Why habits are stronger than motivation with Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben 0:00 I remember one of my very first book signings at the Livingston Mall, sitting in a corner of a room. I think they had like, they only had ordered three copies, and I'm sitting there and I'm playing with my pen, and no one's coming up to me. And finally someone comes up and they ask where the new Stephen King book is. And the second person comes up to me and he says, uh, "Where's the bathroom?" And then I remember at the very, very end, an old man comes over to me and he says, "Is that your book on the shelf?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And he says, "You have a published novel. That's my dream. You're so lucky." And then he just walks away. Didn't buy a book, but he walks away. And it's just like, wow, it's a different way of, of thinking about it. Yeah, it's just lucky to have written a book. I still try to appreciate every moment. [upbeat music]

Adam Grant 0:42 Uh, I don't think I, I thought much about it when I was a kid, but I think one of the reasons that your, your writing really resonated with me was I love the plot twists, but I also just, I really identified with the characters, and I think probably after superheroes, it was the next set of parasocial relationships that I, that I developed. I felt like I knew Myron and Win especially, and I think most people, I guess, have parasocial relationships with celebrities, but it seems like a lot of us have them with fictional characters, too. Do you get this a lot? Do you, do you find that a lot of readers are, are attached to your characters?

Harlan Coben 1:17 Uh, yes. I mean, it's, it's, it's a self-involved question to answer yes, but especially, you know, M- Myron and Win, the characters you're mentioning, 'cause I've written, uh, 37-ish books, and 12 of them feature Myron Bolitar in the Myron Bolitar, Myron and Win series. I think the first one came out in 1995, and the most recent came out a year or two ago. When you have that kind of long-term relationship, it's different than a standalone.

Adam Grant 1:41 What is it about Myron and Win in particular? I, I don't think it's just the number of times you've written about them, because I felt connected to them the first time I read them, which it must've been when I was 14. Uh, what, what is it about those characters that, that makes them more appealing than your average, regular person?

Harlan Coben 1:56 You know, I don't know. I think part of it is they can always say the line you wish you had said. They can be a little funnier than you are. They could be a little warmer. I always say that, uh, writers don't necessarily like to admit this, but when I created Myron, he was kinda me, but with wish fulfillment [laughs] . Like, you know, we both played basketball in college. He was a lot better. He's faster, he's funnier, he's stronger. He's, I think, a better friend probably. It's not like a conscious effort saying, "Oh, he's gonna be this and that." That's the, I think the, the mistake a lot of people make when they create character, is that they say, "Okay, he's going to have a drinking problem, and now I gotta show his drinking problem." The way really to develop character is by putting them in these circumstances, and how they react, which I think for a lot of people is a lot of fun, I think is why y- they become endearing to you.

Adam Grant 2:42 You know, it's so interesting because [laughs] when you say wish fulfillment, I think maybe not. It's wish almost fulfilled.

Harlan Coben 2:49 [laughs] Yeah.

Adam Grant 2:49 I, I think about Myron-

Harlan Coben 2:50 It's true

Adam Grant 2:51 ... and, I mean, my read of him is he could've been an NBA star, but he got injured in college, and so he had the flash of greatness, but the, the wish was never fully realized. He's a sports agent turned detective, and he's doing really well, but he's not quite at the pinnacle of either of those professions, right?

Harlan Coben 3:09 No, it's true in the sense that also I had, I had to make Myron's life more tragic. Otherwise, it's not really, um, interesting. When I created Myron, so I, I gave us both something that the other wanted, and I think that, that sorta helps. So Myron's dream in life is to sorta get married, move to the suburbs, have 2.4 kids, basketball hoop in the yard, barbecues with, you know, the, the neighbors, and that is my life. I live in suburbia, uh, doing all those things. I have four kids, and I think Myron's a little envious of me because I have that and, and he doesn't. On the other hand, I lost my parents at a young age, um, and Myron's parents are still alive, still breathing, and when I write those scenes with his parents, I'm very close to them, I imagine that would be my relationship with my parents had they survived, and so I'm jealous of him. I'm envious of him in that way, and that tension, I think, has helped turn Myron into something very, very different, a Myron Bolitar from Harlan Coben, to use the third person with myself, which is really annoying.

Adam Grant 4:08 Wow. It almost sounds like you have a parasocial relationship with Myron.

Harlan Coben 4:12 I guess I do. I mean, Myron's, you know, he's... Of all the characters, he's my most precious.

Adam Grant 4:17 So let, let's talk about

Adam Grant 4:19 your writing. Uh, I think there are a lot of writers, I think probably any writer who's familiar with your work envies the fact that you just, you publish books like clockwork. I mean, you [laughs] every, every year for over 35 years, a bestseller by Harlan Coben comes out, and I think everybody wants to know, how do you do it? What are the habits? I think when we've talked about it, my biggest takeaway has been that you, you treat it like a job, and I'd love to hear you break that down.

Harlan Coben 4:43 Yeah, I mean, I think that's the key. There's a great quote that I read. It's g- it's credited to a lot of people, but I read it actually originally in a Philip Roth novel, and that is, um, "Amateurs wait for inspiration to arrive. The rest of us just get to work." And I know most of your favorite artists in any field, any, your creatives let's call them, um, writers, uh, painters, sculptors, architects, heck, int- entrepreneurs, people who are creating and building, the ones who try to ch- who try to treat it like it's magical or divine or have to wait for a certain mood or something, you know, strangely mysterious, artistic don't seem to get the job done, and those who do treat it like a job, some days it's good, some days it's not. The other quote that I first heard from Oscar Madison on The Odd Couple, "I don't like writing. I like having written." Sometimes focusing on the creation and actually creating something and not trying to make it always magical and beautiful and blissful and, and zen I think helps. Uh, it's, so I do treat it like a job as much as I can.

