In the course of editing and rereading. I've found that i write pretty good action scenes but lack on the mystery intrigue aspects i wanted. My scifi/supernatural story follows a detective hunting a planet hopping serial killer. She's teamed up with a bounty hunter to catch the killer. The story isn't a murder mystery more of a political thriller i guess.
Unsure what you mean by "political thriller", the premise sounds like a normal thriller to me. The addition of "political" implies that the tension revolves around a political power struggle, and not simple character goals. It would become a political thriller if the serial killer was part of an extremist organization selectively killing officials to bring upon a systems downfall and revolution. Or if the serial killer was the hitman of a major political player who made appropriate steps to ensure the bounty hunter & detective are hindered in their investigation. In the latter case you can have the plot blossom into a "something greater" idea. Back to the thriller and mystery part, the good advice is to ask questions and fill in the gaps. Why is the serial killer doing what they're doing? Who are their accomplices? Why haven't they been caught yet?
Thanks for the reply. I now see my story is a thriller with political sprinkles. The killer wants to expose a great secret hoping for system wide revenge and genocide. While the current government wants to kill/stop him. Covering up his actions in the first place. I also had blinders on trying to get to the finish line that i completely missed the questions of whose helping and why they are helping.
Define intrigue. A feeling of wanting answers? Well, then you'd better have questions, and they'd better be interesting questions that demand answers. Interesting questions are usually unusual questions or questions that have serious implications and ramifications. Sometimes mysteries can be predictable because storytellers are thinking with their story brains instead of their real brains. They write what is expected. There will be a bread crumb trail of clues, and the detective will get all their answers one by one as they follow leads from place to place; after all, that's how the reader will get their answers. The truth is, that is neither how a reader must get his or her answers nor how a detective must get his or her answers. Here is a suggestion that could increase the "intrigue." What is the detective's objective? To identify the killer? Or catch the killer? What if he could only do one? He doesn't know who the killer is or what he is after, but he knows that someone will be at the airport wearing a green hat. Now, he has to block all the exits, or try to corner the killer because the killer got on a plane, but he could only have flown to one of several airports. Hm. Okay, maybe we have to know what he wants to narrow suspects down or track him, but maybe we are only able to narrow it down to 5 people.
I agree, when thrillers are too formulaic they get boring because you can see where each clue is going. Or when red herrings are too obvious. Maybe once the detective finds out the killer's goals they become conflicted because they agree with their aims?
Let your reader know what kind of story your story is: a realistic story. By realistic, I mean two things. One, it stays consistent within the rules established in its world. Two, it is similar to the way real world crimes proceed. There will be no linear trail of breadcrumbs. Intrigue. Entering a detective's mind, one will flex their imagination on serious matters, and they must imagine every possible scenario and motivation. Many scenarios are untrue and many questions will go unanswered, but they must still be asked. You don't ask a question and get an answer. You ask all the questions and get answers to some. You have several leads to follow. Which one should you follow first? Your aim is to find something unique and identifiable that the culprit may have left behind. Then you have to find where the culprit will be next and stop him before he strikes again. Were his shoes unique? Was his money unique? Is your detective a homicide detective or is he tracing fraud? All you have is a knife and a fingerprint. That's all. It means literally nothing, nothing for certain. One cannot jump to conclusions. If the silhouette is duck shaped, the culprit may be two people who put together look like a duck. Clues may be sparse. Your detective may spend a lot of time conducting interviews and research; not all detective work is forensic. Your detective found a notebook that indicates a person was fired... just two weeks before another person was fired. Why were they fired? Maybe he should ask them. Sounds boring to the reader; better be something serious. Empathy. Who benefits? You know what else adds intrigue? An intriguing prey. Do you want a smart enemy or a deranged enemy? Popular media has been popular by having both, smart and deranged serial killers. It's a bit formulaic now, but still popular. Why is your guy so hard to catch? Why is your guy so interesting?
thank you for the replies. setting is sci-fi/supernatural/far future intrigue to me is wanting to know more. more about the story, back story, worlds history, and why things work like they do. i appreciate all your points, i just have to apply them now. I've written a so much without this, cause I wanted to get the stuff in my head down before I forgot it.
