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walter-mosley-masterclass

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You can not have a novel without a story but the story is not the novel.

Walter Ellis Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California; they are perhaps his most popular works. Mosley started writing at 34 and has written every day since, penning more than sixty books and often publishing two books a year. 

This story, like all great stories, begins with a single sentence:

“On hot sticky days in southern Louisiana, the fire ants swarm.” 

In the mid-1980s, Walter Mosley, a computer programmer, types out these words in a quiet moment. He’s 34 years old. He’s never thought about being a writer, but something about the sentence stays with him. He thinks it sounds like something that could be in a book—and it’s the first time he thinks maybe I could be a writer. He’s been reading Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and is excited by what that book opens up in his mind about the kinds of stories one can tell.