The Mythcreant Podcast 480 – Curiosity in Fiction
What’s this podcast episode about? Can you tell? Does it even matter? This week, we’re talking about curiosity in fiction: how stories create it, what purpose it serves, and why it can be detrimental if taken too far. Don’t worry, we love a good mystery as well, but like any flashy move, it’s easy to get so caught up with it that you neglect the fundamentals. We discuss the interplay between tension and curiosity, plus how to use one to create the other.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [Intro Music]
This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Bunny: (Singsong) Bunny.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: So I wonder what the topic of this podcast will be about? Well, we can’t say it, ’cause then nobody will wonder about it anymore and we don’t wanna give it away.
Bunny: I must know more.
Oren: I think wondering about the topic is as good as having a topic, actually.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: We need to buy ourselves time so that we can continue to wonder and not actually give it away. So maybe we could just talk about tangents for a while and then drop hints, but only really perplexing hints that build it up and raise everybody’s expectations for what it will be. This topic is one weird trick, editors hate it.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: This topic killed our parents.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: And then of course, we end the show without ever saying what the topic was.
Chris: Of course, we want them to come back for the next episode!
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: You can look back on it fondly and be like, “Oh man, I was so invested. I wanted to know the topic.”
Chris: No, we’ll have dramatic twists at the end of the episode that maybe has something to do with the topic. And maybe I’ll be like, “Oh, and I told Oren the topic,” and then he’ll be like, “Gasp.” And then we’ll end the episode or something like that.
Bunny: Yeah, you can have a musical hit there. And then “The Castle by the Waterfall” plays.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Chris: Alright. Luckily for our listeners, we’re not actually gonna do that.
Bunny: Fortunately for our listeners, the title is already up there on the website.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: So yeah, we’re talking about curiosity and storytelling. The good, and the bad, and the ugly. Curiosity is a double edged sword. It absolutely can boost engagement. I’m not saying curiosity is purely a bad thing, but it has a lot of costs and limitations, and generally I consider it to be a secondary source of engagement.
For instance, when we talk about ANTS: Attachment, novelty, tension, satisfaction. Those I would think are the bread and butter of engaging your readers. Whereas there’s other things that do matter and sometimes are important to more niche genres, but are more secondary sources, like wish fulfillment, for instance. And I would place curiosity in that category.
Bunny: And just to be clear, how would you define curiosity exactly? Is it just the pull that keeps the reader reading?
Chris: No, lots of things can pull the reader, but I would say that tension is usually a better pull than curiosity is. Curiosity though, can be stronger and milder, just like tension can be. So let me talk about the differences between curiosity and tension then, so we know what we’re talking about.
So, curiosity is a reaction to having unknown information that you know that you’re missing and you think it’s relevant, but most of all, it’s especially strong when you don’t feel like there’s anything that could fill that place, that it has to be wild and weird so that you’re really missing something. Like, a example I’ve used. If you randomly came home one day and all of your pets were wearing sweaters.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: And you swore nobody had been in your home. That’s a very wild thing to happen. It also seems very impossible. So that would be something that is very curiosity inducing. Because you don’t have any information that could seem to ever lead to that outcome, yet somehow it happened.
Whereas tension also has uncertainty. It also comes with a question, but it’s specifically needing to know whether or not something bad will happen. Whereas curiosity is like an unusual question, not necessarily about something bad.
Bunny: So it’s just the sweaters and not necessarily evil sweaters.
Chris: Tension is very forward looking. Will something bad happen in the future? Curiosity could be backwards looking. What happened? And tension often requires more information than curiosity to work. You have to have a certain level of context to understand what bad thing could happen. And why it’s likely to happen, for instance. Whereas curiosity is often evoked when odd things happen that are out of place with no explanation at all.
And so this is why people aiming for curiosity often destroy tension, because they want to give so little information to keep up the curiosity that people don’t have enough information to feel any tension.
