As a new generation of excellent spy fiction writers emerges in the West, I took a sentimental look back at one of my American favorites—the late Charles McCarry, writer par excellence, former CIA man, and undercover operative in Africa, Asia, and Europe. I discovered an old interview with him and found great insights for authors of every genre.

In his first novel, The Miernik Dossier, published in 1973, he was already thinking about the challenges of being a novelist. Paul Christopher, protagonist of at least ten of his novels, says, “There is an artistry to what we are doing: spies are like novelists—except that spies use living people and real places to make their works of art.” In the interview, McCarry reiterated his view that there’s a striking similarity “between the creative process and tradecraft.”

The spy’s clandestine operation is the plot with almost inevitable twists and turns; agents are akin to stories’ protagonists; and the people they interact with are love interests, antagonists, and other sometimes disruptive characters. Authors often complain about their fictional characters not sticking to the plot—“minds of their own.” They go off the page, introduce unexpected complications, misbehave. Certainly, real-life people often don’t do what you expect or want them to, either.

A lot of story complications and their fallout emerge from below the writer’s conscious level. As a person who’s a “pantser”—that is I write by the seat of my pants, rather than with elaborate notes and outlines—I appreciate McCarry’s saying that, for him, writing remained a mystery, as with spying, where “I never quite understood what was going on.” I can relate. In my novel, Architect of Courage, there was a lot in there that I didn’t even realize until I was finished. “Oh, yeah. The subconscious mind at work again.”

McCarry created a character who was the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the book Shelley’s Heart. This fictional person turned out to be much more significant than McCarry expected. “Every morning when I sat down to write my 1,500 words, he would pull some other stunt.” Yet these actions were all perfectly logical in terms of where the plot and characters were going. Somewhere in a writer’s head, he believed, the brain must be assembling elements and figuring out how they work together.

One time in Kyoto, McCarry was in a Buddhist temple, trying to meditate, and discouraged that he couldn’t clear his mind and concentrate. The Zen master said something to this effect, “Don’t you realize that what those monks are trying to achieve is what you achieve every time you write a poem or a story? That is, the opening of consciousness.” Sliding open the doors between the conscious, the unconscious, and the subconscious, so that the work can be influenced by all three.

Acclaimed author Robert Olen Butler says you’re most likely to have access to the subconscious in the early morning while you’re still half-asleep! Before caffeine, the phone, and your analytic, goal-oriented mind take over. You can sometimes tell when a piece of writing was dominated by the author’s conscious mind—or as I think of it, their head not their heart. It may be logical, but it’s thin. It hurtles head-long toward a fixed goal (conclusion), when the characters clearly want to do something else. Artists in many fields talk about arriving at a trance-like state, when they’re deeply submerged in the creative process. Writers do too! In other words, basically, they make their “whole mind” work for them.

Recent espionage novels I’ve especially enjoyed:
The Translator by Harriet Crawley
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry
Moscow X by David McCloskey
All three novels by James Wolff that shatter spy stereotypes. The first: Beside the Syrian Sea.