To write a thriller, put a hero in danger from an antagonist who is stronger, smarter or better placed, give the threat a deadline, and keep raising the cost of failing. A thriller usually tells readers what the danger is. The question it keeps open is whether the hero can stop it in time, and what stopping it will cost.
Thriller vs mystery vs suspense
The labels overlap on every bookstore table. International Thriller Writers, the genre's honorary society of authors, counts murder mysteries, detective stories, suspense, horror, espionage and adventure among the books broadly classified as thrillers. The useful difference is where the pressure comes from. A mystery withholds information about something that has already happened, and how to write a mystery novel covers that puzzle. A thriller's pressure comes from something still on its way, often in plain view.
| Thriller | Mystery | Psychological suspense | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The question | ThrillerCan the hero stop it in time? | MysteryWho did it, and why? | Psychological suspenseWhat is wrong here, and how bad will it get? |
| What the reader knows | ThrillerOften more than the hero: the threat, sometimes the villain | MysteryLess than the detective, or the same | Psychological suspenseWhat the narrator knows, if she can be trusted |
| The hero's job | ThrillerSurvive and stop the threat | MysterySolve the crime | Psychological suspenseFind the truth before it destroys her |
| Pace | ThrillerFast and rising, with short breathers | MysteryMeasured, turning on each clue | Psychological suspenseA slow burn that tightens |
| The ending | ThrillerA confrontation with the antagonist | MysteryA reveal | Psychological suspenseA revelation that changes the past |
Because the reader knows what is coming, a thriller survives a known outcome. Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal (1971) follows an assassin hired to kill Charles de Gaulle, and readers know de Gaulle wasn't assassinated. The book runs on how close the Jackal gets. The scene-level techniques behind that dread, from dramatic irony to the stretched moment, are in the guide to suspense in writing. This guide is about the architecture that holds them up.
Choose a thriller subgenre
| Subgenre | Where the threat comes from | Touchstones |
|---|---|---|
| SubgenrePsychological and domestic | Where the threat comes fromSomeone close, or the narrator's own mind | TouchstonesDaphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938); Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012) |
| SubgenreEspionage | Where the threat comes fromA hostile state, a mole, a secret plan | TouchstonesErskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903); John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) |
| SubgenreAction and chase | Where the threat comes fromA conspiracy, and one capable person in its way | TouchstonesJohn Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915); Lee Child's Killing Floor (1997) |
| SubgenreCrime | Where the threat comes fromA killer still at work | TouchstonesThomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs (1988) |
| SubgenreLegal | Where the threat comes fromA case, a firm or a client | TouchstonesScott Turow's Presumed Innocent (1987); John Grisham's The Firm (1991) |
| SubgenrePolitical | Where the threat comes fromA plot against a leader or a state | TouchstonesRichard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1959); The Day of the Jackal (1971) |
| SubgenreTechno and medical | Where the threat comes fromScience or a system out of control | TouchstonesMichael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969); Robin Cook's Coma (1977) |
Write a thriller in eight steps
The steps follow one original book: a state dam inspector in Colorado finds that a dam's safety readings have been faked, two days before a storm is due.
- Name the threat and the deadline
One sentence: what happens, to whom, by when, if nobody stops it. “If Petra Lindqvist can't prove the Calder Dam readings are fake within 52 hours, a spring storm will fill a cracked reservoir above a town of 9,000.” If your sentence has no clock, decide what will put pressure on the middle instead. A deadline is the simplest tool.
- Write the antagonist's plan first
In many thrillers the antagonist drives the plot until the midpoint, and the hero reacts. Work out what they want, why now and what they will do when things go wrong. Warren Coyle, security chief for the contractor that rebuilt the spillway, needs the readings buried until his company's sale closes on Friday.
- Choose a hero who can't walk away
Give her a reason only she can act and a weakness the antagonist can use. Petra found the data, and nobody believes her. She also signed last spring's inspection report, so going public means admitting she missed it.
- Stack the stakes
Decide what she loses at each level, personal to public, and when each one rises. The next section shows all four layers.
- Plot move and counter-move
List her moves and the antagonist's answers. Every answer should cost her something: time, an ally, her credibility, her freedom. Give each exchange a line in a scene outline so you can see the costs pile up.
- Place the big reversals
Mark the midpoint, where the threat turns out bigger or the hunter becomes the hunted, and the low point, where her plan fails and she is alone.
- Draft fast, in short chapters
End most chapters on a turn. Mark research gaps in brackets, such as [how fast does a full reservoir rise?], and keep moving. The brackets can wait for revision.
