Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I was excited to learn as a young writer,

as I started to put this together,

talking to other writers, talking to great writing

teachers, that there are elements

that must be in a good story.

Not just thrillers, all stories.

We're gonna talk about thrillers here primarily, but all of this

is relevant to a storyteller.

Whether you're writing a memoir or a screenplay,

this is about storytelling.

And there are elements that all good stories have.

If you look out at the highway, you

will see countless kinds of cars.

You'll see minivans and sports cars and tractors.

They all have a different purpose, a different driver.

They're serving their owners in different ways.

But if you take all of these vehicles and you lift the hood,

you are gonna see the exact same thing.

You're gonna see the elements of an engine that

make this car run.

Now they may be crafted a little bit

differently, put together differently,

but they're all there.

The same thing with stories that work.

They all have the same elements.

We're gonna talk a lot about what those elements are

in this class.

In broad strokes, you might have a world.

You might have the sole dramatic question.

You've got to have a hero.

You've got to have a goal.

Your hero has to have something he or she wants to accomplish.

You have to have obstacles that make it impossible.

You have to have a moment when the hero conquers the villain,

when good conquers evil.

These are all elements that you're going

to find in stories that work.

And we're gonna talk about them more

in-depth in a little while.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When I sit down to write a book, I

think in terms of what I call the three

Cs that I think could be very, very helpful to anyone

who's sitting down and trying to outline and write a thriller.

I call them the contract, the clock, and the crucible.

The contract is that promise that you're

making the reader, this idea that if you read this book,

you will find out the following piece of information.

Will the young attorney escape the corrupt law firm

that hired him?

Will Ahab catch the whale?

These sorts of things.

Will the jackal kill his target?

You make a contract with the reader.

And you don't break it.

And no promise is small enough that you don't have to keep it.

Every single promise you make to the reader, you need to keep.

And I remember at the end of "Da Vinci Code,"

I think I had three or four days to finish the end of this book

before it had to go to press.

And we had a list of 17 unanswered promises,

an actual list saying this is small,

but you've made a promise to your reader.

You have to answer it.

And we went through and we found ways

to give answers to every single question.

And the reason people are gonna love

your book is that when you make a promise,

you're going to keep it.

And people will begin to trust you as a writer.

The crucible is just this idea of saying, don't

let your characters run away.

A crucible is something that holds things together

and doesn't let them escape.

If you look at the end of Peter Benchley's "Jaws,"

just a fantastic thriller, you've

got a boat that's sinking, a shark that's coming in,

and these people, if they had two twin Evinrudes

on the back of the boat and could drive away,

you don't have a thriller.

They're sinking.

They've got nowhere to go.

They're in a crucible.

They have to face the villain.

Your job is to give your hero one path.

He can't escape.

He's in a crucible.

He's got one way out.

And guess what?

That way is miserable.

It's just filled with obstacles and monsters and danger

and personal challenge.

That's what's gonna make your hero heroic.

And that's what's gonna make the finale of your thriller

exciting and satisfying.

And the final idea is this idea of the clock.

This ticking clock in the background

of every single thriller.

There is time pressure.

When I wrote "Angels And Demons,"

I wanted Robert Langdon to follow

the path of Illumination.

If he'd had his entire life to do it,

it wouldn't have been that exciting.

So I decided I'm going to take an antimatter bomb,

a literal ticking clock-- not subtle, but effective--

put it in the Vatican, say, well, you kind of

have to solve this by midnight, or else there's a big problem.

These are the sorts of things that you

want to do in your writing.

You may have an idea for a story.

The second you can lay on top of it a time pressure,

suddenly you're moving toward the genre of a thriller.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When you ask people what the elements of a thriller are,

you'll probably get answers like high stakes, suspense.

The truth is that these elements of high stakes and suspense

are in every story.

Thrillers, classic myths, there's always suspense,

because there are always high stakes for the protagonist,

for somebody.

It may not be the world's gonna blow up,

but it may be this question of will this young woman overcome

her fear of her father and find herself.

