How to Write Thriller Characters that Keep Readers Reading with Author Mel Mattison

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EPISODE INFO:
If you want to learn how to effectively introduce characters to your readers, you’re going to love today’s guest.

Mattison talks about finding a big idea that will carry you through a novel. 

And often those ideas come from two or three ideas mashed together. You'll hear that in Mattison's story of how he came up with the idea for his novel, QUOZ.

Writers often talk about how best to introduce a character but in a lot of ways less is more. 

In today's episode, we hear how to create concise character descriptions to keep readers engaged without overloading them with character description

BIO:
Mel Mattison is a writer and financial services veteran. Leveraging over twenty years’ experience in the realm of high finance, he brings real-world authenticity to his fictional narratives. Mel holds an MBA from Duke University and studied creative writing at Loyola University Chicago.

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Transcript

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T000 - Mel Mattison

Mel Mattison: [00:00:00] the backstory on the characters, let that stuff, dribble out, you can hint at it, you can foreshadow it. And so I worked hard to do that and then at, at the end, I think I, I struck a good balance, but it's definitely not easy. 

David Gwyn: If you want to learn how to effectively introduce characters to your readers, you're going to love today's guest. I'm David Gwyn, an agent and writer navigating the world of traditional publishing. During this first season of the Thriller 101 podcast, we're going to focus on building the skills necessary to write the kinds of thrillers that land you an agent and readers.

I'm talking to authors, agents, and other industry professionals about the best way to write a novel. If you want the expert secrets, this is where you're going to find them. Last week on the podcast, I talked to Ash Clifton about his debut novel, Twice the Trouble.

Ash Clifton: The real trick is to, to like what you're doing. If you're not liking what you're writing, probably nobody else is either. So, I mean, you gotta keep writing until you find something, a, a character or a subject at least. That that, you kind of have fun [00:01:00] writing about you know, you hear everywhere about how hard writing is and how it's, you know, you've got to have discipline.

You've got to sit down every day and do it. Well, yes, that's true. But if you don't like it, if you don't take joy in it, there won't be any joy. In the character 

David Gwyn: It's a great episode to pair with today's because we talked about character backstory.

Ash's novel has such rich characters with backgrounds that make them feel really real, so definitely check that out if you haven't already. Today's guest is Mel Mattison. He's a writer and financial services veteran leveraging over 20 years experience in the realm of high finance. He brings real world authenticity to his fictional narratives. Mel holds an MBA from Duke University and studied creative writing at Loyola University Chicago. Let's get right into the interview. 

Mel, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. 

Mel Mattison: Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. 

David Gwyn: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to to digging in here to your novel which is which is out now. So how does it feel? 

Mel Mattison: It feels great. I mean it The build [00:02:00] up to it coming out and the :promoting and and everything it was almost In a way for me, actually, I don't know if it is for other people. It was almost a little anticlimactic the day it actually Went live because by that time I'd gotten my author copies. There'd been reviews.

There'd been sales pre orders and and things but just just getting it out there and seeing people what what really has been amazing to me in this First couple of weeks because it just came out shortly ago is just starting to get some of that first feedback, whether it's reviewers on Amazon or Goodreads that I don't know, or it's people that I know who bought the book who are reaching out to me and telling me what they think.

So that's really been the pleasure of, of the most recent couple of weeks with the coming out. 

David Gwyn: Yeah, that's super cool. What a, what a fun time. And it's funny to hear that it was just kind of like. Not a letdown obviously, but just the, the anticlimactic moment where you're like, okay, it's out now. Like, do I feel different?

I feel like it's like a birthday, right? Like a big birthday. You're like, well, I don't feel [00:03:00] very different. 

Mel Mattison: Yeah, exactly. 

David Gwyn: So can you tell us a little bit about what what it's about? 

Mel Mattison: Sure. So Quaz is set in the near future 2027, so not too far away. In the book, the world's financial markets, the world's stock markets and bond commodity markets, they're now being controlled by an AI quantum supercomputer called Icarus that is operated out of a shadowy international organization called the bank for international settlements, which is an organization that actually exists.

