{"id":2560,"date":"2018-05-28T13:49:52","date_gmt":"2018-05-28T20:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=2560"},"modified":"2018-05-28T13:49:52","modified_gmt":"2018-05-28T20:49:52","slug":"author-interview-owen-laukkanen-and-nick-petrie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/author-interview-owen-laukkanen-and-nick-petrie\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Interview: Owen Laukkanen and Nick Petrie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Owen Laukkanen<\/a> and Nick Petrie<\/a> are two of the most talented and original thriller writers at work at the moment. Owen\u2019s latest book, Gale Force<\/strong>, is a bravura tour de force set on board a salvage ship; Nick burst on the scene with The Drifter<\/strong> and hasn\u2019t made a wrong move since.<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: I\u2019ve been reading and selling mysteries for so long now I\u2019ve started to feel like a biologist, making categories. I had just read a bunch of cozies before I read your books and started thinking about how thrillers and cozies have some similarities. Certain tropes are expected. Can you talk about how you utilize tropes to structure your books?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"OwenOWEN:<\/strong> Wow, what a great question, and not one that I\u2019ve ever been asked before! I think readers expect certain things from a thriller, just as they do a cozy, and honestly I\u2019ve found that thrillers just seem to work better if you adhere to certain tropes while looking for ways to put your own spin on them.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m asked to do a reading, I typically read from the prologue or first chapter of my books, and that\u2019s not an accident. I\u2019m looking to do in a reading the same thing I\u2019m aiming to accomplish with a reader who\u2019s just picking up the book for the first time: draw the audience in and make it impossible for them to walk away (or not buy the book, as the case may be).<\/p>\n

So I look to create a kind of self-sufficient capsule of a scene that\u2019s going to establish what the book is about, illustrate whatever crime we\u2019re going to be dealing with, and leave the reader with at least one burning question he or she simply cannot let go unanswered. And we\u2019ll spend the rest of the book trying to answer that question, or dealing with its fallout. We\u2019ll build to some kind of climactic showdown between the series characters and the bad guy, and hopefully by the end of the book we\u2019ll have answers to some but not all of the questions we raised.<\/p>\n

For me, the fun is using any kind of familiar thriller structure and using it to say what I want to say about social issues and the world at large while couching all of the preachy stuff in a fast-moving and entertaining story that ticks all the boxes a thriller fan is looking for.<\/p>\n

\"NickNICK<\/strong>: I read a lot, so I\u2019m certainly aware of crime fiction\u2019s many tropes, but I can\u2019t say I consciously begin a Peter Ash novel with those in mind. Instead, my goal is to tell a specific, interesting, and exciting story featuring characters I\u2014and hopefully the reader\u2014come to care about a great deal. As I blunder through the first draft, though, certain themes and tropes begin to bleed into the narrative and structure without conscious planning. In part, this is driven by the kinds of stories that interest me, but it also comes from the influence of writers I\u2019ve loved and read over many years.<\/p>\n

Q: You both kind of write non-series series. You have connecting characters, but each book is so different from the one before. Can you talk about that a bit?<\/em><\/p>\n

OWEN<\/strong>: I think one of the difficulties of writing a series is that the audience knows, by and large, that your main characters are going to survive (unless you\u2019re George R.R. Martin, of course). So you automatically lose a lot of the tension when you thrust your series character into a dangerous situation.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve found it\u2019s pretty effective if you have kind of \u201csurrogate\u201d main characters, whether they\u2019re bad guys who have enough humanity to them that we can relate and empathize, or victims\/potential victims who we can see wandering inexorably into harm\u2019s way but can\u2019t do anything to help. We\u2019re not sure, as readers, what happens to these characters, and it keeps us turning the pages and rooting for our series characters to hurry up and save the day.<\/p>\n

I also find the most rewarding thing about writing crime fiction, as I mentioned above, is being able to write about social issues while still giving readers an entertaining story. I\u2019ve been fortunate enough that my publisher allows me to write about whatever interests me, and my interests are pretty varied, so I\u2019m always looking for a new direction to take.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d go insane if I could only write, say, serial killer procedurals. It\u2019s just not why I got into this game.<\/p>\n

