This episode is presented by Mercury. When I started How I Write, I expected finances to be an absolute nightmare. I’ve got team members in four different countries. Things like taxes, currency exchange, expenses — I was dreading it. But here’s the crazy thing: four years in, banking has been maybe the easiest part. I honestly can’t remember running into a single problem! And that’s because I’ve been using Mercury.
I switched over from other, more traditional banks because Mercury is so well designed. It’s easy to get started and easy to use, while also feeling totally legit and secure. Mercury gives me all the tools to run a global company like virtual cards, unlimited users, and the ability to customize each user’s access level to exactly what they should see. And you know what: if anything goes wrong, their support line is super responsive (and actually thoughtful), which is really rare these days. I genuinely can’t imagine trying to run my business without Mercury.
Before we get into today’s episode, I wanted to call back to my interview from earlier this year with Tom Junod. Tom’s new memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, came out yesterday, and I’d highly recommend you check it out.
Our How I Write conversation was epic. These were my favorite moments:
On AI and the soul:
How to free yourself as a writer:
Alright, now to today’s episode. Michael Connelly has written 40+ novels, sold ~100 million books, and is the man behind TV series like Bosch and The Lincoln Lawyer.
That makes him one of the most popular crime fiction writers in the world.
He says: "Every murder tells the story of a city." In this interview, he explains why one telling detail beats five ordinary ones, why Los Angeles is a character in every book he writes, and the piece of Kurt Vonnegut advice that shapes every page he writes.
Transcript
00:01:51 The ‘Telling Details’ trick
00:04:45 Michael’s rewriting process
00:07:39 Fiction vs truth
00:09:54 Michael’s writing routine
00:11:02 Character above all else
00:12:46 Why Michael loves writing LA
00:16:10 Michael’s favorite book chapter
00:20:47 How to write in different voices
00:24:06 The best piece of advice for writers
00:27:59 When the place becomes a character
00:29:16 Every murder is a city’s story
00:34:28 The origin of Harry Bosch
00:41:01 Why dialogue needs to be cut
00:47:13 Heroes vs villains
00:52:14 How to hooks readers
00:56:50 Books vs TV
01:00:43 Inside a Hollywood writer’s room
01:06:06 Advice for junior writers
01:09:20 Have readers changed?
David (01:51–01:58):
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?
Michael (01:59–03:39):
I spend a lot of time with the kind of people I write about, whether they’re detectives, lawyers, or judges. I never take out a notebook because I don’t want anyone to be frozen by seeing me writing down something they said or did. So, it’s really observation. I just try to watch for what I call “telling details.” They can be verbal in a story, someone talking about what they do, or very specifically about a case or an experience they had. But it can also just be something I observe about them physically or in their workplace, even in their car.You just look for these details that open up a window of imagination for you and for your viewer. I’m always conscious of what the reader is going through and how their imagination is turning. It turns on details, so you always have to be available for that.As for what writers get wrong, everyone’s unique, but I know as a writer and reader, I don’t like to be hit with too much detail or over-details. I think in writing and reading, a key thing, maybe the key thing, is momentum. Too many details create speed bumps.
David (03:40–03:46):
So, it sounds like you’re going for the fewest things that create the most vivid picture and keep the momentum going.
Michael (03:46–04:45):
Yeah, that’s what I mean by “telling detail.” Instead of five details, you pick the one that says something about the situation or the character.I often tell this story. I was standing in front of a detective at his desk, and I had been at crime scenes with him. I knew that at each crime scene, he would take his glasses off and hook the earpiece in his mouth as he was observing the victim of violence.When I was sitting at his desk, I saw that he had a groove in the plastic of his earpiece. I realized his teeth were clenched when he had those moments. That was all I needed to say about this guy to convey things.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.
David (04:46–05:04):
As you’re writing detail and working through drafts, do you feel like those details are something that come out in the editing process and the rewriting?Okay, so finally, like, draft four, draft five, you found the detail? Or do you feel like you’ve seen it, you’re thinking of the story, and actually, those telling details are pretty clear for you?
Michael (05:05–05:46):
I think it’s the latter. It comes later in rewriting. Rewriting is a key thing for me, and it goes both ways. I take details out when I rewrite, and I strip it down to what is needed to maintain momentum.That is often the process where I think better of it. I think this is a better detail, or I expand a detail. It just comes to me because now I have a full story, and I’m emerged into a full story. I might know something that happens in a hundred pages that I can set up with a detail right now.
David (05:47–05:56):
How does that work? Is it like, “Okay, I got draft one on the left side of my screen. I’m going to rewrite it as draft two?” Is it like you’re going paragraph by paragraph? How does that rewrite happen?
Michael (05:57–06:02):
I have two ways. One is built in. I start every morning by rewriting what I did the day before.
