Hi Everyone,
I'm trying to find books that talk specifically about how to write suspense fiction. But I keep getting titles for books about writing thrillers and/or mysteries when I do searches on Amazon and the like.
I know all three genres have commonalities but I'm really looking for a how-to book on writing specifically suspense fiction, preferably psychological suspense.
Any ideas?
Djuna
Hey, Djuna. First off, the best research you can do is read published novels that are in the same genre in which you would like to write. Read them through once for sheer entertainment, choose the ones you like best, then read them a second, third time, and make notes about how the author opened it, how s/he expressed the tone and voice, where the inciting incident hit, etc, etc. If you read enough novels in this way it'll provide you a nice education. That said, how do you know what to to look for as far as elements of a good novel in your genre?
To that end, how-to books can be a very valuable resource, but there are so many, how do you choose which ones may be most helpful? I assume you read the reviews on Amazon and other sites as to what readers liked and disliked about various how-to's. Narrowing it down further from there, you can always ask on this or other boards what people thought about certain how-to books. But before all that, you really need to narrow down the genre in which you want to write.
I understand how book stores (what few are left) classify their "suspense" books under such headings as "thrillers" or "mysteries" or "suspense" or "psychological mystery" or "paranormal thriller" etc, almost ad infinity. But for me, there are really only two distinct differences and sub-titles here, the rest are sub-genres.
A lot of peeps here might disagree with me, but in my opinion, there is no real genre as "suspense" in the M/T/S world. There are only mystery or thriller. Most every sub-genre (even those outside of M/T/S) need some level of suspense in order to work. In simplest of terms mysteries start with a dead body (or whatever High Crime) and devolve into a who-dunnit. Thrillers may also start with a dead body (or not) and are about how to stop such an atrocity. Each one may carry elements of the other: the whodunnit story may need to have a ticking clock to prevent more bodies from springing up; the thriller may need to discover who done it to prevent more bodies (if they don't already know who the villain is--a lot of thrillers do). There is major suspense in both.
Sure, each sub-genre could be included in an umbrella genre called "suspense" but I'm willing to bet yours lies within mystery or thriller, and can be broken down further depending on your plot.
