Lee Child: How to Write Strikingly Well | How I Write

Lee Child, the man behind the Jack Reacher series, a series that sold more than 200 million books, the best-selling series of all time on Amazon in the UK. Yeah, more than Harry Potter, which is crazy. And also a series where a new book is sold on average every nine seconds. So how does he do it? How does he write it? How does he come up with the ideas? Well, here be Answers. You know where I wanna start the interview is

creating a sense of place. Like obviously you're English, you're in England when you got fired. And then you're like, hey, let's go base a story in America. Yeah. So first of all, why'd you do that? But also how do you make that real and vivid?

I did it because uh for a bunch of reasons it all pushed in the same direction. Uh one was that as you say, I'd just been fired and it was a kind of political thing whereby the T V industry in Britain was being altered externally in order to give Rupert Murdoch uh a foothold for his satellite business. So that uh I was just annoyed, you know, really just pissed off with uh with what had happened. So in a lot of ways I wanted to escape. I just I was done with it. I wanted to get out.

And if I couldn't do that yet physically, at least I could do it in my head in terms of narrative. And I had when I started out writing, and this is something that a lot of readers don't want to hear. But writing is not just the muse, you know, you don't sit down compelled to just write. It's a job.

And especially'cause I'd been fired, it was a it was a serious thing. I had to make a living. And in order to approach it that way, you've got to start thinking about it in a rather commercial and strategic way. And British uh thriller and uh crime fiction I love. You know, I got nothing negative to say about it. But it is very tight and very internal and very psychological.

a little bit like the island itself. This is a small country very densely packed. And if you look at the great um crime fiction that I was reading out of Britain at the time, uh Barbara Vine, who was uh that's a pen name for Ruth Randell and it was a certain kind of fiction she was doing. Very much in a couple of streets in North London. You know, that was the world. You look at Ian Rankin, another great British crime writer.

That's literally like a couple of square miles in Edinburgh. It was very internal in their heads, very small geography. And I thought it my heart wasn't in that. I wanted I wanted something that was a lot more uh a lot more related to myth and legend from the past. The idea of the mysterious stranger, the noble loner. who shows up here and there. And for that you need a gigantic geography.

To make it plausible. The idea that a stranger can wander miles into a community that is effectively isolated and cut off and has mystery and intrigue going on unbeknownst to the rest of the world. That is not um i plausible in Britain. Everybody knows everybody else's business. Everybody lives cheek by jowl. You needed that frontier feel. So it really had to be America fr uh from the narrative point of view.

And I had been a lot. I first went to the US more than fifty years ago now. Um and I eventually in nineteen seventy four, I eventually emigrated in nineteen ninety eight, which was twenty four years later. And part of the immigration procedure, if you do it legally, is to apply in a numerous forms to fill out. And one of them is you've gotta list every previous visit you've made to the US. So

I guess so they can check with police departments here and there that you're not some kind of murderer or something. And So I had to go back through all my old passports and in those twenty four years I'd visited the US exactly one hundred times. Whoa. Because my wife is from there. And so every trip we took. She's from where? She's from New York. So I felt like

I knew the country well enough to write about it, with the advantage of doing it with an outsider's eye, which I think is huge. I think that Uh you run the risk of getting details wrong. You run the risk of sort of not quite connecting with the culture, but there's an enormous advantage in you're seeing things fresh. you're seeing things that Americans no longer see because they're so familiar.

And as you go about creating a sense of place, what are the things that you're thinking about? I mean, I don't know, there's different uh instruments you can play. You could play the instrument of sound, you could play the instrument of sight, you could play the instrument of light, you could play the instrument of color, of the way the sun sets and rises in the morning, whatever it is. How do you think about bringing a sense of place

That's a life. Good question. And for me, uh I would say mostly it's temperature. Uh you know, I never Versus cool to Yeah. Hard versus soft. Hot versus cold. Things like that. I I don't plan, I never have a yeah, I don't I'm not one of these guys that has

a list with the ne next eight plus, you know, with a little index card saying, you know, set w set this one in Maine or something. I don't do that. What I do, and this sounds terribly pretentious, but if you were a composer writing music, you start with a concept with a key that you want. Uh, you know, G major is a cheerful upbeat key. Uh E flat minor is is the opposite, you know, down and a and rather melancholy key.

So what I do as a writer is I I have a just a vague idea. I want this to be hard and cold, or I want this to be hot. and then you pick a location that you have been familiar with. I never do research specifically for that book. It it always draws on impressions formed over the years from previous visits to places.

Uh, you know, do you want it to be the west of Texas where it is baking hot and arid? Do you want it to be on the Atlantic coast of Maine in April, where it's grey and cold and and and misty? So that's how I start with the sense of place and then it's just constructing it around that. In a way the place and the temperature Kinda dictates the story in a way. Hmm. Almost as if they're like the driving factors.

Yeah, or it gives you a stage on which certain action is inevitable and certain is implausible. Mm-hmm. Like almost sets the physics of the story. I think it does, yeah. You know, is it indo is it mostly an indoor story? Is it an outdoor story with with with wandering? Is it uh Just the flavor of it. I'm absolutely not a planner and I never have a preconception really of what Why do you say that? Yeah, yeah. Because a lot of people assume that a book needs planning.