David (06:02–06:03):
Oh, wow.
Michael (06:03–07:00):
That can be anywhere from three to ten pages, depending on what kind of day I had the day before.I write on a laptop. It’s a digital world, but I really like to feel a paper. I’ve never read an ebook. I read books that I hold in my hand, and I kind of rewrite that way.I print out what I’ve written the day before, mark it up with a pencil, and then I put those changes into the digital form. Then I do a larger version of that.When I get to the end of a book, I print the whole thing out and go through it, reading it in paper and marking it up. I go all the way through before I go back in and start taking the markings and suggestions. I have a whole shorthand of ways of leaving notes in margins.
David (07:01–07:03):
Like a little personal code language.
Michael (07:04–07:20):
RW means rewrite this whole paragraph. NSG means not so good, which I sadly got from my mother once when she was reading one of my manuscripts. I saw these NSGs, and I go, what’s that?
David (07:20–07:21):
Thanks.
Michael (07:21–07:39):
She was a good critic. She read a lot and loved reading mysteries. So she was a good one to say, “Oh, this is the guy who did it, right?” I took some of her shorthand into what I do as well.
David (07:39–08:12):
Tell me about truth. On the surface, it seems like you’re writing fiction, which is the opposite of truth. But when you’re writing, you’re really trying to get the details right. Does this work? Is this the right way to describe this scene? As you’re writing and you get it down on the page, I sense you’re not doing a lot of research. Towards the end, it’s like, “Okay, let’s make sure this works.” How does that work in terms of your own validation process, and sometimes talking to other people to say, “Hey, did I get these details right?”
Michael (08:13–09:53):
There are two things. One is I was a journalist for a long time before I started doing this. I covered courts and I covered crime for about 14 years, so it gives me a rudimentary knowledge of how this is done, which allows me to write and not spend a lot of time researching. I always want to be writing.I have a cadre of people that help me with my books, ranging from detectives to lawyers and judges. I can shoot them texts, emails, and phone calls while I’m writing, depending on the urgency of when I need 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. So, I’ll send him a message. He’s worked for me long enough that he knows I’m not looking for 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.It’s really about maintaining momentum. Always be writing. You have to eat, so a lot of times I will meet people for breakfast because I’m not going to be writing while I eat. I might as well meet someone who can help me or answer a question. The process is all kind of organized so that I can be writing.
David (09:54–10:04):
Okay, so you’re saying always be writing. What’s any given Tuesday like? What did you do today? Did you write today? How do you structure your life in order to get writing done?
Michael (10:04–10:41):
I find that the safest time is mornings. That’s where you’re going to get fewer interruptions. So I like to be writing before it’s light out. I did that today. I’m very lucky that my work has inspired television and so forth. I live in Los Angeles and I’m close to these productions. I’m not someone 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.
David (10:42–10:44):
This is on the TV sets, huh?
Michael (10:44–11:02):
Yeah. I try to write for a minimum of six to eleven every morning, and then I might go off in the afternoon to a set or an interview. If I can get six to eleven in, I’m pretty happy.
David (11:03–11:13):
I saw somewhere that you said realtors talk about location, location, location, and for you, it’s character, character, character. Why is character so important?
Michael (11:13–12:45):
I think that’s what people read books for. Everything’s important, but everything seems to be in service of character: your plot, where you set the story. These are all really important things, but I think they’re really about character. That’s always front of mind. You always have to be thinking about how you’re delivering this character to the reader.You were talking in the last question about details, and I didn’t really answer, but the answer is character. I write books about a character at the center of a book who does not exist. I adopted this philosophy that the best way to sell this character to a reader who’s going to be smart 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, so I’m constantly picking stuff out of the real world that has happened or is happening to put into my books and see how my characters react to it.
David (12:46–12:48):
What do you like so much about
Michael (12:48–13:55):
writing about LA, that it never stops giving? It’s such a big place, such a quickly evolving society that there’s always something new. I’m up to 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. I want to take my readers someplace new in LA. It’s become pretty clear to me that I’ll never cover the city. It’s too big, it’s too sprawling, it’s too different. I’ve been published for almost 35 years, and places I wrote about in the early ‘90s are gone and they’re different. I can go back to these places and categorize that change.There’s a lot on the pallet here to draw from, and it’s a lot of fun to draw from it. I sometimes feel like I have an unfair advantage over other writers because I write about LA.
David (13:56–14:49):
Well, also, do you know the work of Jeff Mana? He wrote a book called *A Burglar’s Guide to the City*. He talks about crime in LA and how it’s distinct, how it’s different. I was thinking about this, prepping for this interview, like, what are the things that make LA distinct? You got the hills and then you have a lot of flat space. Even more, you got the highways. It’s a city that was probably patrolled by air more than any other city. When I think of crime in LA, I think of car chases. You got the big car chases with the helicopters, then you got the tundra, you got the LA River and all the movies, and just like the vibe of this retro kind of concrete of the LA River. What is it about LA? How is crime here different from other cities?
