The best thrillers stab the heart, throughout. They do it by getting readers to experience the emotions of the scenes. How can you do that? First, by experiencing them yourself. Sense memory is a technique used by many serious actors. Here’s how it works: You concentrate on recalling an emotional moment in your life, and recreate each of the senses in your memory (sight, smell, touch, sound, etc.) until you begin to feel the emotion again. And you will. The actor transfers that to her role; the writer, to the page.
non fiction
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Creating an Antagonist
“How much more chilling is the bad guy who has a strong argument for his actions, or who even engenders a bit of sympathy? The crosscurrents of emotion this will create in your readers will deepen your thriller in ways that virtually no other technique can accomplish. The trick is not to overdo it—if you stack the deck against your villain, readers will feel manipulated. Start by giving your antagonist just as rich a backstory as your hero. What hopes and dreams did he have? How were they dashed? What life-altering hurt did he suffer? Who betrayed him? How did all of this affect him over the course of his life?”
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Why Do You Want to Write a Book?
“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.”
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Advice on What to Write
“Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.”
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ The Anatomy of a Story
“There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ The Duty of the Novelist
“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.”
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ On Character Development
“I sometimes use some personality traits to fashion part of a character. Most of my characters are composites of either people I know or people in the public eye.”
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Gaining Writing Perspective
“This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.”
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ It All Comes Back to the Plot
“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.” ~ Jim Thompson
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ The Art of Writing
“We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.”
