The Mythcreant Podcast 515 – Making Politics Compelling
Political stories have a reputation for being boring slogs, and that’s only about half deserved. Politics generate a lot of overhead in terms of exposition, and they often make it difficult for readers to find a character they can cheer for – assuming they can tell what’s going on at all. Fortunately, we’ve got a few tips on how to address these issues.
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]Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is−
Bunny: Bunny
Oren: and…
Chris: Chris!
Oren: So, it’s time to start the story, and obviously the first thing you’re gonna have to do is memorize the list of 20 different noble houses.
Bunny: Is there a dramatis personae?
Chris: A dramatis personae with at least 90 characters, then it’s just not adult enough for me.
Oren: It’s not grown up enough. They each have a paragraph of introduction in the dramatis personae. No, you can’t skip it! There’s critical plot information in there. Each of these characters−it should be noted−they’re all scheming and mean. They’re all bad people. You don’t want any of them to get what they want. And also, you don’t know what any of their schemes mean.
Chris: What do they want?
Oren: Yeah, what would the outcome be? Why does it matter? Why is anyone doing this?
Bunny: They want power.
Oren: Yeah. They want it. Maybe they want− Who knows? Definitely not only doing this because I recently watched Dune: Prophecy, Foundation, and to a lesser extent, Succession, which all have these issues. We’re gonna talk about making politics compelling, because you wouldn’t think that would be hard, but it is. A lot of stories have trouble with it.
Bunny: Well, clearly the first step is to have a one word title.
Oren: Colon, right? Like Dune-colon-Prophecy.
Bunny: But only one word on either side of the colon. You can’t have more than that.
Oren: The issue that I’ve been seeing, and I see this in client manuscripts, too, is that there’s a trifecta of problems that these stories have. They have lots of information, because politics are complicated. They have no one to cheer for, because political dramas tend to be about morally gray characters where everyone’s a jerk. And since they don’t have a main character, they don’t get to develop characters very quickly. So it’s harder to build attachment.
Chris: Certainly the high number of characters that are usually involved in political intrigue divides your time more.
Bunny: But there are some choices that are just unforced. You don’t actually have to make everybody a jerk, and you don’t have to have all 20 combatants in the first episode.
Oren: There are solutions to this. Good, compelling political stories do exist. It could be part of the issue is the new way of streaming shows being made where they have fewer episodes, but they seem unwilling or unable to condense their story down to something that will fit in those smaller episodes, so everything is super rushed, and we’re never really sure what’s going on.
Bunny: And then the show gets canceled.
Oren: Or, I guess it could be Rings of Power, and it’ll just get made forever because it’s Bezos’ pet project.
Chris: But it does really make you appreciate Game of Thrones, which wasn’t a failure of basic storytelling, which is what some of these other ones are. Just the very basic things that you can usually take for granted at any big budget TV show or movie are just missing in some of these shows.
Oren: Which is funny because as much as people like to talk about the original Dune being a huge subversion and not a classic hero story or whatever, Dune−the original book−does pretty much the same thing Game of Thrones does in that it invests us in the Atreides before it starts the really complicated politics.
We at least care what happens to House Atreides. We don’t want them to die, and then once a bunch of them die, we are poised to cheer for Paul because the Harkonnens are the worst. But then you have Dune: Prophecy that comes along, and we don’t have any of that. Instead, it’s like the Bene Gesserit. They want to get a wedding because maybe it will stop a calamity that they think is maybe gonna happen.
But why should I care? What do I care if the Benedict Cucumber Bunch continue as an order? Right? What does it matter to me? It’s the same thing with the Emperor who was like, “I’m worried because the great houses are messing with me on Arrakis.” Who cares?
Chris: So we start with the “Bene Gerriet” as Oren called them.
Oren: Yeah, that’s what they’re called now.
Chris: Just call ’em something slightly different every time. The idea that they’re now starting their breeding program, because it’s based on eugenics, it’s almost an uphill battle. We’re supposed to root for the character who, her very first move is to engage in a power struggle so that she can do the eugenics program she wants to do.
