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Why Casting Your Characters Helps Your Mystery To make your character function in your story world, you need to create details that set each one apart from the others. While the most important feature of your character in the story is the context, how they serve the story, help your readers identify each character with…
No Mystery Without a Puzzle Mystery readers love a puzzle. More than one is more enticing. While your developed detective leads the reader on discovery search, the puzzle is the draw of a mystery. All the work you do in developing your characters, creating suspects, and planting clues has one aim to create a mystery….
What’s A Red Herring? In logic, a read herring is a fallacy of distraction bringing up another point to distract the argument. In the financial world, a red herring is a prospectus of an upcoming business that is not complete but indicates the future stock. In a mystery, a red herring is a false clue…
Scene Checklists Scenes are the building blocks of your story. Each scene moves the story forward. As you build your story alternate between action and reaction. When you go through the first edits of your story make certain that all scene components are in each scene. You’ll take your reader by the hand to lead…
Make Your Sleuth Reach for a Solution Creating a great mystery for readers depends on page turning events in your story. Create tension with challenges to your sleuth. Each time you create a challenge your reader keeps reading to see how your sleuth gets past a stopping point. That point may be a small as…
What is Foreshadowing? Foreshadowing is a literary device which is an advance hint of something that will happen later in the story. Foreshadowing creates an atmosphere of suspense as the reader continues on with expectations over later events. Foreshadow upcoming events with character dialogue, plot events, and changes in setting. Each method supplies a way…
Your Villain Right and Wrong The true pleasure of mystery readers is trying to discover who the killer is before your detective does. It’s the big puzzle and the draw of the genre. The challenge for you as a mystery writer is to create a villain who is understandable, relatable, and yet hidden until the…
The Victim Drives Your Mystery Although your sleuth is the hero of your mystery, the victim drives the story. The sleuth works throughout the story to uncover layers about the victim and the people (characters) involved in the victim’s life. In a traditional mystery, the puzzle pieces the sleuth uncovers are based on the relationship between…
The Counterintuitive Show Clues make up small details in your mystery that point the detective and the reader toward the villain. Detective, crime writer and mystery writing adviser, and Murder.con host Lee Lofland says, Tiny clues are often the ones that bring a case to a close. You want to plant those clues…
A Scene is a Revelation A story is a sequence of small moments. The first moment is make or break for getting your reader involved. Writing advice for beginning novelists can be confusing, like to start with a hook or show the hero’s everyday world. It’s easy to go way off track by starting with…
