Narration styles: Some are good, some are bad, and some are just frustrating! They leave you wondering whose thoughts you’re reading, how the narrator knows so much, and why they have to act so damned smug. Or maybe it’s just bad storytelling disguised under the banner of an unreliable narrator. All of that is our topic for the week, as we discuss books that did their very best to turn our hairs gray with frustration.Show Notes Dr. Strange Looks at All the Futures First Person Omniscient  Eifelheim The Last Murder at the End of the World  Black Swan Ministry of TimeTranscript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [opening song] Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny, and here today is: Oren: Oren. Bunny: And: Chris: Chris. Bunny: So I’ve run the numbers and I already know everything you’re going to say because I’ve been very clever and I’ve guided you into a probabilistic path that will result in the best possible episode. Chris: Oh, I see. So we just do what you tell us to do then. Bunny: Well, I knew you were gonna say that. Oren: Or alternatively, we don’t do what she tells us, but she knew we were gonna do that, and that was all part of the plan. Chris: She was just using reverse psychology on us? Oren: Or if we do what she was gonna say, then it was double reverse psychology. Bunny: Look, I just have a hand of Uno reverse cards right here, and I’m not afraid to use them. Oren: This is great because it means everything automatically makes sense, because if you think it doesn’t make sense, actually Bunny has complete knowledge of time and space, and this is the only way it would’ve worked. Bunny: All the other universes where something happened slightly different, they just ended in ruin. So this is the only way that we’re gonna save the day. Oren: It just makes sense. It just works. Bunny: Don’t worry, it’ll be a hilarious romp. So much hilarity. Just very romp. Trust me. Chris: Do you wanna tell me where this book hurt you and which book? [Bunny laughs] Oren: It was in a lot of places, Chris. Bunny: So many places in multiple places, and this is an episode that’s definitely not born out of Oren and I sharing grievance about certain books that we’ve been reading and I’m sure anyone on our Discord can already guess where this is going. Oren: [grandly] Begin the ritual airing of grievances. [Bunny laughs] Bunny: Today we are talking about frustrating narration choices. Oren: That title was a frustrating narration choice because it’s hard to say. Bunny: It’s actually clever meta commentary when I trip over my own tongue. Oren:  We’re very smart. Bunny: Perfectly calculated it. Chris: You had to do that, otherwise the day wouldn’t be saved. Bunny: Yeah, Oren’s computer would’ve exploded if I hadn’t pronounced that in a horrible way. Oren: Oh, no. Bunny:  So both of the main offenders today that inspired this episode were a version of pretty much first person omniscient. Starting with that makes sense because it seems like the perspective that’s easiest – or maybe not easiest, but has a very prominent ability to go wrong. Oren: I have only read three first person omniscient narration stories, and they have all been bad. Not bad for unrelated reasons; the narration has actively contributed to their problems, and it’s like my bugbear, second only to oppressed mages. Bunny: The thing is, it’s hard to have an all-knowing narrator who’s also a character, ’cause if they know everything, there’s much less tension. And there’s also just the question of why we aren’t just in someone else’s head. I don’t know if I can think of a first person omniscient story that wouldn’t have been better by just being third person omniscient or a limited perspective in a character’s head. Oren: There are several different ways you can go with first person omniscient, and none of them work. First you can go with, well, they’re not a character in the story. They’re like God watching the story. But why bother with a first person pronoun at that point? It’s just gonna cause confusion. Just do third person. Chris: If they’re not in the story, why are they talking about themself? Oren: But if they are in the story, how on Earth do they have all of this information? And how does it not just make them OP? The answer is either it does make them OP and they are ruining the story by being there, or you just have to ignore the fact that they know all of this when there was no way they could know it. Chris: They’re not really omniscient, but somehow they’re omniscient and we’re supposed to just live with that contradiction. Oren: The example of that one was from this book, Eifelheim, that I’ve mentioned a few times. I really love Eifelheim. It’s very good. It has this omniscient first person narrator who just turns out to be a random friend of the protagonist. It’s like, how on Earth did you know all this stuff, man? Bunny: Or at least all of the first person omniscient stories, to some extent that I’ve read have been like, the omniscient characters are like puppet master-type characters, and you have to hear them talk for the entire story because they’re narrating it. Even if they’re not puppet masters, they’ll pop in and provide commentary and I don’t want that. I want to read the story. Oren: I don’t mind commentary. Omniscient can provide commentary in a way that works very well. You have two options with this. You can either have the first person omniscient narrator, just be there constantly, in which case their presence gets very old, or they can just disappear for long sections of the book and then suddenly reappear. And you’re like, what? Who are you? Have you been here this whole time? And I guess we should stop dancing around the bush. I’m talking about The Last Murder at the End of the World. Bunny: Oof. That title. Oren: Yeah, so spoilers for that, ’cause Bunny and I both had to read it and certainly our time was spoiled. Chris: Wait, let’s be accurate. Neither of you had to read it. You’re not in class, this was not assigned reading, I wasn’t grading you, I was not giving you credit- Bunny: And it was Chris’s fault! [laughter] Chris: This is something that you punished yourselves with, okay? Oren: We were so depressed from Chris being mean to us last episode about our short stories that we made a bad decision and went and read this book. Bunny: It was a coping mechanism [mumbles indignantly] Our interfering leads were better than Abby! [laughter] They didn’t have Abby in my story, so… Oren: I don’t know this for sure, but I looked at some of the reviews for this novel. Because this author just likes to do weird, trippy murder mysteries, which in premise is fine. Weird, trippy murder mysteries can be very interesting. But I noticed that fans of his previous books were in the Goodreads reviews being like, what is this? What’s going on? And I’m not positive because his books are weird and trippy. But the difference seems to be that in this version, he has introduced the character of Abby, who is an omniscient AI narrator, and I don’t think his previous books had anything like that, and I really think Abby is the reason that fans of his previous books didn’t like this one as much. Bunny: Yeah. There’s also the setting. I don’t know if his other books have the strange asinine setting details that this one does, but man, I did not like Abby. I don’t think Abby added anything, and in fact, I think she subtracted a lot of things. She’s an AI that’s embedded in everyone’s head. Her role is to keep them feeling good and tell them the time when they ask, things like that. But she’s also got Dr. Strange powers. She’s calculated that the only path forward is if these things happen. Oren: And much like with Dr. Strange. If you think about it for two seconds, you can immediately tell that that’s just complete BS. Like with Dr. Strange, it’s like this 50,000 universes, this is the only one where we win. It’s like really? There’s no other universe where, what’s his face—Chris Pratt guy didn’t mess up the plan to defeat Thanos, because you guys were like this close to beating him and then Star-Lord messed it up. Chris: Or Thor aimed for Thanos’ head. They make a big deal of that. Oren: There’s no universe where he aimed a little higher or just his aim was a little off and it went higher? Come on. And it’s the same thing with this book, right? The moment the convoluted reveal gets made, you’re like, wait, hang on. That was your goal? There are so many more efficient ways you could have gotten about doing that. Bunny: The other thing about Abby is that, did you even pick up on the fact that she can apparently control people’s bodies? Oren: The book makes a point out of making you stumble over things that you would expect to have been established earlier. Bunny: So we find out that she can control them when they’re asleep, but it turns out, no, she can just control them anytime. You’d think this would factor into things. I’m pretty sure if I went back through the book and looked at it with that in mind, I could be like, why didn’t she just control that character then? Oren: There are a few points where that happens, where you’re like, hang on, you can control most of the characters, and if you could do that, you could have solved this problem much more easily and you simply chose not to. Then it does other things where it’s like, well, I have to obey the human characters’ directives, but clearly you don’t. You disobey them all the time, or you can interpret their directives in such a creative way that it’s basically no different. Chris: It’s supposed to be a murder mystery, right? So how does a murder even happen then?  Oren: Through a very contrived series of events. It’s very hard to explain. It’s like 10 levels deep of “Then this happened,” and then it’s like a Rube Goldberg murder. Chris: Why didn’t the AI stop the murder? Oren: There’s reasons, okay? There are reasons, and they do not make any sense. Bunny: Once the actual murder mystery investigation starts, the parts when Abby is very minor or functionally not present and the characters are doing some good old fashioned investigating—those parts can be very good in places. Just proving the point that Abby should not be here. Oren: Abby is just what drags that book down, like a weight around its neck. I don’t know if she’s supposed to be smug. Bunny: I don’t think she’s supposed to be. I think she’s supposed to be neutral. I mean, she’s what inspired our episode on emotionless characters. She talks about how she’s not supposed to have emotions, but you could tell the author seems pretty smug about Abby. Chris: The thing about a know-it-all character is that she probably seems know-it-all because she’s supposed to literally know it all. Puppeteers, not a great narrator. Oren: Abby has a lot of problems that are not specific to her being a first person omniscient narrator, but her being a first person omniscient narrator makes them all worse because you can’t get away from her. You don’t even have the advantage of her being a normal character who could potentially have problems that they encounter, because to be omniscient, she can’t really have any problems. It’s just a no-upside scenario other than it technically allows you to withhold information from the reader so that you can have a bigger reveal. That’s the only thing it does, and it’s just not worth it. Chris: If a narrator has an annoying personality, that’s hard to get away with. Again, this was one of my issues with 10,000 Doors of January, and this was just regular first person retelling. It was not omniscient. It just felt like the narrator took joy in scolding you and telling you what you think, and then in fact, you were wrong within the first line. The first paragraph, I just already wanted to punch her. Oren: That’s the book that tells you that actually, this is a great love story and if you don’t like it, you’re an imperialist. Gotta love the nerve of that to be like, my story’s actually great, and just have the narrator tell you the story is good. Bunny: See, Chris, I should have put that in my short story. I should have ended it with “And if you didn’t like it, you’re an imperialist.” Chris: Make sure you summarize the entire love story too. Oren:  I should clarify. Unlike first person omniscient, I do not think first person retelling is a viewpoint to be generally avoided. I like first person retelling. Chris: Yeah, it’s fine. Bunny: That was also like pretty common, whereas first person omniscient is like extremely rare. I can think of maybe three books off the top of my head that use it. Chris: I think it depends on how often we’re using first person. I think that we would find the number is greater if we found every single mention of the word ‘I’ in any book. But I think if we’re talking about where the narrator is calling attention to who they are and using ‘I’ a lot, I think we would get it down. Maybe A Series of Unfortunate Events. That one actually does have a first person narrator who is a person, who I think is supposed to be somebody who researched events after the fact. It’s unrealistic. At the same time, the book is light enough that I feel like it gets away with it a lot easier than if it was really serious, and the overall realism is low enough that I think that narrator gets more leeway. Oren: You can get a lot of mileage by being funny. There is an issue with first person retellings, which is that you need to be disciplined. You need to have discipline. Pardon if that sounded weird. Bunny: [laughs] Sit down on the caning bench. Oren: You have to have self-discipline because first person retelling can be an excuse to indulge in bad habits. We talked about 10,000 Doors of January, where the character is just lecturing us on the fact that her story is good. And I’m not gonna say that couldn’t happen in some other viewpoint, but I think an author would be much less likely to do it. And then the same thing with something like Deadly Education, because first person retellings allow you to do some pretty powerful things. Like, you could pause the action for your narrator to talk, which normally in a normal limited perspective, you couldn’t really do that, because narration indicates character thoughts, so passing time. But that means that if you have a tendency to ramble, now there are no safeguards to stop you from doing that, and you’re just gonna ramble. Chris: Again, first person tends to encourage people to get more into character and write in a more casual voice, which often is good. For a lot of writers that’s very helpful, but it also can encourage a little bit too much rambling. Related to this, of not using enough restraint, I’d like to talk about the thought dimension. So we say, oh yes, there’s no safeguards, but sometimes when there are safeguards, authors ignore them anyway. The thought dimension is what I’m calling it when you have a narration that is supposed to be unfolding events, so it’s not a future character retelling the story. It’s not an omniscient narrator that’s outside the story. It’s the character experiencing events as they happen is your narrative premise, but the thoughts just defy time and space. It can happen anywhere, but it’s usually most obvious in dialogue. So he’ll have dialogue like, ‘“Are you okay?” And then he’s looking at me with his deep blue eyes as though I’m insect pinned to a board. There’s only one time he’s looked at me like that before.’  There’s a whole backstory around that look and what that look from him means in the middle of a conversation. Bunny: It’s time for my manifesto, reader. Settle in. Chris: The premise here is that the character is somehow thinking all of this before they answer. You can tell, if the character comes to some conclusion that changes their answer, there’s no way to explain that other than they had all of those thoughts. There’s other parts of the narration that shows they must have been thinking all that, but like, who can think all of those things? Oren: They’re just like Xavier in the X-Men movies who just freezes everyone and has a little chat while everyone’s frozen. Bunny: It only works if they come out of the thought dimension and the other character has been snapping their fingers in front of their face for the last minute. Oren: Are you in there? Are you okay? Chris: Again, it’s just a matter of restraint about how much are you gonna prioritize pacing when you really want to talk about his deep blue eyes, and what kind of look he’s giving, and how you’re interpreting that look, all of the previous instances where he’s had that look. And I think a lot of authors just want to say all that stuff ’cause they like the nuances of reading deeply into conversations or other stuff like that. But I think you should just keep it trim, and then create pauses in the conversation for you to add commentary. Oren: Just to head this off at the past, ’cause I’m sure some smart aleck is listening to this and thinking, oh, I will make a character whose superpower is that they can pause and have a thought dimension. I’m not gonna say you shouldn’t ever do that, but be really careful because you would be amazed at how many sequences the drama is going to depend on your protagonist not having a lot of time to think. If they can pause and think about things, there will be no tension. They will just see the obvious solution and do it. Before you get real clever, consider the potential consequences. Bunny: Ah, the thought-dimensionator. Another book that gives into its impulses in the first person retelling and hamstrings itself with the specific premise it’s chosen to do the first person retelling within is A Ministry of Time: the other book that inspired this episode, and part of our Hugo Bait binge. So the premise is that the British government has a time machine and they’ve brought forward some people from the past. And the main character, her assignment is to basically host one of the guys who is like a sailor from Old England who is on an Arctic expedition that got lost. And so she’s introducing him to the world and teaching him things and also getting really horny over him in weird and uncomfortable ways. Oren: As one does. Bunny: But the problem is once the novelty of time travel stuff and the kind of comedy of manners witticisms that they exchange, once all that wears off, you realize that nothing