1. “If readers tell you that stretches of dialogue or narrative were too long, that they couldn’t tell who was talking, that’s something that can be fixed.”

2. “You can get too many cooks in the kitchen – you have to learn how to finish the book on your own.”

3. “Again – most important chapters are the first and last – they must be emotionally engaging – Action should start in the first paragraph.”

4. “When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?”

5. “Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.”

6. “Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.”

7. “Most people like a little sex in their novels.”

8. “If you do outline, you have to be aware of the problems that that kind of thing can cause.”

9. “These characters are not spontaneous creations. They are engineered down to the last nut and bolt.”

10. “A lot of journalists are talented enough to write a mystery novel, and I would say that most of the top-end mystery writers actually started out as reporters. But there is more to it than just the writing; there's a learning process, and most journalists aren't willing to do it.”

John Sanford

John Roswell Camp was born February 23, 1944, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, U.S.A. John Sandford is an American novelist and former journalist, and published 40 novels, and won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1986, and the winner of the 1985 Distinguished Writing Award of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.