Plotting Board, Part 2

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

The MOTW Formula

In our previous post, we mention The X-Files's use of the Monster of the Week (MOTW) as a plot generator to provide variety which would prevent the series from rehashing these series' mythological elements and becoming boring an “repetitive” as a result. But we didn't explain the formula the show's writers used. (There has to be some incentive to return for more posts, after all.) So here it is (the formula, not the incentive):

The MOTW episodes follow the same formula: “There's a monster; Mulder and Scully chase the monster; people die; the monster is caught or killed; and the status quo is restored . . . or is it?”

Innovative Investigation

An innovation in the investigation of a mystery is to have the detective solve it as a result of a shift in his or her thinking. This approach is as old as detective fiction, having been used, for example, both by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as well as such over-the-top police procedurals as Hawaii 5-O. (I use it myself in my historical murder mystery, Death in the Old Dominion, which is set in colonial Williamsburg).

The X-Files takes this approach in “The Erlenmyer Flask,” as VanDerWerff explains: “At every turn of the episode, Mulder and Scully are confronted with what seems to be a brick wall, until they twist their thinking in a new direction and discover the solution waiting just around the corner” (47).

Often, an intuition or the chance discovery of a clue or the understanding that a clue can be interpreted more than one way (as in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which what is assumed to be the name of a person is finally understood to refer to a building.) However, this turn of thought can also occur as the result of a deliberate review of the evidence (as in several of Doyle's short stories, including “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”).

Upsetting the Apple-Cart

In many television series, to keep things fresh, the last episode of a season upsets the apple-cart, as it were, by introducing several significant changes to the status quo. These changes can involve characters, the principal setting, the show's basic situation, or other elements, as “major changes” are made, some of which are “easily” reversible, while others “reverberate for years to come.” 

As VanDerWerff points out, at the end of The X-Files's first season, “the death of Deep Throat,” Mulder's revelation “that the X-Files has been closed down,” and Mulder's and Scully's being split up as they are “assigned to different divisions” certainly upset the apple-cart (47-48).

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the apple-cart is upset by Buffy's death at the end of season one, by Buffy's dispatching Angel's soul to hell and leaving Sunnydale at the end of season two, by Faith's escape after Buffy stabs her during a rooftop fight and by Buffy's graduation from high school at the end of season three.

Art Imitates Life

Another way to generate new directions in the plot of a novel is to imagine that the book is a television series in which actors portray the characters and that something unexpected happens to an actor, which requires a new, if temporary, change in the plot's routine. For example, as VanDerWerff recounts, during the filming season two of The X-Files, Gillian Anderson (Scully) became pregnant; as a consequence, Scully “had to recede from the narrative” (52). To accomplish this requirement, she is abducted.

Similar situations can occur in your own novel, if you imagine your characters are enacted by flesh-and-blood personnel rather than described in words on paper. Such an approach may open many possibilities that might not occur to a novelist otherwise.

MORE next post!