Check Your Rearview Mirror

I adore mysteries. As a reader, I carefully scour the page for clues and try to figure out “who done it.” Part of the fun is deciphering which are red herrings. If the ending has a surprising twist, I search out the breadcrumbs leading to the solution. If those tiny hints don’t lead me to an “A-hah” moment, I feel cheated. As a writer in this genre, I strive to balance a surprise conclusion without giving away the ending or misleading the reader. And sometimes that’s a hard thing to do.

Have you ever imagined an ingenious crime and know how the villain did it, but haven’t the foggiest idea of how to solve it? That’s where I recently found myself.

So I decided to borrow an old screenwriter’s trick. In the mystery genre, the reader expects the stalwart detective to have discovered all clues and put them together by the end. So rather than driving my story engine from beginning to end, I threw it in reverse. I wrote the climax first.

Now that I knew how the mystery was solved, I could envision what must have happened immediately prior to that point and write that scene. I repeated this process. By retracing the steps that must have been taken, and only could have been taken to arrive at the ending, I dribbled out the clues in previous scenes. The middle of the story magically filled itself in.

But what is a mystery without red herrings? Just like authentic clues, the false trails can be reverse engineered and sprinkled throughout. The same goes for the B and C plots.

This technique may not work for all writers, but I found it a handy tool. First check your rearview mirrors before shifting into high gear.