To whet your appetite for the Spring online weekend workshop, Unravelling Secrets, I’ve got a lovely playful Writing Skill for you: Fairytale Detective! This is a splendid skill for exploring red herrings, to keep the reader distracted from the true reveal you’re actually working towards: always a skill worth exercising, whether or not you’re writing detective / mystery fiction, as you never want the reader to see the real ending coming.
So give yourself the gift of ten minutes writing time, curl up with your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, and have fun!
To start, pick a fairytale. If your memory of fairytales needs refreshing, here’s a lovely site which gives you heaps at a glance. And then, as this is detective fiction, you need to pick someone who’s been killed – a main character, ideally, if not the main character.
Next, choose your detective. This can be someone from within the same fairytale or you can borrow someone from another fairytale: the gingerbread man perhaps, or Rumplestiltskin, or the Beast, whoever you fancy.
Now that you’re prepped, you’re onto the main bit: assemble the cast of everyone else in the fairytale, and work out everyone’s motivations to murder the dead character! Only one of them will have actually done it (or more, if they’ve been acting in cahoots) but all of them need an apparent motivation.
You can do this planning-style, if you’re planning-inclined, or just start freewriting to discover. As for tone – you can keep it super-playful / po-faced tongue in cheek, but there is also room to go seriously dark here, in a Gothy/noir way. Think of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber stories and how richly literarily dark some of those are.
The main thing here is to practise exploring everyone’s motivations, so once you’ve done that, you’re done! You’ve stretched that skill. But you can absolutely take this further, if you’d like to. Here’s some suggestions of what you could write:
- The dialogue from the interviews your detective holds with each suspect
- Character cameos of each suspect plus description of how they present themselves
- Action snippets of the suspects doing suspicious things
- Action of how the detective investigates each suspect
- All four together, writing the full story!
Have
fun with it! And if you'd like to explore more techniques to manage secrets, clues, and reveals in fiction, join the Unravelling Secrets workshop on
Saturday & Sunday 21–22 March 2026.
It's an online weekend workshop, on Zoom, and you can join from anywhere in the world. Click here for the workshop details and to book your place.
