The Mythcreant Podcast 566 – Rest and Relaxation Scenes
You’ve written so many scenes of pulse-pounding tension, isn’t it about time to slow down and relax, maybe with your characters on a beach somewhere? After all, your heroes deserve some time to unwind, and readers will enjoy it too. Up to a point, anyway. The big question with R&R scenes is how long they should go on, along with how often to have them and whether you can use them for multitasking. At least, we hope those are the big questions, because they’re what we’re talking about today.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Scott. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So, we’re actually gonna spend this episode just on the beach, sipping drinks and lounging in the sun.
Chris: We’re gonna do that snore cast that we talked about a couple episodes ago.
Oren: No worries, no concerns. Maybe a little emotional growth if there’s time, or rather, we will talk about characters doing that because it’s the Pacific Northwest in October, and there’s no sun. So, that’s not even an option for us.
Chris: What? You don’t wanna do a beach episode in the Pacific Northwest? We can go to Golden Gardens… (sarcastic)
Oren: As long as it’s not raining. I love going to beaches when it’s cold out. If it’s raining, that’s a different story.
Chris: But that’s probably ’cause you don’t actually get in the water. Can’t have a beach episode where nobody gets in the water.
Oren: That would be hard. So, here’s the opening question ’cause we’re talking about rest and relaxation scenes in fiction. So, important question for the panel.
Chris: For the panel as in me then?
Oren: Chris is the panel. (both Chris and Oren laugh) The question is, can you do beach episodes in a novel?
Chris: When we talk about a beach episode, are we talking about having an episode structure first of all?
Oren: Yeah. Not to put you on the spot or anything.
Chris: Okay. I would say actually no, because you can do an episodic structured novel. But it’s kind of a stretch. People aren’t really used to it, they expect a novel to have a much stronger through line, and I think that they can get used to it and it can still be fun, and we do have some episodic novels like travel novels that are very episodic.
But a beach scene is like an entire episode that is usually lower intention. That would be definitely weird in a novel ’cause I still think you would have a higher expectation, that the episodes will escalate to some degree. If it feels like The Witcher book, where it’s really just an anthology, with a framing device…(Chris laughs) If it’s an anthology, sure. But I think if it’s anything beyond an anthology, where we actually have some kind of through line holding together, there’s higher expectations for escalation.
Man, when we had beach episodes, that’s when we had TV show seasons that were like 20 episodes long. Now, big streaming shows are like eight episodes, and it would be a real waste to do a beach scene. We don’t got time.
Oren: Maybe a beach scene, not a beach episode.
Chris: Yeah, a beach scene. That’s true. Slip of the tongue but, yeah, we can do a beach scene, a single scene at the beach.
Oren: I think you would have the same issue with the novel ’cause, even a really episodic one like Voyage of the Dawn Treader which is our go-to example for episodic novels, doesn’t have that many episodes.
Chris: Probably 12 or something. I think I counted them honestly, and it’s in the range of 12, maybe 14 at most.
Oren: An entire episode is gonna be a pretty big investment of time.
Chris: And the other thing that makes this work, is that the through line has to be extremely low key If we’re gonna take a break like that, because if the through line is at all tense, urgency is at all high, the audience is gonna represent the “filler” because they expect the story to have more movement, instead of characters doddling at the beach.
Now, don’t get me wrong, some audiences absolutely love these. If you go to AO3 and look at fan fiction, (Chris laughs) there’s all types of different fanfiction, but you quickly discover one of the biggest motivations for a doing fan fiction, is that there’s so many people who actually want more low tension, personal conflict, and a lot of very popular stories that are much higher tension and much more tightly paced. And that’s of course, because these really popular stories are trying to appeal to a very wide audience, and so they wanna make sure that they have the audience’s attention. Whereas, when you have a story that’s for a more niche audience, like cozy fantasy, it’s meant for an audience that does not want a high-tension story. Then it’s a lot easier to be like “Okay, yeah, we’re gonna do some beach. (Chris laughs) Beach time.”
Oren: In general, if your through line is less urgent and less tense, then you’re gonna have less of a problem. Moving past the concept of an entire beach episode in novels, because that’s already a little strange. Let’s look at the beach scene, as it were, which is a little more manageable. First thing to think about is “why?”. Why would you include a scene like that? Would it be a scene at all or would it be summary? Would it be beach summary?
