Like many fiction writers, when I began trying to write a novel in the mid 1990s, I had no clear notion of genre, much less something called the thriller genre. Of course I did have a clear notion that THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, which I liked, was quite different from THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, which contained a certain genius that even I could discern but, frankly, nevertheless bored me.



We tend to write the kinds of book we enjoy reading, seeking certain familiar touchstones or landmarks, while investing the story with quirks of place, character, or plot that make the work uniquely our own. What I wrote early on was an odd misfit of a manuscript, about which bewildered publishing house editors could say only the dreaded, "We hope you find a home for it." There were of course mutterings that they couldn't figure out how to place it even if they could bring themselves to like it.



Searching for direction, I was told that, "You need to decide where in the store you would look for your book."  Actually, that, too is a bit confusing because thrillers are shelved under numerous categories, and appear in the no-category "general fiction" as well.



At this point I was far from writing a classic thriller although by instinct I continued to try to write a story based on suspense. (I would not have phrased my efforts as "suspense", but a professor of literature advised that I did well with characters who were frightened out of their minds. Suspense books commonly feature such characters, she explained.) At this early stage I remained less-than-blissfully ignorant of genre distinctions. Had you asked me the difference between a mystery and a thriller I would have shrugged.



As I floundered around trying to write something, it dawned on me that some characters are so intriguing that THEY, and not the plot, create the story. Now some of you will harrumph and say that all good fiction requires well-developed characters. Yes, but consider a book where almost nothing happens, and yet it creates a strange and widespread fascination among its readers.



My first experience with such a book was LADDER OF YEARS by Ann Tyler. When the inward intellectual musings of the ivory-tower elite achieve the requisite gravitas to stir wonder akin to childbirth, the book wins a Pulitzer Prize. I've never read a contemporary Pulitzer Prize-winner, and chances are you haven't either. But chances also are that sometime between the age of 6 and your current age, you read a book that you remember to this day simply because of the quality of one of its main characters. Unless you only watched TV, in which case I would call to your attention John Walton if you're older, and Seinfeld if you're younger.

When I realized the potential value of a one-of-a-kind lead character, my next problem with a character-driven story was that I didn't think I could write one. Just going through a personalized list of favorite character-driven novels can be as depressing as it is inspiring: Think of a brilliant literary/mainstream novel (ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST), a literary-quality historical novel (LONESOME DOVE), a brilliant history/mystery combo (SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS), a literary mystery (MYSTIC RIVER), a romance for the ages (BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY or THE NOTEBOOK), an espionage thriller (THE BOURNE IDENTITY or THE DAY OF THE JACKAL), a serial-killer thriller (RED DRAGON), a legal thriller (THE FIRM or PRESUMED INNOCENT), and of course the list goes on. It was a sad day when I realized I had to choose a 'genre' myself.



Please don't misunderstand me: I don't mean that every author has to choose among genres --- your work depends on your natural talent, taste, experience, and will, in a profession with a full complement of aspirants for relatively few slots for literary work, and not so many for thrillers.



If you haven't got my drift: It's tough to get a job in the novel-writing business, and sometimes you take what you can write.



The more perceptive among you have now figured out that in part I'm going to tell you what a thriller is by telling you what it is not. Funny --- that's how I began learning.



As I wandered through my fog of genre uncertainty, I began to focus on those so-called popular writers associated with the thriller genre who had a wonderful talent for writing a character. Thomas Harris with his character Hannibal Lecter in RED DRAGON and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS came to the fore, as he has for many novelists who admire the creation of his cunning, intellectual, sociopath.



Two characters in particular from Dean Koontz's FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE stand out for me. Both Junior, the murderer, and Vanadium, the detective, were brilliantly executed and were major elements of the story. As Vanadium plays with Junior's mind, the suspense crackles, and for some God-awful reason we find little people sitting on the back bleachers of our minds rooting for a psychopath. This particular thriller is a tour-de-force of character development, but the plot, I believe, moves more slowly than some other Koontz books --- INTENSITY, for example.



Character is a critical element in many popular works of suspense, but usually the development of character is done in such a way that it magnifies or helps to create the suspense. Others would say that the thriller simply examines character in the crucible of extreme stress more than it USES character for suspense. I'll leave it to you to sort out the semantics. Either way, clearly many of us try to create characters who will enhance the nail-biting aspects of our stories. The methods by which this is accomplished are myriad.



