Making it Up with Lee Goldberg, author of Murder By Design

“I learned a very important lesson from Janet Ivanovich. She said I want readers to forget they’re reading. I want them to be so lost in what they’re doing… they forget there’s a page. You want the writing to disappear… I want them to get sucked into just being lost in the book.” 

 Lee Goldberg is a two-time Edgar Award and two-time Shamus Award nominee and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels, including the Eve Ronin series, the Sharpe & Walker series, the Ian Ludlow trilogy, fifteen Monk mysteries, and five internationally bestselling Fox & O’Hare books co-written with Janet Evanovich. He has also written and/or produced many TV shows, including Diagnosis Murder, SeaQuest, and Monk, and is the co-creator of the hit Hallmark movie series Mystery 101. 

Among other things, Lee and Carter discuss growing up with parents working in media, putting yourself in a position where opportunities come to you, and writing a screenplay versus a novel. At the end of their conversation, they make up a cinematic story using a line from Tod Goldberg’s Only Way Out.

Connect with Carter at www.carterwilson.com

Connect with Lee at www.leegoldberg.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Fellow writers, hello, this is Carter, and welcome to this episode of Making It Up, the conversation series, where two writers just sit down and talk about whatever they want to talk about. Very rarely do we actually talk about their books because I want to find out about them, their journey, what they think about writing, craft, all of that kind of stuff. So hopefully not things that they've already talked about a thousand times over on BookTour. Before I get to today's guest, just to note a couple things. Actually, I have with my Unbound Writer company, I have I am teaching a class this weekend, May 30th, online only, called The Visible Writer, about how to do all the other things that you need to do as a writer besides writing. So if you're looking to be a career author, there is a certain level of visibility you need to have in order to show people that you are actually a real person and not AI. Um so we're going to talk about things like how to develop your website, how to speak publicly, how to manage social media in a way that's authentic and doesn't feel gross to you. All of those things. So check that all that out, as well as my one-on-one coaching and upcoming retreats, all at unboundwriter.com. All right, today on the show, today I talked to the powerhouse Lee Goldberg. Um, I recently talked to his brother Todd as well. Um, so Lee is the number one New York Times bestselling author of, I mean, what did he say in the podcast? Something like 70 books. Uh, he's also written over a hundred screenplays. So that's what we would call prolific in the industry. And he's got a whole new series coming out, starting with that, starting with the first book in this series, Murder by Design, which launches just this June 1st, 2026. And we just had a great conversation, and he is just a wealth of information, not only in terms of a specific advice for writers, um, but you know, one of the things he said is about how to make words disappear. You never want to have a reader remember that they're actually reading a book, which is obviously easier said than done. Um, but fantastic advice. Um, just hearing the chronology of his writing career and how that has influenced how he writes, starting from journalism to kind of almost getting an assignment of a book when he was in college that became a massive bestseller, to then writing spec screenplays and then getting heavily invested in the TV industry, uh, working on shows like Monk and then pivoting back to writing, which includes writing 15 novels about monk, to now doing a bit of both with more of the focus, I'd say, currently on his novels. It was a fantastic conversation. Um, and then we did a great little storytelling at the end. Um, although we can we cut it off just after a few seconds. It was short but sweet. Um, all right, you're gonna love this one, friends. This is my conversation with Lee Goldberg. So I I actually um interviewed your brother about a month ago.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

I am so sorry. I know so sorry for letters and everything that come in of people offended by what he said. I'm sorry for the profanity. I'm sorry for the nudity. I think I was more than all the things I know he brings.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

He was more nude than me, but I was more profane. But it's it's I mean, it's probably a topic that's been discussed ad nauseum, but um, it's got to be kind of interesting. Like, you know, I'm researching the two of you, and I'm like, yeah, but Lee's number one New York Times bestselling author.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

And he's number six. Oh no, we've never brought that up. Yeah, no, actually, joking aside, it was a real thrill for not only both of us to be on the New York Times bestseller list, but also to be on the same week.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

I mean, what would be realized that?

SPEAKER_02 3:58

Yeah, so his book had come out I think two weeks earlier. So he had debuted a little bit higher. I think he debuted at number three or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then my book came out, and I was number one and he was number six, but it's still we shared New York Times best sellers, and it's clipped out, I assume.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

In front of it, yeah, we do.

SPEAKER_02 4:16

I mean, I I've I have a this is not my office that I'm in right now, but in my office I don't have as much wall space as I would like. So I have to take down these are champagne problems, take down a lot of kudos and memorabilia because there isn't room for it all. So yeah, I did have that New York Times framed. Um, I think Todd may still have it up in his office, but it was a great, great moment for us. And he and I also had a signing around the same time at a Barnes and Noble, and so there was a poster at the Barnes and Noble that had that week's best sellers, and there were our two covers, so we had our pictures taken in front of it. I mean, to have both of our dreams come true and have a it on the same week is amazing, was really nice.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Yeah. Well, I how long ago was this a dream of yours, though?

