Chapter 27 postscript

How should the friendship between brothers and lovers be reflected in detective novels?Especially—if you plan to write the relatively closed genre of "Storm Mountain Villa", how to deepen the emotional theme and make each character more tense? Two more interesting formats were chosen: written letters and oral stories. This is actually a technique that is often used in novel writing, and I have even used it many times myself—— Dr. Gelt tells a long story, and Miss Kemper tells her own story in the prison cell, and Gomony briefly tells Hazel's story in "Erinyes" (even in At the end of Erinyes there is also a last letter from Gomoni to Hazel).

However, such a large amount of use of the content of the letter is the first attempt only in this article (it may be used for reference in the expansion of the "Four Middle Chapters", but it is not yet conclusive). In fact, the contents of those three letters were not available when the outline was first written.When I was about two-thirds of the way through the whole story, that is, when the old man Heiner was telling the story, I suddenly felt that I might receive a comparison by putting two letters with analogy at the beginning to follow. Good results.So, I did it right away—using a different font for the letter and setting aside a separate time to do it.After finishing it, I found that this special form of writing does seem to have a sense of substitution.The content of the letter also satisfies me. Now that the whole article is finished, when I read it again, I will be moved by the content of the letter: I feel that these dead are a group of innocent and kind people—except for John Bain Well, he's the only guy with all the evil qualities (laughs).

Both the letters and the stories can only be regarded as side descriptions: the letters are too subjective, and the stories are too one-sided.Using a combination of both to create characters and describe emotions (and deliberately not giving these characters a lot of dialogue—for example, Miss Arwen and Sears, a couple who don't even have a line of dialogue in the whole text), can give readers There is sufficient room for imagination, which also gives the article a kind of vitality that is not rigid. Let's talk about the dialogue part of the text.In this writing, I specially made some reasonable plans for the dialogues of the characters - during each dialogue, I tried to make a reasonable distinction between the characters present according to the following task summary:

Hosting, offering, commenting, criticizing, mediating, prodding, digging, and changing the mood. The moderator is often Wenzel, but sometimes Carl or even Hans also shares it. The purpose of this task is to sort out the existing clues and data, put forward reasonable assumptions, and lead the general direction of the entire dialogue. Providers are numerous - almost every character with dialogue has filled this role: their main task is to provide clues of various forms.Take the story of Heiner, for example, and even the three letters with different signatures can barely be regarded as providers (the letters can also be regarded as a kind of confessional dialogue).

Ms. Emma is more responsible for the task of commenting—that is, summarizing a certain conversation based on personal emotions, which is mostly used to enliven the atmosphere of the conversation.Wenzel also inserted some concluding comments during the host, but generally they were relatively neutral. Criticism and mediation go hand in hand.Criticism uses a relatively intense way to partially or even completely negate the content of a previous dialogue; mediation is used to gently bring correct critical conclusions into the main line, or gently pull wrong critical conclusions away from the main line—— For example, Captain Harlin's refutation of Ince's handwriting identification content is a typical criticism, and Wenzel's subsequent words are mediation of this criticism.This process of generating and mitigating conflicts is used by me to create a small climax in the plot.

The urging exists to prevent the development of the main plot from being too slow, and is often used to avoid the development of some useless plots, or directly as the termination of these plots (the so-called "interruption") - Miss Esther has done it many times The task of urging was close to criticism several times, so Miss Jenny came forward to mediate as a friend.Emma still routinely commented on mediation-related conversation pieces. As for going off topic, it is often done by sudden intruders (unknown agents, unnamed security guards, bartenders, Inspector Roth and even Taphne have all played such roles): the purpose of this task is to force the Quest interrupts, and complete a "offer" quest (whether or not the offer is actually helpful to the main plot) - good hosts are quick to bring the conversation back to the main line after listening to the newly inserted clues come up.

The task of adjusting the atmosphere is also shared by many characters, especially in the passages where Inspector Roth appears, and even the entire dialogue is inserted specifically for the adjustment of the atmosphere.I am used to adding such content after some rather tense plots, so as to make the whole text flow more smoothly, and readers will not be overwhelmed by a series of tense plots. This kind of thinking has some "comfortable reasoning" intentions hidden in it (laughs). The tasks of roles change very frequently, and some characters can even take on the tasks of "host", "provider" and "critic" successively in a passage (such as our protagonist Mr. Wenzel).

Such task summarization is very interesting-after combining the character of the characters and the specific environment, after matching them with the relevant tasks, the context of the dialogue part of the whole article becomes very clear in an instant: when it is revised later, it will also Much more convenient.This good method should be used frequently in future writing. After the revision of this article is completed, in order to prepare for an important exam, the expansion of "Yan" and "Four Novellas" can only be put aside temporarily.Suddenly I feel a little sorry for "Yan" - according to the original writing plan, it should have been ranked at the front of this article: a writing plan made in a very short period of time actually squeezed out "Yan" which was being written, and let It's a shame that it had to be delayed until the Christmas period to continue.

"Day and Night" has also been postponed accordingly, and at the same time, some new plans have slowly surfaced—for "Day and Night", which I spent more than half a year carefully collecting materials and writing an outline, it may not be a bad thing. Back to the topic-I hope you like this article and continue to support this series. above.