The Mythcreant Podcast 527 – Making Your Story Intuitive
At first glance, it seems like stories have plenty of time to explain things. But do they really? Between cool plot points and poignant character development, there’s a lot less room than you might think, even in a big fantasy door stopper. How do you decrease the need for explanations? By making the story intuitive! That doesn’t mean you’ll never need to explain anything, but the less you have to, the more time there is for the good stuff.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]Chris: You’re listening to the Myth Grant podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Now you probably thought that this was an episode about storytelling, although I don’t know why. Obviously we’re talking about the World Soccer Cup. Because you see, when I was a wee lass, my mother told me a heartfelt story about the soccer cup, and I’ve loved it ever since, even though I’ve never mentioned it before.
Oren: And we’re also not gonna mention that Bunny’s not here. We’re just gonna let people figure that out for themselves.
Chris: Yeah, I mean things just happen sometimes. Sometimes Bunny’s here, sometimes she’s not. You know, that’s how the world works.
Oren: That’s just life. Also, sometimes we call it the World Soccer Cup when anyone who actually watches it just calls it the World Cup. That’s just a thing that happens sometimes, you know. You don’t ask questions.
Chris: Really you should be asking why you didn’t guess that these things would happen.
Oren: [agreeing noises]
Chris: So this time we’re talking about making your story intuitive. Like me saying World Soccer Cup instead of World Cup.
Oren and Chris: [chuckling]
Chris: If you actually know me, that makes perfect sense.
Oren: It does.
Chris: Why make your story intuitive? I think that for most of the stories that we read, that are for sale, it’s really easy to take for granted the way they have lots of stuff that just intuitively makes sense to us. And you don’t notice that it’s easy to take for granted until you actually try to do something that’s weird and different.
I have some clients send me some really wild and imaginative things and those are honestly my favorite. I love those. But it does add some challenges, because the more you do something unique, the more you have to work to make everything fit smoothly together, and the more you notice when those things don’t fit quite right.
It kind of makes parts of your story feel random, contrived, haphazard. The more things like that, it just really adds up and it makes the story not feel right. That becomes a problem. And so, especially if you are trotting on your own path, it’s really important to understand that when you are making up stuff, to make them feel natural they have to fit certain things. They have to feel natural to your readers.
Oren: So the way I look at it is that stories have a lot to explain and anything you can do to reduce the explanation load is probably going to pay dividends. You don’t want your story to be spending its time arguing that it makes sense.
That is just a losing proposition to be in. Because even if you are right, the experience will be very unpleasant and readers will just often reject it, because readers don’t like being told a thing they don’t think makes sense does make sense. They just don’t enjoy that.
And so as a rule, you generally don’t wanna do it if you have a better option.
Chris: And they also don’t wanna do homework. The more you have to explain, the more the story starts to feel like homework.
Oren: Right. And I know if you’re on writing Bluesky or any other social media site where writers hang out, you’re gonna see these posts, some of them semi-viral, of someone being like “I just love it when I have to go to the dictionary constantly to read a story” or “when I have to check the Wiki”.
Those are traps, okay? Those posts are traps. It will not go that way for you. I’m not saying there is no one out there who will do that for any story, but the number of people who will do that for your random ass story is very small.
They almost exclusively do it for big, famous stories written by big, famous authors who can get away with this ’cause they’re big and famous.
Chris: I’m sure there are some people who are like that and they like looking up words. It’s not like that never happens. At the same time, I would have to question how many of these people are motivated by feeling defensive about their favorite story and other people criticizing it. Because that is one thing you see. People being like “oh, somebody said my favorite story had too many words they had to look up. Well, I love looking up words.”
Oren: Based on the comments that we get on articles, the number is greater than zero.
Chris: [chuckle]
Oren: I wouldn’t hazard a guess on the percentages, but there are certainly people out there who fit that description, right?
Chris: Not that nobody is naturally like that, but that is also a fan rage pattern that we have seen.
Oren: Yeah. I think it’s important to keep in mind the philosophy of complexity and depth, because often what people want is depth.
They want to do something important, and to acquire that, they require a certain amount of complexity. But because that’s complicated and difficult, often the complexity can end up becoming the goal instead.
