Michael Connelly is a crime novelist who's famous for series like Harry Bosch and The Lincoln Lawyer.
And combined, his series have sold more than 100 million books.
But then also they've become TV shows on Netflix, on MGM and Amazon Prime, where he's not just writing but he's the executive producer.
His fingerprints are all over the work.
So I want to ask him about it.
How do you dream up vivid characters?
How do you write about a city, a town, or a place?
And if you're somebody, you want to write, you want to come up with stories, you want to imagine worlds and put them onto the page.
Well, you're in the right place.
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All right, back to the episode.
I want to hear about detail.
What do you focus on when it comes to details, bringing stories to life?
And what is it that writers get wrong?
I spend a lot of time with the kind of people I write about, whether they're detectives or lawyers, judges and so forth.
And, um, I never take out a notebook.
I don't want anyone to kind of be frozen by seeing me writing down something they said or did.
So it's really, uh, you know, observation.
And I, I just try to watch for, um, what I call telling details and they can be verbal.
They can be in a story, someone talking about what they do, or very specifically about a case, uh uh, an experience they had.
Um, but it can also just be something I observe about them physically or in their workplace, um, in their car even.
Um, you just look for um these details that, if you can get it, it uh, you know it opens up a window um of imagination for your, for your viewer.
I mean, it does for you as well as the writer, but you're, I'm always conscious of uh uh, what's the reader um going through.
How is their imagination turning?
And it turns on details.
And so you always got to be available for that.
Your second part, what do writers get wrong?
Well, everybody's unique.
But I know as a writer and reader, I don't like to be hit with too much detail over details.
I think in writing and reading uh, a key thing, maybe the key thing is momentum.
You know no, and a lot of details create speed bumps, so it sounds like what you're going for is the fewest things that create the most vivid picture and keep the momentum going.
Yeah yeah, and that's what i mean by telling detail.
Instead of five details, you pick the one that says something about the situation, the character know i i often tell this story.
I was one time sitting in front of a detective at his desk, and i had been at crime scenes with him and knew that um, at each crime scene, he would take his glasses off and hook the earpiece in his mouth as he was observing um, you know, the victim of violence.
And uh, when I was sitting at his desk, I saw that he had a groove in the plastic of his earpiece from and I realized his teeth are clenched when he does has those moments.
And that was kind of like all I needed to say about this guy.
To convey, you know, I took it and put it into fiction and it said a lot about the character with just one little moment like that or one little piece of detail description.
Yeah.
As you're, as you're writing detail and you're working through drafts, do you feel like those details are something that come out in the editing process and the rewriting, the rewriting?
Okay.
Okay.
Finally, like draft four, draft five, I found the detail.
Or do you feel like, Hey, you've seen it.
You're thinking of the story.
Actually, those telling details are pretty clear for you.
I think it's latter.
Um, uh, I mean, it comes later.
Uh, it's in rewriting.
Rewriting is, uh, a real key thing for me.
And, uh, And it goes both ways.
I take details out when I rewrite and I kind of strip it down to what is needed to maintain momentum.
But that is also the process where I think better of it.
I think this is a better detail, or I expand the detail, or it just comes to me because now I have a full story and I'm like emerged into a full story and I might know something that happens in a hundred pages that right now i could set up with a detail.
And how does that work?
Is it like okay, i got draft on the left side of my screen, i'm going to rewrite it.
Draft two is it like i'm going paragraph by paragraph?
How does that rewrite happen?
Well there's, i have two.
One is built in.
So i start every morning by rewriting what i did the day before.
Oh wow, and you know.
So that can be anywhere from three pages to ten, or depending on what kind of day i had the day before.
And you know, I write on a laptop.
It's a digital world.
But I really like to feel a paper.
I've never read an e-book.
I read books that I hold in my hand.
And I kind of rewrite that way.
So I print out what I do, what I've written the day before.
I'll print it out and I'll mark it up with a pencil.
And then I put those changes into the digital form.
And then I do a larger version.
A version of that.
When I get to the end of a book, I print the whole thing out, go through it, reading it in paper and marking it up.
And I go all the way through before I go back in and start taking the markings and suggestions and all that stuff.
And, you know, I have a whole shorthand of ways of leaving notes in margins and stuff like that.
Like a little personal code language?
Yeah, like RW means like rewrite this whole paragraph.
NSG means not so good.
You know which I got from sadly, from my mother once who was reading one of my manuscripts.
And I saw these NSGs and I go, well, what's that?
Thanks, mom.
And it's like, yeah, yeah.
But she was a good critic.
You know, she read a lot.
And loved reading mysteries.
So she was a good one to say, like, oh, this is the guy who did it.
Right.
And that kind of thing.
But, yeah, she I took some of her shorthand into what I do as well.
Now, tell me about truth.
Right.
Because at least at the surface, very crude reading, you're like, OK, right.
Fiction.
Fiction is the opposite of truth.
But no, it seems like in your. when you're writing, you're really trying to get the details right.
Hey, does this work well?
Is that the right way to describe this scene?
So as you're writing and you get it down on page and my sense is you're not doing a lot of research there.
And then towards the end, it's like, okay, let's make sure that this works.
So how does that work in terms of your own kind of validation process on your own?
And then sometimes talking to other people to say, hey, hey, hey, did I get these details right?
Yeah, I mean, there's two things.
One is I was a journalist for a long time before I, uh, started, started doing this.
Um, I covered courts and I covered crime for about 14 years.
So it gives me a kind of a rudimentary knowledge of how this is done.
That allows me to write and not spend a lot of time researching.
And so like, I always want to be writing.
Um, And I have a cadre of people that help me with my books, you know, ranging from detectives to lawyers and judges.
And I can shoot them texts and emails, phone calls while I'm writing, depending on the urgency of when I needed the information.
I also have a researcher who's basically an internet researcher.
I mean, I could go on Google and get this and get that, but I would rather be writing, And so I'll shoot him a message.
And he's worked for me long enough that he knows I'm not looking for a page after page after page of something.
