Time to clock in for another shift in the podcast mines, processing audio ore and the like. But what if our workplace had… drama? Why, then you might be writing a workplace conflict, which we have advice for! We discuss whether a workplace is healthy or unhealthy, what kinds of clashes can be expected, and naturally, why the captain is always going on away missions instead of lower-ranked crew members.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny and with me is…
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: …and…
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: So we’ve all gotten a job at the Rad Dragon Nursery raising and training cool dragons in the middle of the magical mountains, which means that we’ll get to ride them and befriend them and form bonds with them. It’s gonna be great. Are y’all so excited?
Oren: No, you can’t trick me. We’re starting a union. This isn’t gonna be like an “isn’t it cool to work at a cool place and have a cool boss who you do lots of unpaid overtime for?” story. I’m getting my mandatory breaks,
Bunny: But Oren, the CEO says we’re a big family! And the CEO is also HR. So it must be true.
Oren: It’s probably fine.
Chris: I feel like maybe if we’re working with dragons, there’s some workplace hazards here.
Bunny: Nah!
Oren: What could go wrong?
Chris: I wanna make sure I get my workers’ comp.
Bunny: Nah, if you follow the incredibly lackadaisical safety procedures, you probably won’t get incinerated. Uh, and if you are, we’ll hold a big sad funeral because family, and uh, definitely not write it off as a business expense.
Oren: Fantasy OSHA is gonna shut this place right down. We’ve got people given unsupervised belly rubs to the dragons. That is not safe.
Bunny: Yeah. And, uh, unfortunately, we also have to deal with workplace hazards like someone microwaving fish and a boss clipping their toenails on the desk.
Chris: Oh. Hmm.
Bunny: So yeah, maybe, maybe we don’t go work at the Rad Dragon Nursery. There might be a little too much conflict there. But on the other hand, we do like conflict for stories and jobs and have a lot of that.
Chris: I do think one thing, if you’re adding conflicts at work, that is just good to think about is whether or not you want to depict a healthy workplace. Because it’s really easy for storytellers to look for sources of conflict and add them and create a lot of toxicity in social interactions, which again, if it’s supposed to be dystopian and exploitative, that’s totally fine. Just don’t package a toxic workplace as a healthy one. So you want Severance, not Orville season one, basically.
Bunny: But leg theft, Chris!
Chris: Gosh, I’d even forgotten about the leg theft. It’s like the least of the toxic things that happen. So basically, again, if you package it as a healthy workplace when it’s actually a toxic workplace, then you’re giving some level of endorsement to like really bad, often abusive behavior. So let’s just not do that. You know, again, you can create a story reason why your character is working at a dystopian job, or a job that is the worst. They just need a stronger motivation for doing so. So if they’re gonna take a job that could kill them, then they need to be desperate. That’s basically the difference.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s also much easier than, for example, a magic school story, right? Because like jobs don’t have the same expectation of having a duty of care for adults. That doesn’t mean that they don’t abuse their workers. They absolutely do. It’s just not the same as a school where kids go. And at the same time, there isn’t the expectation that if a job is bad, the character’s parents would pull them out, uh, unless they’re also a child, which is this whole other problem. It’s also much easier to explain like, why would they stay there? The job sucks and it’s like, well, you need money to live.
Chris: Right. Yeah. And again, there’s nothing wrong with “no, this workplace is exploitative, it’s dystopian.” But it feels different if you know it is, right, and the characters talk about it rather than, this is supposed to be a utopian setting in a utopian workplace, and we have really toxic things happening. So again, signs of a toxic workplace include things like: employees not getting the training they need to do their job; the employer isn’t making the best effort to keep people safe, or they’re not giving people time to heal, rest or recover; if you have like a boss that is demanding absolute perfection and always find something to criticize, that’s very toxic. Cutting people down or like purposely damaging their self-worth. I mean, if people give each other put downs and there’s no reason for doing that other than just to make them feel bad… That’s a sign of a very toxic person. And, you know, harassment or toxic behavior from other employees should be addressed if the workplace is a healthy workplace.
