610 – Making Sherlock and Watson Work

Sherlock and Watson are an iconic duo, so it’s no surprise many writers want to replicate their dynamic in their own stories. However, getting this pair right requires answering some tricky questions. Should you use a Watsonian point of view? How do you make sure both characters spend enough time in the spotlight? And how do we make Sherlock feel like Sherlock without sacrificing too much likability? Find out on this week’s episode!

Show Notes

• Seven Writing Lessons From Sherlock Holmes 
• Nine Ways for Your Hero to Earn the Clues They Need
• How to Choose Point of View Characters for Your Novel
• POV Character Basics
• Sidekick Protagonists
• Should Your Character Be Mysterious or Relatable?
• Why the Mysterious Badass Hero Is a Trap For New Writers 
• How to Get Readers to Feel Those Emotional Twists
• Fixing Film POV
• BBC Sherlock
• Candy and Spinach
• Three Parts Dead
• Six Tips for a Fish-out-of-Water Hero 
• Movement: The Story Principle That’s 2,300 Years Old
• Making Mysteries Complex
• 18 Ways for Protagonists to Contribute
• The Mimicking of Known Successes
• The Tainted Cup
• Does That Mystery Need a Turning Point?
• Third-Person Omniscient POV
• Why We Have to Let Go of Meta Mysteries
• Discworld
• Nero Wolfe

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Oren: And welcome everyone to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren…

Chris: …and I’m Chris.

Oren: So Chris, I can tell you went to UW for college. Do you wanna know how I know?

Chris: Hmm, how do you know?

Oren: Well, I’ve cleverly put together some clues. Once I saw you smile at a cute husky. Two, you live somewhere in the vicinity of Seattle. And earlier you laughed at my joke about calling the main commercial road in the U District The Way instead of The Ave. And as a result, you must have gone to UW. There is no other set of circumstances that would fit those facts.

Chris: Hmm. Well, I did go to UW, and since you only revealed all of these clues once you’d already come to the correct conclusion, your deductive process must be brilliant.

Oren: Yeah, that’s just logic.

Chris: Or is it abduction?

Oren: I don’t know.

Chris: I always use the word deductive for just coming to a logical conclusion, but technically it’s a type of logic.

Oren: Yeah, I read an article about this, because if you hadn’t guessed by now, we’re talking about how to write a Sherlock/Watson dynamic. And I read an article a while ago that insisted that what Holmes does is not actually deductive reasoning. It’s actually something else.

Chris: Like abduction…

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: …or something.

Oren: Honestly, I couldn’t remember. I should’ve looked that up before the podcast started, but I didn’t, because I’m not the world’s greatest detective. [Chris laughs] And ultimately it’s not important to the joke I was making, which is that when Sherlock does that thing of like, “Oh, well you must have been X because of Y, Z, and A,” the problem with what he’s doing there every time is that he is naming a set of facts which could fit with a character having whatever trait or backstory he suggests, but it could also suggest other things. Like it would also fit with other explanations, and he just always happens to be right.

I especially noticed it when he did this with Watson the first time they meet and he lists off a bunch of things about Watson’s military deployment, but like those things could reflect any British military deployment in a number of their colonies. So somehow he knew exactly where Watson had been, even though those facts could have applied to people from a bunch of different places. Hmm.

Chris: Yep. The trick is that you don’t show your logic in process, so people don’t have any time to scrutinize it.

Oren: Yeah. If you’re trying to do something that resembles Sherlock and Watson today, that is one of the reasons why just writing Sherlock and Watson the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did is not on our list of recommendations. Because Doyle uses Watson’s viewpoint to disguise the fact that Holmes is actually not a very good detective, and that he only really solves mysteries because he gets access to clues you don’t get. Therefore, he is, you know, able to come up with these amazing deductions. And even then, we have to just depend on Doyle to make him correct most of the time. And that would be way more obvious if you were in Sherlock’s perspective.

Chris: Yeah. It would also be easier for us to just guess the answer if the clues were actually good clues…

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: …that would lead us to an answer. So it would be harder to preserve the surprise of the mystery. Not impossible, I will say, but certainly harder than if we just don’t tell the reader any clues that the protagonist is getting.

