Writing
a good thriller can be a bit more demanding than writing a comedy, romance or
action adventure. You can follow a sort
of formula with those, and even though your audience will generally have an
idea of what’s going to happen, they can still be entertained. With a thriller,
you have to keep them guessing, and you have to have a very tight control of your
pacing to keep your audience on the edge of their seats. You can’t really write a thriller to formula;
however I did have some basic ideas to begin with. It calls for switching the
perspective from which you write your stories back and forth between the good
guys and the bad guys.
From the
early days of computer gaming levels and enemies were like problems you had to
solve. Through experimentation you
learned the patterns and timings and actions you had to take to win, and once
you had solved the problem the game had
posed, you could beat it pretty much every time.
In a thriller, the sides present problems for each other and while they're more complicated than those old video games it's still that struggle to solve what the other sides throwing at you. You start with a problem for the bad
guys. The secret CIA list with the names
and locations of all our operatives is very well protected. How do the bad guys
get it? Because bad guys are evil and unscrupulous they can use any means necessary
to crack the problem, from a traitor on the inside to blackmail, or hacking.
For the purposes of the story, you create the security around the list, and
then you figure out what it would take to beat the security. This will always be successful; otherwise you
don’t have a story. The bad guys don’t
act until they have a perfect unbeatable plan, and the hero generally doesn’t
enter the story until after the bad guys have made the first move.
Now it’s
the hero’s turn. He has a problem. The bad guys have an unbeatable plan that
they have worked out in every detail. The hero will generally be working from behind
with limited information and resources.
He has to figure out how to break down the bad guys’ unbeatable plan.
This could be something large scale like a Tom Clancy espionage thriller, or
smaller and more personal, like a detective trying to solve the perfect murder,
or find the kidnapped socialite before the serial killer finishes her. In this
case the criminal’s problem was how to commit the perfect crime and get away
with it. When the hero begins unraveling the bad guys carefully constructed
plan, the problem switches sides again. How do the bad guys stop the hero from
interfering enough to jeopardize their perfect plan? Do they try to kill him?
Maybe the killer runs him off the road after he shows up asking questions.
Maybe they frame him for the murder. And so on, back and forth.
Now
since things never go according to plan in real life, a good thriller
introduces unforeseen elements on both sides.
Usually the earlier one helps the hero like in the action thriller Diehard, one of the first terrorist John McClain took out happened to be the one carrying the detonators
for the bad guys’ explosives. That was a
break for McClain and a wrench in the works for the bad guys plan. Later, the shoe will be on
the other foot, and something unexpected will happen to screw the good guys
over. Towards the end in Diehard, John could not have anticipated that reporter going on
the news and outing his family to the terrorist, allowing Hans Gruber to
discover that he already had McClain’s wife hostage. This is usually the point where the good guys
really have to step up their game to pull out a victory.
Finally, you have to end it. As big and dramatic as you know
how. You’ve been keeping up the pace all this time right? Ratcheting up the
tension? Raising the Stakes? Then let her rip. Yippee Kai Yay…
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