HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK: Stephen James

This concludes this series of essays unless I am contacted by someone wishing to do one. Thanks to all of the writers who participated.

How I Came to Write this Book

The Queen

By Steven James

In The Queen I knew I needed to keep some promises.

When I write a story, I consider every word a promise to the readers about the significance of that scene to the story as a whole. So, if I spend two paragraphs describing someone’s expertise in kickboxing, it had better end up being important to the story.

Since The Queen is the fifth thriller in my series featuring FBI Special Agent Patrick Bowers, I obviously have made quite a few promises to my readers in the previous books about Patrick’s love interests, the killers he has tracked, his stepdaughter’s struggles with depression and cutting, and a myriad of other hints and teasers relating to Patrick’s past and the relationships he’s had.

And the last thing I would want to do is annoy my readers.

I have a guiding philosophy when I write a novel. It affects every scene I craft, every word I choose: always give the reader what he wants or something better.

As I read through the first drafts of my books, I’m constantly asking myself what the reader is wondering, hoping for, thinking of, or worried about at that point in the story. Often I realize that what I had thought a reader would want to hear about or see happen at that moment really wouldn’t matter to him or her. As I shape the story, I need to veer off from my initial thoughts about the book to include a chase scene or a romantic moment or a more complete description of a terrorist’s motives.

So as I wrote The Queen, I realized that at this point in the series, readers wanted to know which woman Patrick would end up with, who a certain serial killer named Richard Basque’s phantom partner was, if Tessa would find peace, why Patrick and his brother didn’t get along, and so on.

As I explored the interrelationship of all of these factors with the action I knew I wanted to include in The Queen and the eco-terrorists threat that was central to the story, I had a fun and interesting time pulling together the threads and making the story the most complex and fulfilling one yet.

I’ve seen too many thriller series authors slip into the trap of telling the same basic story over and over again in each book, just changing the name of the bad guy and the love interest, and maybe putting the book in a novel setting. From the onset of this series I wanted to avoid doing that.

The first book, The Pawn, is a gritty psychological thriller. The second, The Rook, is more of a techno thriller. The Knight deals with a criminal reenacting crimes from a thirteenth century manuscript that was condemned by the church, and The Bishop interweaves a story of two serial killers with a political conspiracy. So with The Queen I wanted to raise the stakes and explore a terrorist threat with cataclysmic implications.

Keeping the series fresh while also maintaining the core characters and personalities has been one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of writing these novels.

Who knows where Opening Moves—the prequel I’m working on now—will go.

But this much I do know: I’ll have even more promises to keep.

Which, to me, means even more ways of satisfying my readers.