Writing Chapters
In the Lead-Up and the Investigation phases, you will take turns writing chapters. To write a chapter, you narrate the next part of the story in order to create something new to add to the journal. In the Lead-Up, you create a clue, and in the Investigation, you create an answer.
Each chapter has a focus character. In the Lead-Up, the focus character is the suspect that the killer is currently visiting. In the Investigation, the focus character is the suspect that the sleuth is adjacent to.
When writing your chapter, simply describe a situation you have in mind and explain what happens. You can write a chapter that’s as specific as a single conversation between two characters, or as far reaching as a character traveling to a new city and getting up to some sort of hijinks.
Keep chapters brief! You don’t have to come up with some complex situation or fill every single chapter with loads of details. It’s good to start with either an idea of characters you want to see interact (‘I want to show Chester and Miss Claretta together’) or a specific clue/answer you want to add to the journal (‘I want a documented instance of Gerry being lactose intolerant’) and see where it takes you.
We each have final say over our own chapters, but are of course encouraged to ask for help and suggestions, incorporating or discarding this input as we see fit.