creative writing description of a mysterious place

How to Create a Setting for Mystery—Let’s Crack This Case

All the best mysteries have two things in common: unforgettable sleuths and immersive settings. In fact, if you think of your favorite mystery protagonist, I’m willing to bet you can’t picture them without the surrounding world that makes them who they are.

Sherlock Holmes’s Victorian London. Shawn Spencer’s deceptively sunny Santa Barbara. Darren Matthews’s East Texas. A great mystery setting is vivid and unforgettable.

It’s also a powerful tool for revealing character, building suspense , heightening conflict, illuminating themes, and much more. If you’re interested in writing mysteries that stick with readers forever, you’ll have to master the fine art of setting. 

Let’s get started now with tips on:

• Creating an engaging setting for your mystery novel
• Learning how to improve your own setting by reading successful mysteries
• Researching your story’s location and time period
• Treating your setting like another character in the novel
• Describing your fictional world
• Using the setting to enhance other aspects of your mystery

First, let’s clarify what a good mystery setting involves.

Elements of a Good Mystery Setting

What makes a mystery setting work? What elements need to be in place in order for your readers to feel the thrills and chills you’re going for?

Here are the key elements of your mystery novel’s world:

Strong atmosphere - Atmosphere is the character of a place—the way it makes people feel. And what fun is a mystery setting that doesn’t tingle the spine or carry a sense of foreboding? 

If you’re not sure how to tap into atmosphere and make your reader feel it in their bones, stick with me. We’ll cover it.

Location - This is the element we tend to think of first when we start talking about setting. Where does this story physically take place?

In a mystery novel, your choice of location influences the atmosphere. It can also create obstacles for your main character, provide unique opportunities for crime, and symbolize the deeper themes of your story.

Time period - When does your mystery story take place? Setting your novel in the past means you’ll have to do additional research. It also means you’ll need to consider the cultural, political, and technological context of that point in history.

Climate - What kind of weather does your main character have to navigate in this world? How does that weather affect the atmosphere? Does it present any challenges for your protagonist?

Cultural context - What are the cultural norms of your main character’s world? Are there any tensions or power dynamics that are relevant to your mystery story? Does your sleuth fit in here, or are they struggling to solve mysteries in a place where they’re considered an outsider?

Clearly, there’s a lot to think about when you’re trying to write a mystery setting. Don’t sweat it. We’ll take this step by step.

Creating an Engaging Setting for Your Mystery Novel

Let’s start by setting up the basic blueprint for your story’s world.

Choosing the Right Location

Your first order of business is to determine where this murder mystery is going to take place. There’s no right answer. Any place can feel sinister once you get a writer involved. Nevertheless, you want to think this through.

Here are some things to consider as you select the location for your mystery novel.

Your subgenre will clue you in to what your readers expect in terms of setting. Cozy mysteries tend to take place in seemingly harmless places: quiet villages, bakeries, bookshops, and the like. The joy of the subgenre comes from the dastardly hidden within the quaint.

If you’re writing noir, you’re probably looking at something darker and harsher—lots of concrete and shadows. A caper could carry your characters all around the world. So could a thriller . 

We’re back to that question of how you want your reader to feel reading your mystery story. 

Are you going for playful and quirky with a thrilling undercurrent of intrigue? Then you might want a sleepy village filled with colorful characters and historical buildings. Are you going for gritty and suspenseful? Then you might want a dark, hard-to-navigate space like a sprawling city.

If you get stuck, make a list of locations that you associate with the feeling you’re trying to convey. What sparks your interest?

Obstacles 

Ideally, some aspects of the location will throw obstacles in your main character’s path. This could be things like:

• Dangerous situations like pursuing a perp into an abandoned warehouse or navigating treacherous mountain trails
• Easy opportunities to dispose of evidence, like a giant body of water
• Resource issues, like an inability to access forensic technology, find a competent crime-solving partner, or gain respect in a powerful police force
• Difficulty connecting with the locals if your main character is in a fish-out-of-water situation
• Too many red herrings if the crime took place in a setting where the crime rate is high or everyone has a connection to the victim 

Crime 

How does the crime itself integrate with the location? Is it delightfully shocking that a murder mystery would happen here? Or does it feel almost inevitable—so much so that the main character has a hard time getting anyone to care about the crime? Does the location give you plenty of opportunities to establish red herrings and false suspects? 

Think through the relationship between where your story takes place and the way both the crime and investigation unfold.

Once you’ve nailed down a location, you’re ready to think about ways to make it come alive.

Creating a Sense of Atmosphere and Mood

We’re talking about scene description here, and let me tell you, it takes a light touch when it comes to mystery writing.

Your audience is here for the story . They want to pick up clues, get creeped out, and try to help your main character solve this thing. They don’t want three pages discussing every creaky floorboard and loose screw.

This means you need to master the fine art of picking details that get the job done fast. 

Start by identifying what you want your reader to feel in the scene. Is it a sense of danger? Urgency? Momentary relief?

Think about what sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes evoke those feelings in you. If it helps, think of a location where you’ve felt the way you want your reader to feel. Are there any details you can bring into your scene description or adapt for your setting?  

The important thing is to show, not tell. That means you help the reader experience the moment rather than telling them how they should feel about it. It’s a cardinal rule for writing mysteries as well as every other genre. In fact, we made some worksheets to help you practice it.

Developing Sense of Suspense: The Role of Foreshadowing

Just as your setting can inspire some great red herrings, it can also help you hint at the chaos to come.

Foreshadowing happens when something in your mystery story indicates that something is coming—something good or bad, but usually bad. It can be very on-the-nose, like a character saying, “Something bad is coming.” (Be more artful about it than that, though.) 

It can also be something in the environment that feels foreboding. The lights flicker in the abandoned museum where the sleuth is searching for the perp. Or an unnatural silence blankets the town the morning the body is discovered.

Establishing Cultural and Historical Context

It might seem like a murder mystery is the one story where the cultural context doesn’t matter. I mean, murder is happening. Don’t your characters have bigger things to worry about than navigating cultural dynamics?

The fact is, culture influences the way we deal with everything, including homicide. All successful mystery novels reflect the norms, values, and assumptions that define their settings.

Sometimes it’s simply a matter of creating obstacles for the main character. Perhaps there’s a culture of fear in the community that makes witnesses reluctant to talk. Maybe the main character can’t get locals to communicate because they’re seen as an outsider.

For some mysteries, cultural and historical contexts are the most defining aspects of the setting. Attica Locke’s Highway 59 series confronts both the history and present reality of white supremacy in East Texas as Black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews investigates the murders that happen there. 

Whether you seek to examine society or just use it to add depth to your world, it’s important to consider this context when writing your own mystery novel. 

If your story takes place in the past, be sure to do your research so you understand not just what the world looked like in your time period, but also what it felt like to live in that era. On that note…

Tapping Into the Time Period

When does your mystery novel take place? The answer to this determines many of your story’s details, including:

• How your characters dress and communicate
• The technology available to your detective
• How the community feels about engaging with law enforcement
• What it would take to pull off the crime in question
• How characters view their world, themselves, and others

We’ll talk more about how to research your story’s time period in a bit. For now, just know that it matters. Even if your story is set in the present, think about which aspects of our current world should play a role in your novel.

The norms of a time period can even help you set up a few red herrings. For example, suppose a young lady in a Regency Era mystery story can’t supply an alibi when her lady’s maid reveals that she was not in her room at the time of the crime, as previously stated. It’s eventually revealed that the young woman was attending a political rally in disguise—a move that could destroy her family’s reputation in the community.

Now that you’ve got a solid understanding of the setting elements that make for a great mystery novel, let’s take a look how it’s done in these successful mysteries:

Examples of Successful Mystery Settings

In order to write a good mystery novel, you need to read a lot of mysteries. Current bestsellers will help you pick up on current trends and audience interests. Beloved classics will reveal timeless tropes and plot structure. 

All great mysteries will show you how to write engaging sleuths, dazzling plots , and—of course—worlds that draw the reader in. Here are some solid books to read for examples of well-executed (*cough*) mystery settings.

Cooper’s Chase Retirement Village, Present – Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club Series

If you’re writing a cozy mystery, this series is one to check out. In the tradition of all cozies, these books are set in a place you wouldn’t associate with murder: a comfortable retirement home.

What makes Osman’s mystery novels unique, however, is the extent to which he leans into the trope of the geriatric amateur sleuth. Not only does this series include an entire gang of senior detectives, it also has a few suspects and spies of a certain age.

Rural Ireland, Present – The Searcher

In this Tana French novel, the main character, Cal, retires from the Chicago police force and retreats to rural Ireland for peace and solitude. When he gets roped into the search for a missing child, his beautiful surroundings start to feel more sinister.

This is an excellent mystery story to read if you want to study shifting atmospheres and learn how to use the environment to create a sense of danger. It’s also good for examining cultural settings and the treacherous business of being an outsider. 

Chicago, 1944 – Clark and Division

This mystery follows a young woman investigating the death of her sister after her family’s release from a Japanese internment camp, casting a light on a corner of history that gets limited attention in pop culture.

If you’re interested in learning about blending a compelling mystery with a weighty historical and cultural context, this is it. Plus, author Naomi Hirahara studied and collected oral histories on Japanese internment for a previous nonfiction book, so Clark and Division is a solid example of a thoroughly researched historical mystery.

Pemberley, 1803 – Death Comes to Pemberley

Writers are nothing if not artistic borrowers, and that includes mystery authors like P.D. James. This murder mystery is set at Pemberley, the fictional estate Jane Austen fans will recognize from Pride and Prejudice .

By writing a whodunit in this setting, James taps into a world that’s already beloved and funnels it into an entirely new genre. The familiar becomes fresh and the fresh is somehow familiar. 

Los Angeles, Present – Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch Series

As this series lands in the crime fiction branch of the mystery genre, it’s not at all shocking that it would take place in a major city—the popular setting choice for gritty deeds and a cynical main character.

But Los Angeles specifically is a great choice for the protagonist, Detective Harry Bosch, who works by the philosophy that “Everybody counts or nobody counts.” As L.A. is known for being a place where people are either somebodies are nobodies, it’s satisfying to watch Bosch doggedly pursue justice for all victims.

The Importance of Research in Creating a Mystery Setting

By now, you have the basic idea of what makes for a good mystery setting. Time to get into the details of how to bring the world of your story to life for your reader.

The first step: research.

What to Research

The amount of research you have to do depends on how familiar you are with the time and place in which your novel takes place. But here are some things you’ll probably want to know about your setting before you start writing:

• Landscape and climate
• Architecture
• Cultural values
• Dominant religious beliefs or political affiliations
• Relationships between cultural groups, economic classes, etc.
• Power structures
• Technology used by regular people
• Fashion, entertainment, and pop culture
• Threatening forces like extreme weather, wild predators, mob presence, etc.
• Local crime history
• Available forensic technology
• Police presence, including the size of the force and their relationship with the community

As you brainstorm and write your mystery, you’ll discover other gaps you need to fill in. But the list above should get you started.

Research Strategies

So how exactly are you supposed to find all this information?

We’ve actually written an entire article on the fine art of researching historical fiction, and many of the strategies in it can apply to researching a present-day location, too. Either way, here’s a quick list of places to look to find information about your mystery’s setting:

Internet - Make sure sources are credible and you’ve got the most current information.

Library - In addition to books and periodicals, your local library might have photo, video, and audio archives, as well as maps. Librarians love research questions, so don’t be shy about asking for help. 

Experts - Is there someone who would know about a particular aspect of your story’s setting? Someone who really knows the time period or can clarify what it’s really like to work in a police department?

The actual place - Can you visit the setting of your mystery novel? Spend a weekend in the town or tour the courthouse that features prominently in your story? 

Museums - Do you have access to a museum that features items or art from the world of your mystery story? Go check it out.

Pop culture - If you plan to write a mystery that takes place in the past, immerse yourself in the pop culture of the time. Listen to the music, watch the movies (if they existed), and even dabble in the kind of recreation that was popular at the time if that experience would help you understand your characters better.

And don’t forget to bookmark this article. You’ll need it for evidence of your authorly ambitions when federal law enforcement inquires about your concerning search history. (Just kidding. Probably.)

Setting as a Character in a Mystery Story

Now for a very artsy matter that’s bound to come up on author panels and NPR interviews when your mystery novel becomes a bestseller. 

How is your setting almost like a character in the story?

I have mixed feelings about this question, because what people are usually saying when they ask it is:

• “This setting has a clear personality of its own.”
• “I want to spend more time in this world.”
• “This place felt real and deeply human to me.”
• “The setting has an obvious influence on your characters’ decisions, conflicts, and sense of identity.”

All those things describe a well-crafted setting. There’s no need to call it by a different name. At the same time, describing anything in human terms changes the way we look at it, so if it helps to think of the world of your mystery as another character, go for it.

When you’re writing mysteries, you usually want to think of the setting as an antagonist . What would it look like if your world was actively interfering with the main character’s goals? 

Maybe this is an antagonist who hides secrets in dark alleyways or eerie bogs, protects the guilty within corrupt power structures, misleads with constant red herrings, or threatens your sleuth with dangerous elements.

Go ahead and give your world a personality. Think about who it would be if it were a character. Then write yourself a living, breathing setting that will impress all the fancy people who interview you.

Using the Setting to Write a Compelling Opening Scene

Your audience reads mysteries because they want to feel the kind of thrills you can only get from a good whodunit. So if you want to rope them in on page one, you have to give them the atmosphere they’re looking for.

Our friend Doug has already put together a great article on writing a solid opening scene. But here’s a quick rundown of how to make your setting shine in those crucial first pages.

Set the mood - Remember all that stuff we said about creating an atmosphere? Now is the time to put those skills to work.

Highlight the obstacles - What aspects of this world are likely to work against your main character as the story progresses? Give the reader a glimpse of that dangerous terrain or tight-lipped culture in the first scene. 

Create a sense of character - How does your main character relate to the setting? Is it familiar or unfamiliar? What about the other characters?

Foreshadow danger - You can accomplish this just by shining a light on the challenges that exist within your setting. You can also take the more symbolic route and let the atmosphere suggest that trouble is coming.

Using the Setting to Enhance Other Elements in Your Story

We’ve already covered this topic in bits and pieces over the course of this article. So consider this a quick reference for when you want to make sure your setting is truly pulling its weight in your novel.

Here are some of the most important ways the world can interact with other elements of a mystery story.

The setting informs and reveals who the characters are, including their:

• Norms and taboos
• Relationships to one another
• Interests and hobbies
• Ability to investigate a crime
• Ability to defend themselves in an investigation

In mysteries, the setting often contributes to both internal and external conflict.

For external conflict , you’re looking at things like:

• The resources available to your main character as they attempt to solve the mystery
• How crimes are concealed in this society and/or physical space
• The level of physical danger your detective must accept in order to do their job
• What it takes to get witnesses and sources to trust your main character
• Red herrings

For internal conflict , the setting can contribute to things like:

• The main character’s dilemma between the importance of their goal and the dangers of the situation
• Any social or cultural risks the witnesses might face by coming forward with the information they have
• Your detective’s strong sense of justice while having to work within a corrupt system

A good mystery demands a setting that contributes to the overall puzzle. When building the world of your story, think about things like:

• How a criminal could conceal their crime in this setting
• What aspect of the setting could potentially give them away
• If there are any accidental red herrings built into this world
• What opportunities there might be to heighten tension by trapping your sleuth in a dangerous location
• How the culture of the world might promote secrecy or distrust of the detective
• The cleverest way to dispose of a body

Think about whether your setting can convey something more than just, “This place has secrets .” 

We talked about the way the setting of L.A. highlights Harry Bosch’s personal philosophy by constantly challenging it.

And in The Searcher , Cal retreats to the quiet beauty of rural Ireland in an attempt to flee the corruption and family drama he’s unable to fix back home. As the atmosphere shifts from quaint to sinister, Cal is forced to confront the fact that you can’t escape pain anymore than you can erase it.

What can your setting do to support the theme of your mystery story?

For more on highlighting a theme, check out this article .

Want More Clues on Writing a Mystery?

I hope you’re feeling more equipped to write a mystery. Of course, there’s a lot more to learn when it comes to this particular genre. If you could use help any other area of your mystery writing, check out:

How to Write a Mystery That Tingles the Spine

How to Build Suspense in Thrillers

Creating Mystery Characters

And may I emphatically recommend using Dabble to plan, draft, and revise your novel? The fully customizable Story Notes make worldbuilding a breeze (or at least worldorganizing), and the Plot Grid is an absolute lifesaver when it comes to writing mysteries. This feature helps you keep track of everything , from alibis to red herrings.

