Tag Archives: Stories and Writing

Nancy Drew Computer Games and Mysterious Boxes

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My daughter and I used to really enjoy playing Nancy Drew computer games together. We’d take turns at the mouse, clicking on objects and puzzles, moving around, and having conversations with the characters we met. An important part of playing these games is investigating anything that can be opened—doors, drawers, and boxes of all kinds.
Often these boxes require you to solve a puzzle in order to open them. In a computer game, the puzzle could be anything from sliding pieces to rotating colors in a specific order to… well, any kind of game you can play on a computer. In the real world, the puzzles are a bit more limited. Still, I love boxes that have a trick to them.
All boxes are a bit mysterious in that you can’t see what’s inside until you open them. (Okay, glass boxes are an exception.) Back when I was young, a neighbor who collected decorative boxes told me that a box should always have something in it, even if it is just a penny. I think she had it right.
assorted decorative boxes, some enameled, some inlaid, one painted ceramic
So even boxes that are neither practical nor tricky have two chances to delight you. They can be beautiful on the outside, and they can hold something interesting on the inside. For that matter, they can be decorated on the inside, which is a lot like holding something interesting.
One opened inlaid box displaying coins, one open enamel box displaying painted butterfly on the bottom
Puzzle boxes offer a third delight—that of solving the puzzle. Even if you already know how a particular box is opened, there is something pleasantly sneaky in the knowledge that other people will not be able to open it without some difficulty.
 I have two puzzle boxes. One, which I received from a friend, is only mildly tricky. The pieces of the fish have to be removed in a specific order, and some slide up while others slide sideways. Still, I love the fact that it is not a straightforward box.
The other box is a Japanese puzzle box. Opening this box involves sliding whole surfaces forward or back or up or down, in the right sequence. I believe it is one of the easier ones, and that is difficult enough for me.
A fish-shaped puzzle box and an elaborately inlaid Japanese puzzle box
Photo shows a fish puzzle box partially opened.
Finding a place to display decorative boxes is a problem, though, especially if you end up with lots of little ones. What to do? Well, when I went looking for my small decorative boxes so I could take photos of them, I looked in… yep, more boxes.  One of those was a decorative box of the sort found at Michael’s.
And speaking of mysteries and discoveries—in the same box I found the record of my smallpox vaccination, dated 1977.
Photo includes cover of international vaccinations certificate from the 1970s.
You never know what you’ll find.
Till next post.

The Pleasure of Pens

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Long ago—maybe it was ten years ago, actually—my husband and I went to some event in our daughter’s elementary school classroom. Her teacher talked about things they’d been doing, and remarked that recently she had tried setting out a large selection of pens for the kids to choose from for a writing assignment. She was surprised that getting to choose a pen had made them more enthusiastic about actually writing. I, in turn, was surprised that she was surprised.
Of course choosing a new pen would make them want to write with it! Or does it not work that way with other grown-ups, the way it worked with those kids?
Didn’t that teacher, when she bought a new pen, find herself writing nonsense notes on a nearby scrap of paper to try it out, followed perhaps by some more extended and coherent remarks that happened to pop into her head as she watched the words appear in clear black or bright blue or even a vivid red?
Well, maybe not. Maybe it’s just me (and some other pen enthusiasts.)
I love pens. I like pencils, too, but pens come in such a variety of colors and feels.
By “feels”, I mean the difference between a gel pen oozing out a generous stream of viscous ink, and a ballpoint, pressed firmly to paper and smoothly putting down a thin line. Or a felt-tip, rubbed lightly along the page and leaving a vivid line of dye that sinks into and sometimes through the paper, versus a fountain pen, whose metal nib is run over the paper with hardly any pressure, leaving an equally inky, though hopefully not quite as penetrating, mark.
The above description only applies to pens that aren’t running out of ink, of course, and to ballpoints that run smoothly. A pen that is drying up is a frustrating object and makes writing unpleasant. I think I have avoided certain kinds of pens—rollerballs, in particular—because I’ve had too many experiences with ones that were halfway dry. It isn’t fair to the rollerballs. When they are fresh and full of ink, they write very well.
So part of the pleasure of writing is the feel of the pen on the paper. Another is watching the words appear. It helps if you have an interest in handwriting or calligraphy, so that you like to play with their appearance. Neat and upright, or elegantly slanted. Round and curly, or sharply angled, or full of flourishes. CAPITALIZED FOR EMPHASIS, or underlined, or even in italics. But even simple printing has something appealing about it when it fills a notebook page.
Samples of different handwriting by the same person
There’s more to writing than physically putting words on paper, of course. For me, writing is a way to organize my thoughts. Writing them down allows me to see them all together and keep track of them, in a way that I can’t easily do in my head. It’s so important that during a time when wrist problems made it difficult for me to write, I found it difficult to think as well.
I read a very interesting book about writing a while ago, about the two very different problems of writer’s block and hypergraphia– The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty. I’d like to quote two short segments from it on hypergraphia.
“…Scientists are never happy until they can assign a number to the phenomenon they are studying, and researchers soon invented a simple way to do that with hypergraphia. They mailed a short letter to their patients with epilepsy, asking them to describe the state of their health. The average answer of patients without hypergraphia was seventy-eight words. The patients thought to have hypergraphia averaged five thousand words.” (p. 19)

