Lee Child
Author of the Jack Reacher thrillers
Where to hear and read about Lee Child1 episode or test
Lee Child is the author of the Jack Reacher thrillers, which have sold more than 200 million books. The most useful thing to learn from him is to imply a question the reader needs answered and keep every sentence tipping forward.
It's like I have my hand gently on their back just pushing them through. They don't notice.
Learn to Write Page-Turners in 63 Minutes (Lee Child Interview)
Lee Child: the story and the lessons
1Why Lee Child set Reacher in America
Child wrote Reacher as an escape after being fired from television. He had just lost his job in a TV shake-up that favored Rupert Murdoch's satellite business, and he wanted to get away, at least on the page.
He wanted myth and legend: the noble loner who shows up here and there. Only a huge, half-empty country could hold a mysterious stranger.
British crime fiction was too small for a lone stranger. Barbara Vine's stories live in a few streets of North London and Ian Rankin's fill a couple of square miles of Edinburgh.
In Britain everybody knows everybody's business, so a stranger can't walk into a cut-off town with secrets.
Child treats his outsider's eye as an advantage. He first visited the US in 1974 and immigrated in 1998. His old passports showed exactly 100 visits, and his wife is from New York.
The risks are wrong details and missing the culture. The gain is seeing what Americans no longer notice because it is so familiar.
Child wrote Reacher to please himself and trusted others would agree. He expected nobody to like Reacher, a dirty barbarian who shoots people in the back and lies, cheats and steals. He liked him anyway.
Since people share a lot of culture, he figured many others would too, and the only unknown was how many. The series has since outsold Harry Potter on Amazon UK, and he says the more you design a character, the worse it gets.
2How Lee Child writes a book without an outline
Child never outlines, so he stays curious about his own story. He has published a book a year with no plan, while some friends write 300-page outlines.
Even a two-page outline would mean he had told himself the story and was bored with it. He starts from a location and discovers the plot as a reader would.
A lifetime of reading stands in for his outline. Child says he is mostly a reader: he writes one book a year and reads hundreds. That builds an internal database of plots, characters, cliffhangers and structures.
He calls it a monster plan and outline in his head. He points to Scorsese watching a movie every night, and to a Reacher film crew watching a movie after a 14-hour shooting day.
Child picks a temperature and a place before anything else. He chooses hot or cold, hard or soft, the way a composer picks a key, such as baking West Texas or misty Maine in April. He draws on places he already knows and does no research for a book.
The setting makes some action inevitable and some implausible, so it does part of the plotting for him.
Child starts every book on 1 September and delivers in March or April. Each summer his ideas fade and he feels washed up. Late in August an idea and a first line arrive, and by 1 September he is running.
Every year he thinks the previous 20 were just luck. He calls imagination biddable: you can quiet it down and crank it up when you need to.
Child holds writing as noble art and as a job, each fully. His first contract with readers was financial, because he had been fired and needed income. It later became an emotional promise never to let them down.
He admits that believing both at 100 percent is mathematically impossible, but says you must. The job side supplies the discipline, and series readers are disappointed if a year is missed.
3How Lee Child keeps readers turning pages
Child plants an implied question and lets readers stay for the answer. He learned from 40,000 hours of television that people want the answer to a question. After remote controls, TV held viewers with teasers like who was first choice for Dirty Harry.
The question doesn't need to matter. He says this makes plotting far easier than people think.
Child engineers every sentence to tip forward. A novel is thousands of sentences in a row, so he spends much of his effort on the rhythm of each one. He compares it to a Beatles song that ends a little faster than it starts.
Experienced readers see it as style, and casual readers just keep going. He wants the book to feel like a carnival ride down a polished tube.
Child writes for both habitual readers and the outer rings. He pictures readers in rings like Saturn's: habitual readers at the center, people who read one book a year at the edge. One book must please both.
For casual readers, finishing the book is a real win. He asks: if you write a book and nobody reads it, have you written a book?
Child opens in the middle of the action. Beginners open with where the hero grew up and who the parents were. His rule is not to start when the earth cooled.
Open on something intriguing happening now and explain later, if at all. He never plans a chapter ending, because 40,000 hours of television made them instinctively obvious.
Child ties up loose ends because readers want the work done. He twice left a minor character's fate unstated, and readers hated it both times.
They want the writer to tell the whole story, not treat it like a writing prompt.
Child does not worry about being liked. He quotes David Mamet: the best answer to 'are we going to like you?' is 'I don't know and I don't care.'
His lesson is that the less you worry about being liked, the more people like you. He says it applies to practically every aspect of writing.
4Lee Child's craft for dialogue, character and violence
Child treats dialogue as an illusion, not a transcript. Real talk is stop-start, full of placeholders and jumps between subjects, so natural-looking dialogue has to be built. He once won a prize for natural dialogue from a Texas paper.
He learns it by listening to people, films and TV, then builds rhythm so the stress lands on the key word without italics.
Child repeats charged words so the emphasis lands without markup. Angry people strip language down to simple words and repeat them. A woman saying 'I need my money. I lost my money.' leaves the stress on money.
He compares it to a song chorus: strong emotion pulls us back to rhythm and repetition.
Child sketches characters with clothes and teeth. An old man with a gray ponytail and double denim, or lace-up Oxfords and pleated chinos, is placed instantly because readers carry a database of types.
A fan who was a dental hygienist noticed every mention of teeth in his books, such as snaggletoothed or wolflike. He had been using them as shorthand without realizing it.
Child keeps violence quick and unglamorous, then lets readers enjoy it. Real violence is over fast and costs a lot: a hard blow to the head leaves you sick and dizzy for a week. Movie brawls with hits and staggers are an illusion.
