A Conversation With Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson on How to Write Action Thrillers (Killer Writers)

Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson, the acclaimed co-authors of the #1 international bestselling author team of Andrews & Wilson, are unparalleled in the realm of action thrillers. Their mastery of the genre, evident in their numerous bestsellers, makes them the perfect guides for those of us who aspire to craft compelling action scenes. What’s more, their approachability and wealth of knowledge make them a team you can comfortably learn from without feeling intimidated.

Clay Stafford: Jeff and Brian, great to see you here today. For those who are reading this and don’t really know what an action thriller is, what is an action thriller?

Jeffrey Wilson: I’m not sure that anyone really knows. It’s a lot like thrillers in general or horror. You ask a horror writer, ‘What is a horror story?’ you’ll get 400 different answers. And I think the same thing is true here. A thriller generally has suspense elements, and typically, there’s some hero’s journey stopping something bad from happening. An action thriller implies a level of combat-style action beyond suspense. We write—not exclusively—a lot of military thrillers. And so, by definition, that will be an action thriller because you’ve got those action elements.

Brian Andrews: Over the last couple of decades—largely due to the influence of Amazon—they’ve created several sub-genre categories. It’s helpful for readers to have all these different sub-genre categories where you can insert books because readers are trying to find the types of books they want to read. I think, typically, our books are categorized as military thrillers. That makes sense for us. Our sort of core value for our writing storytelling ethos is military characters. Mission before self. Often, we incorporate geopolitics, science, and technology into our thrillers. When I think of an action thriller, I think of action, to venture more like Clive Cussler, where you have globe-trotting, adventure, and that sort of thing, and we certainly have international locations and venue shifts in our novels. But I would say we’re more on the military thriller side of action adventure. There’s a lot of action in our books, and I think that’s a separate conversation: ‘What is an action scene? What makes a good one?’ An action scene is a story sequence with a high level of physical activity, often involving combat or high-stakes situations. What makes a good one is a balance of tension, pacing, and character development. One of our latest endorsements was ‘nobody does action like Andrews & Wilson,’ and we take that as a great compliment. In an Andrews & Wilson book, maybe 30% to 40% of the book is action, and we believe this keeps our readers excited and engaged, whereas in many other thrillers, perhaps you have just an action scene at the end to wrap up the climax. We try to weave action through our novels.

Wilson: It is interesting, Clay. Even here, the two of us work together eight hours a day, and we can’t wholly agree on the definitions of those genres. It’s weird, right?

Stafford: Yeah. So basically, we can cut the interview short and say, ‘Write what you love,’ right? We don’t know where it fits.

Wilson: Yeah.

Stafford: What is your target demographic for action thrillers like yours? Who do you want to reach? Who are you trying to reach?

Andrews: I love that question, and that’s something that from the very first book, Tier One, we made a very intentional decision that our goal is to bring this type of storytelling to all demographics. We want a housewife in Oklahoma who no one in her family has had military service, and she has no familiarity with going to sea on a submarine or hitting a compound with a naval special warfare JSOC team. These types of activities are something that anybody, regardless of age, gender, culture, religion—any of these other preferences that we like to describe people for demographics—we want this story to be something that anybody can enjoy. Interestingly, when you look at our demographics, we have a broad demographic, because we do have Amazon sales data. We have men and women of all ages and geographies who are reading our books. The more people we can get to read and be exposed to the values of military service and what the men and women and the pointy tip of the spear are doing, the better. We want you, our readers, to feel included and valued in our diverse community of fans.

Wilson: I want to jump on that slightly because I agree with everything Brian said. I do remember us having that conversation. Two kids are going to write our first book together, and it’s like, ‘We want everyone in the universe to read it!’ And that was a part of it. But I think that the reason it was important to us, and we’ve been successful at it, is something Brian hinted at the end. Our books aren’t about the action. Our books aren’t even about the military or geopolitics. They are about the people. It’s rare to have a high character and relationship-driven story in an action thriller. Not that they’re not well characterized, that’s not what I’m saying, but to have the characters and the relationships drive the story instead of the geopolitics or the plot—to have a plot-driven story—is a little unusual in our genre and that’s why we’ve been so incredibly successful. We bring that character-driven aspect to these stories. And that’s why the housewife in Oklahoma loves them so much. It’s not because she loves to learn more about how a SOPMOD M4 works. It’s because she wants to see if John Dempsey will be okay. She wants to see what will happen with Chunk and Watts in their strange relationship. They want to see what happens to these people because they become genuine to them. We want you, our readers, to feel emotionally invested in our characters and their stories. And I think that’s how we achieved that cross-demographic success. We make it about the people. And that’s something everybody’s interested in, right? Everybody wants to know about the men and women who are out there doing these dangerous jobs and important things, how it affects them, and how it affects their families, which we delve into in most of our books. I think that’s been the key to it for us.

