Writing – The Craft of

High Stakes in Mysteries

/ Lisa / 4 Comments

I’m reading Revising Your Novel by Janice Hardy and here’s a bit from the book that made me laugh. It’s from a section dealing with how to fix scenes where stakes might be too high, or not high enough.

“If the protagonist walked away, what would change? This can help spot stakes that seem high, but aren’t really. For example, ‘they could die’ should be the highest stake of all, but if the protagonist walks away she’ll live. Problem solved. Sure, others might die, but do readers really care about a faceless mass of unnamed people? Nah.”

That made me think about something similar, one of the biggest issues for me in reading (and writing) a mystery series.

Those ending scenes when everything’s about to be wrapped up, all will be disclosed, and there will be the final life-or-death battle between the good guy and the bad guy. Yes there are authors out there that kill off the protagonist of a series, but that’s rare. So is there any reader out there who thinks the protagonist might actually die in those scenes? Most commonly, no.

So then how high are the stakes, really? If you know the main character is going to survive, then there isn’t any reason to have that whole final scene. When I’m reading a mystery series and get to that part, to be honest, I skip it and go the ending where all the threads get explained. And even as I write one of those scenes, in the back of my mind I’m thinking ‘how many are going to skip this?’.

What makes those final high stakes scenes work for me as a reader, and that I need to remember as a writer, is to place the risk elsewhere. Since I know the protagonist is going to survive, then what keeps me reading is if the author has taken the one thing that is most important to the protagonist, and put that at risk.

If that character cares deeply about something, and that could be taken away, then I’m going to be hooked as a reader and race through the tense scenes. Think about it. An author may not kill off the protagonist, but it’s way easier to remove something the character cares about. Secondary characters can be mourned and then replaced, right?

I want the risk, the scene that keeps my heart racing, to be something where I don’t know what the author is going to do. Something where I don’t sit back and scoff and say, ‘go ahead and pull the trigger; you’re not going to kill off the main guy in your series’.

As an additional thought, that type of scene might work just fine in a stand-alone mystery (since there’s no series, the protagonist might not make it) or in the first or second books. Mainly because you don’t know if the author is going to stick around and make a series or not. But after the third book, when a series is here to stay, that final scene stops working for me.

And I stop reading them.

There are some cases where I stop with the whole series. My husband and I used to be big fans of John Sandford. But after twenty-some books they all sound alike. The protagonist wanders around and asks questions, the answers lead up to the final life-or-death scene, and the protagonist survives. The books are so boring now I can’t even go back and re-read them.

And after this, I go back and re-read the endings of my books and squirm a bit. In my defense, it’s the first few so the series isn’t in concrete yet. Which means…who knows what’s going to happen in the next one?

(Ha! Aren’t I tricky, sneaking in a blatant teaser?)

Labels, Irony, and Writing

/ Lisa / Leave a comment

Yesterday I posted a personal essay that was difficult to do. Today, I want to tie that to the craft of writing.

If you write something that dips into your deepest emotions, if you write something brutally honest, something that makes you squirm uncomfortably, or be a little fearful of ‘putting it out there’ then you’ve written something true. And even if those who read it have never been in that situation, they will respond and recognize the underlying emotions.

If you read something that makes you squirm a bit, that causes an emotional reaction, that sticks with you and won’t let you go after the last word has been digested, then the writer has succeeded.

If you can’t touch those deepest wells of emotion, if you can’t be brutally honest in your writing, if you can’t pull up words that battle to stay hidden, then you’ll have a hard time eliciting responses in your readers.

No one ever said writing was easy.

When you write something that scares you because of that honesty, and your trusted friend reads it and says ‘holy shit!’ then you know you’ve been true to your inner soul.

When you think your writing is filled with believable characters with honest emotions, go back and see if you can dig a little deeper, pull off a few more scabs, and expose a few more wounds.

If you’re afraid to write it, then it needs to be written.

If it won’t let you go, it needs to go into words.

lisa-glacier-park

From the 1990s, a photo to tie into the Labels post. 

Just a Quote

/ Lisa / 7 Comments

‘You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.’ – Arthur Polotnik

I like this quote. But personally I don’t write to communicate anything to others. I write because there’s a story inside that I want to read. When I’m writing I’m not thinking about the hearts and minds of others, or to be honest, readers at all. I’m immersed in the story as if I’m watching a movie. I’m engrossed with the characters as if they are friends who either entertain, frustrate, or confound me. I want to know what they’re up to and why.

That part about editing though; I do like that. The concept is more commonly explained as separating wheat from chaff.

You know, I don’t think about readers when I’m editing, either (sorry readers!). During the editing process all I’m doing is reading the editor’s comments and thinking ‘I should have known that’ or ‘why didn’t I see that?’ or ‘man, she’s just made a lot of work for me’ or ‘this story sucks!’. I’m in the process in other words.

So when do I, in my personal writing process, start thinking about the hearts and minds of readers? I guess when the draft goes out to the first beta readers. And then I get nervous. Worried about whether they’ll like the story or the characters. Fearful that the story won’t work the same magic in the reader as it did for me when I was dreaming it.

I guess I’m not one of those brilliant writers who have core themes and messages that they strive to communicate to the wider world in order to change the world or impart some greater societal knowledge. I’m content just telling a story.