Michael (14:49–16:10):
Well, I think it starts with the uniqueness of the place. It’s got mountains, deserts, and ocean; the variety is pretty amazing. It’s also a segregated city, segregated by freeways and a mountain chain that goes right through the middle of it.It’s also a place that wears its heart on its sleeve by virtue of being a major entertainment center. So many people come here because wherever they were, it wasn’t working for them. This is the city of second chances, but not all second chances pay off.The difference between the haves and have-nots is more noticeable here than in, say, Pittsburgh. That creates a sometimes palpable friction, and that’s what you’re looking for when you’re writing crime fiction.
David (16:10–16:32):
I went back and read a Little Sisters by Raymond Chandler. I know that book inspired you. I just read chapter 13, your favorite chapter, and this stuck out to me about LA: “No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf, no smell, none of the harsh, wild smell of the sea. The California ocean. California, the department store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.”
Michael (16:33–17:37):
That’s why I read that. It’s like me raising the flag. I read that chapter when I start a book because it’s a pretty short, five-page chapter, and it has nothing to do with plot. Chandler, through his guy Marlow, decides to take a break and drive around the city and describe it in very sardonic, cynical terms.I’m not sure when that book was published, but some of those descriptions are right on right now. To pull something like, “the department store state,” off and to read it now and know it was accurate then and is now, that’s the definition of art to me. That’s what people like me aspire to, and that’s why I read that before I start writing a book.
David (17:37–18:06):
You can see the details you’re talking about. I pulled another quote: “Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bathtubs, more tufted beds, more Chanel number five. 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 a killer line. It’s just boom, boom, boom. It’s these details that paint a picture of the scene and capture the essence of a place.
Michael (18:07–18:32):
What does it tell you about the guy telling you that story? It’s so much about character because it’s his view of a place that he can’t aspire to, that he can’t afford, that he can’t touch. He’s an outsider looking in. It says so much about character, and that’s the perfect example of how the telling details can reveal character.
David (18:33–18:48):
As you’re writing, you have different characters you’re working with. Do you feel like you can see? It’s like putting on different lenses over your eyes. Do you feel like you see LA differently through different characters?
Michael (18:49–19:28):
Yeah, some are similar. I have the lens that is a female’s view of the city and a male-dominated bureaucracy. I have the wisdom view through Harry Bosch, who’s now in his 70s. I believe my true outsider is Mickey Haller, the Lincoln lawyer, because he’s not a guy with a badge and a gun.The defense attorney is traditionally seen as an outsider, a guy who’s looking at the standards, power, and might of the state and figuring out how he can find the cracks in that and work them bigger, wider.
David (19:31–19:31):
The
Michael (19:31–19:40):
power and might of the state and figuring out how can he find the cracks in that and work them bigger, wider?
David (19:41–20:53):
Okay, so we’re talking about how to get your writing done and how to be more productive. I recommend a tool called Basecamp.Basecamp is a project management tool, and it’s different from the other ones, which are loud, noisy, cluttered, and feature-bloated. Basecamp keeps things simple so you can focus on getting the work done. 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, all those sorts of things in one place for our entire team to look at.I had Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, on the show, and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos, great copy, and telling a great story. He and his co-founder have written five books, and 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 asking how you can be more productive and make your team more cohesive, then I recommend Basecamp. All right, back to the episode. If you have these different characters, it seems like you’re developing different voices. How does that work?
Michael (20:54–21:06):
It’s a lot of things, and some of it is dictionary. I think dialogue is the most important part of character.
David (21:06–21:09):
And by that, you mean two people going back and forth having a conversation?
Michael (21:11–22:41):
How a character speaks and how much they speak says a lot about them. By design, my original character is Harry Bosch. I’ve been publishing him since 1992, but writing about him much longer. I wanted him to be a guy who felt like an outsider, even though he had a badge and a gun and was basically symbolizing the power and might of the state. I didn’t want him to feel comfortable about it, and I think that came out in his dialogue and how he didn’t use dialogue.He’s a guy who nods a lot, a real economy of words guy, to the point that I used to have an editor who, on the margin, would keep a running count of how many times he nods in a book. He’s nodded 540 times, and we’re only on page 200. That’s a character thing. I didn’t want him to say yes or no; I just wanted him to nod. There are little things you do that can give a character a distinct feel for the reader.
David (22:42–22:55):
How do you tactically relate to these characters? Is it a felt sense you have, or do you have a different room in your house, a map room for character, with all their little tricks and quirks?
