Conclusion: The Map is Not the Territory

You’re finished! You have a complete outline of your novel, which is twisty, baffling, and ultimately—satisfying. You’ve undertaken a huge journey in coming this far—but now you must set out on a greater one. And as you turn to your word processor and type out the words Chapter One, you may encounter unexpected difficulties. Let me try to explain why.

Near the end of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, he relates a disagreement with an R.A.F. officer who spurned the idea of religion. Now, the man believed in God—but religious observances seemed extraneous to him. “I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery,” the man said. “And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal.”

Lewis concedes the man’s point—religion is less real than God. But he points out that, in the same way, a nautical map is less real than the ocean. And yet all sailors must rely on maps. It turns out that a map is a very good thing if you’re trying to interact with something that is simply too huge for you to fully wrap your mind around. As is God, as is the ocean, as is your book.

What we have been doing, throughout The Perfect Crime, is building the map of your novel. It is less complex, less meaningful, less challenging than the actual thing. It is even, in the words of the officer from Lewis’s book, a touch “petty and pedantic and unreal.”

Now you must step from the unreal to the real, by actually putting words on the page. And, like any soldier who first sets foot in the territory whose map he has memorized, you will find surprises. You will meet suspects you, now that they are realized on the page, no longer excite you. You will come upon scenes that you can’t seem to route your way through. You will crest a ridge and find yourself looking down on a new, breathtaking idea that—while wonderful—kicks sand into the nice, smooth workings of your engine.

In the immortal words of Douglas Adams—don’t panic. While you have been building your map, you have also been building a body of knowledge about mystery writing—and that knowledge will ensure you never get completely lost. You understand alibis now, and narratives, and suspect subplots. You know the various things your Villain might do to engineer his Coverup. And you know an awful lot about plot twists.

And by your side is your toolbox, which we’ve been assembling throughout this book. Thus far it includes:

• The List of Five—your tool for generating ideas

• The Image Bank—your tool for storing ideas

• The Bug List—your tool for recording and workshopping problems

These tools will be helpful as you move from the map of your novel to the actual territory. But before you go, I want to slip one more item into the box.

The Downward Drill

The Downward Drill is your tool for dealing with writerly anxiety. Many of the writers I know suffer a great deal of angst, pain, even terror when they confront a blank page. Imagine yourself now, rolling a clean sheet of vellum into your typewriter, adjusting it just so, and tabbing over to begin your first paragraph. Do you feel it—that stab of dread? Of course you do. But why do you feel it?

Because the page is blank. Because there are so many possibilities for how you might fill it, and so the path ahead is woefully unclear. This—an excess of possibility—is the exact opposite of the condition that enables flow.

You’ve probably heard of flow—a mental state in which one becomes so absorbed in an activity that everything else seems to recede. Or if you haven’t heard that exact term, you’ve probably heard of being in the zone—which means the exact same thing.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who popularized flow, identified a number of qualities that flow tends to exhibit. We’re going to talk about three. People tend to achieve flow when:

• They’re challenged to work at the upper limits of their skill

• They receive immediate feedback on their efforts

• They know exactly what they need to do—both broadly (across their entire project), but also minutely (at each individual step)

This is why surgery is an activity that’s greatly conducive to flow. It’s highly challenging. The surgeon receives clear and immediate feedback on the efficacy of each stitch—either the blood is still pooling in the abdominal cavity, or it’s not. And both the project, and its individual steps, are clearly understood.

But not all activities are equally conducive to flow, and writing is, in my judgement—poor to middling. Let’s see how it ranks on our three metrics.

Is it challenging? Sure, but not always equally so. In fact, sometimes when you’re writing, you’ll find yourself having to stretch yourself a little beyond where your current skillset lies, to scratch for a level of artistry that presently eludes you. Sometimes you’ll find yourself having to develop new skills on the fly—how does one write a fight scene, anyhow? Writing is a task that frequently calls us to exceed our current level of skill, and that’s not conducive to flow.

Immediate feedback? Forget about it. Yes, you can get a critique group together, but feedback after the fact is not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about feedback that happens in the moment, while you’re actively working. Writers do have a channel for accessing such feedback, but it’s slim. Here’s what it looks like: sometimes you’ll write a passage and think to yourself, Dang, that was awesome. Cherish these moments.

Clarity of workflow? Well, here is where I think we can grease the skids a little bit. By building your engine, we have taken care of defining your project in broad terms. Now we need to turn our eyes to the micro, and for that, we use the Downward Drill.

It couldn’t be simpler. When you’re writing, and you start to feel yourself losing flow, make the task you’re working on smaller. Drill down from write the love scene to write the next paragraph, or even write the next line of dialogue. If that still seems too large, you can pull out the List of Five, and come up with five ideas for what you want that next line of dialogue to be. The point is that you can often take the task you’ve set yourself and make it smaller—thereby making it less daunting, and also giving yourself that clarity of purpose that assists in achieving flow.

The Downward Drill can also come into play when you want to workshop major changes to your book. Let’s say you’re halfway into the book and you feel it’s not sufficiently mysterious, or romantic, or exciting. Take that problem, and see if you can make it smaller. Give words to the thing that’s actually eating at you. For example, “my book doesn’t feel mysterious enough” could mean:

• I think my Villain’s motive is too obvious

• I don’t think there are enough twists

• I’m not sure the twists are really surprising

• None of my clues require the Sleuth to work hard to understand them

• My false suspects feel obviously false

“My book doesn’t feel mysterious enough” is almost impossible to workshop. It’s too big! But by forcing yourself to look hard at your intuitions and define where they’re coming from, you can drill down to a level where you can brainstorm potential solutions. If your real concern, once you’ve drilled down, is that none of your clues feel sufficiently tricksy, you have a lot of options. You can turn one of your clues into a Lockbox. You can throw up some obstacles between the Sleuth and a Key she needs. You can simply lengthen the time between when the Sleuth gets a clue, and when she understands it.

I hope I’ve equipped you well for the journey. But ultimately, this book is your territory to conquer. There will be, along the way, moments of glorious triumph—but also moments of weariness, and of doubt. But don’t despair. When your steps start to falter, when your pack gets heavy, take heart. Consider the shelves at your favorite bookstore, with hundreds—nay, thousands—of colorful, glossy volumes stretching off into the distance. Realize that every one of those books represents an author who, at one point or another, feared that the territory in front of her was unnavigable. You are one of their number. Go and join them.

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You have just finished The Perfect Crime. Thank you so much for coming with me on this journey! It has been absolutely amazing to have you in my corner while I conquered this particular territory. Many thanks to those who sent me questions and comments, who shared my newsletter with their friends, and who supported me financially while I completed this work. I could not have done it without you. And I couldn’t be happier to have, at long last, a complete manuscript to give you in thanks.

So… what comes next?

Plans for Publication

I’m currently working on edits, formatting, and cover art for The Perfect Crime manuscript. I expect this to take some time, as I want to get it just right. Look for digital and physical copies of the entire manuscript to be available within the next six months. (I hope sooner!)

Plans for this Substack newsletter

As part of my editing plan, I have two or three additional chapters I want to shoehorn into various places in the manuscript. You’ll continue to receive these each week as I write them.

After that, I’ll be taking a couple of months to go into serious editing mode. I’ll pause subscriptions during this time. This means that during those quiet months, you won’t be charged, and the remaining length of your subscription term won’t decrease. However, you may still hear from me occasionally when I have details like cover art and publication dates to share.

Finally, when publication is on the horizon, I’ll begin publishing chapters for a sequel, which I’m currently calling The Plot Twist Encyclopedia.