Years ago, I dabbled in songwriting. At one point, I put music to a poem a friend had written called “The Sound of Gathering Stones,” turning it into a folksy, vaguely Pink Floyd–esque song.

The poem was about tired soldiers preparing for battle, but I heard something broader in its central image. One line stayed with me:

“How do you recognize the sound of gathering stones?”

Not every confrontation begins with a gunshot, a shouted tirade, a slammed door, or an enemy charging over the hill. Sometimes you feel it coming first. Someone is making a case against you or is more silent than they should be. An opponent is quietly gaining ground. A secret is becoming harder to contain. The conditions for a future collision are assembling themselves somewhere just beyond your sight.

I think about that image when I think about obstacles in fiction.

Writers often imagine an obstacle as something large and obvious: a locked door, a fallen tree, a witness who refuses to talk, a villain with a gun, a storm that prevents escape. Those things absolutely count. But obstacles can also be quieter. They can be choices, relationships, delays, misunderstandings, alliances, fears, and tiny shifts in circumstance that slowly narrow the protagonist’s options.

Those are the stones being gathered.

Direct and indirect obstacles

A direct obstacle stops the protagonist immediately.

The bridge is out. The detective can’t get a warrant. The witness disappears. The rival gets to the evidence first. A tree fell and is blocking the route. The protagonist is locked in a room, fired from a job, denied custody, stranded by weather, or confronted by someone with an ax to grind.

Direct obstacles force an immediate adjustment. The protagonist has a goal, something or someone blocks the route, and now they have to decide what to do next.

An indirect obstacle works differently. It may not stop the protagonist today—or even tomorrow. Instead, it changes the terrain so that, later, the protagonist has fewer good choices.

Perhaps the antagonist recruits a powerful ally. Perhaps a friend begins to lose faith in the protagonist. Perhaps a character tells one small lie that’ll snowball later. Perhaps a deadline advances while the protagonist follows the wrong lead. Perhaps two characters want incompatible things, even though neither is a villain. Each of these things is another brick in the wall—pardon the additional Pink Floyd reference.

Another common indirect obstacle is withheld or distorted information. A teenager doesn’t tell her mother about trouble with a boy. A woman withholds the truth from her boyfriend because revealing it would expose something she’s not ready to face. The information might resolve the immediate argument, but the character has reasons for keeping it buried. That silence becomes another stone in the pile—sorry to mix metaphors—letting the misunderstanding grow until honesty carries a greater cost.

The reader may not yet know precisely how these developments will matter. But they can feel the pressure building.

A direct obstacle says, “You can’t go this way.”

An indirect obstacle says, “Keep going, but this is going to get harder.”

Both are useful. The strongest stories usually use both.

The obstacle of silence

Speaking of withheld information, I see this a lot in the feel-good Canadian TV show Heartland, which my daughter got me into. Watching it reminded me how often conflict grows out of what characters don’t say. In a family drama, a secret, a misunderstanding, or a truth withheld for understandable reasons can create as much narrative friction as an external antagonist. The obstacle isn’t that the characters don’t care about one another. Often, it’s precisely because they care that they can’t bring themselves to say the thing that would resolve the conflict.

The key is that the silence must cost the character something and make emotional sense. We’ve all watched shows or read books where a character withholds a simple explanation, yet the reason for doing so is never clear. Instead of creating tension, it becomes frustrating. The character looks foolish, or worse, we can feel the author using the misunderstanding as a plot device.

A character may withhold the truth because they’re ashamed, afraid of hurting someone, protecting another person, avoiding a larger consequence, or not yet ready to admit something to themselves. Those are real obstacles. But if one honest sentence would resolve the conflict and the character has no believable reason to keep it to themselves, readers will feel the author’s hand.

Obstacles as theme

Heartland also often lets conflicts between different pairs of characters rhyme within an episode. One storyline may involve a parent and child struggling with forgiveness, while another explores the same issue in a romantic relationship or friendship. The conflicts are not identical, but they echo one another. That shared pressure gives the episode thematic unity while allowing each character’s obstacle to remain personal. The same approach can create thematic unity across a novel or among its individual chapters.

Surprise and slow burn

When it comes to obstacles, there’s another useful distinction to consider: some obstacles surprise us, while others make us dread what we can see coming.

A surprise obstacle is a sudden truck in the road, a betrayal no one expected, or a revelation that changes what the protagonist thought they knew. Used well, it jolts the story into a new direction.

But surprise alone is not suspense, as Alfred Hitchcock liked to point out. If a truck simply appears because the writer needs a chase scene, the event can feel arbitrary. The best surprise obstacles make sense in retrospect. They may catch us off guard, but afterward we can see the earlier details that made them possible.

Of course, in a comic-relief moment, an apparently random interruption can be the point: a slow-moving driver who stops in the middle of a chase to ask for directions may be absurd precisely because the timing is so inconvenient. The interruption isn’t meant to build suspense; it’s meant to briefly release it.

Slow-burn obstacles create a different kind of tension. We see the trouble forming before the protagonist fully understands it. We watch the antagonist prepare. We recognize that a relationship is fraying, that a promise cannot be kept, that a concealed truth is approaching the surface, or that a plan has one obvious weakness.

This is the “sound of gathering stones.”

The audience begins to ask not merely, What will happen? but When will it happen, and how bad will it be when it does?

That anticipation can be as powerful as surprise. Often, the most satisfying stories let the two work together: the reader senses trouble approaching, but the exact form it takes still catches them by surprise.

Obstacles are not just physical

Thrillers make it easy to see external obstacles. A killer is closing in. A clock is ticking and time is running out. A government agency refuses to cooperate. A crucial piece of evidence is missing.

But even a thriller becomes flat if every obstacle is simply another person with a weapon or another door that won’t open.

The most effective obstacles often operate on several levels at once and can include any combination of the following:

• External obstacles: the villain, the weather, the law, a deadline, a physical barrier, a competing agenda.

• Interpersonal obstacles: distrust, betrayal, divided loyalties, conflicting needs, old grievances, a relationship under strain.

• Internal obstacles: fear, shame, denial, grief, pride, a false belief, or a desire the protagonist doesn’t want to admit.

• Moral obstacles: the choice that will solve one problem but create another; the thing the protagonist can do, but may not be able to live with afterward.

A character may be able to get past a locked door. They may not be able to get past the fact that opening it means betraying someone they love.

That’s when an obstacle stops being a mere delay and becomes an emotional part of the story.

What I noticed in Sterling Point

I recently watched Sterling Point with my wife, mostly because I’d heard so many good things about it. Neither of us had realized it was more of a teen drama, but the acting, setting, and central mystery drew us in.

The series follows Annie, a seventeen-year-old who travels with her twin brother to the Canadian island they’ve inherited from their mysterious grandfather. What begins as an unexpected inheritance opens into questions about her mother’s past, new relationships, and family secrets that have been waiting to surface.

What struck me was how consistently the characters’ hopes ran into resistance. Their problems weren’t about car chases, shootouts, or life-or-death deadlines. They were family secrets, competing agendas, revelations, romantic complications, old wounds, and choices that made one relationship harder in order to protect another.

Obstacle after obstacle complicated what the characters wanted.

It occurred to me that whether you’re writing a teen drama or a thriller, that’s what keeps a story moving. We all know the drill by now: a character wants something. Someone or something gets in the way. The attempt to overcome that resistance creates new consequences, which create new problems, which demand harder choices. That’s Conflict 101 for most authors. But it’s the subtle gathering of stones—the obstacles constantly shifting and accumulating—that becomes the heartbeat of a story.

If a teen drama can generate that much momentum from character-driven conflict, a thriller can do the same—while adding danger, urgency, and external antagonists. The genre changes the scale and texture of the obstacles, but the underlying engine is the same.

Make obstacles create consequences

When a scene feels too easy, it’s tempting to ask, “What big thing can go wrong?” That can be a useful question. But it’s not the only one.

Try asking:

• Who is quietly gathering stones against the protagonist?

• What small decision now will create a more difficult choice later?

• What does the reader see coming that the protagonist doesn’t?

• What does the protagonist want that another character cannot or will not give them?

• What internal fear or desire makes the external problem harder?

• How can this obstacle create the next obstacle rather than merely interrupt the action?

The last question may be the most important. Obstacles shouldn’t feel like speed bumps placed in the road by the author. They can begin as ordinary shifts in affection, trust, loyalty, or resentment, then become obstacles only when those changes force characters into competing needs or impossible choices. Ideally, they grow out of character, circumstance, and consequence—gathering force until they become the major conflict the story has been moving toward all along.

The protagonist lies to protect someone. That lie causes another character to lose trust. The loss of trust prevents the protagonist from getting help when they need it. To repair the damage, the protagonist makes a compromise that gives the antagonist leverage.

Now the story has movement. Each attempt to solve a problem changes the situation, and every change carries a cost.

The pressure at the edge of the story

Funny story. When I played “The Sound of Gathering Stones” for my friend, he loved it—but he asked, “Where’s the other half?”

Oops. It turns out I hadn’t realized there was another page of lyrics on the back of the paper.

But there’s a lesson in that.

That missing half made the threat literal and specific: nuclear war. I convinced him the song was stronger without it. By leaving the danger less defined, the song allowed listeners to bring their own fears to the image.

Fiction doesn’t always need to name every threat immediately, either. Sometimes it’s more powerful to let the reader feel the silence before they see the weapon—to sense the forces assembling before the protagonist understands what they mean.

That doesn’t mean withholding information just to be coy. It means letting tension develop through implication, consequence, and the accumulating evidence that trouble is on its way.

A good obstacle does more than block a character’s path. It reveals what they want, tests what they’re willing to risk, and changes the shape of the choices ahead.

Sometimes it arrives like a truck out of nowhere.

And sometimes, if you listen hard enough, you can hear the sound of gathering stones.

In May, I had a pitch prepared for Pitchfest, the ThrillerFest event where authors get three minutes to pitch their work to agents—basically author-agent speed-dating. My agent had retired, so I was looking for new representation. I had thought it through, tightened it, and probably practiced it more than was strictly necessary. If you’ve seen The Court Jester, I felt a little like Danny Kaye trying to keep the pellet, pestle, chalice, and flagon straight before going into battle.

Then, in a hallway conversation, Steven James asked me what my book was about.

I started into the version I had prepared. I got as far as “sun-drenched luxury and espionage” before he stopped me.

Forget the prepared pitch, he said. What’s it really about?

So I told him something like this: Diplomats across Europe are committing murders they swear they can’t remember—and the CIA suspects someone’s controlling their minds. So they bring in Julian Black, a recluse who can read memories with a touch, to find out who’s behind it. But the deeper he gets, the more he realizes that the unidentified woman suspected of using mind control may be connected to his own past.

When I finished, Steven said, “Now that’s your pitch.”

I’ve thought about that exchange many times since.

Looking back, what I had prepared wasn’t really an elevator pitch. It was a query letter compressed into a monologue: market positioning, comparison titles, plot summary, stakes, and credentials. At Pitchfest, agents still needed the title, genre, word count, recent comps, and a little about me. But I had made those things—and the polished marketing language—the opening act. They were not the answer to “What’s it about?”

The version I ended up with got to the heart of the book: an impossible crime, a man with an unusual gift, and a threat that becomes personal. It didn’t bury the lede.

An elevator pitch can borrow the clarity of a logline and the appeal of marketing copy, but it is not simply either one. A logline helps you understand the engine of your story. Marketing copy sells its mood, genre, or reading experience. An elevator pitch gives someone enough of the story that they want to ask what happens next.

First: do you have a story?

Before we get to elevator pitches, it helps to separate three things writers tend to lump together: a premise fragment, a premise, and a logline.

A premise fragment is an interesting situation, but not necessarily a story.

Aliens invade Earth and land in the middle of New York City.

That might be the beginning of a story. But who is the story about? What do they want? What’s standing in their way? What happens if they fail?

A premise gives us more of a “what if” and some built-in tension.

In 2135, a desperate U.S. government strikes a secret deal with an alien race to help reverse climate collapse—only to discover that the deal comes with major strings attached.

Now we have a situation with conflict baked in. But a logline takes us the rest of the way. It gives us a person to follow, a problem to solve, and consequences.

When a rookie journalist uncovers a secret U.S.–alien pact to “fix” climate collapse, she must trust her mobster ex-boyfriend to expose it before the aliens’ real agenda destroys humanity.

That may not be the final, perfect logline. It does, however, tell us that there is a story here.

What a logline does

A logline is the compressed version of your story’s dramatic engine. In fiction, it usually gives us:

• A specific protagonist

• An inciting event or central problem

• A goal

• The main obstacle or opposing force

• Stakes

• Ideally, some irony or contrast that makes the situation feel particular

Jaws is a classic example. You can summarize it this way:

To save a tourist-packed island on July 4th, a water-phobic sheriff must defy a greedy mayor and hunt the killer shark terrorizing the town before it strikes his family.

That tells us the lead character, his goal, the opposition, and the stakes. It also gives us a wonderful piece of built-in irony: a water-phobic sheriff has to go out on the water to hunt a shark.

Once those elements are in place, you can almost feel the story generating itself.

There’s not always one perfect logline. You might choose to emphasize the team dynamic instead:

When a killer shark terrorizes a beach town before the Fourth of July, a water-phobic police chief must join forces with a grizzled shark hunter and an oceanographer to stop it before the beaches fill.

Both versions describe Jaws. They simply choose different details to foreground. The goal is not to cram in every important character or subplot; it’s to select the elements that most clearly convey the story’s central pressure.

Loglines as a Test

When I’m trying to decide which book to write next, I sometimes make a list of three to five ideas, develop a logline for each, and run them past trusted readers or writer friends. The one that gets the strongest reaction is not automatically the book I should write—but it’s useful information.

Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying that he likes movie ideas “that you can hold in your hand”—ideas someone can explain in twenty-five words or less. I’ve always kept that in mind, though I’d caution against turning it into an ironclad rule. Think of twenty-five words as a useful target, not a ceiling. A logline should usually be one concise sentence; if yours needs a few more words to establish the protagonist, central problem, goal, and stakes, that’s fine. But if it takes a paragraph, you’re probably summarizing rather than identifying the story’s engine.

There’s one caveat. Plenty of excellent books are not easily reducible to a single high-concept sentence, such as Cloud Atlas, with its six interconnected stories. You can summarize it as an epic about six connected lives across different times, shaped by the consequences of past choices. But that description leaves out much of what makes the novel distinctive: its nested structure, shifts in genre and voice, and the particular ways those stories echo one another.

Even so, it’s a useful challenge. If you can’t identify the person, problem, and pressure at the center of your story, you may not yet know what you’re really pitching.

Even a sprawling historical epic like Gone with the Wind can be distilled to its essential conflict: On a Georgia plantation during the Civil War, a selfish young woman fights to save her home and finds a stormy romance with a cynical gambler.

Think of a logline as a stress test. It can reveal whether you have a story engine or merely a cool thing that happens.

But a logline is not an elevator pitch

A logline is the version you write down. An elevator pitch is the version you say when someone asks, “What are you working on?” or “What’s your book about?”

The logline has to be clear. The elevator pitch has to be conversational and alive.

An elevator pitch can absolutely begin with your logline. But it has more room for tone, personality, and the aspect of the story that makes you light up.

An elevator pitch can change, too, depending on whether you’re talking to a friend, another writer, or a literary agent. The core story should remain the same, but the door you invite someone through may change.

The “What I Did Over the Summer” Trap

The extra room in an elevator pitch comes with a risk: it can turn into rambling. When someone asks what your book is about, it’s tempting to start walking them through the plot: first this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Before long, you’re giving them the “What I Did Over the Summer” version of your novel.

A useful warning sign: if your answer begins with “It starts when…” or “First, this happens…,” you may be about to walk someone through plot sequences rather than tell them what the story is really about.

The problem isn’t just that this version is long. It’s that it focuses on plot—the sequence of events—rather than the story: who is under pressure, what they want, what stands in their way, and why it matters.

While an elevator pitch shouldn’t be a chronological recap, it should still give the listener the story’s central engine—the pressure that makes one event lead to another. When you’re shaping one, pay attention to the words that create momentum: when, so, but, before, now, and or. They force you to show cause, conflict, escalation, choice, and stakes rather than simply listing events.

“Diplomats across Europe are committing murders they cannot remember, so Julian Black is sent to read their memories. But the deeper he gets, the more personal the case becomes. Now he has to uncover the woman behind the attacks before they trigger an international crisis.”

The distinction between a logline and elevator pitch may look subtle on the page, but in a live pitch, it can make all the difference. Looking back, that was what Steven heard before I’d even finished my rehearsed version. It probably contained the necessary information, but it didn’t sound like I was excited to tell anyone about the book. It sounded like I’d memorized the necessary information.

Later, I saw him again and told him I’d crinkled up my prepared pitch and thrown it in the trash. For Pitchfest, I used the more informal version he had pulled out of me in that hallway. Every agent I pitched requested pages.

Steven congratulated me, then said something that stuck with me: most authors wouldn’t have done that.

I suspect most would’ve clung to the version they’d prepared because they’d worked so hard to prepare it. Or because they were comfortable with it. But the point isn’t to sound less prepared. It’s to find the version of the story that sounds alive.

The best pitch isn’t necessarily the one you rehearsed most carefully. It’s the one that makes someone want to ask what happens next.

From logline to elevator pitch.

Here’s an example of the difference between a logline and a pitch using one of the projects I’m developing, Cast to Die.

The logline:

When a former teen star turned aerospace CEO is forced to escort an assassin to the Oscars, she uncovers a Hollywood conspiracy that threatens her family and the life she fought to rebuild.

It’s compact and, I hope, gives you the basic engine: protagonist, strange predicament, conspiracy, personal stakes.

