Monday, April 25, 2016

Knowing Whodunnit before Writing the Story

In the last article, I wrote about coming up with a protagonist. Now I'm going to write about what I knew I had to know next before beginning to write the story.

I needed to know whodunnit and how. (I will do my best not to reveal any spoilers.)

The following is important, and something that I certainly didn't come up with: Before you write a mystery, you need to know the answer. Even if you're not the sort of writer who outlines before writing, it is essential to know the end of the story before beginning on it.

Why is this important? All throughout the story, you'll need to drop clues, make characters say suspicious or misleading things. That's because the reader is hunting for the answer to the mystery. Even if there are twists that snicker in the reader's face, the reader wants to make sense of the story and believe they are on the path to the answer. They want to catch that place where you foreshadow something or try to make an important clue slip by them.

Foreshadowing and planting clues is hard to do if you don't already know the answer to the mystery, and it may be more difficult than you expect to go back and rewrite the story to make the clues fit.

Knowing this, the next thing I did when planning my mystery is decide whodunnit and how.

It wasn't as simple as that. To understand my characters, I needed to have a setting to put the events in context. I've read that most successful stories transport the reader to someplace other than the world of day-to-day life. Well, I wanted to set the story in more-or-less contemporary Denver. What else, I wondered, could I do to make Denver a special place? Again I circled back to "write what you know." I knew some of the insides of Denver Democratic politics and could write credibly about it. That had promise. The story could be not just a murder mystery but cross over into political thriller.

What about a politician quietly suspected of murder? Good so far, but could I raise the stakes? What about a politician suspected of murder in the middle of a campaign? Better, but could I raise the stakes some more and make the situation very concrete. What about a Democratic candidate for Colorado's Congressional District 1 (which includes Denver) suspected of murder during a mid-term campaign where the race could decide the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives?

There, I had my setting. Not just place, but context.

Working out the whodunnit is hard to explain without being a spoiler, so I'll reveal as best as I can the mechanics I followed without revealing important parts of the plot.

First I decided that I wanted a mystery that was complicated unless you understood something not obvious. From there, I worked out who killed whom and how and why. Then I invented plausible reasons for evidence to be missing, reasons that drew other people into the case.

All along, I cataloged the characters involved. Once I had my basic ideas down, I embellished the characters, giving them details such as their wants, secrets and conflicts.

With the character list in place, I finished drafting a synopsis of who did what that was linked to the mystery in any way. That was to be my story guidebook, the real truth that must ultimately be revealed, but only disclosed in bits and pieces to the reader along the way, sometimes as lies. I reminded myself that it was only a guidebook. Since I like to plan a little upfront but mostly discover a story by the process of writing it, I consciously gave myself permission to depart from the synopsis so long as I considered the ramifications of the change.

So, it appears that working out whodunnit in your story entails not just knowing the secret to the mystery but also the setting--place and context--of the story. It also means knowing the list of characters that are linked to the mystery in some way. If you are like me, you may find it helpful to expand the list of characters and the answer to the mystery into a full synopsis (just a few paragraphs) that captures who did what that is linked to the mystery, and use that synopsis as a guidebook for planting clues, bits of the truth that may sometimes be hidden as lies. Don't be afraid to depart from your guidebook if you discover the story works better that way.

So that's why and how I worked out whodunnit in my story before beginning to write it. Let me know if this helps you.