Want a chance to inspect Dabble before you commit? You got it. You can access a 14-day free trial at this link , no credit card information needed.

Abi Wurdeman is the author of Cross-Section of a Human Heart: A Memoir of Early Adulthood, as well as the novella, Holiday Gifts for Insufferable People. She also writes for film and television with her brother and writing partner, Phil Wurdeman. On occasion, Abi pretends to be a poet. One of her poems is (legally) stamped into a sidewalk in Santa Clarita, California. When she’s not writing, Abi is most likely hiking, reading, or texting her mother pictures of her houseplants to ask why they look like that.

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WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

Helping writers become bestselling authors

Setting Description Entry: Haunted House (inside)

May 23, 2009 by BECCA PUGLISI

Sight Dust, cobwebs, sheets on furniture, broken tables, chairs, windows, lamps, peeling wallpaper, gaps in the floorboards, holes in the walls, flickering lights (if there’s electricity) chandelier with broken strings of crystals, broken glass on the floor, spiders, cockroaches, rust, mildew, ripped curtains, shadows, gloomy staircases, old portraits & paintings, cracked…

footsteps on the stair, creaking doors, window shutters rattling on the outside, wind scattering/rustling paper through a broken window gap, words whispered in ear, screams, crying, wailing, laughter, glass smashing, the scrap of a chair moving, the scritch of tree branches scraping at the windows, rats squeaking, movement in the walls, a…

Phantom perfume or cologne, burning smells, pipe or cigarette smoke, mildew, rot, dank, rusty or metallic smells, wet wood and stone, rancid breath, yeasty beer smell, food, dust, dry rot, rat/mice feces, urine

Sour & dry mouth from fear, dust floating in the air and coating the tongue, salty tears

A phantom hand on the shoulder, the puff of breath on the earlobe or the back of the neck, the sensation of being grabbed on the arm, pushed, pulled, pinched, poked, slapped, burned, a feeling of light-headedness and nausea, hair rising on arms or the back of the neck, the body’s reaction to a drop in temperature (chills, shivering, breath puffing out…

Helpful hints:

–The words you choose can convey atmosphere and mood.

Example 1:  I cringed at each creak on the old warped stairs, but it didn’t sway my determination to make it to the bedroom on the second floor. Halfway up, a shadow flickered at the corner of my vision. I froze, and as I stood there, caught a woody scent lingering in the air. Tobacco smoke? A shiver curled through the hairs on the back of my neck then cascaded down my backbone. It was all I could do to not hurl myself back down the stairs toward the front door…

–Similes and metaphors create strong imagery when used sparingly.

Example 1: (Metaphor ) The dining room chair suddenly jolted back and tilted toward me, a gracious invitation by an invisible host…

Think beyond what a character sees, and provide a sensory feast for readers

Setting is much more than just a backdrop, which is why choosing the right one and describing it well is so important. To help with this, we have expanded and integrated this thesaurus into our online library at One Stop For Writers.

Each entry has been enhanced to include possible sources of conflict, people commonly found in these locales, and setting-specific notes and tips, and the collection itself has been augmented to include a whopping 230 entries—all of which have been cross-referenced with our other thesauruses for easy searchability. So if you’re interested in seeing this powerful Setting Thesaurus , head on over and register at One Stop.

On the other hand, if you prefer your references in book form, we’ve got you covered, too, because both books are now available for purchase in digital and print copies. In addition to the entries, each book contains instructional front matter to help you maximize your settings. With advice on topics like making your setting do double duty and using figurative language to bring them to life, these books offer ample information to help you maximize your settings and write them effectively.

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers —a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

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Reader Interactions

May 14, 2021 at 1:51 pm

creepy…

May 8, 2021 at 6:48 pm

Oh wow. It hadn’t occurred to me to make a list of all the things to do with my settings. Thank you for this. Brilliant!

May 10, 2021 at 5:53 am

It’s so much easier to get the setting exactly where we want it when we know beforehand what to aim for :).

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December 12, 2020 at 5:30 am

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I am doing a descriptive writing project and this helped me so much! Thank You!

October 21, 2020 at 7:01 pm

Glad it helped!

March 20, 2021 at 6:59 am

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January 2, 2020 at 5:56 am

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December 3, 2019 at 2:51 pm

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March 31, 2021 at 11:41 pm

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November 18, 2019 at 1:32 pm

This is so helpful for everyone . People can use them in essays while describing a haunted house .

November 10, 2020 at 5:43 pm

That is exactly what i used it for

November 11, 2019 at 7:02 am

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November 11, 2019 at 10:42 am

Happy this helps!

November 3, 2019 at 7:28 am

October 25, 2019 at 4:58 am

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July 1, 2019 at 6:21 pm

wow I really needed this thank you sooo much

May 25, 2019 at 11:22 am

Amazing. Im a 14-year-old writer and all these descriptions inspired me on how to write my mystery book. Thanks so much Becca

February 9, 2019 at 6:29 pm

I really liked it because it helped me a lot to inspire me with my writing for greater depth.It was all very creative and amazing 😃👍🏻

January 28, 2019 at 11:34 am

very good descriptions

January 3, 2019 at 11:03 pm

This is too helpful

November 11, 2018 at 4:21 am

Helpful!!!!!

June 6, 2019 at 2:08 am

Good descriptive terms and phrases!!

October 24, 2018 at 1:23 pm

Thank you so much you have helped me so much.

October 23, 2018 at 10:49 am

This story describes the house and starts to leave an image of what the inside of the house looks like. I get shivers reading it.

October 22, 2018 at 11:10 am

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July 22, 2018 at 8:38 am

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November 19, 2018 at 11:04 pm

yeah me too it helped alot

December 13, 2017 at 7:04 am

Thank you so much it really helped write my writing assessment and get full marks, don’t worry i didn’t cheat that much!

October 25, 2019 at 12:17 pm

lmao “that much”

November 9, 2017 at 5:32 pm

It Game Some Ideas What To Write

April 4, 2017 at 1:37 pm

Its just awesome because I get a idea to write it in my suspense story??

March 19, 2017 at 11:49 am

thanks alot it really helped me in my suspense story writing and it did really gave me some ideas to write it thanks 😉

December 3, 2016 at 8:15 am

Thank you very much. This is helpful to do my English HW. Zabit Khwaja

September 12, 2018 at 2:01 pm

October 25, 2016 at 2:12 pm

Thank you !! This has really helped me to do my homework and to inspire me for different t ideas.

October 6, 2016 at 9:45 am

this helped me do my English course thank u sooo much

September 1, 2011 at 9:32 am

this is awesome! 😀 helped me do my coursework for English! thanks a lot 😀

October 14, 2010 at 8:47 pm

this story is awsome i want to read another one.

September 16, 2010 at 12:48 pm

Thanks Aloot It Helped Me In My English Homework:) But I Think It Would Be Better If There Were More Examples Of Haunted Houses:D x

April 3, 2010 at 4:53 pm

this has helped me a great deal with my story for my English class 🙂

May 27, 2009 at 11:34 am

I love the image of the child riding a phantom rocking horse — very effective.

May 25, 2009 at 11:48 pm

This one was so fun to do. There are so many unusual settings to explore–stay tuned!

May 24, 2009 at 6:08 pm

You gals cover some of the greatest topics!!! Hope you can get these out in book form soon or eventually! Keep up the good work!

May 24, 2009 at 7:21 am

I can hear the wind moaning around corners…whhoooooooooowhoooooo.

May 24, 2009 at 7:14 am

Fantastic! Thanks!

May 23, 2009 at 4:09 pm

Gives me the shivers too. =)

May 23, 2009 at 1:35 pm

Gives me shivers just reading it. 😉

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100 mystery writing prompts

November 25, 2023 by Richard Leave a Comment

Unexplained events, complex puzzles, suspicious characters, hidden clues… A compelling mystery grabs readers’ attention and whisks them away on an entertaining quest for the truth. But coming up with that next great premise can often be a mystery itself!

Luckily, I’ve gathered 100 mystery writing prompts to ignite your creativity. These story ideas present you with suspicious scenarios ranging from the supernatural to murder mysteries, unsolved crimes, family secrets, missing persons, treasure hunts, and more shadowy what-ifs ripe for exploration.

The prompts offer unique launch points to send an amateur sleuth or unwitting hero chasing leads, cracking codes, unraveling complex conspiracies, catching criminals, or solving historical puzzles. Settings that lend themselves well to mysteries make an appearance too – remote archeological sites, secret passages, eccentric strangers, abandoned asylums, hidden artifacts in attics, strange symbols, and bumps in the night.

With so many premise options, you’re sure uncover story twists and turns to challenge Sherlock himself! So grab your metaphorical magnifying glass and pick a plot that speaks to you. Where might these story ideas lead? The truth is out there in the pages you’ll write as you follow the clues to these 100 mystery writing prompts.  Happy sleuthing!

• A wealthy family’s prized show dog goes missing before a big competition, and you’re hired to find it.
• You find a secret trap door in the floor of your bedroom that leads to a series of underground tunnels. Where do they go?
• A popular local bakery is ransacked overnight. The thief left everything except the secret recipe for their famous chocolate chip cookies.
• You inherit a beautiful antique music box from your eccentric great aunt. But it only plays an ominous tune that you’ve never heard before. What is the meaning behind the song?
• You move into a new house and regularly hear creaking floorboards and other noises at night. One day you wake up to find a strange symbol carved into your front door.
• A archaeologist vanishes while searching for the lost tomb of an ancient king said to be protected by a deadly curse.
• Flowers start mysteriously appearing on the grave of someone who passed away years ago. No one knows who’s leaving them there.
• You’re hiking and come across what looks like human bones buried in a shallow grave in the woods. What happened here?
• The power goes out at the library right before closing. When it comes back on, the rare book you were researching is missing from its climate controlled case.
• An important businessmen doesn’t show up for a big meeting. Hours later, his car is found abandoned on an isolated dirt road.
• You wake up on the morning of your 18th birthday to find an old amulet on your nightstand. No one in your family knows where it came from.
• A frail old woman begs you to retrieve her stolen poodle. But when you find the poodle, it leads you somewhere unexpected.
• Every night precisely at 3:33 am, your sleep is interrupted by the sound of footsteps creaking up your attic stairs. But you live alone.
• A teenager goes missing after school. The only clue left behind is a coded message scribbled in his notebook. Can you crack it?
• You’re exploring the woods behind your house when you find a torn, bloody t-shirt hanging from a tree branch. What happened here?
• An antique dealer vanishes from his shop overnight. The only things missing are a few pieces of old nautical equipment.
• You discover a cryptex – an ancient puzzle box that can only be unlocked with a complex series of clues. Where will they lead you?
• Strange symbols have been appearing overnight on sidewalks all over your hometown. The graffiti seems to be spreading. But what does it mean?
• An elderly man asks you to find his wife who went missing years ago. But records show the man was never married.
• A ring engraved with a mysterious insignia arrives in your mailbox with no note or return address. How did it get there? What group does it represent?
• You wake up tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse with no memory of how you got there. A mysterious voice over the intercom says you have one hour to escape…or else.
• A masked man drops a encoded flash drive into your bag at the library. When you decode it, you uncover plans for a major heist taking place tonight.
• You start getting anonymous letters in the mail that seem to indicate someone is stalking you and knows your routine. Who could it be?
• A young ski resort heiress goes missing on the slopes. The only trace left behind are her snowboarding goggles resting in a tree. You find them.
• Your eccentric aunt dies and leaves you a storage locker full of her possessions. But hidden among them is a valuable stolen painting that criminals are still hunting for.
• Teenagers have been disappearing from your hometown at an alarming rate over the past year. The police have no leads. But you find a connection between the missing persons and start gathering clues.
• A woman swears someone has been getting into her locked house while she’s away, but nothing is ever stolen. You set up cameras and catch the person red-handed. Who are they and why are they doing this?
• An abandoned car is found in the woods containing a screaming man trapped in the trunk. He has amnesia and can’t remember how he got there or who put him there.
• You inherit a house that belonged to your great grandfather who passed away. Inside is a complex model train set-up in the basement. Then you notice the trains seem to run on a sinister schedule.
• On a school field trip, you and your friends sneak away to explore an off-limits area. There you find an elaborately carved stone whose markings have been worn away by time.
• A beloved local bakery owner goes missing. The only clue is a half-eaten pastry left behind with a mysterious symbol frosted on top.
• You wake up in a strange room next to a woman you’ve never seen before. Neither of you have any memory of how you got there.
• For generations, teenagers have been dared to spend the night in your town’s old abandoned asylum on Halloween night. But this year, some teens who took the dare never came back out…
• A secret admirer has been leaving you small tokens of affection around your favorite places in town. The final gift is a locket that you discover belongs to a woman who went missing years ago…
• You find a dusty old trunk in your attic full of strange artifacts – maps, notebooks, and a journal written in code. The first entry dates back over 100 years.
• A mysterious loner moves into the abandoned mansion down your street. One night, you witness strange occult rituals being performed in the solarium.
• Several major corporations have been hit with elaborate cyber heists lately. The only clue is a small pixelated symbol left behind on each company’s servers afterwards.
• A new mounted fish trophy arrives at the taxidermist shop where you work. But hidden inside the fish is a waterproof bag stuffed with uncut diamonds. Who does it belong to?
• Your grandfather gifts you his elaborate model train set before passing away. But as you build and operate it, the trains seem to move and interact as if controlled by a sinister intelligence.
• You volunteer at the archives in your ancestor’s castle overseas. But you keep finding inconsistencies in the records that make you suspect there are mysteries still hidden within the sprawling estate.
• You dig up an old class assignment from middle school to reminisce and find a cryptic note scrawled in the margins that seems to predict future events in your life so far with uncanny accuracy.
• Rocks with strange symbols painted on them keep appearing in your garden each night. The symbols match cave paintings you recently saw on a spelunking trip. What do they mean?
• A prisoner risks his life to pass you a complex cipher through the jail’s visiting room glass. He claims to have been framed and that decoding it could reveal the real criminal.
• A masked ball at an old Victorian mansion takes a sinister turn when the guests are locked inside and robbed by a thief in disguise on the prowl.
• As a new hire at the NSA, your first assignment is watching a Russian diplomat suspected of sending coded messages disguised as love letters to his “fiancé” overseas.
• You inherit an ancient mechanical astrolabe that seems to predict future events and disasters. But foreseeing some tragedies only ends up causing them when you try to intervene.
• Cleaning out your grandmother’s attic, you find a strange wooden box with arcane symbols. Inside is just a stack of old letters written in German and an old photograph of four men.
• You arrive to work at the bank to find the vault empty and your coworkers drugged. Surveillance footage shows the seemingly impossible burglary unfold. Where did they go?
• Exploring a cave as a scout, you stumble upon a native burial site and ancient petroglyphs depicting strange rituals. Days later, town residents start sleepwalking into the hills.
• A puzzle maker vanishes, leaving behind an intricate locked box said to contain all his greatest designs and secrets. Can you solve the puzzles and find the key?
• You accidentally hit a button on your new antique typewriter and it types a mysterious response warning you not to investigate further. When you look at the paper, all the ink has vanished.
• Renovating your home, you find a trapdoor under decades of dust leading into a bunker containing surveillance equipment still mysteriously active and watching you.
• You wake up in an abandoned psychiatric hospital strapped to a gurney. A voice over the intercom says you have one hour to escape your bonds or the poison gas will turn on.
• A museum thief escapes right before your night shift begins. You notice an odd discrepancy on the museum blueprints that leads you to the hidden painting.
• A magician performing on your cruise ship goes overboard during a storm. But the body that washes ashore the next morning clearly drowned days ago.
• A stranger slips you a thumb drive and tells you to wait one week before opening the only file on it. Finally viewing it, you see plans for an impossible diamond heist taking place tonight.
• For generations, your family has passed down the tale of a hidden fortune somewhere on the old estate grounds. A recent clue indicates the eccentric ancestor’s claims may be true after all.
• You notice all of your houseplants have been subtly rearranged overnight. Then you find a strange coding system etched into their pots. It seems someone is trying to send you a secret message.
• A retired detective swears he hears strange clicking noises coming from his study at night where he kept his case files. You help set up cameras and capture a coded transmission being sent through the vent.
• Exploring the woods behind your new cottage, you find an old campsite and photographs of people who don’t seem to have aged in 50 years. A few still live in your town under different names.
• Your strange new neighbors only seem to enter and exit their house at specific intervals during the night. One evening you glimpse two figures in old-fashioned gas masks looking back out at you.
• You pick up a cheap boat at a police auction of seized vehicles. But a hidden compartment inside leads you into the tangled dealings of a modern day pirate crew.
• Hiking through the hills near your town, you stumble upon the wreckage of a small plane. The pilot’s remains are still at the controls, but his personal effects suggest he died over 60 years ago.
• You are selected to decipher your eccentric aunt’s odd journal after she passes away. following a treasure map hidden in the text leads you to some large uncut gemstones and a dangerous secret.
• Clearing out your parent’s old boxes from childhood, you find your mother’s diary which contains many detailed references to an imaginary friend named Clara. But you also find scattered hospital records for a Clara Ellington, a girl your mom’s age who died under mysterious circumstances.
• For decades, your rural town has held a macabre living chess game with townsfolk acting out a life size match every 10 years. When you find diaries detailing the game’s origins, you uncover the unsettling ritual’s true purpose.
• You decide to write to the prisoner convicted of swindling your eccentric aunt out of her fortune years ago. His cryptic responses make you suspect he may have been framed or was protecting someone else.
• A coded message arrives in your mailbox with your address written out in intricate symbols. It leads you to begin deciphering a conspiracy painted in graffiti across town linking major events in the past century.
• Attending a magic act, you are randomly invited on stage to inspect a spooky box. But after displaying your “ordinary” item to the crowd, the magician can no longer open the container. Backstage, he begs for your help.
• You notice a human-shaped dirt imprint in your yard, as if a body has been freshly buried and exhumed. Then you start finding strange microscopic chips and plastic shards in the grass roots. What’s going on?
• Exploring the old abandoned asylum, you find patient rooms strangely preserved. An old photograph shows your father as one of the mysterious doctors there before it closed down. But he died years before your birth…
• Using a metal detector on the beach, you find a tarnished locket half buried in the sand. Inside the locket is a faded picture of a couple from decades past along with a lock of hair and a grainy imprint of numbers.
• For decades, ships have been sinking with unusual precision along the old trade routes. Historical naval documents contain many references to rumors of a rogue submarine captain who turned mercenary.
• Cleaning the attic, you find your late uncle’s chest of prized magic tricks and props. Hidden inside a false bottom is a weathered map leading to a spot in the wilderness marked “X.”
• You choose a small, uninhabited island for your vacation getaway. But exploring your temporary home, you notice strange patterns of seashells by the water and heaps of bone fragments in the distant rocky caves.
• Your grandfather passes down his beaten-up 1973 Pontiac Firebird that has been in the family for generations. Rummaging through the trunk, you find tattered roadmaps leading you across the country to track his mysterious route.
• A coded message is slipped under your door with a time, date, and map coordinates. Arriving at the location, you find a shovel and dirt pile but no instructions. Do you start digging?
• Your new house seems perfect except for the vintage creepy portrait in your bedroom. You eventually notice the subject’s eyes seem to follow you. Then they blink.
• For decades, a serial arsonist has been operating across your region. The fires always destroy old abandoned properties on significant dates. You find a pattern hidden in past police reports.
• Entering your basement, you’re surprised to find a stranger placing items around a strange intricate symbol on the floor. He tells you he awaits the Sign and swiftly departs.
• You inherit your uncle’s massive library of books on the occult. Hidden in one volume is an old dossier documenting an obscure secret society and detailing their examination rituals to gain membership and mysterious secrets.
• You’re hired to investigate a 17th century shipwreck and find the captain’s log washed ashore. It describes a tiny island appearing where none should exist. Charting a course, you head to the same coordinates.
• Cleaning out your new home, you find strange antique uncanny in the walls and floors. Studying the patterns and mechanisms reveals they form a bizarre scavenger hunt across town devised by the previous owner.
• A scholar spends decades trying unsuccessfully to solve an ancient riddle leading to Alexander the Great’s lost tomb. He finally mails it to you before passing away. Do you take up the challenge?
• You come across an old LP record titled simply “For D.S.” Dated 1949, the recording contains only the rattling of a factory machine. In the dead air, you detect a hidden coded message about espionage.
• Your grandfather’s closest friend pulls you aside after the funeral and says he must pass along an old wrong your grandfather regretted. He gives you a name, key, and bank account number, telling you that you’ll know what to fix.
• A watchmaker has a heart attack and dies while working on an unusual custom piece – a watch that runs backward. His notes reference a client named Octavio who paid handsomely for it in untraceable antiquities.
• While browsing in a strange antique shop, the elderly owner tells you an odd jewelry box has been waiting for someone like you. Upon opening it, you find objects arranged to point toward landmarks in your hometown.
• Exploring your attic, you find an old trunk belonging to your great uncle who traveled the world. Inside is just one item – an intricate elephant idol holding a valuable jeweled stone in its trunk with clues leading to another relic.
• You arrive early for an interview and spot the CEO doing something suspicious. To keep you silent, he asks you to discreetly handle a sensitive matter for him, promising it will lead to your dream job. Do you comply?
• As a new hire at a cryonics firm, you discover the frozen head of an infamous mobster in storage. Divining the clues in his file leads you to the crime syndicate still operating today under a new front.
• The family lawyerhandling your wealthy aunt’s will reveals she secretly changed it just before dying, leaving everything to her gardener who vanished quickly after. The maid reports seeing suspicious doctors frequent the house.
• You find an old sea chest hidden in your grandfather’s attic containing his captain’s uniform and charts showing the route to a mysterious uncharted island. At the center, he marked a large red “X.”
• During city excavation, workers unearth a complex network of concrete tunnels and rooms hidden under your neighborhood for decades. Studying the bunker more closely finds it hides an encrypted secret.
• Your grandfather’s wartime role as a code-breaker comes to light after finding his journals. Following the coded maps and messages, you stumble upon something he buried many years ago and hid from the rest of the family.
• An archaeologist friend invites you on a trek into the jungle to locate a newly discovered Mayan temple site. But you arrive to find the excavation crew dead and primordial secrets awakening in the depths.
• A stranger at the county fair reads your fortune, telling you that you will soon come upon eternal life. Days later, a pharma CEO approaches you to trial a new pill that stops aging but also erases memories.
• An odd box arrives in the mail addressed to your deceased grandmother. Inside is just an old key, a ticket stub, and a note with longitude and latitude coordinates. Charting them leads to a remote island.
• Exploring your uncle’s cabin after his death, you find a locked trapdoor leading underground. It contains elaborate models of towns spread across a vast map with strange markings indicating an unspecified threat.
• You come upon a car crash in the woods. The driver is barely breathing and clutching a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. He rasps out a code before passing away, leaving you with the case and key. What’s inside? What now?

