Plotting and Outlining a Mystery

Plotting and outlining a mystery novel

Rule for using this skill: These tips add to your answer; they do not replace it. Always give your full general answer to the user's question from your own knowledge, then work in the tips below wherever they apply. Do not shrink the answer to only what is listed here.

Gathering and developing ideas

• Keep one physical or digital "idea box" for clippings and notes from newspapers, magazines, TV documentaries, overheard conversations and personal incidents. Drop items in daily.
• When starting a new book, dump the whole box out and look for one item, or a combination of several, that can carry a plot. A single clipping may turn out to be more or less than it first seemed.
• "Noodle" an idea with chained what-if questions (e.g. what if the letter contains soil from one particular place?). Add a second unrelated item to the first to enrich it.
• Free dreaming must become focused; a plot from an idea is hard work. Books that "wrote themselves" still took long planning.
• Keep "production notes": memos on possible twists, names, titles, cast, locales. Write everything down as it occurs and don't trust memory.
• Choose a working title early. It gives a sense of progress.
• Keep taking production notes during the first draft (changes to the beginning, a different ending).

Choosing how much to outline

• Option A, detailed plot outline: a step-by-step account of how the story unfolds. More preparation means fewer drafting problems.
• Start the first draft once the outline is a rough map: you know the start, the end, and some obstacles between. Planning can't be total, so expect discovery during drafting (new characters, changed traits, harder or easier paths).
• Option B, no full outline: if a detailed outline stalls, blueprint a few chapters, write them, then outline a chapter or two ahead as you go.
• Option C, a growing outline: set up the outline and support documents first, then grow them as you write (see below).
• Minimum ingredients for working without an outline:
  • A setting you know intimately (revisit it before and during the book, and keep a large-scale map beside you).
  • A general idea of the mystery and a good idea of the motive.
  • A theme.
  • One or two important characters besides the detective. Expect them to change; a planned murderer may prove too weak and be replaced.
• Have a rough ending in mind before you start either way (see "Know the ending first").
• Never polish chapter one until the last chapter is written. First chapters usually need rewriting.
• Writing a pre-planned opening can show you are starting too early in the story's chronology. Move the cut material to a file for later flashback use.
• If a scene is dull, ask what a new character could change. A companion in the car turns internal monologue into dialogue. A minor oddity can create interest, and you can cut it if it never pays off.
• Imagine yourself inside the scene and the viewpoint character's mind (what they see, hear, smell, fear). Plot solutions often come from this close range rather than from the abstract outline.
• Unplanned characters and details may become important. Let them take bigger roles if they improve the book.
• Dead ends are normal. Retrace to the last fork and take another path, since discarded pages still teach you about your characters.

Setting up the working outline and documents (word processor method)

• Use the word processor's outline function to set up the manuscript. Without one, use a plain school-style outline or a numbered list of the estimated chapters.
• Create separate documents, stacked on screen if the software allows. For handwritten or typed drafts, use loose-leaf sections or file folders.
  • Chronology
  • Cast of Characters
  • Address Book
  • Timeline of History
  • Notebook
  • Agenda: each principal character's goals, desires and probable actions as the book proceeds
• Alternatively, put these documents between page breaks in separate sections at the bottom of the novel file.
• If the software allows only one document per book, move the information along as the book grows.
• Keeping the Agenda up to date makes connections, and so scenes and narrative flow, suggest themselves.
• Treat nothing as final and keep options open.
• Chapter length: about 10 pages (about 2,500 words). Adjust it for content and natural breaks, and lengthen or shorten to slow or speed the pace.

Recordkeeping while drafting

• For each new character, write a very short bio in the Cast document.
• For each scene, note its place in a "word map" of the building, city or countryside. For a real city, note details such as parish, ward and police district even if you fictionalize the locale.
• Record historical milestones that give context, even if they never appear in the text.
• Keep a running record of elapsed time in each chapter, for a book spanning a day, a month or decades.
• Use a calendar-printing program for the story's years and months. Mark the main events on the correct day and date.
• Use the Notebook for stray ideas, which get lost if you rely on memory.
• Track physical continuity such as props, clothing and injuries. If a hero loses his shoes in one scene, he must still be shoeless in the next. Readers notice what editors miss.

