Charleston Gazette-Mail: West Virginia Book Festival, Lehane gives quick lesson in writing about what you know
October 20th, 2018
By Bill Lynch
Young writers are often told “write what you know.”
But that can seem impossible, particularly if you haven’t been very far from home and haven’t done a lot, so far.
Dennis Lehane, who appears 3 p.m. Saturday in the Grand Ballroom of the Charleston Coliseum & Convention Center for the West Virginia Book Festival, said young (and older) writers sometimes take the direction as a commandment, which they really don’t understand.
Lehane, who has written more than a dozen novels including “Gone Baby Gone,” “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island,” and most recently, “Since We Fell,” said, “The distinction that often gets lost with the ‘write what you know’ thing — and I speak to this when I teach — is that you’re writing what you know about the human experience.”
He said you don’t have to have grown up in a family of dry cleaners to write about the lives of dry cleaners.
Knowing something about the dry-cleaning business doesn’t hurt, of course, but it’s more important just to know something about people.
Lehane is best known for stories involving criminals and the police. He said he grew up around a lot of cops — and criminals.
“And a lot of people in the middle, who were not quite criminals and not quite law-abiding citizens,” he said. “I saw that spectrum and grew up in an economically disadvantaged world that lends itself to a certain street crime.”
This was the world that was around him and it fascinated Lehane, particularly as he compared what he saw in his neighborhood with what he read in the newspaper or saw on the television news: the disproportionate way justice was often meted out.
“I became fascinated very early by this idea that if you steal a little, you get punished a lot harder than if you steal a lot,” he said.
Small-time criminals robbing houses and businesses could get sent away to prison for years, while white-collar criminals sitting in offices, stealing millions that robbed people of their homes and businesses, could wind up walking away with a lot less time in jail and maybe only fines.
“What’s worse — the violence of a fist or the violence of a pen?” Lehane asked and then said, “I happen to think it’s the pen. The ability to wipe someone’s life out with the stroke of a pen seems to me a far more dangerous form of violence than hitting someone in the face with a punch.”
Lehane knew a little something about cops, criminals and street life, but said it was more important to just understand how people thought.
“I think once you lock into the mindset [of your characters], everything else can flow from there,” he said.
Along with violence and crime, Lehane’s books are populated with traumatized people, some deeply disturbed, but trauma is mostly common knowledge.
“By the time you’re 18, you usually know most of the universal emotional experiences people go through,” he said. “You’ve probably known heartbreak. You’ve probably known disillusionment. You’ve probably known a pain that can’t be cauterized.”
Lehane said most writers don’t feel entirely comfortable in the worlds the grew up in. They may feel like outsiders who are thinking on a different frequency, which may make them better able to empathize with other people thinking on different frequencies like the disturbed or desperate.
At some point, he said, a writer will take these things they know about being human and turn them into characters and a story.
“That’s the rule,” Lehane said. “That’s what writing about what you know means. It’s not strictly autobiographical.”
Lehane didn’t see himself as particularly traumatized. He said he grew up in a stable home with two parents. His father had a good job, working as a foreman for Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Boston, but he said he saw his share of emotional carnage and the aftermath from real physical violence.
“Now, it wasn’t necessarily happening behind the closed doors of my home, but it was happening behind the closed doors of a lot of my friends’ homes,” he said.
After high school, Lehane left Boston and moved to Florida, where he attended Eckard College and then Florida International University, studying creative writing.
Lehane’s first book, “A Drink Before the War,” about a pair of Boston private detectives trying to retrieve missing documents while dealing with their own personal problems, was published in 1994 when the author was 28.
Success wasn’t instant.
Even after the first book, Lehane worked at the Ritz-Carlton as a valet and then a chauffeur until his second book in 1996.
Lehane explained that the pattern for getting published is often the first contract with a book publisher puts most of the financial burden of the book on the shoulders of the writer.
In sales, the publisher gets most of the money, including profits. Book sale advances to authors are really just loans and if the book fails to perform well enough, the publisher will want that money back.
With that second contract, Lehane said, the money isn’t usually very much, but it’s better.
When he got the new contract, Lehane said he compared the pay with what he made as a chauffeur.
“The numbers were pretty much the same,” he said.
Having two jobs sounded like more work than he wanted, so Lehane turned in the keys to his chauffeuring gig and just wrote.
It still wasn’t easy.
“The first couple of years, my girlfriend was still a waitress and a couple of times, she had to cover the rent,” he said. “Progressively, it was about four books in when I began to say, ‘Oh, I think I can make a living at this. I don’t have to go back to bartending.’”
Success was a great feeling, but it was a huge risk for him and Lehane said it might not have been possible if he’d settled down earlier, if he’d started a family and had other responsibilities.
“But I was a classic arrested development American male,” he said.
Since that first book, Lehane’s career has branched into television and film. Some of his own books, like “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island” and “Gone Baby Gone” have been turned into films.
He’s also worked on television shows, like the critically-acclaimed HBO drama “The Wire” and “Boardwalk Empire.” Lately, he’s a writer and producer for “Mr. Mercedes,” a show based on the novel by the same name shown the Audience network.
Much of his work draws on his understanding of how policemen see the world, which sometimes goes against how people wish they did.
“That cop who sits there and says, ‘I’m going to find the killer no matter what,’ he doesn’t exist,” Lehane said.
It’s a job. It’s a difficult job, but, at the end of the day, the police have homes and lives to go home to.
“If they allowed any more than one case in their lifetime to haunt them, they’d go crazy,” he said. “They don’t get emotionally invested. They’re professionals. They do their job.”
Lehane added that police officers still have emotions, but suppressing what they feel is a survival mechanism that lets them keep showing up for work day after day.
Private detectives, however, were a different matter, he said.
“So, if I have to do emotion, it’s going to be the private detective, not the police officers. That’s just one little distinction,” Lehane said.
The TV and film work kept him busy — too busy for his fans, maybe.
Lehane’s latest book, “Since We Fell,” came out over a year ago and no new book is on the horizon.
“Unfortunately, no. I got nothing,” he said and laughed. “I’ve been too busy lately.”
He’ll get back to it, eventually, of course. In the meantime, he wanted to mention that “Since We Fell” is now available in paperback.
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