The Mythcreant Podcast 526 – Unworkable Story Choices
Most of the time, problems with a story are due to the author not knowing how to properly implement their goals. This episode is about the other times when the goals are a problem to start with. While stories are highly malleable, there are still ideas that simply will not work. If the story is good, it will be in spite of them. Often this comes down to contradictions in what the author is trying to say, but the problem can also arise when stories try to go back on their implicit promises. Or it might just be trying to repeat an arc that’s already been thoroughly covered. Specifics aside, these are choices that simply will not work, no matter how skilled the execution.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Savannah Bard. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro music].
Chris: This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny!
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren!
Chris: Alright, so I’ve got an idea. Let’s start calling our podcast The Weavers Podcast. And, each episode we can call it something weaving related, like selecting the perfect loom. And then pair it with a weaving image, but then in each episode there’ll be a subversive twist or reveal that we’re actually weaving plot threads, and it’s a storytelling podcast.
Oren: Ooh, that’s−
Bunny: Who~a.
Chris: So what do you think?
Oren: I think that’s crafty.
Bunny: That’s smart.
Chris: Excellent. Since it’s obviously such a good idea, how about we do this? I’ll contribute the idea, and you can make the podcast, and then we’ll split the billions of dollars we make 50-50. What do you think?
Oren: Yeah, that sounds good.
Bunny: Hey wait, where’s my money? Where’s my 50%?
Chris: You and Oren can jointly get the other 50%.
Bunny: Oh, I see.
Oren: Sorry, Bunny. One of us is going to have to be the unpaid intern, and it’s not going to be me!
Bunny: As the youngest, I think it’s my duty.
Chris: So, yes. These are all very sound choices that nobody would ever regret.
Oren: It’ll all work perfectly.
Bunny: Yeah, because the thing we want most is to have the knitting community mad at us.
Chris: Oh, Bunny [urgently]! Weaving! Not knitting.
Bunny: Weaving! Oh, no, now they’re mad at me.
Chris: Oh my goodness. How could you?
Bunny: The looming community. No, that just sounds threatening.
Chris: Well, maybe that’s what they want. In any case, yes, this time we’re going to talk about unworkable story choices. And, the thing is, obviously we give out advice a lot and people send us questions through our reader question forum or on Discord or when we’re consulting with people in lots of other ways, and it’s just not uncommon for people to ask us, “Hey, how do I do X, Y, Z?” And for the answer to just be “don’t”.
Because when we see mistakes in stories, sometimes they’re implementation issues, but sometimes they’re design flaws where you can’t really construct a story that people will enjoy that way. And sometimes it gets blurry where a choice can technically be done, but it’s so difficult I don’t feel like I can recommend it to anybody, because I think that would just be very challenging for even somebody with advanced skills to pull off.
Bunny: There are some books that have done it better than others, but for anyone pointing to those books as examples, ask yourself, would they have been better if they had not done that thing? And often times the answer is they’re good despite those things.
Oren: Yeah, I would say that at the very least, there are a number of choices that you cannot make without decreasing the quality of your story. And the story could be good anyway for other reasons. And maybe there are some people who are just uncritical and will like it regardless, but they will still cause problems. And that’s the sort of thing that we’re talking about. Most of the time, I find that my clients have very doable ideas. They just don’t know how to do them. But every once in a while, there is no way to do that. I can’t give you advice because the thing you’re asking for is just a bad idea.
Chris: So Oren, did you want to start us off?
Oren: Well, I would say the easiest to fall into is trying to do too many things at once. Things where none of these goals are inherently unworkable, but there are so many of them that the story simply does not have time to do them all. Sometimes you can solve this by just making the story longer, but often the author doesn’t have the energy for that or you’re doing a TV show like Arcane where you have too many characters and they all have their own separate storylines, and you have to neglect one to develop the other. Sometimes you end up with that, and that’s how you get stories where it feels like nothing happened over the entire length because you’re constantly zipping around to different storylines and none of them get any chance to develop. And that’s why it should always be the same story and not a bunch of different stories that maybe will come together later.
Chris: That’s why you consolidate it!
Bunny: You don’t want to weave them together. You want them to already be woven. One that really gets my goat is when sequels reset the clock and undo the successes of the previous one. That annoys me like no other. Perhaps the most famous recent example is The Rise of Skywalker and resurrecting Palpatine, but Incredibles 2 also did it, and Solo and Bookshops & Bonedust did it from the prequel perspective.
