John Ramsey Miller

Human beings will do anything to turn a profit, to gain an edge. Conspiracies will exist forever and throughout the universe. Greed rules the world. Always has, always will. We thriller authors know this and have learned that you cannot really write over-the-top bad guys as long as you keep the motivation real and the character true to his or her motives. Wealth, social or political power, elevation of status, feeding a sense of self-importance, protection of the status quo, a desire to stay out of prison, a need for accolades are all motives for forming or joining a conspiracy.

When you watch a James Bond movie, how do you not wonder how the evil geniuses go about recruiting hundreds of people that will kill any and all comers, threaten the world with selective destruction for extortion of money from world powers. You have to wonder where the bad guys got the cash to build a secret base on an island or in a false volcano where the receding lake is made of steel painted to look like water. How much do they pay their evil workers? Short of buying an out-of-work army from a third world country, or recruiting in mental hospitals catering to the criminally insane, how do you find hundreds of psychopaths who will also do exactly what they are told and will live with other criminals in the middle of nowhere?
Back to conspiracies. Not all are believable, but if you remember to keep them in proper sliding scale, you’ll pull it off. The only difference between a street gang leader, a mafia don, the head of a very large business enterprise, and head of a government agency often lies in the trappings and degree reward at stake. There is little difference between the way a small time drug dealer and the head of a large bureaucracy think and plot.

I just read how organic food is no healthier than food grown using insecticides and commercial fertilizers by a conglomerate. So a chicken raised on feed made from other chickens and injected with steroids and antibiotics is no better for you than one raised by a farmer’s wife who feeds them only natural grains, roasted soybeans, corn and kelp, etc… Well that sounds a lot like what the tobacco companies used to say about the safety of cigarettes. I read about bills introduced to heavily regulate produce sold in farmers markets due to fears of salmonella and other contaminates. How many cases of food poisoning comes from local produces grown on farms as opposed to government regulated large commercially outfits? It sounds like something a Con Agra would pull because people are buying that produce from farmers markets and not the local grocery store. There’s a conspiracy to write a thriller around. The possibilities are endless and we’ll never write them all.

There is no doubt that people working for governments commit murder in the name of protecting secrets, or getting rid of obstacles and critics of the regime. It happens every day. King David sent a brave soldier to a certain death in battle so he could have that man’s wife. Joseph Stalin killed 30 million of his own people out of paranoia and in the guise of progress. Our government killed off and enslaved thousands of native Americans in order to utilize the land they inhabited.

The secret of writing conspiracies is to keep it on the page, and to always tell a little story within the bigger story that the reader can identify with, a character they can identify with and root for. Nobody who loves a thriller wants to read about a battle between titans who are equally matched and you’ve got a perfect yawn machine on paper. But you pit a preteen boy armed only with a slingshot against an armored giant with a spear and sword on a battlefield, and you have the boy kill the giant, and you’ve got yourself a story. Why? Because we are all facing giants every day of our lives, and there’s a chance that any one of us could be the boy with a slingshot.