THE QUEEN OF RETRO

John Le Carre was in awe of his hero Agatha Christie

He had always wondered how she could imagine such elaborate plots

And consistently create such unexpected killers

So when he met her he plucked up the courage and asked her

How did she consistently wrong foot her audience?

She let him in on her secret

She starts without knowing where each story is heading

Or who the killer will be

As she writes she lets the story twist and turn organically

From the point of view of the audience

When she arrives at the end, she has a victim but no killer

So she asks herself, ‘who could it possibly not be?’

And she makes it that person

Then she goes back to the start

Seeding the clues and tweaking the story

She reverse engineers the most unlikely killer for the crime

Ensuring that the audience are left guessing

It almost sounds like cheating

But it’s much better than that

It’s playing god

Because the audience aren’t reading the process

They’re reading the book

And they don’t know what they don’t know

If they are moved by the story, they are happy

The end justifies the means

In advertising we call this practice retrofitting

And often we’re ashamed of it

Worrying that it cheapens our output

If the process wasn’t perfect, how can the answer be correct?   

But we’re in the business of stories not maths

So the only thing that matters is the story

How you got there is irrelevant

As long as where you get is really good

The queen of retrofitting has sold 4 billion books

So maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world