But if someone asked me about the book at a party or in a hallway, I would probably say something more like this:

It’s a Hollywood conspiracy thriller about a disgraced former teen star who’s spent years rebuilding her life as an aerospace CEO. When she’s forced to escort an assassin to the Oscars, where her father’s receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award, she discovers that the entire event may be part of a conspiracy that could destroy the life she fought so hard to build.

That version is not as streamlined. It’s not supposed to be. It adds a few details—the disgrace, her father’s award—that make the stakes more personal and give the listener places to react.

“A former teen star turned aerospace CEO?”

“An assassin at the Oscars?”

“Why was she disgraced?”

Those are the moments where a pitch becomes a conversation instead of a recitation.

Of course, that’s not the whole book. There is also a former paparazzo who helped destroy her acting career and is now assigned to shadow her—making him, inconveniently, her only real resource. The assassin is someone from her childhood. Those details matter. They deepen the emotional complications and give the story more texture. But they don’t all belong in the first thirty seconds of a verbal pitch.

A pitch is not a plot summary. Its job is to give someone the central engine of the story and make them want the next piece. Once they lean in, you have more to talk about.

Here’s another example, from an Old West thriller I’m developing, Call Her Requiem.

The logline:

In the dying days of the Old West, a teenage girl helps a Deputy U.S. Marshal rescue her father from the outlaw who burned her family farm—while secretly aiding Requiem, a masked female rider seeking vengeance against the same man.

It gives you the setting, the protagonist, the central mission, the villain, and the complication: she’s helping the lawman while secretly working with someone else.

But if a friend asked what it was about, I might say:

It’s a revenge Western about a teenage girl trying to get her father back from the outlaw who burned down her family’s farm. She’s supposed to be helping a Deputy U.S. Marshal bring him in, but she thinks he’s too methodical to get there in time, so she secretly teams up with Requiem, a masked female rider who wants vengeance of her own. It’s sort of like Once Upon a Time in the West meets True Grit, but with a female vigilante.

If I were pitching it to an agent, I might add a couple of recent book comps to show where it fits in today’s market—not instead of the premise, but alongside it.

The logline lays out the architecture, but the elevator pitch lets you lead with the version of the story that feels most immediate and human.

Three more non-pitches

In addition to the “What I Did Over the Summer” run-through of sequential plot events—which can have people zoning out—here are three more common pitch habits that can make a promising book sound less compelling than it is.

A list of ingredients

Here’s a made-up example:

My book has goblins that come through a wormhole, werewolves, Irish history, and takes place in Poughkeepsie, New York.

This may sound colorful, but it’s a collection of story elements rather than a story. We don’t know whose problem this is, what the goblins want, why the wormhole matters, or what will happen if the protagonist fails.

A logline doesn’t need to include every interesting thing in the book. It needs to show the element that sets the central conflict in motion.

Depending on the actual story, the core conflict might be expressed in a logline like this:

When goblins pour through a wormhole beneath Poughkeepsie, an Irish American historian must enlist the town’s secret werewolf clan to stop an ancient goblin invasion of Ireland from beginning again on American soil.

That may or may not be the best version of that imaginary novel, but it gives us a protagonist, a disruption, a goal, opposition, and stakes: the basic building blocks a logline needs.

In conversation, I might say it more informally:

It’s about an Irish American historian in Poughkeepsie who discovers goblins coming through a wormhole. To stop an ancient goblin invasion of Ireland from starting again on American soil, he has to enlist the town’s Irish werewolf clan.

A vague theme

Another thing I see a lot is a pitch like this:

My book is a coming-of-age tale about a girl who works through a family crisis and comes out okay in the end.

This tells us the emotional category of the book, but not what makes this coming-of-age story different from hundreds of others. “Family crisis” and “comes out okay” are abstract concepts; they don’t create an image, a question, or a reason to keep listening.

The fix isn’t necessarily to make it melodramatic. It is to identify the specific crisis, choice, and consequence. In logline form, that might look like this:

When her mother’s arrest forces her to move in with the grandmother she barely knows, a shy sixteen-year-old must decide whether to protect her family’s secrets or expose a lie that could send her mother to prison.

It’s not perfect, but now we have a story rather than a label. The reader can ask: What did the mother do? What secret is the girl protecting? What choice will she make?

In a conversation, I might say: “It’s a coming-of-age story about a shy sixteen-year-old who has to live with the grandmother she barely knows after her mother is arrested. As she tries to protect her mother, she realizes the family story she’s come to know may be a lie.”

A verdict instead of a pitch

Speaking of grandmothers, my grandmother used to say, “A huckster never shouts, ‘rotten apples.’” I’m reminded of that when I hear writers, outside of marketing copy, call their books fantastic or say something like this:

It’s an incredible, unputdownable thriller with twists you’ll never see coming.

That may be true. But every author believes their book is great, and listeners can’t know whether they agree until they know what the book is actually about.

A pitch shouldn’t ask someone to take your word for the quality of the story. It should give them enough of the protagonist, conflict, and stakes that they want to discover the quality for themselves.

Let the premise do the persuading. Save “unputdownable” for a blurb—or for marketing copy.

The hallway test

So how do you know whether your elevator pitch is working?

Say it out loud.

Not in your head. Not in the carefully edited language of a query letter. Out loud, preferably to someone who hasn’t already heard you explain the book six times.

If you find yourself using phrases you would never say in real life, simplify them. If you get halfway through and can’t tell whether you’re describing the plot or the story’s actual appeal, go back to the logline. If you notice yourself becoming more animated when you abandon the prepared wording and explain the book naturally, that is worth noticing.

That doesn’t mean you should sound unprepared. You need to know the story well enough that you can stop reciting and start talking about it naturally.

That’s the hallway test: when someone asks, “What’s your book really about?” do you have an answer that sounds like natural speech and makes them want to ask the next question?

A few takeaways

• Use a logline to test the story itself: protagonist, goal, obstacle, stakes, and the particular irony that makes it yours.

• Use an elevator pitch to connect with a person, not just deliver information.

• Keep a few versions of the elevator pitch. Different listeners may respond to different doors into the same story.

• Pay attention to what you say when you stop trying to sound polished. That may be where the real pitch is hiding.

Before you write 90,000 words—or spend weeks building a deck, a query, or a proposal—it’s worth seeing whether you can answer one deceptively simple question:

What’s your book really about?

If you’re still trying to figure out whether you have a premise fragment, a premise, or a full story engine, I go deeper into that process in the So You Want to Be an Author Starter Kit, which includes a practical ebook, exercises, and examples for developing an idea into a workable logline before you spend months drafting, plus a reusable six-month Book Launch Roadmap for planning what comes after.

When people talk about blurbs, they sometimes mean endorsement quotes. I mean the actual book summary—the text on the back cover or sales page that has to do an enormous amount of work in very little space. Great blurbs work a little like trap doors: they look harmless at first, then suddenly give way to something deeper, darker, and harder to forget.

Of course, the blurb is often the last thing written, long after the publishing deal is in place. But even after the fact, it can still reveal the original thinking that helped get the book picked up in the first place. And sometimes that initial pitch survives intact all the way to the jacket copy. I often write my blurb before I write the book at all, using it to test whether the story I’m about to spend months writing will actually be compelling, even as the details evolve.

A great thriller blurb creates a story-shaped promise. It gives just enough setup, danger, contradiction, and intrigue to make reading the book feel less like a choice and more like an irresistible pull.

I’ve always been fascinated by breakout thriller blurbs—the way they establish a premise, sharpen it with tension, and end on a line or idea that makes you need to know more. Three books that do this especially well are The Housemaid, The Marsh King’s Daughter, and Gone Girl.

All three became major publishing events. All three landed movie adaptations. And all three, in different ways, demonstrate what a blurb can do when it isn’t merely describing a book, but actively pulling a reader into one—in other words, selling the story rather than telling it.

The Housemaid: the knockout final line

When The Housemaid was released, I’d heard all the buzz, so I checked the back-cover copy before buying it.

"Welcome to the family," Nina Winchester says as I shake her elegant, manicured hand. I smile politely, gazing around the marble hallway. Working here is my last chance to start fresh. I can pretend to be whoever I like. But I'll soon learn that the Winchesters' secrets are far more dangerous than my own . . .

Every day I clean the Winchesters' beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor.

I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew's handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it's hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina's life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband.

I only try on one of Nina's pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it's like. But she soon finds out... and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it's far too late.

But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don't know who I really am.

They don't know what I'm capable of . . .

What hooked me wasn’t the setup alone. The setup is effective: a woman down on her luck takes a job in a wealthy household, and almost immediately the arrangement starts to feel wrong. That’s solid thriller territory. But what made me want to grab the book was the final line: “They don’t know what I’m capable of …”

That line gave me chills.

Why does it work so well? Because it changes the direction of the blurb. Up to that point, the copy is training you to read the protagonist as vulnerable, trapped, maybe in danger. Then the final line quietly flips the energy. Suddenly the protagonist may not just be the victim of the story’s tension. She may be part of it.

That’s a powerful blurb move in thriller fiction: don’t end on information; end on menace. Let the blurb turn. Make me realize that the story I thought I was walking into may not be the story I’m actually getting.

What I especially like here is that the line is vague in exactly the right way. It doesn’t tell us too much. It doesn’t spoil the turn. It leaves just enough room for the threat to register. A weaker blurb might have tried to be more explicit. Or it might have revealed (SPOILER ALERT) that the character spent time in prison. This one trusts the reader to feel the threat without having it spelled out.

So if I were breaking down what The Housemaid blurb does right—and why it grabbed so much attention before word of mouth took over, I’d put it this way: it sets up a familiar danger, then ends with a line that makes the protagonist dangerous too. That shift is the hook.

The Marsh King’s Daughter: the premise as trap

If The Housemaid wins on its last line, The Marsh King’s Daughter wins on premise, though the last line here is brilliant in its own right.

I’d known Karen Dionne for years, first from an old online forum called Writers.net and later from its successor, Backspace. A longtime mentor, she’d always been extremely generous with advice, so I was excited when I heard her new book—a genre shift for her—had sold in a 12-way auction and was later adapted into a movie. Naturally, I wanted to see what the story was about. As soon as I read the summary, I understood why it garnered so much interest.

Helena Pelletier has a loving husband, two beautiful daughters, and a business that fills her days. But she also has a secret: she is the product of an abduction. Her mother was kidnapped as a teenager by her father and kept in a remote cabin in the marshlands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Helena, born two years after the abduction, loved her home in nature, and despite her father’s sometimes brutal behavior, she loved him, too...until she learned precisely how savage he could be.

More than twenty years later, she has buried her past so soundly that even her husband doesn’t know the truth. But now her father has killed two guards, escaped from prison, and disappeared into the marsh. The police begin a manhunt, but Helena knows they don’t stand a chance. Knows that only one person has the skills to find the survivalist the world calls the Marsh King—because only one person was ever trained by him: his daughter.

What grabbed me immediately was the neatness of the setup: the only person capable of tracking the Marsh King in his natural habitat is the one who knows him best—his daughter. That’s the hook.

This is one of those blurbs where the premise does almost all the work. The contradiction is already baked in: the person best equipped to hunt the predator is also the person most deeply bound to him. That creates tension at the plot level, but also at the emotional level, which is where the best thriller hooks usually live.

It’s specific, too, and specificity matters. “A woman must confront her past” is not a hook. “A woman must use the survival and tracking skills taught to her by the man who abducted her mother and raised her in the marsh” is. One is generic danger. The other is a premise that’s going to hook people in.

That specificity is part of what makes the blurb so compelling. It promises not just suspense, but a particular kind of suspense. This isn’t simply a chase story. It’s a story in which the chase itself is loaded with history, trauma, skill, memory, and twisted intimacy. The blurb makes it clear that the external pursuit and the internal reckoning are going to be the same story.

Strong thriller blurbs do this exceptionally well: they don’t just present stakes. They present entanglement. The chase and the reckoning feel fused together, not separate. It doesn’t hurt that the story takes place in a unique and immersive setting, which the reader knows will be brought to vivid life.

Gone Girl: suspicion as the real hook

Last, we have Gone Girl, which may be one of the clearest examples of a blurb selling not just a premise, but an atmosphere of instability.

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer?

The setup is simple on the surface: a wife goes missing on her anniversary, and suspicion starts to fall on her husband. That’s clean, immediate, and loaded from the start. But the real hook isn’t the disappearance alone. It’s the sense that the marriage itself is already under strain.

That’s what makes the blurb so effective. It doesn’t merely pose the question, “What happened to Amy?” It also raises the more unsettling question: what kind of story am I really in? A missing person case? A marriage autopsy? A media spectacle? A psychological war? The blurb doesn’t answer that. It lets those possibilities hang in the air at once.

In other words, the hook is suspicion. The blurb keeps Nick under a cloud of doubt, and Amy’s diary deepens that uncertainty. It also sets up a he-said/she-said mystery, with each version of events pulling the reader in a different direction. Readers don’t just want an event; they want interpretive danger, where every detail can be read two ways. A missing wife is compelling. A missing wife in a marriage that already feels off is much more compelling.

And like the other two examples, Gone Girl doesn’t over-explain. It gives the reader an unstable central image and trusts that image to do the work. That’s another thing great blurbs tend to have in common: they know when to stop. They leave pressure in the paragraph.

What these blurbs have in common

What fascinates me is that these blurbs reach the same effect by different routes.

The Housemaid uses a final line that flips the setup into something else. The Marsh King’s Daughter uses a premise so sharp and emotionally charged it practically sells itself. Gone Girl uses suspicion and instability to make the reader feel that the obvious story can’t possibly be the whole story.

But underneath those differences, they share a basic structure.

First, they give us a situation we can instantly grasp. A troubled woman takes a housekeeping job. A daughter must hunt the father who shaped her. A wife goes missing and suspicion falls on the husband. None of this is hard to understand. In fact, clarity is part of the point.

Then they sharpen that situation with contradiction. The housemaid may be dangerous herself. The daughter hunting the villain is also his product, trained by him. The husband at the center of the mystery may be grieving, guilty, manipulated, or all three. That contradiction is where the hook starts to bite.

And finally, they leave just enough unresolved that the reader feels a pull rather than confusion.

That, to me, is the heart of a great blurb. It doesn’t dump information; it engineers anticipation.

The takeaway

If I had to boil this down to a few takeaways, they’d be these.

Start with a premise the reader can understand quickly. If the reader has to work too hard just to grasp the setup, the blurb is already in trouble.

Build in contradiction early. The strongest blurbs make the setup seem one way and then reveal a second, more unsettling meaning.

Be specific. Vagueness sounds dramatic until you compare it to a blurb with a clean, vivid premise. Specificity wins.

End with a zinger. If you can, end on a line that changes the temperature of everything that came before. That’s what The Housemaid does so brilliantly. The final sentence jolts.

Above all, remember that a blurb is not trying to tell the whole story. Its job is to create the feeling that a story is already moving, already tightening, already about to reveal something you need to know.

That’s why the best ones are so hard to forget. They don’t feel like a summary. They feel like the beginning point of a story you have to read.

Author A is a thought leader in workforce and project management, organizational leadership, and culture change. He has a solid platform, has appeared on radio and TV, and his books are used in universities around the world.

Author B is a novelist—a writer of thrillers and science fiction with a penchant for twisty tales and international locations.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, both authors are me.

Alas, I resemble Obi‑Wan more than the suspiciously younger figures in the header.

Old Ben Kenobi—Obi‑Wan—brings me to the question of pen names and why one person might use more than one identity.

Why I Use a Pen Name for Fiction

I once saw a kiosk in a local shopping strip in Northeast Philly that said:

Hot Dogs and Keys Made

I don’t need to say much more about that, other than that I hope they were paying attention to which item they put on the roll.

And that wasn’t even the weirdest sign I’ve ever seen.

That honor may go to a food truck that used to be parked at Temple University when I was a student there. The sign said:

Fresh Fish and Furniture Moved

I always felt the kiosk and the food truck should combine businesses and take over the world, but that’s beside the point.

I write fiction as J.B. Manas and nonfiction as Jerry Manas. It’s not exactly a deeply hidden dual identity, especially since I used the same headshot for both (and I didn’t even wear glasses in one like Clark Kent). But it serves the purpose I wanted: I didn’t want readers to get confused.

I didn’t want to be the literary version of “Hot Dogs and Keys Made” (or fresh fish and furniture moved)—someone hunting for a thriller and stumbling into a page of project‑management advice, or vice versa. Bad analogy, I know, but it’s the same kind of whiplash.

If someone is searching for twisty international thrillers with a speculative edge and they land on a page full of project management articles and lessons from Napoleon, they might wonder if they’re in the right place. And vice versa.

That’s really the whole reason for the split. It’s not about hiding one side from the other. It’s about clarity.

Let me introduce you to another author: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a brilliant mathematician, lecturer, and writer of advanced textbooks on mathematics and logic.

Sorry, wrong Dodgson.

Anyway, you may know Charles Lutwidge Dodgson by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland.

That’s a much better example of what a pen name can do. In Dodgson’s case, the name Lewis Carroll separated his mathematical and scholarly work from the more whimsical, imaginative world of his fiction. That distinction didn’t just protect one side of his writing from the other. It helped shape how readers encountered each.

What a pen name does

A pen name can do a few useful things:

• It helps readers know what kind of story they’re getting.

• It keeps your nonfiction and fiction brands from stepping on each other.

• It lets each side of your work make its own promise.

That promise matters.

When people come to nonfiction, they usually want expertise, usefulness, and trust. When they come to fiction, they want atmosphere, voice, tension, and imagination. Those are different reading experiences, and I wanted the branding to reflect that difference.

