Category Archives: Dale Ivan Smith

Building a Mystery

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For years, my library colleagues would ask when I was going to write that library mystery. Afterall, I read mysteries, was a writer, and worked at library, so it seemed like a natural fit to them. While I thought about it I continued writing fantasy and science fiction.

Finally, in 2020, after I’d retired from the library, the desire to write a cozy library mystery novel grabbed me. As I finished the final novel in my Empowered series, I read a bunch more mysteries of all sorts, from Matthew Scudder to more Agatha Christie to Sara Rosett’s Murder on Location cozy series.

I also read books on writing mysteries: Mystery Writers of America’s How to Write a Mystery, How to Write Killer Fiction by Carolyn Wheat, our own KZB alum Nancy Cohen’s Writing the Cozy Mystery, Sara Rosett’s How to Outline a Cozy Mystery Workbook, as well as her Teachable course on writing cozies. Sara’s course also included interviews with cozy mystery authors like Lynn Cahoon and Anna Castle. I discovered very useful handouts at Castle’s website from a workshop she gave on mystery writing.

I read more mysteries, and watched mystery TV series like Midsomer Murders, Elementary, Monk, the new Father Brown series, Perry Mason, and Columbo.

My published fantasy novels had crime and mystery elements, so writing an actual murder mystery should be a snap, right?

I wasn’t surprised it wasn’t that easy. I consider actual mystery novels to be one of the hardest types of fiction to write, and took the challenge seriously, which was a good thing. From the time I began outlining my first library cozy mystery, then called Death Due, until I published the final version, A Shush Before Dying, over two years had passed. I wrote three different versions, with numerous outlines. I did a deep dive into upping my revision game after finishing the first draft.

The second book in the series, Book Drop Dead came faster, being completed in year.

I’m an outliner, who, once upon a time, discovery wrote (AKA “pantsed”) his novels. For me, figuring out story structure was the secret that unlocked being able to create a story that worked. Mysteries were no different.

Cozy mysteries, like other mysteries, usually center around a murder. For me, that meant learning who the murderer was, and why they committed the crime, before outlining the book. I began each book by creating an electronic document file which became a novel journal where I could brainstorm about the mystery, the killer’s shadow story (something I learned from our own James Scott Bell), spin out the web of suspects, background notes, and simple outlines I could flesh out later.

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Mystery foundation

These make up the foundation of the mystery I’m building, and key to my process is asking myself questions about each.

Killer: Who and why? What lead them to kill, and why did they murder the victim? How do they react when they learn they are being investigated by our sleuth-hero?

The Victim: Often someone who is despicable in at least some of the time, and often at the center of a conflict, but they can be something other than a jerk—quirky perhaps, misunderstood, or even a good person who ran afoul of a killer. What was their relationship with the killer?

The setting: the location and community where the murder takes place. For my own cozy mystery, the setting was easy: the public library. I wanted the era to be the 1980s, when I began my at-first accidental career. This was the library before the Internet, when the card catalog ruled and staff used “dumb” terminals to check out books, stamping the date dues on a label on a page at the front of the book.

The public library then and now is a community in its own right, as well as a meeting ground for other communities, which provide opportunities for all sorts of situations and characters. How does the setting shape the murder, and the investigation?

The sleuth-hero: What pushes them to investigate the murder instead of leaving it to the police? Amateur sleuths are often nosy, curious, driven to solve puzzles. This describes my librarian-sleuth Meg Booker. The hero may be motivated to solve the crime because of personal concern if a friend is the suspect or survival if they themselves fall under suspicion.

In other cases, it may be the sense that thing about the murder doesn’t fit the facts as the police see them. The hero must have a reason to investigate and discovering that reason is vital. In cozy mystery the reason is often personal. The sleuth may have a connection to the victim, or to the person the police believe is the killer, as is the case in my first Meg Booker mystery.

The Web of Suspects:  For me an ideal number of suspects is five to seven. The motivations can be similar, but it helps build the mystery if at least some have different motives for murder. For instance, two suspects might both be rivals with the murder victim for a job promotion, while three more have possible motives unrelated to the day job.

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Plotting

The next thing I like to tackle is my story structure. I’m a fan of our own James Scott Bell’s signposts, such as the opening Disturbance, the Doorway to Act II, and especially the Mirror Moment. I brainstorm how the murder plays out, how the sleuth’s investigation begins and progresses, and what the killer does in response.

I’m an outliner, so I began putting the mystery into a beat outline, with sign posts marked and key scenes laid out. I’ll do additional brainstorming in a novel journal, a separate electronic document.

