Thriller Writing Advice from Kathy Reichs Who's Books Inspired 12 Seasons of an Award Winning Television Show

Thriller 101 Newsletter
Learn more about Kathy Reichs
3 Story Elements You Need in Your Opening Paragraphs

EPISODE INFO:
How about some writing advice from an author who’s books inspired twelve seasons of an award winning television show? 

You know the show Bones? It’s is a drama series created for Fox and ran from 2005 to 2017, airing for 246 episodes over 12 seasons. It starred Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz. The woman who wrote those books, Kathy Reichs, is here to talk to us about writing. 

We're going to talk about how to effectively incorporate your expertise into your writing without overwhelming your readers. 

This is especially crucial for genres like police procedurals, legal thrillers, and medical thrillers, but it’s useful for anyone who does research on their novels and has wondered how much to keep and how much to cut…

BIO:
Kathy Reichs’s first novel Déjà Dead catapulted her to fame when it became a New York Times bestseller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Her other Temperance Brennan books include Death du Jour, Deadly Decisions, Fatal Voyage, Grave Secrets, Bare Bones, Monday Mourning, Cross Bones, Break No Bones, Bones to Ashes, Devil Bones, 206 Bones, Spider Bones, Flash and Bones, Bones Are Forever, Bones of the Lost, Bones Never Lie, Speaking in Bones and the Temperance Brennan short story collection, The Bone Collection.   In addition, Kathy co-authored the Virals young adult series with her son, Brendan Reichs. The best-selling titles are: Virals, Seizure, Code, Exposure, Terminal, and the novella collection Trace Evidence. The series follows the adventures of Temperance Brennan’s great niece, Tory Brennan.  Dr. Reichs’ latest novel, Two Nights, was released July 11 and features Sunday Night, a tough-talking, scarred heroine.  Dr. Reichs was also a producer of the hit Fox TV series, Bones, which is based on her work and her novels.

From teaching FBI agents how to detect and recover human remains, to separating and identifying commingled body parts in her Montreal lab, as a forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs has brought her own dramatic work experience to her mesmerizing forensic thrillers. For years she consulted to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and to the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Québec. Dr. Reichs has traveled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide, and helped exhume a mass grave in Guatemala. As part of her work at JPAC (Formerly CILHI) she aided in the identification of war dead from World War II, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Dr. Reichs also assisted in the recovery of remains at the World Trade Center following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Dr. Reichs is one of only 100 forensic anthropologists ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. She served on the Board of Directors and as Vice President of both the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, and is currently a member of the National Police Services Advisory Council in Canada. She is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

Dr. Reichs is a native of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. at Northwestern. She now divides her time between Charlotte, NC and Montreal, Québec.

Tweet me @DavidRGwyn

Transcript

Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs: [00:00:00] It's like writing, For TV, where you have your A story, your B story, your C story. So you've got multiple things going on. So I do like to do that in the books and always have done that in the books as well. 

David Gwyn: How about some writing advice from an author whose books inspired 12 seasons of an award winning television show? You know the show Bones? It's a drama series created for Fox that ran from 2005 to 2017, airing for 246 episodes over 12 seasons, and starred Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz.

who wrote the books that inspired the TV show, , is here to talk to us about writing. Today we're gonna talk about how to effectively incorporate your expertise into your writing without overwhelming your readers. This is especially crucial for genres like police procedurals, legal thrillers, and medical thrillers.

But it's also useful for anyone who does research on their novels and has wondered how much to keep and how much to cut. I'm David Gwyn, an agented writer navigating the world of traditional publishing. During the second season of the Thriller 101 podcast, we're going to [00:01:00] continue our focus on building the skills necessary to write the kind of thrillers that land you an agent and readers.

season, I'll be sharing some of my own insights while also talking to agents, authors, and other publishing professionals about the best way to write a novel. If you want the expert secrets, Thriller 101 is where you're going to find them. Last week on the podcast, I talked about the three elements you need in your first few paragraphs took agents and readers.

If you want to know what those three elements are and how the top thriller authors employ them to pull off quality openings. Be sure to check out that episode. I've linked in the description. That way you can refine your opening chapter. Today's guest is Doctor Kathy Reichs. Her first novel, Deja Dead, catapulted her to fame when it became a New York Times bestseller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel.

Since then, Dr. Reichs has published more than 20 novels in the Temperence Brennan series. She was also a producer of the hit Fox TV series Bones which is based on her work and her novels. [00:02:00] From teaching FBI agents how to detect and recover human remains, to separating and identifying commingled body parts in her Montreal lab As a forensic anthropologist, Kathy Reichs has brought her own dramatic work experience to her mesmerizing forensic thrillers, And that's what I'm going to ask her about today.

So let's get into it.

Kathy, thanks so much for being here on the Thriller 101 podcast. Your novel, Fire and Bones, which will be out by the time people hear this.

So first I want to say congratulations. 

Kathy Reichs: Thank you very much. 

David Gwyn: I have to ask, this is the 23rd novel in this series, so do you still feel the same excitement now that this is the 23rd, or is it a little bit less? 