Chris: I’m not sure why you would do Beach summary. I mean, if you had an entire book that was on the beach side, and you’ve already done a beach scene, then you could summarize “Yeah, my character went back to the beach to relax for the afternoon.”
But, if the goal here is to have a scene that provides some wish fulfilment where we don’t just want characters to relax, we want the audience to enjoy the coffee shop atmosphere. For instance, if we’re talking about Legends and Lattes. Then, summary is really gonna, I think, take away a lot of that. Not that you can’t do some wish fulfillment in summary, but I think that to a certain extent that defeats the point, summary is for stuff that is not engaging but necessary,
Oren: You’d be more likely to summarize a character recovering from an injury, than relaxing for pleasure.
Chris: If your character has an afternoon to themself and we have to explain what they do for that afternoon, or we want them to spend all afternoon at the beach, but only when the sun sets…does the love interest show up? (Chris laughs) So, we just need to get them to the beach, but that part’s not supposed to be interesting, then we have summary. But, I think when we’re talking about scenes of rest and relaxation, a lot of times we’re looking for something that the audience can dig into and enjoy at some level, get some wish fulfilment in. I don’t think that summary really serves that purpose very well.
Oren: Which, I guess, brings to mind the next question. “What are you doing in a relaxation scene?” It could just be wish fulfilment, especially if you’ve got a really cool, fun setup. But, I think you are also often using them to give audiences a chance to catch their breath, and these can also be just a little bit of a relief to see that the characters get some time to recover a little bit if you have a tenser story. Because some stories can be tense, and you still wanna have little bits of relaxation between the really exciting stuff.
Chris: First, if we’re talking about pacing, letting the audience rest is particularly important. After you have a really fast paced tense scene, like you have a big fight or battle, what happens is if you have that super tense scene where the audience is expected to pay attention, to any moment and any moment could be a matter of life or death or something like that, or heated argument might do this, where the audience has to be in high alert because every moment is really crucial. That gets exhausting after a while for the audience.
That’s when they’re actually ready for a lower tension scene, and a complete change of pace, and it’s when they will actually be able to pay attention through it. So, if you have a scene that’s only kind of tense, maybe we kind of introduce a new mystery, but it’s not super tense. Then if you do like a really relaxing beach scene after that, you might lose their attention.
Oren: Right? It’s like, “oh man, we found that the diamond has been stolen. All right, let’s go meet at the bar for martinis.” (Oren and Chris laugh)
Chris: Right! At that point, it just feels like now we’re de-escalating instead of escalating. We were just getting revved up to get started on this arc, that’s when it’s gonna feel boring, but if you put that same “let’s go to the bar” after they’ve had a hard fight, or they had a jewellery heist and just barely escaped from authorities or something like that, now we’re really ready for that bar scene. My simplest rule about pacing is, always put your lowest tension scenes immediately after your highest tension scenes, and then ideally between that you’re going up steadily.
Low tension scene up steadily until your peak, and then you drop. I think you’ve described it sometimes as alternating tenses and non-tense scenes, and I think that also works if your tenser scenes are tense enough. If every other scene was a scene where a character was in immediate danger (Chris laughs) then, yeah, I think you could probably do every other scene having a relaxing scene if it’s tense enough. But, in a lot of stories, we’re gonna have a lot of in-between scenes where we’re booting up the problem or something like that.
Oren: When I talk about alternating tense and untense scenes, I’m usually talking about that with a client who, kind of, has no idea how to arrange their scenes and needs something really basic, and this is how I get them to break up three scenes of the characters hanging out and talking. “Okay, you can have those scenes, but they can’t all be back to back like this.”
Chris: And sometimes people ask me, “okay, how long is it acceptable to step away from the stories through line?” and just have the characters tend to their relationship or work on a subplot, and my answer is “well, usually you’re safe for a scene.” Now, that is still actually pretty generic ’cause some scenes are long and some scenes are short, but roughly a scene is fine. I don’t know, stories are very different from each other, and some stories kind of have two through lines. Like, they have an exciting external plot that happens in the beginning and then fades away, where the character works on their personal problems, and then the more exciting action fades back in again. There can be complex things going on that changes that up, but generally…a scene, is the amount that is safe, but it’s not necessarily all or nothing.
