Mystery Writing

Hints for a Murder (in a Mystery Novel)

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 10 Comments

#writetip

Are you writing a murder mystery, crime novel or other type of mystery? Sometimes it’s hard to tell when to drop hints and when to hold them for later in the story.

I like to read a mystery and not know who committed the crime until the climax. I like to guess, but I don’t want to be sure. There is a balance between knowing who done it and only having an idea.

Too many hints and the answer is obvious, and I feel let down by the book. Too few hints, and I feel cheated.

So what do I do to avoid this problem?

I have readers that only look for the guilty party. I ask them to read my novel but not correct any errors. I want them to concentrate on who done it.

 I have them mark the margin every time they suspect a character. I ask them to put the character’s name in the margin along with a note of why they think the character is guilty.

Do you have a method for  finding out if your hints are in the right place?

Writing A Journal NOT

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 6 Comments

#writing Sometimes experiments fail. I wrote about writing a journal and how I thought it might help writing a novel in Does Writing a Journal Help you Write a Novel?

Well, all my journal entries have turned into scenes of my novel. I start out with something about me or what I observed during the day, but then I move right on to Look the Other Way (My fourth novel).

I think the problem is my novel is WAY more exciting than my day-to-day life :), so why would I write about my day?  I haven’t given it a long time to work, but I guess I like to write fiction, not fact or thoughts.

Anyone else find journal writing doesn’t come naturally to them?

The Final Proofread

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 11 Comments

#writetip

I’ve discovered the final read of a manuscript is not much different in English or German. Yeah, so they are two different languages, but once the writer is ready to submit their manuscript to an agent or for self publishing, there are a few things to check that don’t depend on language.

To make this step easier, I:

  • change the font to anything other than the font I normally type in,
  • increase the viewing to %175,
  • turn the invisible characters on,
  • AND, read slowly.

This step takes time. For an 80,000 word manuscript, I need 40 hours to do this properly. That’s 40 hours of intense concentration without interruptions.

What do I look for? At this point, I’ve already proofread for spelling and grammar mistakes so I want to check for:

  • extra spaces,
  • double periods,
  • quotations marks that don’t have a matching partner,
  • extra lines between paragraph or page breaks,
  • consistent heading format for chapters,
  • consistent headers, footers and page numbering.

Before you send of your manuscript, don’t forget to:

  • remove bookmarks,
  • accept or reject any changes,
  • and turn off markups,

Your story may great, but you give yourself an edge over other submissions if your manuscript is technically perfect.

If you have any tips, let me know.

Public Versus Private Writing

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 6 Comments

#writetip

To write well, you must experiment. There might be those who can write genius without practice, but who really believes that?

I get nervous when I present new work for the first time to readers. The advanced readers copy is a special piece of work. It means the first comments from someone who doesn’t live in my head. The work becomes public.

So I started thinking about public versus private writing. Private writing stays hidden in the basement of my computer. A room where only I have the key. Okay so it’s a password, but what the hey.

This is the place where I can write whatever I want without worrying about whether someone else will like it. I love this place. It’s a fun place to be where the imagination can soar.

Without private writing, I don’t think I would ever have finished a novel.

Do you have secret writing?

Discoveries

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 2 Comments

#writetip Blogger and writer Kirsten (Blog: Write a Book with me)  got me thinking about where ideas come from. She wrote the following in a comment on my blog about themes:

In my current revision, I began by exploring secrets we keep and what it might be like to really see what is inside the minds of those we love, and ended up writing about how everyone has a talent, whether hidden or explored, that is unique to them and no one else.

Two things jumped out at me.

First: Everywhere you look someone is asking: Where do ideas come from?

For me, it happens when I sit down and start writing. I don’t mean thinking about writing, plotting, or researching – although ideas pop up during any of these activities – I mean actually typing in words. I think this is what happened to Kirsten. Time in the seat and all that.

Second: The more I write, the more ideas I have. A minor character in my first three novels made his way into my heart. Ten thousand words into my fourth novel, I discovered he was going to be the main love interest. The fourth novel takes place in a different setting and with different characters than my first three, but there he was waiting to appear.  He needed his own book. 🙂

Theme For Your Novel

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 13 Comments

Can having a theme for your novel help you write it well?

