Tips to Make Supporting Characters Suspicious Supporting characters are rich tools for misdirecting your sleuth. Characters because of their secrets, lies, and coverups lead the sleuth down trails that are dead ends. How to Make Innocent Suspects Look Guilty When you observe people, you’ll notice actions and dialogue that you can use in your mystery. Keep…
Find The Victim’s Secrets in Your Mystery The victim is a strategic character in your mystery. Spend just as much time developing this character as you do your protagonist and the villain. Even though your victim is dead or soon dead, they are the character around whom the story revolves. The crime against the victim…
Basic Mystery Tropes and How to Start Writing a Mystery I had fun with the first Mystery Monday. With an Ask Me Anything base, I answered a few questions as well as covering the topic for the day – Basic Mystery Tropes. Links to Today’s Episode Ten ways to hide clues in your mystery. The…
Mystery Monday: Ask Me Anything Join me on Facebook Live on Mondays for Ask Me Anything chats about writing and reading mysteries. Great place for mystery lovers to get together. http://bit.ly/MysteryMondayAMA
The Writing Process with Jo Nesbø Interview with Jo Nesbø by the Pacific Northwest Writers Association detailing his beginnings in childhood as a storyteller and his writing process.My favorite quote is the one above: You don’t really know your characters until they start speaking. Tweet: You don’t really know your characters until they start speaking….
Image credit bbc.co.uk The Dual Laws The Argolicus Mysteries are set in early Sixth Century Italy. At that time the country was governed by two sets of laws. Native Italians (Romans) inherited a set a laws from the Roman Empire which had collapsed the century before. The Ostrogoths under King Theodoric held to their ancient…
People don’t speak in semicolons and neither should your characters.
Editing & Writing I’ll be publishing The Peach Widow soon. One editor was away and is now back working on the second half of the story. In one way, I’m enjoying the time to work on suggested edits before the next round appears. Rephrasing, augmenting, and rewriting is tedious work for me so I am…
Story Shop has Closed. The concepts still work but I am unable to share examples. Master Mystery Outline Template I am using Story Shop to create a master outline template for mysteries. The software is still in development stage with a generic outline. The developers have plans for outline templates in the future, but in…
