NYT and USAT bestselling author and screenwriter, Cindy Dees, brings her formidable skills as a master storyteller and veteran writing teacher to this encyclopedic series analyzing the major tropes used in commercial thriller fiction, film, television, and more. In this volume, Cindy does in-depth analysis of 40 iconic thriller tropes found across all sub-genres of thriller fiction.

Written by a working writer for working writers, this is a comprehensive reference guide and brainstorming tool to help you quickly generate ideas, create characters and plot, revise and edit, brand and market your story. You'll write faster, cleaner, and deliver your audience a story they'll recognize and love.

If you're writing a novel, script, play, comic, graphic novel, video game script, or other story format that includes a thriller element, this book is for you.

Each trope entry includes:

detailed definition and analysislist of adjacent tropeslist of reasons why audiences love this tropedescriptions of all obligatory scenes necessary to structure this trope correctlylist of additional key scenes important to this tropean extensive list of questions to think about when writing this tropean extensive list of traps to avoid when writing this tropeexamples of each trope in action taken from television, film, and novels

...writers in every genre and format of fiction are going to want these guides in their shelf of go-to reference books...

...a tour de force how-to on creating stories audiences adore...

...the books every writer has been waiting for-a comprehensive walk-through by an industry pro of everything to think about when building a story of pretty much any kind...