is happening and nothing can happen. Because the reveal of the end of this book is that all these tiny moments, they mattered. You’re just not gonna see them pay off in this timeline. Oren: I’ve had dates like that. Nothing is happening and nothing can happen. [laughter] Bunny: Because the twist at the end of the book is that it’s the narrator writing this—question mark—for her past self so her past self doesn’t make the same mistakes, but the sorts of things that she points to as like, oh, don’t do this. Or she’ll go off and meditate and be like, man, if only I had done something a little differently. If only I hadn’t paused for 12 seconds. Chris: That was the one where the narrator was constantly pointing at everything in the story and being like, and this would be super consequential. Bunny: Yes, exactly. Chris: That’s its own frustrating narration habit there. Bunny: Pinky swear, this really super matters. Chris: I know this seems boring to you, but I swear this will change the world. And it’s like, will it really? And then you go to the next paragraph, and this will upend time. Oren: Many things can upend time and change the world, Chris, you don’t know. Bunny: It’s like Butterfly Effect, the book, except you never see the hurricane that the butterfly summons, because that’s in a different timeline. Didn’t happen in this book. Chris: I would actually say that effect is a subset of another thing that really frustrates me which is overhyping, or if I’m gonna be a little more critical, lying, which is the one where the narrator is basically overselling the content to try to make it more exciting instead of just having exciting content. And this one is that you’re talking about is particularly special because the payoff is completely outside the book, and so the narrator can just say whatever she wants.But a lot of times what you’ll see is that I have a lot of my lessons post, my critiques post, is a deliberate setup that raises expectations only for it to just blatantly not meet those expectations. Probably the most blatant one is The Alchemist. You have a chapter that ends with “And in that instant, Josh Newman realized that the world would never be the same again.” And then in the next chapter, it’s just, oh, the bookshop he’s working in, there’s a couple robbers. Oren: By the nature of entropy, the universe is never the same again from moment to moment. So it’s not technically wrong. Chris: Or in the beginning of the Remnant Chronicles, we’re doing all this kind of meta mystery, vague buzzwordy opening where,  oh, wouldn’t you know what to know what this ritual is where they’re scraping the protagonist’s back with knives and it’s like, calm down. They’re just applying henna. Bunny: Yeah. You’ve ever been to a festival? Oren: This is how they put henna on you, okay. Calm down. Bunny: special knife henna. Chris: So I’ve seen a lot of those and it’s all just like, why? Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that you do wanna make your narration exciting and sometimes there can be some judgment calls to make over whether you are selling it or overselling it. Bunny: The other problem with this narrator is also that when she’s not saying, “Don’t worry, this little moment, it matters, pinky swear, trust me,” she’s apologizing to the reader about the bad choices she’s making. The government program she works for is shady, right? So she goes along with a shady thing that they’re doing and you, the reader are like, aargh, when is something going to happen, and she’s like, I know I did the shady thing, please. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done the shady thing. Please. You gotta understand where I’m coming from when I was doing the shady thing. All right, moving on. Oren: Look, I can see the value in a first person retelling of pointing out that the thing that they were doing in the moment was wrong. But that doesn’t help the fact that it’s boring. Bunny: and it is quite a boring book. Oren: An interesting one that I ran into recently was the Watsonian viewpoint, which in retrospect, I actually almost never see in published fiction these days. Bunny: Yay, pop a champagne. Oren: I almost always see it in unpublished manuscripts, and I try to tell the author, please don’t do this. The reason is it’s a bad viewpoint choice, and it was annoying even back when Arthur Conan Doyle was doing it. We just let him get away with it ’cause he’s old and famous. I actually encountered a book recently that used it, the Justice of Kings, which was just the worst. We have our Sherlock character, the Watson character, and then a third character who is the POV character. The Watson’s Watson, if you will. This one is unusually extreme, so it might not be entirely fair to judge the entire practice using this one ’cause she gets nothing to do in the first scene. She has so little dialogue. I thought maybe there was gonna be a reveal that she was a ghost and that no one can see her. But no, she just has no presence. Chris: That’s something that I’ve seen happen in client works is if you don’t have enough for a character to do in a scene, it can just feel like they evaporated. And sometimes it can happen with a viewpoint character where it just feels like the viewpoint character just isn’t there anymore. Oren: But the beautiful irony is that I have seen more direct Sherlock retellings, and they do not use the Watsonian viewpoint anymore. Usually what they’ll do is one of three options. They’ll either just make Sherlock the main character, they will make Watson the main character, or they will make them more equal co-protagonists and switch between them. The Mimicking of Known Success does that. Chris: Yeah, it’s much better.  Oren: I really liked it, and it worked really well. That’s where the actual Sherlock style of story has evolved to. And then you just have occasional weird throwbacks like the Justice of Kings, where the viewpoint character is like a camera following the main characters around. And you might as well just use a non-embodied viewpoint at that point. What’s the point of giving it a character? Bunny: Just make it an actual floating camera. It’s just Cambot from Mystery Science Theater. Chris: Okay, I got another one. I gotta mention framing devices where people talk about the story. [laughter] So, Interview with the Vampire, there’s the boy who is technically supposed to be the interviewer, but it’s really just the audience for Louis to tell him like, “Oh, what happens next? What’d you do?” Or the Titanic movie where we have this whole framing device that’s just not completely unnecessary. Or even Name of the Wind where we gotta talk about how cool Kvothe is before Kvothe tells us his life story. Oren: Chris, if the story is boring, that’s just because it’s about a real thing that happened and real life is boring sometimes. Chris: It just feels like all of these framing devices, their actual purpose is just to hype the story.  Bunny: If you’ve got a character whose only role is to be like, “Wow, gee, tell me more, man, what happened next?” you don’t have confidence in your story to carry itself. Chris: It’s very storyteller wish fulfillment. They’re inserting somebody to be like, “Oh wow, storyteller, your story’s so cool. As your audience insert, I’m totally riveted.” Honestly, I’m not a fan oftentimes of narrators talking about stories at all. Like 10,000 Doors of January, for instance, is very much about stories. I found it all insufferable. Oren: As people who our entire lives at this point are built around stories, being lectured by the fictional narrator about how stories work doesn’t work well. Chris: I think my issue is that usually when we talk about stories within stories, it has a very romantic culture and connotation where we’re saying what to me is just a bunch of nonsense that sounds poetic. Bunny: [long noise] Oh man. Chris: I just don’t have patience for that. Oren: Well, I think with that final pet peeve, we are gonna have to call this episode to a close. And wouldn’t you agree, Chris, that it was a very good episode. Bunny: Just as I predicted. Chris: We’re gonna need a minute while I go into the thought dimension to review this episode and ask our listeners to support us on Patreon at patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: While Chris is off in the thought dimension. I am going to thank a couple 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’ll talk to you next week.  [closing theme] This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.

Novels are a delicious meal, but sometimes what you want is a snack. A bite-sized bit of fiction. Hence, the short story. These compact narratives pack a punch, but they also come with unique challenges. Fortunately, if a short story doesn’t work out, you can move on to a new one relatively quickly. This week, we’re talking about the best practices when writing short stories and also getting our own work cruelly roasted!Show Notes Bunny’s Short Story  How to Write a Short Story Save the Cat  Magnum Opus  Storytelling Constraints  Deathslinger  Shattered Ascension  Honor Among Thieves  Chaser of Shadows  Hellgate Incident 24 Gently Down the Stream Dragon’s Hoard  The Dragonet Prophecy  Spinning Silver The City Born Great  The City We Became  Vorkosigan SagaTranscript Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.  Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]  Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…  Bunny: Bunny Chris: …and… Oren: Oren.  Chris: Oh, sorry. This episode could only be five minutes long, so we need a topic that we can completely cover in that time. Quick, what should we do?  Oren: How about a topic about how this was supposed to be five minutes long, but ended up being two hours. Because that’s usually what happens when I try to do this sort of thing.  Bunny: [laughs] Unfortunately, I have to agree with Oren.  Oren: Or maybe we could just play the first five minutes of another episode as its own episode.  Chris: [laughs]  Bunny: What if we just played The Princess who Saved Herself for five minutes?  Oren: Yeah, here we go!  Chris: We could just cut it off at five minutes and then say To be continued, then promise somebody will make a follow up, and then never do it.  Bunny & Chris: [laugh]  Chris: So yeah, this time we’re talking about writing short stories, which is partly because I’ve recommended short story writing on the blog, and I’ll explain why. But if you’ve been writing novels and really longer works for a while, you might not know how to pivot to writing a short story. And there’s lots of different types of short stories. There’s not necessarily just one way to do them. At the same time, I think it’s worth going over some tips and what tends to work better for them. And I’m gonna focus on the 3000 ~ 5000-word length, just because that’s usually the standardized short story side that if you’re size it, if you’re submitting to a publication, people are writing. But I don’t mind talking about other sizes if the need arises.  Bunny: Oh!  Chris: Oh no, I just rhymed.  Oren: You did it. There’s an excellent rhyme there, but you should obviously do is start by saving the cat on page three.  Chris: And that ends up being like the very end of the story.  Bunny: And the cat was saved.  Chris: The cat was saved. The end.  Bunny: To be continued. Chris: To be continued. So first: why two short stories? We’ve talked before about how we work with a lot of writers—when we’re editing—that are on their magnum opus: Their first story, which is usually super huge, often a series. And what I personally experienced is very often you start this big passion project when you don’t know anything about storytelling, and then you learn a whole bunch of stuff because you wanna make your magnum opus that you’re super passionate about work. But what ends up happening is, unfortunately because of practical reasons, it’s just hard sometimes to get something that you thought of when you were new and didn’t know anything to a really good place. It’s not impossible. Some people have done it, but it’s like pulling teeth. It’s real hard and you have to rethink everything. And a lot of times you’re attached to everything, and you don’t want to give anything up. And so you’re working under 20 different constraints. We had a whole episode about constraints and storytelling and how they make everything hard. And it’s just really easy to get discouraged and think that’s how storytelling always is when your project has just made everything really hard for you. Because it can be really hard to rearrange those pieces. So if you work on a short story, that gives you the chance to start fresh. Focus on your skills as they are now, and to also experiment, which a lot of new riders really need—to get some experimentation out of their system. So that’s a really helpful place to do it at the same time. And then you could get a feeling of accomplishment because you could actually finish something that’s short. That doesn’t mean it’s like super easy. It tends to be more intense per word than writing a novel, but it’s still a short length. Again, it’s easier to just get it done and call it finished.  Bunny: See, I can intellectualize why all of these points are good reasons to write short stories. And yet I am god awful at it. I don’t think I would write a short story of my own volition. I’ve mostly been made to write short stories for various classes and granted. Those classes usually had us read short stories that were far longer than the short stories we were actually able to write for the class. So most of my frustrations with short stories come from specifically the 10-to-12-pages-double-space-Times-New-Roman-font-size-12 limitation. But I just, I cannot. So I’m glad someone here has tips about it.  Oren: Yeah. I used to have fun with a biweekly little flash fiction “contest”. The prize was that you got a little emblem to put next to your forum name for a week.  Bunny: Oh yeah. I love flash fiction for some reason. I can do extremely short and long things, but the short story is simply the wrong length.  Oren: Yeah, it’s ’cause the flash fiction is enough for one kind of neat idea. And then the moment you’re like, okay, I need a second one, and then that just opens the flood gates and it’s like, why not all the ideas?  Bunny: Exactly. See, Oren gets it.  Oren: I do.  Chris: This is process advice, but again, if you have not been consuming any stories that are about the length that you wanna write. Right, because that helps you get a sense of what kind of stories can you tell in a small space and helps get those ideas flowing. So I think that if you do wanna write a short story and you’re having trouble pivoting, one of the first things I would do is just look for how you can consume smaller stories on a regular basis. But I do think that sometimes it comes a matter of if we’re writing longer stories, we have a sense of what kind of material we find motivating. And that’s gonna change because you can’t do some of the things you’re used to with a novel. But you can do other things that might not hold your attention for a whole novel. And so, getting used to like, okay, this is what actually works for me at this length and this is what I like writing. I can take some kind of experimentation.  Oren: Yeah. Like I mentioned a few podcasts ago a manuscript that out of nowhere has a really intense car chase. Why does it have this? Well, the person watched Fury Road. If you want to write about a car chase and there isn’t room for one in your novel, just write a little short story. Car Chase is a perfect thing for a short story. They’re fun, they’re tense, they’re easy to explain what’s happening. Go for it. That’s a perfect scenario.  Chris: So just to be mean and stir up some drama on this podcast.  Oren: Oh yeah…  Chris: I gotta point out something I’ve seen both of you do in the short story, that does not work very well. And that is the fraught interaction. Between two characters that have a long history together.  Bunny: No! [laughs]  Oren: Chris, no, no! You can’t take that from me. Come on, Chris, have you no decency?  Chris: It just doesn’t work very well at a short story length because again, what you learn is that that matters if you already have emotional ties to the characters. If you already understand their history, so that you can be invested in that conflict. Whereas with a short story, you don’t have time to set any of that up, so you’re dropped in with characters you don’t know, with a history you don’t understand, and it really kills the emotions in their interaction. It really makes something that would be really heartfelt just fall flat. Backstories in general require— Bunny: Don’t take my backstory from meeee! Chris: [laughs] Oren: Maybe I want the emotions to die, Chris. maybe this is a story about emotional ghosts. You can’t be the boss of me. Bunny: Ugh, I’ve been burned so thoroughly. Oren: Yeah. I didn’t realize I was gonna be personally attacked on this episode. Bunny: But you’re right though. I think that is another thing that I struggle with with short stories is that we want a climactic, heartfelt, dramatic confrontation, but you don’t have time for much context. And it sucks because I want you to weep at my scenario, but you don’t care about it. Oren: It’s not my fault that I love interactions between characters with lots of history. It is a medical condition that I have, Chris. Bunny: [laughs] Chris: People can definitely do heartfelt short stories, but I do feel like by default the ones that are most successful, particularly speculative fiction, short stories, tend to be the ones that focus on high novelty concepts and fun ideas and gimmicks, and not on creating deep emotions. Because of that upfront investment in, okay, we have to get to know the characters and get to know their situation. And emotional investment takes time. So, I think that if you were gonna try to do that in a short story, you really have to focus in on it. You have to simplify, cut it down. And I’m not gonna say it’s impossible, but it’s gonna be a lot more difficult. And you gotta think about, okay, how am I gonna sell my audience on this character real fast? And is the character in a really sympathetic position, for instance, for me to do that? So it’s definitely a higher bar, whereas I think the ones that tend to be do really well are just like, Hey, look at this cute, fun monster. Oren: Yeah. Sometimes this can be a good opportunity to make use of one of those high novelty storytelling prompts that float around Tumblr and potentially other social media sites, but they’re like always screenshots of a Tumblr exchange. Some of those can work pretty well as short stories. What if that frog that we see dancing a lot was trying to start a dance school or something? That could be a short story maybe, but like probably not the ones that are like, okay, so what if a woman sold her firstborn to both a witch and a demon, and then the witch and the demon had a custody battle, and then they had to co-parent and then they fell in love. That probably wouldn’t work for a short story. There’s too many steps there. Chris: There’s a lot of different steps there. Yeah, but here’s some example of concepts I’ve used for short stories. I have a short story— Bunny: [sarcastic] Which are perfect and without any flaw.  