B (38:05)
Yeah, it's true. Well, what we do again and you know, I don't want it to sound sort of pretentious or whatever, but you know, at the beginning you, you sort of start off by, by kind of what you, you, you try to feel the mood of the book. What do you want? The. If, if it was music, it would be kind of what key is this in? Is it upbeat? Is it, is it somber? Is it triumphant? Is it, you know, in terms of the books, it's typically. Is it going to be kind of one of the claustrophobic ones where it's in a small town and you're in the same place all along and everything is all there crushed in together? Or is it one of the ones in a city where they're zooming around to different locations? That's kind of what you start off with. You start off with that feeling, then you try to get from that feeling to some kind of opening scene. And probably the best, the easiest example of that for me would be the second one we did together, which was better off Dead, where for some reason I just had this picture in my head of a big expanse of desert with the only living thing you could see was one single tree and a vehicle had crashed into that tree. That just came into my head. That is how this book is going to open. Because I think the way that a thriller becomes really, really powerful is if you either ask or you imply a question at the beginning, because people are just, for whatever reason, they're hardwired. If you ask them a question, they want to find out the answer. And so that means in a book, they have to keep turning the pages until they find that answer. And so, you know, a vehicle has crashed in other one tree. That's the only thing that you can say, well, how was it an accident? Why was it on purpose? Yeah, why? Who did it? What? You know, you've got to find out. And so you start off. Off with a starting point, and then you just. You work on that scene till you're happy with it. And then you think, okay, what happens next? What does Reacher do? What do the bad guys do? And, you know, you've probably got a sense in your mind of what the bad guys are going to be up to in general. It doesn't have to be totally specific, but somewhere, you know, you're going to have. In this book, for example, you know, I knew exactly what, what. What kind of thing I wanted the bad guys, you know, the. The scheme that they were up to. And part of that was because, you know, this is the 30th in the series. So, you know, I felt a real responsibility. You know, it's a big. It's a big landmark, a big milestone. And so I really wanted to do it justice. So I wanted the villain to be particularly nasty. And, you know, they've been physically nasty villains before, you know, like in Persuader with Big Paulie, you know, that everybody hated. You know, you had, Had. You've had villains that are horrible from a physical standpoint. This is what I wanted it to be. Just the scheme, you know, the thing that he was doing to be so violent, so repellent that, you know, people would just be dying for Reacher to sort the guy out. And so, you know, I did have a good sense of what the villain was up to, but not exactly how all of the pieces were going to fit together. That is something that we work out as we go along.
