How to Write an Exciting Mystery Story

A mystery story is more than just that, it’s about writing a story that intrigues the reader enough to be unable to stop turning pages. To make a suspenseful mystery, you want to have a plot that’s just weaved enough and has myriad twists and turns to confuse and a few twists and turns that make people look everywhere. Good, memorable characters, good characters in general who are either detectives or suspects or witnesses help add depth and emotional stakes to your story. No matter if your story is a classic whodunit, a psychological thriller that delves into the depths of someone’s psyche or some combination thereof, your readers will need to see the pieces of the puzzle put together and punctuated by you dropping things as you move your story forward.

In this blog we explore the basic mystery writing elements: plot construction, character development and ways to surprise and frighten. If you can master these tools you’ll be able to write a mystery that intrigues and if you’re lucky also solves, the reader. This will be a fun journey into the art of mystery storytelling that will captivate your audience from page one to the very last page.

Understanding the Basics

Making a good mystery is not as easy as presenting this crime or puzzle, but making an interesting one is to weave an elaborate weave of intrigue that will keep you reading until the last reveal. Any great mystery must have a well thought out plan for plot, believable characters and a rope of clues to give the reader something to mull over.  You have to build up suspense slowly, setting tension higher as the story goes. The important thing to understand is how to pace your story, reveal information in the right ways and create reasons and secrets.

The great thing about mastering these foundational elements is that you’ll be able to develop puzzles that not only tax the reader’s deductive limbs, but serve to elicit emotion as they work their way through the narrative. But this solid grounding also ensures that your mystery is intellectually stimulating and deeply satisfying and further, the foundation for a gripping and memorable story.

What Makes a Good Mystery?

The central puzzle holds the reader from the beginning in a captivating mystery. It’s strategic information disclosure: reveal enough clues to spark reader speculation and build theory, without giving away the essential ingredients that leave them hanging. Every reader would like to get their breadcrumbs, but the balance that must be found for a satisfying, engaging read is how much information to provide and how much to protect the reader from the full picture.

The Elements of Suspense

Surprise is not the only thing that makes suspense. This is all about tension and having the readers guess. It’s a question of exactly when to time, exactly when to pace, exactly what to withhold in exactly which amounts at exactly what moments. A good mystery has suspense, not to mention suspense is not just jump scares. That’s that feeling of anticipation and uncertainty that it takes so long to paint for the reader so that he or she will be on the edge of their seat. Suspense is a skill of timing, pacing and manipulative revealing and concealing of information to keep the audience guessing what’s going to happen next and to build the created tension.

Setting the Scene

Mystery writing would be impossible without the atmosphere. The backdrop of the mystery is always dark and moody settings and also expected places. An atmosphere is only as good as the environment in which it occurs; when it comes to heightening tension, anything helps. A palpable sense of unease and, in fact, play a huge part in the story’s atmosphere can be created through dark and foreboding locations or at least unexpected settings. The setting should not be just an (unmeaningful) background, but, as a part of the mystery, an active factor which would distinctly add to its peculiarity of an attractive intrigue and suspense.

Creating the Perfect Protagonist

Your mystery’s central character, a seasoned detective or an accidental investigator needs to be deep, relatable. Their personal motivation and stakes in the story should be intimately connected to the core mystery; a reason for their inclusion cannot be anything other than very important to both them and to the story itself. Having a well developed protagonist means the reader can have an emotional connection with the investigation and are looking to solve the puzzle.

Plot Twists and Red Herrings

The surprise needed to make the story a good one is an exciting mystery story. You need to learn how to plant red herrings and plot twists properly or else you risk losing your readers attention. Plot twists and red herrings are important to use strategically so they keep readers thoroughly engaged and not able to solve the mystery too easily. Red herrings are intended to trick your readers and send them down false paths while plot twists will take you off course by reworking the whole investigation. These techniques carry a certain degree of complexity and surprise to your narrative, you must master the aforementioned techniques.

Step-by-Step Guide

Are you ready to form a story with secrets and mystery? In this step by step guide, we will give you advice on what you need to know to write a good mystery story. Begin with a central puzzle or crime which grabs our curiosity and provides needed stakes. Then build complex characters, including detectives, suspects and, most important, witnesses with things to hide and motives. After that plant clues and red herrings carefully to fool and challenge your readers without driving them insane.