I'm looking for a concise answer to my question that I can digest quickly and then incorporate into what I'm writing.
So it's really about maintaining momentum, always be writing.
You know, I you got to eat.
And so a lot of times I will meet people for breakfast, because I'm not going to be writing while I eat.
So I might as well meet someone who can help me or answer a question.
And so, yeah, so the process is all kind of organized so that I can be writing.
Okay.
So you're saying always be writing.
So like what's any given Tuesday?
Like, I don't know, what'd you do today?
Did you write today?
Is it, how do you structure your life in order to get writing done?
Well, I find that, um, the safest time is mornings.
That's where you're going to get less interruptions.
Um, so I like to be writing before it's light out.
Um, and I did that today.
Um, I'm very lucky in that my work has inspired television and so forth.
I live in Los Angeles, so I'm close to these productions.
I'm not like somebody who has to watch over my stuff.
But there is a good purpose to being there from time to time, even if it's just to be a cheerleader.
This on the TV sets, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
So I try to write um for a minimum of like 6 to 11 every morning and then i might go off in the afternoon to a set, to an interview um, but if i can get like 6 to 11 in, i'm pretty happy.
I saw somewhere they said uh, realtors talk about location location location, and for me it's a character character, character.
Why is character so important?
I think that's what people read books for.
You know, everything's important, but, you know, but everything seems to be in service of character.
Your plot, you know where you set the story, all really important stuff.
But I think they're really about character.
And so that's always front of mind.
You gotta always be thinking.
You know about how you're how and what you're delivering to this character, you know, to the reader.
You were talking in the last question about details and I really didn't answer.
But the answer is character.
You know, I write books about a person, a character at the center of a book who does not exist.
And so I just adopted this philosophy that if the best way to sell this character that doesn't exist to a reader who's going to be a smart reader is to plant that character's feet in as real a world as possible,
So I endeavor to get the details right the details of the job, the details of the geography, the details of the weather, the details of the history.
My books are very contemporary.
Yeah.
And so I'm constantly picking stuff up out of the the real world that's that has happened or is happening to uh put into my books and see how my characters react to it.
What do you like so much about writing about LA?
Uh, that it's never stops giving.
I mean, it's such a big place.
It's such a, uh, quickly evolving society that there's always something new.
Um, I'm up to like 42 books now, and in each book I start out with the goal of ending up in a neighborhood.
I've never been in fiction-wise, you know, in a book.
I want to take my readers to someplace new in LA and it's become pretty clear to me I'll never cover the city.
You know, it's too big, it's too sprawling, it's too different.
I mean I've now been published over almost 35 years and places I wrote about in the early 90s are gone and they're different.
And I can go back to these places and kind of categorize that change.
So there's a lot on the palette here to draw from.
And, of course, it's a lot of fun to draw from it.
I sometimes feel like I have an unfair advantage to other writers because I write about L.A.
Well, also, when it comes to, do you know the work of Jeff Mana?
So Jeff Mana, he wrote I think it was a book called The Burglar's Crime, A Burglar's Guide to the City.
And he talks about crime in L.A. and how it's distinct, how it's different.
So I was thinking about this, you know, prepping for this interview.
Like, what are the things that make L.A. distinct?
You know, you got the hills.
And then you have a lot of flat space.
I mean, even more, you got the highways.
It's a city that I was probably patrolled by air more than any other city.
When I think of crime in L.A., I think of car chases.
You know, you got the big car chases with the helicopters.
Then you got the tunnel, you got the L.A.
River in all the movies and just like the vibe of sort of this, like retro kind of concrete of the LA.
River.
Yeah.
What is it about L.A.?
How is crime here different from other cities?
I think it starts with the uniqueness of the places you just have, um, mentioned.
It's got all this stuff.
It's got mountains, deserts, uh, ocean.
Um it, the variety is pretty amazing, and it's also um a segregated city, segregated by freeway, segregated by a mountain chain that goes right through the middle of it.
Um, and it's also a place, by virtue of being um the entertainment center of possibly the world, but a major entertainment center, it kind of wears its heart on its sleeve.
There's so many people that come here from some other place.
I did myself.
That come here because wherever they were at, it wasn't working for them.
And this is the city of second chances, but not all second chances pay off.
And so the haves and the have-nots and the difference between them, I think, are more noticeable in this city than say, Pittsburgh or something.
And that creates a sometimes palpable friction.
And that's what you're looking for when you're writing crime fiction.
Yeah, I went back.
And there's a Little Sisters by Raymond Chandler.
And I know that that book inspired you.
So I just read, I think it's your favorite chapter, chapter 13.
And this stuck out to me about L.A.
No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf, no smell, none of the harsh, wild smell of the sea.
A California ocean.
California, the department store state, the most of everything and the best of nothing.
Yeah, I mean, that's why I read that.
That's like me raising the flag.
I read that chapter uh, when i start a book, just because uh in it's a pretty short chapter and um, it's like five pages and it has nothing to do a plot.
It's just like uh chandler, through his guy marlo, decides to take a break and drive around the city and describe it in very uh sardonic, cynical terms.
Um, but I'm not sure.
I don't know if it's on there, but I think that book was published in 1939 and some of those descriptions are right on right now.
And you know to pull that off, you know the department store state to pull something like that off and to read it now and know that's accurate then and as it is now.
You know that to me is the definition of art.
And that's what people like me aspire to.
And that's why I read that before I started writing a book.
Well, you can see the details you're talking about, right?
And I pulled another quote.
Malibu, more movie stars, more pink and blue bathtubs, more tufted beds, more Chanel No.
5 more Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs, more windblown hair and sunglasses and attitudes and pseudo-refined voices and waterfront morals.
By the way, waterfront morals is like killer a killer line, but it's just like boom boom, boom.
It's these details that yeah, paint a picture of the scene, capture the essence of a place, and and what does it tell you this?
The guy telling you that story it's about him, it's.
It's it that is so much about character, because it's his view of a place that he can't aspire to.
