This week's Writing Skill is Cosy Vignettes, exploring an aspect of detective fiction. Specifically, "cosy" detective fiction. In crime / detective fiction, "cosy" doesn't mean cottagey / snug /tea-cosy; it means the possible suspects are restricted to a very small group. Classic scenarios are that everyone's in one house together on a rainy night, or on an island, or on the same train. That said, they do tend to be cosier in the ordinary sense: the violence is usually off-stage and the story focuses on solving the crime, like a puzzle, rather than the gruesome crime itself. Most of Agatha Christie's stuff is cosies; so is Death in Paradise.
To explore this, you're going to have six characters: one murder victim and five possible suspects. (Your detective / amateur sleuth can waltz in later.) And for each suspect, you're going to write a character vignette, answering four key questions:
- What was their relationship to the murder victim?
- Why would they have motivation to kill them? (Everyone in the cosy needs an apparent motive, to keep them a suspect.)
- What are they lying about? (Ask Dr House: everyone lies!)
- What makes them different, as a character, from the other suspects? Think of a pronounced character trait and a strong visual hook.
If you'd like to keep it to ten minutes, I suggest you spend two minutes on each suspect. (Of course if you want to do 20 mins, you could make that four minutes each.) And to get your cast of characters, jump over to this quick character generator and tell it to generate six characters. The first is your murder victim; the other five are your suspects. Feel free to ignore anything in their profile that doesn't fit the genre, eg references to outer space, unicorns, superpowers, etc, and to change anything you like: the generator is just to give you a starting point.
Have fun!
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