Carter Wilson is the USA Today bestselling author of 10 critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thrillers, as well as numerous short stories. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a five-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his works have been optioned for television and film. Additionally, he is the host of the Making It Up podcast and founder of the Unbound Writer company, which provides coaching services, writing retreats, and online classes. He lives in Erie, Colorado, in a Victorian house that is spooky but isn’t haunted…yet.
Visit him at www.carterwilson.com and www.unboundwriter.com
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
SunLit: Your new book, “Tell Me What You Did,” has its official release this week. It’s the latest in a string of highly successful and entertaining thrillers you’ve written, and this one has yet another fascinating premise. Could you give us a preview?
Carter Wilson: The elevator pitch on “Tell Me What You Did” is that it follows the life of a 30-year-old, highly successful true crime podcaster, Poe Webb, whose podcast basically has guests on, and these guests are anonymous, and she asks them to confess crimes. So it’s really taken off, this podcast.
Then she gets a guest on whose confession is that he actually killed Poe’s mother. And so that’s how the story begins. The reality of it is, Poe knows her mother died — she actually witnessed her mother being murdered when she was 13 years old. But nobody in the podcast world, none of her fans, know any of this about her. So she’s thinking: Is this guy really the guy? Because she has secrets about why she thinks it can’t be the guy. So it’s a very cat-and-mouse kind of a book.
SunLit: Podcasts are everywhere these days, maybe one of the most significant developments in the media since, I don’t know, blogs? They’re such a thing — especially true crime pods — that they’ve become vehicles for TV series like “Only Murders in the Building.” What was it about this world that made it fertile ground for a thriller?
Wilson: Kind of what you’ve just outlined. I certainly don’t approach books with the market in mind, I approach books with, hey, what’s the story that I want to tell that’s going to interest me? But being a podcaster myself — I’ve been doing it for a few years now — I kind of know a little bit about the inner workings of it and I also know it’s a very popular subject.
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The detriment of that is that… it’s a very popular subject. There are other thrillers out there about podcasts. And I knew that going in, but I just thought to myself, I don’t care. I want to write this story. And if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t sell, but this is what I want to write.
SunLit: In the book, so many people can’t resist the lure of, simultaneously, anonymity and — due to the popularity of Webb’s podcast — notoriety. Was there a particular real-life podcast, or combination of podcasts, that planted the seed for this idea of a public confessional?
Wilson: “Seed” is the right word, because that’s usually how a lot of my ideas start. I’ll hear about something and then I won’t want to know anything more about it, because I want to take that seed and twist it and turn it into an idea of my own. Before I wrote the book, a buddy of mine, we used to share podcast recommendations. And he told me about this podcast — and forgive me, I don’t even remember the name of it and I’ve never listened to it — where people could call this phone number and leave an apology. And they would just play these recordings of apologies from these random people.
I immediately started thinking: What if it wasn’t an apology, it was a confession? That’s how I get ideas — when I get goosebumps thinking about it, I’m like, “All right, I’m writing about that.” All I knew was that it was a podcast about people confessing. I don’t outline, so that’s what I just started with, the general idea. Now what happens?
SunLit: So you get this idea. Then do you just sit down and start writing and see where it goes?
Wilson: That’s 100% what I do, and I usually get into a lot of trouble doing that. I’ll try to maybe think about who the character is, or whatever, and I get impatient, so I just want to start writing. So I start with a scene that may or may not end up making it into the final book, but something that just starts propelling me. And then it’s all about asking myself, “OK, what if this happened? What happens next?”
“Tell Me What You Did”
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And I just start seeing it like a movie through my eyes and start writing down when I think of what would happen next. And then when a twist occurs to me, it’s totally organic. So hopefully the readers are surprised, because I’m usually surprised as well.
SunLit: The excerpt you chose, which describes Webb preparing for and then beginning her podcast with a nervous guest, delves into the rules and guardrails she has constructed for the show. What are we to make of a podcast host who capitalizes on guests’ willingness to confess crimes, but also makes no promises about the potential fallout from their admissions?
Wilson: She’s capitalizing on, I think, the general public’s eagerness to be famous at all costs. She says, “Look, I’m recording this podcast. I’m recording the video of this podcast, but I will destroy the video after a week. I have to keep it for a week because who knows? Maybe the FBI comes and says, ‘Hey, this was a real confession of a real murderer. We want to see this.’”
But people are so eager to be on her show that they kind of just discount that, usually to their detriment, because people have gone to jail before after confessing on her show. Her guardrails are that she has to understand and identify whether or not she thinks they’re telling the truth, because you can get trolls calling in and confessing to something and just making it up. So if she believes you, then the podcast continues with a kind of an interview style format, but sometimes she just gets people calling in and making things up, and she never airs those episodes.
SunLit: Poe Webb is a fascinating character. Is she a good guy, a bad guy, or just a complicated person?
Wilson: She’s morally gray, as we like to say. And that’s not even purposeful. I think that’s just the reality of who we are. There’s nothing more boring to me than reading a very heroic hero or a villainous villain, when they’re so black and white and you’re so dictated about how you’re supposed to feel about them. I just like to say, here’s this very broken and flawed person trying to do the best that they can to get through life, and whether they make decisions that you think are right or wrong, it doesn’t matter to them.
