Dan Brown Teaches Writing Thrillers

Chapter Two

The Anatomy of A Thriller

Suspense begins with the three C’s: the contract, the clock, and the crucible

• The contract is an implied promise you make to the reader about what will be delivered by the end of the book.
• Clock refers to the fact that adding time pressure to any character’s struggle will create higher stakes and more interest for your reader.
• Think of the crucible as a box that constrains your characters, offers them no escape, and forces them to act. Your story should present an increasingly difficult series of tasks and situations for the hero that will funnel him into the most severe trial of all. You must make sure that each successive task is harder than the previous one and that, for the hero, there is no escape.

Escape Tropes - TV Tropes

Chapter Three

Finding The Idea

“What do I want to know?” This crucial question should be your jumping-off point. During your reading, also look for complex arguments that will lead you to moral grey areas.

More dilemmas

The ethics issue: The 10 biggest moral dilemmas in science

Physicians' Top 20 Ethical Dilemmas - Survey Results Slideshow

Ethics | World news | The GuardianOn a page in your notebook titled “Topics,” make a list of all the subjects that magnetize you right now. It doesn’t matter if you just thought of them today. Free-write until you fill the page. If you find this difficult, scan news headlines and list all the stories that grab your interest. Once you’ve filled a page in your journal, go back over the entries and look for connections or themes. Look over your list of interests from above and try to identify any moral grey areas. Write them in your notebook on a page titled “Moral Gray Area.

Chapter Four

Choosing Locations

Location is an enormously useful tool in novel-building. You should treat it as you would treat a character, allowing it to convey mood and letting it reveal more of itself over time. By selecting locations that excite you, you can transform relatively mundane scenes into more compelling ones. Your enthusiasm will come through in your writing, and your characters will view and interact with your locales in a more engaged way. Selecting an exciting location is a key heavy lifter

Chapter Five

Creating Heroes and Villains

Heroes don’t have to be perfect specimens of bravery and strength. In fact, those protagonists tend to be boring. Great heroes emerge from the trials they encounter. Because these trials will define your hero, it’s a good idea to develop your villain first, as the villain’s motivations will create the crisis for your hero.

List of women warriors in folklore - Wikipedia

List of culture heroes - Wikipedia

Sometimes a moral grey area turns a hero into a villain. In fiction, this is known as an anti-hero. Turn to these novels and television shows for some recent popular examples of anti-heroes, or check out TVTropes extensive list.

Literature / Anti Hero - TV Tropes

Chapter Six

Universal Character Tools

While the villain will define the forces that antagonize your hero, a sidekick will help the reader understand the hero’s strengths and motivations, so it’s wise to choose a travelling companion who will complement your hero. This person can be a mentor or a friend, a romantic interest or a helper of some kind. These secondary characters serve the vital functions of assisting the hero with alternate skill sets, giving the hero a sounding board or emotional support, getting themselves into trouble so that the hero must rescue them, and even providing comic relief. Giving secondary characters opposing points of view allows you to explore your subjects, settings, and moral grey areas from a wider variety of perspectives, which sustains complexity and keeps the reader interested. Consider letting your characters have pre-existing histories. This creates space for the reader to grow curious and even generate assumptions about their relationship.

Interior Monologue: The Complete Guide | Novel Writing Help

Chapter Seven

Case Study The Da Vinci Code

15 Types of Villains Screenwriters Need to Know - ScreenCraft99 Archetypes and Stock Characters Screenwriters Can Mold - ScreenCraft

Chapter Eight & Nine

Research

If it doesn’t serve the story, don’t use it. Research materials are like money in the bank—use what you need now and save the rest for the future.

Chapter Ten

Building A Story From The Ground Up

1. Select the World and Find the Moral Gray Area
2. Create the Hero
3. Create the Villain
4. Check for the Three C’s
5. Set the Stage
6. Write the Finale First
7. Navigate the Middle Muddle
8. Develop the Supporting Characters
9. Turn Up the Tension
10. Build the Obstacles
11. Remind the Reader of the Stakes
12. Motivate the Character to the Next Location
13. Wrap It Up

The beginning of your novel has to accomplish a lot. It must introduce the hero, the villain, and the world of the story, as well as the story’s sole dramatic question, and it must do this with enough energy to grab your reader’s interest right away. Often, tension evaporates in the middle of a novel, so it’s a good idea to write your ending first. It may not be perfect, and you can always change it later, but it’s useful to know the climax to which your characters are headed. Your job during the middle of the story is to make the hero’s quest as difficult as possible so that at every moment it seems less likely that the hero will triumph. You must raise the stakes along the way and create obstacles of ever-increasing intensity while keeping your eye firmly fixed on your conclusion. Uses the following techniques to help keep the conflict going throughout the middle section:

• Create secondary characters who bring new tensions to the story.
• Introduce new problems. Whatever situation your hero is facing at the start of the middle section should become worse.
• Give a character a complicated history or situation.
• Create obstacles for your hero.
• Complicate things.
• Keep reminding the reader of the stakes.
• Find ways to keep your protagonist moving from one location to another. If you know you want to use a certain place in a scene, find a way to get the character there.

Chapter Eleven & Twelve

Creating Suspense

It’s a good idea to make big promises to your reader as early as possible. The following list is a selection of Dan’s favorite tools and others he uses in his novels that you might find useful.

