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Shock Point and other books by April Henry are available via the following vendors or your favorite local independent bookseller.
home > writer's tips > the thrill of it allReprinted from Writers Digest:
THE THRILL OF IT ALL—19 SECRETS TO NAIL-BITING SUCCESS
or readers, nothing spells escape like a good thriller. As a writer, how do you keep the thrills coming? Luckily, the avenues for creating tension are endless.
- Keep chapters under ten pages. Short chapters tempt readers to read “just one more,” and before they know it, it’s two in the morning. If you have a long chapter with more than one point of view, pick up the pace of the book by starting a new chapter every time the POV shifts.
- Use multiple points of view and cut between them at crucial moments. When a villain knows something that the heroine doesn’t, then use his POV to create tension. When your readers know or suspect more than the heroine, then they can grow more and more tense, praying she won’t fall into traps.
- End most chapters with cliff hangers. Leave readers in suspense by stopping at a tense moment, then switching to another part of the story. To give a simplistic example, Mary answers a knock on her door. She is expecting a friend, but instead it is a stranger pointing a gun. The chapter ends. The next chapter begins from the point of view of the old friend, wondering why Mary doesn’t answer her door. Readers will wait breathlessly to see if Mary survived.
- Don’t spend a lot of time on lush description in the middle of an action sequence. The last chapter of my thriller Learning to Fly is pretty bare bones: one woman, two men, a lonely cabin, gunshots and a sudden fire. As it went through the editorial process I kept waiting for someone to tell me the chapter needed to be expanded. Instead one of the proofers told me she unconsciously snapped her pencil while reading it.
- Make one of the characters especially violent. If he has a hair-trigger temper, then readers worry something bad might erupt every time he walks into a room.
- Don’t tell everything up front. In fact, don’t tell anything until you have to! Give information in pieces. One of the most common mistakes people make when writing a thriller is to tell too much too soon, because they are terrified readers won’t understand the complexities of the story. Trust your readers to hang in there.
- The element of surprise. The more unexpected twists your thriller has, the better. In the TV show 24, Terri learns from a cell phone call that the body of a murder victim has been identified as someone named Allen York. Only the man beside her, the man who has offered to help Terri find her missing daughter and is now driving Terri’s car, has introduced himself as ‘Allen York.’ 24 probably used every tension-producing trick listed in this article.
- Turn the tables with a betrayal. The kindly neighbor, the friendly co-worker, the adoring husband—are they not whom they seem to be? In Marathon Man, Tom “Babe” Levy is rescued from torture by a policeman named Janeaway. When he tells Babe to call him Janey, the reader realizes with a shock that this is Babe’s brother’s boyfriend (not a woman, as the reader has been led to believe—a very clever surprise). And then when Babe honestly tells Janeway he knows nothing, the cop sighs in exasperation—and returns Babe to his torturer.
- History repeats itself. A defining moment from the heroine’s past can motivate her to either relive or avoid a replay. Torment your character with guilt for having failed: the cop who didn’t react fast enough and his partner died, the mother who let her attention wander just long enough for her child to be kidnapped. Show the moment in flashback (but not before teasing readers with hints—“he woke up panting from the dream again, the one about the fire”—and upping the tension). Then write its echo at the climax. Give your main character a chance to rise above the paralyzing fear and rewrite history. Getting it right will be the final motivation she needs to think and act fast, achieving redemption.
- The forces of nature. Life is complicated enough when the Mafia AND the CIA want you dead, but what if you’re trapped by a snowstorm in an isolated farm house without power? Use a windstorm, ice storm, flood, or earthquake to make matters more complicated for your characters—and more interesting for your readers.
- Drop a hint. Mention the locked gun cabinet or even the razor-sharp Wustof knives, and readers will eagerly wait for your resourceful main character to put the object into play.
