crime thriller essay

How to Write a Thriller: 6 Steps to Writing a Novel or Screenplay

By Sarah Oakley

Table of Contents

Elements of a thriller, thriller plot structure, 6 tips for writing thrillers, how prowritingaid can help you write a thriller novel or screenplay, conclusion on how to write a good thriller.

A thriller is one of the most popular genres of novels and films. Many people love thrillers for the way thriller writers weave mystery plots with heightened tension and complex characters.

Thriller stories make us question human desires and often leave us with the feeling that everyone has the potential to kill for what they want most.

How is it possible to pack all of this into one book or film?

This article details how to write a thriller novel or screenplay. You’ll learn the elements of a thriller, how to create a good plot structure, and some helpful tips for writing.

There are many key elements of a thriller story, and if you want to write a good thriller, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with them. You should be able to identify a thriller novel from the first sentence and a thriller film from the first scene. 

Here are the main elements of thrillers: 

Realistic characters

Short narratives

Plot twists and cliff-hangers

An intense climax scene

A thriller is a genre that creates a physical response in your reader, and suspense is the feeling you want to create with your writing. This will set the tone for your entire novel or script. From the moment the reader steps into the world of your story, we need to be on edge.

Your novel or script needs realistic main characters to ensure readers can empathize with your hero and fear your villain. Your hero needs to be flawed and in over their head. The villain needs to be evil, and you can add a level of concern if the villain is relatable or as though they are someone you might meet walking down the street.

Most thrillers take place over short narrative time frames because they’re all about action and putting the hero under pressure to solve the mystery before more people get hurt. You can include a time pressure or a ticking clock to increase tension for your hero. Villains don’t always give your hero months to defeat them, but if they do in your story, make sure there’s a reason.

Plot twists and cliff-hangers need to be deployed with care and precision to ensure your reader doesn’t feel cheated in some way. If you want to write a plot twist, it needs to be embedded into the story from the beginning to be plausible. Cliff-hangers need to be significant enough to make your reader want to turn the next page.

All thriller stories are about testing your characters, which leads to an intense climax scene that proves to be the ultimate challenge for your hero. In the climax scene, your reader will feel like a back-seat passenger watching the hero and the villain come together, and sometimes, your reader won’t know who to root for.

By including the elements of thrillers, your story should fulfill the expectations of your audience and readers who love a good thriller. 

The elements mentioned so far apply to all subgenres of thriller novels and screenplays. Here is a list of some of the key thriller subgenres you can use these elements in:

Psychological thriller

Science fiction thriller

Crime thriller

Spy thriller

Action thriller

Legal thriller

Thriller novels come in all shapes and sizes, but a lot of books are marketed as thrillers as a way to boost sales, even if the books don’t contain thriller elements. If you write thrillers featuring the elements we’ve detailed, no one will question which genre your books belong in, and your books should fall into the hands of real thriller fans.

One of the best places to start when planning your thriller is with the plot structure. A tried-and-tested method to plot a thriller is using the seven-point structure, which includes these points: 

The first plot point

The first pinch point

The midpoint

The second pinch point

The second plot point

The resolution

All good thrillers start with a hook. This is the opening scene where you introduce your reader to the hero and their world. A thriller hook might be a shocking event that pulls us into the action, or it could be a simple description of something creepy happening to the hero.

Once you’ve introduced your hero, you’ll get to the first plot point, which includes the inciting incident . An inciting incident is what kicks off the interaction between the hero and the villain. Your hero could discover a dead body, receive a threatening letter, or they could find out the villain has abducted someone they love.

After the inciting incident, give your hero time to react before they give chase and resign themselves to the fight against the villain.

The next significant moment in your plot is the first pinch point, which is a moment when your protagonist feels significant pressure from the antagonist. You can use the first pinch point to reveal the villain’s primary goal and motivations. If your hero feels empathy or relates to the villain’s motivations, you could show the internal conflict the hero is experiencing. 

About halfway through act two, you’ll reach the midpoint of your story, which is a crucial moment for your hero. The midpoint can be a perceived victory, but the villain hasn’t been defeated. Alternatively, your midpoint could be a failure that amps up the conflict for your hero, meaning they go into the second half of this act with renewed determination.

Once your hero has recovered from the midpoint, you’ll reach the second pinch point, where you put even more pressure on the hero. Your villain could reveal more of their evil plans, showing more about what drives their actions. 

