Tana French doesn't have a craft book out, but she's laid out specific writing advice in interviews and one essay written in her own words. Nothing here is paraphrased secondhand.
Your Character Is Always Right
In a 2012 essay for Publishers Weekly tied to the release of Broken Harbor, French laid out five pieces of advice in her own words. The centerpiece is about how to write a character you personally disagree with.
If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.
Tana French, Publishers Weekly, 2012
That principle runs through all of her narrators, especially the unreliable ones. Nobody in her books thinks of themselves as the villain. They think they're doing something reasonable, even necessary, and French's job is to make that internal logic legible without editorializing over it. The same essay pushes the idea further with a tip about writing individuals instead of categories: she's warned against thinking of a character as standing in for 'men' or 'women' in general, arguing that there's only the specific person on the page, with a specific history, and generalizing about a gender is a shortcut that flattens whoever you're supposed to be writing.
Embrace the Mess, Trust 'Said'
The rest of her advice is more practical. 'It's OK to screw up,' she wrote, pointing out that in fiction, unlike live theater, a bad paragraph never has to survive: you can rewrite it fifty times and only the version that works has to see daylight. That's a fairly direct echo of how she's described her own discovery-drafting process elsewhere, where whole chapters get rewritten once she finally figures out what actually happened in the plot. She also tells writers not to overthink dialogue tags, to skip the fancy verbs and trust 'said,' because readers' eyes skim right past it without breaking their focus on the scene. And there's one more habit worth stealing from her own house: her husband, who reads her manuscripts first, cuts every dream sequence she writes, on the grounds that they're almost always either padding or a lazy way of doing something the actual plot should be doing instead.
For the bigger picture of how these habits fit into her process, see the full Tana French writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Write your antagonist's logic, not your judgment of it. Every character should feel justified to themselves, even the ones doing terrible things.
- Let early drafts be bad. A messy first attempt only has to work once you've revised it, not on the first try.
- Stop dressing up dialogue tags. 'Said' is invisible to readers for a reason. Save the flourishes for the dialogue itself.
- Get one honest first reader. Someone willing to tell you to cut the dream sequence, or whatever your equivalent is, before it goes any further.