How To Write a Crime Novel
Many of us feel the pull toward writing a novel at some point in our lives. Only a very few, however, decide to sit down and use hundreds of hours on actually writing an entire book. But those who give it their best and really do it, are often motivated to write a crime or thriller novel. Why? There might be multiple reasons why, but I guess some of the most important reasons might be that crime novels are suspenseful, mysterious, interesting to try and solve the murder case before the story’s sleuth, terrifying, action-packed, etc. Or the reason might be as is simple as this: you enjoy reading crime, so you’d like to write crime. Whatever your reason might be, we here at How To Do Whatever have taken a look at a whole host of websites, youtube videos and books – yes, in this case, mostly books, as most authors love books more than anything – that we deem helpful to an aspiring author, or even published authors looking to know even more about their craft.
Writtens
Let’s start with a couple of short, concise tips on how to write a crime novel taken from two different websites.
The first one is taken from The Writers Bureau, goes through a few good tips:
The second one is a great blog post that goes through a more specific sub-genre of the crime story, namely the detective story. Since most crime stories includes some sort of detective, we thought you might find this interesting. It’s found at fictionwriters:
Books
We’ve checked through many books on writing crime, mystery, thriller, suspense novels, and these are the ones we’ve found to be the “best”. If you’re a beginner wanting to write a crime novel, then reading only a couple of these books will surely put you in a much better position to writing a great novel than if you just sit down and start hammering on the keyboard without knowing anything before beginning. As usual, click the image to get to the book you’d like to check out:
Ebooks:
The Easy Way to Write Crime Fiction That Sells, by Rob Parnell:
How to Write a Murder Mystery – Seven Steps to Success, by Jeffrey Marks:
How to Write a Great Crime Novel, by Rebecca Lake:
Writing a Killer Thriller – An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction, by Jodie Renner:
Physical Books:
And to those of you not interested in reading electronic books, but would rather get your hands on some juicy, physically existing reading material, here are two great ones:
How to Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery & the Roller Coaster of Suspense, by Carolyn Wheat:
How to Write a Mystery, by Larry Beinhart:
Videos
At last we’ll put up a couple of youtube videos we think walk us through the process pretty easily and nicely. They’re not as in-depth as the books – how could they, being only a few minutes long? – but they’ll give you a good idea of the most important aspects of the writing to keep in mind when beginning this awesome journey.
Here’s a video from the channel figmentdotcom with a video named Crime Writing Workshop with Robin Wasserman:
She shows how to start generating story ideas by using this method:
Lastly, here’s a look at the video How To Write A Murder Mystery, found on the channel lancenporter:
Good luck on your writing career. Hope you’ll be able to use some of the sources found here, and create a nerve-chilling, suspenseful crime novel of your own!
