How I Discovered I Write Social Thrillers
I went from describing myself as a legal thriller author to one who writes social thrillers
For more than a dozen years, I’ve had a really hard time trying to slot my books into any single category. Being able to fit my fiction neatly into a box is of the utmost importance in marketing and retail. Readers like to know what they’re getting when they pick up a book.
Because I’m an attorney and my main characters are practicing attorneys who battle in an adversarial system, the most natural category was ‘legal thriller.’
As more than one reviewer has mentioned, my books are suspenseful but don’t usually have a dead body. Ninety-nine percent of the thrillers I read have a dead body. It’s more likely one hundred percent if I don’t include my own.
When thinking of categories, I’ve tried on the mantle of suspense, psychological thriller, and women’s fiction, but none worked. My elevator pitch is Law & Order: Special Victims Unit meets Jodi Picoult. I still think that’s the best of the options I’ve used for a long time.
SVU is my absolute favorite network show. It has horrible things that happen to people and intermittent comeuppance. Psychological studies tell us that the most compelling thing is only getting what you want part of the time. It’s why gambling or even dating apps are so addictive. Not knowing if the perpetrator is going to be punished is what keeps me watching. It’s one element included in nearly every one of my books.
Jodi Picoult is the other half of my formula. I love to write provocative books that tackle moral dilemmas. Should we take children from abusive homes and put them in foster care? When it’s well known that foster care far too often exposes children to more neglect and abuse. (Judged). How do we punish the men who sell children for sex, when most sex crimes are prosecuted as misdemeanors? (Caged).
These are the kinds of questions that I think about almost every day and are what I want readers to think about and consider when they pick up a Casey Cort or Nicole Long thriller.
Message-driven thrillers without a dead body are not a thing. Or rather, they’re my thing, but don’t have a shelf at Barnes & Noble or a slot on Amazon.
The call is coming from inside the house. In every book, I work hard to pick up the phone.
Cue my shift to calling my books social thrillers.
In December and January in Los Angeles, my email box is full of invitations to movie screenings. These are free viewings of movies when the studio or director are seeking nominations and awards. I usually see a few each year, mostly documentaries. This year, the invitation for a Bulgarian film called Blaga’s Lessons landed in my inbox. I’m not sure what compelled me to go, but I accepted the invitation and drove over to some nondescript screening room in a generic office building in Beverly Hills.
It was one of the most compelling stories I’ve seen in a long time. During the question and answer session, the director Stephan Komandarev said he’d made this movie and others to spark social change. He called this movie a ‘social thriller.’
The words he was saying were nearly the same exact words I’d thought a thousand times.
The moment I got home, I Googled the term ‘social thriller.’ It was nearly universally applied to movies like Get Out. Drilling down further, a few books came up like Luckiest Girl Alive and The Hate U Give. The list was far smaller than legal thriller or suspense or mystery. After my search it was starting to feel like I finally found a way to succinctly describe my stories.
Every year I read a lot of books. Half are usually nonfiction that tackle social issues. This year the books were about the inherent misogyny in dating apps, the lack of accountability in abusive relationships, and memoirs on class in America. They are all issues about which I’m truly passionate. I want social change, but I’m not an agitator. As my son pointed out, I don’t go to protests or put political signs in my window. I have reasons that I don’t engage in public advocacy, but that’s the subject of another essay.
What I realized though, is that I do agitate for social change, but in my own way. I do it through storytelling. I want to point out inequities in our American legal and criminal justice system that make fairness impossible. So, if you run into me and ask me what I write, my answer is now: social thriller.
Aime Austin is the author of the Casey Cort and Nicole Long Series of legal thrillers. She is also the host of the podcast, A Time to Thrill. When she's not writing crime fiction or interviewing brilliant creators for her podcast, she's in a yoga pose, knitting, or reading. Aime splits her time between Los Angeles and Budapest. Before turning to writing, Aime practiced family and criminal law in Cleveland, Ohio.
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