skills/ai-film-pipeline-master/references/phase-01-story-generation/genres-inquiry.md

# Genres — inquiry

Entry point into the database. Each kit ranks a short list of techniques by `id`; open the `cat-*.md` file named for that id's prefix (or `arcs.md`, `situations.md`) for the full card.

A genre kit carries something a format kit does not: **required beats.** Genre in writing is a set of obligations, not a marketing label. The reader who opens a mystery has bought a contract, and the beats below are its clauses — 15 to 20 specific plot events, in order, that the story owes. Miss one and the reader feels a void they cannot name. Hit all of them and nothing else, and you have written formula: the cure is Truby's — carry two or three other genres in supporting roles, and let one of them argue against the primary.

These five are the inquiry end of the shelf: the genres about the mind and truth, where the plot is a sequence of things learned. The distinctions between them are real and are worth holding. **Detective** is about the person who finds out and what finding out costs him. **Mystery** is about the reader's puzzle and the fairness of the contract. **Whydunit** already knows who and is hunting a motive, and the darkness it finds is in the investigator. **Courtroom** is about which of two stories a room will believe. **Investigation and Journalism** replaces the individual killer with an institution, which changes almost every beat. Where a case-first, cop-first story is really about method and its price, see Crime in `genres-primal.md`.

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## Contents

- [Detective](#detective)
- [Mystery](#mystery)
- [Whydunit](#whydunit)
- [Courtroom and Legal](#courtroom-and-legal)
- [Investigation and Journalism](#investigation-and-journalism)
- [Coverage](#coverage)
- [Sources](#sources)

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## Detective

**What the genre argues:** Detective is the genre of the mind, and its claim is that the truth is findable by a particular kind of attention. Its second, darker claim is that the person capable of that attention is damaged by the capability — the detective sees because he has been where the killer has been. The genre asks what a society owes to the one person willing to look.

**Required beats:**
1. The killer's plan is executed before the detective is on the page.
2. The body, the theft or the disappearance is discovered by someone other than the detective.
3. The detective introduced inside a habit — the thing he does when he is not working.
4. The detective's ghost surfaces in one line or one object, unexplained.
5. The case is brought to him, and he takes it for a stated reason that is not justice.
6. The scene is read, and one observation is handed to the reader that the reader cannot yet use.
7. The suspect field is closed and named.
8. First round of questioning: each suspect lies about something small.
9. An official theory forms and is wrong.
10. The killer's counter-plan lands: a red herring planted, a witness bought, a second body.
11. The detective is warned off by someone with the authority to end his career.
12. Second round of questioning, now using a fact from round one as leverage.
13. An alibi that held is broken by a physical detail.
14. The detective reconstructs the crime aloud or on paper, and the reconstruction does not fit.
15. Apparent defeat: the wrong person is arrested, charged, or killed.
16. The intuitive jump — the observation from beat 6, recontextualised.
17. The killer's fatal mistake identified and proved.
18. The accusation made where making it costs the detective something.
19. The detective sees his own likeness to the killer.
20. Disposal: arrest, suicide, escape, or the detective choosing to let it stand — and the code stated by an action.

**Supporting genres:** Crime supplies the institution at beat 11 and the procedure at 12 and 13. Love Story or Family Drama gives beat 19 a person to wound, without which self-revelation stays theoretical. Horror is the usual third when the killer is a pattern rather than a person.

**Rules:** Give the detective a habit before you give him a case | Plant the decisive observation early and weight it as scenery | Make every suspect lie about something that is not the murder | Let the official theory be genuinely plausible | Cost the detective his standing at beat 11, not just his temper | Break alibis on physical facts, never on confession | Make the fatal mistake the killer's, not the plot's | Put the detective's self-recognition in an action, not a monologue

