About John Gilstrap

John Gilstrap is the New York Times bestselling author of Zero Sum, Harm's Way, White Smoke, Lethal Game, Blue Fire, Stealth Attack, Crimson Phoenix, Hellfire, Total Mayhem, Scorpion Strike, Final Target, Friendly Fire, Nick of Time, Against All Enemies, End Game, Soft Targets, High Treason, Damage Control, Threat Warning, Hostage Zero, No Mercy, Nathan’s Run, At All Costs, Even Steven, Scott Free and Six Minutes to Freedom. Four of his books have been purchased or optioned for the Big Screen. In addition, John has written four screenplays for Hollywood, adapting the works of Nelson DeMille, Norman McLean and Thomas Harris. A frequent speaker at literary events, John also teaches seminars on suspense writing techniques at a wide variety of venues, from local libraries to The Smithsonian Institution. Outside of his writing life, John is a renowned safety expert with extensive knowledge of explosives, weapons systems, hazardous materials, and fire behavior. John lives in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia.

Can A Dream Be More Than A Dream?

By John Gilstrap

Just to set the stage, I consider these Killzone posts to be a corner of the social media universe. It’s different than Facebook and X in that the topics are more focused, but it’s still an opportunity to address people with whom I would otherwise not normally interact. In the social media universe I am the John Gilstrap I choose to project, which is often a shade different than the John Gilstrap that actually is.
For example, I am always healthy and happy on social media. By any reasonable assessment, I live a blessed life, both professionally and personally. As a player in the entertainment business (which is what this writing gig really is), my job is to entertain–to be interesting, insightful, maybe even amusing from time to time. The last thing people want to hear from me are everyday life problems. Folks have plenty of those in their own lives.
Sometimes, though, a personal problem is worth sharing. So, here we go . . .
My back has been a mess for decades–some of it due to overzealous firefighting in my youth, some due to heredity, and some due (dammit) to the fact of getting older. Back in 2019, I had three levels of my cervical spine fused to take care of lightning bolts shooting down my arms. That procedure was very successful, but my lumbar spine continued to trouble me.
If you’ve had sciatica, then you know the torment of the nerve pain in your legs, and of that invisible ice pick in your buttocks. For years, the pain would arrive for a week or two and then go on hiatus for months. For the last six months or so, the pain took up residence and partied daily. It got to the point where I couldn’t walk more than 20 steps without having to stop and try to recover.
My MRI showed nothing but bad and worse news. Worst of all was severe stenosis at L4 and L5. In essence, this meant that bits of bad discs, bone spurs and fluid were directly impinging on the nerves of my lower back.
Time to see the neurosurgeon.
On June 4 (last week), the neurosurgical team at the Berkeley Medical Center successfully performed a two-level laminectomy and microdiscectomy on my lumbar spine. The minimally invasive procedure took about two hours. The medical miracle workers removed a part of my backbone to gain access to the nerve roots, and from there Roto-Rootered all that crap away and removed the pressure that was causing all the pain. The instant I awoke, I knew that the procedure had done its job. All the nerve pain was gone.
There remained, however, the fact that they’d stuck a knife in my back and pulled all those muscles aside to gain access to what they needed to do. The muscles respond with a tantrum of spasms because that’s just what they do. Plus, there’s the discomfort caused by cut-away bone and the steel surgical staples they used to close the wound. A lesser man would call that pain. I just dropped a lot of F-bombs.
(As an aside, note that the autonomic nervous system–your fight-or-flight instincts–don’t recognize the difference between a friendly surgical wound and a tiger attack. It reacts with a pulse of adrenaline and healing chemistry and energy. Now you know why you’re so tired after even a minor medical procedure.)
They sent me home with pills–Oxycodone every 6 hours for the pain and Tizanidine three times a day for the muscle spasms. I was to be a junky for three days. Cool beans.
Except . . . Among the side effects of Tizanidine, listed right there on the bottle, “Might cause hallucinations.”
Which brings us to the real meat of this post. Boy howdy, did I hallucinate! Only at night, and maybe when I was asleep, but if they were dreams, they were some wild, vivid dreams. Three dimensional dreams, if that even makes sense. On the morning after my surgery, when I woke up in bed, I asked my wife if she was real, because the first time I’d done that she’d not been. Whoa.
At Surgery Plus Two, the hallucinations took a turn that give me a chill even as I write this today. I was lying on my back and the bed had become some kind of floating vessel, moving down a river as I looked up to a starry sky through the silhouettes of leafy trees. It was very peaceful, very comforting. Extremely vivid. Then came the faces of relatives who have passed. They floated by one or two at a time, all of them smiling. These were not family photograph images. Uncles, aunts, cousins. I didn’t even recognize some of the faces, but they projected an embracing warmth that I don’t know how to describe. My dad’s was the only face in full color, dressed in his Navy uniform.
I panicked enough to awaken and say a prayer for me and for my family–concerned that this was somehow my version of the “bright light” that people report from near-death experiences. I wasn’t ready to go.
Immediately, sleep returned (or did it?) and instead of seeing the sky and my relatives, I was looking down on myself in a boat as I was cut free from a mooring and allowed to float away.
I awoke again with a feeling of great peace, then sleep returned.
In the morning, I sobbed as I relayed the story to my wife. To be honest, I’m not doing all that great as I write it now.
I don’t know what to make of this. A vivid imagination is an occupational hazard, so I have to acknowledge that the whole river sequence was merely the creativity factory working in overdrive. But I think I choose otherwise. I think there are many aspects of life and living that we just don’t understand, and I choose to believe that love transcends everything we think we know.
I don’t think my family had gathered to tell me it was my time, but rather to tell me that they were at rest and that when my time comes–may it be many, many years from now–I’m going to be embraced when I arrive.

