The Mythcreant Podcast 458 – Making Your Story Believable
No one wants their readers rolling to disbelieve, but how do we stop it? Sometimes it can feel like beta readers are flagging every single aspect of the story as unbelievable, which is super discouraging. Fortunately, we authors have options for helping readers believe in our stories, so there’s no need to throw up your hands and disavow the entire concept just yet. Listen on as we discuss how to keep a story believable, what causes disbelief in the first place, and when it’s time to just accept that some readers won’t buy it.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Mbali Mathebula. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro music]
Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of The Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: And it’s just the two of us today for the next couple weeks. It’ll be just us. We can complain about things Wes and Bunny like, the Three Parts Dead. Wait, I like Three Parts Dead. Darn it.
Chris: Oh, I can complain about Three Parts Dead.
Oren: No, it’s my favourite.
Chris: Hoisted on your own petard.
Oren: I don’t like it.
Chris: Readers get to watch you fan rage.
Oren: Oh man, that’s going to be rough. But okay, so we should probably talk about our topic for today. Problem is, I don’t actually believe in podcasting. You just listen to strangers have a conversation for half an hour. That sounds really contrived. I don’t think anyone would ever do that.
Chris: Oh, geez. It’s like some author came up with a bad social experiment.
Oren: Certainly, when I used to listen to a lot of podcasts, I certainly felt like, why am I not allowed to join this conversation? This seems cruel.
Chris: It’s like a Black Mirror episode. What if the conversations happened where you couldn’t join in?
Oren: What if everyone you thought was cool was having conversations? And also, Mythcreants.
Chris: That is a common impulse upon listening to the podcast, because everybody is like what? Sometimes people get mad at us for not mentioning a story they wanted us to mention in the podcast.
Oren: I understand that impulse. I’ve listened to plenty of podcasts that I’ve been like, why aren’t you bringing up this? This thing is really relevant to what you’re talking about. Why aren’t you bringing it up? I just generally managed to not comment that.
Chris: I don’t believe that you’re not bringing this up right now. Must be deliberately ignoring it.
Oren: What we’re talking about today is making your story believable, which is a pretty hot button topic, a subject of much debate. Not quite as hot button as likability, but pretty hot button.
Chris: It’s hot button when you blatantly call things unrealistic. Our oldest hit post on the site, five unrealistic character traits, was me going around and pointing at popular characters and being like, that’s unrealistic. Made people very mad back in the day and we kept getting lots and lots of traffic to that. The more you make people mad, the more traffic you get.
Oren: There’s also just a huge backlash to the idea of something being realistic or not because people get tired of pedantic, silly critique like CinemaSins, which is just pointless. There’s nothing to it, but it’s not enough to just say that. So instead, they rebel against the idea that anything in fiction should be realistic. And I caught myself recently writing, this has a problem of not being grounded. And Chris had to call me on it. What does that mean, Oren? Why are you using the word grounded? And it’s because I meant realistic, but I was afraid people would think I was uncool if I said that.
Chris: The grounded, it is the hot new term, apparently.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a term people like to use now. And it means the same thing.
Chris: And you can expect that anything that readers often complain about, there are going to be a lot of storytellers, authors who come up with reasons to dismiss that because nobody likes to hear people criticize their stuff. That’s natural. I do think this is an area where we really have to come in with the right expectations because readers do flag all sorts of different things as unbelievable. And for reasons that may have nothing to do with what’s in your story, sometimes they are even factually incorrect. Objectively wrong. But again, blaming them is just not productive.
Oren: Yeah, and I get it. I’ve had some comments about something that wasn’t believable or was unrealistic. And I’d be like, I got that from history. That’s a thing that happened in these exact circumstances that I wrote in the story.
Chris: Oh, but you found something that was stranger than fiction.
Oren: Ooh, and look, there are two possibilities when that happens. One, you might just have a weird beta reading reaction. These things happen sometimes. Two, maybe that thing is perfectly believable, but the way that you are portraying it is not. You are doing something in your portrayal that is making a believable thing seem hard to believe in.
