Pre-order Offer: First Two Chapters of PLOT TWIST by Harlan Coben

CHAPTER ONE

Back in 1994, I received an advance of $5,000 for my first Myron Bolitar novel, Deal Breaker, but a mere three years later, when I published Back Spin, my fourth novel in the series—I’m trying hard not to brag here—my advance had risen all the way up from $5,000 to a whopping—drumroll, please . . .

$6,000.

Just like that. An overnight success.

Don’t worry. This won’t be one of those inspirational “pull up by the bootstraps” self-help, perseverance kind of books. I hate those. I also don’t fit the criteria despite what you just read above. I quit plenty of things. Just ask the karate gi in back of my closet. Or my old wooden tennis racket. I had protégé potential as a tennis player when I was ten years old, but I just up and quit. I gave up on plenty of things, and I don’t think there are many signs in my childhood of gumption or grit.

This book is mostly a writing guide. I’ve learned a lot about how to do this over the years. I want to share that with you. It’s also a creative guide. I don’t like the word “artist”—too pretentious—but if you sculpt or paint or build or, put simply, make something where there was nothing—create—then I hope this will instruct and inspire you.

We humans were designed to create, not just consume.

This book also can’t help but be a memoir—it’s unavoidable, since life experience and creating go hand in hand—but I’ll try not to be too self-indulgent. It may also offer some life advice and child-raising tidbits that have come my way over the years. I’ll swing at a lot of pitches, to use a baseball analogy, and who knows—maybe I’ll connect a few times.

Now that you know what you’re in for, let’s jump right in by talking about the two biggest mistakes most books on writing make.

One, they divvy up the writing process into separate categories—character, plot, setting, research, whatever—when writing is actually a whole and should be thought of as such. Plot is character. Setting is plot. Every aspect of writing should bleed onto every other. There is too much overlap to be breaking it down into faux groupings—it’s harmful even—and yet every writing guide does that. I may slip and do this too, but as long as you know I’m doing it, as long as you realize that I am making a mistake in doing so, I think you’ll be okay.

The second big mistake—the one I’ve been most guilty of buying into until recently—is insisting your life experiences are somewhat irrelevant to the process. I write about murder, I used to surmise with a smug chuckle, but I’ve never committed one. Over the years, I’ve written about so many things about which I have no personal knowledge. How? I just make it up. I say this all the time—my books aren’t memoir. Harlan Coben the writer has nothing to do with Harlan Coben the man.

Don’t worry. That will be the last time I refer to myself in the third person.

But as I get older and start to examine my process, I realize that’s nonsense. I’m on every page, like it or not, so yes, you’ll learn a little about me and my childhood and my life—at least in terms of how it relates to my being a writer.

But back to the perseverance thing because you will need that to write. If I’m not a man of great tenacity and pluck for most things, why is it different with writing?

I’m not sure. Part of it is that I wanted to be a published novelist so badly—you need that desperation, and we will discuss that in detail throughout this book—but a bigger part of it may be that I never realized, back in those early days, how small-time I was. I had a publishing deal. Shit money, sure. But a legit publishing deal. There was no Amazon back then, barely an internet, so I didn’t know what a pimple on the ass of publishing my novel was. I didn’t realize it would probably be ranked 2,309,873 or whatever.

I still remember the first time I saw Deal Breaker in a store at San Diego’s wonderful Mysterious Galaxy bookstore. They had two paperbacks on an upper shelf in the back, and I thought to myself, Man, aren’t I the cat’s ass?

Naiveté goes a long way. So, first lesson: Try not to get caught up in the comparison game in life or career. Write. Just write. We won’t talk much about the business end of writing in this book, but here is the important thing to know about it: You can’t control it. You can’t control publishing or trends or any of that. The only thing you can control is what you write. Focus on that.

A few caveats before we get started.