SPEAKER_02 4:57

Because I I think for every author, it's a dream to be on the New York Times bestseller list. I mean, I've I've known all my life that I wanted to be an author and a TV writer, producer. I didn't think both were possible, but I was lucky enough to be able to pull off both. Um, so yeah, it was a dream. And then Todd, I think he may have told you in his interview, saw through my success that yes, being a writer as a career was possible. And he took a different route. Yeah, he took a more literary route. In fact, tomorrow he is uh a finalist for the second time for the LA Times book prize.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

So he'll find out tomorrow whether he's won it or not.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 5:36

So that's that's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

But it's it's you know, when when I look back not only on my career, but on the career of all the authors I've interviewed and my friends and working with aspiring writers, you know, the possibility of making it as a writer at any level is really a long shot. Um so for him to have this looking at you, be like, oh, well, if he can do it, which and the reality of it is almost nobody can do it.

SPEAKER_02 6:01

It well, it is a long shot, and it is unlikely. But when I was growing up, my father, our father, but Todd's nine years younger than me. My father was a television anchor man at the time. Todd was an adult. My dad was an anchorman anymore, or not adult, but older. So my dad was on TV every night, and he talked like this all the time, like he was on the air, even at home. He spoke like he was on television. I love it. And he had the same insincere smile on his face that I have right now. So seeing my dad on TV every night made the idea of working in TV unattainable, even though my dad was in the journalism side. Right. My mom was a gossip columnist and a society editor for what was then called the Contra Costa Times. So the idea of making a career as a writer wasn't something that seemed unattainable to me. Right. So I just assumed it was possible to do both, even though I went in a different direction. Right. You were drawn in by the TV side of it all. Well, I put myself through school as a journalist, writing about the entertainment industry for a whole bunch of publications, and I had a journalism professor at UCLA who wrote thrillers, and he and I became friends, and I would give him my thoughts on his manuscripts. And one day his publisher came to him and said, We'd like you to write a men's action adventure series, which is sort of at the time the male equivalent of the Harlequin romance. They had titles like The Destroyer, The Executioner, The Interloper, The Drooler, The Defecator, The Erector, whatever. And they all had a cover with a uh a guy with a six-pack and a big gun and women with big hooters behind him and explosions. And you and you found these at Finer 7-Elevens and grocery stores around the country. Right. So he said that he wasn't hungry enough, desperate enough, or stupid enough to write one of these books, but he knew somebody who was, and he recommended me. And I ended up writing a book called 357 Vigilante while I was still in college. It became a huge bestseller, and that started my authoring career, my book career.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

So that's fascinating to me. First of all, because the and the and as you found out, the reality of it is sure, maybe this is a a pulpy book, but it's in every 7-Eleven. It's in every it can sell a tremendous amount of mass paperback copies, obviously.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

I was fortunate, or it's terrible to say fortunate, but the week my vigilante book came out was the week Bernard Guess blew away three muggers on a New York subway train.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Right.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

So Vigilantes were hot. My book became an overnight bestseller. New World Pictures bought the movie rights and hired me to write the script. And you're in college.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

And this is all in college.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

Yeah, just like the last year or so of college. So I I had graduated from college. To make a very long story short, the publishing company went bankrupt before my first royalty check was due. And the movie didn't get made. So my what I thought, my career as an author, my career as a screenwriter, dead.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:02

And I went back to journalism and I was writing about the entertainment industry for a television trade publication and uh with a good friend of mine, uh William Rabkin, and he and I wrote a spec, Spencer for Hire, which is how you get TV. You know, because we like the show, but um, you know, we we had our own take on it. And we wrote this spec Spencer for Hire. And what you're supposed to do with a spec script is to send it to other shows. They see with your spec how well you captured the voice of a show they know, and they think, oh, maybe that writer can capture the voice of my show. And you get interviews about perhaps freelance writing episodes of other shows. My TV agent at the time, who I'd inherited from my book agent, was a newbie, and she didn't know the one basic rule of television spec scripts, is you never send the spec to the show you're specing.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Yeah, I never would have known that.

SPEAKER_02 9:52

If you write a spec Law and Order, the one thing you don't want to do is send it to Law and Order because they will read the script and just see all the mistakes you've made.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Right.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Whereas if you send it to somebody else at CSI or the rookie or whatever, they're just gonna read it like a viewer of those shows and say, Oh, this writer really captured the show. It sounds like an episode of that show, they could do this for me. She stupidly sent it to Spencer for hire. As it turns out, they had a script fall through, they were up against a wall, and the executive producer of the show had all these uh sample scripts in his office. And he saw one that actually said Spencer for Hire on the side. And he pulled it out and he read it and he decided to buy it and shoot it. So he called up Bill and I and he said, I just read your Spencer script, and we'd like to shoot it next week if that's okay with you. We don't want to change the work. Do you have ideas for other scripts? And we said, Yes, yes, and we ended up writing more episodes of Spencer for Hire, quit our job of the TV trade publication, and a 20 some odd wash, I'm still on TV, but the height of my career was I just 20-year-long career writing and producing TV shows, that began it. And I kind of put the books aside for a while.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

And I think you know, a casual listener can can hear these stories and be like, well, you fell into a lot of good luck. And maybe there's a little bit of that, but I think what we're glossing over a little bit is the fact that you had to be able to write well. So I so for example, I would take it a step further.

