Every story is made of countless little pieces, from characters and arcs to locations and magic powers. But if those pieces are scattered around randomly, they won’t amount to much. For a story to be as much or more than the sum of its parts, we need to make it cohesive. That’s what we’re talking about today, with discussions of fractured plots, random Cthulhu aliens, and diverging viewpoints. Did you think we were going to let this episode go by without grinding the multiple POV axe a little?
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: I’ve been thinking, what if we split the podcast into segments? So in one segment I’ll play the harp, in another you can talk about whatever video game you’re angry at the time. Maybe we’ll give a few storytelling tips and then we’ll just play a recording of whale sounds for the rest. Everybody likes whale sounds.
Oren: Everyone does like whale sounds. More variety is better. They say it’s the spice of life. So I say: just put all the variety on there without any thought to the consequences.
Chris: The podcast wouldn’t really be about anything anymore, but we can include whatever we feel like.
Oren: Yeah, like a little cabaret number.
Chris: Obvious bonus. This time we’re talking about making a cohesive story. First: What is that?
Oren: It’s when the story sticks together properly. Wait, no, that’s an adhesive story.
Chris: Yeah, so it’s where all the parts fit together. None of the story elements are easily extractable, everything has something to do with everything else, and it has things like foreshadowing and callbacks and references. Elements make more than one appearance. Basically, it’s the result we get after we consolidate the story. Similar to consolidation, it’s just that everybody uses the word “cohesive.” The verb for that is “cohere,” which doesn’t sound great. I don’t wanna talk about “cohering” story elements. So we talk about the process of making this happen as “consolidating,” making all of your elements work together more, which I technically consider to be different than simplifying or trimming, but that’s also necessary if you want a great end result. And it also kinda assumes that the story didn’t start that way, but I think that this is actually best when you start early as possible.
Oren: If you get to the end of your story and then look back and are trying to make all of the different things you just threw in there cohesive, that’s gonna be a much bigger job than starting from the beginning.
Chris: And so having the cohesive story is really important for kind of creating that feeling of unity, right? Which is also what we’re looking for when we create a throughline. If having a throughline is an important part of making the story feel cohesive, it’s really important for reducing complexity and keeping people engaged, ’cause if nothing has anything to do with anything else, they don’t have as many reasons to be interested in something. Whereas if everything is interrelated, then they can be interested in one thing, passionate about one character, for instance, and they’ll have a reason to care about everything else because that character is interacting with everything else and related to everything else.
Oren: It’s the difference between the related POV chapters in Game of Thrones and the unrelated ones. You’ve got Catelyn, who is trying to figure out what’s going on with Bran, and who pushed him, and then trying to warn Eddard, and they’re not in the same place, but they’re clearly part of the same story. Then you’ve got Tyrion and Jon, who are going up to the Wall, and that’s not super related, but at least it’s establishing like the spooky, magical stuff, which is the backdrop of the political conflict. And then you’ve got Daenerys, who is off with the fantasy Mongols on a different continent, and it’s so weird how, even before Viserys dies, you can just tell that they’re never going back to Westeros. Like, Viserys confronts Illyrio and is like, “Where’s my army to take back Westeros?” And Illyrio is like, “Yeah, eventually, whatever. When we get to it, who cares?” And it’s weird because theoretically that’s Illyrio’s motivation, is to use the Dothraki to conquer Westeros. But man, I have never seen a character who cared less about that.
Chris: Without making your story cohesive, later you’ll probably end up cutting and reworking a bunch of it because the story doesn’t feel right. The story elements start to work against each other or compete with each other. That kind of thing becomes overly complex.
Oren: If you’re really unlucky, you end up with a studio-mandated project with two elements that just do not work together, like giant monster kaiju and human-focused spy drama.
Chris: Talking about the Monarch TV show.
Oren: God, that show.
Chris: Um, to be fair, it is really hard to make things related to the kaiju. As they stomp human cities, they also stomp cohesion.
