Harlan Coben

He had a great writing advice where he said, I try to cut out all the parts you'd normally skip.

I love that.

And I write like that.

I write like there's a knife against my throat and if I bore you, you're gonna kill me.

I write like we are cavemen sitting around a fire.

And if I bore you, someone's going to pick up a big rock and hit me over the head with it, and someone's going to take my place.

I write with that kind of energy and that kind of intensity.

But I've read them.

I don't really understand all these three-act structure stuff.

I never follow any of that.

In fact, I try to go against the grain.

A lot of what I write is like, what have I seen before?

How can I change it around to be something slightly different?

But do you know the end of the beginning?

I do know the end.

You know, I've done surveys of writers, informal ones, and I would say 65% do not know the ending and 35% to 40, somewhere in there, do know the ending.

I always know the ending.

So I start with some really, I know that weird twist beginning.

If you watch, say, Fool Me Once on Netflix, and in the beginning of it, Michelle Keegan plays the role of Maya Stern, and her husband had just been murdered, and she puts a nanny cam to watch her child, and one day she comes home and looks at the nanny cam, and she sees him playing with a man from the back, and the man turns around, and it's her dead husband.

And that was the opening hook.