Let's take this from a game design perspective. I want to make a puzzle. What is the difference between a jigsaw puzzle and a man estimating the angle of an artillery gun? Well... it's a grey area. It's a spectrum. In any case, all games are played in the mind. I want to make a challenge that relies on thinking and less on physical reflexes and coordination. There are several types of puzzles. There are physics puzzles, social puzzles, language puzzles, mathematical puzzles, sequential puzzles, etc. A detective solving a murder puzzle will utilize several skills to solve an amalgamation puzzle, a sequential puzzle. Who did what with what when and where? How do you make a puzzle more difficult? Well, you need all the pieces to solve a puzzle. Or do you? Maybe you don't need all the pieces; you just need most of the pieces to guess that if you continue the pattern, the pieces will form the shape of an imitation deranged murder that was done just to cover up a botched scam. But you have the pieces of the puzzle. Let's make the puzzle difficult to solve. You could obfuscate the information. Hide the pieces. Make them difficult to see or difficult to access. Add a lot of fake pieces. Turn the pieces upside down. You could be a bitch and make them cumbersome to access; every time you want to try to put them together, you have to wait 10 minutes between every trial. Paperwork, forensics processing.
Yeah. I was going to say this sort of thing when I started reading this thread. It's great that you're envisioning your characters in action, by the way. That way you'll get to know them as you build your story. In a way, you're doing the kind of writing I do myself ...I envision characters in immediate situations, but then I need to build a story around these characters. All you need, really, is to spend more time thinking. Do whatever it takes to get your creativity flowing. Take time to yourself AWAY from your computer where you might confuse writing words with actual story-building. Think about your characters. See what connections you can make between characters. What jobs do they do? What kind of background did they come from? You can write a thriller/mystery starting from any point, really. Your characters can be innocent bystanders who get drawn into something bigger than them (willingly or unwillingly), OR they can go all the way up to being professional (paid) spies, rulers, etc. What's the political situation in your story's world? It can be anything from realistic 'now,' to some futuristic situation, or a completely imaginary one. Or a historical one. Play around with ideas, and don't be loathe to challenge yourself a lot. Beware of writing the first scenario you think of. It's probably not original, but stems from one you've heard before. Keep going instead, and see what else you can come up with. Something unique to you. Get out of your comfort zone, if possible. Don't be afraid to write something original. Or combine genres in an original way. (Example: one of last century's bestselling genre authors was Mary Stewart, who was the first to combine Mystery/Thriller with Romance. This seems a pretty run-of-the-mill thing to do these days, but she broke that ground.) I would caution you, if you're going down the futuristic, sci-fi fantasy route, not to spend TOO much time with detailed worldbuilding. That can become an end in itself, and you end up with no story, but a lot of imaginary facts instead. Obviously do some, but you can 'worldbuild' as you go. It's the essence of the story itself that you should try to find. The thing about a good story is it can usually be transposed to any period of history or culture or location. The setting makes it fun to read and may be unique. But in the case of most books, the setting is NOT the story. It's been said that the best science fiction is about Earth. (Not necessarily about the planet 'Earth' but about human sensibility, and the things that drive us to do what we do.) Ditto good fantasy. Game of Thrones, for example. That makes a good story because of the realistic characters and their interactions, not because of the setting.
Adding in Intrigue should become natural side effect of realistic character interactions, rather than something you should actively focus on. But it's very easy to do this once you understand what intrigue is; it's just withholding information that increases the readers curiosity. As an author you have multiple ways to do this: 1. Easiest way is POV. You can mess around with POV so the reader can only find out what the character knows. You can control the amount of intrigue by increasing or decreasing character's knowledge via dialogue or actions. Too much Intrigue is also bad for the story because it may end up in an info dump at the end which feels like an ass-pull, so easy way is to control the level from beginning to end. 2. The intrigue doesn't have to be complicated. If you watch knives out, the intrigue in that is very complicated and interesting. But there are simple intrigues that are just about a characters past. Sometimes it's just about hiding an information in clear sight and then exploring the ramification of that hidden secret until its revealed. Street car named desire does this really well, because you don't understand why the main heroine is so neurotic and it's not like you will find out until she tells you. It's not a Sherlock Holmes type mystery but it can still be intriguing because her actions are intriguing.
Some intrigues work because one set of characters knows the truth while another set doesn't—although the reader knows the whole thing. The reader doesn't need to solve a mystery; instead the reader is kept glued, waiting for the big reveal and its consequences. That's how soap operas work, isn't it? The audience knows what happened but some characters don't. It's amazing how far that device can get you!