**Avoid:** The genius who explains conclusions the reader was never given the material to reach, which is the genre's defining betrayal. Suspects who exist only to be eliminated, with no life beyond their alibi. The withheld fact that the detective knew for sixty pages and did not think about, which is cheating dressed as restraint. The warning-off scene played as a shouting match rather than as a procedural threat with paperwork behind it. And the final confrontation where the killer confesses unprompted because the plot needs an ending.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Fair-Play Contract** (Information) `info.fair_play_contract`
   The genre's licence. Everything the detective uses must have been on the page, in view, and undervalued.
2. **The Buried Plant** (Information) `info.buried_plant`
   Beat 6. How to give the reader the decisive fact and have them walk past it.
3. **The Double-Meaning Clue** (Information) `info.double_meaning_clue`
   The best clues read one way in chapter four and another in chapter twenty. Nothing is added; the weight moves.
4. **The Ghost** (Arc) `arc.the_ghost`
   Beat 4. The detective's unhealed thing is why he takes this case and why beat 19 exists.
5. **Delayed Decoding** (Information) `info.delayed_decoding`
   Describe what was seen, not what it meant. The genre's native prose mode.
6. **Who Asks the Questions** (Dialogue) `dial.question_control`
   Beats 8 and 12. Interrogation is a contest for control of the frame, not a request for information.
7. **What They Notice** (Character) `char.what_they_notice`
   Characterisation and plot in the same move: a detective is defined by his attention.
8. **The Red Herring** (Information) `info.red_herring`
   Beat 10. The card's rule — it must be the killer's choice, not the author's — is what keeps it honest.
9. **The Opponent's Plan** (Antagonist) `anta.opponents_plan`
   Write the murder as the killer executed it, hour by hour, before you write the investigation.
10. **Competence First** (Character) `char.competence_first`
    Beat 6. The reader must be sold on the detective's method early, on something small.
11. **Restricted Narration** (Information) `info.restricted_narration`
    The reader stays at the detective's shoulder, never inside the part of his mind holding the answer.
12. **The Recontextualising Reveal** (Information) `info.recontextualising_reveal`
    Beat 16. Nothing new arrives; the meaning of what is already there inverts.
13. **The Staged Reveal** (Information) `info.staged_reveal`
    Beats 17 and 18. The solution is delivered in the order of discovery, not the order of events.
14. **The Cost of the Truth** (Arc) `arc.cost_of_truth`
    Beats 18 and 20. Detective stories that cost nothing to solve are puzzles, not stories.
15. **The Moral Test** (Theme) `theme.moral_test`
    Beat 20. Whether to expose it is the genre's real ending, not who did it.
16. **Peripheral First Person** (POV) `pov.peripheral_narrator`
    The Watson solution: the detective's mind stays closed because we are not in it. Read before choosing POV.

---

## Mystery

**What the genre argues:** Mystery is the reader's genre rather than the detective's. Its argument is that disorder is temporary and intelligible — that a world can be knocked out of shape by a single act and put back by patient attention. It is the most contractual form in fiction, and the contract is with the reader, not with the investigator.

**Required beats:**
1. A world and its ordinary rules established well enough that a break in them will register.
2. The crime occurs or is discovered, located and dated precisely.
3. The question stated in a single sentence, aloud, by a character.
4. The investigator accepts the question, with a clock or a reason not to take his time.
5. The suspect field presented, closed, and countable.
6. Each suspect given one fact that could be a motive.
7. The first real clue placed in plain sight and weighted as scenery.
8. A first solution proposed and dismantled.
9. An alibi established precisely enough to be broken later.
10. The red herring introduced, and it costs the investigator real pages.
11. Midpoint: a second crime, or a discovery that changes the question itself.
12. A suspect is cleared and the field visibly narrows.
13. Someone lies, and the reader is given the means to catch it.
14. The investigator commits to the wrong person.
15. The last fact arrives — the one the reader has held since beat 7.
16. The gathering or the confrontation: the solution delivered in order of discovery.
17. The method explained with every earlier clue cited by name.
18. Aftermath: what the truth costs the innocent.

**Supporting genres:** Comedy of Manners is the classical partner — the closed country-house set is a social comedy with a body in it. Family Drama supplies beat 6 with motives worth having. Thriller takes over at beat 11 if you want the investigator personally at risk, but it changes the contract, so decide deliberately.

