This week I have been considering – no, make that marvelling at – writer’s clues we novelists leave sprinkled about our stories. The clue is always a key to unlock some crucial element of plot or character when it becomes important. In other words, later. A breath from the future.
Some are for the readers, especially if we’re writing some sort of whodunnit, whether the crime is murder or stealing a pig.
But some are for ourselves. And some come as a complete surprise to us when we get to the crucial moment.
Writer’s Clues for the Reader
It is a powerfully authoritarian assembly chamber. One quailed as one entered. Well, I did, anyway.
It’s been filmed twice. In 1957 was it directed by Billy Wilder and starred Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich. The movie, Wilder and Laughton were all nominated for Academy Awards. In 1982 it was filmed for television with Ralph Richardson and Diana Riggs in the Laughton and Dietrich roles, plus a host of other starry names of the times – and a young Beau Bridges.
In the current staging, the dramatic, not to say melodramatic, events didn’t really get going properly until the second act. There’s a lot of exposition in the early dialogue. And in that exposition there is a Writer’s Clue.
Writer’s Clues the Readers Miss
I reminded him of the conversations in which the character was mentioned. He conceded. But it clearly didn’t have the impact that Christie or her playwright collaborator would have liked.
Among its many virtues, it has an absolutely fabulous clue which you note but don’t see the significance of until the end.
Then the events are explained that actually led to the murder. And the explanation is a fact you already know. You – well, I – just didn’t complete the jigsaw. Perfect!
And I managed both Christie and Ivar without spoilers! Yay!
Writer’s Clues to Self
It filled a series of exercise books, and she would read the newest section to us in bed at night. When she suddenly stopped reading we would wail, “Go on, go on. What happens next?” and she’d say, “Don’t you understand? I haven’t written any more yet.”
An archetypal pantser then. But no notes? No notes at all? Not just a pantser, a major risk taker, I’d say.
Ursula Jones, a children’s writer herself and an actress, says she scoured the text for those writer’s clues and found nothing. For months. And, just when she was starting to despair, she found one of DIana’s clues, early on in the manuscript.
My Own Writer’s Clues
Into the woods we go, equally clueless.
But I know them. And sometimes I know stuff I don’t know I know.
So I did what I’d tell anyone else to do. I sat down and started reading it aloud. And, there it was, the Writer’s Clue to Writer. On page one. Page One.
My hero, Dom, is an explorer. He’s about to go to the Arctic and he’s lost 10% of his funding. My heroine works in a Public Relations Company. Her boss offers to help. And Dom has gone into the office for a strategy meeting and is sitting at the table doodling impatiently.
Clearly Dom doesn’t feel comfortable in an office. Doesn’t take notes. Doesn’t read the stuff they’ve given him. Why?
Dom is dyslexic!
The blasted kitten had more sense than I did.
In Search of your Writer’s Clues
So I have enormous sympathy with Ursula Jones, trying to identify, let alone decipher, the clues left by somebody else. Because it is something that happens below the level of analysis and reason. It comes with dreams, tingles at the back of the neck and, oh heavens, doubt.
But writer, if you’re writing a book and get stuck in the middle, read it aloud. Those clues will be there. You have to dive in and let the book talk to you. And it will. Eventually.
Good luck
Absolutely agree with all this! The writer’s brain is spookily prescient. In ‘A Question of Thyme’ I made up a rhyme very early on in the book referring to a sort of legendary treasure. The rhyme felt right and had the right shape and rhythm, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant. I went on writing the book and unknowingly put in all the right things and WHAM! The meaning of the rhyme hit me almost at the same time as it hit the heroine. (It was a great relief to both of us.) I didn’t have to change a thing.
Re ‘The Islands of Chaldea’, I devoured that as soon as it came out and read Ursula’s account of the process. I do believe I know at what point she took over the writing and the clue she found that enabled her to finish the book as DWJ intended.
Your rhyme experience is very weird, Jan. Never had anything that precise myself. Though I have found that I know more about my characters and their doings that I’d ever realised.
Fascinating that you think you know which clue Ursula Jones found and ran with. We must speak about it when next we meet. Keep it OUR secret?
There are lots of people saying they can’t tell. And I must say, the book feels wonderfully seamless. And weren’t there more pieces left unfinished too? Salivating at the thought, here.
Wish I’d seen that production of Witness. Fabulous setting. Naturally, I agree with all of this, especially as I write whodunnits. And because I write a series, sometimes the clues to self in particular come from a previous book. Complicated, isn’t it?
Now that’s a benefit of writing a series that I’ve never heard before, Lesley.
Agree also. Writing whodunnits, the writer’s clues that hit me are usually whodunnit. I never know when I start. I know suspects but have to write on and wait for the clue that tells ME who the murderer is as well as my sleuths heroine. It seems to work.
That’s brilliant, Liz. You give me hope that I might, one day, achieve my ambition of completing a whodunnit.
Thank you, Sophie – you are spot on with how we write things we don’t know we know (if that makes sense). I am a pantser, too, but the idea of no notes at all is too scary, even for me.
Oh, me too, Sarah. Though I make more notes as I go along – and an awful lot of them have question marks – than I ever do before I start.
Great blog, Sophie. I do find myself suddenly confronted with a clue as to why a character is behaving in a certain way that goes right back to the something written weeks before. It is weird, but wonderful.
I do so agree, Liz. And it goes to prove, as Sophie implies in her blog, that there’s more to writing a good story than some of the tick-box “how-to” manuals would have aspiring writers believe.
I’ve got all sorts of stuff from manuals which have helped lots, especially with editing. But I admit that that they have sometimes made me forget to Read The Damn Book properly and see what pointers I’ve already got in there, Joanna. Kick me the next time you see me doing it!
Weird but wonderful is just about right, Liz.
I’ve got lots of stuff from manuals and workshops, too, Sophie. But there’s a bit of elusive magic in writing that I’ve never been able to describe properly. Or pin down. Maybe if I could, it would be gone?
Oh wow! I’m not as weird as I thought I was.
Comforting, isn’t it, Michele!