Young Writers Society

I have always wanted to write a mystery, but never able to think of a good way to write it...how do you get it started, create the crimes, and reveal the crimes at the end that no one would have guessed?

If you have written a mystery, what tips will be useful? Is there anything that helped you? When did you write your first mystery? Was it good, bad? What would you do to make it better?

I'm seriously in need of tips!

hehehe.

i just had a conversation with my mytery loving grandma about this with a thing I was writing.

she said my story was "so suspensful".
I said, "Really, no way."
and she said "ya, i don't know what's going to happen with anything at all. you didn't drop those tacky large hints like most people do."

and then i realized that the reason it was so suspensful without large hints is because I really didn't know how I was going to finish the book. therefore, suspense was created and no secrets were given away early on.

fool-proof.

my advice. write a mystery where you the writer don't know how it's going to end. (but at least have some sor tof goal. writing without purpose creates boring, winding road reading)

create many little questions. Like in a novel of mine here are some...


1. How did Alex (Main character's sister) disappear? Why?
2. How did Alex's note get in Beth's (Main character) room?
3. If Alex did put it there herself, why did she leave?
4. Why did everyone in Beth's town (family, friends ect) just forget about Alex?
5. Did Beth's dream really happen (where Alex disappears)?


just to name a few. All of which will become very clear later on. Also another good thing for mystery is to add a big question at the end. It makes the audience wonder more about the book and try to figure out why the stuff happened. Perhaps making them re-read it.


I hope this helped!

I'm not quite sure how to write a mystery myself, but here are some solid tips:

-Avoid foreshadowing, ( Little did she know what would happen....Etc.)

-Start the story dynamically, like with the crime.

-Make a intriguing mystery, one that's creative, but complex, making the reader constantly on the edge, and his/her mind working frantically to try to solve it to the end.

-Try making it unique......(No seemingly accidental death...Maybe something akin to all the evidence leading to one person, who is actually trying to defend the person who did commit the crime. Make the reader relate to the criminal.)

These aren't the best tips, but at best, try to avoid overused ideas.

http://fictionwriting.about.com/od/genr ... yrules.htm

I don't usually like about, but I read this article somewhere else a while ago, and I think it's pretty accurate. The especially important one, at least to me in a whodunnit mystery, is that your culprit has to be introduced early on - if your villain is introduced two pages before being revealed as the culprit, then it takes all the fun out of it: "Hey, that guy didn't exist two pages ago. Not Fair!"

The major draw of whodunnit mysteries is trying to.. well... figure out whodunnit. Just keep that point in mind. Of course, there are other types of mysteries besides the whodunnit. I, personally, prefer the fantasy-style mystery, ala Harry Potter, where it's not necessarily a crime, but more the withholding of information that needs to be "solved". I find those ones to be easier to write as well, not sure why. Just have fun with it.

~Annie

The trick to a good mystry book is to keep your reader wondering and at the end make the answer so stupidly easy they want to read another