In recent years, I've read quite a few thrillers -- since having kids, I feel like I'm lacking the brain-power for anything much more literary!
And while I do enjoy thrillers, they're not necessarily particularly memorable once-read. I probably wouldn't
go back and re-read them. Yet they kept me turning the pages ... often a little obsessively.
The reason thrillers do this so well is because of the power of unanswered questions. If you look at a typical blurb for a thriller, you'll see questions already coming into play, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. Here's an example: you can see how the blurb is already raising questions and getting the reader curious:
Everyone knows a
couple like Jack and Grace. He has looks and wealth, she has charm and elegance. You might not want to like them, but you do. You'd like to get to know Grace better. But it's difficult, because you realise Jack and Grace are never apart. Some might call this true love. Others might ask why Grace never answers the phone. Or how she can never meet for coffee, even though she doesn't work. How she can cook such elaborate meals but remain so slim. And why there are bars on one of the bedroom
windows. Sometimes, the perfect marriage is the perfect lie.
(From the Amazon blurb for B.A. Paris's Behind Closed Doors)
Thrillers use two types of questions:
Suspense: "What's going to happen?"
In the case of Behind Closed Doors, is Jack going to succeed with his plans ... or will Grace escape?
Any
novelist can use this technique, at least to an extent. Show us a character in danger; a character fighting against dark forces; a character struggling with all their might to achieve a particular goal. We keep reading because we want to know if they'll succeed. When you hear the advice to "raise the stakes" in your novel, this is the reason why: the higher the stakes, the more eager the reader is to find out what will happen.
Mystery:
"What really happened?"
I've been surprised to see how common this technique is in thrillers, too: a lot of them avoid a clear-cut "beginning to end" narrative structure and instead have some degree of jumping around in time. (For instance, Behind Closed Doors alternates between the present-day of the novel and events that took place a year or two before.)
Again, you don't have to be a thriller (or
mystery!) author to use this. You might have a character with a secret: anything from a seriously dark past to something fairly innocuous but important to them or people around them.
This can require some careful handling: readers don't like being kept in the dark unreasonably (e.g. all the characters know something, openly, but it keeps being referred to in unnecessarily vague terms). In many thrillers, the "mystery" is something that a particular character is trying to
uncover: in Sophie Hannah's Kind of Cruel, for instance, a key mystery surrounds the disappearance of several family members one Christmas day, and -- seven years on -- the protagonist has not been able to let this mystery go. Having the character's experience match the reader's like this can work well.
What sort of questions does your novel or short story raise in readers' minds? How could you capitalize on those, or go
further with them, to keep your reader turning the pages?
