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Mysteries and Deductive Reasoning
Apr. 26th, 2016 11:00 pmSo, looks like I'm currently writing a murder mystery. Sort of. And it's an interesting beast. I tend to have small casts of multi-dimensional, living and breathing characters, but for this I need to be able to sketch a large cast of flatter characters. I know why the murderer is doing it, and I know why the victim draws their attention. The victim is also a suspect, and I have at least three more characters. Maybe one more red herring character. Which means at least five or six disposable, one dimensional OCs in addition to my main characters, who are the basic BBC Sherlock crew. This is not a long story (are you listening, Brain?!), I'm currently estimating about 10K words, and to be honest I don't care that much about the mystery itself, it's more of a subplot than a primary plot. Five plus new characters for a subplot of a 10K word story means that these characters need to be caricatures. They need to be so incredibly one dimensional that people will 'know' them within a single line of description and then anything on top of that is gravy. That's a difficult prospect for me. But probably very good for my characterisation soul.
It's also an AU beginning, which is always interesting in the way that a lot of the dialogue tends to be directly taken from the original. And I love that about AU beginnings, I love playing 'spot the original line', and seeing the way the more things change, the more they stay the same. (Not entirely related: I remember reading an amazing Harry-goes-back-in-time-to-fix-everything story where as a minor side frustration to Harry, Lockhart was so self involved that his lines were practically identical, no matter how much Harry tried to redirect the conversation. It was absolutely hysterical.) But there's a delicate balance to walk between changing too much and changing too little. No one wants to reread a lazy copy-paste job, even when the original dialogue is brilliant. On the other hand, the original lines are the canonical character moments, that are by definition precisely what the characters would say--so in the same situation, it is wrong to have them say anything else. So sometimes it's hard to make them change direction.
In particular, I'm rewriting Sherlock's initial deducing-everything-about-John monologue in a situation where he hasn't had access to John's mobile, so he's focussing on other things. I like writing Sherlock's deductions, and I've had people tell me I'm good at them. I'm super pleased with how far this one has developed over the past 24 hours I've been working on it.
But I'm finding it difficult giving something for him to be wrong about, because the single misconception of Harry's gender is perhaps the heart of John's rock-solid belief that Sherlock has to be for real; how very many logical reasons he had to get to a point that was essentially true in all its intricate detail but technically false because of a mistake he wouldn't have made if he'd found out any other way but the one he'd described. It was great for a number of reasons, but not least because Sherlock was so repeatedly wrong about it - he refers to John's brother at least three times before he mentions Harry by name, absolutely sets it up as a given to the audience, who also haven't yet been introduced to the idea that Sherlock might be wrong, and John is beautifully blandly noncommital about it. "Then there's your brother," he says. "Hmm?" says John. Gold. Very much sets up his dry, sly, enjoyment of poking fun at Sherlock's rare missteps. And then there's the fact that when it comes out that Harry is a woman, it is a humorous misconception. Brother rather than gay sister with masculine name is a totally obvious assumption to have made but Sherlock is so professionally annoyed with himself for making it, or perhaps with the world for being lumpy and occasionally falling ridiculously outside the bounds of standard distribution on something that he hadn't been even a little unsure about.
As Sam Vimes puts it:
He instinctively distrusted [Clues]. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!
That, I think, is what the 'there's always something' moment with Harry adds to BBC Sherlock, because that's part of the suspension of disbelief with Sherlock Holmes that BBC Sherlock didn't require us to indulge in. Sherlock Holmes isn't magic; he's science. The way many of his deductions work is by playing the probabilities, and the thing about playing the probabilities is that--while most of the time, you are right--sometimes you are wrong. ACD Holmes knows this and while he gives some mysterious hints, he doesn't like to say much until he's certain, so by the time he speaks he has accrued enough evidence and narrowed down the pathways enough that when he explains what just happened he's always right. But BBC Sherlock draws us inside the deductions straight away, shows off and struts like a peacock and drip feeds us his arrogant brilliance throughout the show rather than saving the explanations for the end. I like it this way; it brings in the suspense, knowing that sometimes Sherlock can and will be wrong.
