3 Reasons Why I Write Thrillers

When I described myself as a thriller writer, I was once asked what drew me to this genre. What was it about thrillers that fascinated me so much? This was indeed food for thought. On reflection, here are the 3 reasons why I write thrillers:-

• I write what I like to read: It’s as simple as that. That’s not peculiar to me alone. Isn’t it more likely that you will write about things you  read about? Ever since I was a kid, I was very much interested in spy stories, mystery novels and thrillers. They gave me a high. I liked the fast paced stuff. The language may not have been particularly elegant. The descriptions may have been pithy, if not earthy but that’s what I liked. James Hadley Chase, Harold Robbins, Alistair MacLean and Ian Fleming,  were some of those, whose books I read a lot, and read early in my life.

• Cat & Mouse: A thriller allows me to play a mind game of cat and mouse. The main difference being that it’s  for me, the writer, to figure out when and where the cat and the mouse ought to be. It gives me the scope to think of behalf of the hero and the villain, the spy and the counter-spy, the attacker and the defender, the aggressor and the victim. As exciting as this sounds, I can’t, however, afford to lose sight of the reader in the whole process. It should not be too easy for the reader to get the drift of a story which has suspense built into the plot. At the same time, the story should not be totally unbelievable. This jugglery with words and thoughts to show pointers to the reader makes the writing of thrillers more challenging, and hence more exciting for me.

• Unconventional themes: I enjoy unconventional themes. I try to write about very different subjects each time, I start a novel. Perhaps because my star sign is Scorpio, I am very curious about occult, mystery, terror and death.  They say we make good detectives. Ruth Winocur in ” Discovering Scorpio” seems to agree. In my debut novel, a psychological thriller, “It Can’t Be You”, I wrote of a war veteran whose entire life changed at a young age because of the scars of war. I wrote that the scars in his mind were more powerful than the scars on his body. In “Lucky For Some, Thirteen” my soon to be published thriller, I write about a complex terror plot, examining  the motivations of a terrorist and building on why they do what they do. The theme for my work in progress, a novel called “Let The Dead Stay Dead”, is equally interesting to me. Here, I explore mental illness and write about a young lady accused of having committed a murder of a person she does not know whether she has met at all.

My journey as an author has been full of enjoyment for me. I have gained so much and learnt a lot in the short period of three years that I have been writing seriously. So what’s next, you might ask. At present, I have no particular theme in mind other than the thought that I will continue to do what I love best of all, to write thrillers.