NICK<\/strong>: Peter Ash, my series protagonist, is a lot of fun to hang out with, and I hope to be writing about his adventures for a long time, but I didn\u2019t want to be stuck writing one kind of story. Writing about a rootless man, I can put Peter in a wide range of stories with essentially unlimited narrative, geographic, thematic, and stylistic possibilities. Also, each novel can be different in scope, with some books telling big stories, and others telling smaller, more personal stories. So far I\u2019ve written about veterans\u2019 lives in The Drifter<\/em>, emerging technology in Burning Bright<\/em>, the newly-legal cannabis industry in Light It Up,<\/em> and race and class in my upcoming book, Tear It Down<\/em> (January 2019)\u2014although all the books deal with veterans\u2019 lives in one way other another. Also, with just a few connecting characters, I can spend time developing \u201cguest stars\u201d\u2014then do terrible things to them!<\/p>\n

Q: There are some obvious questions for you both. Owen, why a ship? What kind of research did you have to do? Are you a sailor yourself?<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

OWEN<\/strong>: I come from a maritime family\u2014my grandfather was a boat-builder and a commercial fisherman, my uncle a commercial fisherman, and even my dad, who\u2019s a doctor by trade, fishes commercially for lobster during the summer. I\u2019d even applied to maritime college to go to work at sea, but it turns out I\u2019m colorblind, and you really<\/em> need to be able to differentiate between red and green if you want to navigate at sea.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019ve always felt drawn to the sea, and as a reader, to the literature of the sea. Since I couldn\u2019t work on ships myself, I\u2019d always wanted to write books set aboard them. The oceans are still so very lawless to this day, so they\u2019re the perfect environment for a thriller writer.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In writing Gale Force<\/em>, I drew a lot on my own experience on the water. I worked summers on my uncle\u2019s prawn and salmon fishing boat in the North Pacific through my twenties, and they were some of the happiest summers of my life. A lot of the maritime environment in the book comes from the people I met and places I experienced on the job.<\/p>\n

And then, obviously, I did a fair bit of research about the deep-sea salvage industry, which is much more fascinating than it sounds; it\u2019s essentially a gold rush with tens of millions of dollars on the line, and highly-specialized teams of seafarers braving monster storms as they race each other out to shipwrecks. Like I said, the perfect thriller environment.<\/p>\n

Q: Nick, I don\u2019t think you are a veteran yourself but your veteran character is a very powerful one, and I have customers who are vets who really appreciate Peter. Can you talk about why you made that particular choice? <\/em><\/p>\n

NICK<\/strong>: No, I\u2019m not a veteran, but I made my main character a Marine Corps Iraq War veteran for very personal reasons. I ran a building inspection business for fifteen years, and after the Surge, I had many clients who were coming home from war. I\u2019m a curious guy and I\u2019m interested in people, and in talking with these men and women, I found myself profoundly moved by what many of them had experienced, as well as the significant and often unacknowledged price many of them had paid in the process, and would be paying for the rest of their lives. It also seemed to me that, with our all-volunteer military, most Americans truly had no idea of what we\u2019d asked of these young men and women, and I wanted to share their stories. Like you, I get a lot of feedback from veterans who tell me that Peter really resonates with them, which is the best compliment this writer could ask for. My ongoing conversation with vets is honestly the best part of writing about Peter Ash.<\/p>\n

Q: I was talking to some authors at Malice Domestic about how technology has changed things up\u2014you can\u2019t have a character not have a cell phone, for example, which sometimes makes things tricky in terms of plotting, I would imagine. These authors were older and you guys are kind of the new wave. How do you factor in\/avoid technology when you\u2019re structuring your novels?<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

OWEN<\/strong>: I think technology gives a lot more than it takes away, as a writer. A lot of the inspiration for my stories comes from weird technological quirks and developments that simply wouldn\u2019t have been possible a few years ago.<\/p>\n

The Forgotten Girls<\/em>, for instance, was inspired in part by the crazy, real-life story of quote-unquote Brother Orange<\/em>. Essentially, some guy in New York had his iPhone stolen. A few months later, he started getting weird pictures of a Chinese man in an orange grove showing up on his new iPhone.<\/p>\n

