Interview: Jessica Brody and How To Write a Murder

Transcript

Speaker: Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke, and we both love mystery. Brooke. Hi, Sarah. Today, we're going to be talking to Jessica Brody about her brand new book, How to Write a Murder. Yes, I am so excited about this conversation.

Speaker: And before we begin, i will introduce Jessica. Jessica Brody is the author of more than 20 novels for teens, tweens, and adults, including I Speak Boy, Better You Than Me, Addie Bell's Shortcut to Growing Up, The Chaos of Standing Still, 52 Reasons to Hate My Father, The Unremembered Trilogy, and The System Divine Series.

Speaker: She's also the author of Save the Cat Writes a Novel, the number one best-selling plotting guide for novelists, and several books based on popular Disney franchises like Descendants and Lego Disney Princess.

Speaker: Jessica's books have been translated and published in over 23 countries, and several have been optioned for film and television. She lives with her husband and three dogs near Portland, Oregon. Welcome, Jessica.

Speaker: Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So Jessica, this is your first mystery, though obviously you've published regularly in other genres. What was different about plotting and writing a mystery compared to those other books? Did you have to change any of your processes?

Speaker: Well, anytime you start a new genre, there's always a learning curve. And I had a huge one, um steep one, shallow one. I never know whether the curve is supposed to be shallow or so or steep.

Speaker: I think it's a shallow curve, meaning slow. It was a very slow process. um It took me a lot longer to write this book than normal, than than my past books. And I think that's because I literally had to teach myself how to write a murder while I was writing a book called How to Write a Murder. you know I wrote a book on how to plot novels, and there's a whole chapter about mysteries in there. But you know I was analyzing other people's work and breaking it down into patterns and and teaching other writers how to write one, but I hadn't written one myself. So my process was pretty much the same in terms of how I like to plot and write and revise and...

Speaker: um all of that, but just figuring out how to plot something this complicated and layered with red herrings and misdirections and clues and investigation. That was a brand new experience and just super fun. I really enjoyed doing it. I i hope to continue to write murders for a long time.

Speaker: So that is so great to hear that you are going to continue writing these. the The book itself feels a bit like ah a magician explaining a trick while performing it at the same time.

Speaker: Did you ever worry that learning the the behind the scenes structure behind a mystery would make it harder to surprise your readers? It's so funny you say the magician thing, because I actually just wrote a ah guest post for someone's website about how I felt like I was a magician kind of pulling back the curtain and revealing the trick and basically breaking the magician's code, which is I think writers have sort of a code, too, of um we don't reveal how we do things. But that's actually exactly what I do. I i run a writing school. Obviously, I've written books about how to how to write.

Speaker: And I think that's one of my teaching styles is I show you exactly how I do things. And i'm I'm not one of these kinds of teachers who will sort of present something and then hide my own work. Like I will show all my students my messy first drafts. I will show them my revision process. And so this felt very natural to me.

Speaker: But the fun part of it was, you know, I'm not showing you to give you a spoiler. I'm showing you to set up a red herring like when. But there's a narrator in the book who I always just refer to as the mystery writer with pun intended. um And they are basically telling you that they're writing the book that you're reading and they're pulling back the curtain to show you how they're doing it.

Speaker: And so that writer, when I wrote their chapters, it was really fun for me because I got to play with this idea of how can I reveal what I'm doing? How can I tell the reader, oh, this is the part of the book where someone's going to die, or this is the part of the book where there's probably going to be a second body, um or this is the part of the book where where you get a lot of red herrings. How can I do that and also still make it mysterious? And I actually found it to be easier than not. I thought that that would be a hard process, but it ended up being a really fun process because I got to really play with this um this idea that the the narrator...

Speaker: yeah As we all know, there's a lot of unreliable narrators in mystery. So are they telling you the truth when they're saying, oh, look out for red herrings? Is it because they just gave you one or because they're about to give you one and you're never quite sure what they mean? um So I just found that to be really fun. I don't think i don't think it ruined anything. um Definitely didn't ruin anything for me. It just allowed me to play in a world that I know really well, which is plot structure and and teaching people how to write.

