By John Gilstrap

Backstory is an often undeniable temptation for inexperienced writers. We see it all the time in First Page Critiques submitted and reviewed here at the Killzone Blog. And I’m not just talking about the throat-clearing data dumps that poison those first paragraphs. Unnecessary backstory invades minor moments as well, and handled improperly, those moments stop the story one hundred percent of the time.

Backstory is the crutch that explains everything. It’s like the Chorus in ancient Greek plays that represents the epitome of telling and not showing. With a sprinkling of backstory, we can tell our readers why a character flinches, why she drinks too much, why he doesn’t trust authority.

Here’s the tragedy of squandering that slice of real estate on the page: the reader doesn’t care why a character thinks something or does something until the rationale is important to the story. But the worst part of the wasted real estate is that you’re ruining future tension. The fact that a character has a signature tic is cause to keep reading. Once the mystery is solved, interest evaporates.

This is a difficult concept for me to explain, so stick with me as I try to work through that which I was never taught, per se, but have been told I do well.

Backstory should arrive as consequence, not as explanation. Earn the reader’s curiosity before presuming to answer a question he hasn’t yet asked. If your character checks the locks three times before going to bed, don’t explain it. Let it sit there. Let another character notice it. Let it cause friction. Let it slow characters’ actions down when speed matters. Now it’s a problem, not a quirk.

A book is a limitless canvas. Take your time. Make the reader beg to know before you grant them knowledge.

Backstory is best revealed when it is pulled out of a character. It falls flat when it’s pushed onto the character by the author. Conflict is your delivery system. You want your characters to feel real, right? Well, real people don’t sit around in the middle of a crisis and reveal historical details of why they feel the way they do. (Okay, they did that very thing in The Breakfast Club, but that was the eighties, and we should all strive for better than that.)

Some elements of backstory needn’t ever be explained. Why does Charlie have a scar across his cheek?  Why does Agnes walk with a limp?  If it’s not critical to the story being told, there’s no need to explain. That’s a lot harder to do when Charlie or Agnes are your POV characters, but even with them it’s doable. Imagine an exchange like this:

“Hey, Charlie. I’ve always wondered where that scar came from?”

“I go it in a fight with the last guy who didn’t mind his own business.”

That’s a complete reckoning, and it does everything you want a plot to do: it builds mystery, establishes character, and even advances the relationship between the two characters.

Then there’s subtle backstory. I don’t particularly like quoting my own work, but here’s a passage from my current WIP—the one that triggered the idea for this blog post:

Irene parked her cruiser at the curb in front of the streetside door that she knew to be locked and walked around to the right, where the side entrance served as the ceremonial portal with its covered entrance and double doors.

This presents backstory in an implied way that doesn’t get discussed very often in classes. This little passage tells us that 1) Irene has been here before; and 2) she’s comfortable in what she’s about to do. The point here is that backstory can be implied as well as being called out.

Then there’s this from a paragraph or two later:

As she crossed the threshold into the forced faux comfort of a giant living room for the dead, she winced against the mixed aromas of flowers and formaldehyde that she’d come to associate with such places.

Here, we got some emotional history as well as physical recall. We know that she’s been to funeral homes, the tone delivers that she’d rather be someplace else. We don’t need to know the reasons for those previous visits.

Some shortcuts for hiding backstory inside the front story

Let expertise reveal history. Avoid telling us what a character used to be. Show us how they move through their world now. If your character constantly checks over his shoulder for approaching strangers, or he notes where exits are, that’s plenty to tell us that he has an interesting past. You don’t need to reveal what that past is until that story beat has an immediate impact on the main story.

Reveal character details through third-party observation. And here again, only to the degree that is necessary. Consider a retake on the issue of Charlie’s scar:

Adam pulled Baker into an empty office. “Do you know where Charlie got that scar?”

Think of all the opportunities here. Choose your favorite:

“I have no idea. I asked him once, and that didn’t go well at all.” This one is sort of dismissive. It shows that Baker is either afraid of Charlie, or just isn’t interested in the drama.

Or

“Something about Afghanistan. Traumatized the crap out of him. I think it’s what makes him angry. He doesn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t push.” Here, we learn an extra nugget of information about Charlie’s scar, but we also read respect mixed in with the fear of confronting Charlie. Baker has previously shown curiosity, but nods to Charlie’s desire to be left alone.

Or

“Yeah, I do, and it’s none of your damned business. When you’ve endured half the crap Charlie’s put up with—what he’s survived—maybe you’ll understand that when a man says he wants to be left alone, it’s a survival skill to leave him the hell alone.” Here Baker not only projects respect for Charlie, but also loyalty to him—apparently an earned loyalty. It also shows Adam to be pretty small for asking.

Or

“Ten years ago, when Charlie was in the Army, his unit was assigned to clear out a building. The place was packed with bad guys . . .” This one is a data dump disguised as dialogue. While it provides backstory, it is, I believe, hands down the worst of the options. Unresolved questions drive tension, tension drives conflict, conflict drives character, and character drives plot. Data dumps are just piles of words.

I’ve written here before that I think it’s a mistake to study the writing process as a series of component parts. Setting, plot, character, dialogue, backstory, chaptering and all the rest need to be reduced to a stew, not a list of ingredients. I don’t think about any of those things when I write. I just . . . write. That’s the blessing and the curse of being self-taught.

It all boils down to this in the end—the only true, inviolable rule of writing commercial fiction:

Never Squander Drama!

In any writing project, every plot point presents infinite choices derived from infinite variables. If you over-think it, you’ll spend ten years rewriting Chapter One. If you’ve ever been part of a writing group, you know at least one of those people. My suggestion to everyone reading this is to consider one challenge:

For each of the choices you make, choose the one that reveals as little as possible while simultaneously piquing the greatest interest in the unknown.

So, TKZ family, does this make sense?

