A thriller is always made better if the main character becomes mentally stronger as the story unfolds, showing some sort of victory against his or her personal demons.
Sometimes, a story peppered with facts and accurate details can make the plot more believable. A good thriller always has an epic ending that will blow your mind; an ending that will stay with you for days, if not weeks, after reading the final page. Unhappy or unresolved endings should be saved for literary fiction; in a thriller, the protagonist should overcome the antagonist — but only by an inch.
So, these are what we believe to be the main elements of an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Would you add any extra points to the list? And what are your most memorable pieces of thriller fiction? Check out our Crime and Thrillers page for the latest releases. Now, if many of these words sound like synonyms, I get it. But they do have varying shades of differences between them—some subtle, some stark. And what they all share is they try to evoke the same biological response from the audience.
They quicken the pulse. They try to—you guessed it— thrill! But using excitement in storytelling is more nuanced than it first appears. Here, excitement refers to anything we look forward to with positive anticipation. This is a key feature of Action Thrillers. Take the work of Christopher Nolan , for instance. There are iconic action set-pieces in each of his films.
Compared to the last element, this is the other side of the proverbial coin. For instance: when we see someone hard at work at the sewing machine, at first, we think nothing of it. But the moment we realize the material they are working on is flayed human skin? Yeah, the visceral revulsion we experience in that moment is guaranteed to get our hearts pumping.
We are biologically programmed from birth to look for patterns and solve complex problems. And when we do so, our brain gets all kinds of thrilled, releasing dopamine, which increases our heart rate.
It sharpens your wits — makes you mentally alert. To follow a detective story closely you need concentration. To spot the criminal needs acumen and good reasoning powers. I could go on with this forever, but any writer needs to know when to stop, when enough is enough. There are no absolutes in this business and exceptions surely to every rule. Thrillers are as broad as our imaginations, elegantly encapsulating what the great John D.
This is the best explanation of the thriller genre I have read. High stakes, fast pacing, and cliff-hanging chapter endings are what set apart great thrillers from other fiction genres.
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