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Invisiblequinn
some kinda love
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Registered: 01/02/10
Posts: 6,799
Detective Fiction
    #16064284 - 04/09/12 07:49 AM (11 years, 9 months ago)

Arthur Conan Doyle explaining how to write a Sherlock Holmes novel:

Quote:

The first thing is to get your idea. Having got that key, ones next task is to conceal it and lay emphasis on everything that can make for a different explanation.








So we need to find the key, but what will this key unlock?
Nothing.

The discovery of the key is the whole point of the exercise...

It is buried by the author inside a text that seeks nothing more than to make the key invisible until the proper moment.
It is like the cryptogram that when finally deciphered by an algorithm that took a large amount of time and energy to discover reveals its coded message to be the very algorithm used for its own deciphering.

The proper moment will be somewhere towards the end of the book, somewhere just before the denouement (if the story happens to have one), when having satisfied some mysterious need of the reader, the revelatory key is offered as a reward-

a reward for following false leads, arbitrary plot developments and outright authorial trickery. The detective story then is a profligate monster that feeds off itself:
without the key the text is pointless if not meaningless,
but without the text the key is also pointless as there is nothing to unlock and bestow with meaning.

-i transcribed this from a lecture i was listening to. now i am posting it as a topic for discussion...


...

holy shit guys, i do this to myself, in my own life, like all the time. :nut:

what are your thoughts?


Edited by quinn (04/09/12 08:16 AM)


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InvisibleChronic7
Registered: 05/08/04
Posts: 13,679
Re: Detective Fiction [Re: quinn]
    #16064419 - 04/09/12 08:57 AM (11 years, 9 months ago)

Quote:

quinn said:
what are your thoughts?




i like the similarities that this topic has with our own minds stories
as our stories also work to cover up an underlying key aswell

the key to the universe


--------------------


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Invisiblequinn
some kinda love
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Registered: 01/02/10
Posts: 6,799
Re: Detective Fiction [Re: Chronic7]
    #16068617 - 04/10/12 02:24 AM (11 years, 9 months ago)

yeh, and like our minds are stories with planned structures and things...

idk if you unlock the key to the universe or if the key is to nothing,
just a peice in a self made game with ourselves that we create out of bordom, or dissastisfaction, or something... :shrug2:


--------------------
dripping with fantasy


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