By John Gilstrap

Two posts ago, I posted some positivity about AI in general, and ChatGPT in particular. The responses were . . . energetic. I think there’s a misperception of what AI is capable of, and what it is not. Without a doubt, there’s never been a worse time in history to be a graphic artist, and entry level coder or perhaps even a paralegal. The days of paying a “professional” for boilerplate documents are over.

With the appropriate prompts, AI is capable of planning trips, managing budgets, and, apparently, guiding bombs to the precise air shaft where it can do the most damage.

But it will never be able to console a child whose heart has been broken. It will never replace that moment with your beloved, sitting by a fire with a glass of wine or staring up at the stars. It will never replace human emotions. And therein lies my disconnect with the TKZ hivemind over the negative impact of AI on what we do.

Novels are recorded humanity, not just words spelled correctly on the page. They are, in fact, emotional experiences–the equivalent of consoling that child. A computer cannot convey that which it has no frame of reference, and that’s why it cannot replace us.

But I could be wrong, so don’t take it from me. For about two months, I have been pumping everything I’ve written into ChatGPT to see if it can learn style. I actually think it can, but I haven’t wrangled all of that piece yet. I know what I think about the long-term impact of AI on the writing world, but I want to hear what the machine had to say about it. So, I asked it this question:

“Using what you have learned from my style, write a 700-word post for a writing blog. Your topic: Will AI ever evolve to the point that it can replace the human voice in writing novels? Cite sources.”

I didn’t want my thumb on the scale to produce the answer I wanted, so I kept it open-ended, and because I’m talking to a machine, I wanted to know how it analyzed the data, so I told it to cite sources. Here’s the response I got after fewer than 5 seconds of analysis:

Will AI eventually replace novelists?

The short answer is no. Not in the way people fear.

Artificial intelligence will certainly become a powerful tool for writers, but replacing the human voice in fiction is another matter entirely.

To understand why, it helps to understand what AI actually does.

Large language models—systems like those developed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind—are trained on enormous bodies of text. During training, the system analyzes patterns in language: word order, sentence structure, context relationships, and statistical probabilities of what word or phrase is likely to come next. The result is a machine that can produce remarkably fluent prose.

But fluent prose is not the same thing as storytelling.

According to a widely cited analysis from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, large language models operate by predicting the next most likely token in a sequence based on training data patterns. They do not possess intention, memory in the human sense, or lived experience. They generate language by probability, not by understanding.

That distinction matters more than most people realize.

A novel is not merely a sequence of grammatically correct sentences. A novel is the product of perspective—of someone deciding which details matter, which emotions are worth exploring, and which moments deserve attention. Those decisions are rooted in experience. In memory. In the messy accumulation of living.

Machines don’t have that.

When a writer describes grief, fear, betrayal, or love, the power of the scene comes from a human mind recognizing something true. Even when the circumstances are fictional, the emotional substrate is real. The writer is drawing on life—on personal experience or on empathy for experiences observed in others.

An AI system cannot do that. It can simulate the language of grief or love, but simulation and experience are not the same thing.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have repeatedly pointed out that modern language models lack what cognitive scientists call grounded understanding. They manipulate symbols without direct connection to the physical or emotional realities those symbols describe. In other words, the machine knows the words, but it does not know what the words mean in the human sense.

That limitation shows up most clearly in narrative voice.

Voice is not vocabulary. It’s worldview. It’s the sum of a writer’s instincts about what matters in a scene, how characters behave under pressure, and which truths are worth putting on the page. Voice grows out of the author’s background, personality, profession, culture, and history. Two writers can describe the same event and produce completely different stories because their lives have taught them to see the world differently.

A statistical model can blend styles. It can approximate tone. But it cannot originate a worldview because it does not possess one.

That doesn’t mean AI has no role in writing. Quite the opposite.

Used properly, AI can be a very useful assistant. It can help brainstorm ideas, summarize research, test plot possibilities, or identify structural problems in a manuscript. Some writers already use it as a kind of tireless research intern, capable of quickly gathering background information that might otherwise require hours of searching.

In that sense, AI resembles other technologies that once stirred anxiety among writers. Word processors didn’t eliminate authors. Neither did spellcheck. Neither did online research tools. Each new technology changed how writers work, but none replaced the human imagination at the center of storytelling.

The same will almost certainly be true for artificial intelligence.

The technology will get better. The prose will become smoother. The tools will become faster and more useful. But the essential element that makes novels resonate with readers—the human voice behind the words—remains stubbornly difficult to replicate.

Because fiction isn’t built only from language. It’s built from life.

Readers can sense the difference between words that were assembled and words that were meant. The former may be competent. The latter are alive.

And that difference is exactly why novelists aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

So, there you have it, folks, straight from HAL’s mouth. Thoughts?

On sale now!

By John Gilstrap

When I teach at conferences and workshops, sooner or later, someone asks about tension. What is the secret for continually raising the stakes to keep the reader engaged?

The short answer is that tension isn’t magic. It’s engineering. It’s not something your characters generate while you sit back and admire their spontaneity. (If yours do that, please send them to my house. Mine mostly demand coffee and complain about the weather.) Tension is built one writerly decision at a time. Here are some things to think about:

1. Hurt Someone (Strategically)

If a scene feels flat, it’s often because no one is in jeopardy. Particularly in thrillers, happy people doing happy things happily is boring. Readers lean forward when they sense consequence and lean back when they sense safety.

I once fixed a third-act problem by shooting a character—not because I enjoy random mayhem, but because the story needed destabilizing. The moment the gun went off, the emotional geometry of the scene changed. Loyalties shifted. People had to react. That’s tension.

You don’t always have to fire a bullet; sometimes you fire a truth, a betrayal, a revelation that rearranges the emotional furniture. But if nothing in the scene forces a reaction—if no one bleeds, physically or emotionally—you’re not building tension; you’re decorating prose.

