mystery box – Words Deferred

State of the Blog — November 2025

My “State of the Blog” posts are something I’ve been doing since the start of Words Deferred. Back when I was posting more frequently, I’d write these every six months. In 2024, I decided to switch to a yearly cadence—and now I dropped the ball and I’m two months late.

Metrics

Years Blogging: 5
Total Posts: ~550
WordPress Subscribers: 159
Monthly Views: 760 (avg. over last 3 months)

Noteworthy numbers in the past year include the all-time view count hitting 20,000, and highest daily views hitting 213.

The 2024 Slump

Words Deferred has never been “big,” but the stats showed steady growth from 2020-2023. During that first couple years I posted quite a lot, aided by projects like Razor Mountain and journaling through NaNoWriMo, where my fiction writing time and blogging were tightly intertwined. I was also trying a lot of different ideas, still figuring out what exactly I wanted this website to be.

In 2024, I embarked on my Year of Short Stories, where I focused on writing, editing, and submitting short stories. That was a great experience, radically increasing my comfort level with all aspects of writing and submitting work, and I also got some of my work published, which is nice.

That project set me up for one weekly post documenting my progress and submissions. My other posts were less frequent, and ultimately the blog was quieter than previous years. The Year of Short Stories was a project that took most of my writing time and energy, and since I was planning to submit the stories I was writing, I couldn’t use those as content. I also suspect that my weekly updates were less likely to draw in readers from week to week in the same way that something like Razor Mountain’s ongoing story might.

Whatever factors contributed, 2024 was the first year since the start of the blog where I saw the metrics go down—a roughly 30% drop from 2023. I generally try not to pay too much attention to the numbers (outside of these retrospective posts), but I’ll admit that a drop like that is a little disheartening. It begs the question, “have I already peaked?” It’s a lot easier to ignore the relatively low view counts when they’re at least going up every year.

2025: The Year of…Nothing in Particular?

As 2025 rolled around, I found myself once again at the crossroads where I’d finished another writing/blogging project, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. Over the years, I’ve learned that I work most effectively when I have some big project like this to focus on. I think it also makes for good bloggery when there’s a big project to talk about week after week. Documenting those writing projects helps me get through them, and hopefully provides something interesting to post. When I don’t have a long-term focus, I tend to flail around and procrastinate.

Going into this year, I was burned out on short stories. For lack of a better idea, I decided to try tackling a different project each month. What were those projects going to be? I didn’t really know.

For January, I picked an easy one: write a page per day. No problem. I’ve probably done ten NaNoWriMos, at least half of them successful, and this was a much easier version of that. I finished first drafts of two short stories, and even wrote some goofy fan-fiction for a game I was playing at the time, something I’ve never done before.

Then February hit, and I stalled out hard. I had several completed drafts sitting around, and I’d been struggling to find the motivation to revise them. I figured that would be a good goal, but I never really picked out a particular metric to hold myself to.

Then I was sick for a few days. The kids were sick for a few days. School activities started and I ended up being a mentor/coach. We had some family medical issues. Before I knew it, my plans were long-abandoned. I ended up having more than one month in 2025 where I didn’t post anything, and I wasn’t writing much outside the blog either.

It’s never been hard for me to find reasons not to write—hence the name of the site—but the first half of 2025 was chock full of them. Without a big, clear, overarching project to keep me going, I dropped off the map for a while.

Second Wind

Looking back, I didn’t really get my feet under me, writing-wise, until summer. The kids finished school for the year, activities were over, and the medical issues were mostly resolved.

I spiffed up the blog layout ever so slightly, added Recommendations and Support Me pages, and took stock of my recurring post formats. Now that I’m into year five of Words Deferred, I’ve found a few formats that I enjoy writing and can keep coming back to:

The articles I most enjoy writing are still those that dig into the art and craft of writing, from brainstorming to revision to publishing trends. And while I enjoy having a big project to work on throughout the year, I found that I can lean on these recurring series to have something interesting to write about at least once a week, and keep my pen to the paper.

Oddly enough, my number of posts published in 2025 will probably work out similarly to 2024, maybe even a little less, thanks to how little I was writing through June. However, my views have been rising steadily ever since then, and I’m already getting way more eyeballs than 2024. Will I hit beat the 2023 peak? I don’t think so, but it’s looking more possible.

