Kevin Wade, author of 'One Good Eye' - Network TV Showrunner talks learning the rules of crime shows, writing 20 individual mysteries, and switching to novels

Uh, I'm looking out at, uh, a, a small fern garden and, uh, to my right and through a picture window to the driveway to the house.

I work in a, uh, uh, there's a detached garage, and one of the three bays has been turned into a home office.

So turning something into a home office, one in order to write, what, what, um, when you were creating this space, what did you feel that you needed to have around you to help you out?

Uh, books, model cars, uh, framed posters of previous, uh, productions, movies and television and plays, uh, going back to 1981.

Uh, so [chuckles] I never really honestly notice them, but they're nice to have around if it's a long day and I feel like, uh, I'm completely out of gas.

I can look around the room and see, okay, well, I, I used to have gas.

Maybe I can find a gas station again.

Um, uh, so w- is there anything that kind of more pertains to whatever project you're currently working on? So, uh, planning materials, kind of plotting detritus, Post-It Notes, that kind of thing.

Uh, I have, uh, as it is a writer's office, I have the, uh, proscribed, um, two, uh, what would you call them, corkboards and, uh, piles of push pins and index cards in different colors.

And, um, the last couple of things I've done were novels, and I've found that I abandon the file cards way sooner than I would have were I doing a television episode or a, or a movie screenplay.

Uh, w- was it a surprise to you that you abandoned them at all?

You know, uh, it was, and it wasn't.

I think I got my head full of, um, I, I, as I had never written a novel before.

The first of the two books that I've written was called Johnny Careless, and, uh, for years, uh, decades actually, um, I was writing screenplays and teleplays and, um, I, I...

They are as proscribed in form and structure as a sonnet, and so you kind of, you, you want to get down the structure, the scene breakdowns, the character breakdowns, uh, because you can...

W- uh, I found more often than not, if I didn't do it, I'd get lost somewhere in act two and see that, uh, two or three months of work, uh, had hit a brick wall.

Um, in sitting down to write a novel, I kind of filled my head a little bit with, uh, the devil's advocates.

Uh, that would be everyone from Lee Child to Stephen King to Elmore Leonard, uh, who, uh, encouraged writers to sit down with an idea and some characters and the, and a rough idea of the plot and see where those characters, uh, take you, so what they reveal to you in writing them.

Um, and, uh, that seemed like a, honestly, a fun way to go.

Uh, I was not, I was not...

When I sat down to first write a novel, I was not writing on a contract.

I did not have a deadline.

There was literally nobody waiting for that manuscript.

So I thought for the first time in many years, I could just do it, uh, exactly as I felt like doing it.

Uh, y- but you are a...