New Introduction

Hello to everyone reading! As many of you know, I published the final chapter of The Perfect Crime manuscript a few weeks back. These days I am turning my attention to editing, which includes a few additional chapters—including today’s offering, a new Introduction.

This will be the last chapter you get from me for a while. While I edit the manuscript for publication, I’m going to be pausing memberships, which means:

• You won’t be charged until I resume posting

• Any remaining time on your subscription will not diminish

• You will still be able to log in to read the Archives

During this time, you may still get an occasional update from me—I may share cover art, publication dates, and other things I think may interest you.

And in that vein, here’s my first publication update: I’ve decided to rename the manuscript Simple Mystery! Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Important—If you’ve been wanting to subscribe, so you can read all 56 chapters published thus far, today is the time to do it! I’ll be pausing subscriptions tomorrow morning, which means new subscribers won’t be able to join.

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You’ve got an idea.

An idea for a mystery. It’s been there, tickling the back of your brain, for a while now. Growing. Evolving. Sometimes when you’re walking the dog, or scrubbing the dishes, you find that you are not really living inside the sturdy walls of your home—or indeed, within the confines of your own life. You are living inside your idea.

But you want more than that. You want to invite others inside. And so you buy yourself a fresh ream of paper, brew a pot of coffee, and sit down at your computer. And for a while—maybe a day, maybe a week? Everything is perfect.

But then, you get stuck. You’re not sure how to proceed from your beginning to the glorious ending you envision. Even worse, doubts have begun to creep in. Is your idea tricky enough? Is it believable enough? Will it give people that magical feeling—the one you got when you were dreaming it up?

There’s no two ways abut it—you’re stuck. But you’re not alone. Most of the students who take my Simple Mystery workshops have come to exactly this place before they go looking for help. It turns out it’s very easy to get stuck writing mysteries. Why? Well…

• Of all genres, mysteries place the most emphasis on a great final twist. It’s not enough to end your mystery by exposing a Villain whose guilt we can believe in. We need to be taken by surprise—to gasp in shock, then slowly start nodding along in dawning understanding.

• Mysteries have a lot of moving parts. To build that understanding for your reader, you’ll need to lay out a network of clues—and none can be either too obvious or too subtle. You’ll also have to understand what your Villain is doing off screen throughout the novel, and build a collection of false suspects behind which to obscure his guilt.

• Mysteries also have the problems of every other genre. In addition to being surprising and well-plotted, your mystery needs to be—well, a good book. Funny, perhaps, or poignant, or wise—but certainly, entertaining. And to produce it, you’ll need to spend a lot of hours alone with a blank page.

So, we know why we’ve got problems. What are we going to do about it? In this book, we’ll…

• Examine the science behind plot twists. You’ll learn what a plot twist actually is—it may not be what you think! You’ll also learn the three methods for setting up plot twists, and how to reveal them for maximum effect.

• Go deep on clues. You’ll come to understand the three different types of clues—Freebies, Lockboxes, and Whispers—as well as 12 specific tactics for hiding them.

• Build a comprehensive vocabulary of mystery-writing terminology. You’ll fill your mental lexicon with terms like Action Log, Suspect Subplot, Incompetence Alibi, and Timeshifting. Having this vocabulary in place will help you access—and deploy—these concepts while plotting.

• Learn to build from the ground up. Here we arrive at the very crux of the Simple Mystery program—a step-by-step method for creating a mystery. You’ll begin with a believable, primal motive, and layer on top of it every element that a good mystery needs—plot twists, clues, suspects, and more. I call the result of all of this planning your mystery’s engine, because it’s what makes the whole thing work.

As with any brand new engine, building it will require some tinkering. That’s all right. I’ll be helping you to assemble a box full of simple tools, which you can use to get every gear tuned just right.

Along the way, we’ll learn why mysteries matter to people. We’ll discuss the primal questions of human nature that they allow us to scratch away at. And we’ll talk about how to wrap your engine in a story structure that lets you tell a story that is meaningful—both to your readers, and to you.

All right—let’s get to tinkering.