The Mythcreant Podcast 491 – Storytelling Constraints
We all love to exercise our imaginations in the infinite land of storytelling, but what if we can’t just do whatever we want? What if we were limited by things like our previous choices, poor special effects, or our inability to kill off a major villain? This week, we’re talking about the kind of constraints that stories get put under, from the famous movie examples you’ve probably heard of to the more mundane kind that we novelists have to deal with. Plus, how nice it feels when your next story isn’t under a bunch of constraints.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Opening theme plays}Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is:
Bunny: Bunny,
Chris: And:
Oren: Oren.
Chris: You know, I think this episode will be more successful if we meet some additional requirements, don’t you?
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: I mean, heck yeah.
Oren: They could be very logical and not at all arbitrary.
Bunny: What if we didn’t say the word “the?”
Chris: Great, great idea. Also, I should mention we have a sponsor, Wraith McBlade, attorney at law. And so we do have to mention Wraith McBlade three times during this episode and very naturally. Has to be worked in a conversation.
Oren: He’s a very real lawyer.
Bunny: I mean, with a name like that, I think you just walk in and they just hand you an attorney certificate.
Oren: He’s on the cutting edge of the law.
Chris: Ooh.
Bunny: Ouch. That cut me deeper than the Wraith McBlade did.
Chris: Also, I was thinking the Goddess of Podcast, Podcastia, absolutely has to be happy. And she doesn’t like it when we mention books or movies because that’s competing entertainment media so we better not do it.
Oren: It’s all right. I listened to a lot of audio dramas back in the day. I’m ready. I’ll complain about We’re Alive, the zombie audio drama. No one alive today, ironically, remembers that show. But I’m ready. I’m ready to talk about it.
Bunny: I don’t wanna risk anything and then get smited, so maybe I’ll just be silent.
Chris: Alright, let’s go. This is gonna be a great episode. Sponsored by Wraith McBlade, attorney at law.
Oren: Very natural.
Chris: Very natural. Number one, down. So anyway, talking about constraints and storytelling, firstly, why constraints? When I was thinking about this episode, I did not realize that Bunny loves constraints. [laughter] So we may have to do battle. But no, really, I wanted to talk about it, because in many cases it does feel like it’s the invisible force sabotaging your story and making your job hard, and you may not realize that it’s there.
Bunny: Yes, we’ve established pretty firmly that I’m the villain of this podcast, and even though I was reformed a couple weeks ago, I think this is my villain turn again.
Oren: So you’re just Sylar then?
Bunny: Yes, exactly. Because I do think constraints, I think they’re a net good, but Chris, elaborate.
Chris: So it’s not that constraints are necessarily, like any constraints are bad, but I do think that stories inherently have lots already. You know how to tell a good story; there are certain things that the story needs to do just to keep readers entertained, and so that already comes with a lot. And if you add tons more, then it just becomes a problem and you may not realize that you’ve, added constraints or how many. And I think new writers are especially vulnerable to this because they’re usually very ambitious and like to take on big challenges, but are also sensitive to feeling like failures because they don’t have lots of stories under their belt. Whereas a more experienced storyteller will realize, oh, this particular project is just really tough. When it’s your first project, you just assume that’s how it always is. And it means you’ve written yourself in a corner in some way.
So this is the reason why sequels and prequels, as a rule, are not as good as the original. They can be. They can, and sometimes even be better, but even in the best of conditions, if you were to average it out, I think you would always find that originals have an advantage over sequels because they just don’t have so many constraints that they’re working on.
Oren: I mean, you could say that the fundamentals and best practices of storytelling, or the rules of storytelling—spooky—are constraints, depending on how you wanna define the term. When I heard the topic, I assumed we were talking about constraints that are not for the purposes of making stories better, but you could say that having a throughline is a constraint. Because now you can’t tell a story that doesn’t have a throughline, if you’ve decided that your story needs a throughline, which it should.
Chris: Yeah. My point is mostly that storytelling is hard enough without adding additional requirements.
