Author Reading - Gillian Flynn

Last week I went to Gillian Flynn's talk. She is the author of GONE GIRL, DARK PLACES, and SHARP OBJECTS. She specializes in dark psychological thrillers. Gillian was very sweet, humble, down to Earth, and funny. She read us the "cool girl" passage from Gone Girl which was brilliant. 





Gillian's writing process:


-She only loosely outlines and lets the story discover itself as she writes. 

-When writing Gone Girl, she didn't expect the "twist" in the middle. 

-She likes to keep her novels character driven rather than plot driven. The characters create the plot for her. 

-Her office is her basement. She makes notes on sticky pads and puts them on walls to remind her which parts of the story to solve. 

-Whenever she's stuck, she does a writing exercise that is outside of her novel. For instance, a character's memory or writing from a different perspective. Her rule is that these exercises don't go into the final novel (to take the pressure off)--but one of them did make it into Gone Girl since she liked it so much. The infamous "cool girl" passage is from the exercise. 

-Gone Girl was her most difficult project and she spent two years working on it.

-She details her characters outside of the novel as much as possible, such as what they eat for breakfast and if they remember birthdays and what's on their playlist. 

-She enjoys the revision process best, identifying the weak areas and making the story better. 

-She got to write the script for the Gone Girl movie. 


I hope you enjoyed learning some of her writing techniques! I'm looking forward to seeing what the movie is going to be like. 


--Realm

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