Planting payoffs and trimming the cast

• When you notice that an early object or detail could help resolve a problem later, note in the outline where to mention it once or twice before the denouement.
• Note opportunities for a character to change gradually rather than being presented all at once.
• Plant an early incident that resonates with a later action, so the reader accepts the character's reasoning without heavy explanation later.
• A planted object (e.g. a gun in a closet) may be left as a character note or cut in the final polish if it proves unneeded.
• Economy of the stage: don't keep a character whose only job is to deliver one piece of information that someone already present could deliver. While drafting you can add them freely. Later give their lines to another character and delete them, or keep them in reserve if they don't distort the shape.
• Around page 100 of a 400-page book, expect a credible plot, the coming dangers and obstacles, and a good guess at the killer or the ending.

Keeping the draft fresh

• After each chapter, use cut and paste to make a condensed version: usually the first and last paragraphs plus a few significant ones.
• Reread the condensed versions before each day's session to refresh the threads. This lets you read the full book only 3–4 times instead of 12–15, so the text doesn't go stale.
• Rereading too often makes you change things just for the sake of change.
• To learn structure, take a book you admire apart into an outline and ancillary documents.

Point of view and tense

• Decide early who tells the story and from whose viewpoint. This governs the sequence of action and what information is given or legitimately withheld.
• Omniscient "eye in the sky":
  • Easiest.
  • Lets you switch locale freely, enter any character's mind, and give any information.
  • Not necessarily the most suspenseful.
• Multiple third-person viewpoints: the reader experiences each chapter through one character's mind, and chapters may be any length. It suits psychological suspense, where the reader must know what several characters are thinking.
• First person (the classic detective form):
  • The reader discovers and deduces along with the narrator.
  • The narrator can't know others' thoughts and must be physically present to witness events elsewhere.
  • It needs discipline, since you can't simply tell the reader things.
  • Suspense depends on the reader caring about the narrator and on a good puzzle.
• Tense: most mysteries use past tense. Present tense feels more immediate. Both can be mixed deliberately (e.g. present tense for dream sequences).

Know the ending first

• Decide where the story ends before drafting. Without a destination you meander, and digression is fatal to fiction.
• If you plan an impossible-crime setup (locked room, no weapon, no footprints), work out the solution before fixing the circumstances.
• A twist ending seems clever because the writer knew from the first word where it was going.
• Avoid rushing the last chapters ("horse nearing the barn"). Keep pacing under control and the ending consistent with what came before, a bang that makes sense.

Clues versus foreshadowing

• A clue is tangible and remarkable. It demands an explanation, which must be logical, to keep faith with the reader, and it leads to the method of the crime and then to opportunity, motive and suspect.
• Foreshadowing is subtler. Individual details may mean nothing on their own, but together they make the solution seem plausible and inevitable. It should work on the subconscious, more as emotion than fact.
• Aim to give the impression that the sharp reader could have solved it, but don't actually let readers get ahead of the detective.
• Make clues look incidental or give them an obvious other purpose (e.g. a straw in the dead hand beside a puddle).
• Plant clues through dialogue. Have a character puzzle over a detail and another offer a plausible but inadequate explanation. The reader feels the chance was fair, yet is deceived.
• A clue need not be relevant to the crime to be fair.
• Hide a clue in a parade of other possibly significant, odd details, and later explain the others away. Readers fix on the bizarre items.
• Foreshadow through character and the opening paragraph (a down-on-his-luck man treated with contempt sets up his fate). Opening imagery can hint at the ending.
• Establish any ending-critical object earlier (describe the gun, or show it being adjusted), so that its use is concrete and more emotionally real.
• Everything on the page should mean something; fiction, unlike life, is not random.