Somewhere along the line, I’m not quite sure when or where, I got a rep as a “techno-thriller” writer. I find that label somewhat amusing because I consider myself a writer of stories and novels about relationships that use the framework of the thriller in order to get the job done. And the term “thriller” itself is a little misleading, mostly because thrillers are not really a genre of story, but rather a style of telling a story.
Romance is a genre, so is Science Fiction or Fantasy. True crime, police procedural, historical drama – these are all genres of stories. You can take a story in any of those categories and add specific ingredients to it and end up with a romantic thriller, or a fantasy thriller or even a true crime thriller. Anyone who’s read an Ann Rule book can attest to that fact.
Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic Roger Ebert originated Ebert’s First Law Of Movies: A movie is not about what it is about, but about how it is about it. The same thing can be said about the thriller novel. It’s not so much about what it is about (the plot), but more about how it’s about that plot.
At this point let me observe that taking the process of writing, which is essentially a creative, artistic endeavor and breaking it down into easily digestible bite-sized chunks is not something I’m entirely comfortable with for the simple fact that there is no single, sure-fire recipe for good writing. There are things that every writer should know, the boring stuff they drilled into your heads in Eighth Grade English. Such things as grammar and verb tenses and not writing run-on sentences. But I will discuss the things that I think make a good thriller, and how to apply them to the world of fanfic.
Pace
Perhaps the most important thing in writing an effective thriller is controlling pace. Pace is hard to describe and easier to observe. A novel like Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact shows a masterful control of pace, as does John Grisham’s legal thriller The Firm. Blurb writers call thrillers with good pace control “page-turners,” because the story brings the reader along for the ride, practically forcing them to turn the next page and continue reading. But writing a story that is fast-paced is not the same thing as controlling pace. A good thriller writer can control the pace of the story so that the end result is thrilling.
There are two basic types of thriller paces. The first type of story starts off at a very slow simmer; it isn’t immediately visible that there’s tension and suspense in the story. It begins like a Normal Day in the lives of these characters. As the chapters continue marching towards the conclusion, the tension and suspense builds inexorably towards the stunning conclusion.
The second type of thriller pace is more of a “hit the ground running” style. Most James Bond movies, for example, start off this way, with a huge stunt before the opening titles. And then the story goes from there. Stories that use this second style of pacing differ from the first style in a very significant way. Usually, stories of the second type do not have very well developed characters, because the writer is counting on the reader’s tacit understanding that the characters are archetypes rather than individuals. The Strong-Jawed Hero, The Feminine Heroine, The Gruff But Lovable Superior Officer, The Damsel in Distress. Stories paced using the first style demand more work from the writer, more early character development and more backstory so that as the pace steps up, as the story builds tension and suspense,
In the fanfic world, the second style of pacing is very tempting to use because the backstory for all the usual characters has already been established. We don’t have to go into Samantha’s abduction for Mulder’s motivation; we don’t have to revisit the topic that Scully disappointed her father by choosing the FBI over medicine.
A writer that has a strong control of pacing, however, can mix these two pacing styles into a third, specific, individual style that is incredibly exciting to read and also extremely satisfying at the character level as well. Just because fanfic writers are using established characters with a known backstory doesn’t mean there isn’t room in the story for character development or “backstory filling,” that uniquely fanfic-ish tendency to either rewrite history or insert events into a character’s backstory that is outside canon. In ELS for example, the revelation that there might have been an incestuous relationship between Samantha and Bill Mulder is an example of “backstory filling,” because it tends to lend credence to Mulder’s psychological problems.
Control of pacing means knowing how to step up the tension and suspense, when to throw additional stressors into the mix, and when to resolve certain plot points. It’s not something that can be taught; the writer has to have a visceral understanding of how to jack the plot up another notch, and how and when to resolve it.
One of the mistakes that is often made is the attempt to end each chapter or segment with a bang. If you do this, you’ll end up with an unmaintanable tension level. If you have too much going on early, anything less than actually saving the world from utter destruction during the climax is going to seem like a letdown.
