For the past several weeks, we have studied a range of stories within the YA and MG sphere and across several genres. Our guest speaker who I had to bribe to be here is the author of TINY PRETTY THINGS (and several other novels), now a netflix tv show. She will discuss components of writing a YA THRILLER.

On a very fundamental level, a thriller needs to have an exciting plot (literally, thrilling). Think of stories like Jaws, Psycho, You, Cape Fear, etc. Thrillers are dark, high stakes, and suspenseful plot-driven stories. The thriller genre includes unexpected plot twists, a particularly terrible villain, and page-turning tension.

Assignment Outcomes:

• Your journal entry is simply a creative writing exercise to write something that falls within this genre. It does not have to be connected to the logline for your creative writing essay.

• Your assignment is to wr it e a n opening scene of a thriller. When writing thrillers, the opening scene is particularly important. Readers should be on the edge of their seats from the very first page. The opening scene of a thriller novel should introduce the crime, conflict, or stakes as quickly as possible. Don't worry about character backstory orexpositionjust yet. The best thrillers hook their readers with instant action, then fill in the necessary character and storyline information later.
• Watch the following video and of an opening scene that embodies the thriller genre (I would also suggest looking up "thrillers" and reading a chapter or watching the first act of a show/movie) to get a strong sense of it.

Let it be rooted in something e.g antidotes Young adult SELF PITCH 1) protagonist (adjective) Conflict (verb) Goal (noun)

STAKES GENRE

Supernatural elements

Tragedy

Technique based

Or character based

apply 7 Key Elements of Thriller Stories

https://youtu.be/uvi7zl86Zrg?si=VDrL8YY_onOAMMWi

WHAT IS A THRILLER? A story where a clever hero has to foil evil Clever: quick to understand, learn, and devise/apply ideas; intelligent; skilled at doing something, you want a hero who is smart and can outsmart a villain.

First key element of a thriller is high stakes

We talking about what a character has to gain as well as what the character has to lose it's very important to have both impact it could be personal stakes meaning who they care about weather or not that character is in danger or larger scale stakes things like weather or not the whole town city or the whole world is in danger.

2) Unity of opposites (Hero locked in) it means a character is locked into a situation they can't simply walk away from a challenge, villain or anything the easy way to do t hi s is to give the character a Job where they're obligated to solve a problem oftentimes in thrillers you would have a police officer as the main character or federal agent or as to foil a dangerous villain, it is important that your character are locked into whatever conflict they're facing. 3) seemingly Impossible odds and very simply you want to make your audience believe that the hero will fail even if it's obvious that the hero is going to succeed even if it's obvious that there's going to be a happy ending we need to believe that something is going to go wrong for the hero and the hero can never match up to the villain, the best ways to do t h is is by portraying your villain as being this highly effective highly dangerous character and if you can send the message to your audience that the villain is unstoppable and you make them believe it when the hero eventually overcome the villain it's going to have all the more impact.All the impact is moral struggle, and this means that establishing the ideas of good and evil in your story world and you wanna put your hero on the side of the good doesn't mean that you have to have this paint by number is black and white good evil kind of thing going on. You can still have a scenario where your main character is an antihero and they're going up against the villain who just happens to be more corrupt there gonna be plenty of gray areas here but you do need more and you need a hero on the side of the number five ticking clock this means that you c r e a t e a deadline deadlines in order to ramp up in your story you might have a scenario where if you don't deliver the money to the drop off point by midnight, your daughter will lose another one if we don't kill all the vampires by sundown they'll overtake the book entry and if you're not familiar with the story guy pick up a haunted gun and put it down until he doesn't kill one person each day the gun overtake his mind and start shooting people so that he has a choice as to who number six is means you have a villain who makes threats and carries out threats over the course and it's very important that your villain delivers on their threats. You need a villain, and you need to show that this villain is capable of harming people dismembering people killing people because when you do put your main characters or sympathetic characters in danger, your audience needs to believe that that danger is the only way to do that is to show throughout the story that the villain is capable of doing horrible things is thriller type characters and this goes back to what we talked about at the beginning of the video when I defined what a thriller is, it's about a clever hero, who is trying to foil evil. Now you need a clever hero that somebody who's capable of using their smarts to overcome the villain, but you also need a clever villain somebody who can fight back against that hero so that we have a strong back-and-forth between the two characters if you think of the movie, the dark Knight, where you have Batman, who is a clever hero he's this guy who he created the secret identity in order to clean up Gotham stop a lot of criminals and he goes up against this clever villain the Joker the jokers is very clever because he uses Batman strength against Batman Batman identity that's one of his strengths but with the joker does he says OK I'm gonna take that strength and I'm gonna say that for every day you don't reveal who you are I'm gonna kill another person and put in a difficult situation and c r e a t e a strong back-and-forth over the course of the story.