So, in Incredibles 2, we go back to our heroes, and it turns out they’re still in hiding. The public still hates them. Violet’s boyfriend was mindwiped, and everything is just kind of reset. And then in Bookshops & Bonedust and Solo, it turns out that the main characters of the original have done that already before. You thought it was kind of new for them. Solo joining the resistance is a big deal, and Viv is taking her time away from adventuring and doing something quiet, like opening a coffee shop. But no, they’ve actually done that before.
Oren: Solo was such a weird movie because as I was hearing about this, I was like, okay, but how do you do a movie about a character where the premise is that he is in desperate need of a character arc to become a better person? Is he just going to be a selfish jerk for the movie? I don’t think you’re going to do that.
Bunny: It’s either he’s a selfish jerk for the movie, or he has the exact same character arc of becoming a better person. And then somehow between Solo and the actual Star Wars movies, he becomes a selfish jerk again.
Oren: The only way I could imagine it working is instead to have him start the movie as a good person who then becomes selfish and has a downward arc to get him to where he needs to be at the start of A New Hope.
Chris: Downward arcs are not so far that I would call them unworkable, but it’s just like having a tragic ending; that is hard to sell. People are not big fans of that. Maybe there’s some way with Han Solo because he’s kind of selfish, but you can gloss over that a little bit while still having him end up there. You might be able to do something where he’s part of the Empire and breaks free and becomes his own smuggler or something. So, we take a sidestep. He goes from order to chaos instead of good to evil.
So, the number one thing that I would be like, “No, do not do this,” is being coy about your protagonist. So, decoy protagonists? No, do not do that. One of the most important things you can do for the audience is establish who your protagonist is early, because they want to get attached to that person. They’re going to give that person the benefit of the doubt if they can, and then they’re going to get attached to that person. So, it’s never a good idea to mislead them in any way about who your main character is or who your protagonist is.
That is one of the most pivotal things about enjoying a story−and the thing that, if you get it wrong, has the most negative ripple effects on the rest of the story−is how much people like your main character. So do not mislead them about that. Do not have a surprise where a different person than they thought is your main character. You don’t have somebody who looks like a main character and then gets killed off in your prologue to establish how bad the villain is. Those things are just not a good idea. And something that we talk about a lot that’s a little bit similar but distinct is when you don’t give your main character a viewpoint and you try to do the Watsonian POV instead−or also called a supporting protagonist. There’s no situation in which I think this is a good idea. You can do a story with it. But it’s going to, again, create a distance between the audience and your main character, which is so pivotal to them enjoying the story that it’s just not a good idea.
What happens is they’re more likely to get attached to the Watson, but then who you think of as the main character, who is likely not who they think of as the main character, is going to hog the spotlight, and there’s a good chance they’re going to resent your Sherlock. That would be another situation that I don’t think is workable.
Oren: The whole obscuring who your main character is, is just a lose-lose situation because either readers like the decoy protagonist, in which case now they’re in for a huge disappointment when it turns out that wasn’t the main character, or they don’t. In which case, they are not enjoying your story until you introduce the actual main character. And I’ve seen people occasionally say, “Well, maybe you could just do this really short so it doesn’t cause too much disruption.” And then my question is, why do it at all then?
Chris: What if I just stabbed somebody a little?
Oren: You could probably make one of these short enough that if the rest of your story is good, it won’t make people throw the book away, but what is it adding at that point if it’s so small that it doesn’t cause any negative consequences either? It feels like you’re doing it for the sake of having it at that point.
Bunny: That goes back to the whole, is the story good in spite of it or because of it?
Oren: The one that I run into a lot is contradictory goals. This is moving on from having too many goals and having ones that directly work opposite each other. And the one that I run into all the time is where we want to do a message about how violence is wrong or war is wrong, or whatever, but we also want a story about people heroically using violence to defend themselves.
Bunny: Oh, the Red Dead Redemption Effect.
Oren: Yeah and I’m sorry, you can’t have both of those messages in the same story.
Chris: Rude of you to talk about Wings of Fire that way.
Oren: [exasperated] Wings of Fire, Animorphs, Wonder Woman. There are so many stories that try to do this, and you just can’t. At best, you will sabotage one of those things to make the other one work, and more likely, neither of them will end up working.
