An Interview with Lee Goldberg

Lee Goldberg is not just a crime author, he's also a screenwriter and producer. He's produced several TV shows like Seaquest, Monk, Diagnosis Murder and written the screenplays to many episodes. Lee Goldberg has also written several crime novels and spin-off novels to the television shows he's a part of.

How did you get into writing? What was your first book or story that you completed? Did you ever get it published?

When I was ten or eleven, I was already pecking novels out on my Mom's old typewriters. The first one was a futuristic tale about a cop born in an underwater sperm bank. I don't know why the bank was underwater, or how deposits were made, but I thought it was very cool. I followed that up with a series of books about gentleman thief Brian Lockwood, aka "The Perfect Sinner,” a thinly disguised rip-off of Simon Templar, aka "The Saint." I sold these stories for a dime to my friends and even managed to make a dollar or two. In fact, I think my royalties per book were better then than they are now!

I continued writing novels all through my teenage years. Some of my other unpublished masterpieces featured a hapless detective named Kevin Dangler. Being a packrat, I still have most of those novels today in boxes in my garage (some were destroyed in flooding a few years back).

By the time I was 17, I was writing articles for The Contra Costa Times and other Bay Area newspapers and applying to colleges. I didn't get a book published, but my detective stories got me into UCLA's School of Communications. My grades weren't wonderful, so I knew I had to kick ass on my application essay. I wrote it first person as a hard-boiled detective story in Kevin Dangler's voice. The committee, at first, had doubts that I actually wrote it myself -- until they reviewed articles I'd written for the Times, including one that used the same device as my essay. Once I got into UCLA, I put myself through school as a freelance writer...for American Film, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, UPI, Newsweek. Anybody who would pay me. I had a girlfriend at Playgirl and she got me a gig writing sexually explicit Letters-to-the-Editor at Playgirl for $25 each.

How did you finally get published? When were you able to write on a full time basis? Please explain your success story?

I had a journalism advisor at UCLA who wrote spy novels. We became friends and talked a lot about mysteries, thrillers, plotting, etc. One day in the early 80s his publisher came to him and asked him if he’d write a “men’s action adventure series,” sort of the male equivalent of the Harlequin romance. He said he wasn’t desperate enough, hungry enough, or stupid enough to do it…but he knew someone who was: Me. So I wrote an outline and some sample chapters and they bought it. The book was called .357 Vigilante I wrote it as “Ian Ludlow” so I'd be on the shelf next to Robert Ludlum and had plenty of Letter-to-the-Editor-of-Playgirl quality sex in it.

The West Coast Review of Books called my literary debut "as stunning as the report of a .357 Magnum, a dynamic premiere effort," singling the book out as "The Best New Paperback Series" of the year. I ended up writing four books in the series. Naturally, the publisher promptly went bankrupt and I never saw a dime in royalties.

But New World Pictures bought the movie rights to .357 Vigilante and hired me to write the screenplay. I didn’t know anything about writing scripts…luckily, I had a good friend who did, William Rabkin. We worked together on the UCLA Daily Bruin. So the two of us teamed up. The movie never got made, but we had so much fun that we were writing partners for over 20 years…and remain best friends to this day. (He writes the novels based on the TV series PSYCH).

How do you stay motivated to finish a novel? How do you stay focused?

My mortgage. My contract. You may think that’s a joke, but I make my living as a writer. If I don’t stay focused, I don’t get paid and my family doesn’t eat.

What is your writing schedule like? Do you write in the mornings, evenings, and for how long?

I’d love to be able to get up at 5 am and write until noon, but I am just not wired that way. My best writing time is between 8 pm and 2 a.m.

But the truth is I write whenever I can… I write until my creative energy runs out. Sometimes it is hours, sometimes it is just a few minutes. But I have yet to miss a deadline.

How do you get your ideas? What is your method for remembering them?

Actually, I have no idea how I get my ideas and I often fear that I've run out of them. But I keep surprising myself (or fooling myself. I'll let you be the judge of that). But when I have an idea, I am quick to jot it down on whatever piece of paper I happen to have around…or I will send myself an email on my phone to make sure the notion isn’t lost.

If you get writer’s block, how do you get over it?

I never get writer’s block. The only time I have anything close to that is when I hit a wall in a scene or a story…and usually the problem there is not with inspiration but a flaw in my plot much earlier in the story that needs to be fixed. Rewriting often solves those “blocks.”

What are your thoughts on self publishing?

In a nutshell, for fiction writers, 99.9% of the time it’s an enormously costly mistake – on your wallet and for your career. Don’t do it. You can find out more of my views on self-publishing and vanity presses on my blog, where I discuss the matter often and in great detail.

It’s a bit different if you are dealing with non-fiction, especially if you have a platform like seminars, a radio show, etc. from which to promote the books and to sell them directly to people.

What piece of advice would you give to someone thinking of becoming a writer? What is a good starting point for them?

I get asked this question a lot. First thing you need to do, if you want to be a novelist, is to READ BOOKS. If you want to be a TV writer, you have to watch TV…not so much for entertainment, but as a student.

Everybody’s story of breaking in is unique. Most of those stories, however, share one common element: You have to put yourself in the right place to get your lucky break. And it’s easier than you think.

The first thing you have to do is learn your craft. Take classes, preferably taught by people who have had some success as novelists or TV writers. This rule doesn’t apply as much to creative writing classes as it does to screenwriting. You can learn a lot about writing a novel from someone who has never done it – but I am convinced that there’s no point taking a TV writing class from someone who isn’t an experienced TV writer themselves because TV writing is as much a business as it is a craft. You’d be astonished how many TV courses are taught by people who don’t know the first thing about writing for television. Even more surprising is how many desperate people shell out money to take courses from instructors who should be taking TV writing courses themselves.

There’s another reason to take a creative writing or TV writing course besides learning the basics of the craft. If you’re the least bit likeable, you’ll make a few friends among the other classmates. This is good, because you’ll have other people you can show your work to. This is also good because somebody in the class may sell his or her first novel or script before you do… and suddenly you’ll have a friend in the business.

Many of my novelist and writer/producer friends today are writers I knew back when I was in college, when we were all dreaming of breaking into TV or selling a novel some day.

To find out more about Lee Goldberg and his work, check out Lee Goldberg's website.