Writing Thrillers by Michael Newton Review
Michael Newton has allegedly written over 400 books, and had written 260+ by the publishing of Writing Thrillers. I’ve written about him before – here’s a review of his “How To Write Action Adventure Novels.”
This book is very similar, though centred around thrillers as opposed to action-adventure. However, there’s a lot of overlap, and if you want to write either genre, you could do worse than reading both of the books.
This book is also free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers, so there’s that too. It’s not a long or difficult read, so it’ll take you a few hours maximum to get through.
Here’s an annoying thing in the interests of honesty before I talk about what I learned: Occasionally it gets a bit too much like a list of the entire set of things other writers and filmmakers have done. For instance, a bullet-point list about devices used in spy-thrillers turns into a hundreds-of-words long list of all the various different endings, villains and quirks in the James Bond series.
What Is a Thriller, Really?
Newton starts the book by saying that “thriller” isn’t a genre, but rather an overarching theme that runs throughout multiple genres.
From romantic suspense to action-adventure to legal thrillers, he breaks down (pretty exhaustively) all the different sub-genres and gives pointers to the style, structure and customs of each.
He also gives an extensive list of reading material for each subgenre as well as a further reading list at the end of the chapter. This section (as I stated in the review heading) is a bit exhaustive, but chances are you’ll have a particular sub-genre you’re drawn to, so maybe skip through and read that.
The Structure of a Thriller Is Based Around One Thing Only
If you’re interested in writing thrillers, then there’s one thing that every story you write will be based on: High stakes.
Whether it’s a legal thriller where a notorious killer is going to walk or a revenge novel about finding the guy who killed your brother, in every decent thriller there are high stakes, and the story is based on whether the protagonist can win or lose everything.
There are countless renditions on the win all or lose all theme, but they all share the same basic tenet: High stakes and the pressure of gambling on them.
Characters
Writing Thrillers goes into quite a lot of detail about characters in your thriller. One of the big challenges of writing thrillers is that you’ve got a lot of different issues: You’re probably going to have an obsessed protagonist – yet they still have to be a fully-rounded human being. They’ll probably be flawed but they can’t be irredeemable. All of these things have to skirt the line of believable yet not realistic and avoid descending into parody.
Newton talks about what to name characters, what to do with them, whether to flesh characters out and how much to flesh them out.
Don’ts of Thriller Writing
Throughout the book, Newton goes through a lot of pitfalls that thriller writers fall into. and they really do. I’ve read so much bad thriller fiction I could cry about the hours I’ve lost.
Here are just two:
- Don’t treat dialogue like a real conversation. It’s a script, and it has to be short, sharp and precise. You never hear people in thriller movies saying, “See you soon!” at the end of their phone calls. That’s because it slows the pace and doesn’t add anything except dreary realism.
- Don’t proselytise and preach at your reader. This is a big mistake that a lot of thriller writers make. Especially political thriller writers. We want to know whether bad guy dies and good guy wins. We don’t – as readers – want to know what your stance on political issues is. The reader understands why rape is bad… they don’t need a four chapter lecture on why it’s bad and why they should feel bad that rape exists.
The book contains many more examples of things to avoid. What’s interesting is that you could probably hop over to Amazon and find examples of basic errors in 90% of the Thrillers on there.
Minutiae
Writing Thrillers has several sections on various aspects that people need to get right. For instance, there’s a chapter on sex in thrillers. Too over-the-top and you’re into erotica territory – more over the top and you’re going to get banned.
The same is true of gore and violence. Not everyone should be recreating American Psycho.
There’s a whole chapter on firearms, weapons and fighting. Getting these things wrong ruins the immersion for the reader.
There’s also another chapter on espionage seeing as it’s such a staple of thriller authorship. Again, there are things that you can get right and wrong that’ll either make your story dull or unbelievable.
With most things thriller, there’s a balancing act.
Final Thoughts
Writing Thrillers is a good book which you can get from Amazon here.
It has it’s downsides but if you sit and make notes on it, you’ll get a comprehensive checklist of everything to do to build a thriller novel – and a lot of things you shouldn’t do.
If you’re interested in writing thrillers, then I suggest you do just that.