Oren: They send out emails saying, asking you to say five things you did at work that day. I’m not even joking, like, you know, that’s in the news, but that’s like classic bad manager, right? That’s like the weirdest thing where it just shows that whoever is in charge has no idea how this business works.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Because if they knew…
Chris: or just asking for inappropriate things. Like, I know of a personal story.
Oren: …they wouldn’t need to ask.
Chris: That’s real bad.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s terrible.
Chris: Right? So asking for unpaid labor, asking them to invest their own money and things, or asking them to do things that are illegal, like buy drugs for them, that is a real thing that happens a lot in Hollywood, apparently. It’s not good.
Oren: Hmm. I love the idea of someone signing up for a paid internship and they get there and it’s like, yeah. What I meant was that you will pay to go to places as my intern. That’s why it’s a paid internship. What else would that mean?
Bunny: Yeah, you thought you would get money, fool!
Chris: Yeah, and so that’s the thing is if, again, if a coworker is being really inappropriate, and that’s part of the conflict. You have to decide, is this a dystopian workplace or do you wanna work within the constraints of the fact that the manager should be jumping in doing something?
Bunny: Frankly, dystopian workplaces are outside of the idyllic, small business owner archetype, which is cozy. Dystopian workplaces are definitely more conflict rich, I will say that, just don’t pretend that it’s totally normal when your boss does illegal things like withhold your paycheck.
Oren: I would say that it depends a lot on what kind of problems you want your character to be solving. Because if they work somewhere dystopian, simply being there can be the problem that they have to solve, right? Because they can be dealing with a toxic loss or toxic coworkers or unsafe working conditions, things like that, right? And that can provide plenty of conflict to drive a story beyond whatever it is they’re actually doing. Whereas if you want a better workplace, then you’re more likely to lean on what is the job the character is doing and why is it important, and that is going to provide the majority of your tension. It doesn’t necessarily have to be all of it. Like you can still have a somewhat unfriendly relationship with someone at a job that’s not awful and that could still cause some sparks, right? But you are less likely to lean on that for like the majority of your tension.
Bunny: And there are lots of problems at work that do not necessarily feature dragons and fantasy OSHA, this episode was largely inspired by me reading a lot of Ask a Manager, so go over there if you want to see some truly absurd workplace scenarios and some pretty mundane ones that are nonetheless difficult to deal with. There’s problems that we’ve all encountered. Chris wrote a short story about the annoying colleague who is annoying and blocking your way and preventing you from doing things.
Chris: Yeah, this is Hellgate 42, I think it was.
Oren: Yeah. Hellgate Incident 42.
Chris: That one’s all in emails, all in coworker emails. I think that makes it more cowork-y.
Oren: I love it. It’s so much fun.
Bunny: That’s what we call epistolary.
Oren: You could always just peruse like the various LinkedIn drama subreddits. They find some real weird stuff there. I was so confused by the concept of LinkedIn when I heard about it. And to be honest, I still am. Like, a work social network? What, why?
Bunny: [sarcastic] Yeah, it’s a social media platform about being unemployed. It’s great.
Chris: Admittedly, Hellgate Incident 42 is inspired by my experience of sexism in the tech world. I, as a developer, always worked as a freelancer, which made things better for me, but it was weird because every single time I had to interact with another tech consultant that worked for my client, and we had to coordinate, it was amazing how much they tried to block and obstruct me. And it was kind of like, the most innocent explanation is sexism, ’cause otherwise I would have to assume that every tech professional just aggros against every other tech professional, and that’s almost worse.
Bunny: The wild tech professionals circling each other on their territory of a WordPress.
Chris: And then I would have to often bring in the client and you know, I could beat them at the game. But it was still annoying.
Bunny: Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely another common problem at work is, you know, sexism or racism or other kinds of bigotry and, you know, handle that with care. But it is absolutely a source of workplace conflict.
