Literary Birthday – 31 May – John Connolly

Happy Birthday, John Connolly, born 31 May 1968.

Stories come alive in the telling… Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

Quotes from Getting Published on John’s website

I very much believe that writing is a craft: at its best, it should be infused with passion and wit and inspiration, but its basic building blocks are words, and it is practice, trial and error, that teaches you how to use them properly. Through writing at home, then writing for newspapers, I began to learn. I’m still learning.
I say write every day, but there will be times when that just won’t be possible. In an ideal world every day is best, but if you find that instead of 200 words a day you get 1400 words done each Sunday afternoon, then go with that. There are no hard and fast rules, and every writer finds his or her own way to write.
Like a great many writers, my instinct was to write what I read. The first genre fiction in which I ever immersed myself was supernatural fiction, and the second was crime/ mystery fiction, so in a way it’s not surprising that the two genres have both found expression in my writing.
Like most writers, I am kind of magpie-ish by nature, so I’m constantly accumulating newspaper and magazine cuttings, obscure books, and all kinds of other things that catch my interest. Most of them I never use, but some make their way into the books. I also try to consult specialists in their field wherever possible, if I think it will help the book or even just help me to understand a little more clearly a topic that I’m researching.
In the end, whatever you write, you should write it because it’s important to you.

Read our interviews with John Connolly here and here and listen to our podcast here

John Connolly is an Irish writer who has published 17 novels. He is best known for The Book of Lost Things and his series of novels starring private detective Charlie Parker. The series began in 1999 with Every Dead Thing and there are now 16 books in the series.

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