One story is good, so wouldn’t two stories be better? And what if you put one story inside the story you already have? That way, your fans don’t have to put down the book if they want to read something else for a while. That’s right, we’re talking about stories within stories: how they work, what their problems are, and when you should use one. Surprising no one, we spend a lot of time talking about authors who’ve gone overboard.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[opening theme]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And?
Wes: Wes.
Oren: Okay, so for this episode, we’re actually going to record this one for a little while, and then talk about a different podcast that we recorded a while back. Maybe just record that one for a bit. We’ll just do my old Star Trek podcast, as if this was an old Star Trek episode. And then we’ll just come back to the Mythcreant episode and finish it out. Does that sound good? That sounds fun, right?
Chris: Yeah, absolutely.
Wes: We gotta fill up this time slot somehow.
Chris: Look, it’s important that everybody know the backstory of your podcasting career. So we gotta start talking about your previous podcast and then play some of it for a while. It’s just very important information.
Oren: I think we’re gonna have to go like full immersion and do the original two hour live broadcast setup that we had… for some reason. I still don’t know why. [laughter]
Wes: For the challenge, no doubt.
Chris: And let’s face it, this podcast would be so much deeper with a framing device.
Oren: [deep breath] Oh boy. Yeah, I wanted to talk about stories within stories, or nested stories as they’re sometimes called. And the reason is that I read a book that had one recently and it was bad and I’m upset. [laughter] So now I’m gonna make it everyone else’s problem.
Wes: Oh, and so what book was it?
Oren: Okay, the book was The Fisherman. It’s a novel that’s supposedly cosmic horror. I have some issues with that label. It’s got weird water stuff, but I don’t think that’s enough to call something cosmic horror. The problem with this one is, so it starts off with this very, very long backstory explanation that explains how these two guys lost their families. That takes a while. And then they go fishing together for a while. And then finally, one of them is, hey, we should go fish in this real weird, mysterious creek that I won’t tell you how I learned where it was. All right, I’m getting into it.
Chris: I like how this sequence, every time you’re like, okay, once we just get this part done, then I’m sure the story will begin. [laughter] Sure, okay, we need their dramatic backstory. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, maybe the story will start. Okay, well, they’re going fishing, but now they’re going to the creepy fishing hole. So I’m sure the story will start there.
Oren: Yeah, you would think the story was about to start, but then they stop at a diner and the cook there tells them the backstory of this creek for half of the book. Like, half of the book is just the backstory of why this creek is spooky.
Wes: Was it actually spooky?
Oren: No. [laughter]
Wes: Did it ever have a chance, Oren?
Oren: The parts in the present, when we’re not spending way too much time on backstory, are actually spooky. Most of the time. I’d give it about a 90% spookiness rating.
Chris: That’s pretty good.
Oren: Yeah, that’s pretty good. There was one really weird sequence where I think it’s supposed to be spooky, but it’s just gross. But other than that one part, it’s very spooky and weird. The interior backstory is the opposite.
It’s incredibly dry, and it tells the story of how a Hungarian wizard came to this area of New York and set up shop. And then a while later, a German wizard came and also was there, and they didn’t like each other, and they had a beef, and the German wizard won. And then the Hungarian wizard got banished to another dimension for a while, and he’s still around, and that’s why the stream’s creepy. If it sounds weird and dry, it is. This takes up half of the book, and it just does all of these things that I’m like, why is it doing this?
First of all, it has too many degrees of separation. So the protagonist is hearing this from a cook who heard it from a minister who heard it from an old lady who heard it from her husband who heard part of the story from the father.
Chris: Oren, every time you add an additional person, it just gets deeper.
Oren: Yes, and so I got really confused who the ‘I’ is, because this is all first-person narration, and I’m just like, who is ‘I’? Someone is ‘I.’ Who is talking?
Chris: One of those people in the chain is ‘I,’ but it’s like a shell game, or passing it back and forth.
