Thousands of novels are published every year. No matter how niche your genre, other people will still be writing in it, to say nothing of all the previously published books out there. Clearly, we all want our stories to stand out. But how, exactly? Should we just focus on making the story really good, or does it need a gimmick? That’s what we’re talking about this week, and as always, the answer is: it depends.

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[intro music]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Oren with you today is…

Bunny: Bunny

Oren: …and…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: Every podcast needs something to help it stand out. Look at Mythcreants: We’ve got Chris’s superb understanding of Wordcraft. We’ve got Bunny with philosophy and plant knowledge, and we’ve got me. I’m mad about wizards.

Bunny: Um, Oren, fungi aren’t plants.

Oren: Whaaaaat?

Bunny: That’s what I’m here for.

Oren: See, this kind of cutting observation isn’t something you could find on other podcasts.

Bunny: [snickers]

Oren: So today we are talking about making stories stand out, and this is partly because I have read a bunch of stories recently that did not. And I found myself describing them in terms like generic, bland, or even derivative.

Whoo! Spoooky!

Chris: I have thought about this word derivative, that lots of people like to sling around.

I understand the impulse to use it as a pejorative, but I don’t think it’s the right word. Because there are lots of works that are intentionally derivative for very good reason. Any kind of adaptation, for instance, is a derivative work. Any retelling of a public domain work is derivative.

It’s just done in lots of positive ways. There are some stories that I think go so far is to be copycats because they’re so intentional and try to copy everything about a story at every level. If it’s copying both the plot and the word craft, then that’s a little too far. But that’s really unusual.

Honestly, and that’s not what people are talking about.

Bunny: You would say that, Chris, wouldn’t you? You have a stake in the adaptation game, don’t you?

Chris: [laughs] Guilty as charged. Yes, I did do a fairytale retelling recently, which is basically an adaptation. And adaptations are hard. They come with lots of constraints, so don’t be mean to us, okay?

Oren: In my experience, when [people] say derivative, what they usually mean is bland or generic.

Cause there are a very small number of stories that are actually copying another story in a way that is bad. We all are fine with endless remixes of Sherlock Holmes. We want the new Sherlock Holmes to have something new to bring to the table. We’re not upset that they are remixing Sherlock Holmes. What is upsetting is if it’s just another Sherlock Holmes story that we’ve seen before.

And people might call that derivative, but it’s not really the derivativeness that’s the problem. It’s how bland is it.

Chris: It’s the fact that it doesn’t have anything new to bring to the table. It’s not the fact that it has things that are copied. The fact that it doesn’t have anything that’s not copied.

Bunny: I think in visual media too, the aesthetics play a big role in figuring out whether something seems derivative in the negative sense or too copycat. Like that new moo… moon rebel—rebellion, rebel… rebel moon? Rebel Moon. Man, that’s so derivative, I forgot the title.

Oren: Rebel Moon is definitely taking really heavy inspiration from both Star Wars and War Hammer 40K in terms of its aesthetics and certain plot points.

I don’t know if I would care if it was good. Rebel Moon’s real bad and the fact that it’s real bad makes the parts that it borrowed from other stories feel worse.

I’m told that the opening sequence is extremely similar to the opening sequence in Inglourious Bastards—which is intentionally spelled wrong apparently—but I’ve never actually seen that movie, so I’m only told this. I can see how that would be annoying if you’ve just seen Inglourious Bastards than you put on Rebel Moon. It’s like, hang on a second. Why is this scene the same?

Chris: Rebel Moon stands out in that it feels like a bunch of scenes clipped from other movies just mashed together, and that really is something.

Oren: But like if Rebel Moon, for example, wasn’t two hours of gathering the party, which is basically what Rebel Moon is, we spend the whole, almost the whole movie doing that, then I might not care so much. I’d be more willing to let it slide. I’d be like, okay, yeah, that weapon is clearly a lightsaber. But sure. Other sci-fi settings have laser sword type things and yeah, those guys are clearly wearing armor that’s inspired by Warhammer 40k. I like big shoulder pads and blocky guns, so I’ll, I’ll let it go.