**Rules:** Close the suspect field and say how many | Place every decisive clue before the halfway point | Give the reader everything the investigator has, at the moment he has it | Make each suspect's lie about a private shame, not about the crime | Narrow the field visibly so the reader can feel progress | Never introduce the culprit after the midpoint | Cite the clues by name in the solution | Make the aftermath about the innocent, not the guilty

**Avoid:** The unknown poison, the secret twin, the culprit introduced in the final act — the classic cheats, all of which work exactly once per reader per lifetime. Clues so heavily signposted that the reader solves it at page forty and reads three hundred more pages watching an idiot catch up. The opposite failure, the clue buried so far it is invisible, which reads as an authorial trick rather than a solution. Suspects who are pure function. And the explanation delivered chronologically, which drains it — the solution is dramatic because it is ordered by discovery, not by the calendar.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **Mystery — The Audience Behind** (Information) `info.mystery_audience_behind`
   The structural definition of the genre, and the card that separates it from suspense.
2. **The Fair-Play Contract** (Information) `info.fair_play_contract`
   Not a style preference. It is the thing the reader paid for.
3. **The Cheat** (Information) `info.the_cheat`
   Read this as a list of things not to do, then check your outline against it.
4. **The Plant and the Payoff** (Information) `info.plant_and_payoff`
   The genre's unit of construction. Every clue is a plant with a scheduled payoff.
5. **The Buried Plant** (Information) `info.buried_plant`
   Beat 7. How to put it in plain sight and have the reader file it as furniture.
6. **Misdirection by Attention** (Information) `info.attention_misdirection`
   Do not hide the clue. Put something more interesting next to it.
7. **The Rule of Three Placements** (Information) `info.rule_of_three_placements`
   Once is missed, twice is noticed, three times is suspicious. The card gives the spacing.
8. **The Red Herring** (Information) `info.red_herring`
   Beat 10. Must consume real narrative time or it is not a herring, it is a mention.
9. **The Knowledge Ledger** (Information) `info.knowledge_ledger`
   Track reader, investigator and culprit separately, scene by scene. Mystery is unwritable without it.
10. **The Micro-Reveal Ladder** (Information) `info.micro_reveal_ladder`
    Beats 8 and 12. Every chapter pays something, or the reader learns that waiting is free.
11. **The Riddle** (Situations) `sit.tobias_riddle`
    Tobias's master plot — read it for the requirement that the answer be visible from the start.
12. **The Question Planted First** (Openings) `open.question_planted_first`
    Beat 3. The whole book is an answer, so the question has to be phrased well enough to carry it.
13. **The Staged Reveal** (Information) `info.staged_reveal`
    Beats 16 and 17. The drawing-room scene is a structural device, not a period affectation.
14. **The Public Scene** (Scene) `scene.public_scene`
    The gathering of suspects: private guilt staged in front of witnesses. Subtext for free.
15. **The Double Reveal** (Information) `info.double_reveal`
    The second solution behind the first. Use once per book, never twice.
16. **Telegraphing** (Information) `info.telegraphing`
    Filed as a failure, and the one you will commit. Audit against it before you send the draft.

---

## Whydunit

**What the genre argues:** Whydunit tells you who and how in the first pages and spends the rest asking why — because the answer implicates the person asking. Its claim is that motive is where the darkness actually lives, and that anyone who pursues it far enough finds the same thing in himself. It is the only inquiry genre whose real subject is the investigator's corruption.

**Required beats:**
1. The act is shown or stated up front: who did it, and how.
2. The investigator introduced with a personal reason to want a motive.
3. The official motive offered and found insufficient.
4. The secret is named as existing, and is not described.
5. First interview with someone who knows and will not say.
6. A document, photograph or recording surfaces from the culprit's earlier life.
7. The investigator lies, or misuses a credential, to gain access.
8. A sympathetic explanation for the act is proposed and tested.
9. The investigator meets the culprit face to face, and the culprit says something true.
10. The dark turn: the investigator does something he would arrest another man for.
11. Someone close to the investigator names the cost out loud, and is not listened to.
12. The secret's shape is inferred but not confirmed, and the inference is wrong in one part.
13. A second act, or a second victim, recontextualises the first.
14. Confession, document or reconstruction finally supplies the motive.
15. The motive proves ordinary — money, shame, fear, love — and the ordinariness is the horror.
16. The investigator recognises the motive as one he is capable of.
17. Resolution without relief: the case closes, the question does not.

