The Most Powerful Tool I Used When Writing Death Casts a Spell

Welcome back to Behind the Scenes! Since the final chapter of Death Casts a Spell published yesterday, today I’m sharing the complete Scene Index for the novel.

Of all my tools, the Scene Index is probably where I park myself and work for most of the time I spend planning a novel. It looks extremely messy when I’m cobbling it together—glaring green highlights all over the place, and frantic notes-to-self in the margin, demanding follow-up on various issues. But the goal is always to give myself a clean, coherent planning document which allows me to just put my head down and write.

Before I wrote mysteries, I wrote text for the online superhero game City of Heroes. Before we would introduce a new villain group to the game, the designer in charge of it would produce a planning document—something that would outline the villain group’s backstory, powers, look, and ongoing story in the game world. This planning document served as a primary line of communication between artists, programmers, and lowly text writers like myself, ensuring that even though there were many minds at work on the project, the product wound up clear and cohesive.

But why would I need such a document—I am only one mind, after all! Or am I? I’d argue that August Jane and September Jane have, if not distinct and separate minds, at least a bit of drift that makes it hard for the latter to remember what the heck the former was thinking. Enter the Scene Index. It’s the primary line of communication between my planning self and my writing self.

I share it because this space is all about helping you write the mystery novels of your dreams—and because I have always benefitted greatly from peering under the hoods of other writers’ processes and seeing exactly what they’re monkeying around with down there. Without further ado, here she is! I hope you find her helpful.

Now that The Tangled Web Twists the Plot and Death Casts a Spell are complete, I’m going to take a two-week sabbatical to work on some publication tasks. I’ll be back on August 24 with chapters of a new installment in the Tangled Web series, The Tangled Web: Threadspinning, which will help you “spin the threads” of your series and career.

As for Kitty Callahan, she also has a new adventure on the way, called All for the Money. It still needs some editorial tweaks, so beginning on the 28th, Fridays will be reserved for other mystery writing tips—until All for the Money launches, likely sometime in September. If you have any questions you’d like me to address during those Friday articles, please hit me up in the comments!

I would also love to hear whether Behind the Scenes has been a successful experiment. Did it help you in your own mystery writing journey? Was it honestly a bit much? Were there things you wanted to hear, but didn’t? Let me know, so I can make this resource the absolute best it can be!

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