Cause I don’t do that tiresome, ineffective, dramatic character confrontation. Isn’t that right, Chris? Chris: I mean, I do have serious short stories. I just think that the novelty ones work better. I’m just shoving them under the rug so that you don’t see them. [laughs] Bunny: Are you gonna passive aggressively link to Honor Among Thieves with the show notes? Just to leave that there. Chris: I don’t make the show notes. This is up to Oren. Oren: But I was definitely going to do that, so… Bunny: Oh, no. Cut it. Now I’m passive aggressive. Chris: I didn’t name any names. I did not name any stories. Bunny: Look, mine’s not published so you can’t prove it even exists. Oren: Yeah, we’ll see about that. Bunny: I don’t even remember what I called that one. Chris: But again, these are things like little shadow creatures must tame the household cat that’s terrorizing them. It’s a fairly familiar situation. There’s something that’s different, but it’s also something that can happen relatively fast, like you’re trying to monitor a gate to hell, but your asshole coworker won’t get you in an important document. Again, something that has something novelty in it, but is a relatively familiar situation otherwise, and is something that could be resolved quickly. Oren: Based on reader feedback in a mild defense—but not really—of my bad habits. My two best received short stories on the site have been Deathslinger and Shattered Ascension. Both of which have characters with backstories but getting that backstory across was the hardest and probably worst part of the story. Chris: But those are also your longest ones. Oren: That’s true. Chris: Those are notably your longest short stories. Oren: They are longer. Bunny: They’re so good! Chris: Which is fine if you decide that, okay, I wanna do my backstory and I need all this set up and I can’t fit it in the standard story length, and you don’t have your heart set on sending it to a publication or whatever, then yeah, go ahead! Make it a little longer! Make it a novelette instead or something that’s at a slightly longer size. Make it the size that it needs to be, and then you can try for a shorter idea for your next one. Oren: And even in those two stories, I didn’t depend on characters who knew each other super well. In de Slinger, the protagonist. Meets a character who she knew as when they were kids, but they haven’t seen each other for a while, so it’s not like they have a long history. And then in Shattered Ascension, the protagonist doesn’t know either of the two main characters who are also there with her. She’s only just met them. And so instead, I spent the time explaining this weird premise of what if everything was airships. Chris: I do remember having to very carefully manage how your backstory and context was communicated in Deathslinger. I do remember working a lot on that. Oren: Yeah, that was hard. It was a hard thing. Chris & Bunny: [laugh] Bunny: And that’s why you should write novels only. Chris: [laughs] Oren: Yeah, only ever novels. Bunny: [laughs] See, I think the problem I have with a lot of short stories is that they feel like scenes from novels, and that’s because I’m used to writing novels and because I want them to be novels. And that’s how I end up doing these interactions that require so much context. I think the first short story that I’ve written that was alright but not very good was basically just an action scene. It was just an action scene grabbed out of context and it still wasn’t very good for that reason. Cause I had to explain in the middle of combat how the magic system works. Oren: Yeah! [laughs] Bunny: And that was, difficult, let’s say. But required less personal setup. Oren: I did basically the same thing for the first and possibly only short story I got to write for college. Bunny: Wow. How’d you get away? Oren: All of the classes said creative writing. And I finally found one that didn’t entirely lie. We did one short story exercise. And I wrote something similar, it was an action scene. And with very little setup, it was like, assassins want to kill this lady and she’s very cool, so she’s not gonna get killed. And I turned it in, and the professor’s feedback was basically: It’s not very good. Make it better. Which you’re right, it’s not very good, but I don’t know. Could I get something a little more specific? Bunny: Right. And I think Chris, with the short story that you mentioned, of mine, that you’re subtweeting here: I made it more difficult for myself because not only was it this backstory between two characters, but they were also on a quest to retrieve or reach a magical object that also needed to be explained because it was affecting the environment. So there were eight different things going on at once. Chris: Bunny. I hate to break it to you, but I’m not referring to just one story. Bunny: Oh, no. [laughs] Wait, what else would mine have you read? Chris: I’m so much a meany. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help it. I had to say it. Bunny: Okay. Okay. Okay. You gotta name ’em then. Chris: I don’t remember their names. Bunny: Oh… [laughs] we were gonna fight about this. Chris: That was one of them. The other one was actually a play. Bunny: Oh, it was a short play with the monsters, wasn’t it? Chris: Yeah. Bunny: Okay. Yeah, that one too. I like that one though. Aw. Oren: Please stand by as the Mythcreants hosts air their dirty laundry. Bunny: [laughs] I mean, maybe I’ll just give you a link so you can post one of them, so that people actually know what we’re talking about here. Oren: If you want, you might as well. Bunny: I might as well. Oren: If they’re available, I’ll take a link. I’ll put that in the show notes. Just see if I won’t. Bunny: Yeah, I think Stormcaller was that first one. I will get you all a link so you can see how bad that short story was. Chris: Yeah. Oren just has lots of them. Oren has even more of them than you. Bunny: Look, I think Honor among Thieves is very good. Don’t listen to her, Oren. Oren: It’s less bad than it originally was. You put it that way. It’s part of the expanse punk genre of stories where you can tell whoever wrote this had just recently read The Expanse. Chris: Again, the other thing, backstory is huge. That’s a really big deal and trying to jump into super emotional moment without enough context… But I think it’s also worth talking about, okay, how much stuff do you have in your story and how unique are you trying to make it? So you have a unique and complex world and tons of characters and lots of places and things. It can just be too much. That’s unfortunately a lesson I had to learn when writing short stories is that I don’t really have room. To do an interesting world. Even in my novelette, Gently Down the Stream. I tried to do an interesting world and I realized it was a bit overburdened. That I struggled with that one a bit because the world was actually more complex than my 12,000 words short story could really handle. Oren: I do remember there was a bit of discussion about whether we could have letter carrying dogs. Bunny & Chris: [laugh] Chris: I really wanted the letter carrying dogs. Bunny: Oh my gosh. Chris: I really wanted them. Bunny: Okay, well now I want them. Chris: That was the darling I had to kill. Oren: We tried to figure out a way to make that work and we just could not do it. Chris: Yeah, we had to kill, I had to kill that darling Oren: But the dog is fine, to be clear Bunny: This episode is just trauma. This is just short story related trauma, some of which is inflicted. Chris: Now that I’m working on stories that are longer, that’s the thing I’m enjoying: doing more worldbuilding. With the short story, again, it works much better if you just take a stock world from the nearest sub-genre. And then if you want something unique, make the story about that so that you’re not overloading. The story has to be directly about that. I mean, Gently Down the Stream is a post-apocalyptic version of Seattle with a unique monster that causes a post apocalypse and then people live an entirely different way and it’s just, you know, it’s just too much. Oren: I would say that the pick a standard sub-genre and then add a weird thing is a very successful way to do short stories. Because one of the issues with short stories is that they cannot deliver the same level of satisfaction as a novel because they’re very short and they aren’t gonna have the same attachment ’cause they are short. So giving something that is a big novel hook. Is a good way to get people to read them. And good news: By the time the novelty fades, the story’s over. Chris: And that’s also why they work really well for subversions.  Cause you can then use that stock story and then make something different about it. Oren: Yeah. I don’t have to do an entire novel from the point of view of a dragon. What is a dragon gonna do for the entire novel? I’m sure I could come up with something, but it’s not easy. Chris: I mean, there are a surprising number of novels now about dragon main characters. Oren: Yeah. But they all just turn into people. Boring! Bunny: Yeah. You’ve read The Dragonet Prophecy? Oren: Yeah, they’re just people. Chris: They do kind of just become people. Oren: They’re just people that are vaguely dragon shaped a little bit. Whereas when I just did it, it was just for a short story. It was for 2000 words. What’s the point of view of this dragon as adventurers attack her in her cave? And that works great. I couldn’t have done that for a novel. There wasn’t a novel worth story in there, but it was fun for a short story, and it was neat. People were like, oh, that’s interesting. And also kind of gross, it turned out. But you know, you take what you can get. Chris: Horror also can be novelty driven. So I think horror can actually work surprisingly well. cause you can bring out all of the surprises and kill a character right away and you’re done. Oren: Yeah. Horror works well as a short story for the same reason. And that is that in a novel, horror fades over time. You get less scared of things as you learn about them with familiarity. And that’s not to say you can’t make a horror novel. You can. It’s just more challenging, you need to figure out how you’re gonna keep the spook factor going— Chris: or just do a much slower buildup. Oren: Yeah. Whereas with a short story, you can have a spooky thing and then the story ends like BOO! Story over. I have also personally found that spooky stories work well as short stories because if I’m going for a spooky ending, I often don’t have to figure out a way to get my character out of the trouble I got them into. Because they just die. Or some other spooky thing happens. And you still need a downward turning point or whatever to make it feel satisfying. But logistically, it’s easier. Chris: Big twists work really well with short stories. So if you’re like, oh, that would be a cool twist, you don’t have to write an entire novel just to be a vehicle for a twist. You can write a short story instead. And you don’t want it to be boring before the twist, but because there is less to get through, if you have a twist that really is surprising and works, there’s almost like less burden. You want some entertainment factor before there, but the twist could make the story more just because the story’s short. Oren: So we could address the elephant in the room, which is: Can I write a short story and then turn that into a novel? Chris: I think it’s interesting. The thing we usually see is, again, people making short stories out of their novel world and characters to advertise their novel. I feel like that’s an uphill battle right there, because things inherently need to be simpler and less complex and nuanced in a short story, so they come off strong right away, and you’re not overloading yourself with complexity. Whereas with a novel, if you make things more unique and more nuanced, that tends to pay off with a larger amount of space. So I feel like you would need to have some way to show something that is simple enough, and then be able to expand it into something more complex if you’re willing to just rewrite it. How canonical does this have to be? Oren: Yeah, the examples I was gonna bring up are that there are a number of books that are on lists as being based on short stories. And they are—sort of—but they’re also very different from their source material. Like Spinning Silver and Enders Game are apparently both based on short stories. And just based on the descriptions of these short stories, they were not available anywhere that I could read. Chris: Oh, that’s too bad. I would like to read the original Spinning Silver. Oren: But apparently it was about Rumpelstiltskin. Chris: You can still kind of see the Rumpelstiltskin element in the novel, but I didn’t realize it until I was told that it was a Rumpelstiltskin story. Oren: And then Ender’s game was supposedly different in some other way. I think Ender’s Game was really narrowly focused on the reveal of actually you were killing the aliens and you thought this was just a game. Bunny: Spoilers! Oren: So those are both very, very different. It’s not like you took the short story and then wrote a novel at the end of it. It’s like you took the short story as inspiration and then wrote a novel. Bunny: I’ve actually managed to do that. I turned one of my flash fiction pieces into a game. Oren: Oh, very cool. Bunny: A branching game, which seems to have been well received. I don’t know. It got one five-star review on itch. And the short story was basically about—I guess spoilers for the game—It was about a bride who’s about to be married and she’s turning into a bug. She’s gaining the characteristics of a mantis. The groom kind of sucks and she eats him at the end. But obviously, for a branching story, you have to have it go other places. Other than that, so it became much more fleshed out. I could not have kept it as simple as I did in the initial flash fiction piece. Oren: Oh, wait, wait. I read the game. Okay. That’s why it sounds familiar. Yeah. I’m beta reading on the game itself. Bunny: Yes, you beta read the game. That’s right. Oren: It’s a good game. Bunny: But yeah, I’d say it ended up being successfully fleshed out, but I needed an actual setting. I needed different ways that it could go. At one point I considered just calling her the bride the way I do in the original short story. But that didn’t really work for the purposes of a longer piece, what was functionally a novella. So I don’t know. It can be done. Oren: The one warning that I’ll give is that it will probably not work to just use your short story as chapter one of a novel. If it does work, chances are your short story wasn’t a good short story to begin with because that suggests you did not really wrap up the plot properly. And you can see this in the book The City We Became, which is based on a short story. And the short story basically just becomes the extended chapter one. But—spoilers for this book—the short story is the bad guy getting the shit kicked out of her and losing. And so the novel just has that as its opening and then at the end she barely manages to escape. Chris: That is not a good opening for a novel. Oren: It’s a bad opening and it makes everything else that comes after it feel way less interesting because the characters are slowly discovering their magic. But we’ve already seen like a giant magic city battle in the first chapter. So, none of this is that exciting. Yeah. So just don’t, just don’t do it. Also don’t take the epilogue and sell that as its own short story. I think it was Escape Pod which did that with like a Raksura book. You’re listening to it like this is clearly not a short story. Like this is the end of some other story that I haven’t read. And then I finally found that Raksura book and read it and I was like, Hey, guys, what the heck? Bunny: [laughs] Chris: If you’ve already written a novel and you have fans and you want tidbits for your fans, then it becomes more reasonable to write short stories with those characters and that world because they already know and like the characters. Oren: Yeah. I guess if your name is Lois McMaster Bujold, you can do it. Chris: Martha Wells has some short stories that are related to her that Raksura books with the same characters. They’re not bad if you know the characters. But there’s so many characters and she wants to put them all on her short stories, and it just wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t know and like those characters already, but as a way of something to give fans while they wait, for instance, for the next novel, then yeah, they’re pretty good for that. Oren: All right, well, I think we are gonna have to call this podcast to a close. We’re out over time, once again. I told you we couldn’t stay within the word count limit! Bunny: [laughs] At least it’s not two hours. Maybe someday we’ll turn this into the first part of a two-hour episode. Chris: And if you can spare a dollar for this poor podcast that has gone over time, please go to patreon.com/mythcreants and become a patron today. Oren: And before we go, I’m gonna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of marble. 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] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.

