Mapping out a plot is, I believe, one of the most exciting parts of crafting a book, for it by itself bathes me in a mood of mystery and intrigue well before I have written the first word. Last night I sat down to a plate of calamari and a glass of pinot grigio at my favorite Italian restaurant to map out the plot to my next book, “Murder Becomes Miami.” Even though “Murder Becomes Manhattan” just landed a few weeks ago, I am itchin’ to carry on the tale of Dalton Lee and the architect/detectives who make up The Lee Group. How do you write? Similarly, or somehow different? THEN, I go back and refine, and shape, and sculpt, inserting some elements and discarding others, until the final story is ready for you to read. I allow for the possibility of twists and turns I didn’t expect along the way but continue barreling forward with the goal of getting the entire story told. So here is what I do: I tend to charge forward with a general idea of the plot. That said, if I constantly stopped and shifted and backwrote, I might never finish a book.

The result I think is a book that’s more rich, I think, and something different to some degree from what I thought it would be when I launched into it. That means I thought of a very cool way to shake things up late in the book, but for the shake-up to make sense, I had to go back and insert a few elements earlier in the book. I have backwritten a lot in “Murder Becomes Miami,” which comes out in November. You want the subplot between two characters carefully developed in the first half of the book to take a sudden veer into unexpected territory in the second half.īut that requires some serious planning, some meaningful forethought, and sometimes what we in the industry call “backwriting”. That’s because you want the stray comment offered by someone in Chapter 17 to become the vital clue unearthed in Chapter 46.

But it is almost impossible to write a good mystery thriller that way. I am a linear thinker, so my tendency is to produce a book in a linear way. This fall, I have at least three book clubs reading “ Murder Becomes Manhattan.” When I appear at a book club, one question I am always asked is, “How do you go about writing one of your novels? Do you pretty much have the plot laid out when you start? Or do you change it along the way?”

Murder Becomes Miami by Jeffrey Eaton