A Conversation With Bruce Robert Coffin on Never Letting the Dream Die (Killer Writers)
Author Bruce Robert Coffin is an inspiration on never giving up. I’ve known Bruce for more years than I can accurately calculate. He’s a teddy bear of a guy who, once you get to know him, you think you’ve known him all your life. Bruce is a regular at Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference.
(Read more from the Killer Writers interview series.)
After the Killer Nashville Awards broadcast on Saturday night, I sit and decompress with Bruce and a few of the other writers I affectionately call “The Group” in the plush, circular chairs at the Killer Nashville bar. Bruce gave a keynote called Be Careful What You Wish For the day before. After an hour of laughs and drinks, I turn to Bruce, “Let’s talk about your two attempts at becoming a novelist.”
“I wanted to be a novelist since reading Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot when I was 11 years old. I actually had some help winning a few scholarships for my writing to help launch me to college. The only thing that I was really enthusiastic about taking was an advanced creative writing class.”
“You had the bug.”
“I had put all my eggs in that basket, and off I wanted to go and be the next Stephen King. Like most lessons in life, they’re painful. I wasn’t as good a writer as I imagined I was, and the writing professor made no bones about pointing that out. It was shattering. It was probably for the best because it forced me to do the one thing that most writers need to be effective, which was go out and have a life.”
“You gave up?”
“I was lucky enough to go out and actually change career direction. I became a law enforcement officer, which really wasn’t on my radar. I got hired in 1985 by the Portland police department. I hung up my fictional ability.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“My talent for writing, or my love for writing, I thought was dead. I was gonna move on, and grow up the way we all do, and no longer get to play Peter Pan.”
“You’re so successful now, but it looked like the door had closed.”
“I think there were catalysts that kept bringing me back, but one of them was I met an author, Kate Flora, who was a fiction writer. She came to the police station at 109 Middle. She was co-authoring a true crime novel about a murder that we worked, which was six weeks of trying to find the body of this woman who had been taken from Portland at gunpoint and murdered and buried. Through Kate, I started getting a glimpse of what true crime books were like, and what fictional crime was like, because she had already had several series running. And I started reading again—something other than Stephen King—but I still had no idea that I was gonna be a writer.”
“But that dream was still there, maybe deep, though, but still there.”
“My wife bought me an iPad, and after I got done wasting my life playing Words with Friends, I discovered other things you could do with the iPad, and that was write. And I literally sat down, started playing around with the WordPad app, and characters began to spill out that would later become some of the people in my Detective John Byron Mystery series.”
“Did you think that this old dream was coming back?”
“You could feel it. There’s no question. I felt the pull. I tempered my expectations with let’s just see if I can finish something. Like all I had done to that point was write short stories. And I said let’s just see if I can write a novel. And before long, I admitted to my wife what I was up to.”
*****
Check out Bruce Robert Coffin’s The General’s Gold (with Lyndee Walker) here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
*****
“Did anyone else know?”
“My detectives that worked for me at the police station found out, and I thought they would be the toughest to get past. I could imagine them laughing and making fun of me about it, but they were very supportive, and they all wanted to know who would play them in the movie. That’s the kind of ribbing I was getting. They were actually way ahead of where I imagined I was gonna go with this. I just wanted to finish a book.”
“So how long did it take to write that first novel?”
“Two and a half years. A drawer novel.”
“A novel that will never see the light of day.”
“It was such a learning experience for me.”
“You didn’t feel it a waste of time, then?”
“When I finished that there was no question that I would write another book.”
“So fast forward to this second career. Tell us from that drawer novel what happened next?”
“My author friend, Kate, had been trying to drag me down to a writers’ conference. I was really apprehensive about going because I didn’t feel like I belonged, but when I finally finished my drawer novel, I was enthusiastic about attending, because I thought, well, jeez, I’ve written something really good here, or I think it’s really good.”
“You didn’t realize at that time that you’d written the drawer novel.”
“Kate didn’t shatter my dream. She let me find out for myself. I got down to that conference. By midday on Saturday, I had figured out that I had not written the great American novel. I was hearing from writers and publishers that I had done about 99% of the things they tell you that first-time writers do.”
“Things you shouldn’t do.”
“I was bummed about it. And then I started to get enthusiastic because I thought, I’ve done the hardest part of this, which is complete a novel, so now the trick is to do it again, but do it better. So when the conference was over that Sunday, I made the two-and-a-half hour trek back to Maine. I got home, and I was very excited about it. And I sat down with my wife, and I said, ‘Hey, look. You know, I’ve been doing all these other things since I retired from the police department, and you know they’ve helped bring in money, but they’re not going to further my dream. And this writing thing is a lot harder than I imagined it would be, and I think to do it, and do it justice, I’ve got to do it full-time or not bother.’ And I said, ‘You know there’s no money in that when you’re trying to figure out how to get published.’ And I said, ‘You know, I’m guess I’m looking for your support.’”
“And what’d she say?”
“She said, ‘You know what then? Stop talking about it. Go do it. You know you’ve got the tools. You’ve got the passion. Go do it.’”
“And there’s the lesson: connections, support, passion, putting in the work.”
“It was that simple. That was November of ’14, and by April of 2015, I had a brand new 92,000-word manuscript. It would ultimately become, a year-and-a-half later, Among the Shadows, my first Byron book.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“Things went at a lightning pace.”
“Kind of like what you said in your speech.”
“Be careful what you wish for. It’s amazing how fast things take off when they finally hook. I had no idea that any of these things that have happened were gonna happen.”
“So where are you now?”
“You’re the first to hear this officially, but I just signed another four-book contract with Severn River to put out a new police procedural, another Maine-centric series. When the dust settles from that that will make 12 novels that will have been published. And I’m halfway through a four-book contract with LynDee Walker. We’re co-authoring a series called The Turner and Mosley Files, which is sort of a mystery/action-adventure, treasure hunting series. And I’ve got a lot of stuff happening here. It’s crazy. It’s crazy how fast this happens.”
“If you never let the dream die.”
___________________
Bruce Robert Coffin
Bruce Robert Coffin is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. A retired detective sergeant, Bruce is the author of the Detective Byron Mysteries, co-author of the Turner and Mosley Files with LynDee Walker, and author of the forthcoming Detective Justice Mysteries. His short fiction has appeared in a dozen anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories, 2016. http://www.brucerobertcoffin.com/