Teasing Your Reader

Thanks to Cienn at Wikimedia Commons.

Foreshadowing and red herrings are a staple of mystery writers, so do romance writers really need to know about these things? Absolutely! There are a good number of romance novels which are, in fact, mysteries. My husband is constantly complaining to me that he thinks I spend too much time in my romances devoted to the mystery subplot. I don’t know that he’s right, but I do devote time to these subplots. Why? Because they’re fun!

Mysteries do take up a good amount of time/space within a romance mainly because you’ve got to set them up properly. Now, I am not a mystery writer. I’ll admit that right up front. But I did have that wonderful experience yesterday that all writers of mysteries enjoy – a reader totally fooled.

As I’ve mentioned on my Facebook author page, my daughter is currently reading and editing A Dandy in Disguise for me. Yesterday, she came into the room where I was editing my next book and said very seriously, “Mom, we need to talk about red herrings.”

My immediate reaction was, “Uh-oh, I haven’t done a very good job at planting them in my Regency”. But then she went on to tell me how obvious it was the Character A was the one carrying out the illegal gambling scheme in the book. Yes, I did try to pin it on Character B, but I wasn’t doing a very good job of it. I needed to work on this mystery some more.

I was very good. I took notes on what she was saying. Nodded my head and thanked her for her ideas and then recommended that she go back and finish reading the book – because, of course she was entirely wrong in her assessment. Not that I don’t need to be sure that my red herrings are strong, but in who she thought was the guilty party.

She decided to pause in her editing just so that she could quickly read to the end to see “who did it”. It took her about twenty minutes (she’s a very fast reader). When she came back in, she had a huge smile on her face and said that she should have realized it was that person because now that she thought about it, there was foreshadowing throughout the book pointing to that character. Yes, she still thought I should add some more, just to make sure the reader isn’t completely thrown for a loop when they find out who is it, but she was tickled to have been led astray, because that is absolutely the most fun part of reading a mystery.

Tease your readers! Put everything they need to know to solve the mystery right out there for them to see – but in such a way that they don’t actually realize that that’s what it is. That is foreshadowing. Just like in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, in the beginning of the book, Harry gets a trading card that tells him all about Nicholas Flamel, but we pay no attention to it. It doesn’t seem important – until it is.

When you read A Dandy in Disguise (which I expect you will be able to do by the end of the summer, after my dear daughter has finished editing it and I have made all the corrections necessary – including adding in some more foreshadowing), you’ll see that all the clues are there. All the information to decipher the mystery is there. But still, when you get to that part of the book where the schemer is revealed, I’m hoping that you’ll hit your forehead, laugh, and say “Of course! Why didn’t I think it was…” And that is why I devote, perhaps, too much time in my romances to the mystery. Because they’re fun!

And for those of you who are interested, last week I mentioned that I would try to remember to post how much writing and editing I got done each day. To your left at the bottom of the column is a little block where I’m posting how much work I get done each day.