Pace the story as it goes to build tension and suspenseful scene. And, finally, end with a reveal that will have the audience surprised but yet feels logical enough. But by thoughtfully following these stages you will turn your mystery into one your audience will enjoy, that keeps them guessing, that satisfies their attention with a satisfying conclusion. But this guide is your blueprint to help you write a mystery that really holds readers down from page one to the end.

Step 1 – Develop Your Core Mystery

What’s the central puzzle? The central mystery obviously should be the murder, disappearance or theft. The more pieces of the mystery that you can connect and stack on top of each other, the more engaged  you’ll be. Start by thinking what central puzzle your narrative will be driven by. Is it a mysterious murder, a mighty disappearance or an involved theft? The more intricate and multi-layered your core mystery needs to be, the more ways you can suck your audience in. A well defined central question forms a good base for the entire story.

Step 2 – Create Suspenseful Moments

Begin with tension and letting it out. Then, added on top of the first crime, secrets, lies – there’s tons of hidden motives that cloud the fact. The most important part of this is to add specific moments throughout the narrative that create anxiety and keep your readers turning pages, straining to see what unfolds as the enigma.

Get tension earlier. Perhaps that’s the crime that’s mysterious, but perhaps it’s also riddled with layers of secrets, lies and motives. Create moments that your readers are eager to learn the truth.

Step 3 – Craft Your Characters

Ensure your characters are greater than ‘players’ within the story, with depth, secrets and private stakes all tied to the case in which they are solving. Readers should wonder who to trust. Your characters need to have depth, secret agendas and have a personal reason to want the mystery solved. They shouldn’t just be plot devices. Because secrets and vulnerabilities grant your readers something to constantly second guess their allegiances along with wondering which of their fellow readers they can actually trust as the truth starts to peek through.

Step 4 – Drop Clues, Not Answers

The art of mystery is a delicate one and certainly in letting the reader create her own theories, without including all the clues. Make sure your clues are pertaining to the core of the mystery but ensure that you don’t make the answer way too obvious to soon. This maintains a careful balance on the part of your audience: they’re kept interested and actively involved in the investigation until the very last reveal.

Step 5 – Master the Reveal

It should be satisfying and it should be unexpected at the end. When you actually reveal who the bad guy is or solve the mystery, it should make sense, but shock the reader as well (the climax of your mystery gives your readers a satisfying, but surprising, resolution). Your clues should logically lead to unveiling the culprit or explaining the central puzzle, even if your readers are not able to guess it and you should still surprise your readers. A successfully executed reveal will impress your audience and let you know that your well thought out mystery was a sound design decision.

Advanced Tips and Strategies

Once you’ve got the good basics down for writing mysteries, you’ll want to add some of the higher level techniques that explore complexity and depth to the story. Which of course, also adds to suspense because unreliable narrators force the reader to question what they are being told, creating intriguing layers of ambiguity. Having multiple suspects with plenty of motive is how you keep the mystery rich and the audience guessing. Compelling backstories for your characters enhance emotional weight and are in themselves a back door to more back doors, clued into personal histories.

Further, playing with narrative structure – e.g. fragmented and hijacked timelines and multiple points of view – can continue to further engage the reader and vex the reader’s mental suspension of disbelief. The deeper that you go, the more mysterious you become, in terms that are more difficult and rewarding. If you expertly weave these elements together, you’ll construct a multi-layered story that drags the readers through it, just as you drag them through those questions right until the end.

Use Unreliable Narrators

In addition, an unreliable narrator can be an extra touch for mystery. Their version of things may be one sided, misleading the reader as further add to the feeling of being unsure. Using an unreliable narrator can give you an unbelievable amount of intrigue in your mystery. If you tell the story from a perspective that is biased, dishonest or outright incorrect, you’re actively misleading the reader. This choice of narrative makes the whole thing more uncertain and pushes you to think that everything you learn should be doubted, which is super neat as a puzzle because you’re never really sure.

Introduce Multiple Suspects

Instead of leaving your readers with fewer suspects to pick from, have several characters in your story who have the motive, means and opportunity to commit the crime. Rather than quickly deciding a primary suspect, use your own special thriller writer’s magic to strategically populate your story with a whole host of characters who could have done it, with the means and with the opportunity. That purposeful widening of the suspect pool will keep your readers guessing and disabuse them of the idea that they’ve arrived at a solution too quickly. These potential culprits are further complicated by the interplay between them and make the book suspenseful.

