Who doesn’t love a thriller—those page-turning tomes that race through the plot, leaving us breathless and begging for more? We adore the revelations that unfold through complex webs of conflict, the ever-decreasing deadlines, and the complications that steer the hero into spiraling peril. We love to see protagonists facing their demons and finding their paths to solutions that explode off the page.
And some of the best thriller authors write from experience. From legal thrillers to police procedurals, having real-world experience allows writers to build the twists and turns that are often stranger than typical fiction.
In this article, we examine how professional expertise is transforming the thriller genre, from gripping courtroom dramas to workplace-based thrillers that turn the everyday into captivating reads we share with our friends.
What are the elements of a thriller?
A great thriller keeps the reader on the edge of their seat and is full of conflict and suspense, incorporating high stakes and dramatic scenes that lead to unexpected twists, complications, and reversals.
Thrillers often revolve around crime or espionage, but you can create wonderfully gripping stories anywhere, from schools and offices to crumbling hotels on hilltops.
And while no two thrillers are the same, they typically include:
A flawed protagonist
Very few stories are engaging without a fascinating protagonist. And sometimes, what makes a protagonist intriguing is a haunting past they can’t shake.
Take, for example, Robert Bryndza’s Erika Foster series of thrillers. The action circulates around Detective Erika Foster, a maverick British cop who doesn’t mind treading on a few toes to solve a case.
Her principal flaw is her single-minded determination. She pushes herself into risky situations, which often lead to life-threatening confrontations. And that same determination forces her into loggerheads with her senior officers. But, somehow, she always overcomes the bureaucracy of the job and finds the perpetrator—but the personal costs are high.
A moment of change
It’s tempting to fill the opening chapters with flashbacks and exposition about the world of the story. After all, how are we to understand the rules of the world without it?
Generally speaking, books that start slowly can take a long time to pick up the pace, and if your story doesn’t properly begin until page fifty, you’re likely to have lost a fair proportion of your readers.
Thrillers often start from a point of high dramatic tension. They start with a bang, which resonates into the fabric of the novel. The protagonist has been betrayed, or they make a deal with someone that backfires, or they’re hanging off the edge of a building, desperate to foil a terrorist attack.
There are many types of thrillers, from the psychological to the supernatural, all the way to the political, crime, investigative, and action-adventure. But one of the main things they have in common is the impact of their opening.
High stakes
What happens if your protagonist fails to overcome the problem outlined at the beginning of the novel? Do they just go home and put their feet up, thinking “you win some/you lose some?”
Or do they die?
Great thrillers have high stakes—if the plan fails, the world ends, or they lose a loved one, or they end up six feet under.
When writing your thriller, it’s important to ramp up the tension and make the protagonist’s need to overcome the problem impossibly hard for them to achieve, but ultimately essential.
Readers need to care about (and believe in) the characters
This is where a writer’s former profession often helps readers engage with the character’s world. Even if you’re writing a sci-fi in a world that doesn’t exist, ground it in some kind of reality that we somehow recognize.
For example, in Orwell’s 1984, Winston is a product of a totalitarian world that aims to control his thoughts and actions. But he can’t give up his need to think for himself and he secretly questions the regime that is holding the world back. This desire helps us engage with Winston on a human level.
Make your character “save a cat”
Blake Snyder’s book, Save the Cat, explains how to ground your protagonist in a humanity that helps the viewer or reader connect with them.
To boil his thesis into a few words: show us how your character is selfless or compassionate at the start of the story. Get your protagonist to save a cat from a tree at the beginning of the story, and we’ll care about them because they’ve demonstrated compassion to a helpless creature.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be a cat; any act of selflessness will work.
Embed your characters into the problem
Embedding your character deep into the fabric of the thriller helps us care by showing us how the problem they face prevents their actualization, and also gives them a dilemma that allows us to see that they care.
Perhaps they’re fighting against the forces of evil to rescue a loved one from a terrible fate.
However, an invincible protagonist lacks humanity. Give your character vulnerabilities and put them in personal danger. They might not even recognize their flaws initially, but the action of the story forces them to overcome the weaknesses that were holding them back at the start of the story.
Ground your protagonist in the pursuit of their objective and make the world believable.
Build up the suspense
When you’re sitting on the edge of your seat, wanting to know what happens next or how the protagonist is going to get out of their current scrape, it’s because the writer is using suspense.
You could define suspense as an audience question:
- Will they escape?
- Will they win?
- Will they trick them?
- Will they overcome the obstacle?
- Will they defeat the baddie?
When the writer makes it hard for the protagonist to achieve their objective, it’s exciting to read or watch the outcome. But a novelistic action isn’t a silo, it allows the next beat to follow.
You could define a moment of suspense through a dramatic question, which is built on:
- Will Character A (the do-er)
- Do something (a transitive action)
- To Character B (the resistor)
- For an outcome
Will Miss Marple (Character A) trick (do something) Inspector Poirot (Character B) into confessing to the murder (the outcome)?
