You need to employ some Peripheral Plotting!
Peripheral Plotting is the technique of pulling in ancillary elements and using them to create more tension in your plot. Ideally, they will make your character have to tap into a more noble instinct and push them along their journey.
How does Peripheral Plotting work?
I’m going to veer away from Cellular and Eagle Eye for a moment – only because they are such straightforward plots, and look at Live Free or Die Hard the latest in the Bruce Willis saves the world saga. Live Free or Die Hard is a perfect example of peripheral plotting.
Basically, through the Internet, the bad guys are trying to take over all the transportation, finances and utilities in the United States, and if they succeed, the entire world as we know it will collapse. Fascinating, big stakes, and the Primal Instinct here is survival. The problem is, that after a while, we as the viewer become bored or hardened to these larger stakes, and the Primal Instinct to save the world – and survival gets old.
Ultimately, we only care about stories that touch our hearts, and frankly, survival of the world, while important, just feels untouchable. Thankfully, the creator chooses to make it personal, to require John McClane to become more noble by making the situation personal. He kidnaps John’s estranged daughter and threatens her life.
Suddenly, there are new stakes to the story. By putting pressure on John to save his daughter and abandon the quest to save the world, we now have a twist that re-engages the reader into the storyline. He has to choose between two Primal Instincts – survival of the world, or saving his daughter. And only one is more noble. Therefore, when he chooses his daughter, he becomes more heroic. Now, of course, he could have also sacrificed his daughter (but we’ll get to that element in a second), but that would make him less heroic.
The technique of reaching beyond the main storyline to find those fringe elements and using them to exert pressure into the story is called Peripheral Plotting. The creator could have used a stranger off the street and threatened their lives – but this wouldn’t have been personal to John, and therefore wouldn’t have touched our hearts. He could have decided to threaten the life of the president, but this is too far out of the periphery for John. Peripheral Plotting requires that the plot element be Personal and close in Proximity.
Another great example of Peripheral Plotting was the television show 24. Notice how, at any given point, Jack Bauer had two or three other issues to deal with, on a personal level, along with saving the world? In the last season I saw (I’m a bit behind), Jack was trying to find a terrorist (of course) who was trying to keep the president from sending troops into an African country. This is a noble goal, but it doesn’t touch Jack’s life, unless you saw the prequel, where Jack is in the African country and sees his friends killed.
As the season opened, Jack was standing trial for his many “crimes” but was pulled away because of his personal knowledge of the situation. (Why!) As we get further into the story, Peripheral Stakes begin to weave into the story. Suddenly, Jack discovered he must save his best friend from being sucked into a terrorist plot. Then, he was required to save the president’s life and another friend is killed. Then, Jack contracted a biological disease and was going to die, which brought his estranged daughter into the scene. When she was threatened, he would do anything to save her.
The gem of this plotting is that all of these things are happening at the same time, making it harder for Jack to complete the big picture task. Most of all, all of these plotting elements conspire to raise the stakes and keep the adrenaline flowing in the story.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about how to find those perpipheral plotting elements.
Susie May