What he figured out was that the old phone was still connected to his cloud, and was uploading the pictures to both phones. The craziest part is that he tracked down the orange grove guy (“Brother Orange”) all the way in China, and the two men became Chinese celebrities and did a six-week tour of the country, opening restaurants and doing photo ops and stuff. Just weird.<\/p>\n

But as soon as I read the story, my crime writer Spidey sense started to tingle. Because what if it wasn\u2019t just someone else\u2019s selfies that showed up on your phone, but pictures of a dead body?<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s how The Forgotten Girls<\/em> begins, with some poor sap finding pictures of a dead woman on his phone, and the police all believe that he killed her.<\/p>\n

NICK<\/strong>: I\u2019m fascinated by technology, and also by the varied ways people use it. Some live on the bleeding edge, some are Luddites, and some, like me, live on the spectrum between those extremes. Similarly, certain characters, and certain books, require more extensive use of technology than others. And I have to say, for all the plot challenges brought on by modern technology, it also offers many opportunities. But because even a basic smartphone can made plotting problematic, I accidentally evolved a simple cheat. One of the running gags in the series is that Peter has trouble hanging onto a working phone\u2014they get lost, broken, stolen, even eaten by a bear. And it\u2019s part of Peter\u2019s character that he doesn\u2019t much care.<\/p>\n

Q: What book\/books did you read that made you think, wow, I want to do that? What book or books really changed your path as readers\/writers?<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

OWEN<\/strong>: The book that really changed my path as a writer was John Steinbeck\u2019s Cannery Row<\/em>, which we read in grade eleven English class. I had moved to southern Ontario and was really missing the ocean, and Steinbeck\u2019s description of the tuna boats setting out from Monterey made me yearn almost unbearably to go back to the west coast. Since I couldn\u2019t get out there, I decided I wanted to be able to evoke that same kind of image with my own writing, and it was about then that I realized I wanted to be a writer\u2014and also, that writing and the ocean became inextricably entwined for me.<\/p>\n

More recently, I picked up Don Winslow\u2019s Savages<\/em> and it rocked my world. I was working on a Young Adult novel and it wasn\u2019t really working as written, but the way Winslow plays with language and structure really inspired me to try something similar with my own book, and it was an extremely rewarding and fun exercise, and it wound up launching my YA career. (I publish under the name Owen Matthews.)<\/p>\n

NICK<\/strong>: Oh, man, there are so many! Although for me, it\u2019s more about authors than specific books. I grew up inhaling science fiction and adventure stories, gobbling down stories as fast as I could. It wasn\u2019t until high school, reading Hemingway, that I realized that \u201cliterature\u201d could be both exciting and beautiful, with very high stakes. In college, reading Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith and Elmore Leonard, among many, many others, I saw the varied ways that crime fiction could also be gorgeous and profound. Cormac McCarthy\u2019s Border Trilogy was perhaps the biggest revelation for me\u2014lush, violent cowboy novels masquerading as serious fiction, or maybe the other way around. I hoped I could do that same magic trick writing crime, and that goal is what keeps me going every day.<\/p>\n

Q: What makes you excited to start your writing day\/a new book? <\/em><\/p>\n

OWEN<\/strong>: For me, it\u2019s the feeling that I can\u2019t rest until I get the story in my head on the page. There are days when I just can\u2019t stop thinking about a story, plotting out scenes, chapters, places, characters, to the point that it\u2019s impossible to even sleep unless I get something written out. That\u2019s the best place to be; it\u2019s that sense of urgency that made me sure I wanted to be a writer in the first place, and any time I can get that feeling back and harness it, I know the writing\u2019s going well.<\/p>\n