SPEAKER_02 11:16

Yeah, because people have said to me so many times, oh, you were so lucky you had these lucky breaks. No, you have to put yourself in a position for those lucky breaks to happen. Right. I put I worked on the student newspaper, my advisor was writing thrillers, I became friends with him to learn more about thrillers. He had this opportunity come to him, he didn't want to do, but he knew me. Right. So you had to put yourself in a place where that could happen. Totally. If you don't, I'll give you an example that's not that's not me. Um there was this this I probably shouldn't use her name. We'll call her Sue. There was this writer, Sue, and she was part of a writer's group at a Barnes and Noble, people who wanted to break into television. And she wrote a spec Six Feet Under, and she had an agent. And that agent happened to send that spec Six Feet Under to me when I was producing a show. Uh it was called Missing. And I read this Six Feet Under and I thought it was great.

unknown 12:13

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

And to capture the voice of Six Feet Under is a talent.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

So I I invited her in to pitch episodes of the show. And I liked her voice, but I didn't like the ideas that she was pitching. But we came up with something and we hired her to write a spec script. So suddenly Sue was able to go back to her friends, the aspiring writers at the Barnes and Noble, to say, Hey, I just sold this, I'm getting an assignment on Missing. And they were able to learn through her what that experience was like. Well, we liked that script so much we hired her on staff. Wow. So suddenly these friends at the Barnes and Noble had a friend who was in the business.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:50

And to make a long story short, these authors, these writers, by by just meeting up at that Barnes and Noble and sharing their passion for writing, put themselves in a position to not only have luck happen, but to have connections in the industry. You can't just sit in your house in Arkansas and write stuff and expect to sell it if you don't put yourself in a position to have good luck happen to you. Like go to voucher con or left coast crime so you can meet other authors and and fans. Or you just need to put yourself in a position where luck or opportunities, I should say, might come your way.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Absolutely. I mean, one of the the the genesis of this podcast was now I get to know all these cool people. And you know, who knows what becomes of that? In addition to kind of just learning their pearls of wisdom as I talk to them. Um, I'm curious about like you said, I I I'm going back to your your your your pulp fiction novel that that blew up because I I think again a casual listener might say, well, maybe that's not so hard to write. That's not the reality of it all. You still have to make a very astute story that that that hits the zeitgeist of those readers who want a very expectant kind of a thing. Um, was that did you find with your journalism background and also working with the thriller writer, like, oh, this this was easier than I thought, or was it like this is still a lot of work?

SPEAKER_02 14:21

No, at the time I thought it was much easier than I thought because I had read lots of books. I had although I had not written a published novel, I had written novels that were just sitting in in my drawer.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

You know, I okay, but that's a big difference. You had the muscle.

SPEAKER_02 14:35

I had I I had written novels since I was a kid. I mean, when I was like a little kid, I wrote a book called Um Tomorrow's Warrior about this guy from the future who was born in an underwater sperm bank. I have no idea why it was underwater or how you what's the benefit of that?

SPEAKER_00 14:49

It sounds like who came here and became a hero.

SPEAKER_02 14:52

I wrote another novel called The Perfect Sinner that was just a rip-off of the saint. Yeah, um, I wrote all kinds of books, so I was practicing and I was devouring books. So, like I said, I put myself in a position, but not only that, by working in journalism, I learned about writing a compelling lead. Right, I learned about being edited, I learned about organizing dialogue to tell a story, I learned all sorts of skills.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

You're being pithy because you don't have a lot of space in journalism.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Exactly. And that's I I glossed over this, but this is how I put myself through college. I was writing for lots of magazines. You United Press International, American Film, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Playgirl. I mean, I was writing for a ton of magazines to pay my tuition in addition to working on the Daily Bruin. And to talk about putting yourself in a position for good luck to happen, all my articles were about the entertainment industry. So I went out and interviewed my favorite authors, my favorite screenwriters, my favorite producers, and under the guise of interviewing them, I was getting a this term's overused today, but a masterclass in television screenwriting and publishing by going to the people who were most successful doing it and interviewing them. I was able to use this license to get into their offices and get to glean knowledge I never would have gotten before. So when this opportunity landed in my lap, I was more than ready to take advantage of it. And I wrote this book that was for what it was a very good book and got great reviews. Uh magazine no longer exists called the West Coast Review of Books, said it was the best crime novel of the year and far better than you know these other kinds of men's action adventure novels. And it sold great. And the next three books in the series, uh, two books in the series sold great as well. So it and you know, when I sold the screenwrites, I ended up writing the screenplay. And although it didn't get made, I learned all about writing scripts.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

So and then at that point, did you have this taste of like it almost it almost feels like there's a crossroads, right? Which direction am I gonna go? Because I've done both now. Um, even though we both know you can do both at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

I didn't know that at the time.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

It's a lot of work, but what what was your what was your intuition at that point?

