Breadcrumbs & Red Herrings?

A mystery narrative is seeded with breadcrumbs—AKA legitimate clues—and Red Herrings—AKA distractions. I’m having a lot of fun giving my narrator/principal character free reign in creating both of these important threads in the storyline of my latest fiction. I’m employing her habit of going down rabbit holes at the slightest provocation. In this aspect, she’s a lot like me. I do a lot of meandering down unpredictable paths in real life and on the Internet, too. I think we all do the Internet rabbit holes right now. It’s a wonderful “time killer” and it can be “educational” in the broadest interpretation of that word.

            All storytellers use their own life as a starting point. But she is NOT me. She’s younger, more adventurous than I was at her age, prettier, and even a bit taller—but that’s not hard, everyone seems to be taller than me. I’m a starting point and she is a direction I did not go, but could have gone, and that’s a great deal of fun to write.

            Imagining myself as another person is half the fun of a first-person narrator. Her voice reflects my concerns, but not my life experience. It’s a juggling act and I’m playing games with the information seeded throughout the story that she will understand, interpret, act on, ignore or confuse, as the story goes along.

            As she is NOT me, she doesn’t know where the story will end, but… I’m not entirely her, so I’m not completely sure how she’ll react to the end of the story and that’s making me laugh as I write.

            As for the breadcrumbs and red herrings—together they sound like LUNCH!

This was a recent dinner out with my Kindle for company. No breadcrumbs but food & fiction are fun together.