Look Closer
Look Closer
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David Ellis on Look Closer
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A decade of characters waiting to speakEllis had spent years co-writing with James Patterson, and the pandemic created the first real gap in that schedule. When he finally sat down to write alone again, he didn’t reach for a new idea.
Look Closer has been in my head for a decade. And I’ve been thinking about Simon. I’ve been thinking about Vicky. And, you know, they’ve been changing over time. [paraphrased from audio]
Returning to solo fiction also meant returning to a genre his publisher had steered him away from. Early in his career, Ellis was guided toward courtroom drama because of his legal background. ‘Look Closer’ has no court scenes at all, and writing it felt like correcting a long detour.
I feel like I was reborn writing this. This is my first love. [paraphrased from audio]
He set a deliberate emotional target for the project itself, one he tied specifically to the circumstances of writing during the pandemic.
I became enamored with the idea, especially during COVID, of having more fun than I’ve ever had with a book.
The book he had been incubating for ten years and the mood he was chasing in lockdown turned out to be the same project.
How he wrote it
No good place to stopEllis models his plot structure on serialized streaming thrillers, where each episode ends by reshuffling what the viewer thought they knew. He translated that rhythm into a chapter-level pacing rule with a specific target number of full reversals.
I wanted four or five, you gotta be kidding me moments, where it just turns everything 90 degrees and everything you thought you were seeing now looks a lot different with this new piece of information. [paraphrased from audio]
Short chapters are how he enforces that rhythm on a book that runs roughly 460 pages. Any chapter reaching 2,000 words gets interrogated: should it be split? The discipline comes from a single question he keeps returning to as he writes.
I didn’t want there to be a good time to stop. That’s kind of my goal when I’m writing this. [paraphrased from audio]
Years writing with Patterson left Ellis with a concrete rule about what every chapter owes the reader. He keeps a post-it note on his computer with the word ‘fun’ written on it as a reminder.
Every chapter has to be fun. That’s what Patterson says, every chapter has to be entertaining in some way. There’s some exclamation point in each chapter. [paraphrased from audio]
The book’s three first-person narrators, Simon, Vicky, and Christian, were not planned from the start. Ellis generally uses first person for a protagonist and third for secondary characters when co-writing with Patterson. Two of the secondary characters in ‘Look Closer’ forced a change.
They became so big to me as I was writing. I said, no, I have to let them talk. And they all sound a little different, because they’re very different people. [paraphrased from audio]
The cell phone tracking sequences that run through the plot came not from research but from Ellis’s other career. He serves as an Illinois Appellate Court justice and worked as a prosecutor, including on the impeachment trial of Governor Rod Blagojevich.
In my book Look Closer, there was a lot in there about tracking cell phones. That part came from a case I worked on.
The personal thread
Irish Alzheimer’s and early morningsSimon, the novel’s protagonist, carries a particular psychological trait that Ellis describes with a family phrase. The trait is not a novelist’s invention layered onto a fictional character; Ellis names its source directly.
Simon has what we call Irish Alzheimer’s, which means he only remembers the grudges. So Simon remembers all of the grudges in his life, and he got that from the author of the novel — me. I’m also a pretty happy guy, but I do remember if you disrespected me. [paraphrased from audio]
As a sitting judge, Ellis writes fiction in the hours before his judicial day begins, roughly 3:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. He rejects the framing of that schedule as sacrifice.
When you’re waking up to do something, it’s kind of like trying to wake your kids up to go to school versus trying to wake them up to get on an airplane and go to Disney World. If they’re going to Disney World, they get right up. Well, that’s me every morning. I’m going to Disney World every morning when I get up. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Ordinary people, mortal sinsEllis describes himself as a rule-follower who was always drawn to people who weren’t. That curiosity about transgression, not crime-fiction spectacle but the quieter crossing of moral lines, is what he builds ‘Look Closer’ around.
I write about people who are conventional — they follow the street signs, pay their taxes — but they sin. Everybody sins a little bit, but very few transgress those mortal sins.
The book’s engine is deception, and Ellis locates its most interesting form not between characters but inside them. He describes himself as someone who is not deceptive in his own life, which is precisely what makes the subject absorb him.
Deception is endlessly fascinating to me. And I’m really not a very deceptive guy in my life... but I’m always, always so fascinated by how people are able to not only be deceptive with others, but be deceptive with themselves. People are really good at deceiving themselves all the time. [paraphrased from audio]
The thriller he built around that fascination is deliberately short on violence. His reference point for the effect he wanted was ‘Gone Girl’: something that unsettles by saying quiet parts out loud about what people feel and conceal, not by staging spectacle.