In China, the dead are not forgotten – my relatives cheerfully pointed out all the niches of deceased friends and family, as if gesturing at the homes of the living. – Tess Gerritsen
Medicine is probably one of the best backgrounds for a writer to find stories. I always think cops and docs have the best background because we see so much of human behavior, such a range of human emotions. – Tess Gerritsen
I sold my first short story while I was home on maternity leave, then began working on novels. Since I was reading and enjoying romance novels at the time, the first two unpublished manuscripts I wrote were both romances. I sold my third novel, ‘Call After Midnight,’ to Harlequin Intrigue after submitting it unagented. – Tess Gerritsen
I spent my childhood watching every scary movie that Hollywood ever made. And I think that gave me the best education for storytelling. It also made me want to reproduce the scary moments that I felt, sitting in a theater at the age of 5. – Tess Gerritsen
I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it’s a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I’m writing them. – Tess Gerritsen
I’m Asian-American, and I was the only Chinese girl growing up in a white school in San Diego. So I understood what it was like to be different, to always want to fit in and never feel like you ever could. – Tess Gerritsen
Because I never plan anything out ahead of time, I’m always in the process of learning about my characters. Without a biographical sketch to guide me, I discover things about my heroines as the stories unfold. Only in ‘Body Double’ did I discover that Maura’s mother was a serial killer. – Tess Gerritsen
I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful, but I wasn’t used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England. – Tess Gerritsen
The hunting of monsters is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for those who feel bound by such trivial doctrines as law or national borders. – Tess Gerritsen
‘Lonesome Dove’ by Larry McMurtry and ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author’s writing. – Tess Gerritsen
After twelve years of living in Hawaii, I’d gotten a serious case of ‘rock fever.’ I just couldn’t live on an island any longer. – Tess Gerritsen
I have minor characters who are Asian-American, and I’ve been using them throughout my career, but they’ve never taken center stage, they’ve never been really powerful, they’ve never expressed some of the experiences I had growing up in the U.S. Johnny Tam is the first one. – Tess Gerritsen
A project like ‘Rizzoli & Isles’ is something you can’t pursue. It’s something that comes to you… I like to call it ‘fairy dust.’ And it happened without my having to do anything. – Tess Gerritsen
My brother and I spent our childhood in movie theaters screaming. I decided early on that that was the epitome of entertainment. I’m always trying for that same level of adrenaline in my books. – Tess Gerritsen
For years I’ve wanted to write a book about mummies, and had been following the science of mummy CT scans when the premise for ‘The Keepsake’ occurred to me: what if an ‘ancient’ mummy turns out to have a bullet in its leg? How does a modern murder victim get turned into a mummy? – Tess Gerritsen
‘Ice Cold’ is the eighth in my ‘Rizzoli and Isles’ thriller series. It was inspired by a true occurrence in the 1960s, now known as the ‘Dugway Incident,’ in which 6,000 sheep mysteriously died overnight in a remote area of Utah. I thought, ‘What if it happened instead to people? What if the inhabitants of an entire village vanished overnight?’ – Tess Gerritsen
Because my dad’s Chinese-American, and they’re very concrete, he said, ‘There’s no money to be made in literature.’ So he told me to go into the sciences. And I was a good girl. And I did what Daddy said. And that’s how I ended up being a doctor. But you know, you just can’t stamp out that desire to tell stories. – Tess Gerritsen
‘I am a bad mother.’ Every Christmas, this is what I think because the holiday season fills me with such anxiety. I’m sure that other mothers are happily baking cookies, decorating trees, and finding perfect gifts for everyone. – Tess Gerritsen
Mom and I often talked about the trip we’d someday take together to the ‘city of eternal spring’ where she was born. In Kunming, she said, the fruits are sweeter, the mountains look like Chinese paintings, and the weather is always perfect. – Tess Gerritsen
Fans are always asking me where I get my ideas from. The answer is that I’m very curious, and I get inspiration from everywhere. I read the newspapers voraciously, so I know what’s going on in real crime. I pay attention to the strange stories people tell me, and I also read a lot of scientific and forensic journals. – Tess Gerritsen
I’d been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets. – Tess Gerritsen
I was a writer first, and knew I’d be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school. – Tess Gerritsen
My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family’s futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me. – Tess Gerritsen
My dad’s cooking was magic in the kitchen. But eventually over the years, his personality changed and his ability to remember recipes failed. He became paranoid and thought people were stealing from him, when often he was just misplacing things. – Tess Gerritsen
I think fiction, for me, is a way of trying to understand why people do the things they do – and trying to explain what is, at heart, illogical. – Tess Gerritsen
The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally – those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, ‘I want to write that book’, for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and ‘The Bone Garden’ was one of them. – Tess Gerritsen
There is no better test of character than when you’re tossed into crisis. That’s when we see one’s true colors shine through. So I try my best to make my characters personally involved in the plot, in a way that stresses them and tests them. – Tess Gerritsen
I shy away from showing cruelty on the page. A lot of the violence in my books actually happens off stage. The police come on to the scene after the event has occurred. – Tess Gerritsen
One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was the globe that I now keep right beside my desk. – Tess Gerritsen