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mbarkerWriting Excuses 19.48: Beginning With A Thrill
Key Points: Beginning with a thrill. A bang! A big, flashy question. Cold open, somebody is murdered, so who did it, why did they do it, how did they do it? Howcatchem. Start with small question, answer, to build reader trust and curiosity. Thrill or long slow burn? Little things going wrong. Let the character notice that something is wrong. Language and choice of details. Not always a burst of action or violence. Something unexpected or shocking. Mysterious stranger in the shire. Disrupt the normal. Meet cute or meat cube? Don't introduce tension through worldbuilding. Foreground action, not back story. What would startle your characters, and how would they deal with that? Give your characters stakes early on.
[Season 19, Episode 48]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 19, Episode 48]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Beginning With A Thrill.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Dan] Today, we are going to talk about beginning with a thrill. But first, we want to tell you a little bit about what we're going to be doing all month. And this is Erin.
[Erin] Yes. This is Erin.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] 15 minutes… No, I'm…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] [garbled] inspired by an earlier episode that we recorded with Marshall where we were talking about how different genres can help you understand writing in different ways, we're going to be focusing on a genre that does something really cool that you can take into your own work for the rest of the month.
[Howard] I am excited to be a part of these discussions…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because I literally have no idea what's coming.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Well, that is also what all the people who die at the beginning of a thriller say.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Do you like that segue? So, the reason we're starting with thrillers is because thrillers in mysteries, as a genre, tend to start with a bang. You need to ask a big enough, flashy enough, question that will pull the reader through the rest of the story, and you need to do it right off the bat. Kind of establish, this is the kind of story you're in. Where we see this most bluntly is in, like, a detective show on TV, where the cold open is some random person we've never seen being murdered, and then the rest of the show is trying to figure out who did it, or why they did it, or how they did it, or whatever it is.
[Howard] Sandra and I will play a game when we're watching those shows. The game is the moment we see someone on TV, we decide whether they discover a body or become a body.
[Laughter]
[Howard] One of those two things.
[Mary Robinette] Is about to happen. Well, this is one of the things that I love, is that that discovery of the body or becoming the body doesn't actually have to be the very first thing that happens in the novel. But usually when you're watching those cold open scenes, there's something small that goes wrong first. So, what I like looking for is something that goes wrong that kind of sets the tone that is going to lead directly to the big problem, but is not necessarily the big problem. I've… Have a… I've learned that dropping the body in the first chapter is not always the best thing to do. As tempting as it is.
[Dan] Yeah. There's… One of my favorite mystery genres is called the howcatchem, which is related to whodunit, where the main question is who killed this person. A howcatchem story is we know who did it, but we are watching the detective to see if they're going to be able to figure out who did it and stop them. The way this often starts is we will see the killer first. They're not going to discover or become a body, they're going to produce a body.
[Squeak]
[Dan] And often the way this goes is we get to watch all the things that are wrong in their life, the person who bugs them, or the aspect of their life that needles at them and we can tell that sooner or later this person's going to explode. That is the kind of tension you can draw out for a while, because it's just ominous enough and it's tense enough that it does ask that big flashy question, what is this person going to do to get out of this situation they hate?
[DongWon] This is usually, at least in terms of bookstore genre, one of the distinctions between thriller and mystery. When you know who the killer is upfront, and then the tension is more about will the hero figure that out, and then as you have that sort of cat and mouse kind of perspective, that's how you ratchet up the tension, rather than the mystery being what pulls you forward into who actually did this thing. Right? So it's kind of two distinct hooks that define these two genres.
[Howard] There's a secondary principal at work here, which is that when you present that big question, you want the reader to already trust you that you are eventually going to provide an answer. The way to build that trust is that somewhere in the first page, somewhere in the first 10 pages, or the first chapter, you want to be asking smaller questions and providing answers. Small questions, provide answers. Small question, delay the gratification for the answer, get another question, and then, oh, here's the answer. You set this pattern up for the reader, where they realize, oh, yes, I am curious, and then, I am sated. Then, I am curious, and I am sated. Then I am desperately curious… And that's the page turn for the next chapter.
[Erin] So, I have a question. So, I'm thinking about a book where I'm reading about someone going through their life, and things are bad, and I'm wondering, I know that I bought a thriller. Like, I bought it from the thriller section of the bookstore, so I'm probably anticipating that, like, this bad thing will end in a body one way or the other. But how much of that… Let's assume that I didn't know that it was a thriller, I bought it with, like, no knowledge of the book at all. What is it that you're doing in order to make this feel like it's tense, like something's about to go wrong in this person's life in a murder-type way and not just like a day in the life of a guy whose life sucks?