**Supporting genres:** Horror supplies the register for beats 13 and 15 — the ordinary motive works only if the atmosphere has prepared the reader to be afraid of ordinary things. Family Drama supplies beats 11 and 16 with someone to lose. Crime supplies the procedure so the dark turn at beat 10 has rules to break.

**Rules:** Reveal the act early and keep the motive closed | Name the secret without describing it | Let the culprit be articulate and partly right | Stage the dark turn as a procedural act, not as a rage | Make the sympathetic explanation genuinely tempting, then break it | Keep the motive ordinary — profundity here is a failure of nerve | Put the investigator's recognition in behaviour, not in narration | Refuse relief in the resolution

**Avoid:** The motive that turns out to be madness, which is the genre's way of quitting — insanity explains nothing and implicates nobody. The dark turn that is retroactively justified by results, which undoes the entire argument. Making the culprit a philosophical mouthpiece, which converts a person into a position paper. The investigator's spouse existing only to say "you have changed", with no life of their own. And the ending that supplies catharsis — this genre's contract is that the reader leaves uncomfortable.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Withheld Point of View** (Information) `info.withheld_pov`
   The genre's central device: the culprit is present and his interiority is closed.
2. **The Secret** (Character) `char.the_secret`
   Beat 4. The card's rule about naming without describing is the whole engine.
3. **Write the Opponent's Case** (Antagonist) `anta.write_the_case`
   You cannot write a whydunit without being able to argue the culprit's position in full.
4. **The Moral Line** (Arc) `arc.moral_line`
   Beat 10, the dark turn. Establish the line early and specifically enough to cross.
5. **The Lie** (Arc) `arc.the_lie`
   Both men's. The culprit's lie is the motive; the investigator's is why he cannot see it.
6. **The Recontextualising Reveal** (Information) `info.recontextualising_reveal`
   Beat 13. The second act rewrites the first without adding a fact.
7. **The Antagonist With a Case** (Character) `char.antagonist_case`
   Beat 9. He must say one true thing the investigator cannot answer.
8. **The Iceberg** (Subtext) `sub.iceberg_omission`
   How to leave the secret unwritten and still have it structure every scene above it.
9. **The Corruption Arc** (Arc) `arc.corruption`
   The investigator's arc, not the culprit's. Read it with beat 10 in hand.
10. **Withheld Flashback** (Time) `time.withheld_flashback`
    Beat 6 and beat 14. The card's rules about when a withheld scene reads as a cheat apply hard here.
11. **The Lesser Guilt** (Information) `info.lesser_guilt`
    Beat 5. Everyone who will not talk is protecting something smaller and more shameful.
12. **The Secret the Reader Holds** (Information) `info.audience_only_secret`
    Give the reader one thing the investigator lacks and the dark turn becomes unbearable to watch.
13. **The Moral Test** (Theme) `theme.moral_test`
    Beat 10 staged properly: both options must cost, or it is not a turn, it is a slip.
14. **Shame and Humiliation** (Emotion) `emo.shame`
    Beat 15. The ordinary motive is nearly always shame. Read the card before writing the confession.
15. **The Double Reveal** (Information) `info.double_reveal`
    Beat 12 then beat 14: the inferred shape, then the actual one.
16. **The Open Ending** (Endings) `end.open_ending`
    Beat 17. The card's distinction between an open ending and an unfinished one is the one to get right.

---

## Courtroom and Legal

**What the genre argues:** Courtroom is the genre of competing narratives. It argues that truth and proof are different objects, that a verdict is a decision about which story a room will accept, and that a system built to be fair is still operated by people with rent to pay. Its pleasure is procedural: rules that constrain everyone, applied under pressure.