Michael (22:56–24:05):
No, that would indicate that I thought I had longevity. Writers who feel like they’re going to be able to do this for their whole life are rare. If I knew what I knew 30 years ago, I would have started keeping journals with all this information, but I keep nothing. I never have.I’ve only had two copy editors over my entire career, and they have a bible. 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 something I said ten books ago that doesn’t match what I’m saying presently. I don’t really worry about that because 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 a journal that said this person had green eyes back then. I just want to be writing and moving a story forward.
David (24:06–24:13):
Tell me about conflict. How does conflict let character unfold and let the story keep that momentum?
Michael (24:13–26:44):
One of the best pieces of advice I ever read came from Kurt Vonnegut, whose books I loved. He was asked once in an interview what the best piece of advice you can give a writer is, and he said, “Make sure on every page every character wants something, even if it’s only a glass of water.” To me, that is the distilled essence of writing, and that’s conflict. It’s what you want.I often do that. I look at a page and say, do I have Kurt’s advice covered here? Does everybody want something? It’s really important to have that. I was more religious about it in the early days. I had Bosch as a smoker in a society where you’re not supposed to smoke. 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.That shows something about the character, that he is a smoker, and it shows that he’s kind of stepped outside of traditional society and is looking in. There are all kinds of ways that you can use conflict to deliver character.I’m lucky that in a crime novel, there’s building conflict. I have to find a murderer. I have to get my client not guilty. You have these big things, and you build in all kinds of layers, the small ones. Bureaucracy is a huge one, because you’re also looking for conflicts that your reader can relate to.Most of my readers, probably 99.9%, have never solved the murder, but they’re reading a book about a guy trying to solve a murder. You’ve got to connect with them with stuff they do know, like the bureaucrats that don’t help Harry Bosch because they just don’t have to. 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.
David (26:44–27:05):
Wait, so traffic. Let’s follow that thread. You’re right about traffic. How do you bring something like that to life? Because I could see, you’re right, there’s not that much that goes on. You’re sitting there in a Volkswagen. There’s a Cadillac or Mercedes, stop and start. I kind of know what to expect. So what are you doing to take traffic and bring it to life?
Michael (27:05–27:11):
What’s your guy doing in the car while he’s not moving? Because this is LA.
David (27:11–27:11):
Yeah.
Michael (27:11–27:59):
Or what does he do to avoid it? It gets a little bit like that Saturday Night Live skit where they make fun of how Los Angeles people say, “Just take this and do that.” Everyone has directions they want to share with you.I was late to this interview, and I had to call and say I actually had my GPS on when I’d be arriving. It’s an important part of life out here, so it’s got to go in books, and you’ve 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.
David (27:59–28:17):
How does place become a character? Even reading what people have written about your work, they say, “Man, the city of Los Angeles is a character.” It’s not just the stage that the game is being played on; it is a character in the book itself.
Michael (28:18–29:15):
You can use geography to move your characters forward and backward in time, remembering things, delivering how they came to be, who they are, and where they are. I hate calling it a trick, but it is a trick. Harry Bosch will go into a neighborhood or restaurant, and that will kick off a memory of when he was there with his mother or wife. So it’s a way of using geography to deliver character.You started this conversation with the character question, and really all questions lead back to that. What can the city of LA, the physical city, do to help me deliver who Mickey Haller or Harry Bosch is? That’s how I view it.
David (29:16–29:26):
Richard Price said every murder mystery is the tale of a city, or something like that. How does the city show, particularly in murders?
Michael (29:28–31:13):
Richard Price is up there with Kurt Vonnegut. Someone was baiting him because he’s a fantastic writer. I guess someone interviewing him thought he should have been writing the great American novel instead of crime fiction, as if he were wasting his talent on a murder story. His answer was, when you circle around a murder long enough, you get to know a city.That’s precious and probably why I write murder mysteries. Harry Bosch 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. You can tell a lot of stories about a city through an investigation of a murder. By the kind of crime it is and 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 the detective, by virtue of their position in society, can pierce all veils of society. That’s like an invitation I couldn’t turn down. I love that idea about writing crime fiction because you can take your character anywhere.
David (31:14–31:51):
Sometimes when I think of stories, I imagine, and I want to know if you agree, that all you need to tell a good story is to show up and match a beautiful building. If you’re in Barcelona, you see an art nouveau door and think, “Oh, that looks interesting.” You open the door and enter this big hallway and think, “Wow.” That’s all you need to write the story. Once you enter, the rest of the story can unfold. What do you need in order for the story to get momentum, so you can enter the tale and find that momentum?
