Harlan Coben is the master of the plot twist. He's published 35 novels and sold more than 100 million books. This conversation is all about how he writes. Here are the highlights: 1) Keep enough fear to stop yourself from phoning it in. He says: "Every writer I know who thinks they’re really good actually sucks." 2) Write your first draft knowing nobody gets to see how bad it is. This is your chance to break every writing rule because nobody's going to read what you wrote 3) How do you create suspense? By answering questions, then making the answers open bigger questions. 4) Write dialogue people would want to overhear. Ask yourself: “If I were sitting at a pub, is this the conversation I would want to overhear?” If the answer is no, make it better. 5) Give your dialogue a reason to happen: Don’t just put two people in a pub and have them talk. Imagine someone has keeled over, or a fight has broken out, and they’re debating whether to intervene. Now the conversation has a purpose. 6) Start in the middle, where there’s already a story happening. Don’t have your character walk into the church, sit down, and notice the flowers. Put him in the back pew watching the only woman he’ll ever love marry another man. Now we’re engaged. 7) Find the one detail that brings the whole scene to life: A group of mystery writers once debated the scariest sound in the world. Warren Murphy said: you’re alone in a cabin in the woods, and upstairs, you hear the toilet flush. That’s the moment you’re looking for. 8) Make room for quiet, or your loud moments won’t mean anything. If your story is always storming, a rainstorm won’t matter. Think of a placid pond: a small rock makes a ripple. But throw a boulder in a churning ocean, and nobody will notice. 9) Know your ending so you can afford to get lost along the way. Harlan says: "I know I’m driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles. I might take a detour through the Panama Canal and stop in Tokyo, but I know where I’m going. That gives me freedom. I can go off the main road because there’s a destination in the GPS. Knowing the ending lets me explore more without panicking that I’m completely lost." 10) Don't tell people what you're writing before you finish it. If you're at a cocktail party and start explaining your book, you'll almost feel the air coming out of the balloon. You'll get satisfaction without doing the work when all your satisfaction should be coming from finishing the book. 11) Don't expect to be good when you start writing: Harlan's first published novel was the fourth he'd written. You could have the skill of LeBron James, but if you’ve never played basketball, you’re going to suck when you get on that court. Why would writing be different? — — Timestamps: 0:34 How to find your next idea 4:02 Know your ending first 10:21 Why talent isn’t enough 13:45 Only bad writers think they’re good 18:30 What keeps Harlan going 23:47 Books vs TV adaptations 28:48 The mistake most writers make 35:06 What makes for good dialogue 43:08 Your themes find you 47:39 What he learned from Hitchcock 57:01 Making the boring parts interesting 59:58 How Harlan writes chapters 1:02:23 Main vs secondary characters 1:04:37 Don’t talk about your book 1:06:46 Why routines stop working 1:10:12 Stop making excuses 1:12:30 Genre vs form I've shared the full conversation with Harlan Coben below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen to the episode on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!

"I did seven eulogies by the time I was 32." Harlan Coben's life has been marked by loss. That's become the dominant theme across his books. "Agatha Christie had dead people. Philip Roth had the Jewish experience... I write about missing people, I think, because there's such hope there." "When someone goes missing, there's a chance you can be redeemed, a chance you can still find them. When someone's murdered, they're dead." "Justice doesn't really interest me. Retribution doesn't really interest me. Punishment doesn't really interest me. What interests me is hope."

"You make a rough version of the movie seven or eight times before you go to final animation." A behind the scenes look at how Pixar makes its movies: "When I got there, I was like, what's the secret sauce? Is it the people or is it the system? After about six months, I realized it's really both." "I wrote the first draft of Toy Story 3. We made what they call a set of reels, which is a rough animatic of the movie. And then based on the feedback that we got to that, I wrote another ten more drafts, and then we made a second set of reels." "What's great about the Pixar system is that you write, and then you direct, and then you edit...There's a way that you beta test your story." "It's sort of a series of concentric rings. So the first set of reels, which is usually pretty terrible, you show to twenty, twenty five, 30 people. And then you always wanna preserve fresh eyes." "By the time you get up to your seventh or eighth screening, you're showing it to everybody and his grandmother that you can pull in." -Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3 Writer)

Francine Prose wrote a book about Peggy Guggenheim. She told me about the "ditzy" heiress who saved modern art: "Men of her generation would invite me to lunch to tell me how stupid she was. And I would go like, I don't think she was that stupid." "She left Europe with all this art packed up in her crates with her household laundry stuff to avoid paying taxes." "A lot of Picassos and Giacomettis would have been taken by the Nazis. And that was really their definition of degenerate art. And she saved it. I mean, the fact that it exists at all." "She had a great eye. I mean, she was the first person who really got Jackson Pollock."

