Closing credits.

That instance I gave a couple of entries back about the married man in the elevator -- the idea for the scene has been attributed to the great director Frank Capra, replacing rather more than half a page of dialogue supplied for him by a famous writer.

(Part of my password to edit this stuff is my middle name, Kenneth. For some reason, my fingers keep wanting to type "Henry" instead. Why?)

Buttle it.

And as a follow-on from the previous post, I have a pet peeve when people refer to Jeeves -- surely now an iconic figure from fiction -- as a butler. Jeeves was a valet, a gentleman's gentleman, which is quite different.

Does it matter? Well, would you call Mary Poppins a cook? Or Hagrid a chauffeur?

There's a reason why they call him "The Master."

The world, it is said, is divided into two types of people: those who love P.G. Wodehouse and those who've never read him.

Doing some comfort re-reading of The Code of the Woosters, I'm in awe again of Wodehouse's overwhelming genius, as a wordsmith, as a plot architect, as a creator of unforgettable characters.

Wodehouse writes the Jeeves and Wooster stories in the person of Bertie Wooster, who has an unwavering faith in his intellect and sophistication, and is utterly convinced that he is a good deal smarter than most of the other characters in the novels he narrates. (His valet, Jeeves, excepted, mostly.) Furthermore, as the channel for Wodehouse's style, his first-person voice is fluid, hilarious, and studded with an average of three metaphors of dazzling originality per page of text. And yet, through the medium of his own self-deluded words, we are still left with the indelible impression that Bertie is a complete chump.

How does Wodehouse do this? Through passages like this, where Bertie discusses his friend, newt-fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle, with Gussie's fiancee, the dreaded Madeline Bassett.

"Have you not sometimes felt in the past, Bertie, that, if Augustus had a fault, it was a tendency to be a little timid?"

I saw what she meant.

"Oh, ah, yes, of course, definitely." I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie. "A sensitive plant, what?"

"Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie."

"Oh, am I?"

Before he was Obi-Wan . . .

I think movies offer us the worst examples of formulaic writing, but we can still learn from some cinematic techniques. I recall a famous example about a screenwriter who was having trouble depicting a marriage that had grown stale -- no amount of rewriting could get it to less than a page of explanatory dialogue. He passed the idea to a more experienced colleague, who came up with a brilliant wordless visual for this complex situation: The married couple step into an elevator. The man keeps his hat on. The elevator stops, and another woman steps on. Only then does the man respectfully remove his hat. A classic example of the "show me" principle.

My favorite movie is the 1949 Ealing Studios comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, perhaps best known for Alec Guinness's bravura performance as all eight members of the doomed D'Ascoyne family, although it does tend to overshadow the coherent neatness of the plot and Dennis Price's outstanding portrayal of the suave murderer, Louis Mazzini. A constant criticism of the film is that it is too verbal, with a witty, Wildean, deliciously cynical narration delivered by Price. But the narration supplements brilliant visual storytelling; it never substitutes for it.

One brief, wordless scene from near the beginning of the film packs so much information into a single image: a woman dressed in black pushes a perambulator along a street of modest houses and mails a letter. What do we get from that? A young woman, recently widowed, her late husband no doubt the father of the newly born child in the pram, already living in modest circumstances and now by his death deprived of all income . . . Clearly the letter she is mailing is of crucial importance to her situation, perhaps her only hope. Turn the sound off and you've still got the entire backstory conveyed in ten seconds of screen time.

Later, our first glimpse of young Henry D'Ascoyne is through the inverted viewfinder of an old camera, caught emerging guiltily from a village pub. Yet he can't resist coming over to inspect the camera. Again, it shows us all we need to know about Henry -- secret drinker, photography enthusiast, a man whose life is about to be upended (terminated, in fact) by a lethal combination of these very interests. Louis substitutes gasoline for kerosene in the lamp in Henry's darkroom, frying the young man when he adjourns there for a furtive drink away from the censorious view of his abstemious wife.

Now, if we could find a written corollary for these celluloid moments...

A gottle of geer.

I had one of those great writing experiences the other day. Having reluctantly moved on from Effie's disrobing, I let Oliver leave the house and have a brief encounter with a minor character. I'd only decided the day before to write this short scene, so the character was a new invention and I had little idea what he was like. I needn't have worried -- he took over and told me.

Like ventriloquists and puppeteers, writers often have that dissociative experience, when their characters seem to speak to them from the page or the computer screen in their own independent voices, dictating their lines, deciding on their movements, and very often having their own ideas about the way a scene should go -- or not go. It can be eerie, but it's also deeply satisfying. And fast. You have to type fast to keep up.

I belong to a writers' group, and one of the principles that often comes up in reviewing each other's work is "don't tell me, show me." In other words, don't simply assert something in the narration -- for example, a personality trait of a character -- when you can discover that trait by seeing it in the character's words and behavior. It generally produces a more satisfying effect, with richer characterization and a stronger sense of the integrity of the story. (It's not a rule of course, just a tip.)

The way a character speaks, the words he or she chooses, are all indicative of personality, and so dialogue is often a key "show me" technique. (After all, it was all Shakespeare ever wrote.) So when I find Vic Flimsy, village peeping Tom and church-goer, explaining to Oliver -- and, vicariously, to me -- how he practices his voyeurism while maintaining an unassailable code of ethics, I get out of the way and simply transcribe the speech as it flows. (It surprised me when he revealed that he had a pet name for his trusty step-ladder -- I can't recall coming up with that idea.) Later I can go back and shove in the "he saids" and the actions that punctuate and round out the scene.

