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The Power of Little Mysteries

May 09, 2025
tHE POWER OF LITTLE MYSTERIES:
How to Keep Readers Turning Pages

— a podcast episode —

How do you keep readers engaged in a novel without constant action or plot twists?
One of the most effective ways to keep readers engaged is by incorporating “little mysteries,” unanswered questions or withheld information that prompt curiosity. These can be as simple as a character avoiding a topic, a strange behavior with no explanation, or a subtle line of foreshadowing. When done well, they create narrative tension and encourage readers to keep turning the pages to uncover the truth.

Helping writers craft authentic, immersive stories.
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Inside Creative Writing

Table Of Contents Formatted and Edited Transcript Talk to Us! Share This Resource

Why do some stories feel impossible to put down? It’s not always explosions, plot twists, or dramatic scenes. Sometimes, it’s something quieter and more powerful: little mysteries. In this episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, we dive deep into how subtle, unanswered questions can create narrative tension that keeps readers engaged through every chapter. Whether you’re writing a thriller, romance, memoir, or sci-fi epic, understanding how to plant and resolve these small mysteries can transform your pacing and reader connection.

You’ll learn:

  • Why mystery doesn’t have to mean murder
  • How “withholding information” creates forward momentum
  • Five specific techniques for embedding little mysteries in your story
  • Mistakes to avoid when using mystery as a narrative tool
  • How different genres, from memoir to fantasy, use mystery to engage
  • What beta readers can reveal about your use of mystery
  • How ambiguity can help readers take ownership of your story

Want more insight on crafting page-turning stories? Check out the How to Write a Novel guide or listen to Episode 42: Plot Your Novel with Index Cards for practical structuring tools.

Formatted and Edited Transcript

Episode 45. What is it that keeps you turning pages in a book, makes you stay up all night until you finish it? Today we’re talking about little mysteries.

Let’s dive in.

Welcome back fellow writers. I hope your writing is going well this week. Today’s episode is about something that quietly powers almost every great story, regardless of genre. It’s not dialogue, it’s not description. It’s what we’re going to call little mysteries. Now we’ve hinted at this before in other episodes, but I really wanted to take a full episode and dive into it deeply because it’s so important and powerful.

What Are Little Mysteries?

So, little mysteries. I’m not talking about detective stories and dead bodies and who done it, although those are certainly fun too. I mean the kind of mystery that makes readers lean forward, flip the page, and kind of whisper, wait, what just happened, or oh, what’s going to happen?

So let’s get into that.

When we hear the word mystery, we tend to think of crime novels, right? Agatha Christie. Sherlock Holmes. That kind of stuff. Those stories are built around a central question. Who did it, right? One big mystery. And it’s great for your book to have one big mystery, one big question that drives people to the end of the book.

Like my book Crossing Cascadia. The big question is, did her family survive this earthquake? Right? So that’s the question. That’s the through line that drives the entire book to the end. Did her family survive? Is she going to make it back to them? And will she survive?

Great storytelling almost always relies on that kind of mystery, even when there’s no detective in sight. So think of it more broadly. Mystery is simply what the reader or the viewer—if you’re writing a screenplay or something like that—what they don’t know yet and what they’re desperate to figure out, or even just interested to figure out.

Let’s take an example from what is possibly the greatest TV series ever made. Breaking Bad. You can argue with me in the comments if you want to recommend some other shows that might compete. But holy cow. Breaking Bad did a masterful job of writing.

So let’s look at that opening scene and the way it works with mystery. If you’ve seen it, you probably remember it vividly. It comes straight back into your mind, right? That pair of khaki pants fluttering through the air, an RV crashing through the desert, a man in tighty whities and a gas mask just driving frantically, panicked.

And there’s chaos. There’s sirens. There’s those bodies sliding around inside of the RV. And then he pulls out a camcorder and starts recording a message to his family.

At this point, we know almost nothing. We’ve just seen something crazy that doesn’t make any sense, but we are hooked by that point because we have so many questions. There’s so many mysteries happening there. Why is this dude half naked in the desert? Who are the dead people in the back of the RV sliding around? Why is he wearing a gas mask? What went wrong? Is he going to die? What happened?

