One for the Story, Two for the Craft

Thoughts on Thrillers and Thriller-writers

In the box by the door, ready to be given away, are all the books that had either a great story poorly written, a poor story that was well written, or a story that began well but fizzled out before the payoff. Every two weeks, this box goes away to We Buy Books, in case others might enjoy them.

Life’s too short for Book Guilt, which makes us feel we ought to finish books because we (a) bought them (b) started them (c) know the author, or (d) are trying to prove something to ourselves or others.

This goes for my own books, too. If you happen to fall into (c) above, and are reading out of obligation rather than enjoyment, please don’t. I’m still early in my writing journey, and learning to earn my readers’ attention. I want my skills to be so good that my books are inevitable.

But with writing and leadership, it often feels as if you don’t get a chance to be good – you have to be great out of the gate. Especially given the changing landscape, the talent out there, and the high stakes involved, when and how do you get to learn? And if you don’t get things right on the first try, how do you pick yourself back up and try something else?

Last week, at a panel, I was asked how my job is changing because of AI. While I answered, I had to admit, my job has always been changing, even before AI. The danger is believing that I know what I’m doing and have little left to learn, or, worse, that what I’m doing is so innovative and different that I can’t allow myself to be influenced by others. The first is hubris, the second is lunacy.

What will differentiate people, not just from each other but from AI, is the speed and scale at which we learn and grow. We learn from experience, our own or that of others, otherwise known as story. We also learn from practice, from honing a skill through rigor and discipline, which is what we call craft.

Last week was the launch of my latest book, Algorithms of Betrayal. I learned a lot through the process of writing that book, including that “Lawyers and Criminals Humor” is an actual genre category on Amazon. I learned about the incredible Alina Jingan, who runs the Women Love AI podcast, and that I could find a way to reach even non-technical readers, even if one of them did give me shit about making her relive high school with a book that had “Algorithms” in the title.

I owe gratitude to so many people for this book, but I’m going to focus on one of them today: Kia Abdullah, who also launched a book last week – a thriller called What Happens in the Dark. According to her Wikipedia entry (!!!), Kia “worked in tech for three years. In 2007, she quit her job in tech to pursue a career as a writer, taking a 50% pay cut in the process.” She blurbed my book, Her Golden Coast, calling it “a razor-sharp insight into San Francisco’s tech scene,” and has shown up for me and my books in every possible way. In the photo below from the book launch for Algorithms of Betrayal, she’s sitting next to me:

I’m already learning a lot from Kia the person, and Kia the author is on a whole other level. I’ve read many of her books to study how she does her craft, how she manages to keep the tension and pace without sacrificing the quality of her prose. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

1. Don’t anchor too much on the realistic

Kia does her research for the courtroom scenes, and her character Safa’s experiences in boxing mirror Kia’s own, but she doesn’t let striving for accuracy and detail of these things get in the way of telling a good story. I talked to her about feeling a little awkward writing action / fight scenes, and she pointed out that what a normal person would think is melodramatic or ridiculous or over the top really isn’t when it comes to a thriller. Plausibility is key.

2. Pace is everything

You have to be willing to throw away any sentence that doesn’t have forward momentum, which means high-stakes questions, simple active verbs, etc. This sounds pretty basic, but knowing and doing aren’t the same thing. Here, for example, is Kia’s pace in action. This is the first page of What Happens in the Dark:

The first sentence is 10 words, and immediately raises a question. Why hasn’t she come far? Will she change this? The longest sentence on this page is 25 words long, and it will take you a while to find out which one it is, because they all read so fast: simple sentences, often with just one qualifying clause. By the end of the first paragraph, you know this is a character who is resilient and ambitious, and by the second you have another question that makes you turn the page: Why did she lose her cushy old job?

Characterization is economical – Safa Saleem did not cry, and themes of class struggle are conveyed concretely, from shabby Ladbrokes to greasy remnants of someone’s kebab, so that by the end of the first paragraph, you know the world despite no line being dedicated to “world-building” description. Safa is moving, in the first paragraph, struggling against the wind, which stands in for the invisible systems of power that she struggles with throughout the book. The single word artery does a ton of work: connecting grubby East London to the better parts of the city that think they don’t need it, the way a person might outgrow a poor relative (a theme in the book); artery also calls to mind blood, family and death, firmly setting this book up as a thriller.

3. The stakes have to be life and death

When I was writing Algorithms of Betrayal, I wondered about tone. Was I writing a cheesy satire? Or was i writing something closer to a Michael Crichton thriller? In Her Golden Coast, I was very careful to make sure lives were never actually under threat, because there’s enough of that in the queer community in real life, and I wanted to steer far away from the Bury your Gays trope. But the point of this book was to make people face their fears, whether it was AI, rejection, or germophobia. It’s only in the broader context that these fears find their proper place – compared to life-and-death situations, these can be handled. I had to actually put my protagonists through the wringer. What’s the worst thing that could happen to them? Make it happen.

4. Write / edit different POVs separately.

Sometimes I think Thriller writers have a better grasp on Theory of Mind than us normal people. The key to the twist in a thriller is that it should be both surprising and obvious. The clues should have been there at every step, but there were good reasons we ignored those clues. Kia’s Truth be Told is masterful at giving us deep insight into each of the characters, so it’s never the case that you feel the secret is being deliberately held from you. When it’s finally revealed, you realize the mastery isn’t in what isn’t being told, but what is. There are no vague allusions, e.g. “He could never let anyone find out the truth,” that would frustrate the reader and make them distrust the person, but rather the POV character always says the thing that will make the twist make sense, but the reader is primed to interpret it differently.

5. Don’t be afraid to tell the story.

There are so many reasons a writer might balk at writing about the kinds of things Kia writes about — alcoholism and abuse, sexual assault and dysfunctional families, murders ripped from the headlines and the most taboo of topics, including religion and shame. But someone must. That is the job of the writer, and just as the character Safa in What Happens In the Dark is determined to give rape victims a voice, even when their own community mires them in shame and silence, Kia gives Safa a voice, never shying away from revealing the characters in their messy, complex truth. We tend to get attached to our protagonists and focus so much energy on making them ‘likeable’ that we sometimes forget to make them real.

There are more things, of course, that I’ve learned and am still learning, but sharing this for those who don’t know Kia, or don’t have the benefit of her expertise, so that you will, like me, pre-order her books and read them as soon as they arrive.