by Patrick Hoffman, author of FRIENDS HELPING FRIENDS
I started writing Friends Helping Friends without knowing anything about it. No plot, no outline, no end goal. I’d been suffering through six months of depression after a novel I’d been working on had died on me (an experience that most fiction writers go through at some point or other, but this was the first time for me). I’d been deep into that book, fifty thousand words, when one day, sitting in Bryant Park, outside the New York Public Library – it occurred to me that the story was simply too dark. We were coming out of COVID at that time, and I realized thatnobody wanted to read a novel set in an American prison camp in the not-too-distant future.Little did I know.
So six months pass, and eventually, I was lying on my bed – which occasionally serves as my desk – and I said to myself, “You have to start something.” And I started typing. “Okay, there’s a lady in Denver, and she’s using steroids.” That was the jumping-off point. I wrote about her and then I started writing about the young man who sold her the steroids. Soon, I was writing about the young man’s best friend, Bunny Simpson, who would eventually emerge as the main character of this book.
A funny thing happened after that. I got about ten thousand words into that draft, when a nagging feeling came over me. I wanted to be working on something else. I’d been toying with an idea in my head that involved the police forcing someone to snitch. When I’m not writing novels, I work as a private investigator, and I’d recently worked on a federal criminal case involving drugs and gangs in Harlem. In that case, the main witness against our client had been paid $100 a day to snitch. That idea really stuck with me; I found it amazing. Someone would betray their friends, family, neighborhood for $100 a day! It was crazy.
That snitching story continued nagging at me while I worked on the steroid story. And then one day I thought, “Okay, if you’re going to write that story, who would the characters be?” In a flash it occurred to me, “It’s Bunny and Jerry!” (the boys from the story I was already working on). Now that I had my characters and a story, it was time to start writing in earnest.
When I’m working on a novel, I become obsessed with hitting my daily word count. That becomes the most important thing for me. The number can vary, but it stays between 500 – 800 words a day. I also get obsessed with streaks. Looking back on my notes, it looks like I hit 300 words that first day. The next day, January 26th, I wrote 736 words. I worked for nine days and then something happened and I stopped for a month. In June, after I’d worked that snitching story into it, I started a real streak and hit 59 straight days, and by August 19th, I was at 57,212 words. Those streaks are everything for me. On the book before this one, Clean Hands, I had some epic streaks that occasionally put me in odd situations. I remember writing in the delivery room while my wife was in labor. Forgive me, I know that’s obnoxious, but it’s a long process, childbirth, we had 32 hours to kill! During a different streak, I wrote while sitting at the death bed of my mother’s cousin, she was sleeping at the time, and she was a huge fiction fan. I’m sure she would have approved. RIP Noelle.
I recently came across a quote that seems relevant to the idea of just writing and starting a story without knowing its destination. It’s sort of a triple quote because I came across it in Mathew Spektor’s book, Always Crashing the Same Car, and he was quoting from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, who was apparently quoting something that Irving Thalberg had said: “Suppose you were a railroad man… You have to send a train through there somewhere. Well, you get your surveyor’s reports, and you find there’s three or four or half a dozen gaps, and not one is better than the other. You’ve got to decide—on what basis? You can’t test the best way—except by doing it. So, you just do it.” Hitting those daily numbers, getting on those streaks, is the just doing it.
PATRICK HOFFMAN is a writer and private investigator based in Brooklyn. His first novel, The White Van, was a finalist for the Crime Writers’ Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and his books have been named Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year. For more info, visit: PatrickHoffmanBooks.com
If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to The Strand Magazine.
We publish newly discovered stories, original fiction, and interviews with major writers.
Be the first to comment