[Laughter]
[Dan] Yeah. That is a very good question to ask. That's where I was going to try to go next. Because this is called starting with a thrill, not starting with a long slow burn. Although those often can be the same if you're very good at it. We talked earlier in the year about the establishing shot, and when you are writing a book or a short story, the very first thing that you show us is kind of telling us what kind of story this will be. If you start your mystery novel off with a fight scene, then you're telling us this is going to be an action movie or maybe a thriller. If that's not actually what it is, the death has to be more abrupt or less of a back-and-forth. There needs to be less interaction in the way this person dies. But, if you were doing, for example, an episode of TV or a movie, you could get away with a lot of that tension you're talking about with musical cues and stuff. Weird shots, weird POV shots that make us feel like this person is being watched or followed, spooky music, to let us say, oh, no, this person's going to die. The way you can create that… I should say, one of the ways you can re-create that in a novel, where you don't have music and things like that, is to just draw things out. Focus on details that don't seem as if they should be important. Because that makes readers nervous. Why is it taking two paragraphs to find her keys before she can get into her house? Things like that. Which is… The purpose here is not to bore the reader. This has to be tense and interesting. You're giving us little micro tensions of, oh, no, something is wrong. Oh, okay, they got out of it. Oh, no, this other thing is going wrong. Oh, they got out of it. Why is he describing so much about this type of whatever? It's to put readers on edge. Take them out of comfortable territory.
[Mary Robinette] Another tool that you can use along those lines is having the character notice that something is wrong. So, the character who is approaching their house and is like, "That's weird. I don't remember leaving a light on." And having the character… Using POV to signal to the reader, hum, things are about to be not okay.
[Dan] Yeah. Speaking of character, you can absolutely in prose do the freaky POV shot that you would get in a TV show. If the whole first scene is a couple just came home from a date, and they're flirting with each other as they walk through their house, and they talk about their bank accounts while taking their clothes off, but we're seeing the entire thing from some third perspective. Someone is listening to them. Even if that listener is never identified, and you drop hints about how they can't see what they're wearing yet or whatever it is, but it's obvious that this very private intimate conversation is being eavesdropped on, even without any direct mention of danger or threat, that's invasive and puts us on edge.
[Mary Robinette] That really is invasive and does put me on edge.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Let's come back to what it feels like to be on edge after this break.
[DongWon] One thing I've really loved recently is Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite, which was released in 2018. It's a brilliant historical satire about a rivalry between two of Queen Anne's ladies, played by Emma Stone and Kate Winslet [Rachel Weisz?]. The Queen herself is played by Olivia Colman, in a brilliant, hilarious, and tragic performance. It's sort of like All about Eve, but with an even more biting edge and a lot to say about class, privilege, and power, all wrapped up in a strange, almost surrealist aesthetic. It's a really wonderful movie, and I highly recommend it.
[Mary Robinette] One of my other favorite tools to use to make things tense is language. So, the word choice that I pick… If I'm describing a rose, and I want it to be a romance, then I'm going to talk about all of the beautiful, perfect things about the rose. But if I'm setting up for a thriller or a mystery or horror, then I'm going to be talking about, like, the diseased leaf on the rose. And even the words that I'm going to use are going to be much more visceral, I'm going to reach for the ones that are darker. Those are some fun things that you can do to set tone in the same way that a film would be able to set tone.
[Howard] When you put things in a scene and shine lights on them, you can make us comfortable, you can make us uncomfortable. The easiest example I can think of is someone striking a match or lighting up a lighter, and we see a cigarette, and we see the end of a fuse. Those are two very, very different things. Knowing what your stand-in will be for the fuse or for the cigarette or for the stove that requires a lighter… I don't know. Knowing what your stand in is, that's your job, not mine.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Okay. I have another question.
[Dan] Okay.
[Erin] This one is, let's say I woke up and I decided not to choose violence.
[Laughter]
[Erin] I was like no murders here, but I still want to use these techniques in my story to draw the reader in. What should I be doing?
[Dan] You're getting to all my points right before I get to them. That's… We're on the same wavelength here. Because I would wager that a vast majority of our listeners right now are not writing thrillers. They're probably writing fantasy or science fiction, which can include thriller or mystery elements. But we focus so much on tension, whereas what we really are talking about is starting with a thrill, starting with a bang. That doesn't have to mean a burst of action or violence. What it really means for me is something that is unexpected and/or shocking that hooks us into the book. Maybe that is the person we thought the main character dies, and, okay, now I'm in for the rest of the book. I want to see who did this. Maybe that is something like you present to us an idyllic shire full of wonderful hobbits, and then a mysterious stranger shows up that nobody trusts. Then, even if you haven't introduced our main conflict, you've introduced a conflict. We know that there's the potential for danger, that things could go wrong. What about the rest of you? What answers do you have?