And I think a “villain” is just as interesting. They’re the same way. I love bad guys who are just so convinced that they’re doing the right thing, because I think that’s pretty true.
SunLit: The podcasting culture where the story is set is so interesting because it deals with issues of truth, media, notoriety. Does it set up larger moral or societal questions for you to explore in the novel?
Wilson: I don’t want to be flippant and say no, but that is never my intention going in. I never think about a book and what kind of statement am I making, what kind of morality dictation am I trying to deliver here? I just think about, What does this person do next?
But we all insert ourselves into these characters, right? So I’m thinking, well, what would I do? And so it is a reflection of, perhaps, of my own morality, or an exaggerated version of it. So if readers see messages from that, it’s simply because I’m just trying to answer the questions myself.
SunLit: You’ve got a very interesting podcast in which you talk to writers, though I suspect few have owned up to crimes. But how has your own experience sitting in that chair as host informed the narrative?
Wilson: I think good hosts have deep wells of empathy, as do good writers. For example, on my podcast, I interview other writers, totally unscripted. I don’t read their books just because I don’t have time. And that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about them as human beings and as writers.
So I have zero questions prepared, and we have, you know, a 45- to 50-minute conversation. I’m discovering them as a person first and a writer second. So I think the best podcasts do have hosts who can just, off the cuff, kind of start asking revealing questions and seeing what happens with the guests.
SunLit: Circling back to this protagonist, Poe Webb. When you’re creating a main character like that, what is the process like? Is she a reflection or a composite of people you’ve known, or is her character development as organic as the narrative itself?
Wilson: It is kind of an evolution. And then you get to the end of the story, and you think, OK, is she fleshed out enough? You know what I tend to do with my characters? I rarely describe them, because I might know exactly in my mind what Poe looks like, but I want the reader to absorb all that and have their own indications. And I want the readers to fill in the blanks as much as possible.
Rather than it being an amalgamation of people I know, I’m sure my voice comes out through her. But it’s never really based on anyone. It’s almost like I’m seeing her in a movie or a TV show, and I can just visualize it. So I think it’s just a collection of every person I’ve ever studied in my life, deeply rooted in my subconscious, coming out in bits and pieces.
SunLit: The settings of your novels have fascinated me, maybe because they seem to fit so well into the narrative. This one begins in Burlington, Vermont. Others have also been set in the northeast. How did you settle on the location for “Tell Me What You Did,” and did it require a location scouting trip as some of your other books have?
Wilson: That’s a great question, and I’m not sure I have a great answer for it. I will say that I gravitate toward writing in New England just because there’s something about the mood of New England and my books that just feels like a good fit. I kind of like smaller towns, but not tiny towns. I like areas that have history, and that lends itself to secrets.
SunLit: How have you evolved as a writer within the thriller genre? Can you see differences — professional growth — when you look at your body of work?
Wilson: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I started writing without any clue of what I was doing, and I now have maybe 25% of a clue, but I had no training, no background in writing, and I just started. So of course it’s going to be pretty rough, and it has definitely changed over time.
By my fifth published book, “Mister Tender’s Girl,” I switched from writing in the third-person, past tense point of view to the first-person, present tense. And I predominantly switched from a male to a female point of view as well. When I wrote “Mister Tender’s Girl” in that first-person present tense, female point of view, it just flowed out of me. And I feel like that was kind of the moment, the book where I found my voice. And now I almost exclusively write first person present tense.
That’s how I write best. But it took me all those books to figure that out. With every book I just learned to write from my heart and trust my instincts, and those instincts get more honed the more words that you write. So for any aspiring writers out there, more than anything, just write a lot. Because no matter how many classes you take or how many coaches you go to, it just takes practice, like anything else, to get to the place where you can trust your instincts. And that for me was a 15- to 20-year process.
SunLit: That segues nicely into my next question. Aside from writing your own novels, you’ve ventured into helping others who feel called to writing. Tell us about your company, Unbound Writer, and how you decided to offer your own experience as a tool for people who want to follow that muse.
Wilson: There were a few reasons, one of which is the realities of publishing. It’s difficult to make decent money publishing books. You can be at a high level of success in terms of being published by a big-five publisher, but to actually pay your mortgage with that is a very tough thing to do. So I started thinking, What other things can I do within the writing world, which I love, to help make a living? So I got into coaching, online classes, doing retreats and that kind of thing. And so I’ve been building up Unbound Writer. We launched in early 2024, so it’s still a work in progress.
I just love working with writers. Writers are so excited and so full of creativity and so eager to share their stories with the world, and if I can help them focus on certain things and help develop them, I love that, because there’s nothing more rewarding to me than to see somebody with this well of creativity putting it to use.
Because that’s something we don’t do, right? We’re told, go find a corporate job, and if you want to write, that’ll be your little hobby on the side. I love helping people who know, This is how I want to spend my life. How can you help me do this? That’s such a brave thing.
SunLit: What’s next in the works for you?
Wilson: I tend not to sell multi-book contracts, so I have a YA thriller that I co-wrote with a buddy of mine, Josh Viola, that’s out on submission, and I’m just finishing up another thriller that nobody knows anything about. I’ll show it to my agent soon, and we’ll shop it, and hopefully that’ll be the next one to come out. You never know what the industry is going to bring to you next. So I just focus on writing what I want to write, and willing good things to happen.