Oren: I think the core issue with that show is that it is a kaiju story, and kaiju stories have the basic premise that nothing humans do matters. And also a human drama spy show. So the spy show isn’t about anything. They’re just running around being like, “What’s your secret?” No one has a secret that matters.
Chris: Problem with the kaiju is that kaiju are very expensive for a special effects budget, so we need to fill in the time with something else.
Oren: It doesn’t help that it’s a midquel, so it can’t disturb the precious canon of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, or whichever one comes next.
Chris: Kaiju stories have this entire problem where they’ve got human characters that are hard to relate, make them interrelated with the kaiju. Kaiju Preservation Society did surprisingly well with this, and I think it really helped that they spent a lot of time in Kaiju World, so we could interact with the kaiju when they’re not stomping on cities.
Oren: The kaiju were like a cool thing for the characters to learn about and not the reason we were there, ’cause that’s the awkwardness, that’s the creative pull of kaiju stories, is that no one is here to watch the human characters. We’re all here to watch Godzilla blow up a city. And that wasn’t the point of Kaiju Preservation Society, so it just worked much better.
Chris: We got to be with human characters who also just wanted to watch the kaiju. I really think that, when you wanna make your story cohesive, get in the habit of doing it regularly, starting at the concept stage, starting when you have that little idea, start thinking about this. And when I work with writers who have a concept, I help them take all of the bits and pieces that they have that they wanna put in their story and make sure that they can actually work together. A typical writer might come with various ideas that they want, like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I had these crystals that gave off magic? Oh, and I really like Elder Gods. I want Elder Gods in my setting. I want a central romance. And oh, I just really relate to this idea: I have a protagonist who has to overcome their fear. Oh, and fake dating is so much fun. I wanna put that in.” We have all of these miscellaneous ideas that we wanna put in, and the question becomes, how do those things fit together? How are Elder Gods relevant to this romance? And how is overcoming fear important to the romance? There has to be a reason why they’re all there together at once. Otherwise, you just get competing story elements that kind of pull the story in different directions. If you have a bunch of little miscellaneous ideas like that, they will not all fit. You’re gonna have to shake things out and decide. Maybe having a bunch of cool, powerful crystal magic just doesn’t really work with the idea that magic is a dark corrupting force, ’cause that’s something that is strongly associated with Elder Gods, and that is supposed to be part of the danger that Elder Gods create, since we don’t usually have our protagonist fighting 1v1 against an Elder God.
Oren: I just want to go nine rounds with Great Cthulhu!
Chris: So maybe when you look at it, you would find that things don’t really work together very well. And so then you start sectioning off Crystal Magic Academy over here and these Elder Gods over here, I’ll have these characters do crystal magic and these characters do Elder Gods. And pretty soon you’re drawing like a divine line down the story. Maybe the only thing the crystals can do is help protect you from the Elder Gods, or they make you unseen by the Elder Gods or something. It might not work the way you originally envisioned this idea. Crystal magic is something that is just like super powerful and people just like blowing away their enemies, fighting the Dark Arts with them. It’s not very compatible with a cosmic horror setting.
Oren: Spooky crystals maybe. That’s not impossible. Weird crystal growths, cosmic horror term, but they’re not gonna be like beautiful and sparkly.
Chris: So it’s about: Okay, are you willing to change this idea? And then, if you can’t, which one is more important? Basically, the sooner you make the choice about what stays and what goes, the better off you’ll be, because most writers get really attached to their ideas. Especially once you’ve drafted, it’s hard to cut your draft down or discard ideas. Basically, you wanna nip anything that doesn’t fit in the bud so that you don’t cry over it later. And then you wanna build off of what you keep. So the next time you’re like, “Okay, I need to add something to the story. I want a sidekick, I need a character arc for this character,” then you look for something that you already have in the story to build off of. “Hey, I need a character arc for my love interest. That’s what I want. Oh, okay, I have Elder Gods.” So maybe the love interest has been corrupted by the magic and has to get free of that corruption. So now we have a character arc that is inherently related to the Elder Gods. We take what we already have and look for opportunities whenever we add new elements to build off of that.