They assume that you write out an outline or at least a hit list of of uh plot points, some kind of a synopsis or outline or or plan. And I've never ever done that. I I I I just 'Cause for me writing per se, making it with words is not really the issue for me. It's the story that I want. And if I were to plan a story and I've got friends who do huge outlines, you know, three hundred page outlines. Even if I did a two page outline with

you know, two lines per proposed chapter. Then I've told myself the story. And I'm bored with it at that point. I want the next story. So I can't afford to tell myself the story ahead of time. I have to just improvise it as I go along. So it's about starting somewhere which is defined by location and then See what happens. It's it really is that simple.

Yeah. In your life, who are the writers who you've made a point to read everything they've written? Oh, lots and lots of them. I mean uh there was a British uh Scottish actually thriller writer called Alistair McLean, who was huge when I was a kid and and really appealed to me. I read everything of his What'd you take from him? I took from him actually something I've used two things I took from him actually. Number one was

He had a a real skill of having a hero that was so good that he was almost a cartoon character. He was almost falling off the edge of being ludicrous and yet never did. He just kept in the right side of plausibility. And I learned that. The other thing I learned was a completely negative thing, that he got drunk and lazy and bored after about eight books and fell off a cliff in terms of quality.

So I learned a boy that if you can. John D. Macdonald, who is uh was a Florida writer, did twenty one books in the Travis McGee series, which is really one of the most magnificent series and pulls up a trick that I I cannot explain. There was uh twenty one books as I says and only one of them oh only one of them has anything happen on page one. And the other twenty, nothing happens on page one, nothing really happens on page two, but you cannot put them down. Now explain that to me. I can't.

What happens in the first three pages? Two guys hanging out chatting or whatever, you know. And uh somehow it's too it's so compelling. One of them they're sitting in a boat, page one, they're sitting at night fishing in a boat on a canal in in South Florida. You know, they're chatting for half a page and then all of a sudden somebody throws a body off the bridge and it lands in their boat.

That's the only story where something happens on page one. And yet all of them are utterly addictive. You literally cannot put'em down. How do you think your career, your writing unfolded differently by virtue of having one character who you brought in over and over again versus, hey, I'm gonna do this story with all these characters, this story with all those characters. Yeah, it's a great question. And again, um I think an awful lot of it depends on what turns you on as a reader.

Um, I think you can't get away from that. I I think that if if you find a guy who has enjoyed reading a certain genre or a certain style within a genre, that is what they've got to write, really. Um and again, from the audience's point of view, I I everything I do, I try to remember how I felt as a reader. What really turned me on as a reader. How did I feel? uh as a reader. And with a a series with a strong recurring character

There's a kind of pre approval amongst the readers. If they've tried one and liked it. Then they're very happy that the same guy comes back in the second book. And then they th they understand it's turning into a series where he's gonna keep on coming back. So every year they get the new book. And it is pre approved in their mind. They know they're gonna like it. They know they wanna read it.

Certainly they want a different plot, they want a different context, all that kind of thing, but they really want the familiarity and the comfort of their old friend coming to visit for a couple of days, hanging out with the guy for a couple of days. They'd love that. So To me, series were always super appealing as a reader. So naturally I wanted to write a series. And I think it works really well. Uh that you know, I've got

A lot of other writers I love, Stephen King, for instance. Now Stephen, he's a great writer, a terrific guy, a great writer. I mean, literally America's greatest living novelist, I think, at this point. I think so. But Stephen King comes out with a new book. You're never quite sure what it's gonna be. Is it this, is it that?

Is it horror? Is it supernatural? Is it some other thing? You don't know. You buy it because you love Stephen King. You don't buy it because you know you're gonna love the story because the story could be anything at that point. Mm. Mm-hmm.

Obviously you famously start your books on September first. And so what is how do you sort of structure the year, how do you structure the days in terms of where that imagination comes into play, where the actual work of writing comes into play and how those things come together. It's uh I g yeah, I do. I I start on a r on a regular day, which is

Kinda necessary I think because if you're gonna publish a book a year, clearly you gotta write a book a year. And you have gotta have a certain discipline and structure to you how to do that. So it's totally convenient to pick Start first of September, deliver sometime in March or April. That is the way to do it. And um uh funny what you say though about imagination because I you know, I do a book, let's say I'm finishing it in March or April. Done fantastic. Happy with it. And then I suffer

a kind of uh self doubt. Well not really. I uh it's not that I'm sitting there racked with doubt, but I just it kind of fades away. I've done that book. I know it's some months before I have to start the next one. And kind of July August, beginning of August, I'm thinking, Oh g gotta start in six weeks or whatever.

And I'm just bereft. I no ideas. I th I every year I think this is it, I'm washed up now. It was the previous twenty years was just luck, you know. I've got no got got nothing to do, nothing to say about no idea. And I feel a little despondent about it. And then sure as eggs are eggs, towards the end of

August I'm thinking, Oh well, you know, I could yeah, this might be cool or and then toward again a few days later I have a first line suddenly pops into my head. So by September the first I'm up and running again. But the imagination somehow is biddable. It you can quiet it down and you can crank it up depending on when you need to.

Before we started recording, you're like, Yeah, I don't walk much, don't work out, love to smoke cigarettes and all that and how do you think that what you've produced is downstream of how you've lived your life. Because that is unique. Like it's this funny combination of when you said that I was my very dear friend. He's just like, I'm just the laziest guy. And he's super creative. He just kinda like sits on the couch. He sort of just like

mopes around a little bit. But then there's that contrasted with you had been to the United States a hundred times in twenty-four years, which feels like the antithesis of that. Yeah, I mean I travel for fun. I travel for I mean, I guess I w I do not do anything that could conventionally be labelled virtuous. you know, like taking exercise. I just don't. I mean, I grew up in a dull and very boring, repressive family environment where there seemed to be an unspoken

target of just living as long as you possibly could. You know, taking care of yourself so that you live to a grand old age. And I remember associating that with the the boringness of it. And I remember literally at the age of eight, literally the age of eight, I I thought to myself, I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna do whatever the hell I want. And I don't care what the result will be. My t my target is to have more fun in sixty years than the rest of them would have in a hundred.