What makes a book a thriller is the pace

at which the plot comes at you.

I like thrillers that hit you on the first page,

hold on, and don't let you go right

till the end, The kind of thrillers I like to read,

and therefore the kind of thrillers I like to write,

are thrillers that ask a lot of questions very quickly,

and also give answers very, very quickly.

And when you're writing your book,

it's absolutely critical that you put in as many questions

as you can toward the front of a book,

but simultaneously that you answer them

at a rate that doesn't leave your reader confused

or wondering, am I ever going to get the answer to this?

So it really is this kind of patchwork

where you're asking a question, giving an answer as you're

asking a new question, making new promises all the time,

getting people to say, OK, I just figured this out,

but now there's this new question.

Keep them going.

Suspense is all about making promises.

It's about telling your reader, I

know something you don't know.

And I promise if you turn the page, I'm going to tell you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you want to write successful stories,

you cannot overstate the importance of reading.

Reading plays an enormous role in the lives of all writers.

Writers read to learn, to get ideas,

to gain knowledge so that they have a perspective on whatever

they're writing about.

But the other reason they read is

to see how other people do it, to see how stories are made.

You as an aspiring novelist should

be reading as many thrillers as you can,

or as many memoirs as you can.

Whatever it is you want to write,

see how other people do it.

And you are gonna learn from people

who do it in a way you love, but you're also

gonna learn from people who do it in a way you hate.

It's not your taste.

You're gonna say, well, I don't want to do that.

I wanna to do something else.

The more you read, the more you're

gonna know how stories are put together.

So I grew up reading the Hardy Boys, these little mysteries

with a lot of cliffhangers.

I loved them.

And then when I went to high school and college,

I just read classics.

And I really only read the classics, a lot of old stuff,

and I enjoyed it.

I didn't really know the genre of an adult thriller existed

until I was on vacation.

I was in Tahiti, of all places.

Found a paperback on the dock that somebody

finished and left there.

And it was a book by Sidney Sheldon called

"The Doomsday Conspiracy."

I didn't know who Sidney Sheldon was.

I'd never heard of the book.

And I read the first page.

I thought, oh my god.

And I read the next page and I read the next page.

And I just tore through that book.

And I thought, I didn't even know this genre existed.

This is like the Hardy Boys for adults.

And I had this strange moment when I thought,

maybe I could do something like that.

I didn't right away.

But I also had another experience

later on reading the original "Bourne

Identity" by Robert Ludlum.

The thing I loved about "The Bourne Identity"

is that one question, that sole brick with which Ludlum

built the foundation was so quiet and ingenious.

It's a man with amnesia.

Will he figure out who he is?

That's the whole book.

Will this guy figure out who he is?

And, of course, you know as the reader he will.

He will.

But you just want to see how it happens.

And, you know, Ludlum does something

so ingenious in this book where you want to like him.

You sort of sense he's a good person.

But the more he finds out about himself, the worse he seems.

You know, he's a deadly killer.

You see his picture on the paper saying he killed somebody.

And as a reader, you say, I trust the author.

The author's going to show me he's good.

But how is he going to overcome all these obstacles that

say he's bad?

You can actually write a book that's

entertaining from which you learn

about all these different worlds, all

these different skills, different kinds of people.

And I became very, very inspired to try that sort of thing

myself.

And I wrote the book "Digital Fortress."

It's a young novel.

I look back and I say, I'd change this,

I'd change that, I'd change this.

But the bones of it are thriller bones.

It's a simple hero.

He too is a professor.

I was finding Langdon.

Wrote a character named David Becker,

who was a professor of linguistics,

and he gets challenged.

He goes on this terrible journey and all these ridiculous things

happen to him.

And he has to overcome them, and, of course, he does.

And again, what you will find when you read

thrillers that you enjoy--

actually any novel that you enjoy--

is that you will get the answer and the outcome

that you've hoped for.

But it will come to you, as the reader, in a different way.

And your job as a writer, give the reader

what they want in a way they don't see coming.