Bunny: Gosh, Wonder Woman was so close. That one was frustrating.
Oren: Wonder Woman couldn’t quite decide if the problem was that we needed to end the war or if the problem was that we needed to defeat the Germans. And you can tell it was originally supposed to be set in World War II but they changed it at the last minute because we definitely want Wonder Woman to heroically charge a German trench, which doesn’t really work if our message is that the war itself is the problem. It’s a whole confusing thing.
You can have a story about people rightly defending themselves and still communicate that war is terrible to fight. But that’s not the same thing as an anti-war story. At that point, what you were saying is that this war was necessary if awful, in the same way that showing the realistic effects of chemotherapy is not an anti-chemotherapy story.
Chris: The Light Brigade−being an example of an actual anti-war story−in that one, the fighting is never good. It doesn’t accomplish any goals. The main character is fighting for a fascist government. What they do for that government is bad. It is about the main character basically getting free at some level, more surviving. So that’s a very different thing from Wings of Fire, where supposedly the main characters are trying to stop a war from happening, but then they are continually using violence in pursuit of that goal, while also decrying violence. And it’s really graphic violence, too. The first couple of books, at least the author does realize, “Oh, maybe it shouldn’t be quite that graphic,” and tones it down a little bit later. But the first book especially, it’s surprising how graphic that one gets.
Oren: And you can also absolutely do a story where people have to do some violence to prevent more violence. That is also doable. It’s just a question of what your characters say and how you pitch the message of the story. It all comes down to how you portray it. Other things that tend to happen this way is stuff like, “I want my story to humanize the monsters, but I also want the monsters to be like morally uncomplicated enemies to kill.” And I’ve seen that a weird number of times.
Chris: Too many times. Rings of Power, most recently.
Oren: That was so weird. I get it. You can’t make the orcs people in the Tolkien universe. You just can’t do it. But honestly, calling attention to it like that made it worse. It would’ve been better if they had just been cannon fodder. I wouldn’t have liked that either, but it would’ve been better than what we got.
Bunny: Or, sometimes there’ll be a story where it’s like these characters have been stereotyped. This group has been stereotyped and unfairly judged for being super immoral and blood thirsty. And then it turns out they’re super immoral and blood thirsty. Didn’t House in the Cerulean Sea have, “Oh, these magic people are so unfairly maligned. Also, here’s the literal antichrist,”?
Chris: That one does not handle that so well. Honestly, though, the thing that bothered me the most that was contradictory, I mean, I wrote a whole article talking about how it mishandles oppression. But the thing that−as I was listening to that book−really got to me was the way that this orphanage is described as a place where everybody can be themselves and heal, but the main character is constantly lectured at and pressured into behaving a certain way. And then when he conforms, that’s treated as, see? Now he’s so much better because he’s being himself.
What are you talking about? You are constantly pressuring him to do things that he didn’t want to do and wasn’t comfortable with. Can’t get rid of social pressure with more social pressure. That’s just more pressure!
Oren: We could see into his true self, Chris. We knew what he actually wanted, which is definitely not what everyone says.
Chris: A funny thing about that one, I was just talking about decoy protagonists. I definitely got the feeling that I was not supposed to like the main character as much as I did. I was not supposed to identify with him. I was supposed to like all of the other characters better, and so I was supposed to be okay when they all started demeaning him and lecturing at him. Again, this is why it’s really important to be clear about who your protagonist is and to prioritize that person.
Bunny: Reveals where things turn out to be less interesting than you thought they were.
Oren: Yeah!
Bunny: And I know I’ve discussed this before, but I think authors do it because it’s a twist− surprise!
Chris: Oh man. I have so many things on my list that are this type of reveal, because people are just like, all reveals are great! And then they’ll reach for any kind of reveal, and many of them aren’t workable.
Bunny: Reveals are good. You also don’t need to have reveals. Your reveal does not make it a smarter story if you just have a reveal for the sake of there being one. And, in my opinion, this one is one of the worst kinds of reveals. The problem obviously is that your readers−me−I was hooked on the interesting thing. I wanted the interesting thing to be more interesting. I wanted to learn about it, and then it turns out it wasn’t actually interesting, and it’s always a bad sign when your story gets less engaging. It’s also got an aspect of the audience was promised that this thing was interesting tacitly by the text, by it being set up as cool and fascinating and important or whatever, and then that promise is broken when it turns out that it’s actually really boring. The two examples I have are Stranger Things and Oxenfree II.