Chris: But fiction does have to adhere to a higher standard of plausibility than reality. Because in reality, we talk about the things that are incredibly unusual and unlikely, because those are the interesting things. And we believe them because they actually happened, or usually, hopefully, we have some evidence that they happened. That is, sometimes they didn’t happen. But nonetheless, they have that at least a veneer of credibility. And that’s why we believe it. Whereas when a reader knows everything in your story is made up, it’s just you can’t get away with stuff that people will believe is true in a nonfiction story. That’s too bad, but it’s how it is. And yeah, I don’t think you can make every single reader happy about everything. That’s just, don’t try. You’ll wear yourself out. And you’ll probably insert way too much exposition and explanations in your story. I personally like to look for anything that more than one reader flags independently of each other. If you have a critique group that acts like a focus group and they all talk to each other, that’s harder.
Oren: Yeah, because then they all contaminate each other, and they all get each other’s ideas. Yeah, no.
Chris: You don’t want to bother with things. If you sense that one person in your critique group brings it up and another person is like, oh yeah, now that you mention it, don’t know. That doesn’t count. Look, we have enough work on our hands without also addressing things that readers didn’t actually notice while they were reading and therefore didn’t negatively impact their experience. So you want things that multiple readers independently noticed. And if multiple readers flag the same thing, then usually it’s worth, what can you do, right? Even if they’re objectively wrong, again, there’s no point in blame. Our purpose is just to see how we can optimize their experience. And sometimes there might be either you wouldn’t change it anyway, hence the Tiffany problem. Or do you want to talk about the Tiffany problem?
Oren: The Tiffany problem is just shorthand for things that seem like anachronisms but aren’t, because the name Tiffany is actually quite old—many centuries old. But if you had a story set in the Renaissance and you had someone named Tiffany, there’s a good chance that would sound weird, like that would sound too modern. And there’s just a lot of these things, right? Some anachronisms are real, and people don’t ever notice them. Some are fake, and people flag them all the time because they go against people’s conception of what the story should be like. And you just have to decide how much of that is worth fighting.
Chris: Yeah, probably taking a stand that Tiffany is a historical name may not be your goal for the story. So that’s a place where you probably just don’t want to use the name Tiffany, even if it is technically a historical name.
Oren: Yeah, and I had a scene in my story that a couple of people flagged as being unbelievable. And it was a scene where it was a battle and some cavalry were doing this maneuver where they charge in and shoot a bunch of arrows, because they’re mounted archers, like rude guys, and they would shoot a bunch of arrows at the infantry and then very quickly ride away and try to lure the infantry into chasing them. And my beta readers, a couple of them, were like. This doesn’t make sense. Why would the infantry do that? That’s a thing that happens in actual battles.
This is a common tactic that the cavalry will use because, unless they are a very specific kind of cavalry, they can’t actually break through a packed infantry formation. So, they instead try to harass the infantry into breaking formation. And that was important to me. I wasn’t going to take that out, even though a couple of people did flag it as not believable, because I wanted this battle to be based at least somewhat on reality. So, I just did my best to make it believable and to show why that happens. And I decided to take the hit. I’m sure there will be some readers who are like, why would they do this? I don’t believe this. And I’m not saying those people are bad people. They just don’t happen to be as into the historical battle’s fandom as I am.
Chris: But hopefully somebody who is into that fandom will appreciate the tactics that are in the fact that they’re real.
Oren: Problem is the people in that fandom are gonna be like, well, your commanders aren’t nearly ruthless enough. Why aren’t they slaughtering all the civilians? I didn’t want to write that story. That’s why.
Chris: Oh no, no way to win. But yeah, readers flag all sorts of things everywhere. And don’t panic. Do the best you can. And honestly, if you get your ants high enough, if you make them entertained enough, they won’t care as much when something is not believable.
Oren: Yeah, that’s what I keep telling myself. There’s a concept here that I find really useful. And you touched on it earlier. It’s called intuitiveness. Intuitiveness is a very simple way to make your world more believable. Your plot too, not just your world, your whole story. And that is when things feel like they follow naturally from each other because that just makes them much easier to explain. For example, here’s an intuitive set of facts. The world has fire magic. Fire mages are employed as smiths and soldiers. You barely have to explain that. That just feels very natural. An unintuitive example, a world has fire magic. Fire mages are employed only as doctors. That’s weird, right? That doesn’t make any sense. How is that? And it’s like, okay, well, here I have this long explanation about how you can’t use fire to kill thinking beings because the god of fire loves humans because they created fire. And fire that mages make maxes out too low to melt metal. So, they aren’t really any use in a smithy. But it’s high enough to sterilize medical instruments, which makes them really useful in surgeries. And so, they gain a lot of medical skills by doing that. And then they become doctors. You can see how even if that made sense, that would take way more time to explain.