Ooh that's a good one too. I think that's a sort of a dramatical intrigue, which is sort of basically foreshadowing. Shakespeare was good at that; he made the characters live in misunderstandings, while the plot was rapidly explained to the audience through multiple POV. Edit: I'm thinking of dramatic irony. Which I guess can also add some intrigue as you are trying to find out when the characters will find out.
The best example for what you brought up is the difference between the Poirot and Columbo shows. The former uses the "Whodunit?" frame, the latter is described on its wiki as "Howcatchem?". I will say, however, that I don't particularly enjoy the latter and will always gravitate towards mystery / intrigue of the former kind (where I can make my own guesses).
I post this too much, but it's relevant here: Bringing the Dead to Life Bill Johnson explains his technique called question, answer, question, in which you pose a question for the reader (you don't write it in the form of a question, you make them ask themselves a question). It needs to be a powerful question, a dramatic question, not just a mundane one. And then you immediately give an answer, but it's only a partial answer, and leads only to more questions. You don't want to make them wait too long to get an answer (until you get to one of the major questions, then they need to read the rest of the book to get that answer). This is extremely effective, and is otherwise known as teasing. Those who do it well can drive people crazy with intrigue.
There's also the "whydunnit?" I don't know if that's a common term, but it fits a certain class of stories where the characters know what's going on, and the story is all about the reader learning why it happened. The best example I can think of is Donna Tartt's novel "The Secret History." It opens up with a group of college students killing an unnamed one of their own, then backtracks to when the narrator first joins the group, so we get the dual mystery of wondering which one will end up as the victim and why. It's an excellent hook (though I was a bit disappointed in the book)
Thank you for all replies. Didn't expect this much. Like jannert said. I also see my characters in actions and have to think of the way they got there. Currently my characters know who the killer is. Only the bounty hunter and the over all government know why he is killing. I'm stuck on 2 different scenes. 1. A seemingly simple crime that the detective knows is related but the victim doesn't fit the profile. 2. Explaining with out exposition dumping why the killers crimes are covered up.
Intrigue is easily accomplished in 3rd person POV using the "Stick a pin / Meanwhile back at the bank method." Set up concurrent plot-lines and continually switch between them. e.g. (1) The villain's accomplice is using her womanly wiles to detain the hero in a bar. (2) The villain is breaking into the hero's office to crack the safe. (3) The detective is with a witness trying to identify the villain from pictures of know criminals. Cycle through paragraphs in each location.
Ok I got another one and I think it's the most unique that I hadn't thought of yet. I was watching a mostly mediocre TV mini series called deceit on Stan and it got me to think while the final product kinda sucked, it did something that is pretty unique in the genre of crime dramas. Spoilers from here on out if you want to watch it: It established a truth of who a killer was on the onset.-> it spent most of the story manipulating the audience/protagonist to believe that this person was the killer.->it destroyed all this story and the this POI was vindicated of the crime. Ok, so this isn't completely unique; it's very common to have the most quite likely killer at the start to be the one who is NOT the killer. But what was a bit more unqiue and most relevent to a writer, in my opinion, was that they set firm boundaries and rules prior to the operation. Then they spent rest of the show breaking those rules. In the end, the evidence becomes inadmissible due to procedural misconduct. Obviously if it was just that, you'd understand that he was not the killer and that the cops were incompetent. But they did establish some empathy with the cops because they were invested into the man in question being the killer. However, this was the flaw of the TV series; they needed to lean in more on the professional misconduct, and create a stronger narrative for the motivation of the characters to be so invested in the solving the crime. There movie called memories of a murder (one of the best movies of all time so watch it if you havent) that executes this train of events a bit better imo. But to surmise, I think a very strong way to create intrigue is to have unreliable narrators or POV. Make those characters flawed and sympathetic so that they are unable or unwilling to accept evidence as it is provided by the plot. This creates strong intrigue because it manipulates the reader into ignoring details- like the POV, so that it becomes more immersive. Again it falls into with-holding information I said before, but it's a bit more concrete archetype you could utilise in your writing. Edit: I guess it's not really with holding, it's more like disregarding evidence in a convincing way due to characterisation.
