The leap from reporting crime as a TV news producer to writing psychological thrillers is not as big a jump as you might think. For me, it’s been a logical next step, a distillation of so much of what I’d heard and seen and experienced in the nearly two decades I had the honor of covering the news in DC, a city I love so much.
In my early news years, I was an adrenaline junkie. I loved live shot lights and emergency sirens and tracking down people who knew what was really going on. I’d carry the inside scoop back to the newsroom like a great gift. Together with my colleagues, we’d slam together just-shot video with scalpel-cut soundbites and hard-won facts into text to be voiced by a reporter or anchor on the evening news. All of that had to be ready to roll before the newsroom clock struck 18:29:30.
Or else.
What TV Taught Me About Storytelling
Television taught me urgency and brevity, which is helpful since there’s less room in a novel than the pages indicate. I had to learn different pacing, though. Novels aren’t the go-go-go of news. The characters need moments to slow down and reflect, for revelation and emotion. They wonder why. TV news has always failed miserably at answering why. Ultimately, being a why person, I became frustrated by the news format.
Maybe I’d been a novelist all along.
Still, I was able to carry my old bag of TV tricks into novel-writing. The soundbites I’d crafted since my college internship taught me to create dialogue that was sharp, active, got to the point, and also moved the plot along. In TV news, you write the story to the footage your videographer shot, so I knew the importance of imagery, though for my novels, I had to learn to make pictures with words.
Mostly, I’ve carried from the news the memories of the people I had the honor to cover: a sharp-eyed, instinctive detective who saw patterns of crime before his brain catalogued all the evidence; a city official whose ambition came from growing up in a place he’d had to run from—and never stopped running. The celebrity from a famous political family, the artist photographer, the producer with the photographic memory for TV video — these were all characteristics of real Washingtonians who came to populate my books.
And of course, there is DC herself, my favorite character of all — mysterious, deeply misunderstood, a place of many kinds of people, beautiful and dangerous beneath all that beauty.
I’ve probably walked on every street I’ve ever written about in my novels. I’ve jogged the path where Chandra Levy, along with several other women, were attacked while jogging (and which gave me an idea for the opening chapter of Watch Us Fall). I lived six blocks from the Capitol, where on the corner a woman who looked like me had been recently abducted (the mirroring premise of my debut novel, The Cutaway).
The Moments That Stayed With Me
In the late ‘90s, I covered the story of a woman murdered in her basement apartment — a case never solved. A police source showed me horrifying crime scene photos that I’ve never been able to forget. This taught me to “be careful what your eyes take in,” a line from The Cutaway. Yet I’ve never been careful. No author or journalist can afford to look away.
Fast forward twenty years at a DC book event: I was seated at a table with the lead suspect in that 1990s murder I just told you about. I found myself closely observing the man (who I won’t name, since he was never formally charged), eavesdropping on his every word. Did he do it, I wondered. Would anyone know, looking at him, that he was once a suspect in a horrific murder of a young woman?
Some of that must’ve been on my face, because he turned to me suddenly and said, “Do I know you?” I could honestly tell him no, he did not.
But I knew him.
I may use that in a novel one day.