This dramatic question infers action (Miss Marple is going to try to trick Poirot) and an objective (confessing to the murder). It suggests that Poirot will resist Miss Marple’s objective while building up the suspense, and it infers that the question will be answered with the conclusion of the outcome, thereby affecting the narrative’s progress.
So, if your scene or passage is meandering in a way that doesn’t progress the plot, try injecting a dramatic question to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
Work up to a climax
A well-constructed thriller requires focus, and it needs the odds to stack up, which pushes your protagonist into increasingly difficult decisions, and ensures every decision has a consequence.
By stripping your protagonist of their resources and making them face the problem alone, you will draw them into a climactic situation that feels insurmountable.
And your reader will keep turning the pages.
For example, Stuart Neville’s novel, The Ghosts of Belfast, follows Gerry Fegan, a former IRA hitman, haunted by the ghosts of the 12 people he assassinated. He finds himself abandoned by his allies and hunted by his enemies in a cat-and-mouse thriller that sends Fegan to the edge of sanity. Alone, he must confront the power and violence he helped create to redeem his past.
Let the ending satisfy the beginning
There’s nothing more frustrating than a terrible ending. I found the ending of Netflix’s Hostage (spoiler alert) frustrating because it became unbelievable. It puts the characters into situations that wouldn’t happen in real life—taking vulnerable characters out of police protection and into a vulnerable environment just to push the plot forward.
The entire final episode felt like the writer didn’t know the world they were writing about. And this is where we explore WHY professional experience helps strengthen storytelling.
Why is professional experience in fiction invaluable?
No one is born a writer, and very few people who are now professional authors inherited their success. There are very few nepo babies in the literary world (unless you’re an Amis or a Freud).
Therefore, it only stands to reason that writers typically have a professional life before they find success on the page. And, especially in early novels, you can often hear the echoes of that writer’s former profession imbued through the world of the story.
Of course, part of a writer’s job is to conduct research—whether it’s to confirm details they’re already familiar with or to familiarize themselves with something new. But if you have lived and breathed in a particular profession, it’s almost impossible to create new worlds without your former experience seeping in.
Professional experience builds authenticity
Successful novels are the product of many compositional elements: a great protagonist with a clear objective, obstacles, problems to overcome, and a resolution that satisfies the problem highlighted at the start of the story.
But those ingredients are redundant without a believable world. So, if something happens in the story that wouldn’t happen in the real world, the reader can be jolted out of the story’s reality. It suddenly feels like the elements provided are only there to decorate the story without progressing the plot, and the world feels less authentic.
For example, before Charles Dickens became a freelance journalist, he was a legal clerk in a City law office. His experience as a legal clerk inspired the court case sequence in Bleak House. But before that, he was a child worker, pasting labels onto packs of boot polish in a factory. On his first day in the job, at the age of 12, he met some other boys who showed him the ropes; one of whom was called Bob Fagin.
Dickens knew the world of poverty because he lived it, and he took the sights, sounds, and names of those he met and brought them to life on the page. All from lived experience.
Depth and nuance
A writer with professional experience brings a greater degree of nuance to the fictional worlds they create. They have lived and breathed the world they write about, and their fiction feels believable because it’s based on the writer’s deep understanding of that world.
Again, this isn’t to say that writers without professional experience in the field they’re exploring in their fiction can’t create convincing worlds that become page turners. Research is key for most writers. But there’s no substitute for lived experience.
Professional experience brings credibility
Before Stephen King was a professional author, one of his jobs was a high school janitor, which partly inspired his debut horror classic Carrie. And you can feel his experience through the texture of the action. Of course, every teenager has, in some way, navigated the impossible world of high school social politics, but King also brought his institutional credibility to the piece.
And King’s career might never have taken off had his wife not retrieved the novel’s first draft from the bin. She urged him to keep going because she wanted to know the outcome.
Writers whose former careers informed their writing
1. Agatha Christie trained as a chemist’s assistant
Christie qualified as an assistant pharmacist before becoming a writer. Her knowledge of medicines and pharmaceuticals undoubtedly informed the many poison-based murders in her classic thrillers.
2. Jack Kerouac was a dishwasher
Kerouac’s work is peppered with the echoes of the unskilled jobs he had as a youth. His most famous and era-defining novel, On the Road, refers to cotton picking, dishwashing, and night watchman duties—all of which he had firsthand experience with.
His other short-lived working stints included a gas station attendant and a fire lookout (appearing in Desolation Angels).
3. George Orwell worked for the Indian police
Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell) served in the Indian Imperial Police service as a policeman in Burma from the age of 19. He returned to England after a bout of dengue fever, where he moved to London to pursue a writing career.
His experiences in Burma inspired his novel Burmese Days. However, it could be argued that the world of institutional totalitarianism in 1984 was also influenced by his professional expertise in crime control.
Bring your expertise to the literary world
Relay Publishing is built on the talent of our creative team, and we’re always looking for new writers, editors, and designers to come on board.
We’re particularly interested in engaging with writers with professional experience in the legal and medical professions. If that sounds like you and you want to use your authentic experience to add credibility to our ghostwriting opportunities, we’d love to hear from you.
Explore our latest opportunities and get in touch!
Thanks for reading.