Interview with Dennis Lehane - The Writing Life

Talking writing with Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane’s career has reached a pinnacle that most writers only dream of. His popular crime series is being made into a movie by a Hollywood legend, his latest stand-alone novel, Mystic River rocketed to The New York Times bestseller list in a few weeks after publication. His first book, A Drink Before the War was published when he was twenty five and won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel.

Bill Clinton is a fan and Stephen King claimed that “the superb detective novels of Dennis Lehane-became a kind of lifeline for me” during his grueling recovery from his injuries incurred by a drunk driver. Lehane’s six books have been widely and favorably reviewed, he’s appeared on National Public Radio, has been on a high-profile tour promoting Mystic River, and has come a long way from the tough neighborhoods of Dorchester, Massachusetts where he grew up.

Mystic River begins with a terrible turning point in the lives of three friends: Sean Devine, Dave Boyle, and Jimmy Marcus. Then the story fast forwards twenty five years, and the trio become tangled in the murder investigation of Jimmy’s daughter Katie, as their pasts and dark secrets tick away like a bomb as the story unfolds.

His series features private investigators Angie DeNarro and Patrick Kenzie whose working class roots, neighborhood loyalties, simmering sexual tensions, and haunted pasts heat the stories to just one degree short of combustion. All six books reveal a writer who crafts gorgeous prose and shimmering dialogue, and has a deep fascination with how people are shaped by their childhood and place and why they carry out, or try to stop evil.

After pursuing a M.F.A. at Florida International University in Miami where he wrote A Drink Before the War, Lehane returned to Boston, working odd jobs and continued writing about the blue collar neighborhoods and characters from his childhood. You have to wonder how he became so haunted by ugliness. Why his villains are always soulless ghouls, why his victims are doomed to hopelessness or worse. He writes crime dramas populated with tarnished heroes who make us think about themes we’d sometimes rather not think about. His stories are beautifully crafted, yet astonishingly violent---populated with more sociopaths, psychopaths, depraved creatures, and screwballs than your most terrifying nightmares and darkest visions.

Perhaps it was his work with abused and mentally handicapped children and counseling juvenile delinquents, perhaps his unvarnished, working class background; whatever the source, his stories travel to places most writers fear to go.

Morrell: I’ve read that you like to start with character as a base, or starting block for fiction and plot. Could you talk about that?

Lehane: I think it’s essentially because my training was as a short fiction writer. And there the last thing you really think about is plot, instead it’s character. And so, you go from your roots. Never in my whole writing apprenticeship had I attempted a novel before I wrote A Drink Before the War. I came from a character base, so that when I wrote my first book, that’s just where I started. And whenever I’m writing a book, I can always describe what I know of the plot in a couple of sentences, it just evolves on me as I go. But it’s really the characters. I’m always talking about the characters. I get excited about characters.

Morrell: I think your characters set your work apart. I always advise my fiction students to trace their characters back to their sociological roots, to reveal their roots in their actions and motivations. Could you comment on this?

Lehane: I think as far as building a character, Flannery O’Connor said that anything a writer needs to know they’ve experienced by the time they’re eighteen. I think in a sense that’s a good hint on how to find your characters, is to figure out their youth. Even if it doesn’t go in to what you’ve written. It’s Hemingway’s “tip of the iceberg” theory. I think if you, the writer, understand all the stuff about your character, it will show.

Morrell: I think so too, but that’s hard to teach. Have you tried to teach that?

Lehane: Yeah,. A lot of times what I do is what I learned from a professor of mine in graduate school, John Dufresne. He’d say, ‘put a character in a room in their house and describe everything, make lists of everything in a room.’ All of a sudden the students go voila! They notice things. Do they have CDs? Do they have them alphabetized? Where are the clothes? Hanging up? Or on the floor?

Morrell: I always advise writers to know what’s inside their character’s refrigerator.

Lehane: Sure, all that stuff. I once wrote an article on this subject and I said your audience does not need to know that your character doesn’t like mustard, or even why. But you need to know. That’s just a little example of a quirk. Patrick is a good example of serious holding back. I hold back so much of what I know of that character and it took the readers five books to realize that nobody knows what he looks like.

Morrell: I was wondering about that. We know about his beard …..

Lehane: Which he shaves

Morrell: And his scars….

Lehane: He’s a first-person character so it would be odd if he were to describe himself.

Morrell: I know. I hate it when characters say, “I looked in the mirror and there I saw….”

Lehane: laughs

Morrell: Could you talk about how writers can describe deeply felt emotions in their characters?