Could I have put everything under one name? Sure. Plenty of writers do, especially when their genres are close cousins. Jerri Williams, for example, writes crime fiction under her own name and also writes nonfiction that explains FBI practices for writers, filmmakers, and true-crime readers (I recommend both!). But for me, it made more sense to create a clean divide between the work that teaches and the work that tells stories, especially since the audiences are so different.

Why branding matters

Branding is really just a way of telling readers what to expect.

If they know your nonfiction name, they should have some sense of the ideas, perspective, and practical value they’re going to get. If they know your fiction name, they should have some sense of the mood, genre, and emotional experience they’re about to step into.

That’s why I think pen names can be useful even when they’re not secretive. They don’t have to be about mystery. Sometimes they’re just about reducing friction.

Readers are busy. They make quick decisions. The clearer you can be about what kind of experience you’re offering, the easier it is for the right reader to find the right book.

The downside

Of course, there’s a tradeoff.

It takes more work to maintain two platforms. Two names mean two sets of expectations, two streams of content, and a little more juggling than I’d ideally like. Every so often I wish I could just throw it all into one pile and call it a day.

But I know better.

As someone with a marketing background, I know the cleaner choice was to separate them. Not because the work is disconnected—in both my nonfiction and fiction, I like to cross-pollinate ideas, blend in obscure facts, and keep things entertaining—but because the audiences are.

The larger lesson

In the end, I think that’s what a pen name really is for: not disguise (unless maybe you’re writing spicy romance and you’re a pediatrician), but definition.

It helps tell readers which door to open.

And in publishing, that’s not a small thing.

It can be the difference between confusing someone and welcoming them into exactly the right story.

Welcome to all the new subscribers who joined this month. If you’re here for the writing side of things, you can also opt into my So You Want to Be an Author section for posts just for writers. And if you’re still in the early stages of getting published, I have a free Quick-Start Guide on my website, plus a full Starter Kit for $27 that walks you through everything from idea to launch.

Overview

Like the rest of the world, I recently watched the Netflix series, “I Will Find You,” based on the Harlan Coben book, and loved it. Also like the rest of the world, I began binge-watching other shows based on Coben’s books.

As a writer, it also served as a great lesson in how to hook readers, and how so many nooks and crannies and red herrings when done well, make people want to stay up all night to see what happens next (and I’d already read many of the books!). As I’m active with the International Thriller Writers, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know and read many incredible authors, learning from them at Thrillerfest, and seeing how their books engage huge masses of readers.

One thing I keep hearing—and believe deeply myself—is that the hallmark of a great thriller is the sensation that, at the moment of revelation, everything that came before was inevitable—yet you never saw it coming.

Having cut my teeth as a nonfiction author, I love research—especially when it’s about something I’m genuinely curious about. And as a novelist, nothing fascinates me more than how other writers, especially domestic thriller and mystery authors, pull off those glorious twists and red herrings. I’ve had more than a few of my own, and honestly, they usually just come to me—not through any deliberate method. So I decided to dig in and actually break down how the twistiest authors do it, partly for you, and partly so I can appreciate the craft even more myself.

This article maps the full toolkit of deception available to thriller writers, drawing on insights from Harlan Coben, Steven James, Ruth Ware, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Sarah Pekkanen, and a cross-section of authors who’ve mastered the art of the “surprise that satisfies.” It also addresses what separates a twist that gets people talking at the proverbial watercooler (or a group chat at 1am) from one that earns a huh? and a one-star review.

Part One: Defining the Terms

Before diving into techniques, it’s worth separating the terms that are often used interchangeably—because each does distinct work.

• A twist is a reversal that recontextualizes what the reader believed to be true. It doesn’t just add new information; it changes the meaning of information already given (think the ending of The Sixth Sense -- IYKYK).

• A reveal is the answer to a question the story has been raising. As Ruth Ware puts it, “a reveal at its heart is the answer to a question”—and the best ones rise organically out of your plot with a sense of inevitability (you can look back and see the breadcrumbs were there all along).

• A red herring is a false lead—something the reader thinks matters, but doesn’t. As Hank Phillippi Ryan notes, “a clever writer will want you to think it matters. But it shouldn’t feel planted, it should feel natural.” (The best ones, as we’ll get into later, are basically short stories of their own.)

• A cliffhanger is an unresolved question at the end of a chapter or section—the deliberate withholding of resolution to compel the reader forward.

• A pivot is Steven James’s broader concept: any moment where the story changes direction while staying rooted in its own logic. To paraphrase James, a twist is a type of pivot, but not every pivot is a twist.

In practice, the line between twist and reveal often blurs. In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (my personal favorite of the canon), Darth Vader’s “No. I am your father” doesn’t just supply missing information about Luke’s parentage—it overturns what Obi-Wan told him and forces the audience to reinterpret Vader, Anakin, and Obi-Wan’s earlier exposition in a new light. It answers a story question (who was Luke’s father, really?), but it also changes the meaning of what we thought we already knew, which is why it’s remembered as a quintessential twist rather than a simple reveal.

A hidden relationship, a surprise motive, an unmasked identity—these often work more like reveals than twists. But either way, Ware’s rule holds: it only works if it feels earned.

Part Two: Author Fingerprints — Who Does This Well

The Coben Model: Domestic Secrets and Suburban Shock

Harlan Coben’s signature is the ordinary life upended. He’s been called the “master of domestic suspense,” and his method centers on a premise he’s talked about often: every character should have something to hide, with those secrets gradually revealed to add layers of suspense. I’ve noticed something else, too—a lot of those secrets have nothing to do with the central crime at all. They’re their own separate subplot, hiding in plain sight.

His structural secret: he knows the beginning and the end before he knows anything else. In his BBC Maestro Masterclass, he explains that he usually knows the ending—or the big final reveal—before he starts writing, then writes his way toward it, discovering most of the twists in the middle as he goes. That’s the advantage: when you already know where the story lands, you can go back and plant clues that only mean something once the reader gets there. Every suspicious glance, every “harmless” subplot, ends up doing double duty because Coben already knew what it was setting up. It’s like watching a photo slowly come into focus: blurry at first, and by the end, you can’t believe you didn’t see it sooner.

Coben’s technique of rapid question-answering is also worth noting. In I Will Find You, he introduces a mysterious visitor in prison—and resolves who it is within pages. The answer, however, doesn’t close the story; it detonates a new, bigger question (is that photo really evidence that the protagonist’s son is still alive—the son he’s in jail for murdering?). In his BBC Maestro course on writing thrillers, Coben explicitly teaches this: answer small questions quickly, but let each answer open a deeper one. It’s a course I recommend for Coben fans and thriller writers alike—and with his writing memoir Plot Twist on the way, there’s even more to learn from how he thinks about story.

Coben-Adjacent Authors to Know

These authors share Coben’s DNA—family secrets, suburban dread, layered deception—and several I’ve had the privilege of interacting with and learning from directly through ITW’s Online Thriller School and ThrillerFest. Each brings a distinct twist signature worth studying:

Lisa Jewell

Signature Technique: Hidden backstory, dangerous outsiders, surprises driven by psychology and relationships

Notable Example: None of This Is True, The Night She Disappeared

Shari Lapena

Signature Technique: POV manipulation, everyone-as-suspect, rapid escalation

Notable Example: The Couple Next Door

Karin Slaughter

Signature Technique: Emotional stakes, shocking reveals, long-running character secrets

Notable Example: Will Trent series

Louise Candlish

Signature Technique: Middle-class lives cracking open, serpentine domestic secrets

Notable Example: Our House, The Only Suspect

Tana French

Signature Technique: Detectives whose own assumptions mislead the reader, slow-burn layered misdirection, characters you have to solve as much as the crime

Notable Example: Dublin Murder Squad series

Gillian Flynn

Signature Technique: Unreliable narrators as the red herring itself

Notable Example: Gone Girl

Ruth Ware

Signature Technique: Locked-room / closed-circle mysteries, tense isolated settings, fair-play twists

Notable Example: The It Girl, In a Dark Dark Wood

Hank Phillippi Ryan

Signature Technique: Multi‑plot structural suspense, reader-knows-more tension, and newsroom‑style, don’t‑turn‑the‑channel pacing

Notable Example: The Murder List, All This Could Be Yours

Lisa Scottoline

Signature Technique: Legal thrillers grounded in family and community, secrets that hit close to home, emotionally-driven reveals (and a fellow Philly-area native)

Notable Example: Someone Knows, After Anna

Stacy Willingham

Signature Technique: Twists that grow out of who a character really is, atmospheric settings, “nobody is who they seem”

Notable Example: A Flicker in the Dark, Only If You’re Lucky

Andrea Bartz

Signature Technique: Misdirection through withheld or unreliable perspective, psychological female friendships, high-concept hooks

Notable Example: We Were Never Here, The Last Ferry Out

Lisa Jewell is perhaps the closest to Coben in spirit. Jewell has said that characters come first and plot twists are sorted out after. She doesn’t plan her twists—she discovers them through character. Her hallmark is the hidden intruder, the coercive controller with a past, the family secret that has been festering for decades. Where Coben tends toward high-octane revelation, Jewell creates dread that builds slowly into a breathless ending.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl deserves special mention as a masterclass in the unreliable narrator as red herring. Flynn uses Amy’s fabricated diary entries to make Nick appear guilty—the entire first half of the book is a structured misdirection, with the “clue trail” itself being the lie. The reader is misled not by a planted subplot, but by a narrative voice.

Tana French uses a different approach: her detectives are as unreliable as her suspects, and the reader’s assumptions about what the investigation means track what the detective assumes—which is often wrong. This creates misdirection at the level of perspective rather than plot.

Andrea Bartz deserves a special callout for how consistently she pulls off misdirection—not through hidden subplots, but through perspective itself. Across her books, you often think you know exactly what you’re watching, who’s the victim, who’s in danger, who did what—and then the ground shifts. I won’t spoil which book does this best, but if you’ve read her, you know the feeling. Beyond the books, Andi’s also become a vocal advocate for authors navigating the AI era and a terrific source of industry and craft insight on her Get It Write Substack. We’ve had a number of conversations about twists, misdirection, and the business side of writing that have genuinely shaped how I think about this stuff.

Hank Phillippi Ryan, who invited me to serve as the official note-taker and join the core team for ITW’s Online Thriller School, has been a generous mentor in both craft and community. Her way of talking about red herrings and suspense—how confusion isn’t the same as tension—shows up all over how I think about misdirection now.

Part Three: Crafty Advice — Techniques in Detail

1. Sneaky Endeavors: Suspicious Behavior That Turns Out to Be Benign

This is one of the most effective tricks in the domestic thriller playbook: a character does something sneaky, secretive, or just plain weird—and it makes the reader (and the protagonist) suspect them. Then it turns out to be something totally mundane, embarrassing, or even sweet. The trick is that the behavior has to genuinely support both readings. A character sneaking off to meet someone could be having an affair—or planning a surprise party. You have to make both options believable without giving the game away.

The best versions of this do double duty: they work as red herrings, and they tell us something real about the character. The “affair” that turns out to be a support group meeting. The secret bank account that’s actually funding a family member in crisis. These moments resolve in a way that explains the suspicious behavior and deepens who that character is.

2. Seeds and Mysteries: Planting Questions Throughout

Here’s a trick behind every page-turner: instead of one mystery that gets solved at the end, good thriller writers keep several questions dangling at once. Some get answered quickly. Others linger for chapters. And the moment one closes, another one opens—or gets bigger.

Coben talks about this at the sentence level. He’s said that on every page, every paragraph, every sentence, he’s asking himself: is this compelling? Is this gripping? Is this moving the story forward? A chapter-ending seed works the same way, just zoomed out—a small detail, a question, a reveal that hasn’t quite landed yet, left dangling right where the reader wants an answer most..

Seeds work on the bigger scale too: an unexplained scar a character brushes off with a throwaway excuse, a strange little detour to a shop that doesn’t fit the story yet, a habit or phrase that seems like just a character quirk. None of it looks like anything in the moment. When you circle back to it later, that’s what creates the “wait, I should have seen that!” feeling that makes a reveal actually land. A good seed should be explainable two ways—the innocent way you assume at first, and the loaded way you realize in hindsight.

3. Everyone Is Suspicious: The Full-Cast Suspect Architecture

Coben’s observation that every character should have something to hide is a good craft principle to remember. When every character has a secret—even unrelated to the central crime—each secret functions as a red herring. The reader can’t eliminate anyone from suspicion, because everyone looks guilty of something.

The risk here is overwhelm. British author Chris Hills Farrow’s advice applies: “aim for 3-5 solid [red herrings] per act, each echoing the true culprit’s traits for that mirror-image misdirect.” The suspects who seem most like the actual villain in manner—even if innocent—are the most effective distractors.

Steven James’s fourteen pivot questions—which I’ll come back to later—include one that’s perfect for this technique: “Who is not who they appear to be? What is not what it seems to be?”

4. Red Herrings as Complete Stories

The most sophisticated red herrings are not false clues—they’re fully realized alternative narratives that happen to be wrong. When a red herring has its own arc, its own emotional stakes, and its own resolution, it functions as a parallel story that feels meaningful even after it’s deflated.

In a Killer Nashville interview, Hank Phillippi Ryan discusses her model of four interlocking plots per novel: each character group has their own story moving forward. Most of these stories are not the central crime; they are the world in which the central crime lives. When they intersect, they create the appearance of connection where there may be none.

This is the structural principle behind the technique: red herrings that resolve as complete stories give the reader the satisfaction of narrative closure while clearing the field for the real reveal. The reader feels rewarded, not cheated.

5. Multiple Stories That Collide

Harlan Coben’s structural signature is exactly this: multiple independent storylines, each with its own cast, each building toward a collision. In The Stranger—fresh in my mind because I just reread it after binge-watching the show—the main plot around Adam Price intersects with the Stranger’s revelations to multiple people, a missing person case, and secrets from decades earlier—threads that appear unrelated at first but ultimately converge on the same underlying scheme.

The collision technique works because it creates the illusion of significance. When Character A’s story intersects with Character B’s, the reader starts to suspect a connection—guilt by proximity, shared motive, or hidden relationship—that may or may not be real. Coben often lets that false connection stand for chapters before revealing the real one—or reveals that there was no connection at all, and the true link lies somewhere the reader wasn't watching.

The craft challenge: the collisions have to feel earned, not contrived. As Steven James emphasizes, events in fiction should be contingent upon what occurred—each intersection growing naturally from character choices and their consequences, not from authorial convenience.

6. Hidden Relationships: The Reveal That Rewrites the Past

Perhaps the most reliably satisfying reveal structure is the hidden relationship—two characters who the reader believed had no prior connection turn out to share a past. This works because it retroactively recontextualizes everything they’ve said and done. Subtle hesitations, oddly knowing glances, specific word choices—the reader can look back and see the seeds were there.

Hidden relationships come in several varieties:

• Shared history: two characters who knew each other under different circumstances

• Concealed family ties: characters who are secretly related (parent/child, siblings, etc.)

• Prior victim/perpetrator dynamic: a character who was wronged by another and has been operating with concealed intent

• False identity: a character who has reinvented themselves and is known to others under a different name

Lisa Jewell’s work frequently employs the concealed family or romantic history. Coben’s Run Away uses DNA genealogy to uncover a protagonist’s shocking past—a real-world research interest he turned into a story.

The danger: the hidden relationship must be possible given everything the reader already knows about these characters. Think of a book where two characters are revealed late to be siblings, but earlier chapters showed clear romantic attraction and no sense of recognition—that kind of retroactive clash breaks the “unexpected yet inevitable” contract (Luke and Leia aside—at the time, neither they nor the audience knew they were related in Star Wars).

To avoid this, I’ve noticed effective authors plant micro-confirmations early—seemingly neutral details that read as perfectly ordinary at the time but click into place once the hidden relationship is revealed.

7. Misdirection: Leading the Reader Away from Truth

Misdirection is the umbrella strategy behind most of these techniques. It works on a few different levels:

Structural misdirection — the arrangement of information so that the correct solution is technically present but obscured. Placing a critical clue in a scene heavy with other activity, or assigning key suspicious behavior to a character the reader believes is innocent and no longer worth being wary of—say, a jovial sidekick whose evasive answers feel like comic relief rather than evidence.

Time-based misdirection — deploying flashbacks or non-linear timelines so that the order of events hides what really caused what. The reader pieces together a wrong explanation from the fragments they have.

Character-level misdirection — giving the most suspicious-seeming character an alibi (real or apparent) while giving the actual perpetrator sympathetic, plausible reasons for every questionable act.

In her article “Seven Secrets of Suspense,” Hank Phillippi Ryan explicitly identifies misdirection and the layering of clues as key components of her craft. She writes: “Confusion is not suspense. When you withhold information simply as a device to keep people reading, they will not keep reading. They will stop reading. Because they will be confused.” The distinction is crucial: misdirection leads the reader in the wrong direction (not no direction). You’re guiding them—just not toward the truth.

One of the sneakiest tools in the misdirection arsenal is the unreliable narrator—when the person telling the story is lying, mistaken, or simply leaving things out. It’s not a twist or a reveal on its own; it’s a delivery mechanism for both. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is the textbook example: Amy’s diary entries weaponize unreliability, steering the reader toward the wrong story about the marriage.

8. Mystery Characters: The Figure in the Shadows

The mystery character—seen only in silhouette, leaving cryptic messages, observed from behind or through a window—is a staple of the genre for good reason: it delays identification while maintaining urgency. The reader knows something is there; they just don’t know what.

For this trick to feel fair, the eventual reveal has to line up with what the reader has already seen. When the mystery figure is finally unmasked, the earlier appearances should still make sense: the height, the way they move, the wording of those messages. The reveal shouldn’t rewrite what came before; it should make us see it differently.

Coben’s example from I Will Find You—the mysterious prison visitor—shows this at the book’s opening: the identity is unknown, the reader is curious, and the reveal (within a few pages) opens a larger question. The shadow figure works best as a short-term mystery; kept in play too long, it risks annoying readers or feeling like pure withholding instead of genuine suspense.

