Decide What to Keep: The Mystery Novel Workbook
Creating the twist was never the problem.
Your reader is playing to win. And the twist was the first scene you saw clearly: the gasp, the truth landing. Earning it takes two hundred pages, clue by clue, without giving the game away, and that is where mysteries quietly fall apart: a clue you remember writing but never wrote, an alibi that no one could have checked, a reveal that only works because the book hid something.
Decide What to Keep: The Mystery Novel Workbook is a complete 283-page planning system that builds the crime before the investigation. You write the culprit's whole night first, planned to the minute, then construct the case your sleuth assembles across it. Decide what really happened, and the rest gets easier to hide.
This is not a pep talk. It is a set of decisions, in the order you need them.
Inside the system:
- The Hidden Story: the culprit's true chronology, built first and checkable, so the investigation can move backward across it with confidence
- A full suspect pool: means, motive, and opportunity charted for six suspects, with complete templates for the ones who carry the book
- The Clue Ledger and Alibi Matrix: every clue tracked from planting to payoff, every alibi run against the true chronology, so the holes prose hides have nowhere left to hide
- A forty-chapter outline in facing spreads: each chapter's plan and scenes open flat as one spread, no page-flipping mid-thought
- The Fair-Play Gate: an eight-point check your solution must pass before you write a word of the draft
- Craft pages a general workbook can't teach: misdirection, the suspicion ladder, the false solution, the reveal, and the reckoning after it
- A running worked example: one village, one washed glass, one bought confession, threaded from the first foundation to the reveal
Built for the whole shelf
Cozy, classic whodunit, PI and hard-boiled, procedural, noir, cold case: the workbook maps how each subgenre bends the standard arc, and its tone and promise scales let you set exactly how dark, how fast, and how fair your book will be.
One book. One workbook.
Everything lives in one place: digital, 283 pages, dedicated notes pages, a glossary that assumes no prior craft vocabulary, and rescue pages for the days the book stops moving. When you finish, you will hold the complete plan of a mystery that plays fair and still wins.
For writers who'd rather decide than drift.
Also from Keepwrite: The Fantasy Novel Workbook, The Romantasy Novel Workbook, and The Romance Novel Workbook.