It’s because they foresee some future something that has a fancy name. What it entails, we don’t know, and they wanna make sure that the “Bene Gerriet” survive. Why do I care if your order survives? Especially if you’re an order that, you know, does eugenics. “Hey, there’s a calamity that’s coming.” What does that mean? Are lots of people gonna die? What exactly is gonna happen in this calamity that we need to avoid? And why is that bad? Any number of things there could have really helped. But no, that’s actually very brief, and then suddenly we’re thrown into the future. Okay, so we’ve been doing eugenics for a while.
Bunny: Does the show ever acknowledge that it’s got eugenics going on, or is it always like…
Chris: If you’re familiar with Dune, you know, they’re basically a breeding cult. That’s what they do. Kind of hard to avoid that. I think you could downplay it, though, and just− instead of being like, “Yeah, we’re gonna arrange marriages to mix just the right genes together,” just focus on the other things that they do, like being counselors to kings and trying to help them make decisions.
Oren: I’m sure in the show creators’ minds, the idea is that, “Oh, well, you’re not supposed to cheer for the Bernard Jesuits. They’re not good people.” Sure. Why do I care if they win or not then? What is supposed to be compelling here? I’m not a hundred percent against the idea of a story with no good guys, where everyone’s a jerk, but you gotta give me something.
Chris: Some reason to be emotionally invested in the outcome or else it doesn’t work.
Oren: It’s harder to do that if you decide everyone’s a jerk and everything is bad no matter what. It’s not impossible, but this show has certainly not done the work to overcome the hurdle of “I don’t care if anyone here wins or not.”
Chris: Very basic of hurdles.
Oren: What was ironic with Succession− We’ve only seen the first four episodes, right? So, I’m sure the show’s fans are ready to tell me that it changes and it’s different. It was funny because the first couple episodes actually cleared this hurdle because it was funny. The show was fun. It was, these characters are all bad people and it’s funny to watch them scheme against each other. The only people who get hurt are also bad people. It’s kind of like really high-budget Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Chris: In the first episode, they scheme over whether they’re gonna sign this contract where their father wants them to modify the family trust to give his wife more power in the event of his death, which you can imagine is not necessarily appealing to his kids. And we can get that basic idea, but there’s a lot of things about one kid wants him to fire a particular person−you’re probably not gonna remember who that person is−and just a lot of details that are fuzzy around the edges, but that’s easier to let go of if the scenes are just funny. Maybe you don’t need to understand the politics.
Oren: But then hilariously, it regressed, because by episode four, it really feels like we’re solidifying around Kendall as the main character. That was a bad choice. I didn’t like that choice. I don’t really care about him. Even though they had that really awkward Save the Cat moment where he’s like, “What? My subordinates are pressuring a woman to date me? That will not stand. I am a crusader for women’s rights.” Where did that come from?
Bunny: Saved the cat, and the cat was woman.
Oren: The cat was ethical gender dynamics at work. It’s not like it had it a hundred percent guaranteed that he didn’t care about those things, but he certainly didn’t seem like he cared about it. The way that he talks to his other business partners, he’s basically sexually harassing them because he thinks it makes him look like a big man. Very weird. It was very awkward. It felt forced to me.
Chris: When Succession, the humor dies down, what you’re left with is a very flawed protagonist, that they want you to feel sorry for him enough that you are willing to root for him. And I was like, well, now it’s just a drama with a jerk protagonist. It’s not interesting anymore. Again, I’m sure that the show goes places, but that’s how I felt after four episodes.
Oren: Yeah, and Foundation was even worse. It was like Dune, but−granted, we’ve seen all of Foundation, so we know it doesn’t get better. Whereas theoretically, Dune: Prophecy still could because by this point we’ve only seen the first episode. But Foundation, I had no idea what anyone was doing half the time. And I certainly didn’t care. You’ve got the Evil Empire, which is doing Evil Empire stuff. Then, you’ve got the Foundation, who is trying to make it so that we can reestablish the Evil Empire after it collapses, and then towards the end there’s a thing of, well, maybe that’s not what the Foundation is for. It’s like, all right, well, a little late to establish that, don’t you think?
