Moe Claire is the author of the Pyke Island Mysteries in Downeast Maine published by 12 Willows Press with three titles (A Fickle Tide, Granite and Bones, Black Veil, White Rose) and a fourth (A Blind Spider) due later this year. Her non-murderous alter-writing-ego, Moe Moeller, has published award-winning short fiction and community theater plays. Recently, her short play “Remembering June” was selected for performance by the 2025 Maine Playwrights Festival and performed at Portland Stage. Her short story “The Last Stone from the House of Usher” was selected for Snakeberry: 2025 Best New England Crime Stories anthology by Crime Spell Books. Two of her short plays were selected by Lamoine Community Arts for a spring 2026 play festival. Find out more at www.moeclairemystery.com. Find Moe on Substack as “Bookish in Maine with Moe” or Instagram @moemoellerisbookish.
I was thrilled when Moe offered up her insight about the relationship between writing plays and writing mysteries.
Lessons I’m learning by writing plays
I write the Pyke Island mysteries as Moe Claire. A couple of years ago during my journey as a mystery writer, I recognized the impact live theater has had on my creative style. Before moving to Maine, I was fortunate to be able to sit in the audience at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI and many Boston area theatrical performances. It began purely as entertainment. Then much like I learned about the patterns in fiction by reading a lot of fiction, ranging from the good to the bad to the ho-hum, just by being in the audience, I began to understand how plays work.
A stage play (even a full-length one) is not a novel. It’s like a blueprint. The playwright creates the premise, the roles, the act and scene structure, the dialog and action that drive the narrative, but it’s the director who brings the story to life by casting and staging. In comparison, the novelist is both the playwright and the director. After I became involved with community theater, I could see many parallels in what I wanted to create in a novel. Really, we are all story tellers. Here are some lessons from the theater that I believe give fiction writers something to ponder.
#1: A compelling playscript is tight and spare. For one thing, the playwright has generally less than two hours to tell the story. More than novels or movies, in a stage play each scene is laser-focused on moving the story forward with the least number of characters, staging, and special effects. Why? Lack of funding! Aside from a handful of lavish productions, stage plays are performed in theaters where time and money are precious.
#2: Speaking of special effects, in a novel, words must do all the work that a stage play can do with lighting, sound and music, and spatial organization. In fiction this would be called “atmosphere”, but like a play, it’s added to where it has the greatest impact.
#3: Plays are a series of scenes strung together to tell a story. Scenes have their own beginning and ending and purpose in the plot. I know most fiction writers don’t think of it this way, but whether a short story, novel or play, we are all writing scenes.
#4: Playwrights seek to minimize set changes such as backdrops, landscapes, rooms, and furniture. Too many set changes will slow down the pace. During a set change on stage, the audience is sitting there waiting for the crew to finish their work and get back into the play’s action. There are parallels in fiction when a story takes the reader to many different locations, side actions, or subplots, and each must be adequately described (exposition) so the reader can visualize the scene. In both, the risk is that the audience loses interest, visits the concession stand, and never returns to their seat.
#5: The goal of every play is to draw the audience into the theater and keep new audiences coming. Compared to the novelist, the playwright can easily see when there’s something seriously wrong with the play. For one thing, count the empty seats! The playwright can sit in on performances to gauge audience reaction. Reader connection is much harder for the novelist, but don’t give up trying.
#6: Playwrights have been known to rewrite and test their revisions before audiences for years before they finally become successful. Theater history is filled with examples of plays being revised and evolving over time. Revision is progress not failure. It took Lin-Manuel Miranda over six years to develop Hamilton. Just don’t tell your publisher you heard that from me.
#7: The 3-act play structure—setup (25%), inciting incident with rising action (50%), and resolution (25%)—is as old as Aristotle and has been used in plays, novels, and movies with reliable success since the beginning of writing. There are lots of good books that cover this subject, and I suggest reading one on classic play structure.
#8: BUT! Form should never upstage (forgive me) the key elements of character, plot, setting, and narration. Form is a scaffold for writing not the goal of the writing.
Finally: Every rule, every precedent is made to be broken by the right author who brilliantly shatters it while holding the reader spellbound.
Keep your hands moving. And your eyes and ears wide open. – moe