- Revise for plausibility
At every turn, ask why she doesn't call the police, why the antagonist doesn't simply kill her, and how each character knows what they know. In the dedication of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), John Buchan describes the “shocker” as the kind of tale where “the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible.” Stay inside that border.
Stack the stakes in layers
Stakes are what the hero loses if she fails. Thrillers tend to push them outward, to a city or a country, but a number is hard to feel, and one person the reader has met is easy. Petra's dam holds back a reservoir above 9,000 people, and the one who matters most to her is twelve. Build three outer layers and one inner one, and let the personal layer hurt most.
| Layer | For Petra | When it rises |
|---|---|---|
| LayerPersonal | For PetraHer son, 12, lives with his father in Calder Falls, below the dam | When it risesChapter 9: her ex refuses to leave town |
| LayerProfessional | For PetraHer signature is on last spring's inspection report | When it risesChapter 4: her supervisor calls the data a sensor glitch |
| LayerPublic | For Petra9,000 people in the valley and the only highway out | When it risesChapter 15: the storm track shifts north |
| LayerInner | For PetraShe has always trusted procedure, and procedure takes a week | When it risesChapter 21: she breaks the law to reach the gates |
The inner layer is the one the ending answers. Petra has trusted procedure all her working life. By chapter 21 she is breaking the law to reach the gates, and at the climax she opens an outlet nobody has authorized her to touch. A climax that makes the hero do what she has always refused to do turns a rescue into a change of character.
Start the clock early
A clock gives readers a number to watch. At the scale of a book it comes in three forms:
- A hard deadline. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, the American Scudder tells Richard Hannay that the Greek premier Karolides will be murdered when he comes to London “on the 15th day of June.” Then Scudder is stabbed in Hannay's flat. Hannay reckons “the odds were a thousand to one” that he would be charged with the murder, so he runs, with the police and the plotters both behind him.
- A rolling clock. The threat repeats on a schedule: a killer who strikes every third night, a ransom call at noon each day.
- A countdown in the headings. “52 hours,” “51 hours,” or Day 1 to Day 5, so readers can see the margin shrink.
Show the clock in the first act and remind readers of it at the turns. Don't move the deadline for free: if it slips, the hero should pay for the extra time, and if it jumps forward, as Petra's storm does, let it jump at the worst moment.
A slip of six hours can break a chapter, so keep both clocks in one timeline document: the hour, what Petra does, what Coyle does. If the book is a Strokes project, attach that timeline to the Strokes Assistant and ask it to review the chapters for scenes that contradict it, such as a drive that takes ten minutes in chapter 6 and an hour in chapter 18.
Give the antagonist a plan
A mystery's culprit hides. A thriller's antagonist acts, and keeps acting, and the hero's first job is to survive the plan. Write that plan as a timeline before you write a scene, then plot the hero against it.
| Petra's move | Coyle's counter-move | What it costs her |
|---|---|---|
| Petra's moveEmails the data to her supervisor | Coyle's counter-moveHis people wipe the server, and the supervisor calls it a glitch | What it costs herHer credibility |
| Petra's moveDrives up to read the gauges by hand | Coyle's counter-moveA rockfall closes the access road | What it costs herSix of her 52 hours |
| Petra's moveCalls the county sheriff | Coyle's counter-moveHe reports her for stealing state data | What it costs herShe becomes the one being hunted |
| Petra's moveGets the paper logs from the retired dam tender | Coyle's counter-moveHis men take the logs, and the old man vanishes | What it costs herHer evidence and her only witness |
Coyle barely needs to be on the page for this to work. Whether to give the antagonist chapters of their own is a choice: a villain's POV adds dread, because readers see the trap before the hero does, but it spends mystery. If you use it, keep those chapters short and end them on something the hero doesn't know. For motive and menace, see how to write a villain.
Structure and the reversals
Thrillers can use any of the standard structures. What marks them is the job each turn does: it either raises the stakes or takes away a way out. Many open cold, on the threat. Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary (1922) begins “It was 2 p.m. on the afternoon of May 7, 1915,” on the sinking Lusitania, where a stranger hands a young American woman a packet of papers. The packet becomes the MacGuffin the rest of the novel chases.