Where An Idea Came From

By John Gilstrap

You don’t work in this business for very long before you’re hit with what I consider to be the largely unanswerable question: Where do your ideas come from? Generally, my truthful answer is, “I have no idea.” They just somehow arrive when I need one.

But with the upcoming release of Burned Bridges, the first entry in my new Irene Rivers thriller series (launched yesterday!), I finally have an answer.

But first, let me share a little bit about the premise of the series. For those who are not familiar with my Jonathan Grave series, Irene Rivers serves as the director of the FBI in each book. At the conclusion of Zero Sum, Irene torpedoes the presidential administration of Tony Darmond, a corrupt, largely incompetent criminal who uses the clout of the federal government for his own personal gain. (He’s been president since I started writing the series in 2007, so don’t read present-day politics into the narrative.) The blowback on Irene is enormous. She resigns her position and intends to escape the madness and corruption of Washington by moving to family land in Jenkins County, West Virginia.

I loved the idea when I pitched it and Kensington bought it, but then I was left with the challenge of hanging a plot onto the premise. That’s always the challenge. But while the Irene books are thrillers, they’re different than the Grave books. I didn’t want to merely create a female Jonathan Grave.

One late autumn afternoon, as I was walking around our property in West Virginia in the company of Kimber, my 22-pound protector and watchdog, I was squeezing my brain to hatch an idea that felt right. I wanted it to be West Virginia-centric, but in the way that C.J. Box’s works are Wyoming-centric.

About midway through the walk, Kimber became fascinated with one of the many limestone caves we have around here. She was pulling on her leash to go into the hole (that’s the Boston terrier in her). As I pulled her back, I said, “Whatever’s in there, you don’t want to meet it. It will ruin your day.”

Ding ding! There it was. The beginning spot to begin building my story.

It’s hard to see, but that hole is the entry to a cave that I will never explore.

Suppose one of Irene’s kids discovered the skeletal remains of a body stuffed into a cave somewhere on her property. Clearly it’s a murder victim, an adolescent male.

