In this video, I share my strategy for keeping red herrings fresh and avoiding predictable storylines across a series. It has worked wonders for me throughout my long-running Josie Prescott Antiques mysteries series. The secret is making each situation feel organic and true to character.
How do you handle red herrings in your stories? Any tips for keeping your readers guessing in a believable way? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments—I’d love to hear them!
Hello, Jane Cleland here. “I’m writing a mystery series and I am worried that red herrings are going to become predictable over the series.” I think it’s reasonable to worry about that. You don’t want things to become so, um, predictive that we know what’s going to happen next.
I think the best way to address it is to come up with a character trait for your protagonist, presumably the sleuth, that carries through story after story in the series but manifests itself in different ways. For example, um, I have my protagonist, Josie Prescott, in the Antiques Mysteries. I have her thinking she’s good with people, but her cohort, Wes Smith, the newspaper reporter who does research on her behalf, he thinks, “You’re just not good with people.” Well, once you plant that idea, when she misjudges someone or gives someone the benefit of the doubt because that’s her personality and misses some of the clues that this really is not a very good person, it is not coincidental or contrived, it feels organic because I’ve created that element in her character.
But the next book, it’s going to manifest itself in a different way. For example, um, a woman comes in to sell her father’s estate and doesn’t tell her that her brother doesn’t want that to happen. He’s opposed to it. Well, Josie, my gal, is just going along with the daughter, thinking, you know, she’s being so thoughtful, really is taking bids, decides to get an appraisal before selling, she admires that kind of diligence and forethought. And you can imagine Josie’s shock when the brother appears on the scene. So it’s a very different kind of red herring. And by the way, the brother is the bad guy and the sister’s the good guy. That’s the red herring element.
What do you do? How do you think about it? How do you make sure that red herrings across the series don’t end up feeling coincidental or predictable? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Put it in the comment section. And if this video had value for you, would you like it? Would you share it? Would you subscribe to the channel that makes these videos? Let’s make them even more valuable for you because it opens up features. Um, and I appreciate it very much. Thank you.
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