During the second pinch point, let your hero reach rock bottom with the pressure they’re under and the struggle to solve the mystery. By the end of the second pinch point, your hero might have learned a difficult lesson or gained a new outlook on the situation that renews their confidence or determination to keep going. 

The next part of the plot is the second plot point, which includes the climax scene. The climax is when your protagonist has to face the toughest part of their journey to solving the mystery and potentially beat the villain. 

During the second plot point, the protagonist should use the skills they’ve developed to discover the secrets the antagonist has been hiding. The mystery can be solved, but the villain might not be caught because not all thrillers end with the “bad guy” going to jail. 

The ending scene is the resolution. The resolution of a thriller usually presents a mirror image of the hook, where the hero is either back to their old life or they have found some kind of peace after everything they have been through. Not all thrillers end happily, but a good resolution will give your readers closure on the story, and they should feel satisfied.  

Now you know how to use the seven-point plot structure for your thriller novel, but you can use almost any plot structure template for planning your thriller. Your thriller might also have a subplot, such as a romantic storyline, but that will need to be woven into your main plot.

Here are six fundamental pieces of advice for writing a thriller novel or screenplay.

Tip 1: Suspense Needs to Be Sustained

You know suspense is an element of thrillers, but you need to ensure your entire novel is filled with it. Your reader needs to be wondering what could happen next at all times. It’s what will motivate them to keep reading.

Suspense differs from tension. Tension should be added to your story at key moments to increase your reader’s excitement and make them concerned for your hero. Suspense is a constant unease and looming sense of danger. 

The best way to create suspense is by revealing a problem or raising a question but withholding the solution and answer until your character has the strength and skills to figure it out.

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Tip 2: Challenges Build Your Characters

The more conflict you include in your story, the more we’ll learn about your characters. Therefore, the stakes need to be high. We need to see your protagonist struggle and test their bravery, determination, and strength. Everything must be on the line, including your hero’s life.

If the main character fails, we’ll get even more insight into who they are, and we’ll see their weaknesses. Psychological thrillers often focus on internal conflict, which you can show by exposing your character's weaknesses.

Showing your character’s flaws and relatable characteristics creates a connection between your reader and the protagonist.

It’s your job as a thriller writer to make sure your main character’s deepest fears are realized, and they have to face them to move forward in the story. When they reach the climax, you should have revealed almost everything about them, but it still shouldn’t be clear if they’re going to win or not.

Tip 3: Pacing Is Vital

Thrillers are fast-paced, full of action and moments of conflict. The best thriller writers can control how their readers feel by setting the pace of each scene to suit the actions happening in them.

Your story should advance forward on every page. Thrillers don’t have time for pages of world building and exposition. This means it’s easier to ground your stories in settings that are easy to describe and will feel authentic to readers as you move the story forward.

Thrillers aren’t all action, though. It’s okay to have some slower scenes in your story where your protagonist can rest and regroup. These scenes give your reader a chance to get to know your main character and build up compassion for them.  

Tip 4: You Don’t Need Explicit Violence

Simple descriptions of horrific scenes can be more harrowing for your reader than elaborate detailed descriptions of gore and violent acts. In a thriller, less is often more for blood and wound descriptions. If the conflict is emotional, there doesn’t need to be blood spatter for it to be scary.

Let your reader’s mind work—they’ll create the scariest images because it’ll connect to their own fears. If they care about the main character, you won’t need to work hard to have them thinking the worst is happening in pivotal scenes.

Tip 5: Take Your Hero to a Breaking Point

Thriller authors, such as Meg Gardiner, say that in every thriller, there will come a breaking point where your main character will either take a dark turn or they’ll find themselves with their back against the wall. Either situation can happen in your thriller.

The breaking point reveals something about what it means to be human. Sometimes people will choose to do something morally wrong to defeat the villain. Alternatively, if a person is backed into a corner, do they have the strength to get themselves out of it?

One of the main reasons readers seek thrillers is to learn something new about what drives humans to do horrible things, and how we can be strong if we’re ever in a similar situation. It’s reassuring to know good can defeat evil, even under the most stressful conditions.

Tip 6: Chase Scenes Are Difficult to Master

Chase scenes are a staple of thriller films, as the camera can follow the protagonist and highlight specific details the director wants the audience to focus on. You watch helplessly as the hero is hunted by the villain. A chase scene isn’t easy to write.

You’ll need to ensure your chase scene starts with a goal, and the stakes are detailed. Then you can throw obstacles in the way of your protagonist as they give chase. Ensure the obstacles are realistic and make sense to your reader so they don’t feel like you’re just adding elaborate obstacles for the sake of them. 

