Paul Tomlinson

Suspense Thriller Paul Tomlinson

Your in-depth guide to writing edge-of-the-seat suspense

The Thriller is one of the top-selling genres for books and it's in the top five for movies. This is the genre of assassinations, Watergate-like conspiracies, and terrorist plots. It's where we find Lee Child's Jack Reacher, Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne and Dan Brown's Robert Langdon. These writers built their heroes and their stories on genre conventions developed over the last 100 years -- and you can too.

How do you write one?

The trick to writing a successful thriller novel or screenplay is to know the conventions of the genre - what elements need to be in the story and what sort of plot structure readers and viewers expect. You could spend a long time reading and watching films to learn all of this - but you don't have to, because this book gives you all the details you need.

Create a suspenseful story the way Alfred Hitchcock did itWrite a super-spy thriller like a James Bond movie or hunt-the-mole like a John Le Carré spymasterPlot a legal thriller like John Grisham or Scott Turow
Scare your readers with a Robin Cook style medical thrillerThrill readers with the latest military hardware like Tom Clancy Show what happens when technology goes wrong the way Michael Crichton did itOr plumb the depths of the human psyche and write a psychological thriller like Daphne Du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith

In these pages you will see how to raise the stakes for your hero, find more than a dozen techniques for generating and increasing suspense, how to write a killer chase, and templates for the different sub-genres of suspense thriller

Look out for Mystery and Crime Thrillers in the Genre Writer series and Plot Basics by the same author