Michael Connelly: “I don’t start writing until I have a sense of how it’s going to end.”

From a Washington Post story, “Michael Connelly reveals how ‘Bosch’ was born and other tales of his humble rise to fame.”

Connelly has published 32 novels—including the Bosch, Ballard and Lincoln Lawyer series—which he began when he was a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times, writing his first novel at home in a walk-in closet. . . .

When I write a novel, I get an idea and I think about it, sometimes for years, sometimes very quickly. But I don’t start writing until I have a sense of how it’s going to end. I need that light to go toward. And once I have that light, I can jump off and do something else and come back to it.

It may have come from my days as a newspaper reporter, because on the crime beat you usually write about something that happened, but it doesn’t have a conclusion yet, so you have many things that you want to keep checking on. You have a lot of balls in the air when you’re a police reporter. I have a lot of balls in the air now, but I don’t have daily deadlines, so what I do now is easier than what I used to do as a reporter. And I don’t have the pressure of being right because I write fiction.