Writing the Last Chapter First

While I am still a novice, one of the things I've quickly learned about writing a mystery is that it’s an exercise in reverse-engineering a plot. Put more simply, if you don’t know how the story’s going to end — quite literally whodunit and how — then you cannot effectively pepper your book with the clues needed to keep your readers engaged.

As a lifelong mystery reader, there have always been a few things that drove me (and probably other mystery readers) crazy. These include when authors do not provide important information throughout the text that would allow me to participate in the investigation, when they introduce previously unknown characters at the end of the book who provide convenient and unexpected revelations, or when they explain away poor continuity as a “plot twist.” If you’re reading a paranormal or supernatural mystery, the biggest cheat is often the dreaded Deus ex machina (Latin for “the hand of God”), a plot device first created by the ancient Greeks in which an unsolvable problem is suddenly resolved by an unexpected, improbable, or contrived event, character, or object. (When it comes to supernatural or paranormal books, the mechanism is often magical.)

Of course, a supernatural or paranormal book will contain, by definition, both spectacular and unexplainable events. But I really want The Osiris Circle books to be true mysteries, solved through the investigative work of the protagonists without any (or at least many) “magical” shortcuts. I want to provide enough clues throughout the text that readers feel like participants in the investigation. 

And toward that end, I had to finish the last chapter before I actually finished the book. 

If I’m being honest, this happened about halfway through my first draft because my writing tends to be very organic, and I hadn’t worked out all the details of the central mystery until that point. Once completed, I had to go back and fix some clues and other details to ensure they pointed in the right direction. Since the story will also be told through illustrations, I had to ensure my artwork also maintained this continuity. (For additional tips on this, see my article Avoiding Continuity Errors.)

​If you’re an author, I’ll leave it to you to figure out how you’re going to reverse-engineer your mystery and track your clues. Naturally, everyone will have their own process. But at least consider figuring out the resolution first. After all, you only want your characters and your readers stumbling around in the dark — not yourself!