Even outside crime fiction, you see mystery characters—think Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, the whispered-about figure in the shadows whose true nature only comes into focus at the end. I’ve read other stories where the mystery figure turns out to be a detective, eventually revealed as an unexpected ally for the protagonist—but the earlier glimpses still line up once you know who they are.

9. Surprise Motives: The Hardest Element to Pull Off

Surprise motives are one of the trickiest tools in the thriller writer’s kit, because they so easily produce the “out of nowhere” reaction. Sarah Pekkanen’s advice is apt here: when planning an ending or major event, ask “What if the opposite of that happened?” and generate multiple alternatives. The right motive often looks small or ordinary on the surface—jealousy, humiliation, fear of exposure—but is deeply rooted in the character’s history and psychology.

A rule of thumb for motive reveals is: the motive must be seeded before it’s revealed. This doesn’t mean the motive must be guessable—it means the reader, in retrospect, should recognize that the character could have had this motive. A character who has been humiliated, passed over, or secretly betrayed can be revealed as the villain because of those experiences—provided the humiliation, the being-passed-over, the betrayal were visible earlier in the narrative. If none of that is on the page and the villain’s motive appears out of thin air, readers will feel you’ve moved the goalposts.

For example, imagine a character is revealed at the end to be secretly jealous of the protagonist for “stealing their promotion” and sabotaging them because of it—but the book never once showed them working together, competing for the same job, or even caring about career status. That kind of motive feels as if it’s been dropped in from nowhere, because the story never gave the reader any reason to believe this jealousy existed in the first place.

As for choosing a motive, Hank Phillippi Ryan’s question “What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen?” is useful here as a generative technique: work from the most devastating motive backward, then figure out how to seed it in the character’s past and hide it in plain sight.

Part Four: Steven James and the Art of the Pivot

I’ve taken several of Steven James’s classes at CraftFest and ITW’s Online Thriller School, and his teaching is as precise and generous as his craft books. He’s also the person who helped me sharpen my new pitch to agents after mine retired—a practical, immediately applicable insight that got me right to the root of the story. His pivot framework, laid out in his ITW workshop materials and his book Delve, Pivot, Propel, provides the clearest framework for twist craft I’ve encountered.

The pivot principle: when a basketball player pivots, one foot stays planted while the body rotates. A story pivot keeps its roots in what came before while changing direction. The new direction isn’t a break from the story’s logic—it uses that logic to arrive somewhere unexpected. Imagine a character who has always been terrified of public scandal; when they finally commit murder (or some other crime), it isn’t random, it’s the only way they can see to prevent a secret from exploding—an awful choice that grows directly out of the fear you’ve already planted.

James teaches that every effective twist needs to do four things simultaneously: catch the reader off guard, feel inevitable in retrospect, raise the stakes, and reveal something true about the story’s world. Miss any one of these and you have a surprise, not a twist. His book goes much deeper—it’s worth every penny.

James also introduces what he calls The Third Way: every scene has an obvious ending (predictable) and several unexpected endings (non-inevitable). The Third Way is the ending that is both unexpected and inevitable—the ending that surprises and satisfies simultaneously. This is the target for every major twist.

In addition, he offers fourteen pivot questions worth working through for any major twist or reveal—probing things like who isn’t who they appear to be, which details carry double meanings, when all seems lost and why, and where the story has more beneath the surface. The full list, with context, is in Delve, Pivot, Propel.

Part Five: The Cliffhanger — Chapter Architecture

A cliffhanger is a chapter-ending that leaves a crucial question or crisis unresolved, creating the compulsion to continue. The key distinction is between a plot cliffhanger (someone is in physical danger) and a character cliffhanger (a relationship hangs in the balance, a decision has just been made, a revelation has landed but not yet been processed).

Character cliffhangers tend to be more durable. As one online craft guide notes, “plot cliffhangers are skin deep; character cliffhangers reach bone.”

Where to cut: I find it’s best to end at the moment of maximum uncertainty. The most powerful cut is often just after a revelation whose meaning hasn’t been resolved, or just before a decision plays out.

The overuse trap: cliffhangers lose power when deployed every chapter. Variation matters—some chapters should end in quiet emotional resonance, giving readers (and the story) room to breathe. The rhythm of high-tension endings and lower-tension breathing-room endings is what keeps readers from becoming desensitized. Even so, those quieter endings shouldn’t feel throwaway or mundane.

There’s a show-business aphorism often attributed to P.T. Barnum: “Always leave them wanting more.” But not every “leave them wanting more” moment has to be a cliffhanger. Sometimes it’s a planted seed—a new question, a hint of a deeper mystery—that invites the reader forward without dangling someone off a metaphorical ledge. So, yes, even the quieter chapter endings should have some kind of pull that nudges the reader into the next scene.

Question loops: the most addictive thriller structures I’ve seen tend to maintain several unresolved question loops—often four or five at a time. When one closes, another opens. The reader is always mid-answer.

Part Six: The Shocking Yet Inevitable — Making the Big Surprise Work

The gold standard in thriller craft—the surprise that feels, in retrospect, like the only thing that could have happened—requires specific structural preparation.

Plant dual-meaning seeds early. Steven James teaches: choose story elements that can support two different interpretations. When these seeds first appear, they should be clear but not flagged. When revisited through the lens of the reveal, they should look different—not because they’ve changed, but because the reader now sees them truly.

Build false certainty. The stronger the reader’s conviction that they know what’s happening, the more powerful its subversion. This requires actively constructing the wrong interpretation—feeding it detail, giving it emotional plausibility, letting it live. Gillian Flynn spends half of Gone Girl building a reality the reader believes completely. When the lie is exposed, everything built on it falls like dominoes.

Recontextualize, don’t just reveal. This bears repeating: the best twists don’t just add new information; they change the meaning of existing information. The difference between “Here is something you didn’t know” and “Everything you thought you knew now means something different” is the difference between a surprise and a twist—the latter feels shocking yet inevitable.

The inevitability test: I like to go back through the manuscript after drafting a twist. I ask: Can a careful reader have arrived at the correct conclusion from the evidence I provided? Maybe not easily—but possibly? If yes, the twist is fair. If no, it’s a cheat. To make sure it’s surprising and fair, I lean on beta readers: they’ll tell you if the twist feels too obvious or comes out of nowhere.

Part Seven: What NOT to Do — Reader-Frustrating Pitfalls

I couldn’t very well write an article on twists and not include the “DON’Ts.” Readers forgive much, but they do not forgive feeling cheated.

Here are some things to avoid.

The Cheat Sheet: What Breaks Reader Trust

1. The out-of-nowhere villain. If the person revealed as the killer has appeared in only two scenes and shown no significant behavior, the reader will correctly perceive that the author hid the answer rather than embedded it. You don’t want a Scooby-Doo–style “stranger behind the mask,” where the culprit is the groundskeeper we’ve barely met (no offense to Scooby-Doo). The solution: give every viable suspect real page time and real behavior before the reveal.

2. The withholding narrator. When the protagonist is the source of dramatic irony—knows something the reader doesn’t—and that knowledge is kept off the page with no behavioral or emotional breadcrumbs, readers feel manipulated. This is the “too‑close‑to‑the‑vest” narrator: they know the truth, but the story won’t let them share it. The eventual reveal feels like authorial trickery rather than earned suspense.

Hank Phillippi Ryan’s principle applies in most straightforward thrillers: “If the character knows it, the reader should know it.” Information withheld from the reader that the POV character has, with no foreshadowing or clues, is a structural lie. By contrast, it’s often effective when the reader knows something the protagonist doesn’t—that’s dramatic irony, and I’ll come back to it later.

There are exceptions—such as carefully crafted unreliable narrators—where the character’s secrecy is itself the point, and their lies or omissions are signaled through glitches in voice, inconsistencies, or suspicious behavior that the reader can later recognize in hindsight.

3. The overloaded red herring. A red herring so compelling, so emotionally developed, that the story seems to promise it’s the solution—and when it’s deflated, the reader feels robbed. The test: does the resolution of this false lead feel like justice, or like a bait-and-switch? Red herrings that complete a story in themselves (see Part Three, section 4) avoid this—their resolution feels meaningful in its own lane, even when it’s not the central answer. In other words, the lesson is not “don’t make red herrings emotional,” but rather, “don’t overpromise that they are the answer.”

4. Too many suspects with insufficient differentiation. When every character is equally suspicious and similarly sketched, the reader can’t form a hypothesis, and the story becomes an undifferentiated fog of suspicion. It’s better to have a manageable number of suspects with distinct personalities, motives, and behavioral tells.

Classic locked‑room and closed‑circle mysteries, as well as modern ensemble pieces like Knives Out, succeed by either limiting the suspect pool or giving each member of the crowd a sharply defined role and motive. Murder on the Orient Express is a rare exception that weaponizes the very fog of suspicion for its “everyone did it” twist—most stories don’t have that kind of structural payoff, and suffer when their suspects blur together instead of standing apart.

5. The deus ex machina. Any resolution that depends on a character, object, or event introduced out of nowhere, without prior setup or connection to the protagonists’ choices, will feel like a shortcut. Chekhov’s principle applies in reverse: If the gun is going to save the hero in Act Three, it must appear on the mantelpiece in Act One.

6. Surprise motive from nowhere. A villain whose motive is entirely invisible until the climactic explanation dump. The motive must be seeded, even if subtly, early in the narrative. The reader shouldn’t have been able to predict it—but they should be able to look back and see its roots. The revelation of the Stranger’s true motive in Harlan Coben’s The Stranger is a strong example of a surprise motive done well.

7. Cliffhangers without payoff. Steven James identifies this explicitly in his “how to kill suspense” list: “Promise that something terrible will happen and then don’t let it happen.” The cliffhanger that resolves as a non-event—where the threat simply evaporates or is ignored—trains readers to stop trusting the story.

By contrast, Hitchcock’s famous “bomb under the table” shows suspense handled well: the audience knows the bomb is under the table; the characters at the table do not. Suspense builds—will it go off? The bomb is discovered and desperately dealt with (or explodes only after the danger has been evacuated), so the audience’s tension is released through meaningful action or even humor, not shrugged off as if the threat never mattered.

8. Structural confusion masquerading as mystery. Non-linear timelines, multiple POVs, and fragmented narratives are legitimate craft tools—but when they obscure rather than clarify and layer, readers become confused rather than engaged. To once again echo Hank Phillippi Ryan’s sage advice: confusion is not suspense.

Suspense, Surprise, and Twists

Point 8 raises a useful distinction worth making explicit: confusion, suspense, and twists are not the same tool, and mixing them up is where many manuscripts go wrong. Once again, Alfred Hitchcock’s “bomb under the table” example helps clarify this.

As Hitchcock explains, if the bomb explodes without warning, the audience gets a brief jolt of shock. That’s surprise. But if they know the bomb is there and watch oblivious characters chat while the clock ticks down, they experience minutes of agonizing suspense. Suspense, in other words, comes from anticipation—from the audience knowing a dangerous possibility and waiting to see whether it will be averted or fulfilled.

A twist is different. Suspense looks forward; a twist looks backward. The twist is the moment that reinterprets what the audience has already seen, revealing that earlier events or details meant something else all along. Surprise can be part of a twist—a sudden revelation—but a twist that truly satisfies also invites the reader to reassemble the story in hindsight and see that you played fair.

The POV Conundrum

This raises a question I haven’t yet addressed: how does POV affect your ability to build this kind of suspense or set up for twists? The bomb under the table suspense works because the viewer can see the bomb there. But how would you convey that in a book that’s written from a single POV? Therein lies the challenge for authors.

Dramatic irony—the bomb the reader knows about but the protagonist doesn’t—usually requires either a scene from another character’s POV (the villain planting the bomb, the conspirator setting the trap) or some other device that lets the reader glimpse danger the hero can’t yet see. A strictly single‑POV thriller can still build suspense, but it does so by making the protagonist feel that something is wrong—through foreshadowing, ominous details, and half‑noticed clues—rather than by showing readers the full plan in another character’s head.

The same principle applies if your protagonist is about to enter a room where danger awaits on the other side of the door.

The Hunger Games trilogy shows this tension clearly. At the end of Catching Fire, Katniss’s first-person POV means the breakout from the arena happens while she’s unconscious; she wakes in the hovercraft and learns what happened secondhand, in a debrief. In Mockingjay, the third book, other key scenes suffer from the same limitation and happen off-page. Many readers and critics single this out as a structural weakness: the story’s biggest late-book events lose impact because the single POV can’t deliver them directly. A multi-POV structure could have shown those scenes unfolding in real time, but it would have sacrificed the tight, claustrophobic intimacy that made the earlier books work.

The choice to withhold action isn’t inherently a mistake. Done well, it can heighten drama rather than dilute it. In his book, Writing the Blockbuster Novel, Al Zuckerman, my former agent, offers a wonderful example.

In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett waits, fully conscious and afraid, while Rhett and the other men stage a drunken performance to fool Yankee soldiers; the reader shares her anxious uncertainty in real time, and the deception itself becomes the scene we watch unfold. Margaret Mitchell doesn’t show the Klan raid, but she keeps her POV character—and the reader—inside a live, tension-filled moment. Mockingjay’s unconscious-Katniss sequences don’t offer that substitute tension; the POV character is removed from the room entirely, so the reader has nothing to hold onto until the explanation arrives secondhand.

The lesson isn’t “single POV can’t work here”—it’s that withholding action only pays off if the reader has something equally gripping to experience while the offstage event unfolds.

Getting this right isn’t easy, but the payoff is worth the extra planning: readers feel tense and engaged, not like they’re just seeing half the story.

Part Eight: A Framework for Your Own Work

Based on the techniques explored above, here’s a practical checklist that may be useful for building the architecture of deception into a thriller manuscript:

Before drafting:

• Know your ending. Know the twist. Build backward.

• Identify 3–5 red herring storylines that can complete their own arcs.

• Assign every character a secret—not all related to the central crime.

• Choose story elements capable of carrying dual meanings—potentially relevant to the crime and plausibly explained as something else.

• Decide how much the reader will know versus the protagonist—and choose your POV strategy accordingly.

During drafting:

• Apply Coben’s page-level test: is every sentence, paragraph, and scene compelling and moving forward?

• Apply Steven James’s The Third Way at every major scene: is this ending both unexpected and inevitable?

• Maintain 4–5 simultaneous question loops; close one only when you open another.

• Plant seeds that, in retrospect, will confirm the twist—without flagging them.

During revision:

• Test the inevitability of your major reveal: can a careful reader have gotten there from available evidence?

• Test the fairness of your red herrings: does each resolve in a way that feels earned?

• Read chapter endings specifically: are you varying the tension rhythm?

• Ask Steven James’s question for every suspect: “Can I improve my twist’s inevitability by shading character responses to make those people seem more innocent or guiltier?”

The master question: Does your ending feel shocking but inevitable? Can readers look back and see that it all made sense in context? If yes, you’ve tackled what, in my eyes, is the hardest part of thriller writing.

Note: If you want to explore more about Alfred Hitchcock’s principles, including his famous “bomb under the table” example, see my Substack article, Hitchcock on Suspense: Timeless Principles from the Master.

Since this newsletter is called This Writer’s Life, I’m overdue for an update—with a few side roads along the way. To paraphrase Mark Twain, I didn’t have time for a short article, so I wrote a long one.

Remembering Al Zuckerman

My former agent, Al Zuckerman, retired a few years ago, and I recently learned that he passed away in March at the age of 94.

He was a great agent—very hands-on—and he always insisted on a complete outline before writing the book. His view was simple: if there are issues with the foundation, it’s much easier to fix them in the outline than in a finished manuscript. I’d always mapped out my books anyway, so it wasn’t much of a stretch for me.

Al also took the time to brainstorm ideas, often inviting me to lunch near Writers House, the agency he founded. He represented dozens of bestselling authors, from Ken Follett to Nora Roberts to Stephen Hawking.

I can’t count how many times he sent me back to the proverbial drawing board to rethink plotlines or explore alternatives. At first, I was put off. But then I thought—if Ken Follett could take it, so could I. And in the end, I have to admit (as Follett himself did in Al’s book, Writing the Blockbuster Novel), Al was right every time.

More than anything, he made me believe in myself. He was consistently encouraging, always positive, and deeply invested in the work.

One quick story. The first time I visited his office, I saw posters from authors he represented and said, “Ah, you represent Nora Roberts and J.D. Robb.” He replied, “It would be hard not to—they’re the same person.”

I also once heard a story that Nora Roberts sent him a completed manuscript, and he said, “What am I going to do with this? It’s already written.” He was expecting an outline. That would not surprise me in the least.

From Plotter to Plantser?

I’ve been reading Story Trumps Structure by Steven James—one of my favorite authors on writing and an outstanding novelist. The book argues that rigid adherence to structure can sometimes limit storytelling. Instead, it emphasizes tension, desire, escalation, and discovery as the true drivers of narrative.

So far, I’m loving it.

What struck me is that while I consider myself an outliner—and I’m well-versed in frameworks like the Hero’s Journey, Save the Cat, and Truby’s 22 steps—I don’t really write to those structures anymore.

Instead, I focus on the story itself: the characters, their perspectives, the central conflicts, and—most importantly—the reader’s experience.

I still need a foundation before I begin: a strong premise, key plot points, and a clear ending. But within that framework, I allow the story to evolve. New ideas emerge. Characters shift direction. Sometimes the narrative veers off from the original outline—and that’s often where things get interesting.

What I realized is this: I “pants” the story in my head first. That becomes the outline. Then I refine it into a logline and synopsis. And when I’m drafting, I leave room for discovery.

So maybe I’m not a plotter or a pantser.

Maybe I’m a plantser.

