Another take on word count

WHAT’S THE THYME?

‘1,200 words to solve a crime? Piece of cake. In fact we should have this one wrapped up within 1,000, they can use the extra 200 for the medal ceremony,’ Inspector Derek Spit informed his faithful sidekick, Constable Ian Polish. Polish nodded his head in agreement, but as soon as the Inspector returned his gaze to the shop across the road from their surveillance vehicle, he rolled his eyes as if to say, ‘It’ll take more than a novel for this idiot to solve any crime.’

     Spit glanced back quickly, his highly tuned detective mind telling him that Polish had been wasting words to prove him wrong, but Polish kept a straight face, chuckling inwardly at the extra paragraph he had helped create merely by using a few words to express his doubts about his boss’ abilities.

     ‘All we need to do is wait till she tries to sell it, then we’ll have her bang to rights,’ Spit trained his binoculars onto the shop front again. Brightly coloured flowers stood in buckets outside the large glass shop front trying desperately to attract some adjectives to help with the word count. Spit despised flowers in general, and more specifically these ones which, he was sure, were trying to make a fool of him by being involved in a plot to prove his boast wrong.

     ‘Pride comes before a fall,’ he recalled his mother saying to him as a child. He didn’t mind the inclusion of the cliché, usually frowned upon in modern writing, as he planned to prove that wrong too. He would show them, all those back at the station who mocked his rather poor arrest record. How was he to know that ‘wearing a striped shirt with a polka dot tie’ or ‘being a little camp in public’ were not crimes. In his book they were, but the Superintendant didn’t seem to share his views.

     ‘What we need is a change of viewpoint so that we can get into her mind then we could work out when the buyer is likely to come along,’ he mused (for he was scared of too many ‘he saids’ littering the story).

     Mary-Jane Arner was a little disappointed that her hyphenated first name only counted as one word, but she took a little comfort in the fact that a whole sentence was used to express this feeling. She showed this by looking slightly pensively at an arrangement of flowerpots on a shelf in her shop, then pointing at her name badge before shrugging her shoulders to indicate that it couldn’t be helped. Thus she obeyed the show, not tell rule of writing, while sneaking in a couple of extraneous words without the reader noticing. (What else could she shrug but her shoulders?)

     She glanced out of the shop window and saw that the car with those two suspicious looking men were still casing the joint. She wondered whether she should call the cops, but was a little worried that she may get into trouble for lapsing into the colloquial in a short story. This, she had heard, was regarded as a crime by a least one of the local bobbies.

     Before she could dwell too long on the strange car, a customer came into the shop. Mary-Jane itched to allow the slim young blonde to take over the viewpoint of the story as she had a sneaking suspicion that she had not been handed the viewpoint as an act of kindness, but before she could dwell too long on this thought she glanced at the mounting word count and realised that they were just over the 600 word mark and it was therefore time for the middle of the story as it had had its beginning and the middle needed to occur and leave sufficient doubled spaced lines for the end.

     She turned her attention back to the blonde, and eyed her carefully as she made her way round the shop. ‘She’s up to no good,’ Mary-Jane thought. ‘She’s has the look of one trying very hard to become a full blown character and there’s no room for another one in this story, we’ve already got three, another one will surely push us over the limit.’

     ‘Too bloody right,’ Inspector Spit, grabbed the viewpoint back and studied the newcomer carefully through his binoculars.

     ‘What?’ asked Constable Polish who had lost the plot, but was still rather proud of the clever play on words he had managed to insert into the story. Some may argue that the adjective ‘clever’ was perhaps a little bit of vanity on behalf of the writer, but it was merely used as a tool to increase the word count, with the added bonus of an extra sentence to explain this.

     Inspector Spit was not impressed, the 1,000 word mark was rapidly approaching and there hadn’t been a proper crime committed yet. Yes, there had been numerous laws of short story writing broken, but, somehow, he felt that the Superintendant wouldn’t let him lock anybody up for these infringements, so he returned his attention to the shop.

     ‘This must be her contact, I’m sure of it. The florist is going to sell the dope to this blonde girl and then we’ll have her bang to rights.’ He turned to smile at Polish, then the faux pas sunk in, he had already used the phrase ‘bang to rights’ once in the story and that was not good. ‘We’ll get them red handed’ he added lamely, then cursed himself for acting in a manner that required an adverb to be used.

     ‘We’ve just gone passed the 900 word mark,’ Polish said, trying to keep any hint of smugness out of his voice.

     ‘If you spent less time watching the word count and more time creating a better plot, we wouldn’t be in this mess,’ growled Spit, ‘Anyway, enough of these story writing rules, we need to wrap this one up quickly, look she’s handing something over to that blonde woman who shall remain nameless so as not to be a full blown character, let’s move’

     The two policemen rushed across the road, fearful that they would run out of words before they had managed to read this notorious drug dealer her rights.

     ‘Don’t move,’ Spit shouted as he burst into the shop,’ otherwise I will be forced to use this onomatopoeia that says ‘Bang! Spit, grab that packet, it’s got all the evidence we need.’

     Mary-Jane looked bewildered in a way that was slightly obscure that Spit was sure was a stalling technique to ensure that she would live to fight another chapter.

     ‘It’s no use, there is no next chapter, this is a short story and we’ve caught you red handed dealing in marijuana,’ he pronounced, grabbing the packet from the blonde woman and holding aloft a bunch of herbs.

     ‘Marijuana? Don’t be daft, that’s thyme.’

     Spit looked at the herbs, then at the woman. ‘But I heard you on the phone when I was in early, you said marijuana.’

     ‘No, I said Mary Arner, that’s my name.’

     ‘Mary Arner?’ Spit repeated her name for no other reason than to save his embarrassment as he hit the 1200 word limit.

(1,199 words) © John Samson