Music for the Day

I know it may seem odd to suggest this since I mentioned that my late mom reads mysteries, not me, but I do read them. I’ve read those silly Wishbone Mysteries Book series, and I read The Three Investigators when I was a teenager. So it’s not that I dislike the genre; I have other preferences. Though my personal favorites are the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

So, why do I suggest reading mystery stories? To put it simply, it’s because they have the purest structures on how a story is progressed.

Think about it for a moment. To write a mystery, especially a good one, you need to set up all of the pieces, the clues, foreshadowing, Chekhov’s guns/lectures/etc., for the readers to follow along. A mystery story needs a sound structure because it’ll fall apart otherwise. After all, you can’t just pull something out of your pants every time you write yourself into a corner because audiences would see through it in time and lose interest. The same goes if the mystery is utterly clueless since the whole point of a mystery is to follow along and piece together the puzzle.

This isn’t to say that you can’t be loose. After all, I said that I lean more to the pantser rather than the plotter, but I don’t entirely make it up as I go along. Usually, I have an outline in hand, and I have the ending in mind when I begin a story and any significant events. Sure, some characters get more expanded than I thought, and the story doesn’t quite go as I envisioned it, but I stick to the significant events and ending.

The point I’m making is that a mystery book teaches you a lot about plot structures. It teaches you how to set up the plot, the characters, events, foreshadowing, and plenty more. You can take much of the same structures to other genres, and it’ll work just as well. It is the rawest form of a story, which you can learn a lot from. That is why I suggest reading a good mystery novel.