Shop Talk: Jordan Harper Pulls Down the Blinds, Turns Up the Heat, and Writes Novels on Hotel Stationery

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I’ve been a fan of Jordan Harper’s ever since I first read She Rides Shotgun, his Edgar Award Winning debut novel published back in 2017. I was so taken with that book, I even tweeted out a barrage of my favorite lines as I was reading it. Lines like: 

“She wore a loser’s slumped shoulders and hid her face with her hair, but the girl had gunfighter eyes.” 

There were more lines. Way more lines. All from Jordan Harper, this white-knuckle author who dropped double adjectives like atom bombs and wrote sentences sharp enough to cut. 

Needless to say, I was impressed.

So much so I ended up reading She Rides Shotgun a total of four times, trying to suck as much magic as I could from its pages.  

Then this column came about, and now I don’t have to go all vampire Twitter creeper on my favorite authors—I can just interview them!

Turns out, Jordan and I had more in common than I’d first guessed, starting with the fact that Jordan’s from Springfield, Missouri, less than a three hour drive north from my hometown in Arkansas. 

Jordan Harper: Of all the town names in Arkansas, the best one I’ve ever heard is Hogscald.

Eli Cranor: Hogscald? That’s a new one to me.

JH: It was this place where they butchered pigs and boiled them to get the hair off the hides. Hogscald Hollow. Yeah . . . Sounds like something out of a bad movie.

EC: Speaking of movies, you split your time between scripts and fiction. How do you jump from TV writing rooms to working on your crime novels?

JH: The most obvious difference is that television is for the most part collaborative. That’s not to say that it’s not exhausting, because it is exhausting. The part I’m really grateful for, though, is that television is highly structured. I’ve spent a lot of time working with mysteries. I got my start working six years on The Mentalist, a case of the week, catch a killer procedural. That stuff is structured like a sonnet. I think knowing your structure is a very valuable skill that gets downgraded in today’s culture. So, yeah, I’m incredibly thankful to have learned that style through my work in television. It’s kind of like poetry. People who learn to write structured poetry then turn their powers to free verse are much better poets.

EC: How do you apply the structure you learned in television to your novels? 

JH: I outline. I know there are a lot of novelists who don’t believe in that, but I don’t know why they feel that way. What most writing rules like that are really saying is, “Don’t do it shitty.” In television there’s a real dislike of voiceover. Everyone says, “Don’t do voiceover!” But what they’re really saying is, “Don’t do it shitty.” Like anybody really thinks Goodfellas would be a better film without the voiceover, or Taxi Driver. Yeah, right.

EC: What’s your outlining process like?

JH: For Everybody Knows, this book I’m working on now, I had actually just come out of a writing room where I really liked the writers’ room assistant, which is the guy who takes the notes for everybody. I was ready to start working on the book so I hired this guy to come over to my house and help me put my novel together. This manuscript is James Ellroy-esque. In other words, it has a very complicated plot. So, yeah, this writers’ room assistant, Andrew Bane and I, sat at my kitchen counter and spent about a week banging it out. That left me with a twelve-page document, that, if I’m being honest, is pretty similar in structure to the finished product. 

EC: So he just sat there, listened to you throw stuff at the walls, and wrote down what stuck?

JH: One thing we did—which is a great thing to do for any kind of mystery—is we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what really happened, in the order that it really happened. You know? This is the crime. A, B, C, D . . . As boring as possible, here is the crime as it occurred. I always think of structure as a skeleton, and now that you have this skeleton, you can have a character find a rib bone on page one. They don’t always have to find the skull first. But other than that, we just talked through the book over and over, starting with the short version and getting longer. This is how we do television. You do a board, divide it into a grid, and start writing things down. I’m a big believer in act structure. For me—in a mystery, specifically—an act is defined by the question it asks. You know that the act is over when the question is answered, but that answer then becomes the question for the next act. That’s like the simplest version, which makes it seem very linear, but it’s not. That’s what we were doing, though. Just fleshing all that stuff out. 

EC: So, after you finished that part of your process—after you had that twelve page document—what did you do next?

JH: I moved directly to drafting. I started writing in a composition notebook.

EC: Wait. You wrote it longhand! I’ve been trying to find a writer who drafts longhand since I started this column.

JH: I wrote about half the book longhand. Then got very nervous I might lose the notebook, so I transcribed what I had and wrote the rest of the manuscript on the computer. Looking back, I think the better version of that process would be work longhand in the morning, then transcribe whatever I’d gotten down in the afternoon. 

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EC: Do you do most of your writing in the morning?

JH: Yeah. You asked how I split novel writing and TV writing up earlier. That’s part of it. I get up early, before the writers’ room, and work on my fiction for about two hours. After the writers’ room, I’m done. I mean . . . Wait. I’m distracted. My dog looks like he’s strongly considering puking. You know that look, where he’s like licking his lips real heavy and stuff.

EC: What’s your dog’s name?

JH: Ellroy. I’m a huge James Ellroy fan. When I was going into the meeting to try and adapt L.A. Confidential, my ability to pull out my phone and say this is my dog, Ellroy . . . Yeah. That really helped. 