[DongWon] One thing I like to think about when thinking about writing in these different genres is that a genre's really made up of a whole bunch of tropes. Right? It's a whole bunch of individual patterns that we recognize of, like, oh, this has spaceships. Oh, this farmboy found a sword. Oh, this, that, or the other. That tell us we're in science fiction, that tell us we're in fantasy. But there's a thing that I think of as like micro-tropes or micro-patterns, where you can pick and choose from other genres and pull them into the main genre that you're working on. So, this is exactly what Dan was talking about, in terms of having a beat early on that's in maybe a thriller beat and have that moment or somebody's trying to find their keys or key card or whatever it is. That can increase that… Just to have that little hint of the thriller tension in there. Then you don't have to have bodies hitting the floor at that point. You can go into a different scene. You can go into a board room. You can go into the bridge of a starship. Whatever it happens to be. But you can use those little micro-tropes, those little micro-beats to really goose it in the way that you want. Right? So don't be afraid to steal from other genres and to do a little bit of mix and match, while still hitting the big beats that you want to say this is science fiction, this is fantasy.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I find that one of those small beats is just a disruption of the normal.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Like, what is… What breaks their normal. And you don't have to have normal established very long before it breaks, and I think that one of the things for me with the thriller pacing is that that break in normal comes very early. It's not three chapters in, it's something that happens usually on the first or second page.
[Howard] If you throw a meet cute into the first couple of pages, you can absolutely start with a thrill and just take us at a run into a romance.
[Mary Robinette] So, just in case people have never heard this phrase before, that is meet as in meet each other, not meat as in meat cube, which is what I first heard you say.
[Howard?] Did you all think meat cube…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because every last one of you looked at me…
[Garbled bodies. Really thought that's where we were going.]
[Dan] You guys don't put meat cubes into the first chapters of your books? That's super weird.
[DongWon] I love to start a romance with a meat cube…
[Howard] Yeah. When the two meat cubes meet, it's… I'm so sorry.
[Mary Robinette] I did read a book once that said that… That had come here, you big hunk of love [garbled]
[cool]
[Dan] Oh, man. That is not what I would name my meat cube.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I say. As if I don't already have one. So, one way that I see this done wrong very frequently by aspiring writers is that they are trying to present their world, establish who the characters are, and where the story takes place, and the way that they try to introduce tension in those early chapters is through worldbuilding. By saying, yes, we're in an idyllic shire, but we never leave here because there's monsters in the woods. Or because there is evil travelers on this road sometimes, or because there's a dark Lord that every seven years will come and eat one of us. I mean, yes, you're adding some darkness to the world, but you're not adding darkness to the story. This needs to be some kind of action. Those mysterious strangers on the road need to show up. Or something has to, as was said, disrupt normal in some way. There has to be an immediate danger, not just the back story of danger.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because for people who… Dark Lord shows up every seven years, terrible people on the road… That is their normal, and so they continue to go about their day-to-day life. What is it that breaks their day-to-day life that is the foretelling of… The foreshadowing of the bigger thing that's coming?
[Erin] Yeah. I also think that there's a… There's something that can happen where you… Like, one of the things that… Sorry. One of the things that I love about thrillers and mysteries is that the thing that goes wrong is something that we instinctively know is bad. Like people dying, we're not a fan. Like, in general. So, when you're trying to create that for another genre, it's what is the thing that is, like, wrong in your world? What is the thing that, like, would throw things off? If the dragon shows up on year six instead of year seven, that's going to feel very, very wrong in a way that is very unique to the world that you've created. So, a lot of times, just think about what are the things that would startle the people that are in your world, and then what would… How would they deal with that?
[DongWon] Well, this is why giving your character stakes early on are so important. Right? This is why you have to start page 1 really with something your character cares about. Ideally another person, but it could be some goal that they have. Right? That's their normal. Their normal is trying to get to school to give the girl the note that you've been thinking about giving her all week. And then something happens on the way to school. Right? You need to have the thing to be disrupted, not just to be a normal everyday day, but something that somebody cares about their day. Right? Somebody is… Has to give a big presentation, then when they can't get their key card, and they can't get into the room, now you have a cascade series of events where things are going wrong. But… To make those scary things that are coming into the world feel threatening, you have to give the characters something they care about, so that I care about the character and what they care about.
[Dan] Yeah. One of the… One of my favorite examples of this, believe it or not, is the first Toy Story movie. Which we don't think of as a thriller. But that movie starts with a kid playing with his toys, and then we get the little premise of, oop, the toys are awake when he goes out of the room. Then we don't get the actual, like, inciting incident main plot conflict for a while. But what we do get right off the bat is the birthday party, and the toys lose their minds over that. Because this, to them, disrupts their normal. They know that it has the potential to change everything. So we haven't gotten to Buzz, we haven't gotten to the whole Woody's not the favorite anymore, none of that has arrived yet, but we do have a conflict that, through their eyes, we can understand is very meaningful to them, and there's a lot of action, there's emotion, there's a lot of thrilled to it. Then, four or five scenes later, we get the full, actual, oh, this… The real plot has arrived now. We have basically run out of time now. We want to give you plenty of time to write. So we are going to end with homework.
[Mary Robinette] That homework is what breaks normal for your character right now? The next thing you write, how does normal break for them?
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
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