 

“Hypergraphic handwriting tends to have distinctive physical characteristics. Hypergraphics often use highly elaborate or stylized scripts, even mirror writing like that used by Leonardo da Vinci. For emphasis, they frequently write in all capitals or in colored inks. They may not confine themselves to the main text, but may add exuberant annotations, drawings in the margins, and illuminated initials. Lewis Carroll, who most likely had temporal lobe epilepsy, exhibited several of these peculiarities—including what he called looking-glass writing and an exclusive reliance on purple ink—in the 98,721 letters he wrote from his late twenties until his death at age sixty-five.” (p.26)
That’s a lot of letters.
While I don’t find myself compelled to write, and don’t write to anything like the extent she describes in her book, there is something about this description that strikes a chord. Colored inks, elaborate scripts—of course. Annotations and marginal drawings? How wonderful! In moderation, anyway.
But I was talking about pens earlier and now I’m talking about writing, which leads me to wonder—how do people with hypergraphia feel about pens? Do they love trying out new pens and rediscovering old ones, or does the implement they use not matter? The author’s comment about colored inks suggests that it isn’t entirely irrelevant, so now I’m curious.
I’m also wondering why Lewis Carroll relied exclusively on purple ink. His signature color, maybe? I think I’d get tired of writing in the same color all the time.

Till next post.

Dissecting Mysteries–the many kinds of clues

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Yesterday, I sat in a bookstore thinking about mysteries. Kids’ mysteries, particularly. How do they work?
Actually, they vary. Like adult mysteries, some are more about the adventure of solving a case. I’m thinking here of the traditional Nancy Drew mysteries (not the Nancy Drew Clue Book books). First, Nancy has to discover what the mystery is. Further problems occur as she pursues answers. (She often gets knocked over the head along the way—in real life, she would need to see a neurologist for the repeated concussions.) Eventually, in a dramatic chapter, she comes into direct conflict with the villain, triumphs, and the mystery is solved.
By contrast, short mysteries like the Encyclopedia Brown stories have a clear, quickly revealed mystery. It hinges on some particular fact or statement, and in the Encyclopedia Brown stories, the author breaks the story into two parts: the mystery, and the solution. The reader can “match wits” by figuring out how Encyclopedia Brown solved the case, then continue on to the solution to check herself.
Not all short mysteries separate the solution out so explicitly (the Nate the Great stories don’t), but they do generally turn on some one clue, so I started making a list of different kinds of clues.
Some clues link the suspect to the scene of the crime. Sometimes the suspect leaves traces on the crime scene (footprints, a pocketknife with his initials on it), and sometimes the crime scene leaves traces on the suspect (ink stains from the spilled bottle, red mud on his boots).
Some clues involve discovering a falsehood in the suspect’s story. Often the detective knows something that the suspect doesn’t. (Mules are sterile. Oil paintings aren’t framed under glass.) Alternatively, the suspect has forgotten a detail that makes her story impossible. (How did she buy an ice cream when she was in her swimsuit and her money was still in her shorts’ pocket?)
Things that undergo change over time or under special circumstances make good clues. (They also make good weapons in adult mysteries.) One way in which change can be a clue is when it indicates that the suspect is lying about time or about where he has been. (He can’t have been out on the warm porch sipping lemonade for the past hour, because the ice cubes in his glass are clearly fresh from the freezer.)
Another way that change provides a clue is by making something more detectable. (The missing lunch is discovered in someone’s closet because—phew, it’s gone moldy. Spilled lemonade brings out a message written in pH-sensitive ink.) The problem with this kind of clue is that it isn’t to the detective’s credit unless she is the one who correctly identifies the smell, or notices the partial markings and deliberately spills more lemonade to reveal the rest of the message.
I’m sure there are other categories I’ve missed. There’s the locked-room puzzle (how could someone have committed the crime?), as well as the “you had no way to know that unless you did it” categories.Some might be combinations. Something that becomes deadly as it changes over time, or that disappears over time, might be the key to solving the locked room puzzle.
Now that I’ve made this list, I need to come up with an interesting detective and a small world to set the mystery in. But that’s a problem for another day.
Till next post.