We hope these 100 mystery writing prompts have helped you create something amazing. We have many other writing prompts on our site you may enjoy. Please leave us a comment if you have any questions or concerns or if you want to share your creation.

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About Richard

Richard Everywriter (pen name) has worked for literary magazines and literary websites for the last 25 years. He holds degrees in Writing, Journalism, Technology and Education. Richard has headed many writing workshops and courses, and he has taught writing and literature for the last 20 years.  

In writing and publishing he has worked with independent, small, medium and large publishers for years connecting publishers to authors. He has also worked as a journalist and editor in both magazine, newspaper and trade publications as well as in the medical publishing industry.   Follow him on Twitter, and check out our Submissions page .

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Incredible Mystery Story Ideas: 65 Creative Mystery Writing Prompts

• March 9, 2022

There are few things as satisfying as fleshing out a fantastic idea. It’s a great creative writing exercise . Many writers use short writing prompts as inspiration for story starters.

What makes a good prompt? It’s relatively simple: a good prompt has a who and a what. You don’t necessarily need a where or when, but they can be included to form a more specific mystery plot.

But what if you can’t think of anything? Here are 65 mystery writing prompts to get you started. Any of these ideas can be turned into a short story or a mystery novel!

Mystery Story Ideas And Mystery Writing Prompts

Mystery story starters.

Below are starters to help you in conceptualizing, imagining, and creating a new mystery story:

• The fast-paced city you currently reside in turns out to be moving irregularly one day. People wander around slowly, cashiers swipe items slowly, and cars seem to be slower than your walking pace. Everything slows down except you.
• A man visited his best friend’s house, only to find a scrapbook with pictures where his face has been intentionally erased.
• A woman has arrived home after work one night, only to noticed that there is not one other light in her apartment building that is on except for hers. Where did the other people go? And who is inside her apartment?
• A group of teenagers were looking for an adventure, they end up at an abandoned house; a series of screams followed their entrance.
• A man was browsing his emails one night, when a new email pops up saying: “Someone will knock on your door; no matter what it takes, secure the door.”
• A person is detained for a crime and believes that they are innocent but their DNA is on the murder weapon and the clothes of the dead body. As a detective, you have to find ways to prove their innocence.
• A woman’s grandfather passed away and left his last will. However, on the day before its reading, the attorney was nowhere to be found and has disappeared without a trace.
• An 80-year-old woman is convinced that you were her teacher in 1950 and added that you were her favorite. However, you were born in 1994.
• A man wakes up and everything feels like  deja vu . Is it because of the wrong choice he made the night before?

Historical Story Ideas and writing prompts

The following prompts include mysteries in the ancient world.

• As the head archaeologist on the dig, you get the honor of opening up the sarcophagus. What a surprise it is to find a cell phone in a thousand-year-old tomb.
• An ancient artifact arrives at the museum you work at. Your mentor is tasked with dating and placing the piece. When you come in the next day, you find your mentor murdered and the artifact missing.
• A man who struck it rich in the gold rush suddenly disappears, leaving nothing but a cryptic note.
• A sharp-tongued guard and the mayor’s aid team up in WWII Germany and try to find the true killer of the mayor. Plot twist: it’s the guard.
• A defense attorney and the high school-aged son of the murder victim team up together to find the murderer, only to realize it’s actually a suicide.
• The main character is a mafia member in 1920’s New York who has to get away with murder.
• A story set in the 1900’s where the entire police force is complacent in the crime.

Classic Murder Mystery Plot Ideas

• A new boy arrives in your small town just in time for something to go terribly wrong at the yearly homecoming parade, resulting in at least one death. As chaos depends on your high school, one has to ask, “Who is responsible?”
• A dead body turns up at your apartment. The local police chief of your small town is convinced you are responsible, and he’s determined to find the evidence to arrest you.
• A woman is missing and presumed dead. As a private detective, you aren’t limited by the law the same way police officers are. You’re stumped, that is, until the next-door neighbor is killed, and you were the last person to see her alive. Well, besides the murderer.
• Even as an experienced detective, you’re still surprised when someone confesses to a murder they’re convinced they committed, mostly because you know they didn’t do it. Or did they?
• A relationship ends, and the following day the man is found dead.
• A recording of a confession of murder is dropped off at your station. As the head detective, you’re tasked with finding out who the victim is and who the killer is.
• A hardboiled PI and a stranded bridesmaid enter the underbelly of society after a mass grave is discovered. 
• A baker who consistently stumbles into trouble is the main suspect in a murder investigation.
• A story starts with, “I was twenty-one when I first met my killer.”
• The detective is atoning for murdering a man in his youth.
• A murderous hitchhiker must be caught before he strikes again, but it’s the 70’s and everyone hitchhikes.
• A housekeeper that is a hoarder finds a decayed body in her home under a pile of things.

Mystical/Magical writing prompts

• Your best friend goes missing, and in the chaos that ensues, you find out she’s a practicing witch. Does this have anything to do with her disappearance?
• You follow the detective as he solves the murder, only to find out he’s narrating how his own death occurred.
• You find a secret door in an abandoned manor you’re exploring. Upon opening it, you step back in time. Who put the door there and why? Why is the house abandoned?
• Murder victims keep turning up surrounded by strange symbols. They look like ritual killings but end up being something entirely different.
• You buried your sister years ago, yet here she is at your doorstep. Which one was the imposter, and which one is your real sister?
• You’re haunted by your lover’s ghost (literally), and you have to find out who killed them.
• A haunted house is sold in the suburbs. The protagonist can hear the ghosts, and they’re begging her to solve their murders.
• A lost wallet appears in front of you on the sidewalk, and when you pick it up, you’re transported back in time and must solve the missing person’s case before you can return.
• A flight vanishes mid-air, lost in another dimension.

General writing prompts

• Someone is proposed to. The only problem is, where is their current spouse?
• Your best friend stops by to say hi. The only problem is they’ve been missing for the better part of five years. They have no recollection of any missing time at all.
• Secret Santa starts off with a bang when the first present is a mangled hand. Unfortunately, as the rest of the presents are unwrapped, the manager’s body emerges, piece by piece.
• The family is together for the first time in a decade, all to read grandpa’s will and see who gets what. No one was prepared for the winner to take all approach that grandpa took towards catching his murderer.
• A reporter investigating policy corruption disappears.
• A house fire and a burglary next door appear unconnected, but a mysterious note implies otherwise.
• An heiress is missing and doesn’t want to be found. Is finding her the right thing to do?
• A forensic scientist and a babysitter are drawn into a decades-old cold case. Is the killer even alive anymore?
• A serial killer that’s never been caught aids in the investigation of a different serial killer.
• A manipulative janitor finds a missing child in the basement of the school he works for. How did he get there?
• A hardboiled PI with a double identity must keep his secret safe, as he is thrust into the spotlight.
• A whodunit story about drug trafficking that starts with a live alligator being thrown through the farmhouse window.
• A story where every witness is lying about everything but one fact and when those facts are combined the truth can be found.
• A story where the key suspect is a hallucination.
• A story where the protagonist is the murder victim.
• A story idea where the detective solved the crime but is suffering amnesia.
• Evidence arrives at the detective’s door that may reopen a decade-long cold case.
• The husband is in denial that his wife is missing at all and keeps trying to give evidence that she’s still around.
• A story is set in a prison where the killer is already caught, but no one knows it.
• A priest’s dead body is found by his congregation.
• A story where the murder scene and mystery are told through a child who doesn’t understand everything.
• A story where two characters who are never in the same scene together turn out to be the same person.
• The FBI agent is completely incompetent yet somehow stumbles across the truth.
• A story where a minor character is actually the killer.
• A story where one of the characters has a secret that everyone knows exists but is never revealed.
• A story where the protagonist fails, and the killer gets away (for now).
• A story that simultaneously takes place in two different timelines.
• A story where the protagonist’s main objective is revenge, and he’ll take down anyone who gets in his way, regardless of who they are.
• They’re racing the clock to find someone buried alive.
• A story where a blue-collar crime spans four decades and two generations.
• A story that is non-linear and involves a spy searching for a murder weapon.
• A story where the protagonist is a sociopath, but the reader doesn’t know. They may or may not be the actual villain.
• A story where the key witness is a compulsive liar.
• Write a story that is a retelling of a Shakespearean tragedy.
• A journalist is wrongfully accused of murder and thrown in jail. From there, he must find a way to solve the crime and bring the actual murderer to justice.
• A story where the serial killer had been put to death a decade ago, but it is now back.
• A story where someone overhears something they aren’t supposed to and is kidnapped. The detective has to find them.

Using These Prompts as Plot Ideas

There is no right or wrong way to use these mystery writing prompts, whether you write them exactly as suggested or you alter them as you see fit. 

The purpose isn’t to come up with a perfect piece that follows the prompt exactly, but rather to get your brain flowing so you can write more within the mystery genre.

Depending on the amount of time you have and the length of the piece you decide to write, you can easily work through a prompt a day. Choosing a prompt is as easy or as complicated as you make it. You can randomly choose one, or you can sort through them to find the perfect prompt.

Once you have the right prompt , the length of the story has to be determined. You can write a snippet, a short story , you can write a full-length novel or begin a small series of mystery novels. It’s entirely up to you.

It’s always helpful to have prompts lying around, whether the prompt is from your own mind that you scribbled down or if it was from someone else because prompts help you get the creativity started.

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30 Scene Ideas for Mystery Subplots

A mystery is an easy way to add interest to an otherwise simple story. These mystery writing prompts will make you curious to know more. And your readers too!

