I just finished the autobiography (really more an interesting collection of stories) called, “James Patterson by James Patterson”. He’s the famous mystery/crime writer, but he also writes many other things such as children’s books and essays. I’ve read many of his novels, and admire his work ethic and talent, so I was eager to also read his autobiography.

I ran into somebody recently who was writing their memoirs and was frustrated and feeling overwhelmed because she had a 100,000 words written, and everybody was telling her she needed to cut, cut, cut and edit and she was having trouble figuring out what to do. My advice — I told her she could do worse than read or listen to James Patterson’s autobiography and follow his style a little bit. Succinct short bursts. 2023 world attention span almost demands this approach.

Here’s a juicy excerpt from one of Patterson’s chapters —

how it feels to be a writer

I could be wrong, but I think I remember from my grad-school days at Vanderbilt that Gustave Flaubert wrote up to eighteen hours a day, including several letters to the poet Louise Colet. Some scholars believe that the correspondence helped to spark Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary. I don’t know about that…but something he wrote in the letters captures the way I feel whenever I sit down to write. And since I write 350 to 360 days a year, I feel this way pretty much every day.

Flaubert wrote: “It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that
made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.”