It's a little bit like the United Nations for central bankers. And it's located in Basel, Switzerland, Switzerland. And basically, you know, at this point in time, markets are being controlled. Everything's going great. It seems like this computer has figured it out. There's not going to be any more stock market crashes or booms or busts on and things have saved the day.

And our hero is Rory O'Connor and in the book starts out. with Rory, who at this point is a little down on his luck, [00:04:00] despite the fact that he's a financial genius that actually helped design this supercomputer. He's had some backstory, obviously, that put him in just kind of a place of, I wouldn't call it crisis, but he's not, he's not being his best him, and he's living in Puerto Rico, trading cryptocurrencies, drinking too much, And gets a call from a former colleague that also helped design this supercomputer that there might be something wrong with Icarus, right?

And not just a little something, but maybe something that, that could lead to economic destruction and market collapse. And, and so Rory reluctantly coaxed by some, you know, quick money by the billionaire boss of a hedge fund in Chicago goes up there to see if he can, you know, ascertain what's going on and see if this hedge fund guy can actually make some money.

And before he knows it, he's drawn into a whole scheme of international intrigue involving corrupt central bankers, plots by [00:05:00] foreign entities to essentially ruin the world financial system and replace it with a system to their, to their benefits and their aims. And that's really the setup of the story.

And, , it goes from there. 

David Gwyn: Yeah, it's super cool. And, and it was a great read. So people who are listening especially I think it's such a, I feel like financial thrillers are really an interesting sub genre of thrillers. And so I know you have a little bit of background in the financial sector.

So how did you come up with this story? Where did the story come from? 

Mel Mattison: Yeah. Yeah. And definitely I do see it as a, as a sub genre. There is a category financial thrillers on, on Amazon for whatever reason. I don't think it's actually been put in there. It's more techno thriller thing. But you know, I love financial thrillers.

I'm a big financial thriller reader and so I, I also have seen financial thrillers that, that sometimes I get into them and I'm just like reading them and thinking, yeah, but that's not really the way it would [00:06:00] work or, or what have you. And that comes from, as you mentioned, like I have a background in finance.

So I worked for, for over 20 years in like the high finance world. I have a, I have Fancy degree and MBA from Duke University and corporate and investment finance. I worked for large asset managers I worked for smaller firms. I worked for you know, rocket ship type VC funded startups, but I always loved writing So I I majored in philosophy as an undergrad.

I studied creative writing and I really was actually into poetry and And and so at a certain point I decided to kind of, you know, scratch my own itch for a financial thriller that actually, you know, rang true to someone in the industry. You know, it's not just some simplistic plot about some guy is going to, you know, do something really quick in the market and make a billion dollars that way.

You know, when in reality there might not be And that security for it to actually happen and stuff that a finance guy is looking at and saying, no, no, no, this is, this is ridiculous. And so, you know, that was really [00:07:00] the genesis of it. And there was an idea that triggered it and we could get into that if you want, but that's a little bit of how.

The background came in and, and myself not being totally like formally trained MFA type person, but having studied creative writing and actually got a lot of help from books, you know James phrase how to write a damn good thriller James Scott Bell's how to write best selling fiction. And so I really wanted to just turn to people that have been successful and actually written books, but then also written books about how to write books and see if I could learn a thing or two.

David Gwyn: Yeah, that's cool. And that's actually where I was headed next. Which is this idea that so you had a creative writing background. You have this now financial background. And you called it a trigger. But my question is gonna be like, why this story? And why right now? 

Mel Mattison: Yeah. So it really started with the geminal seed idea, like the big idea.

And, and it fit well with actually, when I later read James [00:08:00] Frey's How to Write a Damn Good Thriller, he starts out like, have that big geminal idea, and then his next step is actually, you know, develop the villain. And, and, and before you even get into plots, you know, what, they, they, and so, for me, I just, that, that geminal idea came to me one day And it was, I think I was watching something on quantum computing and just being a finance guy, I thought to myself, there's so much, you know, algorithms and stuff going on right now.