Build a Compelling Backstory

Many times, a good mystery story teaches the history of the present crime, unfolding as a layered history. Develop a backstory that’s rich with secrets and motives—it’s worth taking the time to do. History is full of quite interesting mysteries many of which are rooted in the rich, intricate history that directly impacts the present crime. Spending the time to create detailed backstory full of hidden secrets, conflicts left open and motives that have been quietly gestating produce the best result. They layer this history because it makes your characters and what they do more interesting and having this layers means that the eventual revelations are more interesting and the overall mystery is too.

Pace Your Story Intelligently

Constant action works better than slow burn suspense. Pace yourself so that readers don’t put the book down—expose important details at intervals and let your audience catch their breath before laying another twist on them. One of the most important things you can do for keeping tension in your narrative is to grasp the rhythm of it. Although action isn’t to be ignored, a slow burn method may prove very effective too: the creation of tension and rising temperatures over time, squeezing out every bit of what it has to offer. Reveal important bits of info strategically by slowly spacing them out to create a controlled pace at which your audience will have moments to absorb this new information before you hit them with the next compelling twist or revelation.

Explore Themes of Trust and Deception

The best mysteries tend to look at features like trust, betrayal and the type of lies people tell themselves. Make these themes parts of your plot for more depth of emotion. And the most resonant mysteries usually are the ones that take us deeper into themes about the human. Look at the various aspects of trust, the sting of betrayal and the web of lies people both make for others and for themselves. By including these thematic elements in your plot you can raise the level of your mystery above a normal whodunit, offering a far deeper and emotionally fulfilling reading experience for your readers.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Writing a Mystery Story

Writing an engaging mystery takes careful crafting but avoiding these common mistakes will keep your reader engaged. One common mistake is letting the killer be known too soon or not at all at the end of the book (a sadness to all of us reading fans). After all, too many red herrings or confusing plot twists will frustrate rather than intrigue. Another of the pitfalls is flat or stereotyped characters that are less emotionally involved. Pacing, the omission of which can spell trouble for suspense in two very different ways: either rushing key moments or dragging the narrative, can also kill suspense. Then the inconsistencies between the clues and the plot points themselves can break the reader’s trust. If you recognize and avoid these missteps, you’ll be able to write a mystery that’s not only interesting, but coherent, emotionally resonant and wholeheartedly rewarding for its audience.

Overloading with Clues

When there are too many clues it can lead to confusing your readers and making your mystery muddy. It’s actually better to be subtle and strategic about what clues you give. Giving clues is important for a good mystery, but dumping too many clues on the reader will only lead to confusion and with it waters down the gist of the puzzle. Don’t just randomly put out information, but try being subtle and strategic about where you put your clues. A clue should accomplish a specific feat — divert readers without clouding the waters of their investigation.

Making the Villain Too Obvious

Readers need to be able to figure out the culprit, but it shouldn’t be too easy. Make your villain keep in plain sight. That sensation that reader gets while trying to figure out: who done it? And even though hints are inevitable, the idea behind making the villain’s identity too transparent too soon is that it robs the suspense. Try to keep your antagonist cleverly concealed….hidden in plain sight so readers have lots of ideas floating around about who it might be before you reveal who they are.

Underdeveloping Characters

You shouldn’t just keep the story to the crime. Your characters need depth, flaws and to be dynamic. The mystery loses its zest if they don’t have any personality. The crime in itself is a compelling mystery, it is as much about the people involved. If you don’t spend much time developing your characters — the victim, the suspects, the investigators — you risk making the whole story lame. What can you give them depth, flaws and motivations instead of the central puzzle so we’re not listening to the same kind of thing on repeat, for an hour, for three hours which again will lead to a richer and more resonant narrative.

Ignoring the Pacing

The tension evaporates if you don’t move your story along, giving it closed off, amounts of no developments or action. Don’t forget to keep moving the plot without sacrificing depth to character or intrigue. You need the rhythm and flow of your mystery to hold the reader. Tension in a story does not last forever, if there are no significant plot developments or progression on characters. There are many elements of balance in pacing; balancing the plot, while also giving way to character exploration alongside an ever building sense of intrigue.

Overdoing the Red Herrings

Too many red herrings lead to frustration for readers; but red herrings are important. Make sure the twists are appropriate to the plot, it’s not just there to make you go ‘WTF?’ Well used red herrings can be a great way to mislead readers and increase surprise of the final reveal. But too many false leads can be hugely frustrating to your audience and turn them away. Your twists and turns should always be relevant to your overall plot and should only serve to enhance how mysterious something (or someone) is, not because you feel it needs to be confusing.

