Writing Skill: What Happened?

Want to keep the reader on the edge of their seats in a scene, quivering with suspense as they turn each page? I’ve got a thrilling Writing Skill for you: What Happened? This is a splendid skill for creating slow-burn thriller-style tension, and for weaving in purposeful atmospheric description that becomes part of the action, makes the events memorable, fills the scene with atmosphere, and makes the reader feel like they're living inside the story.

So if you want to stretch your suspense skills, have a play with this. Steal ten minutes for your writing, grab a pen, a cuppa, and your notebook, and curl up to write.

To start with, you need two things: an empty public building + something very very wrong.

The empty public building

It might be empty because it's after dark. It might be deserted. It might be in ruins, ancient or modern. As for what kind of public building, it could be a library, CERN, a medical facility, a shopping mall, a college, a pavilion, a church, a school... Wikipedia has a helpful list of public and institutional buildings if you want more ideas. (An aquarium, perhaps?)

Something very wrong

As for what's wrong, well... We're playing with thriller mode, here, which opens up an inspiring range of sub-genres: action, crime, political, spy, legal, science fiction, medical, archaeological, mystical... Do you want them finding evidence of a new disease? A priceless artefact missing? Gothic powers at work? Glowing fish that almost certainly shouldn't be glowing?

You don't actually have to decide what's wrong in advance, mind. You can consider possibilities, then shrug, dive into the writing, and discover alongside your character.

Start writing

You're not mapping out the whole story, in this Skill: you're diving into writing the first scene. Your character (who they are can gradually come clear through writing them) is exploring the empty building. They know something's wrong, but they don't know what yet.

Include plenty of multi-sensory description as they move through:

• What are they seeing? They're hunting for what's wrong: we're looking through their eyes.
• What are they hearing? Sounds are particularly evocative for creating a tense atmosphere, because they also emphasise the underlying silence, and what we can't see.
• What does it smell like? Smell is brilliant for making us feel like we're really there, inside a scene, because it's not easily reproducible, unlike visuals and sounds.
• What sensations are they having? Is the air warm, cold, humid, dry? Do they touch anything? What are the textures? This brings us right into the embodied experience of the character, so we feel like it's happening to us.

All of this will create maximum creepy atmosphere. It'll also be inherently purposeful: they're hunting for clues to find out what's wrong, so every snippet of description is more information about that, for them, and for us as the readers.

Then end the scene at the most dramatic moment. That may or may not include the reveal on the page – up to you. At the moment you gasp, end the scene. (If you can't bear to stop writing, grab another page and continue the scene on that, as a new section. Leaving the reader on that cliff-hanger!)

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Writing Skill: Fairytale Detective

If you want to explore red herrings, to keep the reader distracted from the true reveal you’re actually working towards, I’ve got a lovely playful Writing Skill for you: Fairytale Detective! Red herrings are 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!

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How Obvious Should I Make It?

In any kind of fiction writing, we need to manage our secrets. We want to hide the ending so it's a surprise, not a slow-moving inevitable train – but not such a surprise that the reader feels cheated. We want to tuck in foreshadowing, but not give the game away completely – or hide the hints so well that no-one even notices them. 

So how do we find the balance between making things glaringly obvious or playing our cards so close to our chests that the story doesn't work? How do you get it right for everyone? It can feel impossible. And it is impossible – if you think of "everyone" as a single monolithic Reader, for whom you want it to work identically.

Instead, write for three different kinds of readers: Smug Readers, Absorbed Readers, and Happy Lil Passengers On A Train.

Smug Readers

Smug Readers are going to guess everything. They're going to spot every hint, remember every clue, smirk knowingly at every red herring, and predict the ending accurately.

And they'll be pleased about being right! It feels like solving a wordle, a crossword, a sudoku. They'll feel proud, satisfied, and yes, very smug. Quite deservedly so.

Let them guess. Give them the means to guess. If you hide things so well that you confound your smug readers, they'll be disappointed, not impressed. And you'll completely lose your…

Absorbed Readers

Absorbed Readers will spot some things, but not everything. They're absorbed, so they're paying close attention, but they're also absorbed in the story, not treating it as a guessing game. They'll read the foreshadowing and remember it, but they won't always put two and two together. They might have vague suspicions, but no more. Then, when they reach the reveal, they'll exclaim "Ohhhhhh! So that's why… Yes, I thought there was something odd about that!" 

They'll be thrilled at having been so cunningly confounded, and satisfied that it all hangs together. And when they reread it, they'll sing your praises at how clever you were, setting it all up.

So put the foreshadowing, the hints, the clues, where they'll see them – actually there, on the page. In words, not in a cryptic form that needs a Brain of Britain contestant to work it out. But put it somewhere that they won't spot it immediately – in the middle of a paragraph, for instance, or in the midst of some exciting action.

It's easy to feel like these are our ideal readers. But you also need to cater for your…

Happy Lil Passengers On A Train

Happy Lil Passengers On A Train are cheerfully immersed in the story. They're not trying to predict the direction – they're on a train! They're staring out the window while the story-scenery flows by, taking every red herring at face value, missing every scrap of foreshadowing, not making a single guess. And when they reach the reveal, they. Are. Astounded. Amazing! Incredible!

Happy Lil Passengers On A Train don’t want to be guessing anything: doing that means stepping outside the story, which means losing the lovely total immersion. They want to be taken on a wonderful journey and reach their astonishing destination. And then they will be very, very happy.

This means that everything, ultimately, has to be spelt out. At the point where your Smug Readers have already guessed a while back, and your Absorbed Readers have just gasped at the reveal – at the point where you think any reasonable reader should know this, how can they not, ffs – at the point where you need them to know this for the next bit of the story to work – you need to make a Train Announcement for the Happy Lil Passengers. Spell it out. In actual words. State it clearly where it's obvious: at the end or beginning of a scene, even at the end or beginning of a chapter, so no-one can miss it. And then, like a Train Announcement, say it again.

*

Instead of writing for one kind of reader, you're writing for three kinds, in turn. First come the clues and hints, which the Smug Reader will spot. Make sure they're there, on the page, so the Smug Reader has a chance: they want to guess right! Then a bit later comes the goose-pimpling moment of dawning realisation, when the Absorbed Reader goes "Ohhhh… Oh, I bet…!" And then, when the reveal is DONE and the story is moving on to the next stage, or ending, a Train Announcement for your Happy Lil Passengers, with a bing-bong at the start, which they absolutely can't miss.

Some people are predisposed to be one or another kind of reader, but we can all be all of them, at different points. Even the smuggest reader, curled up with flu and a book, turns into a Happy Lil Passenger On A Train. As long as you're catering for all three in turn, every reader, whoever they are right then, can enjoy it.

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Writing Skill: Mystery Place

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…

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Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

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