By Elizabeth Heider
Whenever I get discouraged about life, my friend Christine quotes the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard at me: “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
This is both helpful and aggravating.
The same is true of writing crime thrillers. I can only see the patterns and lessons once I’ve already made all the mistakes. Here, I share this hard-earned understanding that only becomes clear backwards.
1. We need to see inside the characters
We all know what it’s like to watch an exciting car chase or fight scene in an action movie, so we may be tempted to think that describing that scene will also be exciting. But your readers will skim past those sections unless they care about the person inside the car or the fight. And they will only care if they feel like they know them.
What happens on the inside of your characters is just as important as what happens on the outside. Let us see how they feel about what’s going on, and how they’re processing it and making decisions. And let them exist inside everyday moments, too. Let them drink coffee, put on pants, worry about a recent phone call from their mother, or misplace their keys.
2. Make sure your protagonist has agency
It’s great if your protagonist has a tragic backstory or a cool aesthetic, but she’ll start to annoy us if she’s always getting pushed around by the plot.
Good stories are the ones where characters have narrative agency.
We should be able to see evidence of a deliberately chosen, lived-in set of decisions in our protagonist’s life. Show us who she is by how she’s shaped the world around her: her friendships, her job, her financial concerns, and her love life.
And make sure that it’s her decisions that move the plot along.
One good test for whether your character has narrative agency is to ask: if I swap out this character with someone else, would the story change?
3. In the real world, actions have consequences
The fastest way to make your book feel fake is to strip out the physical, moral, emotional, legal, or relational consequences from your story.
Is your petite protagonist able to throw Chris Hemsworth punches, or saunter away from explosions in a leather bodysuit? If so, then you may have created a fantasy ecosystem where the laws of physics are suspended.
The same unreality can also slip into social dynamics. If a protagonist is abrasive, contemptuous, and professionally reckless, but nonetheless retains credibility and authority, then your narrative is protecting her from consequence. If she gets into a physical fight with her boss and dislocates his shoulder, you need to make sure she faces criminal charges and loses her job. If she doesn’t, we’re no longer in the real world.
4. Turn up the heat
You may love your characters, you may want good things for them, but they need to suffer. Let us watch them fight for what they want and what they believe in. And let them lose.
It’s your job as the author to give them challenges that strip them down and force them to face their own souls.
5. Give your readers a place to rest
Action is important, but so is a breather. Amidst the relentless intensity, give your readers a moment to reflect on what’s happening, and maybe laugh a little.
6. Nobody is watching
You may have carefully chosen your main character and given them the job of solving the mystery, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is subordinate to them or even acknowledges them the way they might deserve.
In real life, every person you meet is a protagonist in their own story, with their own pressures, distractions, and daily dramas. And most days, we barely register a mention in someone else’s life.
The same is true in fiction. Every character your protagonist encounters has an inner world and their own agenda. Unless there’s a very good reason for it, they will rarely give your protagonist a second thought.
Keep this in mind, and your world will feel inhabited instead of staged.
7. Compassion and nuance, not cynicism
We are all stupid and ridiculous and absurd sometimes. We make terrible decisions and have failures and make mistakes we hope nobody sees. And we would be mortified if someone judged us by our worst moments.
Treat your characters with compassion. Show us their faults, but let us glimpse the nuance and beauty and pity in them. We’re allowed to laugh at them, but in the same way we would laugh at ourselves. Don’t be mean-spirited about it.
8. Get the details right
Do research. A lot of research. Read books and journal articles. Visit the locations you’re writing about. Talk to experts. Show your writing to experts and smart friends, and ask them to tell you what you got wrong, even if it embarrasses you.
You’re not going to catch every mistake, but your readers will feel the difference between careful attention and hand-waving.
9. Discomfort is a guide
If the material makes you uneasy, you’re getting close to something real and probably important. Crime fiction should unsettle the writer first. Lean into that discomfort and ask yourself questions about it. What is it trying to tell you? And don’t forget to let your characters feel it too.
10. Write the book only you can write
Trends come and go. One year it’s vampires, another it’s horny fae. Don’t bother chasing the trends.
Write what drives you. Write the story that you can’t stop thinking about. Write the book you want to read.
Write the book only you can write.
Bio: Elizabeth Heider is originally from South Jordan, Utah, the second of six children in a family of avid readers, and has been writing stories for as long as she can remember.
She entered the University of Utah’s Actor Training Program at sixteen, performing works by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Marlowe, and Mamet, before shifting disciplines and earning a bachelor’s degree in physics. She went on to receive a master’s degree and PhD in physics from Tufts University, conducting research at Fermilab and a high-field magnet laboratory.
After graduate school, she spent eight years as a civilian researcher for the U.S. Navy, writing and running wargames, assessing at-sea exercises, and deploying aboard naval warships. Her work took her to Italy, across fifteen African countries, and to Denmark and the Netherlands at the invitation of allied naval leaders. In 2014, INTERPOL invited her to present a workshop and lecture at its headquarters in Lyon, France.
In 2016 she moved to the Netherlands to work as a scientist for the European Space Agency’s Human Spaceflight program, supporting research on the International Space Station. She later became a Technical Program Manager for Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence Science Research Laboratory (AI4Science) and continues to consult in the commercial spaceflight industry.
She processes experience through fiction, which allows her to pursue emotional truth beyond the constraints of analytical writing. Her short fiction has been recognized by the Santa Fe Writer Awards and the New Century Writer Awards. Other credits include a produced stage play, numerous research papers, a chemistry patent, U.S. Navy wargames, a comic series developed by the European Space Agency, and science writing read by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Her research on U.S. Navy programs in Africa has been cited in U.S. Department of State congressional testimony.
She lives in The Hague, where she bicycles through the dunes, makes wine from the grapes in her garden, and skates on frozen canals.
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