SPEAKER_02 17:11

Well, the crossroads was when I sold the Spencer for higher spec when Bill and I sold it. I keep saying I I, but I had a writing partner in television at the time. Um we sold that script, it was more money than I was earning working for the television trade publication and freelancing. So I just stopped doing journalism, wrote those those scripts. Um and so that TV I I should I should backtrack. Let me backtrack a little bit. When I sold the um screenwrites to the uh 357 Vigilante novel New World Pictures, I had no screenwriting experience. My good friend Bill Rabkin, who was the review editor for the Daily Bruin, was a graduate in the screenwriting program. So I said, why don't you and I team up to write this script? So he and I together wrote the Vigilante movie script that didn't get made. And he and I together wrote the Spencer for Hire spec script. So I had teamed up with someone who had the knowledge of writing screenplays, and what I brought to the party was a job. And then from there, you know, Bill and I wrote the Spencer for Hire, and you know, I I we both quit writing for journalism. And for the next 20 years, we were employed at television writer producers. We we wrote and produced Sequest and Cosby Mysteries and Missing, and we worked on Hunter and a million shows. Probably our biggest credit was we spent many years as the executive producers and principal writers of Diagnosis Murder. So we we did a lot of TV. Um and it was only for a while, that was all I thought I could do with TV. And in the middle of our television writing-producing career, um how did it come about? I'm trying to remember. Oh, yes, uh, Bill and I wrote an episode of a short-lived TV show called Likely Suspects on Fox. And Likely Suspects got nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Television Show. And my literary agent, who I had not heard from for years, an agent, by the way, that I inherited from my um journalism professor.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

When I got that that uh that gig writing those vigilante novels, I hadn't heard from him in years. And he said, Lee, are you familiar with an Edgar is? I said, No, no. He said, Well, it's like the Oscar of mystery writing. On the basis of this Edgar nomination, I could get you a book deal somewhere. Have you written a book? I said, No, I've been writing all these TV shows. He says, Well, if you write a couple sample chapters and an outline, I can get you a book deal by the end of the month.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

And what kind of time period are we talking about?

SPEAKER_02 19:42

That's that's that's uh this is about 1992, somewhere in there. Is that what you mean?

SPEAKER_00 19:47

So by years from when you first wrote Yeah, the books came out in the mid-80s.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

Yeah, I became a TV writer, and then in the early 90s, I got this um Edgar Award nomination.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 19:59

And this the you know, the TV, uh the uh book agent Mel Berger and William Morris kind of came out of the woodwork and said, Hey, I still represent you. We can leverage this Edgar nomination into a book deal. So at the time I was up in Canada working on a terrible TV series called Cobra. I hated the show, I hated the star. I was a supervising producer.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Was that related to the movie at all?

SPEAKER_02 20:20

No, not related to the to the uh Sylvester Stallone movie, but did star Michael Dudakoff, who was the American ninja. Um I was in a hotel room in Canada away from my family, so I had some time to kill. I quickly wrote a sample chapters for a book called My Gun Has Bullet Bullets. The mob brings their style of doing business to TV. They don't cancel shows, they kill them. And I just wrote this kind of romp about what happens when the mob gets into TV. Damn, if Mel didn't get me a three-book deal with uh St.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

Martin's Press, you just got the mightiest touch.

SPEAKER_02 20:54

So I wrote this book called My Gun Has Bullets, and then when I was doing Sequest, I wrote a sequel called Beyond the Beyond about science fiction fans who start murdering people, and that got me back into the publishing. Those books didn't do too well, but years later, I mentioned Diagnosis Murder. Um the murder she wrote books were doing so well for Penguin Putnam that they wanted a series to go alongside of it. And they thought that Diagnosis Murder would be a perfect companion piece to the murder she wrote books they were doing. And they looked into it and discovered that the executive producer of Diagnosis Murder was a published novelist. So they offered me a three or four book deal to write Diagnosis Murder novels. So I ended up writing, I think it was eight Diagnosis Murder novels. And then later on, when I was working on Monk, a publisher approached the creator of Monk about doing monk novels. He said, I don't want to do monk novels, but uh Lee Goldberg, who's a writer on our show, if he wants to do monk novels, and I ended up writing 15 monk novels at the same time I was doing TV. So there was a point in my career where I had turned away from books. But then it kind of converged with Diagnosis Murder. Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

You're still doing your your your work in the in the industry.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Yes. Yeah. And then um I I don't think we have to get into the whole chronology, but at some point down the line, um our daughter, my my daughter Maddie was going off to college. I only have one daughter, and my wife said to me, Look, Maddie's going off to college, we'll have an empty nest. If you keep doing TV, I'm gonna be alone. You know, because if you keep doing TV, you're gonna be doing TV all day. Come home, we'll have dinner, and then I'll see you're back because you're writing books. Is it possible for you to make a living just doing books and maybe a script or two? Basically, we're talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

So it wasn't even like one or the other, it's like her preference was that you're home writing books.