You know that he can't afford that, he can't touch and he's an outsider looking in.
It says so much about character, And so that is the perfect example of how the telling details can reveal character.
For you, as you're writing, you have different characters that you're working with.
Do you feel like you can actually see?
It's like putting on different lenses over your eyes.
Do you feel like you see L.A. differently through different characters?
Yeah, especially, uh, I mean, some are similar.
Um, but you know, I have the lens.
That is like a female's view of the city and uh, you know, a male dominated uh, bureaucracy.
I have the wisdom view through Harry Bosch is now in his seventies.
Um, and then I, I the my true outsider, I believe, is Mickey Hall or the Lincoln lawyer because uh, He's not a guy with a badge and a gun and the defense attorney is kind of traditionally seen as an outsider, a guy who's looking at the standards, the power and might of the state and figuring out how can he find the cracks in that and work them bigger, wider.
Okay, so we're talking about how do you get your writing done.
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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.
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Well, then I recommend Basecamp.
All right.
Back to the episode.
If you have these different characters, it seems like then you're developing different voices.
How does that work?
It's a lot of things.
And some of it is diction.
I mean, I think dialogue is the most important part of character.
And by that, you mean two people going back and forth, having conversations.
Yes, or not.
I mean, just how a character speaks and how much they speak says a lot about them.
I mean, by design, you know, my original character is Harry Bosch.
I've been writing about him since 1992.
Well, publishing him since 92.
Writing about him much longer.
But you know, I wanted him to be a a guy who felt like an outsider, even though he had a badge and a gun and basically was symbolizing the power and might of the state.
I didn't want him to feel comfortable about it.
And I think that came out some in his dialogue, and it also came out in how he didn't use dialogue.
He's a guy who nods a lot.
He's a real economy of words, guy.
Uh to the point that I used to have a uh editor who, on the uh margin this is early on when we actually edited on paper would just keep a running count of how many times he nods in a book.
And it was like.
You know he's nodded 540 times and we're only on page 200.
You know that kind of thing.
Um, but I, but that was a, that's a character thing.
I didn't want him to say yes or no.
I just wanted him to nod.
Um, But there's just little.
I don't know if you want to call them tricks, but there's little things you do that I think can give a character, a distinct feel for the reader.
And how do you tactically relate to these characters?
Is it like a felt sense you have?
Or, like you know, you have a little like a different room in your house where 360 it's like a map room, but for character and all their little tricks and quirks and stuff like that.
No, because that would that would like indicate that I thought I had longevity.
And I think the writers who feel like they're going to be able to do this for their whole life are rare.
You know, if I knew what I knew 30 years ago, I would have started keeping journals that had all this information.
But I keep nothing.
I never have.
And, you know, I do.
I've only had two copy editors over my entire career.
And they have a Bible, so they've been able to catch me on a lot of stuff that I don't get correct from book to book.
Usually it's 10 books ago I said this, and it doesn't match with what I'm saying presently.
But I don't really worry about that because, again, it comes back to momentum.
My eyes are focused on the screen of my laptop and the words I'm writing.
And I don't want to look away to look at an outline or to look at a journal that said this person had green eyes back then.
I just don't want to take my eyes off the screen.
I just want to be writing and moving a story forward.
Tell me about conflict.
How does conflict let character unfold, let the story keep that momentum?
Well, I would say one of the best pieces of advice I ever received read I didn't get this personally obviously came from Kurt Vonnegut, whose books I loved.
And then he was asked once in an interview, what's the best piece of advice you can give a writer?
And he said make sure, on every page, every character wants something, even if it's only a glass of water.
And that to me is the distilled essence of writing.
And that's conflict.
It's what you want.
And, you know, and so I, I often do that.
I look at a page and say that, do I have, do I have Kurt's advice covered here?
Does everybody want something?
And, and it's really important, you know, to have that.
And I was more religious about it in the early days.
You know I, you know I had Bosch as a smoker and it's a society where you're you're not supposed to smoke so, like he always wanted a cigarette but he couldn't have one, that was my little way of making sure there was conflict on every page.
Um, you know, and uh, and again, that shows something about character that a in the first place he is a smoker and uh, it shows that he's kind of stepped outside of um traditional or standard society and he's looking in um, So there's all kinds of ways that you can use conflict uh, to deliver character.
And I'm lucky that in a crime novel, there's building conflict.
You know, I have to find a murderer.
I have to get uh, my client and not guilty, you know.
So you have these big things um and you, you build in all kinds of layers of small ones.
And uh, bureaucracy is a huge one because you're also looking for conflicts that your reader can relate to.
You know, most of my readers probably 999 have never solved the murder, but they're reading a book about a guy trying to solve a murder.
So you got to connect with them with stuff they do know.
And that's, you know, the bureaucrats that don't help Harry Bosch because they just don't have to, that kind of stuff.
Like you put in stuff, traffic, the traffic I dealt with today.
You put in stuff that everybody can relate to while you're delivering the big conflict, which is something they probably have no idea about.
Wait, so traffic.
Okay.
That's an interesting one.
Let's just follow that thread.
So you write about traffic.
So how do you bring something like that to life?
Because I could see, okay, you write about traffic.
There's not that much that goes on, right?
You're sitting there.
You're in a Volkswagen.
There's a car next to your Mercedes.
You're stopping and starting like you kind of know what to expect.
So then what are you doing in order to take traffic and bring it to life?
Well, it's like, what's your guy doing in the car while he's not moving?
Because this is LA, you know?
Yeah.
Or what does he do to avoid it?
I mean it gets a little bit like that Saturday night live skit where they make fun of how Los Angeles people like say, just take this and do that.
You know, everyone has directions they want to share with you.
But, and then you know, I was late to this interview and I had to call and say I actually have my GPS on when I'd be arriving.
So it's an important part of life out here.
So it's got to go in books and and you got to find ways to use it.
My main character, Harry Bosch, lives in the hills and has a view of the 101 freeway.
There probably hasn't been a book I've written about him where he doesn't go out on his back deck and we find out what the traffic report is the ribbon of lights not moving, that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
How does place become a character?