The same thing happened the next day, when the village policeman whom I'd assumed was a stereotypical buffoon, stepped onto the stage for the first time and assured me that you can't avoid work with his consummate slacker skill without having some degree of cunning.

So one day these people don't exist -- the next day they've each hijacked my novel, for their brief moments in the sun (Well, the moon -- they're nighttime scenes). Hmmm. Maybe I can get all the characters to do the book, and I can just be a typist.

Rule 1: There is no rule 1.

I don't like rules. I certainly don't like formulas. For me, there's nothing worse than a movie or a novel so clearly following some "key-to-success" pattern that you might as well put up subtitles announcing "Act III twist" or "symbolic payoff" or "Epilogue." (Actually, didn't "The Man from UNCLE" used to do that?) There's only what works.

Now of course, there's certainly good advice. There are certainly good principles of plot construction or character development, especially in a mystery or a thriller, when you want to keep the story moving -- such as start each scene as late as possible and let the exposition take care of itself. I just object when I read books that tell me I should always, say, start a chapter with dialogue or always minimize narration. I repeat, there's only what works.

Take the famous rule that says readers want a murder to take place as early as possible in the book. A body certainly makes for a good start, and I've tended to stick to that. But there are plenty of great mysteries that let us see the victim alive, gauge his character, observe his interactions with all those people who'll be suspects once he's bumped off in chapter three. Or seven. Or nineteen. Sometimes it pays to see at first hand what kind of person caused someone to break the world's greatest taboo. I get to witness the altercations and arguments and threats first hand, not hear about them later.

And let's not forget the works that notoriously broke the rules. Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which the murderer gets away with it and becomes the "hero" of later novels. Or Hitchcock's Psycho, which killed off its star (rather memorably) less than halfway through the movie. They're the ones we still talk about. A book that's consistently placed in the top ten mysteries of all time, Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, bears no resemblance to the formulaic mystery novel.

Learn the rules. Then ignore them, if it works better that way. (In that order.)

Out of the mouths of . . . etc.

Secundus enters the office. "Do you use Microsoft Word?" he asks.

"Yes. Why, do you want to write something?" I reply.

"Yes, I want to write a book. But not like yours. Mine is supposed to be funny."

Modern parenting tips #5,738.

A brief instructional moment from before Christmas. For months, my favorite calculator, a twenty-year-old HP12C, had been missing from my office. On previous occasions, its absence, along with that of many other essential stationery items, could be traced to my six-year-old kleptomaniac, Tertius. (Similarly one of the babysitter’s credit cards and, memorably, a raw egg.) But this time, despite both dire threats and promises of amnesty, all three boys denied knowing its whereabouts.

Resigned to adding a replacement to my Christmas list, thus displacing the Marx Brothers DVD collection I wanted (the early Paramount movies, with Zeppo), I had one more attempt. “A new calculator will cost fifty dollars,” I sighed, within the hearing of prime suspect Tertius and eight-year-old Secundus. “At this point, I’d gladly give ten dollars to the person who finds the old one, so I could avoid spending the rest of the money.”

The calculator was back in my hand in two minutes. Tertius suddenly remembered seeing it underneath his chest of drawers. But Secundus rushed slightly ahead of his little brother to inform me that the missing object had been found and demanded the reward himself for being first with the news.

I split the ten between them. It may be the wrong message, but the important thing here, I think, is that I saved an unnecessary $40 and I got the DVDs for Christmas. Duck Soup first, I feel, if I can ever wrestle the television back from its Wii duties.

Trivia: Did you know there was an earlier movie called Duck Soup, a 1927 silent short that was one of the first to pair Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy? Oh, you did.

Undress rehearsal (continued).

I did a lot of serious contemplation about the initial direction of Effie's dress on its journey from her body to the floor, but I just couldn't decide. So I arranged for the interruption to come before they get to that point.

But here's today's mini-lesson in writing: if you have two good ideas -- in this case visual images -- that seem to be mutually exclusive, why not see if there's a valid way to include both? And so, in eager anticipation of a night of passion, I have Oliver vividly wondering which approach Effie will use.

Will she do the haul over the head bit, he wonders, a la Glenda Jackson's nightdress in Women in Love? Or the plunge to the floor effect employed by Teri Hatcher in the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies?

(Oliver's pants can clearly only go in one direction, although it was Lewis Carroll who purportedly invented the joke about the man whose feet were so big, he had to take his trousers off over his head.)

And sometimes, this kind of thinking gives you a narrative gift: by showing Oliver's anticipatory imaginings, the gulf between the expectation and the actual outcome is greater, thus intensifying the poignancy. But mainly, it's a sneaky way of not wasting an idea.

Undress rehearsal.

A running gag for the new book is that every night, the protagonist, Oliver, tries to make love to his girlfriend, Effie, but there's always something that either interrupts them or prevents their getting to it in the first place. To add to the piquancy, Oliver's frustrated yearnings are deepened by incidents and appearances that only intensify Effie's attractiveness -- catching her unexpectedly half-dressed, for example.

I've just reached another one of these moments -- to be interrupted again, alas. It begins promisingly with Effie disrobing in the moonlight in Oliver's bedroom, slipping out of a blue summer dress, which turns out to be the only garment she was wearing. But I can't decide which method of undressing is sexier -- the unzipped-back-and-cascading-to-the-floor option or the pull-up-over-the-head-in-one-swift-movement-hair-floating option. I've been picturing both, trying to come to some conclusion, but . . .

Ah, it looks like I'll have to keep on imagining. Down to the floor? Up and over the head? Down? Up? Which is more erotic? "I'm working," I explain crossly to my wife, as she catches me gazing into space with a faint smile.