The Summer of Writing workshops are back! In the run-up to the summer workshops in August & September, I'm posting a writing skill each fortnight – plenty of different stuff for you to play with fresh angles, develop your writing skills, and whet your appetite for the workshops. Each of the skills connects with one of the Summer of Writing workshops and I'll explain the aspect of writing it’s developing at the end of the post each time.
This week's skill is Cosy Vignettes, exploring an aspect of detective fiction. Specifically, "cosy" detective fiction. In crime / detective fiction, "cosy" doesn't mean cottagey / snug /tea-cosy; it means the possible suspects are restricted to a very small group. Classic scenarios are that everyone's in one house together on a rainy night, or on an island, or on the same train. That said, they do tend to be cosier in the ordinary sense: the violence is usually off-stage and the story focuses on solving the crime, like a puzzle, rather than the gruesome crime itself. Most of Agatha Christie's stuff is cosies; so is Death in Paradise.
To explore this, you're going to have six characters: one murder victim and five possible suspects. (Your detective / amateur sleuth can waltz in later.) And for each suspect, you're going to write a character vignette, answering four key questions:
- What was their relationship to the murder victim?
- Why would they have motivation to kill them? (Everyone in the cosy needs an apparent motive, to keep them a suspect.)
- What are they lying about? (Ask Dr House: everyone lies!)
- What makes them different, as a character, from the other suspects? Think of a pronounced character trait and a strong visual hook.
If you'd like to keep it to ten minutes, I suggest you spend two minutes on each suspect. (Of course if you want to do 20 mins, you could make that four minutes each.) And to get your cast of characters, jump over to this quick character generator and tell it to generate six characters. The first is your murder victim; the other five are your suspects. Feel free to ignore anything in their profile that doesn't fit the genre, eg references to outer space, unicorns, superpowers, etc, and to change anything you like: the generator is just to give you a starting point.
Have fun!
Why this skill?
This skill links with the Unravelling Secrets workshop on Saturday 5 August, exploring how to balance suspense, secrets, and clues in thrillers, mysteries, and crime fiction. Whether you're creating a cosy detective fic or a wider-ranging story, you need plenty of strong red herrings to keep the reader guessing. That, in turn, means you need to develop your cast and explore all their possible motivations. It also means you need to work on keeping your cast vivid and distinct from each other, so the reader can keep them all straight in their mind: that's where the pronounced character traits and strong visual hooks come in. That's a useful skill to develop for any kind of writing with a large cast: historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, family sagas, and so forth.
You can read more about all the workshops and book your places here. There's a new skill each fortnight, so you can subscribe to the mailing list on the side or at the bottom of the post.
The full list of Summer of Writing workshops is...
- Unravelling Secrets (Saturday 5 August): How to balance suspense, secrets, and clues in thrillers, mysteries, and crime fiction
- Page Turners (Saturday 12 August): How to map out your novel and every scene to keep the reader engrossed
- Planning a Novel (Saturday 19 August): Hands-on practical strategies to manage the process of planning a novel, whether you’re starting from scratch or reworking raw draft
- Narrative Voice (Saturday 26 August): Using a character’s voice to narrate the story, playing with their limits, and keeping the story vivid
- The Creative Well (Saturday 2 September): Playful challenging activities based on top research to create new ideas and explore the creative process
Read more details about the Summer of Writing workshops and book your places here. NB: Workshops are limited to 12 places and fill up quickly (some are already full / almost full), so do book in advance if you can.
