Murder She Wrote

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been busy adding a few 100 words to my own murder mystery. 

It started as a short story about missing children, because what reader would not show empathy for a lost child, and contempt for the perpetrator. 

After all that’s the basic formula we’ve been discussing, inducing our Readers to emotionally invest in our characters plight.

Upsplash

At the start I cared about my perpetrator or the main culprit anyway. 

I worked on how lost he was, and what motivated his actions, but as I kept writing I found I too sympathised with my lost little girls, and then that of course stretched to their parents. 

At 5000 words I knew this story would be longer, with conviction I said ‘a novella.’ 

Then came my crafty detectives, the woman, in charge of the case, short crabby and haunted. The male, what can you say about male detectives, without stereotyping. 

 They fleshed themselves out, and again the story grew into something else, longer than a novella.

The tenets of a short story are that it should be short, between 500 to 5000 words, neatly made, with believable characters, narrative voice kept separate from your characters, and the development of a central image or symbol to objectively convey your theme neatly to a sprung ending.

Upsplash

 Do we always work to the above theme, of course not? 

There is no tried-and-true formula for success. The most important formula to remember is all stories have a start, middle and an end. 

The rest is you flexing that overworked muscle of imagination. Every story starts somewhere; mine started with one missing girl, and a dead body. 

Where will yours start?

The first step in designing a story is to get together a collection of events. As an exercise write down a series of events from your day, you may have walked the length of the great ocean road, or had lunch at the beach. 

It doesn’t matter, include as many different effects as you can think of, remembering nothing is trivial, so as to give you plenty of material to work with. 

Upslpash

Recognise the major event in your day, what stood out from the
crowd. Did you write your events chronologically or like on a trampoline, jumping all over the place, from the morning to the afternoon, and then back to morning? 

 

Was there something in those events that you would call a climax, or do they sit together like beads on a string. Has something reminded you of a past memory?

What you’ve done is written a story of your day. 

Now that you can see what you’ve got, try rearranging it, bring that stand out event to a climax, inject some drama into your story to make the telling more forceful. 

Upsplash

Insert a character, while you remain the narrator. Start to ask questions.

 

Is what happened a secret, and if it’s a secret who else knows about it. 

This is a great little exercise to get that writing mind working. You’ll be amazed as the words start to form on the page.