Thriller Writing: A Creative Writing and Self-Publishing Guide for Aspiring Thriller Novelists by Ash Greenslade

Author:Ash Greenslade [Greenslade, Ash]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Writing, Education
Amazon: B01M3VT7VU
Goodreads: 32861810
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2016-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Points of view and tense

It’s your book but who should tell the story? Tra­di­tional storytelling uses the third-per­son om­ni­scient per­spect­ive, in which an un­seen and all-know­ing nar­rator re­counts the events us­ing he and she pro­nouns. It’s char­ac­ter­ised by the ad­di­tion of in­form­a­tion which is known to the au­thor but not the char­ac­ters in the book. It’s in­cred­ibly use­ful for the world-view per­spect­ive, par­tic­u­larly in his­tor­ical thrillers where con­text is key. Rich­ness can be ad­ded by the ad­di­tion of well-re­searched in­form­a­tion presen­ted with the om­ni­scient voice. In a con­tem­por­ary thriller, how­ever, the om­ni­scient voice risks be­ing dis­tract­ing and can sap the pace of the book. It’s un­likely that this per­spect­ive can ever be truly ab­sent from a thriller, though, be­cause there will be de­tails you’ll want to in­clude of a de­script­ive or in­form­at­ive nature.

Of­ten the third-per­son om­ni­scient voice is just a whis­per. If you have a scene in which a red Lon­don bus passes an old build­ing, and you men­tion it was de­signed by a cer­tain ar­chi­tect, you’re us­ing the third-per­son om­ni­scient voice. De­tails like that are be­ne­fi­cial to the story. Al­low the nar­rator raise his voice too loudly, though, and he’ll tell you why the ar­chi­tect was com­mis­sioned to design the build­ing and de­scribe the so­cial cli­mate in Lon­don at the time. It’s less apt in a mod­ern set­ting. The red bus will have driven off long be­fore the de­scrip­tion is over.

There will be times when the au­thor’s voice simply has to de­scribe what’s go­ing on. One of the early chapters in The Elzevir Col­lect­ive briefly de­scribes the his­tory of a Vic­torian prison on Eng­land’s south coast. The om­ni­scient per­spect­ive is needed be­cause know­ledge of the build­ing is im­port­ant for the reader, and there isn’t an­other vi­able way of im­part­ing the in­form­a­tion. In Torus I use the third-per­son om­ni­scient to de­scribe civil un­rest in Ger­many. In David Mor­rell’s The Broth­er­hood of the Rose the pro­logue refers to the story of the twelfth-cen­tury lov­ers Peter Abelard and Héloïse d’Ar­gen­teuil. The ac­count is told from the au­thor’s om­ni­scient per­spect­ive to es­tab­lish the theme of sanc­tu­ary.

An­other com­mon voice in thrillers is the third-per­son lim­ited. This is when a char­ac­ter is the prin­cipal ob­server rather than the om­ni­scient nar­rator. We still use the pro­nouns he and she to de­scribe the ac­tion, but we’re lim­ited to the thoughts and feel­ings of one per­son. Don’t be put off by the word lim­ited; it’s ac­tu­ally a very strong way to tell a story. See­ing events through the eyes of a char­ac­ter in­forms the reader about her per­son­al­ity and agenda. Fur­ther­more, the reader sees things un­fold only when the char­ac­ter does. This al­lows the writer to re­strict the flow of in­form­a­tion and amp­lify the sus­pense.

Third-per­son lim­ited is a great way of giv­ing equal im­port­ance to your char­ac­ters, par­tic­u­larly if you have mul­tiple con­cur­rent coun­ter­plots. By switch­ing per­spect­ive from chapter to chapter, you keep the reader in­formed while play­ing with the ten­sion. The rule is one dom­in­ant char­ac­ter per chapter. We’re in­side that per­son’s head for the dur­a­tion of the scene, so we can’t sud­denly be dis­trac­ted by someone else’s thoughts.

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