Chris: The Foundation show does start you off with a character that they deem to be sympathetic so they find somebody who could actually be an underdog and talk about how she’s really into math. Math is illegal on her own planet, or something. Then, she works for this famous guy. But the issue with that is that she’s not actually that central to the story, and she doesn’t have that much agency. Then she ends up working for this guy that we’re supposed to believe in, and we don’t have any reason to care about him. And then we of course keep going back to the weird emperor dude… or clans? Clones?
Oren: Clone emperor drama.
Chris: The Foundation, I have to say, that was a very difficult adaptation because it’s just an idea. It sounds like there’s not really an ongoing storyline to the original book.
Oren: The book is not good once you get past the initial, “Oh, that’s a cool idea.” It’s what happens when people try to write books based off of high novelty social media memes. What if the empire was gonna collapse, but a bunch of scientists camped out on some distant planet and saved all the technology? That sounds cool for a couple chapters and then it would get boring, which is what happens.
Bunny: You gotta keep it up.
Chris: Yeah, I think what Game of Thrones and the original Dune did well is we have to start with some characters that we can say, these are good guys. You’re supposed to root for them.
Bunny: Or at least not despise them.
Chris: Likable enough that you can get emotionally invested in their success. From there, introduce people who are against them, so you have some initial starting investment, and then from there, as you get to know more people, maybe you can humanize the antagonists, start to make things a little bit grayer. Maybe the antagonists have done bad things, but they’re in a tight spot and expand outward and try to keep things apprehensible.
Oren: That’s maybe something that writers now have trouble with. Maybe I shouldn’t say that as “writers now”. That makes it sound like I’m panicking about the youth of today and their stories. Some writers have a problem where they look at stories like Game of Thrones, and they’re like, “Wow, in Game of Thrones, we really ended up caring about some very flawed people. So what I’ll do is I’ll just fill the story with the worst people you can imagine and just assume that the same thing will happen.” Not realizing that, in Game of Thrones, we had some pretty uncomplicated good guys. Then, we slowly humanized the seemingly jerk bad guys, and eventually, we found out they weren’t all bad guys. So we had a lot of time to build that attachment. It wasn’t just, this is the start of Game of Thrones. All of your protagonists have pushed children out of windows. Those are who you’re gonna follow from now on.
Chris: And again, making those initial characters that you’re rooting for central to the plot. In the beginning, the Starks are the perfect example. We open with them. We get attached to them. Then, we follow Ned Stark, right as he has a crucial job in supporting his friend, the king. That goes wrong. The Starks do become less important to the politics. But at first, they’re at a very central role, and they’re still important later. You gotta have your likable characters also have agency. They can’t just be on the sidelines. But having that central role to start with is also important.
Oren: The Starks provide a really important service, which is that they allow enough people to like the story so that it can get popular enough for its diehard fans to be like, “Well, actually I’m not really a Stark because the Starks are too goody-two-shoes. I’m more of a Baratheon. I’m a badass, but I can be sneaky,” kind of thing. If it wasn’t for the Starks, the story would never have been popular enough for us to get into arguments about which great house was the best.
Chris: When it comes to the complexity of those politics, just being able to say what the stakes are in tangible terms and have the conflict be over something that people understand. Like, “Hey, there’s a valuable piece of land that has spice that we want.”
Bunny: I do think there’s often an issue where if the conflict is just politics, the consequences can feel pretty abstract, especially if all of your characters are like high power nobles or something like that. Maybe they care about their people or whatever, but it’s also like, oh no, I’m insulated from the bad thing that will happen, but other characters who aren’t part of the story might end up feeling bad about it. If the stakes mostly feel like they’re about other people, that’ll be harder to get invested in unless we can see the outcomes directly affect the character as well.
