The Anatomy of a Thriller | Dan Brown Teaches Writing Thrillers [Lecture: 01]

I was excited to learn as a young writer, as I started to put this together, talking to other writers, talking to great writing teachers, that there are elements that must be in a good story. Not just thrillers, all stories. We're gonna talk about thrillers here primarily, but all of this is relevant to a storyteller. Whether you're writing a memoir or a screenplay, this is about storytelling. And there are elements that all good stories have.

If you look out at the highway, you will see countless kinds of cars. You'll see minivans and sports cars and tractors. They all have a different purpose, a different driver. They're serving their owners in different ways. But if you take all of these vehicles and you lift the hood, you are gonna see the exact same thing. You're gonna see the elements of an engine that make this car run.

Now they may be crafted a little bit differently, put together differently, but they're all there. The same thing with stories that work. They all have the same elements. We're gonna talk a lot about what those elements are in this class. In broad strokes, you might have a world. You might have the sole dramatic question.

You've got to have a hero. You've got to have a goal. Your hero has to have something he or she wants to accomplish. You have to have obstacles that make it impossible. You have to have a moment when the hero conquers the villain, when good conquers evil. These are all elements that you're going to find in stories that work. And we're gonna talk about them more in-depth in a little while.