#Word writer uses to hide their identity how to#
#Word writer uses to hide their identity full#

When your mystery is a character’s identity, revelations may include: As you create incidents that reveal just a little, ask ‘why?’ Why is this revelation useful or important? This approach to creating plot points – planting information like puzzle pieces – is key to creating suspense. Prior revelations load further action and encounters with meaning and possible significance. This could lead the detective to be distracted all the time by the size of suspects’ feet. For example, perhaps the pattern of treads in a footprint suggest the wearer has unusually small feet for a male. These small ‘giveaways’ are useful because you can milk them for further suspense and mystery. The murderer leaves a footprint and we know their shoe size, the pattern of their treads.

Drop small revelations like a trail of crumbs for readers.

#Word writer uses to hide their identity how to#

Learning how to write mystery means learning to ‘drip out’ suspense.

Have a character don a disguise or role to achieve their goals: The gap between the reader’s knowledge of the truth and other characters’ awareness of it creates suspense.

Hide the identity behind an act: Whether a murderer or a generous giver (as in the Dickens’ example).

To create suspense by concealing identity you can thus: Here, suspense is created by the audience knowing something about a character other characters don’t. A love triangle between the character, the Duke (whom Viola/Cesario falls in love with) and the woman the Duke himself loves (Olivia) complicates this narrative tension further. This concealment creates suspense, as the audience wonders when Viola’s actual sex will be found out and her gender performance unmasked. She disguises herself as a man named ‘Cesario’ in order to serve a local Duke while seeking her brother. In Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, the protagonist Viola is separated from her twin brother Sebastian in a shipwreck on the coast of Illyria. In this case, Dickens conceals the doer of a non-criminal deed, and the revelation makes us reconsider everything we (and Pip) assume about why he was given his fortune.Īnother classic example of suspenseful concealed identity involves gender identity. In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, for example, a mystery benefactor leaves Pip, the protagonist, a small fortune, changing his life completely.ĭickens sets us up to believe that the benefactor is the wealthy Miss Havisham, but we later discover the real benefactor was another, more unsavoury character. Yet concealment isn’t only reserved for criminals. The unknown, criminal perpetrator is one of the most obvious types of concealed identity.

#Word writer uses to hide their identity full#

Conceal a character’s true identityįiction (and not only the mystery genre) is full of characters whose true identities are unknown. To create mysterious suspense, you may: 1. Suspense gives the question we ask most often as readers: What will happen next? This is an integral part of all storytelling. Suspense is ‘a state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen’. These unknowns, and how a story circles around these mysteries, create suspense. In a romance novel, the identity of a mysterious, desirable stranger may be the central mystery to begin. In a fantasy novel, for example, a villain’s real identity (or the scope of their power) may be a mystery at first. Thus while a classic murder mystery like an Agatha Christie novel involves the puzzling nature of solving crimes, any book may have elements of the puzzling and unknown. Mystery, more generally, means ‘secrecy or obscurity’ and ‘A person or thing whose identity or nature is puzzling or unknown’ ( OED). As a literary genre, a mystery is ‘A novel, play, or film dealing with a puzzling crime, especially a murder’ ( Oxford English Dictionary). Here are 6 ways to create suspense and build mystery: First, what are mystery and suspense?

Learning how to write mystery is easy when you understand the ingredients of mystery and suspense. Every good story has unknowns readers want answered, yet a good mystery makes us need to know.