Lehane: I think that significant detail is what was hammered in me when I was in writing workshops. It can unlock so many wonderful things. You don’t go for ‘he felt sad.’ You go for the significant detail and it leads you in there. For example, in Mystic River, somebody said that the weirdest image is Brendan remembering, missing the sound of Katie’s snoring. (Katie is his murdered girlfriend) That’s significant detail. That’s not going for the usual crap that you see in movies, ‘the feel of her palm in his.’ Do you know what I mean?

Morrell: Yes. And you did a lot with smells in that book.

Lehane: Yes, well smell is our most authentic sense.

Morrell: And it’s directly linked to memory… I remember when Jimmy went into his daughter’s room and could still smell her….

Lehane: So you do things like you pick a symbol like the blue dress, (the dress Katie wears for her burial) the thing that will cause the flood of emotion. And sometimes, in fact I think most times, it lies in mundane details. One of the things I did with Mystic is that I wanted to walk a father through the most mundane details of a death. So he’s going to have to be the guy who goes to the funeral home.

Morrell: I noticed that you did that. That you didn’t cop out…

Lehane: Right. I wanted that moment, which I did not intend on happening. I just wanted Jimmy to go and deliver that dress to the funeral home and sit down and speak with the guy at the funeral home. That’s all I wanted. But I researched by calling a guy I know who works at a funeral home and I asked him what he did. And he told me. And in the middle of our talk, he said of course, you ask about the notice, if they want us to place the notice for them. And I said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ And then I started to put that detail in and all of a sudden, that’s the significant detail. That’s what caused the flood and that’s the moment Jimmy says, ‘I’m going to kill this guy. I’m finding this guy. And I’m going to kill him.’ It triggers his thoughts of his daughter a couple of stories below him lying naked in a coffin waiting for somebody to clean her up. And again, if you go for that, or if you just go for the mundane details of a moment, of an experience.

Morrell: And you need to slow it down. I notice that you slow down those moments.

Lehane: Yes. If Mystic River has been hit for anything, in negative reviews, it’s been called slow.

Morrell: I didn’t think it was slow, I thought it was delicious. I call that scope. And that the whole world unraveled over time-as it should. I’ve read all your books and I think it’s your best.

Lehane: Well thank you. But you’re not going to please all the people.

Morrell: Of course not. Especially all those who miss the series. I thought it had a nice epic, big feel. I subscribe to the theory that people read mysteries to sleep better at night. The detective, in whatever form, is our knight, our stand-in to chase down the ugliness, the criminal in our society, to right the wrongs. Do you see Patrick and Sean in those roles?

Lehane: Yeah, they’re trying. What the hope is, that these people are out there and they’re trying. They have that wonderful loyalty. And these are people who WILL NOT back down, not because they don’t want to, but because, damn it, it’s just not right. I find that fact interesting. I hate the fearless, uninjurable hero. I just can’t stand those people because they don’t exist anywhere. And they never have. It’s the Hollywood, Elliot Ness concept when he takes down Al Capone. I think what’s fascinating about these tarnished knights is that they just keep getting up.

Morrell: Which is the secret to life, fiction or reality.

Lehane: As far as that comfort level that people are looking for, it’s just not in my job description.

Morrell: PD James once said was that she begins her mysteries with setting. And that she loves to think of incongruous places to put dead bodies, like the nave of a church. But your settings permeate all your stories. Can you give writers some advice on how to make their setting come alive?

Lehane: If you come from a place that has pungent character, then use it. Especially if you’re from a sharply defined world, although I think it’s changing. The world is getting less and less filled with those places.

Morrell: Yes, it’s filled with Taco Bells instead.

Lehane: Exactly. I think you should cultivate wherever you come from. I think one of the greatest novels I read in the nineties was The Virgin Suicides ---magic realism set in Grosse Pointe. (a wealthy suburb of Detroit) I think you should write wherever you’re from. What Stephen King has done with Maine. Or Richard Price has done with New York. Or William Kennedy with Albany. I think place is extremely important and the only way you can evoke place if you’re not from there is to just go in and study it. I’ve rarely felt knowledgeable enough about a place to put a story there, because I feel like a tourist.

Morrell: Beginning writers often write about a place they’re not familiar with or they want to be too autobiographical.

Lehane: You’ve got to strike the middle ground. As far as place, and I know it sounds like I’m repeating myself you come back to significant detail. The line that I liked in Mystic River that really nailed the place was ‘where the butcher shops still had meat hung pink with blood’ I think you’re there. It’s 1975, and you’re in a place that feels like 1962.

Morrell: Let’s talk about dialogue. That’s where you manage to slip in humor and alleviate some of the tension in the plot from time to time. Any advice to writers on developing an ear for dialogue? Your dialogue is so snappy. I also think that it’s difficult to teach writers that dialogue is mostly high notes, and that there has to be a fair amount of tension and personality revealed.

