Bedding-In The Premise

Any idea, no matter how crazy, can be made to work in a story. As long as you set things up well enough, the reader will buy whatever you’re selling.

That doesn’t mean providing any old nonsense will work, but it does mean any old nonsense can be made to work, whether it's how the impossible murder was committed, or why the billionaire fell for the 6/10 brunette, or the guy who claims victory by using The Force.

The important thing to remember is it’s the stuff during the build-up that will make or break the story, not the explanation after the fact.

Explaining that the killer was able to enter a locked room and leave again without leaving a trace because he was an alien with a teleportation device will not be satisfying if you spring it on the reader on the last page. 

Yes, it technically does explain everything, but when you reveal that the murderer is an alien the reader should be thinking, Of course! not If you say so...

Laying the foundations of what’s to come without giving things away is a difficult skill.

If you have 290 pages of questions, and ten pages of answers, that’s going to feel unbalanced and rushed, even if the answers all make perfect sense.

The advantage you have as the writer is that once you know what happens and why it happens and how it happens, you can go back and work in details that support those elements. It’s a bit of a trick, to know which card was chosen and then go back in time and make sure you place that card where you’ll be able to get at it.

As a reader, you only see half the trick. As a writer, you need to be able to plant the information in the right places. The reader doesn’t have to be aware of what the information means, or they may think it has another purpose entirely, but it has to be there.

One of the ways to make sure the narrative doesn’t end up being so full of unknowns that the reader stops caring altogether, is to make the characters aware of things that might be troubling the reader. 

If the murder seems impossible, have a character mention it. If the new boyfriend (who’s turns out to be a werewolf) acts weird around cats, bring it up. You don’t have to reveal the reasons behind the weirdness, but making the character aware makes the reader less annoyed.

What you mustn’t do is just let it go because it get’s explained a couple of chapters later. You know that, the reader doesn’t, and more importantly, the character doesn't. And characters who just accept not being given answers come across as contrived and unrealistic.

“By the way, I know who killed the President and why, but first let’s enjoy dinner, okay?”

Not okay. If you want to delay a reveal for some story-related purpose, you need to come up with a plausible reason to do it. And that can be quite a complex thing to construct. Just getting the character to accept the wait, perhaps with some kind of mental self-persuasion on the part of the MC (He's already dead, I guess another couple of hours won't make a difference and I am hungry...) is a lot easier to write, but much harder to read.

Why people do things is a key part of the story. The fact you don’t want to reveal until the end of the book that Mortimer always freaked out whenever he saw a cucumber because of  an unpleasant experience he had when he was a child is fine, but having him just start screaming every time someone makes a salad, and then in the very last chapter have six pages of explanation is not going to work.

You need to construct the world around his behaviour. People who talk about it, try to help him, those who know but who are sworn to secrecy, his own excuses as to what’s going on, and a whole host of other ways of making it feel real.

What you can’t do is just have everyone shrugs their shoulders and wait for Ch.36 when all is revealed.

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