How I Write Characters Who Think Like an Analyst

A café worker saves a burning skyscraper. An eight-year-old runs surveillance on a vacant lot. A husband investigates his wife's ghost romance from the lake house. None of them have the training. All of them think like they do.

Three lives, one habit. It came home with me from a thirty-year career in intelligence analysis and investigations.

The training was straightforward. Study the source. Test claims against what you already know. Look for patterns. Flag the gaps. None of that quit when I started writing on my own. It moved into my characters. Two of them I built from scratch. One of them is me.

Mara Flores

Mara in The Legend of Mara Flores runs the café in a fifty-story office tower. On paper, she's invisible. Off paper, she's tracking the building like it's a hostile target. She knows which doors stick. She knows which access badges fail. She knows which supervisors cut corners and which ones don't. She watches faces. She memorizes routes. None of it shows up in her job description, but all of it lives in her head.

When the tower catches fire, that quiet inventory becomes the thing that saves dozens of lives. She's an analyst in apron form.

Here's the part that still makes me smile. The same novel includes Andrea Morales, an actual security compliance analyst who flagged the access badge problems in writing six months before the fire. Her memos got filed and forgotten. So you've got two analysts in one book. One had the title. One had the building. Guess which one got people out alive.

Ray

Ray in The Empty Lot Next Door is the same instinct in a much smaller body. He's also me. Ray was my childhood name, and the book is a memoir.

The neighborhood boys told me a ghost story about a family that died in a fire and got buried in the hole next door. I didn't buy it. My older brother Dan told a different version. I didn't buy that one either. The two stories didn't line up, and that contradiction parked itself in my head and refused to leave.

So I ran an investigation. I climbed a tree at night to see the lot for myself. I timed my trips around when my parents were asleep. I worked up the nerve to ask my father at dinner, even though I stuttered and dreaded being laughed at by my older brothers. That's source vetting. I was eight. I was also right.

Brian

Brian in Co-Author is the husband variant. His wife, Chelsie, is a romance novelist who becomes convinced that a dead man named David is writing her new manuscript with her every night. Brian's first reaction is rational. He looks for the boring explanation. Memory glitch. Stress. Some weirdness tied to the cottage's previous owner.

Then the pattern shifts on him. Brian takes his time. The voice in the manuscript isn't quite hers. The dead man's fiancée looked just like Chelsie. The cottage is the right cottage. He stays with what he can prove, watches what he can't, and only commits when the evidence won't let him do anything else. Co-Author runs as a paranormal thriller, but Brian's arc reads like a case file with a wedding ring on it.

Why I Write Characters Who Think Like an Analyst

Here's why I write them this way. Branching Plot Books are built on reader interpretation. If I write a character who swallows the first explanation handed to them, the reader will too. If I write a character who pokes at the explanation, the reader picks up the same habit without noticing.

A café worker. A kid. A husband. Three different lives, one shared instinct. That's the part of the old job that came home with me. I just gave it better stories to live in.