Last month, January, I joined two of my Sisters in Crime (NE) authors (Nicole Asselin and Barbara Struna)  at the Centerville Library on the Cape for a fun presentation:  “Mystery Making .”  The Speakers Bureau of Sisters in Crime New England offers loads of exciting, informative, and enjoyable programs, but this is one of the most popular.  The audience gets to help us create a mystery  right before their eyes!

How is this mutual creation accomplished?  I’ve seen slight variations of this method, but here’s what usually happens on the presentations in which I’ve been involved. We, the writers, collect anonymous suggestions from the audience in bags marked “names,” weapons,” “motives,” and “setting.” Then we pull suggestions from the bags without looking – well, we look enough to see that we actually get our hands in the bag – reveal what we see, then post it on a white board at the front of the room.  We really get the ball rolling by each making  suggestions and cooperatively shaping characters to go with names, shaping those characters’ lives in terms of setting.  Pulling together how setting and character relationships create motive and how all three are reflexively related to the weapon(s) used.  Of course, the order of the discussion might change at different events, but our joking interplay always brings out how all the elements in creating a mystery are interlinked.

Especially fun is the audience’s participation, as they help create the mystery novel, not just by their suggestions on the anonymous paper slips, but as we gradually invite them in for more and more participation in drawing the elements of writing a mystery into a final form.  It’s a blast to hear people arguing over what weapons are plausible and which are not (big argument over the efficacy of spatulas), or helping us weave a plot in a setting where weapons like a surf board, a yoga mat, an awl, a kazoo, and, (yes) even a spatula can be elements of doom. Really neat, a member of the audience suggested that if the yoga mat would be involved in the murder, we should call the book Savasana:  The Corpse Pose.

Click on the photo above to read the suggestions.

And then, along the way, as we talk with the audience about how we might integrate all the different elements into a tale, we get to talk about how people write (e.g. pantsers vs. plotters) and how the type of mystery you write shapes what elements you will use and how you will use them.  Nicole writes baseball-centered tales in something of a cosy mode, I write historicals in a 1940s noir mode, and Barbara writes tales set on the Cape where the mystery arises from questions of the past.  So, the audience gets to see how and why the mystery genre is so richly varied.

The beautiful thing is that getting a program like this is so easy for your library or other organization.  You can also get your pick of authors (according to availability) from the various members of Sisters in Crime New England.  Just as wonderful, the Speaker’s Bureau has other programs, as well, that focus on writing, publishing, promotion, mystery genres, etc.  Just contact Leslie Wheeler at speakersbureau@sincne.org or go to the Sisters in Crime New England web site, Speakers Bureau.  Hope to see you at an event in the future!

By the way, here I am proving that a spatula can be a deadly weapon.  so there!

Photos courtesy of Judith Marshall at Centerville Library, and De-Ping Yang