Who killed him? Because I write thrillers, the killer has to be someone local.

Suppose the murder happened over 30 years ago. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, so to what lengths will the murderer go to protect his secret?

Now suppose the murderer is an established member of the community–part of a family who’s lived here for hundreds of years. What will the reaction be from the locals when this interloper from Washington, DC, starts uncovering secrets that have long been buried?

Meanwhile, how about Irene’s kids? They’ve been forced to move from the bustling DC suburbs to the middle of nowhere. How are they going to take the move?  One of her kids is a teen, the other a tween, and they have to make their way through new schools where most of their classmates have known each other since kindergarten. How does that go for them?

This is how I “pants” my way through the writing process. Every question needs an answer, but to keep things interesting, each answer needs to trigger a new question. I’m very excited about this book. I love the characters, and I love the twists in the plot.

So, what about you, TKZ family? Can you articulate where your ideas come from?

When Timelines Don’t Mesh

By John Gilstrap

My natural storytelling instinct for my books leans exclusively to third person, shifting points of view. I’ll write an occasional short story in first person, but those are rare, as well. I don’t know why that is, and as with so much else as a self-taught writer, I try not to dwell too much on the whys of my process for fear that if I think too hard I screw something up–much as my one and only golf lesson did to my golf game. Once you start thinking about every movement, no movement feels natural anymore.

Over the course of writing the past few books, I’ve run into an interesting challenge, where the timeline of one groups of characters, and the events of their lives is unfolding weeks earlier than those of my primary characters. Ultimately, the two groups will come together in a tumultuous manner in the same time and place, but the journey to get them there bears a high risk of confusing the reader.

The problem is even more challenging because the separation consists only of weeks, not years. It would be easy to drop in slug lines like 1847 versus 2026, because readers can keep track of those. I don’t think you can say the same about May 14 versus May 5. Readers would be compelled to flip back and forth just to keep up.

My upcoming thriller, Burned Bridges (May 27), begins:

Chapter One

Thirty-Five years ago

Then chapter one shows two teenagers disposing of the body of a third teenager in the opening of a limestone cave. Truth be told, I could legitimately have written that chapter as a prologue, but I have a visceral dislike of prologues. Then, the second chapter begins:

Chapter Two

Present day

In this chapter, we meet my protagonist, Irene Rivers, and her family, and discover that her nephew has discovered a body that had been stuffed in a cave on their property. And then the story remains exclusively in the present day, so I don’t use any more time stamps.

In my Victoria Emerson trilogy, I figured that after a nuclear holocaust, all time would be tracked relative to Hell Day–the date of the attack, so as I moved from one timeline to another, I used Hell Day as the anchor at the top of each chapter:

Hell Day Plus 22

Where events spanned consecutive chapters, or where I was shifting the point of view on a single event, I’d make sure not to lose to the reader by putting a slug like this at the top of the chapter:

Hell Day Plus 22 (Same Day)

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on Scorched Earth, #18 in the Jonathan Grave thriller series, and I’m wrestling with a new twist on the timeline problem. In this case, the other timeline is presenting essential backstory, lived out in real time for the reader, but I’m finding it hard not to squander the big “organ chord” reveal sooner than I want the reader to know it.

I know that in a conference setting or in an academic setting, many of us like to express this thing we do in term of art. But sometimes, it feel more like carpentry–making those pieces you cut wrong somehow join together anyway.

Y’all got any tricks for writing conflicting or parallel timelines? Anybody else had an instructor ruin your ugly yet perfectly passable golf game and turn you into a worm burner?

Gun Porn – Center Axis Relock

By John Gilstrap

As most of you know by now, I am an unapologetic gun guy. I own a few, and I train with them regularly. I enjoy the process of taking them apart and cleaning them and then putting them back together again. The aroma of Hoppes cleaning solvent mixed with gun oil is perfume. I belong to a shooting club that’s populated by the nicest, down-to-earth folks you’d ever want to know. But it would be unwise to break into their homes or mess with their families.