Even just reading what people have written about your work, they're like man.
The city of Los Angeles is a character.
It's not just like the stage that the game is being played on, it is a character in the book itself.
Well, you can use it.
You know you want your characters be moving forward and backward in time.
You know remembering things uh, delivering how they came to be, who they are and where they are, and you can do that a lot with um geography.
You know, um again, I hate calling it a trick, but it's a trick.
I guess you know, like Harry Bosch will go into a neighborhood or will go into a restaurant, and then that will kick off a memory of when he was there with his mother or when he was there with his wife.
And, and so it's a way of using geography again to deliver character.
I mean, you started this conversation with the character question and really all questions lead back to that.
And so that, That's how I view it.
Like.
What can the city of LA, the physical city of LA, do to help me deliver who Mickey Haller is or Harry Bosch is?
And it was Richard Price who said every murder mystery is the tale of a city, something like that.
So how does the city show particularly in murders?
What?
Richard Price, his thing is up there with Kurt Vonnegut.
He said someone was baiting him because he's a fantastic writer.
And I guess someone interviewing him thought he should have, instead of writing crime fiction, should have been writing the great American novel or something.
And they said, why do you write?
They didn't say this part.
But the question really was why are you wasting your talent on a murder story?
And his answer was, when you circle around a murder long enough, you get to know a city.
That's precious.
And that's true.
And that's probably why I write murder mysteries.
And it's Harry Bosch who actually added that part about every murder is the tale of a city.
But it's true.
A murder is basically a framework for you to investigate something in society.
And so you can tell a lot of stories about a city through an investigation of a murder because by the kind of crime it is, by the kind of detectives that work on it, they can go anywhere.
They have license to go anywhere in society.
It goes back to Chandler and some of the essays he wrote about writing detective stories, that that the detective, by virtue of their position in society, can pierce all veils of society.
And that to me is like an invitation I couldn't turn down.
I love that idea about writing crime fiction because you can take your character anywhere.
Sometimes when I think of stories, I imagine...
And I want to know if you're like, yeah, I agree with that.
Or you're like, no, that's nonsense.
But I almost imagine that sometimes all you need to tell a good story is like you show up, you match a beautiful building right.
You're in Barcelona, kind of a Art Nouveau door.
And you see the door, you're like, oh, that looks interesting.
Then you open the door and you enter this sort of big hallway and you go, wow.
And it's like, that's all you need to write the story.
It's almost once you enter, the rest of the story can kind of unfold.
And so I'm wondering with you What is the thing that you need in order for the story to get momentum, in order for you to get propulsion, so that you can enter the tale and find that momentum?
I need an idea I want to explore.
You know, I just had a book come out that is a legal thriller, but it's about AI.
It's a technology a lot of people don't understand.
A lot of people are afraid of.
A lot of people think it will change the world for the better.
So it's a debatable thing that's happening to all of society.
And so to me, that was the ignition point for that book.
I wanted to fashion a story that would essentially put AI on trial.
And you'd hear all sides of people, quote unquote, testifying in a court case.
But what they're really talking about is where are we in society today with this new technology that has the power to both change things brilliantly for the better and also to bring things down?
Um, you know, that's a big picture idea, but I wanted to just compress it into a square, a courtroom, and and use that courtroom uh, You know, is the framework to to look into this and ask questions, not not be didactic.
I don't think the book tells anyone what to think or what to do, but it does ask questions.
And that was the starting point and ending point for that story.
How would you break down the different perspectives beyond the the sort of cliche of it's going to save the world?
And it's the we're going to doom.
Well, I did some research, or I should say I had my researchers give me stuff.
And that's what's wonderful about a courtroom thriller, because you just bring in witnesses and then you have other witnesses that counter that.
So you can get every point of view that you're interested in delivering to a reader into a trial.
The big task with a courtroom thriller is, is they all lead to one or two answers.
It's either guilty, not guilty type of thing.
And so it's.
It becomes uh repetitive, and and you got to keep thinking of ways.
How can I do this differently?
Because every trial ends thumbs up or thumbs down.
And, uh, I don't like being hemmed in like that.
You know, when I write a book about a homicide investigation with detectives, I can go in many different directions.
But when you apply what you're doing to illegal thrillers, you can get shoehorned in and it's not comfortable.
Yeah.
With Harry Bosch, he's into jazz.
Are you into jazz?
Yeah, I am now.
It wasn't that way before.
All along it was uh, a decision i made uh again, i was trying to do whatever i could to make him feel like an outsider.
I i came to wanting to write these books from raymond chandler and guys who wrote about um, private eyes, and what was intoxicating about those books, especially when i read them as a teenager, was they were about outsiders looking in and usually cynically at society, which is perfect for a teenage boy.
But then I became a journalist and I had access to police departments.
I talked to 100 real detectives a week.
I walked into police stations and I had a press pass where they had to let me in.
So I knew instinctively I got to use this.
This is what I know, and I'm going to use this when I write my first novel.
But I couldn't leave that Raymond Chandler stuff behind.
So I did wherever I could.
I tried to make Harry Bosch feel like a guy who didn't belong, who felt that he was an outsider, even though he had an insider's job.
And so I kind of went from there.
So what's in a name?
I mean, we can get to Harry Bosch and the name itself, but how do you think about naming characters?
What's important?
What makes a name kind of feel right?
Good question.
I mean you start with this idea that your primary purpose, almost your sole purpose, is deliver character to your reader.
So never miss a chance to say something about character.
Have everybody on every page.
Want something that says something about character.
So don't like just slough off the name, you know, um, think about it.
Um, names as metaphors are great, especially if it's a metaphor that matches what you're trying to do.
And uh, I mentioned uh Chandler, one of Chandler's essays where he said the detective has to pierce all levels of society.
So when I was writing my first published novel, the Harry Bosch novel in the first draft his name was Pierce
No first name, just Pierce.
