Three Rules for Creating Cozies that Stand Out in the Crowd

By Lois Winston

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Life’s journeys are rarely along a straight path. The same can be said for our writing journeys. I began my career firmly entrenched in the world of romance. Then, one fateful day, I received a phone call that changed my life. My agent asked if I’d be interested in writing a humorous crafting-themed mystery series featuring an amateur sleuth. She knew an editor looking for one. My agent went on to say that she thought I’d be the perfect person to write such a series because I worked as a crafts designer for various publications and manufacturers, and my award-winning first novel, Talk Gertie to Me, was a humorous fish-out-of-water tale.

The closest I’d ever come to writing mystery was my three romantic suspense novels. However, there’s a huge difference between mysteries and suspense. Also, I wasn’t someone who had grown up reading Nancy Drew, and it had been years since I’d watched Murder She Wrote. Still, the challenge intrigued me, and I set out to learn all I could about amateur sleuth and cozy mysteries, specifically, those that involved crafts.

Armed with a stack of books from both the library and my local bookstore, I immersed myself in the sub-genre. I discovered that most crafting cozies centered around a craft shop or a group of crafters, such as quilters, knitters, or scrapbookers. Some featured a production crafter, such as a potter or stained-glass artisan. All took place in small towns, and the amateur sleuth always had a sidekick, usually a friend or relative.

Years ago, I’d been told that it’s never a good idea to follow a trend. If I wrote this series, I’d be competing against well-established authors. To succeed, I needed to stand out, and to do that, I needed to think outside the box. What could I do differently that would set my series apart, yet still be embraced by readers of the genre?

This brings me to Rule One: Give a unique spin to your protagonist, her profession, and/or the setting of your series.

I started out by switching up the setting. Instead of a small town, my series would take place in a metropolitan area, a suburb of New York City. Rather than having a sleuth who owned a craft or needlework shop, I’d make my sleuth the crafts editor at a women’s magazine. 

But I didn’t stop there. In the romance genre, clueless heroines are dubbed TSTL, Too Stupid to Live. These are the women who suspect danger is lurking around a dark corner, in a dank basement, or in spooky woods, yet they deliberately turn the corner, descend the staircase, or head for the trees, where they are then usually confronted by an escaped murderer, monster, or serial killer.

As I read through dozens of cozy mysteries, I came across a similar phenomenon—the busybody snoop who is convinced she’s smarter than local law enforcement and will do a better and quicker job of discovering whodunit. I did not want to write a busybody sleuth. Instead, I decided to create a reluctant amateur sleuth, a woman who wants nothing to do with crime-solving but is forced into it by circumstances beyond her control.

Rule Two: Set up an overall situation that will allow the protagonist to make progress toward reaching her goals and resolving her conflicts as the series progresses from book to book.

Writing an ongoing series means the protagonist needs a reason to keep sleuthing. I set the stage in Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun, the first book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries. It opens with Anastasia yanked from her comfortable middle-class existence after her husband drops dead in a Las Vegas casino. That’s when she learns about his affair with Lady Luck. He leaves her with massive debt and a bookie demanding fifty-thousand dollars. 

In each book in the series, Anastasia works at whittling down her debt to keep a roof over her family’s heads. But as she moonlights and takes on side gigs, she keeps running across unsavory characters and the corpses they leave in their wake.

Which brings me to Rule Three: Develop secondary characters that add depth to your series and create additional problems for your protagonist.

I also discovered that in addition to every amateur sleuth needing someone to play Watson to her Sherlock, she also needs to interact with members of her family and her community. However, many of the books I read kept these secondary and tertiary characters to a minimum. The only new characters introduced in each book were always specific to that book’s murder plot and rarely, if ever, appeared again. Throughout my series, I’ve often introduced new characters who have provided ongoing subplots that are intertwined within the mysteries and add layers of depth to the series as they, too, evolve. Not every character appears in every book. They come and go based on the plot of each book, but they’re available when I need them.

Sorry, Knot Sorry, is the thirteenth and latest book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series. In each book, Anastasia continues to be motivated toward reaching her goals and resolving the conflicts that impede her from doing so, and she has continued to grow as a person. But of course, the dead bodies keep coming.