And as I absorb Steven James’s insights, I find myself leaning even more in that direction.

Book Updates

My latest novel, The Gemini Girl, is complete and currently out with agents as I look for new representation.

I’m pitching it as a standalone with series potential. It works on its own, but it also serves as a natural follow-up to The Mirror Man, featuring some returning characters along with new ones.

Logline:

When diplomats around the world commit murder and swear they can’t remember, a detective and her memory-reading partner uncover a woman who can control minds—and a shadowy syndicate racing to weaponize her.

I’m excited for people to read this one. In my opinion, it’s the strongest book I’ve written to date.

I’ve also mapped out my next project, currently titled Cast to Die, while beginning to explore a potential sequel to The Gemini Girl.

Working Logline:

When a former teen star turned aerospace CEO is forced to escort an assassin into the Oscars, she uncovers a Hollywood conspiracy that threatens her family and the life she fought to rebuild.

Here’s an early draft of the back cover copy:

Behind the spotlight, someone else is writing the script.

Years ago, Kendall Hawthorne’s career as a rising Hollywood actress imploded with a single photograph—an image that turned her into a tabloid punchline and drove her out of the industry. Reinvented as the CEO of an aerospace data company, she’s built a life where her mind matters more than her face.

When her estranged father invites her to the Oscars to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, Kendall refuses to step back into the spotlight—until a chance reunion, followed by a violent abduction, forces her into a deadly bargain.

Coerced by a Russian criminal network, she must escort a former MI6 assassin into the ceremony on a night when a controversial filmmaker is poised to expose secrets that could shake both the Kremlin and Hollywood. Meanwhile, the CIA recruits Dexter Shaw—the war photographer–turned–celebrity shooter whose infamous photo destroyed Kendall’s career—to follow the one woman who has every reason to hate him.

As the red carpet fills with stars and cameras, Kendall is caught between shifting loyalties and hidden agendas—and must decide whether she’ll be used as collateral once again or finally take control of her own story.

Musings on Supergirl

In case you didn’t know, I’m a longtime comic book fan—and I’ve had the chance to write comic scripts in collaboration with some major names in Marvel and DC.

With that in mind, I saw the new Supergirl film, based on Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.

I really enjoyed it.

The story reimagines Supergirl’s origins through the lens of trauma. Unlike Superman—who arrived on Earth as a baby and was raised by the Kents—she remembers Krypton’s destruction and the loss of her family. That experience leaves her more detached, more restless, and at times, more self-destructive.

She’s not the polished hero people might expect. She’s rough, guarded, and sometimes indifferent. When a young girl asks for help avenging her family, Supergirl initially refuses. It’s only when the conflict becomes personal that she reluctantly steps in.

If the premise sounds familiar, it should. The story draws heavily from True Grit. You could easily describe it as True Grit in space—with a tone that blends elements of Guardians of the Galaxy and Mad Max. If you go in with that expectation, it works extremely well. Milly Alcock delivers a strong performance in the lead role.

The reaction to the film, despite most people I know liking it—especially those who knew what it was aiming for—got me thinking more broadly about audiences and criticism.

The film has received some unfair backlash, including a review-bombing campaign long before its release. Not every story will work for every viewer—and that’s fine. But if we’re going to critique something, it’s worth doing it thoughtfully and specifically: What worked? What didn’t? What was the creator trying to achieve?

There’s a difference between “this didn’t work for me” and “this is objectively bad,” and at the end of the day, it’s worth remembering that someone—or more often, an entire team—put in the work to bring that story to life.

Most writers know how to fix a scene by adding conflict, raising the stakes, or tightening the dialogue. Fewer recognize an equally powerful lever hiding in plain sight: interiority. Interiority is what happens inside the character’s mind and heart on the page—their private interpretations, emotional reactions, and the personal meaning they attach to each moment. It is the difference between watching events happen and experiencing them.

Curiously, interiority is also one of the last tools many writers reach for when trying to deepen a manuscript or add page count. They add subplots, backstory, or new scenes instead of doing the simpler—and often more potent—work of letting the reader in.

I know. Like a lot of writers, I thought I was doing enough interiority—until I realized how much deeper I could go.

I’ve been hearing a lot about this subject lately—at ThrillerFest in May, in books and workshops, and on podcasts—and rightfully so. It’s a topic that has been transformative for me as a writer in recent years, allowing me to go from close POV to something much deeper.

In this piece, we’ll look at what interiority is, why it matters so much, and how to deliberately bake it into your scenes using a practical framework and a simple before/after example you can steal as a diagnostic.

Note: This essay is part of my So You Want to Be an Author series—practical, craft‑focused articles for writers who want to go deeper. If you enjoy it and want more posts like this, make sure you’re subscribed to that section from the homepage.

What Interiority Really Is (and Isn’t)

Interiority is not just “thoughts” sprinkled between lines of dialogue. It is the ongoing process of your POV character making sense of what’s happening—through their history, desires, fears, and worldview.

Some quick contrasts:

• Camera vs. consciousness

  • Camera: “She walked into the room. Her boss sat at the table.”

  • Consciousness: “She walked into the room and her stomach flipped. Her boss never asked for a private meeting. Not since the last round of layoffs.”

Note that “her stomach flipped” is a physical reaction. I used to believe it was enough for a character to make an observation and have a physical reaction. You know, the old “show, don’t tell” axiom. But that’s not enough. It doesn’t tell us what she’s thinking. In fact, the right kind of “telling”—her interpretation—is exactly what’s missing, and what the last two sentences in that paragraph add.

• Fact vs. Interpretation

  • Fact: “The text message arrived at 2:17 a.m.”

  • Interpretation: “The text arrived at 2:17 a.m. It’s never good news when you get a text in the middle of the night. She was afraid to look. Who died? What emergency happened?”

It’s a basic example, but you get the idea.

As literary agent CeCe Lyra pointed out recently on The Shit No One Tells You About Writing (the excellent podcast she co‑hosts with Carly Watters and Bianca Marais), a POV character shouldn’t merely notice facts; they should interpret them. That interpretive layer is the essence of interiority. Facts are the skeleton. Interiority is the nervous system that lets the reader feel.

From Three O’s to Five: A Practical Scene Framework

James Scott Bell, whose books on writing I always recommend, popularized a simple way to think about scenes in terms of three O’s:

• Objective – What does the character want right now?

• Obstacle – What stands in the way?

• Outcome – What happens by the end of the scene?

That’s already a strong structural skeleton. But in the interest of deliberately building in more interiority, I’ve come to add two more O’s when writing a scene:

• Observations

• Opinion

Here’s how they plug into the same scene:

1. Objective – What the character thinks they’re trying to accomplish in the moment.

2. Obstacle – What complicates, resists, or threatens that aim.

3. Outcome – How things actually turn out, including any reversal or new problem.

4. Observations – What the character specifically notices about people, setting, body language, and details.

5. Opinion – How they interpret and judge those observations and events. And how these observations may or may not tie to their own experiences, past or present, or their fears about the future.

In essence, observations are the lens; opinion is the tint.

Done well, Observations and Opinion:

• Reveal character without long backstory dumps.

• Increase tension without adding new plot events.

• Justify extra lines or paragraphs of “page count” because they are pulling emotional and thematic weight.

The Role of Interiority in Deep POV

If you favor close or deep third person, you may already be doing some of this instinctively: filtering description through the character’s voice, limiting what the reader knows to what the POV character knows, etc. But there’s a meaningful difference between:

• A character noticing something in close POV, and

• A character reflecting on, theorizing about, or misreading what they notice.

It’s worth mentioning here that much of what I know about interiority, I learned from Donald Maass’s books and workshops. Particularly in The Emotional Craft of Fiction, he makes a compelling case that readers don’t just want to see emotions; they want to experience the inner turns that lead to those emotions. That’s where interiority comes in. It creates the micro‑beats: the flashes of memory, the irrational leaps, the private stories characters tell themselves in real time.

Think of interiority as:

• A continuous commentary track running under the scene.

• A way to braid the outer story (what’s happening) with the inner story (what it means to this person).

A Before/After Example: Close POV Without vs. With Interiority

Here’s a made‑up scenario to show the difference. Same basic external beats, two treatments.

Version 1 – Functional, Close POV, Thin Interiority

Evan arrived at the restaurant ten minutes early. He chose a table near the window and ordered a coffee. He checked his watch twice. At exactly seven, Mara walked in. She saw him, smiled, and crossed the room.

“You’re early,” she said. He swallowed.

“Just wanted to make sure we got a table,” he replied.

They ordered dinner and talked about their week. At one point, she asked how his latest draft was going. He shrugged and said it was fine, though he had other things on his mind he wanted to talk to her about. After dessert, they said goodnight in the parking lot and went their separate ways. Maybe next time.

Nothing is grammatically wrong. We’re technically in his orbit. But we’re stuck at the surface: actions, neutral descriptions, bland dialogue. Externally, things happen—they have dinner, they talk, they part—but we’re not intrigued or engaged with him. We never feel the stakes or the cost.

This is what I think of as pseudo‑interiority—a couple of physical beats and a vague hint that something’s going on inside, without actually letting us in. We can tell he’s nervous and distracted, but we don’t know why, what’s at stake, or how he’s making sense of the moment.

TIP: Take one scene from your novel where you’ve got a few nods to interiority—shrugs, heart pounding, “she didn’t want to think about it”—and label those as pseudo‑interiority. Then rewrite a single paragraph, replacing the vague signals with specific observations and opinions.

Version 2 – Same Scene, Layered with Interiority

Evan arrived at the restaurant ten minutes early, because being ten minutes early felt safer than being exactly on time. Exactly on time left room for her to be the one waiting.

He chose a table near the window, not because of the view, but because he’d read somewhere that natural light made people look more attractive. God forbid his face be lit by the overhead fluorescents when he finally told her. He’d look like he’d just spent the night in a morgue drawer.

He checked his watch. Seven minutes early. Checked again. Six. Time had never moved this slowly, not even during the company-wide layoff meeting last year. That was the one where twenty-five people out of 200 were told to stand up and were escorted into a room. He was one of them. Then the trembling twenty-five were told they were the only ones safe, and that everyone else was being laid off. He hoped he’d end up safe this time, too.

At exactly seven, Mara walked in, shaking the rain out of her hair like she’d just stepped out of a shampoo commercial instead of the subway. She scanned the room, spotted him, and smiled—the same easy, automatic smile he’d seen her use on baristas and receptionists, the one he’d been pretending meant more.

“You’re early,” she said, slipping out of her coat.

“Just wanted to make sure we got a table,” he replied. Not, I’ve been rehearsing how to say this for three days and still don’t know if I’m about to ruin everything.

She ordered a glass of red. He ordered coffee he didn’t want. He hated coffee, plus it irritated his acid reflux. When she asked about his latest draft, he said, “It’s going really well,” even though his hard drive was full of false starts and deleted chapters. The book was about a man who couldn’t tell the truth; he’d told himself that was just a coincidence. The hero was a freeloading pathological liar forced into the family business who witnesses a crime no one believes—and has to solve it using the only thing he’s ever been good at: lying.

All through dinner, he waited for a right moment that never arrived. By dessert, the confession had shrunk from a possibility to a private joke between him and himself.

In the parking lot, when she hugged him goodbye, he inhaled the scent of her shampoo and cowardice.

“Text me when you get home,” she said.

“I will,” he promised, already composing the version of tonight he’d tell his therapist instead.

The external beats are almost identical: early arrival, small talk, no confession, goodbye. What’s changed is the amount of interiority:

• Observations

  • Natural light, her smile as “the one she used on baristas,” the comparison to the layoff meeting, the unwanted coffee.

• Opinion/Interpretation

  • His belief that being early is safer.

  • His assumption that her smile doesn’t mean what he wishes it did.

  • His framing of himself as cowardly, his book as an unintentional confession.

  • His self-defeating belief that he’s a liar at his core, so pretending is safer than being himself with her.

Those layers add depth, tension, and word count—but all in service of character and subtext, not filler.

Speaking of word count, notice how much longer the second version was, but (hopefully) how quickly it read

I once had a draft that was only 60,000 words and I needed it to be closer to 80,000. I thought about adding subplots, stretching out scenes, expanding setting descriptions, and even adding chapters from other characters’ POV. None of them would’ve resulted in a better book, and likely would’ve added fluff that slowed down the story. The answer was, you guessed it, more interiority.

You may have also noticed that Evan’s relationship with Mara isn’t specified—agent, coworker, friend, fellow writer, something else. That small gap can pique curiosity, and the details can be layered in gradually. Just remember, as one author at ThrillerFest put it, there’s a subtle difference between planting seeds and confusing the reader.

A Simple Interiority Checklist for Your Scenes

When revising, building on James Scott Bell’s model, I find it helpful to run a quick pass with these questions:

• Objective/Obstacle/Outcome:

  • Does my POV character clearly want something in this scene?

  • Is there a meaningful obstacle?

  • Does something change by the end—externally or internally?

• Observations:

  • What specific things do they notice that another character wouldn’t?

  • What do they notice that they wish they hadn’t? What do they studiously ignore?

• Opinion:

  • How do they interpret what they see and hear?

  • What private story are they telling themselves about these events, these people, or themselves?

  • Where might they be wrong, biased, or in denial?

  • What past events or future fears are they conjuring in their mind?

If you can answer those questions on the page, you’re no longer just relaying the movie in your head—you’re inviting readers to live inside your characters.

Beyond Interiority: Psychological Acuity

Once you’ve strengthened interiority, there’s another layer to consider: psychological acuity, a subject CeCe Lyra often talks about. This goes a step beyond simply showing what a character thinks or feels in the moment. It reveals the deeper patterns in their psyche—their hidden motivations, fears, contradictions, and self‑defeating beliefs.

In the Evan example, psychological acuity shows up in lines like his hope to be “safe” again after the layoff, or his belief that he’s a liar at his core, so pretending is safer than being himself with Mara. Those aren’t just passing thoughts; they hint at how he’s wired to avoid risk and protect his self‑image.

This is a big topic in its own right, and worth exploring in more depth another day. For now, it’s enough to know that interiority lets us hear a character’s thoughts; psychological acuity helps us understand why those thoughts keep repeating. To achieve it, ask, “What deeper fear or belief is quietly driving my character’s thoughts in this scene?”

Strengthen the interiority first, then start listening for those deeper patterns—and your characters will feel far more alive on the page.

Happy writing (or reading, as the case may be), and remember: we’re all in this together!

It’s funny, people talk about writer’s block. I don’t get writer’s block. Never have. I just start writing, even if it’s garbage and I later have to erase half of it (to be honest, it’s how I started this article, since I had no clue what I wanted to write about). Then I shape it like a sculptor making a statue from a block of clay.

I DO get “idea” block, though. It’s when you try to home in on the “big” story idea that’ll make everyone say, “Wow, I have to read that!” I try. Maybe I come close, but it’s like catching a unicorn.

Truth be told, many New York Times bestsellers don’t even achieve that lofty status. I felt that explosive pull with Jurassic Park (dinosaurs being brought back in modern times!? I’m in!). More recently, I felt it with a new book by Leah Rowan called Marion (a retelling of Hitchcock’s Psycho where Marion turns the tables on Norman and becomes a vengeance-seeking killer herself!? I’m in!). I’m reading it now and so far, it’s living up to the hype.

These are what publishers call “high-concept” stories: a lightning bolt—sudden, brilliant, and impossible to ignore.

Other books are more like campfires—warm, inviting, and built around characters we want to sit with for a while. Consider massive hits like The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. The concept isn’t inherently explosive (an FBI trainee interviews a jailed serial killer to help catch another serial killer). It sold millions because Clarice Starling is an underdog—a young woman from a poor, rural background trying to survive in a deeply sexist, male-dominated FBI hierarchy. When her only recourse to catch an elusive killer is to rely on a brilliant homicidal maniac, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the conflict practically writes itself. In other words, it’s the magnetic pull of the characters and their plight that draws you in.

Tropes can also lure readers in like a campfire. If it’s a favorite author or a favorite genre, it’s an easy decision to pick up the book because it delivers exactly what you love. I know what to expect if I’m buying a James Bond or a Sherlock Holmes book, or a Harlan Coben novel. In the case of Bond or Holmes, the characters themselves are larger than life, and the genre tropes never disappoint. In Harlan Coben’s books, you know you’re going to get a masterclass in twists that you’ll never see coming.

To see how these forces interact, look at a massive bestseller like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, one of my favorites, albeit with a long runway of financial details in the beginning. If you strip away the packaging, the core concept—a disgraced journalist looks into a forty-year-old missing person case on a private island—isn’t necessarily an explosive, “I have to buy this” hook. At its core, it’s an old-school cold case mystery. It became a global phenomenon because it had a masterful campfire hook. Larsson lured us in with moody Nordic noir tropes and then permanently locked us in with the incredible voice and heartbreaking plight of Lisbeth Salander, one of the all-time great thriller characters. The execution made the book, not a flashy elevator pitch.

Hitting just one of these pillars can make a career. But every once in a while, a book comes along that manages to strike all four: a killer high-concept premise, a distinct voice, beloved genre tropes, and a deeply sympathetic character plight.

So, what actually attracts readers? It is rarely just one thing. It is usually a powerful mix of:

• A high-concept plot (the lightning bolt)

• A captivating voice (the style)

• Familiar genre tropes (the comfort)

• A compelling character plight (the campfire)

When a book manages to strike all four, you get an absolute juggernaut. Some good examples are The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Martian by Andy Weir, and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

Now, I know some people love to criticize Dan Brown’s writing style, but the man is laughing all the way to the bank (and personally, I love his books). Critics often mistake simple, frictionless prose for bad writing. But Brown is a master of narrative momentum. He strips away poetic fluff so nothing gets between the reader and the story, using breathless micro-chapters and double cliffhangers to keep you awake until 3:00 AM. He proves that, at least in a thriller, commercial drive, structure, and pacing will beat literary gymnastics every single time, though character is still important.