| Stage | Where it falls | In the dam story |
|---|---|---|
| StageCold open | Where it fallsFirst pages | In the dam storyMarch: the engineer who signed the spillway plans tries to report the flaw, and his car goes into the river |
| StageInciting incident | Where it fallsAbout 10% | In the dam storyPetra finds 31 days of looped readings |
| StageCommitment | Where it falls20–25% | In the dam storyHer office won't act, so she takes the data and goes |
| StageMove and counter-move | Where it falls25–50% | In the dam storyEach move costs her, as in the table above |
| StageMidpoint reversal | Where it fallsAbout 50% | In the dam storyThe engineer was murdered. This is no cover-up of a mistake, and she is next |
| StageSqueeze | Where it falls50–75% | In the dam storyAllies fall away and the police close in |
| StageLow point | Where it falls75–80% | In the dam storyThe logs are gone, the dam tender has vanished, and the storm arrives eight hours early |
| StageAt the villain's mercy | Where it falls85–90% | In the dam storyCoyle catches her in the inspection gallery inside the dam |
| StageClimax | Where it falls90–95% | In the dam storyShe opens the old hand-cranked outlet the dam tender showed her in chapter 12 |
| StageResolution | Where it fallsLast pages | In the dam storyThe reservoir drops below the crack; Coyle is arrested at the closing |
Two conventions hold the table together. The hero wins through her own choices: help can arrive, but only after she has done the thing that saves her. And the way out was planted earlier, here the hand-cranked outlet in chapter 12, so the climax pays off a Chekhov's gun instead of pulling a rescue from nowhere. Psychological thrillers often hold back a twist that changes what everything before it meant, and Gone Girl's arrives as its second part begins. For twists that hold up, see the plot twist ideas.
End chapters on a turn
Thriller chapters tend to run short, and most end on a turn that pulls the reader into the next. Five kinds cover most of them:
- A question. So who had been sending the dam's numbers for the last thirty-one days?
- A reversal. The deputy hadn't come to help. He had a warrant, and her name was on it.
- A revelation. The engineer who signed the spillway plans hadn't retired to Tucson. He had been dead since March.
- A threat. Her phone lit up with a photo of her son's school bus, taken from the car behind it.
- A decision. She looked at the chain on the gate, then at forty miles of dark road behind her, and took the bolt cutters out of the truck.
None of these leaves Petra hanging from a ledge. Each one changes something the next chapter has to deal with. The question turns a sensor glitch into a person. The reversal changes a relationship: the deputy who answered her call has come to arrest her. The revelation changes the stakes, from a cover-up to murder. The threat moves them onto her son, and the decision commits her to a cost the next chapter will collect. A changed deadline works the same way: a chapter can end quietly on a forecast that brings the storm eight hours closer. Readers turn the page to see what the change will cost, and that pull survives even when the next chapter opens calmly.
Vary them. Five threats in a row read as noise, and a cliffhanger that dissolves on the next page makes readers trust the next one less. After a big turn, give readers one short breather chapter (a meal, a wound dressed, a call home) so they care about the person before you put her back in danger. Cross-cut between hero and antagonist at their tensest moments, and cut travel to a sentence. The guide to pacing covers the sentence-level tools. When the draft is done, read it in as few sittings as you can and mark every page where you caught yourself skimming. Start revising there.
Common thriller mistakes
- The idiot plot. The hero could call the police and doesn't. Answer “why not?” on the page, early, with a reason readers believe.
- The villain explains everything. A confession speech at the climax stops the action. Let the plan show through what the antagonist does.
- Stakes with no face. A city in danger is abstract until one person in it is someone the reader has met.
- Rescue by coincidence. Luck can make things worse for the hero. It shouldn't save her.
- Research on display. Readers need to believe you know how a spillway works, not to learn it. One exact detail usually does more than a page of specifications.
Frequently asked questions
Can a book be both a mystery and a thriller?
Yes, and many are. A thriller can hide who the antagonist is, and a detective can end up in danger. To decide which label leads, look at what your climax answers. If it reveals who did it and why, readers will likely judge the book as a mystery. If it is a confrontation that stops a threat in time, they will judge it as a thriller.
How long is a thriller novel?
The range agents most often cite for a debut thriller is about 70,000 to 100,000 words, in line with other crime fiction. Many thriller readers expect a fast book, so cut anything that doesn't raise the stakes or move the clock. Check recent books in your subgenre and the guidelines of the agents you plan to query.
Should a thriller include the villain's point of view?
It can. Villain chapters build dread, because readers see the trap before the hero does, but they give away mystery about who the antagonist is and what they want. Keep them short, end them on something the hero doesn't know, and don't let them reveal the plan so fully that the hero's discoveries become old news.
What is a ticking clock in a thriller?
A ticking clock is a deadline the reader can see coming: a bomb set for noon, a storm due in two days, a killer who strikes every third night. It makes every delay cost something. Show it early, remind readers of it at the turns, and don't let it slip for free. If the deadline moves, the hero should pay for the extra time.
