I love this snarky line about critics. It comes from the English playwright John Osborne: “Asking a working writer how he feels about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.”
Actually, I’m all for critics. As long as they’re honest. And they do their homework. A pretty smart critic at the New York Times once wrote that he hadn’t finished any of my books but he knew he wouldn’t like them. He came to this conclusion because a critic friend of his told him so. Sorry, but I don’t buy that as either good criticism or good journalism.
When people bring up my practice of writing with coauthors, they usually aren’t thinking nice thoughts. Here’s the best defense I’ve come up with about cowriters.
Simon & Garfunkel
Lennon & McCartney
Lennon & McCartney & Harrison & Starr
Gilbert & Sullivan
Rodgers & Hammerstein
Woodward & Bernstein
Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Stephen King & Peter Straub
Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
Joel & Ethan Coen
Matt Stone & Trey Parker
William Shakespeare & Christopher Marlowe & John Fletcher
I could go on. My point is that collaborations are common and they often work beautifully. They obviously succeed big-time in film and music, and for me they’ve been a good way to tell a lot of stories. And trust me, I have a lot of stories to tell.
While we’re on the subject of cowriters, here’s a line for somebody to use in a review of this book: “Surprisingly, Patterson’s autobiography isn’t half bad. I just wonder who wrote it for him.”
That isn’t true, but hell, put it up on the internet anyway. You know the operating principle—lies travel faster than the truth.