Literary Birthday – 10 May – Tana French

Happy Birthday, Tana French, born on 10 May 1973.

Tana French Quotes

1. When you get right down to it, writing – or at least writing in the first person, which is what I do – is basically the same skill as acting. For years, my job as an actor was to create a character – hopefully a full, three-dimensional character – and spend hours a day operating completely from her perspective, bringing an audience into her world. Writing is just an extension of that process. (BookBrowse)
2. That is actually what I’m interested in writing about—those enormous turning points that you only get a couple times in your life. These moments strip people down to their essentials: You get to find out what you’re really made of and what is really important to you. (Goodreads)
3. My job is to create a narrator and see everything through her eyes, filter it through her perceptions and describe it in her voice, so I can draw readers into her world. I play my narrator on paper, rather than on stage, but the mental process is the same. (BookBrowse)
4. I think the genre is absolutely crucial to being able to balance pace, writing, character, and depth. Writing mystery gives you a basic framework: You can mess with it, you can bend it, stretch it any way you want to, but basically someone gets killed and someone else finds out whodunit. So everything you do, every scene you write, whether it’s on one level or four, has to in some way feed into that plot arc. (Goodreads)
5. I was lucky enough to have the help of an amazing detective on the Irish police force. He’s spent hours talking to me, he’s answered an incredible variety of weird questions, and he’s responsible for basically everything in the books that’s police-related and accurate.(BookBrowse)
6. I have friends who have every chapter plotted out and every beat mark before they start writing. But for me all the action springs from character, so it means that I can’t really structure in advance. (CrimeReads)
7. I need to get to know the characters a bit before I understand their interactions and their dynamics. So I start with a basic premise, a main character, and a setting. (CrimeReads)
8. Read good things. I think writing a book is almost like running a marathon: you need the best nourishment you can get. The more you expose yourself to first-rate writing, the more you develop your instincts, and the more you’ll push yourself towards that high standard. (BookBrowse)
9. One of the joys of writing is that we’re allowed to get it wrong as many times as we need to, and no harm done… This is especially true for first-time writers: there are no deadlines and no pressure, so you can afford to take all the time and all the drafts you need. (BookBrowse)
10. When you have a murder, you’re finding out something about that society. I think the interest in true crime might be to do with that. If it’s explored in depth, it can tell us a lot about the society we’re living in. What does it care about? What are its dark places? What does it want to keep hidden and what does it have trouble navigating? (Cultured)

Tana French is an American-Irish crime writer and theatrical actress. She is the New York Times bestselling author of eight previous books, including The Searcher, The Likeness, and The Witch Elm. Her ninth novel is The Hunter. She explores the idea of class and wealth in her books. Her novels have sold over three million copies and won numerous awards, including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. The Independent has called her ‘the First Lady of Irish Crime.  Follow her on Facebook.

Source for image: National Endowment For The Arts, credit: Jessica Ryan

by Amanda Patterson

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