The Wall Street Journal had a great article a few weeks back: “How to Write a Great Novel”, reflections by novelists on how they approach writing. Since the article is subscription only, I’ve been featuring one writer per day here, highlighting their process with a key excerpt from the article – and today is the last one!

Today’s writer is Laura Lippman whose detective fiction includes “Charm City” and “Butcher’s Hill.”

Mystery writer Laura Lippman, who writes a popular series featuring detective Tess Monaghan, creates elaborate, color-coded plot charts, using index cards, sketchbook pages, colored ribbon and magic markers.

She first used the technique on her ninth book, “By A Spider’s Thread,” which had two lines of action. She assigned a color to each point of view and made a chart with alternating blocks of color. For her novel “To The Power of Three,” which had seven different points of view, she bought seven different colors of ribbon and assigned a color to each character. Then she created a grid and strung colored ribbon representing each character between chapters where that character appeared, creating an intricate colored lattice.

I would guess that of all genres, detective fiction – with its labyrinthine plots – would benefit from something as visual as this type of approach to story structure.

BTW, Lippman is married to David Simon, former Baltimore Sun journalist, author of the non-fiction book “Homicide: Life on the Streets” and creator of “The Wire” on HBO.