Bunny: I see. Okay. Maybe I was tracking…
Chris: …or prescriptions. We wanted rules, prescriptions. We are prescribing things like some prescriptivists.
Bunny: [jokingly] No, not the constructivists.
Oren: If you zoom out really far and someone doesn’t know what they wanna write a story about and they’re told to write something, and it can be about anything. Well, right now I have analysis paralysis, but usually by the time authors get to the stage where they’re seeking out our kind of writing advice, they at least have some concept of what they wanna write their story about. The alchemy of their brain has produced that set of constraints. But we do occasionally get people who are like, we have, I have no idea what I wanna write about, what should it be in? The only thing I can tell them is they have to go figure that out for themselves.
Bunny: I guess I was thinking about this more along the lines of what Oren mentioned, but as someone who does get analysis paralysis and blank page syndrome quite a bit, I think on the whole constraints can be quite helpful.
Chris: Yeah, certainly there are times when they provide writing prompts. For instance, a lot of the structures that I would call pseudo-structures that I don’t think actually provide good plotting advice; I do think that one of the reasons that people enjoy them is they give them ideas for what to do.
Oren: Yeah. I mean that they can be useful for that. The problem is that, again, they tend to either be so specific that they’re just counterproductive, or so vague that they’re not really restraining anything. They’re not really constraints at that point.
Chris: I don’t think the point though, is necessarily to constrain. I think it’s to give ideas. It gives something to start with.
Bunny: It might help a moment here to define constraint because I feel like we’re working with two different parallel, but both definitely constraint-y definitions. So one form of constraint is like you’ve written, this is the one you mentioned, Chris, you’ve written a story and now you have to write a sequel that the constraints are, you have to follow from the first one in a way that makes sense. But a different kind of constraint could be something like a production constraint, which, maybe it was more along the lines that I was thinking, like famously the shark animatronic in Jaws was a piece of crap. And then the director had to use it pretty sparsely, and then that ended up being good because it turned out using it that way ended up creating better feelings of tension and ominousness. And then another form of constraint could be bickering in the writer’s room, right?
So there’s a couple different types of constraint, and I feel like some of them might be medium specific. Like you probably won’t have bickering in the writer’s room if you’re not writing a TV show or a movie if you’re just sitting alone in your room. But yeah, maybe we need a little definition here.
Chris: I would think of constraint as any requirement that your story has to meet, and it can be imposed by you. So if you’re writing a sequel, for instance, a requirement would be you need the same main character. That main character has to be in the story after, in the timeline, after the previous story, for instance. That would be a constraint. If you have an animatronic that’s bad and you’re not supposed to show it, that certainly removes your options. And I think that’s what constraints largely do, and that’s a situation where I think it’s really rewarding for somebody to come up with a good solution to a problem that they have. Okay, I can’t show this shark, right? And here I did something clever, and that’s really rewarding. At the same time, we don’t necessarily know that if the effect had looked better that would’ve been worse.
Bunny: That’s true. However, consider the million Jaws knockoffs that slap the shark across the screen like it’s a dead tuna.
Chris: But this is one instance and I think that a lot of people get a lot of satisfaction over, hey, I had all of these constraints I had to work with and look what I came up with. And that’s a really satisfying thing to do. But in many of those scenarios it may not turn out better.
Oren: And there’s a certain amount of survivorship bias when we’re talking about production constraints because we tend to hear about the ones that turned out well, because those are the ones the creators wanna talk about.
Bunny: That’s fair.
Oren: We hear about the shark one. We hear about the cylons in Battlestar Galactica. Because the human cylons was not part of the initial conception of the 2004 reboot of that show. That was something that they did pretty late in production because they realized that having robot cylons on screen all the time would be really expensive and look bad. So they were like, aha, there could be human cylons, and that was pretty cool. But also they didn’t have any idea what was going on with that. And so it turned out when they told us they had a plan, that was just a lie. Because by, by the end, it was just like, why are there human cylons? [mumbles] I don’t know, God maybe.