The best thing to do is to learn how to use your literary throttle; How to let it out a bit at a time, slowly gaining speed and strength. Then the story will slam into the climax with the unstoppable force of a runaway freight train.
A fast word here about the difference between thrills and suspense. Suspense occurs when the reader knows something that the hero does not; perhaps there’s a bomb in his car with a timer ticking down. Thrills is when the hero and the character know what’s going on and are hurtling towards the confrontation together.
The next thing the aspiring thriller writer needs to draw his or her attention to is characters.
Characters
In the world of fanfic, writers have a leg up on the rest of the writing world: Most of the backstory and setup have already been done, and as I mentioned earlier, it allows us to hit the ground running. We have the ability to do some character development, some fill-in-the-blanks type stuff that’s fun and creative. Some of us take it a bit too far and end up having Scully speak fluent German for no apparent reason.
The basic requirements of a thriller will necessitate additional characters being created; this is where it’s easy to make mistakes, take shortcuts and generally muck things up.
The fanfic writer writes fanfic because they love the show, the characters, the story. It’s a natural tendency to focus all of your writerly attentions on Mulder, Scully, Skinner and the rest of the XF gang. When you create new characters, it’s sometimes easy to shortchange them and get back to writing banter or a romantic subplot or a long discussion about aliens. A good thriller, however, requires real, individual characters for Mulder and Scully to interact with. As much as we all love watching them together on the screen and on the page, the story will feel narrowed and limited if your other characters aren’t given enough room to breathe and live and develop.
Develop your characters. Give them histories and pasts and hopes and dreams and hobbies and flaws. Flaws are important, vital, required. Part of the process of really enjoying a story involves the reader projecting themselves into one of the characters in the story. If you make your characters perfect (perfectly good or perfectly evil,) the reader will feel adrift and start to distance themselves from the story, refusing to get involved at a deep, visceral level. Allowing them to participate, even in a vicarious way, brings to the reader a much deeper enjoyment of the story and the reading experience itself. Take Grisham’s The Firm for example: Everyone that has worked for a medium-to-large business has wondered at one point or another if the company isn’t, in fact, up to no good. Secret meetings held by high-level managers discussing God Only Knows What behind closed doors...murky expense account transactions... that box for the boss that arrived from overseas...are there drugs in that box? Grisham takes those totally human, normal suspicions and allows the reader to project themselves onto Mitch. We’ve all felt adrift in our jobs at one point or another, and wonder what we’d do if we encounter similar situations as depicted in that story. We go along with Mitch as he struggles to do the right thing, stay one step ahead of the bad guys, and stay out of jail himself. Mitch isn’t a superhero, an ex-spy or ex-Special Forces trooper. He’s just an ordinary guy trapped in extraordinary situations.
In Point of Impact, FBI Agent Nick Memphis is much like Mitch in The Firm. A normal guy caught in a situation his training and experience has left him ill-prepared for. But he sucks it up and manages to save the day. (If you haven’t read Point of Impact and are thinking of writing a thriller, I can think of few books that would be a better introduction to the genre.) Commander Maggie King in Umbra is another example of a character that lives and breathes, but is not a superhero. She makes mistakes (sleeping with a subordinate,) and has doubts and fears, but still manages to do the right thing when it counts, when the chips are down. These are the kinds of characters you should strive to create.
Now a word about villains. As has been observed by many film and book critics, a thriller is only as good as its villain. This point cannot be emphasized enough. Remember that the fulcrum of the plot isn’t the villains plans, per se, but the villain themselves. The conflict between the hero or heroine and the villain is truly the heart of the story, not whether or not the villain wants to blow up the Empire State Building or start World War III. The relationship by which the hero or heroine and the villain deal with each other is the true center; Remember, a novel is not about what it is about but how it is about it.
