It's for a Book: Difference between revisions

Some questions raise eyebrows and suspicions when asked. Questions like "What's the best knife for slitting the throat of a 14-year old girl?", "What do you need to make a pipebomb?" or "How would you go about hacking into the FBI's database?".

 

 

Luckily this works for characters in fiction too. Dave can ask for suggestion how someone could hide the bodies in his trunk, by telling Sue that he's writing a book about a murderer with several bodies in his trunk. Occasionally she will [[Pull the Thread]] on this, and Dave will either come up with some hastily cobbled-together story, or have the plot be what actually happened.

 

A subtrope of the [[Bavarian Fire Drill]], compare [[I Have This Friend]]. Comes up a lot because [[Most Writers Are Writers]]. See also [[Film Felons]].

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* In ''[[Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle]]'', Syaoran uses this excuse in one of the worlds to gather information of legends. He got the idea from his father, an archeologist, who used it all the time.

** Later, Rika uses a better example of this trope; asking "What would a villain's motivations be and how should the heroine fight back?", claiming that she needs help with the manga she's writing.

*** [[Literary Agent Hypothesis|That explains so much...]]

 

 

* In ''Hollywood Homicide'', we briefly see the acting equivalent; a plummy actor (played by Eric Idle) is marched through a police station vehemently insisting that he ''wasn't'' soliciting a prostitute, but was doing research for a role. He then briefly says hi to Tina, a lady of the night he presumably has some acquaintance with.

* Played straight in ''[[How To Murder Your Wife]]'', where Jack Lemon's character is accused of killing his missing wife after people who've sold him gadgets for the comic-strip murder go to the police, who then find the photographs he used to create the strip.

* Used by the main character in ''[[Catch Me If You Can]]'', who approaches an airline executive on the pretense of writing a report for school, and in the course of the conversation learns enough pilot jargon to bluff his way through a conversation with actual pilots when riding along in the jump seat.

* In ''[[Letters to Juliet]]'', Sophie asks if she can tag along to write an article.

== [[Literature]] ==

* In P.D. James's ''Original Sin'', the villain finds out on whom he needs to take revenge for things that happened decades ago, by pretending he's doing research for a novel called ''Original Sin''.

** King himself had to ask his brother how he'd go about burying a Cadillac, and got extensive details (even down to how to hotwire a digger). Of course, King had spent years preparing the alibi of being a best-selling writer by this point. He also claimed (in the author's notes of ''Nightmares & Dreamscapes'', in which this story appears) that details of the crime were changed in the story so that it wouldn't actually work, just in case anyone reading it got ideas.

* The [[Lord Peter Wimsey]] novel ''Strong Poison'' uses the inverted version: Harriet really is writing a murder mystery, and purchases arsenic to see how hard she should make it for her poisoner to get some. Then her ex-lover turns up dead of arsenic poisoning, for completely unrelated reasons, so naturally she's [[Wrongly Accused]] of killing him.

* In [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Johnny Maxwell Trilogy]]'', Johnny observes that it's amazing what grown-ups will let you do if you tell them that you're doing a project.

{{quote|If Saddam Hussein had said he was doing a project on Kuwait, the Gulf War would never have happened.}}

* In an ''[[Animorphs]]'' book (#6, ''The Capture''), the Animorphs are attempting to prevent the Yeerks from taking a politician when he has surgery at a hospital they control. To find out when he'll be there, Marco calls his office and gets his schedule by claiming to be from the press.

** This kind of thing happened in real life, when writing the books, too (mostly by ghostwriters). Laura Battyanyi-Weiss had to look up limited information on Giant Squids when writing #27 ''The Exposed''.

* In [[Agatha Christie]]'s ''[[Five Little Pigs]]'', Hercule Poirot is asked to reinvestigate a murder that had happened sixteen years earlier. When speaking with some of the witnesses, he claims he is writing a book about famous murders in order to get them to provide written accounts of what they remember.

** In ''[[Third Girl]]'', author surrogate Ariadne Oliver claims to be researching how easy it is to follow someone, when following a suspect on behalf of Poirot. She tells the suspect she's concluded it's quite difficult.

