The Art of Thrillers: Behind the Shadows

2. Don't be Afraid of Tropes.

This brings us to our second piece of advice: don't be afraid of tropes. As a writer, you want to twist the expected in interesting ways because readers who read thrillers like clichés and archetypes. It's not necessary to create a wheel. Any thriller book will typically immediately identify the cliche. Books by Kara Thomas are an excellent example.

The Darkest Corners features the trope of the "Main Character Returns to Their Small Town," Little Monsters is about "Toxic Friends/Mean Girls," and The Cheerleaders is about "It Happened That Night," where everything is connected to the events of "A Big Incident from Years Ago." Other tropes include small-town secrets, government conspiracies, serial killers, and domestic suspense (also known as the "Can You Trust Your Husband?" trope).

Choose the cliches you enjoy reading about—the things that itch you just can't seem to scratch. It's the one you yearn for, the one you can't get enough of, but not enough people have written it. It's the trope you want to experiment with, the one that will test you, the one that provides you with a storyline, characters, or intriguing turns that you could center a whole novel on. Characters stuck on an island or in a house during a snowfall are a great example of the isolation cliché, which I adore. This theme was particularly beloved by Agatha Christie. It's entertaining to read, but writing about the creative murder of people is difficult. Tropes are not recipes; they are frameworks. Because tropes lend themselves to particular plot beats, they can assist you in organizing the framework of your novel in the most effective way. They give writers of thrillers of all stripes a roadmap to follow.

As an example, let's dissect the solitude trope. These are the patterns:

Organize your cast of characters in a remote area.Possibly during bad weather, trap them there.It should always appear to be an accident since nobody realizes anything is wrong until someone dies.Then, when a second person passes away, there is that "Oh sh*t" moment. Furthermore, a third party is pursuing them.While searching the area to check if anyone else is around, the characters point fingers at one another. Since they are a small group, they are certain that one of them carried out the deed.As more people vanish or pass away, they turn against one another. They make an effort to figure out who brought them there and why.Tension reaches a breaking point when just three or four members of the final cast remain, and the investigation quickly descends to the climactic moment, during which the guilty party attempts to flee.

The fun lies in getting to know the characters—their motivations for being on this desolate island or somewhere else, and their plans for getting away, even though all of these plot lines may seem incredibly familiar. Your characters' responses will differ depending on whether they are stranded in an opulent mansion or a woodland during a winter. Because of the way the plot is set up, the isolation trope inherently contains tension. When choosing a thriller trope, choose one that will bring suspense to your narrative right away.