Harlan Coben: It's Never Too Late to Start Your Creative Life

About this episode

Harlan Coben spent decades insisting his novels had nothing to do with his life. Then he went looking, and found his life inside every single one of them. With over 100 million books sold in forty-six languages and a run of number one Netflix hits including Fool Me Once, Missing You and I Will Find You, Harlan Coben is one of the most widely read storytellers on the planet. His new book, Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft, is both a memoir and a writing guide, because he can no longer separate the two. He is also, at this point, one of the most credible voices arguing that the creative work you keep postponing does not require a bigger life than the one you already have. In this conversation, you'll explore: • The two-word question he has been asking since he was a kid, and how it turned a boring family hike into a global hit • Why he wrote three complete novels that nobody published, and flatly refuses to count them as failures • What incremental ambition means in practice, and the modest first goal he set that most writers today would be embarrassed to admit to • The two things fear does to people who want to make something, and the daily choice that decides