I think this is a point you make in the subtext of your post, but, you know, why accept subtle and effective writing when I can belabor a point in the comments section, thereby avoiding working on a troubling chapter?

Right. So. Would the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes shine without the title character? Of course not. You might have clever mysteries without Holmes, but you would have excised the soul from the story. Likewise, if you’d dropped Holmes at County General Hospital, he may have been a brilliant surgeon, but absent Watson, and London, and criminals, and all the pinnings, he wouldn’t have been Sherlock.

In some ways, I think fiction is very much like real life. People are shaped by setting, and setting shaped by people. There’s a push-pull process, a dance, in both fiction and life, that doesn’t exist if you remove one of the steps.

Plot forms character, and character shapes plot, in the imagination and on the page, until they are fully formed.

No chicks without eggs. No eggs without a hen to hatch.

The Novel Writers’ Workshop sounds absolutely awesome. Another “Argh, wish I’d been there for that!” moment. Thanks for another timely and thoughtful post.

But after reading your blog, I realize that this metaphor actual works.