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A Mysterious Epiphany
I realized something last night that goes a long way toward explaining why I'm having trouble getting any of my mystery ideas off the ground.
1. Red Herrings
Red herrings are necessary to a traditional mystery, the suspects and leads that seem promising at first but ultimately prove to be unrelated (or only tangentially related) to the crime. Often other crimes are revealed in the process of investigating them; the dead man's wife didn't kill him, but she's been acting secretive because she's having an affair or embezzling from the company she works for. The embezzlement has nothing whatsoever to do with the murder; at most it might be her alibi because she was at the office after hours fudging the books when he was killed.
I've also been known to use "red herring" to describe a plot thing I hate to write, but have reluctantly accepted the necessity for: the things the main character tries that don't succeed. (I should probably come up with a better term for it.) They're necessary to build tension; if the spy tries to hack the computers, and fails, then tries to finagle information out of the secretary, and fails, and then finally uses her best friend's daughter to pose as an intern and plant a bug, it's much more dramatic than if the spy just shoves the daughter into danger in the first place. All fine and well, but my brain knows those first two things aren't going to work, and it resents spending the time and effort on portraying them.
A mystery, therefore, is largely composed of things I hate to write. Dramatically necessary things, I don't dispute that, but that doesn't make me like them. And since I'm an extremely intuitive writer, what my brain doesn't want to write comes very hard to me.
This part I kind of already knew, but it ties in with the part that really struck me last night. (After watching the end of Magpie Murders, for those who like tracking influences.)
2. Characters
A traditional murder mystery requires a fairly large cast of characters, because you need multiple people who had reason to want the victim dead. Most of those reasons will ultimately be set aside by alibis, by not being a strong enough motive, or by other factors, rendering them irrelevant to the solution of the mystery. They're distractions, effectively.
In any other genre but a mystery, irrelevant distractions are a bad thing. They're something you want to cut, or not write them in the first place.
Now, characters are normally not a problem for me. Characters routinely wander into my head and set up shop, unbidden. If they're main characters, they kvetch until I sit down and write their story. If they're comparatively minor characters, they normally don't show up until I'm writing along, and then they appear when I need them. The operative phrase there is need them -- that is, they show up when they're necessary to the plot. The main line of the plot, that is, or as a characterization or setting tool that's integral to the story. They don't just wander in, give voice to something that ultimately doesn't matter, and then wander out. My brain simply doesn't generate characters who don't have a useful function, or if it does, it edits them out before my consciousness ever sees them.
In a science fiction adventure, or a spy novel, or a romance, this is a good thing. You don't need to hear about the hotel clerk's problems with his girlfriend, if his only function in the story is to demonstrate the hotel's low standards; he's not really a character, he's just mobile set dressing. The rich man's poor sister, who resents his success and her poverty, doesn't have anything to do with the spy who's burgling secret documents from the safe, and bringing up her issues in the middle of the theft would make no sense at all.
But if the rich man is the murder victim, then his sister's letter berating him for not helping with his nephew's school fees may be a vital clue. And when her handwriting turns out not to be a match for the fake suicide note, that doesn't make her whole sub-story an irrelevant distraction that should be cut, it makes her a red herring that is now resolved, which is a valid and necessary thing to a good mystery.
Most of the characters in a mystery are "red herrings" in my own idiosyncratic terminology, as well as in the more commonly accepted meaning. My brain generates characters for me without conscious effort, but my brain also doesn't waste time generating things I don't need. Therefore, I'm sitting at the front end of a mystery not knowing what characters I'm going to need because they'll come to me when I need them, but I'll need them to produce the clue that they're tied to, but I don't know what that clue is because it comes out of the characters' relationships, but I don't know what those relationships are because I don't have the characters yet, which I won't have until I have the clue.... And here we see the difficulty.
Characters come easy to me, but I don't just sit around noodling over a character and making up all his friends and enemies and relations and rivals whether I need them or not, and muddling through their histories and what happened last week or ten years ago that they've never really gotten over. My writing brain is much more efficient than that. And I'm beginning to wonder if it's that very efficiency that's causing me problems.