Chris: [ominously] There’s cylons, they have a plan. Hear that every episode. It’s like, they don’t have a plan.
Oren: Then you also hear about it with the new thing people love to talk about is the constraints of practical effects make the movie look better. And I’m not really convinced that’s true. I think it’s that special effects are cheaper. And so you get, you know, there’s this idea that you can do anything with CGI. I should say now special effects, that’s too broad, but you can do anything with computer animation and that’s something studios want you to believe because it’s much cheaper to do it that way. But as a result, it ends up not looking as good as if you had used more expensive practical effects.
Chris: I’ll say, here’s a couple examples of where constraints are really helpful. And not that you necessarily couldn’t go without them, but that you have to use much better judgment. ‘when we’re talking about, for instance, point of view. One of the reasons we’re really critical of multiple points of view is because having a single point of view is a constraint that is usually very helpful because it encourages good practices. It encourages you to keep things focused on your main character and keep your plot tight, and not jump around and fragment your plot all over the place. So that does mean less freedom. And you can use multiple POVs to great effect, but it comes with a lot more judgment calls. You have to be more disciplined.
Same with having a limited point of view versus omniscient. If you’re using a limited point of view, that just sticks in the character’s head and you can only write what that character knows and their perspective. Again, it, it encourages you to stay focused on them and stay focused on the story and not go into diatribes. And so that’s a constraint that is really helpful and helps you make good choices. Whereas, once you’re writing an omniscient perspective and you’ve got a narrator who knows everything and could tell the reader about literally anything, at that point, you have to make more judgment calls. You know that [dramatically] freedom and power comes with responsibility. So yeah, in those cases, I would call those in many cases good constraints. Not constraints you’d want for every story, but helpful.
Oren: Yeah, and it’s interesting looking at which types of story give you constraints in exchange for something, because a sequel, for example, is going to have some constraints. You’re going to need to address whatever happened in the first one, or leave a really unsatisfying story, I guess you could just not address it. And you’re going to need to work with the same characters and stuff like that. But as a trade off, you get more attachment because the readers or the audience has been with these characters for longer. You can build a more complicated story than you could in just one installment, so you can build up to an even more satisfying ending. So you have lots of benefits there as well. Now, some stories will impose so many constraints that the sequel is basically impossible, but on the whole, sequels can work decently, especially if this original story was set up with sequels in mind. Prequels… [laughter]
Bunny: I was like, when is this coming? If he doesn’t mention it, then I am jumping on this one.
Oren: We gotta talk about prequels, because prequels have even more constraints. And few, I would argue none, of the benefits in most cases.
Bunny: Yeah. I think a world without prequels would not be a worse timeline than the one we’re in.
Oren: Yeah. It’s not that there are zero good prequels, but I’m not sure I can think of any stories that were better for being prequels.
Chris: I think the reason to do prequels is because you’ve already exhausted all the potential storylines in the sequels, but you wanna tell another story about the same characters.
Oren: Yeah. Or not even the same character. Sometimes it’s just a different character who we saw once in a frame somewhere and it’s like, hey.
Chris: That’s not really a reason to do a prequel. [she laughs] They will do it, but at that point you might as well just use the same world and setting with a completely different character that hasn’t appeared.
Bunny: Look, you two can stop dancing around it and just say money. [laughter]
Chris: Yes. The benefit of prequels is money. You got the constraint, which is that the story is awful, but the benefit is money.
Bunny: That’s the trade off.
Oren: It’s sometimes money. Although, I’m not sure it’s always money. Some of these projects really look like passion projects. I could be wrong. Maybe Miller thought that Furiosa was gonna make him a ton of money. I don’t know. But from the general reporting I saw around this movie, it just really felt like this was a thing he wanted to exist.
Chris: But didn’t he make it in conjunction with Fury Road originally?
Oren: Yes.
Chris: Right, so I don’t know. Did he make it as a prequel or did he make the story about Furiosa and then write Fury Road, and then end up making Fury Road first?