Oren: Right. And of course, the other reason that we talk about a lot is that giving the viewpoint to someone who isn’t your main character is always going to be extremely risky at best, because you’re building attachment in the wrong place. If this person is the POV character, and the audience likes them, then you’re building attachment to someone who isn’t the main character, which can build resentment when the main character goes on and does all the main character stuff. Or alternatively, they don’t really care about this POV character, at which point you’re wasting one of the biggest advantages that prose offers over a film story.

Chris: Yeah. Again, just to recap why it’s so important for the viewpoint character to be your main character. First of all, again, we’re trying to develop attachment and emotional investment in this character. And we want emotional investment in the main character because they are the most important. You know, obvious there. One thing that builds attachment is familiarity and exposure, and the viewpoint character is just gonna have the most page space and the most words.

And besides that, generally the viewpoint character, we are deliberately placing the reader in their shoes. They experience things as that character experiences them, so we are basically doing everything in our power to encourage the reader to empathize with our viewpoint character, because that’s the perspective that they view the story from. So it’s just a huge bonus to attachment. And of course, the problem is that what the author is attached to is not necessarily the same thing as the reader.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And so when you have a character, and again, we see this in other circumstances too, not just in mysteries, although it happens in mysteries a lot because of Sherlock, that sometimes writers want to present their main character as somebody who is mysterious.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And view it from the outside, usually because they wanna give that person lots of candy.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Like, see how cool they are. But that really kills the emotion. There are exceptions, but by default, we want the readers to feel some of the emotion that the main character feels. Again, it helps with that bonding, but it also just creates a more powerful experience if there’s some emotion to the story. So if they’re mysterious, they’re also very emotionally flat. Replacing emotion with mystique–and oftentimes this isn’t actually a very good trade-off when it comes to the main character. For side characters it works fine, because we already have our emotional anchor in the main character. But for our main character, they’re not gonna be as attached to that person. That person may be cool, but that’s not the same thing as being emotionally invested in them and wanting to root for them.

Oren: Hilariously, Holmes and Watson are an example of a story type that actually works better in film than it does in prose, despite it originating in prose. So I find that very funny, because in film you don’t have to deal with all this POV stuff, because there is no POV. It’s all the camera, babyyy. So it doesn’t matter that we’re not seeing inside Sherlock’s head, ’cause we wouldn’t do that anyway.

Chris: Yeah, although the BBC Sherlock still managed to have this problem.

Oren: I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are still bad Sherlock adaptations. But at least in theory it’s a lot less of an issue.

Chris: I think in the BBC Sherlock, even though we didn’t have a character viewpoint, we had some of the same dynamic where Watson was the relatable character that we understood, and Sherlock was presented as very eccentric.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And also sometimes kind of a jerk. Which again, typical for Sherlock, and a character you’re less likely to empathize with. And I got really frustrated with that show for making Watson feel too ancillary, and giving Sherlock all of these action hero moments that I felt should go to Watson instead. That balance between who your audience is actually attached to as a character, and which character is actually getting all the spotlight and all the moments of glory in the story, you want those things to align. You want your audience to be most attached to the person who’s also getting the spotlight and is saving the day, and when those things are misaligned, people start resenting the character that is getting too much spotlight. And so I quit that series because I just hated Sherlock after a few episodes.

Oren: Yeah, he’s really annoying. I get it. The show won’t stop giving him candy, and oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? He’s like Rick before Rick, where he’s mean to people, but it’s okay because he’s really smart and they deserve it.

Chris: To be fair, there are some audiences that really love candied characters.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Especially when they’re men, unfortunately.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

Chris: So there is a taste difference here, but if you can get all of your readers on board, that’s obviously better. So that’s why this sort of division where we have one character that seems to be the magnet for relatability and empathy and getting attachment, and another character that is doing the fancy cool stuff is just not really something that we should be doing. And I think most mysteries are doing it mostly because Doyle did it.

Oren: Yeah. Getting back to the idea of how might you do something like this in a written work, with a book and everything. The most obvious answer is you make Sherlock your POV main character. Or your Sherlock analog. Probably he’s not gonna be called Sherlock–although you could just call him Sherlock, public domain and everything.

