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Craft of Writing

Marcia Kiser

Coloring Outside The Lines
How To Add Depth & Texture To Murder Mysteries -- Part 3 -- Weather

Editor's Note: In her previous two articles, Marcia Kiser discussed characters and settings and how going beyond the obvious adds texture to mysteries. In this third article, Kiser looks to the weather to add more depth and texture.

My first artistic endeavors centered around crayons and coloring books, and I was limited by the number of colors in the box and the heavily outlined drawings. From there I graduated to oil painting and found freedom of color and expression. But there was still a lot of structure. Then I discovered the world of watercolor.

When I attempted watercolors, all the rules I learned while working with oils went out the window. No longer was there a careful laying in of the background and the painstaking build out to the foreground. With watercolors, light colors go in first, then darks.

You can add color to writing just as you can to painting, and weather is an often overlooked way to provide color to your murder mysteries. When working weather into your story, start light and build up to darkness, just like creating a watercolor. Let the pageantry and majesty of weather bring your mystery to life.

Create Obstacles
Weather, especially in a mystery, can crank up the tension and add layers of texture to the storyline. Imagine trying to follow car tracks or footprints before a sandstorm or blizzard blows them away. Or trying to gather trace evidence before a threatening rainstorm.

The common adage in mystery writing is, "When the pace needs a jolt, throw in another dead body." Another dead body is sure to pick up readers' interest, but less standard elements sometimes work better. A ferocious rain storm, a tornado, a hailstorm, a blizzard can all add to the story, especially when it has not yet been established that the protagonist can survive the elements.

Most of the Alaskan year is cold, with a few cruelly cold days thrown in. In Dana Stabenow's A Cold Blooded Business, Kate Shugak confronts the weather as she "...then realized the darkness came from a weather front rolling down off the Arctic ice pack, a great boiling mass of fog and snow that engulfed everything in its path..." (page 211). Although readers know Kate Shugak is a native Alaskan and well-acquainted with the trials of the Arctic Circle winter, the tension is cranked up when Kate comments on the magnitude of the weather and the reader begins to wonder if even she can survive it.

Stabenow uses familiar concepts to help the readers feel the weather. For example, "It looked like a Sahara of snow" (A Cold Blooded Business, page 42). The Sahara conjures immediate images of rolling vistas of golden sand. By using something familiar with something unfamiliar, Stabenow gives the reader quick cues to visualize the frozen wasteland that is Alaska.

Crank Up The Tension
In Storm Tracking, Margaret Maron's hurricane becomes a character in the story. "The air was thick with humidity and the sky was full of low gray clouds. There wasn't much here on the ground, but overhead, those clouds scudded eerily past like frantic dirty sheep scattering before wolves we couldn't yet see" (page 197). Readers begin to feel the humidity and the tension of the imminent storm. Maron gives the rain her own distinctive touch in "...the rain was coming down as hard as it could possibly fall, but suddenly it was as if all the fire hoses in heaven were pouring down on the backyard." Fire hoses are a visual clue that Maron uses to reinforce the intensity.

Carolyn G. Hart also uses a hurricane in Dead Man's Island. With a murderer on the loose, the boat destroyed, and a hurricane building, the tension is cranked up to an almost unbearable point. Hart uses the familiar to lay in the texture of the hurricane.

"The wind rolled back that section of roof as neatly as a key curls the lid of a sardine can. Water that had collected on the rooftop sloshed down. Then came the needle-sharp rain. It stung every exposed piece of flesh. The wind pulled and tugged and pummeled, butting us like invisible goats" (page 239).

Smog Alert
Weather can add texture to city environs as well. Major metropolitan areas are perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be constantly overwhelmed with brown air, or smog. While some areas experience dust storms that turn the skies brown, metropolitan areas like Los Angeles seem to have this phenomena daily.

Stephanie Plum, created by Janet Evanovich, sums the smog situation up neatly in Two for the Dough. "I figured if you had to breathe New Jersey air there wasn't much point in getting carried away with always eating healthy food" (page 13). Or, as she opens her story in Three To Get Deadly: "It was January in Trenton. The sky was gunmetal gray, and the air sat dead cold on cars and sidewalks" (page 1). This gives a much different impression of cold and snow than my earlier example of what Kate Shugak experiences in her native Alaska.

As Sue Grafton shows through Kinsey Millhone, even the occurrence of the atypical clear day in a city can add texture and a sense of expectancy. "It was late October, the day before Halloween, and the water was mimicking autumn in the Midwest.... I could have sworn I smelled wood smoke in the air and I half expected the leaves to be turning yellow and rust. All I actually saw were the same old palm trees, the same relentless green everywhere.... It was a typical California unseason, but it felt like fall..." (D is for Deadbeat, page 1).

Write like you would paint. Pick up the reader’s interest by adding color and texture to your writing through the use of weather, characters, and setting.


About The Author
Marcia Kiser writes, works, and lives in Lubbock, TX. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and her short stories have appeared in Nefarious, The Thrilling Detective, Dusty Cowboy, Novel Advice Mysterical-E, FUTURES, and the recently released Novel Advice Anthology. She can be contacted at Mek357@sbcglobal.net.