6 Tips For Writing Your Mystery Story Outline

Lessons learned from writing my own outlines for mystery games

Mystery games place a special emphasis on writing compared to other types of games.

Whether it's a text-based adventure or 3D walking-simulator, they tend to rely heavily on characters in a clearly-defined setting coming into conflict with each other.

Any gameplay elements are simply ways of interacting in that environment.

That's why it's important to learn the three fundamentals of writing any mystery story — including writing a story outline.

Some mystery authors can "fly by the seat of their pants", and while I have a great amount of respect for them, I find myself simply unable to write that way.

Outlines help me organize my thoughts and make sure that every action in the story makes logical sense.

Mysteries in particular require extra attention to detail compared to other genres.

Here are 6 tips I've learned from writing my own outlines:

1. Understand The Mystery Story Structure

You might already be familiar with the Three-Act Story Structure: Setup, Confrontation, and Resolution.

Mysteries have their own structure essentially along the same lines, which I prefer to call the Exposition, Investigation, and Denouement.

The Exposition is the beginning of the story, which introduces the world and characters to the audience. Smaller and more subtle mysteries and conflicts should also be introduced to keep the audience interested. Key elements are foreshadowed that seem insignificant now, but become incredibly important later on.

During the Investigation, the main crime is discovered — almost always a corpse. The detective searches the crime scene, interrogates suspects, and investigates for clues. False leads (red herrings) are pursued, and it all seems hopeless — until, at the very last moment, the final clue reveals itself.

In the Denouement, the detective announces the mystery has been solved. Every mystery is explained in detail, and through logical reasoning, the identity of the culprit is revealed. The culprit's motive is explained, justice is served, and the fate of each character is revealed.

Each of these story acts can be analyzed in much greater detail, but the above explanation should be enough to help you get started writing your outline.

2. Begin With The End In Mind

The best way to keep your story logically consistent is to figure out the ending, working backwards from there.

Most puzzle games in general are created this way.

For example, if you're making a maze, you'd want to clearly define both the start point and the end point.

Then you'd also want to clearly define a path to get from Point A to Point B.

Only then can you add obstacles along that path and diversions away from it.

It guarantees that no matter how creative you get, you don't accidentally make it impossible for the player to reach the goal.

Mystery stories work in exactly the same way.

By starting with the crime and understanding how it took place, you'll immediately have ideas for pieces of evidence and witness testimony that the player can use to unravel the mystery.

Then you just naturally work those clues into your outline.

3. Break The Outline Down Into Smaller Parts

Set a clearly defined limit for your story and break it down into discrete chapters.

For example, if you want to write a short story, set a limit of 10,000 words.

Then set another limit of 2,000 words per chapter, for 5 chapters total.

Now your outline can align each chapter to the previously-mentioned story structure.

Chapter 1 — Just another day at work

Chapter 2 — Discovering the corpse

Chapter 3 — Investigating the crime scene

Chapter 4 — Interrogating the suspects

Chapter 5 — Arresting the culprit

Essentially, this is just the classic divide and conquer strategy.

For stories with more words or chapters, think about the midpoints between the major story beats.

Maybe you want a story where one person is found dead, and then later on a second victim is found, too.

Each discovery would be its own story beat, and so you'd want to add more details between those two events.

Ask how you can enrich your world and more deeply explore your story's ideas.

You'll naturally flesh out your characters and world by filling gaps in the outline.

4. Shape The Setting To Conform To Your Mystery

The flow of your outline, and your mystery, heavily depends upon the setting.

In creative writing, the setting refers to the story's time period and location.

For beginners, the ideal setting is a familiar location in modern times.

It minimizes research and lets you focus on writing the mystery itself.

You'll also want to decide how realistically you want to portray the setting.

Fans of mysteries have an expectation of realism, but fictional locations are okay.

And the greatest benefit of a fictional location is you can mold it to fit your mystery.

For example, I set my game’s story on a fictional cruise ship.

The realistic setting of a modern-day cruise ship forces some interesting constraints upon the story — the characters can’t call for help or leave the crime scene right away.

But as the author, I could construct the fictional ship in specific ways to fit the mystery I wanted to create.

It gave me the freedom to create the schedules of the employees, the layouts of the rooms, the number of keys for each person, and which doors they could unlock.

I asked myself who and what could naturally be found on a cruise ship, and so the story fully explores those ideas from start to end.

Thus, my understanding of my story's setting helped guide the creation of my outline.

5. Understand Your Characters

Your characters are just as important as your setting — if not more — because it's impossible to write an outline without understanding your characters.

Characters include the detective, culprit, each victim, all suspects, and any witnesses.

Some mysteries will also include a narrator who isn't the detective, the most well-known example being Watson from Sherlock Holmes.

An interesting story is where the characters' goals come into conflict with each other.

In mystery stories, the conflict is strong: the goal of the culprit is to get away with a crime, while the goal of the detective is to solve that crime.

Because these goals are so incompatible, the audience is left on-edge, waiting to find out who will win.

So, a strong outline maximizes these character-driven conflicts as much as possible.

Understand the motivations behind each character — do they get along with each other, or do they argue?

For example, two detectives might disagree with each other's methods, and this disagreement leads to a new chapter (or two) where they explore independently — only to later realize they need to work as a team in order to solve the case.

In this way, your outline will naturally form through the conflicts between characters.

6. Don't Try To Do Too Much

When writing your outline, it's tempting to just keep writing, writing, and writing.

You're in the mood to generate ideas, and sometimes it's fun to just keep doing it.

But you'll quickly get overwhelmed, and you'll never want to work on your story again.

I've seen some outlines that are literally as long as novels: pages and pages of backstory, but no actual plot from start to finish.

And this is a point exclusive to mysteries in video games: keep your branching simple!

Adding more branches adds exponentially more work to your game.

Each branch is also a potential point of failure if your story loses logical consistency.

Mysteries are, after all, stories about cause-and-effect.

So if you give the player choices, you need to be careful about how those choices impact the other dynamics of your mystery.

For example, if the player puts the knife in their inventory in order to slice some bread, the culprit will instead be forced to use the gun to commit the murder.

Now armed with a gun, the culprit commits the murder in a completely different way than if they had gone with their original plan to use the knife.

Suddenly you're creating new types of evidence at new crime scenes, which requires new alibis for new suspects, all because the player made one simple choice.

While I fully appreciate ambitious ideas, you have to know your own limits.

This is why you’ll see games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa focus their gameplay on altering the investigation of the crime rather than altering the commission of it.

Not saying it can’t be done — but you’ll be in for a wild ride if you try it.

You should aim to only add choices that improve the player’s personal experience of the game without exponentially increasing your own workload.

So just remember, the outline is where you’ll spot the most errors for the least effort.

If you find those errors and correct them now, you’ll save loads of time later on.

It's much easier to rewrite a 1,000-word outline than a 100,000-word story.

And that's it!

Or, if you have your own tips for writing outlines, let me know in the comments!

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