Michael (31:52–33:14):
I need an idea I want to explore. I just had a book come out that is a legal thriller, but it’s about AI, a technology a lot of people don’t understand or 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. That was the ignition point for that book. I wanted to fashion a story that would essentially put AI on trial.You’d hear all sides of people testifying in a court case, but what they’re really talking about is, where are we in society with this new technology that has the power to both change things brilliantly for the better and also to bring things down? That’s a big picture idea, but I wanted to compress it into a courtroom and use that courtroom as a framework to look into this and ask questions, not be didactic. I don’t think the book tells anyone what to think or do, but it does ask questions, and that was the starting and ending point for that story.
David (33:14–33:23):
How would you break down the different perspectives beyond the cliche of it’s going to save the world and it’s the we’re going to do?
Michael (33:24–34:28):
I had my researchers give me some stuff. 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 that they all lead to one or two answers: guilty or not guilty. It becomes repetitive. You have to keep thinking of ways to do this differently because every trial ends thumbs up or thumbs down. I don’t like being hemmed in like that.When I write a book about a homicide investigation with detectives, I can go in many different directions. When you apply what you’re doing to legal thrillers, you can get shoehorned in, and it’s not comfortable.
David (34:28–34:32):
Harry Bosch is into jazz. Are you into jazz?
Michael (34:33–35:50):
Yeah, I am now. It wasn’t that way all along. It was a decision I made to make him feel like an outsider. I came to wanting to write these books from Raymond Chandler and guys who wrote about private eyes. 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.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. I knew instinctively I had to use this. I’m going to use this when I write my first novel. I couldn’t leave that Raymond Chandler stuff behind, so 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. I kind of went from there.
David (35:50–36:00):
So what’s in a name? 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 feel right?
Michael (36:03–38:40):
Good question. You start with the idea that your primary purpose, almost your sole purpose, is to deliver character to your reader. Never miss a chance to say something about character. Have everybody on every page want something that says something about character.Don’t just slough off the name; think about it. Names as metaphors are great, especially if it’s a metaphor that matches what you’re trying to do. I mentioned 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.Then something happened that reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch, the 15th-century painter who I had studied in college, not by my choice. I took a humanities class, and the professor was fascinated by Bosch. We studied Bosch for about a month. This was pre-Internet, where it’s very easy to find his work and study it if you want, but he was very obscure when I studied him. I never heard of him until I took that class. I never heard anyone mention him afterwards.So I was going along with the name Pierce, and I thought that was a good name with some deeper meaning. But something reminded me about Bosch, Hieronymus Bosch, and I decided to use that name because 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 I knew people would either have known of the painter and gotten the admittedly strained metaphor I was going for, that LA was the modern-day Garden of Earthly Delights. Some people might get that, and then there’d be people that wouldn’t get it. They’d be intrigued about where that name comes from. So I thought it was a win-win situation in terms of a character name.
David (38:41–39:21):
Well, my parents live in Den Bosch, where he’s from. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that painting in particular. All over the city, there are little characters around.It’s funny because when you first look at that painting, you’re like, okay, this is very strange. This is the way I feel about a lot of paintings at that time. There’s kind of a spookiness, almost like, 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 then it gets very goofy. As I spent more time with that painting, I discovered how funny it can be at times.
Michael (39:22–40:02):
That’s why we studied the painter for a month. It was mostly spent on that painting.The painting’s in Madrid at the Prado. Once, I was over there on a book tour, and my publishers arranged for me to go into the Prado while it was closed and spend an hour in front of that painting by myself, except for a museum guard. That was a pretty amazing experience.Is it big? No, it’s not as big as you think it would be. It’s a pretty amazing accomplishment with all the little details because they are small.
David (40:02–40:22):
I went to go see Manneken Pis in Brussels, and we had driven down from Holland down to Brussels. I was probably 11 years old. It’s like, we’re gonna go see Manneken Pis, this famous statue. I remember we were driving a few hours, and the statue was no bigger than my torso. I felt like I’d been scammed.
Michael (40:23–40:54):
David’s pretty big.Have your parents 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? They always point out that that’s the Greek or the Latin root of the name Jerome, so he should be called Jerry.
David (40:55–40:55):
Oh, really?
Michael (40:55–40:59):
My mistake.
David (41:01–41:26):
Dialogue is fake, but it’s real. It’s real, but it’s fake.It’s so core to what a story is, but dialogue in a book is so different from the dialogue that you’d hear at Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks. It’s more dense. We’re talking about making something feel real. How do you make dialogue feel real when the essence of it is that it’s fake?
Michael (41:27–43:00):
One thing you do is almost as soon as you write it, you go back and cut it in half; you shorten it. I think that’s one of your first questions: 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. 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. For the most part, they’d be saying, give me six inches on that. I learned to have an ear for dialogue and for dialogue that carried information—no fluff, because I didn’t have the space.If I quoted 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. That was my practice for 14 years. I couldn’t help but bring that into what I do as a book writer.Now, of course, I can write as much as I want: 400 pages, 100,000 words. I don’t have that kind of constriction, but I carry that with me anyway. I just try to make dialogue carry meaning and information to the reader.
