Don’t Murder Your Mystery
After hearing Chris Roerden’s Don’t Murder Your Mystery so highly praised on BIW, I enthusiastically dived into it with the full expectation it would verify how clever my first novel-in-progress really was. Imagine my shock when, amongst the 24 writing techniques to save your manuscript from turning up “dead on arrival,” Roerden’s cites as the very first offenders, “hobbled hooks,” “perilous prologues,” and “bloody back story,” – an amazingly accurate description of the first few chapters of my masterpiece.
Roerden asks us to examine our writing through the eyes of a publisher’s “screener-outer,” that tired editor who is looking for some excuse to toss your manuscript in the rejected file before reading it through. I can relate. Recently I advertised a position which involves a lot of writing. On a Friday afternoon at 4:00pm, a human resources official delivered me over 600 applications. By 5:00pm, and without having read one resume, I’d reduced the pile to about twenty, for reasons which are strikingly similar to those discussed by Rearden in her first few chapters.
Roerden has been in the editing and publishing business for over forty years, written over sixty articles and conducted numerous seminars and classes. Don’t Murder Your Mystery is her tenth book. Witty, and fun to read, it’s jam packed with tips, alerts, techniques, and illustrations from published authors. She warns against the “backstory dump,” the “description dump,” and “wordiarra.” (Tip: “The key to being selective is the delete key.”) Avoid clichés. Position your characters in interesting scenes. If, for example, you must convey information through a meeting in a restaurant, at least “put a lid on all that sipping and chewing. After a while it’s hard to swallow.”
With almost every page I found myself jotting down changes I would make to my manuscript, the first and most liberating, to move from subjective POV to third person. The things I can do now! I felt like I’d been let out of jail.
This is a must-have book for any novelist–especially those of us who are testing the waters for the first time.