He draws on a rough manufacturing-city childhood where every dispute was a fight. He says thoughtful readers want the release because civilization asks them to give violence up.
Learn to Write Page-Turners in 63 Minutes (Lee Child Interview)
Lee Child explains how he writes page-turners without an outline, by planting a question, driving sentence rhythm forward, and trusting a lifetime of reading. The most useful idea is to imply a question the reader needs answered and keep each sentence tipping forward.
Child wrote Reacher as an escape after being fired from television. He had just lost his job in a TV shake-up that favored Rupert Murdoch's satellite business, and he wanted to get away, at least on the page.
He wanted myth and legend: the noble loner who shows up here and there. Only a huge, half-empty country could hold a mysterious stranger.
British crime fiction was too small for a lone stranger. Barbara Vine's stories live in a few streets of North London and Ian Rankin's fill a couple of square miles of Edinburgh.
In Britain everybody knows everybody's business, so a stranger can't walk into a cut-off town with secrets.
Child treats his outsider's eye as an advantage. He first visited the US in 1974 and immigrated in 1998. His old passports showed exactly 100 visits, and his wife is from New York.
The risks are wrong details and missing the culture. The gain is seeing what Americans no longer notice because it is so familiar.
Child wrote Reacher to please himself and trusted others would agree. He expected nobody to like Reacher, a dirty barbarian who shoots people in the back and lies, cheats and steals. He liked him anyway.
Since people share a lot of culture, he figured many others would too, and the only unknown was how many. The series has since outsold Harry Potter on Amazon UK, and he says the more you design a character, the worse it gets.
Child never outlines, so he stays curious about his own story. He has published a book a year with no plan, while some friends write 300-page outlines.
Even a two-page outline would mean he had told himself the story and was bored with it. He starts from a location and discovers the plot as a reader would.
A lifetime of reading stands in for his outline. Child says he is mostly a reader: he writes one book a year and reads hundreds. That builds an internal database of plots, characters, cliffhangers and structures.
He calls it a monster plan and outline in his head. He points to Scorsese watching a movie every night, and to a Reacher film crew watching a movie after a 14-hour shooting day.
Child picks a temperature and a place before anything else. He chooses hot or cold, hard or soft, the way a composer picks a key, such as baking West Texas or misty Maine in April. He draws on places he already knows and does no research for a book.
The setting makes some action inevitable and some implausible, so it does part of the plotting for him.
Child starts every book on 1 September and delivers in March or April. Each summer his ideas fade and he feels washed up. Late in August an idea and a first line arrive, and by 1 September he is running.
Every year he thinks the previous 20 were just luck. He calls imagination biddable: you can quiet it down and crank it up when you need to.
Child holds writing as noble art and as a job, each fully. His first contract with readers was financial, because he had been fired and needed income. It later became an emotional promise never to let them down.
He admits that believing both at 100 percent is mathematically impossible, but says you must. The job side supplies the discipline, and series readers are disappointed if a year is missed.
Child plants an implied question and lets readers stay for the answer. He learned from 40,000 hours of television that people want the answer to a question. After remote controls, TV held viewers with teasers like who was first choice for Dirty Harry.
The question doesn't need to matter. He says this makes plotting far easier than people think.
Child engineers every sentence to tip forward. A novel is thousands of sentences in a row, so he spends much of his effort on the rhythm of each one. He compares it to a Beatles song that ends a little faster than it starts.
Experienced readers see it as style, and casual readers just keep going. He wants the book to feel like a carnival ride down a polished tube.
Child writes for both habitual readers and the outer rings. He pictures readers in rings like Saturn's: habitual readers at the center, people who read one book a year at the edge. One book must please both.
For casual readers, finishing the book is a real win. He asks: if you write a book and nobody reads it, have you written a book?
Child opens in the middle of the action. Beginners open with where the hero grew up and who the parents were. His rule is not to start when the earth cooled.
Open on something intriguing happening now and explain later, if at all. He never plans a chapter ending, because 40,000 hours of television made them instinctively obvious.
Child ties up loose ends because readers want the work done. He twice left a minor character's fate unstated, and readers hated it both times.
They want the writer to tell the whole story, not treat it like a writing prompt.
Child does not worry about being liked. He quotes David Mamet: the best answer to 'are we going to like you?' is 'I don't know and I don't care.'
His lesson is that the less you worry about being liked, the more people like you. He says it applies to practically every aspect of writing.
Child treats dialogue as an illusion, not a transcript. Real talk is stop-start, full of placeholders and jumps between subjects, so natural-looking dialogue has to be built. He once won a prize for natural dialogue from a Texas paper.
He learns it by listening to people, films and TV, then builds rhythm so the stress lands on the key word without italics.
Child repeats charged words so the emphasis lands without markup. Angry people strip language down to simple words and repeat them. A woman saying 'I need my money. I lost my money.' leaves the stress on money.
He compares it to a song chorus: strong emotion pulls us back to rhythm and repetition.
Child sketches characters with clothes and teeth. An old man with a gray ponytail and double denim, or lace-up Oxfords and pleated chinos, is placed instantly because readers carry a database of types.
A fan who was a dental hygienist noticed every mention of teeth in his books, such as snaggletoothed or wolflike. He had been using them as shorthand without realizing it.
Child keeps violence quick and unglamorous, then lets readers enjoy it. Real violence is over fast and costs a lot: a hard blow to the head leaves you sick and dizzy for a week. Movie brawls with hits and staggers are an illusion.
He draws on a rough manufacturing-city childhood where every dispute was a fight. He says thoughtful readers want the release because civilization asks them to give violence up.