Oren: As far as I can tell, Fury Road did come first, but this was made at about the same time. It’s not really clear which script they wrote first, but I think it was Fury Road. But some version of the script for Furiosa existed while they were filming Fury Road. Charlise Theran, excuse me, Charlize Theron, yeah— is on the record saying that she looked at the script for Furiosa for inspiration on how to play her character and a deeper understanding of her character, which suggests to me that either A, uh, she’s a bit of a fibber, or B, the script has changed at some point because I don’t know what insight we were supposed to get on Furiosa from watching the movie Furiosa other than some of the things they suggested happened, happened, I guess?
Chris: Maybe she looked at it for insight on her character, but she didn’t actually get any. [laughter]
Bunny: That could be.
Chris: Then she glossed it over for a press meeting.
Bunny: It’s not a lie, it’s misleading.
Chris: I did look at it for inspiration and insight.
Oren: It’s really weird that Furiosa— the one thing about Fury Road that suggests a prequel, and I’m not saying this would’ve been a good idea, but it does suggest one, is that Furiosa talks about needing to atone. So that kind of raises the question, atone for what? And according to Furiosa the movie, the answer is nothing.
Bunny: Well, yeah, I feel like this project was, I mean, I still think it’s like… To be clear, I liked the movie, but I think it was also kind of doomed from the start by the fact that we understand from the original that she’s done bad things.
Oren: Hang on, hang on. I should put a spoiler here for the movie Furiosa. I forgot to do that. [he laughs]
Bunny: Oh, that’s right. Yes. [sing-song] Spoilers.
Oren: I haven’t actually given anything away, I just mentioned a thing that didn’t happen. Okay. So we’re good.
Bunny: So we’re continue knowing this is spoiling Furiosa, but yeah. We don’t do see her do anything truly morally reprehensible, like she killed Dementus, but we already knew that was going to happen, or she planted him in her tree.
Oren: I don’t quite know what to make of that. Yeah, that was just, okay, I guess that happened. Maybe. It’s not actually clear if it’s supposed to have happened! It was a little too cartoonish for this world that they’d set up.
Chris: So I think it’s worth talking about—okay. It’s beyond… We can talk more about prequels and sequels. There are plenty of things that can be dissected there, but it’s worth talking about what imposes tons of constraints besides that, because that’s not the only one. One thing is a work that you are adapting. Any adaptation is dealing with all of the constraints of the original, depending on how faithful it stays is original. In some movies that are adapting books, for instance, if you’re adapting a whole novel into a movie, it’s actually a much shorter story. So you have to take some level of liberties. I think we saw Mortal Engines that was trying to stick very closely to the book; did not work out. Yeah, that one can be a big one.
I’m just having finished a retelling of a fairytale. I will say that now that I am plotting a novel that is not an adaptation, because I did stick fairly close to the original fairytale, it’s amazing how much easier it is to plot than when I was doing an adaptation and trying to figure out how to stay close to the original fairytale while actually making it work as a plot. Because fairytales, they’re usually summarized, and that makes a huge difference. You don’t really have to have engaging conflicts, and a lot of those things don’t work as well when you expand them. Or some future cool scenes that you are want to add that you first dreamed up and you haven’t added yet. Those can, again, kind of like the prequel effect. There are some premises we can talk about that inherently hem people in a lot, and are just hard to pull off.
Bunny: I have suffered from this, I must say. As much as I think constraints can spur creativity, I have been trapped in a locked room with ideas that I want to carry out and cannot figure out how to get to.
Chris: Is this something you haven’t written yet?