Oren: From my own experience as, you know, not being particularly subject to either of those, people can be really uncooperative jerks, even without any kind of structural issue. So I can only imagine that that would probably make it worse.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, for me, I realized that the male tech professionals that weren’t like that were people who would always self-select to work with me. They were like people who were my clients, referred people to me, or had chosen to work with me at some level. So no, it was sad. It was sad and kind of unbelievable sometimes because they would just act really bizarrely. But sometimes that happens.
Oren: Yeah. But you got a really good short story out of it several years later. So was that not…
Chris: I mean, I did have some really good moments like pwning them that I still remember fondly.
Oren: Was it not all worth it in the end? We didn’t publish my story Hellgate Incident 43 in which the main character makes a suggestion and people accept it reasonably and continue with their day. I’m just saying, Chris!
Bunny: Or mine, Hellgate Incident 44 where someone comes to return a shirt and it goes fine. Yeah, all of these things can provide good conflict and good fodder for short stories. I think it would be helpful to step back and address the really basic question of like, why do we want stories where the characters work, right? Like, uh, presumably a lot of us work and we do that and we don’t always have fun with it. And, you know, stories are escapism. So why do characters work when jobs kind of suck sometimes?
Oren: Because we’re all real weirdos! That’s the issue.
Bunny: Yeah. We’re inflicting this upon ourselves is why. But jobs provide good conflict, as we were just discussing. I mean, maybe the most classic interpersonal conflict dynamic is, you know, the buddy cop dynamic, right? I mean, we have a whole other episode about this, about that specific pairing of characters who don’t like each other and then come to like each other as they work together on their job.
Chris: And I do have a blog post with a list of personality clashes for your inspiration, ’cause that’s something that people have a lot of trouble writing just off the top of their head. So I have lists of them. And those ones can be really good if you want a couple coworkers who just inherently have, you know, work in different ways and have trouble getting along at first.
Bunny: And crucially, a job forces them to work together, right? Like, if they were just neighbors, there’s less of a reason for them to tolerate each other and work through their problems because unless there’s something truly forcing them together, then it’s harder to contrive a reason for why they would work together even if they hate each other. If you’re an office drone and your boss says you have to work with, you know, Carrie, who you have a personality conflict with, and you and Carrie are gonna butt heads over everything and then eventually form a team and fight vampires or whatever, like, that’s a good arc. And it’s harder to make that work if you’re not assigned together.
Oren: You need a reason for characters who don’t like each other to stay in proximity and do things together, and there are many ways you can justify that, but the fact that they work together is an easy one. It’s very self-explanatory.
Bunny: Jobs can also send you into dangerous situations, like you can be hired to do dangerous things, and if your workplace is toxic and you’re desperate, then you are likelier to put up with this. And dangerous things can be exciting. It’s also sympathetic. So readers, again, have jobs and are familiar with the struggles. Um, that’s not true of all readers, I mean, some of us are podcasters, but… you know, most of them. And then just also, we love whimsical jobs, right? Like running a tea shop or raising dragons. And there are also plenty of comedic stories where, you know, a normal drudgery workplace has some sort of fantastical elements going on. And if you need further proof of the fact that people like seeing stories set in an office, just look at The Office.
Oren: With jobs, they are both pretty relatable for all the reasons you mentioned, and then they are also potentially good for wish fulfillment, which can be a cozy of like, this is a really nice tea shop that I work at where everything’s nice. But it can also be that the job’s hard, but I’m doing something meaningful. Right, because a lot of people do not feel that in their normal jobs. They do not feel like there is any point to what they’re doing, and so feeling like their work matters and seeing a character doing that as part of their job like that does have serious wish fulfillment.
Bunny: Right. Yeah, that’s a good point. The wish fulfillment can also be about the output of the job rather than the job itself and why it’s worthwhile to struggle through that.
Chris: And if we’re thinking about a small business owner, running a small business is difficult and a lot of the books I’ve seen about that I feel like could do a little bit more to create conflicts around running a small business. Like, for instance, one thing that most people don’t know until they get their first employee is how difficult training is and how much time it takes. Takes about five times as long as you think it will take, at least. ‘Cause you don’t know how much you know, and so you’re imagining, “oh, it’s only a, it’s a very simple task. I just, you know, tell them XYZ, and it’s done.” And then it turns out it’s actually a very complicated task where in different situations you make little adjustments and you don’t have any documentation because you’ve never had to train somebody before. And all of that is, and there’s so many things like that in small businesses, and that’s something that I’d love to see more stories similar to Legends & Lattes actually just get a little bit more rigorous because I do think there’s so much you can do there.
