The Chopping Blog

The point of no return makes the detective care more about solving the case, which in turn increases the reader’s commitment.

Almost all mystery fiction is built around three investigatory goals: means, motive, and opportunity. This Sherlockian trinity has been handed down through a century of detective novels.

For a book to be a thriller it just has to be… thrilling, right?

The universal, whether set two years or five centuries in the past, is always triangulating humanity in the here and now.

Where noir sought to make crime and mystery as real as possible, cozy takes one giant step away from that level of realism and looks back at the Golden Age of mystery.

If mystery novels are fundamentally an attempt by the detective to impose order on a chaotic world, then messy relationship arcs become a great way to add more chaos.

Mystery runs on a particular fantasy: the deliverance of order out of chaos. No matter how bad the mess gets, the detective is going to set the world right. But what we’re really here for is to follow one specific person solving a case in a way nobody else quite could.

Maybe your protagonist has a great backstory, an evocative subplot, or a fascinating side quest, but if none of these elements actually intersect, create consequence, or complicate the main trajectory, they aren’t part of the symphony.

The quality we’re striving for in fiction maybe above all else is authenticity. We want our work to have the ring of truth to it.

The emotional draw of a story comes less from explosions and arguments, and more from the interplay between plot and character—from the way a character's inner life is woven into the events they move through.

Mysteries deal with difficult emotions: violence, fear, betrayal. But they do it in a contained structure.

Mysteries look backward, while thrillers look forward.