A mystery or crime novel, like almost any other, is built of plot, characters, dialogue, setting, and authorial style and voice.  The mystery in such a novel—the baffling situation that requires solving, often a crime—is regarded as the basis of the plot and is usually strongly linked to the characters’ motivations.  All very true.  But the mystery itself can also rise above mere plot device and coalesce into something resembling a character, with a distinct feel, mood, and smell, a presence that begs to be solved, left alone, or brought to justice—or doesn’t beg for anything at all and instead seems to take sadistic pleasure from the misery it brings to those who presume to poke at it.  Such a distinct mystery, aside from its relationship to plot and character, can in itself impart much depth, excitement, and allure to your novel.

The spark of passion that inspires a person to write a nonfiction book is often very different from the reason someone else might buy and read it. This gulf sometimes sabotages the author's efforts to sell a nonfiction project, and bridging it can lead to publication and success.

One client came to us with a nonfiction project on the subject of healthcare. He was a highly credentialed, experienced, and articulate expert in his field with media exposure and a growing public platform. His manuscript eloquently outlined the current problems and a proposed solution, all in an engaging, entertaining manner. We helped him complete the proposal and found him an agent, but the first few acquisitions editors who saw it didn't come kicking down the agent's door for first crack at publishing it. We all had one of those forehead-slapping moments when the agent put her finger on the problem: while the ms gave a vivid picture of the overall subject, it didn't say much about what good the book could do for the individual reader. The solution was simple: the author added a couple of chapters giving readers advice on what they can do right now to improve the quality of the medical care. The proposal then quickly found a buyer and was published.

by Peter Gelfan

Fiction lives or dies by the author’s storytelling and writing skills (and perseverance and some luck). For nonfiction, then, one might assume that likewise, an interesting topic well elucidated will do the job. However, the publishing industry and readers regard nonfiction a bit differently.

Unlike nonfiction, fiction's motor doesn't run on information, but on its opposite: mystery. I’m not talking about mystery as a genre, but as the essential quality in all fiction that cultivates curiosity, stimulates the imagination, invites participation, and generally keeps readers reading. Every step of the reader's journey should be fraught with questions, not only about how the story turns out, but about character, motive, backstory, and—perhaps most importantly—what he or she would do in the hero's or villain's shoes.All of which runs smack into the chronic bugbear of many writers, both beginners and veterans—exposition. To tell or not to tell, how much, and when? The best solutions seem counterintuitive to those of us who learned in school to thoroughly introduce our subject and subtopics, then construct sentences, paragraphs and whole pieces as an unbroken chain of logic-joined facts. Fiction, like life, is driven more by questions than by answers. People, whether real or fictional, fascinate us not because we know all about them but because we'd like to, and situations engage our intellects and tear at our hearts because of their uncertainties.

Often we like to imagine the (probably imaginary) good old days when editors searched for traces of gold in the rough ore of a first draft and worked with the writer to refine it. Recently, an editor at a major publisher offered a less romantic glimpse of the process. With dozens of submissions to read and all the nonliterary pressures of the job, most editors and even agents read a manuscript only until they hit the first opportunity to say no. While no doubt many gatekeepers will give you a second or third chance, why hand them even one reason to doubt your brilliance, especially near the beginning?