SPEAKER_02 22:46

Yes, yes, because then we and our we're together, and no one's looking over our shoulder about where we are. So I took out a lot yellow legal pad and we did some math, and I'd be keeping making a lot less money, but we could still live on it, and that's what we ended up doing. How long ago was that? Oh, what did I say, 15 years ago? Okay, 10, 15 years ago. And my book career just started to really build, and we could talk about that. But you know, I did five books with Janet Ivanovich, and and then I kept kind of still doing TV, and I ended up co-creating a TV series for Hallmark, even though I wasn't working day-to-day on these shows. I ended up doing a movie in Germany, so I still have my finger in that world, yeah. Um, and and right now I'm talking to you from you know Northern California, where I'm working on a TV show called You're Killing Me, starring Brooke Shields, which premieres on May 18th.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

So, I mean, it's clear in talking to you, you've got obviously an absolute passion for storytelling, the creative process. And I'm wondering, yeah, as you're talking to me, I'm thinking like you know, you just kind of throw out like I wrote 15 monk books. You know, there was the desire, there was the demand for those monk books before you wrote them. Do you ever feel like, all right, I'm doing this because there's the demand is there, as or are you just like, I can't wait to see what this guy does next. I can't wait to create new worlds for this character.

SPEAKER_02 24:11

There was no demand for the monk books. The only demand for them was the publisher thought we might make a buck that maybe original novels based on monk would do well because the TV series was doing well, and that happened to work. But you're right, I knew there was an audience there for it. Yeah, now I was writing my own novels, not connected to any TV show, and even the books with Janet, we had no idea if there'd be readers for it. Right. The books I'm writing now, the book that I have coming up June 1st, you know, Murder by Design, I have no idea if anyone's gonna be able to do it.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

Which is at the start of a whole new series, so it's that's gotta be even more stressful.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

Yeah, I mean, I write now for two reasons. One, it's how I make a living. If I don't write books and scripts, I can't pay my mortgage. It is how I make a living. It is not a diversion, it's not uh artistic pursuit, it is my job. If I don't write, money doesn't come in, bills don't get paid. Right. Retirement fund doesn't, you know. It is my profession. But the truth is I have to write. It's who I am. I've been writing since I was a child. If I get irritable, sometimes my wife will say to me, if I'm irritable, go write something. You know, it's if I'm not writing something, I'm not happy. Yeah, it is sort of my form of therapy. Yes, we have to go back to what you said earlier about you know, was writing hard when I said no. Well, that was before I became a professional. Writing is very, very hard for me. Yeah, I thought it would get easier after writing literally 70 novels and hundreds and hundreds of TV scripts. No, it's just gotten harder because I don't want to repeat myself. Right. And I also know there that when you write a television show, you're not just writing what you want to write. You have to write something that can be shot in eight or nine days with a certain number of days on the sound stage, certain number of days on location for a certain amount of money. There are all kinds of things that impact the story that have nothing to do with storytelling. When you write a book, you have to satisfy, in my case, an existing audience and the needs of the publisher and uh deadlines and all that. There are all kinds of pressures on you that have nothing to do with a story. And if I'm writing, for instance, one of my Eve Ronan novels, it's a lot like writing an episode of a TV show. It has to be the same show every week, only different. You have to deliver what the readers want, but it has to be different enough that it feels new. That's a huge pressure, right? So, and you also don't want to repeat yourself. So there's a lot of craft that goes into writing for me now, and a lot of passion and a lot of creativity, but also a lot of business. Yeah, totally a lot of other stuff, politics.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

How do you know you're not repeating yourself with that many books? Because even with my 11 books, I'm like, I this like this phrase. I know I've used this weird phrase, I know I've used kind of the way that this character kind of walks through life. So do you almost have like a wiki wiki that you can go and Google to see? Have I written about this before?

SPEAKER_02 27:10

Well, I don't have a wiki like that, but I have I have the benefit of a lot of people who wouldn't written Wikipedia pages about the books I've written. Um, when I am writing a book for the same let's well, let's use the Eve Ronan series as an example. The copy editor, when they when he or she does their copy edit, they list all the characters and who they are, what their relationships are, and also who's driving what car and all that kind of thing, and a chronology. In each subsequent book, the next copy editor, the same copy editor, adds on to that. So I just got the um copy edit on my next Eve Ronan novel, and it came with the copy editor's document, but also what essentially was a Bible. Yeah, I can list everything that came before. So with Eve Ronan, maybe it doesn't list phrases and dialogue and plot situations I've done before, but it does help me find my way. But I remember one time I was writing a monk, and the scene was just flowing so well. I was so in touch with my muse. Oh, it's so easy. I'm just channeling it so well. And I realized it's because I've written it before. I've written it before. And you know, I but this is by the same token, I've probably written a thousand scenes at a crime scene after a murder's been discovered. Yeah, what am I gonna do that's new? Right. Every time I do a police procedural mystery, I have the scene at the scene and I dread it. Yeah. Because what am I gonna do there?