And then I can't even remember why this happened, but something happened that reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch, the 15th century painter, who I had studied in college uh, not by my choice.
I took a humanities class and the teacher, the professor was fascinated by Bosch.
So therefore we studied Bosch for about a month.
And uh, and this was pre-internet, where it's very easy to find his work and uh, and study it if you want.
Um, but it was, he was very obscure when I studied him.
I'd never heard of him.
Um, until I took that class, and I never heard anyone mention him afterwards.
And so I was going along all right with the name Pierce, and that was a good call.
I mean, a good name, I think it would have some deeper meaning.
But something reminded me about Bosch, Hieronymus Bosch, and I decided to use that name.
I knew it would be intriguing.
It wasn't like you could just type that name into the internet.
That book came out in 1992.
And so I knew people would either have known the painter and gotten the admittedly strained metaphor I was going for.
And that is that Bosch's most famous painting is called The Garden of Earthly Delights.
And I was kind of going for the metaphor that L.A. was the modern-day Garden of Earthly Delights.
And so I knew some people might get that.
And then there'd be people that wouldn't get it and they'd be intrigued about where does that name come from?
And so I thought it was, quote-unquote, a win-win situation in terms of a character name.
Well, my parents live in Denbos, where he's from, so I spent a lot of time thinking about that painting in particular.
And all over the city there's like the little characters around And it's funny because when you first look at that painting you're like okay, this is very strange.
And then this is the way I feel about a lot of paintings at that time.
There's kind of a spookiness there, almost like ah, get away from me with a lot of medieval paintings.
But then if you keep looking, I think you can only really understand medieval art.
Once you start laughing because it was very imaginative and it then gets very goofy.
And that's the thing that, as I spent more time with that painting, I discovered is how funny it can be at times.
I mean, that's why we studied it for a month.
I wrote a painter, but it was mostly spent on that, that paintings.
Yeah.
The paintings in Madrid at the Prado.
And once I was over there on a book tour and my publishers arranged for me to go into the Prado, I was closed and spend an hour in front of that painting.
I by myself, except for a, you know museum guard was there, but that was pretty amazing experience.
Is it big?
No, it's not as big as you think it would be.
Um, in fact the uh.
It's a pretty amazing accomplishment.
All the little details, because they are small.
Yeah, I went to go see Monica Peace in Brussels.
And we had driven down from Holland down to Brussels.
I don't know.
I was probably 11 years old.
It's like, we're going to go see Monica Peace, this famous statue.
And I was like, oh, my goodness.
You know, we're driving a few hours.
And the statue was no bigger than my torso.
And I remember just being like, what?
I felt like I'd been scammed.
Well, David's a pretty big statue.
So I don't know if your parents have asked you the question, why is he called Harry?
Because when I've gone to Holland on book tour, the question I get from every single reporter is why do you call him Harry, short for Hieronymus?
And they always point out that that's the Greek, or I'm sorry, the Latin name. root of the name jerome and so he should be called jerry oh really my mistake wow um dialogue dialogue dialogue it's fake but it's real it's real but it's fake i mean you're you know it's so core to what a story is but also a dialogue dialogue in a book is so different from the dialogue that you'd hear at dunkin donuts or starbucks right it's it's it's it's more dense and And we're talking about making something feel real, right?
So how do you make dialogue feel real when the essence of it is that it's fake?
Well, I think one thing you do is almost as soon as you write it, you go back and cut it in half.
You shorten it.
I mean, I think that's one of your first questions is what do writers do wrong?
I think they create dialogue that doesn't sound real.
I was lucky.
I worked for newspapers before they pretty much migrated to online.
And so when I was working for newspapers, I had a finite amount of space to tell a story, especially crime stories, which usually were second tier, unless it was a huge crime.
But for the most part, they'd be saying, like, give me six inches on that.
And so I learned that have an ear for dialogue and for dialogue that carried information, no fluff, because I didn't have the space.
And so if I quoted like a police detective, the quote had to have information that I felt the reader needed and that wasn't repeated in the body of the story.
And that was, you know, my practice for 14 years.
And so I couldn't help but bring that into.
You know what I do as a, as a book writer.
Now, of course, I can write as much as I want, you know 400 pages, 100000 words.
And I don't have that kind of constriction, but I carry that with me anyway.
And so I just try to make dialogue carry meaning, carry carry information to to the reader.
Now, when I think of dialogue, the word that then comes to mind is conflict.
And obviously, we've been talking about conflict with the cigarette, right?
Man, I want a cigarette.
Should we have cigarettes?
There's a sense of almost internal conflict there.
But how about conflict between people?
That's a different kind of conflict.
So how is that the same?
How is it different?
Well, I think it's mostly different.
But it's also a fun thing to build conflict between two people in dialogue without them talking about their conflict.
I mean, you can always have the conflict that's obvious.
But you know, and again, that really you really have to trust your reader that they can, that they're going to pick up subtle nuances of dialogue.
And, you know, and sometimes that becomes a battle of editors and so forth.
The editors generally want things to be more obvious.
Yeah.
OK.
Or, you know, I get the things in the margins. about wanting more to explain what's going on here.
But I eminently trust my readers to pick up on the nuances of conflict, especially in dialogue.
And so I love doing conversations that are on face or about this, but they're really about that.
And it's really about the conflict these two people are having.
Okay, break that down for me.
Take it from your own life.
I mean, it's like in your own relationships, this happens all the time.
And in your own relationship you have the added thing of tone, which you don't get on a piece of paper.
Sure.
But you can infer that kind of stuff.
And like I was writing a scene this morning that was about someone telling Harry Bosch he should cool his jets, that he should at his age and he's fresh from getting a new knee like I'm really playing into his real age, which is in the 70s.
They're trying to tell him to slow down, but they're telling him the opposite.
They're acting excited about it, but they drop in a few words here and there that show their concern.
Yeah, as you were saying, that I was thinking about, during the holidays, every year There's there's there's conflict that shows up in conversations and it's people talking about the stuff going on in their family.
Yeah.