Kathy Reichs: Well, I'm a little more familiar with the characters. It gets easier as you're writing it because you do become familiar with the characters.

It also gets harder because you've got to come up with new ideas and new ways to introduce the reader to those characters. 

David Gwyn: Can you tell listeners what Fire and Bones is about so that they have a sense of the story? 

Kathy Reichs: Well, it's a Temperance Brennan book. So forensic anthropology [00:03:00] figures into it.

She is, of course, a forensic anthropologist. In this book, she's in Washington, DC. There's a fire in a neighborhood called Foggy Bottom. I just really like the name Foggy Bottom. We called the book Foggy Bottom Bones, and my publisher said, no, we're not doing that. Anyway I, I, so I started, so she goes to the scene of this fire at a very old house.

It's a very old neighborhood and in a sub cellar, which doesn't on any of the plans she finds below the basement. She finds remains that aren't supposed to be total surprise. They know there are some victims in this fire, but this little woman that she finds buried down there is a complete surprise.

So she becomes very interested in who the suspect is. little woman is, and the history of that house and Foggy Bottom, and it had a very colorful period back, I don't know, from the 30s to the 50s with the Foggy Bottom Gang so all of that, because there's a bit of history, a lot about the Washington, D.

C., and some history and bootlegging and, you know, all of that. That kind of thing. 

David Gwyn: [00:04:00] Yeah. So and, and you kind of mentioned this already having gone through now 23 books. How do you keep these ideas fresh? 

Kathy Reichs: I introduced new characters in each of the books. I moved the setting around.

Of course, each storyline is completely independent. The main premise is forensic anthropology that the solve of the solving of the crime, and it's always a murder mystery, but the solution comes about by using science. I try to use a different forensic science in each book, not just bones all the time, but we're in this one, we're going to learn a bit about fire and fire and arson investigation and the impact of fire on the human body, which is not good.

And yeah, I bring all that together and twist it up, creating plot lines. 

David Gwyn: Yeah, and so obviously you have this background in forensic anthropology and you have a ton of technical knowledge. How do you decide how much to use and how much research is necessary and how to really avoid overwhelming readers with too much [00:05:00] technical information while also like giving them enough of the information that they want and they need for the particular story?

Kathy Reichs: Yeah, I think you, you put your finger on a mistake that a lot of. scientists who write books or anyone who's an expert in some field and they love their field. So they want to put all that, or they've done a lot of research. So they want to put all of that in there. And you, you can't do that. You're just going to lose the reader.

I think the key is that you have to keep the science short and you have to keep it entertaining and you have to keep it jargon free. You can't rely on all this special terminology that we use amongst ourselves. As experts, you can use the terminology, but you have to explain it, but not just come out in narrative and explain it, but you have to work the explanation into the context so that you're not, you know, hitting the reader over the head with it.

So I think those are the, the key elements of writing a science driven thriller. 

David Gwyn: And so what advice do you think if a writer's listening to this and is like, Hey, I have this [00:06:00] experience, I have this expertise I wanna, I wanna write a book about that kind of the way that you did. What advice do you think you'd give someone who is writing a book like that and interested in incorporating their professional expertise and their fiction?

What advice do you think you'd give them? 

Kathy Reichs: Well, I think going back to those three points, don't put too much of it in. Don't be afraid to kill your precious babies, you know, and don't rely on a lot of jargon and make it entertaining. You can't just do it as straight narrative or straight description, do it as dialogue or do it as thought process in your character's head or different ways of, of describing what's going on, you know, at a exhumation or at an autopsy or whatever it is you happen to be writing about.

David Gwyn: Yeah, I think that's great. I think a lot of writers. As I'm sure you know, you know, pull from their expertise and their experiences. And I think if you're somebody who's listening and interested in writing a book about your experience and expertise, definitely pick this book up because there were like pages and pages [00:07:00] of your descriptions of just kind of the necessary background on like, What, you know, these autopsies are happening and what she's looking at 

and I just ate them up like it was just so enjoyable to read them. And I think, you know, you've become just, just this absolute expert at taking something like you mentioned, this kind of experience, this knowledge that you have, this expertise you have and putting it in a way that somebody who like me has no background in this, but I can enjoy those passages.

I can really get into what's happening. And I think, you know, knowing that this, what type of books that you're, you're writing here I'm constantly kind of filtering this information through the lens of, is this giving me a clue about what happened or what is going to happen in the story. And I think that that level of tension makes the descriptions even that much richer.

So people who are listening should definitely, definitely, definitely check this out. If you're, if you're writing something that has some technical aspect to it because I think that, advice is really, really strong. 

Okay, let's pause there for a second. I love this advice from Cathy. There are so many [00:08:00] people writing police procedurals or legal thrillers or medical thrillers. But there are just as many people who have just done a lot of research and maybe you're one of those people and you're wondering now that you're writing How much to use and how much to get rid of It can feel really difficult to know what should go in what should be cut So, I want you to really think about Kathy's advice when you're including any technical parts of your story.