Bunny: Yeah, you’d be right at home in a 1980s businesswoman outfit.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: Certainly there are a lot of things about Rebel Moon that look visually cool. They just, everything is so underdeveloped except for the wheat for some reason.

Oren: Yeah. There’s so much time on the wheat.

Chris: I mean, the wheat is different. It does stand out. People keep talking about the wheat, so there’s that.

Oren: The wheat is an interesting example of the topic we’re talking about today, actually. Because it does stand out, but not in a good way because it’s not interesting.

It’s not cool space wheat, nor is there any kind of interesting contrast between the fancy high tech world and the nitty gritty farming reality of the wheat, the way that you might expect in a show like Firefly. Or in the Fallout games, there’s some interesting parallel between the world that’s besieged by super mutants, but also people need to grow corn.

But there’s nothing like that in the movie. It’s just a lot of wheat harvesting, which doesn’t end up mattering at the end anyway. And so, it stands out. It’s the meme now, which I guess you could argue is better than no one knowing about it, but it’s still not great.

Chris: And if I understand, the wheat harvesting could just take place in the real world. Is it fantastical wheat harvesting in any way?

Oren: Hard to imagine real world wheat harvesting being in that slow motion. But otherwise…

Chris: [laughs] What was it, like Gladiator or 300 where the character spends a lot of time gazing out over a wheat field?

Oren: If it was 300, that would fit, because that’s also a Zack Snyder movie, so maybe Zack Snyder is just telling us something about his wheat interests.

Chris: I mean, it does go to show that something that’s not gonna hit home as well if it is superfluous, which is a problem with the wheat.

And generally, again, we talk about speculative fiction, that’s our whole thing. Sci-fi, fantasy, horror, what have you. Those things should matter to what you’re doing.

So, if it really was about the wheat harvesting, you could have a space fantasy weed harvesting if you wanted, but there should be a reason why the wheat harvesting is happening in a space fantasy setting. And that should change the harvest in some way. It shouldn’t just be the fantastical elements sitting alongside a perfectly normal wheat harvest.

Oren: Yeah. Like maybe talk about how it’s difficult to grow wheat in an alien planet, something like that. Again, not to keep beating the dead Fallout horse, but that’s what they do in Fallout, right? You have to deal with trying to grow plants in irradiated soil. So it feels like it’s part of the conceit, part of the premise instead of just, oh, and also there’s wheat.

Chris: Part of this being called a Mars Western. When you have a story where the speculative elements just don’t matter and don’t make any difference or have any impact, the idea is that you have a shootout and it happens to happen in Mars. But it could have just been a Western and it doesn’t really make any difference. That’s something we don’t see all the time, but we see sometimes like in Grimm, in the early seasons of Grimm show.

Oren: Yeah. This is obviously just a police procedural and supposedly some of the bad guys he captures are magical, but they would have the same plot if they weren’t magical.

Chris: And that one is so funny because there’s an obvious reason for it. It’s that he needs to be able to report the crime is closed to his boss, which means that he needs a non-fantastical explanation for how he closed this crime. And as a result, all the fantastical stuff doesn’t matter. And it would be exactly the same without it. And I’ve heard that this does get fixed in later seasons.

Bunny: That’s such an unforced error. They could have made him the boss, for one thing and for another, maybe the boss knows.

Chris: The Secret Fantasy Police Division or whatever, do X-Files style, right?

Bunny: Right! But fantasy, no, I’d be into that. Not just police procedural, but we swear there’s magic somewhere.

I haven’t got as much of a finger on the pulse of what’s standing out in the larger scheme of things. Oren, you’ve been discussing and reading the midlist.

Oren: Mm. [indeed]

Bunny: …And I guess I would have trouble picking the midlist out of a lineup based on anything other than advertising, just because I feel like a lot of standing out is advertising and in this case, quality for sure.