Chris: That’s the issue with Dune: Prophecy, where they decide they’re doing eugenics. Suddenly we’re 30 years in the future. The conflict is over whether a marriage happens so that a princess can come train among the Bennys so that she can maybe somehow end up as an empress on the throne. Then, whether or not the current emperor maintains control over Arrakis. Why is a marriage important? Oh, so that she can come and study. Well, why is that important? He’s got several layers to go trying to dig under the surface to find why any of this matters.
Oren: My favorite part of that was that apparently the lady who founded the Bunny Jumping Jacks, she wanted the eugenics program, but apparently created a doctrine where it was heretical to do eugenics. I don’t know what’s going on there. I’m so confused.
Chris: Yeah, they had their hardliners, apparently, were opposed to eugenics. So it suggests that there were some other religious orders before they became Ice Cream Town.
Bunny: This is all bizarre to hear without having seen a lick of the show.
Oren: I mean, it’s a weird show. The first episode is very confusing. Beyond having a character who is likable or what have you, I think the best thing you can do is to ease readers into the politics, in most cases. You don’t have to start with every single grand plot at the same time. You can start with a relatively straightforward situation of the king is coming to your castle, and now he wants you to be the hand of the king to replace the last one who died under mysterious circumstances.
That’s fairly straightforward. You can understand that. And once you get your grounding, then you start the more complicated stuff.
Chris: And in that case, we can clearly see that there are some life-or-death stakes that are at a more personal level. So, the last hand of the king died under mysterious circumstances. That implies that if Ned takes the job, he might die under mysterious circumstances. And because we care about Ned, that matters. Even if we don’t understand, for instance, what kind of beef somebody might have with the king and what the stakes are there.
Bunny: I think that’s another fumbling point. A lot of stories rely on physical stakes without life-or-death or physical threat, writers might not be as adept at keeping the tension up.
Chris: Doing a political storyline with not-high stakes, I’m not gonna say it’s impossible, but that just seems very difficult because you need something important to attach all of these schemes to. And if it’s not high stakes, especially when you have so many people participating, usually things that are lower stakes are also small in scope, like whether the family business goes under. I mean, you could have 20 different relatives in a political conflict over whether the family business goes under. You can have, I guess, smaller scale politics, but generally it’s gonna be high stakes.
Bunny: I’ll also say deescalating from life-or-death stakes to stakes based around talking is a letdown. At the end of the first Hunger Games, Katniss has to talk to President Snow or whatever, and there’s this line about, “Oh, the most dangerous part of the Hunger Games is about to be begin.”
Oren: No, it’s not.
Bunny: No, we’re past that, I think. I get that you’re nervous about this interview, but you’re not about to get shot with an arrow, probably.
Oren: The chances of you dying in this interview are not high. I’m not gonna say they’re zero, but they’re fairly low.
Bunny: I think what it was trying to do is be like, “Oh, the fate of my district rests on my shoulders.” But it’s like, Katniss, you’re good at interviewing. You charmed a bunch of people before the games started and during the games. You’ve just come out of this really traumatic, high-stakes conflict. I think you’re not gonna be too fazed by this interview.
Chris: To be clear, you can have high-stakes talking even with high immediacy. It’s not like you can’t set up a story situation where, “Hey, answer my riddle. If not, you die,” and create that same high-stakes immediacy with talking. You can attach a lot of other stakes to talking, but one of the reasons fight scenes, in visual media especially, are so compelling is because somebody could get sliced open at any moment. The stakes are high, and the immediacy is really high.
Oren: Yeah, but what if they have a sharp tongue, Chris? Then anything could happen.
Chris: Often political intrigue stories do have high-stakes talking. That’s not unheard of.
Bunny: I’m not saying it can’t be done. It’s just, if you have to tell me that, “Oh, this is more dangerous than the other part,” then it doesn’t feel that way.
Oren: Right, you could try showing.
Bunny: That’s a solid idea.
