Writing Unleashed with Laura M. Harkins

Are you an aspiring mystery novelist? Well, there’s no better way to improve your mystery writing skills than to learn from a published author. One author I enjoy reading, Miranda Bliss, has written the Cooking Class Mystery series. Today’s discussion of the fifth novel, Murder has a Sweet Tooth (2009), will focus on analyzing its literary elements. Besides the elements, a basic story structure is important when writing a mystery. A writer employs a specific format to gain the readers trust: a crime occurs, detective investigates the crime and, finally, the mystery is solved. Once you create the skeletal structure of the novel, your style and ingenious plotting build the muscle and present an engaging story.    Character : Characters are the most important part of the novel. Their personality and lifestyle create the fictional world the crime takes place, provides the motives of the detective and suspects and drives the plot forward. You should intimately...

Six years ago, I was student teaching at Pennsbury High School East, 11 th and 12 th grade AP English with Anne Marie Liebel (now Garth).  Administrators and parents visit the classrooms often, so it was important to display student work and learning on the bulletin boards.  The students learn from it as well believe it or not.  Anne Marie came up with a brilliant idea: the composition class will create a bulletin board with aspects of a piece of writing they felt was well done.  The students would choose from well known authors read in class.  We called it Prose from the Pros (see picture above).  The students were then expected to emulate that style in their own writing.  I thought the idea would be perfect on a writer’s blog, for myself and for others.  This series of posts will explain what I liked stylistically about a novel or book, albeit the structure, diction, figurative language, characterization, setting, etc. ...