Oren: A common cohesion problem that I see is there’s some kind of setting or occasionally plot element that appears out of nowhere at the end. Thinking of stuff like A Memory Called Empire. Suddenly Cthulhu aliens, they just aren’t part of the plot for whatever reason, they just hang out in the background. We get an occasional interlude that hints to us that Cthulhu aliens exist.
Chris: Do you think in some of those cases there’s an intended twist where it’s supposed to be like a big, exciting surprise?
Oren: That can work under the right circumstances. Admittedly, those circumstances are a little harder to nail down intellectually ’cause there’s a difference between building up to something and then revealing a cool thing at the end, and your story going along and suddenly, “Ah, this random thing popped up.” I don’t know exactly where that is.
Chris: It’s about having it present at some level to set expectations for what fits. Now, I haven’t read The Expanse books, but just judging on the show, we have a weird protomolecule alien presence that kind of builds up and feels epic at the end. But in the beginning of the story, it’s something that’s killing people and is weird, but is not like a huge thing. Somebody’s science experiment, it appears differently. Or if we take Project Hail Mary (spoilers here), but we start with a single alien molecule, the astrophage, and that sets expectations for alien life. But it’s still a surprise when Rocky shows up. Sapient, sophisticated aliens show up, but at the same time, the presence of the astrophage makes it so that fits, especially since we are as good at explaining the science and making Rocky feel pretty high in realism, despite being an alien who is intelligent.
Oren: ‘Cause that was part of the main character story, right? I think the problem with A Memory Called Empire is that the Cthulhu aliens are not part of the protagonist’s story, but they are important for the ending twist. That’s where the interludes come from and part of the reason why I think they feel so random. I can imagine ways to make the protagonist’s story about the Cthulhu aliens, although I think that would be hard because the main story of the first.book is to explore the Teixcalaan Empire, which is this space empire that’s like a combination of Rome and the Aztec Empire, which is interesting, and they have a lot of cool stuff. So it would be weird to then also be looking at cosmic horror stuff that would diminish how weird and novel this human empire is.
Chris: At that point we have a couple elements working at cross purposes. I think that you could still make the culture interesting and still have the Cthulhu aliens. I don’t think there’s enough focus, again, on these disappearances, ’cause there’s some ships disappearing. So if you set up a situation where the kind of nation the protagonist comes from has been losing ships, so we set up that there’s something kind of mysterious, set up that kind of cosmic horror mood, and then one of the reasons the protagonist has to go to this empire is because they need to sort of build an alliance and get help, but in a way that doesn’t subjugate their nation, then we could still make it relevant, but not front and center until we want it to be front and center. Again, I think setting up that mood, making it through that not only are ships disappearing, but there’s something that feels cosmic horrory about those disappearances, even if you have… nobody has laid eye on these cosmic horror aliens yet.
Oren: What about having too many characters? Is this a cohesion issue or is this something else?
Chris: It’s definitely a complexity issue, but it’s not necessarily a cohesion issue if all of those characters are together and working on the same plot arcs. It’s not necessarily a cohesion issue, but simplifying is still a good idea. Consolidating the story is one way that you reduce complexity, but it’s not the only way you reduce complexity.
Oren: So Wheel of Time has a cohesion problem for its too many characters. ’cause every character has their own plot and they’re all off doing their own thing, whatever. Rebel Moon has too many characters, but not that specific cohesion problem ’cause they’re all part of the same plot, for lack of a better term.
Chris: And certainly simplicity is also something that you want to get just in the habit of. Of never adding more story elements that you need, of thinking why you’re adding them, of not adding cool characters just because you came up with a new cool character concept. As hard as that is, it’s gonna be even more painful to cut them once you’ve had them.