Weaver Stance

As with any other bit of hardware, trends come and go. In the video above, from the SHOT Show, I am shooting a suppressed Glock 19, using a modified Weaver stance, with my body bladed to the target and my right foot behind my left. Think of it as a natural fighting stance. It’s the stance I was first taught a thousand years ago, and it makes the most sense to me. Most fights don’t start with guns, they start with fists, and the Weaver stance mimics a boxer’s stance.

Isosceles Stance

Nowadays, the Weaver stance is considered outdated, and for the last eight years or so, every range instructor I’ve encountered has scolded me for using it. The new trend in shooters stances is the Isosceles stance. In this one, you square your body to the target, with arms completely outstretched. In your fiction, if you’ve got a rookie cop, this is the stance that they will acquire when they shoot, because in stressful situations, people revert back to their training. Among gun folk, there’s a raging debate over the relative wisdom of the two stances.

Personally, the Isosceles stance makes no sense to me. You present a bigger target and by extending your arms out so far, you make it easy for a bad guy to disarm in close quarters confrontations.

Everything changed when that jerk was foolish enough to kill John Wick’s dog, Daisy, and the world was introduced to an established, effective, but until that movie, a little known set of gun handling techniques called Center Axis Relock.

This technique embraces the fact that gunfights are often intimate affairs, conducted within bad breath distance. From the instant the pistol is drawn, it’s ready to join the fight. At the draw, your body is severely bladed toward the target, such that your elbow is pointing at the bad guy’s center of mass. In close quarters, your elbow acts as a front sight and allows you to get shots on close-in targets instantly.

When it’s time to deal with targets beyond, say, 7 yards, you bring the pistol up to the position shown in the picture by Keanu Reeves. This grip and stance is tough to master, and even in the picture, Keanu isn’t doing it quite right. The difficult elements are to keep your wrist straight in line with your forearm (Keanu’s great on that), but he needs to have the gun canted over further to aim only with his left eye–otherwise at that distance, he’ll see two front sights.

The downsides to this stance, I think, are pretty severe outside of a fight for your life–which a day at the range is not. The report of the gunshot will be much louder, you’ll be more susceptible to powder spray from the ejection port, and anytime you’re pulling triggers close to your body, you’re upping the likelihood of shooting yourself.

Your protagonist, however, has no fear of any such outcomes.

Comments and questions are welcome.

And now, by way of shameless self promotion . . .

Here’s the press release for BURNED BRIDGES, the first book of my new Irene Rivers thriller series.

Will You Read From Your Book, Please?

By John Gilstrap

I enjoy speaking to crowds. I like the immediacy of it, the direct interaction with the audience. I’ve previously shared tips and insights on how to deliver more memorable presentations (memorable in a good way–not the way we remember Uncle Henny’s drunken wedding toast). Today, I want to address a specific and mostly painful corner of every author’s public speaking life: the live reading.

Personally, I don’t get the attraction of readings. As a consumer of books, I’m much more interested in learning about the author and his process than I am in hearing him give what is almost always a bad performance of words that I’m going to read for myself anyway.

Said bad performances fall into two major categories for me:

  1. The dreadful, droning monotone of an author who seems somehow surprised by the words he’s projecting to either his feet or his lap. If he’s been given a microphone, he’s holding it in the hand that is also holding the book, rendering it useless. If they’re only moderately bad, they’ll be done in 10 minutes, but because Murphy rules the world, the really bad ones will mumble on for 20-25 minutes. When they’re done, the always polite bookstore audience will reward them with a golf clap.
  2. The pretentious literary author who took elocution lessons from Henry Higgins himself and over-enunciates every syllable of his golden prose that may or may not tell an actual story. When he’s done, his students in the audience will reward him with cheers and a standing O.

There’s a fundamental difference between delivering a speech vs. delivering a live reading.