Oren: Spoilers, you have probably never read a midlist book, or at least not very often.

The term midlist is a publishing term. What it means is no or very little marketing. And if there’s no or very little marketing, you’ve probably never heard of these books. That’s why reading them was kind of a shock because I was looking at books that do have something that makes them stand out. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good, but they at least have something that you can imagine someone being like, oh, that’s neat. And focusing on that either as a sales point or just as a thing they remembered from reading the story.

Whereas some of them are just straight up bad, right? Some of them have serious problems that are not addressed, but others are competent, but not exceptional in any way, and they don’t have anything that makes them feel special.

One example, and this is a problem I think particular to the subgenre, is military sci-fi. I read a military sci-fi novel that I actually liked okay. But it was really low novelty because the whole point of military sci-fi is to replicate the feeling of being in the US military. So that limits your opportunities for novelty. And so, for a lot of the story, it felt like we weren’t really in space. Every once in a while, we would mention, oh yeah, we’re on a space station. But mostly it was the minutiae of army bureaucracy.

Chris: I do think it’s fair to say that stories end up on the midlist for a whole variety of reasons. This is not a comprehensive take.

Not standing out though… We’ll talk more of a high concept. Publishers love having an idea for the book that they can pitch and sell easily. So, if it doesn’t stand out, it’s less likely to be high concept, so they’re more likely to put it on the mid list if it’s otherwise competently written.

And of course, there’s unfair double standards when it comes to marginalized writers and authors for sure.

So, I don’t wanna generalize about the midlist too much because there’s a whole different variety of works that are on the mid list for various reasons. But these are the books that the publishers decided not to risk tons of money on trying to market or replace large bets on, let’s say.

Oren: Yeah, and I’ve certainly read books that were heavily marketed and I thought they were bad, or even I thought that the thing that they were marketed on was a lie.

I recently read Magic Bites, which is a fairly famous work of urban fantasy at this point, and the marketing for it, including the sales blurb, makes a huge deal about how this is a setting where magic and technology take turns working. So you’ll have a magic tide will come up and now magic works. And then the magic tide will recede, and now technology works. And that’s huge. That is in the sales blurb where they talk about how when the magic tide recedes, it leaves behind stranded monsters that cause problems and the protagonist has to deal with them.

And that is a lie. That is just straight up not true. That is not what the book is about. That never happens. And they do mention the magic tide thing a little bit in the book, but it’s so ancillary. You could take it out completely and the book would not change. It’s just a standard urban fantasy. But you can tell that some marketer was like, Aha, I can sell that! So high concept isn’t necessarily the same as a good story.

Chris: Also, bland books can also end up getting big marketing pushes if they’re on trend. That’s another thing. So books which you might look at and be like, Okay, I feel like this is just copy without any heat energy put into it, can get pushes because that particular thing that it’s focused on is just really hot right now and is selling really well. And it was similar to other books that sold well.

And again, marketers that are doing sales assessments for all these large companies that manage creative works. Always looking for a sure bet. Something that, oh, I’m sure that this will sell. I’m sure that it will make us money. And it’s always somewhat in conflict with creative work because things get less interesting the more they’re used. And so safe bets means we don’t get cool new breakouts either.

Anyway, that’s what they like. So sometimes you’ll have something that is very bland, that is pushed, and there are a few people who do try to write on trend, but for the most part, by the time it’s big, it’s too late. And you have to get lucky for those to work out.

Oren: Yeah. Unless you’re really fast.

Chris: If you’re really fast, yeah. But even then, a publisher usually takes two years.

So, I think this is very relevant for a lot of indie works. If you’re fast and you’re an indie writer and you can publish it quickly too, then writing on trend can make you big without making your story stand out.

Oren: Oh, and by the way, I feel like I should have done this earlier, but to define high concept real quick, it’s specifically means a simple, easily sellable idea. And I know that’s a little confusing. I thought high concept meant the opposite of that. For a long time, I thought it meant something really like…

Chris: [pretentious voice] high concept.