Adam Grant 5:48 There's a growing body of research in psychology showing that motivation is fleeting. It waxes and it wanes. Habits are enduring. They keep us grounded. And I think you're describing a version of, "I'm not gonna wait for motivation or inspiration to strike. I'm gonna build the discipline so that whether I have the idea or not, I'm gonna sit down and produce something today." What does that look like from a routine perspective?

Harlan Coben 6:08 You know, it's funny. I don't have, like, there's a lot of writers, uh, my friend John Grisham, for example, he has a, a cottage behind his house. He goes to it the same time every day, same cup of coffee, no internet, works from, I think, you know, whatever time, 8:00 till noon. I'm making up those hours. But does the exact same thing every day, and that works for him. And frankly, I'm a little envious that I don't have that. My routine is not to have a routine. I, or to put it another way, I'm a serial routinist. I keep changing up my routines. Most of my best writing when I was younger was done out of the house. Um, there's too much temptation when you're home. And then I use up places, so I would use up a Starbucks in my, in, in, in town here, and then I would find another place. Uh, two of the weirdest places that I've found is once I was dropping my kid off at school, and I wrote really well. So for six months, I would go there, coming home with olive loaf, and that worked. I would talk to the guys be- you know, say hi to the guys behind the deli counter. And then it just stopped working, so I had to find something else. So I'm constantly looking for whatever makes me write, and then I, I try to follow that until it falls apart. But what, for me, I don't keep forcing it. If that routine's not working anymore, I gotta find a new routine. And when I... It's like, it's like a horse. I grab the horse. This is a cold analogy. I grab the horse, I ride the horse super hard, the horse collapses and dies, and now I look for a new horse.

Adam Grant 7:33 Yikes.

Harlan Coben 7:33 And so that's sort of how I ki- I know, it's, that's a little dark, but-

Adam Grant 7:36 It got dark fast, Harlan.

Harlan Coben 7:37 Yes. Uh, that's how I am, man. [laughs]

Adam Grant 7:39 [laughs]

Harlan Coben 7:40 You've read my books. I go, I go dark fast.

Adam Grant 7:42 This, this idea that you could use up a place, or that you find somewhere to write and then it stops working, I, I've never heard that before. What, what is that?

Harlan Coben 7:50 I don't know. Like, now it could just be, frankly, the natural rhythm of writing. There are days that you are blocked. That's just gonna happen. There are days that you're not gonna find the motivation. There are days when it's going to take another day or two. You've put your character in a corner, and you're just not in the mood right now to get him out of it. And so that happens to me, too. That happens to everybody. And so maybe that's my excuse, but I'm always looking for some way of ch- of getting myself out of it. I also, I change up everything. It's not just changing up the place I work. Most days, I start with handwriting on a, on sheets of, of yellow legal pads, but I have in my, I have literally 10 different kinds of notebooks. B- big, small, spiral, uh, some with lines, some without lines, some with graph lines, some with dots, you know, every kind of thing. I have different kinds of pens, everything from a Montblanc I received as a gift from, uh, an actor that I work with to,

Harlan Coben 8:45 you know, the, the cheapest ballpoint you can find. And I'll just change up the, the instrument. Some days I go straight to the computer, and I'll type on it. I have, you know, some kind of a, um, iPad-ish kind of a thing that I could write on that directly. I just n- sometimes just need to change things up, face something different, and maybe that'll help get you started.

Adam Grant 9:05 That's interesting. So I think that actually speaks to your point, then, that you don't sit down looking at a blank page with no ideas. It sounds like most of the time you've figured out the plot in your head before you start writing.

Harlan Coben 9:17 A lot of it, yeah.

Adam Grant 9:18 Where, where does the idea come from?

Harlan Coben 9:20 Well, i- e- every book has been s- slightly different. I do believe in thinking on paper, getting it out on paper, but I can give a couple specifics. So, you know, I was hiking with my family a few, a couple years ago. And I know all of your listeners, and it's really hip now to love hiking. I really [censored] hate it. I don't know if I can use that word.

Adam Grant 9:39 [laughs]

Harlan Coben 9:39 I hate hiking. I don't get it.

Adam Grant 9:41 [laughs]

Harlan Coben 9:41 Like, I'm in the Ramapo Mountains. It's July. It's a million degrees. There's mosquitoes. I'm sweating. There's dust kicking up in my face. I'm like, "Oh, there's a tree. There's another tree. I wonder what around the bend. Oh, another tree." And I'm, you know, "Oh, my, oh, gl- I got to see a rock." Now, I love walking. I love walking city streets. I love browsing in bookstores. That I understand. But I don't understand the fascination with driving out to the middle of nowhere. I'm thirsty. I'm hungry. Meanwhile, I'm whining and ranting like I am to you, and my family's rolling their eyes as they, as they do. And I see on a path parallel to me a, a little boy about five years old walking by himself. And this is how my mind works. I'm like, "Huh. Why is he walking by himself? Hmm. Suppose he came out of the woods right now and said, 'I've always lived in these woods. I've always been by myself. I don't know parents. I used to break into cabins watching TV. That's how I learned to speak. And, uh, I got food there or off the land, but I have no idea how I ended up in these woods.'" So they find him in the beginning of this book, and then I start thinking more about him.

Adam Grant 10:40 This is The Boy From the Woods.

