Psychological Thrillers
Psychological Thrillers
By Julie Tollefson
For Rebecca Kanner, crafting a compelling psychological thriller goes beyond creating a deceptive narrator or tricking the reader through writerly sleight of hand. “I want the mystery resolved while leaving readers with something more unsettling to consider: 'How well do I know the people closest to me? How well do I know myself?'” she says.
Here, Rebecca offers five tips for injecting maximum psychological suspense into your manuscript.
1) Transform “what ifs” into story — “I have plenty of experience with anxiety—the way the mind can seize on uncertainty, fill in the blanks, and turn a frightening possibility into a certainty,” Rebecca says. Taken to their extreme and twisted into fiction, those thoughts become the type of prose that readers describe as unputdownable.
Her novel Last One Seen grew from two “what if” scenarios, one stemming from the real-life stress she endured while pursuing an MFA and one examining a ripped-from-the-headlines issue: What if a member of a close-knit writing workshop group began secretly using AI?
“Those two ‘what ifs’ gave me the emotional conflict and central tension of the novel,” she says. “From there, the characters and events became fiction.”
Rebecca recommends that writers ask three questions about their protagonists:
What do they fear?
What are they hiding?
What have they convinced themselves is true?
“Then make each external threat put pressure on at least one of those answers,” she says. “That is where plot and psychology begin working together—and where suspense deepens.”
2) Play plot and character off each other — Plot and character are inseparable in the best storytelling, and never more so than in a psychological thriller.
“Plot creates the pressure, but character determines what happens under that pressure,” Rebecca says. “The protagonist’s fears, desires, and blind spots should drive the decisions that move the story forward.”
Can your plot exist unchanged if you swap out protagonists? Bring more of your character’s unique way of seeing and reacting to the world onto the page to make the story his or her own, Rebecca says.
“What happens in the plot should put pressure on the protagonist’s deepest fear, wound, or false belief,” Rebecca says. “In turn, the way the protagonist responds emotionally should complicate the external situation. When those elements work together, the story becomes more than a sequence of frightening events.”
Rebecca considers her ability to portray emotion to be her greatest strength as a writer. “A complicated plot can make readers curious, but emotion makes them invested in the outcome,” she says.
3) Root suspense in character — It’s emotion, too, that will convince a reader to stick by a character even when signs clearly point to danger ahead.
“The strongest choices often arise when every available option carries a risk or a cost,” Rebecca says. “The writer’s job is to make readers think, ‘I’m afraid of what this decision could lead to, but I understand why the character is making it.’”
Rebecca’s fiction leans into secrets, shifting loyalties, deception, distorted perceptions — all the juicy ingredients for a page-turning thriller.
“The central question is often not simply ‘What will happen?’ but ‘Who can I trust, and how well can I really know another person?’” she says. “Isn’t everyone at least a somewhat unreliable narrator? We interpret events through our own memories, fears, desires, and assumptions. Two people can experience the same moment and tell entirely different stories about it.”
It’s that illusion of a single “truth” that underlies Rebecca’s work.
“I’m less interested in revealing that a narrator has simply deceived the reader than in exploring how someone’s version of the truth was formed, and what happens when it collides with another person’s version,” she says.
4) Earn that twist — Readers love a twist, the unexpected turn in a story that makes them question everything they thought they knew.
“I try to hide the significance of information rather than the information itself,” says Rebecca, who wrote about her approach in a CrimeReads article, “There’s Nothing Like a Twist You Don’t See Coming.” “A twist shouldn’t feel as though the author suddenly changed the rules.”
For Rebecca, ideas for good twists often arise while she’s writing. “Once I find it, I go back through the manuscript and earn it by adding subtle foreshadowing, misdirection, and character behavior that takes on a different meaning after the reveal.”
She recommends asking yourself three scene-level questions: What changes because of this scene? What new danger or uncertainty does it create? What choice does it force the protagonist to make?
“If the answers are ‘nothing,’ ‘none,’ and ‘none,’ the scene probably isn’t creating enough suspense,” she says. “A chapter doesn’t always need to end with a dramatic cliffhanger, but it should leave the reader with a new question or a changed understanding of the story.”
Twists can propel your story toward an unforgettable conclusion, one that will stick with readers long after they shelve the book.
“The strongest endings don’t merely explain what happened,” Rebecca says. “They change how readers understand everything that came before.”
5) Follow your research — Rebecca’s research relies heavily on people — friends and acquaintances who have the experience and expertise she’s interested in or who can point her in the right direction. One of her favorite and most creatively productive questions to ask when she interviews sources is, “What do books and movies usually get wrong?”
“The answer often gives me details, complications, and even plot possibilities I never would have discovered on my own,” she says.
Rebecca is also connected with law enforcement professionals through a citizens academy (a program often offered through your local police department or sheriff’s office).
“I also seem to have accumulated an unusual number of lawyers as friends, and — if they have the time — they’re wonderfully generous with their expertise,” she says.