The thing in my story that's naturally falling out for Sherlock to be wrong about is... not like that. It's good, character building stuff, but it's not in any way able to poke fun at, and neither is it something compellingly obvious. It's possible I can fix the second one with some more references to set it up; I'm good at red herrings. It's difficult, though, because it's not a funny thing, it's a bittersweet tugs-the-heartstrings thing. In my writing. What a surprise. But that means even with Sherlock's lack of social graces, he's not going to be as obnoxiously I-know-something-you-don't-know-how-I-know about it as he was about John's brother. So maybe I need to find something else. But then... I wouldn't get to put in my cute little tugs the heartstrings bit that I've worked out how to make John say, as long as he's correcting Sherlock. So maybe I just need to find a way to alter this bit that I've already got, that I love, to do the job that's in front of it.
So yeah, that's... today's thing to pointlessly agonise over.
It's also an AU beginning, which is always interesting in the way that a lot of the dialogue tends to be directly taken from the original. And I love that about AU beginnings, I love playing 'spot the original line', and seeing the way the more things change, the more they stay the same. (Not entirely related: I remember reading an amazing Harry-goes-back-in-time-to-fix-everything story where as a minor side frustration to Harry, Lockhart was so self involved that his lines were practically identical, no matter how much Harry tried to redirect the conversation. It was absolutely hysterical.) But there's a delicate balance to walk between changing too much and changing too little. No one wants to reread a lazy copy-paste job, even when the original dialogue is brilliant. On the other hand, the original lines are the canonical character moments, that are by definition precisely what the characters would say--so in the same situation, it is wrong to have them say anything else. So sometimes it's hard to make them change direction.
In particular, I'm rewriting Sherlock's initial deducing-everything-about-John monologue in a situation where he hasn't had access to John's mobile, so he's focussing on other things. I like writing Sherlock's deductions, and I've had people tell me I'm good at them. I'm super pleased with how far this one has developed over the past 24 hours I've been working on it.
But I'm finding it difficult giving something for him to be wrong about, because the single misconception of Harry's gender is perhaps the heart of John's rock-solid belief that Sherlock has to be for real; how very many logical reasons he had to get to a point that was essentially true in all its intricate detail but technically false because of a mistake he wouldn't have made if he'd found out any other way but the one he'd described. It was great for a number of reasons, but not least because Sherlock was so repeatedly wrong about it - he refers to John's brother at least three times before he mentions Harry by name, absolutely sets it up as a given to the audience, who also haven't yet been introduced to the idea that Sherlock might be wrong, and John is beautifully blandly noncommital about it. "Then there's your brother," he says. "Hmm?" says John. Gold. Very much sets up his dry, sly, enjoyment of poking fun at Sherlock's rare missteps. And then there's the fact that when it comes out that Harry is a woman, it is a humorous misconception. Brother rather than gay sister with masculine name is a totally obvious assumption to have made but Sherlock is so professionally annoyed with himself for making it, or perhaps with the world for being lumpy and occasionally falling ridiculously outside the bounds of standard distribution on something that he hadn't been even a little unsure about.
As Sam Vimes puts it:
He instinctively distrusted [Clues]. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!
That, I think, is what the 'there's always something' moment with Harry adds to BBC Sherlock, because that's part of the suspension of disbelief with Sherlock Holmes that BBC Sherlock didn't require us to indulge in. Sherlock Holmes isn't magic; he's science. The way many of his deductions work is by playing the probabilities, and the thing about playing the probabilities is that--while most of the time, you are right--sometimes you are wrong. ACD Holmes knows this and while he gives some mysterious hints, he doesn't like to say much until he's certain, so by the time he speaks he has accrued enough evidence and narrowed down the pathways enough that when he explains what just happened he's always right. But BBC Sherlock draws us inside the deductions straight away, shows off and struts like a peacock and drip feeds us his arrogant brilliance throughout the show rather than saving the explanations for the end. I like it this way; it brings in the suspense, knowing that sometimes Sherlock can and will be wrong.
The thing in my story that's naturally falling out for Sherlock to be wrong about is... not like that. It's good, character building stuff, but it's not in any way able to poke fun at, and neither is it something compellingly obvious. It's possible I can fix the second one with some more references to set it up; I'm good at red herrings. It's difficult, though, because it's not a funny thing, it's a bittersweet tugs-the-heartstrings thing. In my writing. What a surprise. But that means even with Sherlock's lack of social graces, he's not going to be as obnoxiously I-know-something-you-don't-know-how-I-know about it as he was about John's brother. So maybe I need to find something else. But then... I wouldn't get to put in my cute little tugs the heartstrings bit that I've worked out how to make John say, as long as he's correcting Sherlock. So maybe I just need to find a way to alter this bit that I've already got, that I love, to do the job that's in front of it.
So yeah, that's... today's thing to pointlessly agonise over.