The main thrust will be thriller or suspense writing, but I hope the advice is universal. If you’re writing a memoir or romance novel or scientific text or an op-ed article—or if you are painting a still life, sculpting a torso, composing a sonata, designing a logo, choreographing a ballet, whatever—my hope is that much of what I tell you will apply.

The second is that I will contradict myself a lot. Do I make up the stories in my novels out of thin air, or are they memoir-based? Yes. Which is more important, character or plot? Yes. Should I do no research and just focus on my writing, or should I make sure I get my facts right? Yes.

One of my favorite quotes on writing comes from Flaubert:

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Great, right? And it fits me. I’ve lived a quiet suburban life with my family. But does that mesh with how much of my real life informs the darkest and grief-stricken sections of my novels? On the surface, not really.

The more relevant caveat—this could really be a separate category—may lie in the insecurity and self-doubt of being a writer. I am going to skip the part where I talk about how presumptuous I feel just writing this book, offering advice, that even while I’m typing this, an inner voice is constantly scolding me, wondering who the hell I think I am, and reminding me that I think most writing advice, including mine, is like your appendix—either superfluous or it hurts you.

Most writers have the now overdiagnosed term “impostor syndrome,” but it’s still worth noting:

Only bad writers think they’re good

We all worry that our creation is crap and no one will like it and that we have nothing to say, that we are dull and not very smart, and that very soon we will be exposed as talent-less frauds, while AT THE VERY SAME TIME—I’m italicizing, bolding, underlining, CAPITALIZING, and adding these em dashes because this is key—we have the hubris to believe that people will love what we write so much that they will pay us for our words, pay us to hear our stories, pretty big bucks if we’re talking a hardcover, and when they walk into a bookshop or library, they’ll choose our book out of the thousands available and take it somewhere special and open it and let our words wash over and transport them as we pontificate for hours on end—and they will be grateful for that.

Every word we write sucks donkey ass, and yet you must— must!—read us.

That seems a contradiction. It’s not. You’ll see a lot of apparent contradictions in this text. Go with them.

In that same vein, if you ask ten writers how they do it, you’ll get eleven different answers.

That’s how it should be.

Another caveat: I will be using my own books as examples, not because I’m self-involved or think they are brilliant (see above), but because I am the world’s leading authority on me. I can’t deeply explore how Alexandre Dumas came up with The Count of Monte Cristo or how Jackie Collins came to write Hollywood Wives, but I know in scintillating detail how I came up with the nanny-cam twist in Fool Me Once.

As I’ve already strongly suggested, this book will also question and even fully dispute many of the sacred cows of writing advice. You may vehemently disagree with a lot of what I espouse here. In fact, you may even be bold enough to do the opposite of what I will preach in your own writing.

And you will be better off for that.

That’s cool too.

I disagree with many of my favorite books on writing, but I learned the most from those disagreements. Another contradiction? You decide. This isn’t a political dissertation or social media platform—I’m not trying to convince you I’m right and you’re wrong. I care that you get something out of this book, not that you agree with what I’m gently expounding.

I also won’t be all rah-rah or motivational, but here is a quick reminder for those reading this book with the hope of one day getting published or having a career in the creative arts: It’s never too late, and no, you’re not too old. This is not pro sports. When I was young, I wanted to be an NBA basketball player. That dream is dead and buried. But being a novelist? That heart still beats, dear reader. One of the biggest-selling books of the past decade is Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Ms. Owens was sev- enty years old when the book came out. I know first-time authors who were in their eighties. It’s very doable and not all that rare. For years, I had these words taped to my computer:

You only fail when you quit.

Whatever your reason for reading this book, I hope you find it. And I am grateful you are here.

CHAPTER TWO

My parents never read me a bedtime story.

