Everybody writes different plots. Some authors can sustain a story with nothing but banter, others with nothing but action. Many are fairly straightforward. However, if you are like Eltea, you love intricate, convoluted, even labyrinthine plots. Even if you don’t, you might want to write a mystery into one of your stories - and by mystery, I don’t mean that it has to be the mystery genre, just that there’s an unexpected plot twist. Here are two things that you will need and two more that will be extremely useful to you.

1. Plot Twist - Something unexpected. Something surprising. Something your readers will not be anticipating! This can either be an unexpected answer to a question with which the readers are familiar, or it can just be something out of the blue. It shouldn’t be totally out of the blue, though, because you need to leave…

2. Clues - The best plot twists are those that make the readers go, “Why didn’t I see that coming?” The trick is to give them everything they need to figure it out, but to make sure they don’t. My favorite analogy is to Blackjack, Twenty-One, or Vignt-Et-Un - whatever name you know it by. You want to get as close to twenty-one as possible, adding cards (or clues) until you get right up to it, but if you go a single one over, all is lost. Likewise, you want as many clues and hints as possible, but if you give just one too many, people figure it out and your surprise is lost. Here are two ways to hide clues so that they’re harder to find:

3. Red Herrings - Red herrings are essentially false clues, planted specifically to be found and to fool the reader into thinking he or she has figured things out. As a very basic example, if you don’t want your true murderer to be noticed, you might have a character who is very suspicious and was seen around the murder site. People will be so focused on the false clue that they’ll neglect the real ones and be less suspicious of the actual murderer. A more complex idea of a red herring might be having the letters SON written on a wall, leading everybody to believe that someone is talking about a person’s son when in reality, S.O.N. are somebody’s initials. In this case, the fact that the initials spell a word would be a red herring, because it seems like a clue but actually isn’t, and it hides the real clue.

4. Distractions - Another way to hide clues is by distracting the reader. If a small clue is instantly followed by an explosive battle, chances are, nobody will remember that the clue existed, because their attention will be drawn to the battle. Another version of this strategy is to associate a clue with something other than the mystery so people will not realize it is also associated with the mystery. For example, if two people duck into a room with strange carvings on the walls for a steamy kissing scene, the audience will assume that the room was created for the purposes of giving the characters a private place and that it has no other meaning in the story, and there will be no suspicion about what it means.

That’s the basic idea of how I structure my mysteries. I come up with a plot twist, plant some clues for it, then throw in some red herrings to fool people and attempt to hide my real clues by distracting the reader. If you’d like to see an example of how it all comes together when I’m finished, take a look at The Killing Lights, one of my fanfics - and once you’re done, see if you can pick out the techniques I used to create the mystery. :)