Note: this transcript was generated by AI and only lightly edited, so there may be errors or typos.

[00:00:04.040] – Alan Petersen
Hey there, thriller fans. Welcome to Meet the Thriller Author, the podcast where I chat with best-selling thriller writers about their books, their writing process, and all things suspense. I’m your host, Alan Petersen, and I’m a thriller author myself. If you love Edge of your Seat stories, you are in the right place. This is episode number 214, and I’m beyond excited to welcome today’s guest, none other than Gregg Hurwitz, the mastermind behind the Orphan X series. His latest book, Nemesis, Evan Smoak into uncharted emotional and physical territory, delivering another adrenaline-fueled, thought-provoking thriller by Gregg. We’ll dive into Gregg’s writing process, what inspired Nemesis, and what’s next for Orphan X. You don’t want to miss this one. Before we jump in, I have a quick favor to ask. If you enjoy this podcast, please take a moment to rate and review it on your favorite podcast platform, especially if you’re listening on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Your support helps more thriller fans discover the show. Also, be sure to visit thrillerauthors. Com for show notes, the full transcript and access to my archive of over 200 interviews with some of the biggest names in the thriller world. If you’d like to check out my own readers, connect with me on social media, or join my exclusive newsletter, Thrilling Reads, head on over to thrillingreads.com. All right, let’s get to it. Here’s my conversation with Gregg Hurwitz.

[00:01:20.860] – Alan Petersen
Hey, everybody. This is Alan with Meet the Thriller author. Today, I’m thrilled to have Gregg Hurwitz with us. Number one, New York Times bestselling author, and of Of course, the creator of the legendary Orphan X series, master of the high stakes, action-packed storytelling. Love his books. Gregg, thank you for joining us.

[00:01:38.870] – Gregg Hurwitz
It’s good to see you, Alan. Thank you for having me on.

[00:01:40.930] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, thank you. Just got an incredible nemesis is set to be released in February of 2025, next month. And so the Orphan X has reached 10 books now. So I have to ask you, could you reflect back on that journey? Did you ever imagine it would last this long? What are your feelings about that?

[00:02:00.850] – Gregg Hurwitz
It’s pretty wild to be at 10. I mean, I never really was a series writer. I wrote the Tim Rackley books, which were four early in my career. But Orphan X always had a very different feel. I mean, I wrote it right when I was verging on 40 years old, and I feel like I put so much of what I was going through and dealing with at that point in my life into it. But it’s pretty amazing to see the 10th one come out. And you can grab it as a standalone if you’ve not picked up Orphan X, or if you followed the series, you’re going to see it as a culmination of sort. So I’m always walking that tightrope between welcoming new readers in to the series and also having there be a bit more depth and texture for people who are series readers. So it goes both ways. But I’m super excited for this one. I lost the battle. I was going to name it X for the Roman numeral 10 for the 10th one. But we thought we wanted something that was a bit more grabby, and I like the title this a lot.

[00:03:00.600] – Gregg Hurwitz
I can’t wait for it to come out, man. It drops February 11th, and I’m touring. It’s my biggest tour I’ve done in years. I’m going to be all over the country.

[00:03:08.300] – Alan Petersen
Oh, wow. When does that start? When does that kick off? On pub date?

[00:03:12.570] – Gregg Hurwitz
Yeah, February 11th. Then I mean, I’m in Florida, I’m in Ohio, I’m in New York, I’m in Texas, I’m in Arizona, I’m going all over California. So it’s a big one, and I’m really excited. I’m doing something in Philly. I’m hitting a lot of spots this year, so I’m really excited to see fans along the way.

[00:03:30.500] – Alan Petersen
Cool. Yeah, that’d be awesome. So I have to ask you, too, now, because it’s interesting you said that about the… Because I started at, I think it was the third or fourth book, and it was a complete standalone, but it was so good, of course, and then I went back.

[00:03:44.750] – Gregg Hurwitz
Oh, good. I love readers like you, Alan.

