Writing A Financial Thriller

We have all been affected by the global financial crisis and recently I watched an excellent documentary, Inside Job (aff), about how it all happened. It was like something out of a thriller novel! Using current events is often a great way to make your story more resonant with people. Today, H.T. Narea, author of ‘The Fund’ gives us some tips on writing the financial thriller.

With fall closing in upon us in the northern hemisphere, political leaders around the world hang on every word and posture that comes out of Athens.  What are they worried about?

They don’t want to read a real life financial thriller pour out of the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  The fact that financial news has been making it to the front page quite regularly since the Lehman debacle has prompted more and more people – world leaders and average citizens alike — to educate themselves about these issues.  No surprise since financial news affects everyone’s pocketbooks in addition to a country’s finances.

All of this has led to a resurgence of a particular brand of fiction – the financial thriller. 

This genre was most successfully introduced by my late father-in-law, Paul Erdman, whose first novel ‘The Billion Dollar Sure Thing’ won the Edgar in 1974.  With the release of a slew of other financial thrillers, including his most famous ‘The Crash of ‘79’, Paul held a spot on the New York Times Bestsellers List for more than 100 weeks.  Given that I had the privilege of helping research and edit several of Paul’s bestsellers, I’m often asked what goes into writing a financial thriller.  Here are my three simple rules.

(1) Write what you know.

While this applies to any thriller, it’s particularly important in the case of financial thrillers.  This can be from your own, possibly juicy and sordid, history in finance, or even what you talk about with colleagues or pick up from the financial press.  Whatever you do, make sure it’s thrilling.  Reading about a CPA finding an accounting mistake on a corporate income statement is not going to win points with thriller readers.  Unless of course, after discovering the mistake, the CPA is killed by someone who is using that company for secret arms shipments to a drug pin’s shell company in say, Macau – and maybe the hired assassin could be a sleek Kazakh female who in an earlier life, was the captive mistress of her country’s ruler…  Wait.  I’m getting carried away here with some of my stories….but you get the idea.

(2) Boil down economic/financial matters to a clear, understandable essence.

Economics is often termed the ‘dismal science’.  However, it touches all our lives, each and every day.  The challenge and opportunity of that is to make economic and financial dynamics relevant in people’s lives – framing them in an approachable manner through motivated characters.  No suspense novel would survive with pages upon pages of economic statistics and financial charts.  As an example, in my book, I boil down the problem of financial derivatives to a clear visual.  For me, they resemble a bowl of tangled spaghetti and it is close to impossible to see exactly how they are inter-connected.  And that was precisely the biggest threat our government faced in dealing with market panics centered on the likes of Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers and AIG – who held the other end of those institutions’ derivatives trades – those loose ends of tangled spaghetti?  So yes, international financial markets provide the fodder, but they can’t overpower the underlying human dynamics of the story.  If in the process of developing a believable plot line, a reader ends up understanding a little bit more about the world we live in, that’s great – but it’s not required and there certainly won’t be a quiz afterwards!

(3) Have a clear understanding of the world and its dynamics.

Step back and take a forest from the trees point of view to see how even seemingly disparate parts are connected.  What helped me in this respect were my international studies at Georgetown University, my career as an international banker and more recently, my teaching experience back in that international community of Georgetown.  In today’s global environment, you can draw a direct line that connects a man who sets himself on fire in Tunisia to the toppling of an autocratic ruler of 30+ years in one country and to copycat self-immolations in Egypt that bring to question not only Mubarak’s rule but that of others in the entire region.  And then almost immediately, these political crises impact global commodity prices, prompting market traders in financial centers like New York and London to scramble to either cover open positions or take advantage of price movements, all of which affect companies and individuals all around the world.  All because of that one man in Tunisia.  That alone can be the basis of a thriller, just as long as you create credible characters that tell the story for you.

We live in a very complicated and connected world of finance – so write about it!

Now of course, if you aren’t in the mood to start writing your own financial thriller today, you can always pick up a copy of mine.  Wink.
To learn more about H.T. Narea and his book, The Fund, visit his website: www.htnarea.com

You can buy The Fund on Amazon.com here (aff)