You Can Write a Mystery by Gillian Roberts

Author:Gillian Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: You Can Write a Mystery
ISBN: 9781611876505
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

10. MAKING THE READER CARE

A mystery is, above all, a story. And though our stories involve crimes and villains, we nonetheless want our readers to identify with our characters and to feel emotions of horror, confusion, elation, fear, relief, excitement— something. In fact, our readers demand it.

Nonfiction may also want to make you feel an emotion. An article may aim at rousing the public against elder abuse, but it will do so through a reasoned explanation of conditions. It will use data and facts.

Mystery writers dramatize the situation. Our victim might be an elderly person in a helpless and increasingly horrifying and ultimately fatal situation. Instead of being told how dreadful life is for abused people, the reader would himself experience the problem by identifying with the character and her struggles,

Fiction tries to reproduce the emotional impact of experience. We don’t want you to read all about it. We want you to live it, to reach understanding via gut-level reactions rather than through an appeal to your mind. This is not to say mystery fiction can’t be full of ideas, but those ideas will be conveyed more effectively if you make your reader walk in someone else’s shoes.

This is basic human psychology. If you tell me conditions are bad for many elderly people, I’ll reflexively adopt an “Oh, yeah? Says who? Prove it” reaction. But if what I experienced—through a character—made me reach the same conclusion, I’ll believe it. We trust firsthand experience. Fiction gives that to its readers.

If readers aren’t emotionally moved by the actions of the characters, they won’t care what’s happening, no matter how significant the theme, how clever the concept or how many car chases, violent deaths and semiviolent matings are part of the action. We want to care, we want to feel, we want to be personally involved—to be the characters, live their lives, feel their emotions.

Suppose while you were watching the Olympics, the screen went blank and the announcer said, “Wow! I’ve never seen anything that wonderful! Incredible—a quadruple spin and flip—the move of the century, folks. Wasn’t that exciting?” Wouldn’t you feel cheated? You wanted to experience that yourself, and if you had, you’d have felt the excitement, too.

Your reader doesn’t want you telling him “Wow! This is so exciting! That fellow is really bad—evil and sneaky.” He wants to see those traits in action and decide for himself that the character is evil and sneaky. He wants to feel the excitement himself.

SHOW, DON’T TELL

The mystery writer’s primary obligation is to dramatize events and let them reveal their own meanings, not to stand on the sidelines and preach, telling readers how to feel about people or events. We present evidence, not judgments.

We do that on paper precisely as we do it in life. All human experience is apprehended through our sensory apparatus. In plain English: We find out about the world by seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting and smelling. Then we process those impressions and reach judgments—“lovely voice,” “handsome man,” “rotten idea,” “pompous fool,” “uh-oh, something’s wrong here.

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