I attended the Thrillers: Secrets of the Craft (Event No. 27) discussion at the Bay Area Book Fair on Saturday, June 3. As promised, here are the secrets.
The secrets to writing a successful thriller are as follows:
--- Character drives plot;
--- Plot drives the story and reveals character, but good characters required;
--- A physical macguffin is not required, but the story has to be about something to care about;
--- Character first, plot second;
--- Plot first, character second;
--- Plan things out;
--- Don't plan; start somewhere and keep going;
--- Write good scene after good scene until you have a book;
--- Copyeditors are assholes* (that's a quote);
--- Author A: "Sometimes I don't know who my protagonist is until I'm 200 pages into the book";
--- Author B: "There were two characters in the first scene. I thought the protagonist was Character 1. It turned out, at around page 100, the protagonist was actually Character 2";
--- The difference between a mystery and a thriller is (a) if you wrote a thriller the decimal point moves one place to the left in your check, and (b) a decision by the marketers;
--- Everyone is into sex but people differ on how much sex they want; two of the three said they aim for PG-13-level sex (not clear whether that applied to violence);
--- Reveal character through action;
--- Bad character might want to do good; good character may do bad things;
--- Best villain is one who abuses power and believes abuse is justified;
--- All three said when they were writing they didn't think the work was any good;
--- Writer's work is to sit down and write [not goof off].
* Especially when they attempt to correct language errors in dialogue
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