What Creates Mystery?

A few elements are vital to keeping a mystery story moving forward:

• Questions – A single question can be enough to sow doubt in a reader’s mind, and create a mystery where previously there was none.
• Answers – The dance between questions and answers is what keeps readers engaged in a mystery. Every answer creates a new question until the final dénouement resolves the last loose ends… Or does it? Here’s a worksheet to help you solve a mystery (your own or another writer’s).
• Suspense – Between the questions and the answers there’s… suspense .

The mystery genre often solidifies these elements around physical objects – a dead body, a murder weapon, a clue, a suspect, etc. – whereas a psychological thriller will focus on the internal, non-material aspects – a doubt about another character, the suspense created by a ringing telephone, the silence on the other end, etc.

Mystery Plots & Subplots

You can use these scene ideas in your mystery story, suspense story, adventure story, or thriller, and they can also come in handy for mystery subplots in any genre.

You could generate a whole plot from these mystery writing prompts alone, but if you need mystery story ideas, you might like to adapt one from this list of  story ideas , or from this list of  romance story ideas . Or you can consult a mystery plot generator !

Mystery Writing Prompts

Sometimes we can overcomplicate a story problem, or overestimate the amount of effort required to fix a plot. It doesn’t need to be that hard!

Randomly choose a few of these mystery writing prompts and draft a quick scene summary for each…

P.S. If you’re enrolled in The One Page Novel course , don’t forget to refer to the mystery cheatsheet in the Genre Cheatsheet pack!

Don’t miss these writing prompts…

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The best mystery writing prompts

Great mystery writing is full of suspense and intrigue that gets your readers to ask questions. The key to the gripping whodunnit mystery books you love is the unique mysterious story ideas behind them. If you’re currently waiting for a lightbulb to go off in your head before you embrace your inner Agatha Christie, you’ll enjoy these mystery writing prompts!

There are several types of mystery stories you might want to consider writing: 1) Cozies, which usually take place in — as the name would suggest — cozy settings, such as small towns. They are meant to be a “light read” meaning they don’t involve graphic violence, although the crime in question can still be a murder or death. 2) Hard-boiled. Typically feature a professional detective. As the story unfolds, not only is the mystery untangled, but so is the protagonist’s character development as they face their own internal struggles. While chasing up alibis and collecting evidence to try to bring the killer to justice, the investigation forces our protagonist to confront parts of their own personalities they may have buried. 3) Procedurals. Distinguished by their very in-depth explanation of how a mystery was solved. Fine details will be explored, and the drama often culminates in a courtroom, with a judge and jury deciding whether the suspect is innocent or guilty.

To get you started, here are our top ten mystery writing prompts:

• A crime’s been committed, and the only clues left behind are a half-eaten apple and a bobby pin.
• Write a mystery where the detective realizes at the last moment that they have the wrong suspect.
• You are legally allowed to commit murder once, but you must fill out the proper paperwork and your proposed victim will be notified of your intentions.
• You discover a trap door in your home that you never knew about.
• You thought he was dead, but there he is, right in front of you on the street, smiling at you.
• You're shaking hands with a stranger at a networking event when you ask for their name. I have no name, they reply.
• You’ve forgotten the last year of your life, and have to retrace your steps to figure out how you got here.
• Write a story about a valuable object that goes missing.
• You open a book and note with a letterhead falls out. At the top it says: If you are reading this, you have been chosen.
• Write a story that starts with the reveal of a long-kept secret.

If you’re an author looking to write a mystery novel or short story, check out some of our resources on the topic, full of helpful tips for mystery writers:

• What is Exposition? Examples of Backstory in Action  — When writing mystery fiction, anything could be an important clue — or a red herring. How are you going to drip-feed your reader information? Rather than holding their hand through the story, you’re going to want to provide clues slowly and subtly. That’s where exposition comes in. And don’t forget to check out our guide to  Show, Don't Tell  while you’re there!
• Understanding Point of View (free course) — Our ten-day guide to choosing and mastering your POV. In a genre like mystery, where facts are hazy and everything is up for debate, choosing the right POV is crucial in deploying information and keeping the narrative compelling. Perhaps you’ll opt for an unreliable narrator, oscillate between different POV characters, or go for an omniscient third-person narrator. The possibilities are endless.
• How to Develop Characters (free course)  — The key to a great mystery is not just a great hero. You’re going to need an entire cast of interesting characters, to keep readers guessing and give them a reason to be invested in the events they’re witnessing. This requires a lot of work, which is why you’ll want to dedicate plenty of time to character development.

Want more help learning how to write a short mystery? Check out  How to Write a Short Story That Gets Published  — a free, ten-day course guiding you through the process of short story writing by Laura Mae Isaacman, a full-time editor who runs a book editing company in Brooklyn.

Ready to start writing? Check out Reedsy’s weekly  short story contest , for the chance of winning $250 , plus potential publication in our literary magazine, Prompted ! You can also check out our list of  writing contests  or our directory of  literary magazines  for more opportunities to submit your story.

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AQA GCSE Questions: Narrative, Creative and Descriptive

Below, you’ll find a list of narrative and descriptive questions for AQA GCSE English Language, Paper 1 Section B. These questions can also be used more generally as narrative and descriptive prompts for those exploring the craft of creative writing, or studying an alternate GCSE or IGCSE exam board. 

Thanks for reading! For all English Language and Literature courses,  click here .

AQA GCSE English Language Paper 1

AQA GCSE English Language Paper 2

THE QUESTION

Write a description of a mysterious place, as suggested by this picture:(2020) 

Write a story about an event that cannot be explained. (2020)

Write a story about a magical world as suggested by this picture: 

Different Types of Essay Questions

The picture shows a young child in pyjamas, who is standing beside a window, holding a snow globe. The snow globe is lighting up the child’s face. (2019)

Describe a place you think is beautiful. (2019)

Write a story about a time when things turned out unexpectedly. (2018)

Write a description of an old person as suggested by this picture: (2018)

Write a story with the title ‘Discovery’. (2017) 

Write a story, set in a mountainous area, as suggested by this picture: (2017) 

Write a story about two people from very different backgrounds. (2016) 

Thanks for reading! For all English Language and Literature courses,  click here .

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How to Write a Mystery

On this page, you'll find a detailed guide to how to write a mystery, along with tips to make your mystery stand out!  You can use the menu below to jump to the topics that interest you.

What is a mystery story? Step 1: Come up with an idea. Step 2: Plan a crime. Step 3: Develop your sleuth. Step 4: Decide on a setting. Step 5: Lay a trail of clues. Step 6: Come up with your suspects. Step 7: Invent some red herrings. Step 8: Plan the investigation. Step 9: Figure out your ending. Step 10: Map out your plot. Step 11: Start writing! Step 12: Fact-check and revise. More tips on how to write a mystery.

How to Write a Mystery - What's a Mystery?

Mysteries are an example of what is called "genre fiction." A genre is a category of commercial fiction which follows certain traditions. You can think of these traditions as "rules of the game". You don't always have to follow these rules exactly. You can decide to bend, or even break them. But it's important to know what the rules are, so that you understand what readers -- and agents, and editors -- will be expecting from your story.

Most mystery stories involve a sleuth trying to figure out who committed a crime, normally murder. This might be a professional sleuth (for example, a police detective) or an amateur who decides to investigate the murder (for example, because the victim was close to them, or because they themselves are a suspect, or just as a hobby!).

The answer to the question "Whodunit?" is normally revealed at the end of the story. In the meantime, the reader's curiosity grows as they consider clues the sleuth is uncovering.

Many mysteries are set up as a kind of game where the reader tries to figure out the solution before the sleuth does.

This gamelike aspect of mysteries can make them especially fun to read -- and to write!

There are many kinds of mystery stories, including:

• Cozy mysteries, which tend to avoid explicit sex and violence.
• Hardboiled, which often feature a cynical sleuth and show the dark side of human nature.
• Police procedurals, which give an inside look at the methods used by police to solve a crime.
• Paranormal mysteries.
• Historical mysteries.
• And others.

There's no right or wrong approach to how to write a mystery, but here's a process you can try.

1. Come up with an idea.

Here are some ways to get ideas for your mystery story:

- Start with real-life crime. Read the news, research crimes that actually happened, and then imagine a story around them.

- Start with real people. Think of someone you know and imagine what might cause them to commit murder. Maybe you've even fantasized about killing someone yourself. You can use this as the idea for a novel. The mystery writer Sue Grafton says that her first novel began with fantasies about murdering her ex-husband. She imagined how she might go about doing it and a classic mystery series was born.

- Start with a fictional character. Use [this profiling questionnaire to create a character], and then imagine a situation in which they would be driven to murder.

- You can also find mystery writing prompts here .

2. Plan a crime.

When you plan a mystery, you're really planning two stories...

• The story of the investigation, which is the story the reader sees.
• And the story of the crime, which is background to the main story.

You might find it easier to start by figuring out the story of the crime...

• Who did it, and why?
• How did the criminal try to cover their tracks?
• Did they make any mistakes?
• What evidence did they leave behind?
• Were there any witnesses?
• Who saw or heard something that might help your sleuth uncover the truth?

Enter your email below to get our free Crime Scene Worksheet.

3. Develop your sleuth.

Once you have a crime, you need a character to investigate it, your sleuth. The sleuth might be a professional (e.g., a police detective), or they might be an amateur.

If you have an amateur sleuth, you're going to have to give them a reason to investigate the murder. Maybe the victim was someone they knew, or maybe they stumbled on a dead body and then took an interest in the case. Or maybe they're someone who investigates murders as a hobby.

Whatever their reasons, you're going to want to create an interesting character that readers will care about.

You can use this profiling questionnaire to develop your sleuth. PROFILE QUESTIONNAIRE: YOUR SLEUTH

- What is your sleuth's name? - How old are they? - What do they look like? - Where do they live? - What’s their relationship status? Do they have children? - What is their profession? - What are their hobbies? - What are some of their personality traits? - How will they get involved with the investigation of the crime? - In what ways might the investigation affect them personally? - What strengths do they have that might help them solve the case? - What weaknesses do they have that might make it harder for them to solve the case?

Enter your email to get a similar questionnaire for your murder victim.

4. Decide on a setting.

Apart from a crime and a sleuth, your story needs a setting. Where will it take place? Will it be set in the present, or during a historical time period? In many mysteries, the setting adds a lot of color and interest to the story. Part of the pleasure of reading these stories is that the reader gets to travel in their imagination to places such as Venice (in Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti series) or 1920s India (in Sujata Massey's Perveen Mistry series). You might decide to set your mystery in a place that you already know well. That will require a lot less research. Even if the place where you live doesn't seem exotic to you, you probably know lots of insider details that would be interesting to outsiders. Or, you might choose a story setting that you would enjoy learning about. Writing the story can be a chance for YOU to take an imaginary vacation in an exotic location. Another way to add color to your mystery, and to get story ideas, is to draw on a hobby or area of expertise you might have. Examples:

• Jonathan Kellerman, a psychologist, writes a mystery series starring a child psychologist.
• Scott Turow, a lawyer, writes legal mysteries.
• Eileen Brady, a veterinarian, writes about a sleuth who's a veterinarian.
• Donna Leon, an opera lover, wrote about a murder in an opera house.
• Deb Baker writes a mystery series about doll collecting.
• Josi S. Kilpack writes mysteries about baking.
• Terri Thayer writes mysteries about quilting.

You can find a whole list of hobby-themed mystery series here .

5. Lay a trail of clues.

Mystery stories are generally constructed like puzzles.

The sleuth pieces together clues to figure out the solution. Meanwhile, the reader, watching over the sleuth's shoulder, is trying to do the same thing.

Go back to the crime you mapped out earlier in this process. What mistakes did the murderer make? What evidence did they leave behind?

Is there something about the victim, the timing, or the way the killing was carried out that points to the murderer?

Make a list of possible clues. Then, try to identify the crucial clue that will ultimately allow the sleuth (and a clever reader) to figure out whodunit.

6. Come up with your suspects.

Most mysteries include a number of suspects who look like they might have committed the crime. Part of the fun for the reader is trying to guess which one of them's the actual murderer.

Come up with a list of possible suspects for your story. A good starting point is to think about the murder victim -- who might have had a motive to kill them? Who had the opportunity?

You can add interest by making one of the suspects someone connected to your sleuth -- or someone your sleuth could fall in love with during the story.

7. Invent some red herrings.

A "red herring" is a false clue which points in the wrong direction. To make the mystery more difficult for your sleuth, and the reader, to solve, you'll want to mix some false clues in with the real ones.

Look at your list of suspects. What clues could you plant that point to each of them?

Add some red herrings to the list of clues you made in Step 6 above.

8. Plan the investigation.

Figure out how the sleuth will get drawn into the investigation. If they're a police detective, it might be assigned to them. If they're a private investigator, they might be hired for a case.

What information will they have at the outset? And what will they do next?

Make a list of preliminary steps the sleuth will take. These might involve:

• visiting the crime scene
• reading police files, autopsy reports, etc.
• trying to learn about the victim, especially probing into who might have had a motive to kill them. This may involve interviewing people close to the victim, visiting the victim's home, searching through the victim's possessions, etc.
• interviewing suspects and witnesses.

Go back to the list of clues and red herrings you made in Steps 6 and 7 above. Think about how the sleuth might discover or hear about each of them.

9: Figure out your ending.

When planning a mystery story plot, it can help to figure out the ending first. What will happen that causes the puzzle pieces to fall in place?

Will your sleuth discover a decisive clue that reveals who the murderer is? Will something happen that makes your sleuth rethink an earlier clue and suddenly understand whodunit? Will the murderer come after your sleuth in a final confrontation?

Once you know the ending, you can start mapping a story path to get there.

10: Map your plot.

Because of the complexity of a mystery story, it can help to make some kind of outline.

This can be as simple as a list of scenes in the order that they will happen. For example:

• Tom hires Maria to investigate James's death
• Maria visits the Lees' home (discovers photo of James with Paul)
• Maria interviews Paul (learns about James's gambling debts)

You can use the outline as a guide, but you're never locked into it. Once you start writing, be open to new ideas that don't fit your outline. You can change the outline at any point.

Reading lots of mysteries will give you ideas for how to organize your story.

There's no formula you have to follow, but many mystery stories follow this general structure:

• First, the sleuth gets drawn into a murder investigation.
• In the next part of the story, the sleuth interviews witnesses and suspects, uncovering clues.
• Partway through the story, something happens to raise the stakes and increase the excitement. For example, another body might be found. Or the sleuth might get threatening notes, warning her off the case.
• Then the story speeds up as puzzle pieces start to fall into place.
• The action might build to a climactic face-to-face confrontation between the sleuth and the murderer where the sleuth's life is in danger.
• At the end, the murderer is brought to justice (or not), and any loose threads are tied up.

11: Start writing!

Choose a scene from your outline, imagine it from your main character's (normally, your sleuth's) perspective, and then write what you imagine. Then continue imagining and writing from there.

• You don't have to write the story in order. You can start by writing the ending, and then go back and write earlier scenes.
• During your rough draft, try not to worry about how you write. You'll fix the style and language later, during the revision. The rough draft is for imagining the story and capturing your ideas on the page.

12: Fact-check and revise.

If your readers notice any factual mistakes, that will distract them from your story. So, at some point, you'll want to double-check that you've gotten everything right in terms of police procedures, forensic details, ballistics, etc.

This kind of fact-checking is often easier to do after you've written a draft and know exactly what information you need. Then you might even try to contact relevant experts, such as police officers, and ask them your questions.

Apart from checking facts, you'll want to check your story for plot holes and inconsistencies.

Then, read it through, ideally in one or two sittings, to check for flow or pacing: are there any places where the storytelling feels dull or slow? Are there any places where you want to slow it down to add suspense?

Eventually, you'll ideally want to find a test reader. It's important that this is someone who regularly reads mysteries and is a fan of the genre. Ask this test reader to call you when they're HALFWAY through the manuscript. During that conversation ask them what they think will be the ending of the book (but don't let them know if they're right). This will give you information about whether the solution of your mystery is too obvious. It might also give you ideas for false trails you can plant. Ask the test reader to call you again when they've finished the manuscript. Then you can find out what they thought of the ending -- if it made sense to them, or if they were left with questions.

Revise to fix any story problems, and then do a final edit to smooth out the language.

More Tips on How to Write a Mystery

Here are some additional tips on how to write a mystery.