Many classic character pieces in modern literature help us ponder some neurosis, common or strange --- a deep angst in a dark soul. The point is an exploration of human nature, not the creation of suspense per se. This can work in a thriller (think SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW by Peter Hoeg, or the Arkady Renko novels by Martin Cruz Smith), but personally I do not usually make time to consider such deeper meanings in connection with my fiction reading because I'm too busy contemplating something like what really is hidden on Plum Island (I'm not actually accusing Nelson DeMille of writing a thriller here) or whether Dr. David Beck will ever be reunited with his seemingly dead wife, the utter and complete love of his life, in Harlan Coben's TELL NO ONE.



I know some of you will tell me that your favorite thriller characters are every bit as profound as literary characters. A rather famous thriller writer commented that there was no such thing as literary fiction, there was just good and bad fiction, and all the rest was only an excuse for making no money.



I don't know about that; I only know that in thriller stories we don't seem to spend nearly as much time exploring a character's quiet desperation over ordinary things or their meaning, or the character's compulsions and the consequences. In a thriller, when we authors treat readers to a display of a character's insanity, I think we're using it as a device to put readers ever closer to the edges of their seat rather than create a personal epiphany about life or its meaning.



And yet the main characters remain vital. How can we care about someone's peril if we care nothing for them? So goes the truism that has by now become trite. A good story is always made better if the characters grow or change as opposed to merely surviving or winning the race.



So my thesis is that in thrillers we use character development to heighten suspense and make the story more compelling although admittedly we may serve reader interest in other ways as well.



In a thriller, first and foremost, we want a sense of purposeful evil pouring from the antagonist, because the antagonist must drive the story. If the villain has a semi-understandable rationale, enabling a certain degree of empathy from readers, so much the better. The villain's credibility creates interest in readers, enhancing the impact of his or her deeds. And it's only against this negative "value" (by value I mean quantity and magnitude) that the protagonist's positive value can be tested and admired. And of course seeing the blackness of the heart helps advance the suspense. In some cases the nature of the evil is heartless detachment, and in others malevolence, or sometimes both in generous measure.



A softer form of evil comes from gross negligence fueled by blind ambition (Michael Crichton's John Hammond in JURASSIC PARK). Some of the all-time great evil characters include individuals like Hannibal Lecter or groups of people such as the old Soviet empire and its various agents (DeMille's THE CHARM SCHOOL). Never forget to consider giving evil characters a good side or the left-over shadows of a better life. It makes them more interesting.



In some thrillers the evil force may be a natural phenomenon, like a disease, beast, or natural disaster. Take for instance Tess Gerritsen's GRAVITY about a wicked little microbe locked inside a space capsule. How's that for claustrophobic terror? Such black spawn of mother nature or man's invention can accomplish terrible results, but it always serves the novel for the author to put a human face in, on, or around such nebulous threats that normally exist only as a vague apprehension in our minds. The combination of these natural horrors, as heartless as a psychopath with no comprehension of evil or remorse, and human villains who know better, can be potent indeed.



Good thrillers also create lovable or noble characters or very human characters so that we will sweat over their peril --- and of course we tend to lose a sympathetic character to unfortunate and often violent death here and there in order to keep readers profoundly worried about the survivors. Romantic attachments help as well. It's necessary, even if there's a mass threat, that readers live the story through a few surrogates for the general population to make the threat and consequences feel real (Stephen King's classic THE STAND comes to mind). If the surrogates are depicted as flesh-and-blood human beings, we can't help but imagine ourselves facing the same terrible dangers they do.



By now I'm sure you get the idea that good crisp character development in a thriller enhances suspense and makes a page-turning plot even more of a page-turner. TELL NO ONE was a masterpiece in this sense. In the beginning of the book, as I sat through Coben's exposition of the wonderfully altruistic doctor who tended the poor and had not a prejudicial bone in his body, I thought: "Harlan Coben's just trying to make me like this guy so that I'll be worried about whatever worries him and root for him." Guess what? It worked like gangbusters. Character development boosted the suspense even though I saw Coben playing with my mind.



There is always a balance between keeping the action moving and using editorial comment to describe a character for the reader. In thriller fiction it is wise to pick your spots for character information. The writer needs to make certain it doesn't hurt the reader's sense of urgency.



A long talk about the meaning of life can be like intellectual Valium, so that the book no longer feels compelling and instead becomes constipated. The masters of the art can slow the pace and grip us with various action antecedents, and for most of us this is the pinnacle of the art of the thriller. Hallowed are the steps of the writer who can slow the action and increase his grip on our adrenal glands. Nelson DeMille does it as well as anyone.



