Clay Stafford talks with Otto Penzler on “What Truly Sustains a Long-Term Writing Career”

Otto Penzler interviewed by Clay Stafford

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For more than fifty years, Otto Penzler has shaped the landscape of crime, mystery, and suspense. As a publisher, editor, bookstore owner, and champion of the genre, he has worked with and nurtured some of the most enduring voices in our field. From that unique vantage point, Penzler has seen what sustains a writer’s career and what quietly ends it. From The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, we spoke about longevity, professionalism, and why habits matter as much as talent in the making of a crime writer. “Otto, you’ve seen a lot of writers in the past fifty years come and go. What’s the real difference between a writer who lasts and one who fades after their first success?”

“It’s a good character and a great style. Every now and then, you can do it with an incredible plot, a surprising twist, or with the creation of a kind of suspense that’s difficult to pull off. But most of the writers who have lasted fifty years, writers from the 60s, 70s, and 80s who are still in print and being read, have a style that’s more than simple declarative sentences. There’s color and texture in their language, in their prose.”

“Looking at the professionals, what habits or attitudes do those career writers seem to share from your perspective as an editor and publisher?”

“Most successful writers treat it as a job. They don’t wait for inspiration to go to the typewriter or computer. They go to work every day, writing all the time and reading all the time. Those are indispensable. If you’re waiting for that flash of inspiration, you’re never going to make it. You have to keep at it even if you’re sick, hungover, or too busy. If all of those things are true, you still need regular time for writing.”

“How much of it is habits rather than talent? Obviously, you have to have talent, but is it more about habits?”

“I think it’s dedication to your job, to your career. As an editor, I hold writers in such high esteem. They’re almost god-like to me in the way they create living characters and write about them in a fascinating, unput-downable way. But they have to take it seriously. They have to keep working at it. You can have all the talent in the world, but if you can’t produce a book with some regularity, you’re not going to have success. Waiting five years between books makes it tough for a publisher to promote a writer who seems like a debut every time they publish. Ed McBain/Evan Hunter had a shack built about 100 yards from his house. At nine in the morning, he’d go there and start typing. At twelve, he broke for lunch. At one, he came back. At five, he stopped. If it was mid-sentence, so much the better, because when he came back the next day, he knew exactly how to finish what he left undone.”

“If an author has a very successful first book, how do they top that with the next one?”

“By trying and getting better. The more you write, the better you get. It’s not always true; some people have only one book in them, maybe two, but most veteran writers will say the second book is the hardest because they’ve had years to think about the first. Once it’s out, now they have to do it again under pressure. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed. Look at Michael Connelly. He started out with a successful first book, kept going, and a year later produced another that was probably even better. He’s maintained that level of excellence through more than thirty books. It’s remarkable.”

“He’s done okay for himself,” I smile.

“He has, and he works hard. He’s writing two books a year now. He’s been writing and producing Bosch, plus involvement with The Lincoln Lawyer and another series about his female detective, Renée. He works all the time.”

“Times change quickly, and writing can become dated. How does a writer stay contemporary?”

“Live in the world. Pay attention to other books, movies, television. Talk to people. Be in the real world. Don’t lock yourself in an attic and cut yourself off.”

“You’ve worked with many personalities from your side of the desk. What kind of relationship with an editor or publisher sustains a career rather than making Otto Penzler angry?”

“Be a nice person, write good books, and be a nice person. Then there’s no problem. Very few writers I’ve worked with were absolutely resistant to suggestions. I tend to have a fairly heavy editorial hand, and I’m somewhat opinionated.”

“Are you?” I smile again.

“Yes. I’ll say, ‘Don’t use that word, it’s a cliché, it’s trite. Come up with something better.’ And they’ll say, ‘No, it’s perfect for here.’ I’ll say, ‘No, it’s not.’ Then they’ll say, ‘Okay, let me think about it.’”

