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Things That Go Wrong in A Mystery Novel

Writing a mystery is challenging. You have a puzzle to create, a detective to solve the puzzle, a victim, villain, and conflict for your protagonist as they solve the puzzle. It’s easy to fall in love with your story creating exciting challenges for your protagonist, creating red herrings, and leading your reader on a path to discovery and revelation.

With so many components in your novel, it’s easy to get lost along the way. The character in your head may not come to life on the page. The series of conflicts may be just that without raising the stakes to…

Show The Way

Immerse your reader in the story with actions, thoughts, and sensory details. You will pull your readers into the narrative, allowing them to feel as though they experience what happens instead of reading about what happens.

This approach is the basis of the fiction writing adage: show, don’t tell. Telling is exposition, keeping the reader at an intellectual distance while immersing them in the story allows them to feel what your character feel.

Sensory Detail

Sensory detail is your entry into showing. From sweat trickling down your hero’s side to the sounds, smells, and sensations of a jostling crowd, focus on details…

You Are Not Alone

Every writer goes through fear at some point. That pit-in-the-stomach, I’m-not-good-enough, my-story-sucks, no-one-will-ever-read-this fear blast strikes all writers. Creativity rides an emotional rollercoaster. Creativity is risk-taking. Yes, successful, multi-book authors have the same fears.

Self-Doubt Is The Number One Writer Fear

Blame it on your amygdala in your brain, part of your body’s alarm system. Located at the root of your brain, the amygdala does everything it can — automatically — to keep you safe. If there is risk, the amygdala sends out signals to keep your body safe. Creativity is risk. Fear will happen.

You’ll get fear signals of every kind.

• My writing sucks.
• That just-out-of-college-and-read-10-books…

Tension Creates Anticipation

You know that toward the end, your story will have a big scene between the hero and the villain. It will be tense. And you can’t wait to write the big battle. Whether it’s with weapons or wits, your hero must face down and defeat the villain.

Before your reader gets to that scene, you need to lead them through pages and pages of your mystery novel. Every scene needs tension to build anticipation for what comes next. That’s how you get your readers to keep reading until they reach that big scene.

Beginning writers have so much to tell…

Words That Make Your Reader Feel

Your author voice connects your reader to your story through vocabulary, syntax, tone, and point of view that make your phrases, sentences, and paragraphs flow. Your author voice comes through to the reader through either third person narration or the character point of view in the novel.

When you put all that together, your author voice is instrumental in how your reader feels as they experience your novel. Voice is the icing on the cake of your characters and plot. …

What is Narrative Pacing?

Narrative pacing is a term to describe how the book feels to a reader-fast or slow. It’s the momentum the reader feels to pull them forward in the story. Your reader wants to feel immersed in the actions and thoughts of the characters.

Writer David Mamet said:

Clunky language, bad dialogue, and poorly-conceived scenes will all draw your reader out of the story. Pace will help keep them there.

Good pacing is crucial to the flow of your story’s narrative. It’s the glue that cements your reader to the story. When pacing fails, readers become disinterested, disappointed, or even angry…

What Is Narrative Point of View?

When you choose the point of view (POV) for your mystery novel, you create the perspective of how the story is told. Point of view determines the narrator’s relationship to the story.

The way the narrator tells the story drives the reader’s connection to your novel. To make a decision on point of view, you need to understand the choices. Each point of view method has limitations and positive storytelling approaches.

First Person POV

The first person uses the pronouns I, me, and my. A single character describes his or her experiences. …