Little Mysteries: What Keeps Readers Turning Pages

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 45, what is it that keeps you turning pages in a book, makes you stay up all night until you finish it? Today we're talking about little mysteries.

Let's dive in. Welcome back, fellow writers. I hope your writing is going well this week. Today's episode is about something that quietly powers almost every great story, regardless of genre. It's not dialogue. It's not description.

It's what we're going to call little mysteries. Now, we've hinted at this before in other episodes, but I really wanted to take a full episode and dive into it deeply because it's so important and powerful in our writing. Before I do that, just a couple of things about what you might hear around me today.

So I have a dog softly snoring at my feet, which is wonderful. But every once in a while when she moves into the wrong position, she loudly snores at my feet. So if you hear that, just enjoy the sound of a very relaxed dog. I also have a crazy bird outside my window that has kind of this scream instead of a call or a song.

So if you hear what sounds like a person screaming in the background, that's just a bird, a crazy little bird outside my window. I don't know if the mic will pick it up or not. But anyway, enough about that.

Understanding Little Mysteries

So little mysteries. I'm not talking about, you know, detective stories and dead bodies and whodunit, although those are those are certainly fun, too. I mean, the kind of mystery that makes readers lean forward, flip the page and kind of whisper, wait, what just happened or, oh, what's going to happen?

So let's get into that. All right. When we hear the word mystery, we tend to think of crime novels, right? Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, that kind of stuff. Those stories are built around a central question. Who did it?

Right. One big mystery. And it's great for your book to have one big mystery, one big question that drives people to the end of the book. Like my book, Crossing Cascadia, the big question is, did her family survive this earthquake? Right.

So that's the question. That's the through line that drives the entire book to the end, is did her family survive? And is she going to make it back to them? And will she survive?

So great storytelling almost always relies on that kind of mystery, even when there's no detective in sight. Right. So think of it more broadly. Mystery is simply what the reader or the viewer, if you're writing a screenplay or something like that, it's simply what the reader doesn't know yet and what they're desperate to figure out or even just interested to figure out.

So let's take an example from what is possibly the greatest TV series ever made, Breaking Bad. You can argue with me in the comments if you want to recommend some other shows if you want to, that might compete. But holy cow was Breaking Bad a masterful job of writing.

So let's look at that opening scene and the way it works with mystery. So if you've seen it, you probably remember it vividly. It comes straight back into your mind. Right. That pair of khaki pants fluttering through the air, an RV crashing through the desert, a man in tighty-whities and a gas mask just driving frantically, panicked. And there's chaos.

There's sirens. There's those bodies sliding around inside of the RV. And then he pulls out a camcorder and starts recording a message to his family. At this point, we know almost nothing. We have just seen something crazy that doesn't make any sense, but we are hooked by that point because we have so many questions. There's so many mysteries happening there.

Right. Why is this dude half naked in the desert? Right. Who are the dead people in the back of this RV sliding around? Why is he wearing a gas mask? Right.

What went wrong? Is he going to die? What happened?

So that's mystery. And it's not about murder or solving a crime. It's about questions we have to get answers to. And the beauty is those answers don't have to come right away. Right. And in that example, they don't because the show then jumps backwards to this ordinary life of a high school chemistry teacher.

But because we've seen where he ends up, every detail now carries tension. Right. Every step he takes toward that moment has weight. We have these questions in the back of our mind. How does he get from this to that? And we're watching.

We are engaged looking for those clues for how he got there. So that's the kind of mystery that keeps keeps readers and viewers locked in across every genre. Now, those are examples of crazy big mysteries. Right. Even though they're little to the entire plot, they still feel pretty big because they really call attention to themselves.

Techniques for Building Mystery

But we can do the same work with little mysteries. So let's break this down. How do you build mystery even if you're writing a memoir? Right. A romance, a quiet literary literary novel. Here are a few techniques that show up across genres.

