October 11, 2024 • 12 min read
Every book has a story behind it. Not the story on the page, but the story of how it came to exist. Where the idea started. What obstacles appeared along the way. What the writer learned in the process of bringing it to life.
This is the story behind The Psychotic Intruder.
Where It Started
The seed of this book was a question that wouldn’t leave me alone: what would it take to push an ordinary person past their limits?
I wasn’t interested in writing about criminals or psychopaths or people who were already broken when the story started. I wanted to write about someone normal. Someone decent. Someone who had built a life based on playing by the rules. And I wanted to explore what happens when that approach stops working.
Johnny Allen emerged from that question. A postman with a steady job, a loving marriage, a daughter he adored. Nothing special about him, and that was the point. He could be anyone. He could be someone you know. He could, in different circumstances, be you.
Finding the World
Once I had Johnny, I needed a world for him to inhabit. I chose Newbury deliberately. It’s a real place that most readers won’t know intimately, which gives me freedom to create my own version of it. But it’s also a specific kind of English town: modest, working class, the kind of place where people know each other and nothing much seems to happen.
The decision to make Johnny a taxi driver came from wanting to put him in contact with all sorts of people. A taxi driver sees the full range of human behavior. They hear stories. They’re present for moments of vulnerability and anger and celebration. They’re also in a profession with its own social dynamics, hierarchies, and conflicts.
The taxi rank became a microcosm of the larger world Johnny navigates. Small grievances and petty power plays that might seem trivial from outside but feel very real to the people involved.
The Supporting Cast
A protagonist is only as interesting as the people around them. Johnny needed relationships that would both ground him and test him.
Kim, his wife, represents everything stable in his life. Their marriage is genuine and deep, which means it has the most to lose. Writing their relationship was important to me because I wanted readers to feel what’s at stake as Johnny changes. If his home life were already troubled, his deterioration would feel less significant.
Joey, his best friend, is a more complicated presence. They’ve known each other since childhood, which creates loyalty. But Joey has his own issues and makes his own questionable choices. Through Joey, Johnny is connected to a world that operates by different rules than the ones he’s always followed.
Then there’s Lizzy, Johnny’s daughter, and Andy, her fiance. Their storyline brings genuine tragedy into the book and raises the emotional stakes considerably. What happens to them affects Johnny profoundly and accelerates his transformation in ways I won’t spoil here.
The Writing Process
I’m not a plotter. I don’t outline every chapter before I start writing. Instead, I knew the beginning, I knew roughly where I wanted to end up, and I trusted the characters to find their way there.
This approach has risks. There were times when I wrote myself into corners and had to backtrack. There were characters who didn’t work and had to be cut or combined with others. There were subplots that felt important at the time but ultimately distracted from the main story.
But there were also discoveries I never could have planned. Scenes that emerged from the characters and surprised me. Connections between storylines that I didn’t see until I was deep into the writing. These moments of discovery are why I write this way, even when it’s messy.
The Hard Parts
The most difficult thing about writing this book was maintaining psychological authenticity as Johnny’s mental state deteriorates. I didn’t want it to feel like a switch being flipped. Real psychological change is gradual and often invisible from inside.
I rewrote many sections multiple times trying to get the pacing right. Too fast and it felt unbelievable. Too slow and it lost momentum. Finding the balance was painstaking work, adjusting a scene here, adding a moment of clarity there, making sure the reader could follow the logic even when that logic was starting to fray.
Another challenge was the secondary storylines. Luke Stapleton’s criminal activities. The dynamics at the hospital where Kim works. Joey and Diane’s relationship problems. Each of these threads had to serve the larger story while also feeling complete in themselves. Weaving them together required constant revision and a willingness to cut material I had worked hard on when it didn’t fit.
What I Learned
Writing this book taught me several things I’ll carry into future projects.
First, ordinary life is endlessly interesting if you pay attention to it. The drama doesn’t have to come from extraordinary circumstances. It can come from the accumulated weight of everyday frustrations and the small choices we make in response to them.
Second, readers will follow a character anywhere if they understand them. Understanding isn’t the same as approving. But if readers can see why a character does what they do, they’ll stay engaged even when those actions are troubling.
Third, the support of people who believe in you matters more than I ever realized. My daughter Lauren was there through every difficult stretch, encouraging me to keep going when I wanted to abandon the whole project. Without her, this book wouldn’t exist.
What Comes Next
I’m already working on my second novel. It explores different territory, but with the same commitment to psychological authenticity and moral complexity that drove The Psychotic Intruder.
If the first book asked what pushes someone to their breaking point, the next one asks what happens after they’ve already broken. How do you rebuild? Can you? And what gets lost in the process that can never be recovered?
I can’t wait to share it with you. In the meantime, thank you for reading, and thank you for your interest in the story behind the story.