September 22 2025
Energy is crucial to the success of storytelling. In this piece, best-selling crime writer John Dean offers some thought on how he, and other, authors inject much-needed energy into their stories
There’s an old half-serious/half-jokey crime writers’ adage that, if your novel starts to lose momentum, it’s time to murder another victim.
Of course, it’s not that simple, although a murder would certainly do the job but not if you overdo it and the landscape is littered with them. A murder is a powerful crime writers’ tool but it is easy to overdo it.
What lies behind the adage is one of the most important elements of crime writing, indeed all writing, namely to constantly inject energy into the story – and that does not come just from big drama-filled moments
So how do you achieve it if you are an author? Well, energy does not need to be dramatic, as this list shows. Yes, an incident such as a murder/crime/police raid will do the job but so will:
A revelation, a piece of information that opens up a new avenue in the plot
Well-written dialogue – characters speaking is an excellent way of injecting energy, including a good old-fashioned argument and humorous banter
Back story – something from a characters’ past can inject new energy into the story’s present
A brilliant flash of description which brings a character’s surroundings to life
Dramatic weather/atmospheric conditions, everything from torrential rain and swirling snow to the first light and dawn
A spooky experience such as a mysterious figure glimpsed in the shadows
A noise in the middle of the night, such as the trying of a door handle, the ringing of a telephone, the scraping sound of a shoe
A line that hints at events happening elsewhere that, although unseen, will have a dramatic effect on the main character, eg a scene that switches between characters doing something mundane and the approach of the person who intends to kill them -and back again.
John Dean - Crime Writer 