Oren: And also not enough information to know the characters, so they can’t build attachment either, or even enough information to see what’s going on in the setting, which also removes novelty. Just makes it harder to invest in anything. Because curiosity is a spice. It’s wondering what happened or what’s going to happen. Those are all things that you can be curious about and it can be great. But the problem that we keep running into is stories that neglect the fundamentals because they want to encourage curiosity.
Chris: I think that overall people are actually more familiar with curiosity. The fact that we have a common word for curiosity says something about how familiar it is to people in general. Whereas what tension is. And people don’t necessarily use the word tension universally for tension. Sometimes people use suspense instead, for instance.
A different storytelling device source could use a completely different word for tension, or not have a concept of tension, or divide tension into two concepts, or do something else. So curiosity is just a much more familiar universal concept, and I think that to some extent, that encourages people to try for curiosity when that’s actually not what they should be going for.
Oren: Mysteries are a good example of where the two can and should work together, but often don’t. One of my favorite examples of an old mystery story that has both is The Hound of the Baskervilles, my favorite Sherlock Holmes story. It’s got curiosity. There’s a weird, demon dog, maybe? That’s weird. What’s going on with this demon dog? Spooky.
It’s also got tension ’cause maybe the demon dog is gonna kill somebody, or someone is gonna get killed by something that’s not a demon dog. So there’s tension there because we’re worried something bad is gonna happen. And we’re curious. What facts could exist that would explain these demon dog sightings we’ve been seeing?
Chris: I would say most mysteries have a curiosity element, but if it’s a main mystery plot, if it’s important, it isn’t usually just curiosity. It usually also has tension too.
Oren: You could also have a mystery story about, why do cars keep disappearing off of the street and then being found on the tops of buildings? That’s weird. That’s certainly curious.
Chris: That’s both very curious but also very tense. Because if cars are disappearing, that’s a dangerous thing. That creates tension. More cars are going to disappear. That’s very forward looking and anticipates, but it’s also very strange what’s happening, and it’s hard to imagine what could be happening that would be doing that. That’s very curiosity evoking.
Oren: Admittedly, I was planning to use that as an example of a story that doesn’t have much tension. Oops. [Laughs]
Bunny: Well, Chris is really invested in those cars.
Chris: Oh, I assumed people were in the cars.
Oren: Oh, okay.
Bunny: [Laughs]
Chris: This is the problem with hypothetical examples, is that it’s easy to read various details into them, and then people interpret them in very different ways.
Oren: That shows how they would be different. If there were people in the cars that’s a big deal. But if they’re not, if there’s no one in the cars, then who cares?
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: I guess, ’cause I use things disappearing as an example of something that would create tension so often. So I imagine people driving away with their car, and they disappear, and then the car shows up on top of a building. [Chuckles]
Bunny: Do you think there’s any mystery story with tension, but no curiosity?
Oren: So you would have a question of, is this really a mystery? But, sure. You could have a story where it’s really obvious who did it, and then it’s just trying to catch them before they kill again or something.
Chris: So, Knives Out for a while. The assumption that’s revealed in the beginning of this movie is that our protagonist actually did it, and she’s trying not to get caught for a while, but it still unfolds like a standard mystery story. And of course, then there’s twists in that. It doesn’t really stay with that, but there are various situations in which you’re not necessarily expecting a very profound, surprising answer.
I think that’s kind of how you can tell the difference, is that the more it relies on curiosity, the more pressure there is to come up with a really surprising answer that still makes sense. And that is one of the reasons why it can be difficult to come up with a good answer to your mystery and why you’re not supposed to just, “Hey, these are two suspects,” and then reveal one of them did it.
Because in many cases, if you’ve built that up as a very curiosity-inducing thing, then that’s going to not pay off like it should for something that’s driven by curiosity. But if it’s more, “Hey, we know this person is the killer, but we need a way to prove it.” Or, “How did they do the crime,” or something like that, then we might have less pressure to come up with a really surprising answer, ’cause it’s more about the tension of whether we succeed at the task.
