Published: September 27, 2026
When I started writing, one piece of advice came up again and again: Write what you know.
I've always thought that was a little limiting.
If writers only wrote what they personally knew, we'd have a hell of a lot fewer spy novels, murder mysteries, historical epics, and science-fiction adventures. I've never been a CIA case officer. I've never overthrown a dictator. I've never hunted terrorists across the Caribbean.
I make shit up for a living.
But the second part of that old advice matters to me:
The details matter.
My life before becoming a thriller author gave me a strange collection of experiences to draw from. I served in the U.S. Navy working on MH-53E Sea Dragons. I've worked as a motorcycle and automotive mechanic, in construction and property management, and around the scuba industry. I've shot guns since I was a kid. After a motorcycle accident left me a T-10 paraplegic, I learned to scuba dive and eventually moved into technical diving.
I've traveled, sailed, hunted, fished, rebuilt engines, gutted apartments to the studs, worked around military aircraft, crawled through wrecks underwater, and screwed up more things than I'd probably care to admit.
All of it eventually finds its way into my fiction.
Not necessarily as something that actually happened to me. More often, those experiences influence how I think about a scene, a character, or a problem.
They also taught me when to stop making shit up and start doing some research.
The Navy Taught Me More Than Military Terminology
I joined the Navy after attending Motorcycle Mechanics Institute and working in motorcycle and car shops. I was making $10 an hour flat rate, and the guy with 20 years in was making $14. I didn't want to work 20 years to make $4 more an hour. I looked around for opportunities and decided to join the military. When I called around, the Coast Guard was like, Maybe I'll call you back. The Army said, Come in in two weeks. The Navy recruiter asked how soon I could get there. I left for boot camp about two weeks after deciding to enlist.
While I was in the barracks, I saw a Navy EOD recruiting flyer on a bulletin board. The insignia caught my attention first, but the job really interested me. Here were people expected to understand explosives, diving, weapons, electronics, mechanics, and a dozen other disciplines—and then use those skills when things had already gone wrong.
I couldn't pursue it because of the medical waiver I'd needed to enlist.
That was probably for the best. I didn't want to PT that damn hard anyway.
Instead, I worked on MH-53E Sea Dragons, including the electronics associated with the mine-countermeasures equipment they towed. I also worked around EOD technicians and SEALs and became fascinated with the kind of person willing to repeatedly walk toward danger instead of away from it.
That fascination never really left me.
The military also taught me something that's difficult to get from research alone: the culture.
Every branch has its own language, traditions, rivalries, bullshit, humor, and way of getting things done. Even within the Navy, communities are different. An Airdale's Navy isn't necessarily the same Navy experienced by someone serving aboard a submarine.
And military humor can get dark.
Really dark.
It's one of the ways people deal with dangerous jobs and bad situations.
Sometimes the danger itself becomes strangely routine. I remember being aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard while we were making flank speed to pick up an injured sailor from another ship. I had to climb onto the tail of an MH-53 at night to secure the folded rotor blades.
The tail was hanging out over the ship's safety net.
Wet metal. Dark ocean. Moving ship.
Not exactly OSHA's dream work environment.
But the job needed to be done, so you did it.
That mentality has probably influenced my characters as much as anything else from my military service.
I Like Characters Who Know How to Do Things
Ryan Weller, John Phoenix, and Luke Wesson are very different men.
They aren't superheroes, and they aren't equally good at everything.
I don't want them to be.
Ryan grew up around construction and became a Navy EOD technician before moving into commercial diving and maritime work. He understands tools, boats, diving, explosives, and how to solve physical problems.
That comes partly from my own background.
My father was a welder, carpenter, cabinet builder, and construction contractor. I grew up around tools. As a kid, being locked out of the garage for a week was one of the worst punishments my parents ever gave me.
I never told them that.
Tan my hide if you want. Just don't lock the garage.
I've built things, broken things, rebuilt engines, worked on motorcycles and cars, laid hardwood floors and tile, gutted apartments, welded, done carpentry, and learned a painful lesson: sometimes the smallest detail destroys the entire job.
Forget thread locker on a bolt inside a transmission, and that bolt may eventually back out and destroy the transmission you just rebuilt.
Put the wrong valve seal in the wrong place, and you've created another problem.
Forget the oil drain plug, and the five quarts you're pouring into the engine are going straight onto the floor.
Details matter.
That same mentality carries into my writing.
If Ryan is using a piece of equipment in Chapter 13 that he should have needed in Chapter 12, I'd better have an explanation. If a salvage ship's crane needs to deploy an eight-ton hydraulic shear 300 feet underwater, I want to know whether the crane can actually handle it.