But you gotta be careful with this one, because chances are that you are gonna run into the problem that every super-brilliant-detective story runs into, which is that your plot is about solving mysteries, and if you channel Sherlock as he has been portrayed in other versions, you have basically introduced a character whose power is solving mysteries. And that’s not ideal in the same way that, like, if you have a story about mountain climbing, you probably wouldn’t give a character the superpower to climb mountains. That just takes all the effort out of it. It’s not fun anymore.

Chris: Yeah. Sherlock, as he’s designed, being really good at solving mysteries is what he has going for him. Otherwise, he’s just a jerk.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: [laughing] So he kind of needs that, so you need to really remake the character, and it wouldn’t really feel like Sherlock anymore.

Oren: Yeah. So there are a few ways you can do this. You can do the just scaling him down, which some people do, and I think that can work fine. I think having a Sherlock who is a clever detective, but not playing nine-dimensional chess in his mind palace level of brilliant, is totally doable, and if he has a sidekick who is a little more relatable and gets on with people better, people will understand what you’re talking about, right? They’ll get it. And so I think that can work. If you want to really drag out how brilliant this mystery guy is, then you’re gonna need to either make your mysteries really beefy, really robust mysteries so that he has a lot to solve for the entire story, which you can do, but is challenging.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, maybe if you reveal it slowly. But after a while, mysteries can become so elaborate that they start to feel implausible and unbelievable.

Oren: Right. Can your readers even remember what’s going on? That was my problem in Three Parts Dead, which is a book I really like, is that at the end they have to do this big explanation of the mystery because there’s so many moving parts that I was just like, “What?” By the end I was like, “What is going on?” And it more or less made sense once you put it all together, which is more than I can say for some stories like that, but it was still not fun to have to, like, pause the story for 20 minutes to get an explanation of the mystery.

The other option, and this is arguably more reliable and has less dependence on just a completely brain-melting mystery, is that you put your brilliant Sherlock character into a scenario that they have no context for, like a complete fish out of water type setting. And this is one of the reasons why Sherlock versus magic is popular as a concept, because assuming that Sherlock doesn’t know anything about magic, and suddenly you introduce magic to Sherlock, then that’s like a whole thing he’s gonna have to figure out. And that can slow down his magical mystery solving abilities long enough for the story to happen, and that is probably your most reliable way to go in this scenario.

Chris: Or Sherlock walks into some political intrigue and has to figure out who each faction is and what their deal is.

Oren: Yeah, you take him into something he’s not familiar with, as opposed to, like, your standard bank robbery type scene or something

Chris: Technically, you can have Sherlock deduct most things, but then withhold an important clue for later so he just doesn’t get anything immediately. But I think that’s always really tricky. If you give readers too much information too early, then they can guess the answer, et cetera.

Oren: Right. That could also be frustrating for movement. If it feels like he’s just not getting the clue he needs, then it doesn’t feel like the mystery is progressing. That’s why I was suggesting that if you have, like, a really robust mystery, because then he can find a clue, and then find another clue, and, you know, so and so. But that leads back to our everything’s super complicated problem. And in this scenario, your Watson just has to follow normal side character rules, which is that they have to have a reason to be there, and they have to contribute and, you know, be distinctive and all those normal things. But you don’t have the contradiction of the side character POV anymore.

Chris: Basically, Watson generally should not have a viewpoint.

Oren: Right, in this scenario.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, you could still get away with occasionally, if the two characters are in different places, throwing in a Watson POV scene or chapter. But you would definitely want to give Sherlock more page space and screen presence so that people know which character is supposed to be the star of the story.

Oren: Right. You’re probably gonna wanna give this POV Sherlock, assuming that they are super brilliant, some spinach, otherwise they’ll be insufferable, except with the people who really love super candied characters and identify with them. But that’s probably not the entire audience that you want. So then, of course, the alternate is to try to make Watson work as a main character.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: Which is, in my mind, doable, but I don’t know if I’ve yet seen it done. The closest I can think of is The Mimicking of Known Successes, which employs kind of a hybrid approach where Watson and Sherlock are co-protagonists, and it has scaled Sherlock down, so she, in this case, is less, you know, playing nine-dimensional chess and immediately solving everything the moment