Oren: Like what do you mean it’s hard to train people to feed the dragons? You just put the food in the trough. It’s really easy, and I mean, yeah, sure. If they’re looking a little aggressive, you make sure to look just off to the left so you don’t seem confrontational, but you also don’t seem like too easy a target. And sure if their scales are the wrong color, you know, you wanna deal with that. Easy, right? How long could that take to learn?
Chris: Right? Oh, and that other dragon is recovering from sickness. So we have that dragon on a special diet.
Oren: Obviously!
Bunny: Of course, that’s just intuition. Oh man, did y’all ever feed horses as kids? And we’re told like, “put your hand flat, has to be flat!” and then, you know, have nightmares about the horse sucking your fingers into its mouth, like carrots.
Oren: I was terrified that the horse was gonna bite me. It never did. I’ve never been bitten by a horse, but I was always scared of that.
Chris: Yeah, I had a horse run off with me when I was a kid. My sister was really big into horses and horse riding, and so…
Bunny: Oh no!
Chris: …that resulted in situations where I was put on a horse. Even though I was not big into horse riding, I just kind of found it scary.
Bunny: It was just taking you to the equine kingdom where you could have ruled as queen.
Chris: I mean, it was springtime. Apparently the horse had been cooped up all winter and was eager to get running. Uh, wish it had done it when I was not on its back.
Oren: Yeah. I kept pressing X, which is supposed to be dismount, but just nothing happened, so, you know.
Bunny: Oh, they never ported it to console, did they?
Oren: Yeah, the control scheme is not good.
Bunny: Report the bug, report it! So there’s quite a few jobs that are pretty common in fiction. The ones that sprang most readily to my mind were researchers, detectives, spies, soldiers, and journalists who are actually just detectives with a journalism mask. And then the small business owner, we already talked about, if you want to learn about uncommon jobs in fiction, we have a whole other episode about that. So I won’t go into it.
Chris: Can I just complain about Lockwood & Co a little bit?
Bunny: Oh please.
Chris: So Lockwood & Co is funny because it’s a workplace, but it’s not a workplace. It’s a workplace, but they live together, they’re also roommates. And technically they wouldn’t need to. They just do. Again, in the world of Lockwood and Co, there’s like a ghost apocalypse. So there’s ghosts everywhere and everybody goes inside after curfew, and only young people can actually psychically sense the ghosts. So the people who handle ghost cases are all young. It’s a kind of neat world building actually. And so the idea is that we have young people who have their own ghost agency and so they hire somebody, but then that person comes to live. Like Lockwood is the main character and so he hires people and then they come to live with him in his house.
Oren: I mean, he can’t really pay them very much, it seems like. So I guess offering them room and board, ’cause he happens to have a house he inherited from his parents is like, I guess the best he can do.
Bunny: In general though, disclaimer, if your boss asks you to live with them, probably say no.
Chris: There’s a situation there that actually is more close to what you might have in a workplace conflict where they are really busy, they have lots of work, and I think they toss around the idea of maybe getting some help. And then Lucy goes on vacation and she comes back and Lockwood has already hired somebody. And when he had set up the clear expectation that this would be the hiring process that she would also be part of, and again, if he’s the boss, right, in some workplaces that would be totally normal for him to just make a decision and hire who he wants. But considering that they all like room together, right? And this is a very close collaboration, and Lucy had a reasonable expectation that she would be part of the process and be able to interview candidates, having her suddenly come back to find that he’d hired somebody, and it turned out this person was somebody that Lucy had a little bit of personality clash with, right? So that’s also just a bad idea for Lockwood to do because he can’t see whether the candidates work well with his existing employees.
