B&N Reads, Guest Post, Mystery, Our Monthly Picks, Thrillers

Finding the Killer Opening: An Exclusive Guest Post from L. S. Stratton, Author of Not So Perfect Strangers, Our April Mystery/Thriller Pick

By L.S. Stratton / March 31, 2023 at 1:20 am

Paperback $16.99

Not So Perfect Strangers

Paperback $16.99

A reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train, this domestic thriller is a study in truth lies, trust, and suspicion. Two women trying to help each other get out of unhappy marriages find themselves on a collision course with a catastrophic conclusion. Not So Perfect Strangers is an entertaining exploration of race and gender politics that will keep you guessing until the bitter end. Keep reading for a post from L.S. Stratton about finding the best hook to grab readers attention, as well as five headlines for some of her favorite Mystery/Thriller novels.

When I tell people that my first job out of journalism school was as a crime reporter, covering murder trials, drug raids, and the Hells Angels, they imagine it being much more exciting than it actually was. I wasn’t chasing down criminals or meeting cops in secret to get “off-the-record” info like reporters do in TV shows and movies. Most of my time was spent in cold courtrooms, schlepping to police barracks for press events, on the phone trying to track down sources, and writing on deadline.

At the end of each day, I was often faced with a small mountain on my desk composed of notepads filled with interviews that needed to be transcribed and court documents and police reports that needed to be sifted through and highlighted. I then would have two to three hours to pull it all together and write compelling 500- to 800-word stories that would grab readers’ attention and do it quickly. Because, according to Canadian researchers, the average readers’ attention span in the age of social media can be very short. It was about eight seconds in 2015, which was down from 12 seconds in 2000. (I can only imagine how short it is now.) That gives you … what? A headline and maybe, your lede (what journalists refer to as the opening sentence in an article that summarizes the story) to get your readers invested and to keep them reading until the end.

I’ve found that writing thrillers is a similar process with the same sense of urgency to grab readers’ attention. You come up with the book idea and do all your necessary research on the web and in libraries. You may travel and do interviews, consulting experts. You develop an outline, if you’re a plotter, or simply start writing, if you’re a pantser. And just like with writing copy for a newspaper, when you write thrillers, you know you have to get readers invested in your story quickly. You have to find the killer opening that will suck them into the novel on the first page so that they want to keep reading and find out what happens next.

For my thriller, Not So Perfect Strangers, I wrote almost the entire novel before I decided to go back and draft my opening sentence because I knew how important it was. I tweaked then retweaked, searching for something worthy of the eight second attention span, before settling on this opening sentence: Guilty people run away from the scene of a crime, and that is what Tasha Jenkins was doing as the Gingells’ house burned.

Now, let’s do an experiment and see if I can grab your attention with these made-up headlines of some of my favorite thrillers: