Pairing Books and Food I love curling up with a good book and knowing I have an uninterrupted stretch of time ahead of me to enjoy it. That doesn’t happen nearly as often as I’d like (because I have my own books to write, too!), but when it does, I always like to find the […]
Category Archives: Blog Article
Memories and Suspense: Hank Phillippi Ryan’s Writing Approach
Every author approaches writing a little differently. Some plot while others are pantsers. Some writers conduct research up front, whereas others may dig up what they need to know as they go along. It’s the unique methods and singular style thriller and mystery authors apply to their work that makes books stand out and differentiates […]
Family Memory to Thriller: Samantha Downing’s He Started It
It’s safe to say most people’s childhood memories include at least one road trip, complete with a canon of “Are we there yet?” and “He started it!” In fact, family memories like this can have a big impact on us as adults – particularly if we happen to be thriller writers. Such was the case […]
The Secrets of Megan Collins’ Behind the Red Door
The Bourne Identity. The Girl on the Train. Before I Go To Sleep. Though vastly different, these thrillers have something in common: all incorporate memory loss and secrets into their plots. Memory, as we know, can be a tenuous thing. At the same time, it’s vital to survival. Without our memories, we’d be unable to […]
Memories Inspire Fiction: Q&A with Wendy Walker
What sparks the idea for a novel? Ask five authors, and you’re likely to get five different answers. For some, it’s the desire to shed light on a particular community or event. For others, it’s the need to communicate an experience. When it comes to thriller writers, it isn’t uncommon to turn intriguing but ultimately […]
Sibling Rivalries throughout the Ages
Sibling rivalries have existed throughout recorded history, beginning with Cain and Abel in the bible. I haven’t been exempt myself, and if you have a sibling, you probably haven’t either. Siblings can be the best of friends, and also, the worst of enemies. When I was a teenager, one of my three sisters threw […]
The Death-Driven Mind of Philip K. Dick
To say that Philip K. Dick was obsessed with death would be to understate the case. He dreamed about his death wrote constantly about death. Dick wondered what being alive really felt like and whether unbeing would kill that state of consciousness; sometimes he believed that death was merely a transition between states and other […]
Locations in Thrillers
Why is location so important in psychological thrillers? Who can forget the wild, windy moors in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, or the rugged Cornish cliffs and rough seas in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca? For me, as a reader and a writer, location is just as important as the plot and the characters in […]
Five Tips on Emotions for Riveting Story-telling
I’ve always loved writing suspense for a number of reasons. I love the fight for justice and the assurance that the good guys will always win. I love taking a real-world situation, like human trafficking, or a bio-terrorism threat, and dropping my characters into the middle of the chaos as they risk their lives […]
Seven spellbinding books that shaped modern ‘Western’ magic
Corpus Hermeticum (1st-3rd centuries CE), Anon These mysterious ‘wisdom texts’, written in Greek and attributed to an ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, could claim to be foundational to both Western magic and science! Their huge influence followed their rediscovery and translation during the Italian renaissance, and the hermetic idea of controlling nature by […]
The Killer’s Shadow – Author Q&A with John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
AFG: Tell us about your latest book. The Killer’s Shadow is about the hunt for Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist serial killer who roamed the country with the self-imposed mission of killing African Americans, mixed-race couples and Jews, all with the intent of fomenting a race war in the United States. My first […]
WHAT PUTS THE THRILL INTO DOMESTIC FICTION?
Writing across several genres—women’s fiction, romance and domestic thrillers—can be challenging and a question I’m often asked is ‘what is a domestic thriller?’ For me, it’s women’s fiction with a killer twist…or many. Domestic thrillers are also labelled as domestic suspense, domestic noir and psychological thrillers, when in fact they’re a subgenre of the […]