The Rules

I was reading The Secret Adversary for about the millionth time this weekend, and when I got to the part where Tommy acted completely out of character, I had to stop and ponder it for a few moments.

James Warwick as Tommy Beresford

I love that part. It's one of my favorites. Sober, steady, practical Tommy acts completely impulsively, and it's way better than if the same action was taken by Tuppence, who is KNOWN for her impulsiveness.

Now, most of the time, when a character does something completely foreign to their personality, it drives me nuts. So why does it work so well for Tommy?

I think it's because Christie, as the narrator (she's not quite an omniscient narrator in this one, but it's definitely not a tight third-person POV) acknowledges that he's acting OOC, and so does Tommy himself. I also think it's because it really does happen, in real life, that the predictable steady people DO occasionally get wild impulses, and give into them without understanding the why or the how of it. So even though it's OOC, it's still believable, and it makes for a great scene, and builds up to some that are even better.

I like reading authors like Christie, who wrote before the era of "Rules for Writing," and wouldn't have cared a fig for them if she did (she scatters adverbs wildly) (haha - get it? Wildly? OK, I'm done). She wrote according to her own internal rules, and she never broke them, and it shows.

I break a lot of the so-called Rules in my own writing. But I have a set of my own rules, and the few times I've tried (guiltily) to break them, it makes a mess. And sometimes when I start to fret about The Rules, I remind myself of Christie, and then I feel better. Not that I'm the genius she was! But like her, my rules are more important to follow than The Rules.

As long as you understand what you're doing and why, and you are doing it deliberately, I think The Rules should go out the window.

Where do you stand on the matter?

Collaboration and Community

I've been spending most of my time this weekend (and Monday) getting my short stories ready to send to the lovely, lovely people who volunteered to critique them for me (and attempting to clean my house, burning out the belt on my vacuum, deciding to forget housecleaning and making baked doughnuts with the kids instead), but I did scratch out enough time to read through The Floating Admiral.

Have you heard of it? It's a joint effort by the Detection Club (some notable members: Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Croft ... etc) to see if they could detect a mystery without knowing the end. Each person wrote one chapter, and then handed it off to the next without any hints. Anthony Berkeley had the unenviable task as the end of trying to make sense of the preceding tangle of clues and evidence, and wrapping it up in a tidy solution (which he did BRILLIANTLY), and then in an appendix at the back, each author revealed his or her own solution.

It was fascinating. I loved it. Both as a mystery fan and a writer. As a mystery fan, it was delightful to see each writer try to guess where the previous writer had been pointing, and to contrast the different styles of writing and detection. As a writer, I loved seeing the way they played off each other and used each other to make their own writing stronger. My favorite part, honestly, was the appendix where they all revealed their solutions, because it showed so plainly the way each of them crafted their stories (Agatha Christie's solution, by the way, was the most preposterous, and yet you KNOW that if she had written the entire thing, we would have swallowed it without hesitation). From Sayers' complex and tidy backstory and timetable to Clemence Dane's frank admittance that it was all a muddle to him and he just tried to leave it open so that Berkeley could finish it off in any way he pleased, it was great.

Trying to read it as one cohesive detective story would be fairly exhausting, and judging by some of the negative reviews I've read of this, that's where many people go wrong. Reading it for the enjoyment of seeing all these authors work together and blend their many different styles (the main detective in the story, Inspector Rudge, ends up being a character of so many layers and great depth, simply because he is written by so many different people - just watching his character develop was half the fun for me) is the way to go with this story.

I've been plotting a joint fanfiction story with two of my good friends (Adrienne and Cathy, we really need to get moving on this!), consisting of letters and journal entries between three cousins. It's not the same premise as The Floating Admiral, but much of the idea is the same - we each have our own idea of our character's story, and the fun and challenge will be weaving them together into something cohesive.

This is one of those aspects of writing that thrills me. As much as I love crafting stories and bringing characters to life on my own, I also love the thought of being part of a community of writers. The very idea of the Detection Club makes me happy, much like the Inklings (if given the option of going back in time and sitting in on only one meeting of those two groups, I'd be hard-pressed to pick between them). Can you imagine if the Inklings had written a joint-effort fantasy like the Detection Club did with The Floating Admiral? It would have been amazing and hysterical, all at once.