Andrews: I’m just going to add one last thing: We know that the message and the characters resonate because we get emails that take us by surprise and people that will say, ‘Wow! You know, John Dempsey, he feels like my best friend,’ or ‘Ember feels like family to me. I’m on my third pass of the series, getting ready for book eight,’ and you’re thinking, ‘Wow. Why would somebody go back and listen to the series multiple times?’ Well, because of the other things that people are saying. These characters feel natural to them, and they feel like people in their lives that they want to understand, spend time with, and look up to.

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Stafford: One of the things I think is fantastic for people like me was the back of this book, which had a glossary of terms for nonmilitary people such as myself. Whenever I felt a little over my head, I could flip back and look and get a definition of what the letters meant or what a particular thing was, so I thought that was brilliant. I’ve never seen that done before in a book.

Wilson: It’s interesting that you brought that up because it was intentional for us. One of the things I hate when I’m reading, especially in this genre, is I don’t want to be explained to because it pulls me out of the story. And so, if I feel like the dialogue is written for me instead of between the characters, it’s jarring. It takes me out of that world I’ve been able to put myself into. So, Brian and I talked quite a bit about this, being military veterans and knowing that natural flow of dialogue. The bottom line is that some of these acronyms are a little overwhelming. But do you trade that off against what the dude would say? And you do a little bit, but what we decided was, let’s do this. Let’s work extra hard to make the context explain the vast majority of it so that you don’t have to get pulled out of it by me explaining something to you. You’ll figure it out, and even if you don’t, maybe it’s unimportant to know what the acronym stands for. You get that he’s talking about this gun or he’s talking about this guy or whatever, so that you can get that sort of tick on the hound. You don’t have to feel like you’re not in that universe anymore. But then, on the flip side, there will be that handful of people—it sounds like you’re one of them—who want to go a little deeper. You’re like, well, I want to know what that means. Okay, here’s a way to do that without us ripping you out of the scene and making it less accurate. I think we’re probably better at it now than when we started. But the way we do it is very intentional.

Stafford: It was brilliant because immersing myself in the scene for someone unfamiliar was beneficial. It made a whole lot of sense, especially when you’re talking about relationships with other agencies and things like that. I have not seen that before. So, kudos to you guys for doing that. As I read both books, I find this one a bit out there [holding Four Minutes] and sci-fi more than this one [Ember]. But how do you make these so credible for the reader? I’ve read a lot of books, and some of them seem not as plausible. With both, they’re happening. How do you do that? Do you bring your personal experiences in? How does that work?

Wilson: I think it’s both. Writing military thrillers, having backgrounds as submarine officers, working with SEAL teams, and stuff like that makes that easy. Not just the tech and stuff. That requires research no matter who you are because things change. Knowing how the characters handle situations, some tactics, and other stuff becomes easy. When you bring the science stuff in, it’s also easy because we’re just those curious guys. We both have a science background. Brian’s a nuclear engineer. In my past life, I was a vascular surgeon. We have a lot of science and technology in our backgrounds, and we’re fascinated by it. So, where did Four Minutes come from? Four Minutes came from a social conversation about river theory and how it affects time travel. The sort of quantum mechanics and physics of time travel is possible. And, of course, if you do the math, it should be, even though the hurdles are overwhelming. And so, it came out of a fun conversation because we both have a fascination for science and technology. I don’t remember which of us was like, ‘Well, there’s a book here.’ If somebody ever cracked the code to time travel, first of all, it would have onerous rules, like what you see in Four Minutes. It wouldn’t be Back to the Future, hop in a DeLorean, and see the old West, right? It’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be snapshots. It’s going to be complicated. The next thing was, if it happened, what would be the next thing that would happen? DARPA would perfect it, and it would be covert and out there in the military. It was born out of that—just the fascination for those things. You’ll also see some of that in our other works regarding technology and artificial intelligence. We have a book called The Sandbox that deals with AI in a very grounded way. Even when we do science and technology or sci-fi, we try to ground it as much as we can in reality. How could this happen, rather than building a whole fictitious universe?

Andrews: And it’s interesting for you, too, Clay, because you jumped in. You read Ember, and that’s book eight in the series. Have you read any of the previous Tier One?

Stafford: I have not.

Andrews: Okay, we dropped you into John Dempsey’s life and the rest of the team multi-years into their journey, right? So suddenly, you get to see—and I hope you felt it—that these characters have a history of friendship and service. But shit has happened in their lives. These are flawed human beings who are all driven to try to do the right thing. They’re not superheroes. They’re just highly motivated individuals with a passion for serving their country. And that’s a tough job because we encounter all these moral ambiguities. If it were an easy job, we wouldn’t write books about it, and everybody would do it. It’s not an easy job. When you’re in that situation, our readers say, ‘Oh, what would I do?’ We always try to ask that question. So, in Ember, which you just read, in the middle, there’s a parallel scene between Jake when he’s watching a training video at SQT about enemies and what they’ve done: torture. And then we have Dempsey going to get a bombmaker who’s just assassinated two heads of state because of this weapon he made. And so, we’re trying to paint this picture. In the classroom, it looks this way. How do you react in real life? And what are the choices that you’re going to make? And where is the morality in this? And if the answer was, this is right, and this is wrong, that would be great. But that’s not the reality. Everything has unique circumstances, and there’s a level of moral subjectivity in there. We hope that when our readers read this, some people will say, ‘I think what John did was wrong,’ and others will say, ‘I think what John did is right.’ And even John and his teammates have a conversation with him about ‘Dude, are you okay? Have we stepped over this boundary? And what is the boundary?’ Those are the situations where there might not be a correct answer for everybody.

Stafford: Which does make it credible.

Wilson: It does, and it’s a hard one. Having worked in a JSOC unit before, I can tell you the most extraordinary thing about the men and women in those units is how ordinary they are. Brian said it perfectly. They’re ordinary people—not superheroes—with an extraordinary drive to do the right thing, constantly putting them in great moral conflict. Not just the physical aspects and all that, and how hard it is on you, your family, and your relationships, but how hard it is on your soul to constantly wonder, ‘Was this right? Did I do this the right way? What would Jesus do?’ Those real questions that we struggle with as human beings that maybe you don’t find in most thrillers are an essential part of the story and the journey for us. We write these books intentionally so that any individual book can be read and enjoyed. But what you lose dropping into book eight is John’s journey to get to that point. You didn’t see him in books one, two, and three, where he was conflicted by some of the stuff he was involved with because he was a black-and-white guy. Things are right, or they’re wrong. Period. There’s no crossover. And now he’s thrust into this universe that exists almost exclusively in the moral gray, and he had to evolve in good and bad ways to function in that world, and you’re seeing the result. But we got to write seven books that took him on that journey. The John Dempsey you read is so different from the John Dempsey of books one, two, even three, as he’s gone on that journey, and that’s something we try very hard to do because it’s something we’ve also lived. I certainly wasn’t the same person in 2012 when I made my last trip to Afghanistan as in 2005. Not even close. We wanted readers to experience that entire journey and the effect it has on relationships as well as on individuals.

Andrews: In the previous book, John had been by himself. The title of the previous book was Dempsey. It was a self-titled book because it was just about him. This book is called Ember because he comes back into the fold. And you get to see that he’s part of this team and how all the different personalities and components encircle him. And where do those relationships lie now that he’s returned from this mission where he’s changed? And so, he says something in this book. When asked, ‘Why did you do that?’ He’s like, ‘I’m taking a chess piece off the board.’ The guy in book six wouldn’t have made that comment.

Stafford: Let’s talk about action scenes because you write great ones. They are well choreographed. They are fascinating to follow. How do you write an engaging, accurate, entertaining action scene?

Andrews: Our most extensive advice would be to treat every action scene as its own three-act structure. It needs a beginning, a middle, and an end, where some inciting event draws the characters into action. There needs to be complications in the action. You think the fight can be resolved quickly and easily. It never can because the enemy reacts, so it’s more complex. And then there must be a pivotal element. I think that’s how we approach it. We don’t know a lot of other authors that do that. But first, it makes a more extended action scene, and you feel like you have stakes. You feel like you get something out of it as a reader by the time you’re finished.

Wilson: Once we start and have that mapped out, we execute with two rules. No rules are hard and fast in writing, as you know, Clay. But one, the action sequence has to have a character’s point of view. It must be told through the eyes of a character. Pulling your reader out of the character’s mind into an omniscient narration of the action makes it less powerful. You want them not to see the action; you want them to feel it through the character, and that’s harder to do because you want to tell them about who’s moving where and all that stuff and that’s sort of a segue to my second point, which is—and this usually happens best in editing than in your first draft—you can over-choreograph. It would be best to leave a little for the reader to fill in. As writers, we tend to underestimate our readers and try to give them everything we think they’ll need to see how we saw it. And there are two problems with that. You will bore them because you tell them so much, which ruins the action. And two, their imagination might be better than what you wrote. Leave it open just enough so that they can experience it instead of having it described to them. You can only do that through a POV, and you can only do it by tying one hand behind your back when you’re at the keyboard and not overexplaining. It ruins it. It requires discipline.

Stafford: And we’ve all read those.

Wilson: We’ve all read those. And some of us have written those and had to fix them.

Stafford: Good thing you’ve got a partner there who can help and say you’re going too far. Okay, I’ve read your books and am completely inspired. Can civilians, such as myself, who have no military training at all, write a military action thriller like you? Is it possible to make it feasible and realistic, something that you would read and go, ‘Oh, Clay wrote an excellent book there!’

Wilson: One hundred percent. This is a great time to be a military or covert operations thriller fan because so many people have been there and done that. Don Bentley, us, A.J. Tata, and Josh Hood, and there’s Marc Cameron. There are so many people out there who have backgrounds. But some brilliant writers don’t. Mark Greaney comes to mind, and others, and they are doing it right. So how do they do it? I would say if you don’t have the background but you have the love for it, then you need to do two things. First, you need to inform yourself, do the research, and then resist the urge to share everything you learned, which we all do. Share just enough to make it essential to the story. Then, two: Reach out to the writer community. The best thing about the thriller writer community is it is a community. It’s a family, you know. We go to ThrillerFest. We go to Bouchercon. It’s catching up with family and friends for us more than anything. Those people are out there, and at any given time, even we have, I would say, four to six people under our wing that we’re mentoring or providing advice to. Writers want to help other writers for the most part, and ITW does that better than anyone. I’ve heard the same at Killer Nashville. I wish I could say I’ve experienced it, but I haven’t been there yet. Be in the community. Get relationships, and don’t be afraid to say, ‘Hey, listen! I know you were a sniper in the army. I got this one thing. Will you have a look and tell me what’s stupid about it so I don’t publish it like that?’ We’ve done that. We reach out. Brian was a submarine officer. I was a combat surgeon with special warfare, but we’ve written about many other platforms, and we’ve done that by reaching out to other writers or subject matter experts. We’ve reached out to people within the Pentagon. When we wrote the Clancy book, we were talking to the guy in charge of all submarines because it had been a hot minute since Brian had been aboard one, and he had never served on the Virginia. We reach out to people from naval intelligence. We reach out to Air Force fighter pilots. You would be amazed how ready people are to help you because they’re readers and want to read. They want you to get it right so that they’ll enjoy reading it. So that would be the advice for how to do what we’re talking about, which is to inform yourself through a relationship, and that’s the easiest way.

Stafford: The only thing left is to put it into action.

Wilson: Do it.

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Brian Andrews is a US Navy veteran, Park Leadership Fellow, and former submarine officer with a psychology degree from Vanderbilt and a master’s in business from Cornell University. Brian also is a principal contributor at Career Authors, a site dedicated to advancing the careers of aspiring and published writers. https://www.andrews-wilson.com/

Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson

Jeffrey Wilson has worked as an actor, firefighter, paramedic, jet pilot, and diving instructor, as well as a vascular and trauma surgeon. He served in the US Navy for fourteen years and made multiple deployments as a combat surgeon with an East Coast–based SEAL Team. He lives in Southwest Florida. https://www.andrews-wilson.com/