The Mythcreant Podcast 513 – Simplifying the Story
One of the most common obstacles for new authors is making their story too complicated. When you’re first putting pen to paper, there’s a powerful urge to include everything you can think of. But this leads to stories that are either impossible to finish, collapse under their own weight, or both. Simplifying is the best solution, but it’s not always easy. This week, we’re talking about how to decide what’s really necessary, along with several options for removing the chaff in as painless a manner as possible. Also… The Machine.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Alright. After more than 500 episodes, I’m afraid this podcast has just gotten too complex. Nobody can follow it anymore, so we have to decide what we’re going to give up. Are we going to give up Wraith McBlade?
Bunny: No!
Chris: Are we going to give up sandwiches?
Oren: Hmm.
Chris: What about the Holistic Cup of Depression? Is that going to go?
Bunny: Okay, no. That’s the only thing that stays.
Oren: Ever since Bunny joined the podcast, you two are now the ones whose voices people can’t tell apart. It used to be me and Wes. So I’m afraid we’re going to have to consolidate you into one host. I’ll just go and fire up the machine.
Bunny: No, not the machine! Anything to save the holistic cup of depression.
Oren: Yeah, we have to make sacrifices. Or you two, apparently, have to make a sacrifice in this scenario, is, I think, what I’m learning here.
Bunny: I’ve made my peace.
Chris: Maybe we should just diversify a little bit, because if we’re not fulfilling the same role, we’re less expendable. And we know Bunny’s the villain.
Oren: Mmm, that’s true.
Chris: So I think you need to be the love interest, Oren. Given that you’re not another protagonist.
Oren: Mmm. Okay, all right, all right, hang on.
Bunny: I noticed that you’re the main character, Chris. I’m sure this is coincidental.
Chris: What? No, that’s just the only logical choice.
Oren: Just writing friend fiction over here.
Chris: This time we’re going to talk about simplifying your story, and I think the first thing to note about this is sometimes it’s kind of too late. If we’re being realistic about people emotionally, it can be too late.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Look, I get it. I like trinkets, I like shiny things, and sometimes those mean pages-long worldbuilding digressions.
Oren: It’s one of those things where, theoretically, any manuscript can be edited in any way, but practically, authors have a limit of how much they’re willing to change, and often, if you have finished the manuscript and you are at the point where it is too complicated, it will be difficult to simplify it to the point where it probably needs to be simplified. So often you are much better off incorporating these when you’re starting the story.
Chris: Yeah. It’s possible for us to find targets for simplification with a story that’s already drafted. But part of the problem is that writers just get super attached to what they’ve created and they don’t like giving things up. And we try to convince them, but a lot of times they do not cut things that we think that they should cut to make their story stronger. So, again, simplifying as you come up with ideas and just being in this ongoing habit of keeping things simple as you develop the story is really key. And if you have that mindset as you start from the very first time you come up with that little flicker of an idea in your head, you’ll just be much better off and you’ll be able to do it much more thoroughly and come up with a story that is much stronger and simpler and easier to understand and doesn’t cause you headaches and all of that stuff.
Bunny: Wow. I think the simplest solution is just to not write it.
Chris: It is very simple! Well, actually no, that’s not true because, if you don’t write it down, it’s only going to develop in your head, and you’re going to think it’s simple, but you’re going to be wrong.
Bunny: So you have net complicatedness.
Chris: That’s the thing: actually, people’s first story is usually by far the most complex, what we jokingly refer to as the Magnum Opus, which is this often series (sometimes it’s a novel, but it’s often a series) that people come up with as their first huge project when they’re new to everything.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And it’s usually super duper complicated, and I think there’s many reasons, but I think one of the reasons is that, because it’s your first time writing things down, you let it develop in your head for a super long time before you ever actually start writing, and it’s really hard to tell how complicated things are when they’re in your head. They seem really simple. And only when you put them on paper do you realize, “Wow, I actually have a lot here.”
Oren: Yeah. And there’s also just a factor of you don’t know what you don’t know, and everything seems easy when you’re thinking about it, and there’s a good chance you were inspired by some complicated story that you really liked. And I’ve been there, right? Some of my early stories were like that, and they were unworkable because of how complicated they were.
