A thriller-focused writing exercise with context explaining what the exercise trains and which authors used the technique
An original reflection connecting the exercise to a real writing principle you can use today
A quote from a literary master to ground your morning in craft, not hustle
A few things worth knowing
Suspense lives in information asymmetry.
Hitchcock described the difference between surprise and suspense: if a bomb goes off without warning, you get ten seconds of shock; if the audience sees the bomb while the characters talk about baseball, you get ten minutes of almost unbearable tension. Forsyth built the entire plot of The Day of the Jackal on this principle. The reader knows the assassin's plan in precise detail. The French police are racing to stop something the reader already sees coming. That gap is where suspense lives.
Quiet scenes can be more tense than action sequences.
Highsmith's Ripley novels are some of the most anxiety-inducing fiction ever written, and almost nothing happens in them at the level of physical action. Ripley sits in cafes, writes letters, watches people across rooms and calculates whether they've figured him out. The tension comes from the calculation itself, from the gap between what he's saying and what he's thinking. Speed without stakes is just noise.
The threat has to be specific before it can be credible.
A character who is "in trouble" or "being watched" gives the reader nothing to hold. The Jackal has a name he's chosen, a face he's designed, a custom rifle he's commissioned, and a specific window of opportunity he's calculated down to the hour. The precision of the threat is what makes it feel real. Vague danger doesn't produce tension. It produces impatience.
Build what's at risk before you threaten it.
Harris spent pages establishing who Clarice Starling is before she ever walks into Lecter's cell. Her West Virginia accent she's working to smooth over. Her cheap luggage. The way she carries herself through the FBI Academy, a woman from a specific economic class trying to earn a place in an institution that wasn't built for her. The reader needs to know what the protagonist stands to lose before the threat means anything.
The best thriller endings close rather than resolve.
The case gets solved but the world that produced it keeps running. The protagonist walks away, but into what. Le Carré's endings rarely feel triumphant. The immediate crisis is over. The larger thing that created it is still there. That residue of unease after closing the book is the mark of a thriller that was about something beyond its plot.
These ideas come from paying close attention to what the best thriller writers actually did on the page.
For a deeper look, start with how to write a thriller.
On thriller writing
Thriller Writing
How to Write a Thriller
What le Carré, Forsyth, Highsmith, and Harris understood about the genre that most craft guides skip. →
Thriller Writing
Things I've Noticed About Thriller Plot Structure
Sixteen observations about how thrillers are built, after reading probably too many of them. →
Thriller Writing
How to Write Suspense
The craft of dread that builds rather than dissipates. Hitchcock, du Maurier, Highsmith, Harris. →
A sample from your daily email
May 24th
"Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
- George Bernard Shaw
As a writer, you face a specific terror. The page demanding truth you're not sure you can deliver.
When Kurt Vonnegut began Slaughterhouse-Five, he confronted the impossible. How to transform the nightmare of Dresden into meaningful fiction? For twenty years, he started, stopped, started again. The trauma resisted language. The words refused to come. Yet with each abandoned draft, he inched forward.
Today's exercise: write a scene where your character is being followed. Don't let the follower appear directly. Let your character notice small things — a coat seen twice, a pause in the wrong place. Stay inside the accumulation of small wrong details, and resist the urge to confirm or deny whether the threat is real.
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"I've tried every writing course and productivity system out there. This is the first thing that actually got me writing every day. Two months in, I finally started the novel I'd been thinking about for three years."
David M., first-time novelist
A genre organized around danger, escalating pressure, and the question of whether the protagonist can survive or prevent something. At its best, a thriller is about what danger costs the person at the center of it, not just physically but morally. Le Carré's Alec Leamas, Highsmith's Tom Ripley, Harris's Clarice Starling — they all pay a price that extends well beyond the plot.
Through information asymmetry. The reader needs to know more about the danger than the character does, or the character needs to know something the reader doesn't yet understand. Hitchcock described the difference between surprise and suspense: if a bomb goes off without warning, you get ten seconds of shock; if the audience sees the bomb while the characters talk about baseball, you get ten minutes of almost unbearable tension. Suspense requires the reader to see what's coming before the characters do.
A specific threat, a protagonist who has something real at risk, and an escalation logic that feels like the same problem getting worse rather than a series of disconnected crises. Flynn's Gone Girl, Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — all three have plots where every development follows inevitably from the last. Vague danger and arbitrary escalation are the two most common ways thriller plots collapse.
Long enough to build what's at risk and justify the ending. Most commercial thrillers run 80,000-100,000 words, but the length matters less than whether the pacing earns the final confrontation. Highsmith's Ripley novels are shorter than most contemporary thrillers and considerably more tense. The question to ask is whether the reader believes in what's at stake, not whether the word count hits a benchmark.