Another framing to disguise (or distract readers from) clues is using melodrama. The editors’ blog Edittorrent defines melodrama succinctly: “If the emotion is bigger than the situation warrants, it’s melodramatic.” Melodrama, by definition, is characterized by “exaggerated emotions, stereotypical characters, and interpersonal conflicts.”

Generally, we think of melodrama as something bad, but it’s not as evil as it sounds. Sometimes melodrama is useful in a story. Author and former editor Deborah Halverson wrote a post on the Query Tracker blog about one of the good uses of melodrama: young adult fiction.

But that’s not the only good use for melodrama. In the same post on Edittorent, editor Theresa Stevens gives us a great example of how this oft-maligned tool can also help us bury clues:

For example, in mysteries, we often try to hide clues in plain sight by mentioning them in small ways, and then surrounding them with bigger things. “Hey, look, there’s a bullet hole in this wall. AND OMG SOMETHING JUST EXPLODED AND BLEW ME OUT OF MY BOOTS.” The explosion might make good plot (in context), but the bullet hole is the detail we’re trying to sneak into plain sight.

Naturally, as we’re doing this, we have to be careful. For an experienced reader, the placement of a clue right before a melodramatic distracting event might be too coincidental—an experienced reader knows to look in plain sight 😉 . Even experienced readers, however, can be distracted by continued (melo)drama: keeping the pace going after the explosion in the above example, instead of a lull so the reader’s thoughts might return to the bullet hole. And hey, it wouldn’t hurt to destroy the wall that had the bullet hole in it, right?

What do you think? How do you use melodrama to misdirect your readers? Can you be distracted by melodrama?

Photo by Loren Javier