"I wrote 11 scripts before I sold my first script." Michael Arndt on what it takes to be a successful writer: "I'm gonna be a writer, I'll probably write a screenplay a year, and I'm probably gonna live for fifty more years. So I'm probably gonna write 50 screenplays." "If I'm lucky, five of them will get made into movies. And if I'm lucky, one of them will be a good movie." "My number one thing is you gotta be humble." "Kurosawa gets up to receive his honorary Oscar. He's in his eighties, and he stands up and he goes, I don't feel like I deserve this yet because I'm only beginning to understand movies now. And I'm like, if Kurosawa can be that humble about movies and storytelling, like, we should all be humble."

Before spending years on a book, David Grann asks three questions: 1) Does it pique your curiosity? Does it get under your skin? 2) Is there underlying research? Can you tell it as a story? 3) What is it about, ultimately? What are the deeper themes?

Today, we’re launching an ambitious new school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy. Based in San Francisco, The Academy serves the most promising young high school graduates. We think this can be an elite institution that attracts top tier talent. One that prepares students for the future rather than remaining stuck in the past. The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They'll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups. There are classes and guest lectures, too, from some truly amazing people who have built modern-day Silicon Valley. The Academy is designed as a network, since that’s the reason students go to school in the first place. Core to that network are our 10 Founding Partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The network includes over 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors. To join as a hiring partner or faculty member, you can apply on our website. We raised $42M in funding led by @a16z. I'll be CEO and @pmarca and @eriktorenberg will join me on the board. Applications are open for our Founding Class Fellowship, which will be one year and tuition-free. Eventually, pending regulatory approval, we plan to offer a two-year program that charges tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university. We're looking for the most unusually ambitious young builders on the planet. Come join us in San Francisco: theacademysf.com/

Bill Browder on the two things a boring story needs to become interesting: 1) Stakes 2) A villain He learned it writing about the time he got frog-marched out of Salomon Brothers: "I was in the investment bank, and I had been assigned to start buying Russian stocks. And one of my rivals inside the investment bank turned me into the compliance officers, because you're not supposed to be buying securities if you're an investment banker." "So I wrote this big story about the Chinese Wall. Everyone said, never knew Chinese walls in investment banks could be so exciting." "The reason why it was exciting was because there was this rival who wanted to turn me in, and I was doing something that was sort of wrong, and I was frog-marched out by the internal police."

Due to contact with the Greeks, devices such as sundials and water clocks had spread to Roman cities. A character from this 2nd-century BC play complains about how the spread of time-keeping devices has regimented life:

Marcel Proust claimed that if you want insights into life, an evening with a woman who will make you suffer beats an evening with Plato: "If you wanna recommend somebody to have insights into life, and you could give them a magical choice between meeting Plato or Descartes for an evening, or going out with a woman who will make him suffer; we know who that person should spend the evening with. The woman who will make him suffer." "He had this particular view that suffering is the great catalyst of insight. And therefore, if you want to get some material, suffer." -Alain de Botton

Virginia Woolf begins her essay on illness with a single, unbroken sentence. It is one of her most beautiful sentences: "Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and awake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels in the harbors when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's armchair and confuse his 'Rinse the mouth, rinse the mouth with a greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of heaven to welcome us –– when we think of this as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature." From my interview with Francine Prose

Anne Frank edited her diary knowing that one day it would be published. "This sort of myth of this little girl lying on her stomach scribbling the thing, that was not the case." "She'd heard early on, they were listening to the radio in the annex, and some announcer came on and said, After the war, there's going to be a hunger for people writing about what their experience was during the war. And she said, 'My diary.' So, she went back and edited the diary several times." "She wasn't just some naive tween writing this little book. She was a writer." "I felt that I was speaking up for 12, 13, 14 year old girls everywhere who were so underestimated." -Francine Prose