Oren: But in fairness, the personality clash they have is primarily that the other person is a girl and Lucy hates other girls because that’s a writing choice that the author made.
Bunny: Uh, is she not like them?
Oren: It’s weird, okay, it is real weird.
Chris: The new worker does occasionally act kind of passive-aggressive towards Lucy. Occasionally, right? I think it’s supposed to be a personality conflict.
Oren: Yes, it’s supposed to be, but the way that it was written made it feel like Lucy had basically decided to hate her. And then she also did some things that were a little annoying, is kind of what it felt like.
Chris: I mean, she’s supposed to be a little jealous. Stroud, when he writes the scene, really sets things up to make Lucy jealous, where she comes back and finds this girl at her desk and other things like that. But the thing about this is that Lockwood is like completely off the hook for creating this situation. Whereas Lucy, I think the assumption the book goes with is that Lucy is wrong and she should just accept this girl. And when I look at this situation, no, actually Lockwood is the one who’s responsible for all this tension, right? Because he went and did something that was violating the norms, the expectations that he set with his employees and the norms for their workplace, right? Because when Lucy was hired, his other employee was part of that interview process. But it acts like, oh no, this is all Lucy’s fault and possibly this other girl’s fault. It’s like, no, it’s all Lockwood’s fault, actually. In my opinion.
Oren: Lockwood definitely deserved more blame for that situation than he gets, which is none.
Chris: Exactly.
Oren: Although Lockwood & Co does dovetail into another interesting choice that you can make when you are writing a workplace story, which is, are you gonna do the easy mode, which is where you have them mainly go out on missions, and that’s the work. ‘Cause that’s, I just want you to know, if you do that, you’re a coward. That’s basically the same as a normal story. To be clear, I’m totally doing it and I’m a coward. Or are you gonna do an office bound story where they actually have to go to their work location and spend most of their time there? Uh, ’cause that’s harder, it’s more… it’s not bad, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, I’m just saying that it is more different than a conventional adventure story. Whereas if they’re like a team of agents and they go out and solve problems and then they report to the field office at the end of the week or whatever, it’s like that’s not really that much different than any other story.
Chris: If they stay in the office, then think of the low budget TV show it can make.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, they only need one set. It’s great!
Bunny: I think the sorts of conflicts that they’ll deal with and the scope of them also depends on where they are in a work hierarchy. By far, I think the most common level in that hierarchy that we see is the low level employees. Like, you know, the grounds, the boots on the ground, the people in the cubicle farm, etc, just because they’re less insulated from danger. Most real life people probably feel like they’re in that position on the ladder. It’s sympathetic, and they have boots on the ground. They’re like right up next to the conflict in most cases. And then there’s like social conflicts where you have superiors who are ordering you around and you’re being treated as expendable maybe. And then they have to choose where to draw the lines, things like that. So for example, you would have a story about the soldier rather than about their commander. But these characters don’t have a lot of power. So you have to be careful about the scope of the problems you throw at them. They might feel out of place or useless if the conflict is too big.
Chris: Or give them like a special ability, special magic power that makes them more useful or something.
Bunny: Right. And you have to be careful to make the characters ordering them around remove their agency where we were discussing before, like the issue in Revenger where the character is just kind of floating around after the other characters, without any agency as they command her to go here and there and do various things. You don’t want that to happen. That’s not terribly exciting. This was the category that I could come up with the most examples for off the top of my head. So Lower Decks maybe being obvious, it’s the lower decks, it’s the people in the background, it’s the redshirts, so to speak.
Oren: I mean, I guess you could argue every Star Trek is a workplace show.
Bunny: It is, but I would argue that most Star Treks are a different level on the ladder, which is the characters are bosses.
Chris: The command crew.
Bunny: They’re managers.
Chris: Yeah. I do think on Lower Decks they do send them out on missions, planet-side missions fairly often, and that is what helps give them agency because then they have a reason to send them away from the ship and away from the commanding officers. So they have to solve problems on their own.
Bunny: Which is kind of funny because in the normal Star Trek shows the commanding officers just kind of do that too. Yeah, don’t worry about it.
