Inkcap; Gathering Mushrooms

One of the fantastic things about writing a murder mystery story is that if you find yourself with a particularly annoying or difficult character, it’s fairly easy to kill them off. Almost a requisite, in some cases. Perhaps not the most elegant of techniques, but at least it gets them out of the way so you can focus on creating something better in the void they’ve left.

Not so with Captain Exposition.

In spite of my utter hatred of him, I simply cannot find a way to get rid of him. He’s too vital to the plot. Not as an active character, of course, but as a sort of ghost who lurks through the text and makes my characters say or think some rather ridiculous things at times:

‘Of course, as it customary at all dinner parties, we shall process hand in hand with a partner of equal status. Now, let me briefly explain how status works so that a faux-pas can be made obvious to the reader…’

‘Ah yes, I shall pay you, Mr Postman, for bringing me this letter as that is how the postal system works at this point, I’m so glad you reminded me to do so and thus brought attention to a key plot point we’ll come back to later but requires the reader to have this knowledge.’

‘Now, I’m going to have to conduct this operation with anaesthetic because we don’t have that yet. Nor do we have the word actually. Oh, damn.’

Well, not quite those phrases, but you see my point. It’s horrible inelegant, quite patronising, and not really how a normal person would think about or conceive of the world around them. But he’s necessary, because we rely on him for that vital information without which the reader cannot figure out the solution themselves.

This is when I turn to Little Jimmy. It’s safe to say that I utterly detest Little, Annoying, Cockney Jimmy.* Little Jimmy, who is about eight years old and has spent most of his life living in a box, so that for some rather tenuous reasons he follows the protagonist around asking the stupidest of questions about the world about him. Questions no one else in the story would think to ask because they have actually been outside and spoken to another human being during their entire time on the planet. And the protagonist, calmly and in language an imbecile could grasp, explains about the salient or interesting historical features of the day. Little Jimmy is also a handy sounding board for the obvious solutions to the murder the reader is (or rather, should be if I’ve done the trick right) thinking about.

‘But Doctor Mortimer, why are you paying that man for that bit of paper?’

‘But won’t chopping his leg off hurt him, Doctor Mortimer?’

‘Doctor Mortimer, I fink I’ve got it!’

Bong bong bong Bowowowow. Well, that’s how Little Annoying Luke always seemed to finish his Professor Layton challenges when I played (watch from 35 seconds in for an example of the Terrible Voice). Not only that, but in the presence of Little Jimmy, Doctor Mortimer becomes a horrible caricature of Professor Layton too, setting questions and puzzles to gently lead the reader on to the right path and then never actually giving the solution to the bloody problem he’s just posed.

Clearly, Little Jimmy needs to be throttled. He’s anachronistic, almost inconceivably ignorant, lacks any motivation for his clichéd actions and so interminably annoying that I spend my time looking for opportunities to incapacitate him for a bit to get him out of the way before one of the other characters grabs his head and drowns him in a pool of molten iron. Well, he wouldn’t die from drowning in that case, but you get my drift.

So we come back to Captain Exposition. And I hate him too. And the whole process starts again. Far too much of my time has been taken up by writing in or out either Captain exposition or Little Jimmy that I am beginning to consider just writing an exceptionally long, dry prologue with all the information needed in, and if the reader can’t be bothered then it’s their own stupid bleeding fault they can’t predict the ending. Pfft.

* This is even before we get into the anachronisms of making him bleeding Cockney. It’s just easier to imagine him as this way for now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 17:18 and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.