Every January, millions of people embrace the allure of fresh starts. There's something universally appealing about the promise of reinvention, the idea that we can shed our old selves. This isn't just wishful thinking I've discovered—it's deeply rooted in human psychology.
Research shows these moments create what scientists call the "fresh start effect," giving us permission to draw a line between our past and future selves.
But beneath this optimistic surface lies a darker truth that thriller writers understand all too well. Fresh starts require careful curation of the past, and sometimes, outright deception. As a psychological thriller author, deception and reinvention are two of my favorite tools in the writer’s toolbox because they create perfect conditions for the kind of psychological tension that drives compelling suspense.
The Seductive Promise of Reinvention
Fresh starts are deceptively complex. For instance, a kind of selective amnesia must be at the forefront of any reinvention plan. To truly begin again, we must choose which parts of our past to carry forward and which to leave behind. This act, by its very nature, is a form of deception – sometimes of others, but more often of ourselves. We craft narratives about who we're becoming, glossing over the inconvenient truths that don't fit our new story.
When the Past Refuses to Stay Buried
Consider the psychological cost of maintaining a new identity. Every fresh start carries the weight of what came before. Like pressure building beneath a calm surface, the past refuses to stay quietly buried. This tension between reinvention and reality, between the self we're presenting and the truths we're hiding, creates the kind of suspense that causes readers to miss work or burn dinner. Believe me, I've received text messages about this.
Why Thriller writers Love Fresh Starts
Personally, as a thriller writer, fresh starts offer narrative gold—natural pressure points where human psychology, desperate choices, and inevitable consequences collide to create perfect conditions for thriller elements.
Characters must navigate:
The weight of secrets they carry
The strain of maintaining new identities
The fear of discovery
The guilt of deception
The loneliness of pretense
This internal warfare provides rich territory for psychological suspense, allowing writers to explore the space between appearance and reality, truth and deception.
In my novel Fool Me Twice, the protagonist, Dr. Shelby Cooper, reinvented herself twenty-two years before the story begins—she even changed her name. Though Shelby feels secure in her present life, there can be no true safety or peace when a fresh start is built on deception.
You can change your name, your location, your entire identity – but the real question is can you ever truly escape yourself? When past and present selves collide, the resulting explosion can shatter not just the individual, but everyone caught in the blast radius of their deception.
How Reinvention Creates Vulnerability
The irony of reinvention is that in trying to become stronger—more successful, safer—we often make ourselves more vulnerable. Each carefully constructed story becomes a potential point of exposure. Every relationship built on our new narrative carries the risk of discovery. The more successful our reinvention, the more we have to lose if the truth emerges. In Kimberly Belle’s Dear Wife, Beth Murphy is on the run. But the closer she gets to freedom, the higher the risk of discovery and possible death, a classic catch twenty-two dilemma.
The Universal Resonance of Fresh Starts
Every reader understands the seductive whisper of reinvention. We've all stood at the threshold of a new year, a new job, or a new life, believing in the possibility of transformation. This universal desire to start fresh, to become someone new, creates an immediate emotional connection between readers and characters attempting their own reinvention.
I totally agree with you about the past refusing to stay past/buried even as we strive to make fresh starts. I can see how that works in the favor of psychological thriller authors, like you, but it also covers romance and other genres as well. It's just good for writing. The hero of my latest release found our that the past never stays buried no matter how deep you dig the grave. And oh boy...