I learned this from Extra Credits a long time ago. It’s a YouTube series.
You should think of complexity as a currency that you use to buy things that your story needs. They were specifically talking about depth, but I think this can apply to other parts as well. Or if you’re really nerdy and into certain video games, you think of complexity as the weight of your vehicle, and it needs to be increased sometimes to get all the systems you want, but increasing the weight is not the goal. It just sometimes correlates with particularly impressive vehicles or stories.
My favorite example of something that had lots of complexity but no depth at all was this game called Terrorist Assault Game or TAG, and it was a card game that someone brought back from a con at some point.
Chris: [laugh] That says it all.
Oren: Yeah. It was the world’s most complicated game of coin flips I’ve ever seen. It was like you play a card and that card says to do five different things that says to do more things.
Chris: And we’re trying to conceal the fact that it’s all just chance and there’s no interesting choices to make.
Oren: Yeah, there are no choices anywhere. It is all just random.
Chris: But you see, if we draw a flowchart, then there must be an interesting choice somewhere.
Oren: And it was so complicated and so without any player input, I am convinced it was trolling. Like whoever made this was “ha ha, I’m gonna really waste time for whoever plays this game”.
Chris: Oh, you say that, but have we not met people who have made very overly complicated things and were very proud of it?
Oren: It was just so perfectly zero input from players. THAT I feel like took some effort.
Chris: So yeah, when we talk about intuitive things we’re talking about something that links very closely with cohesion and consolidation.
When we talk about complexity and the ways to get rid of complexity, one thing is just to trim things out and cut things down. And the other thing is to make them more related to each other. Consolidating the story also reduces complexity, but without technically cutting anything.
But those things have to work together. So when we’re talking about intuitive stuff, that’s really what it comes down to.
Things are intuitive when they fit together, when they fit our existing patterns of thinking. So in our Believability podcast, we had this example of a world where all fire mages are doctors for some reason and how unintuitive that is, how weird that is, because it doesn’t fit our associations with fire or with fire mages.
Like in Avatar, the Fire Nation uses fire when fighting and people get burned. That’s generally the association we have with that.
And again, it’s not impossible to justify fire magic for healing, but it’s working uphill. And even then what you would end up probably doing is chart a longer path of association. So you know fire equals life, so fire magic is a life magic, and then life magic is used for healing. Yeah, something like that would probably be your justification. And you might notice I’m already drawing associations that are things that we already have, but it’s a longer path.
So it is inherently more complex and just less intuitive, because it takes more leaps and logic to get there.
Oren: Yeah. Using an example anonymized from a client chat that I had recently. We were talking about different abilities that a certain creature would have, and for the anonymized example, I’ll say lightning elementals. Say that their story had those. It would be pretty intuitive that they could use their abilities to charge a battery or mess with electronics. Right? That just seems like something lightning can do.
Chris: Because we associate lightning with electricity and we know that electronics run on electricity.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: Pretty close matches there.
Orenb: Pretty standard. But then if you want them to create lures for animals. It’s like, “okay, that is not what we think lightning does”. And so then you’re gonna need an explanation of how they create weird electromagnetic fields that mess with the electrical signals in the animal’s brain.
And that’s a whole thing. It’s gonna take a lot of explanations. Not like you couldn’t do it, but you know, you are really going against the current with that one. So that would have to be something that is really important for your story to be worth that much effort.
Chris: Yeah. And it really matters because again, it’s not just about each individual choice — and you will have lots of individual things in your story that you have to explain — but it also applies to how your entire story fits together.
So if you have a medieval fantasy and aliens suddenly appear, the very presence of those aliens isn’t intuitive.
Oren: Yes.
Chris: Once again, it doesn’t feel natural. It feels, if not directly implausible, just contrived. Meaning that it feels like you as an author inserted those aliens in there. It calls attention to your choices. It means they’re not still immersed in the story.
Oren: This is definitely an area where culture shock can play a fairly big role. We found that in general, stories have fairly similar characteristics even across different cultures, but this is an area where cultural expectations can make a pretty big difference.
And fortunately in the United States we have a reasonably shared culture. But if you are not religious, it will seem way more out of place if God happens to be real and the story doesn’t spend a lot of time setting up for that. Whereas it would be less out of place to someone who is religious.
