How to Write a Mystery

by Mystery Writers of America

  I think that when you summon up the support characters for your novel, you need to think of them as a checklist of strengths and weaknesses, of opposing personalities. For instance, Vic has forensic skills and an urban outlook, in contrast to Santiago Saizarbitoria, who knows more about the people in the county—especially since he speaks Basque, the language of a group of people who figure predominantly in my novels.

  Speaking of separate cultures, one of the big issues I was going to have to deal with was another major society, the Native community. As a side note, I suppose I should say something about the current battle cry of cultural appropriation that suggests none of us has a right to compose outside our own personal makeup. I think that’s rather foolish. In accepting his Nobel Prize for literature, John Steinbeck said, “Good writing approaches a universality of the human condition.” Well, how can we approach one another with empathy and understanding if we’re galvanized in our separate little camps? Does that mean that I can’t write about Natives, that they can’t write about whites, that I can’t write about women, women can’t write about horses, and so on? Obviously, any kind of writing that stretches outside of one’s own community requires a foundation of respect, knowledge, and understanding, but a blanket ban gets kind of silly, pretty quick.

  Anyway, I knew I was going to need a character who would be emblematic of the Native culture here on the high plains, and that’s when I came up with Henry Standing Bear. The folks up on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservations are my friends, neighbors, and family. I knew Henry was going to have to be a strong character in the novel, someone capable of giving voice to an entire people.

  One of the tricks I used to develop that character was one that’s been used by authors for centuries, and I think is encapsulated by one of the greatest writing teachers of all time, Wallace Stegner. In his On Writing and Teaching Fiction, a compilation of his lectures at the writing program at Stanford University, Stegner talks about the fact that the greatest piece of fiction is the disclaimer at the beginning of every novel that says any person or persons depicted in this novel are entirely fictional. Hogwash. That’s your job as a writer, to go out and find interesting people and populate your novels with them.

  It’s been said that you should be able to take any given character, even the doorman who opens the hotel door for the protagonist one time, and write an entire novel about that character. I agree. There’s a fleshing-out that carries the weight of a novel, and the devil is in the details, especially when the details are the supporting characters.

  Like I said, no man is an island, and no character is, either, but sometimes you find the support characters in the strengths and weaknesses of your protagonist.

  * * *

  One of the things readers enjoy doing is telling me which characters they like best, and I’m consistently surprised when Walt Longmire isn’t on the list. Maybe I shouldn’t be. I write in first person, so Walt carries the load of the narrative, to the point that he sometimes disappears into the story, leaving the guest-star roles to the support characters. I’m always getting asked why I don’t write a novel with Vic or Henry as the storyteller, but I doubt I ever will, and I’ll tell you why: it would be too much of a good thing.

  You can turn any virtue into a vice simply by giving it too much head. As the old writing saying goes, you have to kill your darlings. If seduced by your support characters, you run the risk of having the same amount of the same characters in all your novels, which leads to a form of nepotistic repetition, the stone-cold death of any series. Better to have an ebb and flow that allows these characters to go with the story’s demands.

  Support characters have a magic all their own, and a lot of that resides in leaving the reader wanting more. It’s very easy for Henry or Vic to walk into my novels when I need them, take the stage, and then disappear, without the burdens of having to actually carry the story. There was a Shakespeare expert who was once asked why the Bard killed off Mercutio in act 3, scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet when it’s obvious he’s the funniest, most entertaining character in the play. His answer: “Shakespeare had to kill Mercutio before he killed Romeo and Juliet.” Telling a story is a balanced affair, and it’s easy to be drawn out onto thin ice by charismatic characters, but you do so at your own risk as it’s quite possible they’ll kill your book.

  There needs to be an ebb and flow with the characters, allowing them their time onstage and then giving them the opportunity to shine. This shining can exhibit itself in a number of ways; with continual appearances, support characters can capture the attention of readers… and you can always promote them from support to main characters in a future novel.

  GAY TOLTL KINMAN

  In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell talks about the hero having a mentor. A mentor gives advice and direction but does not solve the mystery for the sleuth. The mentor is also a sounding board. The sleuth needs a sounding board. It seems like a simple solution, but to me it was a revelation. A “partner” is better than a mentor because they are on equal terms with the protagonist. That’s why there are characters like Dr. Watson. There’s no better way to get information out, to show the thought process of the sleuth. And a partner can trigger that thought process.

  Writing the Talk

  Dialogue that sounds true, reveals character, and draws in the reader.

  GREG HERREN

  We all remember great lines of dialogue from films and television shows—frequently, they wind up as memes or GIFs on social media. Whether it be Bette Davis on the staircase in All About Eve, archly stating that it’s going to be a bumpy night, or Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly belittling any of her underlings in The Devil Wears Prada, or Gloria Swanson ready for her close-up in Sunset Boulevard, great dialogue not only is memorable but can also bookmark the work in which it appears in the memory of the viewer or reader.