• Introduce parallel plot lines. When you’ve got subplots for villains and secondary characters, you create more places for suspense and raise questions in the reader’s mind about how the various stories might be related.
• Use internal monologue to heighten tension. Anything your protagonist worries about will worry the reader. Their thoughts and feeling can create apprehension and set a mood of anticipation.
• Create a promise in every chapter. Almost anything can be a question to the reader— What’s in the box? How will this character get out of the crashing plane? Who planted the bomb beneath the bus? Any question you’ve raised contains a promise that you’ll answer it.
• Create a puzzle. Sometimes a quest revolves around solving a riddle and following a series of clues. This could be a trail of symbolic information or a straightforward solving of a murder mystery.
• Increase physical danger.
• Give characters complicated histories, and withhold information to keep the reader guessing about the dark secrets in someone’s past (and how it may affect that character’s behavior today).
• Create a character who never appears on stage. These shadowy power brokers are usually villains, but they can surprise you by being heroes, too. Let the reader learn about them through other character’s fear of them.
• Place your characters in perilous locations. Sometimes you look at a steep, narrow staircase and just know that someone is going to die there.
• Delay your hero reaching his smaller goals. Let that surprise phone call happen just before your protagonist is supposed to give an important presentation.
• Use dramatic irony to set the stage. Show your villain arriving at the building where the hero is having a lively conversation with an old friend.

41 Ways to Create and Heighten Suspense in Fiction

In general, there are two ways to augment tension in your story. Descriptive elements that create tension are individual; they come from your story and from the forces or events that are pressuring your characters. (For example, a villain is trying to kill your hero.) Structural elements that create tension involve the way you write your story. Dan’s tips include the following techniques:

• Start chapters with a sense of urgency
• Keep passages concise and cut out superfluous descriptions
• Blend descriptive passages into action scenes
• Stay grounded in a protagonist’s sensory experience
• Find plausible ways to withhold key information from a reader (i.e. narrate from the point of view of a character who can’t get/doesn’t know the information)
• Open a chapter in the middle of a scene
• Open a chapter or section with a question, an interesting fact, or a change of pace
• Use a “pulse” to remind the reader of lurking danger
• Use flashbacks to open new sources of suspense
• Finish a chapter with a cliffhanger ending

Chapter Thirteen

Writing Chapters And Scenes

Dan approaches each chapter he writes with a specific goal, which he summarizes in a single bullet point. Once he’s established that essential point, he follows his creative impulse and asks: How can I make this interesting? It’s best to open a chapter with a teaser—an action, a bit of dialogue, or an interesting fact that will grab their attention. Dan’s rule of thumb for chapter openings is to make sure that the reader is always learning something new. This could be a new character, an element of the setting, or a piece of information. It’s important to vary the pacing of your story. This means controlling how fast or slow you unfold events for your reader. By balancing action scenes with more reflective, internal moments, you give the reader an equal dose of excitement and recovery. In all writing, there are two types of narration: scene and dramatic narration. In scene, you show the characters performing an action or having a conversation. This tends to speed up the pacing. In dramatic narration, you simply tell the reader what the characters did, but the event remains “offstage.” This type of narration can slow the story down. To keep pacing from feeling monotonous, it’s a good idea to vary the two modes of writing. Show the reader a scene when it’s interesting or necessary, but use summary to move over the less exciting parts.

Chapter Fourteen

Selecting And Utilizing Narrative Point of View

When choosing which character will serve as your main point of view for any chapter or scene, Dan recommends honing in on the person who has the most to lose or learn. Whichever character is facing the highest stakes—the one who has the most to lose in a particular scene—will be the one to follow closely, because their thoughts and reactions will carry the most tension for the reader. The character who has the most to learn is often an equally good choice. Readers tend to identify with characters who are learning like they are, and through these characters, you can provide valuable information to the reader. At times, you may choose the point of view of a secondary or unimportant character—a security guard, for example, instead of your hero. This secondary character’s curiosity or confusion can guide the reader to ask the questions you want them to ask. Perhaps your main character knows something you don’t want the reader to learn yet. The secondary character doesn’t know the information, so narrating from their point of view allows you to withhold the information from the reader in a plausible way.

Chapter Fifteen

Exposition And Dialogue

In fiction, it’s important to keep a balance between two types of narration: dialogue and exposition. Dialogue refers to the things that characters say, while exposition refers to sequences of descriptive narration. Allow dialogue to encourage disagreement between your characters. It’s more interesting when characters are experiencing tension or sharing different points of view. Use your research and your imagination to describe what places sound and smell and feel like. If you’re working with a longer section of dry information, find creative ways to present it through a character’s point of view. Perhaps they’re having an argument about it, or they’re watching someone else present the information. People tend to look at their surroundings with a travelling gaze. Dan recommends following this pattern in your writing. Instead, let your hero’s gaze move over objects in a more natural way. Maybe he’ll notice the bright red carpet leading up to the glass-enclosed teller booth. A reflection in the glass may make him notice the security guard behind him, who is standing next to an enormous potted plant. This technique can have a subtle but compelling effect. One of Dan’s techniques is to keep characters physically moving during dialogue. For example, if your characters are on the run and having a conversation in an airport, you can show the numerous distractions they might notice as they walk nervously through the airport. By interspersing brief distractions (clumsy passengers, stern security guards) between segments of dialogue, you prevent the pacing from becoming monotonous.

Chapter Sixteen

Editing and Rewriting

But you should commit yourself to your idea, and don’t give up on it. Abandoning the thing that really inspired you is lazy editing. Edit to smooth out your writing but don’t edit so much that you ruin the original magic of your novel.

Chapter Seventeen

Protecting Your Process

While you’re writing, don’t stop—not even to do a quick research. Dan makes notes in his text at the places where he needs to go online to do research, and he follows up on it later. You can be gentle with yourself about the amount you produce, but continue to be tough with yourself about the consistency of your practice. Don’t focus too much on the details of your writing. Just try to get the words on the page. At the end of your work period, prepare for the work on the following day—what Dan calls “setting the table for breakfast”—by writing a paragraph or a note to yourself about what to keep working on the next day. It’s a good way to remind yourself of where you left off and what ideas you may have for continuing a scene.