Balancing Mystery and Character Conflict in Storytelling

Show Notes

• Mysterious Atmosphere
• Lost
• Watchmen 
• A Study in Drowning 
• Piranesi 
• FROM 
• The Way of Kings 
• Silo

Transcript

Generously transcribed by [name]. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythgram Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. 

[Opening Theme}

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… 

Oren: Oren. 

Chris: And… 

Wes: Wes. 

Chris [in an intense voice]: There are three hosts on this episode, but at times there are also pauses while the wind whispers, as though it speaks words just out of perception. Did we leave these breaks in during audio editing? Or did they sneak into the recording while it rested on the web server? Was there another host with us whose words were erased? Maybe if you turn up the volume and play those segments backwards, you will find out the answer. After the season break, return for season two of the Mythcreant Podcast. 

[Laughter]

Oren: Occasionally, you can hear a cat meowing in the background. What does that mean? What does it symbolize? 

Wes: Very spooky. 

Chris: So, this time we are covering creating a mysterious atmosphere. Which is all the rage these days after Lost made a big impression. There are many TV shows doing it. 

Oren: I love mysterious atmospheres in books. Like, I just think about the books that I’ve enjoyed recently, and they’re always mysterious, and something’s going on, and what’s happening? But I can’t think of a mysterious atmosphere TV show that I’ve seen recently that I didn’t find very frustrating. I don’t know why that is. 

Wes: I guess maybe you just prefer letting your own brain do the mystery for you? 

Oren: Maybe that’s what it is? 

Wes: That’s it, right? This is not a mysterious story. It’s slightly off topic, but I remember reading the Watchmen graphic novel and enjoying it. And then I made the mistake of watching Zack Snyder’s version of it, and that guy leaves nothing to the imagination. I’m just like, “okay, this is horrible.: It’s just… visual mediums sometimes just overshow. They go too hard. And we just didn’t need that. You ruined the atmosphere. 

Chris: So I do think it’s because TV shows also do it differently. So specifically, a lot of times when we have something mysterious, we’re leaving it in the background so that we don’t have to spend time exploring it. Whereas the TV shows that are doing this really make it so central that the protagonists don’t have a lot to do other than explore the mystery. But that’s actually really tricky because then as soon as they uncover some facts, you don’t want it to dispel the mystery. So you have to raise more questions. And so they end up doing this thing where to maximize viewership, they make things really bizarre, so they’re difficult to explain. And then the characters start trying to uncover the mystery, but they’re not allowed to, because that would just spoil the mystery. So we just get a bunch of weird events and it’s very dragged out. We add a bunch of filler so they don’t end the mystery too fast. And also TV shows are just very long stories, right? The length sometimes matters because how long can you sustain this? And so I think the incentive is to maximize viewership and worry about how it comes together later. And so I think that they handle them a little differently than a book. Like, for instance, Oren and I are reading A Study in Drowning, which has a mysterious atmosphere, but the plot is not about it. It’s about uncovering a separate mystery that’s actually not that mysterious. 

Wes: The advantage of reading a prose story is that you get to be that character. You’re invited into their mind in most POVs, and you just don’t get that with TV. So Oren doesn’t get to feel like he’s solving the mystery and experiencing the mysterious atmosphere, because he’s watching some other mooks do it. You know? That definitely is a factor for me. Definitely. 

Oren: That definitely has something to it. It’s also just possible that fewer books are influenced by Lost, and more TV shows are. I can recognize the Lost method as soon as I see it. Which is just to keep opening new questions. Don’t ever resolve any. And then just keep asking more and continually adding to the burden of whatever the ending is going to be. 

Wes: I like that definition. I was going to jump in and say that the Lost method is just being withholding. [laughs] 

Oren: Yeah. And I can think of a few books that have done stuff like that. But not many. Area X does it a little bit, especially in Authority, the second book. There are a lot of things that just get thrown at the wall, and you reach a point where it’s just that there’s no way that whatever the reveal is going to be can possibly explain all of these things. And lo and behold, it does not. 