After all, momentum alone won’t carry a book across the finish line if the reader doesn’t care about the people involved. Even in a towering high-concept giant like Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs are only half the draw. The lightning-bolt premise works because it forces a campfire character arc: we are trapped on that island with Alan Grant, a grumpy paleontologist who actively dislikes children, forcing him into a plight where he must learn to protect and care for two kids to survive.

I’m also going to go out on a limb and say I think Leah Rowan’s Marion is on target to achieve that juggernaut status. After all, in her book, Marion isn’t a random killer; she originally stole that money in a desperate bid to rescue her sister from an abusive marriage. She’s an underdog running on pure feminine rage and survival instinct.

All of these books hit that magic sweet spot: a concept readers can understand in five seconds, and a character they can root for until the final page. For any author, I think that’s the ultimate thing to strive for.

How about you? What attracts you to a book first—the lightning bolt or the campfire?

If you’ve been reading This Writer’s Life for a while, you know I like to share the ups and downs of being an author—the wins, the missteps, and the weird detours along the way.

What I don’t always mention is how often people email or message me with some version of:

“I (or a friend) want to write a book and have no idea where to start.”

Over the years I’ve had the same conversations again and again—helping people sort out why they want to write a book, which idea to choose, whether to go traditional or indie, and what realistic next steps look like for their situation. I absolutely love those conversations, but I’ve decided to formalize things a bit so I can help more people with the same questions.

A new section: So You Want to Be an Author?

I’ve added a new section to this newsletter called So You Want to Be an Author?

This Writer’s Life will continue to be my behind‑the‑scenes look at the author journey—what I’m working on, what I’m learning, and the occasional misadventure.

So You Want to Be an Author? will be more practical and focused on helping aspiring writers move from “I’d love to write a book someday” to actually having a plan.

In that section, I’ll cover things like:

• How to know if your book idea is strong enough (and which idea to write first).

• The difference between wanting to write a book and wanting to be an author.

• Self‑publishing vs. traditional vs. hybrid—what actually matters.

• Common early mistakes new authors make, and how to avoid them.

If you’d like to get those posts by email, you can turn on the So You Want to Be an Author section in your subscription settings for This Writer’s Life—or just read them on the site whenever you like.

For those who want more hands‑on help

A few people have asked for more personal guidance, beyond what I can squeeze into a newsletter post.

So I’ve put together a For Authors page on my website that outlines a few ways I can help:

• A free Author Quick‑Start Guide with a bonus 5‑minute idea “Gut Check” template.

• A So You Want to Be an Author Starter Kit – a concise guide to the key early decisions (why you’re writing, who you’re writing for, which publishing path fits, and your next steps).

• An Idea to Publishing Strategy Session – a 75–90‑minute 1:1 deep dive on your book idea and publishing path.

• A Pitch & Plot Analysis – including a review of your query, one‑page synopsis, and first 10 pages, plus a strategy call and market‑fit assessment.

• A longer Story Blueprint Intensive for writers who want structured support over several weeks.

• Optional manuscript evaluations (big‑picture feedback on a finished or partial draft) and, in some cases, more in‑depth collaborative work on revisions.

If that sounds interesting, you can take a look here:
👉 JBManas.com/for-authors

A quick note about paid tiers

You may also notice that I’ve switched on paid and Founding Member options for This Writer’s Life. Nothing about the free experience is changing—you’ll still get the weekly essays, behind‑the‑scenes posts, and author section intros.

Paid tiers are there for readers and writers who want deeper craft breakdowns, full archive access, Q&A threads, and, for Founding Members, things like signed books and occasional critiques. I’ll share more about how that will work in an upcoming post, but for now: there’s zero expectation to upgrade. If free is where you are, I’m glad you’re here.

And if the last month or two has seemed a little quieter here, it’s only because I’ve been head‑down on a few big projects—building these author resources, getting my consulting business off the ground, finishing my latest novel, and heading to ThrillerFest. I’ll share more about all of that soon.

No pressure, just an invitation

Nothing about This Writer’s Life is changing—you’ll still get the behind‑the‑scenes posts you signed up for.

The new section and services are simply there if:

• You’ve got a book idea that won’t leave you alone.

• You’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed by options.

• You’d like a guide who’s been through traditional publishing, indie publishing, nonfiction, thrillers, and even graphic novels, and can help you chart a path that fits you.

If that’s you, I’d love to help. And if you’re just here to peek behind the curtain at the writing life, I’m grateful you’re along for the ride.

— Jerry / J.B.

P.S. I stand on the shoulders of giants like Joanna Penn, James Scott Bell, and Jane Friedman. My goal here is to offer a practical, personalized path that reflects the twists and turns of my own journey—and to help you tailor all that great advice to your situation.

If you’ve ever thought, “Maybe I should write a book someday,” you’re in the right place.

Over the years, I’ve lost count of how many emails and messages I’ve gotten that boil down to:

“I want to write a book and have no idea where to start.”

Most of those conversations involve helping people sort out why they want to write, which idea to choose, whether to go traditional or indie, and what realistic next steps look like for their situation. And it dawned on me: Why not put all that advice in one place? Besides, the advice can change as the industry changes.

What this section is

“So You Want to Be an Author?” is the practical side of This Writer’s Life. Here, I’ll focus on helping you move from “I’d love to write a book someday” to actually having a plan.

Topics I’ll cover include:

• How to know if your book idea is strong enough (and which idea to write first). (Spoiler: there’s no magic answer, but there are a few variables that make the choice easier.)

• The difference between wanting to “write a book” and wanting to “be an author.”

• Self‑publishing vs. traditional vs. hybrid—how do you decide and what actually matters?

• Common early mistakes new authors make, and how to avoid them.

Some posts will be big‑picture strategy. Others will be very tactical checklists and frameworks you can use right away.

Who this is for

This section is for you if:

• You have (or suspect you have) a book in you.

• You’re not sure which idea, genre, or publishing path makes the most sense.

• You want a clear, realistic roadmap instead of vague advice and conflicting opinions.

Whether you lean toward traditional publishing, indie, or you’re not sure yet, you’re welcome here. I’ve been writing and publishing for more than 20 years across nonfiction, thrillers, sci-fi, and even a graphic novel, and I’ve edited or consulted on everything from memoir and self‑help to YA space opera and epic fantasy. My aim here is to help you find a path that fits you.

Free and paid resources

If you’d like something to work through right now, I’ve collected all of my current author resources on my website:

👉 jbmanas.com/for-authors

On that page, you’ll find:

• Free Quick‑Start Guide – A short guide to choosing the right idea and publishing path, plus a bonus 5-minute idea “gut-check” template.

• So You Want to Be an Author Starter Kit – A full e-book plus worksheets for writers who want a practical roadmap.

• Ways to Work With Me 1:1 – Strategy sessions, Pitch & Plot Analysis, and a Story Blueprint Intensive for writers who want more personal support.

What to expect next

You don’t have to do anything complicated to follow along. If you’ve opted into this section, you’ll get new “So You Want to Be an Author?” posts by email as they go out, and you can always read the full archive here on Substack.

If you’re just browsing for now, you can start with whatever topic speaks most to where you are: idea, publishing path, or “what do I actually do next?”.

I’m glad you’re here. Writing a book is a big undertaking, but you don’t have to figure it out alone. We’re all in this together!

— Jerry / J.B.

Show, Don’t Tell

“Show, don’t tell.” It’s one of the first rules of writing you hear as an author. Never say, “She was angry.” SHOW she was angry. While that’s true, it’s only half true.

The “show, don’t tell” mantra mainly applies to character reactions, emotions, or perceptions. It doesn’t, for instance, apply to describing setting, though you do want to reveal your character’s reaction to the setting as well where possible.

But even then, there are not two, but three choices for reactions.

One is the dreaded “telling” (He was shocked. She was scared out of her wits. He was perplexed.).

Next is showing, but there are two sides to showing: physical and emotional.

So, the second option is showing through external physical reactions (His heart pounded. The skin on her arms tingled. He froze. Her forehead crinkled. Her stomach rose into her chest. He raised an eyebrow.). In moderation, this type of showing is fine.

The problem, as mega agent Donald Maass shared in a workshop recently, is that these actions do NOT evoke an emotional response from the reader (nor, of course, does the simple telling of the emotion). If a character’s heart sinks or gut twists, do you feel anything as a reader? Probably not.

But the third option, as Maass advises, is the emotional, internal showing: to have the character think deeper, perhaps recalling something in their past that what they’re seeing reminds them of, or something they’re afraid for in the future, perhaps not seeing their loved ones again.

Or maybe revealing something about themselves that the incident conjures. Or demonstrating their feelings of anger or frustration though simple actions that reveal their emotional state (e.g., silently slamming a cup down and internally ruminating on how the incident makes them feel.) This is different that their blood boiling or muscles tensing, and far more powerful. In other words, show their internal emotional reaction, as opposed to an external physical one.

Obviously, this can’t be throughout the whole book or it could become tiresome, but when strategically used, it moves readers more than the character’s physical reaction. I would classify this hierarchy of emotions as tell, show (external), or reveal (internal). For more on this, read Donald Maass’s enlightening book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction, where he gets into this in detail. It was an eye-opener for me.

Always Open In Media Res (i.e., In the Middle of Things)

This is another often misunderstood bit of advice.

On the surface, there appear to be two opposing concepts. On one hand, there’s the classic advice of starting in media res (in the middle of things), and on the other hand, there’s the three-act structure that starts in the “ordinary world.” With the former, you risk having tense action where nobody cares about the characters or what happens to them (yet), and with the latter, you risk boring people to death until the “real story starts.” It seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

Yet, I think it’s a misnomer to look at these as opposing concepts.

In either case, there needs to be a hook right away, a dramatic question that makes the reader curious and keeps stringing along those breadcrumbs until they get to the call to action.

I used to take in media res to mean “in the middle of a tense situation or an action scene.” But I believe it simply means not to “lay too much pipe,” as screenwriting guru Blake Snyder called it, i.e., having lots of description or backstory or worldbuilding that would have been far better spoon fed later.

And I took ordinary world to simply mean a mundane “day in the life” (which it could well be, but there needs to be a pretty quick teaser or character insight that raises curiosity or the reader may tune out until the “real story starts.”).

I now take in media res to mean to start in the middle of whatever is happening (author James Scott Bell uses the mantra, “Act first, explain later”). But while doing that, demonstrate the character’s personality and how they observe, react, and opine to what is happening around them. In this sense, there really is no “and/or” between in media res and “ordinary world.” They’re one and the same.

In Other News…

I’m happy to share that Dragon Island was named as a finalist in the 2025 BestThrillers.com Book Awards, citing the book as, “one of the year’s best thrillers.”

Reviews so far have been thankfully positive:

“An adventure tale that’s witty, suspenseful, and full of heart ... [a] Jurassic Park-flavored romp.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Epic, intelligent and cinematic... a worthy addition to the canon of great monster thrillers.”—BestThrillers

“J.B. Manas delivers pure adrenaline in DRAGON ISLAND. Think Jurassic Park meets military conspiracy—prehistoric terror, modern secrets, and a cover-up that could cost them everything. Cinematic, fast-paced, and impossible to put down.”—Veronica Wolff, National Bestselling Author

“If you liked Jurassic Park and Jaws, you’ll love Dragon Island.”—Paula Berinstein, author and former host of The Writing Show podcast

The ebook releases December 9th and is available now for pre-order, though the paperback is secretly available now in case any of my subscribers want to get an early copy.

Until next time, happy reading… and writing if the case may be!

The cover was designed by the award-winning designer Kirk DouPonce of Dog-Eared Design. He’s done a lot of famous covers, and I’ve been fortunate to have him do all of mine to date.

This is the back cover copy for those who didn’t catch it in my last post (the back cover is still being designed):

Some monsters are real—and some secrets are deadly.

Deep in a Caribbean rainforest, a secret U.S. military base is hiding something terrifying. After a dragon-like creature decimates a village on the Puerto Rican island of Isla Lagarta, the survivors’ claims are dismissed—until paleontologist Dr. Vikki Barnes and her scientist ex-boyfriend start digging for answers. Now, with the military determined to silence them, they must team up with a conspiracy-spouting pilot, a grizzled war veteran, and a remarkable 12-year-old girl to unravel the mystery and survive.

Can they expose the truth before the island’s secret claims more victims?

In the vein of classic science thrillers such as Jurassic Park and Relic, Dragon Island blends fast-paced excitement and scientific plausibility in a thrilling adventure that brings prehistoric terror and modern science to life.

Did I say you can read it for free right now, prior to its release?

The ARC (Advance Reading Copy) is available to read on Booksirens.

As it says on their site, all you have to do is agree to post a review when you’re finished reading. Reviews are one of the most important factors in book sales, so if you’re into this kind of story, it’s a win-win. It helps me greatly and you get to read the book before anyone else.

Book Signings This Weekend!

In other news, for those in the Philly, Bucks, or Montgomery County areas, I’ll be doing two book signings this weekend.

Saturday from 10:30am to 1pm, I’ll be at the Bucks County Free Library Local Author Fair (150 S. Pine St., Doylestown, PA 18901), and…

Sunday from 1-3pm I’ll be at The Lahaska Bookshop in Peddler’s Village. Hope to see some of you there!

TV Recommendation:

My wife and I just finished watching the phenomenal HBO miniseries: Task, starring Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey, and featuring an overall stellar cast. This was like a masterclass in storytelling, with lots of character depth (even for the “villains”) blended with tension, mystery, suspense, and, yes, heart.

In Task, a Philly-based FBI agent (Ruffalo) leads a task force to investigate violent robberies occurring across working-class suburbs—specifically at the homes of known associates of a drug ring called The Dark Hearts. The series was filmed in and around Philly.

I highly recommend it for those who like thrillers with some depth and gray characters.

It’s been a minute! Everything seemed to converge in September, including final edits for 22 chapters of an anthology called Projectland Goes to the Movies.

My colleague Dawn Mahan and I gathered project management experts and authors (who were also movie buffs) and asked each to contribute a chapter on the most crucial project management and leadership lessons from their favorite movies. Dawn coined the term Projectland to represent the world of projects (as opposed to operations, which is a different animal).

And of course, Dawn and I contributed chapters as well. Mine was on risk management lessons from Star Wars (finding the balance between “Never tell me the odds,” and “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”) Can’t wait to share more about the book as it readies publication.

On the fiction front, my book, Dragon Island is finished and being prepared for publishing.

The wonderful Kirk DouPonce (DogEared Design) will once again be doing the cover. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with! I’m expecting the book to be released in late November. Meanwhile, here’s the back cover blurb:

Some monsters are real—and some secrets are deadly.

Deep in a Caribbean rainforest, a secret U.S. military base is hiding something terrifying. After a dragon-like creature decimates a village on the Puerto Rican island of Isla Lagarta, the survivors’ claims are dismissed—until paleontologist Dr. Vikki Barnes and her scientist ex-boyfriend start digging for answers. Now, with the military determined to silence them, they must team up with a conspiracy-spouting pilot, a grizzled war veteran, and a remarkable 12-year-old girl to unravel the mystery and survive.

Can they expose the truth before the island’s secret claims more victims?

In the vein of classic science thrillers such as Jurassic Park and Relic, Dragon Island blends fast-paced excitement and scientific plausibility in a thrilling adventure that brings prehistoric terror and modern science to life.

Stay tuned for more on that! If you’re curious about what’s next:

I’m currently 9 chapters into my next book, The Gemini Girl, an international thriller and sequel to The Mirror Man.

When a series of high-profile murders are committed by dignitaries with no memory of their actions, detective Lela Mars and memory-reader Julian Black must track down a mysterious woman with mind control powers—before a global crime syndicate weaponizes her abilities and unleashes chaos.

Here’s the tentative back cover copy:

IF THOUGHTS COULD KILL

In this electrifying sequel to the award-winning thriller The Mirror Man, police detective Lela Mars and memory-reading recluse Julian Black face their most dangerous adversary yet. Around the world, respected diplomats are committing shocking murders—then claiming total amnesia. As international tensions soar, Lela and Julian uncover the truth: a woman with the power to control minds is orchestrating the attacks, and the shadowy crime syndicate VIPER is racing to replicate her abilities with a weapon that could change the balance of power forever.

To stop a global catastrophe, Lela and Julian must join forces with unlikely allies—including a former enemy and a brilliant cybersecurity expert. Their hunt will take them from the streets of Europe to a secret facility on Catalina Island, where the line between friend and foe blurs, and every memory could be a weapon.

Can they stop VIPER and the mysterious Gemini Girl before the world loses control—literally?

The third book in the trilogy is already mapped out (title TBD, but the working title is The Hercules Factor).

Then it’s on to my next book, a standalone thriller titled Starstruck, which is fully outlined. Here’s the logline:

A promising actress from Hollywood royalty is forced to escort a deadly assassin to the Oscars, only to uncover a shadowy conspiracy that threatens her family—and the fate of a nation.

Here’s the full blurb for that one.

Behind the spotlight, death takes center stage.

Kendall Hawthorne has always lived in the shadow of Hollywood royalty. When her estranged father invites her to the Oscars—where he’ll receive a coveted Lifetime Achievement Award—her fragile peace shatters. Dragged into a deadly conspiracy, Kendall is forced to escort a former MI6 assassin whose true target remains a mystery.

With her family’s fate hanging in the balance, Kendall must rely on Dexter Shaw, a rival former paparazzo turned covert CIA surveillance expert, to navigate the treacherous world behind the glitz and glamour. Together, they face shifting loyalties, dark espionage, and deadly secrets that reach far beyond Hollywood’s red carpet.