“And you’ve got the barrels of ink, right?” giving my reference to the publisher having the power because they have the ink.

“I do, but look: it’s their book. The author’s name is on the book. I’m not a writer; I don’t want to write the book. But I do want it to be as good as it can be. That’s my job as an editor: to make the author’s book better than it started.”

“You’ve had authors become brands. How do you keep them from becoming predictable? Sometimes people say a writer is ‘writing the same book over and over’ and doing well at it.”

“If I were publishing Lee Child—I did publish his last two books—but if I were publishing the Jack Reacher novels and said after twelve, ‘You’re writing the same book,’ I’d be an idiot. Even if the books have structural similarities, readers love them and can’t wait for the next one. I’d be an idiot to mess with that.”

“There’s something about ka-ching, ka-ching that keeps it going, right?”

“Yeah. And using Lee as an example, those books are endlessly fascinating. I don’t care if they’re structurally similar to the previous ten. I liked reading every one of them. Agatha Christie did that for a very long career and remains tremendously popular long after her death.”

“For building a career, and for helping a publisher, is one book a year the sweet spot?”

“I’d say yes, if you can. There are writers with series who work very hard, like Robert Crais. Crais is slower; he’s meticulous with language and making sure everything meshes, so it takes him two years. Michael Connelly can write two in a year, which is tremendous. I don’t know how they do it. But yes, ideally one a year is good. Publishers get continuity; readers know what to expect. In hardcover publishing, when the new hardcover comes out, the previous book can come out in paperback simultaneously.”

“When an author underperforms, how do you advise them to turn the trajectory back up?”

“That’s really hard. Sometimes it’s the same book that’s been successful six or ten or twelve times, and suddenly the readership starts to fall. You watch numbers sink book after book. The only advice at that point is to try something different, create a different character, or write a different kind of book. But that’s tricky because writers find their comfort zone. Telling them, ‘It’s not working anymore, do something different,’ can be difficult because they may not know how.”

“Same advice if the genre goes out of style? Reinvent?”

“If you can. Writing is hard, the hardest thing I can imagine. I’d rather do yard work. If you know how to write one kind of book and someone says, ‘Write a different kind,’ that may not be possible.”

“If you could give one truth about building a career that lasts, aimed at a new writer, what would it be?”

“Assuming your career starts with a single book, make that book the best you can possibly make it. After that, try to do the same thing even better. How do you make it better? Give more information about the character, make the character come to life more fully, and polish your prose. Read each sentence over and over. Read it out loud. I learned that when I used to write The Reasoner Report for Harry Reasoner. When you read out loud, you hear cadence, and you catch repetition; using the same word three times on a page is irritating to a reader. Reading aloud helps you catch that. It seems like a small trick, but it’s not a waste of time.”

Otto Penzler has built a career elevating writers who take the work seriously; writers who show up, improve their craft, and respect the reader’s and editor’s time. His perspective is a reminder that longevity in this field is not an accident. It is built on discipline, style, character, and the willingness to keep getting better long after the first success.

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop and the president and CEO of Penzler Publishers. He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars, and lifetime achievement awards from Noircon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 80 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction. https://penzlerpublishers.com/

“Dean Koontz: The Secret of Selling 500 Million Books”

Dean Koontz interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Dean Koontz is and always has been an incredibly prolific writer. He’s also an excellent writer, which explains why he’s had such phenomenal success. When I heard he and I were going to get to chat exclusively for Killer Nashville Magazine, I wanted to talk to him about how one man can author over one hundred and forty books, a gazillion short stories, have sixteen movies made from his books, and sell over five hundred million copies of his books in at least thirty-eight languages. It's no small feat, but surprisingly, one that Dean thinks we are all capable of. “So, Dean, how long should a wannabe writer give their career before they expect decent results?”