I want to know how the shear works.
How the divers control it.
What happens when its jaws bite into steel.
What the steel looks like afterward.
That's part of the fun.
Learning to Dive Changed the Way I Saw the Underwater World
I didn't learn to scuba dive until several years after the motorcycle accident that put me in a wheelchair.
At that point, my attitude was basically: I'm in a chair now, so let's do everything.
Scuba had been on the bucket list.
I started diving in 2006 and eventually worked my way into technical diving. Along the way, I had to figure out how to adapt equipment to work for me.
Standard fins weren't going to do much good, so I experimented with webbed gloves before eventually using swimming training paddles on my hands. A traditional jacket-style buoyancy compensator created problems with my position in the water. A backplate-and-wing setup worked better. Later, sidemount changed my center of gravity again and helped solve some of the problems I'd experienced while rolling.
I've dived cold quarries where you can almost see the thermocline hanging in the water. I've dived the St. Lawrence River with freighters passing nearby and currents strong enough that losing the line could become a very serious problem. I've been deep inside the wreck of the Spiegel Grove. I've used dry suits, full-face masks, technical equipment, and more configurations than I can probably remember.
And I've learned that underwater communication systems aren't always as magical as fiction makes them seem.
Sometimes the most common thing communicated underwater is:
What?
What did you say?
Those experiences became part of the DNA of The Ryan Weller Maritime Thriller Series.
Ryan's sense of wonder underwater is mine.
So is his desire to look under something just to see what's there.
Disability Gave Me Another Kind of Experience to Write From
Not every real-world influence in my books is technical.
Some are harder to write.
After my accident, I was angry.
People would visit the hospital and tell me life would get better. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't care how long they'd been injured or what they'd accomplished afterward.
They weren't me.
One of those people was Jake Hipps, another paraplegic. A therapist had him demonstrate what was still possible. Jake stood using a walker and told me that life could still be great.
I remember thinking:
Shut the fuck up and sit down.
Years later, I ran into Jake at a VA adaptive skiing event in Colorado.
I told him that story.
Then I told him something else.
He'd been right.
Since my injury, I've gone skydiving and bungee jumping. I learned to scuba dive. I've traveled through forty-eight states in a camper. I married a wonderful woman, raised a great kid, and checked enough things off my bucket list that I eventually had to make another one.
Those experiences influence Greg Olsen in the Ryan Weller books.
Greg isn't me. His experiences aren't mine. I even gave him coping mechanisms I never had, including a drinking problem.
But I understand some of his anger.
I understand the frustration.
I understand what it's like to fall out of a wheelchair somewhere you really shouldn't have fallen out of a wheelchair. I understand what it's like to look at something you once would have fixed yourself and realize you physically can't do it anymore.
You can research a spinal cord injury.
Living with one gives you different details.
The Same Gun Shouldn't Feel the Same in Every Character's Hands
I've been shooting since I was young.
My father and I used to shoot his .22 pistol without hearing protection, which was a really stupid thing to do. My ears would ring afterward, and I still have tinnitus today.
That's one of those little realities that fiction can conveniently ignore.
Guns are loud.
Really loud.
The mechanics matter, too. You can't put an external safety on a pistol that doesn't have one. You can't suddenly give a firearm a three-round-burst setting because the scene would be cooler that way.
Readers know this stuff.
And they will email you.
But the more interesting part to me is what experience with firearms says about the characters using them.
Shooting is a perishable skill. Good shooters don't become good because they picked up a handgun and discovered they're naturally John Wick. They've usually put thousands of rounds downrange. They've practiced drawing, presenting the weapon, finding the sight picture, controlling the trigger, reloading, clearing malfunctions, and doing the same things over and over until they become ingrained.
That's why my three main protagonists don't handle guns the same way.
Ryan is capable of killing someone, but he doesn't like doing it. The people he's killed stay with him. Pulling the trigger has consequences, and he thinks about them.
John Phoenix is a different animal. Violence has been part of his professional life for years. He doesn't kill indiscriminately, but when he decides someone needs killing, he isn't likely to lose sleep over it.
Luke Wesson isn't either of those men.
Luke gets nervous.
His hand shakes.
His aim can suck.
He might puke afterward.
He works around prop guns in Hollywood, but that doesn't magically make him a trained combat shooter. When somebody hands him a real gun in a real life-or-death situation, he'd just as soon walk away.
That's why I wanted to write him.
Competence is more interesting when it has boundaries.
