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Mckee Thriller Writing Course |
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Written by notes by Tomas Rawlings
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Page 2 of 2 Aspects of Thrillers Balance of Power The balance of power is the flow of who has the most force behind their actions through the story. This is an important aspect of the story and is important to get right. In a traditional crime story, the balance of power will shift towards the police as the story progresses, the investigation gathers pace and they bring into play the resources of the state. In action thrillers, the protagonists are more often the underdogs, trying to unravel the well laid and prepared plans of the protagonist. The Perfect Crime Creating a trilling plot can often be best facilitated by the creation of ‘the prefect crime’. First create a crime/plan with not flaws and holes. Then attempt to solve this using your protagonists. As the plan is perfect, they will either need to use their strengths/sacrifices or the antagonists weaknesses in order to prevail. This method strops the story from becoming ‘flabby’ in its execution. (I guess we could apply this to level design?) There are 3 types of plot within this method:
- Closed Thriller: Begin with the crime/plot being discovered. This increases the curiosity and you have questions existing around both how and who committed the act as well as how it will be concluded.
- Open Thriller: This shows the crime being committed and often reveals how/who committed the crime. Additional tension can be created from the information the audience knows that the protagonists don’t.
- Changing Thriller: Where the perspective changes from closed to open during the arc of the story.
Change Change in a story arc will only be meaningful if it changes the life story of a character. Here change is defined as a shift in the perception of the character from a positive to negative (or Vic-versa) such as love/hate, life/death etc. This change needs to be motivated through conflict of one form or another. In a typical Hollywood film there are around 40 of these changes. In a novel there may be around 60 while a play will typically have less than 40 such events. Each of these changes can (for writing purposes) is called a scene (in that the location/camera view is irrelevant to the content of the change.)
Hierarchy of Change These 40 or so changes can be grouped into a hierarchy of events: a series of scenes builds into a sequence. A series of sequences build into an act. An act represents a major arc of change. Acts culminate in the story climax where a major change occurs that cannot be undone (or at least where the audience imagines that this cannot be undone - prior to this the changes will be reversible.) The value of all the various changes will be relative to their position within the hierarchy and the overall story.
Negative of the Negative This is the concept of an act that is more sever than the state changes described thus far, such as life/death. A negative of death, would the proverbial ‘fate worse than death’ (example the fate of Detective David Mills, Brad Pitt’s character in Se7en). Another example would be changes based on love/hate – where the negative of the negative is hate masquerading as love. The creation of a plot with the negative of the negative takes the pace and thrill of the plot up a level, ad so can add huge value.
Ending a Thriller There are 3 outcomes to a thriller:
- Protagonist uses the power of the antagonists against the antagonist. i.e. overpowers the antagonist.
- Protagonist uses a weakness of the antagonist. i.e. outsmarts the antagonist.
- Combination of above.
These can also be reversed – so the protagonist is overpowered/outsmarted by the antagonist or a mixture of both.
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