David (43:01–43:18):
When I think of dialogue, the word that then comes to mind is conflict. Obviously, we’ve been talking about conflict with the cigarette. Man, I want a cigarette. Should we have cigarettes? There’s a sense of almost internal conflict there.How about conflict between people? That’s a different kind of conflict. How is that the same? How is it different?
Michael (43:19–43:48):
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. You can always have the conflict; that’s obvious. But you really have to trust your reader that they’re going to pick up subtle nuances of dialogue, and sometimes that becomes a battle with editors.
David (43:49–43:52):
The editors generally want things to be more obvious.
Michael (43:53–44:21):
I get the things in the margin about wanting me to explain what’s going on. But I trust my readers to pick up on the nuances of conflict, especially in dialogue. I love doing conversations that are, on the face of it, about this, but they’re really about that. It’s really about the conflict these two people are having.
David (44:21–44:22):
Okay, break that down for me.
Michael (44:24–45:15):
Take it from your own life. In your own relationships, this happens all the time. You also have the added thing of tone, which you don’t get on a piece of paper, but you can infer that kind of stuff.I was writing a scene this morning 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. I’m really playing into his real age, which is in his 70s. They’re trying to tell him to slow down, but they’re acting excited about it. They drop in a few words here and there that show their concern.
David (45:15–45:27):
As you were saying that, I was thinking about, during the holidays, there’s conflict that shows up in conversations. It’s people talking about the stuff going on in their family.
Michael (45:27–45:27):
Yeah.
David (45:27–46:14):
This year felt like there was a lot of conflict in different friends’ lives. I had a lot of conversations, and you talk to someone about, “Oh, we have this drama about the coffee machine, or about locking the front door, or about not cleaning up the front seat of the car when you left.” It’s a whole thing.The deeper thing that’s going on comes back to this question of, “Do you love me? Am I loved?” The smallest things have this 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.
Michael (46:15–46:37):
I was watching the Olympics last night. There was a Geico ad set in a family get-together, and they’re looking at a scrapbook. The guy says, “Look how young you looked back then.”That’s conflict. The look on her face, like, “What are you saying?” That was pretty good, and that’s what I do.
David (46:38–47:07):
That’s a really small, specific conflict. The conflict doesn’t need to be about iced tea.Conflict can be, “Hey, you look so young back then.” All of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, my goodness, do I look old now? Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” The Lana Del Rey line.The smallest thing can have conflict, is what I’m getting from you right now.
Michael (47:07–47:11):
Maybe it’s all about, as you said, “Do you love me?” All conflict leads to that.
David (47:13–47:19):
Tell me about heroes and villains: how villains magnify the hero and how the hero magnifies the villain.
Michael (47:20–48:09):
I don’t spend a lot of time on villains. There are writers who love that. I’m not that interested in the motives of villains.I’m really interested in heroes and what makes them heroes and what sacrifices they make to be the hero of a story. I know it’s a balance.I had a friend, Stephen Canal, who created lots of TV shows and wrote books, and he had a sign over his desk that said, “What’s the bad guy thinking?” I could put that on a list with Richard Price and Kurt Vonnegut.
David (48:10–48:11):
“What’s the bad guy thinking?”
Michael (48:11–50:13):
Yeah, you might be writing about the good guy, Harry Bosch. But you’ve got to remember, there’s a bad guy out there that he’s looking for. What’s he doing? What’s he thinking?I am conscious of that, but I’m not one of these guys who wants to get into the psychological motives behind a violent crime. I think that’s a worthy thing to understand in society, but I leave it to other writers.I’d rather concentrate on what it takes to be the good guy in a story: to be willing to risk going into that kind of moral darkness, to bring order from disorder, and to risk yourself, because I think there is a cost to doing that. That’s the thesis of a lot of what I do, is to explore that.When you do the kind of work that most of the people I write about do—Mickey Haller is an exclusion. But even a Lincoln lawyer goes into darkness in his world. If you go into that darkness, some of it’s going to get into you. A lot of the books are about what you do with that darkness that gets inside, how you try to protect yourself, and how you stop it from metastasizing into a moral cancer that can lead you astray.That, to me, is a noble battle. 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.
David (50:13–50:26):
We were talking about how, when you’re writing a novel about a murder, most people haven’t experienced that. You have to make things relatable: being in traffic, going to the grocery store, whatever it is.
Michael (50:27–50:27):
And
David (50:29–51:15):
Is there something similar where you have a character, and what you have to do in order to have a good character is fundamentally anchor it to something deep about life?You’re asking this profound question: If you’re called to confront evil, to fight chaos, and bring order to it, how do you not let the stuff that you see spread and metastasize and 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 there, and you realize that that’s what you’re writing about in retrospect?