SEO for Dummies

Are there some sort of lessons to be learned about search engines and keywords and maximizing internet points in all this? Probably. The only reason I noticed my views were going up again was because WordPress sent me a little notice to say “Hey, we were surprised to see some people are reading what you wrote.” So I looked at the “Insights” tab on my dashboard, and that only confused me more.

The only app I automatically share posts on is Bluesky. In previous years, I used to share on TwiXter, back before the bots and assholes took over and they shut down the socialist blog-posting APIs in favor of their glorious, free-market, All-American blue checkmarks. So of course it makes sense that WordPress tells me I got about 6,000 shares each on Facebook, X, Reddit and Tumblr, where I never post anything.

I don’t know how this is possible. If you’re sharing my posts on Facebook and Tumblr, please reach out and clear this up for me.

And what exactly is a “share?” Clearly not the same as a “view.” Maybe a “glance?” But then, when people read my articles through the email subscription, that doesn’t count as a view either. Google also sends me monthly search statistics that appear to wildly overestimate just how much traffic they’re sending my way. They use the even more vague term “impressions.” I can only assume an “impression” according to Google means that my website was on page 10 of the search results when someone skimmed the AI overview.

I checked the WP and Google search insights. I seem to be coming up in roughly the same searches as I have been for years. I found out that I’m cited in the Wikipedia article for “Mystery Box.” That’s kind of fun, and apparently counted for 3 whole clicks. Who is clicking that? ChatGPT helpfully sent seven people my way. Why? Maybe they asked it why people hate LOST so much.

In conclusion, the internet is a unfathomable beast. It giveth and it taketh away. None can know its true heart, and those who claim to do so are false prophets.

What’s Next?

I’m itching for another big project. But when I say “big,” that might just mean The Year of Even More Short Stories. Whatever it is, it’ll be intermingled with the usual things, the Read Reports and Story Idea Vaults and random game and TTRPG musings, and maybe even another poem.

Let’s all just try to make it to the end of the year, and then we’ll see where 2026 takes us.

Is Severance Just Another LOST?

A close-up of a man’s eyeball. As tense music plays, the eye opens wide, reflecting a canopy of bamboo.

A wider shot, zooming out: the man wears a suit and tie. His face is scraped. He may be in shock.

A sound from the forest. A yellow labrador retriever walks out of the trees.

The injured man rises, finds a minibar bottle of vodka in his pocket, and runs through the trees. He comes to a beach, where the camera slowly pans to reveal the catastrophic wreckage of a trans-oceanic flight, survivors screaming and frantic.

“Who are you?” It’s a tinny, artificial voice.

We look down on a conference room: a long wooden table surrounded by twelve chairs. The carpet forms concentric rings of green and yellow.

There is a woman on the table, wearing sensible blue business skirt, blouse, and beige heels. She is face down, arms splayed as though she fell from above.

“Who are you?” the voice asks again. There is a little intercom box on the table, near the woman’s head. She begins to stir.

“Hello?” the woman asks, looking at the box in confusion. There is a beat of silence.

“I’m sorry,” the voice says. “I got a little ahead of myself. Hello there, you on the table. I wonder if you’d mind taking a brief survey?”

That Familiar Feeling

The first scene was the opening of LOST, the show best known for popularizing the mystery box genre and irritating its fans with an unsatisfying ending. The second scene is from Severance, the new mystery box darling that’s currently rolling out its second season on Apple TV+.

There’s a striking similarity between the openings of these two shows, nearly two decades apart. A person waking up in a strange environment, inviting the character and the audience to immediately start wondering “what’s this all about?” (And as an aside, if anyone ever tells you that you should never start a story with a character waking up, feel free to point them toward these lauded, high-budget shows.)

I have spent a good amount of time thinking about mystery boxes (and writing my own), and the current popularity of Severance provides an interesting opportunity for reflection. After all, LOST was hugely popular and widely praised for much of its run, with many critics and fans souring only at the conclusion or in the last season.

Is a show like Severance bound for a similar fate? Or will it be a shining example of how to do it right?

What’s In the Box?

So what elements contribute to a show like this working or falling apart?

First, it has to be going somewhere. That implies two things: the writers have to know the answers ahead of time, and the answers have to be interesting. If the story is built up by throwing around mysteries too liberally, without careful concern for how it all fits together, then it inevitably won’t. And even if the biggest mysteries manage to get wrapped up, audiences will be frustrated when the path along the way is littered with plot holes.