Chris: Yeah, I think that’s a good segue into when explanations can work and when they can’t. Because a big thing that we see a lot is that authors, especially since we have the option of adding exposition pretty easily into our narration, that think that explanations are the hammer, and everything is a nail. And we can just insert explanations or even arguments. That’s where it gets really funny is now when somebody’s, no, I can put in my arguments. I’m explaining, but it really sounds like arguments.
Oren: Yeah, every once in a while, you come across a book where this just feels like you’re arguing with a beta reader. Like some beta reader brought up that this doesn’t make sense and you wrote your argument with them into the story.
Chris: So yeah, sometimes if something is just unclear, the more explanation can… if something is just too subtle or implied, sometimes explanation can help. And this is an issue where, most of the time, we want to show where we can, right? And only tell where we have to. And if there are some things that you are showing that are just not coming across, sometimes you may need to tell to get that clarity. But again, too much explanation is going to clutter the story and add way too much exposition. This is definitely a reason, again, not to try to address every single thing a beta reader brings up. And I do wonder how many stories with extra exposition, part of that is that the author is trying to explain every question the beta readers have, everything the readers flag instead of just letting it go unless you have a reason to believe it’s a trend.
Oren: Yeah, I’ve definitely read client stories like that. It’s in my experience not super common in published stories just because the too much exposition bad mentality is really ingrained. I find it’s not super common for stories to be published with too much exposition. Though there are exceptions, and those exceptions are called a deadly education. But not entirely, right? There are also some stories where it’s hard to tell, does this story have too much exposition or not enough plot? It could be like that at one book series that I read, like Aftershocks, I think it was called. This book has a lot of exposition, but it also has no plot. Maybe that’s the real problem.
Chris: Sometimes explanations don’t work because the idea is just inherently unbelievable. And it doesn’t make sense, and there’s no compelling enough argument or explanation you can make that will make it make sense. And of course, nobody wants to admit or wants to hear that their idea is one of the ones that just doesn’t inherently make sense. But sometimes it doesn’t matter. As Oren pointed out, sometimes the story is too complex, and the explanations are just too much to keep track of. That instance where we have why the fire mages are only doctors and the amount of text needed, that’s just too much. If you have to explain that much, it’s not going to stick in the reader’s mind. You need something simple and strong if it’s going to work. And then another reason explanations may not work is if you’re showing something different than you’re telling. Showing is always more convincing. If the readers look at the actual events of your story or the actual things your characters are saying and they draw a conclusion that is in direct contradiction to what you tell them, they are not going to believe you. They are going to believe what they saw directly in the text. For instance, if a character is a jerk and you tell them the character is charming—it’s just an example—they’ll be like, no they’re not, they’re a jerk.
Oren: It’s rude to personally attack Sir Arthur Conan Doyle like that, Chris. That’s like a thing, I just finished recently a complete read of all of Sherlock Holmes, and it’s so weird how Sherlock is a huge jerk, similar to the way he is portrayed in the BBC Sherlock, but everyone around him acts like it’s no big deal, and the characters say that he’s super charming. It’s really weird.
Chris: Yeah, man, he is such a jerk.
Oren: Yeah, there’s a 1983 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles where they basically adapt most of the book line for line. Most of the dialogue is just lifted right off the page. And it’s so weird to watch Holmes say these deeply hurtful things to Watson, and Watson just be like, eh, whatever.
Chris: And the actor’s trying really hard, too. He’s saying these jerky things in a kind of friendly voice, but it’s just like, wow, you condescending bastard.
Oren: It’s very strange.
Chris: Again, there are a few places where explanations do help if it’s just a lack of clarity, but yeah, you can definitely do more harm than good by sticking explanations in everywhere.
Oren: And I would say that there’s a good chance that you may, at some point, need something that’s counterintuitive. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t, but plotting’s not perfect. There’s a good chance you’ll run up against something that is critical for your story to work. And at that point, okay, you may just have to take the hit. But you should try to minimize that, right? You don’t want to go around adding unintuitive things that you then need to explain if you don’t really need them.
Chris: The other thing, again, I’d like to mention, is the point that when you do explain something, you are calling attention to it. So if it is an unrealistic conceit that you just need for your story to work, it’s better to just, that’s how it is and oftentimes not explain it at all. And let just people get used to it and forget it’s there. And it’s really annoying when a story comes up with a very bad explanation, and then they keep mentioning their bad explanation. And they would build off of their bad explanation its like, look, okay, I understand why you need this thing, but can we just, can we let this go? Can we get rid of the blatantly wrong thing?