That might seem perfectly intuitive to you but it’s gonna be a little weird.
Chris: An example I recently read, Teller of Small Fortunes, is a cute little charming, cozy fantasy story. And it had some small breaks in the world building that again, if it was set up a little more carefully, wouldn’t have happened, but were just random enough to bring it to my attention.
So for most of the story, I think there might have been in-passing mentions of non-humans, like fantasy creatures. But they are never there. There are only humans. We really do not see any fantastical creatures until about halfway through when the characters suddenly run into a nihilist troll —
Oren: [surprised] Oh!
Chris: —who doesn’t wanna get out of their way on the bridge because life is pointless. Which honestly, I loved the nihilist troll. It was very funny, right? But it’s still called attention to itself because it was like, wait, there are intelligent talking trolls? We’ve only ever met humans before.
Oren: And they can have existential crises!
Chris: [laugh] And so that’s the other thing. Usually I don’t use the three act structure at all, but I do think the first third of the story is a useful benchmark for when a lot of expectations are being set and when some of those associations are being created. And that’s why you wanna put major unexpected things in that first third.
And so having your first non-human talking entity halfway through the book, it just calls attention to itself a little bit. Like “oh, okay, that was not what I was expecting from the setting”. And then it gets stranger when there’s a sudden D&D quest two thirds of the way through the book, where the characters are suddenly compared to a D&D adventuring party in a way that just…
Again, there are worlds like Legends and Lattes that are clearly fashioned after D&D. But this did not feel like one of those worlds. [laugh] So when they are suddenly given a D&D quest from a mage on the road who just goes and tells them to fetch some treasure for them, it’s just… things like that, those small breaks, they don’t connect together very well.
And we can really tell when writers add something to their story that doesn’t quite belong there. Like they get a fun new idea when they’d already kind of preplanned their story and then they try to make it fit. Or they’re following a pseudo structure, like save the cat or the hero’s journey, and they’re like “oh no, I don’t have fun and games.”
That outside influence can really make it so that there’s a piece of the story that just doesn’t feel like it matches the rest.
Oren: Look, I know the beginning is fun and exciting and gets right to the story, but I feel like I need to stop it for a debate. Where the character debates whether or not to go on the adventure.
Chris: [chuckle]
Oren: It’s like “okay, sure?”
It is interesting that a lot of the things we’re talking about come back to theming. Let’s see who you really are. Oh, it was theming the whole time.
I was reminded of the ending of the Hunger Games. Spoilers, I guess, if you haven’t read that. It’s too late now.
Chris: [chuckle]
They had mentioned that the Capitol did some genetic engineering on some animals, but I was just completely ambushed by the wolves that had human faces. That completely surprised me and I was taken out of the story for a moment. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been because someone had told me there were werewolves, so I was expecting way worse.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: And they aren’t werewolves, but they’re pretty weird and random. That seems significantly beyond the technology level of the Capital up until that point. And I didn’t read the later books, so I don’t know if that kind of technology gets used again. I know in the movies it doesn’t. So it just struck me as “oh, okay, I guess these things are here now”.
Chris: Yeah. Honestly, with that level of genetic technology, you would expect that the candidates from the richer districts would be genetically modified.
Oren: Right. I would expect there to be more genetic modification if that’s the level they’re working on, right?
And I don’t remember there being any. And again, maybe it was in the books and it got cut from the movies. I haven’t read those books, but certainly in the first Hunger Games book, I didn’t see any indication they had that level of technology.
Chris: So, going back to theming. Because obviously this is why I talk about theming so often. And trying to make people clear what theming does and why it’s important. If we’re used to reading stories in recognizable genres, you may not realize how important it’s because you haven’t seen what happens when it’s not there. But the idea is that you consciously choose the kind of unified impression you want your world to make.
And what you need for this is repeating patterns where, when you have something that’s notable, it shows up again and again.
If you have ghosts, okay, put a lot of ghost stuff in your world. Have that show up in various ways. If I want aliens in my medieval fantasy, then I need to make sure both the alien parts and the medieval fantasy parts are just present throughout the story in some way so that they now fit in, so that we’ve kind of built those associations and things are intuitive and expected.