Oren: And it’s barely related to the main story. It does technically explain why this creak is spooky. Other than that, it does foreshadow that this Hungarian guy likes to offer men their dead wives if he’ll help them. That’s a thing he does as an eldritch bargain, which he’s gonna do once we finally get back to the main story, but I don’t think we needed that spelled out for us. It was actually pretty creepy and well-established already. Like, I don’t think I needed that to be spoon-fed to me. That’s a term that people sometimes like to use for stories that over-explain things.
So this thing has several problems. One, it’s just not very good. If you tried to read this as its own story, you’d be like, what is this? It’s super dry. There’s no suspense. There’s no investment in any real character because we keep hopping around and we get very little characterization from anybody. So it’s just bad.
Chris: That reminds me, I just have to say, of Ten Thousand Doors of January, where we have this interior story that the protagonist continually reads, and we have to continually read it with her, but it’s one big exposition dump. It does feel, many times when this storyteller changes up the story, they just don’t try the second time around, including stories within stories, right? You didn’t try to make that inner story as engaging as your outer story.
Oren: And it’s also just weird because it’s just, as far as backstory goes, it is so unnecessary. I don’t need to know that a while back, the spooky Hungarian wizard had a beef with a different wizard. I don’t need to know that. All I need to know is that he’s spooky and weird, and that he’s trying to hook the great leviathan who lives in the deep beyond the world. I would really like to know what’s supposed to happen when he does that. The book never establishes that. But regardless, that’s all I need to know. And I need to know that he is offering these two grieving men their wives back if they will help him. That’s the actual premise of the story. I don’t need to know about this German wizard.
Wes: So the German wizard is the titular fisherman.
Oren: The Hungarian is actually the fisherman.
Chris: Because he’s trying to catch this little leviathan.
Oren: Yeah, because he’s trying to catch the leviathan. That part I actually like. The fishing motif is very cool, which explains why the backstory is so bad, because there’s no fishing motifs in it. It’s just a German wizard. [laughter] And the Hungarian wizard is doing some vaguely bad stuff, and he like turns one of the dead wives in the work camp nearby into a zombie. And the German wizard is like, I guess he should probably not do that. I’ll go mess him up. And then they have a little wizard fight. This is so counter to cosmic horror. Everything is all out in the open. Everything is very dry and matter of fact. That part is not, I don’t think, inherently the fault of it being a story within the story. I think that was just bad writing choices. But you’re not wrong that authors sometimes completely change their style when telling their inner story, and that can be a problem.
Chris: Honestly, it’s similar to POVs, which is one of my grievances against multiple POVs, is that usually the first POV in the book, the storyteller tries really hard to optimize that and make that engaging. And then they just take you for granted when they introduce the second POV. And it’s like, why would I care about this? Which is one of the things that – there’s other problems with multiple POVs. Obviously, we’ve talked about that a lot, but that’s one of the things that makes it worse.
Oren: The other thing that’s hilarious about this is these people, the two guys who are being told this inner story, they don’t know anything about magic at this point. All we know is that there’s a creek that has some kind of mysterious deaths associated with it, and the protagonist knows that his friend is being shady about why he wants to go there. That’s all we know at this point. And so they just go, and this cook just tells them a five-hour story about a German wizard. It’s supposed to be serious and scary, but it is hilarious. Try to imagine how that scene would possibly go.
Wes: Do they just lap it up too?
Oren: Later, they’re like, eh, that can’t have been real. But then they’re all real creeped out by it, because. And the story, the book even implies that they’re supernaturally creeped out by it, because I think later the author realized that he said it took an hour to tell the story, but the actual story takes about four hours to read. That doesn’t make any sense. So he has a little afterwards where the protagonist is like, later on, after all this happened, I was possessed by the spirit of exposition dumps, and I learned all this other stuff, which I have since added to the original story.
Wes: Of course.
Oren: What does that have to do with anything? What even was that?
Wes: It’s like the author got side-railed, went that way, wrote through all of that, then realized what he wanted to actually write about, returned to that, and was like, there’s no way I’m cutting this.
Oren: It does feel like backstory that got out of hand.