So that’s mystery. And it’s not about murder or solving a crime. It’s about questions we have to get answers to. And the beauty is, those answers don’t have to come right away. In that example, they don’t, because the show then jumps backwards to this ordinary life of a high school chemistry teacher.

But because we’ve seen where he ends up, every detail now carries tension. Every step he takes toward that moment has weight. We have these questions in the back of our mind. How does he get from this to that? And we’re watching. We are engaged, looking for those clues, for how he got there.

So that’s the kind of mystery that keeps readers and viewers locked in across every genre.

How to Build Little Mysteries in Any Genre

Now, those are examples of crazy big mysteries, right? Even though they’re little to the entire plot, they still feel pretty big because they really call attention to themselves. But we can do the same work with little mysteries. So let’s break this down. How do you build a mystery even if you’re writing a memoir? Romance? A quiet literary novel?

Here are a few techniques that show up across genre.

Withholding Information

You don’t need to tell the reader everything up front. In fact, it’s often better if you don’t. Let them wonder why a character avoids a certain topic. Let them hear the lie but not know why it was told. Don’t feel like you have to explain everything. This is such a temptation, especially for newer writers, and especially when we’re just beginning a book and there’s so much explaining to do to set up the world and the characters. Hold off on that. Let some of that be those little mysteries that unfold as the story moves forward.

Foreshadowing

Drop a line in early that makes a promise. He never should have opened the door. OK, but don’t tell us why. The reader knows something’s coming, and that tension is gold. This is often done with a gun or a weapon. We just notice it in the scene or it’s mentioned, but there’s something about a weapon, especially a gun, that resonates. It becomes a mystery. When is this weapon going to come back again?

Misdirection

Let the reader make an assumption, then later reveal the truth. Now this happens a lot in thrillers, but it’s not just for thrillers. Even in a love story. Maybe the person they thought was the safe choice turns out they’re not. That twist hits harder because of what you let them believe. So that’s not necessarily a mystery you’re setting up beforehand, but it’s a mystery you reveal has been going on the entire time.

Secrets Between Characters

When one character knows something the other doesn’t, you’ve got that dramatic tension. How long until the other character figures it out? How long until they unravel that mystery? It becomes your mystery to watch them unravel their own mystery.

And what about if the reader knows something neither character does? Even better. That can be really hard to do in some perspectives. If you’re writing in a first-person perspective, it’s hard to reveal a secret that the reader knows but the character doesn’t. But when you do have the opportunity to do that, it can be really powerful. Now suddenly the reader is the one holding the mystery. They’re the ones with the secret. What’s being driven forward is how and when the character will realize it.

Ambiguity

Sometimes you don’t explain everything. Just let the reader fill in the blanks or sit with the discomfort of not knowing. This can be really hard to do for writers. It’s really hard for me because I feel like maybe I’m not giving my readers something they need to know. But here’s the beauty of this mystery. A reader is going to fill that in. You can get them helping you to write the book, helping you create the book for their own world, their own experience, their own perspective, when you let them fill in some of those blanks and take ownership of some of your story.

When Mystery Backfires

Not all mystery works. Sometimes things backfire, sometimes it falls flat. It can even frustrate the reader if we don’t put these little mysteries in there correctly or do it effectively.

Waiting Too Long to Reveal

If you tease a mystery but make the reader wait too long for answers, they can stop caring. Or they get frustrated with you. Curiosity turns into fatigue. You can almost think of it like a rubber band. You can stretch it and stretch it, but only so far before it snaps and hits you in the fingers.

If you’ve hinted at something big for 200 pages and it still hasn’t paid off, you’re really risking losing the reader’s trust.

Mysteries That Don’t Matter

Probably the worst one—when the mystery does get resolved, but the answer feels kind of pointless or mean. You’ve probably seen this happen in poorly written TV shows. The showrunners clearly had no idea what the answer was when they wrote the question, so the payoff feels hollow or disconnected.

