In Tristan 4 America Bruce Overby explores one man’s journey though the American political system as a sudden layoff from the tech company he helped build prompts him to run for President. Tristan’s frank speeches provoke a dramatic response from those that oppose him. Overby discussed the creation of this novel, which deftly touches on the political climate of the day.
Learning Craft Through Writing
AUTHORLINK: This is your second novel. How has the process changed for you? What has gotten easier or harder?
OVERBY: A huge difference between this and my first novel is that this one came into my mind pretty much fully formed. I write character-driven fiction, and the character of Tristan was flesh, blood, thoughts, emotions, interests, background—pretty much everything—very clearly in my mind. The plot comes to me as I write, and a great plot and subplot presented themselves out of the American popular imagination. The first book was harder because the concept was more specious. A simple way to put it would be, I knew why I was writing that book, but I didn’t know why anyone would want to read it. I realize that doesn’t sound like a good foundation for spending 11 years writing a novel, but I guess I’m a dogged and determined novelist. This new novel only took me two years to write, with another year for revision—literally two drafts vs. about ten for the first book. Part of that is what I’m saying here—the clarity of the concept and the character—but part of it, I think, was just my improved skill and intentionality while writing. My first-draft sentences are just better than they were. You wouldn’t know it, perhaps, from the verbosity of this answer, but I’ve learned a lot about the craft through the exercise of more and more writing.
Living Out Your Fantasies Through Characters
AUTHORLINK: James Dickey said the idea for Deliverance came to him as a vision of a man standing alone on top of a mountain. His job was to get the man off the mountain. Where did the idea for Tristan 4 America come from?
OVERBY: First off, I absolutely love that James Dickey image. I’m definitely going to use that. To answer your question, Tristan came right out of my head. In my March 2026 newsletter I go into explicit detail about this, but the short version is something like this: Tristan 4 America is a political novel, and I have thought about politics pretty much every day of my life since I was about ten. My mother was a stay-at-home mom who was an incredibly intelligent person and a broad thinker. She gave birth to eight children between 1955 and 1967, the years of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, and she became as much of an activist as she could with her very, very full plate. I drank that all in, and it very much became part of me. Having been raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, my politics is progressive, and the toxic political era the country entered into in 2016 became a constant set of tapes playing in my mind. These tapes were of the fantasy variety: me debating (and crushing) TV pundits, me running for president, me running the country, etc. So I decided to just create a character who is doing all the things I imagined myself doing. As a fiction writer, you get to live out your fantasies through your characters, and that’s who Tristan became and that’s what this story is.
Research and Imagination
AUTHORLINK: What did setting the story around politics provide the narrative?
OVERBY: Politics definitely provides much of the content of the story, at least in the story present, but it doesn’t really define the characters. I needed to draw from personal experience to make the characters both unique and genuine, so they’re mostly Silicon Valley people, like I was. Anyone who’s read my first book knows, I know Silicon Valley. I was basically born into it and spent my entire career in the tech world. So Tristan and his team are Sales Operations professionals like I was, who then thrust themselves into politics and discover an affinity for it. Again, politics provided the content for the story, but the characters are not really political actors at their core. The other thing politics provided was the subplot, which is all around armed civilian militias, one right-wing and one left-wing, and some startling events that grow out of that world, eventually intersecting with Tristan’s campaign. As one of my early editors once assured me, “research and imagination are magical things, Bruce,” and that very politically rooted subplot was entirely made up out of research and imagination.
AUTHORLINK: In today’s emotionally charged political atmosphere, what sort of pitfalls did you have to look out for when writing?
OVERBY: I think this book takes a lot of risks. I think when it gets out there, if it gets any exposure at all—and I, like any author, want it to get as much exposure as it possibly can—I expect it will raise some eyebrows, and could even result in, I don’t know, lawsuits? I don’t really know that, but the point is that I didn’t really bother to avoid pitfalls all that much. Through Tristan, I’m just saying what I want to say, and if there are consequences, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. That said, though, I did quite assiduously avoid naming names. I’ve fictionalized some prominent figures, and others are just referred to using labels rather than their actual names. Beyond that, I just put the boilerplate disclaimer in at the beginning (“resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead…”), and I’ll just hope for the best.
Character Creation and Evolution
AUTHORLINK: Talk a little about Tristan’s transformation from cynical opportunist to passionate advocate for change?
OVERBY: I’m an unapologetic denizen of Silicon Valley, but since the evils of social media have become evident, I’ve observed with some alarm that the name Silicon Valley has become a dirty word in our increasingly lazy and careless major media. (I could go on—and actually have in at least one essay on Medium—but I’ll spare you. Your readers can look that up if they want to.) Anyway, in creating the character of Tristan, I decided to make him believable by having him behave in a way that’s consistent with that popular, negative image of Silicon Valley. As you say, he starts with this cynical gambit—what you rightly call “opportunism”—that draws him into presidential politics. However, I also give the reader one clue, in a conversation between Tristan and his wife Cindy, that this isn’t actually who he is deep down. And when he finally gets his chance to declare his candidacy, he does so honestly. And when he finally stands in front of an audience to expound on his political views, he surprises even himself by the amount of candor and passion that come to him in that moment. I had another editor say to me once, “surprise me,” and I think Tristan’s transformation, which surprises even him, will surprise readers as well.
