Bianca Marias is an author and cohost of the popular podcast “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing”, which is aimed at helping emerging writers query agents and discover more about the publishing industry. She teaches creative writing through the podcast and was named a winner of the Excellence in Teaching Award for Creative Writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She lives in Toronto, where she loves playing escape-room games and writing about strong female protagonists.

What I wanted most as a child was to live inside my favorite books. It wasn’t enough to just read the stories and bring them to life in my imagination, I wanted to burrow into the pages, have them absorb me like ink, so I could become those characters and fully inhabit those worlds. That’s probably why I decided to become a writer when I was just seven years old. I sensed then already that a pencil whispering against a blank page was the kind of alchemy that could blast open a magical doorway between those worlds.

I haven’t entirely given up on that dream which is evident by how battle-worn all my favorite novels are. Their pages are bent and slipping loose from their binding. They’re stained with whatever snack I was eating at the time, and are anointed with coffee and wine, rain and tears. Their spines are cracked, and the passages within are either highlighted or underlined, sometimes both thanks to multiple re-readings.

Readers who keep their books in pristine condition always wince upon spotting these poor tomes upon my shelves. But there are other readers out there like me. I know because they’ve handed over similarly battered copies at my author signings, apologizing profusely for the state of my book babies when no apologies are necessary. I can’t think of a better compliment as an author than seeing one of my books having been so thoroughly lived in.

I conceived of A Most Puzzling Murder at a time when I was particularly frustrated by how much mindless doomscrolling I was doing on social media. And judging by those seated around me on park benches and on the subway, I wasn’t alone. We were all swiping through reel after reel, never quite alighting on anything for longer than a few seconds. We gazed at our screens slack jawed, swallowing whatever our devices were spoon-feeding us despite not having much of an appetite for any of it.

I wondered if I could achieve the opposite of that but in book form, to create the kind of story that would grab the reader by the lapels and pull them headfirst into the pages. I wanted them to be marking up the pages while rifling back and forth to find clues they might have missed along the way. I wanted their synapses firing as their critical thinking skills went into overdrive, but in a way that was fun and entertaining, so it wouldn’t feel like doing homework.

Instead of just having the reader observing my main character, Destiny Whip, as she interacts with the toxic Scruffmores—a magical royal family whose members are all vying for dominance—I wanted them to step into the story and solve the mystery alongside her.

I came at that goal from various angles:

  • The first was to braid puzzles and riddles throughout the story, each requiring different skill sets to solve so they would be challenging, but not so difficult as to be off-putting. They also had to move the story along rather than halt its momentum, meaning that solving them had to reveal information that was essential to the plot. It became a delicate balancing act, much like writing the reveals themselves. I had to keep calibrating in terms of the pacing, asking myself if a puzzle at that moment would advance the story or just take the reader completely out of it.
  • The puzzles created an opportunity for a different level of engagement with the story – that of interacting with the main character herself! I got the idea when a friend who was reading the manuscript struggled with a particular puzzle and texted me for help. He was grateful for the hints but pointed out that the reader wouldn’t have access to me for the same. Which got me thinking how I could make that kind of resource available to them. The answer was emails! The reader could email the main character for clues, and she could respond! It required some finessing in terms of setting up automatic replies and filters on Gmail, but it added an interactive element to the story that would have delighted me as a child.
  • I used to love “Choose Your Own Adventure” books and wondered how I might use similar elements in my novel. I’m fascinated by philosophical thought experiments, and how what appears to be the obvious course of action for one person is aberrant to another. I started to write Solve Your Own Conundrum chapters to challenge my readers with these kinds of philosophical quandaries, but quickly realized these chapters could become useful in other ways. While novels require a certain degree of backstory and context, flashbacks and exposition can be tedious. Embedding them in these chapters made them interactive and interesting while also altering the reader’s experience of the story depending on which options they choose.

This was an incredibly difficult book to write, especially for a pantser who can’t plot to save her life. It was technically challenging but so rewarding to play around with traditional craft and structure conventions, especially after spending so many years trying to master them. Breaking the rules and thinking outside the box delighted me. It also reminded me of how joyous and wondrous storytelling can be.

I hope my readers curl up in the pages and live inside them. I also hope they find a friend in Destiny who’s like a faithful pen pal for the modern age.

A Most Puzzling Murder by Bianca Marais

When Destiny is invited to Eerie Island to interview for a job she never applied for, she knows something else is going on. After decoding a strange message from the Scruffmore family, she heads to their castle where she will learn more about the family that orphaned her so many years ago. But the Scruffmores are hiding something, and it is up to Destiny and the reader to find out before it is too late.

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