2. Put a Clock on It

Human beings are remarkably calm about catastrophe—right up until there’s a deadline. A bomb that will explode “someday” is background noise; a bomb that will explode at 6:42 p.m. sharp is a crisis. Time pressure forces decisions and eliminates the luxury of perfect plans. It makes smart characters make stupid decisions, and stupid decisions create complications, which is where tension thrives. When you compress time, you compress options. Suddenly every delay matters, every detour carries risk, and every conversation feels like it’s stealing seconds from survival. Nothing sharpens a scene like a ticking clock, and nothing sharpens a character like urgency.

3. Close the Exits

Sensible choices and logical escape routes poison thrillers. If your protagonist can call for backup, the sensible choice is to wait for help to arrive. If they can break contact without consequence, they probably should. If they can confess and clear everything up, why wouldn’t they?

To build tension, take those options away. Maybe calling for backup exposes a secret that destroys a career. Maybe walking away means abandoning someone who will then suffer. Maybe confessing will land the wrong person in prison. Tension lives where every available choice carries a cost, and the protagonist has to choose anyway. When I feel a scene sagging, I ask myself, “Where’s the easiest pathway to safety?” Then I remove it. Leave your character with only hard paths forward.

4. Let the Reader See the Trap

One of the most delicious forms of tension happens when the reader knows something the hero doesn’t. You show the antagonist making preparations. You let the reader glimpse the ambush before the protagonist walks into it. Suddenly, every line of of the story can vibrate with subtext. The hero reaches for a doorknob, and the reader is already whispering, “Don’t.” You’ve got to be careful here because the balance is delicate. Reveal too much and you drain suspense; reveal too little and you muddle the plot.

5. Escalate Consequences, Not Just Action

More gunfire does not automatically equal more tension. I’ve read scenes with explosions that felt sleepy and conversations in parked cars that vibrated with tension. The difference is stakes. Tension isn’t about volume; it’s about consequence. Start small—a lie that might be discovered, a trust that might be broken—then widen the blast radius to a career, a marriage, a life. Maybe more. But escalate in layers and earn each step.

This is where my retired engineer’s mind kicks in. A story is built in layers. The world of someone we like turns sideways, and somehow he has to cope with the crisis. But that crisis is only the beginning because his strategy to solve the problem triggers an even worse problem. Tension truly is engineered into a story.

What about you, TKZ family? Any strategy or tactics you’d like to share for engineering tension?

By John Gilstrap

I’m sure you’ve seen the ads popping up on social media. The 28-day course that will make you an expert on how to use AI to launch your productivity to new levels. I ignored them because as a creative, AI is supposed to be the bad guy, the thing we shall not use. In the end, I surrendered the $20 for the course.

Now I’m forking over twenty bucks a month for the paid version of ChatGPT. It didn’t take much convincing. Here’s my journey. Coming up on a book launch (Scorched Earth, February 24), I needed some fodder for social media posts. I never know what to say.

I logged into the basic, free version of ChatGPT and typed the question, “What makes Facebook posts effective when launching a new thriller novel?” Two seconds later, I got this:

Launching a thriller on Facebook is basically about triggering curiosity without giving the game away. The posts that work best tend to do a few specific things really well:

1. They tease a question, not a plot

Thriller readers love puzzles. Effective posts don’t summarize the book—they dangle a mystery.

• “What would you do if the person you trusted most disappeared… and left your name behind?”

• “Everyone in this town is lying. The question is: about what?”

If a post can be answered with “I need to know more,” you’re winning.

2. They spotlight stakes, not characters

Readers don’t yet care who your protagonist is—but they care deeply about what’s at risk.

• Life or death

• A secret getting out

• A ticking clock

• An innocent person paying the price

One clear, escalating threat beats three paragraphs of backstory every time.

3. They use short, punchy copy

Facebook is a scroll battlefield. Thriller posts that perform well usually have:

• 1–3 tight sentences

• White space

• A line break before the hook or CTA

Think movie trailer voiceover, not book jacket prose.

4. They pair text with a mood image

You don’t need literal scenes. You want vibe:

• A deserted road at night

• A cracked mirror

• A bloodless but unsettling detail (locked door, abandoned phone, empty swing)

Mood-first images stop the scroll better than character art.

5. They imply credibility or social proof

Especially important for new releases.

Examples:

• “Early readers say this one kept them up past 2 a.m.”

• “If you like Reacher, The Night Agent, or The Fugitive…”

• “My darkest thriller yet.”

This reduces risk for the reader.

6. They invite low-friction engagement

Posts that ask for opinions outperform posts that ask for purchases.

• “Which scares you more: being hunted or being framed?”

• “Night reading or daylight only?”

• “What’s the one line that makes you buy a thriller?”

Engagement boosts reach—and warms readers before the buy.

7. They rotate formats during launch week

Effective launches don’t repeat the same post. They mix:

• Hook lines

• Micro-excerpts (1–2 killer sentences)

• Behind-the-scenes (“This idea came from a real case…”)

• Countdown posts

• Reader reactions

Variation keeps the algorithm—and your audience—interested.

8. They end with a clean, obvious CTA

No cleverness here. Be clear.

• “Now available on Amazon”

• “Kindle + paperback out today”

• “Link in comments”

Confusion kills conversions.

---

If you want, tell me:

• your subgenre (political, military, serial killer, tech, etc.)

• whether this is Book 1 or a standalone

• your target comps

…and I’ll write 5–7 Facebook launch posts tailored specifically to your thriller.

Yeah, all of that in a few seconds. Intrigued, I typed, “Scorched Earth is the 17th book in the award-winning Jonathan Grave political thriller series. Summary: Vengeance, murder, and violent political games are on a collision course in a propulsive Jonathan Grave thriller by New York Times bestselling author John Gilstrap. Disgraced U.S. President Darmond has been ousted from office, but his minions have taken aim at everyone they perceive to be enemies. Off-the-record contractors on a secret list are being eliminated, one by one. Jonathan Grave and his Security Solutions team manage to turn the tables when the assassins come for them. But the ultimate attack will strike deep at the heart of what’s best about American values.”