So then when you add more alien stuff, it’s like “oh, okay. I can see why those aliens are there. That makes sense. That fits with the earlier alien stuff I got”.
Oren: [agreeing noises]
Chrisb: Spoilers for Project Hail Mary, which is a fun book if you have not read it, but that one does something really cool where we start with alien microbes and it’s super high realism.
Later, it fits when we have intelligent aliens even though it’s actually a big surprise because the realism level was really high and we were just doing microbes. So an intelligent alien showing up is still a neat reveal, but it fits well enough with everything that we’ve already established.
So again, it’s not that you need to have your alien show up on page one, it’s that you have the things that are notable about your world kind of repeating instead of just having one alien sticking out in one chapter and then disappearing again.
Sometimes when people have a fun new idea and they’re trying to stuff it in their story in some way, it’s not well integrated into the rest. And that’s where you get these things that kind of stick out and they just don’t feel like they belong there. And you kinda lose that feeling that it’s natural.
Oren: The historical angle on this can get very complicated and you have to make some choices because some things about history are just very hard for modern readers to accept. One of the most difficult is linear warfare, which is the kind of warfare where both sides have muskets and they line up and shoot at each other.
Chris: [chuckle]
Oren: If you don’t already know about that, your mind rebels against it. It’s like “why are they just standing there? Why aren’t they in cover? Why aren’t they trying not to get hit?” And you need to understand things like morale and communication limitations and the danger of cavalry, and all of these things to explain why they fight that way.
And there are real reasons. They’re not all just bad at fighting, but it’s complicated. Unless you are an enthusiast of that era of history, it is very difficult to explain. And that’s definitely something that if you were gonna write like Flintlock fantasy, I would say is worth the effort.
Because if you don’t, the people who are most likely to like it are gonna wonder where that is. “Why aren’t they standing in lines? They should be standing in lines.”
But then you have something that’s more like… I used this as an example in a post a while back, which is that Julius Caesar, while he was doing all of his power shenanigans in Rome, was also the pontifex maximus, which is Rome’s highest religious office.
That just doesn’t get mentioned very much in the popular history of Caesar. So if you are just doing a fantasy inspired by Rome thing, I would probably leave that out unless you are really into that aspect of it, or you’re doing an actual historical fiction with lots of details about Caesar, in which case you should include it. Otherwise it’s just gonna add a lot of complication for, I would say, not a lot of benefit.
Chris: Yeah, trim it out unless you wanna talk about religion or unless your story’s about religion.
Oren: Yeah. If your story’s about the intersection between secular power and religious power in a Roman inspired fantasy setting, go for it. Right? Knock yourself out.
But if you’re just doing like a classic Rome inspired fantasy, your Caesar character probably doesn’t also need to be Pope.
Chris: This also means that if you have something in your world, you need to explain it. Why is there this quest item? And how come the character didn’t look for it before?
And you want to reach for something that the readers already know, that is already as much integrated into your world as possible.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So, let’s say you say aliens hate the cold, and that has been thoroughly established, and the alien behavior is entirely shaped by hating the cold. Then if you need an explanation, it’s “Oh yeah. It’s because aliens hate the cold.” That’s really gonna resonate because you’ve already built that association. It connects to what readers already know. The pathways in the brain are already there for it.
But if you make up an entirely new thing about aliens that they didn’t know, like “aliens, they also just don’t like the feel of grass on their feet.”
Oren: Yeah. They don’t like it. It’s gross.
Chris: Then you need to explain something with that. Again, the more you connect things together, the more everything has that feeling of naturalness and fits together and is more believable.
But it doesn’t just apply to world building.
When we talk about characters too, we can also talk about intuitiveness and character behavior and character design.
Oren: If this isn’t a controversial topic [laugh]. Just the whole idea of how characters make choices. Which is both very contentious and also a very easy way to lose readers if they don’t agree with or like the way your character made certain choices.
Chris: Yeah, especially if it has a bad result. If readers are screaming “why don’t you do this?” and the characters are doing something suboptimal and you can’t even understand why and it doesn’t make sense… yeah that’s a recipe for frustration.
Oren: So I recommend the starting position, and I need to emphasize that it is the starting position of your characters making choices, should default to like the most logical/rational choice they can make in pursuit of whatever motivations you have established that they have. That is the starting point.
