Heading to WriterCon next week!
Next Tuesday, August 27, 2024 I leave for WriterCon 2024 in Oklahoma City. I love this conference and look forward to seeing some old friends and making some new ones there.
I will be giving my talk “Creating Mystery: Posing Questions Your Readers Want Answered” on Sunday, September 1, 2024 at 10:30 a.m. CDT
10:30 am-11:15 am
Creating Mystery: Posing Questions Your Readers Want Answered
Fiction
Ballroom B
· Rick Ludwig, Writer
Mystery! The word itself evokes images in a reader’s mind. Multiple genre’s and subgenre’s include the word in their names. Mystery Fiction includes Sensation Mysteries, Quest Mysteries, FairPlay/Traditional Mysteries, Inverted Mysteries, Specialized Knowledge Mysteries (Great Detective, Science of Detection, Police Procedural) , Specialized Setting Mysteries. (Cozy, Gothic, Noir, Macabre, Supernatural, Historical). There are even mysteries that fall into other major fiction genres (Spy, Legal, Medical, Sci-Fi, Humor) and Non-fiction Mysteries. Does your story have to have a murder, a detective, or a Gothic setting to contain mystery? In this talk, I'll briefly review of the history of mystery as a category of fiction, share how I write a mystery, and discuss the importance of posing questions to create mystery in your reader’s minds. I will also discuss the importance of providing answers to posed questions to hold onto your readers. Preview: It’s not just Whodunnit anymore!I truly love this conference. It is just the right size and allows for a great deal of interaction with other authors, editors, agents, and publishers.
After the conference, I will post my talk on this website under Presentations. I’d be really interested in your thoughts about creating mystery.
I’m not taking my laptop with me to the conference this time, but I will post some blogs with pictures when we get back. See you then.
WriterCon 2024
WriterCon 2024
About the pictures:
The top image is the advertising for my talk at the conference.
The bottom image is more of the same.