So the first one we're going to talk about is simply withholding information. You don't need to tell the reader everything up front. In fact, it's often better if you don't. Let them wonder why a character avoids a certain topic. Let them hear the lie, but not know why it was told. Right.

Don't feel like you have to explain everything. And this is such a temptation, especially for newer writers. And especially when we're just beginning a book and there's so much explaining to do to set up the world and the characters. Hold off on that. Let some of that be those little mysteries that unfold as the story moves forward.

So, second, in foreshadowing. Right. Drop a line in early that makes a promise. Right. He never should have opened the door.

OK. But don't tell us why. Right. The reader knows something's coming and that tension is gold. Right. This is often done with a gun or a weapon.

Right. We just notice it in the scene or it's mentioned. But there's something about a weapon or especially a gun that resonates. It becomes a mystery. Like, oh, when is this gun? When is this weapon going to come back again?

Right. Because it does. Number three here is misdirection.

So let the reader make an assumption, then later reveal the truth. Now, this happens a lot in thrillers. Right.

But it's not just for thrillers. Even in a love story. Right. Maybe the person they thought was the safe choice. Turns out it's not right. That twist hits harder because of what you let them believe.

Right. So that's not necessarily a mystery you're setting up beforehand, but it's a mystery you reveal has been going on the entire time. The fourth way to create these little mysteries is to have secrets between characters. Right. When one character knows something, the other doesn't. You've got that dramatic tension.

Right. How long until the other character figures it out? Right. How long until they unravel that mystery? It becomes your mystery to watch them unravel their own mystery. Right.

And what about if the reader knows something neither character does? Even better. That can be really hard to do in some perspectives. Right. If you're writing in a first-person perspective, it's hard to reveal a secret that the reader knows, but the character doesn't.

But when you do have the opportunity to do that, that can be really powerful because now suddenly the reader is the one holding the mystery. Right. They are the ones with the secret. And now what's being driven forward in the story is how is this character, when is this character going to realize this? Are they ever going to realize this? Right.

And then finally, our fifth one is ambiguity. Sometimes you don't explain everything. Right. Just let the reader fill in the blanks or sit with the discomfort of not knowing. This can be really hard to do for writers. It's really hard to do for me because I feel like maybe I'm not giving my readers something they need to know about.

But here's the beauty of this mystery. A reader is going to fill that in. You can get them helping you to write the book. Right. Helping you create the book for their own world, their own experience, their own perspective when you let them fill in some of those blanks and take ownership of some of your story.

Common Pitfalls in Mystery Writing

So let's be honest here. Not all mystery works. Right. Sometimes things backfire. Sometimes it falls flat. It can even frustrate the reader if we don't put these little mysteries in there correctly or do it effectively.

So let's look at a few common ways that can actually backfire and go wrong. So the first one is waiting too long to reveal a mystery or to resolve a mystery. So if you tease a mystery but make the reader wait too long for answers, they can stop caring. Right. Or they get frustrated with you. And they're like, this person is never going to tell me this.

Right. This is never going to be revealed. What was the point of giving me this mystery if they're not going to reveal it?

So curiosity turns into fatigue. You can almost think of it like a rubber band. Right. You can stretch it and stretch it, but only so far before it snaps and hits you in the fingers. Right. And hurts.

So if you've hinted at something big for 200 pages and it still hasn't paid off, you're really risking losing the reader's trust. So that's why these little mysteries work well. Right. We've got that big mystery we talked about that's not going to reveal or resolve until the end of the book. That's OK. That's what drives the entire story forward.

But if we're giving a bunch of these little mysteries that we never pay off, that's going to be So the payoff feels hollow or disconnected, right? And this happens, I think, more in television because they don't always know how, you know, when they're going to be canceled. They don't know when they start writing a show whether it's going to be one season or 20, right?

