On Benjamin Percy's "Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction"
How to blend commercial plots with literary style.
Hello friends,
Shakespeare Unleashed is out today! This anthology of horror short stories and poems includes my campy sonnet, “Ophelia After Her Distress.” I’m so excited to be in a table of contents alongside Seanan McGuire and Jonathan Maberry!
Buy it in hardcover, paperback or Kindle on Amazon (sigh), or at your local bookstore. When my copy gets here, I’ll post pictures on Instagram! I’m really, really excited for it to arrive – the editor called it the best-looking book he’s ever published. Of course he has a bias, and so do I, but still.
News
Apparently I am become an essayist:
My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in autumn 2023.
My essay “‘You Have to Cook It In Your Own House’: One Family’s Pork and Sauerkraut Ritual” will be published in Heritage Local in 2023 or thereabouts.
My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette and Gender in Oops! A Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in 2024 or thereabouts.
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Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction
Obviously I write this newsletter every month, so I mow through a lot of creative writing resources. But someday (not today though, lol), I will add a list of my absolute most recommended resources to my About page, and Thrill Me will be on that list.
Which might come as a surprise to you, because I bet you’ve never heard of it. You’ve probably heard of Stephen King's On Writing (or at least you’ve heard of Stephen King). There’s a good chance you’ve even heard of Save the Cat or Story Genius. But who, you ask me, is Benjamin Percy?
Just a writer. Not a household name like Stephen King, but a successful working writer nonetheless, which is the bar that I personally strive for. He’s written comics for DC and Marvel, plus six novels and some collections. He also, unlike some folks who write craft books, has actually taught creative writing: at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tin House, and Breadloaf, among other places. Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction is his book about how to write stories that combine “artful technique and compulsive readability,” which is to say, stories that do it all:
Literary fiction highlights exquisite sentences, glowing metaphors, subterranean themes, fully realized characters. And genre fiction excels at raising the most important question: What happens next? What happens next?
What I love about this book – the reason why it’s probably my top recommendation for a craft book, in fact – is that the book, also, does it all. The usefulness of Story Genius lies entirely in its depiction of the “third rail”; all Save the Cat has to offer is really a beat sheet; the value of On Writing lies mostly in the fact that it was written by Stephen King. Thrill Me is an expansive collection of essays, covering everything from plot to word choice, but each one of those essays is focused. The book is also, itself, fun to read – voicey, driven, almost suspenseful, as Percy drops in writing-related anecdotes, leaves you on a cliffhanger, and then doubles back later.
A lot of the book’s takeaways are also easily actionable, delivered in bite-sized, practical chunks. In an essay titled “Urgency,” about how to give a narrative a propulsive arc, Percy explains what urgency is and how it operates and then lists some simple techniques you can use to make it happen: you can pepper in obstacles to ramp up tension, set up lower-order goals for your character to meet along the way, establish a ticking clock to stress your reader out. (You’ll also see a lot of the same techniques suggested in Story Genius, but like I said, Story Genius only really does one thing. Thrill Me does a whole bunch of things. I’d recommend this before recommending that.)
The essays, broadly speaking, cover narrative urgency (which could also variously be described as “tension” or “stakes”), specificity in image and scene, language as sound (which could also be called “style” or even “poetry”!), revision, how to write violence, how to handle backstory, how to balance plot beats, and, finally – as Stephen King says – the importance of not only writing, but of living.
In sum: Thrill Me tells us how to write books that are exactly the kind of books I want to write. Plus, it does so in a clear, interesting way that has the benefit of being straightforward – though not always easy! – to put into practice. I recommend it.
Got your own favorite craft book? Email me back or put it in the comments!