Oct 12, 2012

Jamie's cordon bleu guide to cooking a thriller



Venice Biennale 2009, KR
 
What are the necessary ingredients if you want to cook up a good thriller? This is something I have been thinking about a lot and here, dear reader, is my recipe:

1) One genuine moral dilemma – the hero or heroine should have a certain amount of realistic doubt about the rightness of their course of action.  It’s also important that the hero / heroine is flawed but is able to overcome their deficiencies (unless it’s a tragedy, in which case they have to die). By the end of the novel the hero / heroine should have learnt something and become a better and stronger person. Harry Potter plainly had a lot to learn.

2) Four to five plot twists – you need the readers to be constantly surprised so that they carry on reading. This means the plot has to be constructed like a jigsaw puzzle so that you don’t see the complete picture until the last piece is in place.

I read some advice from a Hollywood screenwriter once that explained the essential elements of a screenplay. He said in the first scene you introduce your characters, in the second scene you send a dog to chase them up a tree and the rest of the film is about how they get down from the tree without being bitten by the dog. It sounds easy, but the difficulty is in allowing the characters to nearly get down from the tree, and then getting the dog to chase them up again until they find a way to get the dog locked up/shot/given a bone.

3) Buckets of motivation – all your characters need to have plausible reasons for doing the things they do. I hate thrillers where the baddy is a psychopath. It is such a lazy way for the author to allow absolutely anything to happen. If you look at history, even the very worst bad guys always had you a seemingly logical explanation for what they were doing.
And how many physically violent psychos are out there anyway?
Well, now I come to think of it, my next door neighbour looks very scary when he starts cutting up wood for the winter with his chain saw…

4) A spoonful of obscure knowledge – the reader needs to feel they’ve learnt something from reading your story. The classic example is ‘The Da Vinci Code’. At the end of it the reader feels they’ve got the inside story on Leonardo da Vinci, the Catholic Church, and the true relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Whether any of it is true is irrelevant, the reader can safely immerse themselves in a strange and exciting world and come away entertained and with some mildly esoteric knowledge.

5) A pinch of violence  – obviously if you have your characters being chased up a tree by a dog, the dog has to have teeth to make it believable. There are two forms of violence available, physical or psychological/emotional. I think Elmore Leonard (e.g  ‘Get Shorty’) does physical violence very well. Quick but with not too much detail so the reader has to use their imagination.  Psychological violence can last longer than physical violence. For me, Jane Austen is the biggest bitch on the block when it comes to managing this. The way Fanny Price is bullied in ‘Mansfield Park’ by everybody is positively sadistic. 

6)  One to two compulsory sex scenes romance is optional, but sex is a must. At least one scene. It’s interesting observing the different intensity that an author gives to their sex scene. Robert Harris (‘Vaterland’ ‘The Ghost Writer’) is very restrained. I imagine his editor sends him emails insisting that he writes in some sex and he only does it reluctantly. Ken Follett (‘Pillars of the Earth’) or Ronan Bennet (‘Zugzwang’) seem to enjoy themselves much more. Lots of moaning. 
An interesting question to consider is the potential influence of the ‘Fifty shades of Grey’ trilogy by EL James on novelists (yes, I have read it – at least the first one. An excellent example of point number 4 above). She has really raised the stakes as regards the amount of sex in a mainstream novel.
However, my feeling is that for a good thriller, one scene is more than enough. Apart from anything else, it’s very difficult to do well.  My favourite living writer, Martin Amis, wrote:
“Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do — like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.”
You can definitely see that with ‘Fifty shades of Grey’. Just one boring earth-shattering orgasm after another. As Boy George said, I’d rather have a cup of tea.

Anyway, throw all the ingredients into a word processor, slosh a few bottles of wine down the author, let it all marinade for a few months and then cook the author's brains at high temperature for about four weeks and there you are - one completed thriller. How easy is that?

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