Red Herrings Tips & Tricks | Writing Suspense

hello everyone Alexa done here and today we are going to be talking about red herrings red herrings are a very important concept in thriller suspense mystery and really anytime you have a mystery thread in any other genre you're going to be dealing with red herrings a red herring is essentially a clue a suspect a major threat of investigation that is meant to essentially send the characters and the reader in another direction diverting their attention away from the real solution so this is a device that is used as a sleight of hand not only to make your mystery and investigation more complex and interesting for the reader but also it's a magic trick of but it was really this and you didn't notice because you were paying attention to this over here readers of mysteries and thrillers expect red herrings so you need to have at least one major red herring so one potential solution to whatever the mystery is the mystery suspense thread that is completely feasible and reasonably logically sound as the potential solution you're going to do a significant amount of build-up for your primary red herring your reader needs to realistically believe until you reveal that critical piece of information later in the story that then eliminates that red herring as a real possibility but up until that moment it needs to be totally feasible that that could be the solution and in fact most thrillers or mysteries have multiple red herrings you mean at least one but you can definitely have more than one and it's probably going to be better if you do have two three four potentially more red herrings though you don't want to go overboard how many red herrings are too many red herrings I've heard that question I don't have a magical answer for you it's the point at which things are just a little too crowded in the middle especially a little too ridiculous let's say to be safe go with the rule of threes make sure you have at least three really solid red herrings they don't all have to be equally fleshed out or followed through in and the narrative and in fact some of them red herrings really should be discounted pretty early on you want to have your mystery be complex enough that your characters are looking into more than one solution so what does this mean for you as a writer it means when you're planning out your mystery story you need to have not only the true solution in mind and have a full understanding of how that works the house and the why is the logic behind that truth read and then you have to plan out multiple other threads where the person has just as good a reason as the actual solution or just as much foundation as the actual solution or sometimes even more to be the one but you then of course insert a logical reason why it's not this because it's the truth thing and you were working all of those threads in to the book none of this is easy it's definitely a lot of work but once you understand the fundamentals of red herrings how they work how a good one works you can start to work those threads in to your thriller suspense mystery plot just some examples of what you might do with a red herring for example so you have a character and you want them to seem suspicious they are a red herring something that you as the author can do give that character a secret make it a secret that isn't a secret to the solution it doesn't have anything to do with the murder or the stalker plod whatever sinister dealings are going on in the story but it is a significant enough secret that it would cause them to act suspiciously this gives you a logical foundation for everything this character would do throughout the narrative but you have your character your main character your investigator character and thus your reader make assumptions about that behavior so you want to make sure that that secret sometimes it does tie to the big main a plot thread or it kind of runs parallel to it so that the way that they act about that secret could also theoretically logically work for the actual plot maybe the secret is the characters being blackmail or they were being blackmailed by the victim that could be a good one they could be afraid that if this information is found out that they would become a suspect maybe they're sneaking around and being suspicious because they're trying to find and then conceal evidence of whatever they were being blackmailed for to cover their own but you're giving someone a motive essentially to do a series of suspicious actions where your investigator character is going to see them one way and then you are revealing them to actually be something else what's good about a good red herring is it adds complexity to your plot and your story and your characters because you have to layer things in to your broader cast of characters to give them a reason to behave in a way that is suspicious and that just makes things a lot more fun for the readers and for your story and the function of multiple and good red herrings is you're keeping your reader guessing the recent readers like the mystery thriller suspense genre is they like to play and guess and try to get ahead of a narrative and outsmart things or be outsmarted that is the whole reason to read and so what good red herrings are is it's basically you're giving the reader something to play with you're giving them things to bounce off and guess and to basically challenge them as they read the story to figure out what is really going on so red herrings are an essential of mysteries thrillers and suspense that's what they are that's how they work and let me know down below in the comments questions that you have about red herrings I didn't go into too specific examples in this video because I mean you're basically spoiling any story you give a good example of a red herring for so I didn't want to go down that road but maybe we can talk a bit in the comments what are some of your favorite red herrings of all time give this video a thumbs up if you liked it I will make more videos about the fundamentals of certain genres and craft and if you're not our subscribe to the channel go ahead and do that I post new videos two to three times a week as always guys thank you so much for watching and happy writing

Channel: Alexa Donne

Views: 24,099

Keywords: alexa donne, author tube, writing advice, how to write a book, publishing advice, red herrings, writing red herrings, writing a thriller

Id: VL5bFdEjSfg

Length: 6min 37sec (397 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020