This article was adapted from a Q&A Don Winslow conducted by screenwriter Shane Salerno on the Mulholland Books website.

From Jason PinterBestselling thriller writer
Posted: September 2, 2010 10:13 AM

Let's change direction a bit. As much as we all love controversy and feuds (real or imagined), sometimes the most interesting stories are the ones behind the books. With that in mind, below is an original post from New York Times bestselling author Don Winslow on his new novel Savages. Winslow is a brilliant stylist, unflinching in detail, and his books jab a fountain pen in the eye of anyone who can read one of his tomes and state with conviction that crime fiction isn't literature. So without further ado, Don Winslow.

'Fuck you' was the first sentence I wrote in SAVAGES, even before I had characters or a plot. I heard this book in my head. I saw it in front of my eyes in a certain way, and it felt very radical, especially for the crime genre, which has a whole set of rules, but I really felt like throwing elbows to create a little bit more space for myself to create a book the way I heard it, the way I saw it.

If I thought that a reader might experience a scene better as a film than as a novel, then I wrote it in screenplay form; if I thought that a scene would read better as poetry than as narrative prose, then I wrote it as poetry. Oddly enough, some of the most poetic scenes are the most violent scenes because my experience of having been in a couple of wars as an observer, was that you don't remember it as flowing narrative prose.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-pinter/the-gamble-and-the-payoff_b_703335.html