7½ Ways to Use Real-World Expertise to Build Authentic Suspense

When people hear that I spent more than two decades on Wall Street before writing my first thriller, they often assume I simply swapped reading financial reports for manufacturing plot twists. The truth is far more useful.

(The Unwritten Rules of Writing With Power.)

Real-world expertise sharpens suspense.

High finance is a daily masterclass in power, pressure, secrecy, and consequence. I don’t need to invent danger. I spent years watching it unfold in conference rooms with plush chairs and exquisite lighting.

In my novel, The Lies We Trade, I pulled directly from that world. I didn’t set out to document my career but to translate its emotion into engaging fiction. Here are seven and a half ways real-world expertise can turn suspense from simply entertaining into something that feels uncomfortably real. (Don’t miss the half point. It’s a multiplier!)

Expertise teaches you to see where power lives. Often power hides from the org chart in whispers, deadlines, and the surprising revelation of who controls the narrative when things go wrong.

Suspense ignites when a character realizes their authority is conditional. In The Lies We Trade, Meredith Hansel is a rising star, but she learns how quickly favor can evaporate. She navigates rooms that welcome her as well as people who suddenly stop returning her calls.

Power imbalance creates tension before the plot catches up. That’s the kind of suspense that hums within every scene.

Thrillers need stakes. Wall Street delivers them relentlessly.

Markets don’t care about your personal life. Deals don’t pause for doubt. Decisions are fast, public, and unforgiving. Real-world experience teaches you that pressure compounds: One misstep doesn’t just create a problem, it attracts attention, the kind that comes with scrutiny.

In The Lies We Trade, a single envelope doesn’t detonate immediately. Instead, it tightens the vise. Each chapter adds another layer of urgency, and another reason Meredith can’t step away.

Authentic suspense isn’t about constant action. It’s about escalation that feels inevitable.

If you work on Wall Street long enough, you learn a crucial truth: Everything is a negotiation. Meetings, silence, favors, phrasing, timing—all of it is leverage.

This is where expertise shines. Negotiation isn’t just about deals; it’s about information asymmetry. Who knows what. Who thinks they know more. Who is bluffing. In The Lies We Trade, conversations are rarely what they seem. Characters bargain without naming the terms, and the most dangerous moments often happen when someone realizes they’ve already agreed to something they don’t fully understand.

This is also where selective expertise matters. You don’t need to explain the mechanics of every deal. You just need to show what’s at stake and who’s cornered. Knowing how negotiations really unfold allows you to strip them down to their psychological core.

Suspense lives in the pause before someone answers.

Real-world experience teaches a sobering lesson: Most people don’t see themselves as villains. They see themselves as justified.

On Wall Street, ethical lines blur gradually. People rationalize. They protect what they’ve built. In The Lies We Trade, characters like Hardwin or Betsey aren’t driven by cartoonish malice. They’re driven by seeking relevance, shunning insecurity, and experiencing fear.

Suspense deepens when readers understand why a character makes a dangerous choice, even as they dread the consequences.

Expertise reveals how artificial the work-life divide really is. High-stakes careers don’t stay in the office; they follow you home, sit at the dinner table, and wake you up at 3 a.m.

Meredith’s story isn’t just corporate intrigue, it’s domestic suspense. Her marriage strains. Her relationship with her daughter frays. The danger matters because it threatens the people she loves, not just the career she’s built.

When real-world pressure bleeds into private life, the stakes become visceral.

Some of the most suspenseful moments in finance are silent: a delayed response, a meeting that ends too quickly, a sudden shift in direction without explanation.

Experience trains you to notice what’s missing. Readers feel these moments because they recognize them. Suspense doesn’t always shout. Often, it whispers.

When you know a world intimately, it stops being scenery and starts shaping behavior. Glass conference rooms, trading floors, and polished hallways don’t just host the action, they constrain it and propel it.

In The Lies We Trade, the environment amplifies tension. The expectation of control makes vulnerability dangerous. The culture of composure raises the cost of panic, of showing any emotion at all.

Here’s the half-step writers often miss, but it can amplify or diminish a promising story. Readers don’t care how much you know. They care how much your characters have to lose.

Your expertise is there to serve the story, not audition for it. No one needs a glossary to feel dread. They need emotional truth. They need to recognize the moment when a character realizes the lie they’ve been telling themselves no longer works. Mercilessly cut the lines that only serve to show how much you know and leave them on the trading floor.

Ultimately, real-world expertise shouldn’t make suspense heavier. It allows you to strip away contrived drama and reveal what’s already there: people under pressure, negotiating with power, and discovering too late the truth beneath the surface.

The Lies We Trade isn’t really about finance. It’s about trust, ambition, forgiveness, and the cost of silence. That kind of suspense doesn’t feel manufactured.

It feels inevitable.

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