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: And I think, when you’re first writing something too, you’re just really optimistic and maybe more excited because your expectations aren’t tempered by anything, by what you might have to simplify.
Oren: That’s true. Yeah, the worst part of being an editor is having to tell an author that they are not as far along as they think they are.
Chris: Yeah. Waa-waa.
Oren: I hate having to do that.
Chris: It’s a huge bummer.
Oren: I wish there was a way I could outsource that to someone else.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t want to be the one who has to disillusion you. Can somebody else give you your reality check?
Bunny: Maybe that’s my role in this podcast.
Oren: Yeah!
Bunny: You can pay me and I’ll be the harsh truths person.
Oren: Bunny will get a cut off all my editing going forward. I need you to tell the client. I don’t wanna do it.
Bunny: “I’m sorry, client. Bunny’s going to step in here for a couple minutes.”
Chris: When they see Bunny, they run away screaming. They know what’s coming.
Bunny: I mean, I guess that’s consistent with villainesses.
Oren: One that goes hand in hand with this kind of ambition we’re talking about is a simple lack of focus. This is also more likely to affect new writers, just because, when you’re first writing, stuff is cool and you see stuff and you wanna put it in the story ’cause it was cool. And my players in an urban fantasy game that I ran a few years ago noticed that there was a lot more Greek stuff in it about halfway through. It’s ’cause I was playing Hades and I loved Hades. It’s not my fault ’cause Hades is too good.
Chris: I also think that the Magnum Opus stage also encourages that, because, instead of people thinking about having a long career where they write many stories and no one story needs to completely fulfill them, they have this idea of, like, “No, my grand big story! I’m going to be working on it forever! It has to be everything to me!” So this idea of, like, “No, that’s a cool idea. I should make another story with it,” that’s too far away. That’s not real to them. Your big grand story has got to have it.
Bunny: Anecdotally, talking to people who are having their first big Magnum Opus moment trying to write everything in high school, were planning sprawling series. It’s never one standalone type of thing. You imagine this huge…
Chris: I have encountered a Magnum Opus that is just one novel. I have encountered, but they’re often series. Or more likely to be series.
Bunny: Yeah. Or at least I don’t think I know anyone who actually went through and finished a series. Usually, and this is myself included, the interest tapered out as you realized that this is maybe a little much.
Chris: Yeah, that can happen for sure.
Oren: One of the neat things about working with clients as opposed to reading a published manuscript is that I can ask them, “Where did this stuff come from?” And often it’s a direct one-to-one. There’s a car chase here in a story that I wouldn’t expect to have a car chase. And it’s because they saw Fury Road. Or the characters suddenly start focusing on comedy of manners two-thirds of the way through the book, that’s when they read Strange and Norrell, and I really like the comedy of manners aspect. And I suspect a lot of published authors have the same thing. If they’re successful, they’ve probably managed to tone it down a bit, but I’ll never know for sure because I can’t ask them. But with clients I can.
Bunny: “Why is there a car chase in here?” “Oh, well, I’ve been playing a lot of Hades.“
Oren: It’s all coming into focus.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Sometimes authors give interviews, and in which case we do know some of this, I’m reading Absolution right now, the fourth Southern Reach book. It’s super scattered, it has all this random stuff, and Jeff VanderMeer did a bunch of interviews promoting it, as one does. And I’ve read one on Polygon where, at least the way he tells it, there’s just a bunch of ideas he had, and he wanted to put them all in the book. And you got the backstory of Old Jim and working in this encounter that VanderMeer had with a manatee in real life, and this big metaphor about the state taking away agency and following up on the rabbits from the previous books, and that all had to be in there. Yeah. That’s what this book reads like. It reads like there’s a lot of random things.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Bunny: But Oren, every sentence was intentional.
Chris: Every sentence was planned.
Oren: Which is like, look, people say things in interviews that are off the cuff, I don’t wanna hold that to him too much, but he also says in that interview that he doesn’t remember writing big parts of it. How does he know they were all planned?
Bunny: Shades of Memento.
