Literary Birthday – 5 August – David Baldacci

Happy Birthday, David Baldacci, born 5 August 1960.

Seven Quotes

1. As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice. Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.
2. If I worried too much about publishers’ expectations, I’d probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.
3. I look for material that both interest me and challenges me. If I am drawn to the material and I have to work hard at it, the characters and the plots reflect the hours and hours of research.
4. Why waste time trying to discover the truth, when you can so easily create it?
5. What I do in my thrillers is to try and tell a story with characters you care about. A thriller can’t be just plot or just characters, it has to be a combination of both. I could concoct a really great plot but if I put in characters readers don’t really care about, they are not going to finish the book.
6. I build a story a little by little. I did the same thing when I was a lawyer. You really have to make people believe, whether it is fiction or the facts of the case. I tell people that some of the best fiction that I ever wrote was when I was a lawyer and I said that only partly in jest.
7. Whatever genre you want to write in, just read a lot of it. If writers want to be successful, they need to be infinitely sure about what they are writing about.

Read: The Writers Write Interview – David Baldacci & David Baldacci’s 5 Top Writing Tips

David Baldacci is a best-selling American writer. His books have been translated into more than 45 languages and are sold in more than 80 countries. There are over 150 million copies in print worldwide. His works of fiction include Absolute Power, The Camel Club, and The Innocent. Baldacci has also published six novels for younger readers.

Image:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_Baldacci_-_2015_National_Book_Festival_(6).jpg

fourandsixty, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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