Let me give you an example. Probably the most famous one: Game of Thrones. This show was one of the most talked-about shows, one of the most watched. And so much of that was created by these mysteries. Remember when Jon Snow is brought back from the dead? An amazing, huge moment. It created this huge mystery. Why him? What was the deeper purpose? What role is he going to play in defeating this darkness?

And then… that kind of just fizzled out. He didn’t fulfill any grand prophecy. He wasn’t key to saving Westeros. He was just kind of there again. His resurrection barely seemed to matter at all.

That kind of unresolved or irrelevant mystery makes viewers and readers feel cheated. They’ve now lost trust in you. They are investing a lot of time into reading your book, and we need to take that really seriously. Honor those readers by paying off the mysteries that you give them.

Don’t just ask questions. Don’t just create mysteries for the sake of mysteries. Make sure the answers are worth it. Make them meaningful. Even if they’re subtle, they should land with emotional or narrative weight. Otherwise, it’s just kind of noise.

But answering small mysteries fairly quickly builds trust. The reader sees that you don’t forget your own questions, and they feel confident that the bigger mysteries will pay off too. Those early answers create momentum. They say to your reader, you’re in good hands here. Keep going.

Little Mysteries by Genre

Let’s look at how mystery works outside of the crime section.

Sci-Fi

In Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, the main character wakes up alone in space with no memory. It’s a science story, sure, but it’s really a mystery story. What is he doing there? What happened to the other people?

Romance

Mystery often comes in the form of emotional secrets. What are love interests hiding? What pain are they not ready to share?

Memoir

Memoir thrives on delayed revelation. The narrator knows the outcome. The reader doesn’t. The mystery is how things happened, not just what happened.

Like Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. The book tells you early that Christopher McCandless dies. The mystery becomes how. And that carries the entire story.

Literary Fiction

Toni Morrison. Celeste Ng. Kazuo Ishiguro. These authors don’t technically write mysteries, but every page contains a question that drives the story forward.

Balancing Mystery and Clarity

One of the most challenging parts of using mystery well is figuring out the line between giving too much information and giving too little. It’s something I deal with all the time when I’m writing. And I know that many of you do too, because you’ve written me about it over the years.

How much should the reader figure out for themselves? How much do you need to explain?

If you overdo it, you risk spoon-feeding every detail and robbing the story of its energy. But if you hold back too much, readers might feel lost or disconnected.

My go-to mantra here is: when in doubt, leave it out.

It sounds simple, sounds helpful, but it’s a struggle. Because we don’t want our readers lost, but we still want them engaged. Try to remember—and I’m mostly talking to myself here—readers love to chew on a mystery. They love to make guesses. They love to be proven right, and they love to be proven wrong.

I’ve seen this firsthand with my high school students. One of the things I love to do when we’re reading a story together or even when they’re reading their own books is pause and have them make predictions. Predict what’s going to happen in the book you’re reading. And when I get them doing that, they get locked into the book. Because now they’re invested.

They’re waiting to see if they’re right or wrong. And that jolt of excitement they get from seeing their predictions come true—or shattered—is one of the most powerful tools we have to keep readers engaged.

So as writers, let’s make it really easy for our readers to play along. Give them questions to chase. Little ones. Big ones. Ones that get answered quickly. Ones that take the whole book. Moments to wonder about. Little gaps that beg to be filled in. Let your readers do that work.

This is especially true at the beginning of a story, where we’re tempted to dump all the exposition, all the worldbuilding, all the character history. We want our readers to know everything about this amazing world and these amazing characters. But we’ve got to back off.

It’s OK to drop a reader into a world they don’t fully understand yet. Maybe they don’t understand it at all. It’s still better to drop them in than to explain everything right at the start.

That confusion—when it’s intentional and carefully managed—fuels engagement like nothing else. It gives your readers the joy of discovering your world rather than being handed all the answers.

Use Your Beta Readers

Beta readers are so important in this aspect. It’s one of the main things I ask beta readers when they’re reading my work—about those little mysteries.

