Hey, folks! I know it’s been a l-o-n-g time since I wrote under this banner, but it’s a new semester, and I’ve a brand new crop of students. For those not familiar with this feature of the blog, I’m a mentor in an MFA in Creative Writing program, and what follows here is actual advice given to an actual student under my tutelage. (How lucky can you get!) We were discussing some early writers of the Mystery genre, starting with Edgar Allen Poe and his “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which then segued into Sherlock Holmes, and some observations about genre fiction in general…

Regarding your reading this week: I’m sure that the genre Poe, if not invented, perfected, seems to modern readers a bit trite. But what eventually become cliché does so because it works. Imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery. Last week I talked about the similarities in particular genres that eventually morph into expectations in them. With mysteries, there’s a crime, a body, clues, and the eventual unraveling. With mysteries, as least in what we’re examining here, we see “sidekicks,” at least with Dupin and Holmes. They’re not only assistants but sounding boards, a physical as well as literary device to work their theories out loud. A twist on this, at least from my perspective, is the TV detective, Columbo. He used the perpetrators themselves as his assistants, always demanding “…one more thing” of them to solve the crime. Either way you want to work it, perhaps it’s a technique the protagonist uses instead of deep POV as he works out the crime.

Writing evolves, and as does story form. What seems stiff now was fluid then. Jane Austen’s dialogue, even though a master of story form, seems rigid to modern readers. Where Dupin used what amounts to soliloquies to get his plot points out, she employed The Letter, to me the most annoying form of info dump. But back then the form was new. Since, it’s been used with annoying frequency, especially in YA fiction (but then everything’s new when you’re that young!). My favorite technique, which I use in my own writing, is to dispense information on a need-to-know basis, like dropping breadcrumbs on a trail, very much apropos in the mystery genre.

Valuable advice, indeed!