Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Tim Maleeny | Relationships Can Be Murder
Uncategorized / June 18, 2009

Mysteries and Thrillers have always been popular for their fast pacing, smart dialogue and unexpected plot twists. And as both a writer and a reader, I’d certainly agree those are essential ingredients to any page-turner. But what about relationships? I’d argue that characters drive plot, and your empathy for the characters, as a reader, is what drives suspense. It’s your relationship with the characters — and their relationships with each other — that makes a mystery work. And it’s the tension in those relationships that keeps you up at night turning the pages. Think about it. Does the action matter if you don’t care about the people involved? We’ve all been to movies where we’re sitting on the edge of our seat, mouth full of popcorn, knuckles white as cars tear through narrow city streets on the big screen. And yet we’ve also been to movies where a similar car chase nearly puts us to sleep, and even the final explosion as a car tumbles down the cliff only lingers as an after-image inside our drooping eyelids. The only different between those two movies was our empathy — or lack thereof — with the people in the cars. My latest…