Category: mystery

January 25, 2018 / 4 Comments

Didn’t See That Coming…

             Y’know, I realized I haven’t done a pop-culture reference in ages, and I’m honestly not sure if I keep thinking of too-obscure references or if I’m just being lazy .  Or maybe I’m just not as in touch with pop culture as I used to be.
            No, it can’t be all three. Think about it.  Don’t go for the bear suit with your snarky comments.
            Anyway…
            I talked about the detective’s speech a few weeks back, and I thought it’d be worth mentioning a big way it can go wrong.
            I can even give an example.  The one I hinted at then…
            So, I’ve mentioned once or thrice that I worked on a detective show for a few years. It wasn’t a very good one, mostly because no one ever seemed really sure if it was a detective show or a cop show or maybe some kind of late-night-cable-sexy show.  And it really didn’t help that all of it got pressed through this sort of ‘80s filter… in the late ‘90s.
            Anyway, one episode reached into the fifth act with our heroes backed into a corner. They had nothing.  None of their clues led anywhere.  None of the motives held up.  Everyone’s alibi checked out.  It really seemed like one of those cases where the bad guy—whoever they were—was going to get away with it.
            Then they went back to talk one of the people they’d interviewed earlier and explained how they remembered something he’d said.  Which led to them examining his bank records last night.  Which led to talking to one of his business partners. Which led to them getting a warrant this morning and searching his house.  During which they remembered his love of European architecture and found the priest hole in his home office. Where they found the murder weapon this morning… with his prints on it.
            Bam!  Case closed.  Another one for the good guys.
            Except… even as we filmed it, the cast and half the crew sensed something was wrong here.  It felt weird.  And not just because of some horrible editing (that came later).
            Our entire mystery was solved off-camera.  Almost nothing we’d seen for the entire episode was relevant.  In the end, we just had the two leads standing there giving the detective’s speech about a bunch of deductions and discoveries that all happened off-camera.  The audience didn’t see any of it. They were told about solving the mystery rather than being… well, shown it. 
            Which is a real killer in a visual medium.  And not terribly great in print, either. It’s easier to get away with, yeah, but still not a habit I want to get into.
            When this happens, I think it’s because writers feel like they’re following Elmore Leonard’s famous rule of thumb about skipping stuff nobody’s going to want to read.  Or not going to want to read twice.  In the case above, we don’t want to see the detectives find all the clues, and then also watch them talk about how they found all the clues.
            So the question is, which one do I cut?
            On one level, this is another empathy thing.  Most of the time, it’s going to come down to dramatic impact.  What’s going to give my reader a bigger kick in the gut—seeing them find the gun, or seeing them stand in a parking lot and tell someone they found the gun?
            On another level, this is just knowing what my plot is.  On a detective show (even a late-night-cable-sexy one), the plot is about solving the mystery. Sure, confronting and catching the bad guy is great, but it’s also… well, kinda incidental.  Solving the mystery inherently means we’ve caught the bad guy.  We want  to know it happened, but that’s not what we picked up the mystery novel for.
            Y’see, Timmy, 99% of the time, plot happens in front of my audience.  I can fade to black for a sex scene, maybe skip over the hero’s six hour shift at the grocery store, maybe not even show the bad guy getting confronted and arrested —but those things aren’t really plot, are they? They’re elements we drop into the story for extra flavor.
            As I mentioned above, Elmore Leonard said to cut out all the parts people skip anyway. But I shouldn’t be cutting out the stuff they picked up my book to see.  If I remove a scene and nothing really changes, it probably isn’t plot.  If I remove a scene, but then need to add another scene where they talk about what happened in the now-missing scene… well, that scene was probably plot.
            I want to see the plot unfold.
            So do my readers.
            Next time… I’d like to talk about origin stories.
            Until then, go write.
Leonardmysteryplotreveal
January 11, 2018 / 1 Comment

What They Know

            There’s an empathy issue I see crop up a fair amount of time, and I ran into it a few times back in my film days, too.  I just hit a big patch of it recently, and it was while I was working on a pitch/outline that also kind of skirted around it.  So I figured it was worth talking about a bit here.
            That big patch I mentioned was a werewolf anthology I read (some monster names may have been changed to protect the innocent).  One of the things that amazed me was how many of the stories had a “big twist” which turned out to be—ready for it?—this is a werewolf story!  Some of these were pretty good… but I still ended up twiddling my fingers once it became apparent where things were heading and I had to wait for the narrative to get there.
            Now, granted, in this particular case a fair share of the blame for that falls on the editor.  Why would I accept a story for my anthology that’s undercut by… well, the very nature of the anthology?  That just seems like a bad idea.
            But why submit such a story, either? Shouldn’t I, the writer, immediately realize that anyone who picks up the anthology is already going to be clued in to my big reveal?  And shouldn’t I be aware of the failings that creates in my story?
            Either way you look at it, nobody’s thinking about what the readers are going to know when they sit down with this story.
            Simple truth is, what my audience knows affects what kind of story I can tell.  It’s going to affect my structure. Maybe even my genre.
            No, seriously.  Imagine trying to write a mystery story where we all know who the murderer is from the very start.  Before we even pick up the book.  If I try to tell that story in a normal mystery format with normal mystery tropes, it’s going to collapse really fast.  The whole structure of mysteries is based around the audience not knowing certain things, so if they already know them… well, that’s going to be a tough sell.
            Remember that pitch/ outline I mentioned?  It’s loosely inspired by an old ‘50s sci-fi movie.  But one of the big issues is that the “science” that drives most of the story in that movie is just awful.  Oh, it might’ve been borderline acceptable back in the day, but these days my niece could poke a dozen holes in.  And she’s a high school freshman. In Texas!
            That’s how weak the science is.
            So if I want to tell that story now, I’ll need to change a lot of things.  Those rationales and explanations just won’t hold with modern readers because they know better.  It’ll kill their suspension of disbelief almost immediately and they’ll give up on my story before they get to chapter five.
            And I don’t write big chapters.
            As I mentioned above, both of these examples deal with an empathy issue.  I have to be aware of what my audience knows.  What’s common knowledge, what’s obvious, and what sort of thing they’re already aware of.  And I need to understand how that knowledge is going to affect the reception and dramatic structure of my story.  Something they already know can’t be a surprise, and something they know is wrong can’t support a string of plot points.
            Please note an important difference here. Wrong doesn’t mean not real.  I can propose tons of alternate histories or secret societies or fringe science breakthroughs. I’d love to give you guidelines for making up planets or technologies or imaginary animals.  But the simple truth is… it’s an empathy thing.  Every thread in every story is going to be unique and different in how I present it and how you receive it.
            Semi-related—this is also why spoilers suck so much.  They literally change the story I’m telling (or reading) because they change what the reader knows. 
            For example…
            I’m going to spoil The Sixth Sense, so if you haven’t seen it, stop reading now and go watch it. No, seriously, go.  The whole point of this is how knowing things can mess up how you receive a story, so if you keep reading you’ll never be able to watch The Sixth Sense the way you’re supposed to.  NEVER.  If you’ve somehow managed to avoid it until now, I don’t want to be the one to take it away from you, so stop reading.
            STOP!
            NOW!!
            Okay, now that those folks are gone…
            That big reveal at the end of The Sixth Sense is a jaw-dropping moment when we hit it for the first time.   But if we go in already knowing Bruce Willis has been dead all along, this is a very different story.  It’s almost an afterschool special.  “The Boy and his Phantom Psychologist,” Thursday at four on ABC.
            More to the point, that ending doesn’t have the dramatic weight it would without that knowledge. And it never can.  We can’t unlearn things, much as we’d like to.
            Once something’s been spoiled… that’s it.  No takebacks.  No mulligans.
            I’ll even toss this out.  The ending of The Sixth Sense was such a powerful moment that it got copied many times–often by people who didn’t really understand it.  But this often-copied ending still ended up out there.  It became common.  And because it was common knowledge, so to speak, it changed how writers can tell that sort of story.  These days, most readers know to look for that sort of twist.  And they’ll pick up on the subtlest of clues or hints.  And I need to be aware of that if I want to tell one of those stories—that people will almost be expecting it.
            Because if I don’t, I should know I’m about to make some clumsy mistakes.
            Next time, I want to talk about some more basics.
            Until then… go write.
disbeliefempathygenremysteryrevealspoilersstructure
November 30, 2017 / 4 Comments

