Shoot to Thrill: Building Suspense and Twists in Your Next Thriller
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A great thriller novel entertains, intrigues, and excites in ways that few other genres can. For lazy days spent relaxing by the pool, beach, or in the backyard, a pulse-quickening thriller can get the heart racing — all too important when you’ve been sitting still and lounging for hours (and hours…and hours).
With summer upon us, you might be reaching for your next beach read thriller…or potentially thinking of writing your own. But have you ever wondered how to actually craft suspense, or how to set up the all-important twist?
To help you keep the pages turning, we spoke with two of the rising stars of the thriller genre to get their best tips and tricks. Here, Sian Gilbert (author of She Started It and I Did Warn Her) and Tracy Sierra (author of Nightwatching) weigh in on the techniques they worked into their recent smash successes. With She Started It soon to be produced as a major motion picture and Nightwatching included in Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show book club, it’s safe to say these authors know a thing or two about crafting unputdownable stories.
There may be minor spoilers below — reader beware!
Sian Gilbert, author of She Started It and I Did Warn Her
I think one of the most important parts of writing a thriller is about following a central question that the reader wants to find out basically from chapter one. For example, in She Started It: Why have these women been invited to the island? And in Nightwatching: Who is in this woman’s house?
Every page leads further and further into answering this initial question, but the details the author shares bring up smaller questions that spring off from it. For She Started It: What are the other women hiding from each other? What is Poppy going to do to them? And in Nightwatching: What happened to the woman’s husband? Why won’t anyone believe her?
Which leads then to the other important part of a thriller — the clock. It doesn’t have to be a literal countdown (although in She Started It and I Did Warn Her, I have limited time structures to help with this: the weekend away for the hen party, the time it takes to cross the Atlantic on the superyacht); Nightwatching has, firstly, the initial home invasion, and then the risk of the children being removed from her care. There has to be something that means this can’t go on forever. Because if it can, where’s the tension?
Every character has to serve some sort of purpose. I Did Warn Her obviously takes place on a superyacht, and in reality there would be a lot more crew members, but I streamlined them so it would still be realistic but not superfluous. There used to be another chef, another deckhand, loads more of the female guests on board. All had to be cut because they didn’t serve the actual plot, and in a thriller things need to be as tight as possible.
Tracy Sierra, author of Nightwatching
Two crucial things come to mind.
First, you have to provide satisfying answers to all the questions you pose throughout the story — even very tiny ones –- and in any crime fiction there will be lots of tiny questions that need answers. You can get away with maybe one ambiguous thing, but even then you should acknowledge that it’s ambiguous within the story itself, and answer why it’s left that way.
For example in Nightwatching, it’s left open-ended if the husband’s fall was an accident or if he was pushed, but the main character herself addresses it and specifically says that though there’s no way she may ever know the truth, she’s come to peace with it for her own reasons.
That open point is one of my most asked questions on panels but in a good way, in that it kept people wondering after the book. If I hadn’t addressed this question head-on, readers would have been thinking about it in a negative way or thought it was sloppy writing.
The other important element is the infamous “twist.” There’s so much pressure in thrillers to have a mind-blowing twist that makes you re-think the story you just read, but I think there’s a certain amount of twist fatigue readers have, simply because there aren’t that many options for quality twists out there.
My reader-self, for example, feels utterly cheated if it turns out a character has multiple personality disorder, so three characters are actually one, simply because I’ve seen it too much. This need for the “new, mind-blowing twist” has led to a lot of books where twists are so out of left field that there’s a “love it or hate it” phenomenon for certain novels, where either people love that something was unpredictable, or hate it because it feels cheap and unearned.
My personal feeling about this is that if you can design a twist that the reader may predict, but it’s one that if they do see coming it’s something they want to happen — then you’re creating a satisfying story, and building in anticipation, instead of “how disappointing, I saw that coming a mile away.”
I thought She Started It had an incredibly effective twist for this reason. As someone who reads an absurd number of thrillers, I saw the primary twist coming but my reaction was “I really hope I’m right about this because then these ladies will get what they deserve,” so I found myself reading faster in anticipation. Meanwhile, a reader who didn’t see the twist coming would get that lovely moment of seeing things come together, and getting that satisfaction of the bullies’ comeuppance.
The reverse can work as well if done right, as in, if you’re attached to a character and you think the twist is going to be that they’re insane, or dead all along, etc., you might have an “oh no I hope I’m wrong!” anticipation that is also satisfying. A twist beat of some kind really does add to any thriller, but I think re-framing it in this way can be incredibly helpful.
There you have it!
Thrillers — like mysteries and romances — are a genre that comes with firm reader expectations of what the book will deliver. In thrillers, the plot should present unanswered questions, a ticking clock, and a lingering or looming sense of harm (whether that’s psychological, physical, or recrimination of some kind). Delivering information to your readers in ways that keeps them questioning the solution to the mystery is critical. This can be achieved through unreliable narrators, partial answers that only raise more questions, or even answers that seem (at first glance) conflicting.
If you think of tension like a rubber band, thrillers require you to stretch it as far as it will go — without snapping. This means building suspense and tension over the course of the story by giving just enough forward momentum to keep the reader turning pages, but leaving enough mystery and threat that they’re kept guessing.
How are the characters going to survive this?
What more could go wrong?
Why is this happening?
Finally, the thriller resolves with a last release of that tension — but (unlike romances) that doesn’t necessarily mean the protagonist comes out rosy. Resolve the threat to your protagonist(s) — getting caught, facing their demons, unmasking their tormentor — and answer the core why of the book.
However, thrillers (unlike mysteries) can sustain a bit more uncertainty in their resolutions. Consider answers that shine a different light on all the actions that came before or give an open ending that leaves readers thinking about the untold fallout that must follow, and you’ll have a thriller that will keep readers talking long after The End.
Astra Crompton (she/they) is an eclectic writer, editor, and illustrator with over twenty-five years of publishing experience. Her work has been published in anthologies, table-top RPG books, magazines, and in several novels. They have also successfully completed NaNoWriMo six times and counting. Astra is currently the Editing & Illustrations Coordinator at FriesenPress, where they manage, coordinate, and vet FriesenPress’s industry-leading editing and illustrations teams.