So I just l I I've always done that. I live recklessly. I do whatever I wanna do. Uh I pay no attention to consequence or health or anything like that. And it's an antidote, I think, to to the repression and that uptight kind of upbringing that I had. Uh, you know, absolutely. S in my family smoking was regarded as just awful. Yeah, terrible thing to do. And uh I don't think you know, my parents were kind of before the era of exercise. I mean nobody

in that generation nobody thought it'd take an exercise. Right. But you did naturally, I suppose, because maybe you didn't have a car so you had to walk to work or whatever. Um but yeah, anything worthy, anything virtuous, anything like that I turn turned my face against. I didn't wanna participate in that kinda scheme. I just wanted to live for pleasure. And um I was also very aware that I was a very lucky generation. my micro generation.

Uh I my birth year, maybe a couple of years before, maybe a couple of years afterward, was probably the luckiest generation in all of human history. Uh, especially being born in Britain. We didn't even have Vietnam. Yeah, we were born to a stable post war European democracy. with national health service that worked back then, with a welfare state that worked back then. We had free education completely. All the major dread diseases were conquered.

We never had to go to war, we never had a bomb dropped on our house, we never had the secret police knocking on the door at four in the morning. All those horrors that had existed Very recently, no longer applied to us. And the creativity that you saw exploding in Britain in the sixties, for instance, you know, all those great bands and and the great

artists and photographers and fashion design, all that stuff was the because that was the first free generation. It wasn't that they suddenly developed all that talent. All that talent had been around in every generation, except it had been disallowed. They had to go work in the factory, they had to go to war, they had to do whatever. And now the conditions were right. The conditions were right. We didn't have to do that stuff. So it did explode.

You know what the word that came to mind was just kind of unapologetic. Because there's the unapologetic in terms of, yeah, you're supposed to do this, you're supposed to do that. I don't really do the things that I'm supposed to do. But then the other thing is just the

unapologetic decision to write in a commercial fashion to say, hey, this is my job. Like a l lot of writers are like, oh, don't do that. And it's funny, you wouldn't walk into a hedge fund or an investment firm and say, Don't try to make as much point as you can, but somehow you get into a library or writer's room and it's like, oh, d don't don't don't say that. In a way it was because I started out in the theatre. That that was my first enthusiasm, my first love. This before TV.

Yeah, theatre before T V. And I remember that w so nineteen seventy one, seventy two, um, that kind of time in theater. There was some great stuff. But there was also some ridiculous crap. And the a lot of the ridiculous crap was kind of boasted about. And people would say, you know, people would put on

terrible shows and get zero audience and and they would be p kind of proud of it. Oh, you know, people don't understand our art and all that kind of thing. But I saw it as As a Zen proposition, if you put on a show and nobody comes to see it, how do you actually put on a show? I'm not saying nakedly commercial transaction, but the transactional aspect of it was vital. It was integral. You put on a show, somebody has to watch it before it exists.

If you write a book and nobody reads it, have you written a book? It was you've got to include the audience in the calculation. So that I wasn't It wasn't like a sort of naked, meretricious thing where I I was trying to make a living, although I was trying to make a living, but that wasn't forefront in my mind. It was that If I'm doing something, I want people to enjoy it. And if you want people to enjoy it, you may as well have the maximum number of people enjoy it.

But of course there's a technicality about books and readership is that the readership is absolutely not monolithic. It is far more like the rings of Saturn. Even my books, you know, I write I any any commercial writer's books are consumed at the center of that universe by very skilled habitual readers. And I've got all kinds of h high grade, high level fans.

Um, but in order to sell a lot of books, you've got to push the boundary outward to the outer rings of Saturn, where the audience of people that read one book a year Possibly two books a year. And you've got to satisfy the habitual, skillful, literate readers in the center at the same time as satisfying the people on the outskirts that are not habitual readers. And so that is a skill in itself to make a a a multi level proposition.

And how does that play out? Like what is a How do you actually think about structurally doing that? I think structurally what you gotta do is you've gotta have a style that is both palatable and somewhat enjoyable to the habitual readers in the center, but that is also useful to the people on the outside. And that Inevitably that style needs to be therefore propulsive. I I do a lot of it instinctively, but I spend a lot of time uh concentrating on rhythm, the rhythm of a sentence.

Because a book is however many thousand sentences in a row, and you gotta make it so that each sentence has a rhythm, and that rhythm must always be tripping forward, forward, forward. This rhythm is less artistic and much more about that word that you came back to propulsion, like the rhythm of movement and progress and pace. Absolutely. Momentum. It's about propulsion. It's as if I'm creating a s a style that the experienced reader in the center

i r i appreciates as a style. You know, call it whatever you want, faux naive or this or that, they'll find a word for it. But the people on the outskirts, the the non habitual readers, it's like I have my hand gently on their back Just pushing them through. They don't notice. They they're not aware of it. But I am just easing them through the process. You know, one of the most heartfelt compliments that you get, I've had dozens, hundreds of people say to me,

Oh, I loved your book. I finished it. It is such an achievement for some you know, not habitual readers, some unfamiliar, unaccustomed readers. to finish a book. It's a s it's a sense of achievement, self esteem and so on. And you do that by helping them finish the book. You push them gradually through. They don't notice, but you're driving them through it.

