Hello my mystery-writing friends.
I'm finding myself a bit stuck in the mud. I write fantasy mostly, and while there can be mysteries in those stories, the stories aren't mysteries. But I have this idea for a novel that I really like, concept-wise, and it ends up being a bit of a murder mystery. But, it turns out, I don't really know how to go about writing those.
A bit of background on the story. My main character can use magic that allows her to communicate with the reapers that come to collect souls when people die. One of the uses is that she consults with the police to help solve murders. Some people have mysteriously died, so she's working on that. Who the dead people are doesn't really matter for purposes of the plot. What matters is who killed them, why, and how. I mostly have all of that worked out.
What I don't have worked out is how to go about actually plotting the book. I've gotten about 16k words in, which has introduced some of the pieces. But now I've stalled. I don't know how to go about slowly revealing evidence, how to figure out which pieces to reveal first, etc. So my question is how you all figure that out. How do you construct your mystery? What methods for getting the plot in order have worked for you? I'm really excited about the potential of this story, but I just don't know how to pull off.
Thanks!
LN, Tom is one of our old pals from the original AQC. He remembers how we used to always share and help each other, which as you know is the spirit of what we hope to instill here, too.
You're welcome. Feel free to fling more questions. I'm a better writer than I'm a marketer and I've been at it a long, long time.
Thanks! I've actually got this story on the back burner right now, but I really like the concept so I want to come back to it. I'll definitely keep this advice in mind when I do.
Well I wrote a mystery, and if I've got his i.d. properly I think Rk Lewis has too (his are really good). Can this cross over work? Religion and fantasy both can use magic and souls, but that takes a bit away from the idea of mortal consequences which are at the heart of every murder mystery. That said I'll tell you just a little of what worked for me, and I can imagine that it might work for you because mine was a cross over too. I was writing a story about veterans who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but telling that story as a mystery.
The heart of every mystery is the big reveal, the denouement, resolution and solution. For me it worked best to write that before I wrote anything else. I grew accustomed to that technique long ago in grad school working on a lit degree when I discovered that the fastest way for me to find the structure of a novel was to try to find the climax first somewhere near the end, and then go back and read the book front to back always keeping in mind how the writer was building the images to reach that conclusion.
Yes your climax is going to change. You'll learn more and more about what belongs there while you write the rest of the story, and you will find other climaxes besides the big reveal, and you should find other mysteries.
In my case I discovered one of the mysteries had to be my protagonist's motivation. In my early drafts I gave that away promptly with a pretty harrowing tale of combat in Vietnam - a three chapter story. The problem became that the Chapter 4 was in the Oakland A's ballpark on opening day in 2007. That was almost a disastrous structural problem. Agents who responded to my story thought they were reading a war novel, and when got the whole story couldn't figure out how to fix it. The fix of course was that there were two mysteries. And one of them was based on the fact that the narrator was unreliable and the reader needed to discover why.
The combat story in Vietnam got moved to the last third of the book, followed in close order, because it showed the protagonist's willingness to face the truth, with the resolution of the mystery that I had written first.
The other mystery rule that you really must pay attention to is that the mortal conflict needs to be put in the story front and center. My novel opens on a veterans panic attack at the Oakland A's stadium in what is now Chapter 1, and the dead body that launches story is at morgue in Chapter 2. And if you're still stuck after that never forget Raymond Chandler's immortal advice. If you don't know what happens next, have a man with a gun come to the door. (That's not an exact quote.) It's like throwing mud at your canvas to watch the splatter effect. Hope that helps, and best of luck. I'm self published and so have only a few readers, but most of those who have read it seem to like it quite a lot. The best compliment I ever got was from a fellow Vietnam vet that I didn't know who approached me at 1st Cavalry reunion event. I had the novel available for sale there. He had bought two copies, and wanted my autograph so he could give the book to both his sons so they might understand what they went through.
My first thought would be to question whether it's a mystery with a fantasy element or a fantasy with a mystery element. As a thought exercise, what do you picture the cover to be? If it seems like it should have the imagery you would associate with a fantasy novel, then approach the writing as you would a fantasy. The sharing of evidence, I suspect, will come out as a matter of course. (In fairness, I've never written a mystery either, so I could be talking out my backside.) Over the past 12-18 months or so, I've been very influenced by thinking of genre first because readers think of genre, at least when they see a cover. And we market most effectively by genre. Yes, yes, we need to write the story we're writing and not be guided by marketing , etc. But you want to reach the right readers with a book they are looking to read and don't know it yet. I don't think this is the be-all answer you're looking for, and I'll continue to think about it. But I trust you'll be diving back in and writing and/or plotting the next steps in what I hope will be a wonderful tale!