Chris: Yeah. No, I’m sure he didn’t actually mean that he outlined every sentence and then wrote it again in the draft. It just sounds very funny.
Oren: And we also know this isn’t just VanderMeer who does stuff like this. We know that one of the reasons why Martin is having so much trouble finishing Song of Ice and Fire is that he was too ambitious. He made it too big, there are too many characters, and then he also killed off too many of the characters he needed, because it was shocking when he did that, and now he doesn’t… Nowhere to go. The garden has been overgrown, to use his metaphor.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Bunny: Is this something he admits about it?
Oren: I don’t think that he said it in quite that many words, but I’ve looked at a number of interviews where he has talked about it, and there have been some instances where he mentions that the story has grown in ways he did not expect. And just from reading the books, I have no idea how to resolve this. If someone came to me as an editor with the first five books as they are now, and was like, “How do I end this series?” I’ll be like, “I don’t know. You killed all the characters you needed to end it. They’re all dead. I have no idea how to end it now.”
Chris: Oren, I need you to plan Rise of Skywalker for me. You can’t change anything about the previous two movies in the sequel trilogy.
Oren: Oh, no!
Chris: But you need it to somehow make Rise of Skywalker good. Can you do it?
Oren: I can’t. I can’t do it.
Bunny: Could have done it better than what they did.
Chris: There were some unforced errors in there.
Oren: I don’t know why Rise of Skywalker has “Somehow, Palpatine returned” as a line. I know why they brought Palpatine back. I don’t know why that’s how they explained it, and I don’t know why there are so many scenes where a character seems to die and then didn’t die. That happening once is probably enough. But yes, this has been a thing I did for quite some time after Rise of Skywalker came out: “What would I have done with Rise of Skywalker, assuming I couldn’t change anything about the previous two movies?” And I do not know. It feels like an impossible task.
Chris: Okay. I think we’ve fleshed out the problem. So what are some recommendations for keeping things simple? I said: be in the habit as simplifying as you make things up. And I think that the key thing here, and this is when we talk about consolidation, is, when you decide to develop a story or add new things, always reuse the stuff you’ve already put there whenever possible.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So if you’re like, “Oh, I need a character that does this,” always look at the characters you’ve already created and say, “Can I add a role to this character?” before you, for instance, introduce a new character. Everything. Always return to the story elements, the worldbuilding rules, everything that you’ve already created, and reuse those whenever possible instead of adding like a whole new person, place, item, or anything named that the audience is going to have to learn.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Yeah, I think that your story should only be as complicated as it absolutely needs to be. That’s a good rule of thumb. I will allow for adding tidbits that make the world feel more fleshed out, even if they’re not directly applicable to the story, but it’s easy to get carried away with those, and they can consume your plot if you’re not careful. I think the most genuinely helpful piece of advice in terms of figuring out what to focus on in the story and building everything else around that, I’ve gotten from Mythcreants, is to center your darlings, and that can help the rest of those elements fall into place.
Chris: I think we did go over this in a recent episode, but if you are starting fresh, right? (I think we should talk more about what if you’re not starting fresh), but if you are starting fresh, the very first thing to do is figure out as precisely as possible what is exciting to you about the story, and then build everything else around that to reinforce that. And that kind of gives you some idea of priority, what is important. And if something is unrelated, again, maybe that’s a thing to start a new story.
Oren: Yeah. So one option, and this depends on the story, and you might need an editor to help you figure this out, because sometimes this can be hard to judge, but there are often parts of your story that simply don’t connect to anything else, and you could just remove them. I’ve worked with a number of clients that are like that, where it’s, “We have a story about the protagonist, and the main story is about the protagonist taking down the Dark Lord, but there are several chapters in the middle where they go and hang out in the Morpho Kingdom for a while, and the Morpho Kingdom is complicated and adds a bunch of burden to the audience’s attention, and then they leave and it’s like we were never there. And removing that is not painless. It will probably hurt, but it is relatively low on effort. Because it’s just not connected, and you can just try to run some thought experiments to be like, “If this never happened, if we took these chapters out, what would be different? What is it that the audience wouldn’t get later?” And you might find that the answer is very little.
