Puzzling over Mysteries

Like Diana, my involvement with mystery writing is mysterious in and of itself. I sort of fell into this genre through a series of (very) fortunate events. And now I’m going to leave that statement purposefully vague and intriguing, to keep you reading, just like a good mystery writer should.

So since I’m a newbie to whodunit, I am very much learning as I go, studying every book I read and paying attention to structure, pacing and logic in a way I never did before. Up until now, I’d considered myself strictly a contemporary YA writer, and my concerns were with character, dialogue and emotional arc. Things happened in my writing, but it was often accused of being “too quiet.”

As it turns out, I like the action-driven, big-drama aspects of mystery. I like the process of creating a puzzle and letting my characters unlock it piece by piece. And I like that it demands constant engagement with the reader, as I try to tell the story in a way that is leading without being obvious and withholding without being cryptic. My suspicion is—and I only have one such book plus one first draft of its sequel under my belt—that learning to write mystery is going to make me a better writer, period.

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Elisa Ludwig's debut young adult novel PRETTY CROOKED (Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins), will be released in March 2012. It's the story of Willa Fox, a teen girl who goes Robin Hood on her rich classmates —the first of a three-book series of thriller/mysteries. Even though she had to extensively research pickpocketing techniques to write it, she remains a law-abiding citizen. Elisa lives in Philadelphia with her husband Jesse and cat Beau a.k.a. Bread. When she's not writing for teens, she's cooking and/or writing about food for The Philadelphia Inquirer and other publications. Elisa is a proud member of The Apocalypsies.