Keep it short and entertaining. Use jargon sparingly and be sure to explain it if it's necessary. And find fun ways to integrate the technical parts through dialogue, for example. In the next part of the podcast, we're going to talk about how Kathy develops her characters and keeps them fresh from one book to the next.

She shares how she balances the personal life of her characters And how she thinks about the development of those characters over the course of each novel, but also within the context of all the books combined. So let's get back to the interview.

Temperance Brennan is this multifaceted character, which I, I think you did a great job of. having her profession, which is, you know, [00:09:00] centrally located in the story.

But you also bring in her personal struggles which I think further just allows readers to relate to her as a character. Can you talk a little bit about when you go into a story, how you plan balancing her professional life and the personal life throughout each of these stories that you're telling with her?

Kathy Reichs: It's like writing, For TV, where you have your A story, your B story, your C story. So you've got multiple things going on. So I do like to do that in the books and always have done that in the books as well. So while your main story, your A story is going to be the crime that she's working on.

You've also got what's going on in her, her personal life. And in this book, she meets a new character, a journalist named Ivy Doyle. Normally Tempe is not, Open to interacting with journalists while she's working on a case. But in this case, she, they, they mesh, they hit it off and they end up working together.

So I thought that would be a new element and interesting element to put into the story. Yeah, [00:10:00]

David Gwyn: I think that's so interesting. And, and plays really well in, in this book. I'm really kind of curious how your writing process has evolved over the course of these these 23 novels.

How do you go about writing a book now? And, how is it different? I mean, if you're thinking about plotting character development, obviously character development, you've got new characters in every story. So how has your writing process evolved over the course of your writing career? 

Kathy Reichs: I don't know that it's evolved a whole lot.

I began as a scientist and writing scientific works, you know, articles, books. So I do some outlining. I am very linear in how I approach writing a book. I start with chapter one and then chapter two and chapter three. My daughter If she's in a good mood, she'll write the romance scene. And if she's in blue, she'll write the death scene.

I can't do it that way. I have to start and work through to the end. Linear in that way. I work by each chapter is a separate file. And I open that file when I begin to write and I start at the beginning and I edit, edit, edit, edit, till I get to the [00:11:00] point where I left off. And then.

That brings me back up to where I was, brings me back into the story, so the beginnings of my chapters can be, you know, they're pretty slick. I've edited them like 10 times. Where's the ending? Yeah, and then I just, I start writing, I start, you know, You know, the flow from there. 

David Gwyn: I love that process. I haven't heard that.

With the, with the separate documents and I imagine that gets to, like you mentioned at a place where when you're finally at the end of this book, not only did you know the story really well, but it's also, I imagine that the writing is really clean on your story. And so. What do you think, I mean, when, when you're going through this editing process, are you editing, I mean, are you editing everything or are you just kind of editing the big parts and then focusing on things like copy editing and things like kind of the word choice later on or is all that happening all at once?

Kathy Reichs: For me, that all happens at once. So that once I finish a chapter, I keep up of what I call complete, which is the whole book. So once I've finished a chapter, that file, and I'm satisfied that it's as good as it's going to be for a [00:12:00] while anyway, then I copy it and put it into the complete, so that by the time I finish, I've got a separate file for each chapter, but I've got a master file, which is the whole book in its entirety.

And then of course, I'll go back and edit that multiple times. 

David Gwyn: Wow. Wow. That's really interesting. obviously there's a lot of writers who listen to this podcast and I imagine they're intrigued by, by your system here

And so one of my last questions for you here is just, what are you working on now?

What's on the horizon for you? 

Kathy Reichs: Well, I'm working on the next book, the book 24, I guess would be the next book. I don't know how much to tell you about that. 

It's going to take a look at evil. And how do we define evil and what really qualifies as evil and who's capable of perpetrating that kind of an act.

David Gwyn: Wow. And what part of the process, are you still writing, are you editing, like where are you in that, in that book? 

Kathy Reichs: I am still, I'm writing. I'm still writing. Nice. That's 

David Gwyn: awesome. 

Kathy Reichs: As far along as I should be, my publisher, but I'm working on it and hopefully that book will be out next year about this.

David Gwyn: That's great. Well, congratulations. So [00:13:00] my last question for you is just, where can people find you? Where can people look you up? 

Kathy Reichs: Oh, all the usual suspects. I'm at Kathy reichs. com. I'm at, at Kathy reichs on X, I guess we're calling it now, you know, all the social media I'm there and it's usually just using my name.

David Gwyn: Perfect. And yeah, so if you're, if you're listening to this I will link to that stuff. So you've got quick access to Kathy. Kathy, I can't thank you enough. I really appreciate you sharing your expertise with us. 

Kathy Reichs: Well, thank you for inviting me on. 

David Gwyn: Okay, so that's it. I hope you learned as much as I did from Kathy. Next week we'll hear from Liz Alterman about how she developed the dual point of views in her novel, the House on Cold Creek Lane, which is out right now. So if you wanna scoop it up between now and then and read it, and then you can see what Liz is talking about during our chat, you might get even more outta that conversation. Until next time, keep writing, keep pitching, and keep believing in your story, and I'll see you next week.