If you think about it, podcasts are a separate world that only consists of audio, so we’re already a kind of portal fantasy. Or maybe portal fantasy is any fantasy story in which someone goes through a doorway, aka, a portal. What, are those not great definitions? Fortunately, we’ve got some better ones in this week’s episode, plus a healthy debate on where exactly Hotdog Finger Dimension falls on the scale.Show Notes The Ten Thousand Doors of January  No Exit  Hero With a Thousand Faces  Idiocracy  Outlander  Oxenfree  Demogorgon  Hotdog Finger Dimension  Rock World  The Wormhole  The Other Mother  At Attin  Neel Super Scouts  Enchanted  Hot Frosty  The Ministry of Time Amphibia  The Owl House  LitRPG Otome Game StargateTranscript Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.  You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.  [Musical Intro] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…  Chris: Chris  Oren: And-  Bunny: Bunny.  Oren: All right, everyone, we quickly have to go through this magical gateway into a world where the Mythcreant podcast doesn’t have a portal fantasy episode.  Bunny: Whoa.  Chris: What is this world like?  Bunny: That’s not real. Oren: It’s so weird and different. It’s so strange. Wait, actually, this is this world. We don’t have a portal fantasy episode. I’m so surprised. I was sure we had done portal fantasy at some point.  [laughter] Bunny: I mean, when you think about it, isn’t any story where a character moves from a familiar place to an unfamiliar one a portal fantasy?  Oren: Yeah, portal’s just a door. So if your character ever goes through a doorway, that’s portal fantasy, boom. Done. Podcast over. Bunny: If they’re stuck in the same room, well, it could be a metaphorical door.  Oren: Yeah, the door, anything could be a metaphor if you think about it.   Chris: Yeah, I mean, 10,000 Doors of January taught me that we have tons of stories about doors, [laughter] so the door’s real. So we’re definitely living in portal fantasy.  Bunny: Look, No Exit is a portal fantasy. No, they don’t leave the room, but their feelings.  Oren: Oh man, I love that book so much ’cause it’s so proud of being like anti-establishment, but it’s basically just reusing the arguments of Joseph Campbell, which is that anything can be whatever you want as long as you call it a metaphor. [laughter] Anyway, so we’re now gonna take the portal to Sandwich Land for discourse. Because we have to decide, what is portal fantasy?  Chris: It’s true. Is Idiocracy a portal fantasy? Portal sci-fi maybe?  Oren: You know, it’s, it’s certainly in the area, right? It’s in the vicinity.  Bunny: You know, if you count time, travel as portal, that really broadens things because that’s a pretty big question, isn’t it? Right? Like Outlander, that’s one where you portal back and forth between, I don’t know, ancient Scottish Times and World War II or something. I don’t know. I haven’t read that one.  Oren: Well, 1700’s Scottish Times, but sure, sure.  Bunny: But like, old Scottish times, I think, I think. Oren: Yeah. Old timey Scotland.  Bunny: Old Timey Scotland, or Oxenfree where there’s a bunch of time loops. But I wouldn’t call that one portal fantasy. It’s just, it’s also got shenanigans like that.  Oren: Well, as with any genre, it is defined by an association of related traits that a story will have some of, and maybe not all of them. The most important feature, I would say, the one that really makes us go, ‘yeah, this is portal fantasy’ is like a different world, like a different world that the protagonist is unfamiliar with and it’s like, ‘whoa, what’s going on?’ Which is why I would say Outlander feels more like portal fantasy than something like Oxenfree. Because even though in Oxenfree, I think you do go through some actual portals at various points, you’re not really being taken to another world. It’s the same world. It’s just a little weirder than you thought. Chris: I will say in urban fantasy, like Neverwhere for instance, it can be a portal fantasy world technically being in the same world. I think the point is that the character goes from the familiar to the unfamiliar, to the point where there are different rules that they have to operate by in the other world. Oren: Yeah. And different urban fantasies will have different levels of separation between the human world and the magical world. Like sometimes they are very sharply segregated and at that point, sure. If you wanna call that a portal fantasy, I’m not gonna stop you; I’m not gonna stop you anyway. You can call portal fantasy whatever you want, but I won’t scold you I guess is the difference. Chris: I mean, at the same time, we could say that Luke goes from his familiar home in Star Wars and travels, and that’s unfamiliar.   Bunny: See, see! Anytime you go somewhere unfamiliar! [laughter] Oren: You see the reason why I would say that Star Wars is not going to trigger anyone thinking it’s portal fantasy is simply that, sure, Luke leaves Tatooine, but he’s still very clearly in the Star Wars galaxy, which is sort of the same everywhere. It’s like there are some minor variations depending on where you go, but it’s not like a completely different world that he has no experience with, right?  Bunny: Okay, okay. I have some ones that I want us to fight over, okay?  Oren: Okay. Yeah.  Bunny: Stranger Things.  Chris: Ehh, I’m gonna say no because they don’t spend enough time in the Upside Down. Oren: Yeah.  Bunny: There are some of these which are like, it feels like it’s a portal from the other perspective, I guess it’s a portal fantasy for the Demigorgan.  [laughter] Chris: Who is not a protagonist. If a Demigorgan was the protagonist of the first season of Stranger Things, sure. [laughter] Bunny: Everything Everywhere All At Once.   Oren: Hmm. Chris: Mmm, I’m gonna s- I’m gonna say no.  Oren: Hmm. I would say no. ’cause again, like the places that she jumps to are mostly different, but not that different except for the hotdog finger dimension.  Bunny: Oh, there’s Rock World, right?  Oren: Like there was Rock World very briefly, right? But for most of that story, it’s not like she’s going to a place and it being like, wow, everything’s so different. It’s more like things are the same, but like a little different.  Chris: And on top of that, most portal fantasies aren’t about world hopping. They’re about getting to know the other fantastical world or adjusting your life to live there in some way.  Bunny: All right. What about Deep Space Nine.   Oren: [laughs] There is a literal portal. Bunny: Yeah.  [laughter] Oren: There are some episodes of Deep Space Nine, I would argue could constitute portal fantasy or portal sci-fi as the case may be. I wouldn’t say DS9 as a whole. Sure, the wormhole is there, but like functionally, it’s not any different than any of the other Star Trek shows when they just go to another planet. It’s just you go there through this cool special effect. That would be my argument. But there are definitely some Star Trek episodes that are very portal fantasy.  Bunny: All right. Last one. Coraline.  Oren: Hmm. Chris: Hmm!  Oren: Hmm!  Chris: Y- I’m inclined to say maybe yes on that one.  Bunny: Because she moves back and forth, which is a little unusual. Oren: Yeah. I’d say my view core-aligns with that.  Bunny: Ah-oh (painfully). Chris: Oh, no. Oren: [delightfully chuckles] Got that really buttoned up, you know?  Bunny: Oh [laughter] I, I see what you did there.  Oren: Oh, see, it’s spreading.  Chris: I refuse to engage. Oren: Take the high road, Chris. But yeah, I would say that if nothing else, it certainly has strong portal fantasy elements. Right? Even though she doesn’t spend the whole time there, there’s a very strong aspect of ‘wow, this place is super different that I’ve gone. Right? Everything’s weird. What’s happening?’  Chris: Okay, so can we talk about Skeleton Crew?   Oren: [laughs] Oh gosh. Oh, Skeleton Crew is so funny. All right, mild spoilers for Skeleton Crew. It’s the new Star Wars show on Disney Plus, and they so desperately wanna do Star Wars portal fantasy! [cackles] Chris: It’s so interesting because it’s technically not a portal fantasy, but they’re clearly trying to make it one just by changing various details. Because one thing that we noticed when we were watching the trailer for skeleton crew is how much, like just the neighborhood that they show where the kids live looks like a normal suburbia.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: It’s deliberately designed to look like the real world, which is kind of off putting ’cause it’s Star Wars. Oren: Yeah. I know several people who couldn’t handle that and were just like, ‘Nope, sorry. I can’t do it. I’m out. This is, this doesn’t look like Star Wars. This looks too normal. It’s weird. It’s creepy.’ Chris: And when they introduced the two, like first two kids characters, the two boys, they’re like clearly Star Wars fans. Oren: One of them is also an elephant, but yes.  Chris: It’s true. We still have some Star Wars in there. But what they do is they’re like, oh, well they just love Jedi, right? And they’re just talking about Jedi adventures, but it’s just clearly code for like they love Star Wars. And then at the end of the first episode. Again, spoilers, but it’s just the first episode, they basically do something that is equivalent to going through a portal where they end up in a ship and press some buttons. It’s kind of contrived, but you know, we do what we have to- Oren: -for reasons.  Bunny: Wait, as someone who hasn’t seen the show, what is the premise? It’s Star Wars in suburbia? Chris: So, no, no. That’s the thing, is that they start in what is designed to feel like a familiar suburbia, And then they find a hidden ship inside a hill, and then the ship takes off with them in it and goes towards other places in the galaxy. And they don’t know their way home. Oren: Yeah. And their planet is surrounded by a plot barrier that keeps anyone from knowing about it.  Chris: So like there’s an active, yeah, barrier that they pass through that separates their planet from the rest of the galaxy.  Oren: And it is so clearly aimed at young Star Wars fans, that it’s a kids show obviously, and it is designed for kids who like Star Wars. My only question is; are there any still of those? Do kids like Star Wars? Any? I don’t know.  Bunny: Oh. Oren: I don’t know if kids still like Star Wars.  Chris: They want kids to like Star Wars so they can sell toys.  Oren: Yeah.  Bunny: Oh, I’m looking at the posters. One of them is just Dumbo.  Oren: Yeah, that’s the elephant alien. He is a good friend! Bunny: One of them is, at least in one of these like promo shots, the kid just looks like the kid from a Christmas story. He’s got the same glasses too. And then this other one, the girl is just fully wearing a, like a JanSport looking backpack.  Oren: Yeah, ’cause they’re normal kids! They’re normal kids from a normal planet, in Star Wars! [laughter] The elephant’s name is Neil, but it’s spelled weird.   Bunny: Oh, you know what? You know what the elephant also reminds me of? There’s this old Mystery Science Theater movie called Pod People, and there’s an alien in it named Trumpy  who’s got basically that exact same face. That’s a little unnerving.  Oren: Yeah, there we go. Mystery Science Theater returning with a vengeance. Chris: Yeah. I can just tell some executive is like, ‘okay, so we want young kids to watch this show. Especially boys.’  Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Or we just expect, you know, they start with the boys. Introduce the boys first in a way that’s designed for them to be most relatable. And that could just be like, ‘well. Boys won’t watch it if we make it about girls who knows.’ Oren: Rude of you to assume it’s the fantasy of many boys for a pretty, super competent, girl to be kind of mean to them. [laughter] I wouldn’t know anything about that.  Chris: Right. Some executive is like, ‘okay, we want a relatable character that a kid can imagine themself being, and then getting to suddenly explore the Star Wars universe and hang out with your smugglers and maybe look for a Jedi and all those other things.’ I could just see the marketing pitch. Oren: There’s a section that is obviously advertisements for a ride.  Bunny: Oh my gosh.  Oren: Right? The part where they go into the gun turrets and it’s like the camera panning is such a way to be like, ‘whoa, look how cool this is! You are sitting in a Star Wars turret!’ [laughter] Oh, it’s amazing. I don’t dislike the show, it is just so funny watching them do this!  Bunny: All these posters are also kind of like, they’ve got the kids on Star Wars bikes, I guess? But it’s arranged in a way that it looks like an eighties movie, E.T looking.  Chris: But they hover, so they’re not regular bikes, you see, because they’re hovering. Oren: Yes, they would really like you to bring your ET nostalgia to this movie, please, if you’re a grownup,  Bunny: Maybe the Ralphie kid is the elephant. Maybe they’re just the, maybe that’s just what he looks like outside of the elephant. This is fascinating to me. I’ll stop looking at pictures now.  Oren: So the point of all of this, 15 minutes later, we have agreed that portal fantasy is a kind of broad genre, but it has some characteristics that you start to recognize after a while.  Chris: One of which is again, I recently discovered that portal fantasy can be used in more ways than I had previously imagined. But one of the key elements that they often have is a super relatable protagonist for the audience to identify, often a blank character, that’s the main character. Because that’s the reason a lot of times for doing a portal fantasy in the first place, is having a more relatable, main character. And so it’s a complimentary choice to make that main character fairly bland.  Oren: Yeah, and usually it also allows you to have a main character who is in a fantasy world, but has the same cultural touchstones as your audience, or at least some of your audience, and that’s helpful. It also usually decreases the amount of explaining you might have to do because in an urban fantasy setting, there’s a higher chance that you’re gonna be expected to explain how magic has always existed parallel with the human world. But the more separate they are, the easier it is to avoid that question, which is why Skeleton Crew is so funny ’cause it doesn’t get either of those benefits. Like they have to explain how this like regular earth planet can exist in Star Wars and none of the characters have the same cultural touchstones as anyone from real life, except that they’re Star Wars fans.  Chris: Look, we can make things in their universe that are coded as things in our universe. Bunny: Maybe they should have just set it on Earth.  Oren: I’m sure they thought about making it set on Earth and decided that was a step too far. I’m sure someone was thinking- Chris: -somebody definitely suggested that, yeah. Oren: Can we just do the Super Scouts from the old Battlestar Galactica series? Can we do that? And somebody with good sense was like, ‘no, that is a step too far, sir. They’re not ready for that.’ [laughter] Bunny: I don’t know. I think Dumbo looking characters are automatically sympathetic.  Oren: He is a fun character. I do like him. You know, like the story is doing its job. I like most of the characters. Chris: Which honestly, again reinforces my argument that Idiocracy is a portal fantasy because Idiocracy makes a huge deal about the protagonist being average in every way.  Oren: This is true.  Bunny: Oh yeah.  Chris: And has the same, like, adjustment to life in the future that is pretty typical of a portal fantasy.  Bunny: So it can be a portal fantasy if you go into the future. It can be a portal fantasy if you go into a past, if you do time loops, it’s probably not a portal fantasy. If you go to another world, it’s a portal fantasy. If there’s just a multiverse, it’s not a portal fantasy, [it’s] world hopping.  Oren: At least it’s less likely to be, right?  Bunny: It’s less likely to be.  Oren: Not impossible.  Chris: We’ll not eliminate a multiverse as a portal fantasy, but I would feel like it has to have some key characteristics about how the protagonist adapts to life in their new environment, basically. Bunny: Right, and they don’t have to be farm boys.  Oren: That’s true. Although they could be.  Bunny: They could be. Oren: That said, I have noticed that there are some, shall we say, weaknesses that come up a lot in portal fantasy stories. I don’t think any of these are inevitable, but they’re common enough that they’re worth thinking about. One, maybe this is just me, I’ve brought this up with other people and they look at me like I don’t know what I’m talking about, so maybe this is only a me problem; but I get really tired of the inevitable learning how the world works sequence because it sometimes just feels like, I wish they would just figure it out already and move on.  [laughter]  And at least in some specific stories, I have encountered this problem where it’s really boring to learn about the world in info dumps. That’s not how we, the audience, wanna learn about it. But there are many situations where it would make the most sense for the character to request info dumps from like their allies who are from the world, or whatever. So then the author just has them not do that so then they can be surprised by more things, but I don’t know; they’re in a strange, dangerous world, you figure they would ask how things work? Like I’m sure there are limits, right? If you go to another country, you can’t just have everything explained to you. But at least if I was thinking clearly and I ended up in, I don’t know, Singapore, I’d ask some basic questions about how things work here. Chris: Yeah, no, I see what you mean. And definitely writers can have a habit of just, okay, let me explain my entire magic system in three pages. I do think a lot of that is a matter of implementation. Like for instance, if you had a show doing that and they were talking and it would be exposition, which again, this is why it’s actually really useful for visual media that have less ways to give information and have to do more exposition and dialogue because it makes that exposition feel more natural, but you could have a character explain a few key things to the audience and then just cut away. And really what’s happening is your main character is learning more right off screen, speed up that process. So there’s definitely a balancing act to how much do you carefully teach the audience and how much do you speed up the story. Bunny: Oh yeah. I was just gonna say that I think there are different levels of it too. Like for example, Oren, I think you might have mentioned this in your notes, but Enchanted.  