Category Archives: Sherlock Holmes

Like some of the other Holmes quotes I’ve blogged about this one’s getting two interpretations. One for writing, one for the real world.

If you’re curious, the quote comes from the short story The Yellow Face (art at left by Sidney Paget). Holmes’ client is convinced his wife has some terrible secret, possibly an affair; it turns out she’s caring for a mixed-race daughter, having married a black man back in the U.S. Holmes reassures his client at one point that getting a definite answer will make him feel better than worrying endlessly about what’s going on.

I think it’s true in life in a lot of ways, such as getting a name put to your health problems. Or knowing for sure whether your job will survive the next round of firings; one of the things I learned writing Leaf business articles is that when management doesn’t say anything, rumors fly and people expect the worst.

In writing, it’s simple: sooner or later we have to make a decision. Working on Only the Lonely Can Slay I realized I needed more tension and pressure on my protagonist, Heather. So I decided a couple of drafts ago to have someone accuse my protagonist of murder. That didn’t work. But now I know it didn’t work and I’m trying something else. Sitting and debating which way to go just isn’t workable — we’ve got to put something down or there’s no story. Unlike real life, we can always take it back.

Of course this is a lot tougher with novels where my “that doesn’t work” sometimes comes 40,000 words in and forces me to change everything that came before. But again, it’s better than leaving the story unformed in my head forever.

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Once again it’s time for a Sherlock Holmes quote about writing (even if he didn’t know it) based on my mug from the Philospher’s Guild: “Never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive of the logical faculty.”

Holmes, of course, guessed all the time. He’d hear an account of the case and formulate a theory by the time he got to the crime scene. I’d say that counts as informed (at best) guessing. And frequently he got it wrong, as in The Yellow Face; what he guessed was a case of blackmail was actually a woman hiding her mixed-race child from her second husband.

As to writing, I think of it two ways. Only one is good advice.

The good advice applies to getting our facts right, one of the topics I panelled on at Illogicon last weekend (more on that tomorrow). If it’s important to the story, don’t guess about what the law is, how doctors treat a stroke victim, how they played chess in the 10th century (the queen was a weak piece, moving one square diagonally in all directions). Get the answers. For Southern Discomfort I had a scene in the final draft where St. Luke’s Hospital is dealing with a string of paralysis cases. I’d assumed they would treat them as a mysterious plague of strokes. My friend and MD Heather Frederick said no, they wouldn’t automatically assume that. Figuring out a more plausible response vastly improved the story.

Sometimes guessing is the only option. We don’t know much about what life was like for our earliest ancestors. We don’t know what Lincoln’s own plan for Reconstruction would have been. We can only guess what JFK would have done in a second term as president. According to one of my co-panelists, there’s no floor plan for the Bedlam asylum, so he was free to make it up (within reason).

Doyle himself was often sloppy about the Holmes canon. As he admitted later, he wrote Silver Blaze with zero knowledge of horse racing; people who did wrote to him afterwards and said most of the characters would have been banned from racing for life after what they’d done.

Now, the bad advice: when we’re drafting or plotting stories I think it’s perfectly okay to guess. I’m not sure it’s even possible to avoid it.

Unless we’re writing something based very closely on true-life incidents, we’re making it up as we go along. Even if we outline everything before we write, that doesn’t mean “Shelob captures Frodo” follows automatically from “Frodo enters Mordor.” We have to think of potential options and guess or intuit what the right one will be. Sometimes we’re wrong and have to go back and fix or rewrite or replot. Sometimes we’re spot on.

But even when it feels perfect, we can’t be sure there’s not a better option we didn’t even think of. As Henry Petroski says, engineers can never be sure their design is perfect. It’s always possible there’s a better one. Same with writing. I’m pleased with Southern Discomfort but it’s possible there were twists or scenes that would have worked better than the ones in the finished volume. I’m guessing there weren’t but I don’t know for sure. As Petroski also points out, money and time limit design options: to get anything finished, at some point we have to say “this is it,” or “this is good enough” and not worry about what might be better. And hope it is, indeed, good enough

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“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.” — Georgia O’Keefe (creator of the painting illustrated here, The White Flower).