From the dazzling stages of the Oscars to the fortified penthouses of Monaco, Starstruck is a gripping Hitchcockian thriller where trust is fleeting, danger lurks behind every smile, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Perfect for fans of The Night Manager, Red Sparrow, and The Flight Attendant, this debut novel will keep readers on edge until the final, shocking twist.

But enough about me! A few folks have asked me what I see as the most common mistakes new authors make.

By and large, they are (in no special order):

• Comma issues (too many, not enough, in the wrong place) — I call that last one the “Christopher Walken comma.”

• Quotation mark issues — the period or comma should generally go inside the quotes, with very few exceptions.

• Extra spaces between sentences (the old way of adding two spaces no longer applies).

• Indentation (or lack thereof) — the first sentence in a chapter or after a section break should not be indented.

• POV (Point of View) issues — It’s best to write in close third-person or first person, but in any case, make sure it’s clear whose POV you’re in — watch out for head-hopping where the POV bounces back and forth between characters without a break. For instance, if Jim is your POV character, the next sentence can’t say, “Maria was petrified that something might be lurking around the corner.” Jim wouldn’t know how Maria is feeling. He may notice she “looks” petrified—maybe her face turned white, or her hands were shaking.

• Description issues — Not enough description so you don’t get a sense of where the character is or what they’re seeing, feeling, or smelling. Or too much description that slows down the plot.

• Characters all sound the same — This is why it’s best to read your story out loud. Imagine different actors in the roles. How would they sound? A gruff, New York cop shouldn’t sound the same as a distinguished professor.

• Imbalance of narrative, action, and dialogue — A story should have a mix of all three. Dialogue and action tend to speed things up for the reader. Narrative tends to slow it down. Narrative is describing people, places, and things and taking you inside the characters’ heads. Action portrays what the characters are doing.

• Chapters are too long — These days, publishers are looking for shorter chapters (and books, for that matter). Writers are competing with short attention spans, thanks to streaming and binge-watching. Ideally, 1,500 to 3,000 words is a good length, though even up to 5,000 is okay if broken into sections.

• No cliffhangers — Every chapter should end on a cliffhanger. Some even say every page should have a cliffhanger (or at least make you want to turn to the next page).

• Lack of opinion by POV characters — Your POV characters shouldn’t just be “doing things and going places.” They should have observations and opinions about their surroundings and others around them. They should experience all the senses as they navigate the world you’ve created.

• An opening that doesn’t immerse you — Readers and agents often judge in the first page or two whether a book is worth reading. I often see one of three issues: no endearing, quirky, or dramatic element to immediately interest the reader in the character; heavy action or a major death without painting a picture of why anyone should care about the character; or too much exposition, with pages of backstory or detail about the character’s history or backstory.

How do I know all this? Both from my editors over the years and because I’ve made every single one of these mistakes at one time or another. As authors, we’re constantly learning. I’ve been writing professionally for twenty years (longer, if you include articles), and I still learn something new every day.

That’s all for now! I’ll have lots more to share in the coming weeks.

I’ve always been a researcher. I pretty much had to be, since I started my writing career in the world of nonfiction. For my first book, Napoleon on Project Management, my bibliography included around thirty books (books on Napoleon, Napoleon’s own memoirs, books by Napoleon’s close constituents, book by his enemies, books on military strategy, and more).

In some of those books, I even had to painstakingly translate segments from French (especially in rare French books that included Napoleon’s original communications). After all, as Abraham Lincoln said, “History isn’t history unless it’s the truth.” Of course, when so-called “facts” from different sources conflict, finding the truth can lead you down a rabbit hole.

I’ve been down more rabbit holes than Elmer Fudd.

My book, Managing the Gray Areas, was no easier, as I needed to cite factual examples of organizations and individuals that had found creative ways to avoid black-and-white thinking. I also took inspiration from the worlds of science, philosophy, organizational development, and history.

Research is pretty much a no-brainer for nonfiction, but what about fiction?

Realism in Storytelling

For The Kronos Interference, a time-travel thriller, some of it took place in 1924 Karlsruhe, Germany, 1924 New York and Philadelphia, 1940s Germany, and current-day Paris. I’ve been to all those, places, but not in 1924. So, I had to research the streets, the clothing, and the dialect in order to bring it to life.

All my novels tend to incorporate scientific elements, whether dealing with quantum entanglement, military sonic testing, or paleontology—to name a few. Even the speculative elements require some level of research.

Sometimes, research can produce a few surprises.

When I began writing The Mirror Man, I knew from the beginning I wanted a climactic fight scene to take place on the London Eye Ferris wheel. I envisioned the villain trying to shoot at the hero while the ride goes vertically round and round.

I’d been near the London Eye, but never on it. So, I did what I always do when faced with a place I’ve never been. I watched YouTube videos of people on the ride.

Imagine my surprise when I realized the London Eye’s capsules are fully enclosed, not open like other Ferris wheels. So, I had to adjust the scene. It worked out for the best, because now I had to have both parties within the same capsule, which was both tense and claustrophobic—perfect for the finale.

I just had a similar thing happen in the current book I’m writing, The Gemini Girl (the sequel to The Mirror Man). I wanted a boat chase along the Rhine River, from Basel to Strasbourg to Rudesheim. The heroes were going to pursue the villain in a patrol boat.

As I got closer to writing those chapters, I did my research (what I like to call “just-in-time research). It was then I realized what I wanted was impossible, as not only would they have to navigate through three countries and thus three jurisdictions (Switzerland, France, and Germany), but there are river locks to contend with! It wouldn’t very well be much of a boat chase if they all had to stop ten or twenty minutes to wait every time they approached a lock.

I, of course, should’ve known this, as I was just on a Rhine River cruise and had been to each of those destinations many times before. But alas, it didn’t occur to me.

So, I replanned the scenes, instead having the heroes travel by car to Strasbourg and then beginning the boat chase at the German border near Lauterbourg in pursuit of the villain, and so on.

Of course, locations are only part of the research picture. So far, I’ve also needed to pause my writing on this current book to research luxury yachts, musical steganography (the art of passing codes through music), nanodiamonds, mind control, hacking, Swiss luxury hotels, and more.

How to Conduct Research

These days, authors have it easy when it comes to research. These are just some of the methods I’ve used:

• YouTube videos

• Google / Internet

• Virtual 360 Walk-Throughs (I’ve done this for hotels or other places I haven’t been to, though I try to use mostly locales and hotels I’ve visited).

• Books

• Talking to subject matter experts

• Visiting the location

• Personal experience

• Asking AI (though I’d validate any of the research results) — a tool I favor is Perplexity because it cites its sources.

I should add that not only is research required for the subjects, locales, and technologies in your book, but reading other books in your genre is also considered research. After all, how else can you get a feel for the genre’s expected tropes?

That’s not to say you want to be derivative or create a pastiche per se—you still need an original story and characters—but it can help to know the ballpark before you take the field, so to speak.

All this is to reiterate the statement I tell everyone who will listen, that the recipe for being an author has 5 ingredients in equal parts:

1. Planning

2. Research

3. Writing

4. Rewriting

5. Promotion

Meanwhile, I have to run. I’m researching the pool deck at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France—alas, a place I’ve never been but it’s on my bucket list. Now we’ll all get to visit through my chapter.

Recently, I wrote an article on lessons in suspense from the great Alfred Hitchcock, with the best intentions of submitting it to writing websites. But I figured, why not just publish it here on Substack!

So, for those of you who are either writers or simply interested in the storytelling process—without further ado, here it is! I hope you enjoy it!

In his conversation with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock famously illustrated the difference between surprise and suspense: If two people talk at a table and a bomb suddenly explodes, that’s surprise—a brief shock. But if the audience knows there’s a bomb set to go off at one o’clock, and the clock shows it’s a quarter to one, every moment of their conversation becomes suspenseful as viewers anxiously wait to see if they’ll escape in time.

They could be talking about anything from baseball to basket weaving, and it’ll still be riveting.

“There is no terror in the bang,” Hitchcock said, “only in the anticipation of it.” He insisted suspense works best when the audience has information the characters lack, and that suspense must eventually be relieved—either the bomb never goes off, or it explodes just after the characters leave.

This principle is at work in Vertigo, where the audience learns a major secret about the love interest before the protagonist, Scotty, does. The suspense comes from waiting for Scotty to catch on, then shifts to what he’ll do next. Hitchcock often manipulated both suspense and emotional tension, building anxiety not just through what the audience knows, but through stakes, pacing, and character vulnerability.

Balancing Humor and Suspense

Hitchcock believed suspense is most effective when balanced with humor. A simple gag—a toy arrow hitting the hero in a tense moment, or a getaway driver interrupted by oblivious bystanders—can give the audience a moment to breathe, heightening the impact of the next suspenseful beat. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant’s drunken drive along a cliff is both terrifying and comic, with the humor making the danger more vivid and the relief more satisfying when he skids out of control and crashes lightly into a police car.

Hitchcock said that uniting the audience through laughter makes them more engaged and receptive to suspense—the earlier, the better.

Building Characters for Suspense

Strong, relatable characters are essential to Hitchcock’s suspense. He often chose ordinary people thrust into danger, believing audiences would care more if they could identify with the protagonist. In chase stories, Hitchcock favored wrongly accused characters, allowing for both pursuit and evasion. Even in high-concept plots like The Birds, he took time to establish the characters’ personal lives before unleashing chaos, ensuring the audience was invested in their fates.

His psychological thrillers often centered on characters driven by guilt or trauma, deepening the suspense by tying it to personal stakes.

Thrilling Takeaways

Hitchcock’s methods offer timeless lessons for thriller writers:

• Create suspense by giving the audience key information before the characters know it.

• Balance suspense with humor to keep readers emotionally engaged.

• Develop characters readers care about, so their peril feels real and urgent.

By applying these principles, writers can infuse their stories with the “Hitchcock touch,” building suspense that keeps audiences riveted.

Ye who undertake the journey of authorship, behold! Upon thee I bestow a blessing of knowledge from the annals of those who have ventured forth before thee—be they bestselling scribes or wise agents of the literary realm.

Herewith, I present the Ten Commandments of Successful Novelists, distilled from the shared counsel of many a master at the esteemed assembly known as ThrillerFest, held in the glorious Isle of Manhattan:

1. Thou shalt think upon the race as a marathon, not a fleeting sprint. Persevere thou must, and let not thy quill rest.

2. Thou shalt apportion thy hours 'twixt the five pillars of authorship: Planning, Research, Writing, Rewriting, and Marketing.

3. Before thou dost pen thy tale, craft thou a single logline, wherein dwell a worthy lead, a noble goal, opposition most dire, and stakes of consequence.

4. Strive thou ever to balance description, action, and discourse, that thy story may live and breathe.

5. Let thy dialogue be spoken aloud, for thus doth it gain the breath of life and ringeth true upon the ear.

6. Write thou from thine hero’s vantage, be it third-person close or first-person true, that the soul of thy character may shine forth.

7. Forget not the Five O’s of scene-craft: Objectives, Obstacles, Observations, Opinions, and Outcomes.

8. Consider all the senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—that thy world be rich and full.

9. Sprinkle thou exposition as the gentle rain, gradually and with art, through discourse, deed, or imagery fair.

10. When thy draft is finished, let it rest for a fortnight or more; then return with eyes anew, that thou mayest judge it with wisdom and grace.

And now…. in modern English for those who are Shakespearean-challenged:

1. Think marathon, not sprint. Persevere and keep writing.

2. Balance your time between the 5 ingredients of being an author: Planning, Research, Writing, Rewriting, and Marketing

3. Write a one-sentence logline before writing your book. Include a lead, a goal, opposition, and stakes.

4. Strive to balance description, action, and dialogue.

5. Recite dialogue out loud. It makes it more realistic.

6. Write from the POV of your character. Most common is third-person close POV or first-person POV.

7. Remember the 5 O's of scene development: Objectives, Obstacles, Observations, Opinions, and Outcomes.

8. Consider all the senses -- sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

9. Sprinkle exposition gradually and organically through dialogue, action, or imagery.

10. Let your final draft sit a few weeks. Then read it again with fresh eyes.

These are all mantras I’ve come to rely on over the years, but it was validating to hear these lessons repeated consistently by the greatest authors in the business when I was at ThrillerFest in New York.

Writing a logline (#3) may be the most controversial, especially for pantsers (those who make up the story as they go along). Even in that case, it’s still useful to describe in a sentence the basic premise of the story you’re setting out to tell, even as a thinking exercise. It may (and probably will) change at the end, but it’s a good test to see if what you have in mind is built on a solid foundation.

For #7, the idea is to consider the five O’s from your POV character’s perspective for each scene.

As with all of these…

Do you have any “commandments” to add to this list? They don’t have to be in Shakespearean tongue (unless you want to)!

As I continued reading, and the villain was introduced, it was like reading it for the first time. Somehow, I had forgotten the villain’s name and many of the major twists that followed.

Little by little, it started coming back to me, but I actually enjoyed not knowing what was going to happen.

What made this an especially unique situation was this…

It was my own book—Atticus! I wrote it nine years ago in 2016 and published it in 2017.

In Atticus, when rookie cop Marti Coldwater pulls a dazed British pilot—dressed in WWII uniform and convinced it’s 1944—from a small, crashed futuristic plane in present-day Pennsylvania, she’s stunned. He remembers only one word: Atticus. Moments later, ruthless agents and a Nordic assassin are hunting them both, determined to capture the pilot and erase all witnesses.

On the run, Marti is plunged into a world of secret government projects, alien enigmas, and a plot that could doom the planet. Her only hope: unlock Atticus’s lost memories before their enemies catch up—and the truth is lost forever.

It’s sort of a cross between The Philadelphia Experiment (remember that?) and Ancient Aliens, with government conspiracies, intrigue, chases, unexpected twists, and a climactic scene in an Icelandic volcano.

I was reading the book because I thought I might post some fun excerpts or examples from it. Until I realized, the more I read, the more I felt like I was reading someone else’s book.

It reminded me of 60 Minutes interview I watched where Ed Bradley interviewed Bob Dylan. Dylan admitted that he didn’t think he replicate the magic of some of his old songs today if he just sat down and tried to write it.

"Try to sit down and write something like that,” he said. “There's a magic to that... It's a different kind of a penetrating magic." He said the muse had struck him back in those days, and that the songs felt like they came from somewhere else—from some other force.

Paul McCartney said something similar years ago when an interviewer asked if he thought there’d ever be a Beatles reunion (back when John and George were still with us). Famously, Paul said, “You can’t reheat a soufflé.” Of course, you CAN reheat a soufflé, but it probably won’t taste as good. But I digress.

With each of my books, I feel like the muse strikes. Otherwise, I don’t even bother writing it. The idea comes to me from somewhere organically, or maybe something I read about or see triggers an idea. Then once I immerse myself in it, I’m on a roll, and the twists come to me as I outline (and sometimes in the midst of writing). If I try to sit down and just think of an idea for a new book, I get nothing.

Then, when I move on to another book, I dive in and summon that same energy. But as for the prior books? With each one, as I read it, it feels like someone else had written it. Sometimes I look back and say, “Wow, I wrote that? That’s pretty good.” And sometimes, there are elements I’d change today.

I think every author finds flaws in their prior work, as well as elements of beauty. I think it was Walter Mosley at ThrillerFest who said, “All books are flawed to some degree.”

That’s part of what made rereading Atticus such a fascinating experience for me—it was like rediscovering both the imperfections and the magic that first inspired the story. Sometimes, the distance of years lets you appreciate your own work in a whole new light.

If you’re into twisty sci-fi thriller mysteries, ancient aliens, or visitors from the past, check out Atticus. You may be as surprised as I was.

Have you ever revisited something you created years ago? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

In case you were wondering, no, I haven’t disappeared into the deadly black hole of abandoned newsletters.

Alas, I have returned.

Dragons, Agents, and Spies, Oh My!

In May, I was knee-deep in the final edits of my Crichton-esque sci-fi thriller, Dragon Island, which I’ve finally sent off to my agent… Yahoo! (That’s not his name, I’m just excited).

When I’m totally immersed in the zone, it’s hard for me to switch gears and post to social media—hence my absence—but I’m learning how to make time for both.

Another thing I’ve learned is this: After submitting my final manuscript, do I play the waiting game? Hell, no! I get started right away on the next book. And that’s what I’ve done. While I wait to hear the fate of the dragons, I’m already five chapters into The Gemini Girl, which is both a standalone espionage thriller and a sequel to The Mirror Man.

I’m excited to say I’ve mapped out a whole trilogy, with room to continue the series if there’s interest. With my lead characters, Julian Black and Lela Mars, I’ll be adding “A Black & Mars Novel” as a series subtitle.

Plus, my agent has my nonfiction book, The Bond Advantage: Superspy Secrets for Winning at Work, out on sub (i.e., it’s been submitted to publishing gods while I do a rain dance and pray that they make it rain money… or at least a contract).

So, it was a busy and productive May. But then in June, I attended my first ThrillerFest and… wow, just wow.

The Thrilling Thrills at ThrillerFest

ThrillerFest, hosted by International Thriller Writers (ITW) and held for a week in New York City, is the world’s biggest conference for thriller writers (and readers). I’ve been involved with ITW for a while now, serving as an official scribe for their ITW Online Thriller School and ITW BizFest (virtual live classes of 12-14-sessions held each year). But this was my first time attending ThrillerFest and its cousin, CraftFest, in person.

Where else can you learn from the best of the best: James Patterson, John Grisham, David Baldacci, David Morrell, Lisa Scottoline, Lisa Unger, Lisa Gardner, Jennifer Hillier, Walter Mosley, R.L. Stine, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Tosca Lee, Heather Graham, K.J. Howe, Karen Dionne, and so many others! Seriously, I’m leaving out dozens of NY Times bestselling authors. (And I have pics with many of them to prove it!)

