Peter Blauner
is the author of seven novels, including Slow Motion Riot, winner of an Edgar award for best first novel, and The Intruder, a New York Times bestseller. He began his career as a journalist for New York magazine in the 1980s and segued into writing fiction in the 1990s. His short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and on Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. For the last ten years, he has written for several television shows, including Law & Order: SVU and Blue Bloods. His newest novel is Proving Ground, published in May 2017.
What are you working on currently?
After finishing a second season writing for the CBS show Blue Bloods, I’m putting out my first novel in eleven years, Proving Ground (actually Minotaur/St. Martin’s is publishing it: I’m just following it around). It’s a kind of modern-day Hamlet revenge story with a traumatized vet and a bodacious detective, set in Brooklyn. I’m about to start writing another novel, which I hope will be done a lot sooner.
When and how do you find time to write?
I try to be very disciplined about it. Some people consider writing to be a calling, but it’s also a job and not necessarily one that anybody’s dying for you to do. So it’s on you to take it seriously. Especially when it comes to books. Writing for someone else’s TV show is relatively simple. The characters already exist, the length is predetermined, and the number of sets are limited by budget and time constraints. But a novel can be anything. So when I’m writing one, I approach it like a boxer approaching a title fight. I do the road work and hit the heavy bag every day. I write three pages, without judgment, then spend several hours reading and doing research. I got the three page thing from Hemingway. He said if it’s going well and you cut off after three pages, you have a good place to start the next day. But if they stink, three pages isn’t that much to recover from.
How much and what kinds of marketing do you personally do?
Honestly, I’m not much of marketing maven. What I do like is hearing from readers. The financial rewards of writing can come and go. And publicity is always ephemeral. The only real lasting rewards are the pleasure you take from doing the work and knowing that your words actually landed with someone personally.
What fictional detective would you like to be and why?
That’s a tough one. If I was someone else, I’d miss the people I love in my family. Then again, if I was Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, I wouldn’t love anybody. I’d just go around being a pitiless observer, playing people off against each other, cool about deploying language and violence with equally cool detachment. Nothing would bother me, which might be good. But only for a while.
In five words or less, what advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Read. Can’t get better otherwise.