Michael (51:16–52:13):
No, I don’t think it’s in retrospect. It might be only important to me, but writing a book is a journey. It might take you two days to read a book, but that book was written over quite a long time.I mean, I’m a fast writer, but it still takes me 10 or 11 months to write a book, and I need things during that period to keep me going. I need a higher calling, if you will, and I need to be exploring something that’s a bigger human question. 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, “Oh, that’s what that was about.” I’ve known it’s what it’s about almost from the beginning.
David (52:14–52:19):
What matters at the start of the book: hooking people in, setting the scene?
Michael (52:20–53:53):
If you looked at my early books, I did have the trigger. To me, it’s like a slingshot. You have so much time to pull it back, but at some point, you’ve got to let it go. I used to think you had to let it go within 10 pages, or then it became 25, but now I don’t even think about it.I was writing this morning. I just started writing a book about two weeks ago, so I’m only on page 30, and I don’t outline my books. I just kind of write by instinct. I started a new chapter, and it was a conversation; Harry Bosch meets somebody for lunch. That does not pull back the slingshot at all. It’s just him talking. I’m updating the reader on where Harry is right now through his conversation with a friend. In a way, it’s like chapter 13 of *The Little Sister*, which doesn’t advance the plot at all.I probably would have never risked that at page 30, 20 years ago, 15 years ago. Now I feel I can. That has changed over time. You’re looking for the trigger, whatever you want to call it, the slingshot. You’re always looking for something that drops the car into drive.
David (53:55–54:25):
So, page 30. Without giving too many details about the book, where are you at? Do you have a general sense of theme, a general sense of character? Do you kind of know where it’s going to go? Or are you just here for the ride, and you’ve almost surrendered to something deeper, like the story has a momentum about it, and you’re actually in the passenger seat, and the story itself is in drive? Where are you at in relationship to your story right now?
Michael (54:26–56:49):
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. We’ve talked a little bit about how I have these television shows based on my books. They’re based on my books, but they influence me back.I’m involved in the shows. I read the scripts. I write some of the scripts. TV usually has a shorter time to lock your viewer in, and they call it the teaser. It’s usually six pages of script at the most, where whatever’s going on in that episode, the slingshot’s been let go.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. It was brilliant, but it could not sustain the whole novel. It was an anecdote, so I decided to start this book with that anecdote. It has nothing to do with the rest of the book. Harry goes through this little case, helps somebody solve a murder, then he drives home, and Mickey Haller, his half-brother who’s a lawyer, is waiting for him and gives him a piece of news that starts our story.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. He starts looking into a story, a death that happened 60 years ago, knowing full well—I’m challenging myself here—that whoever did this is probably dead, because it happened 60 years ago. When you’re telling a reader that he’s not going to corner some bad guy and there might be gun battles, 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.
David (56:50–57:27):
You’re unique in that out of all the writers I know who’ve had their work commissioned into movies and TV shows, you seem to be just about the most involved in the on-screen stuff. My question for you is: What do TV and movies allow you to do that books don’t, and what do books allow you to do that TV and movies don’t?
Michael (57:28–58:28):
Books are always going to be deeper. You have that component of internal thought. When you write a script, you can never say what anyone’s thinking, and 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. Very quickly, I learn who I can trust and whether these people have the best in mind for the main characters. That lets me step away. My name is on every episode, but it doesn’t mean I’m there and all that.
David (58:29–58:35):
Tell me more about TV, about what you’re doing. Books are a little bit more about what you’re thinking.
Michael (58:35–60:43):
It’s visual storytelling. One of my hesitations, and it looks like I have no hesitation because I do all these shows, was not without a lot of thought. I’m primarily a book writer, which means I’m steeped in what’s important about reading, the majesty of imagination.I’ve written over 20 books about Harry Bosch, and if you added up all my descriptions, it’s less than five pages because I immensely trust the reader. I put enough telling details in there for them to build Harry Bosch in their head. That’s what I did for more than two decades before there was a TV show.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.As a storyteller, I want to hit all the bases. When the opportunity came, especially for serialized storytelling, which the streaming world really brought, I was attracted to it because I knew if I could get a good run, I could really deliver these characters that I write about in full space.We ended up getting like 98 episodes of Bosch, and now there’s going to be 50 of Lincoln Lawyer. You can really deliver character when you have that kind of space to tell your stories, and that’s pretty much why I did it.
David (60:43–60:54):
What’s a Hollywood writer’s room like? Were you in a writer’s room, sitting around? Or was everyone just going solo, and then you’d come together and edit together? What was that like?
Michael (60:55–61:23):
It was fun because it reminded me a lot of my newspaper days. I went from a newsroom with lots of camaraderie, pranking, joking, water cooler talking, to a room by myself when I could be a full time novelist. It was quite a difficult transition. Just the noise of keyboards in a newsroom was so loud.
