In terms of moments that pushed me toward becoming a writer... My parents, my wife, and my English teacher in the 8th grade were all hugely supportive at moments during my development as a writer that were critical, where I might have quit when things got too hard.
The hardest thing writers have to do is figure out for themselves who they are. What should they be writing about? What stories should they be telling? What does writing mean to them? I didn't know the answers to those questions for a long, long time.
I love to hike, fly-fish, and ski in the mountains where I live in Colorado.
I love taking a character and raining holy hell down on them and seeing how they respond, how they react. It's one of the things I do in almost all my books - my protagonist is put through a very stressful situation that tests their strength and their psychological acuity. That's one of the core components of who I am as a writer.
The more you study quantum mechanics, the more crazy and incomprehensible it becomes. You truly do need a Ph.D. in very high level math and science to understand it at a high, high level.
If I had to get lost in a fictional world? I would love to go with those Hemingway characters in 'The Sun Also Rises' when they go on that trip in Spain, and they go fishing. And they take the wine bottles, and they put them in the river.
'The Lord of the Rings,' obviously, had a huge, huge impact on me. I read a lot of 'Hardy Boys,' also. I liked the equation, that it was always the same but a little bit different. There's something comforting about those books.
I started writing really early on, and my brother Jordan was my first audience. I would come up with scary stories to tell him at bedtime.
I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.
I think the most fascinating thing in terms of relationships is imagining all the different variations that they could be.
I always find out after the fact that the books I've been writing were actually some sort of therapy, some sort of, you know, self-examination that I had to write the book in order to complete.
Writing and producing television very much speaks to the extroverted part of my personality. I love collaboration, the joint effort of hundreds of people working together to create something. But the other part of who I am is extremely introverted. I love being alone and dreaming up ideas and writing novels.
Love means home. It's where you're meant to be.
It's a scary, exhilarating thing to have your work adapted by someone else. There are so many ways it can go wrong or be a poor example of the underlying story.