SPEAKER_00 28:36

I guess technology evolves and and and they come to the scene carrying different things, maybe. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

No, the the way into it is not to look at the crime, not to look at what you were talking about, forensics or anything. It's about character. Yeah, what is the conflict for my character in this scene? What is the challenge for my character in this scene? What about this scene will reveal aspects of the character we haven't seen before? So I have to go into the scene, not caring about plot or about forensics or any of that, but what is it about this scene that's going to show me something new about the character? Because the fact is, readers don't come to books for plot. They come to it because they're in a series novel, they come to it for the characters. Right. So you have to make sure that every scene and every book is revealing the character in a different way. And that's the challenge of episodic television. It's particularly a show like Monk or Ellsbeth, where you're dealing with a character. We don't approach it with what is the murder. We approach what can we do to this character that will give us new humor, new drama, and new, new sides that we haven't seen before and make us more interested in him or her.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Right. What is what is the lead detective actually thinking about a distracted by that's not allowing him to focus on the scene because something else is going on in this?

SPEAKER_02 29:56

Or what does the scene reveal to him about his own problems? Or what do his problems help him solve the case, which is usually the situation with Monk, you know, where his obsessive impulsive obsessive compulsive disorder is his superpower, right? It's his it's his weakness and the bane of his existence, but it's also what allows him to solve a case. So whatever is his problem in his life will actually give him the insights he needs to solve the crime. So we're always dealing with that. And if when you read my book, Murder by Design, the interaction between the the detective and his assistant and the situations, that's the fun, but it's also going to be what reveals who the killer is and allows him to solve the crime. Right. I always approach every scene, every book, every plot from character first, not interesting mystery. The mystery will come.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

Right, right. And and the mystery is something that the reader or the watcher is always going to know is going to be there. They're not worried about that. Right. Um, but I also find it interesting that you know you have these two mediums that have, you know, obviously a massive Venn diagram overlap. But I always think about, you know, for example, with a TV show or a film, one establishing shot can fill in pages of narrative if it's done right. But also with a book, you know, you can have this internal monologue that does maybe not, you're not going to hit them over the head, but you're revealing stuff that that camera shot can't do. So do you have to get into almost a little bit of a different mindset when you're writing a script versus, or you know, when you were writing a script versus a novel?

SPEAKER_02 31:39

I'm I do that right now. I mean, I'm writing a script by day and a and a book by night.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:44

There are two different muscles, entirely different muscles, as you just pointed out. A screenplay is not prose. A screenplay is more like the blueprint for a house. Right. So your script is the document from which other professionals, the location manager, the wardrobe person, the cinematographer, the director, the actors, the set builders, everyone else is reading to do their jobs. And they're going to bring their insights into it as well. So it's their interpretation. It's a blueprint for building a house, it's a blueprint for building a television show. But here's the other thing about a movie or a TV episode. Everything has to come out through action or dialogue. If you don't see it or hear it, it doesn't exist. Right. It's a different way of telling a story. And in television, you only have 44 minutes for an hour-long show. In a movie, a typical movie, you only have 110-page script, you know, two hours or whatever, you know, 90 minutes. So every scene has to move the story forward and reveal character and have conflict, and it all has to come out naturally in dialogue. There is a danger in writing books that where you can just blurt out this exposition, like you just said, in prose, explain stuff. There is nothing more dull than exposition. So I have found that my screenwriting experience makes my books, in my view, better than they would be if I wasn't a screenwriter. Because I try to find ways to have the story come out through action and dialogue rather than through internal monologues, which are lengthy descriptions.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:29

I I think it's cheating. I think it's boring. Um, I'm not writing literature, I'm writing entertainment. And I learned a very important lesson from Janet Ivanovich when I was working with her. She said, I want readers to forget they're reading. I want them to be so lost in what they're doing, they forget there's a page. Right. If you write something clever in prose, it pulls you out. It says, Oh, look at me, I'm writing a clever line, and it reminds people that they're reading a book. You want the writing to disappear, and if you have something clever to say or an observation to make, if it can't be put into the brief head, brief thought of the character or in dialogue, it gets cut. That was a revelation to me.

SPEAKER_00 34:11

And it's true, but it's interesting because you also, uh along with your brother, have an you know, astounding sense of humor which fits your character, so it doesn't feel like it stands out, but it can if you're not too careful, right?

SPEAKER_02 34:25

But the humor is fine. If you look at Todd versus me, if you pick up his book, one thing you'll notice with Todd's books is much longer paragraphs than mine.

SPEAKER_01 34:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:35

And if you read Todd's books, there's a whole bunch of humor in the authorial voice, in the prose. If you look at my books, the authorial voice will be present in the first pair. When I'm let me back that up. If I'm writing a book in third person, the authorial voice will only be in the first few paragraphs of the first chapter. And after that, the authorial voice will disappear because I don't want to remind you you're reading. And I will put anything clever in the mouth or mind of my characters.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

So it just becomes very dialogue-heavy.

