Want to Amp Your Thriller’s Suspense? Add Fatigue
I was a big fan of the show 24, which followed a federal agent named Jack Bauer (played with roaring gravitas by Kiefer Sutherland) as he did some of the worst things you could envision in order to save the world. My enthusiasm was curbed by the show’s cavalier approach to torture as a means of gathering information (especially in light of the real-life horrors at Abu Gharib and other places), but the later seasons took pains to place Bauer’s predations in a more negative light.
I bring this up because I wanted to talk about a topic very close to every thriller writer’s heart, whether they realize it or not: their characters’ energy levels.
The whole conceit of 24 was that it took place in real time, over the course of a single day. In the early seasons, that meant characters got progressively hungrier and more tired; they fell asleep at odd moments, putting their lives in danger. By the later seasons, however, such realism proved inconvenient, and the characters began to exhibit superhuman stamina. It also robbed the narrative of a bit of suspense.
I was thinking about 24 when writing the final third of my new thriller, Boise Longpig Hunting Club. When composing the first draft, my two main characters — an arms dealer and her bounty-hunter brother — spent hours running up and down hills in the hot Idaho sun, in addition to shooting guns at people who wanted them dead.
In the first draft, that whole effort was rather, well, effortless — they sweated a bit, but otherwise sprinted around those slopes without much issue. Then I spent a day on a shooting range, and what should have been obvious from the outset became astoundingly clear once I toted a bunch of long-guns around for a day: it’s exhausting. Like, pass-out-on-the-ride-home exhausting.
So I revised. Jake and Frankie, my characters, get really worn out as they’re fighting for their lives. And it’s a better narrative thanks to all those buckets of sweat and burning feet. There’s a lot of suspense you can generate from sleepiness, tiredness, and that ache that settles into your bones when you’ve been moving at top speed for too long. And by making your characters seem more frail, you make them more relatable — and more human.
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