In fact, I don’t remember them ever reading out loud to me. Maybe they did when I was very young, but I have no recollection of an adult reading to me as I dozed off, or sitting on my father’s knee while he slipped on his half-moon, tortoiseshell reading glasses. I do remember some of my teachers reading out loud in class, the way the legendary Miss Lyons, my kindergarten teacher at Burnet Hill Elementary School, could hold up the book with her left hand, spreading her fingers so every student could see the illustrations on both pages while she read the oft-rhyming text.

But not my parents.

Did this mean I grew up in a household that did not revere and respect and cherish books?

Quite the opposite.

My parents instilled in us a love of reading, but they did so organically. Bookstores were our most common form of family entertainment. On many a Coben-family Saturday in the seventies, the five of us—my parents, Corky and Carl, my older brother, Larry, and my younger brother, Craig, and I, the middle son—would jam into a wood-paneled station wagon (a model fancifully and inaccurately called “the Ford Country Squire”), the kind with fold-down, rear-facing seats in the cargo area, and trek our way from our suburban New Jersey split-level through the ever-present Lincoln Tunnel logjam to a book sales annex on Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District. For five dollars, you’d get a brown paper bag to fill while perusing—all the books you could fit, you could keep.

The Cobens would spend all day there, browsing, reading, mostly focused on our own little sections, mostly in silence, and when it was time to leave, we would all bring the books we hoped to own to my father, who would spend a focused half hour expertly packing that paper bag as though the books were blocks in a game of Tetris, miraculously maximizing space to squeeze in every possible tome.

The Coben family did stuff like this a lot—visited bookstores and stayed for hours. It was cheap. It was fun. It was something we could all agree upon. Our house had few toys or games, but it was jammed with books. Corky and Carl (Mom and Dad) not only read a lot, but they felt most comfortable surrounded by books rather than wall art or houseplants or porcelain tchotchkes or framed family photos or whatever else people put in their homes. My parents were neither fastidious nor sloppy, but because of the books, their bedroom decor could best be described as Early American Fire Hazard. Books were scattered everywhere. On the night tables. On the bureaus. Hardcovers, trade paperbacks, mass-market paperbacks, textbooks, coffee-table books, every conceivable size or shape—stacked in the closets, by the sides of beds, in every corner, always teetering, threatening to collapse Jenga-style yet somehow standing strong.

My most vivid memory of a Hannukah gift was a boxed set of six Peanuts paperbacks by Charles M. Schulz. I would guess I was about five years old. My older brother, Larry, got a boxed set of Kenneth Robeson’s Doc Savages (“the Man of Bronze”—crime-fighter, quasi-superhero, polymath) that same year. The Doc Savage covers were lurid and mesmerizing, and the books had kick-ass titles like The Spook Legion, Dust of Death, and The Land of Terror. More than that, on the back cover, there were tiny images of Doc’s cohorts, the “Fabulous Five” with names like—I kid you not—Monk (the brilliant chemist), Ham (Harvard-trained lawyer), Long Tom (expert in gadgetry), and Renny, who is described as a “world-renowned civil engineer,” though the concept of a civil engineer being world-renowned is perhaps the least believable aspect in this far-fetched sci-fi series. I didn’t really think of this until now, but I loved every member of Doc’s team, and more than that, the interaction, friendships, loyalty, and devotion shared amongst them. If I squint, I can see very early shadows of my own Myron books and his cohorts Win, Esperanza, and Big Cyndi.

Larry and I shared a bedroom in our suburban New Jersey home back then, and I can still remember reading quietly in my lower bunk while Larry rapidly flipped pages (he was a super-fast reader) in his bunk above. I probably read those Peanuts paperbacks a hundred times. Linus was always my favorite—I liked the complexity of his character. We had a little bookshelf on our headboards, and for years—I can’t say how many because years were longer back then—we kept these paperbacks there. At some point, after staring at those lurid covers for so long, I risked trying to read a Doc Savage. The font was intimidatingly small, but I was immediately engrossed. I don’t remember how many Doc Savage paperbacks I devoured—Larry’s boxed set of six was just the beginning—but I ended up going to the library and bingeing a ton more.

