How to Write a Mystery

by Mystery Writers of America

  Pacing. This is related to length, but also to what keeps a reader’s attention. The slow burn of a police procedural is not the hard push of a thriller or the deceptive chattiness of a traditional mystery. Even within the style of your chosen subgenre, the pacing needs to vary, tightening and letting loose, as the reader is inexorably pulled toward the conclusion. If there are too many detours, pare them down or bring them closer to the main path.

  Characters. Your protagonist may be heroic or ordinary; they may change enormously in the course of the story or remain the same person, but every step along their path needs to be clear and understood. Similarly, the antagonist—whether a Bond-world villain or a person who has simply made terrible choices—needs to be clear-cut, believable, and in some way personal to the protagonist. Supporting characters should be varied, distinct, and necessary. Can a reader tell them apart instantly, in background, personality, appearance? There’s no need for close detail, especially when it comes to physical appearance, but deft touches that tie together looks with personality can make them memorable. And what about their function in the story? If two characters feel similar, could they be merged into a single more vivid one? If some of the people in your story have a background that is not your own, are they believable, or is there a whiff of cliché? A beta reader, even a sensitivity reader, from your publisher or your circle could be helpful.

  Language. Are the story’s grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation absolutely correct? Do you choose specific and expressive verbs, or fall back too often on adverbs, modifiers, and the verb “to be”? Is the writing simple and clean, or is it cluttered with the passive voice, unnecessary conjunctions, cumbersome phrases like “It was Mary who…” and words that bleed away vitality, such as “of course,” “somewhat,” and “very”? Is every paragraph its own unit, beginning to end, or does it contain convoluted sentences (the sign of a writer thinking her way along) and too many changes of direction? Worse, are there places where the point of view shifts with no clear signal? And what about the tone: Is the language—the words and sentences—of an action sequence different from that in a contemplative scene, or an angry one, or a silly one?

  Facts. Know them. Check them. If you’re writing a PI novel, it might matter to you that revolvers don’t have safeties, autopsy test results can take weeks, and motorcycles don’t have a reverse gear. If your book is set in 1919 England, please don’t have your teenagers dressed in crinolines and taking high tea instead of the genteel afternoon variety. Mistakes undermine a reader’s trust. If you are not certain, ask someone who knows, whether that involves Googling vintage car museums, buying a dictionary of historical slang, or putting out a call for courtroom expertise on your mystery writers group forum.

  Background. The story’s background, whether setting, situation, or characters, should be invisible, woven into the fabric of the story, not glued on in a solid block of exposition. Look very closely at any background information—the backstory—contained in your first couple of chapters, and see what can be moved or cut entirely. Perhaps that chapter 3 action sequence makes a stronger beginning, anyway. On any page, no matter where in the book, a solid block of prose can be the sign of too much exposition—also known as an info dump. Look for an unobtrusive, less detailed and more spread-out way to present key facts. And speaking of fewer details, if the book is in a series, less explanation is definitely more compelling.

  Dialogue. Does your dialogue feel real? Does each character have a distinctive speech pattern that says something about their personality, whether slow and formal or in quick sentence fragments? Do any facts, clues, and pieces of background information that you’ve put into dialogue feel natural, like something that person might actually say? Or is it an info dump that you haven’t been able to work in elsewhere?

  The sound. Read your story aloud, even if you’re not concerned with the peculiarities of audiobooks, where words that look fine on the page can create odd echoes or blatant misunderstandings. In the editorial stage, listening to the shape of Every. Single. Word is a tool that no writer should neglect. Whether reading it aloud (full-voiced) or following along with your writing software’s audio-review function, there is nothing like hearing the words to catch missing phrases, out-of-place clues, and surviving traces of earlier drafts. And while you’re at it, do keep that audiobook in mind, and see how many of your he saids and she replieds you can cut. Speech tags grow tiresome six or eight hours into a novel.

  Final Draft

  So like most of us, you’ve determined that your first draft was not your final one. We’re all human, and take some tries to make things right in this very human business of writing. But setting a mess straight can be deeply satisfying, as satisfying as creating a clear, compelling story out of a rough first attempt. The rewrite is how we turn a book from a story that speaks to its author into a story that touches the world.

  RAE FRANKLIN JAMES

  I’m a hybrid writer.

  I’m a plotter only up to a point. When I start out writing, I outline the book by chapter, and within each chapter—one-sentence scenes. I used to outline the whole book. But I discovered, for me anyway, a more effective way. I outline to what feels like the middle of the book.

  Now, this is when I turn pantser.

  Once I outline to the “middle,” I jump ahead and actually write the last chapter. By writing the last chapter, I know who did it, why they did it, and how they did it. Then I start writing from the beginning, pretty much following my outline. With this approach, I not only know where I need to go, but what clues (and red herrings) I can plant. I connect the dots from the beginning, to the middle, to the end.