[00:03:46.810] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I always love that, though. Because sometimes you see a series, you’re like, oh, man, I have to start from the beginning.

[00:03:53.920] – Gregg Hurwitz
It’s important to me. People pick up books any which way, and that’s a very important balance for me because I don’t always read a series completely beginning to end. I bounce around a lot. And so I always want to make sure all viewers are welcome. But for people who are hardcore fans, there’s a lot. And long-time readers, there’s a lot in this one for them.

[00:04:14.820] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, this was very special, too, because… And we can get a little bit into it now. Tommy Stojak has been a character. He’s appeared in a few of the books before. His relationship with Evan Smoak now is It’s very central to this story. There’s a clash between them two. Can you walk us about that through that process? And what were your thoughts about having them turn against each other? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:04:43.870] – Gregg Hurwitz
Well, it’s interesting. For the 10th book, one of the phrases that I think is seminal to the series is, just for those listeners who don’t know the series, Orphanax, his name is Evan Smoak, and he was taken out of a foster home by the age of 12 and trained to be an assassin through very, very deep black program in the US government. And then he left it and became a pro bono assassin. He went on the run from the program, and people call him who are in desperate need. They call 1-855 to nowhere, which you can call, and you can see if anyone answers. But the key for me was that when he was raised outside this foster home, it wasn’t this horrible traumatic thing because his handler is a character named Jack Johns, and he loved this kid. He was like a father figure to him. And one thing he always told Evan was the hard part isn’t making you a killer. The hard part is keeping you human. And so it’s very telling that as Evan tries to hold on, those are two very opposing directives, and he tries to hold on to his humanity.

[00:05:43.400] – Gregg Hurwitz
One of the things I say is he never learned how to speak the strange language of intimacy. But as he’s progressed in his humanness, it seemed inevitable that at some point there would be this clash between him and somebody who he has undeniably become close with. And that person is Tommy Stojack. He’s a crusty old armor, early UDT diver in the Navy. He does all of Evan’s guns. He does all of his testing. He does all the ordinances. He’s Evan’s closest friend in the world, and their respective codes have put them on a collision course. And so there’s this horrifyingly personal element to the story where Evan, in his relentlessness as Orphan X, he’s also known as the Nowhere Man, is coming at another character who he and we both love. And that clash and that movement towards him was something I really wanted to highlight.

[00:06:34.150] – Alan Petersen
Is that when you were decided that you wanted to go into that, did you know right away that you wanted that Tommy was going to be the one?

[00:06:40.410] – Gregg Hurwitz
Tommy is the best, man. And they’re very different. Tommy is very rural. Well, Evan’s more urban. Evan grew up in East Baltimore, and Tommy’s very red state. And so there’s all these parts of them that fit together so beautifully. But when they get offset, things in this book, there’s almost like a tribal enmity between them.

[00:07:00.390] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I noticed that in this book, the ruralness of it was actually a big part, like the secondary character to it all. Can you tell us about that process and taking him out, taking Evan Smoak out of his usual element Yeah, well, that was really important to me because Evan’s got his people who he’s accustomed to dealing with and protecting.

[00:07:23.600] – Gregg Hurwitz
And Tommy’s from a very rural town that’s like this, and they have different ways they make meaning in the world. They have different Tommy, I think, is much more religious in his outlook. And so there’s these very different sets that go with the environment. And having Evan in a rural environment was really cool. I spent a lot of time in rural neighborhoods, seeing what the problems were, trying to help to unstick problems here and there where I could. And it was very, very telling. And it was great to put him there where he’s a fish out of water and where we’re inadvertently maybe even rooting for Tommy and the guys on Tommy’s side over Evan at times. I wanted the book to be conflicting and confusing, and of course, deeply emotional.

