Plot Bunnies In Place
Beginnings, middle, and ends
Once upon a time, I heard a story.
A writer had heard a court case, of a ghastly murder. During it, one witness, the wife of one of the accused, insisted that he had returned home when he was (allegedly, and actually) committing the murder because she had heard the theme song of a TV show playing at the time of his arrival. (Would now have to be historical, of course.)
She could not be shaken in cross-examination.
Then the prosecution called another witness. The manager of the TV station in question took the stand and testified that TV show had been preempted that night, and the theme song had not played.
The writer talked of how you could never, ever use that in a story.
I thought, that depends.
You could never use it in the climax of a story except in a roaring farce.
But in other settings, possibly with modifications --
The severity of the crime would matter a lot to the tone of the story, so that’s the thing you would most likely have to change. It would have to be serious enough that you could expect some effort to escape punishment, but other than that, you have a free hand.
That granted, you could use the court scene as an inciting incident.
The prosecutor wants an excuse to fire a lawyer in his office, so he assigns him this case. His victory here blows that out of the water, and so the conflict between them sharpens.
Or, conversely, one murderer is enraged at the foolish failure that ruined their water-tight plan. She could have had the TV on and been able to testify that she was about to watch that show when it was preempted. So he decides he’s entitled to revenge on the wife and her fool of a husband.
Thus, the story turns to a conflict between him and this couple. With the added bonus of setting up characterization for the wife of the couple.
Or -- perhaps the murderer had committed the other crimes, and the couple turns state’s evidence for protection. Thus, you could make another character entirely, one who hadn’t even been there, the viewpoint character. He could be the cop assigned to keeping them safe until they testify in the other cases. (Thus letting him have a normal reaction to the crime and to the stupidity of how they did it, and letting us escape the couple’s viewpoint.)
Another variant would be to cut down the criminals to the murdering husband and the accessory wife, and have the husband decide to take revenge on the defense lawyer for not heading off the wife -- without the knowledge that the wife was perjuring herself, perhaps.
But if those variants do not appeal, and the anecdote still does, you could use in the middle of the story.
The court scene doesn’t even have to actually appear.1 A wily old lawyer explains to a youngster that you have to check every detail, and uses the tale about a court scene that happened once upon at time. Whether they are defense or prosecution doesn’t even matter for that.
Or not lawyers, but criminals making a plan. A crafty old crook tells a youngster why they can’t trust to luck.
It could appear, to be sure, in the story as a subplot. How the viewpoint character, or another lawyer, got himself out of a pickle by careful attention to details. On the other hand, it’s too much dependent on coincidence and cleverness to make a good climax, though it would require, as well as foreshadow, that the climax turn on attention to details. (As an added bonus, if the viewpoint character did it, other prosecutors might think him too clever by half, adding tension in the office.)
The subplot would work less well for a crook, because having your alibi giver watching television at the right time is not striking unless you know why, in which case it would have to appear as a story as well as an event.
It could even appear in a denouement. The hero lives in a region controlled by criminals. One day, he offends some of them. He escapes, finds a new home, new friends, and a new job, and one day one of those friends rushes in to announce that the criminals had been captured for another crime. And guess what happened at the trial?
Beginnings, middle, and ends. Sometimes the plot bunny works in some places, and not in others, and you have to determine where before you start to so much as build the story.