Tools and Resources to Support Your Writing Journey

If you’re looking to write a compelling mystery, having the right tools and resources at your disposal will make your journey so much easier! There are numerous ways to stay organised and motivated from the moment you start brainstorming ideas through to when you polish your final draft. Writing software—Scrivener or Plottr—helps keep complex plots structured and your details about characters in one place. Writing groups and online communities provide great feedback and motivation.

You can find insights in books on mystery writing into genre conventions and how to write that genre. In addition, you’ll find resources like story prompt generators and mystery specific workshops to kickstart your creativity. By using these tools and support, you’ll be able to outline your writing process and sandwich your story into place, resulting into a tightly weaved story that will not only keep them interested until the last twist but also perhaps pay your mortgage.

Mystery Writing Prompts

You can use mystery writing prompts to help you come up with new story ideas, plots, twists and take on different characters; the mind of yours would not come up with everything that you brainstorm with mystery writing prompts. If you’re ever stuck with a creative block or simply looking to have some inspiration, try online resources for mystery writing prompts. These prompts will inspire unexpected ideas for plots, spark ideas for interesting twists you hadn’t thought of and give you ideas of amazing, original and memorable characters to populate your enigmatic tales.

Books on Writing Mysteries

James N. Frey’s “How to write a damn good mystery,” gives in depth advice on writing a riveting mystery, creating memorable characters and setting the perfect pace. Diving into books about the craft of mystery writing teaches the craft more in depth with an expert’s advice. Others such as James N. Frey’s ‘How to Write a Damn Good Mystery,’ guides you in crafting gripping plotlines, creating multidimensional characters with something to hide and timing your story well to keep readers (or audience members) on their toes.

Writing Workshops and Groups

Join writers’ workshops or critique workshops for mystery stories. And they will be able to give valuable feedback and new approaches, about what you do. Writing is a very intimate process and being around other writers really helps your craft, especially other memoir/mystery writers because they get you. Attending mystery workshops and critique groups allows you to get helpful comments on what you’ve written and get insight on different ways you might craft your narrative in different ways and show suspense in different ways.

Plotting Software

If you work with software, then Scrivener is a great way to outline your mystery in a manner that maps out the complex structure of your timelines and character arcs so everything falls into place. Since mystery plots are generally made quite intricate a specialized plotting software can really help. With tools like Scrivener, you can plot out complicated timelines, look at the journey of multiple characters and their relation to your central mystery and guarantee that all the different tentacles of your story resolve effortlessly.

Mystery Novels as Study Material

Read mysteries in numerous varieties. Take a look at how the masters do it, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler etc., how they structure their stories and work up tension. Reading your way through the mystery genre is one of the best ways to improve your mystery writing skills. By reading a wide variety of mystery novels, from classics by Agatha Christie to hardboiled tales by Raymond Chandler, you can examine how other masters of the craft construct their stories and build suspense and how they’ll reveal things along the way.

Conclusion:

Writing an exciting mystery story comes down to a lot of time, patience and a lot of practice. By the end of this guide, you’ll understand the four building blocks of suspense and character development, why pacing is tantamount to a good story and how — when combined — those elements can successfully subvert all expectations. Don’t be afraid to try mysteries of different kinds, frame structures, until you find one that suits you. With these tips and strategies you are ready to start writing your next great mystery.

Is anyone ready to write their mystery story? Then dive in and start your own. In this guide, use the tips to craft a story people will only be guessing at until the very end!

FAQs:

Q1: What key points are necessary to include in a mystery based plot?

First, you start your story with a unique crime or event. Then give your readers secrets, clues and layers of conflicting motivations and secrets.

Q2: Can I write a mystery without having a detective?

A: Absolutely! Detectives are pretty usual in mysteries and you can have an ordinary person solve the crime or just don’t solve the crime at all.

Q3: When to reveal the mystery?

Time is of the essence here. Help reveal crucial details in the final act while never allowing the reader to be left bored.

Q4: Give some good examples of mystery writers.

Some classics: Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler all of whose work can inspire and teach you how to write your own mystery:

Q5: How important is it to create a villain?

A: Yes! A villain is something central to any mystery whether it’s an obvious antagonist or someone hiding in plain sight.