Just Keeping the Flow Going

Before I started writing a crime thriller, I told myself that I couldn't do it. I'm not smart enough to think of a near-perfect crime and certainly not smart enough to have a detective figure out who dunnit.

Still, I wanted to try and after I was laid off from work, I had a lot of time on my hands and didn't have a more-perfect time to give it a go.

Plotting out the sequence of events that led to the murder was pretty easy, actually. I started with the idea, who could be driven to commit a murder, and how would they do it? Once the murder was committed, I turned my attention to the murderer. What would he or she do? Would the murderer hide the body? How do they cover their tracks?

So, for the first week that I started working on Dark Water, I created a spreadsheet that had the main characters, including the murderer. In the spreadsheet, I wrote the person's role in the story and notes about the role that they play in the book. For the killer, I wrote a backstory and traced their movement before and after the murder.

That part of the story was pretty easy, actually. I had the motive and the opportunity, and the killer had to simply go about their life, interacting with other characters throughout the story as though they were innocent.

The hardest part of the story is following the detectives. I have two, which I've revealed in the synopsis. The detectives enter the story after the body is found and they are the main characters in the story, as I follow them more than anyone else.

The hard part is knowing how a detective would go about an investigation, given information and evidence that is presented to them. I'm not a detective (surprise!) so I don't know proper procedures. I only know what I've seen by reading other police procedurals and detective shows on TV.

I have also turned to Google and to ChatGPT: the latter, I present a bunch of evidence and ask how a detective would investigate said evidence. I've also Googled police procedures and what sort of information they'd be able to access.

I've got a pretty good story and I'm afraid that I'm going to get bogged down in details, so I've been writing as much as I can, making up procedures as I go along. I just want to go with the flow and worry about accuracy later.

In my past fiction, I'd get bogged down too much with details. I think that's what got in my way with Gyeosunim, to the extent that I lost interest in the story and stopped writing it.

When I get the initial story for Dark Water finished, I'll go back and properly research the parts that I've made up, regarding police procedures and murder investigations. It's important that I stay focused and just keep writing.

So far, this method is working. As of the writing of this post, with nearly four weeks worth of writing my novel, I am nearly 90 pages in. I don't want to interrupt the flow.

Stay tuned.