Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer - Posts Tagged "murder"

I have begun - sort of and for the fourth or fifth time - writing my NaNoWriMo book for the year.

NaNoWriMo is NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth. You can sign up online to take part. It greatly helped give me structure (of time, not plotting) to get a book finished. The goal is to write a 50-thousand word book in 30 days. I did it, thanks to NaNoWriMo.

That book was tentatively titled HANGING. My editor, Vally Sharpe, suggested a change using the W. H. Auden quotation that opens the story and the book wound up as EVIL IS ALWAYS HUMAN.

This current work-in-progress is going under the name WORST MURDER MYSTERY EVER or WMME for short.

I am calling it the "worst" murder mystery ever because I plan to lay out whodunit at the very beginning. Yeah, the book starts by telling who killed whom.

When I planned to try to do this (I'm still not sure I can do it; I'm trying), I knew that most mysteries follow a typical pattern. I didn't want to follow that pattern. As I did a little research of real mysteries, I discovered that quite a few real-life mysteries are far more than just "whodunits."

The big questions, imho, are WHY? and WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ONES LEFT BEHIND?

I started writing the story from the beginning of the investigation, at the moment when investigators arrive on the scene. I came up with a pretty good (imho) plot twist or two for that scene.

Then I realized I didn't really have a good whodunit because I had not written the actual murder scene. So. I put it aside and thought about it.

I also did some research, reading a novel from 1955 called VANISHING LADIES (I think) by Ed McBain. That book was supposed to be a police procedural, but it's really more of a noir-ish tale of prostitutes and bad cops.

Now I am writing again. This time I've started drafting the murder as well as doing back stories on my two protagonists. I'm hoping it works out.