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Her most recent release is Sorry, Knot Sorry, the thirteenth book in her Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series. Learn more about Lois and her books at her website www.loiswinston.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter and follow her on various social media sites.

When Secondary Characters Demand the Spotlight

By Martha Reed 

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When I’m introduced to a new series, it doesn’t matter if the storyline comes via a book, a movie, or TV, and I’m open to any setting. But if the crime fiction or mystery series is going to engage my active monkey brain and continue to hold my interest, it must offer a wide-ranging ensemble cast with plenty of individual and interesting character development. Cardboard cutouts and one-dimensional characters are not for me.

Developing a supporting ensemble cast is a creative balancing act because while it offers a fertile field of fresh and unforeseen possibilities, you don’t want to lose your protagonist in the crowd. You’ll need to invent just the right number of secondary characters to keep your story lively and fresh without confusing the reader.

And while individual crimes and misdemeanors and their solutions structure the plot, character development provides the necessary depth, conflict, drama, background color, and bodies for the suspect list.

The trick is that an inciting or trigger event not only impacts the protagonist and his/her world; collateral fallout cascades through the secondary characters as well, causing countless new conflicts and story sub-arcs. Say, for instance, your beat cop protagonist finally earns her detective’s badge, a cherished career goal. How does her left behind cop ex-partner feel about her promotion? Bruised feelings and damaged egos among secondary characters are 24K nuggets in any writer’s gold mine.

Of course, the protagonist and the antagonist should take centerstage since they’re the focus of the story, but what is an author supposed to do when a secondary character suddenly strides into the limelight demanding equal face time?

This has happened to me twice, and I’d like to share how you can use these events to strengthen your future stories.

In my Nantucket Mystery series, a secondary character CSI Specialist made an unexpectedly snarky remark standing beside a crime scene that was so wryly perfect with dry humor that I realized she was going to steal the focus from the corpse. As I continued drafting the chapter, I wanted to drop the existing narrative and follow her, and that is a fatal type of rabbit hole.

When you run into a strongly vocal secondary character who refuses to behave, don’t throw them out. Take that rampant character energy and move it into an entirely new story.

Use Shapeshifting as a Creative Writing Tool

To keep that CSI Specialist from derailing that established storyline, I softened her punchline and then moved the strength of it and her character into a primary character position using an entirely new setting and series. It worked. Love Power won a Killer Nashville 2021 Silver Falchion Best Attending Author Award as well as being a 2021 Silver Falchion Finalist in the Best Mystery category.

In another shapeshifting instance, a vibrant young UBER driving named Cleo got axed from one of my short stories simply because I needed to trim the word count to fit the submission requirement. After profusely apologizing to my fictional character, I pasted Cleo into a blank Word document and filed her for later use. She has been impatiently waiting for her turn on the boards and now, as I’m drafting my current WIP, I need a strong young new female primary lead. Viola! There she stood, waiting in the wings, already warmed up and ready to go, a gift.

How to develop a secondary character into a primary one

The best tool I’ve discovered is to write out the secondary character’s career and life goals. Every character, even secondary ones are the hero/heroines in their own lives. He/she will have their own aspirations, dreams, ambitions, and struggles, and this is important: their goals may not be in alignment with your protagonist’s main story but adding this level of depth is critical to character development.

For instance, when I life studied one of my secondary characters, a military veteran and career law enforcement officer, I learned that Ted expected to be given the Lieutenant’s position when it unexpectedly fell vacant. When he didn’t get it, Ted soured on the job, so I started sprinkling in quirky quips and sour asides into his normal day-to-day conversation. The bonus is in not explaining the new quips and asides; just as your other characters will start to wonder what’s gotten into Ted, so will your readers, and keeping readers guessing is one of our writerly jobs.

Primary and secondary characters break up over conflicts. Career goal differences or sudden political flare-ups can raise tension to a snapping point. Different responses to an accident or a crime scene can cause rifts in long-standing friendships. Use these events to add increased insight into a secondary character’s life or to the backstory, and it will pique your reader’s interest as well as signal that a shift in a secondary character may potentially move that character into a leading player position.

