Hello, writers. So you've probably heard-- and it's true-- that you should read widely in your genre. You should read recent stuff so that you know what the state of the market is, what's being done, and what's being done to death.
Yes, all of this is true. I've been doing a lot of that lately, and not enjoying it very much.
So lately I've taken a break, and am reading Agatha Christie.
Ms. Christie (Dame Agatha to folks back home) wrote 66 mystery novels, 153 short stories, 6 romance novels, and numerous plays, including the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which has been running continually in London since 1952.
And that's just the stuff that sold. Whew.
Christie's novels are way short by modern standards. These are books that really fit in your pocket, slim little paperbacks of under 200 pages. Googling around I find that the word count of The Mysterious Affair at Styles is 55k; Murder on the Orient Express is 66k. Nowadays the received wisdom is that that would be too short for anything but a children's book.
(Here's an example of the received wisdom. I can tell you he's wrong about the length of middle grade novels. I can't tell you about the rest.)
But the length of Christie's books works because she doesn't waste a word.
Plot. It usually stands alone, like the cheese. When there's a subplot (eg a romance) it gets little attention and no twisting. Instead, all focus is on the central question-- whodunnit? --and every scene, and very nearly every sentence, addresses the question in some way.
What's most impressive to me about the plots, though, is that they always end in a twist and I can never see it coming. By comparison, in more recent books, I can see the twist coming nine times out of ten. I had foolishly given myself credit for that, thinking it had something to do with being a writer. But Christie shows that it's merely because most modern writers don't twist so fine.
In All Clear, Connie Willis has a character say that Christie's plot twists invariably have to do with the reader having been looking at the mystery from the wrong angle. Christie herself says this in some of her books. At the same time, of course, Christie was skillfully directing the reader toward that wrong-angled view.
Character. The characters are all distinct, strongly portrayed, and nearly always viewed in terms of the plot question. Would they, or wouldn't they? Do they have it in them?
Description. Again, this is focused almost entirely on the plot. Surroundings are described mostly in terms of who could or couldn't have reached, seen, or overheard the scene of the crime.
Worldbuilding. Most of Christie's novels are set in the England we know from books: little villages peopled by vicars on bicycles and ladies of independent means, church fetes, down trains, the works. I suspect this England may not ever have existed. Anyway, no words are wasted building it: it's there, it exists in the books, and that's that.
What's surprising is how satisfying all this is.
And it makes me think. My writing tends to sprawl. My middle grade fantasy novels clock in at around 75k words, and that's after strenuous cutting. I wonder what it would be like to write so concisely from the beginning.
Assuming that's what Christie did, of course.
Tonight's challenge:
Since the above doesn't lend itself readily to a challenge, try this:
Write a passage exactly 120 words in length. (Cut and paste it into Word and use Tools: Word Count to get the length.)
The passage must contain the following sentence:
The ducks had knocked over the salt again.