Twist Ending Tips From Harlan Coben, by The Writer's Digest

You’ve acknowledged that as writers, we all have moments when we think what we’re working on is crap.
Always. Every writer has that, if they’re worth anything. 

How do you push past that?
You just have to. I recently took up golf, [which has] so many power laws and metaphors, and one thing is, when you have a negative swing thought, it kills you. You have to try to make yourself have positive swing thoughts. That said, I’m always having negative swing thoughts. It’s the same here. There are just times that the self-loathing goes on, and it does paralyze me the way it will paralyze other writers.

The secret is to just push through it. There comes a time when you have to get to work. It’s why I love this quote: Amateurs wait for the muse to arrive; the rest of us just get to work. That’s my own paraphrase of it, but I love that, because it’s so true. I remind myself that I’m a working man, and not an artist. A plumber can’t call up and say, “Oh, I can’t do pipes today.” And so when I feel that way, there’s a lot of self-hatred, a lot of guilt, but eventually, I would rather be tortured by writing than be tortured by guilt. 

So you really use the “self-hatred.”
I use it as fuel. My doubts, the desperation … one of the things that makes me keep writing is the fear that one day I won’t be a writer. And then what would I be? This is what I love to do, this is my dream come true. And to not cherish the fact that I’m lucky enough to have my dream come true—if that’s not asking for bad karma, I don’t know what is. There are a lot of writers who would love to take my place. And I know that the only way that good things continue to happen for me is to write, to get your butt in the chair and to write.

How do you think you’ve grown as a writer?
It goes back to what I said before, that writing is an activity where I do believe quantity makes quality, and I do think I’ve gotten better. I think I’ve gotten better in terms of prose, in terms of dialogue, and most of the books are a little bit shorter because I know better how to edit. I think I’m more subtle now than I used to be, that I don’t have to beat someone over the head with a certain twist or theme.

Every book I try to do something different. … The one thing I want to be there consistently is I want my books to be the novel of immersion, the book you cannot put down. I just don’t want to ever write a book that you can put down. What I love about the thriller form is that it makes you write a story. You can’t get lost in your own genius, which is a dangerous place for writers. You don’t want to ever get complacent. If a book starts going too well, I usually know there’s a problem. I need to struggle. I need that self-doubt. I need to think it’s not the best thing ever.

You’ve said you used to make fun of “write what you know,” but that you’ve actually made it work for you. Are there other adages you find to be bad advice?
The one I hate the most is when writers say, “I write only for myself. I don’t care who reads it.” That to me is like saying, “I talk only to myself. I don’t care who listens.” Writing is about communication. You can call it art and you can call it commerce, but without the other side it’s playing catch and you’re throwing the ball and no one’s there to catch it. And that’s a really important thing to remember. People writing only for themselves, it’s probably therapy.

You’ve written essays focusing on your family. How important is it for a writer to have the support of a partner or family as they work toward their dream?
I can only say for myself that I don’t know if I’d be a successful writer without the wife I [have], because she was so supportive of a lot of the chances I took, and because she gave me the confidence to keep writing even when there were times that I didn’t really believe it would ever happen. So I think that does help a lot to have somebody—you know, it could be a parent, it could be a friend—but you need people who really believe in you.

You seem to excel at making your writing time fit into the rest of your life, rather than the other way around. How can writers find ways to do that?
If you can’t find the time to write, that’s just nonsense. My friend Mary Higgins Clark had five kids and was widowed—that’s a woman who had no time to write. And she still used to wake up and write and then get the kids up. There’s always time to write. You can skip the TV show you’re watching, you can wake up an hour earlier, you can write during lunch—you always have time to write.
If your life is so full of other things that you don’t have time to write, then writing isn’t a priority and you’re not a writer. There’s nothing wrong with that, but face that fact. Don’t tell me you don’t have time to write.

And even at times when you really don’t, you can be thinking about your writing.
Oh, all the time. I’m a rude guest, I drift off a lot, I ignore people because all of a sudden I get caught up in an idea. My friends are used to it: Oh, Harlan’s going off to la-la land.

But I accept no excuses. Excuses to me are kind of like, “Oh this? It’s not weight gain—it’s water retention!” After a while, you have to face the fact that you’re just not writing. And I’m intentionally to your readers being a little ass-butt-kicking, because that’s really what you need when you’re starting to think that way, that you don’t have time. When you’re making excuses, there’s no excuse. You just have to put those excuses away. You have a choice: You can either hate yourself, or you can write.