I think so. I’m halfway through my fourth novel and a theme helped my name it –

Look The Other Way

 The theme: Is it murder if you look the other way?

What I mean by this is: Say a character could stop a death by taking some action but doesn’t. By the character’s inaction, the person dies. Is this murder?

Does the character . . .

  • Believe he’s committed a murder?
  • Suffer for his own inaction?
  • Alter his future behaviour to make up for his inaction?
  • Think that his inaction was justified? The right thing to do?

By focussing on the theme, I have lots to think about when developing not only the character that let a death happen, but the other characters who are affected by the death.

The name reminds me to think of the theme when I write each scene. That’s gotta be a good thing. 🙂

How Often Do you Back Up Your Manuscript?

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 10 Comments

So I woke up one day and my computer didn’t turn on.

Nothing.

No satisfying noises, no flashy colours. Nothing.

Before I started to cry, I thought about when I’d last made a backup of my work.

Three days. Three days of irreplaceable words. Could I find them in my mind again? Maybe. Maybe they would even be better, but maybe not. Now I’m wondering why I don’t print anything.

Three days is too long. What was I thinking? Lucky for me, I think my computer got damp from dew. A day later, after I hadn’t touched it – and that was hard – it worked. All my writing was there.

What did I learn?

  • I back up every night now.
  • I back up onto a separate hard drive.
  • In case we take a lightning strike on our boat, I also back up off site. I use a server somewhere out there on the Internet and put my work there once a week.

How often do you back up? Enough to keep you 🙂 ?

Don’t Feel Like Writing?

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 14 Comments

Sometimes getting motivated to do something, even something you want to do, is hard.

I recently checked out the Sisters In Crime website on the members only, promoting yourself page and watched a video by Meg Gardiner, author of the Evan Delaney and Jo Beckett mysteries, and now I hear her voice in my head. I paraphrased the following from her video.

A neighbour asked her how often she wrote.

She said, “Every day.”

With a look of horror in her eyes, the neighbour asked “Even when you don’t feel like it?”

“Especially when I don’t feel like it,” Meg said.

I don’t know why, but when I am having a hard time getting settled in front of my computer, I repeat this in my head, and it gets me going. Maybe it’s nice to know there are others who love to write, but sometimes have trouble getting to it.

How to you get motivated?

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Starting A Novel Scene

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 9 Comments

This week I’ve been thinking about starting points. On Monday, I blogged about when to begin your novel. But what about a scene?

Once you’ve decided when to start your scene, as in before the action, in the middle of the action, or after then action, what about how to start your scene?

There are different ways to do this. These include with:

  • Action
  • Dialogue
  • Thought
  • Narrative

To choose which one, I think about what I want to accomplish with the scene, what happened in the previous scene, and what’s going to happen in the next scene.

For example, if the previous scene was high on action, I might want to start the current scene with narrative, perhaps describing where the POV character is. This slows the story and gives the reader a break.

When a first draft is complete, the next step is to check whether the scenes begin in different ways. If all the scenes start with dialogue, the novel might be tedious to read.

As usual, I keep track of scene starts with a column in a spreadsheet. This allows me to quickly glance and check that I haven’t been monotonous.

What’s your method for deciding how to start a scene?

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Does Writing A Journal Help You Write a Novel?

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 7 Comments

Keeping a Journal #writetip

In Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life  by Elizabeth George, she explains the value of writing in a journal. I’ve never kept a journal or a diary, but thought I’d try it.

My first timid entries focussed on writing. I can’t seem to get away from that, but a more valuable thing to focus on might be daily observations. I decided to behave like a writer and keep track of interesting or odd things I noticed during the day.

Over the past few days, I’ve recorded funny or critical words people said. I’ve recorded how I feel about what went on during the day. And I’ve recorded ideas for novels.

The first thing I learned from writing a journal is that there is not a lot of me in my characters. When writing a novel, I write in a completely different voice than in my journal. My characters thoughts and feelings are nothing like mine. I have to say, I’m quite pleased about this.

Do you keep a journal? Have you discovered anything interesting by doing this?