TECH: A Thrill A Minute?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting Dec. 31, 2015

Well, maybe not quite that fast. But... Over here

http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/12/30/thrill-me/

Sarah Hoyt talks about what the key parts of a thriller are. So fasten your seatbelt and keep your head and arms inside the car at all times, here we go!

First off, Sarah tosses off a definition of a thriller fairly lightly. Simple, eh? A book where good and evil race before something horrible can happen. So we have the good guys (aka the guys in white hats?) and the bad guys (black hats, anyone?) racing to prevent or cause something horrible. That makes sense, right?

Now, Sarah does point out that the horrible thing may range from losing a cookie (children's book? Hey, losing a cookie is a horrible thing to have happen at any age!) up to blowing up the planet (or for those of you who remember E. E. Smith, we can toss in blowing up the sun, blowing up the Galaxy, or perhaps even blowing up the universe -- world-shattering booms!). But it needs to be something really horrible, okay?

The place to start your thriller? With the evil protagonist, and the horrible things that he or she can and will cause. Start with something that establishes just how bad they are, and how horrible the horrible thing is.

An optional tweak is whether you hide the identity of our bad boy, or reveal it up front. For mystery, keep them in the shadows. For a bit more horror, let us see that they are the boy next door.

Next up, build urgency by showing us both the bad boys busily preparing to pull the pin on their boom and the good guy riding to the rescue, intent on stopping them. Alternating scenes, letters back and forth, perhaps a Skype interview? You figure out how to do this, but make us feel that urgency building.

Yes, this is a ticking clock, of some variety. In a thriller, they tend to be explicit and very present, ticking away with the numbers dwindling...

To the climax!

Let the villain build in horror, stepping closer to the final horrible event that we have been afraid of from the start. And keep the hero struggling to catch up, running, running...

Until the final fight. The thriller needs that final confrontation, villain against hero, right on the edge of the final disaster. This is where the hero pays for victory, in pain, loss, or whatever.

Sarah recommends a Writer's Digest book if you want to know more about thrillers.

I have to admit, I think this is one genre where reading helps quite a bit. Reading thrillers, that is, not advice. Then step back and think about just how that thriller kept you turning the pages, racing along with the good guy until...

Exercise? Well, one simple one is to take a thriller that you like and simply go through it, identifying the good guys, bad guys, the ticking clock, and the final horror... What are the parts of your favorite thriller?

Then, of course, you can either try crafting one fresh, or perhaps consider adding some or all the thriller parts to a story you have already. What does it take to turn your story into a thriller? Does punching up the antagonist, adding a horrible thing, and a ticking clock do the job? What else needs to change?

Go ahead, take your readers on a roller coaster ride with a thriller! Just watch out for the final drop!

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