The Thriller Writer Lab

International bestselling author Ashley Mansour outlines her psychological thrillers in detail, but that’s usually not where she starts. Years before, she had pantsed an early version of her first novel and found it all over the place, with a lot of extra work waiting in editing. Starting on an outline, though, can feel constricting, so she begins with free writing: a blank document, no editing, n...

Award winning author Karen E. Osborne’s debut novel, Getting It Right, came out in 2017 as literary fiction. Years later its two leads, Alex and Kara, started talking to her again, and once she began a sequel she realized she was changing so much that the first book had to be rewritten to match. There was also a timeline problem: left alone, the original would have made both women 40 in the sequel...

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...

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 ha...

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 She landed on an answer while working through lockdown on her still-unpublished first novel: having one of your stories stolen.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 stud...

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...

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, s...

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.co...

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 because he went and looked in person. Mark and...

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 re...

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 actually deliver that kind of h...

Ava Roberts spent years as a clinical psychologist before leaving to write thrillers full time. In The Summer House Murder, that background shapes a cast where every character's motivation is psychologically grounded, morally complex, and impossible to judge cleanly. In this episode, Mark and Ava pull apart how the book was actually constructed: the structural choices, character architecture, and...

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 b...

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 is a four-time Emmy nominated actor, filmmaker, and USA Today bestselling author of Hollywood Hustle and Hollywood Payback. In t...

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 builds characters using goals, motivations, and conflicts before writing a single scene, how she balances three interlocking plo...

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, w...

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. In this episode we talk about the dual timeli...

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 award-winning medical thriller Deadly Vision, takes over the show to interview Mark on launch day about the craft, the characters,...

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 setti...

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...

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 getting permission before putting someone in a novel, and what happens when a character based on a real colleague doesn't make i...

What do you do when your characters are trapped at 30,000 feet with nowhere to go? Susan Walter wrote a locked room murder mystery on a plane and had to figure out how to keep it moving when everyone is literally buckled in. In this episode we talk about her writing process, how she went from screenwriter and movie director to bestselling novelist, her brilliant character naming tricks taken from...

35-book veteran Brian Drake joins Mark P.J. Nadon to reveal a brutal industry truth: If you aren't publishing fast, the algorithm will forget you. In this episode, we deconstruct how Brian maintains a prolific pace and why he uses a manual typewriter for his first draft.   Inside the Episode: The 90-Day Churn: The modern algorithm requires high-volume production to stay visible to readers. The Typ...

J.L. Hancock joins me to talk about The Hawk Enigma and how his past work with special operations informed the technical foundation of the story, without letting detail take over. We discuss how he approached researching the technology, how he decided what information belonged on the page, and why clarity for the reader mattered more than explaining everything he knew. J.L. Hancock's book The Hawk...

In this episode of The Thriller Pitch Podcast, I talk with Joel Nedecky, author of The Broken Detective, about the craft choices behind his debut crime novel. We discuss building a story around a private investigator who knows he’s going to prison, writing character before plot, and allowing questions of addiction, family, and consequence to emerge during revision. This conversation focuses on per...