Oren: There might be some aphorism about that. We’ll never know.
Chris: I’m thinking of situations in Game of Thrones, after Little Finger throws the leader of the Eyrie to her death some other noble people come in and then they start questioning Sansa about what happened with the idea that they could arrest Little Finger and drag him away.
So, you have those kinds of tense conflicts there, and Sansa actually decides to back Little Finger, which is really surprising, with the idea that she’s now so suspicious of people that she’d rather go with the enemy she knows than these strange nobles where she doesn’t know what they want.
Oren: I have definitely noticed that with some of my clients, they’ll set up some kind of political, or at the very least social, intrigue story. Then they will also have an action plot that is either disconnected or only sort of connected, and it really feels like they would rather be writing about the action plot because there is just a lot more description of it, even though it’s not happening on screen, and we keep stopping the social stuff to hear about the action plot that’s happening somewhere else.
Once that happens multiple times, you start to feel partly it might just be that you would prefer to write an action story, in which case please do that. Action stories are fun, but it also could just be that you aren’t sure how to make the politics feel important. A good way to do that, and this is much easier for novelists than it is for TV show writers, is start with characters who are not super big, important leaders. Characters who happen to be in the right-slash-wrong place at the right-slash-wrong time and get involved in this. And you see this in stories like The Expanse, which has this complicated political struggle between Earth, Mars, and the Belt, but the protagonists are a normal crew of randos who just happened to be an important place, and then they become central to this political conflict and how it turns out matters to them. They’re not just going home to their mansions at the end of the day.
Bunny: I was going to call this trope the fish out of water, but I think the fish in Parliament would be a better name. This is, incidentally, The Abess Rebellion.
Oren: No, stop that. Stop bringing up my books. No one’s gonna believe it wasn’t my idea.
Chris: Our new hobby is embarrassing Oren on the podcast by bringing up his book.
Oren: Also, it should be noted that The Abess Rebellion, the main character of that book is definitely more important, politically speaking, than the main characters in the Expanse. It has some unusual circumstances, but I did decide to start with a fairly high-up leader character for reasons.
Chris: I do think another thing that you can do if you have a complex political situation, you need to simplify it. Besides just being like, what are the stakes? Have a conflict be over something that people can understand. Narrow things down to what the determining factor is in this conflict. Maybe inheritance comes down to which person has the church’s approval. Everybody’s evenly matched. And so people think that’s gonna be a determining factor. And then you can narrow down the scope and focus on who has the church’s approval. And then while you’re doing that, set the stage a little bit more so that if you wanna complicate things after somebody gets it, and then make things not certain, you can do that.
But for now, we understand, oh, church approval. Now, what does a character have to do to get church’s approval and why might not they get the church’s approval? Much simpler than the entire conflict over inheritance and all the various assets and liabilities each potential heir could have. Or, if a country may or may not become independent, maybe it comes down to whether they get a powerful ally that’s willing to back their play and war and side with them against the people that they want independence from.
Again, a way to just narrow that conflict down a little bit, focus a little bit more while you set the stage so that if you wanna broaden the conflict again, people will understand what’s going on.
Oren: Part of it is also just understanding the scope of what kind of politics you’re planning to bring into it versus how long a story you wanna tell. I did get some feedback on my story from people who wanted the politics to be more complicated, and I thought about it, and I was like, all right, if I wanted to do that, I would just have to make the story much bigger, and that’s just not within my capacity right now. The politics are gonna have to remain as relatively straightforward. I don’t have the endurance to write the first Game of Thrones novel again. And that’s a bigger issue for people who write movies or television shows. I can imagine an interesting version of the separatist conflict from the Star Wars prequels, but it’s hard to imagine explaining it in a two hour movie.
Bunny: Man, Sophie is such a goody-two-shoes.
Oren: Well with that, I think we can declare that our political objectives have been completed. I hope everyone memorized the dramatis personae, because it will be on the test.
Chris: If you found any of our tips useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro music]