Chris: Yeah. I think that the thing that I find that usually can be simplified or cut is backstory.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Backstory, people, I think. Especially if they do character development and they come up with all this backstory to develop their character, they are very tempted to include it. Or it could just be, if you absolutely love this character, or something is an important part of them to you, that becomes really attempting to fill that in. And sometimes you do need backstories, or sometimes giving the backstory in brief is helpful, but in many cases, because it doesn’t actually take place during the story, that’s one of those things that can go. Or, if something about the backstory is really important to the character, like you have a character who… the villain killed their parents, right? That might be something you want to state, but you don’t need a sequence of ten events in their backstory detailing exactly how the villain went about killing their parents. You could usually distill that down into something much simpler. Meeting for the first time makes it easy to keep audiences on the same page with the characters if they just met. We know everything we need to know. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have characters with a long history. But you wanna use that history if so.
Oren: I get it because I love the idea of two characters who’ve just been through so much together. That’s just very appealing to me. But that is hard. If the audience didn’t see any of that, communicating that in a way that will feel real is challenging. So I would say: only do it if that’s something you’re really interested in. It’s going to be hard to do casually.
Bunny: I think backstory is also one of those things that people have the impulse to overexplain when it’s just not as necessary. You can allude to things, and the backstory might be not crystal-clear, you might not know exactly what the villain said to the hero when they switched sides, the exact wording of that, sure, but you can still get the point across, right? without so many words.
Oren: Yeah. One option that is very useful, and is also fairly low on the pain threshold, is combining characters, ’cause you’ll often find that you have a character who’s doing one thing and they could also be doing something else, and you can get the thing you liked about both characters in one, instead of having to introduce another one.
Bunny: I don’t know, or in your machine. Looks pretty painful.
Oren: But in the current story that I’m working on, I had a thing where I needed a witch character to give some ooh! key foreshadowing. And I needed a physician character because there was a subplot where someone got injured and needed a physician and I was like, “Hey, hang on. Those don’t need to be separate people. I just have the witch also healing stuff.” And now the witch can give spooky foreshadowing while also providing medical services.
Bunny: Give spooky medical services!
Oren: Yeah, very spooky.
Chris: Sometimes you have to keep characters away, write ’em off with a stick. I have a story where I have a main character who interacts with their sister, but I just don’t want to introduce the parents. Those two more people, you know? Even though the parents technically are… it’s an agricultural family, right? work in the same lands, so they’re just over there, tending a different plot of land, and I just keep them away.
Bunny: That should be the excuse for everything.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: “Where are they?” “Oh, well, they’re tending a plot of land.”
Oren: Um, as you were going, this is more of a series thing, although it could happen in one book, when you have magic, I always advise trying to figure out new ways to use existing powers than adding new powers. It’s not like you’ll never want to add a new power, but I would recommend doing it as after you’ve already exhausted all the new ways you could use your existing ones.
Chris: And just say no to multiple magic systems. Do not need multiple magic systems!
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: Don’t do it!
Bunny: Dare to say no!
Chris: If you want it, the feeling of multiple magic systems, it’s still possible to just… they’re technically the same system, but two different groups go about it in slightly different ways, so the magic technically works the same, but it has different flavors.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: You can split it into categories and do other things like that, but I think that, most of the time, when people have completely different magic systems, a lot of times it’s a legacy of D&D, where they’re used to just a sorcery versus divine magic or what have you. But you don’t usually want to do that kind of thing in a prose work.
Oren: Which is very funny, because in D&D you have to explain, “Okay, sorcerers get their magic this way, wizards get it this way, clerics get it this way, druids get it this way.” And then you’re like, “Okay, so what do they do?” Pretty much the same thing. They don’t actually have any difference in their mechanics. There are some spells that are exclusive to certain classes, or that others don’t get, but they’re drawing a lot of the same spells. So it’s just this huge amount of worldbuilding effort you would need to go to for almost no benefit.
Chris: Again, with magic, the same principles of always reusing what you have whenever possible instead of adding new things.
Oren: If you’ve spent a lot of work explaining how wizardry works, and it’s complicated and there are a lot of different things you can do with it, you probably don’t then have to create a completely new system for druids. Even if you want there to be druids in your setting, you could probably have them use the same principles of wizardry, but maybe they call it something else and they’re slightly different with it. But you don’t need to start with a complete clean sheet design.