This was perhaps the biggest failing of LOST. The show runners changed across seasons, and are on record admitting that they introduced mysteries without knowing all the answers or the final resolution of the series.

However, it’s not enough to know what you’re doing. You also need the trust of your audience. A mystery box show can earn that trust in a couple ways. The first is to set up and pay off smaller mysteries. These can be arcs within an episode or questions about a particular character; anything that shows foresight and planning, without necessarily giving away too many major plot points. Bigger reveals are less frequent by necessity, but a steady drip of smaller reveals are what builds up audience trust. Severance has done this fairly well, usually dropping a “big reveal” every couple episodes.

Finally, it pays to reward the audience for noticing the details. Smart writers will leave breadcrumbs and clues for the super-sleuths to find and interpret. LOST fans were known for insane frame-by-frame analysis of seemingly mundane details, including many things that simply didn’t end up mattering.

While there’s no way to prevent determined fans from going through the irrelevant details with a fine-toothed comb, LOST included many details that practically shouted “this is a clue!” but never had a satisfying explanation (like those six numbers that kept showing up everywhere).

Mystery is not Enough

The mysteries are obviously an important engine of the “mystery box” genre, but they can’t be the only thing driving the story. Even the most mystery-centric story must have compelling characters and interesting relationships between them.

One of the greatest insights in Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story is that the inner emotional story should drive the external action. Star Wars isn’t just a story about galactic war, it’s about the Skywalker family drama that will ultimately decide the fate of the galaxy. The mystery box needs to be inhabited by compelling characters, and they should be driven by their own needs to try to find out what is going on.

The characters in LOST had a very straightforward reason to solve the mysteries around them (at least in the first few seasons): they were stranded on an island and wanted to go home. To a certain extent, this is true in Severance as well. The “innies” live their lives trapped within the confines of their underground office complex, even if their bodies and the other half of their brain gets to go home at night.

A more subtle and more powerful way to drive the story is to tie the characters’ arc and growth to the resolution of the mysteries. If the character needs to solve the mystery to mend a broken relationship or understand their purpose, they’ll be driven to find answers.

In LOST, this manifested in the long-running debate between characters who believed in free will and choice, vs. those that thought their experiences were driven by unalterable fate. In Severance, the mysteries are direct impediments to at least four different romantic relationships. If those characters want to be together and be happy, they need to resolve the mysteries surrounding them.

The Danger of Success

The biggest threat to quality on a mystery-centric show is runtime, and there is an obvious impulse to drag out a successful story to maximize its money-making potential. Unfortunately, the longer the story goes on, the harder it is to maintain the tension. It’s difficult to keep the audience’s interest across seasons without moving the goal-posts or introducing long digressions.

Even worse, stretching out the development increases the likelihood that the outside world will intrude: from writers’ strikes to key actors and personnel leaving, to network executives foisting questionable demands onto the creatives responsible for crafting a good story.

Every episode or chapter is another opportunity to accidentally introduce loose ends, red herrings, and irrelevant details. There is a constant danger of diluting the elements that make the story exciting.

Gravity Falls — A Mystery Box that Delivers?

While Apple slowly releases new episodes of Severance on a weekly cadence, I also happen to be watching another mystery box show with my kids: Gravity Falls.

Admittedly, Gravity Falls is a slightly different beast. It’s first and foremost a funny cartoon for kids, even if it does have some jokes thrown in for the parents and those unexpected tonal shifts that define a good “dramedy.” However, it is a mystery box, and the slightly simplified formulas of a kids’ show help to show off how a mystery box can be done well.

The show follows the classic “monster-of-the-week” formula, with stand-alone episodes that add depth to the characters, interspersed with key episodes that advance the bigger, ongoing plot. Having originally run on TV before the rise of streaming, the show limits itself to two seasons, but these are old-fashioned TV seasons, totalling 40-episodes. It’s a run that might still outdo a show like Severance, with seasons under 10 episodes. Regardless, it’s fairly tight compared to LOST.

The show builds mystery in a lot of small ways: secret codes in the credits, callbacks and background details, and generally rewarding the fan base for digging deeper. And mystery isn’t the sole draw: there is character building and tension in the relationships, with overarching themes of siblings growing apart, and the challenges of maintaining ties in the face of growing up.

Gravity Falls does a fantastic job spreading out the clues and resolutions across episodes. It doesn’t try to save all the secrets for a huge ending. In fact, most of the mysteries are resolved before the end, with a finale that focuses on defeating the big villain and answering the ultimate emotional question of the show: will the two sets of sibling relationships (adult brothers and kid brother and sister) survive and thrive, or end in estrangement?

