quite as much.Collection: Humor
We don't appreciate the value of humor sometimes.Collection: Humor
You can get through very serious and sometimes horrible and sometimes embarrassing and very awkward situations with humor. It gives us a way out.Collection: Humor
The best we can do is prioritize our needs and make choices accordingly.
Community, responsibility, flexibility, tenacity - these are all things that I imbue my characters with. They are basically good, nonjudgmental people who succeed at the end of the day, sometimes in spite of themselves.
I'm a real voyeur.
There are some men who enter a woman's life and screw it up forever.
I love Sherri Shepherd as Lula.
When I storyboard, they're just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard.
There's just so much craziness out there in the world; it's like I couldn't fit them all in my books.
Inspiration is easy. The hard part is getting the inspiration onto 300 pages in an interesting, cohesive, easy-to-read but hard-to-forget story.
I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.
I struggled to learn basic skills, get a grip on markets, find my own unique voice, create story lines and come up to speed with the industry. I struggled for ten years before having any success.
I like being able to provide consistent and frequent literary choices for my fans.
Since I can barely write two books a year the best solution seems to be co-author projects. My goal isn't to get another writer to clone me... it's more to produce a book that shares my vision of positive, fun entertainment.
I wasn't always a writer. When I went to college and majored in fine arts, I was a painter. Then I was a stay-at-home mom.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.
I actually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers were sending in their ideas for titles, and what we realized is that they were smarter than us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.
I go to bars and restaurants, and I sit and I eavesdrop on people and I watch people in shopping centers and, you know, I read the newspapers and I talk to the Trenton cops, and I just get a lot of information that comes in that somehow turns into a book.
If you want to cry, you're not going to like my books.
I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.
I took all of my rejection letters - there must have been thousands of them in a huge box - and I went out on the curb and burned them all, crying.
The 'Barnaby' books were always intended to be graphic novels.
I've finally reached a stage in my career where I can do what I want.
I had done 12 little romance books, and I decided I wanted to move into crime fiction.
As writers, we all have an agenda, but if you recognize that agenda in a book, then you've failed.
I know nothing about making a movie.
What I do miss is the Jersey Shore.
When you're trying to expand your business, it's about real estate in the stores.
I feel like I never would have been a success and gotten published without my family.
I'm a writer, but this is a business. You have to look at it in the way you would look at any business.
You have to have honesty to the product. You have to meet consumer expectations. You give them value for their money and give them a product that they need. I don't see anything wrong with all these things. And I don't think it's a bad thing to meet consumers' expectations.
I've read comics all my life and have wanted to write a comic for as long as I can remember. Alex Barnaby and Sam Hooker seemed like the perfect team to make the move into the graphic medium.
Writing a graphic novel is hard. It feels closer to a screen play than to a novel.
'Troublemaker' is not an adaptation of 'Metro Girl' or 'Motor Mouth.' It is an original story. The hardest part was probably trying to keep the sound true to the novels. I always write in first person, and it was important to us that the readers of 'Metro' and 'Motor' be comfortable with the change over to a graphic novel.
Like 'Metro' and 'Motor,' 'Troublemaker' is written in first person. The only narration that happens is Barney speaking to the reader/thinking in her head. First person was a big challenge in the graphic novel because we want both men and women of all ages to enjoy 'Troublemaker.'
When I'm plotting out a book, I use a storyboard - I'll have maybe three lines across on the storyboard and just start working through the plot line. I always know where relationships will go and how the book is going to end.
What I have to outline is action and plot because I'm not particularly good at that.
I know the relationships, and I already know my characters and how I'm going to reveal my characters to my readers - how I'm going to feed them information about that character. That stuff doesn't have to be in my outline.
I have people I love and trust on my team. And I'm lucky my family is incredibly talented in a variety of ways.
When I started writing, it felt good, and I knew I was in the right genre.
I work real hard so the reader doesn't have to. I don't want them to have to look up words.
I made a choice that I was not going to be a pretentious writer.
My world is better. Why would I want to waste my time playing golf? I can get up in the morning and be in this whole other world. I love my life.
What I realized halfway through writing romance is that you start out intuitive, and you make all these choices mostly based on yourself and what you like and what talent you have, and... if you want to have any quality control over your product, you have to stop being intuitive and start being more of an analyst.
There are tons of really good writers out there, but for one reason or another, they just have not had the support that allowed them to build audiences.
I did a co-authored book not so long ago that was an American historical romance set at the turn of the century. I'm fascinated by that period in time and would love to do more.
The 'Stephanie Plums' are very much Jersey books. So you can't get away from attitude and objectionable language.
We're comic book fans; we're huge NASCAR fans.
I'm a sitcom junky. And I love rom coms. Mind candy.