I used to think that in order to write well, you had to have experienced a troubled childhood and a constant stream of failed relationships. I used to think that my horror of confrontation combined with a chronic inability to push myself forward was the reason that after three novels, I wasn’t breaking through. But it wasn't. It was because I didn't know what kind of book I was writing. So I decided to write a recognisable type of book. I decided to write a psychological thriller.
I studied the form. I read the top psych-thrillers of that moment: Gone Girl, Girl on A Train, Before I Go to Sleep. I identified the key elements: a sinister vibe, strangers we don’t trust, dark deeds, love triangles, betrayal, a death and, of course, at least one twist. Doing that gave me something incredibly important: the ability to step back and think about my work objectively. Instead of going with the flow, I was thinking about what needed to happen not for me but for the STORY. In other words, I was honing my story telling craft by learning to tell a particular type of story.
Setting myself the task of writing a psych-thriller made me sit down and think about what my story was about at the deepest level. All stories are about people, stuff happening, how they change. But good stories are always about something else, something deeper. With my debut, Valentina, I discovered that I was exploring the betrayal of trust on a platonic and a romantic level, the resulting devastation, and asking which felt worse.
My theme, the core of the story, gave me my characters: the heroine’s principle character trait became her trusting nature, which in turn gave me her backstory and which enabled me to put the reader slightly ahead. Why trusting? Because this trait maximises the emotional stakes (no point exploring betrayal through someone who doesn’t give a toss either way). The antagonists were the toxic friend, for platonic betrayal, and a cheating partner, for romantic betrayal.
The core elements of the psych-thriller gave me structure – I knew where my story had to get to. I once heard an agent say that once you have your main character, there are only three questions you need to answer: what does your character want? Why can’t they get it? And what are they going to do to get it? My students have heard me say this many times.
So, I had characters and a plot which knew what kind of story they belonged to. But back to my horror of confrontation. How was I going to write majorly dysfunctional relationships when my idea of an upsetting show down is telling my husband that I really think it’s his turn to wash up? I’m not saying my life is perfect, far from it. But a psychological thriller requires some pretty dark, pretty extreme behaviour. But here’s the thing: everything can be used to create drama. You just have to subvert it or extrapolate from it. Nothing is innocent. Not anymore. If, in life, my other half calls to say he’s going to be late home from work, I’m either mildly pissed off or I feel sorry for him. If a husband makes the same call in a book with a creepy cover and a blurb hinting at dark deeds in the dead of night, that same phone call has the reader CONVINCED he’s having an affair – bare minimum! – more likely burying a body before heading back home to pop his lasagne in the microwave. When a writer extrapolates, the tiniest moments can be woven into entire novels. That offhand comment can become a fundamental relationship problem. Life is full of rituals we recognise, rituals that are ripe for subversion. A trip to the supermarket is a ritual made up of recognisable stages: find your purse, fetch your bags for life from under the stairs, park, dig out some change for a parking ticket … and so on.
We don’t need to have suffered disaster to create it. Yes, what we have suffered helps us access the emotions we need, but we can apply those emotions to other scenarios, to fictional people. Writers need to identity the opportunities for things to go wrong and the best place to look is ritual. In Four Weddings and A Funeral, Richard Curtis subverts various recognisable stages of wedding and funeral rituals in order to create comedy: Hugh Grant’s character is late, a lost ring is replaced by a grotesque plastic joke ring, the vicar is nervous and mispronounces his script, and so on.
In a thriller, that lovely new friend you have and all the nice things she does because she really likes you? Tip that upside down! Keep the smile, change the motivation. It’s not love that has her bringing you a bottle of wine when you’re down, it’s because she’s got her eye on your husband/children/house/life … whatever. What’s that? She’s pouring it for you too? Why? Because she’s sweet? I don’t think so! What’s that? She’s putting something in the wine? Oh my God, sister! Run!
Suddenly, that lovely or normal act that you’ve taken from life has become something funny or sinister, depending on what you’re writing, and that feeds into your plot, your characters and your themes because you know exactly why you wrote it. Suddenly, every single scene is moving your story along and creating, page by page, a coherent whole. You have a story that knows what it is, what it’s doing and where it’s going. And your reader will be hooked.
In my novel, The Proposal, a woman opens the door to an ex-con selling cleaning products. So what? We’ve all done that. She chats to him. Yeah ... done that too. She invites him in and offers him a drink ... I’m sorry, what now? Of course she does. Because this is fiction. It is from life but it is not life. Ritual is subverted. What was tiny in life becomes massive. Drama ensues.