Holmesian Derivations

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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What you need to know to enjoy Professor Pangaea’s Sub Rosa: A Correspondence by Wire:

a) “The Final Solution” by Sir A.C. Doyle, which turned out to not be so final. This is where Holmes kills (if you follow the “faithful” line) Moriarty in Switzerland and is thought to have died in the struggle, both of them falling to their deaths in the Reichenbach Falls.

b) “The Empty House” by Sir A.C. Doyle, where Sherlock Holmes is found to be alive and has apparently spent his hiatus of a few years doing all sorts of things across the world, sort of the ultimate holiday for someone addicted to thrill and danger, and which apparently also involved lamas, and, arguably, llamas.

c) Mycroft Holmes (”The Greek Interpreter”, “The Bruce-Partington Plans”) is Sherlock Holmes’s smarter and fatter elder brother, who occupies a clandestine and powerful role in the British government somewhere, usually equated to the “M” of modern-day MI5 and MI6.

d) Holmes prefers to communicate by telegraph. And very curtly, too.

e) Presumably you know about Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes’ biographer. Medical doctor. Once you’ve met him, you’ve met all Holmes’ friend.

And now for an oldie but goodie: Sub Rosa: A Correspondence by Wire. Image-laden, but well worth it. Think Griffin & Sabine….

You cannot play him cool and calculating and remote. It would be easier if you could pretend there was nothing there but a machine.

But you can’t.

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