Lehane: Oh yeah. That’s where it’s at. I think if you don’t have an ear, you just cultivate it. It’s not enormously hard to do. You just go and hang out wherever you think your characters hangs out and you listen and you keep a very tiny notebook-so nobody notices you--and you scribble stuff. You scribble it phonetically if that helps you to start. But notice where they drop words or if they drop words and where they emphasize words. For example, humor is almost always a case of emphasis, it’s just a matter of which word you hit.

Morrell: There’s a lot of subtext in your dialogue. A lot left unsaid or hinted at.

Lehane: Richard Yates the novelist and short story writer said one of the best things I ever heard. He said that dialogue is not what is said, but what is not said.

Morrell: I have to agree.

Lehane: One of the things I did while teaching short stories was I finally read one page aloud. And it was two people talking to each other.

Morrell: And they sounded alike?

Lehane: No, it wasn’t that. That’s more subtle, further down the road. It was two married people and they kept using each other’s names. And nobody heard it. And I said, “what’s wrong with this?” And nobody raised their hand. So I finally said, “Bob, what’s wrong with this?” And he kind of blinked. And I said, “Why are you blinking, Bob? Because I’m calling you Bob when you’re sitting right in front of me? How many times do you call your wife Jane?”

Morrell: Or giving your reader information through dialogue that the character already knows. That’s my pet peeve.

Lehane: It’s so hard to do. You have to do it somehow¼ But you’re able to slide it in there somehow without it seeming too overt. That’s a real trick.

Morrell: In Stephen King’s new book On Writing, he said that “reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” Can you discuss how writers can learn to be critical readers? How do you read analytically and still have the enjoyment of reading at the same time?

Lehane: I think that if you take the greatest book that you’ve ever read, and then you find a real piece of crap and figure out the difference. There’s a gulf. What lies in the gulf? Why is this great and why is this one not? If you can take F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I don’t know, Ann Rice, or whoever you consider bad. It’s been often said that you can learn more from bad writing than good fiction. But I don’t agree with that if your mind isn’t tuned in first. First, you’ve got to find what is good. What do you hold up as your ideal? It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t think that The Great Gatsby is a great book. So, you hold that up as the ideal.

Morrell: And maybe have the guts to compare your writing also. I think a side-by-side analysis can be helpful to a writer, especially looking at subtleties, structure and pacing. What do you think?

Lehane: Absolutely. I think it is a good idea to compare your own stuff. Economy and clarity of prose can be amazing, even in a thick book, even if it’s seven hundred pages long. In a book by someone like Toni Morrison the clarity of the prose will prove that she needed those pages. Pick up any great writer and look at how fast they can get into a scene and then see if you can do the same. Because most beginning fiction I see is almost always ambling around for seven pages of setting the scene.

Morrell: Inert description. I’ve heard that you throw away a lot of pages. What is your editing process? How do you fine tune?

Lehane: I write longhand first.

Morrell: Does that feel like your natural voice comes through with your hand on the page?

Lehane: There’s a sense that I can write anything. It’s not written in stone yet. Stone is when you type and so I can write the car was blue, gray, purple, you know, and just keep going.

Morrell: Doesn’t your wrist get sore?

Lehane: No. I get these cheap pens and they write like budda and then usually that night I will type that draft into the computer.

Morrell: So that’s essentially edit number one.

Lehane: Yeah, in a way that’s edit number one. And then I just go along and make a lot of mistakes. The one thing I think I do have---which again, can only be created by writing a lot-I think I have an amazing instinct for when it’s going awry. I mean, I’ll still write forty pages in the wrong direction, but then suddenly I can’t write any more.

Morrell: You can hear it?

Lehane: There’s something just eating in me and usually it takes a few days to dawn on me. Then I’ve got to go back. But then I get to the end of a draft and I just read it and I mark it and read it and mark and read it and I do a lot of that and I then start playing with it.

Morrell: As far as language?

Lehane: Yes, I do a lot with language. Or something is missing as far as the character or if a scene is a little fuzzy in terms of plot. And then I send that version off to my editor or agent and in that time I’ve had three weeks to think about it. And I’ve also had time to send it out people and their responses come back.

Morrell: And hopefully they all say the same thing.

Lehane: Or if somebody says something in that month that has started to occur to me, like oh gosh, maybe that scene didn’t fly--because by this time, you want everything to fly. And then you go, ‘okay, you busted me on that. Let’s deal with that.’ You know. And that’s when it gets into squeezing the manuscript so hard it starts to bleed. And that takes a three to four month process. But I’m a maniacal believer in revision and think it if you don’t do it, you’re just a typist.