At least in terms of novels, as a writer I firmly, religiously believe that every single scene that occurs should in some way move the plot forward. I think this is what keeps pacing tight and readers turning pages. It keeps you from wandering off philosophically. It keeps you honest. When I’m drafting, I literally make notecards where each scene is parsed into two: what actually happens on the left, all the other stuff on the right (eg, what characterization things do we learn, what themes are hit, etc.)
I took what felt to me a considerable risk to violate this rule in this chapter, where technically nothing happens. It also felt like a considerable risk in terms of catching an agent or editor’s attention—they’re often skimming those first few pages and anything that bores them, confuses them, or turns them off can have them put down those pages. You’re specifically told to NOT open a book with someone staring out a window, thinking things. To be fair, Chloe is not staring out a window, thinking. In some ways this list is just a crazy detailed accounting of just how invested she is in her plan. She’s taking it very seriously, so so should you.
Given that I’ve stiffed you on plot in Chapter 2, maybe I will take some time to talk about the Multimethod Psychopathy Panel Study itself! The MPPS, the clinical panel study at the heart of this book is just… wild. No, I can’t see NSF or NIMH actually funding this thing, but hey, who said this book is supposed to be realistic. But it does have the feel of the sorts of things I encountered in graduate school.
I got my PhD in Social Psychology, so I did not do clinical work (it’s clinical and counseling psychologists who deal with abnormal psychology). While many people have never even heard of social psychology, those same people have often heard of very famous social psychology experiments or findings—the Stanford Prison experiment (where subjects were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners and things allegedly went awry), the Milgram experiment (where subjects were convinced to shock someone in another room to the point of serious injury just because they were told to), and Danny Kahneman’s work on Prospect theory (people often confuse him for an economist because that’s what his Nobel Prize was in, but he’s actually a psychologist). There are a few good social psych easter eggs in this book—all of the little experiments the psychopathic students do are based on real experiments from social psychology.
Anyhoo, from my time being a graduate student, I’m very familiar with the processes of getting grant funds, or working within someone else’s grant, recruiting research subjects, analyzing data, and writing things up. The panel study, as described, would be wildly, outrageously expensive and I don’t even know if such a thing would be funded (the notion that their tuition would be covered, in particular). I was just finishing up my PhD when the iPhone was coming out, and the ubiquitousness of smartphone technology has undoubtedly changed the landscape of collecting data from subjects. But back then, the cutting edge had been giving research subjects little PDAs that were like stripped-down Palm Pilots (oh man.. some people reading this might not be old enough to remember Palm Pilots.) They would get an alert to have to do some type of task—like record their mood, which they would do on their PDA, and eventually this data would be manually downloaded from the PDA to the researcher’s computer (so… no Bluetooth). So the addition of smartwatches—which would also be really expensive—would be a more modern, easy way of collecting data. Also, personally, I think that fiction that shies away from technology is often taking the easy way out or not acknowledging the modern world as we actually live in it. As a die-hard horror movie fan, the addition of cell phones and the internet has thrown a considerable wrench into genre mechanics. 911 is one button away. There is no mystery you would encounter in real modern times that you wouldn’t just Google. Some horror movies have dealt with this by having cell phone service conveniently cut out. More clever movies have head-on incorporated technology into new scenarios (Host, 2020, a Zoom movie filmed during COVID lockdown comes to mind, or Caroline Kepnes’ You, which shows the reality of social media stalking people.) But I digress.
Panel studies—wherein you follow the same subjects over the years—are really expensive, but incredibly valuable. From them you can get really rich data that you can’t get otherwise because you can look at the same person over time. They are also really hard to do because you have to contact the same people over and over across many years— some will drop out and then your dataset gets increasingly smaller. And the smaller it gets, the more you have to ask yourself if the people who stayed in the study are different somehow than the ones who dropped out. Most panel studies, or at least the big ones I can think of, didn’t involve the panel members actually interacting with each other. (Think more like massive surveys of people’s diets, health behaviors, wellness measurements, and demographics).
But in this case, maybe our panel members will run into each other… ?