Don’t Let me Down, Ben and Dan…

Back to the original question. Will Severance satisfy, or will it be another LOST?

The answer, of course, is that we won’t know until the final episode. There is still plenty of time for the people behind the show to make bad decisions. I have reason to be hopeful though.

So far, Severance hasn’t been overly stingy with clues and reveals. While certain plot points (cough-cough-goats-cough-cough) feel worryingly LOST-esque, I’m still willing to believe the show-runners’ claim that they have a clear ending in mind.

The characters have had fantastic arcs so far, and they’re tied nicely into the central mysteries. But we’ve seen this before. They need to stick the landing.

I’ll be watching the season two finale with fingers crossed.

Writing Excuses — Mysteries and Tension

I wrote about Writing Excuses almost two years ago, as a part of my Reference Desk series. It’s still my favorite podcast about writing. I’m not a consistent podcast consumer, so I tend to let quite a few episodes build up and then burn through them. I’m currently enjoying several episodes on mystery and tension in Season 18.

If you haven’t listened before, don’t let that number of seasons intimidate you. Each episode is only 15-20 minutes and generally self-contained, so it works perfectly well to just start with the current episodes and work your way backwards.

While the show has had a rotating cast of hosts and a lot of guests over the years, they’ve announced a slight format change with the latest season. The core hosts now include several long-standing members and a couple of new-ish faces who have guested previously. The show is more diverse than ever, not only in terms of gender, race and orientation, but in the different perspectives each host brings to writing and publishing.

Writing Excuses also feels a little bit more organized now, with each host lined up to do a deep dive this season. However, it’s still very much unscripted, and still contains unexpected tangents and the occasional bad joke. It mostly feels like a group of smart people who love stories and writing, sitting around and having a chat about a particular topic each week.

The Tools of Tension

The Writing Excuses folks suggest a list of tools for building tension:

Anticipation
Juxtaposition
Unanswered Questions
Conflict
Micro-Tension

Anticipation, or suspense, is anything that lets the reader know something is coming, whether it be good, bad, or of uncertain providence. It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s bomb under the table. It’s the flash-forward at the beginning of the police procedural that lets us know what’s going to happen, but not how. It may even be built into the genre itself, like the detective’s big reveal at the end of a classic murder mystery.

Juxtaposition is anything that plays with the differences between two or more things. In movies, this might be a contrast between the style of music or voice-over and the action on the screen. In fiction, it might be the calm and collected way the high-class villain writes about the gruesome murder he has committed.

Unanswered questions can find a home in almost any kind of story, but are exemplified in the Mystery Box style of story. The reader keeps reading to find out why strange things are happening, and what will happen next. This was the type of tension that I chose as the driving force in my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

Conflict is that old classic that everyone talks about. It’s characters who want the same thing, when only one of them can have it. It’s a clash between diametrically opposed viewpoints. It’s the kung-fu fight in the martial arts movie, or the shoot-out in the western. It might just be the easiest form of tension to write, and the easiest for the reader to parse, which explains why it’s so popular.

Finally, micro-tension is any of these forms, shrunk down into a tiny little dose. It’s what pulls us through each conversation between characters, each scene, each chapter. It’s what keeps us turning the page. Contrasts are important for pacing, but micro-tension keeps the reader engaged in the lulls between the bigger payoffs.

Just a Taste

This is just a condensed example of the kind of conversations about craft that make Writing Excuses so great. If this kind of nuts-and-bolts writing advice interests you, I’d highly encourage you to check it out.

The episodes on types of tension run from 18.9 – 18.14.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 25

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Narrative Convergence

God-Speaker’s chapters throughout Act II have been jumping through time, showing key moments in God-Speaker’s evolution. They’ve also shown the evolution of Razor Mountain and its people. In this chapter, the narrative is finally approaching the present day. For the first time, we can start to see the same things from both God-Speaker’s and Christopher’s perspective.

This gives me the opportunity to set up some narrative tension by revealing things in God-Speaker’s chapters that will pay off in Christopher’s chapters. Sometimes tension comes from not knowing what will happen next. Sometimes it’s more exciting when the reader can guess what’s happening, but the characters don’t know.