**Required beats:**
1. The client arrives with a version of events the lawyer does not believe.
2. The lawyer takes the case for a reason that is not justice.
3. Charge, statute and penalty stated exactly.
4. Investigation: the lawyer's team finds the fact the client omitted.
5. A plea deal is offered and refused, and the refusal is costed out loud.
6. A pre-trial ruling excludes or admits something decisive.
7. Jury selection, or its equivalent — the first strategic choice with a face attached.
8. Opening statements: two complete, competing stories of the same events.
9. The other side's strongest witness delivers, essentially uncontested.
10. A cross-examination breaks a witness on a detail, not on a theory.
11. The client lies to his own lawyer and is caught doing it.
12. Off-court pressure: a threat, a firing, a family cost, a disciplinary risk.
13. Surprise evidence arrives and must be fought into admissibility.
14. The lawyer's own witness fails on the stand.
15. The decision whether to put the client on the stand.
16. The closing argument — the theme said aloud, legitimately, exactly once.
17. Deliberation, either seen or deliberately withheld.
18. Verdict.
19. Aftermath: what the verdict did not fix.

**Supporting genres:** Crime supplies beat 4 and whatever happened before the indictment. Family Drama supplies beat 12 with something to lose at home. Social Drama takes over whenever the real defendant is the institution rather than the client, which is most of the good ones.

**Rules:** State the charge and the penalty precisely and early | Give both sides a complete, coherent story | Make the rules of procedure visible so constraint can create tension | Break witnesses on facts, never on shouting | Have the client lie at least once | Put the lawyer's own career on the table by the midpoint | Save the thematic statement for the closing argument, where it is diegetically legitimate | Let the verdict answer the legal question and leave the moral one open

**Avoid:** The surprise witness who walks through the door at the back of the court, which no one has believed since the 1950s and which the procedure at beat 13 exists to replace. The opposing counsel who is merely arrogant instead of good, which makes the win worthless. Objections used as punctuation rather than as strategy. Legal detail dumped rather than dramatised — every procedural fact should change someone's next move. And the verdict as full moral resolution, which argues the system works exactly as intended and is the one claim the genre is worst placed to make.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Thematic Argument Scene** (Theme) `theme.argument_scene`
   The genre is structurally an argument scene extended to feature length. Read this first.
2. **Write the Opponent's Case** (Antagonist) `anta.write_the_case`
   Beat 8 requires two complete stories. If the prosecution's is weak, there is no trial.
3. **Who Asks the Questions** (Dialogue) `dial.question_control`
   Cross-examination is this card at professional level: control of the frame, one closed question at a time.
4. **The Concession That Wins** (Dialogue) `dial.concession_that_wins`
   Beat 10. The cross that breaks a witness usually opens by agreeing with him.
5. **The Half-Truth** (Dialogue) `dial.half_truth`
   Beat 11 and every witness in the building. Nobody lies outright under oath; they answer a narrower question.
6. **The Public Scene** (Scene) `scene.public_scene`
   The courtroom is the purest version of this card — private matter, compulsory audience, fixed rules.
7. **Procedural Exposition** (Exposition) `expo.procedural_exposition`
   Legal mechanics delivered through use. The card's test: does the fact change someone's next move.
8. **The Institutional Antagonist** (Antagonist) `anta.institutional`
   Beat 12 and, in the better stories, the actual defendant.
9. **Information Asymmetry Between Characters** (Information) `info.character_asymmetry`
   The genre's engine: the lawyer, the client, the jury and the reader all hold different sets.
10. **The Staged Reveal** (Information) `info.staged_reveal`
    Beats 13 and 16. Evidence is delivered in an order chosen for effect — that is literally the job.
11. **Politeness as Aggression** (Dialogue) `dial.polite_aggression`
    Courtroom register. The most violent line in the genre begins "Your Honour, with respect".
12. **Power as Generator** (Subtext) `sub.power_gradient`
    Bench over counsel, counsel over witness, witness over the truth. Every exchange sits on a gradient.
13. **The Transaction Scene** (Scene) `scene.transaction_scene`
    Beat 5. The plea offer is a negotiation with a human price; write it as a trade, not as a moral test.
14. **Competence First** (Character) `char.competence_first`
    Establish the lawyer winning something small, so the reader can read the trial's turns without help.
15. **The Moral Test** (Theme) `theme.moral_test`
    Beat 15 is the genre's real crisis: knowing the client will perjure himself.
16. **The Value Landed** (Endings) `end.value_landed`
    Beat 19. The verdict is plot; the value landed is the story.