Oren: Yeah, reverse portal fantasy. [laughter] Bunny: Right, reverse portal fantasy from the fantastic to the mundane, where there’s less that has to be explained to a character like that. There’s still a lot that needs to be explained. She’s still like singing to the rats and stuff, but there’s probably less that needs to be explained in that portal fantasy than there is in some portal fantasy that goes somewhere completely unfamiliar.  Chris: It’s similar to when you have a time travel romance where the love interest comes from like, the past, and is unfamiliar with the present day. You get the kind of jokes about how, ‘oh my gosh, cars.’ But at the same time, you definitely, since the audience already knows how the real world works, you definitely don’t want to sit down for any lectures. You wanna skip all that, which is again why we see funny things where the protagonist, like the love interest or whatever, just learns things super fast. The latest conversation I’ve hilariously heard about this is with Hot Frosty, the Netflix Christmas movie. Oren: Oh boy.   Chris: About… [laughs] Bunny: Ah, the famous portal fantasy, Hot Frosty. [laughter] Chris: About a snowman that comes to life and is like super ripped and is really hot, right? Where again, what they do with a lot of these characters that are– that come to the real world and dunno how it works, is they look at the internet or they watch tv, and then suddenly they know everything so that we can just skip over that learning process. Oren: Yeah, for, it’s like that scene inevitably happens as soon as the writers are done making jokes about how the love interest doesn’t understand the modern world or whatever, it’s like once that concept gets in the way of moving the plot forward, they’re like, ‘okay, watch TV for a while and solved. Right. We’ve figured that out.’ [laughter] Chris: Suddenly they know everything.  Bunny: It’s also an issue I had with Ministry of Time, which rides very high on its novelty at first of like this man from like a doomed Arctic Expedition has basically been rescued through time and brought to the modern day UK and the story is mostly about acclimating him to the modern day UK until he just becomes a regular dude. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: Like at some point the story is like, it’s still about acclimating him, but he’s going for runs and stuff like that and seems to basically get things. And at that point I was like, where’s the novelty anymore?  Oren: Yeah. Going for runs on purpose? What a weird mutant.  Bunny: Bizarre.  Oren: A strange person from a forgotten era. Bunny: And then there, there would even be like, ‘oh, he is something of a modern man right now.’ And then it just oscillated between how much he was actually a modern man or not, because the story sure doesn’t have anything else going on other than this novelty. But you know, we’ll get to that in a later episode. Chris: I think it’s also worth talking about what kind of plot stuff a portal fantasy can do. I’ve noticed that in a lot of stories, like having a protagonist that comes from the real world, it’s used for relatability but can also be used to single them out in various ways that either make them special or give them like plot problems because they don’t know how the world works and now everybody’s after them, or something like that. Or give them special knowledge that other people don’t have. Like if your character goes to Fantasy World and they bring a phone, actually this happens in Amphibia, [the] main character brings her iPad in [and] it takes quite a long time before it runs out of battery.   Oren: Don’t they like, recharge it with an electric eel at one point? Chris: [laughs] Something like that.  Bunny:  Is there wifi in Amphibia?  Oren: No no, she just downloaded a bunch of movies before she left.  Bunny: Oh, I see.  Oren: Seems to be the premise.  Chris: But sometimes characters know science or tech and then use that to their advantage as a way of giving them some empowerment, et cetera.  Oren: Yeah. Although there is a whole genre of anime that over does this to the point of me instinctively not liking it anymore, which isn’t really the tropes fault, but I just, I can’t handle it now when a character is like, ‘aha! Now with my modern knowledge of economics, I’m gonna  take over the world,’ it’s like, ‘no, God, please don’t.’ Bunny: ‘With my modern knowledge of Bitcoin, this kingdom’s gonna get rocked!’ Oren: ‘It’s all on the blockchain, baby!’ Chris: One thing that we haven’t mentioned is, in some portal fantasies, the protagonist goes into a book or a game, which has some different dynamics. Obviously we could talk about lit RPGs.   Bunny: Let’s not talk about lit RPGs. [laughter] Chris: Yeah. Well, the whole idea as a protagonist goes leveling. But I do wanna talk about this, the weird niche portal, fantasy genre, isekai genre I found on Crunchy Roll, which I’m calling Villainous Isekai. I found a bunch of anime shows that are specifically about a protagonist that goes into otome game, which is like a dating sim. And these ones are interesting because usually, again, the purpose of having it be portal fantasy is partly for relatability and you have a super relatable main character, but these shows often don’t show the character in the real world environment, like, at all.  Bunny: Hmm. Oren: [wheezes] Chris: They’re just, it’s like not there. They, you start when they’re already in the otome game. So it’s very interesting because that part is so cursory. What I realized about these ones is that there are only portal fantasies to explain why the protagonist knows the future, because she knows how the outcome of the game works, right? And has to avoid a doom that’s coming. Which is why she always ends up in the game as the game’s, the villainess instead of the heroine.  Oren: Although you mentioned at least one that did the same thing without having the game premise, the protagonist just goes back in time.  Chris: That one’s not isekai. It’s a very similar premise.   Oren: But that’s my thing is that like this particular branch of the isekai genre is starting to mutate, where the actual isekai part is getting more and more vestigial to the point where we have figured out how to just dispense with it and have [a] normal fantasy story. Nature is healing. Chris: Yeah, I mean, some of them use the knowledge more actively, like, ‘Hey, I know that if these characters have this romantic moment, then this outcome will happen and that will lead to my doom this way. So now I need to specifically intervene in this character’s life to prevent that game outcome from happening.’ Right. Which would be a lot more active, almost like playing the otome game in its own way. But a lot of others are just like, ‘Hey, I know I’m going to die at the end of the game, so I gotta prevent that from happening.’ And you could do that with the main character, just getting foresight about the future too. But yeah, the other one I saw that was, that had a strangely similar premise, was about somebody like just as she was dying, getting thrown back in time so that she’s like, her mind is older but she’s in the body of her younger self at a specific time in her life and decides to take a different life path in order to avoid the doom that she knows is coming. Oren: All right, well I have a question for you all. Portal fantasy question, if you will, with these traditional portal fantasies, the main character goes from the normal world into a magical world. The main character is usually a kid, again, in the very traditional version of the portal fantasy. So the question; must the child return to the regular world or may they stay in the magical world? Discuss. Bunny: Hmm. I feel like authors have an incentive to send them back to the normal world. Oren: Do they? Hmm. Bunny: They do because otherwise it’s like, ‘and then the kid was gone forever.’ Chris: It depends on how you start the story, because if you do give them loving parents and then they disappear into the magical world and never return again, that definitely feels like an unresolved plot hook right there. Oren: Yeah. But if I’ve never seen their parents and have no investment in them, do they really matter? Could the child simply not decide that, actually, it’s not that important?  Bunny: I feel like you could easily end up with a scenario that a lot of maybe vampire stories do, where although your audience are humans, but it’s just like, objectively better to be a vampire, so they have to like contrive ways for humans to be cool and the vampires to be human and stuff just so that your audience doesn’t feel like they’re being crapped upon. Oren: In this case, I think, I mean, Chris said that it depends, and that’s absolutely true, right? Like the two obvious examples are Owl House and Amphibia. And in Owl House it would’ve been really sad and dismal and depressing if Luz had just gone back to the human world. Chris: So are you saying it wasn’t sad and depressing at the end of Amphibia?   Oren: Uh, hang on. I’m getting to that. [laughter] I would say it was, it was sad, but I wouldn’t say it was depressing or dismal, because Amphibia started off with this theme of sometimes you have to move on, sometimes things change. That was the whole point of Amphibia. And that was not the whole point of Owl House, so it would’ve just been a needless punch on the fans if that had happened. Chris: Not to mention the fact that the main character, like, gets a girlfriend in the magical world in Owl House.   Oren: Right. Whereas in Amphibia that wasn’t the case. Like in Amphibia it was more of a like, ‘in real life we’re moving, so our friend group is probably going to break up, so we have one last adventure,’ was the concept. And I thought both of them worked. I thought both concepts worked. It was just a matter of setting it up in advance and knowing which one you wanted.  Chris: Right. If you want to avoid your protagonist going back home, you could do something to just eliminate the parents from the equation.  Bunny: Dun, dun, dun! [laughter] Chris: Or this is where you have either the asshole parents, or tragedy; everybody dies except the protagonist. Or other devices so that we don’t worry about them going back home. Or you could do something similar to Owl House where you just give the protagonist the ability to just world hop back and forth as much as they want. Oren: Or you could just follow the advice of a comic that I found randomly on mythcreants.com. Where the kid just brings his parents to live with him in the magical world. [laughter] Interesting that that comic exists and happens to prove the point I was trying to make. Chris: Wow.  Oren: Fascinating that.  Bunny: Who’d a thunk.  Chris: Mm-hmm. I don’t know where that came from.  Oren: Yeah. We may never know. All right, well, we’re almost outta time, but I have one last portal fantasy, or not portal fantasy to put before you; Stargate. Chris: Mmm.  Bunny: I have not seen it, but it’s got a gate. So… Oren: It does have a gate! Bunny: That’s like, 80% of the way to a door.  Chris: I’m- I- I find myself strangely reluctant. Even though they are technically going through a portal and investigating a new world every episode, I guess it just feels too much like Star Trek where they go visit planets. Oren: Maybe it would help if the places they go weren’t all Vancouver. [laughter] Bunny: I don’t know what you’re talking about, Vancouver is a very bizarre place. Oren: It’s very strange. Chris: Yeah, again, I think it’s, it’s very purposeful. Like I think often in portal fantasy, the going through the portal is like, something that’s not entirely in the protagonist’s control. And when they just decide to go visit a new place every episode, there’s something about being lost and disoriented and having to adjust that just isn’t present in that concept.  Oren: All right. Well, that sounds like a final verdict to me. With that final bit of sandwich discourse done, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.  Chris: If we transported you, consider supporting us on Patreon, go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: Patreon has a portal and we fantasize about having more patrons if you think about it. [laughter] Before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.  Bunny: (sound effect) That’s the portal closing. [Outro music]

It’s easy to assume that the classics must be better than whatever drek is being published today. Isn’t that why we call them classics? However, such an assumption is wrong. That’s both because older stories aren’t always good, but also because new stories aren’t always bad. This week, we’re comparing the two and also discussing how spec fic stories have changed over time. Plus, what if college professors were the only ones writing fiction?Show Notes The Expanse  A Song of Ice and Fire  Lord of the Rings A Wizard of Earthsea Sword of Shannara  The Great Gatsby  The Grapes of Wrath The Catcher in the Rye  Cinderella  Vampire’s Kiss Swamplandia!  Save the Cat Hero With a Thousand Faces The Hero’s Journey Piranesi  Great Expectations  Professor Challenger  Middlemarch  Gloucester  Ran The Bayeux Tapestry  Understanding Comics How to Be Pretentious  Freytag’s Pyramid  The Odyssey The Tempest  Romeo and JulietTranscript Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Chris: This is the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…  Oren: Oren.  Chris: And…   Bunny: Bunny.  Chris: Now we’ve been going for over a decade. So we’re older than most other podcasts. What do you think that says about us?  Oren: Hmm. It’s a classic question.  Bunny: I think we’re very wise, even though you’re the ones who have been around that long. [Chuckles] Chris: Well, obviously our podcast must be really deep and profound because it’s so old. How can something that’s lasted a decade be bad? It stood the test of time.  Oren: [Chuckles] It’s been around for a while. As we know, all podcasts are timeless.  Bunny: And it can be reinterpreted for each generation. Of which there has been one, but theoretically, future generations.  Oren: What did the hosts mean when they said, “Don’t use oppressed mages?” Is it possible they meant use oppressed mages? Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Bunny: We’ll never know. [Chuckles] Chris: This time we’re doing modern versus classic stories. Because we like making people mad, I guess.  Oren: We record several of these at once and the last one always has to be the spiciest ’cause it’s getting late and we need to stay awake. Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: Last episode we were talking about hunger being an emotion and I haven’t eaten yet, so…  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: It’s getting pretty emotional over here.  Chris: Get ready for hanger.  Bunny: Oh yeah.  Oren: Speaking of hunger, we must again begin with sandwich discourse because, what is a classic?  Chris: What I say it is, that’s what I’ve decided.  Oren: Yeah. [Laughs] Chris: Chris says. [Chuckles] Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: It does seem like a classic story is one that is old and one that we laud for whatever reason.  Bunny: That seems like the only consistent definition.  Chris: I wanna say a classic is a backlist book that sells well. Chris, Bunny: [Chuckle] Bunny: That’s a cynical answer.  Oren: [Chuckles] We’re getting to the point where The Expanse isn’t a classic yet. But it could be one eventually, and we’re getting to the point where Game of Thrones, the book, is a classic almost. I would say it’s probably not quite there yet. I don’t think it’s gonna be too much longer. Lord of the Rings is obviously a classic, people call it that. The Earthsea books are classics. Sword of Shannara is probably not, even though it’s old enough, it’s not lauded enough to be considered a classic. Bunny: Mm, maybe.  Chris: Definitely there is a fame and cultural influence factor. The people still think about it even though it’s older, which is why it still sells, but also the cultural influence a book has. I do think, it maybe isn’t necessary, but what is a big factor, because that makes people want to go back to the original to see that kind of line of influence.  Oren: We are talking about in terms of speculative fiction. Whereas when you talk about classic books, most of the ones that show up are not gonna be spec fic.They’re gonna be significantly older than what we’re talking about in a lot of cases. They’re gonna be the stuff you probably had to read in high school, or maybe not anymore. Apparently that’s less common now. But if you’re our age, The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye for some reason, stuff like that.   Bunny: [Chuckles] Supposedly being good is a prerequisite to being a classic, but I’m not sold.  Oren: I said lauded, not good.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Chris: When we’re talking about classic stories, we don’t have to be just talking about novels here. So Cinderella, for instance, it’s a fairytale that’s maybe 2000 years old. That has a hugely long, classic, Disney… It is classic before Disney.  Bunny: It was classic before Disney. I guess what I’m getting at, is there are classics and then there are classics of things, which suggests a classic is also meant to be representative of a genre. So if I say, “Vampire’s Kiss is classic Nick Cage,” I don’t mean Vampire’s Kiss is like The Great Gatsby, but I am saying it’s classic Nick Cage as in representative of Nick Cage.  Oren: I’ll say Vampire’s Kiss is like The Great Gatsby. I’ll be brave enough to make that stand. Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: I might even say it’s better. [Chuckles] I think we should laud it more.  Chris: Whereas, when I say modern, we could also use very different definitions of modern. I would say the type of book currently being published today.  Bunny: And then there are many things called “modern” classics, which I have read a couple of, that don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. Chris: Is that just an advertising blurb phrase?  Bunny: Yeah. Chris: That’s what I thought. [Laughs] Bunny: It’s the sort of thing you’ll read on the quotes.  Chris: “They” say. Generic “they”. Somebody says this is a modern classic. Does it happen to be the publisher of that book, who says it’s a modern classic?  Bunny: They might also say something specific. I think Swamplandia!, a book I read recently was a “modern Floridian classic” or something like that.  Chris: Oh wow. We’re getting really niche with our classics.  Bunny: Maybe it was the “great Floridian novel,” I forget, but it was something like that.  Chris: The “great Floridian novel.” “Florida Man” classic novel.  Bunny: Classic Florida Man.  Chris: I think there’s some interesting discussion to be had looking at kind of the older stories we still read today and we still discuss today, versus the books we’re publishing now. Mostly because in storytelling, in literary circles, there’s this big myth that stories are unchanging, that sometimes we have to tackle when we’re talking about stuff. I recently had an article on Freytag’s pyramid, which if you don’t recognize what that term is, if you’ve seen the little triangle graph where it has rising action and climax and falling action, that’s Freytag’s pyramid, and it’s about 200 years old. And in my article, I was like, “Okay, so this actually did not originally mean something we’re thinking it means today. It means something entirely different and it’s outdated.” And I had a commenter who just couldn’t wrap their mind around the idea of a story structure being out of date, because this notion of like, “Oh, but stories are eternal. And, what do you mean?”  Bunny: Definitely monomyth-esque.  Chris: The hero’s journey is definitely one of those things like, “Oh, don’t you know all of our mythologies have the same points in them, and all stories are the same?”  Bunny: It was great when Gilgamesh saved the cat.  Chris: [Laughs] Which again goes back to the whole discussion about pseudo-structures and how the hero’s journey sometimes definitely does this weird thing where in one hand they’re like, “All stories automatically have the hero’s journey.” But also you are supposed to make your story like the hero’s journey, so it’ll be good. It can either be prescriptive or it can be descriptive. It can’t be both.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Chris: And I do think a lot of times in academic fields when they’re studying folklore or stories in general, they take a very descriptive approach, which kind of assumes all stories are of equal quality and our job is to just look and see what they’re doing. Whereas a storyteller is trying to master a craft. You kind of have to take a prescriptive approach. You can’t become better unless you acknowledge some things are better than other things. Oren: That’s sort of a requirement, but also, I don’t want any of the things that are better to be the things I didn’t wanna do. Let me know when you get that one solved, okay? Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Chris: I definitely don’t wanna hear that my multiple points of view might be detrimental in some way.  Oren: You leave my multiple points of view alone.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Chris: You can take away my extra viewpoints over my dead body. Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: Hands off my characters with way too much backstory. That’s a real problem I have. I write characters with way too much backstory. Stop telling me I can’t do that, Chris. [Chuckles] Bunny: Rude.  Chris: Part of the culture is this huge myth that our stories have not advanced, when they absolutely have. My favorite anecdote about stories advancing is from ancient Egyptian literature, when they didn’t have first person the way we do today.  As far as I could tell, they didn’t have any professional storytellers. What they had is lots and lots of scholars who could write, and so these people would all write fiction as a hobby, but they didn’t seem to even have a court jester or storyteller. They didn’t seem to have plays. They didn’t have any professional storytellers, but they had tons of hobbyists in their scholar class.  Oren: So it’s like if all novels were written by college professors? Ugh, I don’t love, I’m not, mm-mm. No, no, no, no. No thank you.  Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Oren: I’ve changed my mind on who built the Great Pyramids.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Chris: But back then they didn’t have first person directly. So all the stories that used first person, they specifically have a framing device where they start in third person and a character shows up and then is like, “Hey, let me tell you what happened to me.” And then the rest is them talking, which is where we get that kind of first person retelling narrative premise where it’s a future version of the character telling their past. That idea had to be introduced. And then now when we talk about first person, we have not just a first person retelling, but we may have more kind of immersive forms and we get right into it and start with “I”. But that’s not a thing we had a couple thousand years ago.  Oren: My hottest take as it were, is stories have generally gotten better over time. I said it, I said what I meant and I meant what I said.  Bunny: That’s interesting.  Chris: Oh, Oren, how could you?  Oren: [Chuckles] And people who don’t think that, people who look at modern stories and are like, “Eh, Booktok, eh, Romantasy, eh, LitRPG.” It’s like, sure. I say, “Eh, LitRPG all the time.” But I am aware the past also had many really bad stories, just atrociously bad. I have read some of them. So if you think stories were better in the past, it is a symptom of you not being well read enough.   Bunny: I would agree with this. [Chuckles] That’s hotter than the desert outside Egypt.  Chris: And our classics are also, of course, cherry picked. Not that all of our classics are good, but I’m pretty sure the average classic from a period is gonna be better than the average story from that period.  Oren: And even then, if we look, best stories that are coming out now compared to the ones that have been preserved because they were good enough that people cared about them and wanted to keep talking about them. I put Piranesi against any of the classics I had to read in high school. From any perspective, it’s a better book, and I think you would have a much better time reading it than you would The Grapes of Wrath. Bunny: I think people do forget the quote unquote “classics” are just the ones that have been preserved. There were tons of crappy stories in Edwardian England or whatever, but of course they haven’t been preserved. For every Great Expectations there is an Ironay Itleslay.  Oren: Or they have been, but no one reads them. Everyone’s read Sherlock Holmes, which has its ups and downs, but it’s miles better than a lot of Doyle’s other work. Like his, I can’t even remember the name now. Professor something, Professor Champion or whatever.  Bunny: Challenger I think, which is a tryhard name if I’ve ever heard one.  Oren: That’s what it is. Oh God. Challenger stories are abysmal and there’s a reason Doyle is known for his Sherlock stories and not his Challenger stories. Even though the Challenger stories still exist, you can read them. It’s just no one wants to.  Bunny: Nobody’s making you. I’m trying to read Middlemarch right now. Well, trying. Basically I’m reading Middlemarch as I wait for other books to arrive at the library, and now that they have, I can put it aside. And because Middlemarch is one of those things that’s often called a classic, I looked online to be like, “Okay, what do people say about Middlemarch?” And there are so many haughty takes and I feel like we can’t talk about classics without talking about some of the elitism that also keeps them aloft. There was an especially bad New Statesman article and a quote from it published 150 years ago. Oh, this is the tagline of it: “George Elliot’s epic humanist novel is the antidote to our witless online world.” That’s boring. Middlemarch is pretty boring.  Oren: Wait, hang on. That statement wasn’t from 150 years ago.  Bunny: Virginia Woolf apparently called it “one of the few English novels written for grownup people,” which has a similar vibe. But the New Statesman article was recent. Calling something a classic kind of sets up this environment where the story is uncriticizable, and if you say it’s boring, you’re not a real grownup. You’re a child who doesn’t understand the genius of Dorothea and whatever her guy friend is. Chris: Ohh no.  Oren: I got in so much trouble in college when we were doing Shakespeare for saying the Gloucester character in King Lear is unnecessary because he’s a duplicate. He has the same arc as King Lear, and it goes exactly the same way and there’s no reason to have this other character here. And then we watched Ran, which is Akira Kurosawa’s version of King Lear. It’s very good. And notably, it has simply deleted the Gloucester character. Everything else is almost a shot for shot remake, but not Gloucester. He’s not there, and you wouldn’t even notice if you weren’t looking for it. Thanks, Kurosawa. It’s rare that I get such a beautiful demonstration of my point like that. I’ve never seen anyone make a movie to prove me right before.  Chris: [Laughs] Bunny: Wow. How about that? Who’da thunk?  Chris: I do think this again, comes along with the myth that old equals good. Which maybe in a time before we had science or advanced understanding of how things worked, something lasting might have been a halfway decent sign. Be like, “Okay, well that’s still around, so maybe it works, since we don’t really know.” Now, it’s very silly. But I’ve seen lots of very serious people try to argue things are better or profound because they’re old. In fact, Bunny. Do you remember that ridiculous romantic literary book about comics you lent me that one time or showed me? Bunny: Oh, was it Understanding Comics?  Chris: So your comics class, that turned out to be about narrative nonfiction comics? Bunny: It ended up being about journalistic comics. I don’t know, we weren’t allowed to do fiction in that, so I snuck in fiction by writing about Mystery Science Theater. But, I think it must have been Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Chris: So I looked at one of their textbooks in that class, which was in comic form and it was very into validating comics and why comics are serious and why you should respect them. And  doing that by being like, “Oh, and we define comics as a series of images. Then therefore, ancient,” was one of the arguments that was made in there. Bunny: Don’t get me wrong, McCloud has some useful stuff about understanding how time moves in comics and how it’s different than other mediums, but then he definitely has a “comics are good if you define them this way. You can see, actually the Bayeaux Tapestry is a comic and so is the scroll.” Or something like that. Which, I don’t know if you need to justify comics by doing that. Whether or not you think his definition actually holds water, comics can be recent and also good.  Chris: He was one of the people I was making fun of in my satirical, How to Be Pretentious article because of these ridiculous arguments. The other thing he did that really annoyed me is his effort to distance himself from superhero stories. It’s like, we gotta make comics look better by saying comics aren’t always about superheroes and superhero stories are ridiculous, but we’re deeper than that. Comics can be better than that, and it’s like, we didn’t have to throw superhero stories under the bus. That was not a necessary part of this.  Bunny: Modern comics owe a lot to superhero stories.  Oren: As a very armchair anthropology enthusiast, I desperately want the modern obsession with things being older, being better to be a result of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, after which there was a period in which big public works and that sort of thing got a lot less common because there was less central authority, and what there was was a lot weaker. But I know that’s not true because the Romans also thought older things were better. Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Oren: So it doesn’t matter. It seems to be a universal idea that older stuff is better than newer stuff. That’s just, I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you. Bunny: It goes hand in hand with the “kids these days.”  Oren: Yeah. [Chuckles] Chris: I think it is interesting to look at what are the differences between stories today and older stories, what are we seeing? Personally, one thing I feel I noticed between older, newer stories is the emphasis on immersion in prose works I definitely feel is a very modern thing.  To be fair, fairytales are all told in summary, but they also were oral stories. And I suppose maybe if the Brothers Grimm were working today and collecting these oral tales, maybe they would’ve written them down in more detail and elaborated on them a lot more than they did, for instance. But we wouldn’t usually read a book of stories that are completely told in summary, even though, again, if we’re talking about the limits of somebody’s memory, for oral tales that does make a certain level of sense. But I think there’s gonna be a lot more summary and exposition in older works and also the prose style, more omniscient narration, whereas we’ve been moving more towards close perspective and first person and emphasizing vivid detail. Bunny: I think oral stories too, probably had their own kind of immersion that isn’t totally captured by writing it down, because even if it is summary, there’s a theatricality to it. So oral stories that are kind of blandly summarized in written work probably didn’t feel that way at all when they were being told aloud. And now we figured out how to get that immersion back in a prose medium.  Oren: A somewhat direct comparison I can make, ’cause it’s hard to say the differences between modern stories and any classic, because that’s a huge time period. But if I’m looking at the differences between modern speculative fiction and stuff that is pre-Lord of the Rings. I would say now there is a bigger emphasis on trying to make the world make sense, and I think some of that definitely comes from Lord of the Rings, even though I’m not saying Lord of the Rings’ world makes perfect sense. But Tolkien definitely influenced people to work harder on their setting to the chagrin of weird essayists everywhere. Bunny: [Fake cough] paid by the word.  Oren: But then there’s also, and this is definitely not Lord of the Rings, there’s something else. Where there is more respect for the reader’s time. Older stories tend to spend a lot more time messing around.  Chris: Or don’t you think it’s because we all have super short attention spans and we’re all going downhill? Bunny: [Chuckles] It’s this witless, social media age.  Oren: I’m sure that’s what it is, but if that’s what it takes to stop having stories that have a bunch of prologues and then we fart around for a while in nowhere-ville. It’s like, “Please get me to the part that matters.”  Chris: This is an interesting one because I’m not sure a shorter attention span is always bad ’cause it means you value your time more. I don’t know, maybe back in the day, several hundred years ago, a book that was much slower paced would’ve been considered more engaging, either because there were less books to compare it to, and so there was a novelty in reading a book, or maybe it was because other forms of entertainment were less entertaining, so we had less competition for entertaining media. Their standards are lower.  Or maybe it was the kind of thing where people like me wouldn’t have read books several hundred years ago ’cause they would’ve all been too boring to keep my attention. And that makes books more attractive to more people. It’s kind of hard to say exactly what’s going there, but it is pretty apparent stories today are more engaging, they are spending the time more efficiently and getting right into the story in comparison to older stories.  Oren: It might be worth pointing out even older stories often did this. At this point, kind of well known that Shakespeare plays, they don’t necessarily seem this way to us, but went out of their way to include jokes and stuff that would keep the audience’s interest in the middle of the 15th mistaken identity scene.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Oh boy, it’s another banquet.  Oren: And the same thing with the sudden bursts of violence and the murders and stuff. And that doesn’t translate super well to a modern audience. But as far as Elizabethan theatergoers, that stuff was definitely written to hold people’s attention and help stop ’em from getting bored. So that’s been going on for a while. Maybe the Elizabethan Englishmen didn’t have any attention span. Maybe they couldn’t handle it.  Chris: And another thing we’ve talked about before, one of the things that is reason why I said Freytag’s pyramid is outdated, is the emphasis on tragedy that happened during that period of plays, not just older stories. There was a specific period of time in which tragic plays were normal. And that was during Freytag’s pyramid time. So the falling action in that structure assumes the hero is going to experience a downfall and then die. [Chuckles]  Bunny: [Chuckles] And also that you two will bash, what was it, the Poles? Does he really hate the Poles?  