SPEAKER_02 35:09

Well, no, it's just I don't want people to remember their reading, I want them to get sucked into just being lost in the book. I want the really move, I want to be like an experience of seeing a movie or TV show in your head. Todd's more literary. He wants that. He he lives for the prose. I don't. On the other hand, the book that I have coming out June 1st, Murder by Design, is told first person from the point of view of Edison Dixby's assistant, Wally Nash, this aspiring actor who's not very good at acting. Everything is from Wally's point of view. So the prose is full of personality and humor because everything is filtered through Wally. Right. So then I just have to be careful that what I'm writing is actually interesting character stuff and not exposition. Right.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Which is a hard thing to judge when you're in the middle of a book, I think.

SPEAKER_02 35:59

I don't judge it in the middle of the book. I write outlines before I start writing. I know exactly where I'm going. I don't want to have the problem in the middle of the book of trying to figure out what the book is.

SPEAKER_00 36:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

I want to know all right. When I sit down to write, I want to know what I'm sitting down to write. That doesn't mean I'm slavishly loyal to my outline, but I don't make it up as I go along. Yeah, I have a plan. And that becomes a thing in TV. Right. In television, you have to write an outline, get the outline approved by the network and studio. And then while you're writing the script, there's a bunch of people who are building sets and looking for actors and locations and everything and budgeting based on your outline. So you have to deliver a script that matches the outline. You have to. Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:43

What do you think? You know, based on your, you know, I guess uh the entirety of your career. Uh, you know, I when I hear you talking, I'm thinking about how things have changed, but particularly in the TV industry over time, but obviously clearly in literature and novels as well. And I think about attention span with readers. So the way that you describe your writing, I think fits very well with how a lot of modern readers are consuming things, in that they're not going to have the patience for pages and pages and pages of exposition where they might have in the 70s and the 80s. But do you see your readership changing over time? Do you have, or do you see like these people have been with me the entire time? And I'm picking up younger readers as well.

SPEAKER_02 37:27

I believe you're right that the way audiences are approaching entertainment has changed with streaming, with TikTok, with YouTube, everything moves faster. And I don't think readers of popular fiction, of commercial fiction, have a low whole lot of patience for things dragging on. I don't need to be caught up in. Also, I don't think people have the time anymore, for the most part, young people, to sit down and read in one sitting. Right. So you have to, and I and James Patterson's the master of this. You have to write your books in such a way that they can come at it piecemeal. Right. They can read it on the subway train in the morning and on the subway train going home, or read parts of it in the airplane and always. That you want to engage them while they're there, but leave them hanging so they'll come back. And you don't want them to have to remember so much stuff that they can't engage when they do come back a day later. So, yes, I am very much aware that the pacing of uh to hold a reader's attention, you have to have a very rapid pace. And one way that I have adapted to that, because my daughter's in her late 20s, and I see the way she consumes media, right? And I if I want to hold her attention, I've got to grab her and and and and and and be compelling constantly in what I'm delivering entertainment-wise. So, what I do, and I know that television and film is more engaging in many ways for uh the audiences than reading is now. So, what I do now with my books is I write an outline and then I write my books first as a screenplay. Not to sell it, not to ever show anybody else, but I write this book as a screenplay, and I can get a screenplay out of my system in two or three weeks. So then I know if the story works. I know if the pacing works, I know if it can be told primarily through action and dialogue. And then what I'm doing then is essentially novelizing my own script.

SPEAKER_00 39:23

Right.

SPEAKER_02 39:23

But then I know it has the pace of either a four-act episode or a three-act movie, and I'm coloring between the lines, I'm revising the dialogue, but the pacing, the rhythm that I feel, almost like music or dance when writing a script, gets translated to the page, which is why I'm not saying this to boast, but if you look at reviews from my books, they all say, Oh my god, it moves so fast, it feels like reading a movie. Right.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

That's intentional. You are reading a movie. That's I mean, and and and I think you're right, and I think there is that tempo that you know, and and it varies scene by scene, but to me, it's these, you know, high high odd pain naturality, it's the staccato bursts. And especially if you're writing first person, a lot of incomplete sentences because it's just almost a stream of consciousness, and then it then it slows down to a coda, and um it but I think that gets I think that's innate, like or it gets developed over time. I think a lot of writers don't really have that ability to to hear the rhythm of the writing in a way that a reader would consume it at the pace that they want it to be consumed, if that makes sense at all.