Harlan Coben 10:41 This is the book, The Boy From the Woods, and that's exactly how it opens. He comes out of those woods.

Adam Grant 10:45 That hike gave you Wild. There it is.

Harlan Coben 10:47 This, that's exactly. That hike gave me the character. See, I love that you've actually read the books. [laughs] Most podcasters haven't. But yeah, so and then I said, "Well, let's, how'd he get there?" And I'm like, "Well, let's skip ahead 30 years in his life." He's now 35 or so years old, 'cause he doesn't know his real birthday. He doesn't know if he's four, five, six years old. And he still doesn't know how he ended up in those woods. What a cool character this will be. And this is what I'm thinking now as I'm hiking. Now, I'm making, I'm, I'm condensing this because I just had that first thought, and then I go home and thinking about the kid more and more and coming up with different things. And that's an example. And I can give you, you know, 37 others where something in my real life kind of took a, I took a, I took a little twist on it. Now, for every one of these, there's 8,000 that doesn't work, of course. But that's how my mind is always trying to Go what if.

Adam Grant 11:38 Okay, so this, this helps to, I think... I don't know if it solves the mystery, but it's at least a piece of the puzzle-

Harlan Coben 11:43 [laughs]

Adam Grant 11:44 ... of, of, of why you need to break your routine. You need fresh stimuli.

Harlan Coben 11:47 Yes.

Adam Grant 11:47 You need to put yourself in a different environment where you ask different what if questions, as opposed to, I don't know how many olive loafs are gonna inspire you. [laughs]

Harlan Coben 11:56 [laughs] I think you're exactly right.

Adam Grant 11:58 You know, the, the hiking context is interesting. It sounds like you haven't, you haven't come around to loving it yet, but you at least see a purpose for it. You know, I'm think- I'm thinking about there's a, there's a great paper by Opezzo and Schwartz where they go and test the idea that walking unleashes creativity. And sure enough, they find that if you're walking outdoors, you get the greatest spike in the originality of your thinking. But even if you're walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall, just the idea of moving is enough to increase blood flow to the brain, and that's good for divergent thinking. And so

Adam Grant 12:30 I know so many people, you, you were talking about the almost terror of sitting in front of a, a blank page or a blinking cursor. I know so many people who do that and then think, "I'm not cut out for writing," and they don't realize, no, no, no. [laughs] You do not have good ideas being tethered to a desk. You need to move your body to free your mind. And then once you've filled up your brain, to your point, that's when you sit down and write it out.

Harlan Coben 12:52 Yes and no. I'm gonna agree with that and not agree with that just to make this interesting.

Adam Grant 12:55 Oh, good.

Harlan Coben 12:55 Okay, so-

Adam Grant 12:55 Oh, this'll be fun

Harlan Coben 12:55 ... the agreeing part with it is obvious. But the not agreeing part of that is you also have to be comfortable in boredom to be a writer. You have to embrace that it's going to be work. So that's the only counter I would say is if people are using the Adam Grant take a walk thing to stimulate the brain, hey, great, do it and go for it. If you're using it because that blank page is too painful to face, then you're probably not a writer.

Adam Grant 13:18 Interesting. Well, I, I find myself mostly agreeing with that. I think there's a solid body of evidence that boredom can actually stimulate creativity. But to your point-

Harlan Coben 13:27 Of course

Adam Grant 13:27 ... you have to be careful not to be sort of seduced by the easy and fun temptations and say, "Okay, I'm bored. Now I'm gonna do the hard thinking that will get me out of this," but it might not get me out of it right this moment. Um, I might take a, you know, a bunch of random mental walks and run into a bunch of brick walls metaphorically before I discover the, the eureka moment or, you know, the interesting path that now rescues me from, [laughs] from the state of boredom. And I think that requires a, a really interesting combination of impatience and patience. I think you, you have to be impatient around saying, "I really wanna figure this out, and I wanna get to the bottom of it," and patient to recognize that your first solution may not be your best solution.

Harlan Coben 14:08 Yes, I exact- I agree with that 100%. And the other thing I think about a lot, and this is something I'd love to discuss with you a little bit, is creation, um, versus the actual process. So w- I think too many people are convinced that writing is magical and fun, and it is, but not every day. The process can sometimes be tedious, and it's like, huh, I expected the muse to come and sit on my shoulder and sing an angelic lullaby, and that's not happening. I expected God to come down and make my fingers move, and that's not happening. But what's always magical, what always means something to me, is at the end of the day when I can see pages that were once blank that now have words on them. That's always magic. Do you agree with this or no?

Adam Grant 14:51 That, I mean, that's... Yeah, that's, that's Teresa Amabile's progress principle.

Harlan Coben 14:55 So you always know somebody who already thought of this, whatever. [laughs]

Adam Grant 14:58 No, I know-

Harlan Coben 14:58 Good.

Adam Grant 14:58 I know somebody that-

Harlan Coben 14:59 Yeah, good

Adam Grant 14:59 ... that brought data to it.

Harlan Coben 15:00 Of course, yes. Good.

Adam Grant 15:01 But Teresa and her colleagues studied people doing all kinds of knowledge work, and they were interested in what, what is it that, that creates a sense of, of daily fulfillment in whatever job you're doing? And the, the finding that I think surprised a lot of people was what matters more than anything else is just a sense of progress. Today, did I move forward? It didn't have to be a huge accomplishment. It could be a small win, and that, that boosts your confidence. It gives you a little jolt of joy, and I think it's exactly what you're describing.

