Name
Matt Witten
Current Home
Los Angeles, California
Place of Birth
Baltimore, Maryland
Education
B.A. from Amherst College and MFA in Playwriting from Brandeis University
Why did you choose to come to Amherst?
I liked the idea of going to a small liberal arts college in the country, in the Northeast.
Most memorable or most influential class at Amherst
My most influential classes were an American Studies class taught by Bob Gross, a playwriting class taught by Len Berkman at Smith, and an anthro class taught by Frederick Errington.
Most memorable or most influential professor
Bob Gross was my most memorable professor. For one thing, he had no problem with my writing a musical for a term paper! Later, the class performed it for the entire American Studies department.
Also, Bob’s kindness and dedication to the craft of teaching have always stuck with me. He would write comments on our papers that were almost as long as the papers themselves! Today, I teach TV writing once a year at UCLA Extension. I tend to give my students notes that are very carefully thought out and rigorous – at least I hope they are – and sometimes I get a little impatient with how long my work is taking. But then I think about Bob, and how grateful we were for his wisdom, and I keep going.
I suspect Bob has many other ex-students who have also been inspired by him to achieve greater heights as teachers.
Bob continues to inspire me in other ways. He had a book published this fall called The Transcendentalists and Their World that he was working on for forty-three years. Forty-three! And the great thing is, this book has been getting absolutely fabulous reviews. If you’d like to read more about his writing process, I interviewed him for a blog post on my website, mattwittenwriter.com.
Research Interests?
I like telling good stories about characters I care about, as novels, TV shows or movies.
Awards and Prizes
Malice Domestic Award for Best Debut Novel. Clauder Competition Award for Best Play. Nominated for an Emmy and two Edgars. The Necklace is an Editors’ Pick on Amazon for Best Mystery, Thriller and Suspense.
Favorite Book
Swag, by Elmore Leonard, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish, by Dr. Seuss.
Favorite Author
Throughout my life, two writers have inspired me the most: Dr. Seuss and Elmore Leonard. Dr. Seuss wrote with such freedom and wealth of imagination, and I believe has had a tremendous, underappreciated impact on so many writers who came after him. Elmore Leonard wrote with such economy of language, and such wonderful realistic dialogue, that I still marvel when I reread his work today.
In the past five or ten years, when I’ve been gobbling down psychological thrillers like candy, there are so many writers who have inspired me. Here’s a partial list: Gillian Flynn; Harlan Coben; Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen; Laura Lippman; Jessica Knoll; A.J. Finn; Paula Hawkins; Shari Lapena; Karin Slaughter; Mary Kubica; Lisa Lutz; Ruth Ware; Linwood Barclay; Fiona Barton; Alice Hunter; Lisa Jewell; JP Delany and Hollie Overton.
Tips for aspiring writers?
Write! And read.
Tell us a bit about your path to becoming an author
I started writing poetry in first grade. Mostly my poems were about how great the Baltimore Orioles baseball team was, and how terrible the New York Yankees were.
I had a crush on my tenth grade drama teacher, Karen Kramer. She suggested I write a play, so I did. It was an abstract, surrealistic one-act called Mort-Free, about how humanity doesn’t need to be unhappy. I have gotten much less profound since then. Mort-Free was performed at the women’s club of a local church, and I was hooked.
When I was seventeen I got an undiagnosed illness and vowed that if I ever got healthy again, I would remember that writing is central to who I am and I should never give it up. Fortunately I did get healthy again, and even though I had some almost penniless years as a writer, I held tight to my dream. Except for that one time when I applied to law school.
In my early to mid twenties I wrote plays that weren’t very good, but then at twenty-eight I wrote a good one called The Deal, about the FBI investigating political corruption in a small town. I wrote several plays after that. Probably my favorite is Sacred Journey, about a homeless Native American man I met on the streets of Brooklyn. I passed by him every day for six months, and then I started talking to him, and he was so intriguing I wrote a play about him that was performed all over the world. One of the most moving moments in my life was when he came to see the first performance in New York. He loved the play so much he ended up coming every night!
Somewhere in there I decided to start writing mystery novels, because I loved reading them so much. I wrote the Jacob Burns mystery series, with a main character who was a writer, married to an English professor at Adirondack Community College, with two boys aged five and three. At the time I was married to an English professor at ACC with two boys aged five and three. As they say, write what you know!
I never really intended to become a TV writer, but somehow or other I got hired to write a freelance episode of Homicide, and then a freelance episode of Law & Order, and before I knew it I was uprooting my family to live in LA, where I’ve been writing for TV for twenty years, on shows like House, Pretty Little Liars, Law & Order, CSI: Miami, JAG, Judging Amy, Women’s Murder Club, The Glades, Medium and Supernatural. I also wrote the movie Drones, produced by Whitewater Films. It’s been quite a journey, working with wonderful talented people, growing as a writer, and sitting on my living room sofa with family and friends watching a show I’ve written and realizing that millions of other people are also watching my words being performed.
Meanwhile my favorite thing to do in life – well, one of them, for sure – is to sit with my feet up and a cup of tea and read a thriller. My favorite genre is psychological thrillers; I consume them like candy. So last year I decided I’d try my hand at writing one. It’s been incredibly fun. Collaborating on a TV show is fun too, but sometimes it feels good to just sit in your office – or the coffee shop – and write something that’s all yours, that comes totally from the heart, like The Necklace.
I’m thrilled that The Necklace found such a great publisher in Oceanview Publishing, and that it’s been optioned for the movies by Appian Way and Cartel Pictures, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached as producer. I’m writing another thriller now, and my dream is to write a novel a year until I’m 80, and then take it from here.