Chris: He was very racist against the Polish. Gosh, the Polish. We went through some European history videos recently, and man, the Polish had a real tough time for several hundred years there. Oren: It was not great. One thing I always wonder, and I’m not well read enough to say this with certainty, but based on what I have read of older, European specifically and near Eastern story tradition, I do kind of wonder if the emphasis on tragedy comes from the fact that any stories that had happy endings were not good. If you look at stories that have happy endings, especially the older ones, there’s a reason the term “deus ex machina” caught on, like that was a real thing. It’s like, “Well, we don’t know how to end this story, so the gods will show up and set everything right.”  That happens at the end of the Odyssey. The Odyssey has such a weird ending. Where it looks like Odysseus is gonna have to kill everyone on his island because he showed up and did a bunch of murders on these guys who were trying to seduce his wife. And now everyone’s mad at him.  Bunny: And all the serving maids. Oren: Kills a lot of people. It’s pretty brutal. And then Athena is like, “Nope! Everyone stop, back to your corners.” And then they all lived happily ever after, the end.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Oren: It’s the weirdest way to end that story, especially after reading the Iliad and even in Shakespeare, other than comedies, the Shakespeare story that could be considered to not be a comedy and also have a happy ending is The Tempest. Which basically has the deus ex machina again, although only this time, it’s also Shakespeare’s self-insert OC uwu. Do not steal.   Bunny: [Chuckles] Chris: So nobody had invented the turning point yet, basically. It’s too hard to figure out how heroes can solve problems. So what if the hero just dies instead?  Oren: Did we not have enough stories that have a satisfying, triumphant ending and so everyone assumed they must be bad? I don’t know. I can’t say that with certainty, but it feels like that when I look at older stories. Chris: It does make you wonder because the ones that had a happy ending were generally called comedies. Which speaks to the idea that you didn’t feel you could have a story that was serious and deeply emotional and also have a happy ending. Those two things were considered in conflict.  Bunny: The tragedies, Shakespeare’s tragedies were often also comedic. They had comedic elements, notably the beginning of Romeo and Juliet has a lot of antics with Mercutio mostly. There’s that scene where he is, I think right before he dies, where he is teasing Romeo about Queen Mab and stuff like that. A scene in which I think some of the playfulness of that scene has held up. And that’s an interesting thing worth analyzing, whereas some of the dick jokes don’t so much.  Chris: I do think it almost takes more confidence and perhaps more skill as a storyteller, to feel that I don’t need to make dick jokes and I can still hold the audience’s attention.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Bunny: Let’s say that. All my stories don’t contain dick jokes because I am very confident.  Oren: So I guess this leaves us with a final question since we’re running outta time here. Is, should you read classics? My answer is if you want to, yes. If you like classics, read what you like. Otherwise, I don’t think you should make yourself do it. I think there are modern stories that are just as good, if not better than any classic you might be recommended.  Chris: If you are fascinated by stories, which you might be since you were listening to this podcast, then reading classics gives you the opportunity to see the origin of many story tropes. Which I find rewarding when I can manage to pay attention to them ’cause they are so boring.   Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Bunny: They’re also interesting historical snapshots, not because they’re necessarily representative of the time, but because they’re representative of what sorts of stories were being told about the time.  Chris: They can be a rewarding experience to see, and of course sometimes people like being tuned into the cultural conversation since they heard stories that are often referenced and discussed. And it’s nice to feel like you’re in the know when somebody references a classic. So there’s plenty of reasons to read them, but I don’t think anybody should feel they’re not cultured if they don’t read them or they’re obligated to read them. I think it’s fine to find modern stories that you enjoy. Oren: With that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.  Bunny: With that hot take.  Chris: Well, if we didn’t make you mad or if we did make you mad, you can still support 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, and there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening, closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

Emotionless characters seem to abound in spec fic. Robots, aliens, anime boys who never smile, the list goes on. But are those characters really emotionless? Some of their actions certainly seem emotionally motivated. Just as importantly, what would it mean for them to be truly emotionless? This week, we’re tackling the question of character emotions and whether we can truly go without them.Show Notes Data Using Contractions Is Hunger an Emotion?  Blindsight  Riley  Seven of Nine The Android  The Measure of a Man SNW Vulcan Scene  V’LarTranscript Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [opening song] Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me today is–  Chris: Chris– Bunny: and–   Oren: Oren. Bunny: And this is actually gonna be a pretty short episode. We’re asking if characters can be emotionless. The answer is yes, and the rules are so simple. So here are the rules. Write ’em down. Speak in a monotone. Only say factual statements because you are a rational logic machine. Statistics only, but you can’t say them in any context where they could have an implied emotion.   Oren: [chuckle in background] Bunny: And because you are a rational logic machine, say “beep boop” now and then. And you can’t have any contractions. It’s as easy as that. Chris: [chuckle] No contractions.  Bunny: No contractions. That’s how you know someone’s a logic machine.  Oren：Unless the writers, or perhaps the actor, slip up and insert a contraction here or there — Chris: That doesn’t count.  Oren: — And then some jerk on YouTube 20 years after your show is over does a compilation of all the times Data used a contraction when he wasn’t supposed to. Bunny: [Laughter] Oren: That would be bad.  Bunny: Nobody could ever program contractions into a computer. It’s true.  Oren: It’s just impossible. Everyone: [Laughter] Oren: Well, first we have to do definition time, which means it’s also sandwich discourse time.  Bunny: Oh, my favorite. Yum. Yum.  Oren: Because we should probably define what we’re talking about when we ask about characters being emotionless, right? Bunny: Right.  Oren: Because what is an emotion? And that turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Bunny: Well, it depends what side the bread is on.  Oren: [Still laughing] Bunny: So emotions are very complicated in the clinical sense, which shouldn’t be too surprising. And as it turns out, characters being emotionless is also more complicated than not using contractions. There are a lot of theories on emotions and stuff about brain states, but I think for the purposes of storytelling, we can mostly say that it’s the biggies like disgust, fear, sadness, or general dispositions, like curiosity.  Oren: I found multiple articles arguing that hunger is an emotion, and now I’m just lost. Now I don’t know what happened.  Chris and Bunny: [Laughter] Chris: Well, the interesting thing is that apparently people vary a lot both in how intense their emotions are, but also in their ability to detect the emotions that they are experiencing. Apparently that is also correlated with all sorts of other inner body sensations.  Bunny: Right. Chris: So if you can feel your heart beating, you’re also more likely to be able to easily detect what emotion you’re feeling, which– Oren: Fascinating. Chris: It is fascinating, which really goes to how fuzzy this category actually is. I wouldn’t call hunger an emotion, but I can see how that line would start to blur a bit.  Oren: Right now I’m feeling mild superiority because I’m so good at figuring out my internal emotions.   Bunny and Chris: [Laughter] Bunny: [deadpan] Wow. You’re not a rational logic machine after all.  Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: If Data ever got hungry, that would be the solution to that debate. Oren: Well, Star Trek does treat hunger as an emotion. Like Data starts to have food desires once he turns on his emotion chip. And also taste. [slightly confused] Taste is an emotion?    Bunny: I don’t think taste is an emotion. Chris: Or is it that things give him joy ’cause they taste good, whereas before he had no opinion?  Oren: Maybe before he drank the blackest coffee and was like, “all right, that registers as a 9.5 on the bitterness scale. Whatever”. And then he drank it with his emotion chip in, and he was like, “well, I feel like death now. So that’s nice.”  Bunny: [laughter] [slightly deadpan] My hands will not stop shaking. I cannot just observe this as a fact anymore.  But I guess if you start to think about hunger as desire for something, I could see it being an emotion, but calling hunger itself an emotion, that’s not one I’d heard before. Oren: I mean the argument isn’t that needing to eat is an emotion. It was specifically that the feeling of desiring food was. And okay, sure. Maybe?  Bunny: I’ll accept that if it’s hangry.  Oren: Yeah. Hangry is an emotion. Bunny: Hangry is definitely an emotion.  Chris: I don’t know. According to all the Vulcans in Enterprise, anger is not an emotion because they don’t suppress that. Oren: [Laughing] Chris: They look angry all the time. That’s the only emotion they express.  Bunny: It’s the “cool” emotion.  Oren: There are a lot of very not mature people on the internet who would agree with you. The Vulcans are fun because they have a built-in escape hatch where they say they’re emotionless, but in canon, they actually have very powerful emotions that they just suppress. So anytime you see one being emotional, they can be like, “oh, that’s ’cause some of his emotions was slipping through. That they definitely have. That we established in one episode.” So healthy.  Chris: It also reminds of the main character in Blind Sight — which is this terribly edgy book with very, very bad science in it — where the main character is supposed to be emotionless because he got a procedure, which does not actually change your personality at all.  Oren: [sarcastic] No.  Chris: You know, 10 minutes of research on the internet will tell you that. But the one emotion he can apparently feel is anger.  Bunny:Yeah anger is an emotion. Look, we’ve all seen the inside of Riley’s head in Inside Out. And Anger is there. So we could confidently say that’s an emotion.  Oren: Yeah. Don’t erase Louis Black. He’s trying his hardest. He’s really good in that movie.   Oren and Bunny: [chuckle] Chris: I think that also brings up a question. There’s definitely a big incentive for some people who want to have a character act in really immoral ways to use emotionlessness as an explanation for why they’re doing things. But I think it’s also important to distinguish that you don’t necessarily need emotions to act in moral ways.  Oren: [Agreeing sounds]  Chris: And a person can intellectually prioritize something. Again, this goes back to arguments of empathy. Some people experience empathy more than others as an emotion, but the people who don’t experience empathy as an emotion are still capable of prioritizing the feelings of other people. Oren: Yeah.  Chris: Does it make them a serial killer or something? Oren: The one thing that just is my pet peeve, my personal pet peeve now is any story –usually scifi and occasionally fantasy–where some person or group will be like [sarcastically] “because I lack emotions, I have discovered that actually there’s no such thing as ethics, and I can do whatever I want because everything is equally meaningless.” Bunny: [resigned laughter] Oren: At this point, even when it is presented as an idea to be rebutted, it’s just so irritating. It’s just peak “edgy I’m-13-and-this-is-deep” kind of thought process.  Bunny: Right, and being emotionless doesn’t mean that you’re more rational. In fact, you might have a character that’s less rational and less able to navigate situations if they don’t experience emotions. Emotions are all about facilitating survival. You feel fear when you’re in danger, or disgust if something looks poisonous, or joy that leads you to do healthy behaviors because you get joy as a result of doing them. We use them to make decisions and relationships. That’s how we bond. Like —  Oren: [teasing] Wow, you feel joy after doing something good? I guess you can’t be a true altruist. Chris: [laughing] Bunny: [holding back laughter] Excuse me. Yeah. I guess I’m just selfish to the core. I could never give money to charity because it makes me smile to have done something good and really I should just be self-flagellating.  Oren: [teasing] Wow. So selfish.  But on the topic of characters, it is notable that most supposedly emotionless characters have emotions.Part of that is just that when characters get described as emotionless, what they actually mean is that the character is stoic.  Bunny: Or jaded.  Oren: Yeah, or jaded. I looked up a list of 17 emotionless anime characters and 13 of them had descriptions of them having emotions in that list. Sure, they’re more reserved, most of them, than the other characters. But that’s obviously not the same thing as “emotionless”.  Bunny: Emotionless isn’t the same thing as calm or stoic. Emotions are not just strong emotions like chewing the scenery or wailing or yelling or whatever. We’ve all known scenes where they’ve got a lot of emotional intensity or weight without them being loud and dramatic.  Oren: And then we have characters who are specified to be emotionless, but it’s just kind of hard to write them without any emotions. It’s really hard to argue that Data doesn’t have any emotions. It really feels like he has, if nothing else, curiosity. And you can argue that well, he’s programmed to want new information, but at that point it’s pot calling the kettle black here. It just feels like you’re talking about the same thing.  Bunny and Chris: [agreeing in the background] Bunny: At the very least, there are a lot of emotion-like things that I think are close enough that you’d have trouble calling a character who experiences them totally emotionless. Like hostility or suspicion. Those aren’t in the Inside Out cast, but they’re pretty clearly like dispositions are kind of moods. And I doubt that you can have a mood without an emotion. There’s something emotional in that.  Oren: And with Data, it’s interesting because they show that he doesn’t have anger in that he does not do the things we associate with anger. He doesn’t raise his voice, he doesn’t lash out, he doesn’t retaliate, he doesn’t hurt people because they’ve made him upset. He doesn’t do any of the things we associate with anger, but he does all of the things we associate with curiosity, which is why it’s hard to deny the idea that he is curious and curiosity is definitely an emotion.  Chris: Well, I do think that any protagonist, especially, is gonna have to have motivation of some kind and want something. And you could easily argue that itself as an emotion. Like Data, for instance. The neat thing about Data is that instead of using his supposedly emotional status to make him edgy, they use it to make him a cinnamon roll– Bunny: [Laughter] This is the way. Chris: —where no matter how mean people are to him, he’s perfectly nice back. And very selfless. But he still has priorities as a person that he logically follows. Without any kind of emotion, there would just be no reason to have those priorities. There’s some judgment about “I endeavor to be more human”- which I honestly wish robots would stop doing that, because it just feels weirdly self congratulatory on the part of the human writers — but okay, well why did he make that choice?  Oren: [Laughing in the background] Chris: That seems like an emotional decision. Or his choice to become part of Starfleet or do any number of other things, right? He has priorities and values and without emotion, without some level of wants, it’s hard to set those priorities in the first place.  Oren: So if you’re starting out to write an emotionless character, I think the first thing to decide is: do you want an actual emotionless character? Do you want that to be part of the story or do you just want someone who is calm and reserved? Because that second one generally will pass without any note and just be part of the character’s traits. No one’s gonna be like, “huh, I wonder why that character is calm and reserved?” Not that you couldn’t get into it, but it’s certainly not gonna raise any questions. Bunny: Those are just traits.  Oren: I do think it’s worth comparing data to Seven of Nine because it’s very revealing. ‘Cause Seven of Nine also has a very novel trait,  being former-Borg. So outwardly they have some very similar mannerisms, right? Where they talk with a higher vocabulary, with more formal language that makes them sound a bit like robots. Bunny: Ah, contractions, huh? [laughing] Chris: They also want to become more human, both of them, and seem to value rationality and science and math and all those other things that are designed to make them more robot-like. But with Seven of Nine you get that novelty from having those traits, but canonically she has emotions. Whereas Data’s not supposed to. I think it becomes really important whenever Seven has any kind of internal arc or relationship arc. Then you can just show Seven caring. You can just show how it affects her emotionally.  