Reader experience

Quick Link: The Secret of a Successful Mystery: Making the Reader a Participator

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Although this article on Writers Helping Writers is geared towards the mystery genre, the wisdom that is shared really applies to all types of stories. The best reads are the ones that suck you in and won’t let you out until you find out what happens because you are rooting so desperately for the protagonist.

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The Secret of a Successful Mystery: Making the Reader a Participator

by Writing Coach

A lot of great stories have a mystery in them. The mystery may not be the primary focus; it might be the secondary, or the mystery might be so minor it lasts only a few chapters. But whatever the case, it should draw readers into your story and keep them turning the pages. That only happens, though, if it’s done right.

As an editor, I see a lot of unpublished work. One of the most common problems I see when an author includes a mystery is that the whole mystery seems to happen on the page. The author plants “clues” of course, but then focuses too much on them, making sure the reader “gets it,” or she has her character wonder for paragraphs upon paragraphs, with speculation that is often vague, uninteresting, or leads to conclusions that are far too predictable.

In cases like this, the reader becomes a spectator.

But just as emotion is more powerful when the reader experiences it himself, mysteries are more powerful when the reader is a participator.

The narrator (which in some cases is the viewpoint character) is the readers’ guide. The narrator draws focus to certain aspects of the story, and leaves others in the background. The narrator offers an emotional tone that helps the reader interpret a scene. The narrator suggests themes and ideas and judgments on the story and characters.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Link: Now a Word from the Copy Editor . . . Nan Reinhardt – Anachronism

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

An anachronism is anything in a time period where it doesn’t belong, and it can bring your reader’s experience to a jolting halt. Copyeditor Nan Reinhardt from Romance University, discusses anachronisms at length and why they are so bad for your story. I am pretty sure I never want to play against her in Trivial Pursuit. Read the article and you will see why. ; )

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Now a Word from the Copy Editor . . . Nan Reinhardt

Copyeditor Nan Reinhardt gives us a new word of the day – and a reason to hope we never get to use it when writing our books!

TimeAnachronism—it’s a great word, isn’t it? I love words and this is one of my favorites because if you don’t already know it, you can’t even begin to guess the meaning. Am I right? And when someone uses it in a sentence, like “Kind of anachronistic, don’t you think?” you have to be right in the moment to get the meaning and even then, it might not be obvious. No, most of us don’t get this word from context and I confess, as a newbie copy editor, the first time I heard a project editor use the word, I had to look it up. I wasn’t going to be able to “watch for anachronisms” in the manuscript I was editing if I didn’t know what the devil an anachronism was.

So, Webster tells us an anachronism is “an error in chronology; a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other; a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place; especially one from a former age that is incongruous in the present; the state or condition of being chronologically out of place.”

Make sense? Try this, in a historical romance I once read, the setting was pre-Civil War Georgia and the heroine was having a ball to celebrate her engagement. A friend came to the plantation and admired the flowers—dozens and dozens of orchids—that the heroine had used to decorate the ballroom. The heroine said, “Aren’t they lovely? I had them flown in from Bermuda.” Okay . . . hmmmm. Interesting. First of all, who flew them in? In 1856, the only things flying were birds and hot air balloons, neither of which could have brought hundreds of orchids from Bermuda to Georgia. Anachronism! Maybe in 1956, she could’ve had orchids flown in to Georgia, although if she’d done some fact-checking she’d have discovered that orchids aren’t indigenous to Bermuda—they don’t grow well in the ground there, so even Bermudans have to import orchids if they want them or grow them in pots.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.