The payoff is that secondary character development leads to story growth which will hold the interest of your readers.

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Martha Reed is a multi-award-winning mystery and crime fiction author. Love Power, her new Crescent City NOLA Mystery featuring Gigi Pascoe, a transgender sleuth won a 2021 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Best Attending Author Award as well as being a Silver Falchion Finalist in the Mystery category.

Her John and Sarah Jarad Nantucket Mystery series garnered an Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Award for Mid-Atlantic Best Regional Fiction. Her short story, The Honor Thief was selected for the 2021 Bouchercon anthology, This Time for Sure, edited by Hank Phillippi Ryan

You’re invited to visit her website www.reedmenow.com for more detail.

The Writer’s Playbook | Fan Favorites

By Steven Harms

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If you’ve followed any sport—pro, college, or youth—and whether that be a team sport (i.e., basketball) or solo (i.e., golf), there’s usually a consensus player who earns the term “fan favorite.” It’s the individual who captures the hearts of the fans, someone who isn’t necessarily the star player. In fact, I’d argue the moniker is reserved for a role player who rises above his or her perceived limitations to perform at a high level while organically baring their human side on or off the field of play. 

I used the term “earns” with purpose. In all my years in pro sports, I’ve witnessed many a player become that team’s fan favorite just by combining consistently good performance doing their specific job with a personality that endears them to the fan base. It’s not the all-star player, but rather the sub or the unglamorous player who shines. 

In Detroit, where most of my career was spent, those fan favorites were the players with that working-class approach to their job. Detroit is known as a blue-collar, hard-working, gritty, get-the-job-done town. And they love underdogs. Each market has a vibe and a role player that can capture that quality by their level of play and personality to become a star. 

The NBA enshrines such a player by honoring them with the “NBA Sixth Man of the Year Award,” an annual award to the player who is not a starter but is the best player who enters the game as a substitute and puts up the best performance over a season. Invariably, that player is a fan favorite in that player’s market. Why? He’s the role player that shines. Hollywood does the same thing with their “Best Supporting Actor” awards. The award itself is an affirmation that an amazing performance by a secondary character can win over the hearts and minds of the movie-going public.

This dynamic is true in the stories we write and read as well. In my debut novel, Give Place to Wrath, I introduced a three-headed detective team led by the main protagonist, Roger Viceroy. Viceroy dominates the book, but I gave enough spotlight to his two assistants that one of them became a surprising fan favorite—Trevor “Silk” Moreland.

Silk had the backstory in his favor. As a kid who grew up in a blighted section of Milwaukee, he was destined for basketball stardom with a full ride to Marquette University until his dreams were cut short by a bullet that destroyed his basketball career during his senior year in high school. But that unfortunate incident was also the fuse that ignited his passion for police work and honed his innate abilities to become an excellent detective. 

After the book debuted and reviews started coming in, there were a good number of people who called out Silk and how much they enjoyed his character with a few even suggesting I spin him off to his own series. I thought about it, but I also realized he resonated so much because he was a support character who authentically excelled at what he did as part of a team. 

Every story has minor characters, and at times, they’re written to bridge a gap in the story arc or serve a role to provide information or advance a particular chapter. Those characters are needed, to be sure. However, readers will instinctually gravitate to a secondary character if they are written with enough detail, given their own spotlight at times, and can showcase an authentic and relatable character trait or a backstory of overcoming their personal obstacles. They provide an ingredient that elevates the book because they tap into the charitable and empathetic side of our nature.  

I’ve seen it happen in Major League ballparks, NBA arenas, and NFL stadiums. When the fan favorite enters the game, there is a noticeable lift as the fan’s attention turns to that player and the energy and character traits he brings to the game. Win or lose, when the fan-favorite plays, the fans’ enjoyment of the game elevates because they are emotionally invested in that player.  

If an author can write a supporting character that earns an emotional connection to readers, a novel’s odds of success are simply enhanced. It’s the “fan favorite” effect. While readers are certainly intellectually involved with the protagonist, having that beloved bench player enter the game will always perk up the moment and pull a reader closer to where you want them to be–engaged and wanting to turn the page.