EC: The work you do on scripts, does it slow your novel writing down?

JH: I wish I was faster than I am but I’m not. I wrote another novel in the last five years, along with this book I’m working on now, but I’ve also done a lot of things since She Rides Shotgun. Honestly, though, I had pretty bad writer’s block after my debut came out. 

EC: Writer’s block isn’t something that’s been talked about much in this column. Do you have an opinion on it one way or the other?

JH: I absolutely believe in writer’s block. I say this as somebody who’s thirteen years sober, but people who don’t believe in writer’s block sound to me like people who don’t believe in alcoholism just because they don’t have it. I’ve thought about this a lot. Why we talk about writer’s block but we don’t talk about painter’s block or dancer’s block. And I think it’s because when a dancer feels bad about their work they criticize themselves using words and then express themselves in dance. But writers, we’re literally using our own tool—our words—to stab ourselves. We can’t do that and write at the same time. So, yeah, writing is uniquely difficult. I mean, I could never be a dancer in a million years, but I do think writing is especially hard, which helps contribute to our famous batch of neurosis and anxieties. 

EC: Do you do anything to safeguard against writer’s block?

JH: I try to keep the routine steady and everything else pretty loose. I don’t believe in writing every day. If I’m drafting, I don’t mind taking a weekend off, which doesn’t mean I won’t pay a price for it. There is momentum involved. You’re pushing a boulder, and when you’re pushing a boulder it’s a lot easier if you keep it moving. But what I don’t believe in is anything that smacks of capitalist Puritanism, which I think infects a lot of the writing advice that we see nowadays. What I do is get up, pour myself some cold brew, and get the ball rolling by reading fiction. A lot of times it’s James Ellroy. Right now, I’m using Megan Abbott’s, The Song Is You. It can just be a page or two. What I choose to read flavors the end product. So I try and be aware of that. Like, I won’t read James Ellroy when I’m pretty far down the drafting path because that’ll turn into pastiche. Whereas, with Megan Abbott, well, I could use more Megan Abbott in my writing style. So, yeah, and then I just write until I’m done writing. It’s usually about an hour or two. I do get up before my girlfriend, who’s also a writer. I find I get my best work done before she gets up. I know this for certain—no good writing is done after I’ve gotten on Twitter. 

EC: Oh, man. Please go into that. What’s your opinion of social media as it applies to writing?

JH: I think it is poison. Twitter specifically. If we come out of this period we are in as humans, we’ll look back on it as the time we drove ourselves crazy with screens. I haven’t been on Twitter now for about a month. It’s amazing how quickly you begin to forget that you used to spend two or three hours a day on these devices. Listen, Twitter is nothing but a parade of cops. Policemen’s day at the ballpark. It’s not just political, or strictures on art. It’s everything down to, Do you put ketchup on a hotdog? Fuck you! Do you put pineapple on a pizza? Fuck you! Because I’m a cop and I decide how everybody lives their lives. That’s an absolutely poisonous thing to pour into your head, especially if you’re a writer. The constant hectoring and hall-monitoring of that place. The purpose of Twitter is to let everybody know that you’ve got a badge and you’ve spit-shined that shit and you are controlling these halls. Ninety percent of Twitter is saying, Hey, everybody. Look! I went out into the wild and I plucked an asshole. Look at him. You’ve never heard of this asshole. He doesn’t matter, now you’re pissed. I just don’t get why that’s important. It’s not. It’s poison for the creative brain.

EC: Please, go on . . .  

JH: Oh, man. I could go for days on this shit. Our whole job is to get out of the way of this thing that’s trying to be launched from our skull. There is something inside of me that is constantly trying to tell a story, and I’m always getting in its way. Populating your thoughts with all these little cops does not help. My favorite graffiti ever was this graffiti that was written in Paris during the riots of ’68. Those great communist, anarchist riots. The graffiti was written in French, but it said, “There’s a sleeping cop inside all of us who must be killed.” And that’s it. The best writing advice anyone can give you is, Kill those cops. Now, that’s not to say write whatever you want, however you please, and nobody’s allowed to get offended. That’s not the argument. The argument is about not monitoring what you do, particularly during the drafting process. 

EC: Let’s go back to your drafting process. Do you set a daily word count?

JH: I’m just a big believer in, If you’re writing, you’re winning. You can try and beat yourself up with a word count or a page count, or whatever. And listen, if that works for you, great. But it doesn’t work for me. In fact, it’s just another tool I can use to make myself feel worse. I would rather write a sentence and go on happily with my day, than beat myself up about not hitting a word count. I mean, who cares. We’re all going to die. And here’s the other thing. Look at a bestseller list from—I don’t know—1947. Maybe there’s one name on that list anyone would recognize today, but nine out of those ten bestselling novels in the New York Times from that particular week in history are now out of print and totally forgotten. That’s our future. So, yeah, enjoy what you’re doing. That’s my point. If you’re like, “Ugh, the grind. I’m so manly!” I don’t get it. It’s not manly to suffer, which is not to say that writing is supposed to be easy. But it should be hard the way playing a sport well is hard. Not like, I’m trying to lift something that is too heavy for me to lift and I’m popping things out of socket and straining things. I really believe in that Jujitsu sense of a loose grip and proper pressure. It’s better than forcing something. If you’re going to write, you might as well enjoy it. 