The word high makes it sound like it’s supposed to be snooty or something.

Oren: Yeah, no, it means the opposite. It means very commercial.

Bunny: I did not know that.

Oren: Yeah, that confused me for a while too. And there are plenty of other examples. A lot of them are from, interestingly enough, the role-playing Game space. It has a lot of high concept games because role-playing games depend on Kickstarters a lot. And a high concept is a great way to get people signed up for your Kickstarter.

So, you can have Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants, which is a vampire game that is sold under the tagline, drink the Rich. And that sounds pretty neat. People love that. They latched onto that with their little vampire teeth, and it made tons of money on Kickstarter.

I’m not saying that’s the only reason. I’m not saying the game’s bad, I’m just saying that was definitely a bonus for them.

Bunny: Is the game bad?

Oren: I don’t know. I’ve never looked at it.

Bunny: Okay.

Chris: And there is a distinction between something that is unique and has things that make it stand out and high concept, because I think what marketers like the most is something that is otherwise fairly familiar but has a big thing they can pitch, that makes it stand out. Because that often makes it easier to explain. Whereas some works are very unique and they’re unique enough that it’s not easy to explain anymore because we don’t have as big of a frame of reference.

So if you were to say, oh, this is Twilight with zombies instead of vampires, then Twilight is your frame of reference. You can get works that have wonderful, unique ideas and are great reading and are high novelty but aren’t necessarily pitchable because it takes too long. Again, a novel has a fair amount of time to set up the world and explain. It’s not necessarily gonna be easily condensed down into a two second pitch.

Whereas there are also things that are unique that I would maybe put into more of the bizarre category. And some people do like bizarre stuff, like a lot of the avant-garde crowd, but it tends to have more niche appeal. I think with a lot of the unique elements that are bizarre, there’s a question of like, why? Why do this? This is totally out of the blue.

Interestingly, The Book Eaters, which is a bestseller because of the premise of vampires that eat books, which is a high concept premise. There were a lot of people who felt that was actually also bizarre. And it has a lot of scenes of people just nomming on pages, on the physical pages of the book.

Bunny: So it’s not like they drink the knowledge or anything, it’s that they just…

Chris: The thing about The Book Eaters is that the premise which is used to sell the book, is actually only a small portion of the book. So, it’s another one of those cases where the publisher latched onto part of the book as high concept and then marketed that. And then some readers come in disappointed because they expected it to be a bigger deal. But they also absorb the knowledge, but it doesn’t matter very often it’s not very impactful.

Whereas a lot of the description is just focused on what the texture of these pages is like to eat, for instance. What does the ink taste like? The physical process of just nomming on a book, which I think people might have found a little bit more bizarre.

And again, some people have a taste for that stuff, but I do think that’s when storytellers can lose people too.

Oren: We’ve talked about high concept a lot, but there is another way to make your book stand out. And I’m not saying this make your book like have sales success because I don’t necessarily trust publishers.

But as far as with readers go, you have our good friend, the ANTS, which are Attachment, Novelty, Tension and Satisfaction. Which we talk about a lot. We call them the critical factors that make stories popular. And the reason we call them that is if your story has a lot of them, it is both better to read and people are more likely to remember it and it will stand out from the other books that do not.

Bunny: You will stand the ants.

Chris: Unfortunately, ANTS will not give you a marketing budget

Oren: [snickers]

Chris: …but it does mean that somebody reading the book is more likely to like it.

Oren: Yeah. Novelty is the most obvious because again, novelty tends to line up better with marketing. Not always; The broken Earth is very novel, but not easy to market. Not impossible. You can talk about it’s a world of endless apocalypses, but that doesn’t really get at what it is and why it’s so interesting.

Chris: And novelty really does represent the things that are different in an entertaining, fascinating way. So, it is definitely the one that is gonna make your work stand out the most.

