American - Author | January 3, 1954 -
I usually look for stories with barriers to entry, something complex enough that no one else is going to do it.
Erik Larson
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I'm always looking for a sign - not in a spooky, supernatural way, but in a 'neurotic writer' kind of way.
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It's like being involved in a detective story, looking for that thing that nobody else has found.
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I've heard from the movie marketplace that James Cameron did such a killer job with 'Titanic' that it's almost impossible to do anything better.
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I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.
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Every time I sit down to reread 'War and Peace' - I've read it three times - I feel as though I've lived another life.
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I don't really have a bucket list, but if I did, one entry would be to dust off my college Russian and spend a big chunk of a year reading, or trying to read, 'War and Peace' as it was meant to be read, in Russian, with all that rumbly rocks-on-rocks poetry inherent to the language.
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I was a promiscuous reader. I loved Nancy Drew books and Tom Swift - never the Hardy Boys - but I also read Dumas, Dickens, Poe, Conan Doyle, and Cornelius Ryan's war books. As to favorite character: I'm torn between Nancy, on whom I had an unseemly crush, and Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo.
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It's not my intent to write definitive history. 'Dead Wake' isn't a definitive history of the sinking of the Lusitania. It's my account.
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Anytime you look at someone in detail, you're putting the camera on that person. What I typically look for is one or two or three really strong characters who will hold the narrative throughout the work.
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The reason I choose the stories I choose - and it's why it takes me so long to find ideas - is that I'm looking for that very thing. I want an idea that begins, I want a middle that is compelling and will bring readers along, and I definitely want an ending.
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At first glance, the story of the Lusitania doesn't seem like the sort of thing I would take on. I usually like ideas that are a little bit more complex, things that people don't know about - or maybe they once did, but now you bring it to life for them for the first time.
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