“The little things are infinitely the most important.” — Sherlock Holmes

Any writers reading this know detail is a big part of what we do. Which ones we need to include. Which ones we have to include. Which ones we should leave out.

Detail can make or break a story. Details can bring a character to life — the scars on their back from fighting dinosaurs, their passion for playing chess by mail (yes, that used to be a thing), their freaky tattoo or being nitpicky about other people’s grammar. They can also bring settings to life: the smells, the flavors, the music. The minor details of alternate timelines, such as Leslie Howard and JFK still being alive in the film Quest for Love. Or the slightly different wording of the song “Teen Angel” in my Atoms for Peace (“That fateful night the saucers came/We were caught in their attack.”). For historical fiction or fantasy, the fine points of slang, culture, attitudes and politics can make the period vividly real.

Or take the throwaway line in Monty Python’s crunchy frog skit where a chocolatier points out the repellent ingredients in his chocs are all listed on the label — lark vomit comes “right after monosodium glutamate.” It makes the grotesque premise (there really is a small dead frog in “crunchy frog chocolate”) that much more vivid.

But as O’Keefe points out, details can also distract and confuse us. The classic example is dialogue. Real human speech is full of pauses, mumbling, distractions and repeated words (one of my friends used to use “like” in sentences as a punctuation mark). Even when quoting people as a reporter, I trimmed that stuff out.

Too much visual detail can bore or frustrate readers (it’s TYG’s biggest complaint about the Game of Thrones novels) as much as a lack of any detail. Some people love the nitty-gritty details of how magic systems work. I usually find them boring as all get-out (as long as the magic feels right and stays consistent, I’m fine with not knowing the details). Errors in factual details can make readers stop taking a book seriously. For example, a nonfiction work I read some years back that mentioned in passing that research into identical twins has proven our personality is 100 percent shaped by our genes. Um, NO.

Of course some readers or viewers will treat any inaccuracy or error as a fatal flaw that ruins the entire work. When Stage Crafters did A Glass Menagerie, we got a note from the audience that the pillows had those “do not remove this tag” tag on them even though they weren’t around at the time of the story (late 1940s). How could we make such an utterly incompetent error? Given that Tom, the protagonist, specifically states at the beginning this is a subjective story and not a literal retelling, that seems really pointless nitpicking. But for some people, the nits wreck the story.

So that’s part of the challenge. What some people see as a distracting detail, others are going to find fascinating and fundamental. There’s no perfect level of detail that works for every writer, every story, every reader.

But hey, nobody ever said our gig was easy.

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Yep, time for another of the Great Detective’s insights into writing: “It is easier to know than to explain why I know.”

Holmes’ point was that it was much easier to make a lightning-fast deduction than to break down his chain of thought for Watson or Lestrade. I’ve often had the same experience writing: at some level, my unconscious mind knows what the story needs even if I can’t explain why it’s right. Sometimes I can’t explain what it needs, only that it’s not what’s on the page.

I think the first time I had the experience was writing my second novel. I’d had a big major fight scene midway through the book, and it was decent, but then I found I couldn’t write the next scene. My gut seemed to clench up and obstruct me every time I tried. Finally I realized it was because what I’d written was wrong. Oh, it was perfectly adequate, but there was a better alternative, if I could only find it.

Eventually I did. It was a lot better. The book didn’t sell, but it was still a better novel.

I’ve had that sense of “something’s wrong” since, though not usually as strongly. And more generally I find a lot of choices and decisions I make in writing are intuitive: choice A simply feels better than choice B. My gut is a good guide.