Chris: The other thing is that, and I think this is just an impulse to make your story compelling, that when writers put in these stories within the stories, then they’ll have their characters react to the story, right? Because they just heard it. But they always have them be so impressed, and it just comes off like bragging. It’s oh, wow, that dry story about a wizard, little wizard duel, is so creepy, and I’m so in awe. It’s changed me.
Wes: And you’re like, I just read that, and it’s terrible. [laughter]
Oren: I had to read that, man. Don’t tell me that was good. [laughter]
Chris: Which is one of the problems with stories within the stories, is that I think one of the reasons they’re attractive is we want to talk about storytelling because we’re storytellers. And so if we put in stories, then we can talk about stories. But in the majority of cases, this kind of meta-commentary is just very obnoxious. We don’t really want to listen to storytellers wax poetic about storytelling. It’s not very fun. Ten Thousand Doors of January did something similar. Oh, this book, it’s so riveting. It’s just an exposition dump. Or Middlegame.
Wes: But it’s about her father.
Oren: And if you don’t believe in the love story of Ten Thousand Doors, you’re a dirty imperialist.
Wes: I read her, I don’t know if it was immediately her next book, but The Once and Future Witches, as far as I’m aware, it’s what she published after Ten Thousand Doors of January, and still includes stories in stories, but in an effort to draw her main story’s connection, which is basically three sisters who are witches, spoilers – [laughter] if you didn’t get that from the title – to the larger folklore of witches. So periodically throughout this book, there’s just literally a fairy tale. I skipped most of them. I turned the page, oh, this is a fairy tale. Okay, back to the story. I get what you’re doing, but it’s exactly what Chris said. It comes off as pretentious. And sure, there might be enjoyment there, but I want to see what’s going on with these sister witches. I don’t need to read a rehashing of Hansel and Gretel to explain what’s going on with this person.
Oren: Please tell me about the sister witches. That actually sounds interesting.
Wes: Yeah, I did like that a bit. So it opens up with, it’s set in New Salem, and it’s meant to be a suffragette and witches story. So set in New Salem, the youngest sister basically arrives there. She’s got her gnarled staff and she’s 17 and just left home under some odd circumstances because she was the last one there with her dad. And basically finds her sisters and their meeting has this weird magical energy about it. And they accidentally summon the Tower of Avalon for a moment. But then, they get involved in some local politics with a suffragette group, but they’re not willing to take steps. And the young witch is, we have power. Why would we not use it? It follows that trajectory of them forming their own group and then trying to collect more knowledge because the oldest sister is the town librarian and they piece things together.
Anyway, long story short, big spoilers. The bad guy was one of the first witches with the original three. And so it’s modeled after the Crone, the Mother, and the Maiden. So the three, the once witches and the future witches. He is Hansel from the stories who also acquired witch power, but he didn’t stay in the woods with the witch. He learned from somebody that she was bad. And so he killed her, but his sister fled into the woods, becoming the first Maiden. And he just basically used dark magic to keep his body alive and periodically burn witches.
I liked actually quite a bit of it. I really liked how they explained why did they burn witches? And she explained it as originally they burned the witches’ books because that’s where they kept their knowledge. And then they figured if we’re going to kill them anyway, we might as well throw them on there too. But it was more like we’re destroying your knowledge so you can stop this. Stop spreading this kind of stuff, these dangerous thoughts and things like that. In sum, it’s a good book. You could cut out two thirds of it. And that would be great. Because it’s 550 pages, something silly like that. And the whole story could be told in easily 250. That’s my experience.
Chris: It’s a good book, except for two thirds of it.
Wes: Yes. It’s like when you retell it and you’re like, okay, the core of this is good, but I did just skip a bunch of it. I’m liking these parts, skip, skip, and just chugging along because I don’t care about these parts.
Oren: I can see why the author felt the need to put in fairy tales if her bad guy is going to be Hansel, but I promise there was a better way to get that reveal.
