Put Your Characters to Work

What I’m reading: Nothing Daunted, by Dorothy Wickenden (book club)

[image error]I’m approaching the end of my sequel to Deadly Secrets. No title yet—it’s simply “Mapleton 2″ in my computer. But that’s another story.

I’m not a plotter, but toward the end of a book, especially one with a mystery theme, be it romantic suspense or straight mystery, it’s critical to have all the threads tied up. While it’s okay to mislead readers, again—important in mystery—you can’t cheat them. It wouldn’t be fair for me to have Bob turn out to be the bad guy if Bob hasn’t appeared in the book before. Or, in the case of a book where things happened in the past, at least mentioned in the book before. Or to have Bob play an important role, and then disappear.

For those who read last week’s post about my issues with chronology, you might remember that this book focuses on a cold case and covers several generations of back story, although the book covers less than a week in “real” time. And I’m not using flashbacks, so the reader isn’t going to see what happened until my cops find it. My cops have to dig out all the clues when they don’t have a lot of people still alive to question. So, for them, it’s a matter of brainstorming and spending time with search engines, taking each new fact and trying to see if or how it might connect to the others. My job is to keep track of all these threads and then check them off as I tie them up.

When my kids were little, they went to special classes (I was going to say a gifted program, but that would sound like bragging – oh, I did say it — Ooops) where they were taught to brainstorm. It meant coming up with every possible idea, and the “rule” was that nothing was too far-fetched to be considered. This is kind of like the Rule of Twenty I posted about a while back.

Now, if I were a plotter, I might know all this before the book started. But I don’t.

At any rate, I don’t have local brainstorming partners, and one of the tenets of my small on-line crit group is that we discover the books as they’re written: no spoilers which could influence feedback. So who are my brainstorming partners? My characters. Since they’re cops, they’re going to ask a lot of questions—both amongst themselves and of witnesses and suspects. Although I might not use everything, I find that putting them together and letting them talk while I type can reveal plot ideas I hadn’t considered.

Here’s an example from the unedited draft of the new book. Those of you who’ve read Deadly Secrets might remember Gordon, Mapleton’s reluctant Chief of Police, and Colfax, the county detective who’s a thorn in his side.

“This is going to be one hell of a long timeline,” Gordon said.
“Let’s start at the beginning.” Colfax went to the board and picked up one of the markers. At the far left of the board, he drew a large X. “Somewhere around here, we have a dead body.”
“Just one? There were bones from two females.”
“Until we get confirmation that the bones have been in the ground the same length of time, let’s look at one as our primary.”
“You think someone added the second bones later?”
“I don’t think anything. I’m collecting facts.” Colfax wrote Body #1 on the board. Above that, he wrote Body #2. “What else do we have?”
“Questions is what we have. Where were they killed?” Gordon said. “Were they killed in the same place? At the same time? What’s the connection between victims? I could go on forever.”
Without comment, Colfax simply wrote the questions on the board. “Who was the guy you wanted me to question?”
“Roger Ignatius. And the now-defunct corporation—Roger, Suben and Clark. They owned the property adjacent to the Kretzers’, and even though we don’t have a surveyor’s report, we’re looking at that part of the property as the bone site, so we can’t discount their involvement.”
“You’re saying if the bones are on the Kretzers’ property now, it wasn’t their property when they were buried?”
“Correct.”
Colfax added Roger, Suben and Clark to the board, paused, and wrote Kretzer as well. Although Gordon’s stomach did a quick twirl at that, he knew they had to be included. He hoped they’d be eliminated as quickly as they went up.
Which reminded him of Megan’s picture. He picked up another marker and started writing names at the upper right of the board. Fred Easterbrook. Below his name, Gordon taped the newspaper picture and added a large question mark above it.
Gordon stood back and studied the board. “You know what’s missing?”
“Other than a viable suspect, the names of the victims, and a motive?”