Most of that comes from cutting and pasting the description off Amazon. Two seconds later (and I’m serious about the two seconds), this appeared:

Nice—this has serious launch-post fuel. Since this is Book 17, award-winning, and political thriller readers already know the Jonathan Grave world, the posts should lean hard into stakes, legacy, and national consequences, not introductions.

Here are 7 high-impact Facebook launch posts, each with a different angle so you can rotate them across launch week.

---

Post 1: The Hook (Pure Thriller Tease)

Vengeance has a list.
And Jonathan Grave’s name is on it.

When a disgraced president’s allies decide to erase their enemies, the killing starts quietly… and escalates fast.

SCORCHED EARTH is out now.

---

Post 2: Stakes Over Story

They aren’t after money.
They aren’t after power.

They’re after revenge—and they’re willing to burn the country to get it.

Jonathan Grave faces the most dangerous enemy he’s ever fought in SCORCHED EARTH.

---

Post 3: Series Credibility / Social Proof

Seventeen books in—and the threats have never been bigger.

If you’ve followed Jonathan Grave from the beginning, SCORCHED EARTH takes the fight straight to the heart of American ideals.

If you’re new? Buckle up.

---

Post 4: Villain-Focused (Political Edge)

A president may be gone.
But his loyalists are still pulling triggers.

Off-the-books contractors are dying.
Secrets are being erased.
And the endgame is anything but subtle.

SCORCHED EARTH—available now.

---

Post 5: Ticking Clock

They’re killing names on a secret list.
One by one.
No witnesses. No mercy.

Jonathan Grave and his team turn the tables—but stopping the assassins may not be enough.

Because the real attack is still coming.

---

Post 6: Reader Identity Post (Engagement-Friendly)

Thriller readers:
Do you prefer a villain driven by power, or one driven by revenge?

If your answer is revenge, SCORCHED EARTH was written for you.

---

Post 7: Clean Launch CTA

The rules are gone.
The gloves are off.
And the fallout will be devastating.

SCORCHED EARTH
Book 17 in the Jonathan Grave series
Now available in Kindle and paperback.

---

Pro tip for Facebook performance

• Put the purchase link in the first comment, not the post

• Pair these with dark, symbolic images (burned paper, shadows, empty corridors, flags in distress—not literal violence)

• Pin either Post 1 or Post 7 to your page during launch week

If you want, I can:

• tighten these to Amazon-ad length

• write a Book 17 “jump-in” post specifically for new readers

• or craft a controversy-safe political hook that pushes harder without tripping moderation

Just tell me which direction you want to lean.

I started a dialogue with my machine, and together, we put together a plan. But it didn’t stop there. I decided to play with images. A pivotal scene in the novel involves an airborne attack on a campground where children are celebrating the annual “Planetariat.” Don’t worry about the name, just stick with me.

I wrote, “Create a photorealistic image suggesting that violence is coming to a Camporee.” This one took closer to 10 seconds, and this is what I got:

Disclosure: The first iteration was Boy Scout centric. The final version is the result of edits like, “Change Camporee to Planetariat.”

Addicted now, I wanted more. I wrote, “Create story-related captions for this image.” Boom:

Here are story-related caption options for an image titled “Mysterious campsite at twilight”, all tuned to Scorched Earth–style tension. I’ve grouped them by vibe so you can pick what fits the post or rotate them.

---

Quiet Dread

• Twilight is when secrets stop hiding.

• By morning, this place won’t be what it was.

• Nothing looks dangerous… until it is.

---

Ominous / Foreboding

• The calm before escalation always looks like this.

• Every tent holds a name. Every name is on a list.

• This is where the plan starts to unfold.

---

Minimalist / Scroll-Stopping

• They thought they were safe.

• Safe ground is a myth.

• Night falls. Consequences follow.

---

Political-Thriller Edge

• Revenge doesn’t care who’s camping nearby.

• When ideology turns violent, innocence becomes collateral.

• The fight doesn’t stay in Washington.

---

Jonathan Grave–Flavored

• Jonathan Grave knew this silence wouldn’t last.

• He’d seen places like this before.
  They never stayed quiet.

• The mission always starts after sundown.

All of the above (and much, much more) ate up less than an hour of my day.

I’m hooked, folks. Have y’all played with AI yet?

Click the link if you’re interested in listening in as Jonathan and Boxers discuss Scorched Earth. Spoiler: Big Guy is not happy with me.

By John Gilstrap

The latest episode of a self-help podcast called, A Life in Color, which happens to be the intellectual child of my lovely and talented niece, Laura Branch, used music as a metaphor of what’s missing in many corporate offices these days. Managers want their employees to learn all the notes and meters, and the surest route to success is perform a tune that sounds perfectly fine every time. Rote recitation, no imagination required. In fact, she maintains, imagination is unwelcome in many corporate suites.

Taking Laura’s metaphor in a slightly different direction, perfectly fine music is the aural equivalent of a Bob Ross painting or the product of a paint-by-numbers set. True musicians, however, understand that the spots on the leger lines mark only the outline of where master musicianship resides. For an instrumentalist, music can be reduced to a math problem, but for a musician, those marks on the page reflect the heart and soul of the composer. Through phrasing and passion, a gifted musician pulls life and emotion out of those sheets of paper.

There’s a kind of magical transference that happens that I don’t begin to understand, but most of us have experienced a swell of emotion as a reaction to a performance–sometimes it’s a piece that we have heard many times before without any emotion at all. Perhaps it’s the sheer beauty of it as in the finale of Mahler’s 8th Symphony–“The Symphony of A Thousand“–which choked me up yet again when I was finding the right cue for the link. (Please give it at least a 90-second listen.) A more contemporary example is Carrie Underwood’s performance of “How Great Thou Art” on last year’s “American Idol.” Perhaps it’s simply the story being told, as in David Ball’s “Riding With Private Malone.”