The most artful way to develop a character is through action (what the character does), next dialogue, and last by the author telling us so. It has been said that we learn the most about people by their deeds. Fiction is no different.



Often though, skilled writers will take a shortcut with a few journalistic paragraphs about character as opposed to exposing us to an entire scene with all of the attendant sights, odors, and visual effects. In the hands of an amateur, this fails; in the hands of a master, who's chosen just the right detail (akin to Gustave Flaubert's famous mot juste, it soars. We are told, for instance, not shown, that Hannibal Lecter plucked out a nurse's eye. This macabre detail is rendered up as a point of history before Clarice pays her first visit, at which point Hannibal's opening words to Clarice grab and rip like steel talons, the dialogue seasoned by our memory of Lecter's hideous act. That stark contrast between Lecter's deeds and his urbane conversation is thriller magic.



A few authors are virtuosos at maintaining suspense through fairly long scenes. If you're a beginning thriller writer, please know that the key isn't writing shorter scenes. It's making maximum use of each one. Any scene in a commercial thriller novel must serve many masters: delivery of exposition and key background information; creation of mood, atmosphere, and setting; character interaction and development; and plot movement. For a thriller writer, the pharaoh of those masters is building and maintaining suspense.



If you're an inexperienced scene-writer, it's all too easy to erect unintentional obstacles between readers and the swift movement and inherent 'pull' of your scenes. One, which many of us have to learn the hard way, is the use of 'point of view.'



When I wrote my first two novels, I had no knowledge of this concept. I knew that all my characters HAD a point of view, and I wasn't hesitant in the least to express several at once in any given scene. You can imagine my shock when someone suggested I perhaps ought to try writing each scene from just one character's viewpoint. I mean, like, doesn't a reader need to know what every character is thinking all the time?



It was a real hassle rewriting 400-plus pages twice, making each scene unfold from a particular point of view. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry, you're just about as ignorant as I was, and I more or less got over it. Many wise words have been written on the subject: Seek them out.



Now why, you might ask, did I start out writing about genre and thrillers and then switch to characters and finally point of view. It's because decisions about point of view are critical to character development. It is easier to give the reader information about a character's psyche using first-person narration, but it can be a bit of a handicap creating suspense because there is no looking ahead around the corner at what the evil characters are planning for the hero.

The thriller genre tends to generate books with multiple points of view, and THAT would be because we gain benefits by letting readers know what the bad guys are doing that mystery writers don't. Mysteries are almost invariably told only from the hero or heroine's viewpoint. First-person-narrated thrillers occur, but they're an exception. One fine example is TELL NO ONE, wherein we get to know Dr. Beck through his first-person voice while we experience the evil characters in third person --- all in the same novel.



In a third-person thriller, the reader is given a big-picture view from above the fray, watching all of it unfold. In classic mysteries the reader tends to follow the protagonist, learning what the hero learns when he learns it. In a mystery we struggle with the riddle just as our hero does. Thrillers, however, may depend upon a central mystery, just as a mystery novel does, but the mystery in a thriller is usually overshadowed by the footrace. We're panting through those pages not to see who dunnit, but who will win. One of the suspense-building factors to this is a peek just ahead around the corner before our character arrives there. Do we ever dread that ambush that's waiting for him.



One of the most interesting ways to develop character is through the setting. For example we can describe a rugged outdoor setting and then note that our character is like the place we described perhaps because he lives in it or visits it often and it suits him. Often just a few words combined with a strong sense of a place will tell us volumes about a character. The beauty of the indirect approach is that it seems effortless and natural to the reader --- if it is done well.



Finally things can take on the qualities of a character. Clive Cussler does that with ships. He was one of the early writers to discern the mystery of the TITANIC (RAISING THE TITANIC). Can you feel the sense in which that ship has become a character through all that has been written? The ship's name itself drips images and feelings of opulence, of arrogance, and of tragedy. It's made an indelible impression just like any great character in fiction.



Suspense that compels the reader to continue reading is the lynchpin of a good thriller. Creating memorable characters enhances readers' interest, invests them in the outcome, and is part of the panoply of devices in the writers tool box to seal the readers' devotion to the race and its outcome.

© 2005 David Dun

A practicing attorney, David Dun is the bestselling author of NECESSARY EVIL, AT THE EDGE, OVERFALL, UNACCEPTABLE RISK, and the forthcoming THE BLACK SILENT. His high-action adventure thrillers take place largely in the Pacific Northwest and are steeped in cutting-edge science.