TM Logan: The Truth Behind the Thrillers
Most of us imagine bestselling authors waiting for inspiration to strike.
A walk in the woods.
A bolt of genius in the middle of the night.
A character who suddenly appears and demands to be written.
The reality, it turns out, is rather less romantic.
At the bottom of his garden sits a purpose-built writing cabin. Every morning, TM Logan walks through the door, sits down at his desk and gets to work.
Because writing, as he sees it, isn’t about waiting for inspiration.
It’s about showing up.
Long before millions of readers discovered his psychological thrillers, Logan was a national newspaper journalist, working as the Daily Mail’s Science Reporter. It was a career many people would have been perfectly happy to keep.
He wasn’t one of them.
“I enjoyed journalism,” he tells me, “but it didn’t leave much time for anything else, particularly writing thrillers.”
Like many successful people, his first attempt didn’t go according to plan.
His debut novel was never published.
“It was a thriller with quite strong science and technology elements. Looking back, I think I was trying to straddle two genres instead of committing to one.”
It was an important lesson.
Sometimes success isn’t about trying harder.
It’s about becoming clearer.
That decision eventually led to a remarkable career, with more than a million books sold in the UK alone and translations in over twenty countries.
Readers often assume thriller writers must have wonderfully dramatic lives to invent such intricate plots.
The truth is rather more reassuring.
The ideas usually begin with ordinary thoughts most of us have had ourselves.
Take The Catch.
“It’s about a father whose daughter brings home the perfect boyfriend, or so it seems. It came from those random thoughts parents have.”
Or The Curfew, where parents allow their teenage son to celebrate finishing his exams on one condition: he must be home by midnight.
“As parents,” Logan smiles, “you wake up during the night wondering whether they’re home yet.”
It’s comforting to discover that bestselling thrillers don’t necessarily begin with extraordinary events.
Sometimes they begin with ordinary anxieties.
The difference lies in asking one simple question.
What if…?
Before a single chapter is written, Logan spends weeks simply thinking.
“I’ll kick ideas around for about six weeks. If one keeps coming back, I’ll start making notes about the characters and the story. Eventually I begin writing and discover where it wants to go.”
It sounds wonderfully straightforward.
It isn’t.
Even experienced writers forget things.
Characters acquire histories that exist only inside the author’s head. Vital details accidentally remain unwritten. Entire scenes need reworking.
“The first book taught me a lot,” he admits. “You think you’ve explained something because you know it yourself, but then someone points out you’ve never actually put it on the page.”
That, perhaps, is one of the biggest misconceptions about writing.
Readers see the finished novel.
They rarely see the countless edits behind it.
Logan certainly does.
Even as we spoke, his latest novel, The Mother, had already returned from his editor covered in ten pages of notes.
Not because it wasn’t good.
Because good books become great through collaboration.
“I usually have things to fix,” he says matter-of-factly. “They’re rarely huge plot holes. It’s more that something doesn’t quite ring true, or a character wouldn’t realistically behave that way.”
It’s a refreshing attitude.
Many of us instinctively see criticism as rejection.
Successful people often see it as refinement.
Logan’s writing year follows an almost military routine.
The first draft begins in January.
Submission arrives on 1 June.
The closer the deadline, the longer the working days become.
“I’m motivated by deadlines,” he laughs. “May gets a bit mad.”
Every creative person will recognise that sentence.
From the outside, creativity looks wonderfully free.
From the inside, it’s usually governed by calendars.
Of course, readers only ever see the finished product.
One of those products, The Holiday, became a Richard and Judy Book Club selection, spent ten weeks in the Sunday Times Top Ten and sold more than 400,000 copies before eventually becoming a television drama.
Watching your own novel transformed for television must be an extraordinary experience.
It also requires trust.
“I spoke with the screenwriter throughout the process,” Logan explains. “He’d send me each draft and ask for my thoughts.”
Some changes were inevitable.
Characters evolved.
Appearances altered.
One American character became Swedish.
A blonde daughter acquired dark hair.
Yet somehow the heart of the story survived intact.
Perhaps that’s because stories aren’t really about hair colour.
They’re about people.
When The Holiday was first optioned for television, Logan and his family celebrated.
Then they waited.
Like so much in publishing, what happened next was largely beyond his control.
Fortunately, audiences embraced it.
The series first aired on Channel 5 before finding an even wider audience on Netflix.
Despite everything he has achieved, Logan still admits to moments of doubt.
“I usually reach about a third of the way through the first draft and wonder if I’ve completely gone off-piste.”
I suspect every creative person smiled reading that.
The difference between professionals and everyone else isn’t confidence.
It’s carrying on anyway.
Towards the end of our conversation I asked where he hoped to be in ten years’ time.
He laughed.
“My wife says I’m never going to stop.”
Nor does he intend to.
With several successful novels already behind him, he’d love eventually to have thirty books on his shelf.
He mentions Stephen King almost wistfully.
Not because he wants to become Stephen King.
Because he admires the longevity.
The consistency.
The body of work.
It’s an ambition that says rather a lot about the man.
He’s not chasing one great book.
He’s building a lifetime of them.
And perhaps that’s the biggest lesson I took away from our conversation.
People often think success arrives in one extraordinary moment.
In reality, it usually arrives quietly.
One page.
One edit.
One deadline.
One ordinary day in a small cabin at the bottom of the garden.