** Of course, it's pretty clear that {{spoiler|Slughorn knows on some level that Riddle's story is complete bull: asking for info on Horcruxes for "a project" would be akin to a 6th grader asking for information about anal broomstick rape "for homework"... but he plays along anyway because he doesn't want to think badly of or disappoint his star pupil}}.

** And several books earlier, in ''Chamber of Secrets'', Hermione pulled the same trick to get [[The Ditz|Professor Lockhart's]] permission to get the book with the directions on how to make Polyjuice Potion from the Restricted Section.

* This is toyed with in the [[Extruded Book Product|Gold Eagle]] series Track. The main character, Dan Track, is a consultant to action writers on getting guns right and writing convincing combat. He is good at this because he owns a lot of guns and slaughters about a hundred guys per book (in justified shootouts, naturally).

* There's a ''[[Nancy Drew]]'' book where a crook is using this as cover for casing peoples' houses.

 

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* A typical [[Hand Wave]] for aspiring graffiti artists at a hardware store is "It's for a school art project"/"We're renovating".

* Some people have noted that you can get away with anything on the LiveJournal community ''little_details'' by prefacing your query with: "I'm writing a story where..."

** Another thread had someone asking how much jello it would take to fill up the White House. It quickly devolved into a discussion of which flavor would be best.

** There was also, famously, another discussion on how many koalas it would take to fill a Tokyo subway car. That one got revamped a couple of years running and was more for fun than for real. There was, however, quite a bit of serious discussion about whether the koalas were flattened, crated, alive, dead, and male or female, and if the subway car had seats in it or not. If female, an interesting tangent developed about whether or not they were pregnant, since pregnant koalas are more likely to need their personal space, and what might happen if one (or all) of said pregnant koalas gave birth on the train. The answer was something like 1500 koalas, based on the volume of the car and the average volume of a koala.

* One careless murderer left all his murder plans on a floppy disk, which was confiscated by investigators. Given how closely the details he'd written matched the actual murder, the "it's for a book!" defense fell flat.

* According to legend, in the early 1950s Japanese police arrested two men who were in a restaurant discussing how to destroy Tokyo. They were the director and producer of what would become the original ''[[Godzilla]]'' movie. The commentary track on the ''Gojira'' DVD says that the police showed up when some of the production team were up on top of a building in downtown Tokyo, discussing which of the other buildings in sight they wanted to "destroy". No one actually got arrested.

* Author [[Animorphs|K.]] [[Everworld|A.]] [[Remnants|Applegate]] got very annoyed answers from the military because of questions she asked about the build of tanks, airplanes, and an aircraft carrier.

* There was a Nick game show at one point that required kids to go to various public places and (with the aid of a hidden camera) get people to do various ridiculous actions (eat bugs, wear silly hats, etc.) The usual explanation was something like "We're doing a school project".

* In his book ''Shark Life'', [[Peter Benchley]] notes he once asked his father which end of a shark would float were it cut in half.

{{quote|"What're you up to?"

"That's some shark." }}

* On the commentary track for ''[[Saw]]'', Leigh Whannell mentions how, early in the scriptwriting, he asked a doctor which drug was best to use if you wanted a person to be unable to move, but still be conscious and able to feel pain. --> "He was suspicious".

* John Rogers, showrunner and co-creator of ''[[Leverage]]'', recently wrote in a [http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2010/11/leverage-309-three-card-monte-job-post.html post-game of an episode]:

{{quote|For all you Spec-Monkeys out there: ''never be afraid to call someone''. A very nice lady from the Boston PD Public Relations Department spent a good hour with us on the phone explaining how evidence is stored and transferred in the Boston PD system...Then, we got some vague answers from bank-alarm companies about the protocols for bank alarms and how police deal with them...by cross-referencing the answers we got from the companies to fill in the blanks, we got a very good sense of how these things go down. At which point Boylan and I, who were the ones working on the script (the rest of the room had moved on to #310), realized ''we should totally go rob a bank''.}}

* [[Mortal Instruments|Cassandra Clare]] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK8y8borPZ8 has had an opportunity to do this].

* The reference desk on [[The Other Wiki]] sees "it's for a book"-type questions from time to time. Some are more believable than others.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Social Engineering]]

[[Category:The Plan]]

[[Category:Crime and Punishment Tropes]]