The Busy Writer's Tips on Writing Mystery, Crime & Suspense: The Busy Writer

By M. R. McAlister

A glance at any best-seller list will tell you how popular mystery, crime, and suspense stories are with readers. Most of you will find this perfectly understandable! There's nothing like the thrill of the chase or the intellectual challenge of trying to guess 'whodunit' or 'whydunit' before the sleuth.

 

If you're the writer, this presents you with a challenge. You have to juggle a lot of balls at once. You need to:

• come up with an intriguing mystery (or an edge-of-the-seat thriller) that will keep readers up long past bedtime
• keep your sleuth busy tracking down the perpetrator
• weave in and bring to life other significant characters
• leave a trail of not-too-obvious clues if it's a mystery (trying to pull the wool over the reader's eyes) or building suspense with the hero and the Bad Guy on a collision course (if the reader knows who the villain is!)
• walk in the shoes of the villain, ensuring that he is a worthy opponent.

Oh, and did I mention that you have to write tight scenes, build the suspense, create believable conflict, and choose the correct viewpoint as well? Not to mention how to handle research...

 

Good thing, then, that this is all covered in The Busy Writer's Tips on Writing Mystery, Crime & Suspense!

 

Readers also get a bonus PDF with resources for Mystery/Crime Writers and a collection of all the reference articles mentioned in the book.

 

In the words of Kathryn Fox, internationally acclaimed author of medical thrillers (Cold Grave and five others):

"I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Marg McAlister's books to any aspiring or accomplished writers. She shares priceless insights into structure, characters, setting, action, suspense and importantly, emotional punch. I'm working on my eighth and ninth books, and I still go back to Marg's books when writing. I have no doubt that following Marg's advice saves time, energy and rewrites. A necessity in any crime writer's library!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Gem Publishing
• Release date: May 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9798201233228

Book preview

Introduction

There's a very good reason for fiction bestseller lists being full of mysteries, thrillers, and suspense novels: readers can't get enough of them! 

They love being drawn deeper and deeper into a mystery, putting together the clues, and trying to out-think the main character in the race to solve the crime or outwit the pursuer. 

They love being on the edge of their seat with suspense, wondering what will happen next—more than likely watching in horror as the hero and the Bad Guy steer a collision course!

It's such sweet torture, worrying about the main character's fate, that they simply can't put the book down. Chapter by chapter, the accomplished author stretches the tension and builds the suspense while the reader is breathless with anticipation.

If you are a reader—and most writers are—then you identify with how this feels. You read every book in the backlist of an author who can keep you hooked—and there's nothing you like more than finding a talented new author who can provide you with story after story to feed your habit.

That new author they find could be you.

What This Book Will Teach You

Like all the books in the Busy Writer series, this book sets out to give you exactly what you need to get underway quickly. It will show you all the important elements of writing crime, mystery, and suspense fiction without overwhelming you with so much detail that you can't take it all in. In this book, I've provided links to some of the most relevant articles that I've written over the years, but for your convenience, I've also collated them in a PDF that you can download and keep handy. The link to that PDF is provided in the Useful Resources chapter.

Here is what you're going to learn:

What crime, mystery and suspense readers want (and how you can give it to them)

How to come up with an endless stream of ideas

How to develop ideas into stories

How to choose the best sub-genre for you as an author (cozy, police procedural, PI, etc.)

How to build a mystery (including clues and red herrings)

Why you should write a novel scene by scene

How to build suspense in any novel

How to craft effective Beginnings, Middles, and Ends – from hooking the reader to winding things up

How to create credible heroes and villains

How to adapt this approach when writing for children

You will also find some handy checklists for crime and suspense writers and a useful appendix telling you where you can find more help for mystery writers.

Last–but not least–there is another bonus to having a clear understanding of how crime and suspense novels are structured: you can easily slip across into other genres. A popular sub-genre of romance novels is romantic suspense or mystery/romance. Children love reading mysteries, too. I grew up on a steady diet of mystery stories!

Learn how to stretch out the suspense and write a good scene with plenty of conflict, and you can apply your knowledge to a wide range of fiction.

1

What Crime, Mystery & Suspense Readers Want

Iwould hazard a guess that if you’re planning to write crime or suspense fiction, it’s you probably enjoy reading it, too. That means that you will have an innate understanding of what your readers want.

Speaking as a reader addicted to mysteries and thrillers, I’m going to give you a list of what I hope for when I start a new book. I’m sure we agree on most of the points!

1. Characters that Come to Life on the Page

Some aspiring mystery writers are a bit surprised when I put characters first. Perhaps you, too, thought that I would emphasize constructing a brain-teasing puzzle or building suspense?

Plainly put: if I don’t like the characters, then I don’t usually bother finishing the book. It doesn’t matter how cleverly it has been plotted; how devious the twists and turns; how well the suspense has been planned—if I don’t care for the characters, that’s it for me.

It’s logical, really. If the characters don’t grab me, why would I be eager to see how it all plays out? Why should I care what happens to them?

By all means, plot your book carefully, strew the sleuth’s path with clever red herrings; lay out clues and build the tension—but first, get those characters right.

If you create living, breathing characters that your reader cares about, that reader will seek out more of your books.

2. A Fast-Paced Plot With Ongoing Tension and Suspense

By ‘fast-paced’, I don’t mean that the book must be filled with fights and car chases. This can become quite tedious.

Write a story that moves along at a good pace, and you will carry the reader along with it. Make sure that every scene moves the story forward, and one action leads to another. Cause and effect are vital in any novel. Even when the story opens, you should be able to identify the inciting incident. Something happened to kick off the story. What was it? What changed the main character’s life? What caused people and events to come together so that there was a crime to be solved?

The tension should build throughout the story, as the main character moves closer and closer to finding out ‘whodunit’ or ‘whydunit’.

You probably already know the difference, but let me clarify:

In a whodunit, the sleuth doesn’t know who committed the crime. They spend the story digging for information, putting together clues, and gradually getting closer and closer to finding out who did it.

In a whydunit, the reader (and probably the main character) knows who the villain is, but the thrill of the chase is finding out the ‘why’ of things or how the perpetrator is caught (also sometimes known as a ‘howcatchem’!)

It doesn’t matter what kind of novel you choose to write; your main task is to keep the reader enthralled to the last page. You want your reader to be continually wondering what is going to happen next.

3. Unexpected Twists and a Surprise Ending

It’s not easy to surprise the reader. You aim to leave enough clues to play fair without giving too much away.

How can you come up with a nice twist or a surprise ending