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MYSTERY WRITER CHALLENGE: SUSPENSEFUL SIMILES
…a turret with a top like a metal witch’s hat.
A mystery writer wants to set the mood for the reader at the very beginning, to let them know this is going to be a suspenseful, mysterious story. One way to do that is with a simile. In a simile, the author compares a person or thing in the story to something else—usually to something unexpected.
For example, let’s take the turret in our story (a “turret” is a small tower coming off the top of a building). If you wanted to set a funny mood, you might say “a turret like a giant banana.” Or if you wanted the building to sound grand and beautiful, you could say “a turret like the top of a proud old castle.”
But the author of this mystery didn’t describe the turret in those ways. She chose a very specific way to describe it, which fit the mysterious mood she wanted: “a turret with a top like a metal witch’s hat.” You’re going to see a lot more of these similes as you keep reading. Be on the lookout for a chandelier that hangs “like a big glass spider,” a hallway “dark as wet ink,” and many more.
This brings us to a game called “Make it Mysterious,” which will help you add a little mystery to your own life, while also giving you good practice for writing suspenseful similes. You can start by looking at objects around you. For example, let’s say the television is off. How could you compare the boring dark TV to something mysterious? Is it “dark as a musty tomb?” Or can you see your face reflected in it “like a ghost peering in at the world of the living?”
You can also come up with similes for people. Are your teacher’s fingernails painted “red like her fingers had been dipped in blood”? Is your next-door neighbor sitting on his front steps “as silent as a wolf stalking his prey”?
If you get in the habit of comparing normal, everyday things to weird, mysterious things, you’ll have a lot of good practice for when you write a mystery.
If you got here by flipping forward from this page, flip back and keep reading!
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DETECTIVE’S NOTEBOOK: MYSTERY SETTING
Do you want to write a story set in a creepy, mysterious place, where secrets lurk around every corner? Are there locked basements, secret passageways, peculiar objects, and strange people who seem like they’re trying to hide something?
Or maybe you want to write about a totally normal place you know a lot about, like your neighborhood or your school. At least, maybe this place seems normal, until you take a closer look and start uncovering all the weird secrets hiding there….
The setting for your mystery—where and when it takes place—can be anywhere. If you think it would be an interesting place for a mystery, then it probably is! One tip to make your job easier is to think about a setting where there are lots of people around. This could be a plant store, a school, a beach, a train, a party at an old mansion, a starship full of ninja scientists…anywhere your imagination can come up with. The more people you have in your setting, the more secrets there will be to uncover, and the more suspects there will be to investigate (more on that later).
Once you’ve decided on a setting, it’s a good idea to think carefully about the characters who spend time there. What kind of people (or animals, or imaginary creatures) do you want in your mystery story? Then it’s important to imagine the setting with your five senses: What can you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste there? Check out the Mystery Setting organizer on this page for an example of what we mean.
As you look it over, you’ll notice lots of details about Carrolls’ Gardens, the exotic plant store where Digging Up Danger takes place. You may also notice that one box has been left blank: “Is there anything in this setting you’re keeping secret from the reader?” We didn’t leave it blank because there’s no secret in Carrolls’ Gardens. There is.
We left it blank because it’s a secret. If you want to find out what it is, you’ll need to keep reading.
MYSTERY WRITER CHALLENGE: SETTING THE SCENE
Once you’ve used your five senses to think about the setting, the next step for a writer is just as important: setting the scene for the reader so that they feel like they’re actually there. How do you do that?
Here’s an example: In Carrolls’ Gardens, we already know from the Mystery Setting organizer on this page that you see “lots and lots of green leaves” and smell “thousands of plants.” But in the novel it doesn’t just say “Eliza saw lots and lots of green leaves and smelled thousands of plants.” Instead, it says:
First came the smell. It was a deep, damp, leafy smell, the smell of thousands of living things breathing and blooming. Then came the rush of color: emerald green, jade green, black-green. Green so thick and bright you could practically hear it. Green in the racks and shelves and tables full of plants, on the walls and windows climbing with vines, in the lily pads floating on the indoor pond.
The writer has given us LOTS of details, telling us EXACTLY what the setting looks, sounds, feels, smells, and tastes like. Even if you’re brainstorming ideas on a Mystery Setting organizer, when it comes time to write the story, you’ve got to be so detailed you make the reader feel like they’re standing right there in the setting, soaking it in with all five senses.