Characters can be doing something that’s meant to solve the through line problem, but they’re not in intense conflict over it yet. Like, “Hey, we need to investigate what happened to this murder, so we’re gonna go over to the mortuary”. So, we are working on that, but once we’re at the mortuary, we run into our ex and then most of the scene is actually spent on personal drama, but they’re still at the mortuary and they still come away with some sort of clue that they used on their murder mystery, for instance.
But, if you’re completely stepping away from the through line, I think a scene is about the rule of thumb I would go for.
Oren: Probably not a super long one, you wanna probably keep that scene on the shorter side and I think, to just hit upon an important point which is that, a lower tension scene is not necessarily the same as an R&R scene. If you just had a life-or-death chase, and now you’re gonna go and research what that thing was that was chasing you, that’s lower tension but I wouldn’t call it relaxing. You have to think about “what is the purpose of the scene.” If you’re trying to move the story forward by having your characters do some non-physical conflict, they’re trying to solve a riddle or figure out a puzzle or something, that can also be good, but it’s not really relaxing. When you think about relaxing, it’s really more about the feeling you’re creating and the reader.
Chris: But at the same time, you can have problems and conflicts during relaxing if you want to. Usually, you would just be aiming for them to be a little lower key, but oftentimes relaxation scenes are when you work on the more internal arcs of the story. Oftentimes, especially if, let’s say your character just made a bad choice in their character arc and then faced consequences, you have a relaxation scene afterwards. That’s a really important time for your character to then process what happened and then be like, “Hey, maybe I made the wrong choice there…naaah.” (Chris laughs) Or whatever you want to happen.
Have them talk it through with another character, have those relationship arcs, have those characters spend time with each other. I mean, I do think one of the really important things about those lower key scenes, whether they’re technically relaxing or not, is that usually during your really tense, fast-paced moments, you don’t really have as much time to focus on internal arcs. It’s just harder to then talk about their feelings, than it is if they’re having a tea party, for instance.
Oren: Here’s something to think about. Timing. When you’re planning these scenes, and this is more delicate the higher urgency your story is, and urgency is usually something – first of all, it’s gonna be more present in higher tension stories – and it’s usually going to increase towards the end.
Chris: I bet you’re thinking about A Study in Drowning.
Oren: You know, I wasn’t, but I should be. (Oren laughs) Now that you say that. I should have been. (Oren and Chris laugh)
Chris: It’s such a great example of a relaxing scene. It’s a culmination of a romance so, the characters finally decide they’re gonna go to bed together, but it’s just at the wrong time, and it would only take actually a fairly small change…to make it okay…but it’s a situation where the urgency is actually really high ’cause there’s a big storm, and they’ve been staying at this creepy mansion where they’re trying to uncover some evidence, and the storm was probably gonna bring the mansion down.
Oren: They don’t have a lot of time. (Oren and Chris laugh)
Chris: And that’s when they decide “bow chicka wow wow” (Chris laughs) and we really needed to reduce the urgency of the situation a little bit.
Oren: Usually the way that you would have a scene like that, regardless of whether the characters are gonna get it on or not, the result of some successful conflict or maybe a failed conflict – the resolution of a conflict on the character’s part – which now puts them in a situation where they just kind of have to wait for a little bit. If your high tense plot is that your character “needs to get these plans to the rebel base as soon as possible, and you’re running outta time” you would have a sequence where your character fights their way through the spaceport, and just manages to get their ship off the ground, and now they’re in hyperspace for a little bit and they got nothing to do.
So, they can talk about their feelings or go to town, whatever they want, and because that’s the result of a resolution, it is less likely to feel like “maybe you should be doing something else right now” you know? In character you can make it make sense too. Those are both important.
Chris: And having just a required waiting period. If there’s no movement on the through line for too long, it doesn’t really fix that problem because the audience knows that you created this. It’s like “Nope, sorry, but we can do nothing but stay in this cabin for three months” and then narrating three months’ worth of content. It’s still gonna make them impatient, but what it does is it takes care of that specific urgency problem where it distracts the audience with “how could they be having dinner right now? Somebody’s dying!”
It takes care of that problem so that they’re no longer distracted, by feeling like the characters need to be doing something else right now. Just any, any reason that they’re hold up or they have to wait. They’re waiting to hear back from somebody, for instance, and there’s just not a whole lot that they can do right now.
