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Thrillers need a placid pool
The still pool
Most of Harlan Coben's books take place in suburbia or other placid pools, and that is deliberate. In a churning ocean, a writer could throw as many rocks as possible and never see one hit. In a still pool, a single stone makes a ripple.
It follows a way of thinking that favors opposites: there is no left without a right, no up without a down, and no darkness without light. The placid pool is what makes the ripples possible.
Flaubert's rule
A line he likes from Flaubert applies the same idea to a writer's own life: be regular and orderly in your real life so you can be violent and original in your work. Writing twisted stories does not require a twisted mind.
Why do thrillers favor quiet suburbs?
Suburban gothic has a long line in American fiction. Shirley Jackson's 1948 story The Lottery set a violent ritual in an ordinary small town on a sunny summer morning, and The New Yorker received a flood of letters from baffled and angry readers. Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives did the same for a Connecticut suburb in 1972.
How does contrast change what we notice?
In the 1830s, physiologist Ernst Weber found that the smallest noticeable change in a stimulus is a fixed fraction of its starting level. A whisper stands out in a silent room but disappears in a loud one, and a single added candle is obvious in a dark hall but invisible in daylight. Gustav Fechner later formalized the relationship as the Weber-Fechner law.
How did Flaubert live while writing Madame Bovary?
Flaubert lived most of his life at his family's house at Croisset near Rouen, mostly with his mother. He spent about five years, from 1851 to 1856, writing Madame Bovary. It was serialized in 1856, and in 1857 he was prosecuted for offending public morals and acquitted.
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