Mysteries

[jethrien]

I've always been in awe of mystery writers. Getting all the clues in order so that there's a satisfying ending that doesn't feel like a cheat...it just always seemed too hard. One thing for certain, I was not ever going to write a mystery.

Yeah, one guess what this book has turned into.

There's a spreadsheet now. With the various suspects, why they're suspicious, what evidence points to them, and at what point they get eliminated (and what eliminates them). Oy. Self. What are you doing.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

The problem I always found with mysteries while editing is that the story has to make sense backward and forward--it has to make sense as you read it, and it has to make sense in retrospect, knowing everything, that that's how people would act. (Agatha Christie I'M LOOKING AT YOU.) Really, though, I've always found the main problem to be the artificialness of the bulk of the book being exposition, with important information arbitrarily withheld due to the order you talk to the suspects.

So yeah. You haven't given yourself an easy task. You're way ahead of a lot of authors with your spreadsheet, though. I can think of one who I edited who pantsed his mysteries and it goddam showed.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I know, which is why I hadn't wanted to write one. But the bulk of the book is them playing cat and mouse with a mysterious antagonist, who turns out to be someone everyone was introduced to earlier in the book. (No Mwah ha ha evil genius in the shadows no one knew existed.) So for them to not know who it is but not be total idiots, I need to throw in a bunch of red herrings. And suddenly, bam, mystery.

I have basically an entire bare bones outline of a set of scenes I'm not actually writing in which the antagonist reacts to what they're doing, so that the next move makes logical sense. It's...oh god, it's so complicated. What did I do to myself. But I'm trying so hard not to have anyone holding an idiot ball. People need to make reasonable decisions given the information they have, and they need good reasons not to share information. (The fact the main characters are on opposite sides of a feud is at least keeping them from comparing notes for a little while...and I'm planning to have them actually surprise the villain by getting over themselves and comparing notes earlier than expected. The whole "this could be resolved with one conversation" thing is not happening.) But that means everything has to be set up just right so they can do the things I want them to do, but not be stupid for doing it.

I have so many notes at this point. A background info bible, a set of family trees, a running chronology that goes back like 70 years just so I could make sure the personal family histories lined up with the alt world history, a set of costume references, the aforementioned whodunnit chart, an outline that includes master character motivations and parenthetical "this is what the villain's doing now" notes...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I am laughing so hard right now. OMG.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

You're writing the Silmarilion, aren't you?

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

No, I'm really not. But it's alt-history, which means I need to know what actually happened vs what I want to happen. And, well, it turns out if you don't want to have your characters do the obvious stupid thing, it takes a lot of work...