In parts 1, 2, and 3 I showed how a theme is often shoehorned into a story at the expense of the story, and I showed how one might avoid the shoehorning, and thereby make the story feel more natural and more satisfying, by causally connecting story events and having the events share a single causal inciting incident long before any of the action that is described in the now of the story takes place.
Welcome back to the world of Fast, Slow, and Boss and the murder/robbery at the school.
Of course the story, as now developed, is still very basic. The only thing we have achieved here is to give a bare history of the crime. There is nothing here of the investigation that will be the driving force of the episode. Personalities, places, specific criminal acts, and the police investigation—full to brimming with red-herrings—have yet to be charted.
What is clear is that the occurrence of the many exams, as nailed to the originally proposed story, is now seen to be window dressing. Showy padding. Never really part of the story at all.
In our modified rendition, abstract nouns no longer cause story events, nor do accidents create links between the timing of exams. Everything now flows causally from Fast’s reason for leaving the town of his university (subject of course to any limitations imposed by the series bible).
It seems to me that including any mention of exams at all is now arbitrary: of no story use, and merely inserted to satisfy the request to include exams in the episode. Why would we need to mention the children’s exams at all? So, ideally, the request to insert exams goes away in the light of the more integrated, bigger story now developed; any mention of Fast’s and Slow’s children’s exams is dropped.
I hope.
Suppose however that Producer, Director, Show-runner (Publisher, Editor, Critiquer, Focus Group) and Uncle Tom Cobley and all demand that the writer insert all the aforementioned references to exams—or find work elsewhere.
Okay. If you insist.
We will unify the following key events:
- Stolen exam papers,
- Fast’s daughter’s university finals,
- Fast’s partner’s driving test,
- Fast’s pub quiz,
- Fast’s best-kept village competition,
- Slow’s son’s school exams,
- Slow’s partner’s marking papers,
- Slow’s promotion,
- Boss’s police station audit,
- Boss’s partner’s accountancy audit work.
We will call the story The Final Exam as follows:
We have a gang who steal exam papers and arrange for answers to be written, customized to a student’s writing style based on a sample of the student’s writing, and sell the answers prior to the exams, to be learned by heart by the student. That covers the theft, and university final exams, and sixteen-year-old students’ exams [in this story, the latter two involve students being offered the service]. Those marking the exams [Slow’s partner] raise suspicions. The gang’s operation includes impersonating candidates, as for instance in a driving test [Fast’s partner is also offered the service]. Pub quizzes are a recruiting ground for the gang [an encounter for Fast]. The accountant’s audit [performed by Boss’s partner] can be at the specific behest of Boss and is aimed at a company associated with the gang. Boss’s own police station audit arises out of a fear that police officers have been using the gang’s services to gain unearned promotion [neatly roping in Slow and his attempts at learning. He too is offered the service]. As to the well-kept village, one of the gang members will just have to live there. And all this because the gang leader, having failed school exams, resents being judged and wants to subvert the system to prove his—or her—superiority, and a recently won minor lottery prize (no exam there, a counter example) is used to fund this revenge.
Does it stretch plausibility beyond breaking point? Perhaps it’s down to the writer to make it plausible, in the end. Plausibility is certainly not stretched as much as when a crime is committed and it transpires that every investigator, every family member, every suspect, and every organization is, by chance, in the middle of an exam.
You decide. I think this second example, The Final Exam, still feels improbable, and contrived, and would benefit from some keystone event—an inciting incident that lies at the root of all the events that get mentioned in the episode. For example, supposing a gang was targeting Fast personally and trying to discredit all those that had dealings with him (in the episode, Fast’s associates would report being watched etc.). Or suppose a pupil at Slow’s son’s school was using all their social contacts (including parents and friends of parents, and older siblings) to launch a business online which addressed people’s ‘fear of exams’, and had hit upon a business model which brought fearful students and cash-strapped advisers together anonymously.
Regardless, if you can confidently now say: “Look, Director-Producer-Showrunner-Editor-Publisher-Godhead, there’s an alternative way of doing this,” then my job is done.
Besides, I make no claim for a great story in the above. My elaborations in response to theme are, no doubt, rather weak and clichéd and have been seen too many times before.
But theme is no longer tacked on; theme is no longer shoehorned in. Things that previously were helicoptered in, now play a causal role in the provenance of the crime.
~
This complete piece – now serialised in 4 parts – was too long for inclusion in the book:
“CB’s Top 100 Writing Tips, Tricks, Techniques and Tools from the Advice Toolbox”
(Break the rules, not the writing) by Carter Blakelaw
Published by The Logic of Dreams, 2021
Carter Blakelaw BSc BA lives in bustling central London, in a street with two bookshops and an embassy, any of which might provide escape to new pastures, if only for an afternoon. Carter has studied physics, philosophy and computer science and was the architect and lead programmer for the Rooms 3D Desktops virtual reality engine, and has worked in integrated circuit design. In addition to his Top 100 Writing Tips book, he has published three books on what makes us conscious and how that knowledge impinges on both the machines we build and on our art. He has been an active member of the T-Party (latterly renamed Gravity’s Angels) SF writers’ group for 15 years, and of the Cola Factory (latterly renamed Spectrum) SF writers’ group, for the last ten years. Carter’s website is: https://www.carterblakelaw.com/ for more info and up-to-date news.
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