Stranger Things being cosmic horror is actually just a guy. Don’t worry about it. That makes things so much simpler. You just have to beat up the guy. That ruins the tone of it. And Oxenfree II, the cult is just hippies.
Chris: With Stranger Things, they wrote themselves into a bit of a corner. Just thinking of when you’re setting up a really cool plot, at this point Oren and I, we can pretty much recognize when we start a story and we’re like, “Okay, this is not going to end well,” because we can tell the storyteller is taking on too much and won’t be able to find a resolution at this point. We can pretty much just recognize it, which is funny. Stranger Things is definitely a situation where, by the way, they set up the threat. We don’t have any way to get rid of the threat. And so then they downgraded the threat, which is disappointing.
Bunny: Right. The whole thing with cosmic horror is that it’s supposed to be vast, unknowable, and difficult to perceive.
Chris: I think they had to introduce some kind of plot device that they could permanently keep the Upside Down away, because that’s the problem. It’s that it’s now broken through our world in all sorts of places, all sorts of times. How do we dispel tension if we know that maybe it could always come back another time later, because it has for four seasons? It has kept coming back, so it could just always come back again. And I would think we would have to add some speculative tech or something that creates the scenario where we can get rid of it permanently.
Oren: I would say that if you want to do one of these very clever nine-dimensional subversions where you imply you’re going to do something and then you do something else and everyone cheers, what you have to do is give them something that is as cool or preferably cooler than the thing you were promising. That’s why Knives Out works so well. Spoilers for Knives Out: you think it’s a murder mystery about who did the murder, but it turns out it’s actually about trying to keep the murderer from being caught because it wasn’t really her fault, and that’s cool. That’s a neat concept that works really well. If it had just been like, “Oh, well it turns out there was no murderer, the guy just fell on a knife and died,” that would’ve been a bad movie.
There are other examples, like if The Last Jedi had been willing to commit to the whole Rey’s-parents-are-nobody, that was actually pretty cool because that gave us something tangible about her character and who she was and her place in the universe that I would argue was much more interesting than the fact that she was somehow Obi-Wan Kenobi’s secret granddaughter, or whatever the fan theory was at the time.
Bunny: And it would’ve made more thematic resonance, too, right? If we’re looking at Kylo Ren as her foil, which they clearly want us to do because there’s all this dark side and the light type of things where they’re juxtaposed against each other, and one of them comes from high status, high power, and one of them comes from nobody, it makes sense if that’s the story you’re telling. But no, it actually turns out that they’re both very important people.
Oren: I’m sure that there were some people who wouldn’t have liked that, but I think most people who wouldn’t have liked it already didn’t like Rey as a character. Not everyone, but most people. At that point, there was really nothing that you could do with this reveal that would make them like Rey. And so if they just committed to it, that would’ve been cool. But instead they were like, “Eh, maybe your parents were nobody. Who knows?” And then, of course, we know what happened with Rise of Skywalker.
Chris: A couple more types of reveals that are not workable. I actually have a whole blog post talking about the premise reveal, which is basically−this is what I was joking about at the intro of the podcast−where this is a different type of story with a completely different premise. It seems like a good idea. There are times where as long as it serves the same audience, you could have a big twist in your premise. But the big problem is that you have no way to market your story. And it sucks to have to think about your back blurb and your marketing material and all of those things when you’re deciding on the experience the audience has.
But in most cases you’re going to have to think about it. And so I do have clients that will ask me, “Oh, what if I kept this big thing about the main character, for instance, that shapes the entire book a reveal?” And I’m like, “Well, okay. Think about how you are going to pitch this book? How, what are you going to tell readers about it?” Because if you can’t tell them something that is so basic and fundamental to your story, I don’t know how you’re going to attract the right audience or tell them something specific and interesting enough to get them to start reading.
Oren: What are you supposed to do when the entire premise and reveal of your movie is that the innocent girl is a vampire? There’s no reason to come see the movie if you don’t know that. But also, we spend a weird amount of time building up to that reveal.