Chris: Or just put in one fairy tale. Just put in the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. You don’t need any of the other ones. The trick to doing a story within a story is that you have to make it matter or else it’s just skippable. And that means that it coming into play somehow changes the outcome of the story. And there’s multiple ways we could do that. Obviously, it can reveal information about the history, and usually if you’re doing that, the character again is also reading, telling the story, listening to it, what have you. They learn something important that’s based on history. They use that information somehow. Method one.
Another method is just to have it impact the character in a way that makes sense. So this one is a little harder. I think it could risk once again getting into the kind of cheesy pretentiousness of having your character be like, oh my gosh, that story is amazing. But I think what you want to do is look at it at a personal level instead of just being like, this is the most incredible story that has ever been written. Just be like, hey, this, I empathize with this character, right? Because it feels similar to my own life. And it got me thinking, and I realized because of this character’s journey that maybe this is what I want to do for myself. So keep it personal instead of just talking about how amazing the story is.
Wes: I like that advice because it seems like sometimes these stories and stories aren’t written for the story or the characters, but the readers. And that’s the wrong approach for sure.
Chris: And then the other one is a little bit more unusual, which is breaking the fourth wall, which you have in The Neverending Story, which I might have to just read that book sometime since I’ve only seen the movie. But that one is just very unusual in that Sebastian, the main character, starts reading a story and then we dive into the story. But then as it goes on, it starts to link him and the story together. So the world starts to, he starts coming into the story world slowly.
Oren: You have a number of stories that use the framing device as a way to insert commentary onto the inner story or the main story, depending on how big your framing device is. The Neverending Story is hard to judge because it’s just silly in a lot of ways and not very well put together. So it’s hard for me to tell how well that strategy would work if it was better presented.
The recent AMC Interview with the Vampire adaptation does something that’s not exactly the same because it’s not a person being literally pulled into a book, but it’s similar in that the reporter is hearing the story from Louis. Louis is clearly lying at some parts and the reporter either calls him on his bullshit or investigates to be like, what’s Louis hiding here? These parts of the story don’t make sense. And that’s really cool. It’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen that work.
Chris: Yeah, it’s probably the only time I’ve ever seen using this for commentary on the inner story seems like it has paid off, especially since that allows the show to clarify that what people are seeing is domestic abuse, which people are bad at recognizing normally.
Oren: It’s helpful that they’re basically doing what you said, Chris, is that they are using this to reveal things about the character and rather than having the reporter be like, wow, Louis, that was the best story I’ve ever heard, or the scariest story I’ve ever heard.
Chris: Which is what the original Interview with the Vampire does. The boy.
Oren: My favorite thing about the new Interview with the Vampire is that the reporter guy is like, yeah, and so when I was like a young kid and heard your story for the first time, I was all like googly eyed and over impressed, but I’m not like that now. I’m snarky and jaded, so you’re gonna have a tougher audience. And it was so great. I loved it so much.
Chris: Looked at his old work, because this is a different interview. It’s like, thank you. No, it is not an interview. I really appreciate that. [laughter]
Oren: That adaptation is so good. Hey, what if we took everything great about the book and made it better, and either cut or subverted all of the bad stuff? The only way it could be better is if they included Lestat’s dad.
Chris: No, we don’t need Lestat’s dad [she laughs].
Oren: Chris, no adaptation has been brave enough to include Lestat’s dad. I won’t stand for it.
Chris: No, that was a good move on their part. But similarly, just going back to The Neverending Story for a second. I do think that the breaking the fourth wall makes sense to me, because it sounds a little cheesy, but they still make it clear, at least in the movie, that the message they’re going for is that imagination is good, and resist calls to give up your wild imagination to be more grounded. And it feels a little fanciful. It’s just like, hey, kids, the message of this story is you should go play with toys and have fun. Or maybe the kids need to read more books, right? Which is the other end is, hey, children, brush your teeth. [laughter] But nonetheless, it has a message that is about the importance of the imagination or of story worlds and books. And so then having a story where Sebastian has to participate in the story he is reading in order to save the story world just fits with that, and I think makes it so that it adds something as opposed to it just having commentary that isn’t useful or doesn’t… You want all parts of a story to be stronger together. And I feel like it fits that criteria. Even if that if you watch the movie, yes, it is a very silly movie. [she laughs]
Oren: One thing that I will advise, and I talk about this in my post from a few years ago on stories within stories, is that if you are planning to put like an entire or at least most of a story inside your book or whatever it is, practice your microfiction. Because that’s what you’re doing, right? Because what you should be doing is it should be short and sweet. I’m just gonna say, don’t do what The Fisherman did. It’s not a good idea. That’s too long. So you’re gonna want it to be much shorter.
