Raising Hell or Raising the Stakes?

To the Max

One thing that all thriller writers should have in common is the ability to take the suspense to the ultimate level. This is the difference between a suspenseful tale and a damn good thriller.

 I always associate reading a thriller with the experience of riding a roller coaster. The ride is full of scary ups and downs …

First we toil steadily upwards whilst the suspense builds. We giggle nervously because we know what will happen when we get to the top… Or do we?  We know (and expect) we will experience a rush of adrenalin but until we actually get there we do not know exactly what it will be like.  The anticipation is enough to get your pulse racing and your palms sweating as you hold onto the safety bar and stare upwards at the sky ( best not to look downwards…)

When finally we get to the top we hold our breath… Prepare for the downward whoosh… Then we are plunging downwards and most of us cannot help but let out a terrified scream! Yes, scary… We asked for it and we got it! But fear is not pleasant, you say… But it is when you finally get back to earth, realise it is all over and, crucially, you are still in one piece.  This is the thrill that many live for – the intense emotion of having survived.

For most ordinary people the roller coaster is a harmless way of experiencing that thrill. For readers of good thrillers that is what they too expect – perhaps in not such a dramatic way but the highs of a thriller story must be towering and the lows… Well, low...  The ride up must be full of incident and the tension and suspense should mount up as the plot gathers pace. Then, in my opinion, the suspense should be taken to the max and not wimped out on. When you think your character cannot take any more ( or things could not be more deadly )that’s when you need to up the stakes and max it.  You can always toss in the kitchen sink!

 

 

Do you think in terms of raising the stakes higher and higher in your novel writing?

 

Chiller Thrillers for humans!

Chiller Thrillers to die for.

Intriguing plots, suspense, dreadful predicaments, breakneck pace, ‘out of this world’ events even... These are all elements of a good fiction thriller novel. Of course, you can also break thrillers down into lots of sub genres and start including spy/terrorist, swash-buckling adventure, horror, and supernatural. Maybe the key ingredient of thrillers is that they should have you breathlessly hanging onto your hollyhocks to see what will happen next. The stakes are high and layer after layer of ‘can it possibly get any worse?’ is superseded only by the hero/heroine’s attempts to come good, which conversely just gets him/her into further disasters... I just love these plots…

But wait there is more to it than this...

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?