A good chase scene has its own climax moment where the stakes are raised and the emotional pressure is increased. It reveals more details about the characters and makes us care about them.

You can use a plot twist at the end of the chase scene to change the direction of the story. Remember to set the plot twist up using subtle clues you have dropped into each of the scenes leading up to the chase. 

You can use ProWritingAid to edit your thriller novel or screenplay once you have finished your first draft. Thrillers are concise. Every sentence needs to add detail and develop the story. You must trim anything else.

When you edit using ProWritingAid, you’ll want to edit one chapter or scene at a time to ensure you can focus on each section completely before moving on to the next one.

To set up ProWritingAid for editing your novel, you’ll need to click on the document type drop-down in the Realtime sidebar and select “Creative,” then “Thriller.” This will ensure you see suggestions specifically designed for thrillers. For scripts, you’ll need to select “Script,” then “General Script.”

There are many reports you can use to edit your writing. For thrillers, we recommend using the pacing check to ensure your fast-paced chapters or scenes don’t contain any slow paragraphs. This check will highlight anywhere you’re slowing your readers down.

Slow pacing isn’t always a bad thing, as it usually means you’re adding introspection and some backstory. However, too many slow paragraphs in a row aren’t good for a thriller novel. You’ll need to add some action and dialogue to improve your slow paragraphs.

Another report that can help thriller writers is the sensory report. The report will underline examples of concrete sensory words it finds in your document. By checking how many underlined examples you have, you can see how much detail is in your chapters. Details create the images in your reader’s mind, so it’s important to have the right amount.

If you’ve written a sentence that doesn’t sound quite right but you’re not sure how to rewrite it, you can use the ProWritingAid’s Rephrase feature. Simply highlight the sentence and click on the Rephrase button to see several suggestions for rewriting. You can select one or use them for inspiration.

ProWritingAid doesn’t just help thriller writers with the editing software. We also run a Crime Writers’ Week event every year. In our weeklong summit, you can hear tips and tricks from some famous writers, editors, and crime-writing specialists.

Thriller writers can network with other thriller writers to bounce ideas off each other, work out plot holes, and share your love for the genre. If you’ve got a burning question preventing you from finishing your novel, this is a great opportunity to find answers.

Thrillers thrill readers with insights into human psychology and relationships. If you include the right elements, follow the plot structure, and keep in mind the tips detailed in this article, you’ll create a truly memorable thriller. 

Remember—once you’ve written your first draft, you can use ProWritingAid to go through your chapters with a fine-toothed comb to ensure it’s tight and clean. You can also learn how to write a thriller at the ProWritingAid Crime Writers’ Week.

Sarah Oakley

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Crime Thriller Writing course

Crime and thriller writing.

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Assessment and certificates, eligibility, recommended reading, crime and thriller writing course overview.

This course is also offered as an intensive one-week summer school.

This ten-week crime writing course will include an in-depth look at how to write a thriller and what makes a good crime novel. It aims to make your own writing strong, compelling and ready to submit.

Areas covered will include plotting, characterisation and analysis of all the elements that give a book that page-turning quality.

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You will learn a variety of techniques from creating characters that live off the page, to how to build a plot and how to use effective description. Other topics include building tension and pace into your writing; creating crime scene settings; and how to use research to bring veracity to your stories. By the end of this course, you will be able to:

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• Gone Girl , Gillian Flynn, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2013
• Someone Else’s Skin , Sarah Hilary, Headline, 2016
• And Then There Were None , Agatha Christie, Harper Collins, 2007
• Slow Horses , Mick Herron, John Murray, 2017.

Caroline Green

Caroline Green’s debut adult novel  The Woman Next Door was a Number 1 e-book bestseller.  In A Cottage, In A Wood was a Sunday Times top ten and USA Today bestseller. She is also an award-winning author of fiction for young people. A genre-busting crime series for adults (writing as CS Green) starts March 2021 with  Sleep Tight . Writer in Residence at East Barnet School, she also teaches for City University and Writers and Artist’s Yearbook.

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Ian Fleming Explains How to Write a Thriller

"you have to get the reader to turn over the page.".

There is no literary spy—and perhaps no literary character, full stop—more famous than James Bond, which should already be enough of an argument for any aspiring writer, but particularly any aspiring writer of thrilling tales, to seek advice from his creator, Ian Fleming.