So, what does this have to do with writing? Well, pretty much everything.

Let’s be honest here. Perfectly fine storytelling isn’t that difficult. Artificial intelligence can take assigned plot points with designated twists and barf out a tale. It will bring the reader all the emotional satisfaction of a paint-by-numbers image. It won’t be bad but it won’t be good, either. It will just . . . be.

I don’t want to just be. I want to leave an emotional impact on my readers–whether it’s fear or excitement or sadness or triumph. I want to be a master musician of genre literature. Stories need to be more than conduits for plots and twists. Books we love connect with us emotionally because a human author infused that emotion into their work. It’s in the ebb and flow of developments. In turns of phrase. In pacing. In the unique and insightful peeks into the world through the author’s eyes.

But because a book is a work of art, there’s room for limitless interpretations of the author’s intent. Just as we can never know how Gustaf Mahler or W.A. Mozart phrased their work during performances, readers of my books cannot know the rhythm of words that I imagined as I wrote them. Emphasizing one word over another in a paragraph can make a huge difference. Passages intended to make readers chuckle may in fact offend a few. A scene I write to elicit a tear may cause some readers to roll their eyes. And that’s fine. I hear from readers who find symbolism that I did not intend, but that makes the symbolism no less real to those who see it.

The emotional connection is what counts. Like musical composition, a story is in its way an immortal piece of its creator’s soul. It lies silently until living person picks it up and interprets the author’s words through the filter of the reader’s own life experiences. The result is an experience that is close to but never precisely what the writer intended. The result is musical.

=

On Sale Now. Listen to Jonathan and Digger talking about the book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2A7Nn1sJyA

By John Gilstrap

Spoiler: It ain’t quick and it ain’t easy.

“Okay Boomer.”

There, we’ve all said it together so now that’s out of the way. I wrote my first published novel when “Lion King” and “The Santa Clause” were the top two new releases of the year, and O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial for murdering his wife dominated the news cycle. Query letters were sent via U.S. mail (don’t forget the self-addressed stamped envelope), and manuscripts, God help us, had to be printed then mailed via Fed-Ex at about $25 a pop. Submission and rejection were expensive. On the positive side, the expense was also a barrier to entry. When there’s expense, I think writers are more careful about their editing in particular and storytelling in general.

Thirty books later, a few of which were bestsellers and fewer of which bombed, I think I’ve got insight worth sharing about how to survive as a working novelist and end up with a decent reliable income. NOTE: Mileage may differ for other writers.

Write a good story that is accessible to a wide audience.

I write thrillers about families in jeopardy. They are emotional roller coasters that are simultaneously heartwarming and violent. I intentionally appeal to as broad an audience as I can.

You write what you write — romance, sci-fi, fantasy, young adult, children’s, whatever. Then there’s romantasy, a genre I didn’t even know existed until I did a joint signing with Jennifer Armentrout and saw that her line was about fifteen times longer than mine. The idea is to embrace the largest possible audience to sell the largest number of books. Even before we get into talking about publicity and marketing, if you’ve written a cross-genre sci-fi vampire romance set on Planet Xanthar where all the characters are ugly, you’ve got to understand that the odds of success are stacked against you.

Sell your work to and through a traditional publisher.

(See Okay Boomer, above). Yes, there are gatekeepers (yay for them!), yes, there’s rejection, delayed gratification and all the blah-blah and yada-yada about self-promotion is true. And yes, you have to have an agent to gain entry to the gatekeepers.

But your stuff is good, right? You shouldn’t be afraid of no stinkin’ gatekeeper. Once you’re through the gate and you’ve become a critical element of the traditional publishing machine, you’ll have access to retail outlets and film agents and foreign agents and subrights opportunities that can pay handsomely. All of these are negotiated by others on your behalf so that you can get on with the business of writing the next book.

NOTE: All the rumors you hear from “experts” who say that the traditional system is closed to new writers are lies. The entire industry thrives on new writers.

ALSO NOTE: The entry gate is also the exit gate. Once you get a contract, the pressure remains to keep producing good stories that are accessible to wide audiences.

To get ahead of the comments I imagine will come, I acknowledge the royalties paid by traditional publishers to their authors is considerably less that that which is paid through online publishers, but you’ve got to consider that trad publishers pay advances and then bear the burden of all production and marketing costs. By my math, 15% of 25,000 sales is better than 70% of 250 sales.

Don’t stop writing.

Whether you make $1,000 from your first book or $100,000, you can’t stop writing if you want to make this writing gig a career. One book per year, minimum — or even more than that if you’ve chosen certain genres. This is a business of numbers and name recognition. By definition, nobody knows who you are when your first book drops, but if readers like the story, a solid percentage of them will buy your next book, too, and then tell their friends about it. The people who first learn about you on your fifth book (or fifteenth) may be inspired to go back and buy your previous works.

So, folks, this brings us to the true secret of how to make a living as a novelist. Never forget that . . .

The backlist sells the front list.

Of my 30 novels, 16 are part of my Jonathan Grave thriller series, with #17 on its way in February, 2026. Every time a new book is released (look for Scorched Earth, dropping on February 24), there’s a big spike in sales for the first book in the series, and smaller spikes in all the books that follow. The backlist lives forever and produces income forever, but for best results, that income pump needs to be primed annually with a new release. Otherwise, the sales curves flatten.

Do the math. Every book is an evergreen revenue generator, and those revenues add up over time. Now, 30 years into this game, I have reliable income from my current book, previous years’ books, foreign versions of all of the above, ongoing renewing movie options, and miscellaneous sources like speaking fees and the occasional short story. All of this in addition to the Social Security payments I’ll start accepting in a couple of years.

As promised, the route to real money is neither quick nor easy. But it is very real.

