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What Literary Writers Can Learn from Thrillers (Contains Spoilers) by Tom Andes
by Writing Workshops Staff
3 days ago
I have always been torn between my love of literary fiction and my love of genre fiction. Though it's fashionable these days to dismiss genre distinctions, I think they're useful. I have tried, for instance, writing a quiet, New Yorker-style ending for a story that announces itself as a genre story, complete with mobsters from the first page. It doesn't really work. Readers feel cheated after twenty-two pages. In that case, the story needed a murder to finish things off.
That said, I think thrillers and genre fiction in general can teach literary writers a lot, and I was thinking about this the other night while watching Michael Mann's 2004 neo-noir Collateral, which stars Jamie Foxx as Max, a Los Angeles cab driver who ends up chauffeuring Vincent, a hit man played by Tom Cruise around the city while he tries to complete five hits.
Like most Michael Mann movies, it's beautifully shot, with the city lovingly filmed in aerial shots that capture its neon glitz, then sequences that show its multicultural life from the street-level. From urban jazz venues to swanky nightclubs, it radiates the kind of cool that Mann has made his trademark throughout his career, from early films like Thief and the terrific Heat to the series Miami Vice, which he executive-produced. The neon and the nightlife also reflect the themes of emptiness and alienation, which we'll return to in a moment.
Early on, the movie does a lot of work building Max's character. Film being a visual medium, it does this via showing, not telling. As much as that's a canard of writing classes, we can learn from that, too. We see the attention Max pays to cleaning his cab, which he shares with a daytime driver, for instance, before he starts his night shift. And we see that he wants something, namely, the tropical island he keeps a photograph of in the sun visor of his cab.
Even before the importance of this photograph is revealed through Max's dialogue with a fare, Annie, played by Jada Pinkett Smith, we know it's important to Max. Through dialogue, we learn this is a place where he goes when things get to be too much for him; it's how he gets away, his moment of Zen. It's also connected to his core concrete material ambition, which is to own a company, Island Limousine, in that tropical paradise. When he gives Annie the photograph, we see that he's unselfish, giving. We know what it means to him, so to see him give it up is powerful. However, we also see that he's afraid to ask Annie out and reproaches himself for this until she takes the initiative, comes back to the cab, and gives him her number.
Even before the action starts, there's nary a wasted frame. In establishing Max's character, Mann and screenwriter Stuart Beattie set up the major reversal Max will experience by the end of the movie, when he is forced to face his delusions about himself and take decisive action. Yet besides these pieces of early character development, the dialogue establishes several motifs that pay off in big ways in the plot. These are exactly the kinds of craft techniques I love exploring with writers in my Advanced Short Fiction 8-Week Zoom Workshop—how seemingly small choices in the opening pages can create powerful reversals and transformations.
The biggest, most obvious motif is the metro system in Los Angeles. When Max meets Vincent, Vincent talks about how much he hates Los Angeles. It's a lonely, alienating place, Vincent says, and he tells a story about a man dying in the metro and no one noticing his corpse riding around on the train all night. On one level, given what we learn about Vincent, this is ironic. Vincent is a sociopath, likely a psychopath. After all the lovingly filmed shots of the bustle of life in downtown L.A., a life Max loves, this also marks Cruise's character as a villain. But it also sets up major plot points in more concrete ways. And here's a spoiler: the movie's climactic chase scene takes place in the metro, and Vincent's observation about a man dying there proves prophetic.
Other small pieces of dialogue in the cab allude to the violence to come later. Over the course of the movie, we realize Max has been chasing his dream—Island Limousine—for twelve years without getting any closer to achieving it. At the halfway point, when Max and Vincent go to visit Max's mother in the hospital, we learn that Max has been lying to her. She doesn't think he's a lowly cab driver. She thinks he owns the limo company. Then comes the big reveal: Max's fare from the beginning of the movie and his love interest, Annie, a federal prosecutor, is Vincent's last hit of the night.
What does all this have to do with writing literary short stories? The typical literary short story doesn't have a body count, and the architecture of a thriller is obviously different from that of a short story. Maybe we're not writing a story in which our hero experiences a transformation like Max's and has to save the love interest. That said, I think we can take a few basic compositional principles away from a movie like Collateral.
First, at the risk of repeating myself, is that old canard, show don't tell. Film doesn't lend itself to extended interior monologues. At a thriller's breakneck pace, the only way for Mann and Beattie to reveal character is through action. In a literary short story, that action might be nothing more than a gesture, a piece of dialogue. In Gina Berriault's powerful, affecting short novel, Afterwards, the climax of the story comes with a piece of dialogue spoken by a drunk woman near the end of the novel. It's a much quieter climax than Collateral, and no gunplay is involved. But it's heartrending.
The biggest thing I took away from watching the movie the other night, though, was the importance of everything that ends up in the frame having a purpose, even if it's only an incidental one. Years ago, on a field trip to a museum in college, we viewed a large abstract piece that was composed mostly of color fields. The docent was giving a talk, and one point, she stepped in front of a line in the corner of the painting. The only way to describe what happened next was that the entire composition fell apart. It was a vivid lesson in the ways in which seemingly innocuous details can make a profound difference in composition.
If we're writing a story, composing a scene, making it up as we go along, we might get stuck. But sometimes the answers we need are right in front of us. What are those flowers doing collecting dust on the television in the corner of the room? What are those old men doing smoking in front of the truck stop on that cold morning? Before we put a third or a fourth character on the page, have we thoroughly investigated the relationship of the two characters we started with? To put it another way, have we made use of everything we've introduced to the world of the story? As writers, are we checking back in with the elements we've put into play, signaling to the reader that we're aware, that we're paying attention to what we're doing?
There's nothing formulaic about this. It's similar to the process Samuel Delany describes in his excellent About Writing, in which the plots of his science fiction stories emerge organically from an ongoing process of creative visualization. Similarly, asking questions of ourselves, clarifying desire and stakes, especially, can help us figure out where to go. These are the kinds of generative questions and craft investigations that drive the conversations in my workshops—helping writers discover the organic architecture already present in their work.
In Collateral, nearly every line counts. Eventually, those elements come together not only to form the plot of the movie, but also to develop its existential themes, especially the themes of loneliness and alienation Vincent introduces when he gets in the cab and which he embodies as the movie progresses. Like Max's reversal, where he goes from being afraid to ask Annie out to saving her from Vincent, these are the kinds of symmetries that can give our stories in any genre shape and meaning.
Ready to discover the hidden architecture in your own stories? The techniques I've explored here—from establishing character through concrete details to creating meaningful motifs that pay off in powerful ways—are exactly what we dive deep into in my Advanced Short Fiction 8-Week Zoom Workshop. Whether you're drawn to literary fiction, genre work, or the fertile ground where they meet, this workshop will help you develop the analytical eye and craft skills to make every element in your stories count. Over eight intensive weeks, we'll workshop your stories, explore craft through close reading of published work, and develop your unique voice as a writer. Join a community of serious writers committed to pushing their work to the next level. Sign up today and start making your stories as tightly constructed and emotionally resonant as the best thrillers.
Instructor Tom Andes wrote the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books, 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, among many others. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a musician and freelance editor. Southern Crescent Recording Co. re-released his acclaimed EPs on vinyl under the title The Ones That Brought You Home in 2025.
