How to Write a Murder Mystery Tape
- 1). Pick a location. An English manor is the most common place for a murder mystery, so come up with something else, such as a summer camp, an acting school or a luxury apartment complex.
- 2). Draft a list of characters. For example, if your murder mystery takes place during a Mount Everest expedition, you might have a grizzly mountaineering guide, one or two athletic climbers, a few inexperienced climbers and perhaps a good-looking photographer to make things interesting.
- 3). Develop your characters and their back stories. Write a one-page biography of each character. Choose your murderer and spend a lot of time blossoming his character. Determine his motive for killing and his victim. Write several pages about his childhood and adulthood and describe his appearance in detail.
- 4). Create a protagonist. This is the person who will solve the murder and essentially "save the day." Write at least a page of his back story. The protagonist's character can be a huge contrast to the villain or strikingly similar so that when your characters discover the murderer, it comes as a surprise.
- 5). Outline the major plot points. For example, the murder shouldn't happen immediately. Wait until about a third of the way into the script. Prior to that, outline interesting events that help develop the characters and get the audience interested in the story in general. By the time the murder happens, the audience should be so engrossed in the story that the murder comes as a complete surprise.
- 6). Invent a way for the protagonist to solve the murder. You can come up with a twist for the ending or have the hero use his intellect to follow a series of clues.
- 7). Write the murder mystery, starting with each plot point. Because this will be a tape, presumably to be played on the radio, the majority of what you write will be the dialogue of each character with possible interjections from a narrator. Picture how you want the story to unfold and write it through your characters' eyes and voices.
- 8). Reread the script after it's finished. Put it away for a day and then reread it again with a fresher perspective. Fix any weak points or underdeveloped areas by providing new details. Your murder mystery is ready for actors to record it onto a tape.
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