But other than that, we just talked through the book over and over, starting with the short version and getting longer. They don’t always have to find the skull first. I always think of structure as a skeleton, and now that you have this skeleton, you can have a character find a rib bone on page one. As boring as possible, here is the crime as it occurred. JH: One thing we did-which is a great thing to do for any kind of mystery-is we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what really happened, in the order that it really happened. That left me with a twelve-page document, that, if I’m being honest, is pretty similar in structure to the finished product.ĮC: So he just sat there, listened to you throw stuff at the walls, and wrote down what stuck? So, yeah, this writers’ room assistant, Andrew Bane and I, sat at my kitchen counter and spent about a week banging it out. In other words, it has a very complicated plot. I was ready to start working on the book so I hired this guy to come over to my house and help me put my novel together. JH: For Everybody Knows, this book I’m working on now, I had actually just come out of a writing room where I really liked the writers’ room assistant, which is the guy who takes the notes for everybody.
Everyone says, “Don’t do voiceover!” But what they’re really saying is, “Don’t do it shitty.” Like anybody really thinks Goodfellas would be a better film without the voiceover, or Taxi Driver. Yeah, right. What most writing rules like that are really saying is, “Don’t do it shitty.” In television there’s a real dislike of voiceover. I know there are a lot of novelists who don’t believe in that, but I don’t know why they feel that way. People who learn to write structured poetry then turn their powers to free verse are much better poets.ĮC: How do you apply the structure you learned in television to your novels?
So, yeah, I’m incredibly thankful to have learned that style through my work in television. I think knowing your structure is a very valuable skill that gets downgraded in today’s culture. I got my start working six years on The Mentalist, a case of the week, catch a killer procedural. I’ve spent a lot of time working with mysteries. The part I’m really grateful for, though, is that television is highly structured. That’s not to say that it’s not exhausting, because it is exhausting. JH: The most obvious difference is that television is for the most part collaborative. How do you jump from TV writing rooms to working on your crime novels? EC: Speaking of movies, you split your time between scripts and fiction.
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