And I don't know why this year felt like there was a lot of conflict in different friends lives.
So you know I had a lot of conversations and you know you talk to someone about oh, we have this this, this drama about the coffee machine.
Hey, we got this drama about locking the front door.
We got this drama about, hey, you didn't clean up the front seat of the car when you left.
And it's like a whole thing.
And actually the deeper thing that's going on is about.
It almost comes back to this question of like do you love me?
Am I loved?
And the smallest things just had these cosmic scale of importance to people, because the thing that people were actually bitching about really came down to I feel like you don't love me or I feel like you ignore me, or something like that.
I was watching the Olympics last night and there was a Geico ad that was set in a family get together.
And they're looking at like a scrapbook and the guy says, look how young you look back then.
And it's like, that's conflict, you know, and the look on her face, like, what are you saying?
That was that was pretty good.
And it's kind of like, that's what I do.
But that's a really small. a really small specific conflict.
That conflict doesn't need to be, hey, you want iced tea.
I want iced tea.
There's only one iced tea left and it's 110 degrees outside and there isn't any water.
Conflict can be, hey, you look so young back then.
And all of a sudden it's like, oh my goodness, do I look old now?
Have I, you know, will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?
The Lana Del Rey line.
Like the smallest thing can have, conflict is what I'm getting from you right now.
Maybe it's all about, as you said, do you love me at all?
Conflict leads to that.
Hmm.
Tell me about uh heroes and villains, how villains magnify the hero and how the hero magnifies the villain.
It's funny.
I, uh, I don't spend a lot of time on villains.
Um, I, you know, there's writers who love that.
Um, I'm not that interested in the motives of villains.
Um, I'm really interested in your heroes and what makes them heroes and what sacrifices they make.
Uh, to be the hero of a story.
And I, I know it's a balance.
I had a friend uh, Stephen canal, who created lots of TV shows and wrote books and um, And he had a sign over his desk that said what's the bad guy thinking?
And you know I could put that on my list of 10, you know, with Richard Price and Kurt Vonnegut and all that.
What's the bad guy thinking?
Yeah.
You know, you might be writing about the good guy.
I might be writing about Harry Bosch.
But you got to remember, there's a bad guy out there that he's looking for.
And what's he doing?
What's he thinking?
And I do.
I am conscious of that, but I I'm not one of these guys who wants to get into the psychological, uh uh motives behind um a violent crime.
Um, and I think that's a worthy thing to understand in society, but I leave it to other writers.
I rather um concentrate on what it takes to be the good guy in a story to um to be willing to.
You know uh, risk going into that kind of moral darkness to bring order from disorder um, and and to risk yourself.
Cause I think there is a cost to doing that.
And I really think that's at the.
That's the thesis of a lot of what I do um is to uh explore that.
And uh, You know when you, I think, when you do the kind of work that most of the people I write about, I mean, I think the exclusion is Mickey Haller, but I think even a Lincoln lawyer goes into darkness in his world.
But if you go into that, some of it's going to get into you.
And a lot of the books are about what you do with that.
You know that darkness that gets inside and how you try to protect yourself and stop it from metastasizing into kind of a moral cancer that can lead you astray.
So that to me is a noble battle.
And I'd rather write about that noble battle than the flip side of the person who has lost that battle and acts out against society or against people in horrible ways.
You know we were talking about how, when you're writing a novel about a murder, most people haven't experienced that.
So then you have to make things that are relatable being in traffic or the grocery store, whatever it is.
And is there something similar where you have a character and what you got to do in order to have a good character is to fundamentally anchor it to something deep about life, which is you know?
You're asking this profound question here, which is like
If you're called to confront evil, you're called to fight chaos, bring order to it.
How do you not let the stuff that you see spread and metastasize is the word you use and sort of overtake you?
That's this very deep philosophical question.
Do you feel like that emerges?
Is that something that you're trying to do consciously?
Is that an important thing in a story or is it just that's just going to be there?
And you sort of think about that, realize that that's what you're writing about in retrospect.
No, I don't think it's in retrospect.
And I think it's important and it might be only important to me.
But, you know, writing a book is is a journey.
It's not you know, it might take you two days to read a book, but that book was written over time.
Quite a long time.
I mean, I'm a fast writer, but it still takes me 10, 11 months to write a book.
And I need things during that period of time to keep me going.
And I need like a higher calling, if you will.
And I need to be exploring something that's a bigger human question.
And that's why I say this fight against the darkness that gets inside.
I'm very conscious of that as I'm writing books through my whole career.
I really think I don't have to look back on my career and go like, oh, that's what that was about.
I mean, I've known it's what it's about almost from the beginning.
What matters at the start of the book?
Hooking people in, setting the scene.
I would say if you looked at my early books, I did have the the trigger.
Um, to me, it's like a slingshot.
You have so much time to pull it back, but at some point you got to let it go.
And I used to think you got to let it go within 10 pages or, and then it became 25.
And now I don't even think about it.
I don't think, um, it's funny.
You should bring that up.
Cause the thing I was writing this morning, I just started writing a book, um, about two weeks ago.
And so I'm like only on page 30.
And I don't outline my books.
I just kind of write by instinct.
And I started a new chapter, and it was a conversation.
It was Harry Bosch meets somebody for lunch.
And that does not pull back the slingshot at all.
And it's just him talking.
I'm kind of updating the reader on where Harry is right now through his conversation with a friend.
And the, and in a way it's like chapter 13 of the little sister, it doesn't advance the plot at all.
It doesn't pull the slingshot back at all.
And I probably would have never risked that at page 30, 20 years ago, 15 years ago.
Um, now I feel I can.
Um and so that that has changed over time.
But but yeah you're, you're looking for the trigger.
Whatever you want to call it the slingshot.
Um, You're always looking for something that kind of drops the car into drive.
So page 30.
Walk me through.
I don't know, without giving too many details about the book if you don't want to, but where are you at on page 30 in the book?
You've got a general sense of theme.
You've got a general sense of character.
You kind of know where it's going to go, or are you just like I don't know?
