Holmesian Derivations

Previously we looked at how Doyle revealed character depth in the flow of the story, rather than breaking flow to drop in character information.

Today, we’ll look at Doyle’s skills at description, atmosphere, and suspense as we lead into that part of any story, so maddening to many a writer: the middle.

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Last time, we looked at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s techniques of:

• the information dump as extended inner story; and
• pacing between inner and outer story.

Today, we’re going to look at Doyle’s adeptness at revealing character depth through multiple narrative means.

Let us type.

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Last time, we looked at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s techniques of:

• opening the story;
• non-direct dialog;
• laser-focused description;
• establishment of character.

Today we’re going to look at how Doyle attacks one of the most difficult methods for any fiction writer: the information dump.

Let us type.
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Photography: k4chii

When I first started writing fiction again in the middle of 2007, after a hiatus of over a decade, I realized that I had lost the cadence and flow of writing a story. Story writing is inherently an entirely different process from that of non-fiction. As a result, I had a tendency to stall, and stall badly.

The damage was spectacularly bad on a couple of short mystery stories I wrote. I was filled with sadness and despair, but I kept going ’cause I’m like that.

One day, I stumbled across the thread of a wise writer, by the name of James D. McDonald, over at AbsoluteWrite called Learn Writing with Uncle Jim. Continue Reading »

I started writing fiction again because I wanted to save Sherlock Holmes.

It turned out that he was the one who saved me.

For the better part of a decade, I stopped writing fiction. I had never really wrote it to begin with anyways; just a couple of stories. Since then I wrote non-fiction for hobbies and technical specifications for work, and that was about it.

Then one day, I came across in my local video store the Granada adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories, with Jeremy Brett. I smiled, because I remembered watching a couple episodes of the show back in my childhood, when escapes were hard to come by. I rented some of the DVDs.

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