Final note: If you read this post on the the day it was published, I will be in Las Vegas, hanging out with 65,000 of my closest friends at the SHOT Show. Check my Facebook page for updates.

Pre-order your copy today!

By John Gilstrap

Okay, folks, SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD FOR “A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE”

Kathryn Bigelow’s celebrated new thriller, “House of Dynamite” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, something of a master class in how not to write a thriller. To be sure, the premise is gripping: A nuclear missile is detected en route to an as-yet unknown target in the United States, launched by an unknown enemy. This happens at a time when the U.S. is at Defcon 4 (peacetime) and during shift change in the White House Situation Room. Time to impact:18 minutes.

The first minute or so is wasted on what resonated as truth to me: “Wait, that can’t be right, can it? Is it a computer glitch?” Then, Captain Olivia Walker, the duty officer in the Situation Room calms everybody down. There are procedures to be followed, people to be notified, and actions to take. America fires two interceptor missiles (only two) to take out the incoming warheads, but they both miss, and the National Command Authority (NCA) accepts the inevitability of a nuclear strike in Chicago. (I’m not going to address the ridiculous plot holes, except for the one where Captain Walker, who lives in Virginia and clearly loves her husband, surreptitiously call him and tells him to get in the car and drive west–toward the incoming nuclear blast.)

The intense 18 minute period from launch to impact is presented more or less in real time, but just before impact, the film shifts to show the same events from the points of view of the various people we know that Captain Walker has been interacting with–saving the president, of course, for last. Call it 20 minutes of screen time. Out of a 90-minute movie.

The rest of the film shows the same actions, same results, from different points of view.

Twenty minutes in, I was breathless. I thought, Wow, what an exciting yet flawed, implausible movie! Then came the reality that they were going to quadruple-down on the same flaws and implausibilities, just from a different angle. WTF?

But I don’t want to talk plot. I want to talk structure and character, and that’s where this film truly fails.

The filmmaker was making a point rather than a piece of entertainment.

Eighteen minutes ain’t a lot of time to make 100% correct decisions under stress. Got it. (And from submarine based platforms off the East Coast, the flight times are more like eight minutes.) Presidents, played in this case by Idris Elba, whose talents are woefully squandered, don’t spend a lot of their spare time scouring the target packages contained in the infamous “football”, which itself is cared for in the film by a twenty-something junior officer. Got it again. Awesome decisions must be made on the fly. Finally, horror of horrors, government officials give their families a heads up to get out of town before the roads become impassible. (Between you and me, I would 100% do that. RHIP, baby.)

The flaw in the film is that everybody simply follows the book–literally and figuratively. No one dares to fire an unauthorized third interceptor missile in attempt to save millions of lives even if it scorches their career. (Okay, I can’t resist a plot comment here. They limit the interceptor package to two missiles because they might need more if there’s a second attack. Better to char the Windy City. That made sense to a Hollywood writer. Someone needs a good old-fashioned Three Stooges slap, hair-pull and eye-poke.)

Reading procedures, discussing the efficacy of procedures, and then ultimately following them is . . . what’s the word? Oh, yeah. Boring.

A thriller is about characters taking chances and succeeding or failing as a result.

I don’t care about anyone in this film.

This reflects back on the intellectual origins of the film. Every character is merely a game piece to be manipulated to bring the larger points home. Once NCA wrote off the millions of innocents in the greater Chicagoland area, why would I give a rat’s patootie whether or not SecDef gets a last chance to tell his daughter he loves her? We all love our kids, buddy, and you just shrugged at toasting millions of them.

Stakes and tension are different things.

Within the first ten minutes of this turkey, we know the the Miracle Mile will soon be baked to glass because the screenwriter says it must be so. In storytelling parlance, I believe that’s called a Big Reveal. Normally, those are saved for the third reel, not the first. All that remains is the question of how the president should respond. The military cliche, of course, pushes for a global, kill-everybody response, and President Elba seems confused and disturbed by the plastic-sheeted four-color Denny’s-like menu sheets that details the pre-targets smorgasbord of retaliatory options. (Had I been sought out for my technical guidance, I might have asked, what’s the hurry to retaliate? As absurdly unlikely it is that an ICBM could be launched from an untraceable location, once detonated, the forensic evidence left behind would tell us everything we need to know for a surgical strike.)

The ending sucks.

That’s it on the ending. Hard stop. Sucks.

Never forget what a thriller is all about.

Pacing, tension, and ever increasing stakes for the characters are the elements that separate a thriller from the other suspense genres. That’s the job of the writer. If it’s a film, add screenwriter and director to that list.

If you ever allow an agenda to take the front seat, your project is doomed.

By John Gilstrap (Only my wife still calls me Johnny)

Last Saturday was the night of our annual Christmas party. It’s a catered event in our home where we host about 100 friends for an evening of food, drink and frivolity. Things were just getting started–I was taking coats at door and directing people to the various bars and food stations–when my wife’s urgent cries drew my attention to a 12-inch-high patch of flames on the dining room table.

“Oh, bother,” I said–or something like that. A lit taper had fallen from its base and had set the linen table runner alight. Linen burns pretty well with a bit of paraffin accelerant. However, it extinguishes quickly when you drown it with the water from a chafing dish. Thinking quickly, the caterer then covered the burn mark with a serving dish and the party was back on track.

About 18 hours have passed as I write this, and I realize that some blog topics are ordained. So buckle up as I set my writing creds aside and return to my previous line of work. For newcomers, that means 15 years in the fire and rescue service and 35 years as a safety engineer specializing in things that burn.

First, this video is mandatory. The first ten seconds or so will do. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Welcome back. Nothing about that video was doctored. Dry pine burns almost explosively, and it doesn’t care if it’s part of a tree, a wreath or a centerpiece. It also burns very hot. If the fire in the video had been in a real house, those superheated gases would have ignited all the furniture and wall coverings, creating an even hotter plume of gases that would have mushroomed along the ceiling to the rest of the house, self-propagating by all the additional items and structural members it ignited along the way. If it were a two-story house, the stairway would have been the internal chimney, and the Beast would have fed on everything up there.