Chris: The Lost method is where you have characters that are in a situation, usually. Like, Silo for instance, or From. [laughs] Which is a weird name for a show. They’re all shows where the characters are trying to figure out what’s going on. And so the writers have to string you along, just like in Lost. Because we don’t actually want them to solve it. And that kind of creates a more frustrating experience. 

In any case, I thought it might be good to clarify the difference between mystery and mysteriousness, because obviously they’re related. So when we’re talking about a mystery plot. We’re talking about a plot arc about finding out a specific piece of information that’s missing. And unless it’s also mysterious, everything else is basically known, and we know exactly what we don’t know, or pretty close to what we don’t know. And so it’s not about the general atmosphere. It’s about a specific plot arc. And that’s a mystery story. Whereas mysteriousness is a sense that lots of things are unknown. You don’t even know exactly what you don’t know. There’s an entire world hiding just out of sight–not completely out of sight, just out of sight, because we need our evocative hints. 

Oren: Right. We need to see a little bit of it, otherwise it might as well not be there. 

Chris: And there are lots of writers who try to do mysteriousness and don’t manage it, because it requires depriving the audience of information. And if that information is, for instance, too important, it could be bad to not give people that information. Or they could just do too much and reveal too much, and then it’s not mysterious anymore and they don’t know why and they want it to be mysterious. 

Oren: If I can bring up what I think is a good example of a book with a mysterious atmosphere — that also has a mystery, but it’s not necessarily the same thing — is our good friend Piranesi. 

Wes: Oh. Surprise surprise. 

Oren: The Mythcreants podcast mentioning Piranesi?? Not possible! Who would have foreseen this? So mysterious. Because with Piranesi, we have the house that the protagonist is in, and we know it’s weird. You can tell that it’s maybe a labyrinth. But he doesn’t know that much about it. He’s studied things, like he knows the tide cycles, and he knows where the birds roost. But he has no idea who built it. Or what it’s for. Or why it’s here. So that’s real weird and mysterious. And then he knows one other living person, who he calls the Other. And that’s a classic mysterious name right there. And then there’s a third person who shows up. What do we call that person? That’s so weird. I think that’s just a really good strong case of building a mysterious atmosphere and then building a mystery within it. “How did I, the protagonist, get here?” And we slowly advance that as the story goes forward. We never actually solve exactly what the deal is with the house. 

Wes: No, but elements in that story that add to the mysteriousness of this house world are accomplished in ways that still matter to the story. Like when the Other is searching for a power and he asks Piranesi for a specific room where, I think, he could see the stars or something like that. And Piranesi knows that room. And he says, “All right. You need to go there.” And that room is super weird. It’s dark. The statues are weirder. But that whole journey leads him out there. We don’t learn more about that, but we do get that sense of creepy wonder that comes with this place. We learn a little bit more about it without getting any of that thing revealed. But then he finds the pages from those missing journals. So that expands the mysteriousness of the world, but also works toward solving the mystery of what’s going on. So both can be accomplished in the same scenes. 

Chris: One character does posit a theory as to what the world is. But it’s just a theory, and it doesn’t really explain everything necessarily.

Oren: An interesting example from the book that we’re reading now, A Study in Drowning — Mild spoilers — is an interesting case of what to do and what not to do. Early in the book, the protagonist is driving to this weird, spooky house and catches sight of something in the headlights. And then it’s gone, and she has just a brief glimpse of it, and it looked weird, but we couldn’t see much. And that’s very evocative. For one thing, we don’t know much about it. We don’t know exactly what she saw. And just the concept of seeing something very briefly in the headlights is something a lot of us have experienced. So it’s very like, “Oh. That’s real. That seems creepy and weird.” A little later in the book, she walks out of a room and sees a ghost. And it’s just there. It’s floating there. It’s a ghost. And then the ghost leaves. And is like the least mysterious thing I’ve ever seen. 

