5 Tips for Writing Psychological Thrillers

I love a good character-driven psychological thriller, the kind of book that explores our messy interiors, the secrets and lies we tell ourselves, and that let us—the edge-of-our-seat, nail-biting readers—follow along on a character’s journey mapping out the who-done-what along with the character’s psychological struggles with what the story reveals.

(What Writing Mysteries Taught Me About Fiction Writing.)

Some of the timeliest psychological thrillers, to me at least, are those with characters who struggle with trauma (like so many of us seem to be struggling with right now) and denial beneath their glossy exteriors (where many of us try to hide). Sometimes these thrillers are about a crime victim’s struggle, while other characters confront the truth of their own wrongdoing. Will these characters break apart into something better or new? What is the novel saying about who we are? What can we as readers learn?

The human mind is endlessly fascinating. It’s a challenge to write the sorts of books that climb into a character’s twisty brain. My sophomore novel, Watch Us Fall, was much harder to write than my debut for the simple reason that these sophomore characters were twistier-brained than those in my debut. I had to figure them out before I could figure the story out. Unfortunately I wasted a lot of time and several drafts before I understood this.

Friends, let me save you some time. Here’s what I learned.

…what the Greeks called the fatal flaw. This is something in your protagonist’s psychology that’s missing, broken, dark but yearning for light, something that holds the character back from change that will make their life better. In a book I’m writing now, a character can’t forgive past wrongs and avoids the person who wronged her. That’s the character’s psychological set up that the story’s conflict will challenge. My job as a novelist is to make this character come into direct conflict with the person who’s wronged her. The story will challenge her inability to forgive.

This can be the character’s view of their dramatic situation or the world of the story or the characters in it. In psychological thrillers or suspense, this is often a mistaken belief in themselves and their idea about their status quo. Again, this belief gets challenged in the crucible of the story, and with that challenge, the character re-evaluates and only changes as the story forces them to change (by reacting and pivoting and fighting and suffering) until the they can finally “see” what their mistaken belief made them blind to. The character learns, so the readers can.

I’m talking here about the “twists” readers say they love. To me, a twist is simply a revelation, what the character or the reader discovers that fundamentally changes the character's (and often the reader’s) view of what’s happening. In a psychological thriller, these revelations should probably gather in intensity and speed as the story progresses—so that the last quarter of the novel will have one right after the other—until the climax when the big one hits. I like to jot out a revelation list with plot outline, nothing too fancy, because your plot will obviously change as you discover more about your characters during the actual writing (and as you refine in subsequent drafts). Remember, nobody likes to change, not really. It’s the revelations that force the character to shift and adjust until the final change.  

Not so much that it overwhelms you or constrains your imagination, but enough so that you don’t rely on stereotypes. It’s important to have sympathy for characters, too, even if—or maybe especially if—they’re bad guys. Every bad guy thinks they’re the hero of the story, after all. Also, so many people suffer from mental health issues in our world. Don’t we as writers want to be a force for good? Isn’t it better to show mental health issues in its truest, most helpful light? We don’t want to add to a stigma, do we?

In my second book, I went into a draft thinking that delusion (a character’s psychological problem) was caused by childhood trauma. I’d read about it, done my research, talked to people about it, but in the subsequent drafts it felt a bit off. I was missing something. I dug deeper, past the trauma to the grief, and once I got there, the character came alive. So I guess the biggest advice is: If a characterization feels off or forced, it may not be that you have your characters wrong. It may be that you must go deeper. Be curious, brave; push yourself a bit harder. Then, after you’ve done all the research and thoughtful planning and deep dives, let go! Have fun! Let your characters surprise you. I bet your readers will be surprised, too. 

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)