People assume I must have read a lot of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew as a child. I didn’t. I actively hated them. I’m not sure why. I tried a few times but never finished one. I’ll talk later about favorite elementary school reads that inspired me, but for now, I’ll tell you about my first favorite book of mystery and psychological suspense and maybe yours.

I’m referring, of course, to Are You My Mother?, written and illustrated by the brilliant P. D. Eastman. I was maybe three or four years old, and holy shit, this story was nightmarish stuff. A seemingly abandoned newly hatched baby bird can’t find its mother. Not knowing what she looks like, the hatchling, who can’t yet fly, topples out of the nest, plummets to the earth, and begins a danger-laden journey in search of the missing mother. The baby bird approaches terrifying creatures far and wide—a kitten, a giant dog, a hen, a beat-up car, a steam shovel—a friggin’ steam shovel!— bravely asking them the titular question: “Are you my mother?”

Gripping, suspenseful, frightening. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil the ending for you.

Would I be a writer if I didn’t grow up surrounded by books? I doubt it, though neither of my brothers writes fiction. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. There are many pretentious things writers say that annoy the shit out of me. We will go through several in this book, but one of the most grating is (please hear this in the whimsical yet nasally tone of the self-satisfied artiste):

“Oh, I always knew I’d be a writer. Always. Everyone did. When I was a six-month-old embryo, a pen formed in my mother’s womb and I started to scratch out haikus, and even as a small child, children would gather around me in the playground as I regaled them with stirring pirate tales . . .”

Oh please.

You’d get beaten up on my playground, and I didn’t grow up in a tough neighborhood. Stop with that. But I did read a lot as a kid. I did love books. Still do, of course. I don’t know too many musicians who don’t listen to a lot of music, and I don’t know too many writers who don’t read a lot. And I always liked to just be around books, to experience that new-book smell (though the old-book smell may be even better), to hold books in my hands, to flip them back and forth and look at the covers and then the author photos and wonder about the authors—the magicians— who created them out of thin air.

I wondered how lucky it must be to be one of them. Or maybe I’m making this last part up, confusing hindsight with reality because, really, did I actually wonder about that as a kid?

I’m not sure anymore.

Fiction is memoir, of course—and sometimes, memoir has more than a hint of fiction.

I don’t want to make this sound too highfalutin, but I adopted the mind frame of a reader and then a writer. I recommend this. It’s life-changing in the best of ways. It makes you more observant, more empathetic, and more creative in everything you do in life.

What do I mean by the writer’s mind frame? First and fore- most, everything in life is material. You see a man wearing a strange hat. Okay, the old you would think, Strange hat. Onward. But the new you now takes it a step further. Why is he wear- ing the hat? Where did he buy it—or was it a gift? Who gave it to him? Why? When the person bought him that hat, what hat came in second place? When he chose this hat this morning, was it an easy choice or did he think about going out with no hat or was there another hat he left behind? Does he have a whole collection of strange hats? What does the hat tell you about this guy? Is he married? Did his wife encourage him to wear the hat or does the hat embarrass her? Did she tell him not to put it on— or did she keep her mouth shut for reasons we don’t yet know?.indd

Your answers don’t have to be (and won’t be) accurate, and there is no way to know if they are. You just need to create a story behind it. An entire character bio can sprout out of the top of that strange hat.

That’s what I mean by the writer’s mind frame.

Everything you see, everything you do, is material. Life is just a series of writing prompts. I was listening to “Across the River” by Alejandro Escovedo, a hauntingly beautiful albeit obscure song about the destructive and devastating nature of loss and love. With painful longing in his voice, Escovedo wonders about the type of love that “destroys a mother and sends her crashing through the tangled trees.”

Powerful stuff. Go ahead. Take a few minutes and stream it. I’ll wait.

Are you back? The song is great, right? Later, try blasting the banger “Castanets” from the same album and dance like nobody is watching.