Harlan Coben 15:31 Let me give you another example that we, that we can discuss together because I'm, I'm always curious about this. A lot of my friends, and maybe some of yours, have taken up painting, right? They love painting. They're artists now. They go, and they, and they mix the colors, and they get the right canvas, and they just tell me, like, this wonderful feeling of zen from their hobby of painting, and I get that. But at the end of the day, if they finish painting and the canvas is blank, if there's nothing on it, did they still enjoy themselves? This is sort of like the, the, the tree falling in the woods or the egg. Did you still enjoy yourself if there's nothing there? And I contend you will look back and not. Uh, the most annoying thing that a writer sometimes will say is, "Oh, I write only for myself. I don't care if anyone reads it." That's not writing. That's therapy. That's like saying-

Adam Grant 16:18 [laughs]

Harlan Coben 16:18 ... "I talk only to myself. I don't care if anyone's listening." Writing is about communication. If I write a novel and no one reads it, it doesn't exist as a novel. I need a, a reader, or it doesn't exist. That's for me personally, and I think that's most people who actually wanna create. You wanna create because you wanna tell someone something. You don't wanna tell yourself something. You normally wanna tell someone else. Now, I know I'll get a million people who say, "No, I write only for myself." That's fine, but to me, that's a, a slightly different thing. And what I'm not saying is that it's not magical. When I'm really writing and I'm writing well, the hours disappear in a bliss that I, I actually can't describe. It's, uh, the strangest feeling in the world. But I'm not sure if at the end of that, if I looked up and saw nothing on the page, I might have enjoyed that moment, but I don't think I will have a, uh, give that day a satisfactory rating. And what's good about this, the good thing about this for you is if you're struggling or whatever else, I tell writers, picture the end product. It's okay. Imagine if you're a writer, imagine your book on a bookshelf one day. Imagine a reader telling you that they loved it. Imagine unboxing. If that helps give you what you call motivation, I'm all for it. It's not gonna last motivation, but it will help some

Harlan Coben 17:30 of those dark days.

Adam Grant 17:31 You know, this is- This is all interesting in the context of Plot Twist, of course, because you have, you have just written a book about writing.

Harlan Coben 17:37 Yes.

Adam Grant 17:37 And it raised a few questions for me. We've actually covered, I think, some of the most powerful insights from it already, indirectly, but one of the things that I wondered was what changed about you as a writer from writing a book about writing?

Harlan Coben 17:50 What I realized while I was doing it was I was wrong about a lot of my process. I always thought I just made this stuff up. I sit down, I make the stuff up. And what I realized was it's always something that actually happened in my real life, and that my real life is weirder and stranger than I originally thought. So, you know, the, the cute line I would always tell myself was, "Ha, I write about, you know, people being murdered. I've never murdered anyone. Ha ha ha." But there is, in a sense, as I mentioned with The Boy From the Woods and Promise Me, there's always something in my life, something that goes on in your life, that can inspire. So there's a reason I write missing people. It's because I lost a lot of people a certain age, and I always had this wish fulfillment, what if they were still alive? So that, for me, I think was the biggest surprise. I was trying to inspire people to write, tell them the truth about writing, contradict a lot of the books that they've already read about writing, which I think lead people astray, but also realizing how much of myself and yourself, if you wanna write, how much of yourself has to be in the book.

Adam Grant 18:47 One of the more surprising points you make in the book is you suggest that character versus plot might be a false dichotomy.

Harlan Coben 18:55 Yeah.

Adam Grant 18:55 And, uh, this, this really caught me off guard, 'cause I've always thought about those as two independent elements that have to be developed in order to intertwine. Why do you think the character is plot?

Harlan Coben 19:06 Well, I mean, first of all, the examples that I used in the book, for example, I've used a couple, but one I used was Batman again. We're gonna go back to Batman. So the origin story of Batman is Bruce Wayne is seven or eight years old, he's walking with his parents, his parents are murdered by a mugger. This is obviously traumatic for him. He decides he's going to, uh, uh, avenge this, and he learns how to fight, and one day a bat flies through his window, which is the weakest part of the story, quite frankly, and he decides he's gonna become Batman. So what I just described to you, is that plot or is that character? Well, it's character, 'cause it's developing how he became it. But really, it's plot. I'm not telling you Bruce Wayne is a crime fighter, blah, blah, blah. I'm showing you by showing you somebody shooting his parents when he's eight years old, being in his head, and him witnessing it. That moment changed him. That moment isn't character, it's plot. And so when you start thinking of them separately, that's when I think people start getting in trouble, and you make your story stilted. "Oh, I gotta make sure, this character's a guy who this happened to. I gotta make sure that I get that in." Just tell the story, and through what the character goes through in the story, which is plot, that's how your character's gonna develop. So character is plot, and plot is character. And it's also setting. I mentioned The Boy From the Woods before, right? If I had been walking in Central Park or I'd been walking in the streets of New York and I saw a little boy walking alone, I might've come up with a story about a little boy coming up like that, but it wouldn't have been The Boy From the Woods. What are those woods? Setting. So setting becomes character [laughs] becomes plot. Is this sounding messy? Yes, it should. That's how your mind should work. Don't try to divide yourself into these neat little categories. It doesn't work.

Adam Grant 20:47 I love that. Okay, that is actually a great segue to one of the other things I wanted to ask you about, which is in the process of, of bringing your books to Netflix, uh, you've now gone from largely working alone to doing a lot more collaboration. And I'd love to hear a little bit about what you've learned from having to work through what are we gonna maintain, what are we gonna change, with a bunch of other people who might have clashing visions?