When I deliver a speech or teach a workshop, I get to be myself. As the subject matter expert for the duration of the gig, I deliver my information my way. The only role I play is myself.

Live readings of fiction require a level of acting which I don’t possess. I feel silly raising my voice to sound like a woman or a child. Acting and writing are related yet entirely different skill sets. Given that this is the entertainment business, nothing makes an audience more uncomfortable than an uncomfortable performer.

When the game doesn’t suit you, cheat.

Remember Kobayashi Maru? In the Star Trek universe, Star Fleet cadets are faced with an unwinnable simulation called the Kobayashi Maru test, in which the cadet has to choose between risking near certain death to rescue the crew of a fuel ship, or leaving the fuel ship crew to die. Captain James T. Kirk made history by being the first cadet ever to solve the dilemma. He did it by changing the program. He cheated because he didn’t accept the inevitability of losing. I always admired that about him.

When I am left with no choice but to read from my book, I do not, in fact, read from my book. Instead, I read an original work that is closely based on my book. That means never reading from Page One. If I did that, people in the audience who already had a book in their hand would be confused as they tried to read along, and they’d miss everything I was presenting.

My specially prepared piece is engineered to be 5 minutes long, give or take ten seconds, and it will end with a cliff hanger. The piece will include within the text all the introductory information needed to know who the characters are, and I will have excised all elements of backstory, and all unnecessary foreshadowing. It’s a stand-alone performance piece that parallels the book’s events and hopefully whets the appetites of potential readers who are on the fence about buying the book.

Because it will be the same piece every time I read for that particular book, I’ll have it largely memorized, so I’ll be able to make eye contact with the audience. Even if I can’t do the acting, I’m still communicating.

What about you folks? What are your secrets to surviving the live read-aloud?

Don’t miss the launch of Burned Bridges–the first book in my brand new thriller series!

My Branding Opportunity

By John Gilstrap

On March 20, less than two weeks ago as I write this, I received the following email out of the blue:

Dear John,

Last week, your name and “Zero Sum” came up in a staff meeting…

It was the strong opinion of our award-winning Branding / P.R. firm that you are entitled to and would benefit from a significantly greater visibility in the modern world.

We have a new low-cost, high-impact plan that I sense might be perfect for you. Here is our Wikipedia page for your review: [redacted]

Can we arrange a convenient time to discuss this, John?

Warmly,

[President of a well-established, high-powered public relations firm in California]

Yeah, right. I know a scam when I see it. Some fraudster expects me to believe that a firm that represents some really well-known folks is talking about my paperback original that dropped over nine months ago? I might live in West Virginia, but I’m no rube.

Funny thing though. The address for the incoming email matched the email address on the company website. And the Better Business Bureau. I decided maybe it was a mistake to ignore this email completely.

I went stealthy. I went to the company website and filled out the general interest form that anyone from the general public would fill out. That form includes my phone number, and in the comments section, I referenced the email I had received from the president. Then I replied to the original email thusly:

Dear XXX,

 

Lovely to hear from you. These being the awkward times that they are, I have sent a note back through your website seeking authentication of this email. Please feel free to call me on the phone number I left on that inquiry. I look forward to speaking with you.

 

Best,

 

John Gilstrap

To which he promptly replied,

Dear John:

Yes, it’s me, and to be open, I could weep over the seeming necessity of your note.

Warmly,

He called me later that evening and we had a very nice chat about author branding and what he and his firm could do to help me. The details aren’t important here, but they resonated with me. They come with a price tag, of course–significant, but not bank breaking, and hey, I just got a movie deal.

After laying out the general elements of the plan, he closed by saying he didn’t want me to make a decision right then. There are things I need to do to make this work, so there’s an element of commitment. He urged me to think it over for a day or two, but no longer than that. In his experience, after two days, a maybe should be a no, even if the client talks himself into a yes.

I sent him an email the next morning telling him I was ready to go.

