Whack-A-Mole Plotting

Lately, I’ve run across a number of novels that suffer from the same structural and plotting flaws. I believe this is a result of misunderstanding how the various plot skeletons work, especially the journey-based ones.

To refresh everybody’s memory, the basic plot skeleton goes something like this: “Main Character has problem. *MC tries to solve problem. MC fails. MC tries again; repeat from asterisk until work is almost as long as needed. On final iteration, MC succeeds in solving problem. Finish with rewards and weddings. (For tragedies, MC permanently fails to solve problem, followed by punishments and funerals.)” The journey-based plot skeletons are variations on the twelve stages of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey,”  which get a lot more specific about what happens when.

The common flaw I’ve been noticing in people who are plainly trying to apply these extremely general structures is that most of the time, the hero’s “problem” or “what they want” can be summed up as “To stop the Villain.” The resulting stories look a bit like this:

Hero discovers that Villain plans to take over the government. Hero attempts to stop Villain by thwarting Villain’s initial move. Now Villain cannot execute evil plan. *But Villain gets away, because the plot skeleton requires failure and another iteration. Villain has not been stopped, so Hero has failed. Villain concocts a new, different plan to take over government! Hero thwarts initial move of new plan. Villain cannot execute new plan…Repeat from asterisk until story is as long as necessary, then suddenly there is a Final Confrontation, Villain is killed or captured, and rewards and weddings follow.

This is what I am referring to as Whack-a-Mole Plotting. Since the Hero’s main motivation is to stop the Villain, all they ever do is wait for the next Evil Plan to pop up so that they can thwart it. First they stop the Villain’s attempt to replace one of the Prime Minister’s chief advisors with a doppleganger. Then they thwart the Villain’s attempt to kidnap the Prime Minister’s daughter to use as a hostage. Then they have to deal with a disinformation campaign designed to discredit the government and force a new election (which will, of course, be rigged). Then they stop the Villain from poisoning the entire top level staff. There’s no real build-up, except, occasionally, the acknowledgement that the Villain is getting cleverer about his/her plots and sneakier about his/her escapes.

In a Whack-a-Mole Plot, the protagonist is always reacting … and never quite reacting enough. The protagonist stops every attempt, but never seems to make any progress in tracking down the villain after he/she escapes (if they attempt to track the villain down at all – this is why the protagonist’s motive, on examination, looks like “to stop the Villain,” rather than “to catch the Villain”). Some writers misidentify this as the primary problem, but having a reactive protagonist is, in this case, a side effect, rather than the main difficulty. (Reactive protagonists are a different post.)

The underlying structure of a Whack-a-Mole Plot is very similar to that of a fix-up novel or series. Each try-fail-try-again iteration has a beginning (discover Evil Plot), a middle (figure out how to thwart it), and end (successfully thwart this plot, even though the villain gets away). Each iteration is mostly independent of prior episodes; all that ties the story together is that the same Hero faces the same Villain, over and over. Neither side ever gets very far (though in most cases, the Whack-a-Mole Plot at least has both sides doing something slightly different with every iteration).

The solution, of course, is to provide a novel-long plot arc that does build with each iteration. It doesn’t matter whether the build-up happens through raising the stakes or digging the protagonist into a deeper and deeper hole, as long as there is a trajectory that increases tension.

If you’re a character-centered writer, or if you’re stuck with a lazy or reactive protagonist, digging your main character into a deeper hole is a good place to start. Every time the protagonist doesn’t follow through, or figures that now it’ll be someone else’s problem, you look at how that allows the villain or the situation to get much worse than it would have gotten if the protagonist had worked a little harder or been a little more proactive. Basically, you let your lazy/reactive protagonist dig the hole that they’re eventually going to have to get themselves out of. The less they do, the deeper the hole gets.

If you’re plot-centered, you look for the threads that tie your plot-episodes together, and/or incidents that will complicate the situation, raise the stakes, or generally make it harder and harder for the protagonist to succeed. These don’t have to be surprising to the reader (though they probably should be unexpected to the characters). The movie “Apollo 13” is a great example of building up tension – when I saw it in the theater, it had everyone on the edge of their seats even though we all knew how it came out (some of us remember living through it). (Also note, “Apollo 13” doesn’t have a villain, and it’s still a rattling good story.)

Whether you’re primarily plot-centered or character-centered, it can help a lot to think about why your protagonist wants “to stop the Villain,” as that why is probably the thing the protagonist really wants (and will likely be more useful in creating an overall plot arc, even if the answer to “Why does he want to stop the Villain?” is “So I can quit this stupid job, move to Tahiti, and spend the rest of my life on the beach.”)