Harlan Coben 21:10 Yeah, it's a really good question. It's a struggle I go through a lot. I mean, as a novelist, I get a report

Harlan Coben 21:15 card that says, "Does not play well with others." You know, we are alone. I kinda look at it like when I have success as a novelist, that's, you know, hitting a New York Times bestselling list or whatever, to me, it's like I've won Wimbledon or I won the Masters. I'm a golfer, a tennis player. It's solo. I stand alone. I get a trophy, and that's fantastic. But when I have success, uh, I Will Find You is out right now, and it's doing quite well for Netflix, it's like I'm captain of a World Cup, a football team, and I'm the captain. I don't care who scores the goals. I don't care who... I just wanna win, and I wanna celebrate with my teammates, and I love that. I love celebrating with other people. And at this stage of my life, I actually prefer being the captain of the team where I'm not doing as much, still doing a lot, but as much as being that, that solo person who's standing there who made the winning putt in the Masters on his own. Does that make sense?

Adam Grant 22:08 It does. It makes me think also about your collaboration with one of our past guests, Reese Witherspoon. I don't think anyone who knows either of you would've guessed that collaboration was coming.

Harlan Coben 22:17 [laughs]

Adam Grant 22:18 But what did you learn from working with her and from having to write with somebody else?

Harlan Coben 22:21 Reese called me on the phone one day, and she says, "I have an idea I kinda wanna talk to you about, maybe writing something together, and I'm be in New York next week and, and can we meet at your apartment?" And, um, I said, "Sure," uh, but I, my mind was sort of saying, "This is not going to happen. I'm not that guy. I don't collaborate on novels." Other writers, uh, are, are big on collaborations with other people. To me, it sounds gimmicky, and I don't like the idea, so I was sort of not really set to do it. So Reese came, and I was sorta thinking, "How do I nicely tell Reese Witherspoon no?" And then Reese pitches me the idea, and this might not surprise people, Reese is really good at pitching, and she's really persuasive, and her idea was really, really good, and I was sort of like, "Uh, yeah, wow, I could do something with that." And I take out my yellow legal pad, and I said, "Well, what if she goes here instead of there?" And we start bouncing back and forth, and three hours pass, and Reese gives me the Reese Witherspoon smile and says, "So are we gonna do this?" And I'm like, "Yeah, why not?" Because also, as we talked about, life's about new experiences, and how cool to do it with someone like Reese? So we had a long discussion about how that was going to work, and one of the things that we also discussed was how, which everyone's always asking, how did you write? Did she write one chap- you wrote another chapter? There's no way that could work. How could r- I sound like Reese Witherspoon or she sounds like me? So day one I told her, there's an old Yiddish expression that you can't ride two horses with one behind.

Adam Grant 23:43 [laughs]

Harlan Coben 23:43 Be my hands on the keyboard. I'm the writer, I'm the one with the knowledge. I'm gonna write, do the actual typing and writing, but we're gonna go back and forth. We talked almost every day, or we emailed or we text. She would send me ideas at all hours. I would send her ideas at all hours. I would throw her pages, I would ask her questions.

Adam Grant 24:01 One of my mentors, Richard Hackman, was for a long time the world's leading expert on team effectiveness, and he would always remind us that after years and years of studying teams and why most of them fail, that the first mistake that every collaboration makes is designing a task for a group that's better done by individuals. And you, you just gave us a pitch perfect example of how to avoid that mistake by saying, "Look-

Harlan Coben 24:23 [laughs]

Adam Grant 24:23 ... I am going to do all the writing." Writing is a task for one person to do, but we're gonna develop the ideas and the plot, character, setting, uh, however you describe that three-headed monster together.

Harlan Coben 24:35 Yeah. But sometimes Reese would say, "Here's how I see Maggie walking into the scene," or where, and she would just write it down, type it, and I would almost take it verbatim and put it in. But Reese is also a, a wonderful business person, as a lot of people now know. She runs a huge production company called Hello Sunshine, and she's had tremendous success as, as a producer and a creative, and has a good sense. But one of the senses that I got to see is how well she handles people. She knew exactly sort of when to push my buttons one way, when to push them the other way, when I needed a shoulder to cry on, when I needed a little push, and I did the same with her. It just worked out. People say, "Would you ever collaborate again?" The answer again is still no, except maybe with Reese. This is also a thing, I guess, with teams, and you can tell me which study's going to apply here. Neither one of us had our egos involved in like, "I have to make sure I do this much, and it has to be 50/50." There was times she was doing more, times I was doing more. An old friend once told me about relationships are never 50/50. They're 60/40, they're 80/20, sometimes it'll be the 20, sometimes it'll be the 80, and I use that a lot. I agree with that in my own relationships, and you have to let go of that. Obviously, if you're feeling neglected, that's different. But that's, I think, also worked for when I collaborated with Reese on this.

Adam Grant 25:45 Yeah, I think that's something a lot of people get wrong, and I, I see it in all kinds of relationships. I see it in teams, I see it in, in marriages, frankly. People doing too much keeping score and saying, "Okay, we, we gotta make sure everything is equal." No, I don't want things to be equal. I want them to be equitable. And-

Harlan Coben 26:01 Yes

Adam Grant 26:01 ... what equity requires is everybody puts in a fair amount and is trying to figure out how I can contribute effectively and support our shared goals and support the other people that I'm with. That doesn't mean we're gonna measure

Adam Grant 26:15 out everything even.

Harlan Coben 26:16 That's e- exactly right.

Adam Grant 26:17 Okay, it is time for a lightning round. Are you ready?

Harlan Coben 26:21 Uh-oh. Go ahead.

Adam Grant 26:22 I have confidence in you.

