This storybuilder is designed to help you write an action thriller with 20 chapters, between 50-70,000 words, depending on your writing style. It is structured to help you plot multiple books in an ongoing series.

Included topics:

Excerpt:

What Is An Action Thriller?

Action thrillers are popular fiction, with a mostly male readership, but women enjoy them too. Authors like Lee Child, Jack Slater, and Diane Capri are familiar names in the genre. Everyone has heard of Robert Ludlom’s Jason Bourne. The book is a series of ever-increasing action moments, with high stakes, and a goal that might seem unattainable in the beginning. Action thrillers are usually written as an ongoing series featuring the same protagonist, and sometimes, the same sidekicks. They can have a common, overarching villain, or the hero can face a new villain with each adventure. As a rule of thumb, you should

Plotting

Ch. 1

This is the intro chapter. If this is your second+ book in the series, it’s a bit of a reintroduction and perhaps a recap if something happened last book, or throughout the series, that carries into this one. You want each book to be as standalone as possible, but it’s still part of a series, so a little recap is good. If he has recurring sidekicks, probably at least one is featured in this chapter.

You can dig right into the action, showing the hero in a scrape he escapes, or you can ease into it by showing his more mundane life, and someone comes for him or after him. There is usually at least one fight scene or confrontation in the first chapter, to show his fighting skills—or lack thereof if you’re going for a more unique approach by having him learn quickly. (Not really recommended from a marketability standpoint.)