Twitter and blogs are a wonderful way to build writers' communities; one of the reasons I'm thrilled to have critique partners for my short stories is because it is yet another way to build that same sense of community. Ultimately, though, nothing quite beats in-person meetings of a regular sort, to discuss and laugh and help each other become better writers.

Maybe someday - for now, I'm thankful, so very thankful, for these internet communities I can call my own.

Influences: Agatha Christie

As a kid, I had pretty bad problems with nightmares. The tabloid pictures of the infamous "Bat-Boy" scared me so badly I couldn't walk through the checkout line at the grocery store for years. Years.

So it may come as a surprise that I adore mysteries. However, I don't read the really gruesome stuff. I mostly love the mystery writers from the Golden Age - Dorothy L Sayers (LORD PETER FTW!!!!!); Anthony Berkeley; Margery Allingham (Campion may start out as a pale imitation of Lord Peter, but quickly develops into his own charming self); Josephine Tey; Ngaio Marsh; and I've been trying to read Freeman Wills Croft for years but only just recently found ONE of his books free for Kindle so I'll finally be able to give him a chance ...

And of course, the queen of them all, Agatha Christie.

The first Agatha Christie I ever read was The A.B.C. Murders. I know, an odd pick for someone prone to nightmares! I should have started with Tommy and Tuppence. Still, it was better to start with that one than with And Then There Were None, which was my other choice at the time. And amazingly enough, though I didn't dare put it down before finishing it (for fear the serial killer would come after me before I learned his/her identity, duh), I didn't get any nightmares from it. Just extreme fascination.

David Suchet IS Hercule Poirot. No one else comes close.

I quickly fell in love with the fussy little Belgian detective Poirot, and with the masterful way Christie wove her stories and her characters so intricately with each other. It wasn't long before I'd read every Christie book that my mother owned, and had moved on to the library, and then onto buying them for myself. At this point in my life, my Agatha Christie collection has spilled off my bookshelves, and I am now stacking the books on top of each other because I've run out of room for them anywhere else.

Some are less brilliant than others; some recycle the same plot under a different guise (as Dame Agatha herself slyly informs us in the person of Mrs Oliver, the most beautiful self-insert ever created); some are implausible; some frankly impossible; all of them are a delight to read. I started out a die-hard fan of Poirot, grew into a Tommy and Tuppence fangirl, and at this point in my life am firmly Team Marple. Murder at the Vicarage is one of my favorite stories of all time, and who can help but love the opening to The Body in the Library?

"But the worst is so often true."

(While on the topic of Mrs Oliver, her indignation at the assumption she bases all of her characters on real people, as well as her description of how she does come up with her characters (in, I believe, Hallowe'en Party), is so exactly along the lines of how I feel and the way I work that it never ceases to astonish and gratify me, every time I read it. And whenever I read now about authors who DO blatantly base characters off of real people, I wonder how on earth they can do so and still feel that the character belongs to them.)

Much of Maia, the MC of my 1920s adventure fantasy, is inspired by Virginia Revel of The Secret of Chimneys, as well as Bundle Brent, Anne Beddingfeld, Frankie Derwent, Tuppence herself, and others of Christie's "plucky girl sleuths." I think I love Virginia especially because she is older and has already HAD adventures, and yet is eager for more ("Oh Anthony! How perfectly screaming!" she says upon revelation of the hero's Dark Secret), and Anne for her impulsive yet essentially practical outlook on life (the way she cheeks Lord Nasby into giving her a job is priceless). "Let's have an adventure" is pretty much what my outlook on life has always been, and it's mostly thanks to Christie (well, CS Lewis shares some responsibility for that).

This image of Tommy and Tuppence is sheer delight

Agatha Christie truly is one of the greatest writers of all time, and while I've come a long way from that young girl delightfully shivering as she read about Poirot and Hastings tracking down an alphabetical maniac, I will never outgrow my pure enjoyment of her books. What better tribute can I give?