Bunny: So curiosity is more about weird thing than dangerous thing.
Chris: Yes.
Bunny: And I’ve definitely run into, I guess for lack of a better term, unfulfilled curiosity. Where it turns out that the thing you’re curious about was actually less interesting than you thought it was. Oxenfree II unfortunately does this with the spooky ghost cult, which turns out to just be some hippies, which disappointed me.
Oren: I did not like that. [Chuckles]
Bunny: I wanted it to be a spooky ghost cult and hippies are just not as interesting. I’m sorry.
Chris: One thing that’s interesting is when sometimes fantastical elements are actually not a good payoff. I did a critique of one of the Pendergast books, Brimstone, and it sets up this mystery where the person who died, there’s tons of locks. The gates are locked and the outside of the house is locked, and the room is locked and barricaded. Yet somebody still got inside and tore this person apart.
And that’s the murder scene. And if there was no fantastical elements in the story, it would be like, “How could somebody possibly get in and out to murder somebody in this manor while leaving all of those locks and barricades perfectly in place?” And that’s very curiosity inducing, and you would need some kind of answer that’s very not intuitive and seems like it could be impossible. But if you add like, “Oh, they had a space laser, or a wizard did it,” then that’s no longer a profound thing. And that’s actually a let down in that situation.
Oren: You can also use speculative elements to increase curiosity. It’s all just a matter of what you’re promising. Like the locked room scenario, you’re promising a clever solution, whether you mean to or not. But if you have something like, “Oh man, our protagonist catches a glimpse of a mysterious figure in the woods,” at that point, if it turns out to be a supernatural creature, no one’s gonna be disappointed.
You’ve raised curiosity, what was that? And it turns out it was a spooky fae. That’s cool. Or maybe not now, ’cause people are tired of fae ’cause of Maas. But you know, some other magical creature that hasn’t been overused yet.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Oren: That’s not going to disappoint people because you weren’t promising a specific thing that you then couldn’t deliver on.
Bunny: The other kind of unfulfilled curiosity is something we were joking about at the beginning of this, which is just, it never pays off. The BBC Sherlock show is infamous for this. Always ending on cliffhangers that didn’t end up going anywhere. It’s like, “What’ll happen next?” And then the next time, “Whoa, we don’t know, what’ll happen next?” And it keeps teasing you like that rather than actually resolving anything.
Chris: The ultimate example of this that everyone is familiar with is Lost. Because Lost had no plan. And it’s like, “Why is there a polar bear on this island? It seems impossible for a polar bear to be on this island.” They would do just tons of stuff like that. “Oh, where did this big silo come from?” Everything. Everywhere. They had no plan. They had no answer.
So most TV shows I think are are trying to do a lot better, but there are TV shows that are modeled off of that. Severance definitely is. Severance, they’re in this weird corporate workplace and they run into a room full of goats. I think they’re baby goats. This is obviously inspired by the Lost polar bear. Are we ever gonna explain why there is a room full of baby goats in this weird corporate workplace?
Bunny: It’s for goat yoga.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Bunny: All the cool startups are doing it.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: And why does the main employee reward involve a weird BDSM show? That doesn’t match with the rest of this corporation at all. This is a problem with curiosity, is that curiosity more than most other storytelling aspects, has a kind of toxic incentive where you can end up borrowing more than you can pay back, essentially. Where you create a bunch of really curious elements that make people wonder what’s going on.
And the more you do that early in the story, it can make people engage more because they wanna know the answer. But you’re also making it increasingly difficult to actually give an answer. And that’s just a thing you have to be careful about. You exercise some self control.
Bunny: You gotta have some kind of plan.
Oren: Otherwise, you just end up digging yourself into a hole you can’t dig your way out of.
