The Writer’s Corner: The Craft of Writing Political Thrillers

Last month marked the twentieth anniversary since I began writing my first political thriller, The Last Jihad. As I reflect on twenty years in this crazy business, I thought it might be fun to use my next two columns for The Writer’s Corner to tell you how I got started.

In January 2001, I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. After ten years of working for various think tanks in Washington and as an advisor to various U.S. and Israeli political leaders, I really had nothing to show for it. Everyone I had ever worked for had lost. I had helped Steve Forbes lose two presidential elections and about $70 million of his five daughters’ future inheritance money. Most recently, I had worked for Israel’s then-former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I was part of his “comeback campaign team” for several months in the fall of 2000, but by that December he had been blocked from running for office through a loophole in Israel’s election laws. As it happened, he didn’t come back to the PM’s office for another nine years, and thus he didn’t need me anymore.

Then came January. George W. Bush was about to be inaugurated and begin his first term as president. Out of the blue, I got a call from Peggy Noonan, the former speechwriter for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. She told me that there was a job opening at the White House for an economics speechwriter. Knowing that I had been the communications director and speechwriter for Steve Forbes, she wanted to know if she could recommend me. Hopeful, I said, “Sure.”

 

Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. The Bush crew valued loyalty above all, and I had been on the team that ran against him.

With few clients for the communications consulting company I had started, and few prospects, I began wondering if it was finally time. Ever since I was eight years old, I had dreamt of telling stories, either writing screenplays or novels or both. It really didn’t matter to me the medium; I just wanted to take people on an adventure. Maybe it was finally time to stop dreaming and start writing.

I had been chewing on this idea for a political thriller for a while. So I decided to carve out some time from my fledgling business and begin working on this book. It was in January 2001 that I sat down in front of my computer and typed that first page, the one that put readers inside the cockpit of a jet plane that had been hijacked by radical Islamist terrorists and was now on a kamikaze attack mission in an American city.

That was almost nine months before September 11, 2001. I had no idea what was coming. I wasn’t trying to predict the future. But as I plotted out my story, my fictional American president decides to retaliate for the kamikaze attack by launching a war against the radical Islamist terrorist cells throughout the Middle East and North Africa and by removing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from power because of Saddam’s ties to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

That was the novel. That’s the story I began to type in our little town house, located fifteen minutes away from Washington’s Dulles International Airport that cold January day.

By March, I had three polished chapters ready. I was excited about them and thought they just might have potential. However, I didn’t have a contract. I didn’t even have an agent. All I had were three chapters and a dream of becoming a published novelist.

How could I now transform those first chapters of The Last Jihad into a completed manuscript and get it onto the shelves of bookstores across the country? Stay tuned. I’ll tell you that part of the story next month.

—Joel C. Rosenberg