Writing a thriller, especially a crime fiction thriller, is challenging and very demanding. There are so many things that you need to be aware of throughout the story, like pacing, twists and turns, and maybe a surprise ending. It’s almost like you need a checklist to tick off every time you make it through one of the harrowing scenes. I don’t just mean on paper either. It usually feels like you’ve lived the scene a hundred times before you tweak a chapter just right. That can get pretty tiring.
One of the most important aspects that I find in creating a proposed page-turner is that you need strong supporting characters for your protagonist and antagonist to interact with to move the plot along. This is one of my favorite parts of writing a novel. I love to incorporate a character that brings out many different emotions for the hero(ine).
In my second novel Dead Game, I created the charming, but annoying, know-it-all Jordan Smith that really kept my heroine Emily Stone on her toes. I like creating characters readers can either relate to, or know someone just like them.
In my most recent novel Silent Partner, one of the supporting characters just happens to be a four-legged Labrador retriever named Keno. Not only is he a dog, but a police dog as well. For this crime thriller, I wanted to add another dimension to the twisted chase of good guys and really, really bad guys. Don’t be fooled, this isn’t a warm and fuzzy dog story by any means, it’s a down to the second chase to apprehend a serial killer.
My characters aren’t modeled after “real” people, they are a combination of people and of course my imagination. However, Keno’s character was in fact my own Labrador named Trucker. We trained with the local police K9 and I couldn’t think of a better dog to back up Deputy Jack Davis.
On an extremely sad note, as I was writing Silent Partner, Trucker was stricken with an aggressive cancer and three days later I had to put him down. It was an extremely emotional time for me and this book almost didn’t get written. But, life goes on and I thought what better way to keep his memory alive and share all of his wonderful traits with readers in Silent Partner.