  But films are almost entirely dialogue. How do we use that same element of storytelling in a piece of writing?

  The word “dialogue” comes from the Greek words “dia” (“through”) and “logos” (“word” or “meaning”): essentially, the back-and-forth exchange of information between two people. “Conversation,” on the other hand (from the Latin “vers,” to do with turning) is less formal, more about the interaction than what we learn from it.

  In its simplest form, dialogue is what characters tell us—about themselves, about their relationships with the people they speak to, about their situation and its dangers and the mood of the world in the story.

  Dialogue might seem like the easiest part of writing fiction. After all, everyone talks, even those who are nonverbal. And we spend a great deal of our day listening to other people speak—friends, coworkers, television programs, service personnel.

  However, hasn’t your mind wandered while listening to someone talk? The last thing you want is to have that happen with your reader—once their mind starts wandering, you’ve lost them.

  Everyday conversation is often unmemorable, but dialogue in fiction must have a purpose: it either advances the plot, imparts information necessary for the reader’s understanding of the story, or reveals something new about the character who is speaking.

  Or all of the above.

  Eavesdropping and Taking Notes in Public

  A common piece of advice about dialogue is often misinterpreted: Listen to people talking and use that as your basis.

  That sounds incredibly simple, right?

  The problem is that most people do not speak in a way that makes sense on a page. Several years ago, I worked on a research project that required me to transcribe recorded focus groups and interviews with members of the community being studied. For the sake of accuracy, every recording had to be transcribed word for word, including hems and haws and pauses, every sigh and break in speaking. It was an eye-opening experience—and made me realize that you can’t, in fiction, write dialogue the way people actually speak.

  People have a tendency to talk in
run-on sentences and say “um” a lot—oh, and use figures of speech like “you know what I mean” or “blah, blah, blah,” and frequently fumble for words (and sometimes use the wrong word or say the right word incorrectly, or their verb tenses don’t match and their grammar is wrong and they use dialect that some people might not understand) and then there is the whole aspect of accents and regionalisms and colloquialisms—

  No editor would ever let that perfectly natural, utterly run-on sentence I just constructed get past them.

  Conversations are not only more disconnected than dialogue in fiction, they also aren’t as focused. Actual, real-life conversations bounce from one subject to another and then back again. People frequently interrupt and the topics veer all over the place.

  Dialogue in fiction needs to be clear and focused—and yet it needs to feel natural. To sound real, not to be real. Interruptions or changes of subject must either matter to the story or serve as character development. (“She was always cutting me off, never letting me finish a sentence. It wasn’t just annoying, but also made me feel like nothing I had to say mattered.”)

  Dialogue as Character

  However, listening to people speak—especially in a setting you don’t know really well—can be valuable for a writer. Speech is like a fingerprint: no two people use the same words and phrases, the same grammar and vocabulary, the same rhythm and flow of words. Listening to how others give themselves away through their speech can show us how to do that on the page.

  Dialogue needs to illuminate the character. For example, if your protagonist is walking down a street and is stopped by a homeless man who asks for spare change in Shakespearean English, there has to be a reason. And you don’t have to explain it right away, but like Chekhov’s gun (that is, if a gun is introduced in the first act, it must go off by the third), at some point it needs to pay off: we need to find out this man’s story—or at least, you have to use this experience to get your main character to explore their own prejudices and assumptions about the homeless. In either case, having the homeless man speak in an unexpected way is, in essence, a way to build either his character or the character of your protagonist—if not both.

  Then there’s the rhythm of each person’s speech, the almost singsong way the subconscious finds the music in words and language and sends it out through the throat. An important part of building a character is finding the rhythm in the way that person speaks.

  Creative use of punctuation in dialogue is a valuable way to indicate those peculiar speech patterns: “I wasn’t sure… I—I didn’t know, you see… how to bring it up… um, and I’m still not entirely sure if it’s the smart thing to do; but someone has to do something, you know?”

  Case in point: in my novel Timothy, I show one character’s idiosyncrasies by capitalizing the words that she emphasizes when she speaks:

  “DON’T mind the way I’m dressed—don’t judge ME!” she warned with mock severity, wagging an index finger with a perfect French manicure at me.… “I HAVE to play tennis this afternoon, and I didn’t WANT to cut my visit ONE minute short to have to run home and CHANGE. Oh, dear, you’re SPEECHLESS in HORROR at my CLOTHES.” She looked stricken.

  This habit of emphasis defines the character in the book, and tells the reader who she is as a person: her background, her relationships, and how she views not only her life but the world around her.

