I am pleased to welcome guest, Elizabeth S. Craig here to kick off the Literary Genre Blog Series running through February, March and into April, and give us a clue as to how to write a traditional murder mystery. Please enlighten us Elizabeth. 

I think mysteries are fun to write. Not only that, but they’re fairly easy to write. Although the structure of these stories sometimes scares off new writers, it’s actually the structure itself that makes the books so easy. There’s a necessary pattern of events to mysteries that ensure that a writer won’t be wondering what to write next.

Know what you’re writing: There are many mystery subgenres. Some of the most popular are police procedural, thriller, and cozy/traditional, but there are many others, including hardboiled and private investigator. There are different reader expectations, publisher expectations, and word counts for each of these genres. The differences could really be a whole post in itself. Writer’s Digest has a nice list of mystery subgenres. Since I write traditional, or cozy, mysteries, I’ll give tips on writing those…but much of this advice also works for police procedural mysteries (the difference being that police procedural investigations are performed by the pros…and they’re done by amateur sleuths in traditional/cozy mysteries).

To read the full post, visit my blog here.