  I never have writer’s block.

  LESLIE BUDEWITZ

  Every project will hit a roadblock. Whether you’re a new writer or a veteran, a planner or a pantser, whether this is a story you’ve labored on for years or one you’re writing on a tight deadline, you will come to a point where you truly, honestly do not know what to do next.

  Remember this: the same brain that created the problem can create the solution—but not if you keep thinking the same way.

  So do something different. Write the next scene from the antagonist’s POV, even if you don’t intend to use it. Write longhand with a pen you found in the bottom of your desk drawer instead of at your keyboard, or at the communal table in the library instead of in your cozy home office. (Yes, put on shoes. Maybe your character wants to take a walk or go out for coffee.) If you write in first person, try third. If you write in third, let your character rip in a private diary only she—and you—will ever see. You’re certain you know what happened three years ago that brought your characters to this point? What if you’ve held on to your first idea, the one that started the wheels spinning in your brain, or the one you built your synopsis on when you pitched the proposal to your editor, but it doesn’t quite fit with the story as it’s playing out? Toss those preconceptions. Don’t know what your character does next? Make a list of ten possibilities. The sixth thing, or the tenth, the thing they would never do as a matter of principle—that’s the one that’s new and fresh and so exactly, perfectly right.

  Whatever you’ve been doing, do something else. Your brain, your beautiful creative brain, will find another way, if you give it a chance.

  Plot and the Bones of a Mystery

  Bringing together all the elements of your novel so it stands strong.

  DEBORAH CROMBIE

  When I first decided to embark on writing a mystery, I was perplexed—and terrified—by the concept of PLOT. I had an idea for a setting, a beautiful timeshare in the Yorkshire moors. I added a detective, a Scotland Yard superintendent named Duncan Kincaid on a much-needed holiday, and his colleague in London, Detective Sergeant Gemma James. But then what? Something had to happen—a plot! But what on earth was a plot, and how did you get one?

  I found all kinds of definitions in books and articles. Some were contradictory—E. M. Forster’s famous “plot” and “story”
definitions (“The king died and then the queen died” is story; “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is plot) seemed the reverse of how I thought of things. Some theories said there was only one plot. Some said there were three, and some said there were seven, or these five:

  The Quest (think The Lord of the Rings)

  Rags to Riches (Great Expectations)

  Overcoming the Monster (Beowulf)

  Rebirth (The Secret Garden)

  Voyage and Return (The Hobbit)

  But you can see from just these examples that most stories fit into more than one category. Frodo’s journey is a classic quest, but it is also a voyage and return.

  Author and literary critic John Gardner once said that there are only two stories in the world: a man goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. While I suppose you could shoehorn most books into a variation of those stories, neither seemed very helpful in regard to my budding novel, and none of these plot theories seemed particularly germane to a mystery. A few points did stand out for me, however.

  A plot is not the story. A plot is a merely a framework for the story, a structure to hang your story on. The story is characters and setting and theme and voice, all carried along in concert by the vehicle of the plot. Plots require some sort of conflict, whether it’s between characters, within the characters, or between the character(s) and the world. A plot must have forward motion. And in every plot, you have a protagonist in conflict with an antagonist while struggling to reach a goal. All of those elements are necessary. (The antagonist can be a situation as well as a person.)

  There are five stages common to any plot.

  Exposition, which introduces the characters and their situation

  Rising action, in which a series of events (usually triggered by an inciting incident) moves the story forward

  Climax, in which the story’s tension reaches a peak

  Falling action, which bridges the climax and the resolution

  Denouement, which wraps everything up

  Obviously, the lines between these stages are blurry, and the share each stage occupies in the novel is inexact. But generally the first two stages take up the majority of the book, while the last three can be fairly short—or, sometimes, non-existent. If a book ends with a cliffhanger, for instance, there is no resolution.

  A simpler structure is the time-tested three acts:

  Dramatic opening

  Major plot developments

  Resolution

  But how to apply all these general tips to mystery? In the most traditional of mysteries, a crime, usually a murder, is committed, either before or after the beginning of the story. A protagonist, usually either an amateur sleuth or a professional detective, must discover the perpetrator. Eventually, all is revealed, and justice is (perhaps) done.

  Here, for example, is a plot: A woman is in an unhappy marriage. Her husband dies suddenly. She must come to terms with his death and decide how she will live her life going forward. There is conflict (she is unhappy, she must deal with her feelings and make decisions) and a resolution (she sees a future for herself).

  But how does this become a mystery? Let’s try again, throwing in a lot more questions: A woman is in an unhappy marriage. Her husband dies suddenly. But was his death an accident? If not, was he murdered? If so, why? And by whom? The woman (or a sleuth) must discover the truth, then confront the killer and bring them to justice. You have your classic conflict and resolution, but you have added how, why, and who. It’s now a mystery! And there are more possibilities. If the widow is the viewpoint character, and might herself be responsible for her husband’s death, your plot may become psychological suspense. If the widow now fears for her own life and must try to avert her fate, you have the makings of a thriller.

