Harlan Coben, one of our most accomplished spinners of suspense yarns, makes no promise that his hybrid writing manual and memoir will turn you into a bestselling novelist.
He isn’t selling a formula. Yes, he lays out plenty of rules. But successful novelists, he argues, learn which ones to follow and which ones to mug in an alley.
His message: Writing isn’t one-size-fits-all. My take: Plot Twist is smart, useful and breezy, the rare writing guide that practices what it preaches.
Coben has written nearly 40 crime novels, 17 of them No. 1 New York Times bestsellers, and his books have spawned roughly 20 television series.
With that résumé, he’s earned the right to offer advice to novice and experienced writers alike.
He addresses the question every writer is asked and most are annoyed by: Where do you get your ideas?
Coben’s answer is the query that has launched a thousand plots: What if … ?
He recalls wondering: “What if late one night, a camp counselor who was too young for the job sneaked into those woods with his summer girlfriend instead of watching his campers? And what if something went very wrong?”
That became The Woods, a 2007 thriller drawing on Coben’s own experience as a summer-camp counselor.
Coben often mines his memories. Experiences buried in childhood — hopes, dreams, fears — can find their way into fiction. Then there is true crime, the fodder of daily journalism, that often ignites novels.
His general advice is simple: “Everything you see, everything you do, is material. Life is just a series of writing prompts.”
To make sure he doesn’t forget those prompts, Coben has kept an Idea File for 40 years. It contains overheard conversations, daydreams, song lyrics, movie clips, and scraps of notions as thin as “Patty Hearst-type kidnapping.”
I’m a believer in the writer-as-eavesdropper. Alert for material, I frequently hiked the TreePeople trail in Coldwater Canyon Park along Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, timing my pace to fall behind talkative hikers.
I always hoped to hear, “Sure, I’ll help you move the body.” Instead, the men generally talked about work, the women about relationships.
Some clichés, perhaps most, turn out to be true.
Coben’s stand-alone thrillers often focus on missing people and ordinary families caught in extraordinary circumstances.
His childhood was ordinary enough on the surface. He grew up in suburban New Jersey with his parents and two brothers.
“You have to do the grunt work of writing. You have to write. Actually write. Really write. Only writing is writing. Outlining is not writing. Doing research is not writing. Creating a character is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing … Only writing is writing …You can always fix bad pages. You can’t fix no pages. Write. Just write.”
— Harlan Coben in Plot Twist
But there was his grandfather, a labor union leader who was part of the Jewish mob. “Pops” once went on the lam for two years to avoid a grand-jury subpoena. Now there’s something for the Idea File.
Coben can begin with the slimmest notion and turn it into a 75,000-word novel populated by compelling characters and propelled by a twist, a double twist, and a somersault ending.
He likes to have at least three twists in a book.
“I want to fool you with at least two of them,” he writes, “but I’ll settle for one. I want to smack you in the back of the head with a 2×4 with the last one. I want you to gasp out loud.”
That’s useful advice, up to a point.
Beginning writers, beware: no lightning bolts to dispatch the villain. No deus ex machina. A plot twist, like every turn in your tale, must be earned through character and story.
The trick Coben pulls off is that his biggest surprises, while startling, seem inevitable in retrospect.
I first encountered Coben’s work through his Myron Bolitar series, featuring a wisecracking sports agent who walks the not-so-mean streets of midtown Manhattan. Think Philip Marlowe with a Harvard Law degree.
The fictional Bolitar was a Duke basketball star whose NBA career ended before it began because of a serious knee injury. The real Coben played basketball at Amherst and gave up pickup games in his 40s when his knees were giving out.
Coben is neither a pure “plotter,” a writer who outlines, nor a “pantser,” one who flies by the seat of his pants.
“It usually takes me about three months of asking tons of what-ifs and searching through writing prompts and sifting through my own life and then blending ideas before I start writing … It isn’t always fun. There are days you feel as though you are emptying a bathtub with a teaspoon. And then, one day life hands you a bucket instead of a teaspoon. You have that moment, and it is pure euphoria.”
— Harlan Coben in Plot Twist
He’s a little of both. And that’s the larger point of Plot Twist. Coben isn’t offering a system. He’s describing a working life that he summarizes in four words: “Only writing is writing.”
Dorothy Parker famously said, “I don’t like writing. I like having written.” Coben offers a different take: “I feel better when I write.”
I’ve long thought the urge to write — the need to write — is akin to a virus.
The Writer with a capital W is uneasy, unsettled, feverish when not writing. The cure is to write, which is the only way to reach the sweet spot of having written.
The fever subsides … until the next day.
Harlan, please don’t get well.