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The Arc of Suspicion

I also work out what I call “the arc of suspicion,” which is the sleuth-hero and readers progression in who they suspect committed the crime. I posted about this here. I’m going to crib from that earlier post and share the beats of the suspicion arc. I don’t necessarily write all these out, but keep them in mind as the story progresses, brainstorming as needed:

  1. The arc begins with noticing something is off about someone’s behavior, or a set of circumstances.
  2. Doubt ensues.
  3. Then, discovering “evidence” which increases suspicion. This can be an overheard conversation, reading a note or email, seeing a meeting without hearing what is being said, looking at a pattern of behavior, perhaps behavior out of character for the suspect, etc.
  4. Discovering a lie, or a false alibi can heighten suspicion.
  5. There can be a deepening fixation on a suspect’s behavior, words, deeds, and trying to figure out what they were thinking, why they did what they did, etc.
  6. Acting on that suspicion to the point of taking risks and putting yourself in potential jeopardy. This often precedes the confrontation/reveal in the final act of a mystery.
  7. Given that mysteries usually have multiple suspects, there will be a point where the sleuth (and the reader) rule out a person because of evidence, alibi, or learning what the secret was that made a particular individual act suspicious to the main character.
  8. Of course, heroes and readers often suspect more than one character at the same time, so the arcs can overlap. Sometimes the behavior or evidence is one thing, which leads to doubt about a particular person. Doubt which might deepen to suspicion or might simmer in the background. Or, even forgotten for the moment, until the end, when new evidence makes the sleuth suddenly suspect that person with a cold-in-the-bones feeling.
  9. Finally, the sleuth’s suspicions lead to the actual killer and/or can lead the killer to them.

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Drafting

As I write the first draft, I’ll come up with new ideas, clues etc., and, if they make the grade, will add them to my outline.

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Revision and feedback

Revision is where I work to fix plot holes, add missing clues, clarify motives if needed, along with the usual revision tasks of improving scenes, pacing, characterization, setting details etc. I then send the revised novel to my beta readers, who give me invaluable feedback on whether the mystery worked for them, where they were surprised, if they guessed the identity of the murderer, etc. I then make any additional changes based their feedback.

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The resources which helped me learn how to build a mystery

Nancy Cohen’s Writing the Cozy Mystery. Nancy’s book provides an instructive break down of the elements of a cozy mystery.

Sara Rosett’s How to Outline a Cozy Mystery. Rosett  gives the building blocks of a cozy mystery, as well as different outlining methods, tips on clues and red-herrings, conventions of cozies etc. While Rosett’s online course on writing a cozy mystery appears to be no longer available, the book still is.

Carolyn Wheat How to Write Killer Fiction. Wheat looks “the funhouse of mystery” as well as the “rollercoaster of thriller,” and reading the book gives a useful comparison between the two as well as the elements of each.

Hallie Ephron Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel. Ephron’s book is a deep dive into the elements of mystery, looking at plotting, characters, mystery, sense of place, revision, as well as advice on publishing, both traditional and self-publishing.

Mystery Writers of America How to Write a Mystery. A collection of essays by mystery masters also covers the different aspects of mystery fiction.

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So, this is how I build a mystery. If you write mysteries, what tips you do have?

Revision Block

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The proverbial brick wall.

Every writer has heard of writer’s block. Whether they believe in it or not, it’s been part of the conversation and lore around writing for a very long time. One of my favorite movies about fiction writing, Throw Momma From the Train, opens with Billy Crystal’s character blocked on the opening of his next novel. “The night was…moist,” he types. He crumbles up the paper and tries again, but remains stuck.

I believe writer’s block is either caused by genuinely not knowing where to begin or where the story goes next, or by fear—fear of exposing yourself, fear of failure, fear of simply screwing up, etc.

It turns out, for me at least, there’s also “revision block,” which I define as an inability to begin revising and/or being unable to finish a rewrite.

Perhaps you don’t know how to fix the issues you’ve found in your draft. Maybe you don’t know  where to start a revision. Maybe you don’t feel like you are making any real progress in rewriting your novel, or the revision seems to go nowhere.

Usually when I revise a novel, I dive in and begin immediately rewriting. With the five books in my Empowered urban fantasy thriller series, revision was a fairly straight-forward process, mostly fixing continuity errors, making sure things were clear, and keeping the tension mounting.

The first novel in the series, Agent, did require a complete voice edit at the direction of my developmental editor, Mary Rosenblum. Her observation that my hero’s voice was completely wrong gave me revision block for all of two minutes, but I recognized the problem she had identified, and set out to deal with it. Over five weeks, I went through the novel word by word to get the first person narrator’s voice right.

It was time well spent.

The rest of the series, as well as my two stand alone novels, didn’t require nearly that level of revision. There was usually a point during each where I felt stymied, but I always worked out what the problem was and finished the revision.

Things became more tangled when I turned to revising my first mystery, A Shush Before Dying, in 2021. I knew the first draft had serious problems. It was my first mystery novel, after all. The mystery storyline was clearly not ready for prime time. The red herrings, the suspects with secrets, the narrative head-fakes, the planted clues, I needed to work all these out, as well as learn how to layer in them into the narrative with subtly and misdirection. It took time, lots of time.

Progress on the second draft slowed until, in late 2022, I realized I was stuck.