Speaker: Have you had feedback from readers who aren't necessarily authors that it didn't feel like it was spoiled, the mystery for them?

Speaker: <unk> I mean, the book is not out yet. I think it'll be out by the time this airs. But we've had some early readers that have given me some fantastic feedback that they really enjoyed the sort of breaking of the fourth wall by the narrator. And they enjoyed sort of seeing behind the scenes of what was happening. And it you know it doesn't, I don't think it reads quite like ah like a plotting guide, but the joke is that it's sort of structured like a plotting guide. um But it's definitely more written for the reader as ah as a way, it's less teaching writers how to write a murder and it's more teaching readers about the genre that they love with like a little bit of a peek at, this is actually how all us mystery writers write books. And I think, um well, it's like how this mystery writer wrote a book, but I think writers get something out of it too, because they get a little, there's a lot of winks at writers. There's a lot of jokes about writers. There's even a lot of ah Easter eggs for some of my, you know, what I teach writers. um But I think readers will just enjoy seeing the genre that they love, the tropes that they love sort of being taken apart and dissected and then explained to you in a way that makes you wonder how it's being used.

Speaker: Yeah, I think you're right. While you didn't mean to make it a how-to for authors, I do think that there are some really great lessons and maybe some things that we do intuitively. But then when you you know point them out, you go, yeah, that that really does impact my process. So that was really interesting.

Speaker: I tried to put in the book was it's a bit of, it's a bit of an ode to writers in, in the end. It, it, it explores on a deeper level. It explores what it, what is required, the courage and the stamina and the determination that's required to like bear something out of your soul and put it on the page. And I think,

Speaker: that's the respect that I have for writers is the amount of courage it takes to write something. um And so there's sort of an underlying current there beyond the fun of the mystery and the clues and, you know, who did it and how there's also just a little bit of a, um,

Speaker: ah like ah like a reverence for writers in general. and um And that's woven into the story as well. As you start to see some of the characters go rogue, you know they're not following the plan that the writer has put out for them. And um that's always part of the process for writers too, of the the moment your characters stop behaving the way you want them to behave and sort of take on a life of their own. And um I tried to make that almost like a literal ah ah literal representation in the book.

Speaker: Yeah, I really enjoyed that part and can completely relate when things don't go to plan. So that was really fun. um Well, later in this season, Sarah and I are going to talk about the rules of mystery, like set forth from the detection club.

Speaker: Do you think that there are any of those rules that are unbreakable? Wow. um As someone who wrote a plotting guide, which a lot of people call like the rules of plotting, um i would say all rules are breakable. I mean, it really, try not to break too many of the golden ones in this book. There might be a few. But what?

Speaker: What I like to tell writers whenever they say, you know, they've read Save the Cow Writes a Novel and they're like, can I do it this way? Can I break this rule? and like None of it's a rule. It's all just a guideline and it's all just a blueprint that you can follow or not follow. um But what I tell them is make sure you have a reason and it needs to be something purposeful.

Speaker: like i on I often advise writers not to break rules just to be rebellious, but to do it for a very specific reason. And I think it probably applies here as well. If you're trying to do something really cool and different, um that's great, but make sure it works with the plot. it um It has some kind of intentional purpose in the thing you're trying to say, um which is, you know, i don't think that me pulling back the curtain as and saying, here's how the writer is writing the book is necessarily breaking the rules, but it had a very specific intention in the way the story is written, in the the message I want to get across, in the themes of the book, and even in the

Speaker: the solution at the end. Everything sort of had a purpose. It wasn't just, maybe it started out of like, oh, I would love to just write ah um a mystery narrator who's telling you how they're doing it. But in the end, i I felt like it had to kind of all come together. So that's always my advice, whether you can or can't is sort of, I think your personal choice.

