Friday, April 18, 2014

The Murder Mystery: Black Box and White Box

Another post? Well, I found my inspiration again. Turns out it was laying on dust under my bed... nah, actually, lying around in a hospital bed with nothing to do gives you a lot of time to get bored. Also, reading all the crime novels and thrillers got me thinking about my own ideas. This, in turn, got me thinking about the very thing I kept getting stuck on: The murder mystery itself. Who did it, why did they do it, and how the hell do the cops find them?

This post is about two basic ways of finding that out.


Thinking in Boxes


The terms I use here are something I unabashedly pulled from software testing. There, a White Box test refers to testing the product with knowledge of its inner working and free look at the source code itself. A Black Box test, on the other hand, gives you none of that, leaving you to test it under the same conditions as the eventual user. The same principle can be applied to the murder mystery.


Definitions


White Box Plot
As with the software testing example above, you have all the information. You have plans on who did it, why they did it, who lies and who tells the truth. You follow the murderer, so you know where the evidence is, why they did it, and so on and so forth.

Black Box Plot
The Black Box Plot is best described as "follow the cops". You start out with just the things the cops see at the crime scene and basically do the same thing in your story planning as the cops do in their investigation.


Pro/Con/Black/White


Of course, both Black and White Box have their advantages and disadvantages. Also, not everybody can pull off both things equally well.

White Box Plot
The biggest pro of the White Box Plot is that you start out knowing who did it in the end. You don't pull things out of thin air as you go along, since you already have a fixed set of characters, pieces of evidence and other things where you want to end up. It's hard to get stuck when you already know something that's going to happen.
The biggest con of the White Box Plot is actually the downside of its biggest pro. You know who did it. It's easy to have your investigators jump to conclusions that sound a bit farfetched or have them find things by accident a few times too often. It's possible to ignore that extra knowledge you have, but it's harder than it seems.

Black Box Plot
The Black Box Plot basically writes your story for you. As I wrote above, you follow the cops, who are most likely going to be your main point of view characters. Sure, there's enough stories that include the culprit's point of view, too, but the main focus is still on solving the crime. So you're basically swimming with the stream here.
And again, looking at this from the other side reveals the problems. Following the cops will lead you the same problems as them. You'll find yourself endlessly meandering until you figure out what your next step is. Sometimes, you need to take leaps of faith and see if the story works out the way you want it to.


Plot and Story


Up until now, I've always talked about a something something plot. That was because I was talking about the raw "what is going on" of the story, not necessarily what is written down. Just because you develop the plot white box, that doesn't mean that you have any culprit POV segments in it, and vice versa. Because once you have your plot, you can write your story around it, and that doesn't need to have the same structure as your internal plot notes.
Of course, I'm not telling anyone how to make their murder mysteries, but I think I've done a decent job outlining black/white box differences for writing here. Because I'm preeetty sure you can apply this to other types of plots, too. Make of that what you will.

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