Doing it his way

William Landay (Dominic Chavez/Globe Staff)

Outtakes from my interview with Newton's William Landay, author of the Boston-based crime novel, "The Strangler," for Tuesday's Globe profile: We talked about writers' apprenticeships, and how he had shunned formal study of the novelist's trade:

"I was leery of that, and I don't mean to be critical of it, because I don't know if it's a good thing or not. I was skeptical that [fiction writing] could be taught, and skeptical of the workshop method. I wasn't the sort of guy who would have enjoyed being in that situation. The way I prefer to work is to go off and write my book and polish it until it is as good as it possibly can be. The idea of sitting in a workshop, where everybody is tearing each other down, and where you're showing unfinished work, and where there's politics in the room, didn't sound like a supportive environment, which, to me, for a creative endeavor, is what you want.

"I also think there is an overemphasis on credentials. If someone has an MFA from [the Iowa Writer's Workshop], it's no guarantee of anything. I am leery of my own credentials, too. People look at me and focus on the fact that I was an assistant D.A. and project all sorts of things on my books, as if that is some sort of guarantee of authenticity. But the credential guarantees nothing, and that was one of the important lessons I learned [before he became published] as I was off writing pretty bad books."