Speaker: And then, you know, you'll have to deal with the consequences of the readers and some readers will love it and some readers won't. And That's kind of the joy of writing is you don't know what ah what the response is going to be. um But, you know, do it do what you want. That's what I always say. do Write the book you want to write and let the rest just be the rest.

Speaker: i i I really like how you've answered that and and kind of given permission for people to um to play with those rules. And one of your characters, Darius, he's deeply analyzed mysteries and and he's he's you know talking about the steps and and the structure of mysteries.

Speaker: And so I think that your advice, I think, is allows people to to play with that structure as well. Is there anything that you think in the way that a mystery um plays out that there are elements of the structure that need to be there? So, you know, we've got this permission to play with with the rules or or, you know, play with with readers' expectations, but is there anything that you think, like, actually don't don't play with that? Yeah.

Speaker: Um, ah yeah, I mean, it's that would be probably my, my, these would be my personal preference as a mystery reader. But, and then there's also, you know, you can get very logistical about it. Well, to be called a mystery, there has to be a crime that's committed, there has to be a perpetrator, there's probably someone who's solving the crime, whether they're officially a detective or not. um Or maybe it's just the reader who plays detective and everyone else is sort of, um you know, just part of the story. But there in in my mind, i think there has to be a solution. Whether it's fully spelled out or not, um um I kind of feel like it's a flexible rule. some Some writers choose to leave some things...

Speaker: um unanswered, but I feel like you can't leave everything unanswered um unless there's a sequel. But even then, you kind of want to answer something in this book. um There's just certain things that I don't, I wouldn't necessarily call them unbreakable rules. i would call them more reader expectations and genre expectations. and whether or not you're going to leave readers feeling satisfied by the end. And then there's sort of another level of it is is whether you want to traditionally publish or self-publish, because I think self-published authors have a lot more flexibility. They don't have sort of gatekeepers to um adhere to, but in the traditional publishing space, if you want to get an agent and a publisher, they all have to get on board with whatever rule quote rules you're breaking. um And so there needs to be, you know, some, there might, there might be pushback there in the process. But if you choose to write whatever you want, break all the rules, self publish it. Like I said, there might be readers who,

Speaker: You might feel the backlash from that from readers. But again, i don't because self-publishing is something that is an option today. I don't think anybody can. I think anybody could break any rule they want and put it out there. um It's just a matter of what what do you want out of it? Do you want readers to feel satisfied? You probably need to give them an ending that feels satisfying.

Speaker: Right. And in the world of mystery, that is kind of one of the most important backbones, I think, is that, you know, satisfying ending. So I would agree.

Speaker: You briefly mentioned that there are some Easter eggs to save the cat in this book, and I found them really fun. So tell us about how did you decide how much of that writing world you put in your story and and how much then you kept to the plot? Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah, you know, i from the very beginning, i wanted there to be a fictitious Save the Cat writing guide in the story. So I had to make one up because I didn't want to use the real one. I wanted it to be like a nod, like a wink to the Save the Cat Writes a Novel book that people know me for. um i think in the very first draft, it was called, I didn't know what to call it. So I called it Rescue the Dog in my like own little... I love it. In my own little like brackets of like placeholder, but figure out what to call this. And I just called it that um because I wanted like ah a real nod to it. And then I decided, okay, that's a little bit too on the nose. So I went with something that's a little bit more nuanced. And that is... um

Speaker: For Save the Cat fans out there, I think you'll get this. um There's one of the critiques of the Save the Cat method or any plotting method is that it feels, quote, formulaic. And, you know, I have all sorts of counterpoints to that. So I wanted the word formula in the name of my fictitious writing guide. And then I thought, well, you know, it's all about writing bestsellers. So I called it the bestseller formula. And I just thought that was kind of a fun nod and only like the true Save the Cat fans will understand the joke of the word formula. um

Speaker: But anyway, so i I eventually named it that. And what's funny about it is that whole fictitious plotting guide, it evolved as my story evolved because I had to sort of figure out not just how to bring the 15 beats of the Save the Cat method in, if you're not familiar, Save the Cat method breaks all stories down into 15 beats.