And unfortunately, the example I use in that article is from a franchise I don’t want to give any more airtime to. So instead, I’ll use Bolin’s journals, the one that they find in the minds of Moria. And they don’t read us the whole journal, but they read us a section of it. And it’s real creepy. And it ends with we cannot get out, which is [shudders].
Wes: Very good.
Oren: Gives me shivers constantly. And so that inner story is used for a few things. One, it is used to fill in what happened, which is actually really important. And in the movie, one of the things that’s very confusing is that Moria apparently is super ancient, has been abandoned for a long time. But also there have been dwarves here recently. And it’s hard to tell what’s going on. But in the book, it’s clear that the dwarves are a recent expedition to Moria, which is an ancient, long-abandoned dwarf kingdom. So it gives us some exposition on that. And then it also sets the mood and builds tension as it describes what happened to them and how they all died and how they didn’t make it out and all of that.
Chris: And it’s very relevant for the characters, because if this prior party that came in here died, that means very bad things for them.
Oren: Yeah. So it both gives information that the reader needs, and it is really good at establishing the mood and building the tension of the threat the protagonists are about to face. And it does all that in a very short amount of time. Because if it had been much longer, any tension it had would have worn off because it would have been like, wow, we apparently have time to read this entire thing.
As opposed to something like the start at The Name of the Wind, which has a framing device. Before we even get to the framing device, we have some randos in a pub telling a story. And it’s short. I’ll give it that. I’ll say that much for it. But it’s otherwise just useless, because it’s just a story about this invincible superhero who nothing bad can happen to.
Chris: And he’s Kvothe, right?
Oren: I don’t know if he’s Kvothe or not, honestly. Kvothe is also like that.
Chris: I don’t know that he’s Kvothe, but that is the thing that struck me about it. Because Kvothe is supposedly really famous elsewhere, hence why he’s changed his name. Slightly. Changed his name slightly. Not enough that would actually disguise him. Just enough to pretend he’s disguised.
Oren: Especially since his hair is true red. Not like…
Chris: Red red!
Oren: Yeah, not like fake red people’s hair. No, like real red. You’d think that would make him pretty easy to find. But I think – it’s been a little while since I’ve read this – but I’m pretty sure that story they tell at the beginning predates Kvothe. I think he hears part of it when he’s in his childhood flashback. But I could be wrong. But even if that is Kvothe, it’s just… All it would do… It would be even worse, right? If that was actually Kvothe, and those were things he’s actually supposed to be able to do. The only way that would work is if we told the story about how great Kvothe was, and then the real Kvothe narrated to us about how I actually can’t do any of those things. People just expect that from me. And that might have had some value. But as it is, it’s just worthless. All it does is foreshadow the Chandrians, which is just not worth that much time and energy spent on this.
Chris: Yeah, it’s not an exciting story. It’s not tense. Really. I felt like it did more to establish the magic system, which is maybe what it was for, but I don’t think it had any particular purpose.
Oren: Right, especially since the magic… The part of the magic system that it establishes is the boring part. There’s two halves of the magic system in Name of the Wind. And there’s the actual, if not rational, at least robust sympathetic magic system that you have to think about, and it has trade-offs, and you have to figure out how to use it. And then there’s the true name system, which is if you know something’s name, you can make it do whatever you want.
Chris: I understand why people like the true name system, because they seem mystical, then it’s, oh, how do I get something’s name? But they don’t work out very well. Because then you just go around collecting names, and it just becomes uninteresting after that.