But unlike Holmes, not a perfect guide. In writing new drafts, I spend a lot of time thinking and studying the previous draft’s structure and pacing. And after I’m satisfied that a story feels right and the logic holds up, then I go get feedback from my writer’s group or other beta readers.

For example, when I wrote The Savage Year I thought a lot about the story’s structure, giving Diana and Artemis multiple encounters with the villain. I thought about the talismans that would make logical sense for him to hunt for. But I also trusted my feelings about the story. As I was dealing with quasi-Lovecraftian horrors, I felt the sensations the magic triggers in Artemis needed to be weirder and more horrible. So I wrote at one point about how the magic made Artemis feel like rats were running around in her stomach, and trying to climb out. Other magical efforts triggered similar unpleasantness.

Then I showed it to the group and got lots of feedback. Including that the bad guy needed to come on stage sooner and that the effects of his magic weren’t creepy enough. I took those suggestions both into account. Eventually the story sold to Lorelei Signal (unfortunately the web site’s been down so long, I wonder if it will ever come back up).

I don’t know if this is true for all writers, and it doesn’t need to be. Everyone’s got their own method. As long as the story works for readers (or listeners, or viewers), it doesn’t matter whether we get it by following a formula or improvising based on intuition.

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So the Holmes mug I picked up a while ago is covered with quotes from the Great Detective. So I thought where they seemed relevant or interesting, I’d take an occasional post to discuss them. This time, it’s “mediocrity know nothing higher than itself. Talent instantly recognizes genius.”

When I was younger and doing community theater, I’d look at every role I might conceivably have been cast in and think how I’d do it. I could usually see how to do it better. Or so I thought. But sometimes I’d see a performance so good I’d realize no, I couldn’t have done it that way. Couldn’t come close. Not necessarily genius-level performance, but definitely very good. Definitely better than me.

Humbling, but this is part of the process for improving our craft. As Fred Clark points out in looking at Kirk Cameron’s career, if you can’t see that other people are better, if you can’t imagine a higher level of craft to shoot for, you can’t get there. The same applies to writing.

In a parallel to the Dunning-Kruger effect (where the less you know, the more you overestimate how much you know), mediocrity doesn’t see quality. Recognizing genius, or at least quality, is essential to talent, or even competence. If you don’t imagine “better” is possible, it’s hard to achieve. Or if you’re already convinced you’re absolutely awesome!!!!, like that one author who bragged about his amazing strong woman protagonist. Or Scott Bergstrom, who bragged about how his book The Crueltywould show all the other Y/A authors how to do it (Bergstrom’s book at least got decent reviews). Or pretty much anyone who announces their book transcends the genre.

Surprisingly I’ve had less problem with this as a writer than as an amateur actor. My parents were both into theatre so I was involved in amateur theatrics  from childhood. By contrast, I was reading for years before I decided to try writing. I already knew there were better writers than me. Like many writers, I tried copying HP Lovecraft; it’s not as easy as I imagined. Heck, it’s impossible; Lovecraft’s prose is overwrought and purple but Lovecraft could make it work. I couldn’t (I’ve had much better success with reworking Lovecraftian ideas).

Of course, we can be inspired by mediocrity too. Lots of writers have told stories of seeing something crappy in print and deciding “Well if that can get published, I should be able to do it!” I don’t think there’s a contradiction.

And comparing ourselves to the best can be crippling too. Veteran mystery writer Lawrence Block in one of his old Writer’s Digest columns wrote about authors who define “great writing” as “whatever I can’t do.” For example, the successful action author who feels inadequate because he doesn’t have sensitive, complex characters, the talented wordsmith who berates their inability to write suspense, etc., etc. I’ve had attacks of that sometimes, but I’ve learned to ignore them, focus on what I do well, and keep going. Comparing ourselves to others is bad if it cripples our self-confidence; as Samuel Johnson said, anyone who works as a writer must have the wit of a courtier, the assurance of a duke and the guts of a burglar.

A little humility doesn’t hurt though.

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