Let’s find out if you qualify.
Imagine you’re walking by a lake on a gorgeous summer morning, breathing in the mingled scents of lake water and fragrant fir trees, and then you come upon a canoe pulled up at a dock, and you think, “That canoe could have a body in it for my detective to find”: my friend, you’ve got the makings of a mystery writer.
Also, can you write sentences shorter than that one? That will come in handy.
Herewith my tips
You’ll find an independent income very helpful.
I know! I don’t have one either! My income is totally dependent. In fact it’s often reduced to standing on LinkedIn and craigslist, holding up a tin cup and a sign: WILL WORK FOR PRINTER PAPER. OH, AND INK CARTRIDGES, I NEED THOSE TOO.
Meanwhile, my employers, with a tunnel vision that I can only attribute to unhappy childhoods, insist on paying me to write dull business-oriented documents. I ask you, does the world need any more of those? No. What the world needs more of is mystery novels.
I start being helpful here. Well, kind of.
It helps to know a police person. Even in an amateur-detective “cozy” you may end up needing a cop character, and you will want her to behave in a cop-like way. Or you can make him eccentric (eccentric cops are usually male), but you should still know the rules against which your budding Inspector Morse is planning to kick.
While cultivating a police person, word your questions carefully. I once called a policeman with the following book-related query: “Suppose a woman named Zanthie meets a guy in an airport, and he asks her to look after his small daughter for a few minutes, and then he doesn’t come back, and the kid doesn’t speak English, so the woman takes the kid home with her, and — ”
“She shouldn’t take the kid home with her,” the cop interrupted. “She should take the kid to the authorities in the airport.”
“But if she does that I won’t have a story.”
Click.
So how do we get around that one? Should we lie and tell the cop that Zanthie is spaced out on goofballs?
“But in that case,” he’d interrupt, “she shouldn’t be driving.”
Cop logic. It’s so damned logical!
Timelines are helpful. Take my soon-to-be-published novel Fall Crush. (Not the book that stars Zanthie. In Fall Crush everyone behaves rationally. Well, except for the Frog Woman, but what do you expect from a spectral amphibian?)
While writing Fall Crush I created a five-page calendar in Word that lists every event in the book from beginning to end. This helped me pace my clues and charted things like the progress of my heroine’s treatment for shingles. Otherwise I might have cured her in chapter 21 only to start her scratching again two chapters later.
Okay, full disclosure. When I describe Fall Crush as “soon to be published,” I mean “in my dreams.” These are the same dreams in which I’m living in a flat in Highgate and dating Alan Rickman.
Would you like to hear more about my dreams? No? Okay.
An indispensable guide to the writer’s life
But speaking of a writer’s dreams, the best advice I can give you when it comes to preparing for life as mystery writer, or indeed any kind of writer, is to read The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel.
In this short illustrated work, the great Edward Gorey takes Mr. Earbrass through his writing process from soup to going nuts: devising a plot, making diagrams (similar to my calendar), seeing his characters assume “a fitful and cloudy reality,” and re-reading early chapters (“Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL”).
Also, staying up all night (“neglected sections of the plot loom on every hand”); discussing with his publishers, Scuffle & Dustcough, “the ramifications of a scheme for having his novels translated into Urdu”; and lamenting with other writers “the unspeakable horror of the literary life.”
Buy it. Read it. Believe it. You will end up feeling like Mr. Earbrass in this image. Take that on board.
Then go ahead and write your mystery novel anyway. And please, let me know how it’s going. We can lament the unspeakable horrors together.
Illustration by Edward Gorey from The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel.