Speaker: I had to sort of bring those in, give them more mystery flavors. um But then also used them to break up the story. So the story is broken into 12 steps instead of 15 beats. And then there's steps and then there's chapters.

Speaker: And I had to kind of make that work for the plot as well. So there was a lot of like, maneuvering of things. um It's not an exact map to save the cat, but it's pretty close. um And then I just had a lot of fun, like planting those little Easter eggs, because I knew that writers would read this book. um I knew most of my audience is writers, and I would be pitching this book to them. And I wanted to give them something. I wanted to give them these little gifts. So, you know, in the first a couple chapters, someone does save a cat. Yeah. There's a quite literal, there's a, there's a pretty literal one there. um The writer at one point says, let, let the fun and games begin. And fun and games is one of the beats of the save the cat method. And, and the writer says this right as the fun and games beat is beginning in the, you know, in the outline. So there's just some fun things like that in there.

Speaker: I bet that was really fun to weave all those pieces and parts together. it was. Yeah. So I think you alluded to this, Jessica, but is this the only mystery that you are going to write or have you now been bitten by the mystery bug?

Speaker: Well, um you know, i have been bitten by the mystery bug. and The mystery was always a genre that was on my bucket list that I just never had the time, the courage or the right idea to write. I was writing young adult, middle grade, sci fi. I mean, it was sort of i i always go where the idea goes.

Speaker: The next idea is the the one I write. um But I usually had a contracted book that i had to write. like I had sold two books or a series. And so there was always another book that I already had to to write. So mystery just kind of kept getting pushed back and pushed back. And like I said, I didn't have the right idea. um And then when I finally finished my last book contract and I did not have another book due, I just sat back and went... what should I write next? And I i i asked myself, what do you want to write for you what do you? What would be most fun for you to write? And my you know little mystery novel like bug came up and I was like, well, the idea sort of started with this question of, I'm known for the Save the Cat Plotting Guide, but a lot of writers use it. you you you went to like a writing conference, most writers would have at least heard of it.

Speaker: um And I thought, so what if if what if there's this mystery conference where everyone has written read the same mystery writing guide? And then it that if that you figure out that someone's actually using that guide to plot a real murder.

Speaker: um And so that that was kind of the original idea. But once I got into it, I just had so much fun. I've always had a puzzle brain. I've always loved puzzles. When I was a kid, I used to set up little you know scavenger hunts for people in my house and with clues and things. And so I think I was always kind of...

Speaker: leading toward writing mystery. And then I remember telling my husband multiple times while writing this book, I was like, I found my genre after so many writing so many books, like I found my genre, this is my genre. So I definitely want to write more. And um fortunately, my publisher bought two books when they bought this one. So now I'm working on a second one, which is really exciting.

Speaker: That is exciting. Are you able to tell us, you know, but because this story had this very meta feel, will that continue in your mystery worlds? I am still sort of working out the second one. i would like to have a similar tone to this one, a similar, this is a very...

Speaker: It has some darker undertones, but the packaging, as you know, is very, it's light, it's playful. um There's a mischievous quality to the book that is more fun, I think, than than dark. um But there are some darker storylines, you know, sort of delivered in that in that package. And I would like to do something similar with the second book. I definitely had a lot of fun with that tone and that and that level of...

Speaker: of darkness was kind of the perfect sweet spot for me. So I think I'd like to continue to play with that. Whether I can do something this meta again, i don't know. i don't know if this is like it was like a fluke and just, I put every meta thing I could think of into this book and now I have nothing left. um I don't know, but I'm going to try. We'll see.

Speaker: ah That's great. um And, you know, I can think of a ah couple of other books that kind of play with that meta method of of storytelling. ah And I imagine as a writer, at some point, you're kind of like, oh, I'm, I'm done with this. Right. And I, you know, I i i think,

Speaker: mystery writers who have a series and they've got the same, you know, the same detective or the same amateur sleuth. I suspect that they all kind of reach that. Like, I'm just tired of this group of characters and I'm going to write something different. And that's the nice thing about mystery is that you can write like there are so many different types of mysteries and and different ways to play with the genre.

