Mystery and its counterpart suspense have been around since the beginning of time. These two sides of the same coin can take form everywhere, anywhere, and anytime. Not just in stories but in life, too. Go everywhere in the world, and I bet you my face there’s a...
I just finished my crime thriller novel’s latest editing round, and I’m almost ready to send it out to literary agents. But before getting into all those submissions, I contacted an agent from New York and booked a fifteen-minute consultancy call that included her...
The movie is a criminal drama with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as protagonists. It takes place in a Key Largo hotel that’s been taken by a group of criminals escaping justice. This movie is compelling because it sets up an impossible situation for the...
This is a short post on implementing or introducing conflict as a sequence of events into your writing. Returning to your character’s goal, we talked about conflict being the most crucial thing in fiction because nothing happens without conflict. And that’s true. So,...
Before conflict can be ignited and injected into your plot, your reader has to find a way to care about what’s going on with your character. I always try to start with an intriguing, strong situation to put the reader into the context of the story and to get them to...
Well, my friend, you are in for a treat. The Maltese Falcon is the classic of all noir classics. It is the best John Huston and Humphrey Bogart movie ever. It is the most tension-filled, intriguing, and entertaining movie about private investigators ever made. Yes,...
The new century brought this jewel with Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss. But before the movie came to be, the short story Memento Mori was published, I think, by the New Yorker. Memento is a psychological neo-noir movie. The protagonist is caught in a memory-loss loop...
So, once you have established your situation, you start sending your protagonist forward while hurling obstacles at her. Once you put the first obstacle before your protagonist, you can think about Try/Fail and Try/Succeed cycles. One way to implement those try...
Getting into the characters’ heads is one of the most important things you can do for your reader. It’s especially important in horror where it’s always necessary to portray psychological terror through this method. This is what authors like Stephen King do...