And you do that by propulsion and you do the propulsion by sentence structure so that the beat is always tipping forward, forward, forward. It's like a great pop song. If you look at a great pop song back in the days before uh before, you know, all this electronic stuff came along. The rhythm will speed up through the song very, very, very subtly. Look at a Beatles song, especially live.

You know, Ringo will be driving that ri driving that tempo and it always ends up a little faster than it begins. Nobody notices but it's there. And that's what you gotta do on the page. You've got to you gotta make it so that It's a little bit like uh like a carnival ride, you know, where you it's they they're slipping down this polished tube, you know, and um there's no getting out of it. Once they're in it, they can't get out.

And now tell me more about that sense of propulsion, because there you're talking about sentences. But then there's the sense of propulsion of opening a question at the beginning, keeping that question open, answering at the end. There's the sense of propulsion that comes at the end of a chapter of Hey, we're gonna have a cliffhanger. Uh television does this. And in the next episode you're gonna learn something like that.

Yeah, well that's and that's really where I got it from. I did forty thousand hours of of television of every kind. and it kind of bakes it into your DNA. Uh and ending a chapter to me is never thought about. It is always utterly sort of instinctively obvious. When you say that, do you mean that the book begins to reveal itself that hey, this is where it should be or is it something else?

Yeah, th exactly. And even the end of a book. I remember one of my books, The Hard Way, I think it was it was that book where I remember Finishing a chapter very late on. I think great, you know, I'm almost done. I've just gotta kinda do, I don't know, maybe a chapter and a half to wrap it up. And then I suddenly realized, no, this is the end of the book. This is done now. Right. Um, because you just know.

It's all about asking the question. Um and uh T V had a th had uh there was a situation in nineteen eighty. Uh that changed completely by nineteen ninety. By nineteen ninety people had something that they did not have in nineteen eighty, and it utterly changed the business. And y you see now you are thinking, why? What is he talking about? What what did they not have in nineteen eighty that they did have in nineteen ninety? I've implied nope, I've implied a question there.

and you now want the answer. Uh and the answer is remote control. Ah. In nineteen eighty, people actually physically had to get up off the sofa And change the channel. In nineteen ninety they could do it with the push of a button and that utterly changed the business. And because you could rely on a certain amount of laziness in nineteen eighty, you could rely that if they finish one programme they're gonna stick around through the commercial break for the next one.

Uh, by nineteen ninety absolutely all bets were off. They could jump around at the pr press of a finger. And that utterly changed it. And so how did we react to that? We reacted to it by something that has largely disappeared now, but you still see, for instance, in baseball or certain sports where You know, in baseball you get to the sort of fourth inning and it's pretty clear maybe which way the game's going and so on and so they usually have a trivia question.

Um, that they'll tell you the answer at at the end of the break when they return to the game. And it's incredibly powerful that humans are hardwired to want to know the answer, even if they're not interested in the subject. You know, if it's a movie show or something, you might say Who was the first choice for Dirty Harry?

In terms of casting. We'll tell you after the break. And people are like, Whoa, who was the first choice? Wasn't Glend Eastwood the first choice? And they wanna know. Even if they do know, they wanna stick around for the gratification of being proved right. People have jeopardy. Yeah. And yeah, the answer to who was first choice, believe it or not, for Dirty Harry was Frank Sinatra. He he he turned down the park.

So we learned that humans are hardwired to want the answer to a question. And I think that actually that is the easiest part of of constructing a novel. Mm-hmm. Absolutely the easiest part. You imply a question, doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter how important it is, people will stick around to find out the answer. And so that really plotting in that sense is Way overestimated in terms of difficulty. Plotting is really pretty easy.

And now as a writer, do you feel like you're going on an adventure yourself kind of like Fingers are following the story or something. Yeah, I mean absolutely. Yeah. I again I try and replicate what I want is this feeling that I have as a reader. And you know this. When you when you got a really great book Oh my god.

Yeah, you're really angry if you have to put it down and you just cannot wait to get back to it. You you you know, let's say you gotta do a chore or an errand or something or go to work

and then you get back and you pick up the book and you're like, Oh, what's gonna happen next? Yeah. I need that feeling as a writer. It's incredibly strong as a reader. I remember one Christmas day I was um our daughter was working um in a cinema and she was doing the day shift on Christmas Day and therefore our Christmas was gonna start when she

finished work and got back, which was maybe I don't know, six o'clock or something. So I was reading a book uh that afternoon. It was a great book, but I was just loving it. And I was thinking um I was hoping Th there would be a big snowstorm and she couldn't get there or something like that. I was hoping that she wouldn't arrive so that I could keep on reading the book. And that is that's the power of story. And I I wanna feel that power when I'm writing it. R as well as reading it.

Well the you were talking about needing to know the answer to the question, kind of being pulled along, the other word that came to mind for me was just the feeling of being absorbed. Absorbed in another world, absorbed in a pattern of language, absorbed in characters and scenes. Absolutely immersed, I call it, and that is such a subtle thing. I mean, how do you do it? Nobody knows. No but I do. It absolutely happens or it doesn't happen.

You know, that's one of the strange things that there's all kinds of cliches, you know, f or jokes about about how to write a book. You know, people say a thriller. Just it needs just two things. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are. Ha ha ha. And that's kind of true. I was so excited for you to tell me what they were. Exactly. You know, it's a mystery. Some sometimes you uh it grabs you and sometimes it doesn't.

