October 2011
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Interview

Bobby Nash p1

By Simon Sandall ⋅ October 2, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

READERSVOICE.COM aims to collect a few good reading tips. Bobby Nash is a professional writer from Georgia, USA, who has written numerous comics and novels. Novels include Deadly Games and Evil Ways. And he's written comics like Lance Star: Sky Ranger, Yin Yang, and had stories in anthologies, like his Secret Agent X story in Airship 27 presents All-Star Pulp Comics. In this interview he gives an insight into what it's like being a working writer - and a hard-working writer at that. And he lists a lot of his favorite authors, particularly thriller writers.

READERSVOICE.COM: I really liked your novel Evil Ways, particularly the way it rips along, even during the scenes where there is no major or violent action, just school friends reuniting, or an FBI agent catching up with his newspaper owner brother in a small Georgia town, or a character remembering his childhood in the town. Can you give some tips on creating suspense?

BOBBY NASH: Suspense is all about making the reader believe that anything could happen at any moment. Movies and TV do this with music and camera angles. What I try to do is use the story for pacing. When things are heating up I try to write it in a way that you read faster. I hope I was successful.

Evil Ways was my first attempt at doing this type of story so I made a lot of it up as I went along and hoped it worked. I see some things I would do differently now, but I’m still very happy with the end result.

RV: You said in one interview that you spend a lot of time reading and watching tv. What books or comics have you liked in the past year or so, and which tv shows do you regard as well-written?

BN: I probably spend more time watching TV than I should. Burn Notice, Leverage, Rizzoli & Isles, Warehouse 13, Young Justice, NCIS, and Castle are all well-written shows that I enjoy. I love it when a TV series can surprise me. So often I can anticipate what’s coming or who the killer is, etc. It’s always great when a show or movie surprises me like that.

I love to read, but don’t read quite as much as I used to before I wrote full time. I generally pick up anything by Michael Connelly, Alex Kava, J.T. Ellison, Kyle Mills, Steve Alten, Beverly Conner, Michael Crichton (R.I.P.), Stephen J. Cannell (R.I.P.) and on and on. I also enjoy James Patterson, but I just can’t keep up with all the books that come out from him and his co-authors so I just stick to the Alex Cross books. I have friends who are writers and I pick up their books as often as I’m able. There are a lot of talented writers out there. Comic books are the same. I love ‘em, but don’t read quite as many as I used to. FF by Hickman is probably my favorite comic book running at the moment, followed closely by Brubaker’s Captain America and Criminal series.

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-copyright Simon Sandall.

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