So they can misfire sometimes on creating these mysteries that they then have to solve later on that they didn't realize they were going to have to solve or they're rushed to take the show in a different direction. So watch that. Oh, in fact, let me give you an example of this. Probably the most famous example of this, at least current current favorite or famous game of Thrones. This show was, as you probably know, one of the most talked about shows, one of the most watched shows in a long time, right? People set their timers so they wouldn't miss the next game of Thrones.

And so much of that was created by these mysteries that the show wrote in. So do you remember when Jon Snow is brought back from the dead? Right. An amazing, huge, huge moment in that series where, I mean, first of all, it was a huge moment when he died. And then what you can bring Jon Snow back from the dead, it created this huge mystery, right? Why him?

What was the deeper purpose of this? What role is he going to play in defeating this darkness, right? It sets up this mystery that he is meant for something huge because, for God's sake, they brought him back from the dead, right? And then that kind of just fizzled out, right? He didn't fulfill any grand prophecy. He wasn't key to saving Westeros.

He was just kind of there again, right? Just alive again. And by the end of that series, his resurrection barely seemed to matter at all. It almost made no difference in the story whatsoever that he was resurrected, right?

So that kind of unresolved or irrelevant mystery makes viewers and readers feel cheated, right? They've now lost trust in you. They are investing a lot of time into reading your book, hours and hours into reading your book. And we need to take that really seriously, right? And we need to honor those readers by paying off those mysteries that we give them.

So as a writer, don't just ask questions, right? Don't just create mysteries for the sake of mysteries. Make sure the answers to those mysteries are worth it, right? Make them meaningful. Even if they're quiet, even if they're subtle, they should land with emotional or narrative weight. Otherwise, it's just kind of noise, right?

And it feels a little bit hacky, right? The reader loses trust in you that your mysteries are anything more than just kind of nonsense. So, but at the same time, it helps to answer some small mysteries fairly quickly, right? Doing that builds trust with your reader. They'll see that you don't forget your own questions, your own mysteries, and they'll feel confident that the bigger mysteries will pay off too.

So those early answers create momentum, right? They create that trust. They say to your reader, hey, you're in good hands here, keep going, right? That those early mysteries in that Breaking Bad pilot episode, they're mostly paid off by the end of the episode, right? If they had set those up and then not answered them for four or five more episodes, they would have lost readers, right? Or viewers.

Mystery Across Different Genres

They would have lost them. So it's important to set up those little mysteries early and then reveal some of those early just to gain that trust in your reader so that they begin turning pages knowing that the answers are coming. So let's work a look at how mystery works outside of the crime section. We'll look at a few different genres, right?

So let's look at sci-fi, for example. So in, I'm not sure everybody's read this book. It's not as popular as The Martian, but in Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, the main character wakes up alone in space with no memory, right? It's a science story, sure, but it's really a mystery story. What is he doing there? What happened to the other people, right?

So some major mysteries that we create there. In romance, mystery often comes in the form of emotional secrets, right? What are you hiding from this person that you're falling in love with, right? What are you worried that they, if they knew about, they may not be so in love with you, right?

So what are the love interests hiding? What pain are they not ready to share? Those can be those mysteries that drive a romance forward. Even in memoir, right, where it's a true story that you're telling, they thrive on delayed revelation, right? The narrator knows the outcome. They know what happens, but the reader doesn't.

So the mysteries is how things happened, not just what happened, right? In fact, a way that this is done really well is in, is it Jon Krakauer? I think that's the right first name. Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, right? The story of Christopher McCandless who goes off into Alaska and dies, right? True story.

It's not a memoir, right? He's writing about Christopher McCandless, but it's a true story that he's telling, right? Or at least as true as Jon Krakauer could get it at the time. That's a side story that we won't go into.

So at the very beginning of that book, it tells you that Christopher McCandless dies, right? So even if you didn't know that he dies out there in the Alaskan wilderness, you know within the first, it might just be the first few pages, that he's dead, right? That almost seems to give up the big mystery of the story because it could have been, is this guy going to survive? That could have been it, but Jon Krakauer reveals that mystery at the very beginning and said, this dude is dead. And then the mystery becomes how, right? How did that happen?