The villain is the most important character, beyond even the hero or the heroine. Your readers expect your hero to be good, strong, virtuous, all those things. That’s standard. What they’re looking for is a particularly hateful villain, someone they can boo and hiss at, someone that the hero must deal with. What separates good thrillers from bad, and good thrillers from great ones is the villain and his or her relationship with the hero.
Understand your villain’s motivation. Why is he or she hatching these evil plans? It’s not enough to have a villain who is evil for the pure sake of being evil. That’s empty, almost biblical evil and doesn’t resonate with modern readers raised on a diet of Grisham novels and Ah-nuld movies.
If you are considering creating a thriller novel based around the idea of an antihero, like the Parker novels, tread carefully. It takes a very strong writer to able to pull this off.
Now that you know you have to control your pace carefully, and that it helps to have strong, individual characters who live and breathe...what do we do with them?
Plot Mechanics
Now we get into the specifics of what makes thriller plots thrilling. A wee bit of cynicism is useful here, with a dash of inventive charm. There are certain touchstones to the thriller genre, certain things that fans of these types of stories look for. In much the same way that you use landmarks when driving a car t to point you to familiar directions, these touchstones are beacons for the thriller reader, assuring them that they’re on track and heading in the right direction.
That doesn’t mean they have to be trite, hackneyed or cliched. Your challenge as a thriller writer is to take these hackneyed conventions and trite cliches and breathe new life into them.
One of the most treasured of all thriller touchstones usually occurs in police procedural or other crime-based thrillers where the hero is a detective or other law-enforcement type: The ritual suspension by the gruff-but-loveable commanding officer, usually under political pressure from the mayor or someone like that. How many hundreds of movies have you seen this in? How many thousands of books have you read this in? WHY, oh WHY can’t a cop solve a case while still on duty?
Well, it’s a signal. A beacon, if you will. It tells the reader or viewer that the hero is entering rogue mode; that he’s gone off the reservation and is ready now to start kicking ass and taking names. Freed from the rules that bound him as a law enforcement officer, he no longer has to play fair. It also allows us to glimpse something deeper in the character: Most people, if suspended from their jobs, would take a few days or weeks vacation. They wouldn’t keep doing the jobs they were suspended from! But this guy, the hero, is unable to take “No” for an answer, and continues his pursuit of the villain. He’s dedicated, unbending, and must win at all costs. We like seeing this in a character, in a plot. We like to imagine that we ourselves, when faced with a similar circumstance, would go that extra mile and Do What Has To Be Done.
Personally, I don’t find this plot touchstone all that involving anymore. I’ve seen it too many times for it to resonate anymore. I’d like to read a story where the police department, realizing that in order to deal with the rising tide of crime, has to create an elite, extralegal team that does all the things cops on suspension would do, but with the full backing and approval of the administration and the mayor’s office. Then make the unit secret, and put a reporter on their tail who is slowly uncovering the Horrible Truth. Midway through, we have a scene with the newest member of the elite, extralegal team and the reporter are in bed, and he has a passionate speech about how the police are tired of always having to solve crimes and isn’t it time tax dollars were spent in preventing crime and cleaning the scum off the streets? Reporter counters with the Free Society speech, and so on. THAT is a story that I find more interesting than the same-old-same-old.
But even that plot (renegade, secret police unit taking out career criminals) has been done to death. The challenge, again, is to take the old, familiar, comfortable touchstones and somehow make them new again.
Make a list of the top ten thriller movies and the top ten thriller novels in your opinion. Now start listing all the things that are similar between the stories. Look for specific plot points that are identical, or similar enough to be recognized. Then determine how each other dealt with that plot point differently. If your ten comparison points don’t differ that much, you need to upgrade your reading list, because you’re reading the same thing over and over again.
Some things to consider: Although a chase down a snow-covered mountain with the hero on skis being chased by henchmen on snowmobiles can be thrilling, the fact of the chase itself is not. The reason for the chase can add to the thrill factor, as can any potential pitfalls (like the skier going over the side of a 1000-foot sheet drop...) What distinguishes a good thriller from a great one is the stakes.
