Writing Mysteries

Lesson 3: The Writing Process

Now the fun begins. Outlining your stories will be a helpful exercise. When you write down your character profiles, details of your settings, your plot outline, etc., then you will be able to take those notes and start writing your story plot, short stories, or novel. These notes will help you to include the important information that you don't want to forget.

You get to start writing your mini-mystery and learn how to develop your short stories and novels. All of the previous lessons have prepared you to write mini-mysteries, short stories, and novels. Are you ready to begin the final project?

Introduction

In this lesson, you will learn how to organize your thoughts so you can write your short story in the next lesson. This information will also prepare you to write a novel.

However, sometimes you may feel that it will take too long. You probably would rather skip this part and start writing your story, but it's worth taking the time to plan your story or book.

You can outline characters, settings, and plots. This can be done by lists if you are writing a short story or by chapter outlines if you are writing a book.

When you make a character outline, you will list each character whom you want to use in your story and their personal information. For example, you will write down their names, what they are like inwardly, and what they are like outwardly. You want to know everything about them, including their past history. You want your characters to be realistic so your readers can relate to them.

Besides outlining your characters, you will do the same thing for your settings. You need to write down the location and what type of setting you will have. Will it be a large city, small town, island, a place in the country, inside a building? Where? After you decide where you want it to be, then you need to write down the types of houses, people, income status: rich, poor, middle class, etc. What race or races will there be? What kind of trees, lakes, parks, etc.? All of these things are important to your setting. You need to become familiar with your background so you can write it in such a way that your readers can visualize the setting.

Outlining your plot is also important. You need to write down the characters for each scene, the important events that will be taking place, and the clues you want to plant throughout your story or novel. What chapters will they be placed in? What are the titles of your chapters? Your plot outline will help you to structure your story or novel.

If you know the type of characters, settings, and the plot structure of your story, then it will be much easier to write it. By developing outlines on these different elements, you will remember the important points, and you will be consistent throughout your story structure.

Throughout this course, you have been given information on the differences between suspense, detective fiction, and thrillers; gathering ideas; learning the elements of fiction; reading and analyzing short stories and mini-mysteries; outlining; and now you'll learn how to put this information together.

My goal for the course has been to teach you the information you needed to write suspense, detective fiction, and thrillers. Are you ready to begin the writing process?

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8