I mean, people may not realize, but like 90 percent of the trades executed in stock markets are done by computers that, you know, it's, it's, it's trading for literally thousands of trades per second to, you know, arbitrage like a half a cent here, a half a cent there you know, companies have built servers right next to the New York Stock Exchange.

One hedge funds spent like I don't know, billions of dollars to construct a high, speed fiber line from Chicago to New York because Chicago has [00:09:00] like options and futures contracts in New York has stock Contracts and sometimes there's a difference in price that shouldn't exist if you can capture that difference in price and the current fiber network Weaved its way from Chicago to New York and this guy spent a billion dollars to literally put in a like a direct as the crow flies You know, in the areas where it twisted, it turns that only he could use.

And so I just, this, this development is going on. And I thought, what's going to happen when we get to AI and quantum computing, like if this is already happening. And, and then as I was writing it, I was focused a little more on quantum. But then a lot of the AI stuff started coming out and I realized like, you know, AI makes sense to be part of this too.

Because, you know, it's going to be a mix of the software and the hardware, right? The AI is the software side, the quantum is the hardware side. And so, I had this idea watching this quantum computing show, what's going to happen when computers get to a point where [00:10:00] What if they could actually figure out the right price of a stock, and there's no way to make money trading because it's just already priced to perfection.

It's like, Apple is worth X amount today, and tomorrow it might go up 2 or 3 cents, and the next day 2 or 3 cents. And, and there's no volatility, right now, you know, a stock might be 30 one, one day, 40 the next month, and then 30 the month after that. What if a computer figured out that it's going to wind up at 30 eventually and it never went up to 40 and down?

It would ruin a whole industry, hedge fund, trading, all this. And, and like, what would that world look like? And that, I went from there. 

David Gwyn: Yeah, that's so cool. It's so funny to listen to people talk about where the ideas come from because it it really to me having having talked to a bunch of writers now like it almost Feels like there's not like a it's not so much like as a generating out of nowhere It's like the merging of two ideas It's like you have this idea and this other idea and then they merge together And it sounds like that was the same for you I'm [00:11:00] curious though, because you, you have a background in creative writing did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

Mel Mattison: I, I did always want, want to be a writer. I always wanted to write a novel. When I was in my younger days, and I was a, 20 something, I was really, into the big ideas and, you know, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus The Stranger and grappling with the big ideas of life.

 I'll be 50 next year. I basically got to a point where I didn't want to deal with those questions anymore. You know, like, Hey, my life's going to be what it's going to be. I've probably already lived more days than I've got left. And you know what? I, people have been trying to answer these questions forever.

I'm going to put the philosophy to the side and I, And enjoy writing for the craft of writing, for, for language itself, the poetry of language, for telling a story, like the campfire reason, , and yeah, there can be big ideas behind a good story, and, and I think there are actually ideas behind Quoz, it's not just about telling a good story.

But that was the number one purpose, was to tell a good [00:12:00] story. And then after that, if I can, you know, bring in, not a, not a moral agenda or a political agenda. But if I can also try to have an educational agenda, you know, something else there, a little meat to that bone of the good story, that would be great.

And so that was how it was. Number one, tell a great story. Number two, is all the other stuff. 

David Gwyn: Okay. Let's pause there for a second. I loved how Mel talks about finding that big idea that will carry you through a novel, and often those ideas come from two or three ideas mashed together.

You can see that in Mel's story of how he came up with the idea for Quoz. In the next part of the interview, we talked about efficient character descriptions. Writers often talk about how best to introduce a character, but in a lot of ways, less is more.

So when we head back to the interview, listen to how Mel uses his concise character descriptions to keep readers engaged without overloading them with character descriptions. Also, I mentioned the Thriller 101 pitch contest in the next [00:13:00] section. You can still enter that contest. So if you're interested, check the link in the description for more information about that.