Harlan Coben 26:23 [laughs]

Adam Grant 26:24 I'm gonna try to hold you to one sentence, though. What is the worst writing advice that you see given regularly that we haven't already covered?

Harlan Coben 26:31 Oh, write, write for the market. This is always a disaster. Write for a certain trend. Uh, you know, you read dystopian thrillers are working, I'm gonna write a dystopian thriller. It's not gonna work. I could explain. By the time you write it, the trend will be over, and if you don't love what you're writing and you're doing it just that way, you're not gonna have the interest to maintain it and finish it. So writing for a trend or writing because somebody told you. Also ignore whatever... When you get a rejection letter, for the most part, you should ignore anything other than the fact that it tells you you were rejected. Most people don't know why they rejected you, so they come up with a reason that m- might be complete and utter horseshit. So you have to have the ability to see what went wrong or what you can do better or why it happened, rather than, than listening to whatever advice you just got because the writer said that your character didn't wear enough pink or whatever it was.

Adam Grant 27:19 Okay, so on your first point, are you saying I should scrap my plans for a romantasy novel?

Harlan Coben 27:23 [laughs] In your case, maybe not. [laughs]

Adam Grant 27:27 Oh, I, I wait to differ.

Harlan Coben 27:28 Jump right on that, Adam. Come on, man. Jump right on that.

Adam Grant 27:30 [laughs] Well, I m- I might try to pull off a chapter of romantasy just to see how hard I can make you laugh.

Harlan Coben 27:35 [laughs] That would be great.

Adam Grant 27:37 I'll take it as a challenge.

Harlan Coben 27:38 Look forward to getting it.

Adam Grant 27:39 Uh, okay, what's your, what's your favorite piece of writing advice that you do not hear given enough?

Harlan Coben 27:45 If it helps you produce pages, good. If it doesn't help you produce pages, bad. That's my life motto. So whatever I'm doing, I'm trying to, you know, get my life in a position where I have the ability, time, and desire to write.

Adam Grant 28:01 Okay, you are organizing a dream dinner party of your favorite writers throughout history. Who are you inviting?

Harlan Coben 28:08 Oh. Oh. My all-time favorite writer is, is, is, uh, Philip Roth, so I would probably, uh, I would have to invite Philip Roth. I find Dorothy Parker fascinating in a million different ways, so I think I would probably invite Dorothy Parker. And then Robert B. Parker, who wrote the Spenser series, is somebody I never got to meet, but I was actually quoted in his obituary when he died as saying that 90% of those of us who write detective fiction admit he's an influence, and 10% of us lie about it. So, you know, let's invite those three

Harlan Coben 28:44 maybe.

Adam Grant 28:44 I like it. Every successful writer has a random country where they become a hit.

Harlan Coben 28:49 [laughs]

Adam Grant 28:50 And I think one of yours is France. You are-

Harlan Coben 28:53 Yeah

Adam Grant 28:53 ... beloved in France. Why, and what has it taught you about cross-cultural differences between people?

Harlan Coben 29:01 I am the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction. Huge in France.

Adam Grant 29:04 [laughs]

Harlan Coben 29:04 I keep yelling at my German publisher, "I wanna be the David Hasselhoff of publishing," but, uh...

Adam Grant 29:09 [laughs]

Harlan Coben 29:10 You know, it has been the weirdest and strangest relationship with France, and I like to think they're just smarter than us and better readers, so maybe [laughs] that's the self-involved reason. I don't know.

Adam Grant 29:20 As, as somebody, as somebody who tanks in France, France is one of my worst countries.

Harlan Coben 29:24 [laughs]

Adam Grant 29:24 I'm gonna disagree vehemently with that.

Harlan Coben 29:26 [laughs] It's really interesting. What they tell me, and it's very hard for me to describe my own books this way, but I hope this is true of my books and in a sense the TV series. I can twist and turn like nobody's business. That's my thing. Every, you know, I can fool you, I can do all of that, but it's the heart. And Tell No One, for example, what the friends understood about making it and why they made it a good film is it's a love story, really, um, more than it ever is a thriller. I Will Find You is really more a story about a father searching for his son, um, than it is about a thriller of a man escaping prison. And so I hope, I'm hoping that's what made you, when you were a young, a young lad, Adam, attached to Myron and, and Wynn, is that you liked them and they had heart, and that you wanted to hang around with those guys. So that's what I hope it is. I don't know if that's what it is, but that's what I hope it is.

Adam Grant 30:16 Yeah. Yeah, that, that captures the trifecta for me really well. I mean, I, of course, the, you know, the, the thriller element is what always fired up my brain, right? Trying to figure it out. Wondering, "Okay, who did it? Uh, what's really going on here?" And, you know, that, that to me was always the hook for getting into one of your books. But the lasting effect was much more, it taught me something about human nature and the way people think, and it was, it was frankly one of my first exposures to psychology because you would always sneak in these little... Like, it was often a Myron observation. Um, and you would anticipate something that then, you know, had 10 years of research behind it, [chuckles] I'd discover a decade later. And that, you know, that, that part was intellectually exciting. But I think you're right. I think at the end of the day, you're communicating human virtues and values through your flawed characters. You're showing us what's important. Uh, I think my, all of my favorite characters of yours are givers, not takers, and they-

Harlan Coben 31:10 Right

Adam Grant 31:10 ... they are givers in spite of their limitations as opposed to, you know, sort of being born with this superhero instinct or, you know, some, some level of j- just innate goodness, right? They have to struggle to be kind and caring. They have to push themselves often to, like to, to go out of their way to help in situations where they, they really don't wanna be bothered or get dragged into it, and I think that is really the lasting effect for me.