[00:08:05.570] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s something that was so interesting, too. Was that something like you mentioned that it was important to you? How do you balance that, though? Because we’re dealing with a lot of philosophical and emotional elements here, but you’re still delivering an action-packed. Is that something? Do you think about that when you’re planning this? Or what’s your process to coming up with that?

[00:08:27.300] – Gregg Hurwitz
Well, that’s the most important toggle in a thriller because I never want to sacrifice character development. Character is what we remember more than anything. If I asked you your favorite James Bond action scene, you’d probably hesitate and think for a moment, but we all know immediately how he takes his Martini. What draws us is the character and spending time with that character, but it’s got to be wrapped in propulsive action or suspense. And so the toggling between those is so important. And the key really is to have the suspense progressing as character gets illuminated along the way, that they’re part and parcel. So oftentimes I’m asked, what’s more important, character or plot? And I always think that plot is nothing more than character in motion. And if you can marry those two elements, then you really have a cooking. So when Evan’s in a suspense sequence or there’s an action scene or some violence perpetrated, how he contends with it is unique to him. It won’t read like a Jack Reacher action sequence or Jason Bourne action sequence. It has to read like it’s of Orphan X and that he has his own stamp on it, and that stamp is of his character.

[00:09:37.770] – Alan Petersen
You mentioned that you went out to the rural areas for your research process, and your books always incorporate a lot of cutting-edge technology. So I’m curious about that process. How much research do you put into a book before you actually start writing the story?

[00:09:57.760] – Gregg Hurwitz
A lot. I got to talk to a lot of people who are smarter than me in one area. I mean, maybe in many areas, but in particular in one area where I’m really trying to drill down, whether that’s hacking, whether for Lone Wolf, my last one, I’m really exploring AI and how it gets off our screen and scrambles its way into our brains and tries to commandere us. I’ve talked to a lot of experts in AI. I held a little AI summit at my house with some world leading experts in AI and engineers and theologians. And I love exploring these different areas and then seeing what stories I can generate out of them.

[00:10:32.830] – Alan Petersen
Oh, wow.

[00:10:33.120] – Alan Petersen
It’s fascinating.

[00:10:34.010] – Gregg Hurwitz
The gun stuff is fun. I trained in mixed martial arts fighting before I embarked on the series. I’ve shot every gun that Evan uses. I’ve snuck on a demolition range with Navy Seals and I’ll own up cars. The action and physical parts is really fun, but there’s a very strong element in a lot of these of how are technologies working on us? How are our divisions working against us? In this one, there’s a lot of emphasis dispaid or indicated to the forces that are built on tearing us apart and dividing us from one another and vilifying us.

[00:11:08.380] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. It’s very reflective of what’s going on in the world nowadays. Is that something that you wanted to tackle as part of this, a novel?

[00:11:19.630] – Gregg Hurwitz
Yeah. I mean, I’m never writing a novel from a idealistic or partisan, God forbid, or abstract perspective. For me, the story always comes first, But when I’m setting it in time, I don’t want straw men anywhere. I want steel men all the way around. And what that means is really inhabiting different characters and points of view. I think it’s something that we’re not motivated to doing. We’re a bit atrophied at that right now as Americans. And I think it’s really important to think about how do we truly embody different characters. And that’s what being a novelist is. It’s pulling on the face mask of another character and trying to see the world through their eye holes.

[00:11:58.030] – Alan Petersen
And for your writing process, So do you outline? Can you walk us through a little bit about your process?

[00:12:05.240] – Gregg Hurwitz
I have a very flexible outline. I tend to have 20 to 30 pages of bullet points, and that could be scenes, it could be acts of violence, it could be snatches of dialog, it could be little character notes. And I shape them up very, very roughly. And then as I’m writing the book, the outline, I call it a rolling outline. It’s a living, breathing outline. So it’s changing, and I’m writing in the outline constantly as I’m writing in the book. And the outline tends to swell, and then slowly it shrinks and gets absorbed in the manuscript. And at the end, I have a full 400-page manuscript over here and an empty word file on the left, which I then trash.