SPEAKER_02 40:31

But I think if you talk to Lee Child, Michael Connolly, Jan Ivanovich, Harlan Coben, Robert Crace, all these bestselling writers, they do feel it. Yeah, they do know the pace, they they they do have that innate ability, and that's why those books are bestsellers. I mean, Janet told me when we first started writing together, there is a bestseller formula, and I'm gonna share it with you. I shared you with you part of it. You know, you want the writing to disappear, you want it to move like a movie, you want to show, not tell. You don't want big blocks of exposition. If you look at James Patterson, he doesn't have big blocks of exposition. He shows, he doesn't tell. You look at Janet, you look at Michael, you look at Lee Child, you look at all these people, and it's true. And it's hard for people who fall in love with their own writing to realize that you you're writing for an audience, you're writing for a marketplace, you're writing for uh if you want to be a commercial fiction success, you need to write in the commercial fiction formula. If you want to sell 2,000 books and get literary awards, well, that's something different. My brother is capable of both. He can write literature literary fiction, which gets awards but often doesn't sell at all. But he and he can also write commercial popular fiction. And don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction, I have a great taste for it, but sadly it doesn't often sell as well as it's not going to pay your mortgage. Yeah. I mean, for there are a lot of people for whom it does. Don't get me wrong. You have Ann Patchett and all these others that you know write incredible novels, John Irving and Larry McMurtry and all these people. But for the for the most part, there are a lot of literary fiction writers, uh, uh who like for instance, Tim Sandlin, who just passed away, he wrote wonderful books and they were made into movies too, but he never broke out in the big way he should have. Yeah, he was beloved by other writers and beloved by people who love the craft of writing, but he never broke out in that big way that you could, you know, really make it.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Like a Cormac McCarthy might have. Yeah. Yeah. So well, I feel like I've learned a lot. So thank you for for being on this. We're going to move on.

SPEAKER_02 42:27

I apologize for losing my voice. I've been having some voice issues last year.

SPEAKER_00 42:30

You're okay. We're going to quickly wrap up with our storytelling part of the show, which I normally pick three books at random and we pick a random sentence from a random page. I read that sentence, and then that's the first sentence in like a two-minute long short story. So I read the sentence, you give me maybe the next sentence, what happens? I'll do a sentence. And when it goes off the rails, which it might not, I'll call it.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

Um, you actually want to write the short story. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

Yeah, yeah. We're actually just going to improv it. Um, but I actually, because this was literally within arm's reach of my desk, I have your brother's book here. Um, so we're going to use this um as our stepping off point. So give me a number between one and 347.

SPEAKER_02 43:11

222.

SPEAKER_00 43:13

Okay, so we're gonna look at 222, and I'm gonna just pick out a sentence that that might work for us. It's the last um page of a chapter. Um, all right, you can do whatever you want after I read this sentence with this. Um this just popped right out of the page at me. Uh the toilet was his spiritual lodestar.

SPEAKER_02 43:38

When he vomited into it, he saw his entire life right there swirling in the toilet bowl. He saw what he ate, he saw the drugs he consumed, he saw his own shame.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

And when he flushed it and stood there or sat there and waited for the water to clear, he then saw a reflection of himself. Watery, gold. Like defeated, and he knew right then what he had to do.

SPEAKER_02 44:06

He had to go kill the woman lying naked in his bed.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

She deserved it after all. She was the one who drugged him in the first place. She probably thought he was dead.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

If she lives, then everything that made him vomit in this toilet bowl will come true and he'll be spending the rest of his life in prison. It's a shame he loved her. The sex was incredible, but he doesn't want to spend the next 30 years in Soledad. So it has to be done.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

I think we call it there because that was talking. All right, talk about tight, fast-paced, right off the top of your head. You were you're one of the faster uh storytellers that I've had on the show. So that was that was fantastic. I I think that could be a whole story right there, starting with Todd's sentence.

SPEAKER_02 44:54

Well, Todd often is a as a um excuse me, uh, in his teaching when he was in um the extension program in UCLA, he would start with a sentence and make the whole class write a chapter from that sentence. And there was one uh one uh student he had uh who wrote a chapter from Todd's sentence and said, Todd said to him, That chapter is so good, I want you to remove the first sentence and keep writing. And that student ended up selling that novel. That's amazing. And I and Todd can tell you which which student that was, what the novel was, but that was a prompt he gave his students every year was he would just give them a sentence that he made up that morning and and and see how each student wrote something different.

SPEAKER_00 45:36

And but that one student's chapter was so damn good that Todd said just change the first line and so maybe our little storytelling is inspiring a listener out there to write a whole book about this toilet. Lee, what a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for taking the time, and I hope to run into you someday.

SPEAKER_02 45:54

Uh likewise. Don't ignore the restraining order.

SPEAKER_00 45:58

Absolutely. Thanks, brother. Talk to you soon. Okay. Bye. All right, friends. That is it. That is my conversation with Lee Goldberg. Um, just a reminder: his new book in a in a series, Murder by Design, is out June 1st of this year. And you can read about that book and everything you want to read about Lee at his website at leegoldberg.com. And you can pop on over to CarterWilson.com. If you want to especially check out my my upcoming thriller in November, when they find me. And if you're looking for any kind of advice or coaching or retreats or seminars on writing, you can head on over to my company at unboundwriter.com. All right, that is it. That is it for this episode of Making It Up. I appreciate you watching andor listening. Stay tuned for another episode just next week. In the meantime, friends, as always, thank you. Take care.