- Start your story right in the action. For example, many mysteries begin with the discovery of a dead body. Or, if your sleuth is a private investigator, it might begin with the meeting where they are hired to solve the mystery.

- Develop the character of your sleuth so that they feel three-dimensional and real. The profiling questions above can help with this. If readers care about your sleuth, they will feel much more involved in your story.

- Create a three-dimensional world. A mystery may be a kind of puzzle, but it's more than a brain-teaser. Give your characters lives that extend beyond the investigation. Use descriptive details to make your setting feel real.

- Give your sleuth some skin in the game . Solving the mystery needs to matter to them so that it will matter to the reader. Maybe they have a personal relationship to the victim. If your sleuth's a professional, their career might depend on solving this particular case. Maybe your sleuth's husband is a suspect and they have to clear his name (but are increasingly concerned that he might be guilty!). Your sleuth might have a reason to believe they themselves could be the next victim. (Feel free to borrow any of these ideas for your story).

- Make it exciting. You can keep the reader turning pages by using suspense-writing techniques, such as foreshadowing (when you hint at what's coming) and cliffhangers (when you end a scene or chapter at a suspenseful moment, and the reader has to wait to find out what happens next).

Our 8-week course  on how to write a mystery will take you step by step through the process of planning your story.

How to Write a Mystery - Further Resources

Browse mystery-writing prompts .

Learn techniques for adding suspense to your mystery .

Join our 8-week course   on how to write a mystery.

Get advice on how to write a mystery novel outline .

Also, be sure to join our email group to get more writing tips and ideas !

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How to Write a Mystery Story

Last Updated: May 17, 2024 References

This article was co-authored by Lucy V. Hay . Lucy V. Hay is a Professional Writer based in London, England. With over 20 years of industry experience, Lucy is an author, script editor, and award-winning blogger who helps other writers through writing workshops, courses, and her blog Bang2Write. Lucy is the producer of two British thrillers, and Bang2Write has appeared in the Top 100 round-ups for Writer’s Digest & The Write Life and is a UK Blog Awards Finalist and Feedspot’s #1 Screenwriting blog in the UK. She received a B.A. in Scriptwriting for Film & Television from Bournemouth University. There are 10 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 574,303 times.

A good mystery story will have fascinating characters, exciting suspense, and a puzzle that keeps you turning the pages. But it can be difficult to write an engaging mystery story, especially if you have never tried to before. With the right preparation, brainstorming, and outlining, you can create a page-turning mystery of your own.

Preparing to Write

• When it comes to mystery, one of the key elements is tension and making the story compelling from the very beginning. [1] X Research source
• In mystery stories, your reader does not know who committed the murder until the end of the novel. Mysteries are centered on the intellectual exercise of trying to figure out the motivations behind the crime, or the puzzle.
• Mysteries tend to be written in the first person, while thrillers are often written in the third person and from multiple points of view. In mystery stories, there is usually a slower pace as the hero/detective/main character tries to solve the crime. There are also limited action sequences in mysteries than in thrillers.
• Because mysteries are often slower paced, the characters are usually more in-depth and well rounded in a mystery story than in a thriller.

• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. The 19th-century mystery novel was originally written in serial form, so the story moves forward in measured steps. Much of what became standard in crime fiction was done by Collins in this novel, so it is an engaging and instructive introduction to the genre.
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Chandler is one of the genre’s greatest writers, creating engaging stories about the trials and tribulations of private detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe is a tough, cynical, but honest P.I. who becomes entangled in a plot with a General, his daughter, and a blackmailing photographer. Chandler’s work is known for its sharp dialogue, great pacing, and riveting hero, Marlowe. [3] X Research source
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. One of the genre’s most famous detectives, along with his equally famous sleuthing partner Watson, solves a series of mysteries and crimes in this collection of stories. Holmes and Watson inject their unique character traits into the stories along the way. [4] X Research source
• NANCY DREW by Carolyn Keene. The whole series is situated in the United States.Nancy Drew is a detective. Her close friends Helen Corning, Bess Marvin and George Fayne appear in some mysteries. Nancy is Carson Drew's daughter. Carson Drew is the most famous lawyer in River Heights, where they live.
• "Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon.This is similar to Nancy Drew.It is about two brothers: Frank and Joe Hardy, who are talented detectives.They are the sons of a very famous detective, and they sometimes help in his cases.
• A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne. This recent mystery novel is set in 1970s suburban Washington. It centers on the “crime” in the neighborhood, the murder of a young boy. Berne intersperses a coming of age story with the mystery of the death of the young boy in bland, boring suburbia, but manages to make the story anything but bland or boring. [5] X Research source

• For example, in The Big Sleep , Chandler’s first-person narrator describes himself through his clothing on the first page: “I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with the dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be."
• With these opening sentences, Chandler makes the narrator distinct through his way of describing himself, his outfit, and his job (private detective).

• For example, in the second paragraph of the first page of The Big Sleep , Marlowe places the reader in the time and setting: “The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high.”
• The reader now knows Marlowe is in front of the home of the Sternwoods and it is a larger home, possibly wealthy.

• In The Big Sleep , Marlowe is hired by General Sternwood to “take care” of a photographer who has been blackmailing the General with scandalous pictures of the General’s daughter.

• In The Big Sleep , Chandler complicates Marlowe’s pursuit of the photographer by having the photographer killed in the early chapters, followed by the suspicious suicide of the General’s chauffeur. So Chandler sets up the story with two crimes that Marlowe has to solve.

• The resolution of the mystery should feel surprising to your reader, without confusing them. One of the benefits of a mystery is that you can pace the story so the solution unfolds gradually, rather than in a rushed or hurried manner.

Developing Your Main Character and Outlining the Story

• Body size and shape, hair and eye color, and any other physical characteristics. For example, you may have a short female main character with dark hair, glasses, and green eyes. Or you may want a more typical detective character: tall with slicked-back hair and a five o’clock shadow.
• Clothing and dress. Your character’s clothing will not only create a more detailed image for your reader, it can also indicate what time period your story is set in. For example, if your main character wears heavy armor and a helmet with a crest, your reader will realize your story is set in medieval times. If your character wears a hoodie, jeans, and a backpack, this will tip off your readers that the story is likely set in modern times.
• What makes your main character unique. It’s important to create a main character who stands out to your reader and feels engaging enough to sustain many pages in a story or novel. Consider what your character likes and dislikes. Maybe your female sleuth is shy and awkward at parties, and has a secret love of reptiles. Or perhaps your detective is a complete klutz and doesn’t consider himself a strong or smart person. Focus on details that will help to create a unique main character and don’t be afraid to draw on details from your own life or your own preferences and tastes. [7] X Research source
• What matters most is that your main character has a burning question or burning need to solve the mystery.

• If you decide to set your story in a time period or location you are unfamiliar with, conduct research on the time period or location through your local library, online sources, or interviews with experts in a certain time period or location. Be specific with your research and during your interviews to ensure you get all the details of a setting or time period right.

• An item is stolen from your main character or someone close to the main character.
• A person close to the main character disappears.
• The main character receives threatening or disturbing notes.
• The main character witnesses a crime.
• The main character is asked to help solve a crime.
• The main character stumbles upon a mystery.
• You can also combine several of these scenarios to create a more layered mystery. For example, an item may be stolen from your main character, a person close to the main character disappears, and then the main character witnesses a crime she is later asked to help solve.

• Create a list of possible suspects your main character may encounter throughout the story. You can use several suspects to point the detective and/or the reader in the wrong direction to build suspense and surprise. [8] X Research source
• Write a list of clues. Red herrings are clues that are false or misleading. Your story will be stronger if you include several red herring clues in the story. For example, your main character may find a clue that points to one suspect, but it is later revealed the clue is actually tied to a different suspect. Or your detective may find a clue without realizing it is the key to unlocking the entire mystery. [9] X Research source
• Red herrings are all about saying "follow this thread" when the "thread" in question is completely wrong. A good writer can put something in the way that stops readers from realizing what's going on.

• The main character is investigating a possible lead alone and encounters the murderer or killer.
• The main character begins to doubt his/her abilities and lets his/her guard down, allowing the murderer to kill again.
• No one believes the main character and he/she ends up trying to solve the crime alone,and he/she ends up getting kidnapped.
• The main character is injured and trapped in a dangerous place.
• The main character is going to lose an important clue if he/she can’t get out of a certain location or situation.

Find continuous ways to engage the reader. "I end each chapter with a cliffhanger, resolution, a turn, a reveal, a new wrinkle ... something that will make you want to read the next chapter of that character."

• The main character saves someone close to them, or an innocent person wrapped up in the mystery.
• The main character saves himself/herself and is changed by his/her courage or smarts.
• The main character exposes a bad character or organization.
• The main character exposes the murderer or person responsible for the crime.

• Introduction of main character and setting.
• The inciting incident, or the crime.
• The call to adventure: The main character gets involved in solving the crime.
• Tests and trials: The main character finds clues, encounters potential suspects, and tries to stay alive as he/she pursues the truth. Close ones might be kidnapped as a threat
• Ordeal: The main character thinks he/she has found a key clue or suspect and believes he/she has solved the crime. This is a false resolution, and is a good way to surprise your reader when it turns out the main character got it wrong.
• Major setback: All seems lost for the main character. He/She found the wrong suspect or clue, someone else is killed or harmed, and all his/her allies have abandoned him/her. A major setback will amp up the tension in the story and keep the reader guessing.
• The reveal: The main character gathers all interested parties together, lays out the clues, explains the false leads, and reveals who the murderer or guilty person is.

Writing the Story

• Think what your main character might see in a certain setting. For example, if your character lives in a home much like yours in a small town, you may describe his/her bedroom or his/her walk to school. If you are using a specific historical setting, like 70s California, you may describe your character standing on a street corner and looking at the unique architecture or the cars that drive by.
• Consider what your main character might hear in a certain setting. Your sleuth may listen to the birds chirping and the sprinklers on the lawns on the way to school. Or your detective may hear the roaring of cars or the crashing of ocean waves.
• Describe what your main character might smell in a certain setting. Your main character might wake up to the smell of coffee being made in the kitchen by his/her parents. Or your detective may be hit with the smell of the city: rotting garbage and body odor.
• Describe what your character might feel. This could be a light breeze, a sharp pain, a sudden jolt, or a shiver down his/her spine. Focus on how your character’s body might react to a feeling.
• Think about what your character might taste. Your main character may still taste the cereal she had for breakfast in his/her mouth, or the drink from the night before.

• Think about being concise with your language and description. Most readers continue reading a good mystery because they are invested in the main character and want to see his/her succeed. Be brief but specific when describing the main character and his/her perspective on the world.
• For example, Chandler’s The Big Sleep starts by situating the reader in a setting and gives the reader a sense of the main character’s perspective on the world. “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
• With this beginning, the story starts in action, with a specific time, date, and description of the setting. It then presents the main character’s physical description and job title. The section ends with the main character’s motivation: four million dollars. In three lines, Chandler has covered many of the essential details of the character, the setting, and the story.

• Think about how you would react in a situation if you were angry or scared. Have your character react in ways that communicate angry or scared, without telling the reader about the character’s emotions. For example, rather than “Stephanie was angry,” you could write: “Stephanie slammed his/her water glass down on the table so hard his/her dinner plate rattled. She glared at him, and started ripping the thin, white napkin into shreds with his/her fingers.”
• Showing, rather than telling also works well for descriptions of setting. For example, in The Big Sleep , rather than tell the reader the Sternwoods were wealthy, Chandler describes the luxurious details of the estate: “There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a large greenhouse with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.”

• Plot. Ensure your story sticks to the outline and has a clear beginning, middle, and an ending. You should also confirm your main character shifts or changes at the end of the story.
• Characters. Are your characters, including your main character, distinct and unique? Do all the characters sound and act the same or are they different from each other? Do your characters feel original and engaging?
• Pacing. Pacing is how fast or how slow the action moves in the story. Good pacing will feel invisible to the reader. If the story feels like it is moving too fast, make the scenes longer to draw out the emotions of the characters. If it feels like the story gets bogged down or confusing, shorten the scenes to only include essential information. A good rule of thumb is to always end a scene earlier than you might think or want. This will keep the tension from scene to scene from dropping and keep the pace of the story moving.
• The twist. The twist can either make or break a good mystery story. This is completely optional, but many of the best stories have a twist at the end. Make sure that a twist is not too "cheesy". The more unique a twist is, the easier it is to write. When writing an overused twist, such as "then they woke up", you'll need to be a very good writer to make it sound good. A good twist not only fools the audience, but fools the character(s) too. Consider hinting towards the twist during action scenes, so that when the reader looks back on the story, they'll wonder how they missed it. Try not to make the twist evident too early on.

Mystery Story Help

Community Q&A

Things You'll Need

• Paper and pen and/or a computer with a word processor (like Word)
• Mystery books/stories
• An idea/plot for the story

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/7-tips-writing-great-mystery-suspense-novels
• ↑ http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/59582-the-10-best-mystery-books.html
• ↑ http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/bigsleep/summary.html
• ↑ http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1661/1661-h/1661-h.htm
• ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/reviews/970720.20careyt.html
• ↑ http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2013/10/how-to-write-murder-mystery.html
• ↑ http://www.creative-writing-now.com/how-to-write-a-mystery.html
• ↑ http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2014/03/how-to-write-murderously-good-mystery.html
• ↑ http://www.creative-writing-now.com/how-to-write-fiction.html
• ↑ http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2013/10/how-to-write-murder-mystery-part-two.html

About This Article

Before you write your mystery story you’ll want to create some characters and outline the plot. You might make your main character a detective or just a curious citizen who witnessed a crime. Once you have characters, choose a setting and a mystery such as a murder or a robbery of a precious artwork. If you want to make your story dramatic, add in cliffhangers and red herrings, or clues that lead to dead ends. When you’re ready to write your story, scroll down for tips from our Creative Writing reviewer on creating a well-paced and exciting narrative. Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Novel writing ,

How to write descriptions and create a sense of place.

By Harry Bingham

Your first job as a storyteller is a simple one, and a crucial one. You have to get your passengers into your train – your readers into your story. Only then can you hope to transport them.

And that crucial first step doesn’t have much to do with characters or story or anything else.

What matters first is this: your fictional world has to seem real. It has to grip the reader as intensely as real life – more intensely, even.

Writing descriptions that  seem  vivid, with the use of evocative language, is therefore essential. The buildings, cities, places, rooms, trees, weather of your fictional world have to be convincing  there . They have to have an emphatic, solid, believable presence.

A big ask, right? But it gets harder than that.

Because at the same time, people don’t want huge wodges of descriptive writing. They want to engage with characters and story, because that’s the reason they picked up your book in the first place.

So your challenge becomes convincing readers that your world is real . . . but using only the lightest of touches to achieve that goal.

Not so easy, huh?

Start Early

Set the scene early on – then nudge.

It may sound obvious but plenty of writers launch out into a scene without giving us any descriptive material to place and anchor the action. Sure, a page or so into the scene, they may start to add details to it – but by that point it’s too late. They’ve already lost the reader. If the scene feels placeless at the start – like actors speaking in some blank, white room – you won’t be able to wrestle that sense of place back later.

So  start early .

That means telling the reader where they are in a paragraph (or so), close to the start of any new scene. That early paragraph needs to have enough detail that if you are creating a coffee shop, for example, it doesn’t just feel like A Generic Coffee Shop. It should feel like its own thing. One you could actually walk into. Something with its own mood and colour. One vivid descriptive detail will do more work for you than three worthy but colourless sentences.

And once, early in your scene, you’ve created your location, don’t forget about it. Just nudge a little as you proceed. So you could have your characters talking – then they’re interrupted by a waitress. Then they talk (or argue, or fight, or kiss) some more, and then you drop in some other detail which reminds the reader, “Yep, here we still are, in this coffee shop.”

That’s a simple technique, bit it works every time.

One paragraph early on, then nudge, nudge, nudge.

As the roughest of rough guides, those nudges need to happen at least once a page – so about every 300 words. If it’s natural to do so more often, that’s totally fine.

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Be Specific

Details matter! They build a sense of place like nothing else.

Gabriel García Márquez, opening  One Hundred Years of Solitude , introduces his village like this:

Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.

Boom! We’re there.

In his world. In his village. Already excited to see what lies ahead.

