You Don’t Have to be an Expert to Write a Mystery by Jacqueline Green

Common wisdom encourages writers to “write what you know.” My sister, the romance writer, adds: “Write what you want to read.”

I’d say a successful author does both. I enjoy reading cozy mysteries, in which the protagonist is an amateur sleuth who has a business or hobby that is important to the story. I’ve read all kinds of cozies, including those about quilting, music, herbs, booksellers and even paranormal. I particularly enjoy cozies with a yoga theme but have found only a few series. In keeping with my sister’s suggestion, I decided to write what I wanted to read. In keeping with common wisdom, I wanted to write what I knew.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. First, I worried that I wasn’t a yoga “expert.”  When I started writing Book 1, I had been teaching yoga less than a year. Surely, I needed more experience to be able to write a mystery about yoga, right? I was nervous that hard-core yoginis would take issue with the poses or cues I had selected. I envisioned angry emails from readers, saying I was a hack who didn’t know the proper way to move into Goddess pose.  

 I pressed on anyway, and this is what I discovered: You don’t have to be an expert.

 The way I see it, mystery stories, particularly cozies, are entertainment and escapism. No one (I hope) expects to learn everything there is to know about the topic from my cozy mystery. My readers don’t want a tome about which muscles flex during Plank or which ones abduct during Goddess pose. They want a good story with a little yoga woven into the fabric.

Secondly, I learned not to overwhelm my readers with information about the theme. A nonfiction editor once told me that if a reader gleaned one gem from an article, then the article was a success. I’ve taken that philosophy into my cozy mystery books. If readers enjoy the story and pick up a bit of yoga theory or history or even a pose that they didn’t know before, then that’s good enough. As a reader, I like to learn a little bit about the theme. For instance, in a coffee cozy, I was glad to learn coffee beans don’t belong in the freezer. I was also glad not to learn the inner workings of an espresso machine.

In my series, I didn’t want to include too much yoga, or people who weren’t deep into yoga wouldn’t be interested in it. On the other hand, I wanted to include enough to add to the theme and setting.

Finally, I learned that if you’re not an expert, you need to do your research. Don’t skimp and don’t spread misinformation. Even though I was a certified 200-hour yoga instructor with several years as a yoga practitioner, I researched cueing in yoga poses as well as yoga philosophy, among other things.

Writing a mystery that involves a hobby or business requires striking a balance between story and theme. How do you strike that balance in your mystery novel?

Jacqueline M. Green is a certified yoga teacher and the author of The Yoga Mat Cozy Mystery Series, which includes Corpse Pose, Indeed. A former newspaper editor and writer, she teaches second grade by day and yoga in the evening. She lives with her teenager, two cats and two dogs in Reno, Nev.