Chris: That’s one where she seems like an innocent girl and they kidnap her, but she’s a vampire. And that one was so funny because that reveal was given away in the trailers, but whoever made the movie was clearly not prepared and made it a slow buildup towards that reveal. And that is not how you would do that if you knew you had to give that information away. I can’t blame the marketers. A lot of people at times would blame whoever makes the trailers, but I can’t because they had to have something to pitch the movie on. Otherwise it would just be a really generic horror movie, and they’d be able to give nothing away.
Oren: And I cannot remember the title of the movie. I’m desperately Googling “vampire movie 2024”, and all I’m getting is Nosferatu.
Chris: Abigail.
Oren: Abigail, that’s it.
Chris: As opposed to Megan.
Oren: A different movie.
Chris: It was a different movie, but did this right. And Megan, instead we have a killer doll. Yeah, they gave it away in the trailer, but also you could tell it was written in a way that the knowledge that the doll is going to go evil is building suspense. We know we have to give that information away, and the story is designed so that it’s not a reveal. So, that’s just something to think about. The other one is the narrator reveal. Don’t do a narrator reveal, please. This is like, “Who’s narrating the story?” And it goes back to all the POV issues we’ve talked about. It’s weird and distracting. And, probably, if they can’t tell who the narrator is, the reveal is not going to make sense.
Bunny: The Ministry of Time kind of did that. Because of time travel shenanigans, the narrator is talking to a different timeline version of herself and also is never named, which I have no idea why they did that. It didn’t serve the story.
Chris: You can’t have a good narrator that misleads people about the nature of the narrator. It fundamentally doesn’t work. You could have something like The Ten Thousand Doors of January where we reveal at the end that supposedly this was all written by the protagonist for the love interest. But it clearly wasn’t. If it was, we would’ve been able to tell, and that’s how it is every time.
Oren: All right, so my last one real quick here is any premise that denies your protagonist agency in whatever the plot is. And this is kind of a broad one, because agency is a complicated subject. People reasonably want to write stories about characters who don’t have what we would consider to be a lot of agency, they don’t have a lot of power or control over their lives for various reasons, and that’s totally legitimate. The reason it becomes an issue is that they then want to put those characters in more traditional plots, and then the characters can’t do anything. So that’s where the issue is. If you want to tell a story about the custodial worker who cleans General Eisenhower’s office, unless you’re doing some kind of weird Ratatouille thing, that story is not going to be about defeating the Wehrmacht. It can’t. Defeating the Wehrmacht would be something that happens in the background of your Eisenhower janitor story, but it would have to be about something else.
Chris: Or you have to give your janitor a special power…
Bunny: The power to sit on Eisenhower’s head and direct him, right?
Chris: Some plot device that gives your character that is supposed to be underpowered the ability to alter the course of events that would normally be beyond them.
Oren: Someone for whom this is an issue almost certainly does not want to do that. That’s the whole reason they picked this character in the first place. They wanted to tell a story about the little guy who doesn’t have anything special about them, and so you have to figure out what is your story about, and you give your protagonist agency in that.
Bunny: And what scale does it take place on?
Chris: Yeah, and if you want to do like a lower decks type story−there’s now a whole TV show called Lower Decks, but it’s after a Star Trek: Next Generation episode where it just features all of the little junior staff and ensigns that are on board the ship that are normally in the background. It’s about them for an episode. You can do something like that. You would normally do it by showing−we just covered public domain stories−so this would be a situation where, let’s say, Sherlock and Watson have a maid or their landlady or something, and Sherlock and Watson are running around frantically in the background. And usually this is done for comedy’s sake. Basically, in that situation, you wouldn’t really create tension around whatever it is they’re doing. You wouldn’t communicate enough about whatever their emergency situation is to make the readers feel tension. You would just get humorous references that sound vaguely Sherlock-like in their details and have them run around, and then tell your story of their landlady going about her day. So, you could do something like that. But again, the plot is no longer a Sherlock plot at that point. It’s a different story.
Oren: It’s the same thing if you want to tell a story about the porter who follows the world-saving adventurers around and does not help them save the world. Okay. But you can’t then build tension around whether the world will be saved or not, because that’s not what your story’s about anymore. You just have to find another story, and if you can’t find one, maybe that’s not the right main character. That’s just what you have to think about when you’re doing this.
All right. Well, with that, we will make the very workable choice to call this podcast to a close.
Chris: And if you would like us to iron out any more unworkable problems, 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’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
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