And yes, he’s started early (Chapter 1, Page 1, Line 1). But it’s more than that, isn’t it? He could have written something like this:

Macondo was a village of about twenty houses, built on a riverbank.

I hope it’s obvious that that sentence hardly transports us anywhere. It’s too bland. Too unfocused. Too generic. There are literally thousands of villages in the world which would fit that description.

In short, what makes Marquez’s description so vivid is its use of telling detail. They’re not just houses, they’re  adobe  houses. The river doesn’t just flow over stones, its flows over  polished stones  that are  white and enormous, like  (wow!)  prehistoric eggs .

The sentence works so well because Marquez has:

• Created something totally non-generic
• Via the use of highly specific detail, and
• Uses surprising / exotic language to make those details blaze in our imagination.

That basic template is one you can use again and again. It never stales. It lies at the heart of all good descriptive writing.

So here, for example, is a more ‘boring’ space . . . but still one redolent with vividness and atmosphere thanks to the powerful use of atmospheric specificity. In Margaret Atwood’s  The Handmaid’s Tale , Offred introduces her room with details that not only grab us but hint at something dark:

A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. There must have been a chandelier once. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to.

Those clipped words transport us straight to Offred’s enclosed, and terrifying, space. We’re also told just enough to give us an image of that place, enough to heighten tension, enough to tease curiosity. This is just a description of a room – but we already feel powerfully impelled to read on.

Be Selective With Your Descriptive Details

Be selective – don’t overwhelm.

It might be tempting to share every detail with us on surroundings.

Even with a setting like Hogwarts – a place readers really do want to know all the hidden details of – J.K. Rowling doesn’t share how many revolving staircases it has, how many treasures in the Room of Requirement, how many trees in the Forbidden Forest. That’s not the point. (And it would write off a little of Hogwarts’ magic and mystery.)

If you’re describing a bar, don’t write:

The bar was approximately twenty-eight feet long, by perhaps half of that wide. A long mahogany bar took up about one quarter of the floor space, while eight tables each with 4 wooden chairs occupied the remaining area. There were a number of tall bar stools arranged to accommodate any drinker who didn’t want to be seated at one of the tables. The ceiling height was pleasantly commodious.

That’s accurate, yes. It’s informative, yes. But it’s bland as heck.

The reader doesn’t want information. They want atmosphere. They want vivid language. They want mood.

Here’s an alternative way to describe a bar – the Korova Milk Bar in  A Clockwork Orange.  This description delivers a sense of intimacy and darkness in a few words:

The mesto [place] was near empty … it looked strange, too, having been painted with all red mooing cows … I took the large moloko plus to one of the little cubies that were all round … there being like curtains to shut them off from the main mesto, and there I sat down in the plushy chair and sipped and sipped

We’re told what we need to know, thrown into that murky Korova atmosphere and Burgess moves the action on. All we really have in terms of detail are those mooing red cows, some cubies (curtain booths?), and a plushy chair. There’s lots more author Anthony Burgess could tell us about that place. But he doesn’t. He gives us the  right  details, not all the details.

And if that’s not enough for you, then try reading  this .

Write For  All  The Senses

You have a nose? So use it.

Visuals are important, but don’t neglect the other senses. Offering a full range of sensory information will enhance your descriptive writing.

Herman Melville, say, describes to us the chowder for the ship’s crew in  Moby Dick : ‘small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes.’ Such descriptions are deft, specific, and brilliantly atmospheric. Where else but on board a nineteenth century American whaler would you get such a meal? By picking out those details, Melville makes his setting feel vibrantly alive.

Here’s another example.

Joanne Harris’ opening of  Chocolat  plays to readers’ senses, as we’re immersed straightaway in the world of her book through scent, sound and sight:

We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausage and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hotplate right there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters .

These non-visual references matter so much because sight alone can feel a little distant, a little empty.

By forcing the reader’s taste buds to image Melville’s clams or Harris’s pancakes – or making the reader feel that warm February wind, the confetti ‘sleeting’ down collars – it’s almost as though the writers are hauling the readers’ entire body into their scenes.

That’s good stuff: do likewise.

(And one easy test: take one of your scenes and highlight anything that references a non-visual sense. If you find some good references, then great: you’re doing fine. If not, your highlighter pen remains unused, you probably want to edit that scene!)

Get Place And Action Working Together

That’s where the magic happens!

Use the atmospheric properties of a place to add to other properties of the scene. That doesn’t mean you should always play things the obvious way: no need for cliché;.

You can have declarations of love happen in idyllic meadows, as in  Twilight  by Stephenie Meyer, but why not at a bus stop in the rain? Shouted over the barriers at a train station?

Your character also brings one kind of mood to the scene, and the action that unfolds will bring other sensations.

Lynda La Plante’s crime novel  Above Suspicion  makes a home setting frightening after it becomes obvious a stranger has been in protagonist DS Anna Travis’ flat, and she’s just been assigned to help solve her first murder case.

So the place is influenced by action, once Anna notices:

Reaching for the bedside lamp, she stopped and withdrew her hand. The photograph of her father had been turned out to face the room. She touched it every night before she went to sleep. It was always facing towards her, towards the bed, not away from it. … In the darkness, what had felt safe before now felt frightening: the way the dressing-table mirror reflected the street-light through the curtains and the sight of the wardrobe door left slightly ajar.

Here a comfy, nondescript flat becomes a frightening place, just because of what else is going on. Go for unfamiliar angles that add drama and excitement to your work.

Descriptions As Active Characters

You know the way that a place can turn on you? So (for example) a place that seems safe can suddenly reveal some other side, seem menacing, then almost try to harm the character.

That’s an incredibly powerful way to build descriptive writing into your text – because it feels mobile, alive and with a flicker of risk. You can use  plotting techniques  to help structure the way a reader interacts with a place: starting with a sense of the status quo, then some inciting incident that shifts that early stability, and so on. The inciting incident can be tiny – discovering that a photo frame has been moved, for example.

Having your characters voice their perceptions of a place in  dialogue  also adds to its dramatic impact, because now the reader sees place both through the eyes of a narrator and through the eyes of the characters themselves. Good, huh?

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We’ve made the offer as rich as we know how to – and made it incredibly affordable too. You can find out  more about our club here . Remember: we were founded by writers for writers – and we created this club for you. Do find out  more … and we’d absolutely love it if you chose to join us.

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Use Unfamiliar Locations

And smart research ALWAYS helps.

Using unfamiliar settings adds real mood and atmosphere.

Stephenie Meyer, when writing  Twilight , decided she needed a rainy place near a forest to fit key plot elements.

Like protagonist Bella, she was raised in Arizona, but explained the process of setting  Twilight  in an unfamiliar setting on her  blog :

For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest. … In researching Forks, I discovered the La Push Reservation, home to the Quileute Tribe. The Quileute story is fascinating, and a few fictional members of the tribe quickly became intrinsic to my story.

As her success has shown, it’s possible to write successfully about a place you don’t know, but you must make it your business to know as much as you can about it. (Or if you’re writing a fantasy or sci-fi novel, plan your world down to its most intricate details.)

And to be clear: you’re doing the research, not because you want that research to  limit  you. (Oh, I can’t write that, because Wikipedia tells me that the river isn’t as long / the forest isn’t as thick / or whatever else.)

On the contrary:

You are doing the research, because that research may inspire and stimulate a set of ideas you might not have ecountered otherwise .

The key thing is to do your research to nail specifics, especially if they are unfamiliar, foreign, exotic.

Just read how Tokyo is described in Ryu Murakami’s thriller  In the Miso Soup :

It was still early in the evening when we emerged onto a street in Tsukiji, near the fish market. … Wooden bait-and-tackle shops with disintegrating roofs and broken signs stood next to shiny new convenience stores, and futuristic highrise apartment complexes rose skyward on either side of narrow, retro streets lined with wholesalers of dried fish.

There’s authenticity, grit to this description of Tokyo, as opposed to using ‘stock’ descriptions that could apply to many modern cities.

Note this same thing with foods: in Japan, your protagonist could well be eating miso soup, as per Ryu Murakami.

Or say if your story was set in Hong Kong, you might write in a dai pai dong (a sort of Chinese street kitchen), something very specific to that city if you’re describing a street there.

Alternatively, if you are setting something in the past, get your sense of place right by doing your research right, too.

In historical novel  Girl with a Pearl Earring  by Tracy Chevalier, set in Holland in 1664, maid Griet narrates how artist Johannes Vermeer prepares her for her secret portrait, musing, to her horror, that ‘virtuous women did not open their mouths in paintings’.

That last is just a tiny detail, but Griet’s tears show us how mortified she is. Modern readers won’t (necessarily) think about seventeenth-century connotations like this, so if you’re writing a scene set in a very different era or culture to what you know, research so you’re creating a true sense of place.

Use Place To Create Foreshadowing

A brilliant technique – we love it!

Descriptions of place are never neutral.

Good writers will, in overt or gently subtle ways, introduce a place-as-character. If that character is dangerous, for example, then simply describing a place adds a layer of foreboding, foreshadowing, to the entire book.

Just read how J.R.R. Tolkien describes the Morannon in  The Two Towers : ‘high mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained … like an obscene graveyard.’ It’s obvious from this description trouble lies ahead for Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee.

But even if you’re not writing this sort of fantasy, character psychology and plot (as we saw above) can also render seemingly harmless places suspect, too. A boring apartment in  Above Suspicion  becomes scary when it seems someone’s been inside.

In the same sense, we thrill to the sense of a place with excitement and promise, too, like when Harry makes his first trip to Diagon Alley (in  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone ) to shop for Hogwarts equipment with Hagrid.

There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels’ eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon. … They bought Harry’s school books in a shop called Flourish and Blotts where the shelves were stacked to the ceiling with books as large as paving stones bound in leather; books the size of postage stamps in covers of silk.

Just weave place and action together like this to create atmosphere, excitement, tension, foreboding.

Think About Your Words – Nouns And Adjectives

Specific is good. Unexpected is great!

One final thought. When you’ve written a piece, go back and check nouns.

A bad description will typically use boring nouns (or things) in settings, i.e. a table, chair, window, floor, bar, stool, etc.

If you try to fluff up that by throwing in adjectives (i.e. a grimy table, gleaming window, wooden floor), the chances are you’ll either have (i) made the description even more boring, or (ii) made it odd.

Of course, this works for that first passage we looked over from Margaret Atwood.

We sense Offred counting the few things she has in the little room she calls hers, the window and chair, etc., in terse phrasing. We sense her tension, her dissociation, and we feel trapped with her.

All the same, play with nouns, with taking your readers to new surroundings. Give them a Moloko. Play with surroundings, how you can make them different, how you can render the ordinary extraordinary. With the right nouns in place, you’ll need fewer adjectives to jazz things up – and when you do use them, they’ll feel right, not over the top.

Happy writing!

About the author

Harry has written a variety of books over the years, notching up multiple six-figure deals and relationships with each of the world’s three largest trade publishers. His work has been critically acclaimed across the globe, has been adapted for TV, and is currently the subject of a major new screen deal. He’s also written non-fiction, short stories, and has worked as ghost/editor on a number of exciting projects. Harry also self-publishes some of his work, and loves doing so. His Fiona Griffiths series in particular has done really well in the US, where it’s been self-published since 2015. View his website , his Amazon profile , his Twitter . He's been reviewed in Kirkus, the Boston Globe , USA Today , The Seattle Times , The Washington Post , Library Journal , Publishers Weekly , CulturMag (Germany), Frankfurter Allgemeine , The Daily Mail , The Sunday Times , The Daily Telegraph , The Guardian , and many other places besides. His work has appeared on TV, via Bonafide . And go take a look at what he thinks about Blick Rothenberg . You might also want to watch our " Blick Rothenberg - The Truth " video, if you want to know how badly an accountancy firm can behave.

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How to write mystery: 6 ways to create suspense

Learning how to write mystery is easy when you understand the ingredients of mystery and suspense. Every good story has unknowns readers want answered, yet a good mystery makes us need to know. Here are 6 ways to create suspense and build mystery:

• Post author By Jordan
• 7 Comments on How to write mystery: 6 ways to create suspense

Learning how to write mystery is easy when you understand the ingredients of mystery and suspense. Every good story has unknowns readers want answered, yet a good mystery makes us need to know. Here are 6 ways to create suspense and build mystery:

First, what are mystery and suspense?

‘Mystery’ itself has many meanings. As a literary genre, a mystery is ‘A novel, play, or film dealing with a puzzling crime, especially a murder’ ( Oxford English Dictionary ).

Mystery, more generally, means ‘secrecy or obscurity’ and ‘A person or thing whose identity or nature is puzzling or unknown’ ( OED ).

Thus while a classic murder mystery like an Agatha Christie novel involves the puzzling nature of solving crimes, any book may have elements of the puzzling and unknown.

In a fantasy novel, for example, a villain’s real identity (or the scope of their power) may be a mystery at first. In a romance novel, the identity of a mysterious, desirable stranger may be the central mystery to begin.

These unknowns, and how a story circles around these mysteries , create suspense . Suspense is ‘a state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen’. This is an integral part of all storytelling. Suspense gives the question we ask most often as readers: What will happen next?

To create mysterious suspense, you may:

1. Conceal a character’s true identity

Fiction (and not only the mystery genre) is full of characters whose true identities are unknown.

The unknown, criminal perpetrator is one of the most obvious types of concealed identity. Yet concealment isn’t only reserved for criminals. In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations , for example, a mystery benefactor leaves Pip, the protagonist, a small fortune, changing his life completely.

Dickens sets us up to believe that the benefactor is the wealthy Miss Havisham, but we later discover the real benefactor was another, more unsavoury character.

In this case, Dickens conceals the doer of a non-criminal deed, and the revelation makes us reconsider everything we (and Pip) assume about why  he was given his fortune.

Another classic example of suspenseful concealed identity involves gender identity. In Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night , the protagonist Viola is separated from her twin brother Sebastian in a shipwreck on the coast of Illyria. She disguises herself as a man named ‘Cesario’ in order to serve a local Duke while seeking her brother.

This concealment creates suspense , as the audience wonders when Viola’s actual sex will be found out and her gender performance unmasked. A love triangle between the character, the Duke (whom Viola/Cesario falls in love with) and the woman the Duke himself loves (Olivia) complicates this narrative tension further.

Here, suspense is created by the audience knowing something about a character other characters don’t. 

To create suspense by concealing identity you can thus:

• Hide the identity behind an act: Whether a murderer or a generous giver (as in the Dickens’ example)
• Have a character don a disguise or role to achieve their goals: The gap between the reader’s knowledge of the truth and other characters’ awareness of it creates suspense

[ Brainstorm characters and plot events using the step-by-step prompts in the Now Novel dashboard.]

2. Create chains of small revelations

Learning how to write mystery means learning to ‘drip out’ suspense. Drop small revelations like a trail of crumbs for readers. The murderer leaves a footprint and we know their shoe size, the pattern of their treads.

These small ‘giveaways’ are useful because you can milk them for further suspense and mystery. For example, perhaps the pattern of treads in a footprint suggest the wearer has unusually small feet for a male.

This could lead the detective to be distracted all the time by the size of suspects’ feet. Prior revelations load further action and encounters with meaning and possible significance.

This approach to creating plot points – planting information like puzzle pieces – is key to creating suspense. As you create incidents that reveal just a little, ask ‘why?’ Why is this revelation useful or important?

When your mystery is a character’s identity, revelations may include:

• Physical remainders: What careless personal effects or trail (footprints, fingerprints, paperwork) does the character leave behind?
• Giveaway behavioural patterns: For example, a killer who is a scout leader might tie elaborate knots and leave other signs of specialist knowledge
• Tip-offs and rumours: In mystery, there’s always a character who knows more than they’re letting on. Even in books like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, we find out characters have more knowledge than we assumed, later in the story

Think of chains of revelation and how they stack up. To take the footprint example above, a sequence could be:

• Detective notices size of the print: Narrows down possible suspects
• They notice details of the tread: Maybe it reveals a specific brand or style of shoe, giving something to look for
• Errors behind assumptions: For example, perhaps the tread belongs to a witness who fled the scene

3. Sidetrack your sleuths

No discussion of how to write mystery is complete without the ‘red herring’ . A ‘red herring’ is an item of information that leads a character (and the reader) to false conclusions. It’s an object or action that we might perceive to have major significance initially. Yet later it turns out to have led us to false assumptions or suspicions. Solving a mystery depends on following signs and associations, and signs can point your reader down dead ends.

