Tess Gerritsen

Writing is very much an emotional process; it requires you to be very in touch with your feelings. That is the opposite of what you're taught as a medical doctor. We're supposed to be detached and logical. Maybe because I started off as a writer and then became a doctor, I'm able to integrate those two.

I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school.

I don't work all day, every day on 'Rizzoli & Isles,' but I work every day. It may be a scene or two, or it may be an enormous workload, but there's really not a lot of room for anything else, and that's the choice I made. And that's why I stayed away from TV before: Because I know that that's what it is.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.