The solution: I wrote a new high-level outline of the book. I took out everything in the manuscript save for the cozy subplot, and then began writing a third draft, which came together quickly. After revising that draft, I sent it to my beta readers, who gave me feedback, which was largely very positive. The final edits were mostly of the continuity and clarity variety, along with of course copy edits.

Book Drop Dead, the second novel in the series, took seven months to draft. By that point my writing process for mysteries was to work out the killer’s “shadow story” and the murder, followed by mapping out the investigation, and sketching a cozy subplot, all of which go into a detailed outline. As I drafted, I came up with more ideas, connections, clues etc., which could cause me to repeatedly pause as I worked out those ideas and any problems which arose.

I began the revision shortly before my annual writer’s retreat, Rainforest, in February 2024. It was work, and involved a several new scenes, as well as some rejiggering of the storyline but came together fairly quickly It was also fun in an intense, up against a deadline sort of way. I finished it, sent it to my betas, who had some great feedback. I rewrote the book one last time and then had it copy edited, and proofed. It was published in June 2024.

The third Meg Booker mystery, Fine Me Deadly, turned out to be a different beast.

The book also took seven months to draft, again in a halting start-stop fashion. The storyline was complicated, to put it mildly.

Granted, mysteries are always complicated, at least for me, and involve a great deal of skull sweat. My first two mysteries had passed muster with readers, including a former library colleague who had been our branch’s “mystery maven,” who possessed a deep knowledge of the genre, but I’d also heard how complex each was.

As with Book Drop Dead, I reoutlined Fine Me Deadly in a rolling fashion while drafting and kept a novel journal where I brainstormed as needed, outlined new plot twists, etc. I finished the draft in mid-January, and decided, for the first time, to put the book aside for several weeks, and then come back to it with fresh eyes, advice many writers have discussed here at the Kill Zone.

When I returned to it while at Rainforest in late February of this year, I read through a printed out copy of the novel in two days, and wrote a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline of the drafted novel, as well as lots of margin and in line notes. I returned home, unfortunately with Covid, which interrupted the revision.

When I recovered, I realized the book needed a great deal of work. The plot had logic holes and worse, the mystery storyline itself didn’t work.

So, I began working on outlining the second draft. This stretched for months, also in a start-stop fashion.

It became obvious by late summer that I was blocked on the revision. So I spent more time trying to figure out why. I finally wrote a new, high-level “major plot points” outline, along with making some major changes to a few relationships, including my sleuth now having a friendship with the murder victim. I was all set to begin revising the actual manuscript.

I decided to try an idea suggested by author Matt Bell in his book on novel writing, Refuse to Be Done. The advice, he notes, is the one thing people never want to hear: retype the whole draft into a fresh document. The idea is you’ll make changes as you retype, with your new outline for the revised version at hand. I did this for the first couple of chapters, writing a whole new scene at the opening, and then another new couple of scenes as well as changing existing ones.

Then I hit a wall. Revision block returned in full force. Despite all my work on re-outlining the book during and after the draft, after the draft the book’s narrative still felt forced and my brain just couldn’t get going on writing new material.

Why did revision block return, and so powerfully? While I knew the storyline, it remained extremely complicated and very twisty, especially for a cozy mystery. There were many moving parts. Too many. True, as readers had noted, the first two novels in the series also had complex mysteries, but this one went much further, into a bewildering, intricate puzzle box, which exceeded my own ability to fix.

The solution would be to cut out a lot of the complication, focus more on the cozy. Really, rework the novel into something simpler.

However, I realized there was another reason I was blocked:

I had run out of creative energy for this novel.

I came to realize, for me at least, there’s a finite amount of creative energy to be spent on a book.  I’d expended all of mine on Fine Me Deadly. I’d also created a storyline that sounded compelling in outline, but didn’t work out in practice. Yes, I had the elements of a mystery, including a cast of suspects, the head-fakes, secrets etc., but I’d put a lot of espionage elements into this cozy mystery, and created my own writer’s wilderness of mirrors adding further  the complexity.

All of this caused me to lose interest and burn out on the book.

So, this week, after considerable thought and separate discussions with two author friends, I decided to put the book a drawer for the time being, and move on to a new project.

As with writer’s block, the first step in solving revision block is to figure out why. It could be something as simple as a plot hole that needs fixing, and a high-level outline will do the trick. It might be because you’re afraid to make changes, and getting past that fear will get things moving again.

Then again, it might be that taking a break and writing a different novel will give you the distance you need, and also the chance to rekindle your love for that particular book.

Certainly I need some time to clear my head. I’m now writing something different, in a different genre, and giving myself the chance to play with a simpler storyline.

After I finish the new novel, I’ll see where I’m at. It could be I’m done with Meg Booker. Or it could turn out that all I needed was to write a new, different book to refresh my creativity energy and desire in order to finally revise Fine Me Deadly. Time will tell.

Have you ever encountered revision block? If so, how did you get past it?