How to Use Mystery to Grab an Audience

Mystery works in the opposite way to suspense. With suspense, the audience is given some information about a high-stakes conflict or choice in a story but doesn't know the resolution, while desiring to learn it. In contrast, when a writer employs mystery, they often reveal the resolution but keep hidden important information about its meaning or cause, leaving the audience hungering to learn it. For example, Agatha Christie gives you the murder but not who the murderer is. This lack of vital information induces intense curiosity and frustration in the audience. Creating and playing a mystery in a story is a vital way to engage and captivate an audience.

Creating an Effective Mystery

To create a mystery line, writers must:

1. Set up an important mystery question in the minds of the audience  

2. Carefully decide what important story information the audience will and won't be told (though some characters may know it)  

3. Logically and dramatically (and often deceptively) reveal clues that the audience can use to solve the mystery

An audience will stay engaged, yearning to receive more clues about the mystery so they can work it out themselves before a main character does or before the writer reveals it.

Most often, the mystery questions a writer sets up relate to the questions of Who and How, but stories can also have smaller mysteries related to questions of What, Where, and especially Why. A writer who is greatly skilled at pressing a key mystery question into the minds of an audience will set up something that seems impossible to have happened or be caused. A mystery at this level can be more intriguing to an audience than a big suspense question. The famous locked room mysteries of yore are a good example of this.

Teachable Examples

Lee Child created an intense and seemingly impossible mystery in his novel The Visitor where the hero Jack Reacher hunts a serial killer who is killing female soldiers but leaves no forensic evidence or motive.

Another excellent example is in the film Saving Mr. Banks. In this based-on-fact drama, we long to learn the deepest reason P.L. Travers is rejecting Walt Disney's offer to buy her Mary Poppins book. In the climax of the film, Disney and the audience get the final clue to Travers' motivation and can finally understand her and solve the mystery. Walt Disney can now succeed in his quest, and the audience experiences a strong emotional response to learning the poignant meaning behind the mystery.

Mystery Development Questions

• What is the big mystery question for the audience to grapple with?

• Does the question focus on Who, What, How, or Why?

• Did you set up the mystery in a dramatic and clever way?

• Can you progress your mystery to focus in turn on different elements—its Who, What, Where, How, Why?

• What main clues will the detective follow and the audience learn?

• Did you lay in some red herrings, false clues/leads?

• Did you lay in key clues hidden in seemingly innocuous information?

• Why should the audience care about this mystery? What are its stakes?

• Are some of the answers to the mysteries twists or surprises that set the story off in a new direction?

• Is the mystery seemingly impossible to solve?

• Is the mystery finally solved/revealed in a surprising, clever, and intense way?

 Final Thoughts

Writers who do not consciously understand how mystery works—and thus don't artfully employ it in appropriate stories—are not emotionally moving an audience to the depth that they can and should. A vital part of good storytelling is HOW the story is told, not just WHAT the storyline is. How much do you focus on the HOW of a mystery element in your story?

If you need help with your mystery reply Mystery.

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