‘X Files’ Actor David Duchovny Feels ‘Complete and Happy’ After Writing Several Bestselling Books

He’s a two-time Golden Globe winner, a Princeton and Yale English graduate and a New York Times bestselling author — it’s no wonder David Duchovny is widely considered to be a renaissance man.

While Duchovny has had a myriad of nuanced acting roles for three decades — with successful shows like X-Files and Californiacation — it is his writing that most intrigues him.

“Writing is the one place in all my art that I get to do it all by myself,” he told Closer prior to his appearance at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival.

Duchovny is wholly committed to his writing when he takes on a new book.

“When I write, I’m like a soldier,” he acknowledged. “It’s always the same, I’ll get up close to dawn before the sun rises and I’ll drink coffee, which gives me a false sense of being really smart. I just go. And then I write for about five hours, to noon-ish/ lunch. And then I’m done. And it feels really good. I really love that existence. Because when noon rolls around, I just feel complete and happy. Like I just did my work for the day.”

The prolific author has already written four books, with his novella, The Reservoir, coming out in June. The New York-based story tells the tale of a guy living alone, who grows increasingly obsessed with a woman whose apartment window he faces.

“He thinks he’s got something to say that he hasn’t said yet,” said Duchovny, about the enigmatic character. “And that kind of lures them into a delusional relationship with a woman across the park. He wants to be indispensable again, like he was when he was a young father. He was looking at the feeling of being needed or being special. And it was leading him into these delusions and then the fever just took him all the way.”

Duchovny is also an accomplished singer-songwriter with three studio albums, noted that his writing process varies when writing lyrics for his music.

“Lyrics just kind of come with the chords that I’m strumming, or I have a bunch of them tucked away in an iPad folder somewhere and I’ll just go back to them,” he said. “I’ll look through a bunch of lyrics or lyric ideas. And then I’ll just start writing on that, and then prune and cut it, until it fits into the song.”

For The Reservoir, Duchovny is embarking on a multi-city book tour, check him out when he gets to your town!