Is that individual to the reader? Is it general? Can you trust it for a large population as opposed to individual readers? Y I don't know. I I I think certain books appeal to different people in different ways. But yeah, either you are immediately sucked into the world and I think probably the way to do that is not try too hard. I think that is absolutely true of practically every aspect of writing. Don't try too hard.

There's a great, great quote uh by David Mammoth, a screenwriter. He was talking about actors. in this particular quote, but really it can be about book characters or anything. And he said, Essentially an actor steps onto the stage or steps onto the screen and he says, Hey, I'm the main character And the audience says, Are we gonna like you?

And the p worst possible answer is to say, Yes, you are, and I'll tell you why. That's the worst possible answer. The best possible answer, are we gonna like you? I don't know and I don't care. That is the that kind of insouciance, self-confidence is the way to do it. He was talking about that generation of

actors that had come out of the Korean War, people like Gene Hackman and Lee Marvin and people like that, they had a certain kind of self confidence. They were not needy. They were just there, take me or leave me. They weren't trying too hard. And that In a strange roundabout way, the less you worry about are they gonna like you, the more they do like you.

So help me reconcile a few things. So on one hand what I'm hearing is this sort of don't try too hard and then on the other side it's the real sense of discipline of treating your writing like a job, showing up every day. Help me Work that out. Well it is. I mean it is but writing is is a strange thing in that you have got to believe two things a hundred percent, both of them. It's not believing one fifty percent the other fifty percent.

you believe them both a hundred percent, which is mathematically impossible, but you've got to do it. You've got to believe it's artistic, it's creative, it is noble, it's part of an that great tradition that stretches back a few centuries now, writing novels. You've also got to believe it is a job that your family's income depends on, uh that you have responsibilities to publishers and retailers. Uh you gotta believe both things one hundred percent.

And so you do need structure, you do need discipline. Ultimately you have got you owe it to the reader. And that is what has been the driving force for me. I initially I I'd lost my job, I was broke, I was out of work, and initially the the implied contract was purely financial. Could I keep a roof over my head? Could I pay the bill?

And then when that turned out to be yeah, you know, happily that happened, then it became an emotional contract with the reader. The reader has loved these books, the reader has bought these books, enthused about them, talked about them, enjoyed them. So my my obligation from that point on was never to let them down. And part of that, of course, is actually showing up with the product.

Because If a reader not just me, of course, but hundreds of series writers publish a new instalment every year, if you miss one, the reader is really disappointed about that. Okay, so we're talking about how do you get your writing done. And if you're thinking about work and how you can be more productive there, well I recommend a tool called Basecamp.

Basecamp is a project management tool and it's different from the other ones, which are loud and noisy and cluttered, they're feature bloat. Basecamp says, no, no, no, no, no. We're gonna keep things simple so that you can focus on what actually matters, which is just getting the work done, you know?

Now for us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we're doing with how I write, when episodes are being recorded, where we're recording them, the publishing day, all those sorts of things in one place for our entire team to look at. And I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Fried. He came on the show and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos. He cares about great copy. He cares about telling a great story.

And him and his co-founder, they've written five books. And I can tell you that they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software. So if you're thinking about work and you're asking, hey, how can I be more productive? How can I make my team more cohesive? Well then I recommend Basecamp. All right, back to the episode.

And tell me about what goes into making a main character.'Cause you were talking about likability. Mm-hmm. And is that important to the main character? When is it good? Hey, should we like the main character? Should we hate the main character? Should we think they're funny? I don't think that you can have a character that you hate. Uh Main character that you hate or a character?

Well, obviously a character, you know, a despicable bad guy or a henchman or something like that. You can absolutely hate them. But in terms of the main character Or th the implied main character, Hannibal Lecter, for instance, would be as close as you could get to a character that you should hate, but there is something compelling about'em. Uh you can have characters that you ought to hate, but you kinda don't. Mm. Breaking bad.

Yeah, all that noir style, there's something about them that makes them likable even though you shouldn't. Uh, you absolutely can't ha uh have a character designed to be hated. Uh you absolutely equally cannot have a character that's designed to be liked, because the more you design it, the worse it gets.

You've just gotta have an honest, authentic portrayal and then you gotta hope for the best. You know, when I start I did the first Reacher book, I thought and there's a clue in what I'm gonna say. I thought I'm happy with this. I love this. You know, this is a hundred percent what I wanted it to be. Obviously, otherwise I would have done it differently. This was exactly what I wanted. But I thought, ah, nobody else is gonna like this. The guy is a

you know, a filthy, dirty barbarian. He you know, he he s shoots people in the back, he lies, he cheats, he steals, he he uh never changes his clothes. Nobody's gonna like this guy. And then I thought, well, maybe some men will like him, but women won't, or whatever. Uh but the clue is I liked him. Now I am obviously a a unique individual, just like you are, just like everybody else is, but we're not that unique. We all share quite a lot of culture together.

And so if I like him, the chances are that many, many other people will like him too. The only unknown at that point is how many exactly. You know, is it gonna be thousands? Is it gonna be hundreds of thousands? Is it gonna be millions? You don't know that yet. But if you like it A substantial uh proportion of other people will like it too. What matters let's bring together two themes. We've been talking about rhythm propulsion.

And uh I think there we've been talking about a kind of truth, right? You're saying if you don't if you plant it, it's not gonna kind of feel real. There's something about the following the roller coaster that actually makes it feel real. So bringing together the propulsion, the truth. What matters in dialogue as you're writing dialogue bringing that to life?

