Tana French has never hidden how strange her process looks from the outside. She starts a novel without knowing who committed the crime, then writes toward the answer instead of planning it first.
No Outline, No Idea Whodunit
French has said plainly that she doesn't plan her mysteries in advance. 'I don't outline at all, actually,' she told Goodreads interviewer Glenn McDonald in 2018, around the release of The Witch Elm. 'In fact, I can't really figure out what's going on myself until I've been writing the characters for a while.' She's added that she doesn't know who committed the murder until she's spent enough time inside her characters to understand who among them might actually kill someone, and why.
I write my way along until I have a revelation about what must have happened. Then I have to go back and bloody rewrite it all.
Tana French, Goodreads interview, 2018
She's given that method a name: reverse retrospective outlining. Instead of solving the mystery first and writing toward a known ending, she discovers the solution mid-draft, then goes back through what she's already written to plant the clues that make the ending feel inevitable. A 2024 Irish Times interview has her making the same admission in plainer terms: she said she envies 'writers who have every chapter plotted out beat for beat before they start the book,' because they have a certainty about the shape of the story she says she's never had.
The tradeoff is more rewriting than a plotted approach would need. French has said as much herself, describing the method as one with real disadvantages, chiefly the sheer amount of redrafting it demands, but she's also said the twists that come out of it feel startling and revelatory to her as she writes them, and that she hopes some of that surprise survives on the page for the reader too.
Character Comes Before Plot
French traces this backwards approach to her years as a trained stage actor at Trinity College Dublin, where she worked professionally for roughly a decade before her first novel was published. 'I come from an acting background, so for me, it's all about character: plot comes out of character, not the other way around,' she told CrimeReads in 2018. An actor has to build a complete person from the inside before a scene makes sense, and French treats a narrator the same way, working out what a character wants and fears until the murder becomes the logical consequence of who that person already is.
It's also why the Dublin Murder Squad novels rotate narrators instead of following one recurring detective. Each book hands the story to a different member of the squad, someone who was a supporting character in an earlier installment, because French is chasing a different psychological question each time and needs a narrator whose specific history makes that question answerable. A returning hero would make the discovery-drafting approach harder to sustain book after book. A fresh narrator gives her a fresh person to build from the inside out.
Read the full Tana French writing routine for more on how her acting background and Dublin setting shape the books.
What You Can Steal
- Let the story reveal itself. If plotting in advance kills your momentum, try writing scenes to find out what a character would actually do before deciding what happens next.
- Build the person before the puzzle. Work out what your character wants and what they're hiding from themselves first. Let the plot follow from there.
- Budget real time for a second pass. Discovery drafting means genuine rewriting, not just polishing. Plan for it instead of treating it as failure.
- Use genre structure as scaffolding, not a cage. French leans on the built-in shape of a mystery, a crime, an investigation, a resolution, then writes freely inside it.