A Fifteen-Minute Free Write

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According to the assignment, this week I’m supposed to do a 15-minute free write to get “everything I know or think I know” about my topic down on paper. I’m not wild about free writing; I always feel like an idiot when I look at it afterwards. Here goes.



Sherlock Holmes relies on logic and deduction. He knows a lot of strange things about different subjects that come in handy. I remember that in one of the stories I read, he talks about knowing where a bit of cigar ash came from because he wrote a monograph about tobacco (what’s a monograph, anyway?). He wears a deerstalker cap. He sometimes uses a bloodhound named Toby to track a criminal. He lives with Dr. Watson (before the doctor gets married) at 221B Baker Street. Their landlady is Mrs. Hudson. He plays the violin when he is thinking, and he smokes a pipe. He also uses cocaine in a 7 percent solution (what that means, in terms of strength, I have no idea, but I guess that the people reading it when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing the stories would have understood). Watson is an educated man, has served in the military, and sometimes carries a handgun. Holmes does not carry a gun.
Think, Rhonda, think!
“Elementary, my dear Watson”—I seem to remember my dad telling me that this isn’t in the stories. I’ve seen the old black-and-white movies with Basil Rathbone; Dr. Watson is a goofy old man in those and usually kind of bumbling. He mostly gets in the way, and he’s the comic relief, I guess. My dad likes the BBC tv series, I think it’s from the 1980s, with Jeremy Brett. I think he’s kind of creepy, but he makes that work for the character. His Sherlock Holmes is very enigmatic. He keeps everything as secretly as possible. I guess my favorite movie Holmes is the one from The Hound of the Baskervilles, the British one, could be the 1960s, with Peter Cushing. Actually, he reminds me of Rathbone and Brett. They all have similar faces. And now that I think of it, the kid in Young Sherlock Holmes has that kind of face, too. A narrow, hard face with a prominent nose, they all look like their skin is kind of close to their skulls, if you know what I mean. Weird. Robert Downey Jr, on the other hand, has a much softer looking face, and he is built differently. I bet that he has to work hard to keep his weight down. So, there’s one difference.
The Dr. Watson in the new film is different in one interesting way—he actually gets mad at SH. The others sometimes became exasperated, but they seemed to regard Holmes as if he were a superior life form or something, like they don’t have a right to get angry at him. The new Watson seems to be angry at Holmes repeatedly. I need to see the film again!



Can’t think of anything else. Can’t think of anything else. Waiting for an idea. The dog that didn’t bark, and that was the strange thing. Which story is that from?


15 minutes are up. Yay!