Michael Connelly's Advice on Writing: Character, Character, Character

Michael Connelly has sold over 80 million books. He created Harry Bosch, the LAPD detective who has anchored a series for more than three decades. He created Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, who became a Netflix phenomenon. Before any of that, he spent 14 years as a crime reporter covering homicides, courts, and the people caught in between.

In a March 2026 episode of David Perell's "How I Write" podcast, Connelly laid out his approach to writing with the specificity of someone who has been doing it professionally for 40 years. No abstractions. No motivational filler. Just hard-won principles from one of the most successful crime writers alive.

His advice centers on a single idea that drives everything else: character. Here are the key principles.

Character Above All Else

When asked what matters most in writing, Connelly's answer is three words: "Character, character, character."

Plot is secondary. Twists are secondary. Setting is secondary. Everything serves character development. If the reader does not care about the person at the center of the story, nothing else matters. The most intricate mystery in the world falls flat if the detective solving it is a cardboard cutout.

Connelly built Harry Bosch over 20+ novels. The character ages in real time. He changes. He accumulates damage and wisdom and contradictions. Readers follow Bosch not because the cases are clever (though they are) but because they care about the man working them.

This principle extends well beyond fiction. Any writing that involves people benefits from deeper characterization. A personal essay gains power when the writer reveals genuine complexity, not a polished version of themselves.

One Telling Detail Beats Five Ordinary Ones

Connelly does not describe characters through inventories of physical traits. He finds the one detail that reveals something about who the person is.

Connelly tells a specific story. He was sitting at a detective's desk, a man he had watched at crime scenes many times. At each scene, the detective would take his glasses off and hook the earpiece in his mouth as he observed the victim. At the desk, Connelly noticed a groove worn into the plastic of the earpiece. The detective's teeth had been clenched every time he did it. That single detail - the groove in the plastic - tells you everything about this man: his habit, his restraint, the tension he carries into every crime scene.

The principle is compression. One precise detail does the work of five generic ones. It is more vivid, more memorable, and more efficient. The reader fills in the rest.

This maps directly to the editing principle of deletion. When you revise, look for the places where you used five details and ask which single one carries the most weight. Cut the rest. As Verlyn Klinkenborg argues in Several Short Sentences About Writing, the simplest revision is subtraction. Connelly's telling-detail principle is subtraction in action.

Cut Your Dialogue in Half

Connelly's rule for dialogue: write it, then cut it roughly in half.

Most writers overwrite dialogue. The fix is mechanical. Write the scene. Then go back and cut approximately 50% of every exchange.

Connelly learned this from 14 years of newspaper work. When an editor said "give me six inches on that," every quote had to carry information. No filler. No repetition. If he quoted a detective, the quote had to contain something the reader needed that was not repeated in the body of the story. He carried that economy into fiction. Even with 400 pages and no space constraints, the newspaper discipline stuck.

What remains after cutting is sharper, faster, and more natural. Paradoxically, shorter dialogue sounds more like real speech. People interrupt. They leave things unsaid. They respond with a look instead of a sentence. Connelly's original character, Harry Bosch, barely speaks at all. An early editor kept a running count of how many times Bosch nods in a book. "He's nodded 540 times and we're only on page 200," she would write in the margin.

This principle applies to any kind of writing, not just fiction. Emails, reports, essays - all of them improve when you go back and cut roughly half the words. The first draft captures your thinking. The second draft cuts the thinking down to what the reader actually needs. Our 30 writing tips guide covers similar compression techniques across multiple writing traditions.

Every Character Wants Something on Every Page

Connelly credits Kurt Vonnegut for this rule: every character should want something on every page, even if it is just a glass of water.

The principle creates constant momentum. When a character wants something, the scene has direction. When a character does not want anything, the scene drifts. Connelly was religious about this in the early days. He made Bosch a smoker in a society where you are not supposed to smoke. Bosch always wanted a cigarette but could never have one. That was Connelly's way of making sure there was conflict on every page - and it doubled as characterization, showing a man who has stepped outside standard society and is looking in.

Write by Instinct, Not by Outline

Connelly does not outline his novels. He starts with a character and a situation, then follows the story wherever it goes.

This is the same approach Lee Child uses. Both writers believe that the writer's excitement transfers to the page. If you already know what happens, the prose goes flat. Discovery keeps the writing alive.

Connelly describes it as letting the characters make their own decisions. He puts Bosch in a situation, then asks: what would this person actually do? Not what does the plot need. What would this specific person, with this specific history and these specific habits, do next? The answer often surprises him. Those surprises become the best scenes in the book.

For writers who feel paralyzed by outlines, this is permission to try a different approach. Sit down. Write the first scene. Follow it. You can always restructure later. The energy of spontaneous discovery is real, and readers can feel it. For more on writing process and finding your own rhythm, see our guide on how to write a book with AI.

Names as Metaphor

"Harry Bosch" is not a random name. In the first draft, the character was simply called Pierce - a nod to Raymond Chandler's idea that a detective must "pierce all levels of society." Then something reminded Connelly of Hieronymus Bosch, the 15th-century painter he had studied in a college humanities class for an entire month. The metaphor clicked: Bosch's most famous painting is The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Connelly saw Los Angeles as the modern-day version.

The name works on multiple levels. Casually, it sounds tough and working-class. For readers who catch the reference, it adds a layer of meaning that deepens with every crime scene. On Dutch book tours, every reporter asks Connelly the same question: why Harry instead of Jerry? (Hieronymus is the Latin root of Jerome.) "My mistake," Connelly says.

Connelly treats names as the first piece of characterization. A well-chosen name carries subtext the way a well-chosen detail carries description.