One Of You… Is A Murderer

            Sorry for the blast of posts this week.  Feel free to blame it on my love of storytelling—my own and other peoples.  Or rampant consumerism.  Or on me wanting to pay rent in January.  Any one of these answers is true.
            But now… let’s get back to some plain old writing advice.
            Readers tend to love a good mystery.  It’s kind of like the original VR game, where we get to see all the same clues and evidence as the protagonists and try to piece them together first.  We do it with books. We do it with TV shows.  Hell, there are some fantastic comic books you can do it with.  Alan Moore made a compelling argument once that comics are the perfect medium for mystery stories.
            But…
            As writers, let’s be honest.  Mysteries are tough.  They need to be in that perfect sweet spot—not so tough they’re impossible, but not so easy that my reader solves it before my character does (and then my character looks stupid for the next 150 pages for not figuring this out yet).
            Plus, there’s so much to keep track of.  Who saw what.  Where they saw it.  When they saw it.  These are all super-important, because readers hate it when they get to the end of a mystery and find a gaping hole there.  It’s probably the second-most annoying thing I can do when I’m writing a mystery.
            (And now I’ve got you all wondering, don’t I…?)
            At the Writers Coffeehouse a few weeks back, one of our regulars, Hal Bodner, offered a brilliant tip for writing mysteries. It eliminates this issue almost altogether.  Honestly, it’s so clever… it’s the whole point of this little rant.
            If you’ve ever seen or read an older mystery, they almost always have a chapter near the end when our fearless detective (or sleuths or investigators or what have you) bring all the suspects together and walk them through the crime.  They’ll go over the evidence, the clues, the alibis.  They’ll explain what each one means, which ones were red herrings, which ones they immediately discounted, and which ones pointed to…you, Widow Humphries!  Or should we call you, Isabella, the Viscount’s estranged sister!!
            You know this scene, right?  I’ve heard it called the parlor scene, the tea room room speech, the summation gathering, and other titles along those lines.  Hal called it the detective’s speech.  You might still catch it today on shows like Elementary, although it’s often pared down to just the detective and the guilty party.
            So… here’s the tip.
            Write that scene.  Even if my hard-boiled action story doesn’t really call for it, I should spend a day or three and write it out before I get going.  Have my investigator pace the room and point at people and say how he noticed this and saw those and learned about this.  Explain how this theory was discarded and where that idea came from.  And then point that finger right at the guilty party and scream “J’ACCUSE!!”
            Or maybe your detective plays it cooler than mine and just stands there with her hands in her trenchcoat.  Maybe she gives a little nod and a faint smile when the murderer gets hauled away. And then she pulls out her flask and crawls deep inside until she can re-bury all those memories about Jenna that this case dragged up again…
            Anyway…
            I don’t need to keep this scene, mind you.  Very likely this will just be one of those things I write that doesn’t get used.  Probably best if it isn’t.  Like I mentioned above, it’s kind of an archaic, cliche scene, and on the off chance it shows up it’s really pared down and tight.
            But once I have it written out, I have a mini-outline for how the mystery is revealed in my story.  Literally, who knows what when.  When they met the suspects.  What they see.  When they see it. When they make which connections.  It’s all right there in that speech—what my investigator needs to solve the crime.
            So gather your suspects—yes, even the butler—get them all seated in the parlor, and tell us about the first thing you noticed when you saw the crime scene.
            Next time, I wanted to talk about Luke’s father.
            Until then, go write.
detailsmooremysterytips
August 24, 2017 / 4 Comments

The Genre-Device Mnemonic Caper

             Middlemanreference.
            Very sorry I missed the last two weeks. Lots going on, which I’ll get to in a minute 
            I wanted to toss out a couple of quick, easy genre/device mnemonics for you.  These are a couple of things I’ve heard over the years.  Sometimes—when I’m struggling with something in a story—I’ve found them helpful for getting my head wrapped around things.
            So, what is it you’re working on right now. Maybe keep in mind…
            Suspense is about what’s going to happen
            A thriller’s about what is happening
            A mystery is about something that already happened
            Granted, these are kind of broad definitions, and there’s always going to be an exception or two. But I’ve mentioned once or thrice before the problems that can crop up when I try to push this kind of story into thatframework.  And if I’m trying to write a thriller that’s about events that already happened… well, there’s probably a reason I’m having problems with it.  Or maybe my readers are having problems with it.
            It’s not a bad thing to double check what I’m writing about and what I think I’m writing about.
            Now, let’s flip this and talk about devices.

            A mysteryis when my characters are actively searching for a piece of information they don’t know.
            Suspenseis when my readers—or the audience, in a larger sense—knows a piece of information that my characters need to know but don’t.
            A twist, is when we’re talking about a piece of information that nobody even suspects exists (readers or characters), but once we learn it, it’ll change how we view a lot of what’s already happened in the story.
                       
            I think we all mess these up a lot when we’re starting out. We’re trying to use a device or write in a specific genre, but we fall into the patterns of another one.  Or we’re so focused on having, for example, a cool mystery that we don’t realize we’ve actually set up a twist.  And it’s kind of a weak twist because… well, we’re still trying for a mystery.
            Worse yet, sometimes we learn these mistakes.  They become that thing we’re convinced is right because we never learned anything different. And so we stick with these mistakes for years, focusing on other things instead fo the one clearly-wrong thing.
            Make sense?
            That’s why I like a lot of these little mnemonics.  They’re easy things to keep in the back of my mind and check my work, so to speak, every now and then. Good for starting out, good for later on, too.
            Next time…
            Okay, truth is, I had surgery last Tuesday.  Nothing super-serious, don’t worry, but it was pretty intense and the painkillers have really knocked me for a loop (and really messed with my sleep). Heck, this post was mostly done last week and I couldn’t pull it together long enough to get this up on the site.  Barely got that cartoon up the other day.
            Long story short—no idea if I’ll have a coherent post done for next week.  August might be my lame month.
            At the least, I’ll put up another cartoon. At the best… well, we’ll see how close I am to reality at the given moment.
            As always, please feel free to toss any requests or suggestions in the comments below. Or any handy mnemonics of your own.
            Until then, no matter what… go write.
genremysterysuspensethrillerstipstwist

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