Oren: It occurred to me that a book series that does a lot of scenes like this is actually Lord of the Rings – which I find interesting – and it does more earlier in the story, they become fewer and farther between as you go. But, after the initial Shire sequence, we have the characters do a little bit of traveling and it gets a little dangerous, and then they just stop at various places. They stop at Tom Bombadill’s house, they stop at Rivendell. Or first they stop at The Prancing Pony. Then they stop at Rivendell. The order of operations continues, and in the second book, I think that one point they stop and hang out with, uh, oh gosh. What’s Boromir’s brother’s name? The less-good Boromir brother. Faromir, that’s his name. (Chris laughs)
Chris: Technically, according to the book, he is the superior brother.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true. And then of course, as the story ramps up, they have fewer and fewer of those (scenes). By the end, they’re just exhausted ’cause they can’t ever stop. There’s nowhere to rest. Both narratively and literally.
Chris: If I remember correctly, the pacing for some of those scenes at the end still, is not necessarily high. There’s a difference between the tone and the pace. So, that long trip where they’re trying to dodge Orcs as they get closer to Mount Doom, I remember that being kind of a slog. The Hobbit also has this long sequence where they’re going through this…Oh, gosh, what is it called? This gloomy forest full of spiders.
Oren: Murkwood?
Chris: Murkwood, yeah, that’s it.
Oren: The hobbit’s not real, okay? We don’t know what’s going on in The Hobbit. Tolkien was having some kind of fever dream when he wrote The Hobbit, nothing in The Hobbit makes any sense. (Oren and Chris laugh)
Chris: But, we can have long periods where there’s just tons of narration about how miserable the characters are, that doesn’t make it exciting. It just makes it kind of depressing, and so that’s how I feel like a lot of the Lord of the Rings ends up being. Whereas, when something is exciting, that means there’s an active problem for the character to solve that is providing an immediate threat, and that’s what actually makes it exciting. And you can have that excitement without making all of the characters super miserable all the time.
Oren: The Red Wall series also does this in a way that I find very interesting, which is food porn. It’s like, “hang on, everybody, pause the story. We gotta describe this deeper never turnip and tater’ beet root pie in exquisite detail”. And sometimes it is a little much, in some of the books you’re kind of sitting there wondering, “do we have time for this? Isn’t there a bad guy? I thought we had a bad guy to deal with?”
“Hang on a minute, there’s still soup. We haven’t done the soup course yet.” (Chris laughs)
Chris: A lot of cozy fantasy is pretty much well known for having slow wish fulfillment scenes, whether we’re going into details on the coffee shops, baked goods, but not the coffee…
Oren: Not the coffee though, just the baked goods.
Chris: We’re never gonna stop teasing Legends and Lattes for having really lackluster coffee description, but the baked goods are, you know, described-
Oren: Baldree, do you just not like coffee very much? (Oren and Chris laugh)
Chris: “Maybe it should have been a tea shop. If you don’t like coffee, I don’t know.” Maybe he just didn’t really know very much about coffee. It’s like, “I don’t know how to describe coffee.” I feel like you could research that pretty easy.
Oren: That was the part that confused me. I’m not a big coffee drinker either, but I was immediately able to come up with various things that they could do with the coffee, because I have the internet available to me.
Chris: Or the obvious. So, you have chocolate and you have coffee. Mocha, how about that? The obvious implications of the ingredients you are already established to have.
Oren: I kept expecting them to do that and they never did and I’ll never get over it. It’s broken my trust. (Oren and Chris chuckle)
Chris: Or Teller of Small Fortunes. That one is interesting ’cause they travel around, and they have their little wagons and they invent fortune cookies, which is hilarious. You always gotta invent something that exists, but we go into details about how they make these fortune cookies for the first time, and sell ’em to customers…
Oren: Red Wall is a weird book because sort of cozy, but also not. It has sequences that you would recognize from a lot of cozies, and yet, it is also occasionally very dark and brutal. (Chris laughs)
Chris: I guess the question is, “is it just inconsistent?” As I said, I feel like cozy fantasy comes from lighter, classic fantasy stories that had a cozy element, but were all so exciting, but still were sort of lighter in tone. Like the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, or Howl’s Moving Castle, or some Terry Pratchet, where those all have definitely neat wish fulfillment elements. Like talking to Dragons, the first in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Technically, it has tenser action than you wouldn’t normally have in a cozy ’cause the wizards are all evil, but you can just defeat them by pouring soapy water on them and they just melt. So, it’s never graphic. (Chris laughs)
So, we technically have a big villain that we wouldn’t usually have in a cozy fantasy, but at the same time, the story is still very light in tone and a bunch of time is spent on problems that are very cozy. Like, “oh, I was just sorting the dragons hoard and organizing everything very neatly, and then I accidentally opened the bottle, and a genie came out. Now we need to figure out how to get it back in there.”