“Well, it varies for everybody. But six months is ridiculous. Yeah, it’s not going to be that fast unless you’re one of the very lucky ones who comes out, delivers a manuscript, and publishers want it. But you also have to keep in mind some key things. Publishers don’t always know what the public wants. In fact, you could argue that half the time, they have no idea. A perfect example of this is Harry Potter, which every publisher in New York turned down, and it went to this little Canadian Scholastic thing and became the biggest thing of its generation. So, you just don’t know. But you could struggle for a long time trying to break through, especially for doing anything a little bit different. And everybody says, ‘Well, this is different. Nobody wants something like this.’ And there are all those kinds of stories, so I can’t put a time frame on it. But I would say a minimum of a few years.”

“I usually tell everyone—people who come to Killer Nashville, groups I speak to—four years. Give it four years. Is that reasonable?”

“I think that's reasonable. If it isn’t working in four years, I wouldn’t rule it out altogether, but you’d better find a day job.”

“I was looking at your Facebook page, and it said on some of your books you would work fifty hours a week for x-amount of time, seventy hours a week for x-amount of time. How many hours a week do you actually work?”

“These days, I put in about sixty hours a week. And I’m seventy-eight.”

“Holy cow, you don’t look anywhere near seventy-eight.”

He shakes his head. “There’s no retiring in this. I love what I do, so I’ll keep doing it until I fall dead on the keyboard. There were years when I put in eighty-hour weeks. Now, that sounds grueling. Sixty hours these days probably sounds grueling to most people or to many people. But the fact is, I love what I do, and it’s fun. And if it’s fun, that doesn't mean it’s not hard work and it doesn’t take time, because it’s both fun and hard work, but because it is, the sixty hours fly by. I never feel like I’m in drudgery. So, it varies for everybody. But that’s the time that I put in. When people say, ‘Wow! You’ve written all these books; you must dash them off quickly.’ No, it’s exactly the opposite. But I just put a lot of hours in every week, and it’s that consistency week after week after week. I don’t take off a month for Bermuda. I don't like to travel, so that wouldn't come up anyway. When you do that, it’s kind of astonishing how much work piles up.”

“How is your work schedule divided? I assume you write every single day?”

“Pretty much. I will certainly write six days a week. I get up at 5:00. I used to be a night guy, but after I got married, I became a day guy because my wife is a day person. I’m up at 5:00, take the dog for a walk, feed the dog, shower, and am at my desk by 6:30, and I write straight through to dinner. I never eat lunch because eating lunch makes me foggy, and so I’m looking at ten hours a day, six days a week, and when it’s toward the last third of a book, it goes to seven days a week because the momentum is such that I don’t want to lose it. It usually takes me five months to six months to produce a novel that’s one hundred thousand words.”

“Does this include your editing, any kind of research you do, and all that? Is it in that time period?”

“Yeah, I have a weird way of writing; though, I’ve learned that certain other writers have it. I don’t write a first draft and go back. I polish a page twenty to thirty times, sometimes ten, but I don’t move on from that page until I feel it’s as perfect as I can make it. Then I go to the next page. And I sort of say, I build a book like coral reefs are built, all these little dead skeletons piling on top of each other, and at the end of a chapter, I go print it out because you see things printed out you don’t see on the screen. I do a couple of passes of each chapter that way and then move on. In the end, it’s had so many drafts before anyone else sees it that I generally never have to do much of anything else. I’ll always get editorial suggestions. I think since I started working this way, which was in the early days, my editorial suggestions take me never a lot more than a week, sometimes a couple of days. But when editors make good suggestions, you want to do it because the book does not say ‘By Dean Koontz with wonderful suggestions by…’ You get all the credit, so you might as well take any wonderful suggestion.”

“You get all the blame, too.”

“Yes, you do, although I refuse to accept it.”

“Do you work from an outline, then? Or do you just stream of consciousness?”