A lot of career elements seem to be aligning for me these days. In addition to the SixMin movie deal, Kensington is repackaging the Grave backlist and changing the format of the Grave front list to trade paper, all while launching the new Irene Rivers thriller series.

For this public relations opportunity to arrive as it did and when it did somehow feels right. So I’m rolling the dice and writing some checks.

The John Gilstrap Brand

When it comes to marketing and publicity, I don’t know what sells books and what doesn’t. I don’t think anyone does. But I know that I can work a crowd well and that I deliver a pretty decent speech and workshop, and that a higher profile generally is better for sales than a lower profile.

Enter the John Gilstrap brand–similar to yet different than yours truly. Yes, it makes me uncomfortable because I don’t fully understand all of it yet, and because I do know that it comes with a level of self aggrandizement that will make me uncomfortable. Somehow, if all goes as planned, with the help of my new best friends on the Left Coast, the world is going to see a freshly packaged new breed of author who’s politically conservative, carries a pistol, drinks martinis and lives in the woods of West Virginia.

How they do that without pissing off half of the reading public is a mystery for the future.

 

Copy Edits

By John Gilstrap

First, look up norovirus. As I write this, I am in the throes of my second day, and that explains why this will be a short post.

It might not sound like it when I’m done, but I really do have a lot of respect for copy editors. Their eye for detail and knowledge of the rules of grammar have improved every manuscript I’ve ever submitted. For my Grave series, Jeffery Lindholm has been my copy editor for at least the past four or five books. He knows the characters and remembers details from previous stories that might conflict with actions in the current story. That kind of interaction is truly remarkable. He’s part of the team, as opposed to the traffic cop that some copy editors can become–the folks who go out of their way to try to catch the author is an error that often does not exist.

Prior locking Jeff to my manuscripts, I dealt with a number annoying copy editors. One changed my sentence that “Jonathan holstered his Colt 1911” to “Jonathan holstered his Colt M1911A1 semiautomatic pistol.” Not inaccurate, but not what I wanted. The most egregious copy edit ever–and I’m sure I’ve written of it here–came from Rosemary, who changed “Jonathan looked at the door the the kid came through” to “Jonathan looked at the door whence the kid had come.” Whence. In a thriller. That’s a hard no.

About a week ago, I received the copy edits on a short story that I did for an upcoming anthology, and these edits trod new ground. In DIALOGUE . . .

Changed “Maybe we should call Triple-A” to “Maybe we should call AAA.” and

“That rifle looks like a three hundred win-mag” to “That rifle looks like a .300 Win-mag.”

In my worldview, dialogue is literally quoted speech, as it is heard. People would call AA for Alcoholics Anonymous, and Triple-A for the auto club. No one would ever refer to a rifle as a dot three-oh-oh win mag.

What do you think?

Okay, I’ve been up for an hour now. Time to go back to bed and sleep for three. Here’s hoping for a better tomorrow.

Attention New Writers: Ignore Naysayers, Go Traditional

By John Gilstrap

Full disclosure: some of this post first appeared as a late-in-the-day comment on Brother Bell’s excellent post last Sunday.

Dear Rookie Writer,

No matter what you hear from your writer buddy who heard it from a friend who knows a guy in the publishing industry, agents and editors are hungry and actively hunting for new material. Are they picky about quality? Of course they are. Can it be hard to get an agent’s attention? You betcha, Red Rider. Is it the single most reliable model to make some scratch as a newbie without any readership? One hundred percent.

The vast majority of new writers (read: yet-to-be-published writers) I meet at conferences and such espouse no interest in making a living as a writer. Most just want to see their books in print, whether it be on paper or with electrons. When they hear that their pacing is off or that their characters are flat, they seem not to care. And why should they? They just sat through three sessions on self-publishing that pumped them up on a thrilling publishing world with no gate keepers.

These new writers commit themselves to the indie route because at its face it’s easier. In the end, 90+% of them will spend thousands of dollars in production costs and will complain that they’ve only been able to a hundred copies, mostly at their family reunion. Still, they print business cards pronouncing themselves to be published authors and dare anyone to claim otherwise.

