Writing mysteries is partly about an intense atmospheric sense of place, and partly a complex little puzzle of laying out your clues, reveals, and red herrings so the reader's neither bewildered nor bored, but enthralled, guessing along eagerly. This Writing Skill is a nifty way of playing with both halves, your rich place and mapping out the story's shape.
The Writing Skills come alive when you play with them, rather than just reading them, so steal yourself 10–20 minutes, grab your pen and notebook / some paper, pour yourself a cuppa, and start creating.
Step 1: The Place
First off, pick a place you find suitably intriguing or interesting. That can be somewhere you know, or a location from photos, or a random interesting place in the world. If you want ideas, try the first four Place links on the Writers' Links page. The first two let you choose a location by type, then you have lots of pictures of it; the third lists types of places for inspiration; the fourth gives you unusual locations around the world.
Step 2: The "facts"
Next, write down 20 "facts" about the place, from the banal to the mysterious: some real ones, if you know anything about the place; some made-up ones; anything you randomly come up with. Allow yourself to invent and to add "silly" / "boring" ones. They don't all need to be great facts: that's why you're writing 20. And taking the pressure off lets you be more creative.
Step 3: The story
Once you've got your list, you're going to select five of them:
- Pick one "fact" as the final piece of information that explains everything.
- Pick one "fact" as the first puzzling thing that your character encounters or discovers.
- Pick three "facts" to go in between, which do ultimately help explain what's going on with this place, but which also seem to point to another answer. Put them in order of increasingly surprising / dramatic / intriguing.
You now have the shape of your mystery story: the first puzzling thing to create the initial mystery; the three layers / plot twists / red herrings to give shape to the middle of the story; and the final reveal. You also have plenty of background on your place, and a good sense of it (possibly some photos too) to write compelling description-as-action-and-atmosphere, as your character explores and starts to uncover the mystery.
You can stop there if you want: you've already practised the techniques of a) brainstorming freely; b) mapping out a story shape according to five pivotal "reveals"; and c) using place to generate the story. If you'd like to carry on, start writing the story from the character first arriving at the place, some atmospheric description, and uncovering the first puzzling thing…
If you want to take your mysterious story skills further, the Summer of Writing workshop, Unravelling Secrets, is on Saturday 16 August in Oxford and covers mysteries, crime / detective fiction, and thrillers. And, of course, any story that's using that same approach of structuring a story around secrets and hidden clues, while keeping the suspense high. Across the day, you'll develop a deeper understanding of all three genres, enrich your story's possibiities (a new story created in the workshop OR your own work in progress), and map it out to the thrilling final reveal. See the full details and book your place here.