“If there is a single most deplorable intellectual failing on the conservative side, it lies in reducing every question of law, constitution, culture and society to a question of economics.” Sir Roger Scruton

"If someone put a gun to my head and said, you have to read Finnegan's Wake now, I'd go, Shoot me. Go ahead." Francine Prose doesn't have time for obscure writing. Her test for every sentence: say it out loud. "When people sit down to write, they think they have to do a lot of writing with a capital W. Fancy words they would never use or weirdly convoluted expressions." "The one thing, I tell my students is read aloud. If you wouldn't say it and if you can't get it out of your mouth, it shouldn't be on the page." "I used to give an assignment where I'd say, bring a passage of jargon, a bad one, then just translate it into English and see what you get. And the jargon would just collapse like this big merengue because it didn't have anything."

Precisely C.S. Lewis's point in The Screwtape Letters: the enemy doesn't need to ruin you, he only needs to distract you. Screwtape finds that a reliable way to lead a patient to hell is to distract him with jargon, for instance. Have the patient evaluate ideas not by their content but by their labels ensures that he never engages meaningfully with their content. Another method is to fix his attention on the "stream of immediate sense experiences," so that his mind is drawn away from universal issues and he no longer thoughtfully engages with things that matter. The path to hell is not so much paved by grand sins than it is by small, constant distractions from what really matters. The path to goodness begins with reclaiming your attention, and turning your eyes from the endless stream. Wasting time "doomscrolling" is not neutral. It distracts you from doing good in the world.

Michael Moritz's investment memo for Stripe was under 4 pages. "The shorter the memo, the better. If you can express yourself clearly and have a strong opinion, you don't need a lot of paper." "Being able to distill things to their essence and keep it very short has stood me in good stead over the years."

Harlan Coben uses this question to come up with all his novels: "Anytime I'm walking down the street, anytime I see somebody, I try to figure out what their story is. The what if." Here's how it inspired one of his books, "Promise Me": "I overheard some teenagers who I adored talking about drinking and driving. And I pulled them aside and I said, promise me you won't do that. I don't care if it's 3AM. I don't care what you're on. Call me. I'll come pick you up. No questions asked. I won't tell your parents." "Now in real life, nothing else happened. End of story. But fiction writing's asking 'what if?'" "What if a teenage girl had called me on the phone? I went and I picked her up in New York City. I dropped her off at what I thought was a friend's house. The next day, she's gone, and no one at the house knows who she is."

The most interesting thing about Spider-Man isn't that he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Harlan Coben on what makes him a fascinating character: "Spider-Man, Peter Parker, gets bitten by a radioactive spider. That's not the most interesting part to me. Then he becomes kind of a dick and wants to just be Spider-Man to make money and get girls and be famous. He develops tremendous vanity." "And one day, a robber runs past him and he doesn't stop him. And that robber ends up killing his uncle Ben that night, the man who was raising him. That guilt is what makes Spider-Man become Spider-Man and dark."

"You get at most one cliché per book." Jonathan Franzen doesn't finish most books people send him. He reads until the second cliché, then stops. "People send me a galley of a book that's coming out. I read along until I get to the second cliché, and I say, thank you." "They tell me this is not an attentive writer. Aren't you aware that that's a cliché? Didn't it occur to you to stop and take 20 minutes to find a better phrasing than that?" "You can also have borrowed feelings, borrowed ideas, borrowed situations. Sentiment can be clichéd, or unearned."

This is the 15-minute exercise R.F. Kuang gives her students to make them better writers: "I tell them, you're gonna produce your worst writing now in the worst possible circumstances for writing. You will have only 15 minutes. You'll have a prompt that you haven't seen before. You'll be surrounded by other people, and you'll have to share at the end. Nobody is producing publishable work under these circumstances." "I try to teach that playfulness and spontaneity and the willingness to get really messy and just roll your sleeves up and try out everything that doesn't work so that when you are working on a project that you want to publish, you have a better sense of what does work."

What makes this front page great is that The Onion had a sacred rule for all its articles: "The perfect Onion article had no jokes. We would look at it and we'd say, did you take out all the jokes? Yep. Not a single joke." "You take the absurd premise, whatever it is, and you write the story in strict AP style so that there's no humor that you can perceive at all. The writer of this has no idea it's supposed to be funny." -Scott Dikkers (former editor-in-chief of The Onion)