Plot A: The skier is an LAPD cop on vacation in Utah with his family. He uncovers a drug ring operating out of the hotel, run by the hotel staff. He starts investigating, and the drug ring henchmen decide to silence him, so they chase him down on the slopes to clip his wings.
Plot B: The skier is an FBI agent who has uncovered a plot to assassinate the President. He tries to convince the Secret Service that the President is in danger, but because of his history with alcoholism, they want proof first. He finds that proof at the ski lodge, and is skiing down the mountain to deliver the information to the proper authorities. The henchmen desperately need to prevent him from reaching the bottom. Their orders are to a) get the proof back, or b) kill the hero before he reaches the bottom.
Which plot is more thrilling?
Plot C: The skier is an FBI agent who has uncovered a plot by an international cabal of organized crime lords to assassinate both the President of the United States, AND the President of the Russian Republic during an economic summit in Geneva in order to send a message that organized crime is here to stay. Again, the FBI agent is a recovering alcoholic, so the Secret Service and the CIA want proof. During his investigation, the hero’s daughter is kidnapped by the cabal’s henchmen, and the hero must get to the bottom of the mountain with the evidence, WITHOUT being discovered by the henchmen on snowmobiles AND rescue his daughter from the evil clutches of the cabal. Because they’re in Geneva, the FBI agent has no law enforcement powers and no backup.
Plot C would be something I’d be interested in reading, because it neatly circumvents the Only A Suspended Cop Can Solve The Case Rule. By moving the FBI agent out of his normal element, we allow him to Do What Must Be Done (which we all like,) without having the trite cliche of having him relieved of his gun and badge. Putting the daughter in jep is a cliche, but if you change it only slightly (his daughter is 22 years old and has been dating the leader of the cabal, not knowing that he’s evil,) it adds another layer of depth and dimension to the story.
Now that I’ve illustrated plot mechanics a little deeper, let’s talk about another possible plot:
Plot D: The skier is President of the United States, and has determined that there is an assassination attempt under way. The Secret Service feigns ignorance, and the President slowly realizes that they’re in on the plot because of his decision months ago to merge the FBI and the Secret Service into a single agency. The President, unsure of who to trust, turns to his closest advisor, the Chief of Staff, who also is in on it, having been bought off by a Colombian drug cartel that wants to see the President dead because of the President’s stance on illegal drugs. Six months ago the President ordered a Special Forces team to destroy the six biggest labs of the drug lords deep in the Colombian jungle. The President decides to trust the leader of the Special Forces team that went into Columbia, who just happens to be dating his daughter. When the daughter is kidnapped by the drug cartel, the President must decide between saving his daughter and avoiding his own murder.
That’s a bit much, isn’t it? You have the assassination plot, the political subplot (A) about the merger of the FBI and Secret Service, the political subplot (B) about the nation’s drug policy, the military subplot (D) about the first invasion of Columbia, and the personal subplot (E) about the kidnapped daughter. There’s just too much there, and the reader would get distracted and annoyed trying to follow all the threads. And writing all those threads so they tie up nicely at the end would be a huge task in and of itself.
So the trick is to create a plot that is interesting and complicated, but not all over the place or overly complicated. The basic rule of thumb is, if you can explain your plot to someone that’s never read a single word of it in three sentences or less, then you’re on the right track. Anything more than that, and you’re going to create more work for yourself...and for your reader.
As you gain experience writing thrillers, you can learn the subtleties of subplots and subtext and throwaways and things like that.
From Plot Mechanics, we move on to...
Theme
Theme is one of those vague words your tenth-grade Creative Writing teacher used in such a way as to make you scratch your head and wonder if she was doing bong hits in her car during lunch period. Most especially when it came to dense, impenetrable works like Shakespeare. “What was the theme of Hamlet?” You’d scratch your head and keep your hand down, knowing that whatever answer you might give would be wrong. (Unless you had Cliff Notes, in which case you’d look like a suck-up to your classmates, who would pound your ass after class for blowing the curve. At least, that’s what happened to me.)