Luckily, I recently stumbled across an essay by Fleming, aptly entitled “How to Write a Thriller,” which appeared in the May 1963 issue of Books and Bookmen , only a little over a year before the author’s death. (I admit that the below version has been pieced together from a few incomplete online sources, primarily this one , which was reprinted by Peter Morwood, and which seems to have been a slightly different edit from the Books and Bookmen version.) It meanders a little, and it’s a little pompous in places (even as it tries to be casual about it) and parts of it have not aged particularly well (delicate shade of pink, indeed), but in the end, most of it is still pretty good advice.

“How To Write A Thriller,” by Ian Fleming (1963)

The craft of writing sophisticated thrillers is almost dead. Writers seem to be ashamed of inventing heroes who are white, villains who are black, and heroines who are a delicate shade of pink.

I am not an angry young, or even middle-aged, man. I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds.

I have a charming relative who is an angry young littérateur of renown. He is maddened by the fact that more people read my books than his. Not long ago we had semi-friendly words on the subject and I tried to cool his boiling ego by saying that his artistic purpose was far, far higher than mine. He was engaged in “The Shakespeare Stakes.” The target of his books was the head and, to some extent at least, the heart. The target of my books, I said, lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh. These self-deprecatory remarks did nothing to mollify him and finally, with some impatience and perhaps with something of an ironical glint in my eye, I asked him how he described himself on his passport. “I bet you call yourself an Author,” I said. He agreed, with a shade of reluctance, perhaps because he scented sarcasm on the way. “Just so,” I said. “Well, I describe myself as a Writer. There are authors and artists, and then again there are writers and painters.”

This rather spiteful jibe, which forced him, most unwillingly, into the ranks of the Establishment, whilst stealing for myself the halo of a simple craftsman of the people, made the angry young man angrier than ever and I don’t now see him as often as I used to. But the point I wish to make is that if you decide to become a professional writer, you must, broadly speaking, decide whether you wish to write for fame, for pleasure or for money. I write, unashamedly, for pleasure and money.

I also feel that, while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as “Thrillers designed to be read as literature,” the practitioners of which have included such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these.

All right then, so we have decided to write for money and to aim at certain standards in our writing. These standards will include an unmannered prose style, unexceptional grammar and a certain integrity in our narrative.

But these qualities will not make a best seller. There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.

If you look back on the best sellers you have read, you will find that they all have this quality. You simply  have  to turn over the page.

Nothing must be allowed to interfere with this essential dynamic of the thriller. This is why I said that your prose must be simple and unmannered. You cannot linger too long over descriptive passages.

There must be no complications in names, relationships, journeys or geographical settings to confuse or irritate the reader. He must never ask himself “Where am I? Who is this person? What the hell are they all doing?” Above all there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects what he might have done or what he proposes to do next. By all means, set the scene or enumerate the heroine’s measurements as lovingly as you wish, but in doing so, each word must tell, and interest or titillate the reader before the action hurries on.

I confess that I often sin grievously in this respect. I am excited by the poetry of things and places, and the pace of my stories sometimes suffers while I take the reader by the throat and stuff him with great gobbets of what I consider should interest him, at the same time shaking him and shouting “Like this, damn you!” about something that has caught my particular fancy. But this is a sad lapse, and I must confess that in one of my books, Goldfinger , three whole chapters were devoted to a single game of golf.

Well, having achieved a workmanlike style and the all-essential pace of narrative, what are we to put in the book—what are the ingredients of a thriller?

Briefly, the ingredients are anything that will thrill any of the human senses—absolutely anything.

In this department, my contribution to the art of thriller-writing has been to attempt the total stimulation of the reader all the way through, even to his taste buds. For instance, I have never understood why people in books have to eat such sketchy and indifferent meals. English heroes seem to live on cups of tea and glasses of beer, and when they do get a square meal we never hear what it consists of. Personally, I am not a gourmet and I abhor food-and-winemanship. My favorite food is scrambled eggs. In the original typescript of Live and Let Die , James Bond consumed scrambled eggs so often that a perceptive proof-reader suggested that this rigid pattern of life must be becoming a security risk for Bond. If he was being followed, his tail would only have to go into restaurants and say “Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?” to know whether he was on the right track or not. So I had to go through the book changing the menus.

