My NaNoWriMo project is a mix of familiar and new territory for me. It’s a fantasy; that’s familiar. Urban fantasy, but that’s not a big leap. There’s also a romance (subplot), and I enjoy writing romance. So far so good.

I decided to add a mystery (subplot). My MC’s dad and mom were both murdered. He knows who killed his mom (his wicked stepfather), but not how his dad died. Later, he finds out that his father was accused of murdering all the Knights of the Year, and in order to exonerate his dad, the MC has to find the real murderer.

I’ve never written a mystery before. In fact, I tried to work in a mystery subplot into The Unfinished Song books 4-6, and it was so awful I had to scrap the mystery part and take that whole subplot in a different direction. It caused me many painful hours of head-scratching and re-writing.

One of my goals with this project is to master the mystery format at a simple level, so if I ever want to try it in a more complex story (like my multivolume epic where so much more is going on), I’ll be less lost.

The first step for me was to read a bunch of mysteries (and watch more on Netflix) and then buy a bunch of How To Write Mystery books. If you want to learn to do something, study how others do it, don’t reinvent the wheel. It’s been incredibly helpful, and I wish I had done this a year ago. Better late, and all that.

The thing which the How To books really emphasized is that you need to know the murderer’s story first. After all, the murder (at least the first one) has already taken place before the detective investigates, it only makes sense to write that part first.

I know who was killed. Thirteen people…the twelve Knights and the MC’s father. (I decided the Knights are all teens, so the dad, although once a Knight, could not be in that position at the time of the murders.) Besides, thirteen murders makes a better number for Halloween, which of course, is when they were killed.

In addition to the murderer, I need a bunch of other possible murderers. The MC’s dad is one. He’s the one implicated by all the initial evidence. Even the MC will begin wonder if he was guilty. (Spoiler: He’s not.) But who, then? And why?

In fact, all the serious suspects need a motivation. I’m looking at my plot, figuring out who my supporting characters will be, since this is the first place to stash suspects.

Brainstorming is still in progress. It’s going to be open season on ideas until the rich outline / rough draft is hammered out. Early on, it’s important to ask, “Where is this going? What concrete action will the hero take to show he’s won?”

I was talking to a writer friend recently about his new novel and asked him for the story synopsis. He gave a wonderful premise and what sounded like the first chapter or two. But there was no story arc, no goal and no ending in sight.

If you plow into a 50,000 word or 100,000 word novel not knowing your ending, I think you’re just asking for a life of pain.

As I’ve looked back over the many books I’ve started to write and never finished, I realized something. If I didn’t know the ending to a book, I didn’t finish it. If I knew the ending, I might leave it for a while, but I always came back to it.

Wow. How mind-numbingly obvious is that?!

There are two stages to knowing your ending: knowing what concrete goal your hero seeks, and knowing whether or not he finds it. That’s it. Easy-schmeasy! How could I have missed that for so many manuscripts?

A concrete action is something like throwing the Ring into the heart of a volcano, or marrying Rosie and having a dozen baby hobbits or departing Middle Earth forever on Elven Ships. You know there’s no going back to the way things were before. If you’re ambitious, you can include all of those, like Tolkien—but you must have at leastone.

Now, if you are writing a literary novel, you might think I am full of pulp fiction crap, what with my concreteness and all. Nonsense. Even literary novels culminate, and they usually have some concrete manifestation of that culmination, even if it’s terribly subtle. My friend Michelle Argyle Davidson’s book Cinders (now available as part of the collection Bonded) ends with the heroine releasing white flowers into the air. You won’t know what significance that has unless you read the story, and it’s subtle even then, but it’s a physical manifestation of the heroine’s transformation.

Choosing an ending goes hand in hand with the most important thing you need to do if you want to know the plot of your book: choose the hero’s goal. If you know what the hero wants, and needs (they usually conflict), and how these are reconciled, then you’ll know the ending.