Thrilled!
By Colby Marshall - July 16, 2012
I just arrived back home from Thrillerfest, a four day long conference in New York City that celebrates thriller books and those who write them. I heard some great panels and learned a lot from bestselling authors like Sandra Brown and Catherine Coulter. I particuarly enjoyed panels featuring Peter James and Ann Rule. Jack
Higgins took over this year as Thrillermaster. I got to pick up some brand new books by some of the ITW writers as well as had a chance to network with some of my favorite thriller writers such as R.L. Stine, Jon Land, Lisa Gardner, and more, as well as a chance to meet some authors I'd never had the pleasure of knowing before. (The picture at the right is of me with one of my absolute favorite authors, Lisa Gardner, author of domestic suspense.)
It was also a happy surprise that I got to celebrate with other thriller writers my own Publisher's Marketplace announcement heralding my new book sale, which came out the Thursday of the conference. I'm pleased to post a screen capture showing off my new deal with Stairway Press! I'm thrilled they will be publishing CHAIN OF COMMAND in 2013!
Which brings me to a topic that was discussed on one of the Thrillerfest panels about taboos in thriller writing that applies to CHAIN OF COMMAND. One of the biggest "taboo" subjects that is hard to address in thriller writing is politics. And because Chain of Command could be considered a political thriller, one question I'm sometimes asked is, "How do you deal with addressing political issues in your book? Does your story tend to reflect your own feelings about the political climate?"
The easy answer to this is no. When I wrote CHAIN OF COMMAND, it was important to me to bring in characters who fall in varying places on the political spectrum, playing up each individual character's idealogies and their own reasoning for the way they think rather than imposing my own personal belief system on an entire of book of characters (which to me, would be boring).
As a reader, I've never wanted to read a novel where I could feel the author's agenda radiating at me off the page. For this reason, it was important to me to create rich characters with their own individual backgrounds and political leanings, then to make them sympathetic to the reader (or not, depending o
n their role in the book), regardless of how I personally felt about that character's politics.
CHAIN OF COMMAND contains conservatives, liberals, feminists, anti-feminists, radicals, and everything in between. It contains some controversial stances, but they aren't necessarily my stances. I think good writers can separate from their characters' motivations and their own. I hope that when readers pick up CHAIN OF COMMAND next year, they won't get bogged down with any "political" message that doesn't exist, and rather, simply enjoy the book as the escapist fun it is for everyone to have their own agenda, be guilty and innocent in their own ways, and as always, be their own characters.
Have you ever read a novel where you felt an author's "agenda" was being pushed? Was it a thriller or a different kind of book?
FLASH POINT (Dr. Jenna Ramey #3)
Comments
Be the first to comment on this post!
Add New Comment