Place as Character

Los Angeles is not just the setting of Connelly's novels. It is a character. He is up to 42 books now, and in each one he starts with the goal of ending up in a neighborhood he has never written about before. "It's become pretty clear to me I'll never cover the city," he says. "It's too big. It's too sprawling. It's too different." Places he wrote about in the early 1990s are gone now.

Connelly reads chapter 13 of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister before he starts every new book. It is five pages where Philip Marlowe takes a break from the plot and drives around the city describing it in sardonic, cynical terms. It was published in 1939 and the descriptions still hold. "To me that's the definition of art," Connelly says. "That's what people like me aspire to."

Place becomes a mirror for character. Bosch lives on stilts overlooking the city, literally suspended above the world he polices. Geography triggers memory. A neighborhood kicks off a flashback to his mother or his ex-wife. Richard Price told Connelly: "When you circle around a murder long enough, you get to know a city." That is why Connelly writes murder mysteries.

Trust Reader Intelligence

Connelly pushes back on editors who want him to make things more explicit. His response: trust the reader. Readers are smart. They catch subtext. They notice the glasses earpiece in the mouth and understand what it means without being told. Spelling everything out is not clarity. It is condescension.

He wrote over 20 books about Harry Bosch, and if you added up every physical description of the character across all of them, it would fill fewer than five pages. "I eminently trust the reader," Connelly says. He puts in just enough telling details for readers to build Bosch in their heads. Then, 20 years later, came the TV show. "I kind of betrayed them," he admits. "I said build Harry Bosch for yourself, and then I said, this is exactly what he looks like." He cannot count how many readers have told him they do not watch the shows. They have Harry Bosch in their head, and they are keeping him there.

Write Daily, Even Fifteen Minutes

Connelly writes every day, typically from 6 to 11 in the morning, before the world can interrupt. Not because he is disciplined. Because stopping breaks the spell.

He credits this habit to a creative writing teacher named Harry Crews, a southern gothic novelist at the University of Florida. Connelly took four classes with Crews - though Crews only showed up for three. He does not remember a single thing Crews said in those three semesters except this: "If you're going to be a writer, you got to write every day, even if it's only for fifteen minutes."

That last part is what matters. Fifteen minutes is not about word count. It is about staying inside the story. "You'll always be in the tunnel," Connelly says. "The water's swirling around you. You'll be thinking about it. And you can't wait for those fifteen minutes."

Rewrite Every Morning

Connelly starts each writing session by revising what he wrote the day before. He reads yesterday's pages, edits them, and uses the momentum of revision to carry him into new material.

This serves two purposes. First, it catches problems early. A wrong turn in chapter three gets fixed before it infects chapters four through ten. Second, it builds momentum. By the time you finish editing yesterday's work, you are already inside the story. The new writing flows from the revised writing without a cold start.

Compare this to the approach of drafting everything first and editing later. That works for some writers. But Connelly's method means the draft is already substantially edited by the time he finishes. Each chapter has been revised at least once before he moves on to the next. The first draft is close to a second draft.

The Battering Ram for Writer's Block

When Connelly gets stuck, he does not push forward into the unknown. He backs up. He goes back into pages he has already written and starts rewriting them. He gathers momentum through familiar territory, building speed and confidence, until the force of that momentum carries him past the stuck point and into new material.

He calls this the battering ram. The already-written pages are the weight. The rewriting is the acceleration. The block breaks because you arrive at it moving too fast to stop.

Know Only the First and Last Fifty Pages

Connelly plans the first fifty pages and the last fifty pages. The middle is open. "Ripe for improvisation," he says. He knows where the story starts and where it ends. Everything between those points is discovered in the writing.

This is a middle ground between rigid outlining and total improvisation. The bookends give the story direction. The open middle gives the story life. Characters can surprise the writer. Subplots can emerge organically. The middle is where the story becomes more than the writer planned, precisely because it was not planned.

Block Out Time Cues

Connelly writes with blackout shades drawn and tape over the clock. He eliminates every cue that tells him what time it is or how long he has been working. Only the screen exists. When you know it is 3pm, part of your brain starts calculating how much time you have left. Those calculations pull you out of the story. Connelly removes them entirely.

What This Means for Your Writing

Connelly's principles converge on a single philosophy: character drives everything. Plot serves character. Details reveal character. Dialogue expresses character. Setting mirrors character. Even the name is character.

The craft principles that support this philosophy are all about precision and economy. One telling detail, not five. Dialogue cut in half. Trust the reader to fill gaps. Write daily to maintain immersion. Revise yesterday's work before writing today's.

Several of these principles align with the core editing philosophy behind AI-assisted writing tools. Connelly's "cut dialogue in half" and "one telling detail" are both deletion principles. They ask you to find what is essential and remove what is not. That is exactly the kind of revision where inline diffs help most - you can see what the edit removes, decide whether the compression improves the writing, and accept or reject each change individually.

Key Takeaways

• Character above all. Plot, setting, and style all serve character. If the reader does not care about the person, nothing else rescues the writing.
• One telling detail. Find the single gesture, habit, or object that reveals the most. Cut the rest.
• Cut dialogue in half. First drafts of dialogue are always too long. Go back and remove roughly 50%.
• Every character wants something on every page. Desire creates momentum. Even a glass of water counts.
• Follow instinct over outlines. Discovery keeps the writing alive. If you are bored, the reader is bored.
• Names carry meaning. Choose names that suggest origin, class, or metaphor. The name is the first act of characterization.
• Place as character. Use geography to reveal identity. Setting is not backdrop. It is mirror.
• Trust reader intelligence. Resist the urge to over-explain. Readers catch subtext. Let them do some of the work.
• Write daily. Even fifteen minutes maintains story immersion. Momentum matters more than word count.
• Rewrite every morning. Start by revising yesterday's work. It catches problems early and builds momentum for new writing.