God-Speaker’s Cabinet

The two new characters introduced in this chapter are Reed and Cain, and they are both members of God-Speaker’s cabinet. However, I looked through my notes and I had no record of what their actual positions are. I was certain I had thought about this when I was first developing the story, but it turns out that writing a book is a messy process, and I either lost those notes or never wrote them in the first place.

Internally, to the citizens of Razor Mountain, the cabinet is a secret arm of the US government that handles the day-to-day operations in the city. Only God-Speaker and the secretaries themselves know the truth about who runs the city. The populace “knows” that the secretaries report to a higher authority, but they’re told it’s the President of the United States and the military. God-Speaker doesn’t need to worry that the population will try to overthrow their autocratic king, because they don’t know that they have a king.

When deciding what positions there should be in this cabinet, I looked at the US presidential cabinet for inspiration. Razor Mountain is a sort of city-state, so a lot of those positions make perfect sense. Others are completely unnecessary (ambassador to the UN) and a few just need to be tweaked.

I wanted a large enough group to seem like a reasonable governing body, and to allow for interesting interactions between members.

These are the positions I ended up with:

Secretary of the Treasury – Responsible for overall budget, accounting, and income and outflows across all departments. Administers local banking system.
Secretary of Agriculture – Responsible for local farming and food processing. Works with the Trade Coordinator for food imports from outside.
Secretary of Commerce – Responsible for most non-food businesses internal to the mountain. Works closely with Secretary of Labor and Trade Coordinator.
Secretary of Labor – Responsible for labor conditions, allocation of labor across industries, work safety, etc.
Secretary of Housing – Responsible for maintaining and expanding housing supply within the mountain as needed for the population.
Secretary of Energy – Responsible for generation and distribution of electric power, lighting, and certain energy-related trade (batteries, generation equipment, etc.)
Secretary of Education – Responsible for the school and university system.
Director of Media – Responsible for producing local media, importing external media, censorship.
Director of Intelligence Operations – Responsible for gathering internal and external intelligence, as well as most external interaction with outsiders for trade.
Secretary of Science and Technology – Responsible for science and tech R&D, manufacturing, and external trade. Collaborates with Intelligence Ops for external hacking.
Director of Military Operations – Responsible for military within the mountain and the area around the mountain. Collaborates with Intelligence Operations for external military and espionage ops.
Trade Coordinator – Responsible for import/export and maintaining trade. Collaborates with Intelligence Operations for external negotiations and obfuscation.

I decided that Cain is the Secretary of Energy. He is very focused on his particular field, and is especially excited about developing and constructing new electric generation and distribution technology.

God-Speaker would be constantly thinking about how to balance power between the cabinet members, and play them off each other so that nobody can ever feel secure or think about turning against him. To this end, I thought he would avoid involving the Secretaries of Intelligence Operations and Director of Military Operations when it comes to investigating their fellows. Instead, he turns to Reed, the Secretary of Labor, who naturally collaborates with the Secretary of Energy on his big building projects.

Resolving Mysteries and Emotional Catharsis

My goal throughout most of this book has been to draw the reader in with a series of mysteries. However, it’s not structured like a classic “who-done-it.” It’s not building up to a revelation that wraps up the plot. Instead, in Act III I will be trying to rapidly resolve most of the open questions that have given the story momentum so far.

Unraveling these mysteries will reveal more about God-Speaker and Christopher, and those revelations will leave Christopher with some difficult things to do, and some difficult choices to make. The end of the story will not be about big mysteries, it will be about the choices Christopher decides to make and why he decides to make them.

This whole structure goes back to one of the big lessons I learned from Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story: the big, world-shaking stakes should be tied directly to the main character’s “smaller” but more relatable personal stakes.

It will be up to Christopher to decide what the outcome is, for himself and for the world.

Next Time

Next chapter, we go back to Christopher as the two narrative worlds begin to collide.

Reblog: The Mystery Box Is Broken — Justin Kownacki

Today’s reblog is courtesy of Justin Kawnacki, who discusses the “mystery box” style of storytelling, as popularized by J.J. Abrams and the show LOST. This kind of storytelling has driven many of the biggest successes on TV and streaming in the last decade or two.

Still, shows like LOST and Game of Thrones prove that just because you can capture audience attention with this formula, it isn’t necessarily easy to wrap up these shows in a satisfying way, or even in a way that avoids outright enraging your audience.

In the case of Lost, those myseries were compelling questions like: Who are all these people? Where are they? Why are they there? (When are they there?) How did their plane crash? How will they survive? What unseen force is behind all of this? Who can we trust?