[00:12:45.010] – Alan Petersen
Oh, wow. Facinating. That’s very different from everyone else I’ve been doing for this podcast. That’s a very interesting process. It sounds as if you use word as your main writing tool. I do. Yeah.

[00:12:57.580] – Gregg Hurwitz
Having the outline that way lets me be open a discovery. Because once I’m breathing life into the scenes and the characters, then I’m aware of what I just discover so much along the way. And I don’t want to just be locked into an outline, but I need to know that I have this a chunky structural hold through the story, at least.

[00:13:17.290] – Alan Petersen
It’s interesting, too. I was reading in researching for this interview was that you’re like an anti-polarization expert. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I wasn’t too familiar with that and how you worked that into Nemesis.

[00:13:34.180] – Gregg Hurwitz
That’s interesting. Well, I’d say that the example that I gave about being a novelist, trying to embody different viewpoints, I’ve always done that in politics. So I’ve been done a lot of work opposing extremism and trying to build bridges and pull differing sides together since about 2015. I’ve done polling and research and psychometrics and created content. I mean, I’ve created content around around this that’s got hundreds of millions of views. I’ve written a couple of dozen op-eds. The bottom line for me is trying to get people to understand that just because people think differently or have different value structures than us or make meaning in the world different from us, doesn’t mean that we’re enemies. In fact, the diversity that we have of thoughts and meaning structures and value hierarchies and even political proclivities, that variance between us is what actually strengthens us. It helps us look at issues from a variety of different sizes, which strengthens us when we’re unified and helps us move forward to navigate a complex change in the culture. This is a lot of my interest that I do mostly pro bono interventions in the culture, let’s just say, when I think something really, some form of extremism is threatening from one side or another.

[00:14:54.230] – Gregg Hurwitz
That focus has been very predominant in the last years. I think it’s impossible for it not to creep into my stories. Now, the stories certainly are not some ideological statement, or they’re not political on the face of them, but they take place in the real world, and they’re going to address the kinds of issues and psychological dynamics that are compelling to me that I’m dealing with in the real world as well.

[00:15:18.890] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. Orphan X and Evan Smoaks have been such a big character that it’s become over the years. I’m just curious about that. Why What do you think has been such an enduring character after all these years? Why do you think we’re so into him?

[00:15:36.730] – Gregg Hurwitz
Well, first of all, that’s a lovely question, and it delights me. Look, I think people connect to Evan in a lot of ways because he’s not the biggest guy like Reacher. He’s not the best shot like Swagger. He’s not the most dashing and handsome like Bond. One of the lines I use about him is he’s average size, average build, just an ordinary guy, not too handsome. He’s this every man who can blend in anywhere, but he has to bring the totality of who he is to every circumstance. So he’s constantly working with people who are much smarter than him in one arena, a lot like when I go and talk to my consultants or my subject matter experts words you were asking about. So Tommy Stojack is a better shot than him, and he’s an ordinance expert, and Joey’s a better hacker. So he’s got these different… Melinda Trong is a better forger of documents. And so there’s a nice dynamic where he’s reliant on a whole crew of people who are smarter than him in one thing, and he is the assimilating center who has to take all these things and integrate them and navigate his way through the story.

[00:16:41.510] – Gregg Hurwitz
And he’s humble and he’s polite and he’s tough as and he only uses force when it’s justified, and he has an unbreakable code. There’s a lot of things, I think, in the ways that he uses minimal possible force, but plenty of force when it’s necessary, when there’s no other choice, and we’ll put everything on the to help other people that I think people really connect to. I mean, that and the fact that he’s helping people who have nowhere to turn. They’re really desperate because the system has failed them. The bureaucracies have failed them. No one’s looking out for them. And I think we have an increasing sense of vulnerability in the world. And he’s somebody who will step in to fill that void and try and close the delta between the law and what it offers and trying to get justice for somebody and get them to safety. And he’ll do what needs to be done to do that. But he’s also not a violent vigilante Charles Bronson type. He’s got a very strict code and a very strict edict to help people. I mean, his slogan is, Do you need my help? That’s what he says every time he answers the phone.

