Harlan Coben was not a voracious reader at Amherst College. (His classmates included David Foster Wallace and the future superstar Dan Brown.) Coben was not "groomed" to be a writer; his parents liked books, but they didn't push an agenda.
When Coben tries to explain the source of his ambition, he recalls a high-school classmate who was murdered. The apparent killer--another teenager--simply disappeared. Coben also recalls that he lived near a site for the storage of nuclear missiles. (This was close to the Livingston Mall.) And one of Coben's neighbors was a wealthy mafia kingpin--a man responsible for several murders. These bits of data floated around in Coben's head. And he became a writer.
Coben offers life advice--as well as writing advice--and he sometimes offers advice that seems to fall into *both* buckets. Don't whine. Be curious about the world. Don't hesitate to make things up. Bad writing often seems like throat-clearing. There is a tendency to drag one's feet for seven pages before revealing the new "jaw-drop" information. Don't do this. Don't be coy.
Coben is not among my favorite writers, but I appreciate that he gave real thought to his memoir. I especially like that he makes fun of himself. "Don't look for consistency here..." Coben is especially blunt about Dan Brown; having just had his own triumph with "Tell No One," Coben felt magnanimous and decided he would do a great favor for his struggling friend. He would give a generous blurb to Brown's silly little manuscript. That manuscript became "The Da Vinci Code."
I'd recommend Coben's memoir.
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