Let's head back to the interview. 

 I wanna dig in a little bit here to one of the things that I think you did so well in this opening chapter especially, which was you have like really efficient character descriptions.

David Gwyn: I, I read a lot of thrillers obviously, but I also because we have this pitch contest that we're doing thriller 1 0 1, I'm reading a lot of authors who are trying to get published, right? They're trying to find an agent and they're trying to, to find a, a publishing house and things. And so. It's interesting to see how different ways that people introduce characters And I thought yours was one of the most efficient ways I've ever seen like you hit like you've got your character but like it's usually in between dialogue and it's like a paragraph and it's tonally on point, like the tone is perfect for that character in that moment.

And so I'm thinking specifically in this opening chapters, if people are listening, check out the opening chapters where Rory and Kota in those that kind of like first couple pages [00:14:00] and so many writers struggle with backstory, like how much to give to readers without bogging them down and like, are you giving the right amount?

Are you giving enough? And so I'm curious how you went about deciding how much backstory and what backstory to give when you were putting these characters onto the page? 

Mel Mattison: Yeah, 

David Gwyn: sure. Well, I 

Mel Mattison: mean, I think really it's just, you know, an amazing, like, natural talent. I struggled with it too. I struggle with it a hell of a lot.

And my editor helped me with it actually. And in fact, it was one of the thing that first chapter I probably rewrote it. I don't know how many times, you know, and I think that is a big struggle, you know, and, and I think at the end of the day, like for me, what I found, there's a big difference. In the way I was thinking from when I was doing that first draft and by the time I was doing my final last minute edits and different things, because I wrote the first draft really quick, I wrote it 300 some pages in two months, eight [00:15:00] weeks more or less.

And, and then there was like a year of editing and, and back and forth and, and stuff like that. And, you know, there was editing for, you know, maybe four or five months on my own. And then there was like. six months of like a couple back and forth with a developmental editor who also was my copy editor before we sent it off for the proofread.

 He helped me. His name is John Ford. He's a great editor. And he, he just told me, you know, like Mel, you have to kind of trust the reader a little bit and don't, you know, you, you, you want to tell something about, you know, Icarus or the supercomputer or how it works or the bank for international settlements.

You can put that in a later chapter. , the backstory on the characters, let that stuff, dribble out, you can hint at it, you can foreshadow it. And so I worked hard to do that and then at, at the end, I think I, I struck a good balance, but it's definitely not easy.

One thing that also maybe helped me a little bit be able to do it is, [00:16:00] Just the years of writing in, in the business world , a lot of what you do in the jobs that I've had is writing, right? It's email writing. It's crafting maybe presentations and things, but it's putting words together to get a message across.

And so, just like a lot of great writers were newspapermen or whatever, you're getting that exposure to words and working with words. Yeah. And I think that some of that comes through in the way that my novel's written. It, it has A little bit of that, like to the, to the point. I just noticed a lot of times when I went off on flowery flourishes, that stuff needed to get, get out.

And my editor would call me out on it. Like the best paragraphs that I thought were so cool. It's an amazing paragraph if it stood alone, but it's different than the rest of the chapter. It pulls the reader away from the story and, tone it down a little bit of the, you can keep some of the, the, the, the poetry of the language, which I know you want to do Mel, but, but try to tone it down a little.

And so I, I tried to do that. So just to [00:17:00] bring out the characters and, and sharing. The last thing I'll say with that is, by the end, I was really comfortable trusting my reader, and trusting that they could get invested in the story without knowing everything about the character, trusting that I didn't need to spell everything out for them, especially not right away, and trusting that, if I had a plot device, in that first chapter that I tried to get him hooked, that the character development could come, throughout the rest of the, the first sections of the book.

David Gwyn: I feel like what we're hearing is like, You know, revise like crazy, trust your reader and get a good editor. Right? Three things that, that we really need. I'm curious though, cause you, you said you wrote this book in just a couple of months.