Bunny: And I think this approach can be applied to scenes as well. Elements of your plot. Do your characters need to go to location A to do a thing and then go to location B to have a conversation? Well, no. They can probably do the thing while they’re having the conversation, right?
Chris: And the multitasking. Again, I’ve told people it’s very useful if you do outline. Outlining is not for everybody. Some people really want to discover the story as they create it. But if you do outlining, if you lock out your scenes, it’s a lot easier to see where that stuff is happening, and you’re likely to have a conversation and then a whole new scene to do something else that’s small, when you can just combine them together. And that’ll be more efficient. But in general, I would look for anything that has the same role, ’cause those are the things that are most likely to be efficiently rolled together. So, if you have two mentors, for instance, you can have two mentors that have lots of contrast with each other and do very different things and justify their presence, especially if the story’s not already over complex, but those are good candidates to combine together.
Oren: Yeah. Does your hero need two rivals? If you want to have a new enemy, does it really need to be a new enemy? Or can it be a minor enemy from several chapters ago who turns out to be a bigger deal than you thought? Now that one’s risky. ’cause if we beat this guy up several chapters ago, having him show back up to be like, “I’m more important than you thought” might not work. But if there was a minor confrontation with some bandit or something, you could be like, “Okay, here that bandit is going to turn out to actually be a local crime lord or something,” instead of introducing a different crime lord.
Chris: And sometimes with locations. Do we have to go into the other city? We just combine them into one city and not have a traveling sequence.
Oren: Yeah, traveling is a huge thing. Sometimes your story does need to take place across a large geographic area, but if it doesn’t, don’t force it. If it does, see if you can consolidate how many places your character needs to be.
Chris: But how will I show off all the cities I created in my world?
Oren: Yeah, well, just going to have to acknowledge that it’s better to give a more complete picture of one city than an incomplete picture of several ones.
Bunny: That’s the first Wheel of Time book. Did that where it was just journey between different towns that were all the same, but had one thing different.
Oren: I mean, yes, the Wheel of Time world is incredibly samey. Everything is the same. I could not tell you which nations were different, except for the one where everyone talks like a pirate. It’s like the only one that is different than any of the others.
Bunny: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And of course, if you have been listening to this podcast, you should know this, but let me just say it again: if you have any interludes, just imagine us sitting and editing your story with you. And I’m going to tell you: we’re going to look at your story and we’re going to say, “Just cut all of them.” Okay? We have now given you a custom edit. It’s imaginary, but it’s very real at the same time, and your editor has told you to just cut out the interludes. All right? They just have to go bye-bye.
Bunny: That’ll be $200, please.
Oren: Yeah. Another one that comes up a fair amount is what I can only describe as going with your world or story’s momentum as opposed to against it. And this is where you might have a plot point where your bad guy just needs to do something that is out of character for them, you know, you have a bad guy and the bad guy has been established as trying to conquer the world, but you need them to not conquer this one city. And so they come up with a bunch of excuses and it’s like, “Okay, that’s more complicated. Better to come up with an initial motivation for this villain that makes sense as to why they wouldn’t conquer this one city, as opposed to get there and then try to explain why it’s not going to happen.” I’ve critiqued Deadly Education for this problem, because Deadly Education is a project trying to justify inherently unrealistic worldbuilding concepts. And so it suspends so much of its runtime arguing with you that absolutely it makes sense, but it might just be easier to design a world that does make sense.
Chris: I’ve said this before: explanations only help if they’re compelling.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And to be compelling, they first need to be simple. And then you should reuse what you have in your explanation. That’s the theme of this episode. Reuse the stuff you’ve got.
Oren: Reduce, reuse, recycle. We’re just Captain Planet up in here.
Bunny: Get your plot from Goodwill.
Oren: All right. I think we’re about out of time. We’re going to avoid overcomplicating this podcast. We’ve given our message, and now we’re going to go ahead and call things to a close.
Chris: If we didn’t make you mad by telling you to cut your interludes, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[music]Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.