Literary Birthday – 12 August – Gregg Hurwitz

Happy Birthday, Gregg Hurwitz, born on 12 August 1973.

Gregg Hurwitz Quotes

1. I was at a conference when I was young and James Patterson was there, who I’ve long admired. He’d flown out from the East Coast, and I said, ‘Oh, did you work on the plane?’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘Always – you don’t you write when you travel?’ And I said, ‘No, I need my office and my desk. I need this whole setup!’ And he looked at me, and he just said, ‘Learn to.’ I realised I was being a bit too precious about the space I needed around me to function. It was a really clear thing that was like: get more flexible. Now I write everywhere.
2. I have white noise on that goes through speakers in the ceiling, and the door is shut. And I’m just focused. It’s just me and the words. And my phones are out of my office; no notifications or anything happening with email. And the only way that I’m online is to just search for things that I need for the research for the manuscript that I’m in. Perfect.
3. So as a teenager, I read two of what I think are the most perfect books I’ve ever read. The Great Gatsby, I think, is perfect. And The Sound and the Fury; William Faulkner is just unimproveable.
4. [I most admire] Shakespeare. Without Shakespeare, you don’t have psychology; you can’t have Freud if you don’t have Shakespeare. The Shakespearean canon is inexhaustible in the way that it reaches through philosophy and history, and politics and psychology. It’s all-encompassing, it’s ever-yielding. And the plays are so spectacular. There’s so much depth, you could never get to the bottom of them. He wrote these highly structured, fast-paced narrative tales of lust, intrigue and murder designed to sell out to the widest possible audience.
5. I like to put my head down and blast on one project. Then move to the next and do the same. I don’t do as well working on one thing in the morning and something else in the afternoon. But sometimes when deadlines crowd in on me I’m forced to do that. It takes a lot of focus.
6. Write what you most want to write. Write what fascinates and compels you. Write what terrifies and inspires you. Find a zone that feels like play or compulsion. That is how to find what you and only you can create. Then all failure or success will be on your own terms.
7. As long as I remember, I wanted to be a crime writer. I have mysteries that I wrote when I was in third grade that I bound between cardboard covers.
8. To write a book you have to write a book that is clearly a book and adheres to all the conventions and requirements of being a book. This is a sh#t-ton of work and will take drafts and time and sweat and blood until it’s either good enough to submit or you give up…No publisher or agent will be interested in talking to you until you’ve written a manuscript.
9. Writing is an evolving thing. You get better and better as you go along. You have to keep moving, keep producing, keep turning things over in your mind.

Source for quotes 1-4: Penguin and 5: The Real Book Spy and 6: Facebook and 7-9: The Downey Patriot

Gregg Hurwitz is an American novelist, screenwriter, poet, and comic book writer. He is the New York Times #1 internationally bestselling author of 27 thrillers, including the Orphan X series. The latest in the series are Antihero and Last Man Standing. His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages. Gregg currently serves as the Co-President of International Thriller Writers (ITW). He also writes screenplays and television scripts for many of the major studios and networks. Gregg has also written comics for AWA (including the critically acclaimed anthology NewThink), DC, and Marvel. His scriptwriting work includes a film adaptation of his book Orphan X. Follow him on Instagram.

Source for photograph: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson
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