“I worked from outline for many years, but things were not succeeding, and so I finally said, you know, one of the problems is that I do an outline, the publisher sees it, says ‘Good. We’ll give you a contract,’ then I go and write the book and deliver it, and it’s not the same book. It’s very similar, but there are all kinds of things, I think, that became better in the writing, and publishers say, ‘Well, this isn’t quite the book we bought,’ and I became very frustrated with that. I also began to think, ‘This is not organic. I am deciding the entire novel before I start it.’ Writing from an outline might work and does for many writers, but I realized it didn’t work for me because I wasn’t getting an organic story. The characters weren’t as rich as I wanted because they were sort of set at the beginning. So, I started writing the first book I did without an outline called Strangers, which was over two hundred fifty thousand words. It was a long novel and had about twelve main characters. It was a big storyline, and I found that it all fell together perfectly well. It took me eleven months of sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, but the book came together, and that was my first hardcover bestseller. I’ve never used an outline since. I just begin with a premise, a character or two, and follow it all. It’s all about character, anyway. If the book is good, character is what drives it.”

“Is that the secret of it all? Putting in the time? Free-flowing thought? Characters?”

“I think there are several. It’s just willing to put in the time and think about what you’re doing, recognizing that characters are more important than anything else. If the characters work, the book will work. If the characters don’t, you may still be able to sell the book, but you’re not looking at long-term reader involvement. Readers like to fall in love with the characters. That doesn’t mean the characters all have to be wonderful angelic figures. They also like to fall in love with the villains, which means getting all those characters to be rich and different. I get asked often, ‘You have so many eccentric characters. The Odd Thomas books are filled with almost nothing else. How do you make them relatable?’ And I say, ‘Well, first, you need to realize every single human being on the planet is eccentric. You are as well.”

“Me?” I laugh. “You’re the first to point that out.”

He joins in. “It’s just a matter of recognizing that. And then, when you start looking for the characters’ eccentricities—which the character will start to express to you—you have to write them with respect and compassion. You don’t make fun of them, even if they are amusing, and you treat them as you would people: by the Golden Rule. And if you do, audiences fall in love with them, and they stay with you to see who you will write about next. And that’s about the best thing I can say. Don’t write a novel where the guy’s a CIA agent, and that’s it. Who is he? What is he other than that? And I never write about CIA agents, but I see there’s a tendency in that kind of fiction to just put the character out there. That’s who he is. Well, that isn’t who he is. He’s something, all of us are, something much more than our job.”

“What advice do you give to new writers who want to become the next Dean Koontz?”

“First of all, you can’t be me because I’m learning to clone myself, so I plan to be around for a long time. But, you know, everybody works a different way, so I’m always hesitant to give ironclad advice. But what I do say to many young writers who write to me, and they’ve got writer's block, is that I’ve never had it, but I know what it is. It’s always the same thing. It’s self-doubt. You get into a story. You start doubting that you can do this, that this works, that that works. It’s all self-doubt. I have more self-doubt than any writer I’ve ever known, and that’s why I came up with this thing of perfecting every page until I move to the next. Then, the self-doubt goes away because the page flows, and when I get to the next page, self-doubt returns. So, I will do it all again. When I’m done, the book works. Now, if that won’t work for everybody, I think it could work for most writers if they get used to it, and there are certain benefits to it. You do not have to write multiple drafts after you’ve written one. What happens with a lot of writers is they write that first draft—especially when they’re young or new—and now they have something, and they’re very reluctant to think, ‘Oh, this needs a lot of work’ because they’re looking at it as, ‘Oh, I have a novel-length manuscript.’ Well, that’s only the first part of the journey. And I just don’t want to get to that point and feel tempted to say, ‘This is good enough,’ because it almost never will be that way.”

“No,” I say, “it never will.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Dean Koontz is the author of many #1 bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies in thirty-eight languages, and The Times (of London) has called him a “literary juggler.” He lives in Southern California with his wife Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens Trixie and Anna. https://www.deankoontz.com/