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about the creation of Cletus Samuel. Is he modeled after a real life figure?
OVERBY: I’m going to congratulate myself here for strong characterization because Cletus Samuel is honestly not modeled after anyone I’ve ever known. I have the term “huckster lawyer” in my early notes, and I think the bottom line was, I needed someone to feed Tristan’s nefarious instincts and thereby nudge him in the direction of this transformation we’ve just discussed. I also needed someone to explain the legal ins and outs to Tristan, and subsequently, to the reader. And honestly, I needed someone to anchor my research on these legal ins and outs, and so I invented Cletus out of whole cloth, and he turned out to be just the man for the job. I’m a firm believer that every fictional character is based on some real person the author has been exposed to at some point in their lives, either personally or through popular media, or through literature, or something. So I believe I’ve seen someone somewhere along the way who has the characteristics of a Cletus Samuel, but I honestly could not put my finger on who that person might be. Just answering this question, by the way, is making him more interesting to me. I might have to go deep on him in the next book.
Writing Challenges
AUTHORLINK: What was the greatest challenge when writing Tristan 4 America?
OVERBY: The biggest challenge, by far, was in convincingly portraying the extralegal activities of the armed militias that appear in the story. Some of these characters became very important to the story, so I felt an obligation to do them justice by getting as much accuracy into their portrayals as I could, everything from the locations where they trained and operated, the tactics they used on the missions they ran, and of course, the weapons they used. Going back to that first editor I mentioned (“research and imagination are magical things”), he was compiling an anthology of military stories, and he knew my work and asked me to contribute. He made the “research and imagination” comment after I had explained to him that I had never served in the military and so might not be the best person to contribute to his anthology. With those and some other artful words, he convinced me otherwise, and the story I contributed, “Bull’s Eye,” became the first story I ever had published in print. That experience gave me the confidence to step outside the “write what you know” axiom and write about things—like armed citizen militias—that I knew very little about going in. Nonetheless, those forays are particularly difficult, and that was not only the hardest thing about writing this book, it’s continuing to be a hard thing about writing the sequel, which I’m working on now. These characters have captivated me, so the research and imagination continue.
AUTHORLINK: Without offering any spoilers, how did you decide how to end the book?
OVERBY: The ending I arrived at consists of what I think of as a physical element and a contemplative element, and both just sort of flowed from the pen—or keyboard, as it were. The physical element was driven by the characters, who sort of told me what they wanted to do. The author Adam Johnson talks about the novel as a “meaning-making machine,” and the process of writing a novel as following the characters rather than leading them. There are differing opinions on this—one classic author is famous for saying, in essence, “my characters are galley slaves, they do as I command them”—and I admit to both leading and following sometimes. But in this case, that physical element of the ending, which is comprised of an act of violence and a response to that violence, was something these characters were destined to do, and they told me so. The contemplative element, by contrast, was entirely my doing, and served my purposes as an author. I always want to leave the reader with something to think about, some new universe to consider based on the narrative I’ve just given them, and that was my intention in those final pages.
Take Chances
AUTHORLINK: What advice do you offer apprentice writers about craft, staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both?
OVERBY: It’s very handy that I’ve already included two excellent pieces of advice from editors I’ve worked with: Research and imagination are magical things, so don’t be afraid to step outside your comfort zone and write about things you might not be particularly familiar with. And surprise the reader to keep them engaged, remaining aware that sometimes the biggest surprise can be the most obvious thing the character would do, assuming it’s outlandish or unusual. To that I would add a bit “meta-advice,” which is, when you’re considering craft advice from experts or writers you know and respect, always run it through your own sensibilities as a creative. Because if you look at the work of truly exemplary writers, the award winners, etc., you’ll see that they almost never follow any of the most common craft tenets to a tee. One example is, there’s a common tenet that says you should only use “said” or “asked” in quote attributions. But if you look at the work of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Adam Johnson, you’ll see that he uses a number of different verbs (responded, added, etc.) in quote attributions. It’s a simple example, but the point is, whether you find it hard or easy to follow common tenets, deviating from them is one of the things that helps you find your voice and hone your creative vision, I think.
AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.
OVERBY: As I mentioned, I’m working on a sequel to Tristan 4 America. Since Tristan is set in the early months of the 2024 presidential campaign season—that is, mid- to late 2023—I feel the characters, settings, and plot directions, and their relevance to current events, will all make a good series. I actually finished Tristan before I knew who won the 2024 election, and given that I was able to land a book contract despite that, I think the material can continue to have legs. I don’t want to say anything about what Tristan and the team are up to in this new book because that would give away too much of Tristan 4 America, but I will say that the principal characters are all still there, and the action leads right into the actual election and the early months after it. The challenge, in fact, has been keeping my mind rooted in that pre-election period, given that we are all experiencing an absolute daily flood of new, surprising events on the political front. I’m managing, though. Turns out research and imagination are indeed a magical thing.
Bruce Overby is a native of San Jose, California, with an MFA in Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. He is also a veteran of a 35-year career in Silicon Valley. His story “Bookmarks” won First Prize in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, and his debut novel, The Cyclone Release, published in November 2022, was a finalist in the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Competition. Tristan 4 America is his second novel.
