Twelve Elements to Consider When Writing a Mystery Series

1. Your sleuth should be likable, interesting and resourceful, with a definite personality that includes quirks and personal issues that have yet to be resolved. Your sleuth needs to have a personal stake in solving the mystery.

2. Consider your setting a major character. Use your setting well--its geography and flavor, its contrasting neighborhoods, businesses, parks and restaurants. Set your scenes in various locales to avoid monotony.

3. Occasionally change your setting. If most of the books in your series take place in a small town, you might have you sleuth solve a murder in Manhattan.

4. Your sleuth needs a best friend or confidant with whom to brainstorm. Consider his/her having a nemesis, as well, to up the tension and add red herrings to the mix.

5. A love interest or interests spices up your plot and adds another dimension. While your reader enjoys the puzzle-mystery aspect of your novel, his/her ties to your sleuth are even stronger.

6. Choose your victim carefully. Why was he/she murdered? What connects the victim to the suspects? Why was the second victim murdered?

7. As for suspects, have many, with various motives, and with varying connections to the victim(s). Don’t telescope the identity of the murderer, but let your murderer appear often enough so that your reader doesn’t feel cheated when all is revealed.

8. Secrets relating to the past are like chunks of dark Belgian chocolate in a chocolate brownie. Every character should have a secret or two. Reveal each secret only when necessary. Use them to your advantage.

9. Every mystery should have a theme. Be it a dispute regarding an inheritance, collecting butterflies or coins, each mystery should include a theme that reflects the concerns of the village or the outside world.

10. Decide what role official crime solvers play in your mystery. Even if you’re writing a cozy series, the police must appear in your books. Is your sleuth friendly with the homicide detective? Do they have an adversarial relationship?

11. Sub plots are essential to any novel, including your mystery. They arise from the theme such as a dispute over land development, or from an issue in your sleuth’s personal life.

12. Make sure your personal viewpoint comes through in your writing. You are unique. Your take on the human condition will help make your series stand out.

It's A Mystery to Me

Actually, a lot of things are, some to do with writing, more to do with just living life. I'll concentrate on the writing things now.

Why, when I'm really revved up about the book I'm writing, do I have a million interruptions and all sorts of things that need to taken care of right now?

Why can't I remember the name of a new character I've just created, even though I've written it at least a dozen times? (I'll chalk that one up to age, or having too many things going at once, and I have the solution and that's to keep the names of all characters written down along with all important aspects about them.)

Why do I have such a hard time making a simple phone call to arrange an event? (This is a phobia I've had nearly all my life. I don't really like to make phone calls. Thank goodness for emails. What really frustrates me is when I can't find an email for someplace or person.)

Why, when I've just figured out how to use a new piece of software or my iPhone, do they invent something else that I have to learn how to use? Thinking back over the years I've had to exercise my brain so many times, first learning how to use a portable typewriter, then an electronic typewriter, then a computer with two floppy disks, then a new one with a little square diskette, all kinds of printers and copy machines, then copiers right in the printer, new email programs, and on and on. Makes by brain hurt just thinking about it.

Why, when I've learned to love blogging are people saying studies show that blogs don't sell books? That's not the only reason, I blog, but sure interesting people in my books is one reason I blog. Am I wasting my time?

The same goes for blog tours. That was the hot new thing--and now they (who the heck is "they" anyway?) say that blog tours don't work. They've worked for me--when ever I'm on a tour the Amazon numbers go way down which means something. Besides, blog tours are fun so I don't think I'll give up on them just yet.

What about Facebook and Twitter? Do they sell books? I enjoy doing both, but I've never really thought of them as a real selling tool--maybe for those who are on there over and over, but I don't have time for that. So that's another mystery? Why do we do Facebook and Twitter?

And why does a crowd come sometimes to a book launch or signing and only a few the next time? One thing I've learned if you serve food and drink, more will come--or if you give a talk about publishing, which brings up another mystery. Why are so many people writing books when it's so hard to sell them?

My answer to that mystery is I can't seem to help myself. I write two series, when I've finished a new book for one, I feel compelled to start a new book for the other. I always want to see what's going to happen next to the people I've created. I can't just leave them hanging, can I?

What are your personal mysteries?

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com

It's Planting Time

Rather than a how-to, this is more of a how-do? We all know one of our favorite parts of reading a mystery is trying to figure out all the clues...can we discover whodunit before our intrepid detective, whether it’s a police investigator or the nice neighborhood grandmother who always seems to be involved? Is there that palm-to-the-forehead moment of "I should've seen that"?

I tend to lay in the clues as I go along – I know what I want my reader to know, what s/he can extrapolate from that and what should be a bit, shall we say, “fuzzy” in an effort to keep the villain's secret as long as possible.

Let’s share what we do: how do you get your clues in there? Do you plot them out before hand? Do you go back through your manuscript and drop them in the right places at the end? Do they surprise you and kind of insert themselves at opportune (or even inopportune) moments?

Let’s dish for our readers!

Libby McKinmer
Romance with an edge
www.libbymckinmer.com
libby@libbymckinmer.com
Also on Twitter, GoodReads & Facebook

Why We Write Mysteries

Many authors write about their reasons for writing mysteries--and I've written mine more than once. My usual answer is that when I'm writing a mystery I can make it end the way it should--which isn't the way it always happens in the real world. Too many murderers manage to get away with their dastardly deeds. In my worlds, the bad guy always gets it in the end.

Authors often state that their first interest in writing mysteries came about because of reading the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew mysteries when they were kids. Though I gobbled up every Nancy Drew mystery that I came across, I also read any other mystery I could get my hands on, including those intended for adults.

Perhaps, though, what had a greater influence on me was the mystery radio shows that I listened to as a kid, The Shadow Knows, Inner Sanctum, Mr. and Mrs. North and many, many others.

But, probably the greatest influence was the daily newspapers. We lived in Los Angeles and at the time my parents subscribed to three: The Herald Express, The Los Angeles Times and another that I don't remember the name of, but was like the tabloids of today. Los Angeles had plenty of intriguing and sometimes gruesome murders to fill the front pages of the newspapers--often with movie stars somehow involved.

The most famous one, The Black Dahlia, I heard about first on my little Philco radio. For some unknown reason, that radio picked up police calls. My mother had forbidden my sister and I to listen to them--but we did almost every night after we went to bed.

I heard the police radioing each other when the found the pieces of the Black Dahlia in that vacant lot. They spoke quite explicitly about what they had found.

Sometime in the night, I felt something on the bed. I reached down and touched a leg. I was afraid to touch anymore for fear I'd feel a bloody stump! I screamed.
Mom came running into the room. "What's the matter?"

I kept my eyes closed tight. "There's a leg on my bed."

Mom quite calmly said, "Yes, and it's attached to your sister."

Of course she knew we'd been listening to the police calls again. And when the morning paper arrived she knew what we'd heard.

That's something I've never forgotten. And that's one case where despite all the theories, no one really knows who killed the young woman called the Black Dahlia.

That will never happen in one of my books, in the end, the reader will always know who the bad guy is.

Marilyn
a.k.a. F. M. Meredith