Chapter 50: The Investigation

In this chapter, we’ll talk about how to plan your book’s Investigation—the actual scenes where your Sleuth snoops, schemes, and puzzles things out.

There are four Investigation beats, and each one will take place over multiple scenes. Taken together, these four beats comprise a large chunk of the time your reader will spend with your Sleuth—perhaps as much as two thirds, or even three quarters. So you want to pack them full of fun, intrigue, and excitement.

Fortunately, if you’ve been planning your clues and suspects, you already know much of the material that you’ll be using to fill these beats with drama. I’m going to walk you through a step-by-step process for planning them out—but first, let’s talk about how these beats differ from each other. They each have a slightly different flavor, escalating in intensity as the Sleuth gets deeper into the case—and as the Villain becomes more intent on stopping her.

Getting Curious

In this beat, something has begun to tickle your Sleuth’s curiosity, but she is not yet fully invested in the case. This is a great time for you to introduce us to the various characters who will become her suspects, and to lay out the basic rules your reader needs to understand the world of your Hook.

On The Case

This beat, where the Sleuth begins investigating in earnest, is pure fun. This is a great time to dip into your Image Bank for events and locations that will really showcase everything awesome about your Hook. If you’ve promised your reader an Egyptian mystery, here is where you show us some pyramids. If you’ve promised a spy drama, here is where your Sleuth goes undercover.

Things Fall Apart

Here is where things get dicey for the Sleuth—where theories explode, and where shots get fired. Your goal here is to hit the Sleuth with a number of small defeats, softening her up for a double whammy in A Grave Setback. These defeats may come while investigating—but they can also take place in her subplots. Here is where she might have a big blow up with her love interest, or find that her newly developed magic skills aren’t up to snuff.

The defeats your Sleuth suffers may come from the inherent difficulty of solving the case—but they may also be deliberately engineered by the Villain. By now, he’s probably figured out that the Sleuth is onto him. This is a great time for him to destroy evidence, engineer frame ups, commit Coverup crimes, or attack the Sleuth directly.

Final Clues

Following the events of A Grave Setback and Go the Hard Road, your Sleuth is newly committed to the case. She holds nothing back as she works to assemble final clues and unmask the killer.

Plotting Your Investigation

To begin plotting out your Investigation beats, you’ll want to pull together three of the engine components you’ve been building throughout this book:

• your final list of clues

• your list of suspect subplots

• your Villain’s Coverup Timeline

To this, add a piece of poster board, and a nice little stack of post its. Divide your poster board into four sections, one for each of the four Investigation beats. You’re going to be going through the elements of your plot systematically, and decide what goes where.

I recommend you start with the events from your Villain’s Coverup Timeline, because they’re the easiest to place within a specific beat. In fact, you may have already placed some of them, perhaps as the Midpoint or as A Grave Setback. Placing the rest will be a relatively simple matter.

For each event, come up with a Scene Brief to describe how the Sleuth learns about it—just a short sentence or two that tells you what happens in the scene on a bare bones level. Let’s say your Villain’s Coverup Timeline looks like this:

1. Villain erases CCTV footage of the campus library where the murder occurred.

2. Accomplice attempts to blackmail Villain, and Villain kills her.

3. Villain realizes the Sleuth is onto him, and tries to kill her.

From this, we might write these Scene Briefs:

1. Sleuth hides in the library until after hours, enters security office, and scrolls through CCTV tapes. She finds a gap in the footage.

2. Sleuth receives a desperate call from the Villain’s accomplice, and arranges to meet her at the campus quad. She finds the accomplice dead in the central fountain.

3. Sleuth is lured to the science lab and locked inside, with a beaker that begins spilling out toxic gas.

Now that we have an idea of what happens in these scenes, all we have to do is figure out which beat each belongs in.

First Scene Brief: The Sleuth hides in the library

This is a low-danger scene that should move the Sleuth’s understanding of the case forward. It might reasonably happen in Getting Curious, or in On the Case. To decide which makes sense, I’d look at what I’d already planned for my Challenge Accepted beat. Does the library scene most reasonably belong before or after that beat?

Let’s say that during my Challenge Accepted beat, I decided my Sleuth will learn that the police have closed the case on her roommate’s death, ruling it a suicide. This shocks the Sleuth, as she’s already seen evidence that proves the death was murder. She becomes convinced that the police are covering something up, and decides she has no choice but to pursue justice herself.

Based on this, can we locate the library scene within one of our Investigation beats? I think that this scene will be good for establishing that a murder actually occurred—if someone is committing coverup crimes, it stands to reason that there’s something to cover up. So if I want my Sleuth to go into The Challenge Accepted having seen proof that the death was murder, I may want to position the library scene in Getting Curious.

Second Scene Brief: The Sleuth finds the dead accomplice.

This scene likely doesn’t belong in an Investigation beat at all. It’s a huge, dramatic moment that probably fits best as the Midpoint, or the Grave Setback. Let’s say it’s already gone into my plan as A Grave Setback.

Third Scene Brief: The Sleuth is attacked in the science lab.

This is a high-danger scene that takes place after the Villain is sure that the Sleuth is onto him. It might reasonably happen in Things Fall Apart, or in Final Clues. However, if I want it to happen after the accomplice is killed, and if I already set that scene as A Grave Setback, then the location of this attack is obvious. I need to drop it into Final Clues.

We’ve dealt with the Coverup Timeline. Now it’s time to take a look at our suspect subplots. We’ll try to figure out in which beat they naturally begin and end—and also where we can give them a Hook-In to another plot.

Let’s say one of my suspects is my Victim’s ex-boyfriend. She recently dumped him, and he’s been pinning nasty notes to their dorm room door ever since—”You belong to me;” “You’ll be sorry;” and other messages of this sort. Where should his subplot begin?

Well, this is such an obvious suspect that it feels natural for his subplot to begin during the first quarter of the book, before our Sleuth has even made a commitment to the case. I’ll create the following Scene Brief:

The Sleuth attends a candlelight vigil for the Victim, and is angered to see the ex-boyfriend there, crying, after the shoddy way he treated her friend. She tries to confront him, but he gives her the slip.

And I’ll stick it into Getting Curious.

Where should this subplot end, and how can we give it a Hook-In to another plot? Well, to me, this feels like a subplot that should end with an emotional appeal—a scene in which the Sleuth talks with the suspect and becomes convinced he can’t be guilty. Our Sleuth will pin down the boyfriend, and demand to know why he harassed her friend. That’s when she’ll learn that he sincerely loved her friend—and that he never sent those messages. The Victim blamed them on him, perhaps because she didn’t want the Sleuth to know who had really sent them.

This is a scene that deepens the case, routing us onto the plot line for another suspect (those who that is, we don’t yet know). On the Case feels like the right beat for this one

Continue doing this for each of your suspect subplots. Lastly, pull out your list of clues, and create Scene Briefs in which your Sleuth can find—or decipher—each of them.

Now you have an idea of what needs to happen during each beat of your Investigation—and you can start organizing all of these scenes into a logical order in your Scene Index. I don’t want to suggest that this will be a simple matter of typing your post-its into Excel. There will likely be some futzing about required to make all of the Scene Briefs you’ve invented flow together into a nice, tidy list. But that’s all right—that’s what the Bug List is for! Use it to work through any difficulties you encounter.

Pulling together your Investigation will likely be the last truly thorny problem for you to sort out while creating your plot. In fact, you’re almost done! The only scenes you have left to plot are those at your book’s very beginning, and its very end. That’s what we’ll talk about next week.