Brad Taylor
Into the Gray Zone
Pike Logan uncovers a geopolitical scheme that has spiraled out of control in India in this latest pulse-pounding thriller from New York Times bestselling author and former special forces officer Brad Taylor.
The Writer’s Dossier 6/25/2024 – The big Brad Taylor interview
DOSSIER: As you prepared to end your military career at The Citadel and decided to stay home one night to take a stab at writing while your wife went out for some evening fun, what exactly were you thinking?
TAYLOR: Nothing at all, really. I had my laptop out and thought, “You’ve always said you’d write a novel. Let’s see where this goes.” I had left a Special Mission Unit where I was deployed almost constantly, and now I had some time to just sit back and reflect. I honestly didn’t think I was stepping on the path of a second career. I was tinkering around with a plot that had been in my head for years. And I’ll tell you upfront, those first few pages weren’t my best writing. But it was fun taking a stab at it! So, I continued trying to hone that work until it was something that I’d want to read. That’s always been my cutline.
While Afghanistan was falling apart
DOSSIER: With THE DEVIL’S RANSOM, you managed to pull in three highly compelling storylines that involve the unceremonious return of Afghanistan back to the Taliban, sophisticated cyber-attacks against America, and an insider threat vector. In mapping out your approach to a book, do you simply scan the landscape for the best topics to write about and combine them into a fully charged thriller, or does one storyline naturally lead into another as you begin to write it?
TAYLOR: I’ll be honest, as I was finishing End of Days, Afghanistan was falling apart, and I received a lot of emails asking if I was going to broach that subject. I had no intention of doing so because it was raw to me, like it is for most veterans of that war. I was following it closely and keeping tabs on the news because I had some good friends who were at the airport during the chaos. During that time, I saw a news story about the Bactrian Treasure having disappeared from the presidential palace and that the Taliban were fighting mad about it. I started digging and thought, “Wow. There’s a story in the making.” I had initially intended to write about ransomware and the threat it poses – which I did – but Afghanistan ended up playing a role. To answer your question, at least for this book, the storyline just appeared. I still used the roadmap I’d created for the novel, but that all changed with including Afghanistan.
Writing anywhere is not a problem
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (Music, silence, Maverick at your feet, or gazing out to the Yorktown on the Mount Pleasant side?)
TAYLOR: I write wherever I am, be it an aircraft, bar, or outside on the patio. I wrote my first novel at my daughters’ gymnastics meets and volleyball tournaments. I have no preferred location and have the ability to block out everything around me. I get asked all the time, “What do you have on top of your writing desk?” And my answer is, “I don’t have a writing desk.”
Creating a universe of bad guys
DOSSIER: Since writing military operations orders, briefing points, and situation reports for special ops missions is a completely different style of writing, what was the first big lesson about storytelling you learned and where did it come from?
TAYLOR: Actually, they’re not that different. As a SOF commander, whenever I designed an exercise I had to make it realistic. Using “Country Orange” is attacking “Country Brown” doesn’t translate into real-world training benefits, so I had to create an entire universe of bad guys, complete with backstories, making it as realistic as possible to get buy-in from the boys. Once you’ve done that, you also have to make sure the exercise will be executed in the manner you intended. Since it’s Special Operations, we’re talking about conducting exercises in real cities, with unwitting civilians and real consequences if something goes awry. The SOF Operator is capable of doing a thousand things with the information you give him, but your objective is for him to do only one – the one you’ve crafted – which requires creating the exercise in such a manner that that one result will happen. That’s literally the first lesson I learned about writing a novel. Pike or the bad guys could do a thousand different things, but he’s going to pick just one – and that one had better make sense or the reader is going to say, “Wait a minute. Why did he do A instead of B?” You craft the story in such a way that A is the only thing that makes sense, which is hard, but I learned that in the Army, not at a writing course.
DOSSIER: You’re notorious for conducting deep field research for your books and often travel to the ends of the Earth to get the best first-hand information possible. Have you ever been on a research trip for a story and found something completely different you wanted to write about instead? I mean, you found a weird license plate in Rome and discovered the Knights of Malta. That’s what led to END OF DAYS, right?
TAYLOR: Yeah, it’s true that discovery led to me using the Knights of Malta later in End of Days, but while I was in Italy, I was doing research for a different book, and didn’t let that license plate distract from what I was there to do. I tucked that away in my head for future use. While there have been plenty of times when I found something on a research trip that I had no idea about (which is precisely why I like getting boots on the ground), I have yet to discover something that made me completely rethink my entire plot. It’s usually the opposite: “How can I use this in the framework I’ve designed” versus, “Wow. I need to completely alter my novel because I found the biggest ball of mud in Sweden.”
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