The biggest obstacle to success in indie publishing is the inability for real talent to rise above the noise of the dreck. And when the rare exceptions like Andy Weir rise up and get notice, their careers only get supercharged after signing with a traditional publisher. (Work with me here. There are undoubtedly other one-off exceptions, but they are extremely rare.)

If a new writer wants a shot (nothing close to a guarantee, but at least a shot) at selling thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies of his book, then I believe the traditional route is the only one to consider.

First, there’s the issue of the money flow. It’s a one-way valve. Author pays nothing. Yes, the royalty scale is a minority percentage of overall revenue (a negotiated percentage–thus the importance of an agent), but the publisher has taken all the risk. X% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

The right traditional publisher opens up doors to marketing routes that are otherwise locked for indies (Goodreads, BookBub, etc.). They can get your book into libraries, and they have access to the otherwise locked-away network of sub agents who can sell your book to foreign publishers so your book can be published in multiple languages. Each copy sold is more cash in the author’s pocket.

Then there’s the access to studios for film options.

This is the entertainment business, folks, where the odds of true success are slim. But as a rookie, you want to stack as many of the slim odds in your favor as you can. If you go the indie route first and your book does not sell, you have all but closed the door to future entry into the traditional publishing world. Make your career choices accordingly.

Now, the case FOR indie publishing:

Back in the day, when I had a Big Boy Job, I was the director of safety for an international trade association. In the words of Ron Burgundy, I was a pretty big deal. My particular squint on safety management principles was both unique and effective. I traveled extensively to speak to large crowds. For a brief while, after I left the association, I considered writing a safety management book and joining the speaker’s circuit. (Working title: Safety is Not Number One)

Had I followed through, I would have had to self publish that book because the potential market is very small. I could have sold the hell out of the books I brought with me (or I could have made it part of the speaking fee), but there wouldn’t be enough money to attract a publisher.

If (God forbid) Kensington were to shift its focus and drop my Jonathan Grave series, I would consider continuing it independently, but I would be doing it with a substantial established readership base.

There is no one common path for everyone. But before choosing your path, or dismissing one, I urge you to evaluate your goals and objectives.

The Bane and Pain of Transitional Scenes

By John Gilstrap

We’ve discussed in this space before the burden of the Muddled Middle or Page 200 Syndrome, where the writing process gets hopelessly bogged down in critical exposition that is strikingly un-fun. Today, let’s talk about other un-fun writing: I call them transitional scenes.

Say Detective Jones has discovered what he thinks he will turn out to be a key piece of evidence, and he needs to hand deliver it to Dr. Parker to get his input. The transitional scene in this circumstance would be the process by which Jones gets to Parker’s office.

You could just cut to a new scene where the detective and the doc are in mid-conversation, but if this is their first interaction, in medias res could leave the reader unsatisfied. In my style of writing, the reader needs to know the nature of characters’ relationships. Did they go to school together? Do they like each other? What is Detective Jones’s mode of transportation?

Here comes the balance of backstory and data dump. I’ve got to set up the scene without boring the reader. This means doing the reveal in the midst of some kind of intriguing action. I’ve got to reveal backstory without losing momentum on the front story.

Dr. Oscar Parker knew more about art and art thievery than anyone Flannery Jones had ever encountered. The professor’s tastes had always run toward the modern stuff–the random splashes of color and shapes and mis-assigned anatomy that Jones believed were practical jokes inflicted on the snooty rich. Judging from the ornateness of the gold-tipped iron gates that blocked access to his driveway, his expertise had elevated him from geeky eighth grade nose picker to a gentleman of means and influence. As Jones drove into the frame of the CCTV and pushed the button on the intercom, he wondered if he should start with an apology for the swirlies he’d administered back in the day.