Oren: How do travel stories fit into this? Because the whole idea of a travel story often is to visit a cool new location every new section, and if you are visiting a new location and you then leave it behind, is that gonna create an issue? Is that gonna feel like, “Oh, we introduced this cool thing and then it didn’t end up being a big deal later?”
Chris: Episodic stories do have slightly different expectations. So if we’re talking about the type of travel story that is really episodic, then I think we can get away with a lot more elements that don’t repeat. They’re just important to one episode. I had one client who thought… the characters were traveling, and thought they had to bring in all of the important characters they met while traveling back for the climax. You don’t need to do that, because people will understand if we have these adventures in different places. That’s a separate episode that’s a little bit more independent than a typical child arc is. Often, it still could be a child arc, but in that case, the difference is that the story in that one place is higher attention, right? and more important than the overall quest during that time, feels much more present. Like, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the quest is really just a motivation for traveling. They’re trying to find these guys who disappeared, and they’re journeying farther and farther out, so there’s a question of their safety. When they get to an island where, you know, the water turns things to gold, and then everybody gets greedy and starts fighting each other, that feels much more important, that they deal with this gold island, than it does their quest to find these people. As opposed to Lord of the Rings, which also has a little bit of episodicness to it, but is a little more overarching because we have this very important One Ring, and Sauron is hunting them, and that’s much higher attention.
Oren: We don’t stop anywhere in Lord of the Rings any longer than we have to.
Chris: Yeah. Even in Lord of the Rings we have various characters that come in and out. There’s a little bit higher expectations that they are interrelated with the big arc. Even when they go to Lothlórien, Galadriel helps Frodo with the main quest. Even as the elements change out, it’s still a little bit more focused on that big quest because that’s the structure that story has. Even so, though, where it’s still allowed for characters to come in and out, but if you had like the story taking place in just one city, the big plot arc was most important, that might be weird. It would have to feel a little more episodic for switching out characters. You could have an episodic story in one city. It would just be a little more unusual.
Oren: It would be a little harder to justify, but not impossible.
Chris: One thing that’s worth talking about, because it is really important, is just finding out what’s important to you. What I tell people is: You wanna start with whatever element you really care about the most, the one that is not acceptable to cut.
Oren: Center your darlings.
Chris: Exactly. And build everything else around that, and that’s the most productive use of your time. This works with plotting too, right? If you have an end, if you are driven to write the story, because you can just see this one moment at the climax or at the very end of the story that you’re really drawn to, sometimes it’s easier to just work backwards from that. Okay, what would need to happen for them to get there, instead of starting at the beginning? Whereas, if you’re really drawn in by a good beginning situation that you find compelling, then you can work from beginning to end. But regardless, I always think you should start with your darling, right? and fit other things around that, to make for sure that it’s saved and that it stays as central as possible.
Oren: This is where starting with the throughline can help a lot because you really want your throughline to be the plot that you care about. Once you know what that is, then you can make sure that you add stuff that supports it and then just build a cohesive story around the throughline. Whereas, if you start with a throughline, and that’s not really the one that you care about the most, you’re always gonna have problems.
Chris: When we look at, “Okay, what do you want to write about?” Like, in a general sense, do you love writing where your character is gardening? What kind of scenes do you enjoy writing becomes relevant here because the throughline determines what problem you have and the fact that problem needs to be resolved at the end, but there’s also choices for what type of conflicts do you have, right? What activities is your character engaging in? Those activities allow you to write about what you wanna write about. If you like to write about gardening, you have an excuse for lots of gardening because your character can solve the problem by gardening. Causality is often very useful here. If the problem, you know, if bad gardening causes the issue, which sounds silly, but let’s say the village doesn’t have enough food. There’s been something wrong with the field, there’s been flooding or rot, or potatoes have had a disease again and gone bad. The big problem is caused by that. Then you can focus on gardening all you want to solve that problem.
