Art & Creativity Quote by Jonathan Kellerman

Kellerman’s line reads like a modest craft note, but it’s really a quiet manifesto about control, uncertainty, and credibility. As a psychologist-turned-novelist, he’s describing research not as trivia-gathering but as a way of building a believable mental world: motives that ring true, institutions that behave realistically, details that don’t betray the reader’s trust. The first move is practical and disarming: research “varies,” which punctures the fantasy that good writing follows a single disciplined template. That flexibility is its own authority.

The sharper subtext lives in the tension between “I try” and “inevitably.” He wants the security of preparation - do the homework, stabilize the variables, lower the risk of error - yet admits that storytelling creates new problems faster than planning can solve them. That’s a very clinician’s admission: you can intake a patient, take a history, run the tests, and still the real issue shows up mid-session. Writing, for Kellerman, functions the same way. The plot is an experiment, and the draft is where the unexpected data appears.

Context matters: Kellerman built a career on psychological thrillers, a genre where readers are unforgiving about procedural sloppiness and even more unforgiving about human behavior that feels “off.” His emphasis on front-loading research is also a defense against procrastination disguised as diligence; he draws a line between preparation that enables momentum and research that becomes a refuge from the scary part: committing to choices on the page. The final clause - questions emerging “during the writing” - nods to the real magic: imagination doesn’t follow an outline, it interrogates it.