By James Hannibal @jamesrhannibal

Aaron banked his F-35 hard, dodging orange streaks of anti-aircraft fire. A ZSU-23-4. Where had that come from? “Vega Zero One, this is Two. Sparkle the threat—half a klick north of the burning tank. I’m clear to the west, angels three thousand.”

“Vega One copies. Contact sparkle. Terminate. Snake Four Three, I can roll in from the north with a maverick in sixty seconds.”

“Vega, Snake. Cleared hot and cleared to re-engage on a north-south line, plus or minus thirty. Friendlies are still two hundred meters east.”

Confused? Overwhelmed with jargon? You might be if you’re unfamiliar with the military techno-speak of Close Air Support (CAS). But I can guarantee what you see above his authentic.

Authentic or overwhelming—where is the balance? How do we write an authentic military or spy thriller without making the average reader’s eyes cross? In this blog I’ll offer three keys: accuracy, explanations, and the spiral learning method. Read on.

Accuracy

Accuracy is vital in the techno-thriller game. The die-hard genre readers know when you mess up, make up a word for something that already exists, or cut a corner. 

The less die-hard readers may not notice these things, but made-up terms are sure to confuse them. The agencies that employ these weapons and tactics have spent decades developing the terminology and naming conventions. Military techno-speak is a learned and regulated language. As a reader, how would you react to an author who threw random letters together and tried to pass it off as French? Even if you don’t speak French, you’d know.

For an author without a background in the military or associated agencies, research is vital.

• Take a look at my previous series on research, especially the ways to “know what you don’t know.” 
• Understand that the military has a regulation for absolutely everything, and most of them have an unclassified version online. 
  • Search for “joint publication” (with the quotation marks) and then add whatever you’re looking for, like “ground attack.” 
  • Be careful. This may give you multiple hits. Look for .org, .mil, or .gov addresses and use the one with the most current date. 
• Use a “style guide” for the service you are writing about. These are also easily found online.
• Ask questions—find current experts and establish a dialogue so you can get the details right.

Speaking of  “current experts,” authors with military or associated backgrounds still need to research to keep up with changes in technology and terminology. Just for this blog, I took a quick look at the most current Close Air Support (CAS) regulation and discovered one of the terms I used had changed due to confusion between two different technologies.

Explanation

Okay. You did your research, and you’ve got the language down. Do you smack your readers with it on the first page? No. They need explanations for each new term. This is not easy when opening a story with a tactical engagement. If I used the engagement above to open a book, here’s how I might need to expand and re-write a portion of the first paragraph.

Aaron Michaels banked his F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter hard, dodging orange streaks of anti-aircraft fire. His threat warning system identified the source as a ZSU-23-4—a self-propelled Russian-built heavy machine gun designed to slice aircraft in half. Where had that come from? He locked the fighter’s target designator onto the threat and illuminated it with an infrared laser spot known as a sparkle so his flight lead could take it out. “Vega Zero One, this is Two. Sparkle the threat—half a kilometer north of the burning tank.”

That snippet got long fast, didn’t it? What I can communicate in thirty-five words to someone who speaks the language turned into eighty-nine words when written for readers who don’t. And to be honest, what you see here is an epic fail. I spent the last forty-five minutes trimming this paragraph down, and if I put this result in a book, I’d still get frustrated letters from novice techno-thriller readers and former military folks.

Novice – “What’s a target designator, and who is Two? Your writing style is too confusing.”

Retired Joint Tactical Air Controller – “Your guy would never call his IR spot a ‘sparkle’ in his head. We only call it that over the comm net. What unit did you serve with?”

Why is this so hard? It’s hard because I’m trying to force the reader to master military techno-speak in a single paragraph—specifically the dialect of Close Air Support. If you’re an educator, you might know this as the mastery learning or fire hose approach. In a novel, it’s not the way to go. Instead, try the spiral learning approach.

Spiral Learning

In the spiral learning approach to language education, the instructor covers elements of the language multiple times from semester to semester in successive spirals, each time hitting the element in greater detail. This gradual method of introducing and reintroducing vocabulary, syntax, verb tense, etc. helps the students learn without overwhelming them. 

The same works for techno-thrillers because you are teaching the reader a new language. Don’t try to go broad. Decide on two or three focused technology and the tactical areas for the book, then slowly introduce the reader to the language, working the explanations into the dialogue and action as I did above, but gradually. 

Each time you return to the technology or tactics, add a little more detail and trust your reader to learn. 

Accuracy, explanation, and spiral learning. With these tools, you can teach the reader the language of your techno-thriller, and by the time you reach the big action scenes of the finally, the reader will be fluent, able to handle the intricacies of a big engagement or operation with lots of moving pieces.

Those moving pieces will be our topic next time. Part Two of this series is all about the necessary intricacies of a techno-thriller story. See you then!

As a former stealth pilot, James R. Hannibal is no stranger to secrets and adventure. He has been shot at, locked up with surface to air missiles, and chased down a winding German road by an armed terrorist. He is a two-time Silver Falchion award-winner for his Section 13 mysteries for kids, a Thriller Award nominee for his Nick Baron covert ops series for adults, and a Selah Award finalist for his Christian CIA thriller, the Grypyhon Heist. James is a rare multi-sense synesthete. Want to know more? Visit JamesRHannibal.com.