Leave No Mess Behind

The story behind J.D. Barker’s bestselling success.

If you look at author J.D. Barker’s desk in his home office, you’ll find only a laptop on his desk. No files, no sticky notes, nothing to help him write one of his New York Times bestselling crime novels. He doesn’t need the crutch.

“I can create some pretty complex plots,” he says. “I’m good at writing computer code. When you write the first line of code it impacts the last.” And that’s how he thinks when crafting plots from first chapter to finale––all in his head without notes.

Barker is unlike any author writing today. He starts at the beginning and just plows through the writing process until he’s done while referring to only what’s in his brain. Oh, he takes time off from writing to eat and sleep, and he quits work by three o’clock each day to spend time with his family. But he takes no notes and doesn’t leave reminders scattered about of where he is in his story. And when he sits down to continue to write again, he just picks up where he left off and keeps rolling.

There is no writer’s block. There is little hesitation. He just rocks forward with his manuscripts. Other writers write in fits and starts. They make wholesale changes to their stories because they can’t tie one part of the plot to another and figure out where it is going. But in Barker’s case, all of this is already organized in his head and his mind is planning and fixing ahead before he ever gets to writing the next chapter.

How does he do it?

“It’s all up here,” he says, pointing to his head. No, but really, how do you do it?

Barker’s wife, Danyna, says he has a superpower, but Barker didn’t discover it until he was twenty-two years old. He found his superpower when he worked at a brokerage firm in Florida as compliance officer overlooking the work of stockbrokers. He didn’t get along well with his colleagues and finally got into a big argument with his boss. Rather than fire him (Barker was very good at his job), his boss sent him to a therapist who diagnosed his superpower in twenty minutes.

J.D. Barker is autistic—he has Asperger’s––a neurodivergent disorder that makes interpersonal communication difficult. He is at the top of what many therapists today refer to as the Autism Spectrum. He learned to read at age three, but it wasn’t until age twenty-two that he learned from the therapist he thinks differently than most people. He spent years in therapy and in a recent conversation, the only thing I could discern is that he is a very smart guy. I wouldn’t have known he was Autistic had he not freely talked about it.

Barker sees plot patterns that other writers don’t. He works them out in his head––all of the details––something most other authors can’t do.

He might also be called a savant, because he has not only mastered writing complex plots for his novels in his head, he is super productive and is creating his own publishing empire. He now has his own imprint, Hampton Creek Press and is distributed by Simon & Schuster.

Today, he is an advocate for Autism and frequently speaks publicly about it. He’s come a long way from what he describes in his schoolboy days as “just the weird guy in the corner.”

With a very clean desk.

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen