People often ask me when I decided to become a writer. The honest answer is that I am not sure I ever decided. It felt more like something that had been accumulating for years — case files, courtroom observations, the particular way people behave when the stakes are real — until there was simply too much of it to keep inside a professional context.

Writing fiction was not a departure from my career. It was an extension of it.

What Law Teaches You About Story

Every legal case is, at its core, a story. There are competing narratives, unreliable witnesses, documents that say one thing and mean another, and a resolution that rarely satisfies everyone involved. Lawyers spend their careers learning to construct and deconstruct narratives under pressure.

That training turns out to be extraordinarily useful for writing thrillers.

When I sit down to plot a novel, I am doing something very similar to building a legal argument. What do I know? What can I prove? Where are the gaps, and how will the other side exploit them? The difference is that in fiction, I control both sides — which means I have to be honest about the weaknesses in my protagonist's position.

The Authenticity Problem in Legal Fiction

Most legal thrillers get the atmosphere right but the procedure wrong. I understand why — procedural accuracy can slow a narrative down, and most readers are not lawyers. But there is a cost to that inaccuracy. Readers who know the law feel it immediately, and it pulls them out of the story.

My goal with the Brandon Powell series was to write books that a practicing attorney could read without wincing, while still being propulsive enough to keep a general reader turning pages at midnight. That balance is harder to achieve than it sounds.

The solution, for me, was to let the procedure drive the tension rather than interrupt it. In a real courtroom, the rules of evidence and procedure are not bureaucratic obstacles — they are the battlefield. When you understand that, the procedural details become the most dramatic elements in the room.

The First Book Is Always the Hardest

Abuse of Process took longer to write than any book I have produced since. Not because the story was unclear — I knew what I wanted to say from the beginning — but because I was learning how to translate professional knowledge into narrative form.

There is a significant difference between knowing something and knowing how to write about it. I had to learn to trust the reader, to resist the urge to over-explain, and to let the story carry the information rather than stopping to deliver it.

Every writer goes through some version of this with their first book. Mine just happened to involve a lot of unlearning habits I had spent years developing in a professional context.

Writing Across Genres

The Brandon Powell series sits firmly in the legal thriller tradition, but I have also written outside that lane. Willie C is a different kind of book — different in tone, setting, and emotional register. Writing it reminded me that the skills developed in one genre transfer more readily than you might expect.

Character is character. Tension is tension. The specific vocabulary changes, but the underlying craft does not.

Advice for Writers With Professional Expertise

If you have spent years in a specialized field — law, medicine, finance, military service — and you are thinking about writing fiction set in that world, my strongest advice is this: do not underestimate what you know.

The details that feel routine to you are revelatory to a reader. The insider perspective you take for granted is exactly what makes your work distinctive. The challenge is not acquiring knowledge — it is learning to deploy it in service of story rather than in service of accuracy for its own sake.

Write the book that only you could write. That is always the right starting point.