Sometimes You Have to Go There
I've written about far more places than I've personally visited.
That's unavoidable unless I want to spend my entire life traveling instead of writing books.
Actually, that doesn't sound terrible.
For places I haven't visited, I'll use maps, satellite imagery, Street View, photographs, videos, firsthand accounts, and whatever other sources I can find. If I need something and it doesn't exist, sometimes I'll invent it.
It is fiction, after all.
But visiting a place in person gives you details that are hard to find online.
My wife and I once stayed at a resort in the Dominican Republic. I got bored sitting around the resort, so we headed into Santo Domingo. We saw the old city, visited the cathedral, and explored places that would eventually influence scenes in my books.
On another trip, we rode ATVs through sugarcane fields and villages. Those are the kinds of experiences that give you the odd details you remember years later.
The same thing happens closer to home.
I've used the Hogfish Bar & Grill in the Florida Keys in my books. You can look at photographs and maps all day long, but Google doesn't necessarily tell you what a place smells like when there's been a sewage spill nearby.
When I was writing No Regrets, the second novel in the Stuntman Series, I kept looking at New Mexico on Street View and thinking:
It can't possibly be that yellow.
Eventually, I got tired of wondering.
My wife and I got in the truck and went to New Mexico. We traveled the roads Luke traveled, visited locations from the story, ate at restaurants, and stopped at places I'd been studying online.
Turns out New Mexico really can be that brown and yellow.
And beautiful.
Every Job Gives You Something
I’ve never had one job I can point to and say, That’s where my fiction comes from.
It comes from all of them.
Construction taught me one set of skills. Working as a mechanic taught me another. Property management introduced me to another collection of people and problems. The dive shop introduces me to still more.
I’ve had tenants who paid their rent on time for years because they had absolutely no interest in owning a house. Something broke, they called Evan, and I fixed it.
I’ve also opened apartments where rooms were packed so full of garbage that cleaning them required a shovel.
I’ve changed engines in my driveway and rebuilt ATVs inside an efficiency apartment.
I’ve also screwed up.
A lot.
I’ve made mistakes, broken things, gotten fired, trusted the wrong people, and occasionally had my head firmly planted up my ass.
All of that is useful to a novelist.
So is simply watching people.
I love listening to conversations and observing how people behave. My boss at the dive shop, Kary, regularly comes out with lines so good I’ve threatened him with the existence of a notebook devoted entirely to “Karyisms.”
I warn people:
Whatever you say or do can and will end up in a book.
They’ve been warned.
I Aim for Near-Realistic Thrillers
I'm not trying to write documentaries.
In the original Dark Water, I leaned much harder into James Bond-style adventure. There were impossible saves and villains revealing plans at convenient moments. I've edited the book several times since then, and I've even added jokes acknowledging some of its 007 DNA.
My writing has changed.
Today, I think of what I write as near-realistic thrillers.
Sometimes reality needs to be compressed.
Sometimes I need technology that doesn't quite exist yet.
Sometimes I need to skip three boring hours because nobody wants to read about Ryan sitting around waiting for something to happen.
That's what chapter breaks are for.
But the fictional world still needs rules.
A small airplane can't fly across the Caribbean if it doesn't carry enough fuel to reach the other side.
A boat has to do boat things.
A gun needs to function the way it actually functions.
Diving equipment needs to work underwater.
Characters shouldn't magically know something they haven't learned yet.
And when I don't know something, I research it until I understand enough to make the scene hold water.
Maybe that comes from spending my life fixing things.
I want to understand how things work.
Take me to a museum, and I'll read every damn sign. Put me inside an old Florida home or Victorian house, and I'll stare at the woodwork trying to figure out how the craftsman made it. Show me an unfamiliar machine, and I want to know what every piece does.
That curiosity follows me into writing.
Details Matter
Ultimately, I'm trying to do something pretty simple.
I want readers to have fun.
I want them to finish one of my books feeling as if they've been somewhere they haven't been before. Maybe they learned something about scuba diving, salvage, boats, military culture, firearms, aviation, or some obscure piece of equipment they had never heard of.
I want them to think:
That could happen.
I want them to feel like they're underwater with Ryan Weller, caught in the middle of an operation with John Phoenix, or desperately trying to survive alongside Luke Wesson.
I want to write interesting characters readers would want to sit down and have a beer with.
And I'd really like them to finish the book thinking:
This author isn't a complete idiot. He actually knows what he's talking about.
Then I want them to pick up the next book.
Because, yes, the details matter.
But I also have a mortgage to pay.
© 2026 Evan Graver. All rights reserved.