In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of "True Detective" that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.

I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession - they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

You can't really judge an actor's abilities by their career, because the business is going to pigeonhole people into whatever turns a profit, and no artist is less in charge of how their work is presented than an actor, the appeal of Vince was that within a great naturalism, he can convey fierce intelligence, complex emotion, and a real warmth married to a real edge, strength and vulnerability and danger and humor. There are essential contradictions at work that makes him fascinating to watch.

In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for True Detective was one of them.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.