Oren: It’s also a lot based on whether some other book has done this before. Before 2015, I think it was? Whenever it was that Weir published his novel. Before then, the concept of an astronaut trapped on Mars and having to escape would be a lot more novel than it is now because there’s a very famous book and movie about it.

Chris: But I will say that novelty is not the same thing as originality. I try to discourage people away from originality because I think that standard is just too unrealistic with 8 billion people on the planet trying to find something that nobody else has thought of is just… don’t torture yourself, please.

There are some things that are just not used very often, and that’s enough. Or they haven’t been used in a really long time, that could be enough.

Bunny: And recontextualizing things like existing things is something that I’ve seen work a lot. Legends & Lattes did this with its orc main character, and that was also doing the thing where you fill a niche and a genre that’s beginning to grow.

Cozies existed, but I feel like Legends & Lattes gave them a huge boost.

Chris: Yeah. I think the plot is the thing that stands out in Legend & Lattes. A novel element, because yeah, there are definitely other stories about doing things like creating a coffee shop or stuff that’s similar to that. But they’re just not that common, and especially not when combined with that D&D-type setting.

Oren: Legends & Lattes also brings up another thing that can make your story stand out, which is wish fulfillment. Maybe we need to add that to the ANTS and have it become the WANTS, but we haven’t done that yet. So right now, wish fulfillment is its own category.

Chris: I consider it to be secondary. I have a list that I have not yet written about.

I’m starting to write about it in the blog, what I would call like secondary engagement factors. Which means that they do add entertainment value, but they are usually lower priority than the main ANTS. So, you don’t wanna trade off where you get them at the cost of the ANTS, for instance.

Oren: But in this case, with Legends & Lattes, it manages to have really high wish fulfillment without sacrificing too many ANTS. And the ones that it does sacrifice, I think were unnecessary. But the wish fulfillment of We get to open a really cool cafe and have coffee and delicious baked goods and really cool friends who we found who will help us with our business enterprise. Everyone liked that.

Bunny: Baked goods that are maybe a little too delicious, if we’re being honest.

Oren: They’re fine, okay. There’s a magic baking rat in there and he can make a croissant that is frankly a little higher than PG-13, if I’m being honest.

Chris: [laughs] Now, if people want to buy anything, any croissants at their coffee shop, they have to bring some government issued ID to prove that they’re 18 or older.

Bunny: [laughs]

Oren: Not appropriate for minors, these croissants.

Legends & Lattes does sacrifice some tension. Not like all tension. It still has some, but it does sacrifice some tension because it would be harder to enjoy the wish fulfillment if the coffee shop was constantly under attack.

But it still has decent ANTS in other areas, especially in attachment. It does pretty well there and in novelty.

Chris: I will say that The Wandering Inn, which has a similar setup where somebody’s creating an inn. That one had a lot of tonal whiplash where the attacks were just way too grimdark compared to the rest of the story. But we build up the battle a little bit more, we deal with some goblins, like that could have worked okay if the goblin attacks weren’t quite so grim.

But in any case, there’s definitely a place for stories that are not so tense, but Legends & Lattes still does have tension. It still has a plot. It’s just not as high stakes.

Oren: One book that I think did a really interesting job, and I’m not really sure how to categorize this, is the Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. It is about a person who signs up with a scientific mission to go study Kaiju.

On the one hand, it has some recognizable ANTS as I would describe them, right? There’s definitely some novelty to going to another world to study kaiju. And the protagonist is a fairly selfless, likable person, so there’s some attachment there. But they’re not super high. Description has never been Scalzi’s strong suit. So the kaiju are vague in their general description, and the other characters are a bit one note.

But the book still strikes a pretty good note. I think it’s because we really like Kaiju and this story allows us to have kaiju without the weird problem that Kaiju movies have of having to focus on boring humans for so long, because who cares about the humans in a Kaiju movie? Who does? And this book is about a human, but it’s about a human who is there to study the kaiju. So you cane in their perspective. And I think it solves that problem and I think it fills a want that people had.