To make it even better, I was invited to be part of a panel led by #1 NY Times bestselling author Boyd Morrison called: Fear, High Stakes, or Character Development: Ratcheting Up Tension, where we had lots of lively discussion.

Bottom line: We agreed that all three (fear, high stakes, and character development) contribute to tension, with character development being key. After all, no matter how high the stakes or how tense the scene, if you don’t care about the character, the impact is diluted. Also, there are at least two tiers of stakes to worry about: global stakes and personal stakes, with personal being the most impactful.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Bookcase

Cue the Jaws theme. Every time I went to a panel session or a class, I came away with a desperate need to run down the hall to the onsite bookstore and buy the books mentioned.

The photo below shows just part of my (signed) book haul. I was generously given the autographed hat as a gift by K.J. Howe for my work as the ITW Online ThrillerFest scribe. Bigger bookcase, indeed.

This doesn’t include the books I already owned or the ones I ordered because I ran out of room in my suitcase (Serial Killer Support Group, by Saratoga Schaefer, Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz, and several more).

I had also recently read The Last Ferry Out, a twisty, tropical thriller by Andrea Bartz and The Splinter Effect, an Indiana Jones-ish time-travel thriller by Andrew Ludington (I highly recommend both!), and it was a pleasure to see both authors there.

David Morrell (creator of Rambo and so generous with his time) recommended a few books as well, which I immediately ordered: Joanna Penn’s How to Market a Book, Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer, and Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads (where 100 top thriller authors contributed essays on the thriller that most inspired them).

PS: As an author, you may be wondering how I have time to read. I asked myself the same question. And the answer was: I had to make the time. Writers need to read in their genre (and even outside of it) to stay current and relevant, and to learn what we might refer to as “best practices” while still staying original.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go (and the People You’ll Meet)

One pleasant surprise about the event that that I met my agent, Alec Shane, for the first time in person!

I also loved meeting Hank Phillippi Ryan (USA Today bestselling author and winner of 37 Emmys), who spearheaded the ITW Bizfest and has been so supportive of the note-taking role I’ve assumed for all the online classes.

(I can’t tell you how many authors came up to me and said, “Hey! You’re the notetaker!” as if it were a CIA code name).

I was especially delighted to finally meet Karen Dionne (author of The Marsh King’s Daughter) in person, even though we’ve communicated for years when I had been a member of the writer’s forum she ran years ago, called Backspace. Back in the day, she’d given me excellent writing career advice to focus on the characters.

What’s Better Than Knowledge? (This is a trick question)

What’s better than gaining new skills and insights from the world’s greatest authors? In a word… community. I didn’t just gain knowledge at ThrillerFest; I gained a community. It didn’t take long for it to hit me: These are my people.

By and large, everyone I met was fascinating, compassionate, articulate, and generous with their advice. And this included the biggest names in the business. Most authors, I’m finding, are an open book (pardon the pun).

Best yet, I made quite a few new friends that I’m sure will be friends for life as we all navigate our journeys.

Needless to say, I’ll be going back to ThrillerFest every year. It’s a must-attend for any thriller author and/or fan.

Final Words About… Well… Words

In addition to writing, I love editing, especially developmental editing and consulting. You probably know the Frank Sinatra song, My Way, where he sings, “Mistakes, I’ve made a few.”

Well, I haven’t made a few. I’ve made them ALL!

Fortunately, I’ve learned from them and love passing along this knowledge to other writers. I’m referring not just to writing (pacing, dialogue, character development, plot structure, etc.), but also to pitching, proposing, querying, marketing, branding, coming up with ideas, self-publishing, traditional publishing, and so on.

While I’m still on my journey to NY Times Bestsellerdome, I’m not without successes. I’ve been traditionally and indie published. I’ve done international TV and radio. I’ve had book proposals that led to mid five-figure deals. I’ve had 3 agents (two retired). I’ve had a starred review on Kirkus, a book named to their Best of 2012, and won a BestThrillers.com award in 2022.

All this is to say that I’m considering offering book consulting and editing services, plus I’m contemplating adding a separate paid Substack subscription for a nominal fee (in addition to this free one) that focuses exclusively on advice for writers. If this is something that is of interest to you (no obligation of course), let me know!

Genres include speculative fiction, thrillers & suspense, YA sci-fi and fantasy, mystery, historic fiction, memoirs, self-help books, business books, and more.

(There are other authors offering similar newsletters for writers, but the way I see it, this town’s big enough for all of us! Each author brings unique perspectives.)

Anyway, until next time! Meanwhile, I’ll try not to be a stranger.

A reclusive writer with the power to read memories is forced by a mysterious stranger to steal government secrets.

There’s of course, a lot more to the story than that, but that’s the core. The full blurb reads:

One with the curse of other people’s memories. The other with the power to make anyone forget. Who will win in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse?

Julian Black has built a wall around his life in suburban Philadelphia. Perfectly fine staying at home with his mother watching classic movies, the self-proclaimed recluse avoids touching anyone and tapping into their most horrifying memories. But when the thirty-five-year-old undertakes a risky act of heroism to help local police detective Lela Mars solve a murder case—he soon finds himself the target of a kidnapping attempt.

Julian is lured halfway across the world to London by a dangerous stranger who seems to know all his secrets—an equally gifted man who can make people forget. And when the mysterious captor demands he access a military device protected by the government—a device that could change the balance of world power—he's faced with an impossible choice: Comply or pit his wits against the world’s most secretive and deadly crime organization.

Desperate to foil a global disaster, can Julian outsmart the deadly intentions of a shadow organization and uncover the secrets of his own past?

So, we have a guy who avoids people like the plague because every time he touches their skin, he experiences their most intense memories as if he’s living it himself. He’s had this affliction for as long as he can remember.

I always wanted to write a Hitchcockian thriller (Hitchcock nut that I am) and had several story ideas loosely outlined. I first got this particular idea when I read the blurb for The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn, about an agoraphobic woman who begins spying on her new neighbors after she witnesses a brutal crime. The book hadn’t even come out yet at the time, but I had read that it paid homage to Hitchcock. It did seem sort of Rear Window-ish.

I thought, what if I wrote my own ode to Hitchcock? I liked the idea of a reclusive protagonist, but that’s where the similarities would end.

(Confession: I didn’t actually read the book, as I didn’t want to be influenced by it, but I’m making a mental note to add it to my list.)

A Reclusive Hero Who Could Read Memories

I started thinking about what could make a hero reclusive, outside of being agoraphobic, which had already been done. A number of the story ideas I had in my “vault” had to do with memory loss or alteration. So I thought, what if he could read people’s memories? And it caused him so much trauma that he stayed at home watching Hitchcock films (of course!) with his mother. The mother figure is a common Hitchcock motif as well.

Upsetting the Hero’s Status Quo

As for what the catalyst was that would upend Julian’s life (I named him Julian), I was stumped. Then I saw a road rage murder on the news. I was incensed, but it also gave me my story idea. Julian would see a road rage murder on the news, and something about the injustice of it and seeing the grieving family makes him realize he might be able to help. After all, if he could read the memory of the surviving daughters, maybe he’d spot a license plate that they didn’t process in their minds.

He sticks his neck out (after some false starts) and meets the tenacious Latina detective who’s working on the case. At first, they don’t hit it off. She doesn’t for one minute believe him and thinks he’s playing games. So, he has to prove it to her.

Ultimately, after reluctantly helping her solve several crimes, they become allies.

Finding the Villain

So, I had the beginnings of a story. Now I needed a villain.

I had the idea that a news story could accidentally leak about Julian’s talents, and it could attract someone with the intent to use Julian for nefarious purposes.

What would someone want with a man who can read memories?

That single question gave me the idea of a villain who wanted to use Julian to retrieve secret government plans from the memories of a kidnapped scientist.

What kind of plans? Did it matter? After all, with Hitchcock’s MacGuffin concept, the thing everyone was after—the MacGuffin—didn’t really matter. In North by Northwest, it was simply “government secrets.”

Raising the Stakes

To make the stakes high enough to give Julian motivation to resist, I decided I needed something substantial as the thing everyone was after. Something important. It couldn’t just be a MacGuffin. I decided to make it a device that protects U.S. satellites from anti-satellite weapons (a very real threat in today’s world). Whoever has that device has the ultimate edge in the space communication wars, changing the balance of world power.

Hitchcock Meets Bond

I knew I wanted certain Hitchcock motifs.

I wanted the climactic scene to take place at an iconic landmark (Hitchcock most famously used Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty). I thought of the Eiffel Tower, but then I had the idea of the London Eye. I envisioned some kind of shootout on the Ferris wheel.

I liked the idea of a “fish out of water” hero, similar to Cary Grant’s advertising exec, Roger Thornhill, in North by Northwest. But in this case, rather than the hero, I envisioned the villain being a suave, Cary Grant type — a master thief hired by an international crime syndicate. (I remember a Hitchcock interview where he said he liked to cast villains against type — someone you’d least expect to be a villain).

Having a suave master thief recalled another Cary Grant character, John Robie “The Cat” in To Catch a Thief. In fact, I pay homage to To Catch a Thief. As Julian watches a scene from the film, wishing he was more outgoing like Cary Grant, the villain, whom I named Sebastian Blaine, is over on the French Riviera actually living that life (ironically at the iconic Carlton Cannes, notable in To Catch a Thief).

I realized I was also getting into James Bond territory, with the espionage plot, international intrigue, and a villain funded by an international crime syndicate.

Then again, Hitchcock often referred to North by Northwest as his version of a James Bond film. Ironically, it ended up influencing the entire cinematic Bond series (and some of the latter books) with its blend of style, humor, and action. Cary Grant was even offered the Bond role before Sean Connery. So, in a way, Hitchcock and Bond have always been connected.

Anyway, I pitched my own “Hitchcock meets Bond” novel to my agent at the time, Al Zuckerman, a legendary agent who’s since retired (he represented Ken Follett, Nora Roberts, and many others). He liked the general story, and he especially liked Julian, but he had one challenge for me. He said, “Now, make the villain as interesting as your hero.”

Making the Villain More Unique

I ruminated over this problem for quite some time. I had to take stock of the elements I had so far:

• A reluctant hero who could read memories and who was in over his head

• A tenacious Latina detective who would be his ally

• A villain who was a suave master thief intending to use the hero to obtain government secrets

• An international crime syndicate who hired the villain to retrieve a device that could change the balance of world power

• A climactic battle on the London Eye

• Exotic locations, such as London, Paris, the English countryside, and the French Riviera (though the first part of the book takes place in Philly, my hometown).

It had all the ingredients for a Hitchcockian spy thriller, but with the twist of having a hero who could read memories. Then again, Hitchcock did, after all, have a man with a photographic memory called Mr. Memory in The 39 Steps.

But the question still plagued me: How could I make the villain more interesting and unique, like the hero?

My brother gave me the answer, in a sense. He said, “Why don’t you think about who the hero is and find ways to make the villain the mirror opposite of the hero?”

I thought I was already doing that. One’s a shy recluse who barely leaves the house. The other is a suave, confident, and well-traveled master thief.

Then it dawned on me. There was one other “opposite” trait I was missing.

If Julian could read memories, what if the villain had the opposite talent? What if he could make people forget?

The Missing Piece

At first, I thought it was getting too far-fetched. How would two people an ocean apart have these bizarre abilities, let alone the opposite gift? Then I realized; that would be a driving question for the plot to address.

The villain, Sebastian, knows all about Julian. But Julian has no idea who Sebastian is, or how Sebastian knows him. Clearly, they’re connected somehow. And that’s a central mystery to the story.

I also liked the irony that Julian could see everyone’s past but his own.

I decided to call it The Mirror Man. I had that title in the back of my head for a while, thinking it could allude to Julian’s ability to see people’s memories. But now it took on a whole new meaning. Sebastian was the mirror opposite of Julian. Sebastian was, in a sense, the “mirror man.”

And Then There Were Three

I realized there was great potential to do more with the Latina detective, whom I called Lela Mars. After all, she would be Julian’s only ally once he gets kidnapped and brought to London by Sebastian. So, a good part of the story is hers as she investigates.

My good friend, longtime colleague, and critique partner, Dawn Mahan, was a huge help here, providing feedback and posing challenging questions that helped me make Lela more of a multi-dimensional character. Lela is not only Julian’s guide and confidant; she has her own backstory, having been abandoned by her mother as a child and dealing with an abusive, narcissistic boyfriend. She learns to overcome her personal issues through her efforts in helping Julian, and the two form a meaningful friendship.

Making it Plausible

The story was coming together nicely. All the characters had strong character arcs; there were surprises and twists; and the plot held together well.

There was only one problem.

Would people buy the memory stuff?

I won’t spoil the details other than to say it’s all explained by the end of the book in sort a Crichton-esque fashion (I’m also a huge Michael Crichton fan). But it’s not just a plot device; it ties the story together.

That aside, I’m of the mind that if a story is immersive enough and made believable though real-life references, people can overlook one far-fetched idea. This is why people believed Jurassic Park; the “DNA in amber” explanation was rooted in real science.

And so it was with the Mirror Man. The ties to real life didn’t end there.

The opening heist scene in the book (to establish Sebastian’s character) is based on the real Brussels Airport Diamond Heist of 2013.

I reference several other true events as well.

The fancy meals Sebastian enjoys reflect the restaurants’ real-life menus. Most of the book’s locations I had been to (The Hotel Napoleon in Paris, Monkton Combe in the Cotswolds, London, etc.), but for others I had to do virtual tours and online research. It was important to me that every scene immerse the reader in the locale.

During a chase scene along the Thames, Julian tries to hide among a theater troupe that’s congregating outside a restaurant next to Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. I had run into that theater troupe myself when I was there, which gave me the idea.

I had a few significant scenes in The Shard in London, I’d never been in the building, so I called their office and asked a few questions about the layout. They said they couldn’t tell me, for national security reasons. So, I called one of their restaurants and spoke with a staff member who gave me a few pointers. Then I went through their office rental process to review online floor plans for their offices.

Ultimately, I captured the feel of the place without giving away any national security secrets!

The Final Book (and a Final Twist)

I finally sent the manuscript off to my agent, and lo and behold, he had just retired (I now have a new agent at the same agency).

Around that time, I had read that publishers were looking for books in clearly delineated genres (e.g., psychological thrillers, cozy mysteries, police procedurals, etc.). “Give me the same, but different,” was the familiar battle cry. My book spanned all of these genres and more. (I’ve since learned that cross-genre books are having a resurgence).

I decided not to even pitch it to agents and to publish it under my company, Somerton Press. As a side benefit, this meant I could publish it sooner and have control over the cover.

I guess you could say I did it for the same reason Napoleon invaded Russia; it seemed like a good idea at the time (to paraphrase a comedian who was asked why he had so many kids).

To my relief, the published book was well-received. The review excerpts are posted on my website.

For the cover, I hired the amazing Kirk DouPonce, who had done my other fiction book covers, plus the ones I wrote with my friend Ed Miller (The Kronos Interference, The One). I wanted something that screamed Hitchcock, with jagged writing and some kind of circular design (a la Vertigo). Those were my only instructions. Kirk had the idea to play off the mirror theme and include the London Eye.

I was overjoyed with how it came out.

I do have a sequel to The Mirror Man fully outlined, which I plan to tackle once I’m past my current books-in-progress (yes, I said “books”).

I hope I didn’t bore you to tears with all this detail, but I thought it might be interesting to see how an idea evolves from a loose premise to a story (building on my last post).

The truth is, in most cases, what they have is a basic premise, if that. A story idea requires much more.

Let’s say a guy comes up and says, “I have a really good story in mind. Aliens invade Earth and land in the middle of New York City.”

“Okay,” I say, but what makes it unique?”

“Well, they’re more like ape-ish aliens,” he says, “not like the ones with the giant heads like ET.”

I’m thinking it’s still not a story. It’s not even a premise. It’s a starting point, but I’m waiting for the punch line. The hook.

Now if they said something like:

In the year 2135, a desperate US government strikes a secret deal with an alien race to assist with the war on terror—only to find that the deal has major strings attached.

Then we’re getting somewhere.

It’s still not a story, mind you. But it is a premise. Not a great one, but it’s to illustrate the point that there has to be a hook that hints at a unique story.

For an actual story, we need:

• A lead character

• Allies

• A goal

• An opposition

• High stakes (ideally personal)

• And for the pièce de résistance… a touch of irony.

Think of the movie Jaws. The logline reads: A water-phobic sheriff must stop a great white shark that attacked a beach town on the 4th of July before it kills again.

You have the lead, who’s not only a sheriff; he’s a water-phobic sheriff who has to go out on the water. And he lives on an island.

Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?

Let’s go deeper (pardon the pun).

His goal is to stop the shark.

If we go beyond the logline, his opposition is both the shark and the city’s mayor, who carelessly wants to keep the beaches open. The stakes are high, not just because people will die, but because his own kids are in danger, plus he’ll be in jeopardy of losing his job.

And the allies themselves are set up for conflict:

• a police chief who hates the water

• a cocky young marine biologist

• a grizzled veteran shark hunter.

The adventure practically writes itself.

Indeed, I would argue that characters drive story, and are at least equal to the plot in terms of importance. So is setting.

So going back to our alien story, what if we said something like:

When a rookie journalist discovers a government plot to enlist an alien race in the war on terror, she must rely on her mobster ex-boyfriend in order to stay alive and expose the truth before the entire human race is exterminated.

Okay, it needs work, but it’s a decent starting point for fleshing out a story idea. You could do all kinds of variations to make it more compelling. Maybe the journalist is in a wheelchair. Maybe she’s the daughter of the president. You get the idea.

So next time you have a premise in mind, think how you can turn it into a story by adding a lead character with a goal, an odd mix of allies, an opposing force, personal stakes, and a bit of irony.