RFC: Sometimes, if you know what you’re doing, clichés are useful. Even characters my readers see as minor have full emotional lives to me.ĭF: Do you have to work at avoiding clichés when depicting New York City and Long Island, especially in a thriller/mystery setting, or do you feel comfortable in your knowledge of it that you don’t really think about it? I have always plumbed my own “kishkas” (guts in Yiddish) in order to bring my characters alive. So while I can create a character’s appearance or preferences for food, women, dress, etc., through an external process, I have to look inside myself for emotional resonance or it comes off as inauthentic. RFC: I believe the best place to find characters is in the mirror.

This combined with the idea for a character whose life is full and predictable one day and whose world is empty and chaotic the next was what led to the writing of Where It Hurts.ĭF: How much of yourself ended up in Gus Murphy? How do you develop your characters in general? Places where people had sometimes to choose between food and heat in the winter. I drove a home heating oil delivery truck for seven years and saw parts of Long Island that had nothing to do with Gatsby, the Gold Coast or the Hamptons. I enjoy exposing the unseen side of things and places. All of this appeals to me as both reader and writer.ĭF: What inspired your new series, which starts with Where It Hurts? And my particular subgenres-hard-boiled and noir-allow for exploration of the human condition, moral choices, and the contrast between thought and action. The stakes are high and the consequences serious. Well, short of war, life during or in the immediate wake of a serious or violent crime is like that. RFC: Someone much wiser than me once said that life during extremely stressful times is most interesting. Why write something again once you’ve already written it?ĭF: What is it about the mystery genre that appeals to you as a writer and a reader? But for me, outlining removes the joy and excitement from the process. It’s not that I object to outlining per se. Other writers will tell you I am the king of pantzers. I don’t even like it when other people are home when I work. The only thing I ever want to hear when I’m at work are my own thoughts and my characters voices.

Finally, when I was in my early thirties, I succumbed to the call.ĭF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

After that it was a matter of stripping away my own resistance to the idea of being a writer. I discovered poetry as a way to be heard and found that I could lose myself in it. But of course when everyone is shouting no one hears a thing. I grew up in an angry household where we communicated by shouting at each other. Reed Farrel Coleman: The short answer is age 14. Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman