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Help with my Paranormal novel?

Hi, so I've been developing this novel idea for a while and I'm still not sure which idea to use.

It's Paranormal/crime. The main character is an eye witness to a brutal muder, and the detective is second main characters. But due to the witness's current situation, the police feel her in put into the invesitgation is worthless. After some of the witness's claims come true the Detective takes her more seriously, but when one of the victim's mother is a Crime Journalist writes in the paper how the police could have prevented the death of her daughter and all the others by catching the killer sooner and that the police are using this witness as aid, the killer begins stalking the witness.

I wanted to add a twist into the book, these are the two ideas I've come up with so far.

1) she is a psychic, who saw the murder is a 'vision', and since that the victims have been haunting her.

2) or she has some sort of memory problem, maybe a bit like amnesia. She sees something, but then forgets it completely until a few hours or days later. Then she remembers it, but it's not a clean meoery of events. They are all jumbled up, and some of the things she remebers have nothing to do with the murders. Perhaps gradually her memory improves, or its a permanent illness, I'd have to do some research.

In the end is it the Detective that solves the crimes, but using the information she provides.

Which idea sounds better to you? I'd be really grateful for outside opinions lol
 

WyrdMystic

Inkling
A mix of both could be could. Where the visions are unclear, a kind of mash up of Medium (visions of ghosts) and Perception (a mentally ill professor whose halucinations offer him cryptic clues to unlock what he already knows but hasn't realised).

Still, both ideas sound good to me!
 
I thought about that too, but I wasn't sure if putting the two ideas together would be too much. A Psychic Medium with a memory problem...just sounds a bit OTP to me. But I've been thinking about this for so long, I don't know.
 

WyrdMystic

Inkling
Best way to decide is to write and see where it goes. Inevitably the story will change the further you get in and likely your characters will evolve and decide where the story goes.
 
One point: unless the heroine (or someone else) do have a psychic gift or such, it's harder to market the book as paranormal. If you go with memory, it would be more of a thriller.

Another movie to see if you like the memory approach: Blink, with Madeleine Stowe.

Of course, I'm maybe not one to talk about thrillers being different from paranormal:
 

mpkirby

Scribe
How about the hook being that she remembers, not as a third person viewing the murder, but as the actual murderer.

Her visions could come in 3's.

She remembers an event the day before the murder, the act itself, and then a day after (perhaps guilt, satisfaction, whatever).

To further complicate, she can actually influence the events somewhat.

Her conflict is feeling the guilt of the murder's, wanting to avoid the dreams or visions. But at the same time realizing she can do something about it.

Mike
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
A possibility:

Your witness sees something that is relevant to the crime - but does not realize its relevance until later - maybe when reading the paper or gossiping with her friends.

This happened to me once, in an actual felony situation.

I used to live literally next door to a small time gunsmith. I liked him, and would drop in occasionally. I did not care for a lot of his clients: some of them might as well have had 'future convict' written across their foreheads. I came home from work one day to see one of these guys leaving the gunsmiths place (who was off in another town at the time). I didn't think much of it, he got a lot of visitors. But...a few hours later he comes home to discover he'd been robbed. I was able to identify the character I saw leaving his place from a photo lineup. That didn't lead directly to a conviction, but it did open the door to other investigations which did result in a conviction. (One of these deals where the guy is charged with six things and four of them get dropped.)

So you witness see's something weird, but does not connect it to the crime until later.
 
either coudlw rok fine, though the second dosen;t really scream paranormal so much as regular crime. unless there's more paranormal elements to this (such as the killer?)

if you want to incorporate both without mixing, perhaps give the girl the memory thing, and the detective the psychci abilties, and have himseen her as a witness in a vision?

whichever way you choose, I look forward to seeing the results
 
Wordwalker - wasn't Blink to do with Vision though, not memory?

Actually it wasn't, despite the name. It involved a cure for physical blindness (nothing psychic), with odd side effects that she couldn't quite remember what she was seeing. Tricky but fun.
 
Yeah, I had a mad time on that Movie for years, I watched it religiously lol.

Thank you all for your answers so far
x
 
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