Chris: Yeah. Mysterious atmosphere really benefits from some level of doubt over what you perceived. When I advise describing mysterious things, a lot of times I suggest using phrases like “it sounded as though,” or “it seemed that,” or “it felt as if,” to create some kind of doubt as to what the perception is. And then you can describe something long and elaborate that’s very weird and mysterious. “As the water rippled, her reflection seemed to look past her toward the shadowed trees,” or something. Your reflection is looking the other way. But it’s subtle enough that it could be imagination or maybe we just saw something that only looked like an elaborate spirit. Although I will say, in A Study in Drowning, when she’s in the car and she sees what looks like somebody with long black hair and a bone crown, and then the driver’s like “Oh yeah. That was a deer,” [laughter] I’m sure it was supposed to be inaccurate. But at the same time, we could have probably made it a little bit more mysterious if we had a more plausible explanation for what it could have been. 

Oren: I definitely feel like shows that use the Lost method — and, to a certain extent, books, if books use it — is that they’re compensating for a lack of plot. That’s just really what that feels like, because if you have a strong plot, you don’t need to be constantly opening new questions. You don’t need to be constantly withholding information, and you don’t need to be constantly dragging out the reader’s excitement to try to learn what’s happening next. You can just have stuff happen that’s exciting and fun to watch, and then you can have mystery in the background. Whereas if you look at From, for example, the first season doesn’t have a lot of this, because the first season has a very strong plot. But then the plot gets a little more diffuse as the show goes on, and they have done the thing they were trying to do with the monsters, and now that plot is over. And so we’re just relying more and more heavily on the “What is this weird place that the town exists in?” I’m sorry. There’s no way you can answer that. There is no explanation that will be satisfying. 

And Lost definitely had the same problem. There just wasn’t that much for them to do after the initial episode or two of island survival. Because it turns out that they weren’t really that interested in that concept. So after the first couple episodes, they just magically have all the food that they need. 

Chris: The other thing that really helps is to not have too many fantastical things in the world. I think we talked about this in terms of magic. If you want your magic to be mysterious, having lots of magic everywhere is not going to make the magic mysterious. A Study in Drowning is a setting that doesn’t have magic everywhere, but there are superstitions, and that means that when the main character sees weird things, it’s mysterious. Whereas if this was just a high fantasy setting or a setting where everybody had a wand and was casting spells all the time, you wouldn’t be able to get that “oh, there might be a fae king here. That’s so mysterious.” Instead it would just be like, “yeah. The fae king can go sit right next to the dwarf at the high table.” And so you do have to tone it down, and if the protagonist has lots of flashy magic, it’s not impossible to add something more mysterious to a setting where there’s lots of overt magic. But it has to stand out and be different in some way. If everybody’s doing wizard magic, sorcerer magic is not going to be different enough to feel mysterious. It’s possible that if everybody’s doing magic, the only dragon in the world might still feel mysterious. It’s still possible. But it’s going to be more of a stretch. And if you want something that’s magical or supernatural, it’s just going to stand out a lot more if you have lots less natural or supernatural things in your setting. 

Oren: With role-playing games, at least, I’ve had a fair amount of success taking a fantasy setting — be it urban, or high fantasy, or whatever — and then using more Cthulhu-y cosmic horror aspects to be the mysterious stuff. Because that feels very weird and different as opposed to if you’ve got an urban fantasy setting where there’s werewolves and vampires and selkies. And then you introduce… I don’t know. An elemental type creature, that’s not really that mysterious. At that point, those feel about on par with each other. But you might be able to do it if you introduced an angel, because angels don’t show up in urban fantasy all that often, and they’re usually not mixing it up with the regular folks. So that might work if you did some work to make it not just seem like a stereotypical, out-of-a-renaissance-painting angel. 

Chris: It’s also worth talking about what you should hide, what you should not hide. Because obviously, you want to reduce the amount of information your audience gets so that things can seem mysterious. No meta mysteries, please. We’ve talked about meta mysteries before–it’s basically anything that your protagonist knows [that your audience isn’t told].  It’s just not going to work. It’s just not going to work as a mystery or something that’s really mysterious, because those go in two directions. Either A, we just don’t understand the protagonist or where they’re coming from at all. We can’t feel what they feel. The story loses its emotional power. The protagonist becomes less likable. And we’re really stealing the momentum of the story just to make a cool reveal later. Or alternatively, it’s not important. Okay, sure. So what? 