  To put these theories in perspective, I reread some of my favorite mysteries and took careful notes. What I discovered was that when you break the most complicated-seeming stories down to their essence, they are, in fact—once you strip away the distractions—quite simple. Murder disrupts the status quo. When the crime is solved, order is restored. It’s the clothing in which you dress the body of your plot that makes a novel memorable. That clothing includes character development, setting, dialogue, and, in a mystery, the famous red herrings, or misdirections.

  However, when I’m working out the initial idea for a novel, I don’t plan red herrings. They flow naturally out of the progression of the story as I consider alternate possibilities, and the assumptions that the characters, especially the detectives, would make, given each set of circumstances.

  Which brings us to the question of whether you are a plotter or a pantser, as these two modes of writing a mystery are often called. Plotters know where the book is going. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants, or as I like to think of it, the headlight method, where you can see only what’s illuminated right in front of you. I know a number of talented and successful writers who say they are pantsers—they begin a book with a basic idea and allow the story to unfold as they write, often not knowing more than their viewpoint character does. And then there are writers who cover their walls with color-coded index cards that not only lay out the entire plot arc but fill in the details for each scene and chapter in the book. In truth, I think most writers are hybrids, falling somewhere on the plotter-pantser spectrum.

  As my writing progressed, I discovered that I fall somewhat into the plotter camp. I’ve never begun a novel without having an idea of where I intended it to end, but I’ve also never outlined an entire book before starting to write. However, knowing how you want a novel to end is not the same as getting there!

  You may know that there is a logical underpinning to the events in the story, but your detective—and your reader—has to get to that truth in a way that doesn’t engender disbelief. This dangerous middle is what my late writing teacher, Warren Norwood, called the foggy valley. From your mountaintop (the beginning) you can see the next mountaintop (the end). But everything in between is shrouded in the swirling fog of the valley below.

  How do you navigate the valley?

  Over the course of writing multiple novels, I’ve come up with a method I think of as “story lines.” I see a novel as having multiple threads. For example, there is the investigation of the crime. This is normally the driving force of the mystery novel, and one thread. But perhaps you also have the sleuth’s relationship with a professional partner, which should progress in some way. That’s two threads. Does the sleuth also have a romantic interest? That’s three threads. Perhaps the detective has a child who is trying to deal with the complications of her parent’s new relationship or job. That’s four threads. And what if there is a backstory essential to understanding what is happening in the present? That’s five threads. And so on—you get the picture. And I do mean literally a picture, because I make a chart. For my early books, I used big pads of blank newsprint. These days I usually just tape sheets of printer paper together to get the size I need for a particular book.

  Admittedly, I write complex books, always with multiple viewpoints, sometimes with multiple timelines, so for each book I might have eight to ten threads. Each thread gets a labeled column in a different color. At the top of each column is the status of that story thread at the beginning of the novel.

  For example, in my novel No Mark Upon Her, a female police officer goes missing while rowing on the Thames. I labeled the first column of my plot chart Rebecca Meredith’s Murder, and began it with a bullet point that said “Becca Meredith takes a scull out alone at dusk.” At the very bottom of that column, after a huge, scary blank space, I filled in “Murderer revealed.” I then made a bullet point for each incident that had to occur in order to logically get from the first thing on the column to the last.

  The second column was Duncan’s investigation, Henley. The third, Gemma’s investigation, London, as my two detectives are working different aspects of the same case. The fourth was Backstory, because of course I had to know all the characte
rs’ histories, and how things that happened in the past led up to their current situations. I added more columns that had to do with the subsidiary characters, and with Duncan and Gemma’s children. Each column had its own start and end points, with the relevant incidents filled in between. (I’ve tried mind-mapping software, but it doesn’t work nearly as well for me as plain old pen and paper.)

  Many of these plot points overlap, which is fine. The chart still allows me to see what is necessary to move the story forward (not to mention have lots of fun drawing crisscrosses between the columns). It also may seem a bit juvenile, like playing a game—but then that’s exactly what making up stories is, even if the stories contain serious material and themes.

  None of these plot points in a column needs to be fixed in stone. It’s just a way of kick-starting the creative process, of generating some signposts in the foggy valley. Characters will develop as you write, and they may direct the plot in a direction you couldn’t have foreseen.

  Does that mean that your plot should be controlled by the characters, rather than by the structure you’ve given it? Again, I think most novels are a hybrid, part plot-driven and part character-driven. If you don’t listen to your characters, your plot, no matter how well-planned, will feel flat. On the other hand, you don’t want your characters to run off to Mars (unless you’re writing science fiction).