Bunny: Yes and no. It’s something that I’ve plotted, but that I spent a long time banging my head against because of part of this. Okay, so this was the thesis I wrote as part of my senior project, and I wanted a twist at the end. Spoilers, but maybe I’ll change this. I wanted this reveal that there’s been a spooky cult essentially. And as this is a mystery and a speculative fiction, I feel like I can lay the groundwork of there being spooky, supernatural things. But some of my readers were like, oh, this seems like a story about the relationship between these two characters. And then suddenly spooky cult comes outta nowhere. Now granted, this was just them reading my outline and being like, that seems contrary to the rest of the story. But looking at it, I’m like, okay, I can see why this slow burn mystery suddenly having this flipped switch into this cult plotline. I can see why that would feel strange and like I hadn’t set it up properly. So it’s partially a question of setup and partially a question of whether it’s the type of story where that sort of reveal would feel satisfying.
Chris: Yeah. Any storyline that relies a lot on withholding information or secrecy or has a big twist, those generally come with more constraints, because if you’re trying to withhold information, you have to figure out how to plot the story without revealing things. And that can become a problem if, for instance, that information is needed for a good story, but you also want it to be a twist. Or a lot of twists and reveals, they rely on a double interpretation, right? So you have to look at it before the reveal and be like, okay, I’m looking at X. And then after the reveal, you have to go back and think back on it and be like oh, that was really Y. And what that means is when you’re writing it, it has to fit the requirements of both X and Y. Or like stories where, this could be, this magic is real, or it could be imaginary.
Bunny: Oh, I also caught that issue with that same thesis. [laughter] It’s ambiguity. I want ambiguity in the room for spiritualism, but also…
Chris: Any time you add an interpretation because you’re doing a reveal or you want ambiguity, you have to then extremely carefully maneuver everything so it can be interpreted in multiple ways. That adds a lot of constraints to the project. Or just antagonists that are just misunderstood, and aren’t actually bad. Those ones… I have written some plots where people just needed to work it out, and there’s always so much harder because I just can’t have an antagonist that’s really malicious. That means they can’t do a lot of the things that they would normally do to create tension in this story. And it becomes so much harder to plot. Anything where the plot is spoiled if two people just talk to each other is the worst.
Or you can have characters that are too powerful, I think is another one that makes the premise hard. You know, a powerful ally that you have to constantly keep them away, or a villain that you have to constantly come with reasons they don’t squash the protagonists, or worse yet puppeteers and string pullers where oh look, now I have to make it so all of these events could be masterminded by some character. Those are all things that just make the whole process of plotting have to fit additional requirements. That makes it hard.
Oren: Yeah. You can do the same thing with any villain you want to do a redemption arc on. Assuming that you want the redemption arc to be satisfying, you’re now operating under constraints. Because you can’t have them do anything too bad, because if they cross the moral event horizon, that’s just gonna be upsetting if you try to redeem them at that point.
Chris: Yeah. How many times can I have them just toss people to the side? And then just have them roll. I trying to remember what show we saw where they were just throwing people off of buildings and being like, no, really, they’re okay.
Oren: Everything’s fine. They’re fine.
Bunny: Don’t worry about it. They’re all rubber people made of rubber.
Chris: Okay, but here’s the big one actually, as far as constraints that we work with all the time, is your existing draft.
Bunny: [dramatically] Noooo!
Chris: Your existing draft that you were revising. [she laughs]
Bunny: My enemy.
Chris: But this is a big deal for if you’re working on a big project for a number of years and you get better as you go, but you made your entire, like all the ideas from your story and how you constructed it and all the events, you made those when you knew nothing, oftentimes, or you knew less than you do now, but you are attached to all of it. And you’re trying to make it work, and you’re trying to make the story better while changing as little as possible. That’s a huge one and it can be really crushing. And again, if this is this first work you’ve worked on, you don’t realize just how crushing it is.
Bunny: It’s also, again, speaking from experience, really hard to go back to old projects that you were once super duper into, but knew way less about. You can just feel like it’s better to cut that one loose than it is to edit it.
Oren: That’s the reality of most of the clients I’m working with, is that’s one of the reasons why I spend so much time asking them questions and getting their buy-in; because you can give someone the best recommendations in the world to improve their story, and if they’re not able to make those changes, then that’s all useless. A large part of what I work on is, what changes can we make to improve this? And at the very least, what lessons can I teach you so that you’ll know better next time? It happens all the time.