Oren: It’s rude to call out Way of Kings both times. Like, oh man, what happened with Kaladin’s brother? Something bad happened to him. What was it? Oh. He died in a very predictable way. Exactly what you guessed happened. But we really dragged that out for a while. 

Chris: So you want your protagonist to be questioning what’s happening along with your reader. And it’s–you want the reader to know what the protagonist thinks about whether things are real. And you want the reader to know, other than that, anything that the plot relies on. Like, tension often requires a lot of context. So you need some kind of stakes. And that–your villain can still be mysterious. A monster can be mysterious. A threat can be mysterious as long as it’s obviously a threat. And we don’t, you know, it’s not so mysterious we’re not even sure if it means harm. Unless you have, of course, another source of tension. But you need something to hold up the story. You don’t want to make it so that we don’t have a sense of–we don’t have a deadline or we don’t have anything that holds that up. So if you don’t undermine attachment and you don’t undermine the tension of their story, then you’re probably okay. 

Oren: Yeah. You need–you can have a reveal that there’s more at stake than we thought or something. But the key word there is more. There still has to be something at stake. If it’s like, “Oh, well, the fairies are going to open a portal that will plunge the world into eternal winter,” alright. That’s a strong set of stakes. But. If your protagonist doesn’t know that, and the story is just them occasionally going out to the edge of the property and feeling an unseasonably chill breeze, that’s kind of nothing. It’s a little mysterious, but it’s not helping your story at all. You need something to bridge that gap. 

Chris: And if there’s a question of whether beings mean any harm, that can be tricky to balance. Because if your protagonist–you want to justify why your protagonist takes risks. For instance, by going into the woods and looking at these mysterious beings. And then your protagonist is like, “Oh, I don’t think they mean any harm,” as a way to justify their motivation. But then if your readers believe that, they may not feel any tension. So there can be a balance there. That’s why, again, it’s helpful to have another source of threat. But otherwise, it has to seem likely that they are threatening, likely enough to convince the audience that they’re a threat. And if you have a main character that doesn’t think they’re a threat, having other credible characters say they are can help. Something to look out for. 

Wes: So what I’m hearing is, setting expectations for your story are important, and then not just introducing elements that seem too out of sorts, or just having too many of them in there. And explaining it is bad. I go there because we’ve talked about Stranger things before. Season one, there’s a lot of mysteriousness going on there, then–I don’t even want to bring up the later seasons, but it’s just gone. It’s just gone. And it’s not sustainable. We know it’s different. But the questions that get raised, and some things get answered in the first season. But both the Upside Down itself has an uncanny mysteriousness to it, because it’s a weird mirror of Hawkins. But because there’s like the predator loose in the town, there’s also that threat there of, “How is it getting there?” And I remember the scene where–R.I.P. Barb–the monster apparently just ripped a hole through a tree. How did that happen? That adds a new layer to it. There are tiny portals into this place that we can access. And they don’t explain that. They don’t need to explain that. But it opens up the world. 

Chris: Speaking of Stranger Things–to some degree, for most stories the novelty may decrease as the story goes on. Because people get used to things, and they just naturally become less novel. In this case, mysteriousness is a form of novelty. As things become more familiar, that novelty is going to wear off. That’s natural. Your goal is usually to build up tension and attachment to your characters, so that by the time the novelty is gone, everybody’s invested. And Stranger Things succeeded in doing that, so I wouldn’t criticize it for, in general, being less mysterious. As the show goes on, it compensated, and that’s pretty normal. But there were some choices like in season four, when we initially had this cool spider monster in the sky, this leggy monster. It felt like a cosmic horror being up there. And then no, it was just some guy. Some guy created that. Wow, that really deflates it. The creepy being was mysterious. Some guy, not so mysterious. 

