📝 Harlan Coben’s Writing Routine

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By the time Harlan Coben finishes a book, he’s often unshowered, over-caffeinated, and swaddled in self-loathing. “At the end of a book, I’m crazy,” he says. “I grow a playoff beard. I don’t shower.” His kids, long used to this phase of their father’s year, know to keep their distance. “Throw Daddy a banana and run,” he jokes.

This is the rhythm of Coben’s life—writing one novel a year, every year, for over three decades. He’s published 34 books, sold more than 75 million copies, and watched his name rise atop bestseller lists in over 45 languages. His twist-heavy thrillers are passed between beach towels and devoured in airport terminals; they’ve become binge-worthy TV series on Netflix, Apple, and Amazon. He writes about secrets, disappearances, and the darkness beneath suburbia—but his own creative process is more workmanlike than dramatic.

“Writing may be creative and all those terms,” he says, “but really, I treat it like a job. A plumber doesn’t wait for inspiration to fix the pipes.”

He never set out to become a writer. At Amherst College, he majored in political science, played power forward on the basketball team, and imagined he might become a lawyer. His summers were spent guiding tour buses for the family travel business. But in his final year, after returning from a stint in Spain, he decided—on a whim—to write a novel. It was bad. But something stuck.

“I think I caught the virus—the writing bug. It just becomes something you have to do.”

His first books were published by a small press. Modest sales. Limited expectations. But Coben kept at it, climbing one rung at a time: paperback originals, award nominations, a growing readership. In 2001, Tell No One became his breakout novel, launching him onto the international stage. A French film adaptation soon followed, and then, like a twist in one of his own plots, the momentum never stopped.

He’s the first writer to win the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony awards, and remains a perennial presence on bestseller lists. Yet he still describes the act of writing with the same grim pragmatism he had when scribbling his early drafts in the back of a supermarket café.

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