But I digress.

Maybe you’ll get this even more after listening to the track, but “Across the River” made me think about a dark forest, about what could have caused Alejandro to sing that particular verse about a destroyed mother. I sat with it for a while, listening with eyes closed, and an image came to me. Nothing magical. Images come to us all.

I started to write what became the opening for my novel The Woods:

I see my father with that shovel.

There are tears streaming down his face. An awful, guttural sob forces its way up from deep in his lungs and out through his lips. He raises the shovel up and strikes the ground. The blade rips into the earth like it’s wet flesh.

I am eighteen years old, and this is my most vivid memory of my father—him, in the woods, with that shovel. He doesn’t know I’m watching. I hide behind a tree while he digs. He does it with a fury, as though the ground has angered him and he is seeking vengeance.

I have never seen my father cry before—not when his own father died, not when my mother ran off and left us, not even when he first heard about my sister, Camille. But he is crying now. He is cry- ing without shame. The tears cascade down his face in a freefall. The sobs echo through the trees.

Did I get all that from Escovedo’s lyrics? No. Does this even follow the song’s meaning? Doubtful. But can you see the influ- ence? I think you can. This was the image I saw in my head. This was the image I started the novel with—the writing prompt, if you will—and then, in a sense, this opening became the writing prompt for the rest of my novel.

Okay, so I had this opening as my writing prompt—the sobbing dad with the shovel. Now what?

Fiction is memoir.

When I was seventeen years old, I got a job as a counselor at Camp Millbrook, an eight-week coed sleepaway camp near Cape Cod. I had charge of over a dozen ten-year-old boys in my cabin, a responsibility, in truth, I was far too young, immature, and stupid to be given. I kept wondering what could go wrong. There was a lot of interaction between the boys and girls at Camp Millbrook, a lot of first-time mingling and flirting, and the camp was in the midst of what seemed a dark forest . . .

. . . Or woods.

We start our prompt with a what-if.

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?

Now we add back that opening image. The father. Sobbing. In the woods. His teen son, who’d be about the same age as Har- lan the counselor (breaking my third-person promise already), watching him dig that shovel into the still earth. Now the final paragraph above starts to come together. The mention of a mother. The mention of a sister. The fact that he had never seen his father cry before. So why now?

A fuller story starts to emerge.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Or maybe not. That’s the thing with writing. We want our thoughts to go one way, but it’s like herding cats. The stream of consciousness in this chapter— jumping from my childhood filled with books (ages three to twelve) to my listening to a song by Alejandro Escovedo (age forty) to my summer job as a camp counselor (age seventeen)— ends up being the closest thing I’ve written to how a writer really does it.

It’s messy. It’s rarely linear.

Here is the best way to describe what is going on in your head when you’re starting a novel: Have you ever had a night where you’re lying in bed in the dark, but you can’t fall asleep because you can’t remember the name of the dog on, say, the Partridge Family? It’s driving you nuts. What was that damn dog’s name? Wait, did they even have a dog? Am I mixing them up with the Brady Bunch and their dog Tiger? Oh, and while we are on the subject, how come we know Shirley Partridge is a widow and Mike Brady is a widower, but we never learn what happened to Carol Brady’s husband? Hmm. Mysterious. Did Carol get divorced or, I don’t know, kill her first husband? And so you’re lying in bed and you can’t sleep and then you start wondering how you started thinking about something so inane, so you try to trace your thoughts back—rewind, if you will—and it all started with something seemingly completely unrelated, like at first you were wondering why Burger King doesn’t serve Moun- tain Dew and then your mind just went.

Writing is a lot like that.

And it’s not.

If you understand this even a little, if you’ve ever lain in the dark and are nodding along with what I’m saying just a bit, you may have the right stuff. You may be my kind of people.

But now that I’ve given you some of the messy, let’s take a step back and try to organize and see how we got from Mountain Dew to here.