I kind of figured out the first 30 pages.
I'm now kind of here for the ride and I've almost surrender to something deeper, like the story has a momentum about it.
I'm actually in the passenger seat and the story itself is in drive.
Like where are you at in relationship to your story right now?
I can only answer that by saying where I'm at in relationship to my overall writing and to the people who read my books, and where I am in the world.
So we've talked a little bit that I have these television shows going that are based on my books, and they're based on my books, but they influence me back.
You know, I'm involved in the shows.
I read the scripts.
I write some of the scripts, and TV usually has a shorter time to lock your viewer in and they call it the teaser.
And it's usually six pages of script at the most, where whatever's going on in that episode, the slingshot's been let go.
And so in this book I wrote two chapters that are really nothing about the plot, but they're like an anecdotal story based on the true story that a detective told me about how he solved the case.
And I thought it was brilliant, but it could not sustain the whole novel.
It was an anecdote.
And so I decided to start this book two chapters with that anecdote, and it has nothing to do with the rest of the book.
And Harry goes through this little case, helps somebody solve a murder, and then he drives home and Mickey Hall, or his half-brother, who's a lawyer, is waiting for him and he gives him a piece of news.
That starts our story.
And the piece of news is not enough to say that's a slingshot.
It leads to him being intrigued and looking into a case from his past, his far back past.
And so he starts looking into a story, a death that happened 60 years ago, knowing full well I mean I'm challenging myself here knowing full well that whoever did this is probably dead.
Happened 60 years ago.
And so when you're telling a reader that he's not going to corner some bad guy and there might be gun battles and all that,
I'm really gambling that I've earned what I've just said, that the reader's going to stick with me because he's pursuing a case where he wants to find an answer, but he probably won't find a real person alive.
Yeah.
I mean, you're unique in that, out of all the writers I know who've had their work commissioned into movies, TV shows, you seem to be just about the most involved in the onscreen stuff.
And my question for you is I almost have the image of a butter knife and a steak knife or something.
What is, like, the same tool, but they're not the same tool.
What does...
The screen TV movies, what do those allow you?
How do they allow you to tell a story that books don't allow you to do?
And what do books allow you to do that TV and movies don't allow you to do?
Well, I mean, books are always going to be deeper.
You have that component of internal thought.
You know, when you write a script, you can never say what anyone's thinking.
That's why I don't hold myself out as a good script writer, because I am too steeped in my world of writing what Harry Bosch is thinking and what's the bad guy thinking.
In TV, it's what's the bad guy doing, I guess.
It's a different form of storytelling.
I'm involved, but not to the degree a lot of people think I am.
I get involved in the first season of a show just because I want to be there for the transfer of it from page to screen.
But very quickly I learned who I can trust and whether these people have um the best in in mind for for the, the main characters.
And, uh, and that kind of lets me step away.
Um, and so I, you know, my name is on every episode, but it doesn't mean I'm there and all that.
Tell me more about TVs, about what you're doing.
Books are a little bit more about what you're thinking.
Yeah, it's just, it's visual storytelling and and it also one of the hesitations it looks like i have no hesitation because i i do all these shows, but it was not without a lot of thought because um, you know, i'm primarily, by far, a book writer, which means i'm steeped in the amount and what's important about reading and that's, you know, the majesty of imagination.
And in all, you know, I've written over 20 books about this guy, Harry Bosch.
And if you added up all my descriptions, it's less than five pages because I, as I've said before, I eminently trust the reader.
And so I put enough telling details in there for them to build Harry Bosch in their head.
And that's what I did for more than two decades before there was a TV show.
So I kind of betrayed them.
I said, build Harry Bosch for yourself.
And then 20 years later, I said, this is exactly what he looks like, this guy on the TV show.
So I can't tell you how many times I've been approached by people saying they don't watch the shows because they have Harry Bosch in their head and their heart.
And I totally respect that.
But as a storyteller, I want to hit all the, you know, we're back to baseball.
I want to hit all the bases.
And so when opportunity came, especially for serialized storytelling, which is the streaming world, really brought the advent of that.
I mean, I know HBO was doing it and some cable, but streaming was totally built on serialized storytelling.
So I was attracted to it because I knew if I could get a good run, I could really deliver.
Uh, these characters that I write about in in in full space, you know, and you know, we ended up getting like 98 episodes of Bosch.
There's now going to be 50 of Lincoln lawyer.
And so you can really deliver character when you have that kind of uh uh space, uh to tell your stories and and and that's pretty much why I did it
What's a hollywood writer's room like?
Did you do that?
Were you in a writer's room sort of sitting around, or was everyone just sort of going solo and then you'd come together and and edit together.
What was that like?
Um, it was fun because um, it reminded me a lot of my newspaper days.
Uh, so i went from like a newsroom where lots of camaraderie pranking joking, you know, water cooler, talking And then when I reached a point where I could be a full-time novelist, I went from that to like a room by myself.
It was quite a difficult transition.
Just back then, the noise of keyboards in a newsroom, it was so loud.
Totally.
And so many years go by and I'm still doing the solitary thing and we get these shows going and it was fun.
There's about seven to nine people in a.
You sit around a board it's like a board room big oval table and everyone has a spot um cork boards all around and and you put up three by five cards and you kind of dope out um the episodes in the season and there's a lot of um camaraderie and water cooler and pranking and and joking and and it was fun, it was.
It was even addictive um And I probably stayed longer than I needed to.
But that's not an all day thing.
Basically, a writing room is set up with eight or nine very small offices surrounding the boardroom.
And like you go in there from like, you know, 10 to 12 or 10 to 2, bring in lunch.
Then everyone retreats to their little offices to do the writing they've been assigned, whatever episode, and so forth.
So a writer's assigned a specific episode.
Yeah.
Everyone contributes to all episodes in the room, you know, throwing out ideas.
And then there's a boss, a creative boss called a showrunner.
Yeah.
And they're kind of the final arbiter of like, this is what we're going to do in that episode.
