This is Lee Cowan.

Viola Davis, actor, producer, and now novelist.

She's written a thriller with famed author James Patterson.

And talking with Sunday mornings Tracy Smith.

Even before this novel, writing has been an important part of your life, an important part of your acting.

Yeah. You write bios for your characters? Yeah, well, all actors write bios for their characters because we're trying to figure out

who they are.

That's the first thing they teach you in acting school is to write a bio.

It's like, what's your character's favorite color?

What's their first memory?

What was it childhood like?

You know, and you write and you write so you write and you write and you write,

and somewhere in there, something clicks.

Certainly I've done that with, especially my character in doubt.

That was the mollywopper of them all.

You wrote how many pages of a bio?

Like 100 pages, yeah.

I'm now in the midst of doing another character now, and I think that I'm

just at 30 or 40 pages, but there's more to come. We should talk about the character in doubt.

That was less than a 10-minute performance, but you wrote 100 pages. Yeah, I mean, the time on screen has nothing to do with the sort of life of the character,

right?

The life of the character, you're getting just a slice of it.

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