PHOTO: Steven James, acclaimed author and storyteller, at home in the Appalachian Highlands where many of his stories take shape.
Exploring Storytelling Craft And Creative Discovery
Steven James, bestselling author and master storyteller, discusses organic writing, suspense versus horror, narrative pivots, and the power of storytelling, offering candid advice and insights from his wide-ranging career.
Steven James has built a career on the power of story—not merely as a writer of novels, but as a thinker, teacher, and craftsman of narrative itself. With more than twenty books to his name, spanning suspense, horror, science fiction, and young adult fiction, he continues to push against the boundaries of genre, exploring not only what makes a story work, but why stories matter. His fiction brims with intensity and imagination, while his nonfiction reveals the underlying architecture of tales that captivate and endure.
Across decades of writing, teaching, and speaking, James has remained committed to one essential truth: storytelling is not about a neat arrangement of events, but about desire, conflict, and the human pursuit at the heart of every tale. Whether in the Appalachian settings of Rift, the relentless drive of his thrillers, or the craft insights of Delve, Pivot, Propel, he has consistently reminded us that stories come alive when they spring organically from character, rather than formula.
A consummate storyteller, James has also carried his love of narrative far beyond the page. Through The Story Blender podcast, he has drawn wisdom from hundreds of the world’s finest writers, always with a curiosity for what lies beneath the surface of a scene, a character, or a choice. His reflections reveal a writer deeply attuned not only to the mechanics of suspense, but to the subtleties of emotion—the “but also” that lingers behind every reaction.
With Publishers Weekly hailing him as “a master storyteller at the peak of his game,” Steven James continues to embody both artistry and generosity: writing with intensity, teaching with clarity, and living with the conviction that stories are not simply told, but discovered.
The Art of the Tale explores storytelling for leaders—what storytelling techniques from that book do you find translate best into thriller fiction?
Thrillers are built on promises and payoff just like many oral stories are. When telling a story, you might make the “promise” by your inflection or your body language and so on. We don’t have those available when writing stories, but we can make narrative promisesby drawing attention to different aspects of the story through specificity (details about something in the story) or magnitude (how much we write about it). So that’s the key: promise making.
And the keeping them.
Suspense occurs in the space between promise and fulfillment when we stretch out what other authors skip over.
Your YA horror, Rift, marks a genre shift—how did writing a trilogy for young adults in the Appalachian Mountains challenge your usual suspense structures?
I love that question. It wasn’t so much the structure of the stories that’s different, but more the degree to which I tried to appeal to dread rather than simply concern.
In my view, with suspense, I’m afraid to look away because something might happen to someone I care about. With horror, I’m afraid to look because I’m about to see something I don’t want to see.
With suspense, it’s concern.
With horror, it’s dread.
This shift in emphasis affected the timing of reveals, the emotional impact I was shooting for in each scene, and the eventual payoff for the promises made early in the book. (Yeah, it’s about promise-keeping again.)
With Delve, Pivot, Propel, offering new approaches to fiction writing, which “pivot” moment in your own career do you foresee as most instructive for other novelists?
A pivot is a moment that’s both unexpected and inevitable. It contains a surprise, but also follows logically from what preceded it. Pivots make perfect sense, but satisfy readers in a way they didn’t anticipate.
Regarding my own career, I think the biggest unforeseen pivot was when I moved away from trying to outline or “plot out” a story and began to write organically. Trying to outline set my career back about five years as I tried to figure out how to do it and continually failed.
Finally, I thought, Why make this so hard? Why not just write the story?
So—finally—I embraced organic writing and my career took off.
The worst advice I ever received about writing was to outline a story.
I see it as vital to be receptive to the story as it unfolds rather than clinging to some sort of preconceptions about where the story “should” go.
Having earned an MA in Storytelling, how does academic training in narrative shape your process compared with instincts of genre conventions?
I thought I knew what a story was. After all, I’d written two award-winning books on writing, I had a master’s degree in storytelling, I’d written more than a dozen novels, and I’d taught writing or presented keynotes thousands of times all across the world.
So, yeah. I was an expert on story.
Or so I thought.
Until three years ago.
My academic studies in storytelling provided some framework for understanding story, but eventually it was through the process of writing that I began to finally realize what a story truly is.
And it wasn’t what I thought.
Basically, when most people think of a story, the think of “something with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” This definition is parroted back endlessly to aspiring authors at writing conferences and in how-to books, but I don’t like it because it gives people the impression that a story is about a progression of events instead of a collision of desires. At their core, stories are not about events occurring—that is, plot. They’re about intention-infused pursuits.
You can have all the plot in the world, but if you don’t have pursuit—if you don’t have desire-driven choices—you aren’t going to have a very poignant story.
You’ve interviewed top writers on The Story Blender podcast—what insight form those interviews most influenced your latest fiction?
Yes, over the years, I’ve interviewed more than 200 of the top writers and storytellers in the world on the secrets to great storytelling. Each week we chat about more than their approach—we dive deeply into what actually makes a story work.
I’d say that, most recently, I’ve been thinking not in terms of what a character feels on the surface, but what lies underneath the obvious.
For instance, let’s say that your character is offered a new job. Well, on the surface, they might be excited about the new possibilities, but likely they’ll also feel something else: Fear that they might not enjoy it? Apprehension about moving across the country? Hope that they will fit in?
It’s that secondary emotion that I want to dive into in my stories. So, I’ve been asking the “but also” question: “Obviously, my character is… but what are they feeling beneath the surface? What is the ‘but also’?”
Accentuating that deepens the characterization, adds tension, and fleshes the characters out more fully.
What one piece of advice would you give aspiring authors hoping to master both suspense fiction and the craft of storytelling?
Stop following outlines.
Stop depending on templates and formulas.
Stop constricting yourself. Instead, let the story emerge as you write, respond to the direction that it’s leaning into, stop trying to define where it “should” go and what the characters “should” do.
Cut the leash you have on your characters and let them act without restraint. Abandon your preconceptions about the story and be ready to jettison anything that doesn’t contribute to the reader’s engagement or entertainment. Do those things and you’ll find that your stories begin to resonate because they have natural pivots, they’re honest about human nature, and they provide deeper, more irresistible characters.
