Chiller Thrillers to
die for.
As a thriller writer I’m always fascinated by human
behaviour in extremis. When the chips are down (forgive the cliché) all bets
are off! Because, much more than the exciting plot lines, there must be a
strong human interest that readers can relate to. And that, I believe, is what
makes a thriller story so believable and engaging. It is the hero/heroine
suffering and struggling and yet overcoming adversity – eventually - that makes
readers empathise with them.
One of the main faults I had when I first started writing thrillers
was that I did not understand the power of empathy. I focused on the
multi-layered plot making it as full of chills and frights as I could. I made
my main character a bit of a bitch and apart from overcoming the threat to her
and her family I never made her particularly likeable. After this criticism of
my story came from more than a few quarters, I looked afresh at other stories,
comparing them to my own and realised they were right. Mostly main characters
should be likeable even if they do some not so good things.
None of us know how we’d react if we were put in a life or
death situation or were faced by a dreadful choice but we can’t help but wonder
how we’d cope and that emotion – empathy - is the engine of all good fiction,
not just thrillers. Of course it does mean that the heroine/hero characters
must be likeable so we can root for them to succeed. Even superheroes and star
trek characters have to have some human frailties for us to feel for them.
Thrillers may be fast paced, exciting reads but they still
need to conform to basic story telling rules and the main characters need to
connect with us, the readers.
Do you think empathetic charcters are key ingredients in good fiction?
