"I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth"
About this Quote
Craft, not charisma, is doing the bragging here. Deaver isn’t selling “relatable” characters or the comforting moral geometry of good guys versus bad guys; he’s arguing for complexity as an engine of suspense. In a thriller, the plot is a trapdoor. Psychological depth is the mechanism that makes the fall feel inevitable rather than arbitrary.
The phrase “try very hard” is a quiet tell. It frames depth as labor, not inspiration, which doubles as a rebuttal to the genre snobbery that treats thrillers as pure velocity. Deaver’s subtext: the page-turn is earned through excavation. When readers sense a character has an interior life - contradictions, blind spots, private logic - they’ll follow them into darker choices without feeling manipulated.
The most revealing move is pairing “heroes and villains” under the same mandate. That’s a deliberate refusal of the cardboard villain whose only motive is “evil,” and it also complicates the hero who wins because the author needs them to. Deaver is signaling a worldview where antagonists aren’t monsters dropped from the sky; they’re people whose desires have curdled into damage, whose self-justifications are coherent to them. That makes them scarier, because they’re legible.
Context matters: Deaver’s work sits in the late-20th/early-21st century crime tradition where forensics and procedure can become fetish objects. He’s staking his claim elsewhere. The best twist isn’t a new clue; it’s the moment you realize a character’s psychology was the clue all along.
The phrase “try very hard” is a quiet tell. It frames depth as labor, not inspiration, which doubles as a rebuttal to the genre snobbery that treats thrillers as pure velocity. Deaver’s subtext: the page-turn is earned through excavation. When readers sense a character has an interior life - contradictions, blind spots, private logic - they’ll follow them into darker choices without feeling manipulated.
The most revealing move is pairing “heroes and villains” under the same mandate. That’s a deliberate refusal of the cardboard villain whose only motive is “evil,” and it also complicates the hero who wins because the author needs them to. Deaver is signaling a worldview where antagonists aren’t monsters dropped from the sky; they’re people whose desires have curdled into damage, whose self-justifications are coherent to them. That makes them scarier, because they’re legible.
Context matters: Deaver’s work sits in the late-20th/early-21st century crime tradition where forensics and procedure can become fetish objects. He’s staking his claim elsewhere. The best twist isn’t a new clue; it’s the moment you realize a character’s psychology was the clue all along.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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