Chris: The big thing that I see with some of these TV shows, like Severance and Silo is another of ’em. That again, is another thing I was joking about in our intro, is the fact that they are trying to use curiosity, but it can be really hard to move the plot forward if your main plot line is supposed to be really curiosity inducing.
Because usually to move the plot forward, you need to learn new information. But if you learn new information, it dispels the curiosity and they don’t wanna do that. So these shows have very serious movement problems where they’re absolutely stringing you along and nothing is happening because they want to keep the curiosity up. And it’s not impossible to move the plot forward without this happening, but it’s much more logistically trickier than it is to keep up tension. Which is one of the reasons why tension is just usually more powerful and much more practical way to pull people in.
You would have to be like, “Okay, why are there goats in this room?” And you would have to answer that question in a way that openly opens up more questions. So it’s like we’ve gotten our answer to the goats and that makes it feel like we moved forward towards solving this mystery. But the answer only opened up more questions so that we have more things to be curious about.
And I’m not gonna say that’s impossible, but it definitely is not easy for a storyteller to do. Whereas keeping up tension is more like, “Okay, I solved this first problem, so I got closer to avoiding the big bad outcome that’s creating tension. But oh no! Another complication happened to make things worse,” and that keeps up the tension.
Bunny: At some point, things have to start falling into place, and if you want nothing but curiosity, then you have to keep withholding that moment. Because then we get the kind of resolution to the question.
Oren: Then once you dispel the curiosity, what if there’s nothing left? And then you just never can. So that’s a whole thing.
Chris: I think this is one reason why I think some of the best, more curiosity focused mysteries are subplots. That you’ve got another main plot that has tension that moves forward, and this other mysterious thing is a thing that is not so urgent that we feel like the main character needs to drop everything and pursue it. So it can just be mysterious for a while, and then at some point it’s resolved.
If you were traveling and you saw a mysterious figure in the woods, going back to our mysterious figure. Maybe that’s also tension inducing. ‘Cause a mysterious figure could also be threatening. That could create more tension too. But your main problem is that you need to get from point A to point B safely. And so to do that, you move forward. You keep traveling. You don’t go into the woods chasing after the mysterious figure.
Oren: The Expanse books do a pretty good job of that because they have this big source of curiosity, “What’s going on with the protomolecule? What’s that deal?” But that’s not the main source of tension. The main source of tension is the political conflict in the solar system. So that gives the protomolecule plot plenty of time to cook and to be mysterious, and for them to introduce little tidbits and you don’t get bored or feel strung along because you have a really compelling political conflict going on around you.
Now, of course, that book series did still have a problem where they built up this incredibly powerful enemy that was the result of the protomolecule plot line, and there wasn’t really any way to defeat them, so we just ended the series.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: So that’s a problem that is a different thing. But for the first six or so books, it does a really good job. My favorite kind of curiosity is what I call “meta curiosity,” and as an editor, I encounter this all the time. I imagine people who don’t analyze stories for a living, it happens less.
Where I’m just reading or watching and being like, “Oh, hey, is that a love interest?” They’re introduced with a bunch of candy and they have an odd amount of dialogue with the hero. Are they a love interest or is there some other reason the writer is doing this? Or when you mentioned that there was “legends of a beast in the woods,” is that foreshadowing or just imagery? I wanna know what that’s gonna be.
Chris: Be careful, Oren. You don’t wanna encourage listeners to create meta mysteries.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Bunny: Danger, danger.
Oren: This happens when the story is bad too. I’m just sitting here reading a story with a million different POVs and wondering, “Are they gonna eventually meet up at the end? Or are they just gonna be separate for the whole book?” And it’s not like either option is good. I’m just curious to find out which way the author is going.
Bunny: I have found a sort of genre-based curiosity, like in The Mimicking of Known Successes, for example. There are events that appear to be unrelated. They’re investigating the disappearance of this one guy from the university. That’s the main plot. But then this doomsday preacher gets murdered and Mossa gets drawn off to deal with that. And you, the reader, are like, “This wouldn’t just be a random addition. These two events have to be connected.” But the characters don’t know that. So there’s a level of genre-savvy curiosity that you can have.
