Writing a Great Summer Thriller

Danny Singer, author of Nothing Left to Lose, on Writing A Great Summer Thriller: Make Them Wish They Were James Bond . . .

The sky is a deep cobalt blue, and the heat is still bearable. You congratulate yourself for beating the Germans to the loungers at the shady end of the pool while at the same time regretting the breakfast indulgence of congealed scrambled eggs and mini frankfurters that are now repeating on you. The Med is shimmering in the distance and for the next week or two you can forget about the office and that horrid woman from HR.

It’s time to dream. Grab that novel you picked up at Gatwick Airport and sink in.

Books, in whatever format, as opposed to the fodder peddled by the myriad video streamers, are an act of collaboration between two strangers, the reader and the writer. A book is the source of a thousand different interpretations as each reader will create their own visualisation of the story. Like most satisfying endeavours, it requires effort. You get out what you put into it. A good novel will give the reader space to colour between the lines and bring their own experiences into the story.

What makes a great summer thriller?

What makes a great summer thriller? First of all, the two basic ingredients of any thriller: high stakes and constant tension.

High stakes imply that something important is at risk, typically a matter of life and death. This doesn’t necessarily require a high body count, car chases or gun fights (although that sometimes helps) and it could be as subtle as a strategically placed cyanide-spiked cocktail or a protagonist under the obsessive control of a murderous psychopathic partner.

Constant tension is a little trickier. Typically, it will involve a secret that the reader is privy to, but the central characters may or may not discover over the course of the novel. The tension builds as the protagonists get closer to the truth. However, the best thrillers will lure the readers into a false sense of security (the secret is safe) before plunging them into the next crisis. The term “constant tension” is therefore misleading. Ideally, tension will ebb and flow through the narrative. There is nothing more effective than a crisis resolution that turns out to be false.

Summer Vacation Characters

The most important thing however are your characters. Making the reader care and root for them makes all the difference. The summer holidays provide the ideal opportunity to get your readers to feel a special bond with your protagonists. Why? Because it is on holiday when men and women alike will take a look at their lives and allow themselves to dream about what might have been. That is your chance to grab the opportunity and offer them a fantasy of what another life could look like.

For instance, in my novel Nothing Left to Lose the stakes couldn’t be higher. The lives of 200-odd passengers and crew depend on a pilot’s ability to land a plane on a disused runway at an abandoned Soviet airbase in a remote corner of Tajikistan. However, the tension is not derived solely from that, but mainly from the question of what drove those people to seek new lives and whether reinvention was possible. They would be dead to their old world whether the plane made it in one piece or not.

A Different Life

As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it: “Character is plot and plot is character.” In my novel, I bet on the fact that, particularly when on a summer vacation, we’ve all had moments when we dreamt of living a different life. A fresh start somewhere where nobody knows us. A more liberated sense of self. A place where we can be ourselves, unencumbered by the expectations of family and society. Palm trees and turquoise seas or a cabin high up in the mountains by a limpid lake. A new life looks pretty tempting as you dodge the splashes of your own screaming progeny going wild in the pool while doing their utmost to drown each other.

A summer holiday, away from the pressures and distractions of our busy lives, is where these dreams tend to emerge from beneath the surface. For many people, it is the one annual occasion to pick up a book. So, why would they pick yours? Typically, it would be a recommendation from a friend or the novel that had most publicity that year.

Louis De Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin featured in the closing scene of Notting Hill. The movie was released in May, guaranteeing that dog eared copies of the novel would litter the sunny beaches of Southern Europe for the entire summer of 1999. More recently, Richard Osman was a permanent feature on our TV screens long before he became our six-foot seven modern day Agatha Christie.

Authenticity

However, there is more to it than luck, celebrity or publicity. Mark Twain had a singular piece of advice to writers everywhere: “Write what you know”. Authenticity is key. The essence of an engaging, captivating thriller lies in the flaws of its characters. And in order to accurately portray these flaws, writers need to look deeply inside themselves. Be honest. Your flaws are your greatest asset, literarily speaking.

What will inspire someone to pick up your book is the feeling that they could be one of these characters. The one that got away, or the one who got the girl (or the boy). When speaking specifically of thrillers, it’s being the hero who saved the day. Or the one who uncovered the secret. When Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code, he understood that on every beach there was at least one Professor Langdon or a Sophie Neveu ready to solve the mystery of the Holy Grail.

All you need to do is make your readers believe they could be the hero (or indeed heroine) of your thriller. In the immortal words of Scouting For Girls: “I wish I was James Bond, just for the day…”.

(c) Danny Singer

About Nothing Left to Lose:

When Flight MH066 mysteriously vanishes an hour after leaving Kuala Lumpur, the world assumes catastrophe.

In truth, its passengers are en route to an abandoned Soviet airbase in Tajikistan, recruited into Project Lazarus, a covert scheme offering broken souls a chance to begin again. At its center is James, a former MI6 officer determined to seize control of his life by giving others an escape from theirs.

But in New York, solitary conspiracy theorist Truman becomes convinced the passengers survived and builds an AI tool to prove it. His search leads him to Pauline, a British woman fleeing unbearable grief, and to Rami and Amara, lovers defying the conflict that divides them.

As secrets unravel and pasts refuse to stay buried, Project Lazarus begins to fracture. Is reinvention ever truly possible, or does truth always find a way home?

Nothing Left to Lose is a gripping, thought-provoking story of survival, identity and the price of freedom.

This article was first published on writing.ie (https://www.writing.ie/resources/great-summer-thriller-danny-singer/)