How did you become a writer?

I used to spend my summers on my aunt's massive, forested ranch, and one year, around fifth grade, I had an unexplainable encounter with an animal I couldn't identify (that's the non-crazy sounding way to say you saw Bigfoot). I can't tell you how profound an experience that was. In an instant, everything the world had taught me was true was suddenly cast into doubt. All my teachers were wrong, all the top scientists were wrong, all the adults were wrong. Little twelve-year-old me had gained a knowledge about the world that few people knew to be true. It made me think, well what else is everyone wrong about? and I became obsessed with the paranormal. My main passion was and is reading. My local library and my school library had pretty much no books on paranormal phenomena at the time, so I thought, Why not write one? So that was my first piece of fiction writing. The hero finds a monster and has to either run from it or face it. That's pretty much the same story I've written ever since. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Every person has a handful of books that changed the course of their lives. The first one I remember was DEAR MR.CRENSHAW by Beverly Cleary. I was in 2nd grade. The book was about a kid going through his parent's divorce, wanting nothing more in the world than for his parents to get back together, and having to learn to cope with the fact that it wouldn't happen. My parents were going through a divorce at the time, and that's when I knew the power of literature: when words on a page made me feel better about my own life.

My more recent influences are much different than other writers', I'm sure. I did some graduate work in philosophy before going to law school (because I didn't want to starve to death as a philosophy professor) and philosophy has always been a passion of mine. So the writers that influenced me most are philosophers like Plato, Nietzche, Ayn Rand, Sartre, and especially Albert Camus. I'm not satisfied with books, even commercial fiction books meant primarily for entertainment, if they don't raise some deeper philosophical issue. I try to do this in all my own work as well.

When and where do you write? 

At any time and everywhere. I've written in Ubers, in the middle of screaming kids, even once in court when I had a deadline. I would write as quickly as I could when the jury took breaks. I see writing as work, and you don't wait for inspiration to work. Just sit your ass down and write. Even if you know it's crap. Crap can be fixed later. Empty pages can't.

What are you working on now? 

Just finished the start of a new series based loosely on the Zodiac killer. I lived in Northern California and, for some reason, we had, per capita, more serial murderers than anywhere else in the country at the time. So I would go places and hear people talking about "The Golden State Killer killed a person in that neighborhood" or "Ted Bundy came to this Red Robin" or whatever. When I heard about the Zodiac, I learned that not only had he never been caught but the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Defense couldn't break his last cipher. I thought I had to learn everything I could about someone like that, and so I've always wanted to write something about Zodiac. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

"Ninety-nine percent of show business is just showing up." – Woody Allen

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don't have unrealistic expectations (or preferably any expectations). Accept failure and rejection and do the work anyway. The fact is, a writing career is not a Gaussian distribution: There's no bell curve of the great plethora of mid-list authors taking up the bulk of sales. Five authors account for almost 95% of all book sales worldwide. It's a winner take all market. The odds of becoming one of those authors are astronomical. So if you're telling yourself you're not going to be happy unless you're the next Stephen King, you may never be happy. We need to be happy now; it's a choice. Rather than, "I have to be the next Stephen King," tell yourself how privileged you are that you can write something and have other people read it. Writers, I would say especially commercial fiction writers because we're the ones people are actually going to remember a hundred years from now (no one will remember who won the Pulitzer Prize a century from now, but people will still be reading John Grisham and Anne Rice), are the keepers of the history. If I want to know what life was like in ancient Greece, I don't read the historians, I read the great playwrights. Fiction is an expression of the spirit of a people at a specific time. It's important. If you love writing, the fact that you get to do it at all is incredible. If you can make a living doing it, you're in the top 1% of all writers who have ever lived. Be happy now, and don't worry about the future. It's out of your hands anyway. 

At the age of thirteen, when his best friend was interrogated by the police for over eight hours and confessed to a crime he didn’t commit, Victor Methos knew he would one day become a lawyer. After graduating from law school at the University of Utah, he sharpened his teeth as a prosecutor for Salt Lake City before founding what would become the most successful criminal defense firm in Utah. In ten years, he conducted more than one hundred trials. One particular case stuck with him, and it eventually became the basis for his first major bestseller, The Neon Lawyer. Since that time, he has focused his work on legal thrillers and mysteries, winning the Harper Lee Prize for The Hallows and an Edgar nomination for Best Novel for his title A Gambler’s Jury. He currently splits his time between southern Utah and Las Vegas.