Oren: You as a reader can wonder about it as long as the plot keeps going forward. We can come back to that later.
Chris: I will say that you do have to be careful with lots of random things that ultimately end up being related because that can make it feel like there’s not enough movement, even if they end up being related later.
Oren: It can also just be that you get to the end and then the bad guy is like, “It was me. I was behind all of those things.” Okay. What things were those? Those happened a long time ago.
Chris: Let me relate my convoluted plan that explains why I did each one of these things. And of course it doesn’t make sense.
Oren: It’s not a good sign if your villain has to give a PowerPoint presentation at the end to explain all the things they were doing.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: Even if it does make sense, it’s probably not gonna feel like it makes sense and most readers are gonna be bored anyway.
Chris: I think that when curiosity works really well, it’s often at the micro level. Where you don’t necessarily wanna just dump all information at once, especially the very beginning of the story. You don’t have time to explain everything at once, so usually in your opening paragraphs, opening scene, even, curiosity can be a really good supplement. Because when you can’t just exposition dump and have everybody understand everything that’s going on at one time, you can give them tidbits that are intriguing and a little curiosity inducing.
The key is to not purposely string it out just to maintain curiosity. That curiosity buys you time to build attachment and tension and other forms of engagement, other ways to hook the reader and pull them in. But it is a good supplement when you, again, haven’t done that yet.
Bunny: Yeah, you can’t just eat vitamin D gummies, you gotta have vegetables. Those would be your primary source of nutrition.
Oren: We’re coming up on the end here, but we’ve still got some time. Maybe we should talk about how to create curiosity in the first place. Maybe not “meta curiosity”, ’cause you’re probably not writing for an audience of editors.
Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]
Bunny: Or what your book cover looks like. You can get curiosity from a book cover, I will say.
Oren: That’s true. Book covers can be very suggestive. If you have a good book cover, you can desperately hope people will judge the book by it.
Bunny: [Chuckles] It’s true. This is something that happens. In fact, Chris and I went to a bookstore once and did it for a whole afternoon.
Chris: I guess the first thing I would say about creating curiosity is, again, we think about it as a deprivation of information, but everything requires some level of context to understand why it’s relevant or why it’s weird and different. Including curiosities. For instance, when I see people’s opening sentences and it has too little information, that can be a problem. ‘Cause I don’t have the context to know why something is strange.
So for instance, my example of, you come home and you find that your pets are not wearing sweaters. That they weren’t before. We have to know the context of, there was nobody at home, you lock the doors, nobody was planning to come home. You have a house with pets or whatever. In order to make it seem odd that this happened.
Oren: If you just describe that and there’s no context that these pets were not wearing sweaters before, then what does that mean? Nothing.
Chris: Again, if you were creating tense hooks, it’s good to focus on one mystery at a time, not to just throw tons of curious things at once at your reader.
Bunny: And this isn’t a rule, but it seems like if the character has a reason to be curious about this thing, so does the reader. Of course you can make a mistake, the reader just doesn’t find it interesting. But if the character comes home and they’re like, “Why are my pets wearing sweaters?” Probably the reader will pick up on that and be like, “Yeah, I wonder why. I wanna know too.”
Oren: That certainly helps. You could certainly build curiosity even if your character doesn’t necessarily pick up on it right away, that’s possible. It’s more challenging, it requires more subtlety. Whereas if it’s just something that your protagonist is curious about, that’s much easier.
Chris: And then I think from there you really do have to think about, again, not biting off more than you can chew. Because curiosity gets bigger the more something seems out of place or even impossible. The more difficult something is to explain, the more curiosity it will induce.