  Howdy Pardner: Accents and Regionalisms

  Overheard conversations lead us into the question of how best to present those regionalisms and colloquial phrases we pick up.

  Again, we are aiming less at exact transcription than at the impression we give our reader. A close mirroring of accents and dialects is one of the reasons Faulkner can be so difficult to read. In Faulkner’s case, he was showing the differences in speech patterns between different classes and castes of people, to show the effects of education and poverty. Faulkner accomplished this by sounding out phonetically the speech of his working class, less-educated characters, while having his upper class, better educated characters speak standard English.

  And while it is true that a southerner would see the way they speak as “normal,” a reader from the other end of the country might like the occasional reminder. Not that you want something as literal as:

  “Ah doan know,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “Ah jess cain’t think about thayat raht now, kay?”

  I find that hard to read. Isn’t this easier?—

  “I don’t know,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “I jess can’t think about that right now, ’kay?”

  Similarly, if you’re introducing a British character in a manuscript that is primarily about Americans, or a teenager into a room of adults, the very first time they speak I would not ding you for putting the exact words and pronunciation, as long as you call attention to what you are doing:

  It took me a few moments to realize what he was actually saying, but once I got the hang of his accent [her slang, etc.], it was easy to understand him.

  But once you’ve established that the person speaks with an accent, the need to reference it or spell out words phonetically isn’t as necessary as it was to begin with. The occasional touch is plenty.

  Drawing In Your Reader

  In addition to sounding like the real world and giving insight to the character, dialogue is an excellent way to make the reader feel as if they are participating in the story and figuring things out. Being handed an “info dump” (which could be a lengthy recitation, or simply a piece of information unnecessarily given to a person who knows it already) can take your reader right out of the story.

  Readers, especially mystery readers, are bright. An offhand reference to someone’s wheelchair or their hard shift on night patrol is a more immediate way to draw the reader into the character than a mere description of physical condition or job. It’s a great way for the writer to show rather than tell.

  And of course, the mystery reader is always alert for hints and red herrings. Does a character’s speech—what she says, and what she doesn’t say—contain a clue that she might have been in the vicinity of the murder? Does another’s uncharacteristically rude interruption hide his anxiety that the speaker might give him away? Is there some relationship that the investigator hasn’t yet guessed that the reader might pick up on from two people talking?

  Use those!

  Said or Shouted? Dialogue Tags and Adverbs

  This is not the place for a detailed primer on formatting dialogue (in general, format it in a standard, therefore invisible, manner, with quotation marks, one speaker per paragraph, etc.). But it is worth looking at the all-essential dialogue tag or speech tag, the verb used to show who is talking:

  “Where are you going?” Joey asked.

  Many editors and writing instructors believe that the only dialogue tag necessary is “said”; that if you need an adverb—“softly,” “belligerently,” “wildly”—or a dialogue tag other than “said”—“retorted,” “bellowed,” “purred”—to make your meaning clear, it’s a sign that your dialogue needs work. The words, the rhythm, the breaks, the punctuation should render most adverbs superfluous.

  You often find an outright contempt for adverbs—everyone from Mark Twain to Elmore Leonard and Stephen King advises killing them on sight. But as with all rules, there are exceptions, and to have nothing but a string of “he said,” “she saids” on the page can irritate the reader—to say nothing of the audiobook listener. Let’s take a simple line of dialogue and look at some alternative ways to present it.

  “I hate you!” she said. “How could you do that? How?”

  By itself, “said” isn’t very strong. What about adding an adverb?

  “I hate you!” she said angrily. “How could you do that? How?”

  The addition of “angrily” makes her emotion clearer, although a more specific adverb like “furiously” might be more vivid. However, perhaps you can use description rather than adverbs and dialogue tags:

  “I hate you!”
Her voice shook with anger. “How could you do that? How?”

  Or vary the words spoken to convey a more intense emotion:

  “I—God, I just HATE you!” she said. “How could YOU, of all people, do that? HOW?”

  Or you can use my personal favorite, the action tag:

  “I hate you!” She slammed her hands down on the desk. “How could you do that? How?”

  Sometimes you only want a dialogue tag to remind the reader which character is speaking. But as these examples show, the more specific the verb, the more detailed the words spoken and action taken, the more of a chance you’ll have to give the reader subliminal information about the character and the situation.

  Just take care whenever you get away from a basic “said.” The verb should have to do with talking: your character can whisper, scream, yell, shout, ask, or reply without problems, but you should think carefully before using a verb that has little to do with human speech—like “laugh” or “pout,” “roar” or “explode.” And you should hesitate to bring in a fifty-cent word such as “retorted,” “declared,” or “opined.” Those verbs are not wrong, but they stick out, and so risk kicking the reader out of your story.