The Fine Art of the Gentle Nudge (and When It Becomes a Shove)

On Persuasion, Spin, and the Writer's Obligation to the Truth

There's a moment I keep returning to when I think about persuasion—not in a courtroom or a marketing meeting, but somewhere stranger: a reader of my mystery thriller novels wrote to ask if I could send them information on what to see when visiting Cross Township. They were planning a road trip and wanted to swing through the little Midwestern town featured in my John Pilate series.

Problem is, Cross Township doesn't exist.

Not really. The first book in the series, Pilate's Cross, was inspired by a 1950s-era true story—one of the earliest school shooting incidents in U.S. history. I stumbled across it while working as the public relations and marketing director for a fine, venerable little college in the bucolic town of Peru, Nebraska. That real place and its local legends sparked something. From that quiet corner of the Midwest grew a fictional murder mystery, and then an eight-book series.

But the town itself? The geography, the people, the dark corners and half-solved secrets? All invented.

Yet somehow, through a few well-placed details, some smudged-at-the-edges truth, and a lot of intentional choices about what I didn't say, I persuaded that reader it was real. The geography of fiction had become indistinguishable from memory.

That's when it hit me: writing—whether fiction, law, PR, or politics—is persuasion. Not a card trick. At best, it's an artful nudge toward understanding. At worst, it's a shove into a well-padded illusion. And the line between the two? It's thinner than we'd like to admit.