And the story unravels that mystery. Even in literary fiction, we find mystery, right? Toni Morrison, Celeste Ng, Kazuo Ishiguro. I don't know that I'm pronouncing all those right. These authors don't technically write mystery novels, right?

Balancing Information and Mystery

But they're absolutely mysteries, right? They craft stories where every page contains a question that you want answered that drives your story forward. So how to use this in your writing. One of the most challenging parts of using mystery well is figuring out the line between giving too much information and giving too little. It's something I deal with all the time when I'm writing and I know that many of you do as well because you've written me about it over the years.

So how much should the reader figure out for themselves? How much do you need to explain? You know, if you overdo it, you risk spoon feeding every detail and robbing the story of its energy.

But if you hold back too much, readers might feel lost, feel disconnected. So my go-to mantra here is when in doubt, leave it out. When in doubt, leave it out. Oh, I say that and it sounds so, you know, helpful, but it's really a struggle, right? It's really a struggle because we don't want our readers lost, but we still want them engaged. Try to remember, and I'm talking mostly to myself here, readers love to chew on a mystery.

They love to make guesses. They love to be proven right and they love to be proven wrong. I've seen this firsthand with my high school students. One of the things I love to do with them is when we're reading a story together or reading their own books, I have them pause quite often and just make predictions, right? Predict what is going to happen in the book that you're reading. And when I get them doing that, they get locked into that book because now they're invested in it, right?

They are waiting to see if they're right or they're wrong. And that jolt of excitement they get from seeing their predictions come true or even shattered is one of the most powerful tools we have to keep readers engaged. So as writers, let's make it really easy for our readers to play along in this game, right? Give them questions to chase, little ones, big ones, ones that get answered quickly, ones that may take the whole book before they get answered, moments to wonder about things, little gaps that just beg to be filled in. Let your readers do that work. And this is especially true at the beginning of a story where we're often tempted to dump all the background, all the world building, all the character history right away, right?

We want our readers to know everything about this amazing world and these amazing characters that we've created, but we've got to back off of that. It's okay to drop a reader into a world, into a culture, into a situation that they don't fully understand yet. Maybe they don't understand it at all, right? It's still better to just drop them in to that world. That confusion, when it's intentional and carefully managed, fuels engagement like nothing else, right? It gives your readers the joy of discovering this world that you've created rather than just having it given to them right at the beginning of the book.

So beta readers are so important in this aspect. It's one of the main things that I ask beta readers when I have them looking at my work is about those little mysteries, right? Where in this book did you find yourself getting frustrated? Where did you feel left out or lost?

But also, the flip side of that, where were you dying to read the next chapter, right? Where was a little mystery that kept you up a little later than you meant to be reading this book because you had to find the answer to it? Where did not knowing something actually get you more invested rather than less invested? Those are such important questions for beta readers because they're pretty much the only ones that can give us that information. We as writers know all Just enough mystery to spark that curiosity and just enough clarity to still keep them grounded in the story and still keep their trust in you as the writer. Before we wrap up today, I want to look at some of the areas of your story that are especially prime for creating mystery.

Sources of Mystery in Character and Setting

So one of the richest sources of mystery comes from a character's past. What is this character not saying? Why do they react so strongly to maybe a certain place, a certain word, a certain person? Holding back just enough detail about a character's backstory can make them so much more compelling.

So maybe they change the subject when asked about their childhood. You're not going to explain that to the reader, but when they notice that they do that, that creates that little mystery. Hmm, what happened in their childhood that made them this way? Or maybe they seem to contradict something they said earlier. These little discrepancies invite the reader to lean in, to guess, to make those predictions. Some of the most memorable stories build character arcs around mysteries.

What happened to them? What are they hiding? Or what even they don't know about themselves? That leans us into the somebody needed but so that we've talked about in previous episodes. If you want to check that out, check the link in the show notes to see what that's talking about.

