ThrillerTalk

During the entertainment portion of the awards banquet at ThrillerFest V, ITW members Michael and Daniel Palmer performed the following, sung to the tune of the Folsum Prison Blues.  Many who were at the banquet have said they wished the words had appeared simultaneously on the room's two big screens, so Michael sent them along.  Enjoy!

 

The Writer's Prison Blues

 

I'm sittin' in my desk chair,

Just waitin' for my muse

My protagonist is stumblin' about

Searchin' for some clues

I'm stuck in writers' prison

And my screen is blank

While the plot that once seemed brilliant

Moves like a Grumman tank

 

When I was just a Freshman,

My professor told me, "Son,

If you think you'll get rich writing,

then you really are quite dumb"

So I put him in my prologue

Just to watch him die,

Now I sit here writin' queries

And hang my head and cry. 

 

I'm working at Home Depot

Just to pay the rent

My character development

Has cost me my last cent

My agent hasn't called

My deadline's drawing nigh.

I'm thinking of just falling back

On stuff from Junior High.

 

Patterson and Coben

Those guys don't scare me none

Follett . . . He's still writing?

Well, let him have his fun.

I've out swum Cussler's heroes

Lee Child won't stick around

Baldacci said he'd blurb me

If I were Sandra Brown.

 

Twitter has abandoned us

Our facebook friends are down

A market for Zombi, romance, nautical, young adult women's fiction

Hasn't yet been found

We know the world will love us

We need to make them see

If they won't put us in paper

We'll make the e-Book free.

The English call them thrillers, and in our clumsier way we call them novels of suspense.

They contain elements of mystery, romance and adventure, but they don't fall into restrictive categories. And they're not circumscribed by artificial systems of rules like those that govern the whodunit or the gothic romance.

The field is wide enough to include Alistair MacLean, Allen Drury, Helen Maclnnes, Robert Crichton, Graham Greene, and Donald E. Westlake. (Now there's a parlay.) The market is not limited by the stigmata of genre labels, and therefore the potential for success of a novel in this field is unrestricted: DAY OF THE JACKAL, for instance, was a first novel.

The game's object:  To perch the reader on edge  ---  to keep him flipping pages to find out what's going to happen next.

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.

In a famous essay, Henry James once wrote, "The house of fiction has many windows." The same applies to thrillers. There are many types: the legal thriller, the spy thriller, the action-adventure thriller, the medical thriller, etc. One of their common denominators is that they quicken the reader's heartbeat.

The following is a list of those we believe made a difference, compiled with the advice of several thriller reviewers. Books were chosen based on the impact that each had on the genre. Did the author contribute a new subject, direction, and/or technique that had a lasting effect? Did a work make such a impression that it has been frequently imitated? There will no doubt be objections about what was included and what wasn't. For that reason, please consider this a work in progress.

The list has a serious purpose. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot insisted that every writer has an obligation to study the literary tradition in which that writer works. Eliot believed we have a responsibility to absorb and carry it forward, trying to add something of our own. Too often we pay attention only to current trends and lose the guidance that literary history can provide. Still, if we study our antecedents, we can strengthen our technical skills while using old concepts to go in new directions. At the least, we gain enough sophistication to know when we're innovating rather than performing the literary equivalent of reinventing the wheel.