In the Abrams formula for storytelling, more mysteries = better stories, because every new answer creates more new questions. This means the audience will keep coming back to scratch their intellectual itch, and spread the word about the mysteries in the process.

To be fair, in the case of Lost and other stories that have used this model — including Game of Thrones, Westworld, and nearly every Christopher Nolan film — he’s mostly right. Audiences do love mysteries, and they enjoy trying to piece hidden clues together in order to see if they can figure out the ending before everyone else does.

But: a mystery is not necessarily a story.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with using the Mystery Box as a storytelling tool.

The problem is the way it’s been used, and the troubling effect it’s had on audiences.

Let’s take a look at the impact of the Mystery Box on pop culture, and then consider one tweak to the formula that could fix nearly everything that’s wrong with it.

Read the rest over at Justin Kownack i ‘s blog…

Storytelling Class — Mysteries

Every once in a while, my daughter Freya and I have a “storytelling class.” Really, it’s just a fun opportunity to chat about writing stories. This time, our topic was mysteries.

We always start with two questions: What did we read, and what did we write over the past week?

What Did We Read?

Freya has been reading Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side collections, and started on the first book of the Wheel of Time series.

I have been reading collections of short stories, including some of the anthologies that I got from the Martian Kickstarter. I also checked out the first three volumes of Locke and Key from the library, and I’m working through those.

What Did We Write?

Freya continues to work on her chapter book, Amber and Floria. She recently felt the downsides of exploratory writing as she had to rewrite her first two chapters to match the way the later parts evolved.

I’ve been working on Razor Mountain, and spending a little time here and there working on short stories.

Mysteries

Our topic for this class was crafting satisfying mysteries.

The first thing to note is that there are “big mysteries” that drive the whole plot of a story, as in murder mysteries and police procedurals. There are also “little mysteries” that can serve a few different purposes in a story, but all boil down to reasons for the reader to keep reading.

Little mysteries don’t have to be long and drawn out like big mysteries. They can be posed and resolved in the same chapter, or even a single conversation.

Many mysteries are just questions the reader asks the story, like:

What happened?
What happens next?
Why is this thing like that?
Who is this person and why did they do that?

Mysteries can also be just for a character, while the reader can see all the answers. Then the question for the reader becomes “how will the character find the answer I already know?” A lot of tension can be added to a story by letting the reader get information that a character doesn’t have. The character, using the limited information at their disposal, may make reasonable choices that the reader knows are bad. Few things are more harrowing for a reader than watching a character make bad choices that they think are good choices.

Driving a Story With Mysteries

Mysteries are a great way to define a section of a story, or an arc. Each mystery naturally has a beginning (when the mystery is first posed), a middle (when the characters work through the clues and overcome obstacles) and an ending (when the answer to the mystery is revealed).

To drive a story with mysteries though, you’ll need multiple mysteries being created and resolved over the course of the plot. This can be done in two basic ways, which I’ll call overlapping mysteries and feeding mysteries.

Overlapping mysteries are not necessarily directly related to each other. A character might have a personal mystery that affects themselves, and a larger mystery they’re working on that ties into the big plot. For example, a police detective who is trying to solve a murder, but spends his off-hours trying to find his long-lost child, hidden from him by his late ex-wife.

Feeding mysteries are arranged so that the solution to one mystery provides clues or ties into another mystery. A common type of plot twist is when two mysteries that appear to just be overlapping may turn out to actually be feeding into one another. In our example, maybe the detective discovers that he did have a child, and the picture he found looks suspiciously similar to the killer he’s tracking.

Feeding a personal mystery into the bigger plot mystery is a great way to set up personal stakes for a character, and then make those stakes affect the outcome of the story.

Making a Mystery

I won’t claim there is a single formula for creating mysteries, but I’ll provide a few steps you can run through to get started.

Come up with a question. This is your mystery.
Answer the question. This is the payoff.
Add an obscuring complication.
Find a way for the character(s) to overcome that complication.
Repeat and nest as necessary.

When you’re first coming up with your question and answer, don’t worry if the answer seems obvious. The key is to start by having something to ask and knowing the answer.

Once you have a question and answer, you can add an obscuring complication. This can be anything that makes it harder for the characters to discover the answer. This is how you can adjust the difficulty of the mystery.

