📝 George Pelecanos’ Writing Routine

"I wrote eight novels like that, working at night and in the early morning, while holding down a daytime job."

Author

Famous Writing Routines
February 20, 2025

Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.

George Pelecanos is an American author and television writer, best-known for his detective novels and collaborations with David Simon on HBO’s The Wire, Treme, The Deuce, and We Own This City.

I never use the word lucky, but I will say that I’ve been fortunate to be able to do what I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. How many people can say that? I just never forget that I’ve been given this opportunity. The only thing standing in my way is time. But I will never retire. There is so much happening in the world that can make a writer passionate and angry.

Interview with George Pelecanos | The Idaho Review

With a career spanning decades, Pelecanos has established himself as one of the most celebrated writers in his field, with Stephen King dubbing him “perhaps the greatest living American crime writer” and Esquire hailing him “the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world.” His work is often compared to that of legendary crime fiction writers like Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, and James Ellroy.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Pelecanos was never much of a book person by his own admission; he was more of a “movie freak” as he describes it. But during his time at the University of Maryland, where he was studying film, he took an elective on Hardboiled Detective Fiction and he was instantly hooked.

“I decided then that it was what I wanted to do,” he said in a 2008 Writer’s Digest interview. “It took me 10 years of living some more, though. In that 10 years I just read everything I could—a couple books a week.”

The D.C. writer’s career didn’t take off right away though. In between his first writing class and publishing his debut novel, he worked several jobs, including a woman’s shoe salesman, line cook, and dishwasher. In later interviews, he would credit these jobs as integral to his writing career — “I mine those experiences for my fiction to this day,” he told The Daily Beast. “But I think the greatest influence those jobs had on me was that they gave me my work ethic as a writer.”

In 1992, at the age of 35 years old, Pelecanos would make his debut with A Firing Offense, a Washington, D.C.-based crime thriller that revolves around marketing executive Nick Stefanos and his investigation into a missing colleague. In a 2018 interview with The Idaho Review, Pelecanos recalled the thrilling rush of writing A Firing Offense while juggling a family life.

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