Oren: Lower Decks is also just a pretty low realism story, so like. They are on the ship and find that the ship is about to explode and then they go and deal with the problem themselves instead of like, you know, calling the bridge and being like, “hey, we need you to send like every person to help fix this problem” because it’s Lower Decks. It’s all for the bit.
Bunny: Comedic, for sure. And I’m pretty sure Severance is in this category too. Light Brigade. The Mimicking of Known Successes too, which is a good example of…
Oren: Really?
Bunny: Yeah. Platy, it’s not super prominent, but Platy has to deal with like… she’s not a manager, she’s not a grunt either, but she is not overseeing anyone and she has to deal with internal politicking between different departments at her college. So I’d say she counts as this, even though it’s not a huge element of the story. She’s not a boss or a commander or a manager. She just eats scones and researches things.
Oren: Who loves scones. But yeah.
Bunny: And then you can have characters at the very top of the hierarchy, which are the leaders or the CEOs who have a lot of power and influence. So they’re well positioned to tackle big threats. If they’re the small businesses, they can struggle against failure or against the big businesses. Although usually these are, I don’t know if we should count these or not, because they’re not workplace conflicts so much as they are conflicts about the workplace. Specifically, whether it’ll survive.
Oren: Right. Well, that’s the difference between… is your conflict about your protagonist dealing with crappy office culture, or is it about them trying to do a really important job and there are exterior problems stopping them from doing that? It’s that sort of difference.
Chris: But I guess if your protagonist is like in HR, right? Their job is to sort out what’s going on with the workplace. So those things are kind of intertwined and I think a lot of… a small business person would realistically have to do all of the admin work in addition to whatever the business is about. Right? So if we’re making coffee, we have to deal with making coffee, but we also have to deal with hiring employees and training them, and doing the accounting, what have you. And I feel like those admin tasks make it feel more workplace-y.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true.
Bunny: Yeah. I mean, the thing about having this level of character is that there are plenty of examples of them. Batman and Tony Stark, both are technically big business boys, but we don’t really see them do business things, which could be cutting commentary on the laziness of CEOs or it could just be the narrative not caring about that. You decide.
Oren: I was so surprised, or sad and disappointed really, in the most recent Batman movie because the bad guy’s plan basically depends on the fact that Bruce never goes in to oversee his company, so he doesn’t notice that his company’s funds are being misappropriated. And I thought for sure that was gonna be a character arc moment where he’s like, “oh. I should spend more time managing my business and making sure it’s being used responsibly.” But no, he doubles down on Batman. Yes, punch every criminal now.
Chris: And nobody calls him to be like, “hey, there’s a major problem with funds at your company.” I think somebody would call him and let him know this was happening.
Oren: Don’t worry about it.
Chris: I think the issue with having the leader of the workplace or the business, they have the most agency, but they have more liabilities when it comes to likability because it’s just harder to put them in a sympathetic position. And I think this is one of the reasons why the Orville turned out so terribly because I think they were trying to make the leadership position sympathetic. But when Ed comes in, he is responsible for all his own problems. And it’s like they make him relatable, being like, “oh, so you didn’t really deserve to be captain, but we’re making you captain anyway.” And yeah, I don’t think that was a good way to go. Now if this was a ship they were thinking of retiring for reasons outside of his control and nobody else wanted this command, then you could use that to make it sympathetic.
Oren: Well, that’s the classic problem that a lot of writers have is that they misinterpret second chance with fail up. Right? It’s like, look, a second chance means we let you try again at whatever you were bad at. Or maybe we let you try again in a different area where you aren’t gonna cause the same problems or something. This is like, you messed up and now we are directly rewarding you for messing up.
Bunny: Yeah. Going back to the whole logical worldbuilding thing, logic versus realism. And I think it’s difficult if it’s like a big entity, a lot of villains are leaders of big companies, right? Like the evil CEO and that’s also true in fiction.
Oren: All right. Well, with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. We had our own kind of workplace story, I guess, to the extent that podcasting is a job.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, 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 there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week!
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.