In fact, this brings us to a challenge! It’s a game to help you practice describing your setting with LOTS of details. We call it “Deduce the Setting.” Take a look at the following two descriptions and see if you can guess what the settings are:
1. The breeze whipped across my face, and as I opened my mouth I could taste a hint of salt on the wind. The sand was sinking beneath my bare feet as I walked forward, squinting from the bright sunlight. In the distance, over the tan and white of the sand, I could just make out the yellow circle of a Frisbee, flying between two laughing children.
Did you get that one? Too easy? Here’s another:
2. Screams. That’s what I heard first, starting high up in the air, but then quickly rushing toward the ground. All around me, however, families chattered happily, paying no attention to the noise, and moving with excitement in all directions. The smell of food drew me forward, with the thick, sugary scent of fried dough hovering close by.
Did you figure it out? Look on this page to check the answer.
You can try this out yourself: Give your friends and family a description of a setting you think up, without actually saying what the setting is. You can either write it down ahead of time or make it up on the spot. Either way, if you give them enough clues from the five senses, they should be able to guess what it is. When you write an actual story, of course, you probably aren’t going to make the reader guess the setting—but this game is good practice for adding enough details to bring your setting to life.
IDEA STORM: CREATE A MYSTERY SETTING
What setting will you choose for your mystery story? Will it be a strange, mysterious setting with danger lurking around every corner? Or somewhere that seems like a totally normal place…at first?
Take a look at our Mystery Setting organizer on this page, and make your own version to help you imagine your setting! Pay special attention to describing the setting with all five senses, and remember to think carefully about what characters spend time there. That will become very important later.
What kind of secrets will you hide in your setting? It can be a small secret (there’s a big box of quarters hidden under the bed), a gigantic secret (there’s a dangerous ray gun with mysterious powers hidden under the bed), or anything in between. This doesn’t even have to be the main secret that starts off your mystery (we’ll talk more about that very soon). More secrets just make for a more interesting, surprising setting, whatever they are.
Also, don’t forget that you have PERMISSION TO GET WEIRD in imagining this setting. You can make it a very unusual place (even if the unusual part is a secret…for now).
If you got here by flipping forward fr
om this page, flip back and keep reading!
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MYSTERY WRITER CHALLENGE: KEEPING THE READER IN SUSPENSE
Eliza edged around the room. She backed away from a cluster of plants that looked like they might bite and skirted something with a speckled seed pod as long as her arm. She was bending down to sniff a wrinkly blue flower when, from somewhere nearby, there came a deep, ghostly moan.
This is a classic way to build suspense in a mystery story. Let’s look closely at what the author is doing in this paragraph:
The character looks around the setting.
The author describes a few things the character sees there. There’s some good, detailed description, but nothing too shocking.
Right at the very end, the author slips in one final detail that is weird…mysterious…chilling…what does it mean?
This is a technique you can use in your own mystery story. Write a little bit about the setting, but then at the end of the paragraph, have the character notice something…weird. The weird thing could be a clue or an unexpected person. Maybe you don’t even tell the reader what the weird thing is right away. You make them keep turning pages instead. For example, Eliza keeps looking around….
She peered into the leafy shadows. When she took a small step sideways, the moan came again, a little bit louder.
Things are getting weirder. The reader really wants to know what’s happening…but the writer has a secret to tell. It’s no fun telling a secret all at once, so we’re going to take our time and have Eliza keep looking around.
Eliza crouched down to look.
There was no vent. There was something else.
Something else? What was it?
From the darkness beneath a rack of plants, a black blob with gleaming yellow eyes stared straight back at her.
Eliza yelped.
Okay, so in the end, it turned out to just be a dog. But that’s part of the fun of writing a mystery story: Instead of writing “Eliza saw a dog. She was startled at first,” you can tell the reader about it slowly…not giving away the secret that it’s a dog until the very end…making the reader excitedly turn pages wondering “What is it? What’s the secret?”
Doing this is called keeping the reader in suspense. Sometimes, early on in the story, the secret might turn out to be something normal, like a dog. Then, a little while later, the characters will run into something much, much weirder than a dog….
Here’s a way to start practicing this yourself: It’s a game we call “Keep ’Em in Suspense.” Find some friends or family members and get them to listen while you tell a short story following the steps below. You could write something down ahead of time, or just make it up in your head as you go along. Either way, to help set the right mood, you might talk in a low voice, or a whisper, and go slowly, like you’re telling a mysterious secret.
Start by describing the setting. It can be a real place or an imaginary one. For example: “There was a supermarket on the corner. It was an old building, and a little small, but it was always full of people buying groceries.”
Give a few more details about the setting. The details shouldn’t be too shocking yet; just tell everyone a little more about the setting using your five senses: “Everyone especially loved the produce section. There was always fresh fruit and delicious vegetables, and in the fall you could smell the apples the second you walked in the store. They came from an orchard right outside of town.”