Where in the book did you get frustrated?
Where did you feel left out or lost?

And also the flip side:
Where were you dying to read the next chapter?
Where did a little mystery keep you up later than you meant to be reading?

Where did not knowing something make you more invested?

We as writers know all the answers, so we can’t read our work and know when the mysteries are working. Beta readers are gold for this. If we’re not talking to them about those little mysteries, we’re missing a huge opportunity to improve our work.

So the sweet spot we’re looking for is not perfect clarity, and not total confusion. Just enough mystery to spark curiosity, and just enough clarity to keep them grounded and trusting you.

Prime Places to Add Mystery

Let’s look at some areas of your story that are especially great for creating mystery.

A Character’s Past

One of the richest sources of mystery is a character’s past. What are they not saying? Why do they react so strongly to a certain place, a certain word, a certain person?

Maybe they change the subject when asked about their childhood. Maybe they contradict something they said earlier. These little discrepancies invite the reader to lean in and start making guesses. Predicting. Getting invested.

Some of the most memorable stories build character arcs around mysteries. What happened to them? What are they hiding? What don’t they know about themselves?

This connects directly to the “Somebody Needed But So” technique we’ve talked about in previous episodes. If you missed that, check the show notes for a link.

Setting and Worldbuilding

Another opportunity for mystery is through the setting. Dropping a reader into a world with unfamiliar rules or customs or maybe a magic system—without explaining everything—creates tension and curiosity.

Think about The Hunger Games. We don’t really understand the political structure or the purpose of the games right away. But we figure it out as we go. That becomes a mystery that pulls us forward.

Or in Station Eleven, where we’re given pieces of the past and present in a way that encourages us to start connecting them ourselves.

Readers don’t need to be told every rule up front. That active discovery can be just as satisfying as the story itself.

A Few More Examples

To Kill a Mockingbird. Boo Radley is mysterious. Mentioned throughout the book, but we don’t really know who he is. That mystery creates this sense of myth and fear that drives us forward.

Big Little Lies. The story starts with a crime, but they don’t tell us who did it. Or even exactly what happened until the very end. That mystery is the spine of the whole narrative.

The Night Circus. The rules of the magic system are never really fully explained. It creates this ethereal atmosphere where the unknown is part of the appeal.

These stories trust the reader to engage without giving them every answer. It’s tough to do, but so powerful when it works.

Wise Words

Writers have been talking about this for a long time. Here’s one from Billy Wilder:

“Don’t give the audience 4. Give them 2 + 2.”

That’s the heart of little mysteries. Don’t explain it all. Give the hints, the clues, and let the reader put it together. Then it becomes their story.

And from Rachel Cusk:

“The job of the novelist is not to supply answers, but to ask the right questions.”

That’s it. Ask the right questions. Let readers assemble meaning on their own.

This Week’s Writing Challenge

Take a scene you’ve already written. You can draft a new one if you want, but I think it’s more powerful to go back to something you’ve already written and look at it in a new way.

Add one layer of mystery. Maybe a secret. Maybe a strange behavior that isn’t explained. A line of dialogue that hints at something deeper. Or maybe you take something out. Maybe something you told the reader that you could hold back and let it become a mystery.

See what it does to your pacing. See what it does to the energy of that scene. And see how it might spark the reader’s curiosity to drive them forward.

Wrap-Up

That’s going to wrap it up for this episode of Inside Creative Writing.

If you want to go deeper on this topic, check out the past episodes. Like I said, this is not a new topic for the show, but I wanted to go a bit deeper in this one.

And I’d love to hear from you. You can leave comments about this episode at the bottom of this page. I check those all the time and respond to them.

Let me know what you liked, what you didn’t, what you agreed with or didn’t agree with. Maybe share a book that hooked you with little mysteries. What’s that example I need to read?

Until next time, keep writing. Because we know the best way to improve as a writer is by writing.

I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for being here.

Talk to Us!

We’d love to hear from you! If you have a question, a comment, a suggestion, or just want to tell us about your work-in-progress, give us a shout!
info@insidecreativewriting.com

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