Yeah, I mean dialogue is the ultimate uh kind of illusion. In fact I I once I think won a uh a competition prize or, you know, won some literary prize. I think it was from it was Years ago, I think it was the Fort Worth evening telegraph or something in Texas, I I won the prize for natural dialogue. Ha ha. And the honestly written dialogue in a book there is nothing less natural than that.

Uh, it's really instructive to actually l seriously really listen to how people speak. Yeah. In a real dialogue exchange where people are talking, you know, go on the train and eavesdrop. uh the seat next to you or whatever. Listen to how people really talk. It is incoherent, it is stop start. It was it's absolutely full of placeholders, you know, mm, all this kind of stuff. It's it people

Jump from one subject to another, there are long gaps. It's utterly, utterly unlike anything you will ever see written down. In a book. It is utterly unnatural that people talk in a structured way and actually exchange information A B A B like that is absolutely never happens in real life and except you can do it in a way that makes people think it's utterly natural.

Huh. One of the greatest illusions in entertainment. Again, rhythm is important because dialogue when when you listen to people talk, they put emphasis on words. that uh vary throughout the sentence. And how do you do that on the page? In extremist you can use italics, I suppose, for the uh emphasized word. I prefer not to because otherwise you've got italics peppered over the entire page and uh random spots.

You don't really want to do that, but you've got to construct the rhythm in such a way that the emphasis is thrown onto that word as opposed to any other words. So that you go du du duh. Somehow the rhythm lands you on the important word. And that is, I think, uh it's partly an innate skill. It comes from reading a lot, it comes from listening a lot, and it comes from listening a lot how do you do that Like listen to people chat.

You listen listen to real people talk, listen to movies, listen to TV. I mean there's a lot of great dialogue. on T V, there's a lot of great dialogue in the movies. Just just immerse yourself in it. Listen, listen, listen. And you you pick it up how to do it. Man, I was on the train last night coming back from Gatwick and there was a woman sitting next to me, an Indian woman. She was with her husband. And

something had happened where she had lost a bunch of money and she was in a financial struggle and the way that she kept on emphasizing the word money. I need my money. I'd lost my money. and just the tension of it. It was just this this you talk about listening. Like there's a story there, you know. Absolutely. And you know, you've laid it out very well there that you use a little bit of repetition. I

need my money, I have lost my money. That creates it to a large extent. It puts it the repeated words kind of dissolve in the air and you got need money, lost money. The emphasis automatically ends up on those words. Yeah, you know it's funny now that you're saying it back to me, in moments of anger there's a great simplicity in language. I need my money, I lost my money. There's no room for the highfalutin whatever. It's you are in a primal state.

You are, and you also you tend to use that r that emphatic repetition um of certain words that almost then relates it to song in a way. You know, li it's like lines in in in the chorus of a song. Aga you know, let's let's venture back into prehistory. What was the first ever art form? had to be singing. You know, we already had expressive voices because of the development of syntactical language in our evolution. So obviously the first music was sung.

And singing depends on rhythm and a and repetition to a large extent. So we we revert to it when we are in a in an excessive emotion. That's a great story. I can absolutely picture that woman. I can hear what she's saying and I I know how to I would know how to write it.

beginnings, endings, what matters is you're right in the You know, one of the th beginnings and endings. Let's talk about beginnings and endings. Uh first of all, for you as a writer. When should you begin? When should you end? And um I find it very difficult to I get invited to let's say a college somewhere or or even a high school um to talk about writing and there's all these people keen on being writers. And really The only valid message to them is don't. Don't do it now. Um, waste.

Too young, read for twenty years and then do it. Because There's a lot of uh enthusiasm, a lot of talent amongst young people, but there's no content yet. They haven't lived, they haven't seen things, they don't know much. You need to know when to start and you need to know when to finish your career as well before you get worn out and boring. Th that's the macro sense. In terms of the book, where do you start and where do you finish?

you you don't start when the earth cooled. You know, that is what a lot of a lot of beginning writers get wrong. You know, they start they they give you the backstory. You know, they you've got, let's say, you

have a great line of dialogue. Your character has a great line of dialogue. They feel they need to tell us about where you grew up, where you went to school, who your parents were, what formed you, all that kind of stuff. Do not start where th when the earth cooled. Start The the the action right now

Um there's a Latin phrase in media res, meaning in the middle of things. Start in the middle of things. Don't give all the explanation yet. Just start with something intriguing and see where it goes. Um, that and where do you end it? You end it when the story's over. How do you know when the story's over? You just gotta judge that on a gut level, instinctively. One thing that does not work, I I've tried this, you know, I've done a long series and so I've had room to

uh experiment a little bit. Um We had a thing in television. See, television uh developed over the years a tremendous amount. That television used to be what you would call a series activity that you would Concentrate on TV before you did whatever w was next in your day. You know, you would y and your grandma still does it. She sits and watches her show. Right. But Most people don't do that. It develops into a parallel activity.

to show while you're on the phone to your mother, while you're cooking dinner. Yeah. In other words and we went through we had to cope with that. And so what we would do, we had this sort of shorthand way of saying it. We w we would tell you that we're gonna tell you. Then we would tell you. Then we would tell you that we told you. That sort of in order to help people who who were very distracted. And I wondered is was I doing that a little bit too much in the book?

