psycho thrillers

I can't help you there but the best thing I could suggest would be to read some of the ones out there. That's really the only way to get a grip and a feel for a type of book is to just read a bunch of them, IMO.

Thrillers

Depends on how you're using psycho--under one defintion, it might fit under medical thriller (doctor gone bad, doing bad things to patients). If you're going for the psychopath definition, it could fit under any number of subgenres of thriller, depending on what the bad guy does. For example, if he's off killing multiple people, then it might be a serial killer thriller. That's where, as Brokenfingers suggested, doing research will help. It'll help you pin down the subgenre your story best fits into and give you a feel for the elements unique for the subgenre.

Meanwhile, this post might help on defining thriller: http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=386898&postcount=2

More important than knowing your genre is knowing your psychology. If you don't, reading a few psycho thrillers won't help you one bit when it comes to writing one.

I'm working on sort of a thriller-esque novel myself. And I'm reading everything. I hope mine will turn out to be a page-turner, but with a touch of lit fic. There's a lot out there with plots that move, but terrible writing and one-dimensional characters.

The question to ask is if your protag will be likeable with some redeaming qualities after you're through messing him up. Are you talking about doing something akin to Dr. Jeckle and Mr. Hyde?

Tri

Mine likes cats, yoga, and watching Letterman.

He's also a mad scientist.

"More important than knowing your genre is knowing your psychology."

I can't say I completely agree with this statement. I think a psycho doctor who is a psychologist doesn't have to practice their discipline. A good percentage of the conflict, scenes, and narrative can come from outside the practice. This antagonist can pray on people who never step inside the door. There are many variations like "Hannibal Lecter" who never practiced for the readers.

Jon

Psycho Thriller Do's and Don'ts...

I would have to second Spooky. Probably a few weeks of reading up on the basics of psychopathic behavior (intense narcissism, lack of remorse for actions etc.) would give you as much as you need to create a viable villain. A good model is Thomas Harris. Hannibal Lecter is probably the ultimate "franchise" villain in the genre, and if you go through Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, you don't have much of a clue as to what motivates him to eat people. This is clarified in the last book, Hannibal (the wartime deserters who ate his sister), but it really didn't even have to be then.

I have written a psychologically-based suspense novel, and one agent after a first read told me I had focused too much attention on underlying motives and not enough on the "gory doings," which is after all why most suspense readers buy the book. After you do your initial research, there is a tendency to flesh too much of it out, as if it's important the reader completely why the villain does this or that. But some part of it is ego, that you want to show the reader that you know what you're talking about.

Probably much more important in the genre is that you had better have your reader in the thick of the "gory doings" within the first ten or fifteen pages. Suspense readers don't have a lot of patience for slogging through thirty or forty pages to get to the page-turner stuff.

You're missing the point, and how you can keep a straight face while telling Jewel to skimp on research is beyond me.

Jewel101 said:

It's about a psychologist gone bad.

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This is inherently an entirely psychology-based plot, and if you try and write it without having a firm grasp of the subject matter you're going to end up with a straight slasher about a psychologist who randomly starts killing people. He might as well be a milkman for all the depth that provides.

And Thomas Harris is not a good model - his psychoanalysis of Lecter and his attempt to portray the full extent of his madness in Hannibal was embarrassingly, book-hurlingly lame.

three seven said:

This is inherently an entirely psychology-based plot, and if you try and write it without having a firm grasp of the subject matter you're going to end up with a straight slasher about a psychologist who randomly starts killing people. He might as well be a milkman for all the depth that provides.

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Thrillers aren't known for their depth. They're known for giving an entertaining read and a rip-roaring roller coaster ride. Serial killer thrillers are actually extremely popular, so much so that it is hard NOT to find one. I actually have read a serial killer thriller with a psychologist as the killer (yup, it has been done), and I doubt if the writer had any background at all. The focus was on the serial killer killing people. The only research something like that requires is some research into police procedure and some forensics for accuracy.

Now if the story is leaning heavily towards a plot revolved around psychiatric medicine, then Jewel is going to need a similar background. It'll be a hard sale just getting past the query letter without it. Readers who come to such books are not just looking at a good story but looking for rich details with unexpected twists and turns that result from those details. Superficial research for such a book will not make it competitive enough to get past the slush pile.

And Thomas Harris is not a good model - his psychoanalysis of Lecter and his attempt to portray the full extent of his madness in Hannibal was embarrassingly, book-hurlingly lame.

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Those books are also very old by today's publishing standards. The genre has changed a lot in the last few years, so any comparisons should be made off modern books only.

All this is why it's so important to research the subgenes of thriller (and please note that thriller is different than suspense) and pin down which one it is. Some subgenes require a special background of some sort while others don't.

Linda Adams said:

I actually have read a serial killer thriller with a psychologist as the killer (yup, it has been done), and I doubt if the writer had any background at all. The focus was on the serial killer killing people.

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You neglected to mention whether it was a good book.

three seven said:

You neglected to mention whether it was a good book.

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I don't consider any of the serial killer thrillers books good, and I only read them to help familiarize myself with thriller in general. I know there's a huge audience out there that has a fascination with serial killers and enjoy reading novels about them. For me personally, I don't want to read about women being murdered in extremely horrific ways.