Oren: And look, maybe you can do something interesting with actually finding the name, but once you have it, it’s like, all right, now I got this name, and I can basically do whatever I want. I would advise maybe have something a little more interesting happen once you get the name.
Chris: Probably be one part of a bigger system that has other interesting things in it, perhaps.
Oren: Yeah. And then the other method that I talked about in that article is referencing sections of a longer story. And here, you’re not going to put the whole thing.
Chris: This is the Middlegame strategy, just to curse it.
Oren: Yeah, it’s Middlegame, but also The Magicians, which is not a book I love, but did use this aspect of it fairly well. Because in The Magicians, the inner story is basically Narnia. It’s called Fillory, but it’s Narnia. And The Magicians, although it is pretending to be grimdark wizard school, it’s actually grimdark Narnia. So having the protagonists already be familiar with the fake Narnia story is helpful, because it creates some beautiful dreams they have that the story can then rip to shreds, because that’s what the story is about. And I’m not saying that’s what you should write your story about. I’m just saying that if you want to, this is an effective way to do it.
And they talk about the story, and it becomes clear how it’s important. At first, it’s just like an offhand reference, right? They don’t belabor the point early. They just mention that it’s one of many fantasy books that the protagonist likes. And it comes up more later, once they realize that Fillory is a real place they can go to. And then it sets up the expectations of, oh, it’ll be great, and there will be fauns there, and we’ll be kings. Then they actually go there, [grimdark voice] and everything’s horrible, and the Aslan equivalent ate Lucy’s head. [normal voice] I see what you did there.
Chris: I feel like one of the issues with Middlegame is that it felt like all of the pieces of the bigger story were meant to be symbolic in some way. And it just came off as too much, right? Like, we’re trying to create a story that is supposed to be from a best-selling series that one of the characters writes. So we’re already putting it on a pedestal by talking about how amazingly popular it is. And then we take little pieces, and they’re supposed to be both from a really compelling story, and supposed to have some deeper encoded symbolism in them. And it only works to the extent that it does, because it’s like when you make up a fantasy chess game, and it’s not really chess. But you’re like, oh, this is a game where all the moves perfectly correspond to the political intrigue in the story. That’s never going to work. You can’t really do that. But you can pretend if you just don’t say what the rules of the game are.
Wes: Yup.
Chris: Then we can pretend it’s totally analogous. Same with Middlegame’s excerpts. We have these weird excerpts with weird language in them. And no, this is totally evocative of such and such, we swear.
Oren: Yeah, I guess maybe. The weirdest thing about Middlegame is that technically the characters in the book have all read the inner story because it’s a novel that exists in the setting, but they almost never talk about it. So it’s hard for me to tell how it’s supposed to apply to different situations. I just know that each chapter starts with a quote from this book, which took me forever to figure out it was an in-universe book. I thought these were just a completely different set of characters off somewhere else for a while. Which – that book exists. Maguire just went and wrote that as its own story. So I guess at some point it might be funny to go and see if the snippets from Middlegame actually match what’s in the full version that Maguire wrote.
Chris: I would be surprised if somebody’s reading these books that were written after Middlegame and just be like, okay, that’s cool. Nice text here… huh, we have this weird section where everything just doesn’t fit right and feels really forced. I wonder what that’s about.
Oren: Yeah, it’s like dialogue that was written for the trailer. [laughter]
Chris: Yeah, dialogue written for the trailer. Huh, that’s weird.
Oren: It’s like, why did they say that? I don’t know, but it seems like it would sound cool separated from the rest of the story and just set on its own. You’ll be watching an episode of Star Trek and they’ll be doing normal Star Trek dialogue and then suddenly one of the characters will turn to the camera and be like, and that is why we must continue our exploration at all costs. What? What are you talking about, Captain? But that was a line he had to say because it was in the trailer and it looked cool in the trailer. [laughter] All right, now I think our story within a story has come to an end, as is our story outside of a story, because the podcast is over.
Chris: If you enjoy this podcast episode within a podcast episode, please support us on Patreon. You can go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s the popular writing software Plottr, which you can learn more about at plottr.com. Then there’s Callie MacLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
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