---

## Investigation and Journalism

**What the genre argues:** This genre replaces the murderer with an institution, and that single substitution changes everything: there is no confrontation, no arrest, and no moment where the guilty party is present to be accused. It argues that the truth is reachable by labour rather than genius, and that publishing it is a separate and harder act than finding it. Its characteristic emotion is not triumph but complicity — the discovery that the reporters' own institution knew.

**Required beats:**
1. A small anomaly noticed during routine work — a number, a name, a sealed record.
2. The pitch to an editor who is unconvinced and grants limited time.
3. The first source, who talks off the record and will not be named.
4. The institution's first polite refusal: a spokesperson answering a slightly different question.
5. The document — the first hard thing that exists outside a person's word.
6. The pattern: a second case that matches the first.
7. Archive or database work made physical — boxes, microfilm, a spreadsheet built by hand.
8. A victim interview that is not usable, and the cost of having asked.
9. The story is nearly published early and is held.
10. Legal review: what can be said, and on what evidence.
11. A source is burned, threatened, fired, or recants.
12. The institution moves — a lawsuit, a leak to a rival, pressure on an owner or an advertiser.
13. The scale reveal: the number is far larger than the original case.
14. The insider who agrees to go on the record, and states the price of doing so.
15. The right-of-reply call made to the subject, on the page.
16. The deadline: publish now, or lose it to a rival or to an injunction.
17. Publication, and the first forty-eight hours.
18. Consequence and its limits — who resigns, who does not, and what the paper itself was complicit in.

**Supporting genres:** Detective supplies beats 5 to 7, and borrowing its clue discipline is what stops the middle becoming a montage of phone calls. Social Drama supplies the victims, who must not be reduced to evidence. Thriller is the usual third, but it is also the usual mistake — car parks and shadowed sources are cheaper than the real tension, which is editorial.

**Rules:** Make the anomaly small, specific and numerical | Show the work at real length — the genre's pleasure is labour, not danger | Give the institution a spokesperson who is polite, competent and immovable | Pay the victims proper attention as people, not as evidence | Put the editorial argument on the page; the newsroom is where the drama is | Keep the deadline editorial rather than physical | Let the reporters' own institution share the guilt | End on the limits of consequence