[00:17:42.680] – Alan Petersen
I was interested in reading your bio, too, that in addition to novels, you’ve written for TV, for film and comics. Can you tell us a little bit of the difference? Do you treat it different when you’re writing in these different mediums?

[00:17:56.200] – Gregg Hurwitz
Well, yes. I mean, in a novel, the author is everything, right? I’m the cinematographer, I’m the director, I’m hair and makeup, I’m the location scout. When you’re writing a screenplay, a screenplay really is a recipe for a final product or piece of art. It’s an invitation to collaborate stories. And so you’re trying to get things on that intimate what the story is going to be so that other people who are amazing can come in and fill that. Now, in a comic, you have even less room. You have 5-7 snapshots per page. So you have a camera. I can’t show Batman meeting someone, I can show the wind up, I can show the moment of impact, or I can show the aftermath. Sometimes what’s more compelling in a story is just to show the aftermath, and we come in on that. That can suggest things back to me for certain scenes. I’ve written action scenes in Orphan X where he describes everything that’s going to happen, and then I just cut away from the scene, and then four chapters later, the people who were his target show up with all the matching injuries that he said he would inflict on them.

[00:18:58.220] – Gregg Hurwitz
There’s a lot of ways to to play with these things differently. But the other ones that are not novels are much more collaborative, and I’m relying on experts and artists to make me look like I’m a better writer than I am. That’s always the aim is everyone’s got to bring what they have to make everything shine.

[00:19:17.400] – Alan Petersen
We’re talking about AI and the technology and ethics and all that because you’re the co-president of the International Thriller Writers Organization, and there’s so many changes going in the publishing world. I’d love to get your input, your thoughts on that, on the industry and the technology that’s going on with writing and arts. What are your thoughts on all that?

[00:19:43.030] – Gregg Hurwitz
Well, first of all, AI writing has still shown itself to be pretty dense and constipated and stumbling. I mean, it’s okay. It can help. I use AI as a research assistant. It’s very useful. But I think there’s a couple of things that we forget People really like transparency. We did a series of polls for ITW, and we found that something like 94% of people don’t want to read a book by a dead author that’s been regenerated in AI, meaning they don’t want a new Faulkner novel. It’s very important. There’s two ideas that go into that for me of why humans and authors are superior in a lot of ways to the creation of art. We like to see and encounter human excellence. That’s what inspires us and makes us want to soar in a lot of ways. So who the hell would want to turn on and watch an AI basketball game? You want to see Michael Jordan fly. We watch the Olympics for these reasons. When Deep Blue was first invented, which was the early chess-playing machine that was AI, we didn’t want to see it play itself. We wanted to see how Kasparov would fare against it.

[00:20:51.920] – Gregg Hurwitz
So there’s something in humans trying to generate something from themselves with all their hardship and vulnerabilities and missteps and all the things we’ve learned and all of our pain and all of our anguish and our hopes that comes into this thing that’s much more meaningful. And the other thing humans can do that AI can’t is community. And I think we’ve lost some of that. We’ve seen some of that in how unspecial sometimes our viewing habits feel. I’ll be home watching Apple TV, and I have a trillion dollars of free content, and I can’t figure out what the hell to watch because it’s like, oh, it’s another series, and here’s this. It’s so ready, and it’s so different from waiting online for three hours before the first time I saw Tim Burton’s Batman in high school, where it’s a shared community experience and everyone’s gasping and there’s this release of oxytocin and dopamine and adrenaline in a theater. And so this notion that we have our own books that are tailored just to us. If I say, I want a new F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, I want it to be half the length, I want it to have no violence against kids, and my cue is 115, so please dial the vocab to that.