- The fun of phobias. Whether it’s a fear of enclosed spaces, snakes, or heights, forcing your hero to confront his phobia (preferably while dodging bullets or saving another character or both) is a great way to heighten the tension. Use flashbacks to provide a frame of reference for the current sense of vulnerability. Heighten the tension even more by picking a phobia that personally gives you, the author, a bad case of the willies. In this case “write what you feel,” is even better than “write what you know.”
- Why won’t anyone believe me? Like Cassandra, a hero whose sanity, morals, or judgment has been called into question can find his truths fall on deaf ears. The hero—and the reader—feels an escalating sense of panic as he tries to find someone who will listen before it's too late. Sometimes even the reader doesn’t know whom to believe. In Ravelling, the main character has just been released from a mental hospital and believes he can read others’ minds. He also “knows— his brother is a killer—but is he right?
- Hurt a main character. It was going to be difficult enough to escape, but now that your heroine has a blinding migraine headache, a bullet wound, or a dislocated shoulder, how will she pull it off? Ask yourself what is the worst that could happen to someone, and then write it. Make your main characters suffer and readers will thank you for it. In Greg Iles’ excellent thriller, 24 Hours, a child manages to escape her kidnappers and hide in the woods—but she has diabetes and will go into a coma if she doesn’t get insulin soon.
- Kill somebody off—preferably a likeable character. Otherwise, readers might start believing that you would never let anything bad happen to your main characters. Show readers that you can do it and that you will do it. From that point on, readers will be jumpy at the first sign of a threat against one of the remaining characters.
- Limit time. By letting readers know the action will happen in a confined time frame you increase tension. Are the flood waters rising, is the dawn breaking, is the security guard scheduled to walk past in just another eight minutes? G.M. Ford’s Fury heads each chapter with the number of days in a countdown, starting with six. Simply reading the start of each chapter heightens the tension.
- Tick, tick, tick … This is related to the above. How many movies have you seen where the characters are staring fixedly at a bomb—complete with a digital clock helpfully counting down the remaining seconds? Given 22 weeks to solve a problem, we all might be able to do it, but what happens to the tension if it’s just 22 minutes—or 22 seconds? When time grows short, the characters—and the reader—grow more agitated. In my thriller, Learning to Fly, Free is told by Roy that he will kill her if his wife doesn’t show up by 9 pm. The only problem is that Free knows his wife is dead. Free—and the reader—knows she had better think of a plan B before 9 pm. Time pressure forces your characters to take action.
- Limit the character’s physical space. No matter how bad things get, the characters don’t have the option of running away, so you force them to become resourceful. Take the movie Dead Calm. The two main characters—heroine and villain—are trapped together on a boat. Every space and sound is freighted with menace.
- One last twist. Your hero is finally out of danger and readers can let out a sigh of relief. Or can they? Now’s the time for one final twist. It may be a cliché to have the supposedly dead villain pose one last threat—but sometimes cliches work. Don’t let your main character win too easily. The more hopeless it seems, the more readers will be engaged.
Author information
In addition to her thriller, Learning to Fly, April Henry is the author of three series mysteries, Circles of Confusion, Square in the Face, and Heart-Shaped Box. The fourth in the series, Buried Diamonds, will be published in 2003. Her Web site is AprilHenryMysteries.com.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The
differences between mysteries and thrillers
While there should be plenty of thrills in a mystery,
and plenty of mysteries in a thriller, still the two species aren’t
quite the same. A mystery starts with a “why,” traditionally,
why was one character murdered? In a thriller, the question is “how,”
as in how is the main character going to make it out alive? A mystery
usually takes place among a small circle knit together by friendship,
work, or location. In contrast, a thriller will often move out into the
world, introducing characters previously unknown to the protagonist. Mysteries
are frequently part of a series, while thrillers are almost always one-shots.
A mystery can be an intellectual puzzle (in Josephine Tey’s classic
Daughter of Time the mystery is solved by a man confined to a
hospital bed), while a thriller is expected to have a fast pace, plenty
of thrills, frequent plot twists, and skin-of-the-teeth escapes.
