
Writing Great Mystery Plots - jawns
https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/charles-finch-on-how-he-writes-charles-lenox-mysteries.html
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LeonB
> 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.

~~~
fenomas
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.

~~~
ggambetta
I did the same, except with Dan Brown. I wrote a bit about this process here:
[https://gabrielgambetta.com/tgl_swiss_trains.html](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...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HdlD_tmmm1D0zX1JgXzFVSFB9nk6LT_DMDnsIPugl0M/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
WA
Cool, thanks for sharing!

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_bxg1
> 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

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NotCamelCase
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...](https://lithub.com/ian-fleming-explains-how-to-write-a-thriller/)

> 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.

~~~
sweetdreamerit
> 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 :)

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wainstead
> 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-...](https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-
responds-with-wit-and-humor)

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hellofunk
> 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.

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once_inc
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?".

~~~
kd5bjo
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.

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