Sobering Fact #1: You don’t have time. The Beast is coming, and you can’t stop it. Even if it’s not true in your one-off case, you have to assume it is true. If it’s after bedtime, and the smoke detector sounds, your reflex should be to call 9-1-1. If you live in an area that has “enhanced 9-1-1” service, you don’t even need to speak to anyone. The computer will know your address and the audio will tell the call taker everything they need to know. If it turns out to be a nothing burger of a call, well, that’s good news for everyone. Your house won’t have burned and the firefighters won’t have had to clean their equipment.

Sobering Fact #2: Everybody’s instincts are wrong.

• You keep your and the kids’ bedroom doors open because you want to hear problems. Remember the Beast in the hallway? He kills with his breath, not with his claws. Not only is he consuming all of the oxygen from the air, but the products of combustion from all that furniture and structural material are toxifying it with carbon monoxide and phosgene and oxides of nitrogen and God knows what else. Some of these gases are toxic at parts per billion, and if bedroom doors are open, they’re rolling right in. A closed bedroom door adds as much as 10 minutes of survival time in a house fire. Give the firefighters a chance to make a rescue instead of a recovery.
• You think you’re going to have time to rescue your kids from down the hall. You’re wrong. At least, you have to plan to be wrong. See everything written above. Honestly, you don’t comprehend how geometrically the Beast grows once he gets started. Dying in the hallway during a rescue attempt is not a rescue. It’s a tragedy. Likely part of a larger one.
• Your kids are going to run to you for help when things get scary. I don’t even want to write the rest. Read the paragraph above and extrapolate. Hands down, the worst day of my fire service life was when I found the bodies of two children under their parents’ bed. A part of me broke that night that still hasn’t healed.

Elements of a Fire Evacuation Plan 

• Every room has a way out–ideally, two.
  • If the CLOSED bedroom door is hot to the touch, the Beast is out there waiting to kill you. Don’t open it.
    • OPTION 1: If it’s safe, climb out a window.
      • Are your kids big enough/strong enough to open the window?
      • Do they know it’s okay to break the window if they can’t open it? (You need to tell them very specifically that it is permissible because you’ve spent their whole lives making it clear that windows are NOT to be broken.)
      • Is there a designated implement nearby that they can use to break the window?
    • OPTION 2: If the Beast is outside the door and window egress is unsafe, the only option is to stay put and await rescue.
      • Stay low and in plain sight
      • Make lots of noise. (Bedside whistles are a great idea.)
• Establish a meeting place outside and once there, stay there. 
• Do not hesitate. Hear the smoke detector, activate the plan.

Please consider this post to be my Christmas message of love.

We’re all extended family here at the Killzone Blog, and it so happens that the season of God’s greatest gift to mankind coincides in the Northern Hemisphere with the time of year when we stack the rules of chemistry and physics against ourselves by placing uniquely combustible fuels in close proximity to efficient ignition sources. There’s a reason why first responders refer to this time of year as Fire Season.

I don’t want to stress you out, but I do want all of you to take a look at every single display in your home. If having a real tree is important to you (or any real greens for that matter), make sure that they are moist and well away from direct sources of heat. Keep a pitcher of water near the fireplace in case a log falls out. You just have to cool it off enough to get it back into the fire box with the tongs. There’s no need to extinguish the fire in the fire box before you go to bed, but make sure that the logs are stable and won’t fall.

Candles out before bed. All of them. Don’t make me come over there and give you a talking to.

With all that lecturing behind me, I wish you all a wonderful Holiday Season, and I will see you on the far side of our annual hiatus!

By John Gilstrap

When Zero Sum, #16 in my Jonathan Grave thriller series hit the stands in 2024 as a “premium mass market paperback,” the paper copy retailed for $9.99 and the Kindle version cost $7.99. Fifteen books and as many years earlier, the standard mass market version of No Mercy, the first book in the series, retailed for $6.99, and for two weeks, the Kindle price was $0.00 before it skyrocketed to $2.99 after the promotional period expired*.

This coming February, when Scorched Earth, #17 in the series is revealed to the world, it will be in a trade paper format. If you’re not familiar with the jargon, trade paperbacks have the dimensions and font size of a hardcover, but with soft covers. Paper copies will retail for $18.95 and the Kindle version will cost $9.99.

For what it’s worth, I had nothing to do with this decision, and the decision itself isn’t about greed–at least not directly. Without wallowing too deeply in the weeds, the demand for mass market paperbacks has been dwindling for years, kept alive mainly by the reprints of last year’s bestsellers by big name authors. Those were the books you’d see in grocery stores and pharmacies and airports, but the real driver for the mass market were big box stores like Walmart and Costco, both of which announced that they would no longer be stocking their shelves with mass market paperbacks, with certain exceptions, including category romances.

This change concerns me. First of all, it’s change and I hate fixing things that don’t feel broken. I’ve always lived by the mantra, “Never try to make a happy baby happier.”

Trade paper has always been the format for literary fiction. At least that was the case in the United States. Thrillers were hardcover and mass market reprints. We are all creatures of habit. Will readers who generally trend toward hardcovers be more drawn to my books because they’re larger yet still softcover? Will mass market paperback readers who’ve reserved a specific spot in their briefcases for a small book be pissed off that they now have to carry something larger?

And there’s the price. Over the years, I’ve been blessed to be able to build a devoted fan base that’s willing to spend mass market prices for my stories. Will they stay with me as the price for the handheld book doubles? I guess I’ll find out. I worry less about my eBook fans because the price increase is less drastic, but it’s still change.

Now for the exciting part . . .