The pacing of some stories require that the reader perceive the passage of time. Early in Nathan’s Run, there’s a section where 12-year-old Nathan decides in the morning that he’s going to execute the next part of his plan that night after the sun goes down. Following that decision comes a chapter about the parallel story of the police who are chasing him, but at this point, the cops don’t have a lot to go on, so the plot is dependent upon them acting on what Nathan does, so there’s not a lot for them to do, either. The trick is to keep these characters alive on the page even when they don’t yet have meaningful tasks to perform. Herein lies the beauty of sub-subplots. In the absence of real action, I inserted political turmoil within the police department itself.

Great. Now, that has to somehow payoff later.

Next came a short scene that might have felt like a non-sequitur at first because it introduces an important character who has exactly one very important task to perform within the story. But he can’t just walk onto the page, do his thing, and disappear. He has to feel real. So, Todd first joins the story as a stressed out professional (I forget what his job is) who’s sweating over a very important presentation that he needs to make the next morning. The reader needs to like him, and he needs to have a reason to be awake at a certain hour the next morning to see the thing that then sets the third act in motion.

Back to Nathan. It’s finally time to pull the trigger on him executing his plan. As the eponymous character, though, people want to know what he’s been doing for the past fifteen or twenty pages.

Now, finally, it was time to get the true action of the story moving again.

As I write this blog post, I am in the middle of a multifaceted transition for Scorched Earth, the Jonathan Grave book for 2026. I’ve got a good guy dead, another good guy wounded and in the hospital, a bad guy in a different hospital, while Jonathan and his team are just now in the process of unpacking who is the power behind all of this. In thirty pages or so, the story valve will open wide for about 50 pages.

And then, I’ll arrive at the Muddled Middle and the joy of writing will once again become less joyful. But only for a little while.

What say you, TKZ family? Have you all walked this same walk? Got any tricks to share?

When The Moment Came, I Couldn’t Do It

By John Gilstrap

Maybe I’m losing my edge. Maybe I’m just getting soft and doddering in my old age, but it’s not the kind of thing that happens to me. I let the character live.

Actually, it’s worse than that. I couldn’t bring myself to kill him. I mean, he was supposed to die. The next chapters were going to work because Jason was dead. I’d made him a point of view character for a couple of chapters so readers would feel pain with his loss–we call that drama in my line of work–and I’d given him a fine, heroic final few moments.

But when the paragraph came that Jonathan Grave was supposed to witness him die, he instead discovered a pulse. Which is a real pain in my butt because instead of just walking away from the body and moving on with the story, Jonathan and his team have to figure out what to do with a critically wounded innocent.

Did I mention that Jason was fourteen years old? Okay, that played into my decision.

Here’s the thing, though: Actions have consequences. Not only have I stumbled into an unexpected twenty-page diversion and new plot point, but that plot point somehow has to pay off down the road as I race toward my April 15 deadline. That’s a lot more work.

And, now that I look back, that looming prospect of a lot more work might have been pushing me to lean more on the side of letting the kid die. Yes, it would have been dramatic, but it also would have felt like a bit of a betrayal of my brand. Fictional heroes save lives, they don’t walk away from corpses. Readers don’t buy my books with the anticipation that I’m going to take the easiest route for myself as an author, but rather with the anticipation that I’m going to squeeze as much drama and excitement out of as many scenes as I can create.

These past few weeks, I have been tired, conflicted, and way too busy. It’s been hard to concentrate on my writing–or anything else for that matter–for more than just an hour or two at a time. When that happens, it’s easy to become tempted by shortcuts. I know I’m preaching to the choir here because many of you have jobs and kids and a dozen simultaneous obligations that make your writing time difficult and fleeting.

When those times come, I urge you to remember to trust your creative gut and do the right thing.

I started this post by lamenting that maybe I had lost my edge, but now I know that’s not at all the case. Quite the opposite is true, in fact. I discovered that my edge is sharp enough to not let me make a mistake that I would regret later.