1. Red Herrings
Red herrings are necessary to a traditional mystery, the suspects and leads that seem promising at first but ultimately prove to be unrelated (or only tangentially related) to the crime. Often other crimes are revealed in the process of investigating them; the dead man's wife didn't kill him, but she's been acting secretive because she's having an affair or embezzling from the company she works for. The embezzlement has nothing whatsoever to do with the murder; at most it might be her alibi because she was at the office after hours fudging the books when he was killed.
I've also been known to use "red herring" to describe a plot thing I hate to write, but have reluctantly accepted the necessity for: the things the main character tries that don't succeed. (I should probably come up with a better term for it.) They're necessary to build tension; if the spy tries to hack the computers, and fails, then tries to finagle information out of the secretary, and fails, and then finally uses her best friend's daughter to pose as an intern and plant a bug, it's much more dramatic than if the spy just shoves the daughter into danger in the first place. All fine and well, but my brain knows those first two things aren't going to work, and it resents spending the time and effort on portraying them.
A mystery, therefore, is largely composed of things I hate to write. Dramatically necessary things, I don't dispute that, but that doesn't make me like them. And since I'm an extremely intuitive writer, what my brain doesn't want to write comes very hard to me.
This part I kind of already knew, but it ties in with the part that really struck me last night. (After watching the end of Magpie Murders, for those who like tracking influences.)
2. Characters
A traditional murder mystery requires a fairly large cast of characters, because you need multiple people who had reason to want the victim dead. Most of those reasons will ultimately be set aside by alibis, by not being a strong enough motive, or by other factors, rendering them irrelevant to the solution of the mystery. They're distractions, effectively.
In any other genre but a mystery, irrelevant distractions are a bad thing. They're something you want to cut, or not write them in the first place.
Now, characters are normally not a problem for me. Characters routinely wander into my head and set up shop, unbidden. If they're main characters, they kvetch until I sit down and write their story. If they're comparatively minor characters, they normally don't show up until I'm writing along, and then they appear when I need them. The operative phrase there is need them -- that is, they show up when they're necessary to the plot. The main line of the plot, that is, or as a characterization or setting tool that's integral to the story. They don't just wander in, give voice to something that ultimately doesn't matter, and then wander out. My brain simply doesn't generate characters who don't have a useful function, or if it does, it edits them out before my consciousness ever sees them.
In a science fiction adventure, or a spy novel, or a romance, this is a good thing. You don't need to hear about the hotel clerk's problems with his girlfriend, if his only function in the story is to demonstrate the hotel's low standards; he's not really a character, he's just mobile set dressing. The rich man's poor sister, who resents his success and her poverty, doesn't have anything to do with the spy who's burgling secret documents from the safe, and bringing up her issues in the middle of the theft would make no sense at all.
But if the rich man is the murder victim, then his sister's letter berating him for not helping with his nephew's school fees may be a vital clue. And when her handwriting turns out not to be a match for the fake suicide note, that doesn't make her whole sub-story an irrelevant distraction that should be cut, it makes her a red herring that is now resolved, which is a valid and necessary thing to a good mystery.
Most of the characters in a mystery are "red herrings" in my own idiosyncratic terminology, as well as in the more commonly accepted meaning. My brain generates characters for me without conscious effort, but my brain also doesn't waste time generating things I don't need. Therefore, I'm sitting at the front end of a mystery not knowing what characters I'm going to need because they'll come to me when I need them, but I'll need them to produce the clue that they're tied to, but I don't know what that clue is because it comes out of the characters' relationships, but I don't know what those relationships are because I don't have the characters yet, which I won't have until I have the clue.... And here we see the difficulty.
Characters come easy to me, but I don't just sit around noodling over a character and making up all his friends and enemies and relations and rivals whether I need them or not, and muddling through their histories and what happened last week or ten years ago that they've never really gotten over. My writing brain is much more efficient than that. And I'm beginning to wonder if it's that very efficiency that's causing me problems.