Chris: I think if you’re looking to make your story stand out one way is to just break it down to the different areas. In speculative fiction, we talk about worldbuilding a lot. And worldbuilding is obviously one area it can stand out. A famous example being Dune with its giant sand worms and other stuff. That was work that really stood out because its world was different and there’s lots of others like that. The Expanse too, made waves because it had a world that was different.

But that’s not the only area you can stand out. If you have an interesting main character who just has unusual character traits. Like Murderbot and the Murderbot Diaries, for instance. Murderbot basically makes the Murderbot Diaries.

Bunny: Yeah. Speaking of another author whose description is maybe not the strong suit.

Oren: The world of Murderbot is exceptionally bland, but Murderbot itself is an amazing protagonist and is really what sells that series.

Chris: Or, as I said, the plot like Legends & Lattes, a very different kind of plot for that setting.

There are cases when we usually focus on the story aspect, but if you like wordcraft, having a distinctive style does make a difference. I think that the book This Is How You Lose the Time War has an interesting preference, but I really do think it’s the style that really sells it. It’s two lovers on opposite sides of a time war writing back and forth to each other, writing love letters, and it just sounds like poetry. It’s just a very elaborate style. That’s very distinctive.

Oren: It definitely struck a chord with people who are a fan of certain Doctor Who dynamics. You can also just have a story that is not a 10 in any one area, but if it’s generally high across the board, again, that will help a lot.

Lockwood & Co. is one of my prime examples of this. Lockwood has decent characters. They’re not amazing, but they are better than average, I would say. And its world is cool, not as interesting as something like Broken Earth, but pretty neat, right? Ghosts becoming a public health problem and needing freelancers to deal with them. That’s neat. And then it has a pretty good plot with pretty strong tension and strong satisfaction.

And those are all high enough that it is a memorable book, even if, I wouldn’t say that any one category is exceptional.

Bunny: I think it might be helpful to just briefly mention what doesn’t necessarily make a story stand out that people tend to give a lot of credit to.

And we touched on this, but one of those is just the idea, talking about high concept. But that’s not necessarily gonna make your book stand out because ideas are easy and execution is hard.

Oren: Or you could end up with a situation where a marketer markets the idea and then you make a ton of money, but you get some maybe not super great reviews of people being like, Hey, I thought this was gonna be something else. And it wasn’t so…

Bunny: Annoying people called Oren!

Oren: [laughs] So, I think we can all agree that is a fate worse than death.

Bunny: That’s true.

Chris: I’ve definitely read books that had a world that could have been interesting. But the author poured absolutely zero energy in it.

Like again, I talked recently about the Vampire Royal series that I started and didn’t finish. And I don’t actually know the intent behind this work, but when I read it on the page, I just feel like there’s a complete lack of passion on the author’s part. And maybe that’s just the style. But it’s kind of like vampire post apocalypse because vampires came and everybody’s technology went away. And that could have been interesting, but there’s no detail given to it. It’s not elaborated on at all.

And it just makes me wonder if this was a book where the publisher came up with the idea to mimic other bestsellers and then with an IP work and then hired an author to write it. Because it just feels like there’s no interest in that actual subject matter of the book.

Bunny: We were talking about stories being derivative earlier, and this one is pretty explicitly The Selection and Twilight, right?

Chris: Yeah. But again, the problem isn’t that it’s taking inspiration from the selection and Twilight, I think it’s that it doesn’t have any of its own life. It doesn’t feel like it has its own passion, its own distinctive feature that really brings it to life. So it just feels a little bland and generic.

Oren: Okay. I think that is an excellent note to end the podcast on. Now that we have shared all of our wisdom, I think you can agree that this definitely stands out as an episode.

Chris: And if you would like to stand out to us, consider becoming our patreon, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patreons who definitely stand out, cause we mentioned them at the end of every episode.

First there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[outro music]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

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