Good Post from The Player's Side of the Screen: Plotting and Paradigm: How to Open a Story

I realized something important about the design of the plot. Whenever Bond stumbled across an initial lead, it was because something went wrong. A courier got noticed who wasn't supposed to be, a drop was made sloppily, leaving room for him to track. If you think about it, the exact same thing happens in a great many Alfred Hitchcock films: the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time mucks an entire plan up.

In essence, it's all about an organization. Every plan, every conspiracy, every villain operates through structures that work just like machines. To accomplish Objective X, parts A, B, and C need to come about, and each has a specific mechanism that makes it tick. If the plan is a recurring one, like a Mafia's money laundering scheme, then the machinery is more or less regular.

And every machine has parts that can break down. For example...

via playerside.blogspot.com

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales