Learn to follow the mystery writing rules and avoid angry readers
My mother is a big mystery lover, so I grew up around mystery novels and watching mysteries with her on TV. In an attempt to write something Mom would read, I decided my first novel would be a science fiction-flavored mystery. Mystery writing was an interesting experience. I had learned the rules of creating characters and developing plots, but mysteries had rules of their own. I was a bit nervous giving Mom my first draft, because there was some violence, drug use, and even cannibalism in the book, but the only thing she complained about was the bad language. “Why is there so much swearing? I didn’t teach you to talk like that.”
Other than avoiding your mother’s disapproval, the biggest challenge in mystery writing is creating a story with the right “difficulty level.” When you write a mystery, you’re playing a kind of game with your readers. You want the game to be challenging, but not too much. You don’t want the clues to be so obvious that readers figure out the killer right away, but they should be obvious enough that, when they reach the big denouncement, the detective’s solution to the mystery feels fair.
In order to set the right difficulty level, you have to follow a few rules:
- All the suspects have to be introduced in the first twenty percent of the novel. You can’t just throw someone in ten pages before the book ends and go “Yup, it was reclusive old Uncle Gary, who none of us have ever mentioned before!”
- The reader has to see the same clues as the detective. You don’t need a neon sign pointing them out, but they should be there on the page. Your detective can’t just say “I found something interesting back there!” and keep it a secret until the end. However, you can hide the clues in the scene description or in a list of details about a suspect. The detective can take note of every detail of a room, even though only one of them is a clue. “Hmm… Blue curtains, orange couch, two coffee tables, a flamethrower, a painting of flowers, a fish tank… Nope, nothing here!”
- Unless you’re writing Sherlock Holmes fan fiction, the solution to the mystery shouldn’t rely on a fun fact or random historical detail that would be impossible for the reader to know. “Oh, this type of red mud is only found along the banks of the Super Wet River, where Weird Uncle Gary goes running every morning! Clearly, it was his flame thrower the whole time!”
Rules like these are important because you want your readers to feel like you presented them with a puzzle, not a trick. When the big denouncement comes, you want readers to look back and think “Oh yeah, it was so obvious but I didn’t notice! Grandma Edith did mention she was a black belt in Krabi–krabong!”
Mystery writing takes a lot of planning and careful plotting. You have to write detailed outlines… Unless you’re willing to trick some beta readers.
I had a friend “pants” a mystery. No outlines, no planning of any kind. He wrote about ninety percent of the novel, then sent it to beta readers and asked if the mystery was too obvious, if they knew who the killer was, and what clues gave it away.
Except he didn’t know who the killer was! He hadn’t decided who would actually be guilty, and had simply tried to make every character look suspicious. When he got all the feedback, he took the most common answer from the betas and wrote an ending where the detective noticed the same clues.
While trickery and deceit might work for some writers, I recommend the outlining method. My outline included every scene in the story, and also everything that happened before the story – when the killer decided to commit the murder, and how they did it. I also had separate character sheets with the possible motives of each suspect, and what clues or details about their personalities would make the detective suspect them. Some writers might even need sketches of the murder scene and where every clue is hidden.
Yes, it’s time-consuming. There are no shortcuts to writing a mystery. But in the end, you’ll have a marvelous puzzle to share with your readers. When your clever detective explains how they figured it all out, you’ll look pretty clever, too.
For more on mystery writing, I have a detailed article here. Be sure to check out my articles on developing characters, so your detective ends up more than just a generic sleuth with some quirks tacked on.
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