Understanding, Not Judging

My mother used to say, "Clean off your own doorstep before you clean off someone else's." I guess that might explain why I have always tended to blame myself rather than others for my faults. Her teaching prepared me for the Orthodox Christian teaching of not judging others. What I have been trying to do with my fiction is to leave to the readers what to make of the characters. There are stories where the characters misjudge the future, and the reader will know - having hindsight - the characters' errors.

But the stories are not catching any interest. 

Then I ran across The Magic of Maigret by A.E. Gauntlett on CrimeHub. I have read some of Simeon's Maigret novels - enough to know I like them, but not enough to understand the details of the work.

Simenon once said of his famous creation: “My motto, to the extent that I have one, has been noted often enough, and I’ve always conformed to it. It’s the one I’ve given to old Maigret, who resembles me in certain points… Understand and judge not.”

Such is the power of a nuanced, well-rounded, and iconic character that in Maigret, Simenon had a detective he could take (almost) anywhere. To luxury hotels, seaside resorts, ramshackle slums and country piles. But more than that: Simenon could take Maigret into the deepest and darkest recesses of the human psyche. And that’s a trip worth taking, for a reader or a writer. We can all learn a great deal from the godfather of crime fiction – not just about the lives of others, but about ourselves too. 

Which makes me wonder if it is how I tell the story. I favor the close third-person. Already, I have thought of converting several of the stories to the first person to get at the characters' emotions as much as I have tried to get at their lack of understanding of their place in history.

Until now, I had not considered the use of a narrator as an investigator. That would give me a way both into the characters and a person able to comment on the action

The biggest problem is to stop thinking and get back to the writing.

sch 9/22