So I'm assuming you didn't plot it out much. Is that, is that true? Did you have an outline going in or not so much? 

Mel Mattison: Yeah, I, I did, I did spend a solid two weeks. I left. My job in, you know, I, first thing I did, my wife and I actually went to the Blue Ridge [00:18:00] Mountains for a week and just kind of really started thinking through what the story was going to be.

I had already at this point read some, some books and gotten some ideas of ways to think about it. And, and for me, I'm kind of naturally a pantser type of a person. Person, but because this was my first book, I decided to do something I usually don't do, which is like put my own ego aside, read, read what's in some of these books that people that have actually done this are telling me to do.

And at least for my first novel. Follow their recipe, you know, and if I ever get to a stage of being an expert or a master writer after 20 books, then maybe I can, I'll go off and do things on my own. But, but at least for this, I wanted to just kind of have a plan and go with it. And part of that plan for me was to come up with not necessarily super detailed Every moment of the book, but come up with an idea for the whole book and understand what's going to happen, who are going to be the main characters, where this is going to go, how it's going to [00:19:00] end.

And so I drafted, I did stuff on paper on a notebook with a pen and paper. I did stuff in an Excel spreadsheet with my business background and plotting that stuff out. And of course the end is not really that even close to what this was when I started. So But I did come up with that plan and had an idea where I wanted to end it before I started writing it and what was going to happen along the way.

And then through edits and through different things and through learning about the characters, the story sort of revealed itself to me and took it in its own direction. And when I recognized that the direction the story wanted to go was better and made more sense than the direction I thought it should go earlier, I went with where the story was telling me to go.

David Gwyn: I'm curious, I know Quoz just came out. So maybe you're not thinking about this yet, but what are you working on now? What's your next project? Are you doing more fiction? 

Mel Mattison: , I mean, I'm kind of a sucker for series thrillers. So that's, that's what I love to read.

And I feel like you can [00:20:00] get deeper into the story and the characters and, and things. And so I, I was thinking of this as a series from, from the beginning. You're And the last chapter leaves open a pretty big question that that's going to come into book number two. So, so that's really where my, my head is right now.

I have been busy kind of doing some promotional stuff and, and doing things. And I want to get more into the, the writing, but for me, it's like, I really do like to just, You know focus, and it's a little hard for me to over multitask, so I don't have a draft of book two started yet But that's coming 

David Gwyn: And so my last question for you is just where can people find you where can people look you up 

Mel Mattison: sure so I?

My name is Mel Mattison with two T's instead of a D in Madison. M A T T I S O N I have a website melmadison. com and if you search Mel Madison, or if you search just quaz q u o z Financial thriller. Just add that financial thriller in there and tons [00:21:00] of stuff will come up and places to buy the book and stuff about me and anything anybody wants to know, they'll find it through the magic of a Google.

David Gwyn: Good. And so if you're listening I'll link to that stuff too, in the description. So you've got quick access to cause and to Mel. Mel, this is awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat. I had an absolute blast. 

Mel Mattison: I thanks a lot, David. 

David Gwyn: Okay, so that's it. I really do suggest you check out Quoz. And while you're reading, watch how Mel seamlessly and efficiently introduces characters. I learned a lot about how to introduce characters to readers by checking out his novel.

Also, I write a weekly newsletter through Thriller 101 with exclusive information, advice, and updates you only get from the newsletter. I talk about goal setting, systems, productivity, and I share the best resources and advice for writers from all around the internet. If you want to level up your writing skills, be sure to subscribe.

There's a link in the description where you can do that. 

Next time on the podcast, I'll be talking to Carey Blankenship Kramer. She's a literary agent at Belcastro agency, [00:22:00] and she is going to pick a submission and she's going to talk about what she loves about it,

what she hopes to see from other submissions, and she's going to request the full manuscript for somebody's pitch. So if you're ready to start pitching and querying, definitely check out the thriller one on one pitch contest.

Again, that link is in the description and I will see you next week.