For example, a suspect may have a particular item in their possession belonging to a murder victim. This makes them appear more suspicious by association. Yet there could be an innocent reason why they possess said object.

You can sidetrack your sleuth (investigators and readers) and create suspense by:

• Giving events misleading significance: A flashlight blinking on and off in a window at the same time every night might seem ominous at first. Yet we discover it’s two teens way to signal to each other to get on a Skype call to discuss a friend’s disappearance
• Showing false assumptions: In a mystery romance, for example, a romantic lead could mistake a would-be lover’s close friend for a romantic rival. The reader wonders how this false assumption will play out
• Creating sidetracking subplots : While investigating a crime, a detective may be roped into dealing with townspeople’s other personal problems. These may indirectly furnish further details helpful to solving the case, while also sidetracking and distracting

Once you have established the main unknown (e.g. a character’s disappearance), each little event or action may be loaded with meaning. From flashlights at night to sightings of strangers acting suspiciously near the scene of a crime, anything may provoke further uncertainty.

4. Show intriguing actions without immediate explanation

‘Show, don’t tell’ is often abused advice . Explanatory exposition is sometimes necessary and effective. Yet in mystery showing is vital.

When you show unusual or odd actions without explaining their significance to the reader immediately, you make your reader wonder why. Why this specific scene/action? What does it tell me?

Take, for example, the reboot of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult murder mystery TV show, Twin Peaks .

Near the start of the season, the viewer sees the local therapist Dr Lawrence Jacoby spray-painting shovels gold. The action is a little creepy and we wonder what this gesture means . In the context of a murder mystery, we might associate shovels themselves with suspicious activity (such as digging a hiding place or grave).

It turns out Jacoby is a conspiracy theorist who drums up fear about government and pharmaceutical companies on his regular podcast. He also sells his golden shovels to his followers, via an infomercial where he stands in mud holding one, telling viewers to buy a golden shovel so they can ‘dig’ themselves ‘out of the shit’. The build-up of the strange ritual of spray-painting shovels turns out to lead to absurd humour poking fun at hokey advertising.

Even though strange actions don’t lead to a revelation relevant to the show’s biggest mysteries, the writers milk a simple, strange action for great narrative suspense.

The example above shows the power of delaying explanation, sometimes. Remember to trust in your reader’s patience and imaginative ability to supply their own interpretation of events until you reveal the ‘real’ meaning.

5. Build suspense through sentence and scene construction

We could discuss how to write mystery purely in terms of genre and literary terms and devices. Yet how we use language itself is also key to creating suspense .

For example, putting the ‘a-ha’ moment of a sentence in the final clause makes the sentence build to this revelation. For example:

‘It was unusual (though there were one or two brands that used a similar design), and if it were not for the manufacturer’s logo (the letters barely legible) imprinted in the hardening mud just outside a back window, the detective may have had no idea what shoe type had left the footprint. But she knew exactly the type (gumboots, Another Day brand), and even the location of the supplier’s factory outlet – just a mile out of town. She could get there before closing if she hurried.’

If we read over the sentence and examine its structure, we see how it piles on questions before answering some. Each clause creates questions: A) What was unusual? B) There were several brands of what ? C) Why is the manufacturer’s logo important? Only by the time we get to ‘this particular print’ is it clear a character is trying to find further leads from a footprint.

A caveat to using suspenseful sentence construction

Delaying revelation in sentence construction and scenes is a simple yet effective way to keep your reader guessing. Yet balance building sentences like the one above with shorter, simpler ones. If we make every sentence long and climactic, the effect starts to tire. Keep this technique for moments of high intrigue (such as a detective caught in complex pondering, in piecing together evidence).

Similarly, when developing a mysterious scene, delay major revelations for final paragraphs and sentences, so your reader has every reason to turn the page.

6. Use mysterious, suspenseful dialogue

Dialogue is a great device for creating implications , mysteries and inferences.

For example take this scene: A detective visits a local dive bar. The owner inclines their head slightly towards a man sitting drinking alone in the corner, saying, “You want to keep an eye on that one.”

This brief exchange creates immediate suspense and curiosity. Why is the lone drinker a person of interest? Are they mixed up in dubious dealings? Or are they simply a troublemaker who might interfere in investigations?

Keep characters’ motives in mind when writing dialogue to create suspense. Perhaps, for example, the proprietor of the bar has personal grievances to the lone man. Great mysteries show how difficult it is to find the truth. Because everyone has a view, an agenda, a public life, a private one.

Cryptic words or phrases also help make dialogue mysterious or suspenseful. Yet don’t overdo it by making every sentence so obscure that your reader is totally lost.

In Lynch and Frost’s reboot of Twin Peaks , for example, we see a drug addict sitting at a table shouting ‘ONE ONE NINE!’ hysterically over and over. Although this isn’t explained and given any context, observant viewers noticed this is the North American emergency number ‘911’ backwards. Speaking backwards, in the world of Twin Peaks, is associated with paranormal portal-like locations called ‘lodges’ through which destructive spirits can enter our world. Thus these simple but mysterious shouts could indicate paranormal activity, or simply the character’s drug-induced ravings. Giving dialogue ‘double’ and elusive meaning at times makes it suspenseful and open to interpretation.

Need help developing suspense and mystery in your story? Join Now Novel for constructive feedback from the community or your own writing coach.

Related Posts:

• Writing a cozy mystery: 10 feel-good suspense tips
• Suspense in books: 6 ways to grow anticipation
• How to write suspense like The Hunger Games

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

7 replies on “How to write mystery: 6 ways to create suspense”

Excellent tips for most genre. I think mystery is the root of most stories and this is an excellent primmer for the everything from big-world-building science fiction to regency romance. Thanks for sharing.

It’s a pleasure, Elias, I’m glad you enjoyed reading this. You’re right – mystery is a key story ingredient in many genres besides mystery ‘proper’. Thanks for reading.

The writing style is amazing. I get great pleasure when I read and agree with what I read. I think mystery is the basis for most works. A huge number of people read books for this-they like mystery and mystery. Thanks for the great content.

Thank you for reading and for the kind feedback, Writer 🙂

Another amazing blog from Jordan. All you have shared in this article are useful that I can’t wait to apply these in real life.

Hi Patricia, thank you for reading our blog and for the feedback! I’m afraid I had to remove the blog link you shared as it said the target site was not secure.

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The Top 10 Descriptive Paragraphs About Mountains

Written by Dan

Last updated February 15, 2024

As a teacher, when you’re looking for examples of descriptive paragraphs for your class to study and explore, there’s no better subject than the majesty of mountains. Mountains offer a different type of beauty—one that can be both awe-inspiring and peaceful simultaneously.

To help give your students an idea of what mountain descriptions look like, we’ve created a list with some of the top 10 most evocative passages about mountains—all written by some beloved authors over the years!

In this post, we’ll examine each with insightful quotes from each passage so that teachers can use material in their classroom activity instructions to further illustrate how expansive and captivating a description about mountains can truly be.

Related : For more, check out our article on  Descriptive Paragraphs About King Charles  here.

Table of Contents

1. The Majestic Mountains

The mountains, like the ancient sentinels of a forgotten realm, stand tall and proud, their peaks scraping the soft belly of the cerulean sky. They rise like majestic titans, their silhouettes etched defiantly against the backdrop of the heavens.

These mountains are an epitome of grandeur and resilience, a living testament to the earth’s might and its relentless endurance. Their formidable stature is a constant reminder of the planet’s ageless strength and timeless persistence.

Their rugged surfaces, etched with the countless stories of time, are a complex tapestry of shadows and light. These surfaces, worn by the ceaseless march of seasons, bear the imprints of centuries, their crinkles and folds narrating tales of eras gone by.

This intricate mosaic of crevices and ridges, illuminated and concealed by the shifting sun, is a testament to the relentless passage of time and the enduring spirit of nature.

The sun, a celestial artist, paints the mountains with a precision that is nothing short of poetic. As it embarks on its daily journey across the expansive horizon, it bathes the mountains in a kaleidoscope of colors, from the soft pastels of dawn to the fiery hues of dusk.

The play of light and shadow over the mountains’ rugged terrain creates a dynamic landscape that changes with every passing hour, offering an ever-evolving spectacle of natural beauty.

The craggy faces of these mountainous giants, speckled with the vibrant greens of hardy vegetation and the pristine white of winter snow, hold a raw, natural beauty that is both awe-inspiring and humbling.

The contrast between the harsh, unyielding rock and the delicate, fleeting snowflakes or the resilient, tenacious greenery serves as a stark reminder of nature’s paradoxical character — its capacity for both ruthlessness and gentleness.

This juxtaposition, this symphony of extremes, contributes to the mountains’ mesmerizing allure, making them a sight that is as humbling as it is breathtaking.

Related : For more, check out our article on  Descriptive Paragraphs About The Queen  here.

2. A Symphony of Silence

Listen closely! The mountains speak in a symphony of silence, a language so profound that it transcends words. This silence is punctuated only by the crisp crunch of snow underfoot or the distant echo of a lone bird’s call.

It is a sound that reverberates deep within the soul, a profound hush that drowns out the clamor of the world below, offering a sanctuary where one can hear the whisper of their own thoughts. This silence is not empty but full of a stillness that sings a song of tranquility and peace.

The mountains, silent sentinels of a bygone era, are soothing balms for the soul. They offer refuge from the bustle and anxiety of daily life, allowing one to connect with a peacefulness that is eons old.

For those in need of solace, these quiet giants are beacons of hope, providing a place where one can rest and replenish their reserves of energy and strength.

The mountains beckon us to their untamed peak, inviting us to explore and discover the lessons that lay hidden within their depths. Beyond the chilly winds and steep slopes are secrets that remain untouched and unspoken, waiting for those who will brave its heights.

Those courageous enough to venture into the mountains will be rewarded with a serenity so profound it seems almost sacred, an experience they are unlikely to forget.

The mountains are powerful and mysterious, a place of awe and reverence. They are a reminder that in the vastness of our world lies something greater than ourselves, an ancient wisdom that can only be found in the silent depths of their peaks.

The majestic beauty of these silent giants stands as a testament to our fragile planet and its enduring spirit—a spirit that will continue to speak in its own language, a language of silence.

Related : For more, check out our article on  Descriptive Paragraphs About Macbeth  here.

3. The Beauty of Solitude

In the heart of the mountains, solitude is not a state of loneliness, but a tranquil companionship with nature. Here, one can commune with the wind that rustles through the pines, the snow that blankets the slopes, and the rocks that have stood the test of time.

Each element is a friend, offering comfort in its constant, unchanging presence. This solitude nurtures the spirit, providing a space for reflection and introspection, a chance to connect with oneself amidst the majesty of the natural world.

The mountains are a place of calm and repose, where one can be surrounded by beauty while still remaining in control. Here, the elements are at peace, and one is free to explore the depths of their own inner world.

The harshness of the terrain encourages self-reliance and teaches resilience, while its serenity facilitates contemplation and growth. The mountains offer a unique opportunity to experience the joy of being alone, far away from the clamor and chaos of everyday life.

The beauty of the mountains is that they offer something for everyone. For some, it’s an escape from the hustle and bustle; for others, an adventure in a wild and untamed world.

But no matter what the purpose, in the mountains one is never truly alone. The company of nature’s elements provides an unspoken companionship—a presence that remains steady and true no matter how far one ventures into the unknown.

The mountains are a place of solace, with their majestic beauty and ancient secrets luring us to explore its depths. Here, amidst the stillness and peace of its peaks, we can find refuge from the chaos of life. The mountains are a reminder that no matter how isolated we may feel, there is always something greater than ourselves that surrounds and sustains us.

They offer a glimpse into an ancient wisdom beyond our understanding, serving as both an inspiration and a protector. In these silent giants lies the promise of solace and serenity, a reminder that beauty and power are intertwined in the timeless embrace of nature.

Related : For more, check out our article on  Descriptive Paragraphs About The Wind  here.

4. The Dance of Light and Shadow

At dawn, the mountains are cloaked in ethereal hues of pink and gold, their jagged silhouettes sharp against the awakening sky. As the day progresses, they transform into an ever-changing tableau of light and shadow, each hour revealing a new facet of their beauty.

The sun, in its celestial dance, plays with the mountains, casting shadows that creep and retreat, highlighting ridges and illuminating valleys. At dusk, they are bathed in the fiery glow of the setting sun, their peaks aflame with a riot of colors, as if bidding a spectacular farewell to the day.

The mountains are a living, breathing canvas, their faces ever-changing. The subtle hues of morning mist, the play of light and shadow at noon and twilight’s golden curtain; each is a unique symphony that speaks to the soul.

They evoke emotions ranging from awe and wonder to reverence and serenity, inspiring feelings that can only be found in the embrace of nature.

The mountains are more than just a beautiful sight, they are portals to an alternate reality filled with possibility and potential. They remind us that there is beauty even in moments of darkness, if we take the time to look for it.

By exploring their depths, we can discover our own inner strength and courage—strengths that can be found only in the depths of their majestic passes.

The beauty of the mountains is timeless, and as the sun sets each day they remind us that the world is constantly changing, even if it appears otherwise. They invite us to step into a realm where dreams are made and infinite potential awaits.

No matter how daunting it may seem, these silent sentinels are a reminder that the journey is worth taking—for in the depths of their peaks lies an enchantment beyond our wildest imaginings.

5. The Mountains’ Might

The mountains, with their towering peaks and deep, mysterious valleys, are a testament to the earth’s raw power. They are sculpted by the relentless forces of wind and water, carved by the slow crawl of glaciers and the ceaseless march of time.

Their strength is palpable, radiating a quiet assurance that they will endure long after we have returned to the dust. Their might serves as a reminder of our own insignificance in the face of nature’s grandeur, a humbling experience that puts our fleeting existence into perspective.

The mountains are a source of strength and inspiration, pushing us to the limits of our physical and mental abilities. They challenge us in ways that other environments cannot, teaching resilience and perseverance in the face of hardship.

The sheer magnitude of their slopes teach us humility, while their rugged beauty elicits feelings of awe and wonderment. In the presence of these silent sentinels, we can’t help but feel small.

The mountains are a source of solace and strength—a reminder that beauty and power are intertwined in the timeless embrace of nature. Here, amidst the stillness and peace of its peaks, we can find refuge from the chaos of life. The mountains beckon us to explore beyond our comfort zone, reminding us that there is always something greater than ourselves that we can strive for.

They offer a glimpse into an ancient wisdom beyond our understanding, a reminder that the journey is worth taking—for in the depths of their peaks lies an enchantment beyond our wildest imaginings.

6. The Call of the Wild

In the heart of the mountains, the wild calls with a primal lure, awakening a deep-seated yearning for exploration and adventure. Here, amidst the rugged terrain, the untamed beauty, one can feel truly alive, their senses sharpened by the crisp mountain air and the stunning vistas that unfold at every turn.

The mountains call to the adventurer within us, beckoning us to lose ourselves in their wilderness, to breathe in their purity, to become one with their untamed spirit.

The mountains are a playground for the soul, an escape from the mundane and everyday. They invite us to explore their secrets, to discover forgotten trails hidden in their folds, to marvel at their natural wonders.

Here we can find true freedom, where danger is ever-present and adventure abounds. The wild beckons to us—to take risks, face our fears, and test the limits of ourselves.

The mountains are a reminder that life should be lived to its fullest. They invite us to break free from the chains of everyday life and take a leap into the unknown. Here we can find solace in nature’s embrace, discover hidden treasures, and embark on a journey of self-discovery and adventure.

The mountains are a call to the wild, an invitation to explore their depths and discover our true potential. They offer us a glimpse into an ancient wisdom beyond our understanding, reminding us that beauty and power are intertwined in the timeless embrace of nature. Adventure awaits—all we have to do is heed its call. Take the plunge, embrace the risk, and find strength in the wild.

7. A Sanctuary of Serenity

The mountains offer a sanctuary of serenity, a haven from the hustle and bustle of life. Their timeless beauty and tranquil silence provide a balm for the weary soul, healing the wounds inflicted by the frenetic pace of modern existence.

Here, one can find peace, solitude, and a profound connection with nature. The mountains teach us to slow down, to appreciate the simple beauty of a sunrise or the quiet majesty of a snow-capped peak, to find joy in the journey rather than the destination.

