By John Gilstrap
 I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that for at least a few writers, the news of Osama bin Laden’s demise was met with less than pure elation. These writers are no less patriotic than their neighbors, nor are they sympathetic to terrorist causes.

They are authors who were 50,000 words into a novel about the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. As the mass murderer’s brains were spattering the walls in Abbottabad, the potential value of those manuscripts dropped to just about zero. Months of work (years?) shot to hell—literally. Those writers learned what I consider to be a valid—though painful—lesson:

Reality in fiction ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It takes a lot of work and countless hours to turn out the kind of books I write. For them to succeed among my fans, the stories need to feel timely and current, and with a contract to produce a book a year, I can’t afford waste. That’s why none of my timely, current stories are ever set in real places.


My series character, Jonathan Grave, lives in the Northern Neck of Virginia (a real place), in a town called Fisherman’s Cove (not a real place). In No Mercy, a lot of the action takes place in the fictional town of Samson in the very real State of Indiana. In Hostage Zero, one of the characters is spirited off to an unnamed village in Colombia. The bad guy who does the kidnapping is able to do so because of a series of diplomatic agreements between the United States and Colombia that never happened.


They call this stuff fiction because it’s all made up. If an author expends enough intellectual energy to construct his fictional world with a few dollops of reality and a pinch of bravado, the reader will follow him wherever he wants to go. I don’t see a reason in the world why the Fisherman’s Cove or Colombian jungle of my imagination have to be any more real than JK Rowling’s Hogwarts.


Jonathan Grave and his crew use some amazing technology in their missions. Some of it is real, but a lot of it is just plain made up. One bit of made up stuff actually prompted a Navy SEAL buddy of mine to ask how I knew about such a top secret project. I told him the truth: Having hung around with a lot of spooky people in my time, I’ve learned that there’s a development project for just about anything anyone can think of. I don’t even have to understand the technology; I just have to convince my readers that my characters understand the technology. I think of it as literary sleight of hand.


There are a lot of authors out there who disagree with me on this subject. These are the types for whom research is an obsession—a calling. For some—like historical fiction writers—the research by necessity never stops, but for the average suspense writer, I think that making stuff up is a way more efficient use of time. I know crime fiction writers whose books are equal parts story and travelogue. Los Angeles and New York seem to be the most frequently-traveled.

 Fictional characters travel real streets and eat in real places. They do a lot of stuff that I frequently skip over. Think about it: Unless the specific intersection of Hollywood and Vine plays a role in the story, it might as well be the intersection of Maple and Elm, because, as a non-resident of L.A., I’m dependent exclusively on the author’s description, which means that the realness of the description is irrelevant.


Some research is just a little bit crazy. My friend Joseph Finder posted a piece a week or so ago in which he—a self-described claustrophobe—allowed himself to be sealed into a coffin so that he could adequately describe what it’s like to be buried alive. Really. Turns out it was quite unsettling. I gotta say, as a borderline claustrophobe myself, I think I could’ve just made up the darkness, stale air and panic and saved myself some long-term counseling.



(Love ya, Joe!)


The more specific a writer gets in the depiction of real things and real places, the riskier the writing becomes. The devil is deeply embedded in the details. I read a book not too long ago that involved the fire service. During a response to a call, a character flipped the switch on his Federal Q siren and got a whooping sound out of it. The scene would have worked just fine if the author had stopped short of showing off his research. A Federal Q siren doesn’t whoop. I suppose for most of his readers it wasn’t a big deal because they wouldn’t know the difference—which invites the question (happy, Jim?), why not just leave it at siren? Or, if that extra level of verisimilitude is important to the author, he could just call it a Predator Nine siren? (There is no such thing, to my knowledge, but it sounds like it could be real, and the rank and file reader would be none the wiser.)


When your character jacks a round into his Glock and thumbs the safety off, you alienate people who know that there’s typically no need to do one of those actions, and that the other isn’t possible. It’s a mistake that pushes some of the audience out of the scene. No one would raise an eyebrow, though, if the character jacked a round into his pistol and thumbed the safety off.


So, dear Killzoners, if any of you are among the fictional bin Laden hunters, I hope you’re able to retool for the hunt of a more generic terrorist. Take heart in the knowledge that you’re treading the trail followed by downtrodden Soviet threat writers.