Also, there’s relevance. If it’s something that’s trivial, like we don’t care about. That’s gonna be less curious, something that matters, a mystery that matters. Let’s get people’s attention more. We have to think about, “Okay, can we explain this polar bear on this tropical island in a satisfying way?”
Or in Severance. Okay, we want something weird in curiosity-Inducing in this workplace, are we gonna be able to, you know, if we put goats there? That is very strange. It’s very out of place. It’s also very hard to explain and that’s directly and correlated to how curious it is. And can we give somebody an answer that is surprising and satisfying?
As opposed to if you have an answer that’s too easy. Just like our example of locked rooms, but it turned out a wizard did it. [Chuckles] It’s not gonna be a satisfying answer. It’s not gonna have a payoff that people want. It has to be something that clicks into place. I totally wouldn’t have thought of it, but now that you mention it, that makes great sense
Bunny: And it does have to make sense. Let me drive that home.
Oren: As a word of caution, ‘cause I know a lot of novelists get their primary learning from TV, which is not inherently bad. You just need to understand the difference. A novel writer has a much stronger incentive to not string their readers along and then not have an answer at the end than a TV show writer does. Because a novel writer is a brand in themselves, and readers will remember you, and if they had a bad experience with one of your books, they’re not gonna wanna pick up another one.
Whereas TV writers tend to be much more anonymous. I’m not saying TV writers do this on purpose because they hate their audience or whatever. But, once the TV writers for Lost were done, they mostly just went and took other jobs. Even Damon Lindelof, who is most famously associated with Lost, isn’t a household name, even though he’s a super important person in Hollywood, people are more likely to know movie directors. So they don’t necessarily have the same problem that a writer does.
Chris: And a TV show, there’s also kind of how short term or long term the thinking is. And oftentimes TV shows are just trying to get renewed for another season. Once the show actually ends, that’s when they don’t have anything to lose, ’cause the show is ending anyway. They’re not trying to get renewed. At which point, if they fumble the end, they’re much less likely to chase any consequences for it. Game of Thrones, the TV show was very unusual in that the ending was fumbled so badly that the showrunners actually faced consequences for doing so.
Oren: They actually lost some projects, although they still landed on their feet. They’re doing Three Body Problem now.
Bunny: I thought you were gonna say that the ending was unusual and I was gonna say, well, that is one way to put it.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: As far as our locked door example, an answer to that could be, maybe this is at the very top floor in the attic, so maybe somebody actually came down from the roof and there was a hatch or something. That might be an answer. That’d be like, “Okay, that makes sense. I was not expecting that. But that could explain this.”
Oren: Or you do the classic of, the person is actually still there and has never left. Sherlock Holmes did that. So that one works.
Bunny: That’s good for tension.
Chris: Again, another answer that’s surprising but can be like, “Okay yeah, no, that totally fits.” So in this case, it’s just, okay. I don’t even know how I would explain those baby goats in the corporate office.
Bunny: Goat yoga, goat yoga.
Chris: Yeah, you can do goat yoga, but that doesn’t click together. That’s not like, “Oh, that makes sense.” So it’s bizarre. Anything that doesn’t click, is surprising, but doesn’t make sense in any way, just feels bizarre. And it doesn’t have that same payoff.
Oren: And you could do something like, “Oh, we keep them as a sacrifice to the demon that we’ve made a bargain with.” But that creates this whole other thing. There’s nothing inherently supernatural in this show. So just having a demon or a Cthulu god show up at this point is probably gonna feel pretty weird.
Chris: I think if you took Severance, you had showed goats in the beginning, and then throughout a couple seasons you slowly built up the fact that this is a corporate workplace that actually is a Cthulu cult. And then you finally got to the part where there were sacrifices and that actually fit and made sense. You could go back, “Oh yeah, that’s what the goats were for.” [Laughs] If you wanted, I think you could probably do that.
Oren: Alright, with that very good explanation of curiosity out of the way, I think we are gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If this episode satisfied your curiosity, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. 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 all next week. [Outro Music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.