Interview With James Patterson, Best-selling Author of Gripping Novella ‘The Trial’

Patterson notes that his former career in advertising also gave him a perspective into the way women work. “I found that women collaborated more than men did,” he says. “They were more willing to listen to the other person’s point of view. … That’s sort of where the idea for this Women’s Murder Club got together.”

Collaboration is also an integral aspect of Patterson’s career. He works with a stable of authors to publish multiple books each year. Some of these coauthors happen to be high-profile — like former president Bill Clinton and country music icon Dolly Parton — but others are writers with whom he works regularly. His process, as detailed in his recent autobiography, James Patterson by James Patterson: The Stories of My Life, goes like this: Each new book starts with a detailed outline — from 50 to 80 pages. Then Patterson asks each coauthor to take over. He asks for pages to be sent to him every two to three weeks, and they tweak as they go.

Patterson has written all but three of the Women’s Murder Club novels with Maxine Paetro. He wrote the first book in the series himself and the next two with bestselling author Andrew Gross. Says Paetro: “When Jim asked me if I would like to write the Women’s Murder Club with him, he added that it would be ‘a good and lucky thing.’ I couldn't say yes fast enough. For me, the last 20 years have been an ongoing masterclass with the master of suspense.”

But even the master gets “slapped around a little” for his collaborative approach, Patterson says. “A lot of people don’t understand [working with another author on a book]. They think it’s just the oddest thing in the world,” he notes. “The reality is that if our planet is going to be saved, it’s going to be because we learn how to collaborate. The Sistine Chapel … some wonderful painters [were] up there all collaborating to paint that ceiling. The vaccine, whatever people think of it, collaboration. Almost every TV show writers’ rooms [has] six to nine writers in a room collaborating — so it’s not that unusual.”

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He also understands, and plays into, his readers’ voracious appetite for his signature style: short paragraphs, short chapters, a fast pace, bare-bones description — just enough to whet your whistle and keep you guessing. “For some reason, people have decided that for a serious novel, you should know more about that character than you know about your spouse,” says Patterson, who has won nine Emmy Awards, an Edgar Award and the 2019 National Humanities Medal. “Well, I don’t think that’s a rule of the art of fiction. It’s a way. It’s an approach. And my approach is a little truer to life, to be honest with you. We know what we know. We don’t know everything.”

He adds, “I like to pretend I’m just talking to one person, and I don’t want them to get up until I’m finished. And that’s both my strength and my weakness. The strength is that people keep turning the pages, and the weakness could be sometimes I don’t go as deep as I should, because I’m afraid they’ll stop turning the pages.”