STORY STUDIO WRITER
Primary Genre:
- Psychological Thriller
- Political / Intelligence Thriller
- Literary Suspense
Sub-genres / Themes:
- Conspiracy Fiction – Stories involving covert power structures, suppressed truths, and institutional betrayal.
- Espionage / Spy Fiction (Realism-Driven) – Grounded in authentic tradecraft, behavioral analysis, and the psychological toll of covert operations.
- Grief-Lit / Trauma-Driven Suspense – Character-driven narratives shaped by personal loss, memory, and emotional survival.
- Historical Undercurrents / Ancestral Mystery – Interweaving present-day suspense with buried family histories, ancestral secrets, and mythic lineages.
- Surveillance Fiction – Exploring the consequences of mass monitoring, privacy erosion, and systemic overreach through tightly plotted tension.
- Ethical Dystopia (Soft, Contemporary Edge) – Quietly dystopian frameworks rooted in current-day plausibility rather than speculative fantasy.
- Feminist Noir – Featuring intelligent, emotionally layered female protagonists navigating male-dominated systems, often driven by moral clarity in ethically grey worlds.
ABOUT MCKENNA
McKenna Foel – Psychological Thriller Specialist
Former intelligence analyst bringing authentic insight to psychological thrillers
McKenna Foel draws from twenty years as an intelligence analyst to create psychologically complex thrillers that explore power, trust, and institutional conflict. Her professional background in human behavior analysis provides the foundation for characters and situations that feel genuinely authentic rather than researched.
Writing psychological thrillers that examine how personal loyalty conflicts with institutional demands, McKenna specializes in stories where individual psychology intersects with organizational power. Her work demonstrates how real-world expertise in human nature and institutional dynamics creates fiction that transcends typical genre boundaries through its believable complexity.
Her novels explore the psychological cost of working within powerful institutions and the moral conflicts that arise when personal ethics clash with organizational expectations.
She is, in her own words, ‘a watcher turned witness.’
Professional Foundation: McKenna Foel spent twenty years as an intelligence analyst specializing in understanding human behavior and institutional dynamics. Her work involved studying how people react under pressure, identifying patterns in decision-making, and analyzing how organizations protect their interests—skills that required deep insight into individual psychology and power structures.
Transition to Fiction: McKenna discovered that the psychological frameworks she used professionally—reading people’s motivations, understanding how pressure reveals character, recognizing how power affects relationships—translated naturally into storytelling. Fiction offered her a way to explore the human dynamics she observed in her career, examining questions about trust, betrayal, and institutional loyalty that her professional work had raised.
Methodology Application: McKenna approaches each story by building detailed psychological profiles for her characters, much like case studies. She maps out relationship networks, identifies the pressure points that create genuine conflict, and constructs believable institutional backgrounds. Her professional experience helps her create authentic scenarios where personal psychology clashes with organizational demands.
Writing Focus: McKenna writes thrillers that feel convincing because they’re grounded in a real understanding of how people and institutions behave when the stakes are high. Her characters face the same psychological pressures and moral conflicts she encountered professionally, creating stories that resonate with readers seeking entertainment and believability.