Jul-01-04

We went out for barbecue, my wife and child and I, and our engaged friends. J, the groom-to-be, put a puzzle before us:

A woman goes to her mother's funeral. There, she meets a man. They go out afterwards and have an amazing evening together. She falls in love with him. The next morning, she wakes up, and realizes that she forgot to get his name or phone number. The next week, she attends her sister's funeral. Who killed her sister, and why?

(Answer at the end of the article) Try and figure it out for yourself, first.

Looking at this puzzle now, I can't believe it took us ten minutes to come up with the answer. Perhaps Saturday Morning Cartoons did make our brains soft. Or maybe it was the beer. I'm sure most of you will have less trouble than I. However, our trouble illustrated an important idea.

This riddle resembles one of those mysteries that you're supposed to ask "Yes or No" questions about, seeking the missing information that makes an irrational story rational. It's not that kind of mystery, though. J refused to answer any questions, because he had given all the information we needed. All we had to do was connect the dots.

Not that we didn't ask questions. We theorized about inheritances and jealousy and secret identities. J just kept saying, "The answer is simple."

The answer is simple. More than that, it's elegant. By that, I mean Antoine de Saint-Exupery's definition of elegance. He was speaking of engineering, but it applies to the above story: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (courtesy The Jargon Dictionary.)

Replace "designer" with "writer" and I think you'll see my point.

Often, when I'm rewriting a scene, I will think to myself, "Oh, if I just set that up earlier in the play, this scene will work. If I just add this piece of dialogue, it will all make sense." But what very often happens is that the scene comes out clunkier than ever, weighed down by the new baggage.

Here's another way of looking at it. In this riddle, we figured out quickly that the woman did it. Really, there's only two suspects, and the man is the less likely candidate. We searched for a reason why she would do such a thing: there was an inheritance she stood to gain; or, the man was the sister's husband; or, the man was the woman's sister, or her father, or her brother. We were looking for something in this woman's past that would make her actions clear. Yet her actions were clear, if we bothered to extrapolate them from the story. To paraphrase an old concept, we were looking for the bear she ran from, not the tree toward which she ran.

In other words, who cares where the character has been? Who cares what's missing? Where are they going, and what's interfering? Investigate that, and everything becomes clear.

Rewriting a script is a gut-wrenching experience. It's a process of figuring out what really matters in the script. The sensation is something akin to the one I had working on this puzzle. I'm looking for the simple, elegant solution. I know that it's right there in front of me, but I can't see it. Very often, I think, the solution must be not to add, but to take away. Strip the play to nakedness, and have a hard look at that. I can always dress it up again later.

ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE:
The woman killed her sister, in the hopes that her lost love would come to the funeral.