NICK<\/strong>: Coffee! An essential part of this writer\u2019s toolkit. Actually, I have two favorite moments in the life of a book. The first is that electric jolt when my tentative attempts to find the opening of a novel finally result into my falling headlong into scene and story, and the book begins to unfold. The second is toward the end, when I\u2019m writing full-tilt and I can\u2019t type fast enough to keep up with the words in my head. It\u2019s the slow, ugly middle that\u2019s always a struggle\u2014when it\u2019s important to remind myself that it\u2019s not my fault, it\u2019s just the ugly middle, and if I keep writing, eventually the book will gather momentum again. (Some days, I\u2019m tempted to write that reminder in reverse on my forehead, so I see it every time I look in the mirror.)<\/p>\n

Q: How do you avoid being predictable? <\/em><\/p>\n

OWEN<\/strong>: That\u2019s another good question. I think it starts with being aware of the tropes in the genre, and that comes with reading widely and being aware of what other authors are doing. And then, I think it continues with having a desire to surprise the reader, which is something that I\u2019d wager most thriller writers have in spades. I get a kick out of subverting expectations, so I try to lead the reader into a situation that they think<\/em> is predictable, and then turn it on its ear.<\/p>\n

NICK<\/strong>: Thank goodness, I\u2019m not predictable! I actually work hard to keep things fresh, try new things, and stretch myself as a writer. This is part of why I\u2019ve built the series the way I have\u2014my vast looming dread of boring both myself and my readers. I think changing the setting really helps give each book a unique feel and flavor, and bringing significant new characters into play can really shape the form and path of a novel.<\/p>\n

Q: Do you feel like you are having a conversation with readers as you write, or are you writing a story and just hoping someone will eventually enjoy it?<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

OWEN<\/strong>: Obviously, I hope that the reader comes away from my books with a new perspective, or something unexpected to mull over, but for the most part, it\u2019s the latter. I\u2019ve found that my most successful and enjoyable writing comes when I forget about everything but the fun I\u2019m having putting words on the page. I try to write the kind of book that I want to read, the way I want to write it, and then have faith that when other people pick it up, my excitement and enthusiasm will shine through.<\/p>\n

NICK<\/strong>: Selfishly, I begin writing to entertain myself\u2014to write the book I want to read next. I feel very lucky that the stories I want to tell also interest my readers. It does eventually turn into a conversation when I show sections to my wife, Margret, or to my editor or agent. They react to the work, and I internalize that feedback for the following drafts.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: What\u2019s next for you both?<\/em><\/p>\n

OWEN<\/strong>: I have a new series coming out next year; I pitched it as Jack Reacher with a rescue dog, which is pithy but not entirely accurate. Essentially, it\u2019s about a rescue dog who is trained by a convicted murderer in one of those prison outreach programs, and who is then assigned to a US Marine with PTSD.<\/p>\n

The Marine gets into some trouble, and the dog is taken from her, and when the murderer is released from prison at the end of his sentence, he learns that the dog is in trouble and goes to see if he can save it.<\/p>\n

In the process, he gets mixed up in the Marine\u2019s troubles, and the two of them have to team up to save the dog and, ultimately, clean up the corrupt little town where the Marine is living.<\/p>\n

The murderer kind of fancies himself as the Reacher character, but the Marine isn\u2019t quite the damsel in distress. So it\u2019s fun and hopefully a new twist on that trope. And as a bonus, the rescue dog is based on my own rescue pitbull, Lucy, who\u2019ll be hitting the road with me to promote the book and who will actually be in Ann Arbor for my event with Nick!<\/p>\n

NICK<\/strong>: My new book, Tear It Down<\/em>, hits the shelves in January 2019. Peter travels to Memphis to help a photojournalist who\u2019s being harassed. By the time he arrives, someone has driven a dump truck into her living room\u2014and things get much worse from there. The story brings Peter into close contact with a gifted street musician, a neighborhood warlord and his enforcers, and a pair of hog-butchering brothers with an ugly agenda. The book was a blast to write, and it\u2019s saturated with great Memphis music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Owen Laukkanen and Nick Petrie are two of the most talented and original thriller writers at work at the moment. Owen\u2019s latest book, Gale Force, is a bravura tour de force set on board a salvage ship; Nick burst on the scene with The Drifter and hasn\u2019t made a wrong move since. Q: I\u2019ve been … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2560"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2565,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2560\/revisions\/2565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}