Brainstorm! Read the paper, pick up a mystery novel or think back to an interesting event you experienced. Pick something that excites you, and then brainstorm how you could make it into an interesting story. This doesn't need to be organized, just collect your thoughts and ideas in one place.
Focus your story. Start by picking out the key ingredients from your brainstorm: Who is the main character? What is this character's main action? What are the primary obstacles the main character encounters in trying to complete this action? You may want to include the answers to a couple of other questions, but you should be able to condense it all into one or two clear, direct sentences: "Mary believes that her neighbor's cat was murdered and is determined to find the culprit, but the cat's owner is strangely reluctant to help her find out who might be responsible." You may want to put this statement on a card to keep at your desk, so that as you're writing you stay focused on what's important.
Now that you have a focus, start building your story. Take elements from your brainstorm and weave them together to create a cohesive narrative that will keep your audience engaged. At this stage, you should not be writing in too much detail. Instead, try to figure out the plot points of the story. The beginning of a story outline might look like this:
- Mary wakes up and eats breakfast with her Mom.
- She grabs her bag and runs out the door for school, tripping over the dead cat on her stoop.
- She convinces her mom to let her skip first period to take the cat over to the neighbor who owns him.
Plotting out the story this way will ensure that you don't wind up spending too much time on any given section. It will also give you complete control, which is key to writing mysteries. You must control the reader's emotions by carefully timing the delivery of important information. The only way to do this is to know all the clues yourself ahead of time so you can place them to create maximum effect.
As much as possible, try to let your writing flow. Pay attention to your outline and don't get sidetracked, but also make room for spur-of-the-moment inspiration. If you have a great idea about how to make a sequence more dramatic, go for it. Keep in mind that you should always be one step ahead of the audience, keeping them informed so that they don't get confused, but not giving so much away that they know what is going to happen next.
As you are writing, you should periodically check back to see how the overall structure of your essay compares to the structure of your outline. Are you four pages into an eight-page essay but only a quarter of the way through your outline? If so, consider doing some quick editing before you move forward. You don't want to waste time on writing you know you'll have to cut.
Once you've finished your first draft, take a break. You need some distance from your writing before you can continue.
Read through your essay and break it into scenes, then take note of the critical elements in each scene (it may be helpful to write these on note cards). For example: "Morning at Mary's house -- The reader is introduced to Mary and she finds the cat." Now, as you're reading you should be paying attention to both the good parts and the bad parts, where the story is interesting and fun to read, as well as where it is boring or confusing.
Line up all your scenes in order and look at how they could be improved, both individually and in relation to one another. If a scene is boring, for example, you have three choices. It may be that the information in the scene is irrelevant or repetitive, so you can eliminate it, or the information could be important but presented in the wrong manner; in this case you need to fix it. Finally, it could just be that the scene is in the wrong place (example: Maybe it's more exciting if we meet Mary in the moment when she discovers the cat and only get introduced to her slowly over the course of the first few scenes).
Once you've figured out the best order of the scenes and which ones need to be changed, do a rewrite. This second draft should be more polished than the first, but it doesn't need to be perfect. Focus on structure more than style; you can smooth out the details later.
When you've done a rewrite or two and are happy with the product, show it to someone else. Even the best writers need editors.