“God, these knights keep showing up, wanting to slay the dragon. I don’t really want them to slay my dragon, so how do I convince them to leave” and other things like that. But it sounds like Red Wall gets…darker than that. (Chris chuckles)
Oren: A lot darker. Red Wall, actually, is kind of infamous for having a major character die every book.
Chris: Wow.
Oren: Yeah, sometimes a character survives through multiple books and I’m like, “okay, they’re gonna die eventually” and then eventually they do. “oh, that character’s been around for a while.” (Oren chuckles)
Chris: That just sounds like a total disconnect. It reminds me of- In Wings of Fire, the first book has violence between these dragons, in a story that is supposed to be anti-violence but is clearly not, but it’s surprisingly graphic. We get surprisingly graphic about all these horrible injuries that all of these dragon characters are getting, and it’s like “this is a middle grade story” and it’s true. The author does actually lighten up on the graphic violence.
Oren: Yeah, someone talked to her between books.
Chris: Somebody talked to her (Chris laughs)
That was just a thing, she didn’t know that she was going too far. She didn’t know where the right level of graphicness or non-graphicness was at, and she corrected it after a couple books. It’s like, “okay, that’s understandable.” It sounds like with Red Wall, they are not the right stories to have a major character die.
Oren: That always struck me as weird when it happened. “Huh? I wasn’t expecting that. All right. I guess that character’s dead now.”
A final form of relaxation scenes that I find interesting are scenes that you find in books like Animorphs. Which are less about the characters catching their breath, and are more about – to a certain extent – almost like what the Save the Cat people would call “the fun and games”. Where in the case of Animorphs, it’s like “what if we turned into an animal and hung out as that animal for a while and had a fun animal time?” You could see it’s superhero stories, It’s like a sequence where the character just kind of enjoys having powers for a while. Unlike the Save the Cat people, I don’t think that that scene needs to happen at a specific point in the story in every story, ’cause that’s ridiculous. But, you do recognize that kind of scene when it happens.
Chris: When I originally read Save the Cat, what interpreted is that you have advertised this story as having a specific novel premise, and this is where you fulfill that promise. So, if you advertise “oh, look at the funny hijinks that will be in the story.” That’s when you have the funny hijinks. For Animorphs it’s like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you could turn into an animal? Child, wouldn’t you wanna read this?” And that’s where you’re like, “Hey! Here’s the part where I give you that novelty I promised, and that wish fulfillment I promised, about turning into an animal”.
Oren: You can’t be fighting aliens all the time as an animal, sometimes you just gotta have a moment to be an animal. Classic case of Save the Cat, noticing something that does happen and then universalizing it because that makes it easier to sell storytelling advice. (Oren chuckles)
Chris: But I would say that dark stories can also have rest and relaxation scenes, the tone might just be a little different. For a cozy fantasy, we’re really looking for a heavy wish fulfillment experience, whereas in a darker story, it’s more about – obviously giving the audience a chance to rest – but also making it realistic that the character can keep going. (Chris laughs)
You can only put a character through so much then it’s like “aren’t they just gonna collapse from their injuries at some point?”
Oren: It’s fine, don’t worry about it, they’ll just keep chugging energy drinks. Those let you go forever.
Chris: You do want some variation in tone too, in the story. Even if you have like a dark and edgy story, your edgy twists are not gonna…feel that shocking anymore if you do that every single scene. (Chris laughs)
So, some contrast is still there, but it still shouldn’t feel like a cozy scene and then have lots of graphic violence featuring protagonists. That would still be weird.
Oren: I think now that we have had a long and difficult high-tension episode, we are gonna go and have our relaxation at the cold, damp, dark Pacific Northwest Beach. (Oren and Chris laugh)
Chris: And if you found this episode relaxing, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
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