Karen Ellis’ Top 3 Tips for Writing Mystery & Thriller
Karen Ellis, author of the Searchers series, shares her top 3 tips on how to write the best mystery and thriller. Book 1 of the Searchers series, A Map of the Dark, is available now, and the highly anticipated sequel Last Night.
For many years I’ve taught fiction writing at The New School (in Manhattan) and for the last several years my course has specifically focused on suspense fiction. I like to start my students with an assignment I call “First Pages”—the challenge is to establish character, context, conflict before the end of a single, double-spaced page.
Character
Because it’s essential for a reader to know who this is about, which allows us to start making an emotional connection—without an emotional connection, who cares?
Context
So we have our bearings by knowing where the character is—as a reader, it’s disorienting if on page four I discover that the character is on a train when all along I thought she was in a living room. (You’d be surprised how many new writers make this kind of mistake.)
Conflict
Because if a reader has a sense of what the problem or question is before the end of page one, there’s a good chance they’ll turn the page to find out what happens next—and compelling us to turn those pages is the only way to bring us deeper into your story.
Once you’ve got your first page nailed, take your time, pace yourself and give your reader only what they need to know, but no more, as you build the rest of the story. Don’t answer the story’s ultimate question or solve the ultimate problem—whodunnit, or will they catch the bad guy before he does it again—until the end.
Novelist Karen Ellis lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America and International Thriller Writers.
Even as her father lies dying in a hospital, FBI Agent Elsa Myers can’t ignore a call for help. When a teenage girl disappears from Forest Hills, Queens, a series of false leads during the critical first hours of the case obscure the fact that she did not go willingly. But as Agent Myers searches for a man who may have been killing for years, everything she has buried from her own self-destructive past threatens to resurface with devastating consequences.
NYPD detective Lex Cole tracks a missing Brooklyn teen whose bright future is endangered by the ghosts of his unknown father’s past, in this highly anticipated sequel to A Map of the Dark.
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