**Avoid:** Turning it into a thriller — the underground car park is the genre's laziest scene, and every hour spent on physical threat is an hour not spent on the far better tension of whether a source will go on the record. Victims used as emotional fuel and then dropped. The heroic-press ending, which is self-congratulation and reads as such. Skipping the document work because it is undramatic, which removes the only thing that makes the eventual publication feel earned. And the institution personified as a single villain, which lets the system off precisely when the genre exists to indict it.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Institutional Antagonist** (Antagonist) `anta.institutional`
   The genre's defining choice. No face, no motive, no confrontation — read the card for how to keep that dramatic.
2. **Procedural Exposition** (Exposition) `expo.procedural_exposition`
   Beats 5 to 7. The work is the plot. The card's rule keeps it from becoming a montage.
3. **The Pressure That Is Not Aimed** (Antagonist) `anta.ambient_pressure`
   Beat 12. Nobody threatens the reporter; the advertising department simply has a quarter to make.
4. **The Micro-Reveal Ladder** (Information) `info.micro_reveal_ladder`
   Beats 1, 5, 6, 13. Progress must be visible in increments or the middle collapses.
5. **The Cost of the Truth** (Arc) `arc.cost_of_truth`
   Beats 8, 11 and 18. Someone always pays for publication, and it is rarely the reporter.
6. **The Reporter's Stance** (POV) `pov.reportage_stance`
   The genre's native narrative distance. Read it before choosing how close to sit.
7. **The Professional Pair** (Relationships) `rel.professional_pair`
   Two reporters who are not friends and are not enemies. The card's dynamics are exactly this genre's.
8. **Diegetic Text** (Exposition) `expo.diegetic_text`
   Beat 5. The memo, the ledger line, the redacted page — evidence delivered as the object itself.
9. **The Knowledge Ledger** (Information) `info.knowledge_ledger`
   What is known, what is provable and what is publishable are three different columns. Keep all three.
10. **Information Asymmetry Between Characters** (Information) `info.character_asymmetry`
    Beat 10 and the newsroom scenes: the lawyer, the editor and the reporter hold different sets.
11. **The Time Antagonist** (Antagonist) `anta.time`
    Beat 16. The deadline is editorial and commercial, which is more interesting than a bomb.
12. **Strategic Withholding** (Dialogue) `dial.strategic_withholding`
    Beats 3 and 14. Source interviews are negotiations conducted entirely in what is not said.
13. **Competence First** (Character) `char.competence_first`
    Beat 1. The anomaly is only visible to someone the reader already believes can see it.
14. **Let Someone Else Feel It** (Emotion) `emo.someone_else_feels_it`
    Beat 8. The reporters stay professional; the emotion is routed through the person across the table.
15. **Descriptive, Not Prescriptive** (Theme) `theme.descriptive_not_prescriptive`
    The card that keeps beat 18 from becoming an editorial.
16. **The Cost Paid** (Endings) `end.cost_paid`
    Beat 18. Publication is not the ending. What it did and failed to do is.

---

## Coverage

Five kits: Detective, Mystery, Whydunit, Courtroom and Legal, Investigation and Journalism. The primal genres — Horror, Thriller, Action, Crime, Gangster, War, Survival — are in `genres-primal.md`; Crime there is the method-and-its-price story, and hands the *who* question to Detective here.

## Sources

Consulted 2026-09-17.

- [John Truby's Story Beats for 14 Genres — The Elements of Writing](https://theelementsofwriting.com/truby-beats/)
- [John Truby on the New Rules of Genre Writing — The Elements of Writing](https://theelementsofwriting.com/truby/)
- [Murder Mystery: Crafting an Intriguing Puzzle of Justice — Story Grid](https://storygrid.com/murder-mystery-crafting-an-intriguing-puzzle-of-justice/)
- [Crime Genre: Justice and Injustice Stories of Mystery and Intrigue — Story Grid](https://storygrid.com/crime-genre/)
- [Genre Conventions: Must-Have Elements of Story — Story Grid](https://storygrid.com/genre-conventions/)
- [What Are Obligatory Scenes And Conventions? — Savannah Gilbo](https://www.savannahgilbo.com/blog/obligatory-scenes-and-conventions)
- [12 Step Mystery Formula: How to Plot a Whodunit — Plottr](https://plottr.com/12-step-mystery-formula/)
- [How to Write a Whodunit: Tips and Plot Twist Ideas — ProWritingAid](https://prowritingaid.com/how-to-write-a-whodunit)
- [Summation Gathering — TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SummationGathering)
- [Save the Cat! Genre Mapper](https://savethecat.com/genre-mapper)
- [The Ten Save the Cat! Story Genres — SceneOne](https://sceneone.app/blog/the-ten-save-the-cat-story-genres/)
- [Legal drama — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drama)
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- [How to Write Courtroom Scenes That Aren't Boring — River](https://rivereditor.com/guides/how-to-write-courtroom-scenes-that-arent-boring-2026)
- [8 Lessons on Investigative Journalism from "Spotlight" — GIJN](https://gijn.org/stories/8-lessons-on-investigative-journalism-from-spotlight/)
- [How 'All the President's Men' Defined the Look of Journalism on Screen — Atlas Obscura](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-all-the-presidents-men-defined-the-look-of-journalism-on-screen)