But the somebody needed but so can really help build these character backstory mysteries. Another opportunity for mysteries is through the setting and the world that you're creating. So dropping a reader into a world with unfamiliar rules or customs or maybe magic systems without explaining everything right away creates a tension and a curiosity.

So think of a story like The Hunger Games. We don't really understand the political structure or the purpose of the games right away, but we figure it out as we go. That becomes a mystery that pulls us through the story, but the stakes are clear at the beginning. We know this is life and death, which draws us into that story. Or maybe in Station Eleven, where we're given pieces of the past and present in a way that encourages connection building. If you haven't checked that one out, that's a great one for an example of imbuing your story with mystery.

So readers don't need to be told every rule of your world upfront. As tempting as that is, we're so excited to have created all these rules, right? We want to throw them all out there.

But instead, let them pick them up as they go. That act of discovery can actually be just as satisfying as the story itself. You know I'm a big fan of examples, so let's look at a few more examples here just to really flesh this out.

So look at something like To Kill a Mockingbird, right? There's this character, Boo Radley, mentioned throughout the book, and he's really mysterious, right? We don't really get a sense of who he is. It creates this sense of myth and this fear that really drives us forward in that book to figure out who is this Boo Radley character. Or another example is Big Little Lies. The narrative starts with a crime.

They don't tell us who did it or even really exactly what happened until the very end. That's a big mystery that drives us through. And then The Night Circus. The magic system and rules in that book are never really fully explained. It kind of creates this ethereal atmosphere where the unknown is part of the appeal of that book and it creates buy-in from the readers who are trying to figure it out as they go.

Quotes on Mystery in Writing

So these stories trust the reader to engage without giving them every answer. Really tough to do, but so, so powerful when we get it right. Let's jump into our wise words here, and writers have definitely been talking about this idea of little mysteries over the years.

Let's look at one from Billy Wilder here. Don't give the audience four. Give them two plus two. This really talks about the heart of little mysteries, right? Don't just tell them exactly what's happening. Give them the hints.

Give them the clues and let them piece it together. And then it becomes their book, right? They take ownership of it.

Another one from Rachel Cusk. The job of the novelist is not to supply answers, but to ask the right questions. Right? Not to supply answers, but ask the right questions. These quotes are a reminder. It's not our job to explain everything.

Writing Challenge: Adding Mystery

It's your job to just give enough for the reader to start assembling meaning on their own. Let them do the work that they want to do, and they're going to thank you for it with recommendations of your book to your friends. So for this week's writing challenge, what I'd like you to do is take a scene that you've already written. You could draft a new one if you want to, but it's much more powerful, I think, to go back to something that we've written before and look at it in a new way.

So take a scene that you've written, then add one layer of mystery. Maybe you add a secret. Maybe you add a strange behavior that isn't really explained or a line of dialogue that hints at something deeper. Maybe you take something out, right? Maybe it's something that you told the reader that you realize, you know, I could hold this back and create a little mystery out of that. And just see what it does to your pacing.

See what it does to the energy of that scene and see how it might spark the reader's curiosity to drive them forward. So that's going to wrap it up for this episode of Inside Creative Writing. If you want to go deeper on this topic, check out the past episodes at the show's website. Like I said, this is not a new topic to the show, but I just wanted to go a bit deeper on it in this episode. And I would love to hear from you. You can go to the show's website and search for the title of this episode.

And it's going to take you right to a page where you can leave some comments at the bottom. I check those all the time and respond to them. And it's a great way to start up a conversation or give me some feedback about this episode. What did you like? What didn't you like? What do you agree with?

What didn't you agree with? And maybe what's a book that you loved that hooked you with those mysteries? What's that example book of little mysteries that I need to be out there reading?

So until next time, keep writing because we know that is the best way to improve as a writer is by writing. And I will see you next week. Thank you so much for being here. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.