Oren: Yeah, a lot of masquerades are like that. Where the masquerade is really hard to explain. Often, there’s no way to do it in a way that makes any sense. But we accept it because we need it for urban fantasy to work.
Chris: Just in case anybody is unfamiliar with the term masquerade, this is the conceit in most urban fantasies where most people don’t know magic is real or magical creatures are real, etc.
Oren: And we need it to make that premise work; similar to, you might have something that’s sci-fi with a similar concept, right? Animorphs only works if we maintain the masquerade that nobody except for the Animorphs and one or two people knows the yeerks are here. That is something that’s necessary for a lot of stories to work. It’s almost impossible to explain it. That almost there means that there are some exceptions, but they are very rare. Most urban fantasy stories are not using them. And so in general, it’s usually best to just accept that’s a thing and tell your urban fantasy story, and stop calling attention to the masquerade. But some authors just can’t help themselves. I’m going to build huge plot points around the masquerade. Please don’t.
Chris: But what if we used oppressed mages to explain the masquerade?
Oren: Oh boy.
Chris: Now we have to explain the oppressed mages in addition to the masquerade. It just keeps getting better.
Oren: Yeah, the problem with oppressed mages is that almost no one adds them to a setting casually anymore. People add them to settings because that’s what they want the story to be about. And there’s not really a way to ignore the oppressed mages in most cases. It’s not like a masquerade; where it’s like a utilitarian setting device that allows you to have a certain kind of story. It’s just if it’s in the story, it’s almost certainly what the author wants to write about.
Chris: The masquerade starts to stick out. Again, a lot of things don’t stick out until the story makes use of them. In the masquerade, it is a thing that’s pretty easy to ignore until you get to the point where the protagonist is supposed to tell somebody about their situation. And they’re like, no, I can’t tell my mom I have magic because of the masquerade. So my mom’s gonna think I’m being real bad instead and ground me. That’s a typical thing. Now that’s when it becomes a lot harder, right? Or even worse, I’m not gonna tell my girlfriend I’m a hero. I’m just gonna not show up to dates frequently. There’s always a reason why the love interest doesn’t get to know. That’s a very bad reason.
Oren: Yeah, and that’s another one that’s, to a certain extent, that’s just a kind of story that people like. And I don’t necessarily know if it’s practical to be like, don’t ever have any conflict in an urban fantasy story where your protagonist is caught between their real-life responsibilities and their magical responsibilities. I do think you probably don’t want to lean on those too hard. Not like we don’t talk about Teen Wolf enough here on the Mythcreants podcast. But I think Teen Wolf has the balance on that pretty well set up. Teen Wolf has, especially in its early episodes, some sequences where the protagonists are like, oh no, we have a high school thing that we can’t do because of werewolves. Or, oh no, our parents grounded us because we were out all night, and we can’t tell them why. And it works okay, but they know when to stop.
Chris: They also have somewhat of emotional reason because they’re all werewolves, right? They’re not doing the whole urban fantasy shindig. There’s always the fear that a loved one will fear them when they find out, right? And again, when it’s between telling somebody and letting other people die, being afraid that somebody will fear you is no longer a compelling motivation. But it still gets to you a little ways when it’s personal.
Oren: Yeah, as a counterexample, they don’t go all the way that Buffy does, where Buffy and her mom have these really emotionally upsetting fights over this. At that point, it’s just, tell her already. I’m just frustrated that this is happening over such a nonsense reason.
Chris: Okay, so when we do have believability problems, we obviously have a variety of ways to take care of them. We talk about explanations a lot. Obviously, foreshadowing is one of our primary tools. Basically, what happens is that readers have a conception of how things work in their head that’s sometimes subconscious. And when you surprise them, things often seem unbelievable. So foreshadowing sets expectations, usually before they become super important, in which case they’re under a lot more scrutiny. And it allows you to have cool reveals, right? Where we put in little hints. We don’t actually realize there are aliens in the story until we want to reveal that. But then once we know that we’re like, oh yeah, we have these characters studying UFOs and these mysterious things happening. That was all the aliens. Makes sense. We have a better reaction. Another thing that’s commonly used, instead of doing little hints, you can just change things gradually. If you do it slow enough, it tends to work. If you want to introduce aliens, you could start with people discovering alien microbes first. Which is, depending if you have a high-realism setting.