Harlan Coben 31:37 Well, thank you. It's very flattering.

Adam Grant 31:38 Okay, la- last question for you. This is the office hours portion. I guess give you the mic. Uh, what's, what's on your mind? What do you wanna know about human psychology?

Harlan Coben 31:48 So this, I, I wrote, I wrote down like three or four different things. We can pick one. Um, so one of, one of the things that I've noticed as I've gotten older is that we are always 17 waiting for our life to begin. That inside of me, I don't feel 64 years old. I don't think I'm any different in many ways than I was then, yeah. Maybe the knees ache a little more or whatever else, but what is that about? You wanna hit that one? Is that one a good one? Give you-

Adam Grant 32:15 It could be. I'm, you, you teased the others, though, so I wanna know what the others are, too.

Harlan Coben 32:19 The other, the other two are... So I, I've, I've always told my kids this, and so I don't know where I got it from, so I Googled to find out who the origin, who the first person to say it was, and literally every site that I visited said that I am the first one to say it. So I don't know if they're wrong or that I somehow did come up with it. But I tell my kids, "You bring your own weather to the picnic," which I think is in a sense is a great way of saying to people that a lot of it is about your attitude and, and, you know, again, if I sit down thinking there's no way I'm gonna produce pages today, you know, I don't think that's, um, going to work. And the third thing I was going to ask you about was the human condition, that we as human beings feel that we are uniquely complex and that no one really knows what's going on inside of us, that no one can actually read us. But conversely, we can read everybody else. We sort of do know what's going on in your head. And of course, by definition that, that can't be true. And this fascinates me, and I write about this a lot. So you have three choices, Adam. I've given you three, right? They're all pretty good, right?

Adam Grant 33:21 Those are, those are all great. Uh, why don't we spend a minute on each of them?

Harlan Coben 33:24 Okay, go ahead. So the first one was, uh, we are always 17 waiting for our life-

Adam Grant 33:28 Why?

Harlan Coben 33:29 ... to begin. Why is that? Or, and is that true? Do we all feel that way?

Adam Grant 33:32 Yeah, I, I don't know if 17 is the magic number, but-

Harlan Coben 33:35 'Cause that's when you graduate high school.

Adam Grant 33:37 I, so I th- I think that's, that's a pivotal turning point in life for, for everybody in the sense that number one, it's a temporal

Adam Grant 33:45 landmark, right? You're, you're passing through a portal. You're going from basically being at the, at the whim of adults to writing your own future and your own destiny. Two, we are future-oriented creatures. I think one of the things that differentiates humans from, from every other species that I know of is how far ahead we, we plan and dream and how vivid our images are, are of our future selves. And I think if you put those two things together, that's the moment in our lives when we have the greatest range of possibilities and also sort of the, [chuckles] the fewest punctured dreams and hopes. And I think it's, it's probably the most optimistic moment in life at some level, and it's the time when it feels like all the doors are open. And, and who wants to, [chuckles] who wants to start when a bunch of doors are closed? Who wants to cross off a bunch of possibilities? I think we wanna be looking out on that horizon and saying, "Yeah, there's a lot of excitement in front of me."

Harlan Coben 34:43 I, I agree with that 100%, and I think th- having that other attitude, though, leaves that window open longer. I mean, if somebody out there is trying to th- you know, writing is, it's not basketball career. I, when I was in college, I hoped to play pro basketball. That dream is gone. Never gonna happen, right? But, you know, When the Crawdad Sings, which is a huge book that came out a few years ago, Delia Owens was 70. There's another new book that's called Theo Golden. Also, author was 70, a complete unknown. So if you're still out there and you still feel like you're 17 waiting for your life to begin, the, the motivational part is it can still happen. There are new chapters, and I'm encouraged by that.

Adam Grant 35:20 Yeah. I, I agree wholeheartedly. All right, let's go to number two.

Harlan Coben 35:22 So the second one was, what was the second one? Oh, you bring your own weather to the picnic.

Adam Grant 35:25 Yeah. Okay, so when you said you bring your own weather to the picnic, first of all, I've never heard anyone else say it, so I'm with you that you deserve the credit.

Harlan Coben 35:32 It's officially mine.

Adam Grant 35:32 It's yours. You know, what it made me think of is a paper by Lyubomirsky and Sheldon on the basic mistake people make when they pursue happiness, which is they try to change their circumstances When instead they should be changing their actions. And, uh, the easiest case of this that, that I run into is when I have undergrads who say, "I chose the wrong college. I shouldn't have come to Penn. I wish I had gone to this other place," and then they start working on a transfer application. And [laughs] I just look at that and say, "Okay, but what drives your experience at college is not whether you're in Philly or whether you're in Palo Alto. What drives your experience is the friends you make, the classes you take, and the professors you meet." And so if you shift your actions, if you join a different set of clubs, if you change your major, if you start doing different things, you can redesign your own experience. Whereas if you just pick up and leave for somewhere else, you might still not like your friend group. You might still not like your surroundings. You might still not like your classes or, you know, really resonate with your, your professors. And so I think that's a way of saying you've gotta not only bring your own weather, you have to create your own weather.

Harlan Coben 36:43 Also a saying when you're looking at a blank page, yeah, maybe take a walk, but maybe instead grab a notebook, paper, and turn off your screen and write on that. So you're just changing what you're doing, and hopefully that's going to produce a better outcome. But yeah, and it's, it's a lot about your attitude, that one, obviously. And the third one is the human condition being that we all think we are uniquely complex. No one can read us, but we can read everybody else.

