Sometimes I wonder if I’ve ever had an original thought in my life. All my books have been inspired by real events, and my upcoming novel, SPECIAL VICTIM, is based on the notorious Central Park Jogger case. Still, I suspect that the process I go through in finding ideas is a typical one for most writers, and I increasingly suspect that no writer imagines something out of whole cloth, even if he or she is spinning a yarn about orcs.
Maybe we’re just not as creative as we like to think we are.
For the record, my biggest artistic influence is not a book, but a movie: “Chinatown.” (Weirdly enough, it’s not my favorite movie. More on that in an upcoming post.) “Chinatown” is an excellent murder mystery, and it’s also noirish, twisted and creepy, so of course it appeals to me. But it works extremely well, I think, as a dark riff on the foundational story of modern Southern California. It’s based on real events, but Robert Towne and Roman Polanski shifted the time frame to 30 years after the events occurred, and the story is better for it. And I particularly embraced its uncompromising ending (which Polanski insisted upon, over Towne’s objections), which has given me the confidence to write stories in a similar vein. In fact, when I was trying to land a deal for my third novel, BLOOD ALLEY — a tale involving corruption and real estate scams in Manhattan shortly after World War II — I pitched it as “Chinatown East.”