Will the mystery be more difficult for the characters if some piece of critical information is missing? They could solve it easily if only the murder weapon wasn’t missing! Perhaps a character flaw would make it harder for them to solve. Too bad the character is an antisocial lone wolf, because the person they never get along with would be able to see exactly what’s going on. You can add multiple obstacles if you want the character to go through several steps to solve the mystery.

Then, for each obstacle, you must determine the way that the character(s) will ultimately overcome it and move the plot forward.

Once you have a complete arc—question, obstacle, overcoming, and solution—you can begin to overlap or feed one mystery into another.

A Mystery Is Only as Good as Its Payoff

A final warning: one of the most dangerous things you can do as a writer is to create lots of mysteries without knowing the answers or how to resolve them.

Episodic TV shows fall into this trap all the time, because creating big mysteries gets viewers excited. However, as the show carries on, they either fail to provide solutions to the mysteries or create such tangled, nonsensical plot webs to justify their solutions that the whole thing falls apart.

Nobody will remember or appreciate how well you built up that tantalizing mystery if the payoff turns out to be garbage.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 12

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Thank God For New Characters

This was a big, exciting chapter for a lot of reasons, and a fun one to write. This marks the end of Act I for Christopher, so a major shift in the story is appropriate.

Christopher’s long isolation is at an end. I get to introduce him to a new character, and then a whole host of new characters. A protagonist who is all alone presents some special challenges, as I’ve discussed in previous development journals, so it’s a relief to be out of that stage. It comes as both a relief and a shock to Christopher to suddenly be around people again, and hopefully readers will feel a little bit of a jolt as well.

This chapter serves as a transition. Rather than jumping into big blocks of dialogue, we start with a few terse sentences. Amaranth’s inability to speak (and her unwillingness to answer all of Christopher’s questions) means that we really only get a few terse sentences of back-and-forth between the two characters.

I really like Amaranth as a character. She comes across as very mysterious initially, but we’ll eventually see that she’s a person with simple motives. Writing her poses a few challenges—it can be hard to clearly describe gestures in fiction. I tend to fall back on a simple description paired directly with the character’s interpretation of what they’re being told. This hopefully helps the reader build an image in their head while making the meaning clear (or unclear, if that’s the goal).

I also had to decide how to depict her written responses in the text. I debated italics and eventually went with bold, just because it stands out more. I think I would ultimately like those “written” lines to be in a font that simulates handwriting, but that is more hassle than I want to deal with right now, especially when I’m posting the story across multiple services, and they each have their own tools and limitations.

Old Mystery, New Mystery

Along with the transition to Act II, we get the resolution of some major mysteries. However, the plot has to keep moving, and these resolutions only lead to new questions. Yes, there are more mysterious structures out here, and yes, there are people in them. But who are they? Why are they here? And why does at least one of them seem intent on shooting Christopher?

This is a balancing act. In this kind of “mystery box” story, the reader needs some mysteries to resolve or at least move forward. Otherwise, it just feels like it’s piling confusion on top of confusion until the reader gets fed up. On the other hand, the story’s momentum is built on those mysteries and getting to their resolutions, so the mysteries need to ramp up in scale and importance until the end, when the biggest payoffs and resolutions can finally happen.

Revision

This chapter and the previous chapter both started as two chapters in the outline (so these were originally conceived as four separate short chapters). I’m happy with how these turned out when reduced and combined.

There are two chapters left in Act I in my outline. These are both God-Speaker chapters, and once again I think it makes sense to combine them. This neatly keeps up the format of two Christopher chapters for every God-Speaker chapter. And while Chapter 12 was a pretty big moment in Christopher’s story, I’d argue that Chapter 13 will be an even bigger moment in God-Speaker’s. It’s the perfect way to wrap up the act.

The start of Act II will also signal a change in the format of the chapters. Christopher’s timeline will continue apace, but God-Speaker’s story is about to jump through time at a much faster pace. This big inflection point is a subtle signal that will hopefully make that more palatable for the reader.

Research

I didn’t have to do a lot of research for this chapter. In fact, the only things I looked up involved elevators. Specifically, what’s at the bottom of an elevator shaft? As it turns out, hydraulics, springs, or a shock absorber, and not much else. It only ended up mattering for a few sentences in this chapter, but I now know a little more about the different types of elevators out there than I did before.

Next Time: Finishing Act I!

That’s all for this chapter. Next time we’ll talk Chapter 13, and the end of Act I for God-Speaker.

Tag: mystery box