Finally, add a weird detail that will make your listener wonder “What is it?” “One day the manager came in early to set up, when he noticed something odd. The apples were dripping something. It looked purple.”
What was dripping? Were the apples so rotten their insides changed color? Or was it paint? What kind of maniac would paint an apple?
For now, you don’t even need to decide on the answer! If you can keep your audience in suspense, wanting to know what will happen next, then you’re getting in good practice for writing a mystery. If they ask you “What was it?” you can always say “You’ll have to wait until I’m done writing my story to find out!”
Here’s a quick bonus: During this challenge, you might be describing some WEIRD things. It would be repetitive to use the word weird over and over again, so here are some other words that mean the same thing, which you could use instead:
Weird
abnormal
bizarre
curious
odd
peculiar
strange
unusual
So weird it’s funny
absurd
far-fetched
kooky
ludicrous
outlandish
preposterous
wacky
So weird it’s scary
creepy
eerie
freaky
ominous
spooky
uncanny
unearthly
In fact, you can practice speaking these words out loud in real life any time you want to say that something is “weird.” You’ll be needing them a lot in a mystery story, so you might as well get used to saying them.
If you got here by flipping forward from this page, flip back and keep reading!
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DETECTIVE’S NOTEBOOK: THE MYSTERY
Once you have a setting, it’s time to start thinking about the mystery you want to put there. How do you do it? There’s no one correct way, but we have an easy place to start:
Think about your setting, and then think about something that is either MISSING from that setting, or something WEIRD that DOESN’T BELONG there.
In a classic mystery story, the missing thing might be something that was stolen (the diamonds are missing from the museum!), and the weird thing that doesn’t belong might be a murder (how was the murderer able to strike on the middle of the basketball court without anyone seeing what happened?). But your mystery can be much, much weirder than that if you want. The thing that’s missing might be all the water from the swimming pool…or a whole Ferris wheel from the amusement park. The weird thing that doesn’t belong might be a tiger in a restaurant…or an alien spaceship on the school playground. Anything weird or missing in the setting can be the starting point for your mystery.
For example, in Digging Up Danger we have a couple of WEIRD things that DON’T BELONG:
First, Eliza is sure she’s seen signs of a ghost: mysterious figures that seem to vanish, unexplained sounds, peculiar shadows…
Second, there are those incredibly rare plants, which even Professor Stahl has never seen before. Plants this rare are WEIRD, even in a plant store.
Are there really ghosts lurking around the building, and if so, what do they want? Is there any connection between the ghosts and the weird plants? The only way to find out will be to solve the mystery!
MYSTERY WRITER CHALLENGE: MAKING UP A MYSTERY
Want to get in some practice making up mysteries before you settle on one for your story? Try this game called “Puzzling Picture”:
Take a look at the picture on this page. Somewhere in this picture is a secret. Or several secrets, to be precise. Sure, it might look like an ordinary classroom…but something isn’t quite right. There are some things in this scene that don’t belong. Look carefully to see if you can pick out what’s WEIRD here, and try to count how many WEIRD things you see.
Next, make up your own! Draw a picture of a setting and include as many details as possible. Then either add something WEIRD that DOESN’T BELONG, or decide on something MISSING that you would normally find there. Show your picture to your friends and family, and see if they can guess the mystery!
Turn to this page for the answer.
Also, when some
writers come up with a mystery, they enjoy saying it out loud in as mysterious a way as possible. For instance, they’ll say “It’s the case of the tiger in the restaurant!” or “It’s the case of the missing Ferris wheel!” Then they’ll sing “Dun dun DUUUUUUUN!” to sound extra mysterious. We’re not saying YOU have to do that. We’re just letting you know that SOME writers like to do it.
IDEA STORM: MAKE UP A MYSTERY
Think about your own setting and decide what mystery you want to put there! You can brainstorm ideas by drawing a setting, then choosing something that’s MISSING or something WEIRD that DOESN’T BELONG there.
If you already came up with a “secret” on your Mystery Setting organizer (see this page), the mystery might have something to do with that. (Maybe the quarters under the bed are missing…or maybe the ray gun opened a portal to outer space and made a comet appear in the backyard. Nobody can figure out where the comet came from!) But you can also save that secret for another time—it might come in handy later in the story.
Finally, don’t forget that you have permission to make your mystery as WEIRD (or BIZARRE…or ABNORMAL) as you want!
If you got here by flipping forward from this page, flip back and keep reading!
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DETECTIVE’S NOTEBOOK: THE DETECTIVE
The Story Pirates Present Page 13