Don't Murder your Mystery

All the usual suspects show up in Chris Roerden’s Don’t Murder Your Mystery: verbs, adverbs, similes, metaphors.  As she tells it, they are fascinating, if not quite innocent, characters. Besides the fact that it’s just plain fun to read, what makes this book especially useful is that Roerden actually offers high tech tools for detecting issues in your prose.  One example:  use the “find” on your edit menu to track down every piece of dialogue (use just the final curly quotation mark), and check every bit of dialog to make sure you haven’t committed any crimes against character and plot. At the end of every chapter is a useful list of clues to vivid writing, and they frequently include these great leads on solving the puzzle from the computer instead of the armchair. Maybe I’ll write a mystery. SQ
 
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