Adam Grant 37:04 Yeah, this is, I mean, at some level, this is the bane of my existence because the moment you recognize your own complexity, you should be granting that level of nuance and understanding and [laughs] willingness to withhold judgment to other people. But it's hard, and I think it's hard because we see ourselves in 3D, and we see other people in 2D. I think one of the things you do brilliantly as a novelist-

Harlan Coben 37:27 Oh, dear

Adam Grant 37:27 ... that does not happen in daily life is

Adam Grant 37:30 you actually paint people's circumstances in the same level of detail that you paint their, their traits and their character strengths and vulnerabilities. And I, I just don't think life works that way. Like, I get to see what you say. I get to see what you do. I don't get to see where you come from. Like, the, the, the movie starts or the novel starts when you're already in the scene, as opposed to the scene having been set. And so I think if we're gonna solve this, I mean, psychologists have written about this for years, is the fundamental attribution error, that we, we overreact to, you know, to people's character and personality as drivers of what they do, and we underappreciate the situational forces and conditions around them that have affected their choices. I think what we'd wanna do is we'd, we'd basically wanna take what's normally background and try to make it part of the foreground. And I don't know how to do that, but you do.

Harlan Coben 38:18 [laughs] Oh, thanks. I, I love that line that we see ourselves in 3D. We see others, as much as we don't want to, in 2D. And probably we can't change seeing in 2D, but if we recognize that we're not seeing the full picture, I think that helps. And it's fine to have opinions, but you have to somewhere along have the humility, be humble enough to realize that you don't know everything. It's also, to, to, to turn into a thriller thing, is when people say, "Wow, all of your characters have secrets." Yeah, but so do you, don't you?

Adam Grant 38:45 [laughs]

Harlan Coben 38:45 Don't you have something inside of you that no one else knows? And so I'm not... I'm, I'm, I, I'm using it in a sense in a, both a commercial thriller-esque way, but also-

Adam Grant 38:54 Yeah

Harlan Coben 38:54 ... in a human nature way.

Adam Grant 38:55 Yeah, no, I, I, I love that point. And I think whenever I see somebody who's just filled with conviction, I think your certainty is not a sign of competence or expertise. It's just a sign of confidence. And it's probably a signal that you're overconfident because people who have complex knowledge are rarely sure of anything.

Harlan Coben 39:16 Exactly. But the smartest people I know are always sort of doubting themselves. Same thing with writers. If you know any writer who thinks they're really great at writing, they usually suck.

Adam Grant 39:23 [laughs] That's the only-

Harlan Coben 39:24 Only bad writers think they're good, here's my l- my other phrase.

Adam Grant 39:27 Wow. So I guess that's, that's bad for daily self-esteem but good for ongoing learning and improvement.

Harlan Coben 39:33 You have to be insecure to write. But in, you know, it's a strange dichotomy 'cause on the one hand, I suck. I'm terrible. No one's gonna wanna read this. It's crap. I have imposter syndrome. On the other hand, I have the hubris to think that you're going to spend $20 to $30 on a hardcover book. You're going to read 4 or 500 pages and spend those hours with me, and you should pay me for that privilege. I mean, so it's like a, they're two complete contradictions, and yet they work together as a whole.

Adam Grant 40:00 How do you reconcile those two?

Harlan Coben 40:02 I don't. I just realize that they, that life has some contradictions. I feel both ways. There's days I feel like I suck, I'm terrible, and there's days I have the hubris to think, you know, you should be reading everything I say and grateful for it. That's the other thing. Like, when you have doubts, there's two ways it can go for you. Doubts can paralyze you, or they can inspire you. I try to let them inspire me. When you're scared, I try to write through the fear. I try to make it fuel me rather than paralyze me. And that's true for anything. Again, um, a lot of the advice I'm giving is on writing, but it's on life and everything else itself. We all get scared. We all think we suck. We all have those moments of doubt. I know Stephen King does. He wrote me something one time about when he was using my name as a character in a book, and I could tell he was actually nervous. Stephen King, nervous that I might not like the book. I'm like, "You're Stephen King." And I said to him, "Steve, does this mean I'm always gonna feel this way?" And he goes, "Yeah, you are. It's part of what you have." And so you use it to fuel you rather than to make you cringe and to... Take the blows. It's okay. You'll be fine.

Adam Grant 40:59 Wow. Well, I think if-

Harlan Coben 41:00 Yeah, that was a nice name-droppy story too I just kinda threw in there without anybody even noticing I was name-dropping there.

Adam Grant 41:05 [laughs]

Harlan Coben 41:06 [laughs] Not, not-

Adam Grant 41:07 That-

Harlan Coben 41:07 ... calm enough to point it out, so [laughs]

Adam Grant 41:09 And, and that right there is what I love about Myron so much. That, that is exactly the joke he would make.

Harlan Coben 41:14 [laughs] Thanks.

Adam Grant 41:16 So good. Harlan, this is, this has, has always been a blast. Uh, I love just absorbing the way that you think and the, the stories that you tell. And I think it's a delightful and rare experience that the mind that created the story is as interesting as the story itself. And I, I'm excited that you're, uh, you know, that you're in the, the nonfiction world a little more now, and I hope this is not the last. I just, uh... I feel like a little kid in a candy store every time you release a new book.

Harlan Coben 41:42 Wow, that's so flattering. Thank you so much, man. I just... I'm, I'm very moved, so I will stay quiet for once.

Adam Grant 41:47 [laughs] Thank you. That was a blast. [upbeat music]