Are you a fan of thriller novels? Do you want to write a thriller or mystery one day? Have you wondered why so many authors choose a dual timeline books for these genres?

To understand why a dual timeline is perfect for a thriller novel, we need to understand why people read them in the first place

I recently kicked off my BookTube YouTube channel with a video about dual timelines through the lens of thriller novels. (Huge shoutout in there to the queen of thriller Lisa Jewell). Anyway, in that video, I broke down the psychology behind why we love a thriller, because I really think that’s key to understanding why the dual timeline works so well in thriller books.

Now, let’s be clear, I think that dual timelines have their place in all sorts of books, especially when there is mystery involved. After all, my upcoming novel Echoes of You features multiple timelines but it definitely not a thriller 😉

Let’s explore the topic, here, on my blog.

((Rather watch the video? Click here to head to YouTube now.))

In order to understand the allure of dual timelines in these sort of books and how to best create it if you are a writer, let’s say, um we really need to understand why people are reading it to begin with. What is the attracting feature of a psychological thriller?

Why do we crave this sort of book? Why are people just so enthralled with the idea of reading a psychological thriller? Why do we want to read things about tragedy?

It seems kind of counterintuitive. Why would that be our form of entertainment when all we want is just to lead peaceful and happy lives?

I think it’s because, you know, this kind of stuff happens.

Tragedies happen. Horrible things happen. People commit crimes every day. And the truth is, a lot of us have had to experience that. Whether it’s been firsthand, it’s happened to us, or it’s happened to someone we know, or we’re just seeing it on the news and hearing about it in in conversation and we’re like, “Oh my god, that could be me.”

I really think that that’s why things like psychological thriller books and true crime are so interesting for us. I think that’s why we are drawn to it as readers, as podcast listeners, etc.

Because we want to understand it.

We want to understand why. That’s the big question that sits there and lingers for most of us. For people who feel like we are not capable of committing those level of atrocities, but we do see them unfold. We want to know why. We want to know why because we want to prevent it from happening, you know, to us or to people we care about.

A quick look at dual timeline books in action

There is truly no better place to start than the queen of dual timelines, Lisa Jewell.

If you’re not already familiar with Lisa Juul, I’ll get you up to speed real quick. Lisa Jewell typically writes psychological thrillers. She gets you really deep into the mind of why people are doing the weird things that people are doing in these books. She doesn’t shy away from actually taking the perspective of the person committing the crime which I really appreciate from her.

Sometimes you don’t even know, when you’re reading, whether the person whose perspective you’re looking through is the person who’s like doing the bad thing or if they’re the person having it done to them. Or if the lines between those two things get blurred. And honestly, the lines get blurred a lot.

we learn things from thriller novels and mysteries

A couple weeks ago, Lisa Jewell actually posted something on her Instagram. She was being interviewed and someone asked if she ever worries that she’ll take a story too far, or go too dark.

And it made me ask myself, as a reader, why am I reading this? What am I getting out of this? Because, we are getting something out of it. And so, I jumped into her comments immediately and I was like “because we want to understand; because these things are really happening.”

These types of things are happening everywhere all of the time and they could happen to any of us. And so we want to wrap our head around the why.

And and I think that Lisa does an amazing job of drawing that line for us. It’s not just figuring out the who done it of a mystery. It’s also figuring out the why done it. Yeah, I said it. I said “why done it.” Because it is; it’s figuring out why.

Why did they do it? And how? Not how did they commit the crime, though. How they became the kind of person who was capable.

Why are dual timelines the perfect approach to thriller and mystery books?

So if we look at this question right of like why dual timelines work so well in these sorts of books and how to best craft them, we really have to understand that why these are so popular, why we like them, why we want to read them, what the reader is getting out of this experience. Because it’s not just entertainment.

There is something you’re getting out of reading (whatever kind of book it might be). Maybe it’s an escape. Maybe it’s learning something about yourself. Maybe it’s living out a fantasy life you wish you could have lived. Or, as is often the case in thrillers and mysteries, it’s putting together pieces of a puzzle that might seem so obvious in the end but flew right over your head in the moment.

When we read thrillers and mysteries we learn how to spot clues in our everyday lives in real time. When you add a dual timeline to the mix, you teach a reader how to spot things in real time (leading up to an event) and how to make sense of things afterward (through reflection and by understanding the present in relation to the past).

Want to dive even further into this topic? Watch my full video 👇
https://youtu.be/lycYDptmbrE