The Thriller Writer Lab

J.D. Barker spent his early career as a strict pantser, writing more than half a dozen novels without an outline, when a phone call from James Patterson turned into an unlikely writing partnership. Patterson is a hardcore outliner who writes thirty to fifty pages of outline before starting a book, so the two agreed to try it Barker's way first. They wrote The Coast to Coast Murders by pantsing it scene by scene, each one trying to ...

This is the spoiler discussion for The Mentor with Angela Douglas. If you haven't read the book or heard the full conversation yet, stop here, this episode gives away the ending.

Angela goes past the pitch: the other endings she wrote before landing on the one in the book, including a documentary-style version she cut for being too explanatory, and the red herrings she planted for Natalie and a handful of ...

Angela Douglas asked herself a question before she'd published a single book: what's the worst thing that could happen to a writer? She landed on an answer while working through lockdown on her still-unpublished first novel: having one of your stories stolen. That became the premise for The Mentor, a psychological thriller about Karla, an author accused of basing her breakout book on a former student's real life.

Angela likes writi...

This is the spoiler discussion for Another Try with Gene Koon. If you haven't read the book or heard Tuesday's full conversation yet, stop here, this episode gives away the ending.

Gene goes past the pitch: whether the story could have ended a different way, the real winery research trip behind one of the book's key scenes, and the theme about political accountability and mass violence he wove in without turning the book preachy. H...

Gene Koon spent 14 years as a UN video director with no plan to write a novel. His best material wasn't research he went looking for, it was testimony he sat through incidentally, sitting in on the Yugoslavian war crimes trials where intelligence operatives sometimes testified in closed session. The more he listened, the more he suspected these people could make compelling characters for a book, so he filed the idea away. Years lat...

This is the spoiler continuation of the Ellis Hart episode on The House That Held Her. If you haven't read the book or heard the main episode, stop here. Mark and Ellis get into the ending, the skulls, and what almost made it into the book instead.

Ellis Hart The House That Held Her: https://www.amazon.com/House-That-Held-Her-Keeping/dp/B0F24D62JS

Follow Ellis Hart online: https://www.instagram.com/ellis_hart_author/

Want to be par...

Ellis Hart didn't plan to write the tunnel scene in The House That Held Her, it didn't exist until a research trip to Mount Dora, Florida changed things. Down at the docks, he found a real system of rainwater runoff tunnels pouring into Lake Dora, and knew immediately he had to work it into the book. It became his favorite chapter, and it only exists becau...

Josh Jensen wrote a full 50,000-word draft of his debut thriller, then scrapped it completely because it felt like the book he was supposed to write, not the one he actually wanted to tell. In this episode he breaks down that rewrite, and how No Easy Way Back became a neo-Western built around his own hometown in central Utah instead of a normal thriller wearing a cowboy hat.

He also talks about rebuilding the brother dynamic from s...

Cleo Ballard built her AI antagonist, Aletheia, around a specific problem: how do you make a protective directive believable as the actual danger, instead of turning Aletheia into a random villain. Mark and Cleo trace that back to where the idea started, a joke with a friend about a company called Honest Feedback, and why Cleo decided only an AI, not a person, could...

Bestselling author Amanda West joins The Thriller Writer Lab to break down The Memory Foundation, a speculative thriller about memory flights, destination travel, and a secret mountain facility where guests can relive the best moments of their lives.

Amanda talks about moving from psychological suspense into a more high-concept thriller, building the idea of memory flights, and finding the right balance bet...

What does writing feel like when it's actually working? Not the grinding, forcing, staring at the screen version. The other kind, where you're not even really writing anymore, just trying to keep up with your fingers because something is coming through you.

Jon Lindstrom i...

Brittany Butler spent 10 years as a CIA targeting officer running spies in the Middle East and war zones. Now she writes espionage thrillers for Crooked Lane Books and the operational world she lived in shows up on every page.

In this episode Brittany breaks down how she b...

Michael J. Lalonde spent 23 years as a Canadian Army intelligence officer before writing The Quiet War: Canadian Front, a modern military thriller built around Canada's tier one special forces unit, JTF Two.

In this episode we get into how he built a story where the heroes are winning every engagement and losing the war without knowing it, why the villain targets Canada before the United States, what the "every day is selection" cu...

Cam Torrens is a retired Air Force C-130 pilot, active search and rescue volunteer, and author of Havoc, book five in the Tyler Zan series. His first two books never got picked up. His third did. Then he went back and got the first one published as a prequel. Every book in the series starts with a real SAR mission or a real location where one happened.

What does it actually mean to write what you know? For Mark P.J. Nadon, it meant embedding the parts of himself he doesn't talk about into the characters at the heart of his new psychological tech thriller, The Treatment Room.

In this episode, TD Severin, author of the awa...

A phone call dropped Luke Richardson into a story he couldn’t ignore. An ancient manuscript lost for thousands of years. A British Museum dig in Lebanon. An archaeologist who faked his own death to smuggle out clay tablets.

That call became The Ark Files, the first book in his eight-book Eden Black archaeological thriller series.

We get into how that real story shaped the novel, how he turns setting into part of the action in...

James Rosenberg is a Pittsburgh attorney and author of the Verdicts and Vindication series, legal thrillers pulled directly from cases he has handled. Unclean Hands is based on the most nerve-wracking trial of his career: defending the store employees who accidentally killed a man they were detaining for shoplifting. We get into how he builds thriller pacing around a full courtroom proceeding, why a case with no clear right answer ...

Robert Adamcik is a Navy veteran and defense contractor who writes spy thrillers populated with real people, coworkers, shipmates, and friends, by name and by personality.

We talk about his Martini Squad series and the second book The Wave Force Affair, how he approaches g...