David (61:23–61:24):
Totally.
Michael (61:24–62:32):
So many years go by, and I’m still doing the solitary thing. Then we get these shows going, and it was fun. There’s about seven to nine people, and you sit around a board. It’s like a boardroom, a big oval table, and everyone has a spot, cork boards all around. You put up three by five cards, and you kind of dope out the episodes and the season.There’s a lot of camaraderie and water cooler talk, pranking and joking. It was fun, even addictive, and I probably stayed longer than I needed to.It’s not an all day thing. The writing room is set up with eight or nine very small offices surrounding the boardroom. You go in there from like 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.
David (62:32–62:34):
So a writer is assigned a specific episode.
Michael (62:35–63:09):
Yeah, everyone contributes to all episodes in the room, throwing out ideas. Then there’s a boss, a creative boss called a showrunner, and they’re the final arbiter of what we’re going to do in that episode. It’s assigned to somebody, and they go off and write, usually in the afternoons.I didn’t have that component, so to me, it was a part time thing. 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.
David (63:10–63:18):
We talked about Raymond Chandler a little bit, but what is it about his novels, his work, his writing that inspired you so much?
Michael (63:18–64:20):
I grew up in Florida and I read his work long before I ever set foot in LA. I didn’t come to LA till I was 30 years old. It was just something about the way he could use his character to capture a city.Again, it wasn’t a city I’d been to, but I’d seen it in movies and TV and all that. But I felt I knew it through his books.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.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. Then you’ll get the kind of view that he got as he described the city along the way.
David (64:21–65:12):
When I think of LA, I think of the neon and those 1950s, 1960s pastels. I think about that kind of Disneyland original font. There’s this whirly swirly font, a cheeriness, an optimism about it.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. It’s got the fake palm trees and whatnot. It’s got these cool triangle angular shapes. It’s just this bygone world.When you go from Santa Monica down to Venice towards LAX, you swear you’ll get it there, but it’s very distinct to this area.
Michael (65:13–66:05):
I think this place still shows the massive growth that happened after World War II. So many of those mid century structures are still around and they’re revered. People keep them exactly as they were, and it does make it distinctive, especially when you get outside of the entertainment sectors like Hollywood.If you go up into the Valley, a lot of it’s still preserved. A lot of it doesn’t work anymore or has fallen into disrepair. But the places that revel in it, some of those neighborhoods in West Hollywood have it. A lot of the arcade apartment buildings, they’re very cool.
David (66:06–66:21):
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 you’re trying to teach people?
Michael (66:22–68:09):
Wow. I’d probably turn down that offer.I would make sure everyone writes 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’d definitely be a writing type of guy. That would allow me to see someone’s progression through the course of the semester.I did take some writing classes. 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 impressive to me. He was the first actual author I’d ever physically seen when I took the first class with him.I ended up taking four classes, but he only showed up for three of them. 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 have to write every day, even if it’s only for 15 minutes.”That last part was really important because even if you only get a chance to write for 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, the story swirling around you, and you’ll be thinking about it, and you can’t wait for those 15 minutes.
David (68:10–68:40):
It’s funny talking to you and Lee Child. Lee Child worked in TV for a few decades. You worked in journalism.Maybe there’s something about this genre, or being a novelist, or being an author who sells a lot of books, where if you do something overtly commercial to start, that teaches you how to communicate, trains you to write in a way that really resonates with a mass audience.
Michael (68:42–69:20):
I hope so.I don’t judge anybody, but I have found that people who come to writing novels from non-traditional means, like journalism, TV, or lawyers—lawyers have to do a lot of writing. They have to be clear, and they have to win people over. I have found that those are a really good training ground for then making the jump into fiction.
David (69:20–70:20):
Do you feel like you were talking earlier about editors wanting you to reinforce things more, be more explicit in what you’re saying?I was watching an interview with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and they were talking about how TV and movies have changed. 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 or TV show. 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 audiobooks have changed how writing needs to be done? Or do you feel like, no, you’ve been doing this since ‘92, 34 years, and it’s basically the same craft? What was excellent in 1992 is excellent in 2026?
Michael (70:21–71:33):
That’s a hard one to answer. I would probably be wrong, but I would say more no than yes when it comes to books.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. They know that statistically more people are watching with subtitles.I don’t know if that carries over to books. 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, jogging, or walking the dog.I have to say that the growth market of publishing is audiobooks. There’s more multitasking creeping into everything, I guess.As long as there are people, and they’re probably dwindling as they move more towards audio, if you’re holding a book, it’s hard to do anything else.
David (71:33–71:34):
Michael Connelly, thank you.
Michael (71:35–71:36):
Glad to be here. Thank you.
David (71:36–71:37):
Yeah.