And so I thought, I'm gonna try an experiment where I don't explain everything. I will give the information. The information will be there, hiding in plain sight, but I will not pull it together and make the conclusion. I'll leave that up to the reader. Um, that happened in w in in one book but very explicitly in another earlier book. There was quite a fascinating um minor character, quite a brave woman

whose husband was in trouble and she was brave about it and so on. And I left it completely unstated what happened to her, thinking that this character would live on in the reader's mind and the reader would would decide for themselves what had happened to her. In both cases, readers hated it. They wanted all the loose ends tied up. And they wanted as situations explained. So that you you can't live it uh

Too uh too unexplained. Br the readers want your version rather than it's not like a writing prompt. If you were college during an MFA, the professor probably gives you a writing prompt and then you tell the story. Readers don't like that. Readers want to you to do the work and tell them the story.

You were talking about writing being a second half of your life kind of thing, right? The first half is about more indexed towards collecting, reading and picking up life experiences, and then the writing comes a little bit later. How do you think that varies across genres?'Cause like intuitively I'd be like, Hey, you're you know, you're making up stories. Why do you need to know stuff? But no, no, no. Clearly I'm missing something in that in that assumption. Yeah, I think what you need to

And n nothing is ever uh all one thing or all the other thing, sure. I mean I know that i i in my genre, virtually everybody that's successful is doing it as a second phase career. Having done something prior that often does r require an audience, either they're a journalist uh or they're a lawyer

with a jury in mind or something like that and then they go on to be a writer. There have been a couple uh people that have started fresh in their in their twenties, early or mid twenties that have made a success, but it's very much the minority. Um and even though you might be inventing an entirely new genre because an old guy like me, there's all kinds of stuff, you know, vampire fiction, this, that, the other, that I have just no concept of what it's about. But

It's about something and it's about structure in in a sense. And so what you do have to have is enough r reading, I think, that you have internalized the idea that there must be a structure and what structure is. Uh people are very skeptical when I say I never make a plan, I never make an outline. Every single line is improvised on the spot, and that is absolutely true, but it is not quite as naked as it sounds.

because I've read tens of thousands of books. So in fact I have an enormous internal database of ev virtually every available plot, virtually every type of character, virtually every type of cliffhanger or structure or whatever. I've got it in there somewhere. So actually I have a monster plan and outline. Um Yeah, I've been going down the rabbit hole of

just all sorts of different creatives. And what you realize is that the bank of how much they've consumed is just so much greater than people would realize. Martin Scorsese used to watch a movie every single night. You look at someone like Ralph Lorraine, people say, Hey, you know, what was it like talking to him in the early days? He just knew every single thing about the different kinds of ties. Talking to a musician, musician

um was saying, hey, in the way that you can remember how things look, I can remember how things sound. So I can tell you how Oman sounds versus how Israel sounds versus how China sounds. And you just realize that when you're talking to great creatives, it is this process of constant consumption, but this even more, this very naturally created filing bank that somehow you're pulling from without even realizing in the process of creation.

That is very well put and very well diagnosed and that is exactly what happens that you I mean, for instance, I remember that the first uh Jack Ritchie movie with with Tom Cruise directed by Chris Macquarie. Uh Macquarie I mean man, that movie crews work hard, you know. It's twelve, fourteen hour day, maybe up at five in the morning or whatever. Work all day incredible. And then what would happen? Macquarie invites.

Everybody too is sweet, and they watch a movie. Mm because it's not that it's like a duty to top up their knowledge, it is their enthusiasm. But they end up they work all day making a movie, then they watch a movie. And that internal database gets bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more passionately analyzed. And you're absolutely right. Whoever it is, interior designer, they know this stuff because it's their life. And uh writers are like that.

We we're total consumers actually. We're not we're not predominantly a writer. We we're predominantly a reader. You know, you write one book a year, you you read hundreds. And so you're much more of a reader than a writer. So your internal supply of reference and um stimulation is um by the time you get to z halfway through your life

Making it feel real, the purpose of it, what matters with violence. Uh I think making it feel real is again, it's a bit of an illusion, a bit like dialogue, in as much as most violence in in the real world is over really quickly. Um and most violence has got very bad medium term effects. I mean the thing that you see in the movies where or in a regular story where

uh, you know, somebody is hit hard and they stagger back and then they come back at you and swing at you and back and forth, back and forth. That does not happen in real life. If you get hit in the head, you are sick and dizzy for a week. You know, you're just out of action. Yeah. I'm also if you watch the average bar fight it's just so lame. It is. It's just swiping and brawling. There's no technique to it. So again, violence is something that is noth nowhere near realistic.

Um and why do we it's a really interesting question. Why do we want it in in a story? Why do we like it? And uh The answer to that I think is i it's paradoxical because generally speaking, out of the population as a whole, people who read books are the most thoughtful probably, the most educated, the most uh, in some way what you would call not virtuous, but, you know, they're on on one side of the divide. Why do they want violence in the book? And I think it is because they know

that in a civilized society you shouldn't have it. You should have law. You should have due process. You should have rights for the accused. Th people know that. As that's the price of civilization. That's how we organise ourselves. They they get that. They understand it. They approve of it. They would not like to see the real world any different. But man, is it frustrating if somebody has n stolen your car? You just wanna smash him in the face. Oh right.

Yeah, you know, so that the real world that they're committed to, that they feel like they they need to have and support in in a good, solid, liberal way. And I don't mean liberal uh politically necessarily Yeah, I just mean in terms of modern civilization. They know that we need these rules and safeguards, but it is terribly frustrating and so They love the consolation of being in a fictional universe, they know it's fictional, but they love to see it happen as a release, as a consolation.

