Art Bell is the author of Constant Comedy and What She’s Hiding, a memoir and a thriller that trace two very different but equally compelling paths through his creative life. A former television executive, Bell helped launch Comedy Central and later led Court TV, where he oversaw hundreds of hours of true-crime programming. In this conversation, he reflects on the transition from nonfiction to fiction, what true crime taught him about suspense and pacing, the freedom of inventing characters from scratch, and why writing a thriller feels a bit like playing with dolls.
Art, you’ve gone from telling your own story in Constant Comedy to spinning a suspenseful, fictional one in What She’s Hiding. What made you want to try your hand at a thriller? Was there a moment that kicked off the idea?
I didn’t decide to write a thriller. I fell into it. After Constant Comedy, I began thinking about fiction. Nobody said, “you can’t go from memoir to fiction,” so I started writing short stories without thinking too much about genre — I wrote sci-fi and romance and horror — and found I enjoyed it all. I started What She’s Hiding intending for it to be a short story. All I knew when I sat down to write was that it would be about a guy who gets into mortal danger for the first time in his life. I wanted to see how he’d handle it. But as I wrote, more characters I liked showed up, so I kept writing, and it became a novel. As I wrote, if someone asked what I was working on, I never said, “I’m writing a thriller.” I said I was writing a book about a lawyer who gets into trouble.
You’ve worked in television, comedy, and true crime—how did those experiences shape your approach to writing fiction, especially in terms of pacing and suspense?
I’m not sure my Comedy Central experience gave me much more insight into humor than I already had. My writing has always had an element of humor, and that goes back to my high school days when I discovered I loved comedy and wrote short satirical pieces for the school paper.
Court TV is where I learned about storytelling, pacing, and cliffhangers. Watching documentary producers craft true-crime stories that were exciting and suspenseful taught me a lot. These were often crime stories people had seen on the news, and the challenge facing our producers was to make them into hour-long shows with a beginning, middle, and end, to find the pacing that worked for the story, to include twists, to exploit red herrings, and most of all, to make sure the audience stayed riveted and came back after the commercial break. In writing What She’s Hiding, I liked ending chapters with a cliffhanger so the reader had to turn the page to see what would happen. I learned that from the true-crime producers at Court TV.
Working with the lawyers, judges, forensic investigators, detectives, and cops also helped me to write about criminals, investigators, and especially lawyers. I’m not a lawyer, but I knew enough from Court TV to write convincingly about lawyers and law firms.
What was the biggest adjustment you had to make going from memoir to fiction? Were there any habits from nonfiction that you had to unlearn—or anything that surprisingly helped?
This might seem obvious, but when you write a memoir, you know the events and the characters in your life, and the challenge is to make it interesting. Writing fiction requires you to invent interesting characters and a fascinating story. Sometimes I felt like a four-year-old who gets caught breaking a lamp and then makes up a fanciful lie about what happened, embellishing as necessary, and hoping it all sounds believable.
I didn’t have to unlearn anything I learned from writing a memoir. For me, writing fiction required the same storytelling and characterization skills I used in memoir. I suspect if I started writing fiction and then moved to memoir, I’d have to keep myself from bending the truth in service of the story.
Your memoir was rooted in real events and personalities. In contrast, with What She’s Hiding, you’re building everything from scratch. Was that freeing, intimidating, or a little bit of both?
Memoir is about remembering. You need to recall people, places, and things to write convincingly. And sometimes recalling an event, who was in the room, and what was said, is difficult. I didn’t want the people who helped build Comedy Central saying, “I read your book—that’s not what happened.” So, fiction writing was liberating because I didn’t have to get my facts straight.
When I was writing What She’s Hiding, someone asked me if it was fun, and I said, “Yes! It’s like playing with dolls when you’re a kid—you make up personalities and then move the dolls around and imagine what they’re saying to each other.”
How do you approach writing now compared to when you were working full-time on TV? Do you have a daily routine, or has it shifted depending on the project?
I was a programmer and an executive during my television career. While I occasionally got involved in writing while at Court TV, it was not my job.
As for a writing routine, I don’t have one. I find I like to write in the late afternoon, but sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and work or write on an airplane. I was very driven while writing What She’s Hiding, so I was always writing in my head. I tried to write at least 750 words whenever I sat down at the computer, which, I will emphasize, was not every day. I found I had bursts of creative inspiration, and then fallow periods where I didn’t write much at all.
Your main character, Henry Gladstone, gets drawn into a web of secrets and danger. What was it like building his world and mindset, compared to writing from your own experience in Constant Comedy?
I had no idea how the novel would unfold. I didn’t have any scenes or characters (other than Henry) in mind. I would just write and see where the writing would take me. For example, someone new might walk into a scene and I’d say, “Hey, I like that character. Let’s see what happens if she sticks around.”
Building Henry’s world relied on my understanding of working in a corporate environment. I assumed it wouldn’t be too different in a law firm. I had a lawyer friend tell me, “Wow, you really captured the big law firm experience.” I had a good idea of how Henry’s city life would take shape because I lived in New York City for several years. I gave the novel some of its noir flavor through the descriptions of the city. I made it hot, and dark, and sometimes forbidding.
Henry’s world had to be a lot more physically threatening than the world of television comedy. There were scary and threatening incidents at Comedy Central, but I feared for my job and career, not for my life.
Thrillers live and die on plot twists—what did you learn about crafting surprise while still keeping things grounded and believable?
You don’t want the reader to scream, “That would never happen,” and throw the book against the wall. The surprises and twists need to be organic and believable. But I’ve found so many times that when I made up something that I thought was ridiculous, I’d find out it actually happened. Real life is full of weird events and coincidences, so I think it’s just a matter of not overdoing it.
Was there anything from your time at Comedy Central or Court TV that ended up unexpectedly influencing this story—or the way you tell stories in general?
At Court TV, seeing how people became victims of crime and, more importantly, how they reacted, before, during, and after the crime, fascinated me. I was particularly interested in the ways regular people dealt with violence. Did they freeze up or fight back? I sometimes wondered what I would do in a similar situation. At Court TV I was exposed to this every day.
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