The master of PI

I am talking of course about the great Raymond Chandler.

[Pause here to allow students to seriously reconsider their lives if they have chosen to read a blog instead of the greatest detective author of all time]

Raymond Chandler was the american author who, back in the 1930s, refined the hard-boiled genre that had been popularised by Dashiell Hammett. And whilst most famously a novelist (and pulp fiction writer), Mr Chandler dabbled in scriptwriting. However, it is from his novels, and the man himself, that I draw inspiration.

My most recent revelation in my writing came from something Chandler said, and to my dismay it completely contradicted my (at the time) approach to writing. I am a planner. I create plans in order to optimise my approach to plan creation. My mind is never still, always moving at tangents. [A common misconception - cutting down on caffeine amplifies this problem, causing the patient to think constantly - about coffee]. This is great for lateral thinking, or comprehensive understanding, but it pushes thoughts to the macro scale. I have a plan for the year, I just don't know what I'm doing tomorrow.

As a consequence of this, I have a knack for spotting plot twists and turns, and, as would follow, am rather effective at planting my own such twists in writing. So you can understand my dismay when I read that Mr. Chandler emphasised that the overall story is far far less important than the individual components - the scenes.

This is one of those things that, once realised, becomes so tangibly, painfully obvious you wonder what it was you had been doing all this time. Think of your favourite piece of cinema, nine times out of ten you will remember a specific scene or character that really caught your attention - not the overiding story arch. When you a good book is read, we wish for no end - clear evidence that it is not the final resolution that matters, but the individual trials and tribulations that allow us to relate, and to care.

It is the scenes that make the story, not the other way around!