So then as you're writing violence and we're talking about the illusion and bringing that to life. What matters there? And do you feel like it's the same sort of thing we're pulling from a reference bank of violent stories that you've read. Yeah, largely and and also lived, you know, uh'cause I I grew up in a in a very it was a manuf a huge manufacturing city and it was very uh inarticulate emotionally. Um everything was every dispute was about a fight.

And numerous little triggers constantly. Um you know, I was a smart kid. I did well in school, and that was. uh a trigger, you know, people hate you. They think you're above yourself. You think they think you're a class traitor if you're doing well. So I'm experienced at it and I'm good at it. So i in a way it was kind of remembering the ballet moves, as it were, for that. But mainly it's about tuning into um

people's secret hidden desires. And I I when I did book bookstore events or public events, I I I used to have a line. I said, the re the reason why you like Reacher is that even though you are like good citizens, you are civilized people, you are all of the good things, even though you all have a list of ten people you would cheerfully shoot in the head. Ha ha ha.

And they do, you know, and they see it happen on the page. And it is a release. It is uh it is getting the satisfaction without actually see without actually having it in real life.

Clothing. Clothing is your writing. How how does clothing inform character? I think it is a symbol. You know, it's a very quick way of of describing a type of person. Um, that you we all have a kind of internal comparative database of uh you know, if you see an old an old, old guy with a long grey ponytail and uh double denim, you kinda know who that person is. Yeah. Uh you see a guy wearing um

you know, lace up Oxfords and and pleated chinos or something like that. You know who that guy is. And they they are Quick references, I think. Like teeth as well. I I once had a fan who was a dental hygienist and she would write in about every reference to the appearance of people's teeth in books. And I found that fascinating'cause I realized I was doing that instinctively. Again, kind of trying to sum up a character through a quick visual reference.

Uh you know, a snaggle toothed person, a person with missing teeth, a person with wolf like teeth or something like that. Um, she was obviously a professional and very interested in it and was picking up on everything. And I wasn't really realizing I was doing it. It was a shorthand way of describing people.

All right. We're uh you're invited to a university, you're given a semester to teach a class on writing, a seminar on writing. How do you structure the curriculum? What are the core things that you're trying to tell people? Uh I would turn down that gig. I absolutely would. I don't think I'm I I don't think I'm a good as as a teacher. I'm pretty sure that writing is not teachable. Uh I think plenty of shortcuts within the business of writing are totally teachable.

You know, how to get a good agent, what pitfalls to avoid, how to relate to a publisher, how to do this or that. I think absolutely that can be taught based on experience of what has worked and what hasn't. But actually how to write, I'm not sure Uh can be taught. When you say not teachable, does that also mean not learnable? Or can something be yes, you can learn how to do it, but that doesn't mean that it can be tough.

I I think you absolutely can learn to do it and I would I would allow possibly the the possibility that something that might take you ten years of of reading before you figure it out for yourself could be explained a little faster. But that's probably a rare occurrence. It's and it's probably only very partial. I don't think you could take

A completely untutored person. Yeah, let's say you've got an intelligent person who is capable at lots of different things. I don't think y there's any any process by which you could turn that person into an accomplished novelist. You either are or you're not. It's again a bit like being a musician. You y you've either got those pathways in your brain or you don't. Right. I've got musician friends, in fact I made a C D with

couple of um musician friends. They did the music, I did the lyrics. Oh, cool. Totally cool. Just the best fun ever. And hanging out with them You know, structurally, biologically our brains are all the same, obviously. But it's almost like they're a little tube. that in my brain, some of them are are big and fat and and can let things through. In in others are are collapsed, you know, like flat tires that nothing will get through.

And their brains are different. They've got different tubes open and different tubes closed. And it just if you are a musician, you are, and if you're not, you never will be. Hm. Last question. You're English. Why has so much good writing come from Scotland, from England, from Ireland? What is it about this part of the world? I think uh

I think it's a different answers for each of those different countries. Um I think Scotland is I mean, England is the centre of the UK and all the power lies exactly where we are right now in London. And I think Scottish people feel neglected and resentful of that and so they build up a An alternative culture that's theirs. I think in Ireland it's very clear in Ireland, I love Ireland for this reason, that if you go there

uh they they give you a chance. Whoever you are, even you're not a writer, you're just some guy. You you're in the pub. with a bunch of friends, you start to tell a joke or you start to tell a story or whatever, they will give you a chance. Maybe it's only five seconds, maybe it's only ten seconds, but you've got the stage to state your case. and they will listen to you. And I think that's huge. Uh people grow up feeling that

They will be heard. Not for long if they're crap, but they will give you the chance to be heard. I think that's huge. You know, there reminds me of a a bunch of Irish friends. Bunch of Irish friends. I was trying to think about how were they different from my American friends? And the way that they're the same is that, you know, they're pretty career oriented. But the way that they're different is all of them to a T.

They know how to tell a joke, they know how to tell a story. Exactly. And one of the things I noticed that when when I was in Ireland is like if you could go to the pub And you can tell a good story and you can keep people engaged. You can make people laugh. You can You can just hook'em in and keep'em there. You're part of the squad. Right, you are and you get that you you get to be that because they give you the chance.

If you seize it, then you have the space, you have the table, you you know, you have the platform. And um and I think that encourages and b certainly emboldens people. It encourages them and they think, Yeah, I can do this. Well, you are uh welcome on how I write anytime. This was so fun. It was great to meet you. Good to meet you too and thank you very much for the uh opportunity.