Thrills and Chills: How Do I Write a Great Thriller?
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| Title: | Thrills and Chills: How Do I Write a Great Thriller? |
| Creator: | Dawson E. Rambo |
| Date(s): | February 2001 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | The X-Files |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Thrills and Chills: How Do I Write a Great Thriller? |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Thrills and Chills: How Do I Write a Great Thriller? is an essay by Dawson E. Rambo.
It was posted to the X-Files website Working Stiffs in 2001.
Some Topics Discussed
- X-Files fanfiction
- discussion of pace, characters, plot mechanics, theme, tone, research, romance
- the author uses some of his fiction as examples: ELS, Umbra, Ellipsis
Excerpts
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.
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.
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.