GETTING TO THE POINT

Frederic Dorr Steele in Hearst's International (November 1921)

'Plenty more here, Count. Here is the robbery in the train-de-luxe to the Riviera on February 13, 1892. Here is the forged cheque in the same year on the Credit Lyonnais.'
'No, you're wrong there.'
'Then I am right on the others! Now, Count, you are a card-player. When the other fellow has all the trumps, it saves time to throw down your hand.'
'What has all this talk to do with the jewel of which you spoke?'
'Gently, Count. Restrain that eager mind! Let me get to the points in my own humdrum fashion...’

There is a point in the travesty that is "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" where Holmes tells Count Sylvius to allow him to get to the points in his own humdrum fashion. While I could argue that Holmes is seldom humdrum and he was being a bit, ahem, theatrical in this ridiculous story that is not why his statement was on my mind this week. 

Instead, I've thought of the quote several times while caught in a conundrum brought about by another Doyle short story, "How It Happened." The word short is the operative word here as this one clocks in at only 1400 words. Yet, it is an interesting, well-paced, detail-rich and clever story. Doyle gets to the point without any sense that something is missing within the limited word count.

The reason the story is a conundrum for me is I'm working on a gothic story inspired by "How It Happened" and I want my piece to be about the same size as Doyle's. My problem is the exact opposite of what one might expect in this scenario: Instead of struggling to get my story contained into 1400 words, I can't get my story long enough. I'm stuck at a paltry 900 words.

900 words is nothing and yet, it feels like the story is to the point, detailed enough and, dare I say it, complete. I need 500 words or so and every time I've tried to add to it, the addition feels like filler. I don't want any filler but I don't want to short change the reader either.

I've always admired Doyle's clarity and his ability to impart a great deal of information without using a great number of words. As Doyle's editor at The Strand Magazine, Herbert Greenhough Smith, said about his first reading of "A Scandal in Bohemia":

 "...here to an editor, jaded with wading through reams of impossible stuff, comes a gift from Heaven, a godsend in the shape of a story that brought a gleam of happiness into the despairing life of this weary editor. Here was a new and gifted story-writer; there was no mistaking the ingenuity of plot, the limpid clearness of style, the perfect art of telling a story."

A limpid clearness of style—that is the goal. I will set this story aside for now and come back to it at a later date when hopefully a solution will present itself.  This ramble is 500 words so far but have I gotten to the point? Maybe.

Meanwhile, here's the best reminder that Doyle knew what to do with 500 words (508 to be exact): 

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy's country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.

The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.

Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshawur. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. I was dispatched, accordingly, in the troopship Orontes, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air - or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought. So alarming did the state of my finances become that I soon realized that I must either leave the metropolis and rusticate somewhere in the country, or that I must make a complete alteration in my style of living.