Various

Jewel101 said: "I think it might be important to mention the fact that the psychologist doesn't going around killing people, he's just the reason they are dead. So I think research on psychology is needed."

Do you mean that people die because of his malpractice or neglect? Or is he trying to manipulate people to do things that will cause them to die or commit suicide (in which case he is probably a serial psychopath regardless of the MO)? Or something else?

Linda Adams said: "For me personally, I don't want to read about women being murdered in extremely horrific ways." Not surprising, 90-something percent of the readership for the serial killer subgenre is male. My ex-wife (a good friend) can't even bring herself to read my serial thriller, even though half the vics are male.

Three Seven said: "You're missing the point, and how you can keep a straight face while telling Jewel to skimp on research is beyond me." It depends a lot on what her character is doing. A synopsis would probably make things much clearer. Unless you're going to go into hibernation for a few years, research is a trade-off, time you spend on research in one area is time you can't spend researching something else.

"And Thomas Harris is not a good model - his psychoanalysis of Lecter and his attempt to portray the full extent of his madness in Hannibal was embarrassingly, book-hurlingly lame."

Agreed, and even worse was his lovey-dovey deal with Clarice, which would be virtually impossible given his pathology. Maybe he'll eat her in the next one.

Nonetheless, Red Dragon still outsells anything else in this subgenre two decades after it was written, largely because of Harris's ability to come up with memorable, multi-dimensional villains, which to this day remains the main shortcoming of the serial thriller realm (partly for the simple reason that, other than their savagery, they are generally pretty boring people). And I don't think this subgenre changes that much, there's not all that much difference between, say, John Sandford's recent work and his work of five or six years ago. So at least regarding the serial thriller, I would disagree with Linda's statement that the genre has changed a lot in the last few years, so any comparisons should be made off modern books only. The Butcher's Theater written by Jonathan Kellerman decades ago still trumps any recent works.

In my own case, I spent a year basically just working on my villain and his ghoulishly droll sense of humor. But even though I spent a lot of that year researching psychopathy, I think there is a point of diminishing returns because beyond a month or two of basics, the field becomes either repetitive or contradictory (what for example explains Dahmer, whose childhood environment appears pretty mundane). On the other hand, if the psychology aspect is in some other way a major plot element, as Linda mentioned, then the research is certainly necessary.

dantem42 said:

Not surprising, 90-something percent of the readership for the serial killer subgenre is male.

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Where did you come by this statistic?

Having a woman cop is a great way to work with one of the current trends in thriller. Over the last few years, there has been a lot more emphasis on using major women characters into the story to bring in the women readers. I think the suicide route might be tricky to do credibly and believably without a lot of research. Maybe an offshoot of it could be that all these people were suicidal, but he murdered them instead, making it look like a suicide, so no one investigated.

One thing to remember: A psychologist is a PhD. He/she doesn't prescribe meds. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who can prescribe meds.

Maybe you should check the markets before investing loads of time on something that may or may not sell. As someone said in this thread, "It's been done before," so this might be a clue.

Booker, I have to disagree with that one. If you've got a well-developed idea and the skill and knowledge to pull it off, write it anyway.

Serial subgenre

Perks said:

Where did you come by this statistic?

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One of my mentors for my writing is a former Editor in Chief of The Mystery Guild. When they would release a serial thriller title, the subscribers would be 90-plus percent male, and almost all female subscribers would decline. It's a pretty set pattern. The reverse is true for "cozy" mysteries, the readership is mostly female. It's not a matter of misogyny or anything, it just reflects disparate reading tastes.

Motive

Jewel101 said:

can't do that, he goes around driving women to suicide to convince himself that his love committed suicide

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I'm not convinced as to motive. Except in the case of people like contract hit men or genuine, drooling psychotics (who hear voices that tell them to do things, etc.), the act of murder, and especially serial murder, is almost always motivated by some sort of anger. In the case of a sudden kill, it may be a moment of blind rage. In the case of sequential killing, it generally reflects some sort of bone-deep anger, most often starting with childhood humiliation or other abuse. His true motive would probably have to be that his actions (driving women to suicide) somehow assuage his anger, at least temporarily until he feels the need to do it again. It would be difficult to convince the reader that he was doing it in order to foster a delusion that his love committed suicide.

This type of personality will be able to maintain certain types of delusions about lkilling someone, mostly issues of justification. For example, an "angel of death" who works in neonatal at a hospital may convince herself that when she secretly pulls the plug on babies with birth defects, she is doing good by sending them to a better place. But it's doubtful she could really convince herself that the babies actually died of natural causes rather than by her hand. These people have to do a lot of premeditated planning to do what they're doing, and it's difficult to square with being under that level of delusion.

It would also be very tricky to "get" women to commit suicide on some kind of predictable basis. Even most people predisposed to suicide don't actually do it, or do it in a way where they will probably be rescued in time (cry for help stuff). Actually I like Linda's idea here a lot -- killing them off but where they've made threats before to commit suicide, so that no one pays much attention. In that case, you would probably need to research means of killing that look like suicide.