And it's assigned to somebody and they go off and write, usually in the afternoons, which I didn't have, that component.
So to me, it was a part-time thing.
And I'd write at home in the mornings, go in around 10 and then come back in the afternoons and go back to my books.
We talked about Raymond Chandler a little bit, but what is it about his novels, his work, his writing that inspired you so much?
I think it was.
You know, I grew up in Florida a And I read his work long before I ever set foot in LA.
I didn't come to L.A. until I was 30 years old.
It was just something about the way he could use his character to capture a city.
And again, it wasn't a city I'd been to, but I'd seen it in movies and TV and all that.
But it wasn't a city I knew, but I felt I knew it through his books. and you know so when I arrived at 30 to work for the newspaper one of the first things I did was follow the track of chapter 13 where he basically circles the city goes out through the valley out to Malibu and then back in through Hollywood Santa Monica and Hollywood and all that and it's it's still a track you can take there's freeways now he didn't take freeways but You don't have to take the freeways and then you'll get the kind of view that he got as he described the city along the way.
You know what I think of when I think of LA.
I just realized I think of this sort of the neon, and then those sort of 1950s, 1960s pastels.
That's what I think about with that kind of Disneyland original font.
There's sort of this, I don't know why this word came to mind, like whirly swirly sort of font.
And there's a, There's a cheeriness.
There's an optimism about it.
And then what you get is you get these restaurants that are almost these mini worlds.
Like I was driving to West Hollywood last night from LAX and I passed this diner.
The diners, you know, it's got the fake sort of palm trees and whatnot.
It's got these cool sort of triangle angular shapes.
It's sort of just this bygone world.
And then when you go sort of Santa Monica down to Venice, towards LAX, you sort of get it there, but it's a very distinct to this, to this area.
Yeah, i mean, i think this place still shows the massive growth that happened after world war ii.
Oh absolutely, and uh, so many of those mid mid-century structures are still around and they're revered.
You know people who keep them exactly as they were.
Um, and does make it uh distinctive, especially when you get outside of the uh, the entertainment sectors like hollywood.
But if you go up into the valley um, a lot of it's still preserved, a lot of it doesn't work anymore um, you know, or or has been fallen into disrepair.
But the places that that kind of revel in it some of those neighborhoods in west hollywood haven't um, And a lot of the arcade apartment buildings.
They're very cool.
So tell me this.
If you were invited to a college, you got a semester to teach a course to say hey, this is how you do what I've – the kind of writing that I've figured out how to do.
How do you structure that curriculum?
What are the core principles they're trying to teach people?
Well, I'd probably turn down the offer, but –
I don't know.
I mean, I would make sure everyone's writing.
I have to write something for every class.
It doesn't have to be long.
But the more you do something, the better you get at it.
So I'm definitely an always-be-writing type of guy.
And that would allow me to probably see someone's progression through the course of the semester.
But I don't know.
I did take some writing class.
I mostly did journalism, but I did take some creative writing classes.
And I had this teacher named Harry Cruz who was a Southern Gothic type of writer.
I went to college in Florida.
And he was more impressive to me as a – like he was the first actual author I'd ever physically saw was when I took the first class with him.
I ended up taking four classes, but he only showed up for three of them.
But, yeah, he had this history of disappearing.
He wrote great books, but I don't remember anything he said in three classes other than if you're going to be a writer, you've got to write every day, even if it's only for 15 minutes in that last part was really important because to uh to, even if you only get a chance to write 15 minutes, you're not going to lose the story.
It's always going to be in your head.
You'll always be in the tunnel.
Uh, you know the water tunnel, the water, the stories swirling around you and you'll be thinking about it.
And when you can't wait for those 15 minutes.
No, it's funny talking to you, talking to Lee child.
Lee child worked in TV for few decades, i think it was.
You worked in journalism, i don't know.
Maybe there's something about this genre in particular.
Maybe there's something about being a novelist.
Maybe there's something about being an author who sells a lot of books where, if you do something that is overtly commercial, to start with limited space, maybe that teaches you how to communicate, trains you to write in a way that really resonates with the mass audience.
I hope so.
I mean yeah I, I mean I don't want to, I don't want.
I don't judge anybody, but I have found that people that have come to writing novels, writing fiction, from the non-traditional means like journalism or TV, or a lot of lawyers lawyers have to do a lot of writing and they have to be clear and they have to win people over.
Um, I have found that those are really good training ground for then making the jump into fiction.
Do you feel like you were talking earlier about editors wanting you to reinforce things more?
Be more explicit and overt in what you're saying.
I think I was watching an interview I think it was with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and I forget who was saying it, but they were talking about how tv and tv in particular movies, have changed, and they're saying that one of the things that's happened is you almost have to assume that people are watching it almost as a second screen, so they're making dinner while watching a movie, watching a tv show.
So a lot of the plot points you need to reinforce over and over again.
Do you feel like the reader has changed?
Do you feel like audio books have changed?
How writing needs to be done?
Or do you feel like?
No, you know, I've been doing this since 92 and uh, it's been 20, what 34 years.
And it's basically the same craft.
Like what was excellent in 1992 is excellent in 2026.
Is that's a hard one to answer.
I would probably wrong, but I would say more no than yes.
Uh, when it comes to books um, I think TV definitely has changed, because I have some experience in TV.
And they pretty much say you can expect that someone's on their phone while they're watching your show.
And they know that statistically more people are watching with subtitles.
Yeah.
And – but I don't know if that carries over to books.
I think – I mean –
I'm going to contradict myself.
I was going to say books take your full attention if you're going to read a book.
Sure.
But if you're going to listen to the book, then you get more into that TV world because you can be driving or you can be jogging and you can be walking the dog.
And I have to say that that is the growth market of publishing is audio books.
And there's more multitasking creeping into everything, I guess.
Yeah.
But I think as long as there are people and there probably are dwindling as they move more towards audio and so forth
But if you're holding a book, it's hard to do anything else.
Michael Conley, thank you.
Glad to be here.
Thank you.
Yeah.