Oren: The order of your scenes should matter to make the story feel more cohesive. And this is something that might sound obvious, but I have worked with authors who haven’t quite mastered it yet. Maybe because they were watching old shows like Next Generation, where you can watch a lot of the episodes in any order you feel like, because nothing changes between them. But with a single story, for it to be cohesive, it should feel like these scenes could only have happened in this order. If you can rearrange them, something’s probably wrong.
Chris: You shouldn’t be able to just cut something out without making edits elsewhere because it all should be essential.
Oren: Stuff should change. Plot should be different. Character relationships change. Even just the stuff that they’re using can change. It doesn’t always have to be a huge change, but, like, readers like to be able to track that stuff as they go. It’s why some TV shows, even though their plots are very episodic, they have more consistent character growth. Supernatural was like that. It had a lot of one-off episodes, but there was still like a feeling that the characters were changing over the course of time, at least for a while. And then they ran out of ideas, but no one’s perfect.
Chris: Long-running show.
Oren: 15 years old. That’s, uh, quite a while.
Chris: Signs when you need to trim or change: If you have any story element that’s just standing alone, it doesn’t affect anything, isn’t affected by anything. A similar sign: If you find yourself going back and forth between elements, you can’t logistically put things in the same scene ’cause you have one plot and some side characters that have nothing to do with that plot, so you have to keep alternating back and forth between which one you’re writing about, that’s a really bad sign.
Oren: If you have a story or if you have a plot line or something in your story that is more exciting than the one that your hero is on, that is a problem. And I have run into this a lot with clients that I work with: They set out to write a story that is about interpersonal relationships and character growth and working with an oppressive system, and then they also have a badass rebellion story, but the main character’s not part of that badass rebellion, but that badass rebellion has clearly captured their attention, and so we spend a ton of the story talking about it. Write whatever story you want. It can be about a badass rebellion. If that is what is in your heart, then that should be what’s on the page. You are not obligated to not write badass rebellions. You’re not doing penance.
Chris: There’s also a place where input from others can sometimes do damage, is if you’re like, “Okay, I just wanna write my characters being cute together, right? and having a little personal time.” And then you’re like, “Okay, but I gotta do a climax.” So then you put in a villain who swoops in to give yourself an exciting climax, and then your beta readers read it and they’re like, “Oh, this villain should be in there earlier, ’cause you need your plot to be exciting.” So then you start adding that villain earlier, and as you go through revisions, you’re pushed by various people to start doing more and more about that exciting villain plotline, but that’s not actually what you ever wanted to write about. You just felt obligated to write about it. That’s fairly typical, and you wanna give some structure to your cute personal strings, but it should keep the focus on those characters and allow you to write the type of content you wanna write.
Oren: This brings us to your regularly scheduled Mythcreants corner about how you shouldn’t really be taking revision suggestions from your beta readers. In most cases, they don’t know what the stories should have. They can only tell you what they liked. Unless they’re an expert, what they like might not be what’s best for the story.
Chris: In that situation, adding more of those villain scenes could lead to a story that some readers would like, but if you don’t like it, that’s gonna cause problems because the way that you write it is not gonna fit, right? and also you’re gonna be unhappy and unmotivated. It’s not good for you or for the story. The last thing, of course, is: Anytime two elements are clashing, especially if there’s two different themes, if you want it to be about folklore, but then you are also putting in superheroes, those things, again, just have very different feelings, and so those are things that typically do not… It’s not that you couldn’t do folklore/superheroes, but usually you would really have to work hard to integrate those elements with each other. If you’re… when you’re thinking about that stuff, you’re like, “I like the Witcher. I wanna give it an Eastern European feel,” you gotta commit to that. You wanna make everything an Eastern European folklore feel. If you just, “Oh, I’m now excited about a superhero,” you gotta let that go so that you can keep that theme that you wanted.
Oren: All right. With that, I think we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you’ve got some useful tips, please support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Then 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’ll talk to you next week.
[closing music]This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
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