Karin Slaughter
Women can be two different people - one person at home, another at work.
I thought I had to write literature and add my name to the list of great Southern storytellers. Fortunately for me, no one wanted to read any of those stories. They got rejected by everyone. Sometimes, I would get a note saying they liked the writing, but the story simply didn't work.
I grew up in a small town in Georgia where nothing bad happened - it was like Mayberry.
I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.
Visual storytelling is at once immediate and subversive.
Librarians have always stood up for writers and readers in every kind of community across this country.
There's a tendency among some male writers to make the women in their stories weak and needing of rescue so that their hero looks like a manly man.
Denise Mina is probably one of the most gifted writers out there, whether it's mystery or literary or whatever label you want to give it.
Jack Reacher is one of the sexiest characters in fiction.
For many children, the library represents their only access to books, reading, and the Internet outside of their home. If you think about how far behind a child would be without access to these fundamental tools - tools that are vital to successful employment later in life - it's a travesty.
Equal access to reading is fundamental to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, 'I want to do that.'
I grew up having the library as the best place ever. I spent a lot of weekends there as a kid - my parents would drop me off and leave me there all day. I would just sit in the back and read whatever I could find.
When I became a published writer, I said, 'Whatever I can do to help the libraries I want to do,' so all of my book tours since then have involved me coming to a library and talking about how important libraries are for a community.
I started Save the Libraries in 2010 by hosting a big fundraiser in my city library of DeKalb County in Atlanta. Through that, I learned that even with fundraisers, libraries often don't make money - they just barely break even.
No matter where you are on the political spectrum, libraries make sense. It's such a small investment. Every dollar supporting a library system returns five dollars to the community.
When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you've just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes - those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.
'Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Case,' 'The Secret of the Old Clock,' 'Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret,' 'Flowers in the Attic,' 'Gone With the Wind' - these are the books that defined my childhood. They thrilled me. They made me feel like I wasn't alone in the world.
Though he was not a reader himself, my father understood that reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.
With 'Pretty Girls,' I saw the opportunity to talk not just about crime but what crime leaves behind.
Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.
As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.
No crime lab in the world looks like the 'CSI' ones because there's simply not the money for all those fancy machines.
There aren't many people in the world who can say that they are doing the job they've wanted to do since childhood, so in that regard, I feel incredibly fortunate.
I'm over the word 'like' in conversation, and 'you know' seems to be the placeholder of choice, but when I'm writing dialogue, I tend to use those phrases because that's how people talk.
I've never purposefully based a character on any one person I know, but I'm certain there are amalgamations that exist.
I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where for the first time in my life I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books. This was where I discovered 'Encyclopedia Brown' and 'Nancy Drew,' 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Rebecca.' This was where I became inspired to be a writer.
If there is still an American dream, reading is one of the bootstraps by which we can all pull ourselves up.
As much as we would like to deny it, reading is not vital to human survival.
Reading is exercise for our brains in the guise of pleasure. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them.
I grew up watching the 'People's Choice Awards.'
I read a lot of true crime growing up - 'The Stranger Beside Me' by Ann Rule about Ted Bundy.
Readers are very, very savvy, and I don't want to insult them by making them think I'm too lazy to get it right.
Even 'Gone With the Wind' had a shocking, cold-blooded murder.
Prosecutors and public defenders deserve to make a living wage.
Graphic novels let you take risks that just wouldn't fly in the conventional book form.
We make assumptions: nurses should be nice, teachers should be good. But everyone has a dark side, some darker than others.
My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.
Reading develops cognitive skills. It trains our minds to think critically and to question what you are told. This is why dictators censor or ban books. It's why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. It's why girls in developing countries have acid thrown in their faces when they walk to school.
Even if you live in a big city, everybody lives in a small town. We identify ourselves by our neighborhoods - 'I live in the Village, or in Chelsea.'
As the youngest of three girls, most of my childhood works were revenge fantasies against my older sisters, so of course the sisters in 'Pretty Girls' share some similarities to my own.
When I was little, my grandmother would take me to church with her, and she would introduce me to people.
It sounds pretentious to say I 'divide' my time, but when I am home, that usually means my house in Atlanta or my cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. The latter is where I do the majority of my writing.
My typical morning involves some time on the treadmill, but obviously I skip that a lot. Mostly, I wake up, check my email, then get to work on the various interviews and questions and phone calls that come with being an author.
I'm extremely introverted. I used to think it was shyness, but I got over that, so it must be door No. 2. It's still hard for me to be away from home much, and I have to make sure I get lots of time alone in my room when I'm touring.
I love puns. I've been known to turn the car around just to take advantage of a good pun situation. It really is the highest form of humor.
As a Southerner, I love obstacles for my characters.
I know the cadence of the language and the voice of Atlanta because I've lived here for so long.
I read extensively about serial killers and all sorts of things people get up to.