[00:21:59.700] – Gregg Hurwitz
And you push a button, and here comes this little puck of a book that’s designed just for me. That sounds incredible, but it’s also broadly hellish. Who wants to read something that’s only for you? You want to read something that’s from another human being excellent that is shared within a community of people who are reading the same thing. There’s something that’s joyful about that, and that’s part of why book tours are important. I’m leaving on a book tour February 11th. Like I mentioned, I’m going to be all over the country, and I love doing that because people show up and there’s a sense of community around a shared story that’s very important to us.

[00:22:37.080] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, it is very true. The book clubs and Facebook and elsewhere and meetups, and people love to talk about their books. And yeah, if it’s just one book just for you. That’d be a whole different experience, that’s for sure. So I was curious, before I let you go, because I have a Ryan writers that listen to this podcast. What’s your advice for them? If they want to get into writing readers, can you tell us a little bit about that? What advice would you give them?

[00:23:12.570] – Gregg Hurwitz
Well, the first thing I’d say to anybody who wants to write Two pieces of advice that are basic. One, it’s about to put your ass in the chair time. You have to carve out time and make that sacrosanct. You have to make it time because everything will be more important. Getting the dry cleaning, cleaning your desk, doing your taxes, is nothing is important ever or nothing. You’re never going to have writing day 37 of 360 days to complete a novel or 365 days, then some other things that are more pressing. So you have to take that time and be selfish around it the way that athletes have to be selfish. Have a ritual, get in shape for it. When you’re going to the gym or when you’re getting up and getting ready to go to work, you have to have it ritualized and get the time blocked off. The The other thing is, don’t be afraid to get down a vomit draft. You can put everything out. You can’t fix a blank page. If you have something down, no matter how bad, you can then fix it and make it better, even if you cut 90% of it.

[00:24:13.940] – Gregg Hurwitz
So don’t let yourself be critical to the point of paralysis. Then the other thing I’ll say is that what people really want to get at is the thing that is unique in all of us, as unique as our thumbprint, is this so-called voice that everyone talks I really like the voice of this writer. There’s some writers where it’s clear as a Bell, Lee Child and Megan Abbott, and you just know you can read a paragraph and you recognize them. That’s the thing that is the most unique and the rarest that’s within you. The more that you’re emulating or writing scenes that you think, or, Oh, here’s a version of a great Connolly scene or a Cray scene or a Patricia Cornwell scene. Think about yourself and try to unveil all the things that you have to bring to a character or to a scene or story that only you can bring on the basis of that? What are the things that are really true for you? The more that you can try to peel the onion and get to that and have that be suffused through all the scenes into the story and your characters, the more you’re going to have something that shines and stands out.

[00:25:18.150] – Alan Petersen
That’s great advice. Then, of course, I have to ask you a sneak peek about Evan Smoak, Beyond a Nemesis. Are you working on the next one? What are you working on now?

[00:25:29.510] – Gregg Hurwitz
I am indeed. I’m typing away, Alan. Sweet.

[00:25:31.890] – Alan Petersen
Good to hear. All right, Gregg. Well, thank you so much for your time. Nemesis comes out February 11th. Listeners, look for Gregg out on the road. It’ll be a lot of fun. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[00:25:48.900] – Gregg Hurwitz
Great to see you. Thank you.

[00:25:50.540] – Alan Petersen
And that wraps up my conversation with Gregg Herowitz. I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into Nemesis and the Orphan X series. Gregg always delivers top-tier readers, and it was a having him on the show. If you’d like to learn more about Gregg and his books, be sure to visit his website at GreggHurwitz. Net for the latest updates, book info, and more. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It really helps spread the word and keeps the show going strong. You can find the show notes, full transcript, and my archive of over 200 author interviews at thrillerauthors. Com. If you want to check out my own readers, follow me on social media or join my exclusive newsletters newsletter, Thrilling Reads. For book news, giveaways, and more, visit thrillingreads. Com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Meet the Thriller Author.