One of the really amusing things for authors is when we either get letters from readers, or read something posted publicly about our writing that contains the phrase, “What the author really meant by this story is...” or “It’s obvious that he means...” You get the idea.
I’ve heard and read that my novel ELS, about the hunt for a savage serial killer in New York City, was really a condemnation of pornography and the desensitizing effect it has on our nation’s youth. Or that it was a value judgement against women in positions of power. Or that it was a story about a little abused boy who grew up to be an FBI agent and solved a lot of cool cases.
All of those interpretations are wrong. The theme of ELS was redemption. Simple, easy-to-understand, easy-to-grasp redemption. Mulder, transferred in disgrace from the X-Files back to the ISU, redeems himself in his own eyes by solving several cold cases and one very hot one. And during that time, he discovers things about himself that he’d never consciously considered.
Grabbing a bunch of characters and jamming them into an action-adventure plot doesn’t make a novel a thriller. What made ELS thrilling, in my humble opinion, was the uncertainty surrounding Mulder’s psychological state as the case grew hotter. Would he crack? Would he manage to figure it out? Would he manage to solve the entire case, not just the mystery behind the ELS itself?
The theme of Umbra was the idea that there are certain things that must be done in the name of Freedom. Distasteful as they are, sometimes, as Thomas Jefferson said, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.
Possibly one of the worst things you can do is to start a thriller novel under the auspices of, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Mulder and Scully were in [some situation?]” if that is all you have in terms of plot, character and theme it’s going to show.
Now for the part that will make your head spin in a 360-degree circle. It’s not always necessary to know what your theme is when you begin writing. But you’d better be sure of what your theme is when you start posting, otherwise you’ll write yourself into a corner faster than a monkey on crack. Trust me, I know. I started writing Ellipsis before I had a clear idea of what theme I wanted, and you can see the results. It’s been almost two years since I wrote chapter 13, and chapter 14 is nowhere in sight.
If you can start your novel with your overriding theme in mind so much the better. I started Umbra with no theme in mind, and you can read the results of that. I started ELS with a definite theme in mind, and you can read the results of that technique as well.
Finally, we go onto:
Tone
Tone is another one of those words that makes us scratch our heads when we’re asked to define it or identify it in someone else’s writing. Tone is the thing that made your eleventh-grade English teacher think that some of Shakespeare’s works were hilarious when in reality it read like Yoda had been crossed with the cast of Upstairs, Downstairs.
Or, we can hearken back to our own childhood. When your mother asked you to clean up your room (if you’re a guy-type-person,) and you said, “FIIIIINNNNEEEE MO-THER!”, rolled your eyes and emitted one of the ten largest sighs in sigh history, your mother might have responded with, “Don’t give me that tone young man!”
Tone in the spoken word and tone in the written word are slightly different concepts. You can read a humor column by Dave Barry and one by Carl Hiaasen and get two entirely different experiences. Whereas Hiaasen explores the humorous ins and outs of the South Florida political scene, Barry’s columns usually explore humorous variations on the word “booger.” Tone can be conveyed by setting, dialog and pacing.
Setting – Having Mulder and Scully hide out from the Bad Guys in a convent sets one tone; having them hide in a mental hospital sets an entirely different tone, and having them hide out in a high-class brothel sets a third tone. Setting your story in the corridors of power in the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency pretty much sets a official, high-pressure tone. Setting the story in a wine vineyard in Northern California means there isn’t going to be a lot of dialog along the lines of, “Colonel, have the Joint Staff meet me in the Situation Room.” Likewise, having the setting in the Pentagon/CIA Headquarters isn’t going to generate the dialog “It’s pretentious, with a woody aftertaste.”