Oren: That was definitely an example of them explaining something that didn’t need to be explained, which doesn’t happen that often in my experience. The big question. “What is the Upside Down?” And honestly, I don’t think that was a big question people were asking. I don’t think we needed an explanation to “What is the Upside down?” Especially since the explanation they gave was that a psychic person made it up from a plane of pure energy. What are those things? Where did those things come from? And now it’s just a bottomless pit. 

Chris: Honestly, I was really hoping that it was an alternate universe version of Hawkins that had been taken over by the monsters already, because that would add some tension. These are universe-traveling monsters that gobble up universes, and see how a universe just like yours was already gobbled up. 

Oren: That definitely would have been the simplest explanation, and if I was going to explain it, that’s what I would have gone with. It requires the least leg work. It’s the easiest to comprehend. It would not even be that hard to figure it out. Instead they went with, “some guy made it because he likes spiders.”

Wes: Each element of mystery and whimsy throughout the show was blowing up this balloon of whimsy and mystery, and then they pop it by making all of that due to just one person. It’s a terrible decision. 

Oren: I think Chris was the one who suggested that the reason they did that might have honestly just been because they didn’t know how to defeat the Mind flayer as an enemy. Like the Mind Flayer was too big. So they down-shifted to a guy who is much easier to defeat and so they can maybe hopefully wrap that up before Netflix goes out of business. 

Chris: This is why giving the protagonists another problem to focus on while they are experiencing mysterious things is very helpful. And you can still circle around if you want them to uncover what the mysterious stuff is by the end, as long as they have something to do in the meantime. Maybe your main character has come to the home of an ailing relative to try to convince them to move into assisted living because they aren’t able to take care of themselves in this big mansion. That is very mysterious. But then you can have, for instance, family drama and weird things happening. Or, your character is running from the authorities, and then something else is also following them. But they have a main thing to do, which is hide from the authorities. What you want is that the main character has more urgent things to work on rather than just trying to figure out what the mysterious stuff is, but the mysterious stuff is still affecting them and therefore influencing the plot, so that it still feels like it matters. But it’s not as urgent as the other problems, or we have a tangible way to fix our problems, so I’m not going to spend my time trying to figure out what the weird moving shadows are, because I can just talk to my ailing relative. That seems like the practical way to address this problem. That way, you don’t have that issue, the Lost show issue, where we’re trying to uncover things but we can’t really get anywhere, because then it wouldn’t be mysterious anymore. So we just open up new questions and then slow down the movement of the plot, like in Severance. And then have the character look at something, and their eyes widen, and they gasp, and then you fade to black and tell them, “you can come back next season.” 

Oren: An unusual problem–I’m not sure how likely this is to happen, but it would be worth mentioning just in case. This can be found in the show Silo–spoilers for that show–which is, if you introduce an intriguing mystery or a mysterious part of the environment, do not then take the story away from it. Because what happens in Silo is they’re in a post-apocalyptic survival bunker of some kind, and the big mystery and where most of the mysterious atmosphere is focused around is what it’s like outside. And you basically find out in the first or second episode. Then you spend the rest of the first season on a murder mystery desperately trying to get back to where you were at the start. This murder mystery just feels incredibly unimportant, because it’s pretty obvious. The government of the Silo is evil. Yes, I figured that out in the first episode. Don’t particularly care who it is. 

Chris: We get some information about what’s outside above the Silo, but it’s still unclear, if there is something, what dangers or threats could be there. But the thing is that matters. It matters whether or not people can live outside the Silo. That affects everyone and everything, so it’s really important. Whereas what they’re trying to make mysterious for most of the first season is just, “Why is the Silo here? What is the unknown history of the Silo that everybody’s trying to hide?” It’s a little curious what this history of the Silo that they’re trying to hide is. But it doesn’t matter, so it’s just curiosity. There’s no tension behind that. Whereas what’s outside really matters. I don’t really care that much about the history of the Silo. Can we just go outside and see what’s going on? It’s a cautionary tale about making sure that the things that are important in your story still matter to the plot and still have an effect on people. 

Oren: All right, with that, I think we’re going to call this very mysterious episode to a close. 

Chris: And if we helped you be mysterious, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie MacLeod. Next, there’s. Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week! [Outro music]

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