The Writer’s Corner: The Craft of Writing Political Thrillers

Amazon Prime Video released The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power television series on September 1 to much hoopla and fanfare. Besides it being a spin-off of J. R. R. Tolkien’s masterful works set in Middle Earth, which is always a draw, much of the buzz surrounding the projected five-season series was its incredible cost. Amazon is expected to dish out $1 billion for the multiseason epic, with $465 million being spent on the first season alone.

My sons are watching the series, so I asked them to give me their reviews. “It’s beautiful. The effects are incredible,” they reported. But when I asked them about the story itself, they responded, “It’s okay. Not great. I don’t really care that much about what’s going on.” Fascinating, I thought. You spend hundreds of millions of dollars on bells and whistles, but you forget to write a good story.

Whether writing a movie, TV show, or novel, there is nothing more important than a powerful story and compelling characters. And even if the story is interesting, if the characters aren’t, then you’ve got a serious problem.

When your hero or heroine is original, fascinating, quirky, sympathetic, and unpredictable, readers will care about what happens to them. As a writer, I don’t have the ability to surround my stories with hundreds of millions of dollars of visual brilliance and special effects. All I have are printed words on white pages. So what I type on my computer has to be enthralling enough to get an agent, an editor, and a reader to set aside hours or days to follow my hero’s journeys and really care.

The advantage novelists have over those in other media is we can take readers into the minds and emotions of our characters. If we’re doing our jobs right, we help our readers form deep and lasting bonds with the players in our stories. We can arouse feelings of love or hate, attraction or revulsion, desire or disgust.

In fact, if there’s one area where many writers fall short, it’s in not spending enough time developing and defining their villain. A great hero is only as good as the enemy he or she is up against. That is to say, a hero is only truly revealed to the audience when facing a terrible threat and an epic antagonist. If the villain isn’t incredibly dangerous and smart and real and cunning, you won’t be able to show just how remarkable your hero is by how they are able to somehow summon the courage and ingenuity to defeat such a powerful and implacable foe. And when your hero defeats that villain, your reader won’t feel the satisfaction of “Phew, well, they got what was coming to them; justice was done; all is right again in the universe,” which is the big emotional and spiritual payoff of almost all great thrillers.

Another encouragement I give to younger writers: let your heroes be flawed. Make sure you as the author understand your hero’s weaknesses, their flaws, and where they are tempted and vulnerable. And then make sure we as your readers see that, too. Your protagonist doesn’t need to outsmart every villain, conquer every love interest, and win every fight. Despite what Marvel and DC Comics may say, the world doesn’t need another superhero. The world needs to see characters rising above their flaws, conquering their weaknesses, showing courage despite their fears, taking risks to serve others despite the innate desire to play it safe. I find “superheroes” boring because I know they’re going to win. I don’t expect to see them struggle. But readers bond with characters by being able to put themselves in the others’ fictional shoes and asking, “What would I do in this situation?” And because we sometimes make bad decisions and fail, the characters we will identify with are ones who also sometimes make bad decisions and fail—but rise again and find a way to come back despite their flaws and failures.

Obviously intense action is a necessity in thrillers. And such scenes can be very difficult to write. Allowing readers to use their senses to feel the surroundings is also very important. But let’s be clear: it’s all for naught if we don’t really care about the characters—the good guys or the bad guys. Don’t focus on action and setting at the expense of creating great, original, quirky, flawed characters—they’re the gold every reader wants to discover and embrace.

—Joel C. Rosenberg