Speaker: Yeah. And I love that about it too. I love that I could go to the mystery section of my bookstore. I could pick up something fun and light and puzzly, or I could pick up something dark and sinister and twisty. um and it's kind of like, what what mood am I in today? What kind of mystery am I in the mood for? um And I do have a nod to that in the book. There's ah there's a chapter in the book where Darius, one of the main characters, is trying to figure out what kind of murder mystery this is that that this writer is writing. And he flips through the bestseller formula to the to the back where he's gots got all the genres, the subgenres of mystery. And he's like, am I in a noir? Am I? Is this a... is this a noir? Is it a police procedural? Is it a cozy? And she's like, well, there is a cat. So maybe, maybe this is a cozy.

Speaker: And so there's, I had some fun just kind of playing with that. I mean, in the end, this is very much a locked room sort of isolated setting mystery, but I, yeah, I would love to try my hand at some of the other sub genres as well. and And that's, again, like you said, what makes it really fun is that you can just play around and do it and do different things.

Speaker: And so, you know, you mentioned all the different or that there are so many different subgenres. Is there a mystery that you wish you could read for the first time again? Oh gosh, like all of them. That's such such a great question. um I'm getting better, but I was infamously, before I wrote Mystery, I was infamously bad at guessing the endings of Mysteries. like i I'm like the perfect reader. i I'm fooled all the time. um I have gotten better at it. I've noticed since I started writing Mystery, I'm able to spot things that I don't think I used to spot. Like, oh, I see what i see that plant right there.

Speaker: That's interesting. Um, because now I'm sort of reading it with more of a writer's eye than I used to. Um, so funny enough, like all of the ones that are my favorites are the ones that really fooled me. And so I feel like if I read them again now, are you saying like, if I could erase my memory and read them for yeah for the first time? Yeah. Um,

Speaker: oh Gosh, it's so hard. The guest list is one of my favorites. And it's, um it was ah a huge inspiration for How to Write a Murderer, just in the, you know, the mysterious, ominous setting that the characters get trapped in. um Very different story, though. That one was, I just love going back to that one. I study it just to see, like, how, where did she reveal this? And where did she plant that? So that one's high up on my list.

Speaker: I actually did have this experience with, um, Death on the Nile the other day. I started reading it and I had this idea. i was like, I think I know who did it.

Speaker: I think I'm like, I'm finally getting this. Like I'm finally picking up the clues. And then I realized I read it in high school. and And there was like this subconscious memory. I didn't remember the book at all. But suddenly there was this part like right at the beginning. i'm like, I bet I bet that's the killer.

Speaker: um So that was maybe a literal version of your question. um i'm so I'm just trying to think of I'll just go with the guest list just because it's my favorite.

Speaker: And it it is a great book. Well, Jessica, thank you again. This has been so fun to talk to you about your brand new book. Where can listeners find out all about you? JessicaBrody.com is a great place to start. It's sort of my hub. um You can find all my books there, all my novels there. If you are a writer and you want to ah learn more from me, i also have writingmastery.com and that's where my writing academy lives as well.

Speaker: Wonderful. Well, we'll make sure that we put links to those in the show notes. And yeah, thank you so much for joining us. It's been such a pleasure to chat with you about your book and writing generally.

Speaker: Thank you so much for having me. I love talking about mysteries with fellow mystery lovers.

Speaker: And thank you listeners for joining us today on Clued in Mystery. Until next time, I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery. Clued in Mystery is written and produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen.

Speaker: Music is by Shane Ivers. If you liked what you heard, please consider telling a friend, leaving a review, or subscribing with your favorite podcast listening app. Visit our website to sign up for our newsletter, The Clued in Chronicle, and get mystery news, podcast updates, and bonus episodes.

Speaker: We're on social media at Clued in Mystery.