EC: That seems to be a recurring theme for your process. This idea of enjoying the process. You mentioned cold brew earlier, but do you have any other rituals that get you in the zone? 

JH: The cold brew is an exceedingly necessary thing. I enjoy beverages of all kinds. I switch to Diet Dr. Pepper in the afternoons. I’m a big fan of cold drinks. I don’t understand drinking hot things. 

EC: Sounds like that’s the Missouri coming out in you.

JH: Maybe, yeah. Ice is definitely big in the Midwest, and refills. I always expect refills, which you don’t get much in LA. But, yeah, the most important aspect for me in regard to the cold brew is that it’s there and I can get to it first thing. I want to get into the process as quick as possible.

EC: I’m a fan of your newsletter, “Welcome To The Hammer Party.” You mention using a “spirit board” in one of your early installments. Can you dig into that more?

JH: With the spirit board, I really wanted to try and create this list of inspirations that was completely unique to me. Maybe someone would put Megan Abbott and James Ellroy on their spirit board, but they’re not going to put Giallo and Nipsy Hustle on there. The more unique you make it, the more of a blueprint you’re laying out for the tone. The spirit board becomes a set of guardrails that aren’t constricting at all. They’re incredibly freeing. They’re telling you drive this way, and now you can drive very fast. 

EC: Is there a certain place that you write best? Do you have an office?

JH: I like to go away, if I can. I’ll lock myself in hotel rooms to write. But for this last book I’ve been working on, I did something very specific, and I also have to say, extremely privileged, which is that I checked myself into the Chateau Marmont. This is the hotel at the border of Hollywood and West Hollywood. It’s where John Belushi died. Jim Morrison cracked his head open there. So, I checked myself into one of the bungalows and started drafting. As it turns out, the first chapter of the book takes place at the Chateau in one of these bungalows. This place is so fancy, they give you stationery with your name printed on it. So I had some stationery with “From the desk of Jordan Harper” and I wrote the opening right there. As it turns out, that two page thing has been cut from the novel, but that doesn’t matter. The process was still magical.

EC: What do these trips do for your writing? 

JH: I enjoy the complete lack of pressure to be normal. That’s freeing for my writing process. I enjoy the—if I’m being frank—selfish time. I don’t write the entire time while I’m on one of these outings. I do write more than when I’m at home, but I’ll take a stack of DVDs with me and way more books than I’ll ever read. I also eat like absolute shit. I like to turn it into a cocoon. Pull the blinds down, crank the heat, and wear shorts. There’s just sort of this nice feeling of not having the world pressing on you. You can control the flows into you too, which I think is very important for controlling what flows out. I’d also be lying if I said it wasn’t fun. It is fun. It all just comes back to getting yourself in a state, which is a state I find hard to get into when I’m having to be social and friendly.

EC: Have you found that these outings produce your best writing? 

JH: Not necessarily. Sometimes I write better in my apartment. It all just comes down to what I can get on the page. The more that I work in storytelling, the more I’m convinced your goal is to create a vivid and sustained dream that draws the reader in. There’s this thing that I do when I’m watching a movie I really like. I’ll lean forward on both elbows and put my face in my hands, kind of peering out over my fingers at the screen. Whenever I do that it means I am locked into that film. To me, that’s the goal. Period. Every decision you make as a writer of fiction is in service of that because it’s trickier when it comes to novels compared to television or film. In fiction you control everything. Your word choice is so important. The essence of it is tone. That’s what Megan Abbott and James Ellroy share. The ability to create a particular tone, not a world, a tone. 

EC: Last question. One of your recent newsletters was titled, “How to ride a tiger,” which I read as this beautiful rumination on staying true to your roots and writing straight from the heart. Did I get that right? Is that what it means to “ride the tiger?”

JH: The tiger is your subconscious brain. The subconscious is the one who’s coming up with all of our stuff. Free will is a really overrated concept. My metaphor of the tiger, and more specifically, riding the tiger, is that your conscious brain, your super ego, your id . . . The Freudian stuff is all probably bullshit. Anyway, the important thing is that you’re not just the guy riding the tiger; you’re the tiger too. You can steer a tiger a little bit, but if you break it, so that it does exactly what your conscious brain wants it to do, you’ve also broken your tiger. It’s a circus animal now. It is not the wild beast that you want it to be in order to create. All this stuff I do—the spirit board, the cold brew, the writing excursions—it’s all about getting out of the way and letting the thing that’s smarter than me, and also a part of me, dictate where my work goes. Over-intellectualized art is almost always bad. A lot of the things people discuss on Twitter about what is good or bad about art, it’s all intellectual, and therefore boring. If most people would let their tiger decide what they were writing about, they’d be making much more interesting art.

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