On Writing Both Historical Fiction and Psychological Thrillers
Author Brianna Labuskes discusses the similarities and differences of writing historical fiction vs. psychological thrillers.
Stories are stories, no matter what rhythm they hit or what chord they strike. So, although I often get a confused head tilt, and a curious “huh!” when I tell people I write both historical fiction and psychological thrillers, the genres don’t feel as far apart to me as they might appear on paper.
Because the details that are different are just the window dressing, the curtains and furniture, maybe the color of the wall paper. Where historical fiction has tyrants and trenches, tanks and traitors; psychological thrillers have murderers and blood spatter, ransoms and body dumps.
What’s important to me, though, is that the bones of the house are the same. In both genres, I’m telling the story of characters who are being put through the highest stakes imaginable as they grapple with what it means to be human in a violent world that can bring out both the best and worst in themselves and everyone around them.
One of the main reasons I enjoy writing is that I get to explore the why of human behavior. We are ridiculously complicated and endlessly contradictory creatures who do things for reasons even we often don’t understand. Everything from evolutionary wiring to sociological pressures and a demanding ego can play a role in all the decisions we make.
There are brilliant writers and books that ponder all that through slice-of-life stories, mining the emotions from everyday moments, and exploring them with beautiful subtlety.
But I like bombs. And bloodshed. I like putting my characters through extraordinary stress tests, stripping them down to their rawest selves. Doing so helps me better understand and appreciate the human condition. I know what pride looks like in the face of a parent watching their child swim a lap for the first time, or when it walks right up to the line of arrogance and thinks about crossing over it. There are a million little serrated edges between those two outward manifestations of pride that I want to know, that I want to examine.
So I need to make the emotion big so I can see it.
Enter war. Enter serial killers.
What does courage look like in the face of a Gestapo officer with a machine gun, and what does it look like when you’re hunting down a murderer and realize it might be someone you know? What does fear look like when a bomb is falling from the sky on your village, and what does it look like when a criminal has a knife to a loved one’s throat? What does despair look like when the coal mine collapses killing hundreds all because of lax safety practices in 1920s Montana, and what does it look like when you find the clue a minute too late to rescue the hostage?
The scenarios might be different, but the core question at the heart of them—the human emotion at the heart of them—is strikingly similar.
Beyond the opportunities for high-stakes plots, both genres lend themselves to the use of cinematic language. The act of writing may be so much more than putting words on the page, but it is also putting words on the page. It’s fun to find the exact right word for a sentence, and slot that sentence into a paragraph that paints the world in brilliant, theatrical colors for a reader who wants to get lost in the story, whether they are racing up the stairs for a final confrontation with a kidnapper or speeding through the French countryside in a Citroën on the way to unmask a spy.
Those high-stakes plots and atmospheric language can be found in my new novel, Clean Slate, which stars Olive, a crime scene cleaner who gets pulled into the hunt for a serial killer. Her job might be dirty, but writing about it felt like stretching every descriptive muscle I have. There are maggots that eat decaying flesh, and skull fragments that get lodged into walls and mattresses that are saturated in blood.
I was also able to put her through the wringer, in a stress test that brings out all the sharp edges and soft vulnerabilities of her character. Olive was raised by a mother who had contamination OCD and saw germs, dirt, and sickness on any surface. Then that same mother killed Olive’s father, leaving Olive to fend for herself. She had to turn to the only skill she had that she knew she could make money from: cleaning. To torture her just a bit more, I make it so that she has to grapple with violent crime every day while trying to forget memories of her father’s blood-drained body on the floor of their house.
She doesn’t want to get pulled into any investigations—she has a job, and that is not doing the cops’ for them—but she doesn’t have a choice when a serial killer tricks her into cleaning up after him. All of it tests who she is as a person, what she values, what compromises she’s willing to make to bring peace to victims forgotten by the law for too many years.
At the heart of narrative, it’s the exploration of a flawed person, the mistakes they make along the way, while they’re trying to do what is right in an unjust world.
And that’s something you can find in all my stories. No matter the genre.
Check out Brianna Labuskes' Clean Slate here:
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Brianna Labuskes is the Washington Post bestselling author of The Librarian of Burned Books as well as eight thrillers. For the first decade of her career, Brianna worked as a journalist for national news organizations covering politics and policy.