And the reason that’s the starting point is that it’s a very easy place for everyone to be on board. And from there you can add more things that alter the way they make decisions and often make them less optimal.
And you can add traits. Is this character afraid of confrontation? So they’re not gonna take the direct route, even though that’s probably the best one. Do they love a good scrap? So they’re going to be more aggressive than maybe they should be ’cause they like fighting. These are things you can add on top of that.
But if you just start your character decision making off in the wilderness because people are weird and make weird choices, then nobody is on the right page, except for people who either don’t think about these things or already really like the character for whatever reason.
Chris: But also, sometimes you may know what goal the character’s aiming for, but you haven’t yet decided how the character will accomplish that goal. And again, going back to the same traits.
“Oh, I established my character is sneaky, so maybe my character should go about this in a sneaky way. Or my character is very bold and blunt. Maybe they should just walk up to the antagonist and demand something and something.”
Tying those things together and looking at what you’ve established about your character, and then invoking those things whenever you have the opportunity helps the character actions stay intuitive. It helps make them more distinct.
It makes it so that it doesn’t feel like you’re just “oh they have this trait”, but then the reader looks at them and is like “what? No, they don’t!” You’re showing and are just telling.
So again, the whole thing brings the character together. And I keep saying over and over again how important it’s for the story to be cohesive. That is what storytelling is about, right?
Oren: And of course there’s gonna be the feeling of “well, I don’t want my characters to come across as if they make the same type of decision the same way every time”. That’s true, people make a variety of different choices ’cause people are complicated, but the good news is that the characters where that is most likely to be an issue are also the characters where you spend the most time with them, because that’s when readers will notice if they act in a very one-note manner.
And that is when you have time to establish different things about them that might pull them in different directions. It might result in the character being bold and daring in one situation, but super cautious and conflict avoidant in another because you have time to establish why that is.
But if you don’t have time to establish why that is, and this is a character we only ever see two times and they just act completely differently in both in the different situations — even if you have a headcanon explaining why that is–it’s still gonna be confusing to readers.
Chris: And that’s just one thing. When people talk about character development, it’s always more development, more complexity, more flaws. They don’t talk about the fact that complexity can actually detract from a character if that character only has a tiny role.
You don’t have time for that much complexity if your character…
Or if you are just writing flash fiction, for instance, you don’t have a lot of word count. People won’t notice if your character has one trait in a flash fiction because you don’t have time, and they don’t have time to get to know the character.
Oren: There’s also the question of just explaining the speculative elements of your setting, which is potentially its own topic, but the same thing applies, right?
You try to make everything flow downhill as it were. You follow the ideas you’ve already set up as much as possible, and that’s why the Broken Earth is, for the most part, fairly easy to understand because everything is based on this kind of geological logic because of the way that the world is constantly going through these apocalyptic earthquakes, and that influences everything.
And you can often trace why a thing in this world is the way it is because of these earthquakes in however many steps it takes to get there. That’s why it’s generally pretty easy to figure out. And there are some exceptions. There’s a weird part where it reveals that they have like brain surgery tech in a setting that it really does not seem like they have that. Stuff like that.
But for the most part it works very well and it’s very cohesive. As opposed to something like our good friend Brandon Sanderson, whose magic system is very robust, but is also not very intuitive most of the time. It’s just a bunch of different effects. Once you know them, you can predict new effects from them, but learning them in the first place is challenging because they often just seem very random. It’s like “wait, which metal gives me super strength? And which one makes my eyes better? Yeah, sure, why not?”
Chris: [chuckle] Yeah. It’s kind of like a collection of superhero traits.
Oren: Which admittedly, metal honestly doesn’t have that many different characteristics, so I can see why he ended up just kind of assigning them randomly. I don’t know what power copper should give as opposed to aluminum. What different powers should those give? Metal doesn’t have that many obvious differences.
Chris: Yeah. If he just narrowed the band of powers, the possibilities for powers… if they were all sensory powers, for instance–I think he just wanted more that he could come up with — I think that would’ve really helped.
Oren: All right. Well, I think with that, we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If we made storytelling more intuitive for you, 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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.