Patricia Cornwell on Crime and Creativity
The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has written more than forty books, which have altogether sold more than a hundred and twenty million copies. (This week, a long-awaited adaptation of her “Scarpetta” series, which centers on a forensic pathologist, premières on Amazon, with Nicole Kidman in the title role.) How does she do it? “I learned early on that the biggest enemy of creativity is fear,” she writes in her memoir, “True Crime,” which comes out in May. One of her goals for the book, she said recently, was to pass on some of her own advice—to impress upon people that creative endeavors are living, reactive things, and that they shouldn’t give up in the face of rejection. Not long ago, she joined us to discuss some books, new and old, that have offered her creative guidance. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
by Rick Rubin
Sometimes when you’re doing something creative—for me, that’s writing—it feels like you’re conducting electricity. You’re channelling something that comes from outside of you. My favorite books—whether nonfiction or novels—are the ones where you can feel the author’s DNA on them, but also feel, at the same time, like they almost came from elsewhere.
One of the reasons I like “The Creative Act” so much is because it talks about that process, and about how you’ve got to keep your current unfettered by all the distractions in life. The book reminds me a little bit of “The Artist’s Way”—they both have a little bit of Zen to them, and at the same time they get down to concrete questions like, How do you not have writer’s block? Rubin’s answer for some of these is that you just have to be willing to get out of your own way. If you get hung up on what people think of you, or fame, or fortune, or, you know, “You’ve got to stick this in here because it’s popular right now,” you get further from whatever truth it was within you that motivated you to be creative in the first place.
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris
I really, truly think this is the best crime novel ever written. I read “Silence of the Lambs” when I was dabbling with starting “Postmortem,” which was my fourth attempt to write a “Scarpetta” novel—the first three were failures—and ended up being my début. I try to learn from masterpieces, and this one taught me a lot. I have a signed first edition that’s in a clamshell. Now and then, I pick it up and look at it to remind myself of how important it is to tell really dramatic scenes that almost aren’t possible, but in such a way that nobody doubts them. Let’s be honest—there are crude versions of maniacs out there that have done similar things as Hannibal Lecter has, but the difference is you don’t doubt him. And yet, at the same time, he is surreal. To me, he feels more like myth than reality, and that’s what makes the book work so well.
The Garden of Eden
by Ernest Hemingway
The reason I love this book—which Hemingway never finished, and which was published in a heavily edited, abridged form after he died—is that it almost feels like a friend. It’s about a young writer who is beginning to get great reviews. He’s newly married, and he and his wife are honeymooning in Europe. The novel is an incredible study of human nature, viewed through the lens of this young and dysfunctional relationship, but it’s also a peep into Hemingway’s mind as an author.
I like to keep a copy of this one nearby, too, because if there’s one writer I would aspire to write like, it’s Hemingway. His prose has a photographic quality that just takes my breath away. You can feel the cold stone under the character’s bare feet as he’s walking. You can smell the pencils as he sharpens them and looks out at the day and wonders what it will bring.
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
This is an account of a murder case in Kansas that took place in 1959. It is beautifully crafted. Look at the beginning, where Capote gives you a snapshot of Kansas—I mean, you can taste the dust. He was just that fine a writer.
Capote called the book a nonfiction novel. We don’t really know if it is fish or fowl. I mean, what is he doing with us? Am I supposed to believe it really happened like this? For my part, I think there is probably a lot more fact to “In Cold Blood” than there is fiction. What Capote did was remarkable—spending time with the two killers, talking to them in prison, witnessing their execution. What also interests me about “In Cold Blood” is the way that Capote—who spent years following the case—in some ways, became part of the story he was telling, as he was telling it. That resonates for me, because I also do very intense research. I visit morgues and crime scenes and spend time with people involved in real serial-murder cases. What starts out as research becomes a drama that you’re living. You’ve gotten to know people, and they want things from you, and suddenly people get angry, and you even feel in danger. I marvel at what he did so long ago, when most writers weren’t doing things like that.