Chris: So I, I think that this episode wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t at least mention the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
Bunny: You knew it was coming.
Chris: I mean, everybody of course has ranted about them, but this really is just the epitome of how constraints can sink something. Not that the directors were making great choices on their own, but there was no way for that third movie to be good. It was impossible.
Oren: Yeah, by the time you get to the end of the Force Awakens and it’s like this isn’t a great place for to start a second movie. It does not open well, and then you get the Last Jedi, which is just, I’m taking my ball and going home, I don’t want to deal with any of the things that were in the last movie, and then you get Rise of Skywalker, which at that point I don’t know how to fix Rise of Skywalker. Given the constraints of the previous two films, I’m not sure it can be done now. Obviously that movie also takes its ball and goes home even harder. [laughter]
Bunny: Goes home with a vengeance for sure.
Chris: The biggest constraints, the biggest problems that it was put under, was the fact that the villains had been completely destroyed, and then Rey had then been given powers.
Oren: Yeah, she has more powers now, but her powers were super vague.
Bunny: She makes rocks float.
Oren: The villain thing is the biggest constraint. The villains have been all destroyed, but also so have the good guys, like the Resistance is completely gone. What are we supposed to do with that?
Chris: Because usually each story in a series is going to increase the scope to make things more epic than before, and at least definitely in a series like Star Wars, that’s what people expect. You would have a big Starship battle. But if you’ve destroyed all of your starship fleets, that’s hard to do.
Bunny: But Chris, you could just raise some up out of the water, fully crewed.
Chris: [laughs] Yes, you could do that. Which is, if you’ve ever seen, oh, there’s a big time jump right in between seasons of a show, especially, one of the biggest reasons that people do that is to give things a soft reboot to try to get rid of constraints. Because if we just made it so, okay, five years passed, now more things could have happened in between that time and it feels more realistic to change up things more. If the last Star Wars sequel film took place 20 years later, then it’s more realistic for them to have fleets again.
Oren: Yeah. But no, instead everything’s fine. We’re back. Don’t worry about it.
Bunny: And they did that. They did jump forward for the Last Jedi. Oh, wait.
Oren: The Force Awakens?
Bunny: Yes. That one jumps ahead to an identical scenario, which is about the most disappointing thing you could do with a time jump.
Oren: The Force Awakens was definitely the least constrained of them other than constrained by the fact that its director just seems to want to have done Star Wars again. But even it was under some constraints. It was clear that people wanted the original characters, but also clear that the original characters could not convincingly do a Star Wars movie because they’re all much older now. So that was the biggest constraint that the first film was working under. And that’s a challenge in its own right. And then it decided to just do A New Hope again. Because why not?
Chris: I do think though, that as we’re talking about the sequels. We should probably praise Obi-wan the show. It’s not a perfect show, but it’s a mid-quel. And considering the fact that it’s a mid-quel, I think they did a really good job. Yes, if you watch A New Hope, you’re not gonna believe that Leia and Obi-wan have ever met before.
Oren: Not only met, but gone on this bonding adventure. It’s like, no, that is, that did— no. There’s no way that happened in the New Hope timeline.
Chris: But honestly, that’s the kind of minimum thing that they could do, is to fill in things that we didn’t believe were there, but at least aren’t directly contradicting really huge parts of the setting and storyline.
Oren: Yeah. Obi-wan being as good as it was is frankly a miracle. I was really not optimistic when I heard the premise.
Bunny: I noticed that neither of you have mentioned our sponsor since the beginning of the show, which was one of the stated constraints.
Oren: Call now, Wraith McBlade, good legal advice.
Chris: Yeah. If you’d like to save us from Wraith McBlade, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want thank a few of our existing patrons, which is technically a constraint. We do have that in our Patreon rewards, but we like to do it, so it’s not really a constraint. 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 next week.
[closing theme plays]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.