Dialog – This is the first time I’ve discussed dialog, only because dialog is another one of those things that’s incredibly hard to describe how to do well. When writing fanfic, listen to how the established characters talk. Listen to the pauses in their sentences, the word choices they use. Mulder would never say, for example, “Zoinks, Scully! Wanna go out for ice cream?” When dealing with your own characters, if you’ve created living, breathing individuals and you can see them clearly in your head, dialog is a snap.
Romance In The Thriller
Thriller plots naturally lend themselves to MSR-type developments. Just a word of caution – try not to have Mulder and Scully fall into bed as the result of a deathly near-miss. If they narrowly escape death, emotions will be running high in your characters, but it always reads much better if the sex isn’t just out of the blue. Use the early chapters of the story to build on the relationship, to add tension between your hero and heroine (or your hero and hero if you’re writing slash...) so that when the sex does occur, it has an emotional payoff. The longer you wait, generally the better, but don’t wait for the last chapter. Usually at about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through your plot arc is a good place to put it. (Notice I said plot arc and not chapters.)
Research
If you have the time and the resources, research never, ever hurts. I’m lucky in that I read a lot of nonfiction about military and intelligence matters for pleasure anyway, so I’m killing two birds with one stone. You don’t have to research to the depth of a Tom Clancy novel, or even (heh heh) one of my books...but using the right terms and ranks and situations always benefits from a little research before you start.
And, some final thoughts:
1. Villains should have clear motivations for their acts. A murky, unclear, unmotivated villain is a Bad Thing. Avoid at all costs.
2. Villains should be hateful. Unless you’re trying to write an anti-hero novel, no one likes to like the villain.
3. Avoid The Not-So-Bad Villain. An invention of Hollywood, also called the protovillian in most Tom Cruise movies, the Not So Bad Villain usually winds up teaming with the hero to defeat the Real Enemy. Unless you’ve got 300,000 words to tell the story, there’s never enough time to pull this off right. (Just as an aside, Umbra was about 300,000 and ELS was 450,000 words.)
4. Avoid the Hollywood Villain. This is the villain that can outguess the hero at every turn, think six steps ahead, speaks nine languages, can reprogram a computer and change the oil on an M4A4 battle tank with both hands tied behind his back.
5. Don’t be afraid to invent things. I invented CBX gas for Umbra for a very specific reason. Do your research, and you can use poetic license to stretch the truth to where you need it.
6. If you’re going to write about serial killers, read about them first. Nothing is more annoying than reading a serial killer story that is too dumb to know anything about serial killers. Serial killers are sexual sadists, not just mean people with a short temper. Although their average intelligence is slightly higher than the norm, that does not mean they are closet geniuses who can outguess the cops at every turn. Most are inadequate personalities with severe, life-crippling dysfunctionalism.
7. Read as many thrillers as you can get your hands on. Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter is a good one, as is his The Day Before Midnight and his Dirty White Boys. The Firm by John Grisham is a first-rate thriller. Also: Plum Island and The Lion’s Game by Nelson DeMille and his The General’s Daughter is a much better book than a movie. Rules of Prey by John Sandford (any in the Prey series, actually; there’s about 10 or so now) Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz and his Dark Rivers Of The Heart are all good thrillers.
8. Backstory, backstory, backstory. If you need your characters to possess a unique skill for the climax, make sure you set it up early.
9. If you show a gun, virus, poison or bomb in the first third of the book, you’d better use it by the last third. When a reader sees something like that, they start anticipating. Avoid using red herrings at all costs.
10. Avoid Deus Ex Machina endings. This is the kind of story where the ending comes totally out of left field, clunks onto the stage and neatly ties up all loose ends and was never even hinted at anywhere else in the story. Readers of Point of Impact may argue that the ending is a DEM ...but if you re-read the book and pay careful attention to what Swagger does just after the nice folks from RamDyne leave him the first time you’ll see that it’s not really a DEM ending.
Well, that’s about all I have to say on the subject of writing a good thriller. If you want me to answer any questions, or want to debate my thoughts and observations, I welcome feedback. Address it to drambo@sonic.net.
Dawson E. Rambo
Santa Rosa, California
February 2001
