“Empire” Screenwriter and Author Attica Locke Balances 'Two Very Different Ways of Telling Stories' (Exclusive)

The author, producer and screenwriter reflects on the end of her hit 'Highway 59' series and how crime fiction helps her understand humanity

Attica Locke never set out to be a novelist. For that matter, the screenwriter and producer never intended to work on shows like When They See Us, Empire, From Scratchand the Emmy-nominated Little Fires Everywhere, for which she won an NAACP Image Award.

"I always thought I was going to be a movie director," Locke tells PEOPLE. But after the studios lost faith in her first film project and she was "really young and really down and afraid," she decided to try her hand at screenwriting instead. After a number of years as a screenwriter for hire, she realized the slog of "writing just to go to meetings" wasn't for her.

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"I want something more for my life," she explains. "And so I made this crazy decision to walk away from Hollywood and write a novel."

And write novels she did. Readers may know Locke from such page-turning books like Black Water Rising, The Cutting Season and her Highway 59 series, which concludes with Guide Me Home, out Sept. 3.

Today, Locke finds herself balancing a dual career: screenwriting by day and writing books on the weekends. "I'm trying to balance these two wildly different ways of telling stories," she says.

No matter what kind of writing she's doing, Locke is drawn to figuring out what makes people tick and always has been, writing crime fiction that she approaches as "a deep study of the human psyche."

"I have a deep affection for human beings in all their stripes and forms. I just find human beings so interesting," she says. "I am curious about people. I have a compassion for them, and I think I'm always looking for the why of people's behavior."

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When writing crime fiction, Locke enjoys figuring out what's driving the "bad guys," in particular. "I try to look at villains through the lens of what makes them the way that they are," the author explains.

She looks at her fiction as "a way of studying broken people," Locke adds, as well as examining the scarcity mindset that's at the root of so many problems in society.

"It's such a way of of laying bare the fallacy of scarcity: There's not enough. There's not enough money. There's not enough food. There's not enough land. There's not enough love for everybody, so I gotta get mine, and if I gotta knock somebody else out to get mine, I'm gonna do it," she says. "And I think what these novels do is frequently, they have a morality to them."

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While exploring that morality is an intentional choice, Locke is not one to methodically plan everything out when writing her novels. She gets enough of that in her day job. Instead, she lets the book show her where it needs to go.

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"I want the freedom to explore and be surprised, and I want writing to feel like reading, in a way," she says. "There have been times when I didn't even know who did it. I just go, and I just sink into a world and throw all these complications at a story."

A lot of her process involves researching the elements of her books that she doesn't know firsthand. The Highway 59 series draws on her knowledge of rural East Texas from her childhood growing up in the region, but she had to learn a lot about the Texas Rangers, the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, the timber industry and the Cato Indians to bring those elements to life.

For Locke, who loves learning as she reads, that's all part of the fun. And as it comes to a close, she's grateful for where the journey has taken her, and for her readers who have come along for the ride.

"I've had the pleasure in hanging out with this guy who has given me, as an author writing him, the gift of a way to understand the last eight years of American history, which have been really difficult," she explains. "Writing this Texas Ranger has given me a space to hold all of the anxiety, all of the confusion, the 'how did we get here.' It's given me a place to reflect, and it is my hope for for readers that maybe there's some salve in this, that there's some way to contain and put all of these very difficult feelings, while also following an interesting story."

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Guide Me Home by Attica Locke, the final installment in the Highway 59 series, is available now, wherever books are sold.

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