Harlan Coben says he always thought his fiction had nothing to do with his real life as a suburban dad. ”I make stuff up; what do I know about murder and mayhem and all these things?”
And then he wrote “Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft,” and realized how deeply his life and his writing are intertwined.
Funny enough, for him to even write something that isn’t a novel was a plot twist.
“Every time I say I’m not going to do something, I end up doing it. I said I would never collaborate with anybody; I ended up collaborating on a novel with Reese Witherspoon,” said Coben, referencing the 2025 thriller “Gone Before Goodbye.”
“And I would never write nonfiction or a memoir…and now I have with ‘Plot Twist,’ so I’m going to stop saying that.”
Coben was speaking via Zoom from his book-lined office at his New Jersey home, as part of the September episode of Bookish, the free monthly virtual program about books and authors produced by the Southern California News Group.
The author of “Tell No One,” “Fool No One,” “Missing You,” and more than 35 other international bestsellers, as well as the creator and executive producer of many streaming series adapted from his books, including “Runaway,” “Stay Close,” “The Stranger,” “Hold Tight” and “I Will Find You,” Coben said he initially set out merely to offer writing advice, but realized it was something more.
“I had just written two straight novels back-to-back, and I was just, like, I didn’t want to dive into another one,” he said. But then he thought about a master class he’d taught for a company called BBC Maestro, and started to contemplate all the things about writing that he “got wrong.”
“I thought that might make kind of a cool book, if I could combine a memoir about my childhood, because it relates to what I do creatively,” he said. “For one, it could teach people who want to write about writing. But what I’ve heard from my friends who are musicians or painters, or sculptors, or even entrepreneurs, is that it’s a creating guide, a book that I hope will encourage you to look at the world a little differently and to be a little more creative in your day-to-day life, no matter where it takes you.”
To that end, here are five takeaways from Coben’s “Plot Twist,’ condensed from our interview and edited for clarity:
1) Learn to write by…writing. “You could have physical basketball skill like LeBron James, but if you’ve never played basketball before… You could put LeBron James on a court and he would be terrible if he had never had a basketball in his hand. So, I don’t know why we think writing has to be different.”
2) Be obsessed. “You have to love story, you have to have that passion for it; you have to be a little bit obsessed,” said Coben. In the course of contemplating his childhood for the memoir, he writes that he realized his habit of playing with baseball cards alone in his room and inventing stories about them for hours was evidence he’d always been a storyteller at heart.
3) Get curious. “There’s a whole writer’s mind frame that I kind of go into in the book, about how to walk through the world with a creative mind frame. ‘How can I use this in a story? How can I figure out what’s going on underneath that engine?’ I’ve raised my kids to say this: Whenever you see someone on the street, [imagine] what are their hopes and dreams? Be it the richest, the poorest, the healthiest, the sickest – everybody has hopes and dreams. It’s a very simple thing to think about. Did they come true? Did they not come true? Do they still have them? When the dreams came true, did they end up being nightmares? All of these questions keep your brain engaged and make you more creative. I just think it makes you a happier and more self-satisfied person in many ways. And you make yourself more empathetic.”
4) Your life provides material. “I hope when you read [‘Plot Twist ‘], you’ll realize something that happened in your life, even small things, can, by asking ‘what if’ enough, and wondering different things and combining them, become a story, or some way of creating,” he said. “When I looked back on it, almost every moment, every important moment, every story idea, didn’t come from some grand search or something like that. It came from something that I sort of stumbled across. And by leaving my brain always open to asking, ‘What if?’
“And what I find is, like, every entrepreneur I know who’s been successful, it was always something in their life, a need that they had, or something that happened that led to [their ideas]. It wasn’t done in a vacuum; it wasn’t done when somebody said, ‘I’ve got to figure out something that would be a good product.’ It was usually something that they stumbled across in their life. So by examining your own life, by having some self-awareness, I think you can really help yourself be creative in everything that you do. And we all, you know, want to be more creative in everything we do. It just makes you a little bit more alive.”
5) Let yourself be bored. “I whine a lot about social media, like most people my age do – and we should, because social media is a terrible thing,” he said. “When I was a child, you were allowed to be bored, and you were bored quite frequently, and I don’t know if I would have been a writer if I wasn’t bored, because the moments…where I would make up stories in my own head, or I would take my baseball cards and invent worlds, or I would walk through the woods and sort of make up adventures, I would be scrolling on my phone like an idiot, which I do now! Which we all do now. I think it’s a really bad thing for creativity in many ways, that we have these sort of, these tools that make us a little lazier of mind.”
To see the full interview with Coben, click here. Also featured on the September episode is mystery writer Lee Goldberg. To sign up for future episodes of Bookish, go to SCNG Virtual Events.