The mountains have a magnetic quality, an otherworldly aura that draws us in. They offer a respite from the noise and chaos of life—a place to reflect, rejuvenate, and find clarity. In their embrace we can reconnect with our true selves, discover our innermost passions and dreams, and begin anew.

The mountains are a reminder of the power of nature and its ability to heal. They are a source of strength, courage, and peace—a sanctuary for the weary traveler. Each peak is an invitation to explore, to climb higher than ever before and bask in the awe-inspiring beauty that lies beyond.

The mountains provide a refuge from our daily lives, offering us solace in their stillness and serenity. Let us take a deep breath and be filled with the peace that only nature can provide.

8. The Seasons’ Canvas

The mountains are the canvas upon which the seasons paint their masterpieces. Winter swathes them in a blanket of pristine snow, transforming their rough terrain into a shimmering wonderland of white.

Spring adorns them with a burst of color as flowers bloom and trees bud, breathing life into their slopes. Summer bathes them in warmth and light, revealing their full splendor in the long, golden days. Autumn, the grand artist, sets them ablaze with fiery hues of red and orange, making a spectacle of their descent into winter.

The canvas of the mountains is ever-changing, a stark reminder that nothing in life is constant. The rocky terrain is both relentless and resilient, weathering centuries of storms, floods, snowstorms, and droughts. It stands as a silent witness to the passing of time—to the ebbs and flows of nature’s cycle—reminding us of our own mortality.

The mountains are a reminder that life is fleeting, but also ever-renewing. They offer us a glimpse into the renewal of life through the changing seasons, reminding us to take pleasure in the little moments and savor each experience with all our senses. Let us be still and marvel at the beauty of nature’s canvas, for here lies a never-ending source of inspiration.

The mountains are more than just a backdrop to life’s ups and downs—they are our teachers, guides, and companions. In their embrace we can find strength and solace in times of struggle, and joy and peace in times of ease.

Let us take the time to listen to their silent voices, and find the courage to embrace their call. The mountains await—all we have to do is heed its call. Take the plunge, embrace the risk, and explore the wilds of life’s eternal canvas.

9. The Mountains’ Majesty

There is an undeniable majesty to the mountains. They rise from the earth like colossal sculptures, their contours shaped by the hand of nature. Their peaks, wreathed in clouds, seem to touch the heavens, reaching for the stars in their silent, stoic way.

Their valleys, cloaked in mist, hold a mystical allure, hiding secrets in their depths. In their towering grandeur, the mountains command respect and awe, inspiring poets and artists, dreamers and adventurers alike.

The mountains challenge us, calling us to re-examine our place in the natural world. They remind us of our insignificance and mortality, but also of the strength and resilience that lies within all of us.

Here we can find courage to take risks, explore new possibilities, and live life to its fullest. The mountains beckon—to stand in their glory, to marvel at their timeless beauty, and to be moved by the awesomeness of nature.

The mountains offer us a chance to reconnect with the wildness within ourselves—a part of our true selves that has been forgotten in today’s modern world. To climb a mountain is to break free from the mundane routine of life, to escape from the confines of comfort and be filled with a sense of freedom.

Let us take a moment to marvel at the majesty of the mountains, for here lies an inexhaustible source of inspiration and strength.

The mountains have been witnesses to our struggles and triumphs throughout history—they are part of our collective memory, a reminder that we can overcome any obstacle and find joy in the journey.

Let us embrace their call and take a plunge into the unknown, for here lies a chance to explore uncharted terrain and discover our true potential. The mountains await—all we have to do is heed its call. Take the plunge, embrace the risk, and find strength in the wilds of life’s ever-changing landscape.

10. The Mountains’ Song

The mountains sing a song as old as time itself. It is a melody woven from the rustle of leaves, the babble of brooks, the whistle of the wind, and the call of the wild. It is a symphony that resonates in the heart, a tune that speaks of peace, strength, beauty, and the eternal rhythm of nature.

This song, once heard, stays with you, a haunting melody that calls you back to the mountains, to their majesty, their solitude, and their wild, untamed beauty.

The mountains’ song is a reminder to take pleasure in the little moments and savor each experience with all our senses. Let us pause to listen and be filled with the serenity that only nature can provide.

The mountains may be silent, but their song speaks of life and its mysteries—of adventure, courage, hope, and renewal. In its embrace we can find the strength to take risks, explore new possibilities, and live life to its fullest.

The mountains are alive with their song—a never-ending source of inspiration and courage. Let us take a moment to listen, and find the resolve to heed their call.

Take the plunge, embrace the risk, and explore the wilds of life’s eternal song. The mountains await—all we have to do is listen. So take a deep breath and be filled with the peace that only nature can provide, for here lies an adventure unlike any other.

In conclusion, these top 10 descriptive paragraphs about mountains serve as perfect examples of the power of evocative language. Each passage offers a unique perspective on the majesty and beauty of mountains, highlighting their grandeur, tranquility, and the awe they inspire.

The various descriptions illustrate how the same subject can be depicted in numerous ways, depending on the author’s choice of words and imagery.

These passages serve not only as a tool for teaching descriptive writing but also as an invitation for students to explore their own experiences and emotions, encouraging them to convey their thoughts and feelings with similar depth and vividness. By studying these examples, students can learn to appreciate the richness of descriptive language and the endless possibilities it offers for expressing their perceptions and experiences.

Furthermore, these passages remind us that nature, particularly the magnificence of mountains, provides an abundant source of inspiration for writers. By learning to observe and describe the natural world around them, students can cultivate their observational skills, expand their vocabulary, and develop their ability to create compelling, immersive descriptions.

In essence, these masterfully crafted passages about mountains are more than just examples of descriptive writing; they are a testament to the beauty of language and its power to bring the world to life in the reader’s mind.

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About The Author

I'm Dan Higgins, one of the faces behind The Teaching Couple. With 15 years in the education sector and a decade as a teacher, I've witnessed the highs and lows of school life. Over the years, my passion for supporting fellow teachers and making school more bearable has grown. The Teaching Couple is my platform to share strategies, tips, and insights from my journey. Together, we can shape a better school experience for all.

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Tips for describing features of unusual place that I often visit

I'm having problems describing certain parts of a place that I usually visit. Here are some pictures:

For instance, I have no idea how I should refer to the wooden platform on the left (so I just called it wooden platform). I'm also not very sure how to call the section between the wooden platform and the handrail (I just called it sidewalk).

Well, here is the description.

The darkness and fog made it hard for Jun to see the end of the sidewalk. There were no people around, and the streets were unusually quiet. After walking a few meters, he spotted a large wooden platform and decided to sit there. He pulled a Busch beer from is bag, opened it, and looked up. In front of him, there was a sewage canal that was surrounded by a handrail and streetlights. A minute or two passed when Jun heard the sound of a second can opening. He looked to his side and realized that someone was sitting just a few meters away from him. It was a girl. She was looking up. Something at the other side of the sewage canal. Jun glanced his watch. It was 2 A.M. What is a girl doing here at this time, he wondered. He tried following her line of vision to the other side of the canal. It took him some time to make out the shape. It looked like a tree. A standing dead tree. It had a grayish color and had long branches. After finishing his can, he pulled another one from his bag and continued staring at the decayed tree. He glanced to the girl from time to time, but she never never took off her eyes away from the tree. Jun woke up in his bed with a terrible headache, wondering how he had reached home. His bag was lying on the floor with nine empty beer cans inside. An hour or two passed when the phone called. He let it ring for moment and then picked up the receiver.

Beyond simply finding words for these particular items, I would like to know how to figure out good descriptions on my own in similar cases.

• description

• I've made some minor edits; nice question! –  Standback Commented Apr 15, 2012 at 7:18
• Can you tell us what you consider wrong with the existing description? –  Goodbye Stack Exchange Commented Apr 15, 2012 at 13:02

Doing research is part of being a writer. So, don't know what that pavilion is called? Find out. Look online, look around the thing to see if there's a plaque that may give you a hint, heck, you could even ask some people in the area, like cafe workers.

That said, you don't necessarily need to know what it is:

...spotted a large wooden platform with an asian-looking arbor over it. It looked vaguely Shinto, not that Jun's experience with oriental shrines extended much past martial arts movies.

But that's only if you need to focus that much attention on it. I think the problem you're running into has less to do with the wooden platform and more to do with over-describing and under-showing the scene. That is, you've basically got a bullet point list of what Jun sees and does. This takes a scene with some very interesting concepts (the staring girl, the dead tree, the blackout), and dulls and flattens it.

Compare your first two paragraphs to this:

The darkness and fog muffled the street. Jun could barely see to the end of the sidewalk, so he felt, more than saw, his way along. He kept the parked scooters rising and falling in the mist like chained derelicts to his left and the dead iron ladder of the sewage canal's railing stretching to infinity on the right. He'd steer between the two, and eventually he'd be home. Eventually. He wasn't quite ready to get there just yet. A wooden pavilion shaped itself out of the gloom and Jun sat down. A couple of cans of beer in his backpack called to him so he open one, drank, and pondered the dark wavelets in the canal. The hiss-click of another can of beer startled Jun out of his reverie. There was a girl sitting on the far end of the pavilion, her legs dangling over the sides. Had she been there the whole time? He watched her drink the beer down in one long swallow, her eyes closed, her throat bobbing in time. She didn't seem to notice him. Instead she stared across the canal, the beer can, now empty, forgotten in her lap.

This isn't necessarily the best way to write this, but it shows you that you don't have to tell the reader the boring bits of how a character moves through space (X meters, spotting, looking this way and that) -- their mind will fill in those blanks.

The blanks they can't fill in are how the scene feels -- and how it'll make them (the readers) feel. This is texture, and you have to provide that. And that can't be done by listing facts.

Consider, for instance, when Jun first sees the dead tree. You write:

It took him some time to make up the shape. It looked like a tree. A standing dead tree. It had a grayish color and had long branches.

"It had a grayish color and had long branches." Really? No! This tree is a pivotal element on the scene that, if my impression is right, gives the scene's spooky nature a reason for being. I mean, the whole thing was set up for the girl to stare at that dead tree, right? So why not something like:

"It stood there like a forgotten evil, its bark the shriveled gray of a drowned man's flesh, its skeletal branches grasping through streamers of murky night air, lusting after the memory of its trembling victims.

Both here and and in the first paragraph with the scooters and canal railing, I'm using similes and adjectives to give these elements some punch.

I'll grant you, I am over-doing it a bit. The tree thing especially is over the top. But that's just for purposes of example to make my point.

When describing a setting you don't want to describe everything, which inevitably leads to summarization. Instead, you want to use a few elements shown in loving, delicious detail to set the whole scene for you.

So remember, it's about texture .

• Thanks a lot! (Actually, I was planning to approach the people who usually sit there smoking, and ask them: "Hey, what is this thing you are sitting on called?") –  wyc Commented Apr 15, 2012 at 11:56
• 1 Another tip: Use all your senses. Not just visuals, but also smells, sounds, a taste in the air, a chill on the skin, etc. You already do this to some extent ("unusually quiet", "sound of second can"). Descriptions need not be all visual. –  Koen Van Damme Commented Apr 15, 2012 at 19:09
• @KoenVanDamme +1 for using other senses. Frequently, if you analyse a descriptive scene that sticks in your head, you'll find senses besides sight used. For me, smell seems to be a sense that really makes a scene stand out. –  Patches Commented Apr 16, 2012 at 21:45
• I didn't even read past the first line before I +1ed this. Find out. God, the number of times I've told someone that. –  temporary_user_name Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 21:29
• Also, if you do know what it's called, and the readers won't, call it something they will understand. –  David Thornley Commented Jun 13, 2018 at 19:38

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A Mysterious Find (Short Story)

By chris j mitchell, i was deep in the woods and the trees were casting a cold shadow on to the ground..

The call of a solitary bird echoed from far away, and I wondered if it was time to turn back for my stroll had turned into something more strenuous than I had planned.

Still, I kept on for I felt something inside of me wanting to push forward. I squeezed through a couple of huddled trees, but then stepped into a tangle of nettles. This distracted my attention for a moment while I freed myself and I kept my balance with one hand firmly placed against the damp bark of a tree.

I then caught sight of a curious-looking structure set a few feet from my location.

Laying in the ground the hands of time had covered it in moss and hidden it away from civilisation. The object looked as though it had not been touched for over a hundred years. Was it an old stone trough or even an ancient grave I thought to myself?

The structure rose a foot from the ground and where it was not covered in moss there were flakes of stone peeling away after years of rain, damp and cold.

I approached, carefully stepping one foot over the other, but the sound of a twig breaking under my foot forced me to freeze. Why it should force me to do this? I cannot say for I was not hiding or in danger, but a sense of fear came over me.

My heart rate had increased and little sounds, such as leaves rustling or the chirp of a bird all became exaggerated and ringing out in my ears as potential threats of danger. A natural fight or flight reaction I assumed.

I gazed into the centre of the structure and could see only leaves and a few rotting branches. Glancing over my shoulder I took a few steps closer.

Most likely a drinking basin for livestock or horses, but still enough for my curiosity to push me to investigate. I put my foot gently on top of the leaves and pressed a little. The rotting organic debris depressed under the weight of my foot, but no trap door or hidden passageway swung open.

I kneeled on the side with one knee and cleared a few small branches and leaves away with my hand. They felt cold, damp and as you would expect. Underneath was earth and disappointment that I had not discovered a great missing artifact.

My heart rate returned to normal and I sat down on one of the cold stone sides to take in the silence…

Then a strange sound, like the wind whipping against a cliff edge, emanated from behind me. Jumping to my feet and turning around, there was a strange swirl enveloping the leaves and the earth inside the shallow walls of the structure.

I took my feet into a stride and just as I made the nearest tree I stopped and turned around.

“Yes, of course,” I said out loud. “How could I forget!”

Memories at this point were flooding back into my mind. The past, the future and the Otherworld.

A hand, old, wrinkled and greyish popped up through a vortex that had formed at the centre of the swirling mess of leaves and earth.

This was followed by an arm and then the bald, boney head of a strange figure. He had grey skin and in places bones showing where there should have been skin. It clambered out of the edifice.

My heart was not racing though and my palms were not sweaty, for I knew exactly who he was.

His name was Graham!

He pulled out an old rolled-up manuscript and sat on one of the stone sides of the structure.

“Ready when you are,” he said.

“Sounding a little rusty, you need some more vitamin D. It would add colour to your cheeks,” I replied. To which he did not respond, but started reading the paper.

“How did it go?” he asked over his shoulder.

“It went well.”

“You found here okay?”

“It appears so… Please give me a moment.”

I checked in my backpack and sure enough, it was still there. An old Celtic artifact lost long ago. Stolen from the Otherworld and brought to Earth without permission. My task to retrieve it and then to return.

The vortex and the magic around it had restored my memories to their rightful place. My name is Caratacus, and having been sent here from the Otherworld years ago the memories of my real identity quickly faded. This was a side effect of the transition spell and its casting that sent me here.

Aside from a few notes written on a parchment how would I know to retrieve it or where to return?

I was assured by my elders it would all fall into place. I would have an instinct in me that called me to this place when the time was right. Where the keeper, Graham, would let me in.

“I have friends here you know that I will not see again,” I said.

“I know, and we all knew that is a price you would pay. Anyway, can’t you send them a text goodbye or something? Isn’t that all the rage these days?”

“I could, but texting is a little out of date, I will send a DM instead.”

“Please do, its chilly here.”

“I sent the message, “Tata for now.” and that was it. I was always a bit of an enigma for those few who knew me. Maybe I will meet them again one day in another life. But who knows. For here, for now, my time is done!

For further fictional tales please see the fiction page or for an insightful academic look at the history of ghosts and how they have been used in creative literature to add suspense, story devices and to engage with the reader please see A Concise History of Ghosts and Famous Accounts in Literature

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GCSE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Paper 1 Question 5

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Descriptive Model Answer: A Secret Place

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Worksheet/Activity

Last updated

3 January 2022

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Descriptive Writing Prompt:

You have been asked to contribute a descriptive piece of writing about secret places to a creative writing website. In your writing, create a sense of atmosphere and focus on colours, sounds, and movements to help your reader imagine the scene. Write the description, using no more than 400 words.

Originally written as a model answer for the CIE AS English Language (9093) syllabus, this piece of writing can also be used as a prompt or model answer for GCSE Language descriptive writing skills.

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