It must surely be more stimulating to the reader’s senses if, instead of writing “He made a hurried meal off the Plat du Jour —excellent cottage pie and vegetables, followed by home-made trifle” (I think this is a fair English menu without burlesque) you write “Being instinctively mistrustful of all Plats du Jour , he ordered four fried eggs cooked on both sides, hot buttered toast and a large cup of black coffee.” No difference in price here, but the following points should be noted: firstly, we all prefer breakfast foods to the sort of food one usually gets at luncheon and dinner; secondly, this is an independent character who knows what he wants and gets it; thirdly, four fried eggs has the sound of a real man’s meal and, in our imagination, a large cup of black coffee sits well on our taste buds after the rich, buttery sound of the fried eggs and the hot buttered toast.

What I aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism. I have not re-read any of my books to see if this stands up to close examination, but I think you will find that the sun is always shining in my books—a state of affairs which minutely lifts the spirit of the English reader—that most of the settings of my books are in themselves interesting and pleasurable, taking the reader to exciting places around the world, and that, in general, a strong hedonistic streak is always there to offset the grimmer side of Bond’s adventures. This, so to speak, “pleasures” the reader . . .

At this stage let me pause for a moment and assure you that, while all this sounds devilish crafty, it has only been by endeavoring to analyze the success of my books for the purpose of this essay that I have come to these conclusions. In fact, I write about what pleases and stimulates me.

My plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible. . . . Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside—for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed—but for two further technical devices, if you like to call them that. First of all, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground. This is where the real names of things come in useful. A Ronson lighter, a 4.5 litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers supercharger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London, the 21 Club in New York, the exact names of flora and fauna, even James Bond’s Sea Island cotton shirts with short sleeves. All these details are points de repère to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.

Well, I seem to be getting on very well with picking my books to pieces, so we might as well pick still deeper.

People often ask me, “How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have.”

I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don’t think there is anything very odd about that. We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale , there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.

The first was the attempt on Bond’s life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other one blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one contained a bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which they could escape.

One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb. In fact, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.

Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the method used in the Russian attempt on Von Papen’s life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they were blown to nothing while Von Papen and his wife, walking from their house to the embassy; were only bruised by the blast.

As to the gambling scene, this grew in my mind from the following incident. I and my chief, the Director of Naval Intelligence—Admiral Godfrey—in plain clothes, were flying to Washington in 1941 for secret talks with the American Office of Naval Intelligence, before America came into the war. Our seaplane touched down at Lisbon for an overnight stop, and our Intelligence people told us how Lisbon was crawling with German secret agents. The chief of these and his two assistants gambled every night in the casino at the neighboring Estoril. I suggested to the DNI that he and I should have a look at these people. We went, and there were the three men, playing at the high chemin de fer table. Then the feverish idea came to me that I would sit down and gamble against these men and defeat them, thereby reducing the funds of the German Secret Service.

It was a foolhardy plan which would have needed a golden streak of luck. I had £50 in travel money. The chief German agent had run a bank three times. I bancoed it and lost. I suivied and lost again, and suivied a third time and was cleaned out, a humiliating experience which added to the sinews of war of the German Secret Service and reduced me sharply in my chief’s estimation.

It was this true incident which is the kernel of Bond’s great gamble against Le Chiffre.

Finally, the torture scene. What I described in Casino Royale was a greatly watered-down version of a French-Moroccan torture known as passer á la mandoline , which was practiced on several of our agents during the war.

So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one. I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings.

We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.

Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathize with you. I too, am lazy. My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.

In my case, one of the first essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work, whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat. I am fortunate in this respect. I built a small house on the north shore of Jamaica in 1946 and arranged my life so I could spend at least two months of the winter there. For the first six years I had plenty to do during these months exploring Jamaica, coping with staff and getting to know the locals, and minutely examining the underwater terrain within my reef. But by the sixth year I had exhausted all these possibilities, and I was about to get married – a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidget. To give my idle hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book. The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written. But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual “life” as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions in the strange locale will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application.

So far as the physical act of writing is concerned, the method I have devised is this. I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript. The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine—and I mean strictly. I write for about three hours in the morning—from about 9:30 till 12:30—and I do another hour’s work between 6 and 7 in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.

I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain.

By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be, and is, in my case, in about six weeks.

I don’t even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.

When my book is finished I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.

They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Béarnaise with asparagus.

Such mistakes are really nobody’s fault except the author’s, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a salutary dig at the author’s vanity to realize how quickly the reader’s eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence.

But what, after all these labors, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?

First of all, they are financial. You don’t make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and the film rights, you do very well.

Above all, being a comparatively successful writer is a good life. You don’t have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around you.

Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing, even if you only write thrillers, whose heroes are white, the villains black, and the heroines a delicate shade of pink.

Emily Temple

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