by Jenna Blum
That’s what I’ve always thought about thriller world. I’ve never written mysteries or thrillers–probably because I didn’t read them. I tried for years, starting with my mom’s Agatha Christies and Alan Fursts. But I couldn’t keep the clues straight. Even with thrillers whose wise-ass narrators I loved, like Lawrence Block’s The Burglar in the Closet, I’d get about ⅔ of the way through and get this vaguely befuddled, stupid feeling, like Okay, If you say so. I’d skim to the end just out of respect for the voice or I’d give up.
Hence I became a historical novelist.
So imagine my surprise when I started writing a thriller.
It was a secret at first. I was working on a historical novel, which wasn’t going well. You
know the phrase “Good on paper”? This book wasn’t. It was a great idea, but on the page it was completely wooden.
Meanwhile, a killer story was sneaking in the back door. Elbowing my historical novel aside. Pushing her down the basement steps. Locking the door and throwing the key into the sewer so nobody would ever find her.
The story was about murderous writers. I outlined it, furtively. I wrote scenes from the POVs of desperate authors, bookseller stalkers, and literary narcissists and felt like I was plugging my hands into an electric socket. Writing it felt so transgressively delicious and darkly funny. And, compared to historical fiction, easy, at least in one way: I didn’t have to spend ten years researching. I’ve been a career novelist since I was 16, so all I had to do to write this tell-all tale was–rather than open a vein, as Hemingway so bloodily said–unpack my life.
But did I have the chops to write a thriller? True, now that I considered it, my favorite novels had always been psychological suspense–featuring writers. Stephen King’s The Shining –which everybody always thinks is about a haunted hotel but really it’s about an alcoholic with writer’s block, saddled with a whiny wife and distractingly psychic kid! King’s Misery, about overzealous fans and enforced creative process. Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife, about intellectual property and writers making uneasy bedfellows. Then I read Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot, about the dire consequences of literary thievery,so smart about the publishing world we both knew so well, and I thought: Hey.
I became a legit stalker. I tracked Jean down and called her. “Did you get publisher pushback when you switched to thrillers?” I asked.
“I just write what I write and other people market it,” she said. “You should write what you want.”
Vindicated, I continued with my ill-behaved writers. But the plot though–that demanding sudoku-like structure the genre demanded. Thriller readers had expectations. They wanted to be kept guessing. To figure it out.
“Don’t forget red herrings,” said my friend Mark. “False leads that lead to dead ends.”
“NO,” I said. After decades of paring nonessentials out of my books, down to the stray comma, I just couldn’t. “I REFUSE. I’ll do what I’ve always done, which is try to write a story so tight the reader can’t put it down for a second.”
That’s when it hit me: maybe writing a thriller wasn’t that different.
My entire career, I’ve tried to provide a good story well told. It sounds simple. As every writer knows it’s not. But good storytelling elements transcend genre. Conflict. Rising stakes, step-laddering up in every chapter. Cliffhangers. Characters we care about, who feel real.
And there’d always been plentiful death in my previous novels, which were about cheery topics like WWII, mental illness. Now the violence was wearing modern clothes. I’ve just always been that person, the one who imagines the worst-case scenario. The mugger in the parking lot, the car jumping the curb, the rapist in the stairwell. I’ve always been fascinated by people doing bad things and why they behave that way.
I’m no stranger to darkness. I might as well put it to good use.
All I had to do was transpose it into a new framework. With consistent suspense, jumpscares, and twists.
Shocker: once I was down the rabbit hole, I loved it there.
Unlike historical fiction, which provided some structural scaffolding via actual events but otherwise rudely required me to invent the whole plot, the thriller, I discovered, had tropes. I leaned into them, with glee. The dark and stormy night! Dead bodies piling up! The characters trapped on a remote island! In a blizzard! The antagonist’s Oscars-worthy confession speech! It was a trip. It was hilarious! I cackled evilly the entire time I was writing the book, throughout every scene.
And rather than finding it daunting, I loved the puzzle of figuring out how to keep everything both realistic and increasingly scary. How to get a stalker into a closet in a locked apartment building. How to coerce a young publicist to cough up somebody’s location. How to conduct a convincing police investigation when a dead body was discovered. My search history now looks criminally insane.
Finally, I’ve always known writers are somewhat sadistic. We want to hold you hostage, after all, to keep you helplessly trapped in our stories. #SorryNotSorry! But I hadn’t anticipated how much I’d love hitting the surprise twists in every act. Turning the knife of the plot.
The result: my first thriller, Murder Your Darlings.
So maybe I do belong here after all. You’ll have to tell me. But please, ignore that muffled screaming–that’s just my historical novel in the basement. She’s stuck there for good, I’m afraid.
Because I’m in thriller world now. Like the killer in the backseat of the car, the footsteps in the dark, the shadow in the closet with a boxcutter, I’m here to stay.
Jenna Blum is the New York Times and # 1 internationally bestselling author of novels Those Who Save Us, The Stormchasers, and The Lost Family; memoir Woodrow on the Bench; audiocourse “The Author at Work: The Art of Writing Fiction” and original podcast The Key of Love. Jenna is CEO and Co-Founder of online author interview platform A Mighty Blaze and one of Oprah.com readers’ Top 30 Women Writers. Jenna earned her MA in Creative Writing at Boston University and has taught workshops for Boston University, Grub Street Writers, A Mighty Blaze, and numerous other institutions for over 25 years. She interviewed Holocaust survivors for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and is a professional public speaker, traveling nationally and internationally to speak about her work. Jenna is based in Boston. For more about Jenna, please visit www.jennablum.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter/X (@Jenna_Blum), Instagram (@Jenna_Blum), TikTok (@jenna.blum), and Substack.
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