Ask the Author: Matt Fulton

“Ask me a question.” Matt Fulton

Answered Questions (9)

Sort By:

An error occurred while sorting questions for author Matt Fulton.

Hello Matt. Re - Reading Active Measures part 1, something came to mind. Nina Davenport. Driven, dedicated case officer. She is a realistic portrayal of a modern day spy. My question, was she intended to be a foil for Carrie Matherson of Homeland fame? Carrie is everything Davenport isn't. Gifted but horrific and unfit for her job and the sort of person most intelligence services would not touch with a barge pole.

Matt Fulton The creation of Nina Davenport as a character predates Homeland's first season by about 9 years, so I wouldn't say Nina is meant to be a response to Carrie Mathison (full disclosure: I've never watched Homeland). Rather, while I'd say Nina and Carrie are certainly cut from the same cloth--i.e. that group of methodical, driven counterterrorism analysts and targeting officers who came to prominence in Langley after 9/11--they differ widely in personal qualities. That's not to say Nina has no character flaws (she definitely does) but hers are more more subtle, more internal. Nina focuses on her target to the point of obsession, neglecting nearly everything else around her, and this is something she's done for years now. As she takes a moment to stop and look around at the personal wreckage of her life, she's beginning to realize the cost of that obsession. Yet more than that, I think there's something much deeper to her that needs to be explored--there's a reason she obsesses over this rogue's gallery; there's something else she's trying to avoid by hunting ghosts.

flag

1 like · like
Comment

Hello Matt, in this day and age of contemporary spy/geopolitical fiction, the henchman gets a short shift. But in your stark, realistic geopolitical thriller devoid of Bond like trappings, you made an entire stand - out unit of henchmen for one of the characters, "Team Beowulf". How did they come about and what ideas did you throw around developing their characterization?

Matt Fulton Thanks for the question. That little company first came about primarily through necessity. I wanted Kazanoff to have his own men independent of al-Din's loyalists in Hezbollah, which naturally brought me to search Russian SOF and special services. Using a standing unit didn't quite fit the bill from from an OPSEC perspective, so I decided to have Kazanoff source his team from the GRU Spetsnaz units that have recently seen action in Ukraine, and even some of the militias loyal to the Chechen president (who, as you'll see in Part II, is a twisted fellow named Ramzan Umarov).

After I figured out where these guys might come from, I had to factor in what sort of person would serve an individual like Kazanoff and the influence he might have on them. You can clearly see that influence in Part I. Moving into Part II, I'll say it might be better to call them acolytes, rather than henchmen.

flag

3 likes · like
1 comment

I can't remember reading a novel with such detailed description on a variety of totally different topics. Therefore my question. How did you approach the research and what things were the most difficult to get right?

Matt Fulton Great question. To be honest, researching Part I was pretty scattershot. I mostly researched as I wrote, taking time to handle different problems as I confronted them in the plot. All the discussion of nuclear physics was probably the most difficult (and it's just going to get worse in Part II). I really value those mundane, day-to-day details of life inside the Intelligence Community, the State Department, etc (how their offices look, how schedules are set up, how things actually work from one minute to the next) and I found those little things are most difficult to come upon. You can read a huge book about a given issue or organization and often the author will leave those details out because, to most readers, they're irrelevant--but of course, to people like me, the opposite is true.

Another big issue was (and continues to be) portraying the Special Operations community. Obviously, not having any service experience myself, I went into this project about as blind as one could be, and that was pretty intimidating. Looking in, I find the community to be extremely guarded and almost suspicious of "outsiders," for lack of a better term. It was important to me to do them justice, not to portray them a flawless superheroes who go and kill the terrorists who simply hate our freedom, or something. That's not a story I'm interested in telling and so I think it was important to keep that in mind from the very outset. Of course, I hope I did them justice. It's not really up to me anymore, but I'll certainly keep trying.

flag

1 like · like
1 comment

Hi Matt! How did you develop your 5 key characters? I love how nuanced and layered they are! And I'm especially interested to learn with what ideas you were juggling around with when you created David Kazanoff and if there were other famous villains that influenced him?

Matt Fulton Thanks for the question, buddy. Jack, Ryan, Nina and Harris all serve to fulfill very specific emotional goals that will come to pass in Part III of the trilogy--which I can't really talk about!--so it's hard for me to go into great detail about it; but they are all carefully carved pieces of the puzzle.

Regarding Kazanoff...he's a pretty special guy. He's always been the "big bad" of the story, going back fourteen years now, but how I've interpreted him has changed a lot. I went through a bad depression in college a few years ago and that had a HUGE impact on his character. You know, in a way, he's not really even a villain (in the sense that, would you call a lion a villain for shredding apart a gazelle?) but more like a virus rampaging through the DNA of this story. At the end of it all--after the politics, after the tradecraft--Kazanoff is just Death coming for everyone and everything. He's the great equalizer.

And a quick addendum! If you're really a sick SOB and want to get into Kazanoff's mindset, check out THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE and TEATRO GROTTESCO by Thomas Ligotti, antinatalism philosophy, or any sort of cosmic horror by Lovecraft or Robert W. Chambers--monsters that aren't scary because they render us dead, but rather render us insignificant against our own universe. All good beach reading!

flag

1 like · like
2 comments

How do you get inspired to write?

Matt Fulton I'd like to bring a certain quality and depth back to the genre that I think has been lacking for some time. I want to tell complicated stories with nuanced characters who are ultimately confronted by the horrors of human nature... Or something like that.

flag

1 like · like
Comment

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Matt Fulton Maybe they could advise me!

flag

1 like · like
Comment

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Matt Fulton There's no real answer for that. The five principal characters in the trilogy have been with me for about fourteen years. Their world and the plots surrounding them have gradually built up over time.

flag