There are plenty of different words for it; a talent, a purpose, a sixth sense, a calling. Everyone is good at something no matter who you are or what you do. For some people it may be playing the flute. For others, it could be playing football or babysitting. Someone could even have two things that they are skilled at and have to juggle activities. You could even combine your talents to get a dream job. Say you are good at writing poems, but your also talented with playing music. Your ultimate career choice would be a song writer. But first, you need to find something that you are good at. For me, what I'm skilled at doing and what I love to do are the same things. My passion is to write stories, specifically mystery stories for the challenge. If you would like to learn how to do something like this, there are four main things that you need to know or be able to do: how to come up with compelling characters, how to elaborate, how to develop good organization skills, and remember the components that all mystery stories need to have. A good tip to remember while you're writing is that you are never done writing.
The first step in developing your mystery story is to come up with some characters. Now, that doesn't mean that you just think of a gender and a name. What it means is that you need to develop a character with specific physical features who has a conscience, a personality, a relationship with other characters, and feeling that lead him/her to do the things that he/she does. In order for your readers to get absorbed into your mystery story, they have to feel a connection to your characters, whether its good or bad. They need to feel that your character is a real life person who is out there, somewhere in the world, continuing your story exactly where you left off. That is one of the ways to hook a reader.
Another important part of writing a story is detail. Something that is important to describe is the setting. That is how you get a mental picture running through your reader's head. If you were watching tv and you closed your eyes, you would still kind of get the gist of what's going on, wouldn't you? That's because there's a lot of different ways that shows give you hints on what's going on; things like music, sound effects, and sometimes a narrator. That's a good thing to strive for when your writing your book. Imaging you're writing the most important scene in your book: the scene where the crime takes place. You're not going to want to say, "the man took the wallet from the purse." You need to add some descriptive words. Instead say, " the sneaky man slid his wrinkled hand into the pocket book. As he snuck his hand back out, it was clutching a small wallet." A good question you can always ask yourself before settling with a passage would be: would I actually want to read this? If you don't like what you've read, save your self some time and just go back and edit it.
Organization is also a key part in a mystery novel, not only when you're writing your story, but when your preparing to write it. First, you need to get your area organized. You can't keep your thoughts together if you have hundreds of papers spilling off of your desk. You might not get your papers in the right order when your putting it together for a presentation, and you won't get it published. You need to have lots of spare paper handy to continue thoughts and scribble down some ideas for later. You don't want to lose any ideas, because you need to know where to take your story.
Make sure to include clues in your story, as it is a key part in a mystery novel. At the end of every good mystery, there is the part where a character tells how he/she solved the mystery. You can't piece a puzzle together without the pieces. Some readers like to try and solve the mystery for themselves instead of just hang around for the ride. Some people will get pretty ticked off if you don't included some of the hints in the beginning but they magically appear at the end when the character is explaining.
People connect to characters in stories through emotional scenes and feelings that characters experience. Without the connection, the readers feel no need to continue to read. So you can't even call them 'readers' anymore. They're just people that used to enjoy your stories. To avoid that, just remember to have compelling characters, details, good organization, and the main components of a mystery story.
I just want to let you guys know that this was a WRITTEN paper and I just spent the last half hour trying to type and edit this juvenile paper. It is so obvious how I have changed as a writer just by seeing something that I have written last year and trying to comprehend those run on sentences. Which I'm sure I still do, but just less. Well I don't think I'm going to out myself through anymore of that today, so I will post another one tomorrow. Thanks for reading thus far.
-Alonna Kilpatrick, blog author
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