Submitted by DaveK on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 10:48pm

I figured out why I couldn't finish my story. It was because I didn't know the middle of my story. It's a murder mystery and although I knew who dun it and why but I didn't know how the detective figured it out. Duh.

So I took the dog for a walk. I do that most days but this day I decided to tell the story to the dog - Zena- and that made all the difference. It's hard to tell a story if you don't know the story and when I got to the middle I had to stop. So I tried different ideas and slowly a reasonable middle popped into my head. So now I can finish it and move on.

I haven't written any other mysteries so I wonder how it is normally done. Does the writer know how it was done and how it was solved before starting? Does he know the crime and solve it or does he have a method of solution and build the crime to that? I tried the second and if you make a difficult crime than it takes a bit to solve it. Unless you have a dog.