The format change has provided an excuse to re-release all of my Grave series in trade paper format. No Mercy and Hostage Zero will hit the stands at the same time as Scorched Earth. While all the concerns remain, it’ll be nice to see out-of-print titles returning to the shelves.

Good news for autograph collectors. If there’s one complaint I’ve heard more than any other over the years about the mass market format is that bibliophiles who collect autographs don’t like the way small paperbacks look on their shelves. I understand that, actually. And as the man signing the autograph, I confess that I will be happy to have a larger signing area on the page.

This brings us to the importance of pre-orders. I’m not a “please buy my book” kind of guy. I figure that if you have to beg, something’s wrong. In fact, I don’t even bring books with me to sell when I teach workshops. First and foremost, I’m not set up to be a retailer and have no desire to manage another layer of taxation. But also, I figure if I do my job right, people will be inspired to buy my books from a bookstore, or to borrow them from a library.

That said, if you’re inclined to buy my books when they come out, given the expanse of this change in the way of doing business, it would be extremely helpful for you to pre-order the book through your retail outlet of choice. Whether you prefer a physical book or an eBook, preorders send a message to the publisher and the marketplace in general.

So, what say you, TKZ family? How price sensitive do you think readers are? Are you going to miss pocket-size books?

=

*I’m proud to note that No Mercy shot to the #1 free book on Amazon, “selling” over 60,000 copies during that time. When the price returned to $2.99 the book remained the #1 overall Kindle bestseller for the next week. That was a promotional gambit that worked better than I’ve ever witnessed.

By John Gilstrap

As a thriller author, I know all about testing the boundaries of suspended disbelief. As a consumer of thrillers, I do it all the time. Coincidences have to happen to make a story work, and as writers, it’s our job to make the coincidences feel organic to the situation the characters are enduring. For the sake of tension and drama, we stack the odds against our good guys. That way, when they ultimately prevail, the victory feels that much sweeter.

We’ve been watching a lot of streaming movies and television shows in our special viewing room over the past couple of months, and as the tropes stack up, I’m having a progressively harder time keeping my inner commentary silent, earning a few elbow shots from my beloved and more than a few harsh shushes. Consider . . .

. . . When crashing the drug den and the SWAT team is stacked up behind a ballistic shield and armed with enough fully-automatic firepower to topple Venezuela, why is Detective Danny Reagan with his pistol and designer ballistic vest out in front of everybody?

. . . Why don’t detectives ever just turn on a light? Instead, the search the dusty darkness of a suspects bedroom–or the basement where all murders were committed–with only the illumination provided by a tiny penlight.

. . . Why does our brilliant good guy wait till he arrives at the site of trouble before he chambers a round into his pistol? That means he’s been driving around all day essentially unarmed.

. . . After prevailing in the firefight in Room A, why doesn’t our good guy take advantage of the relative peace to reload before moving to Room B? Never bring old bullets to a new gunfight.

. . . For heaven’s sake, good guy or bad, just friggin’ shoot! You’ve achieved your goal. You’ve got your prey in your sights. And let’s be honest: At that point, while the victim very likely cares deeply that you intend to kill them, they’re not really going to be listening to the why. If they’ve got any sense, they’re going to be focused exclusively on either how to get away or to kill you first. Any way you cut it, your best call is to pull the trigger. Conversely, if you change your mind, your only move is to run like a bunny rabbit because only bad things lie ahead for you.

I make it a point to never pick on particular shows by name, but there’s one very popular program that makes my head explode every week. Let’s pretend there’s a show called “Trooper” and it features a character named Dalton Shames. To our knowledge, Dalton’s never had a conventional job, but it’s clear that he was raised by MacGyver. Give Dalton a can of Dr. Pepper, and he can turn a paper clip into a flame thrower.

Okay, I joke about the flame thrower, but he routinely produces a full-size 1911 platform pistol from the waistband of his trousers, right at the small of his back. His limp-wristed grip is all wrong for that gun (that’s a real description, not a pejorative), and none of the nations most draconian gun laws apply to him. Not even New York or Los Angeles.

In last week’s episode, a plucky 19-year-old is able to infiltrate the lair of a dangerous drug kingpin with the intent of kingpin regicide. It’s quite a feat given the army of armed guards. Dalton, in the company of the local sheriff, who has inexplicably ceded all law enforcement powers to this stranger from out of town, raid the compound themselves by ramming their way through the front gate. They have to keep the 19-year-old from being killed by the cartel, don’t you know.

Here’s the plan: The sheriff will hold off the army with his six-shot revolver while Dalton makes his way to the kingpin’s throne room, where the plucky kid has his highness dead to rights, but can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Yada, yada . . . shot from off camera, kingpin gut shoots plucky kid, Dalton shoots kingpin and takes off running with plucky kid over his shoulder. Bad guys with rifles can’t hit a running target at ten yards, Dalton can’t miss with unaimed shots while running.

All is well but for this kid with a hole in his gut. Not to worry. There’s a horse veterinarian with a pouch of goodies who says he can help.

CUT TO: A kingpin’s yard filled with cop cars that would have been really handy a little while ago. But the vehicle we really care about it the ambulance with our plucky-now-gut-shot 19-year-old looking like a million bucks, all cleaned up, sitting upright in the stretcher while Dalton tells him everything’s going to be okay. Then Dalton allows the paramedics to close the back doors and drive him away.

Sigh.

There’s suspension of disbelief, and then there’s no element of this story is possible so therefore none of the story is engaging. I am without a doubt becoming progressively more curmudgeonly about these things, but I swear that lazy storytelling is becoming the norm.

In these days of Chat GPT and even simple YouTube searches, even uninformed storytelling is lazy. A car door has never been adequate to stop any but the smallest bullet, but ten years ago, not knowing that was forgivable. Now, there are entire channels dedicated to what stops what caliber of bullet. I have to assume that s true of every other once-esoteric subject.

What say you, TKZ family? How forgiving is the suspension mechanism for your disbelief?