Writing Great Mystery Plots | Hacker News Reader

Writing Great Mystery Plots

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192 pointsjawns19 comments

> I start by writing a brief, extremely dull short story ...about three pages ... I refine it for weeks...

> that small story contains a full, straightforward account of the case my detective must solve, told in simple English. It enumerates who committed the crime and why, how they covered it up, and all the stuff of mystery novels: clues, red herrings, false leads, bloody knives, mysterious scars, anonymous notes, midnight rendezvous — in short, all the details I know I’ll have to omit from the real book I write, the actual mystery novel.

This is gold. Thank you.

Interestingly, it's quite similar to how Raymond Chandler taught himself to write - he took a popular short story (by Erle Stanley Gardner I think), wrote an outline of its plot, and then wrote his own story from the outline and compared it to the original. He clearly didn't keep up the process for his original works; it's interesting to wonder what the result might have been.

Benjamin also used a similar process to learn writing. I've been meaning to try it, but I'm a huge procrastinator.

I did the same, except with Dan Brown. I wrote a bit about this process here: https://gabrielgambetta.com/tgl_swiss_trains.html

Every time this comes up, someone asks to see the actual spreadsheet. I've shared it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HdlD_tmmm1D0zX1JgXzF...

Cool, thanks for sharing!

I remember reading a 3-5 page novel outline that Arthur C Clarke published in one of his short story collections. It was dull, but an interesting insight into his process. I can't seem to find a reference to it now.

"The Sentinel" collection has a bunch of Clarke's early short stories, some of which he later developed into novels:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/149070.The_Sentinel

I've come across some mystery stories (mostly the occasional episode of TV series) where my guess is the writers for a particular episode could have benefited from this approach. If your story doesn't make any sense in a matter-of-fact format like this, I won't make a lick of sense when told properly. This seems like a fantastic way to gauge the soundness of the story you want to tell.

It seems like solid advise, but not sufficient? Having wasted many hours watching tv mystery shows, I’d say that just because the crime is coherent, doesn’t mean it’s compelling. Though it for sure helps, I thought his comment about “is it good enough for serial” is nice advice (unless you want to be subversive of course).

But for me, what matters is the sequence of clues. Too many time it’s just talk to person a, talk to person b, etc, until they hit a “dead end” until the magic revelation/piece of evidence solves it. But for me a real compelling mystery has every piece along for the entire ride. And that’s not really related to the core crime that you sketch out.

It’s definitely not sufficient, but it’s valuable advice because it shows the very starting point, the foot of the ladder. So often advice assumes you’re already at a location very far up the ladder.

But yes, crafting those big revelations is a different and more advanced skill.

> The first impulse of each mystery I write is some crime — or occasionally some enigmatic and ominous image — that gets a grip on me. (A good test I use for these is whether I’d listen to a whole season of Serial about whatever I just made up. If not, I scrap it immediately.)

> But writers often falter when they simply ride that feeling without trying to shape it, which is why Gone Girl is better than nearly every novel that’s been published since it came out. I’m not a complete inspiration skeptic — once in a while, as Hemingway said, you get lucky and write better than you know how to write — but it’s a rare novel that can survive on it exclusively.

Seems like good writing advice in general

Good read. I recommend a similar essay by Ian Fleming on the topic that I love, "How To Write A Thriller" which contains quite a few gems:

https://lithub.com/ian-fleming-explains-how-to-write-a-thril...

> Well, I describe myself as a Writer. There are authors and artists, and then again there are writers and painters

> Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing, even if you only write thrillers, whose heroes are white, the villains black, and the heroines a delicate shade of pink.

> There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page. Yes, indeed :)

> This is why it’s funny when literary novelists who couldn’t write a competent John Wick novelization (I put this challenge squarely to A.S. Byatt) call J.K. Rowling a bad writer.

Neal Stephenson wrote a lengthy reply (item #2) to a question that touched on this topic, posed on Slashdot many moons ago, and is still a great read:

https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...

> I refine it for weeks, as carefully as Rudy Giuliani mixing his old fashioned before he Skypes in to Hannity, because, like Rudy, I’m focused on doing a crime.

Wow did this ever make me laugh out loud, unexpectedly.

> you can be as schematic as James Joyce, notable author of white-hot beach reads,

Another one.

He's basically explaining the snowflake method, right? Start with a most basic explanation of the plot, sometimes just a single sentence that people would use to describe the book. Then slowly build out from there, adding more details in each iteration, until the plot is fully fleshed out. The creative process then switches from "What is this about?", to "How does this go about?".

There’s two plots in a mystery novel: what actually happened, and how the detective figures it out. My understanding is that the short story he describes is the former, and defines the puzzle part of the mystery: what clues are available, where are they, and what do they really mean?

The actual novel, though, is the story of the investigation. It can be written in any way the author likes, so long as the detective only uncovers clues that the prewriting indicates should exist.

One clear example of this distinction is the old Columbo TV series, where the murder happens onscreen at the beginning of each show. The bulk of the time is spent on the mental sparring match between the culprit and the detective.

Not at all. The author isn't talking about constructing the story per se, he's talking about constructing the underlying "problem of logic and deduction" (as Chandler called it) that's demanded by the mystery genre.

That is, he means writing out just where the murderer was going when he dropped his left cuff-link, and whether it happened before or after the second gardener potted that prize-winning tea-rose begonia. Even if those scenes don't appear in the story's narrative, the clues related to them will need to be consistent and form a satisfying puzzle for the reader to pit themselves against (since mystery stories are usually expected to give the reader some kind of chance to guess whodunit).

So the author's saying to work all that out in advance, before considering what scenes to write and what happens in them and so on.

To summarize: write a spec for the crime, that way when you get to development it is consistent and focused.

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