Oren: If you had the Martian, you wouldn’t just have ET show up in the Martian. That would not make any sense. That would be unbelievable. But if you wanted to do the Martian and Mark Watney first finds some bacteria on Mars, that’s more in line, and you can work your way up to ET.
Chris: If you move it slowly enough, usually it works. Then there’s—we talked about this a little bit—it can be tough if you have contradictory ideas. That’s where it’s much harder to be like, yeah, just do it slowly. And sometimes there are two things that just don’t exist very well simultaneously. If you have a high-tech setting where characters are using swords. If you have aliens and also a bunch of fantasy tropes, it’s going to give people some dissonance, usually. And sometimes you can reconcile them by showing how they fit together. It’s a little tough, it’s not necessarily impossible. In Firefly, one of the things that they do is they have their sci-fi elements and their western elements, and they show that there’s these border planets that are generally much poor and low on resources, and all the high-tech stuff takes a lot of resources. They don’t have swords; they’re still using guns because guns don’t actually take that many resources. It’s hard to justify why people wouldn’t use guns. But nonetheless, there’s lots of, they ride horses, right, in the border planets, for instance.
Oren: The one that gets me is you have a modern setting or whatever, and everyone’s using swords, and I’m like, all right, sure, swords. I like swords. Let’s get into this. And then suddenly, one of them pulls out a gun. I’m like, no, why didn’t you do this earlier? Why are you not doing it again? Oh God, it’s ruined now.
Chris: I couldn’t pretend. I could forget about those guns as long as you didn’t pull one out.
Oren: It just feels like you’re trying to get one over on me. I feel like the author is making fun of me for putting in the work to suspend my disbelief. When it comes to characters, the maxim to remember is from the Vulcan dictates of poetics, which is that characters should act in accordance with their established traits. And that can be tough because sometimes we want a plot point that requires them to act against their established traits. And we’ve all seen Game of Thrones season eight by now. That’s a pretty obvious example where we want Daenerys to burn down the city, but that obviously goes against her interests and everything that we’ve established that she would do until that point. So just do it, whatever. You also have stuff like in book form in Legends and Lattes, minor spoilers, or not minor spoilers, significant spoilers for Legends of Lattes. Viv has this whole plot line about not giving in to the mob’s demands and not paying protection money because it’s against her principles. That’s like her entire stance. Not because she can’t afford it, because it’s against her principles. And then she has a meeting with the mafia leader and agrees that she’ll totally pay the protection money as long as she can do it in goods instead of coins.
Chris: And pastries? Or what have you?
Oren: Food and drinks. So now a bunch of mob guys are going to hang out at her coffee shop. What is this? What is happening?
Chris: I will say, though, that besides things that are plot reasons for having a character act out of character, there are also a lot of perceived character inconsistencies that can happen because readers do interpret characters very differently. And they may project themselves onto a character, for instance, or just have a different idea than you do about how a character works. In particular, if you have a character who is supposed to make some kind of behavior change, they are intended to change their mind. They have an act, and then they drop the act. Or they stop putting in an effort in. Any kind of changes that we would normally want when we are depicting complex characters, those can come off wrong or come off unclearly so that people just look at it and they’re just being out of character. In which case, sometimes if it’s a point-of-view character, you might need more internalizing to help keep people on the same page with that character. You may need to if you don’t have a stimulus, right? What is the reason they changed their mind right then? Did they get a new piece of information they didn’t have before? Was there something that emotionally moved them? They may need a catalyst to make that clear and to show the audience, okay, the before and after picture more clearly. This is tougher if it’s not a viewpoint character, but you can have your viewpoint character speculate on what’s going on with that character and wonder themselves, and that will help the audience because it will give the audience some kind of reasoning. Last, just remember that preventing believability problems can be a lot easier than fixing them later, after you’ve already drafted your story. Plan your magic system. Put limits on that magic early, because once that powerful magic is in your story, it’s going to be a mess to keep all of your plot points from being contrived. Choosing a theme, being conscious about the level of realism you’re employing. Do you want people to walk off bullet wounds, or do you want wounds to get infected? You probably don’t want both of those things in your story. So, planning does, in some areas, really help keep you from running into huge problems that are just too hard to fix after you’ve drafted the story.
Oren: Okay, with that, I think we are going to call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found what we said believable, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants.
Oren: And if you didn’t, I’m prepared to argue with you about it for five paragraphs. Before we go, I want to thank some of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie McLeod. Then 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. Talk to you next week.
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