PLOT TWIST

A master thriller author explains how he does it.

Having written 38 novels—“I think”—beginning at age 21 while working for his family’s travel agency as a tour guide in Spain (though that one remains in the drawer), Coben sets out to describe his process and to debunk the many instructions and shibboleths laid down by “other writers.” Should you always start with character? Nay! You can start with plot, or at least the beginnings of a plot, but you can also start with setting, as the author did with The Boy From the Woods (2020). “It’s messy,” as he repeats many times, and also fiction is memoir and memoir is fiction; if we never do find out where to start, it’s fun and interesting to read about “the Coben Method,” a system of simultaneously writing and rewriting that produces a first draft that is actually the 10th. Amusingly, despite the scorn for the wisdom dispensed by others, the most functional piece of advice in the book comes to us via Anne Lamott, whose Bird by Bird (1994) is proclaimed the author’s favorite on the topic. (It’s good old “shitty first drafts,” here translated as a call to “accept and even embrace our suckage.”) Coben flavors his admittedly contradictory exhortations with a heaping helping of autobiography, affectionately describing his parents, his brilliant brothers (he was considered the “nice” one, “and we all know what that’s a euphemism for”), and his suburban childhood in Livingston, New Jersey. These took an exciting detour when his grandfather was investigated as a member of the Jewish mafia, and the extended family took a sudden, unplanned road trip to Canada. We do certainly learn how Coben does it, employing a writing practice so dedicated that he carries a backpack full of writing materials with him at all times and will sit down to write literally anywhere. A table in the deli section of the grocery store functioned as his study for several months, and he is “writing this paragraph right now in a boat while my four kids snorkel in a nearby cove.” No one would argue the point that, whatever it is, it works for him.

A charming and personable (if not entirely useful) writing guide.