You can show her struggle, you can show her having strife. Whereas with Data, whenever that happens they have to like make the other person do all of the emoting. I still remember one episode where he tries to do a relationship, be in a romantic relationship, and his partner shows all the emotion and he is just kind of intellectually trying to figure things out and we have to sort of imagine he kind of cares with the little emotional hints in the acting and the suggestiveness of the situation and other things. But it’s just much harder to put Data in those kinds of internal arcs than it is for Seven.  But they both have some of the interesting traits that are kind of robotic. Oren: And with Seven, it’s definitely like much more straightforwardly that, yeah, she has emotions, but she doesn’t really know what to do with them because she’s been a Borg for most of her life and now she has a mind of her own instead of just being one node in a collective, which may or may not actually be a collective. There’s a lot of discourse to be had on whether the Borg are actually a collective or not. But anyway —  Bunny: I think there are some questions you can ask in that way, and yeah, I like the idea of someone who has, until recently, not had really emotional experiences now dealing with having emotions again for the first time. That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen that before outside of Seven of Nine.  Oren: There’s a character who does a sort of very similar thing. It’s the Android from Dark Matter. Now, in her case, it’s more that she’s only sort of just been activated.  So she’s sort of figuring things out. It’s not that she doesn’t have… she has emotions, it’s just that she’s not experienced with them. Definitely the best character in that show.  Bunny: And then I think one thing that we should probably mention is that with emotion and reading emotion and having and expressing emotion, some of these things, the way they’re depicted, can be coded as  neuro-atypical. These are also traits, like reading someone else’s emotion and struggling to respond the right way to it, is something that people who aren’t neurotypical also sometimes deal with. So that’s something to be aware of when you’re creating a character who struggles with interpreting other people’s emotions or expressing them in the right way. Oren: I also try to be careful with assumptions that a character can, with a hundred percent accuracy, tell what another person is feeling. Because neurodivergent or not, people express emotions differently. It can just be kind of flattening to be like “all right, well, I could tell that guy was angry ’cause he had the subtle anger cues and those are the same for everybody.” Bunny and Chris: [chuckle] Oren:  Just allow for a little more uncertainty.  Bunny: You can let your emotionless or semi-emotionless character have trouble navigating society. That probably would happen. There are a lot of expectations for expressing emotion and understanding emotion that are just unspoken cues. And if you had no background in it –if you weren’t human, for example, and didn’t understand human emotions or how they’re expressed, you would’ve a lot of trouble in a social scenario. And I think it’s worth asking for the robot AI characters and the emotionless characters: do they fake emotions? Are they inclined to hide them? Are they any good at that? If they do, do they understand how the people around them experience emotion or do they just completely not understand that? Chris and Oren: [agreeing in the background] Bunny:  Do they recognize authority? That’s an interesting question.  Oren: It’s also interesting to think about what their motivation is. What makes them do what they do? And again, there can be motivations that are not emotionally based. It’s just that those tend to be the ones that writers reach for.  So if you have an emotionless character, they usually will have some kind of code of ethics that they have decided is good to follow for whatever reason, or some kind of program directive or maybe they’ve picked another person to model their behavior. There are various ways you can explore it.  Chris: I do think that one thing that’s important if you do have a relatively emotionless character in your story–and it could be somebody who’s just really stoic–is how that affects how problems are seen by the reader. Because usually the protagonist caring about something is a signal that readers should care and if a protagonist thinks something is bad or is afraid of a villain, those are all signals to the reader.  So what can happen is if you have a protagonist who just doesn’t care about problems, sometimes that can diminish or completely remove the tension. And if you have a higher-stake arc, this isn’t usually that big of a deal. You can have other important characters say why something matters. If you have a side character that is just explicitly in trouble and readers are attached to that person, that will matter to readers. You have a number of ways to show, even if your character is emotionless and doesn’t feel grief when a person dies, why that would still be bad. However, if we’re looking at lower-stakes arcs, in particular character arcs…I have sometimes had clients who wanted to do a specific character arc but they wanted that arc to be something where the protagonist doesn’t care and has to learn the value of something. And you can do that, but in some cases, it just won’t feel like it matters. Because your character’s not unhappy because they don’t care. So if you have something where they’re making poor judgements that an outside observer can see, then that’s something that could be a character arc the reader would still care about because we see that they’re making misjudgments and they need to learn better. But if it’s gonna be something that’s “moral”… A lot of times people like to use a character being emotionless or gaining emotions to sort of teach them morality or human connections and bonds in some way. You just can’t have the problem be so bad that “Ugh, I hate this person because they’re just letting people die in front of them and they need to learn better”. Actually, this was an issue with Resident Alien. So the first episode of Resident Alien — the first thing that happened, so it’s not really a spoiler — is this alien shows up and then kills a guy. And this is our main character of the show. He just straight up murders somebody, and it’s part of a general ongoing character arc for him where he basically gains human emotions and human preferences and learns not to be amoral, but at the same time, that gave us a very bad introduction to him. And later we learned this guy was a murderer, but we don’t know that in the first episode. So it’s just extremely off-putting.  Oren: Yeah, don’t worry, we retroactively made it okay.   Bunny: Now the character didn’t know that but… Oren: It doesn’t help that how much that character understands humans is extremely malleable, depending on what the authors need. And then like we also meet some other members of his species eventually, and they also seem to have emotions. They’re just jerk emotions.   Chris: That’s the problem with emotionless just being an excuse to be edgy.  Oren:  It’s not that they don’t have emotions, they’re just assholes.  Bunny: [chuckling] Asshole is an emotion. Chris:  So in that case, you could have them learn the value of something as a kind of slow arc, but you wouldn’t wanna depend on that for your tension. You’d wanna build something that has little higher stakes that readers can care about and use that to create tension and then just have the character arc or something happen at the same time.  Oren: And for those amoral characters who are like “whatever, I don’t understand that it’s wrong to kill people”, usually the obvious play there is to arrange things so that they don’t actually end up killing anybody. That’s just how it turned out. That’s how you do it. And for some reason they didn’t do that in Resident Alien. I dunno why.  Chris: Just because of how people judge characters and morality at an emotional level, how much harm a character does matters a huge amount when we’re judging if they’ve gone too far. So you can have a character that is ready to kill people, but if you just prevent them from doing it they are much easier to like than the person with the exactly the same inclinations that actually goes through with it.  Oren: If that story had been like, oh, I’m gonna kill that guy and take his body to infiltrate earth, and then he was about to do it and then the guy slipped on the ice and died in an accident, that would’ve been a lot easier to swallow, even though it’s the same character. Chris: So basically it’s just about doing damage control whenever you have a character that’s super amoral and just trying to keep them from actually doing harm, especially to characters that readers are likely to sympathize with or care about. Sympathy for a character like that can also be reduced ’cause you don’t see them struggle as much. You don’t see them go through anguish.  For Data, he’s still put in many hard positions. Like the guy who, in the whole trial episode, Measure of a Man, where somebody wants to take him apart. Even though Data doesn’t experience — I mean, he does experience emotions, you can tell even though they’re not obvious — we can still sympathize with him when he’s in a really hard place. But again it’s just easier to create sympathy if we can see that the character is affected.  Oren:  Here’s a question. This is what I was thinking about and I was like, I’ll explain this in the podcast, and then I realized I don’t really know how. In a prose medium when you don’t have an actor there to help you out, I’m trying to figure out what the differences between writing a character who comes off as stoic or intentionally emotionless versus a character who is just flat. There’s gotta be a distinction there, but I’m not really sure what it is.  Chris and Bunny: [sounds of agreement] Bunny: Yeah, that’s tricky. When we talk about emotionless characters, we’re not talking about actors who play their characters poorly.  Chris: Yeah, what I’ve recommended for stoic characters before is showing a difference between what they say and what they do. Somebody else is grieving and the character doesn’t say “oh, I’m so sorry for your loss” or what have you, but maybe you see them do something without remarking on it to help that other person out In a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s just there.  Oren: And then since they don’t feel good about doing it… BAM. True altruism.  Bunny and Chris: [burst into laughter] Bunny: Wow, you got ’em.   Oren: [sounding fake-smug] Take that philosophy department.  Bunny: Oof. Ouch. I’ve fallen to the ground.   Chris: If this is your viewpoint character, I do think that you have a lot of room for subtlety if you’re internalizing and showing their thought process. To some extent it goes back to the basic priorities — Data has values that he follows when he’s making logical conclusions — and showing what the person values.  Bunny: And it’s worth noting that with stoic characters there is a difference between actually lacking in emotion and just not emoting. And I think you’re right about either just showing what they do or finding alternate ways of demonstrating a very subtle emotion. A character who’s not stoic might go hug the grieving person. But a character who’s not outwardly emotive might just go silently sit there and offer support through presence rather than physical touch.You could see a stoic character doing that. Chris: I guess Vulcans are all stoic characters.  Bunny: [laugh] Chris: That’s what they technically… Or I think there’s been some evolution of the explanation for Vulcans not having emotions, if I understand correctly. I always understood them as having deep emotions under the surface, which seems to be what recent shows are going with, but that’s not always been the explanation in various shows.  Oren: Well, it’s been a while since I’ve seen TOS, but I think that explanation was there too. I do think that even in, even in the original series, the idea that Vulcans actually had very powerful emotions that they kept in check was present. Bunny:  Well, there was that time that Spock got horny and Kirk had to fight him.  Oren: The pon farr was definitely its own thing. Someone had the idea of “what if Vulcans had to have sex every seven years”, which I’m sure seemed like a good idea at the time.  Bunny: Of all the ideas one could have…it is one of them.  Oren: The idea of Vulcan emotions being very powerful is at least as old as, I don’t know, the original series movies. It’s pretty well established now. I’m a little concerned about this preview clip we got from the new season of Strange New Worlds where they seem to take some kind of medication that turns them into Vulcans and then they immediately all start acting as the classic stoic Vulcan look, which doesn’t seem to be an act, it seems to be that’s what their personality is. And it’s weird to sort of imply that that is just something you get from Vulcan genes, but maybe there’s maybe there’s context missing that we don’t have yet.  Chris: I assume they had lots of training for that. Oren: Yeah. Maybe. We’ll see. It certainly didn’t strike me as great when I saw it. And they also immediately start being down on Spock and it’s like, wait, so you’re telling me– Chris: It gives them an immediate superiority complex too.  Bunny: [Laughter] Oren: — that Vulcan prejudice is genetic. That’s a weird thing to establish. If that is what’s going on, I’m sure in the writer’s mind it’s just a funny joke, but I didn’t love it. I’ll wait. I’ll withhold final judgment until I actually see the episode.  Chris: I will say the whole Vulcan deep emotions under the surface is very convenient for storytelling. Because they can be mostly emotionless to add novelty during your character interactions, but then when we want that big dramatic plot moment there, that big internal arc, you can suddenly be “now they’re super intense”. Bunny:  Plus you gotta give the Spork shippers something to hold onto. Oren: We’re almost outta time, but I do wanna mention one of my favorite, if not my favorite, Vulcan, who is actually from Enterprise. She’s a one-off guest star. Her name is V’Lar. She’s from the episode Fallen Heroes. And I really liked her because for the most part, Enterprise’ Vulcans are not good. They’re not really emotionless so much as they constantly feel smugness and it got to the point where in the fourth season, they even decided to make it a plot point that the Vulcans were acting too emotional and make that like part of the story for better or worse. But I really liked her. Because the implication that she gave was that she’s old enough and experienced enough to allow herself a little bit of emotion without going overboard. Bunny. That’s a treat,  Oren: Which I find an interesting concept of the Vulcans being, when they’re younger, they have to really commit to the emotional suppression because otherwise they lose control. But as they get older, they learn perhaps healthier ways of dealing with it.  It’s just kind of a neat idea, you know? It didn’t feel like it broke anything that had been established before, and it was a neat twist on the classic Vulcan archetype. So I really liked that. That was one of my favorite moments in Enterprise.  Bunny: The last shout-out I wanna do is if you’re depicting a sociopathic or psychopathic character, do your research please.   Oren: Your research may turn out…that’s complicated. I’m not even sure if those are real terms anymore. I’ve seen competing claims on that one. Bunny: Yeah, I don’t know either. That’s why I’m saying do your research ’cause I genuinely don’t know. I just know that often those are used as a shorthand for why a character seems emotionless or amoral. And uh, a little bird in my brain is like “that’s not it, folks”.  Chris: Yeah, I’m not sure if those were ever actual scientific terms. Oren: With that word of warning, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If this episode made you feel an emotion, even hunger, 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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.   [closing theme] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

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.Show Notes Dune: Prophesy  Foundation Succession  Game of Thrones  Bene Gesserit Breeding Program  Always Sunny in Philadelphia  House Stark Hunger Games Should You Show or Tell? The Abbess RebellionTranscript 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]

We love stories where two contrasting characters overcome their differences to become good friends, but we don’t love how that genre of stories is forever associated with cops. This week, we’re discussing how the vaunted buddy cop arc actually works, what it requires, and how you can use it in your stories without ever involving law enforcement. Also, a fun moment to remember how mad certain goobers got about Fury Road, and now they don’t say a peep about it.Show Notes Three Types of Friendship Arcs  Loki Sherlock & Watson Magic School Planes, Trains, and Automobiles  Han Solo Venom One Dark Window  Maybe We Should Be Afraid  Bashir & O’Brien  Practical Magic  Fury Road  Rush HourTranscript Generously transcribed by Latifah K. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro music] Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Bunny and with me today is- Oren: Oren. Bunny: -and Chris: Chris. Bunny: And today we are going to be talking about creating a buddy cop dynamic without cops, and from doing my research and studying a lot of classic buddy cop movies, I come to the conclusion that buddy cop movies are just rom-coms for straight dudes. [laughs] Yeah, I said it. [laughs] Chris: That doesn’t make sense. Bunny: They’ve got so many of the same traits as rom-coms, so many of the same romantic beats, maybe we should call them brom-coms. Oren: Brom-coms. Oh yeah, that’s good. I like that. Bunny: Like bromance. Bro-coms. [laughs] Rolls off the tongue. Oren: Well, fortunately for us, the famed Chris Winkle has already written about this in a blog. Chris: I did? Bunny: Uh, praise be. Oren: Yeah, “How to write three types of friendship arcs?” Bunny: Oh, yeah. Oren: The second one is the buddy cop arc- [laughs] -and as we point out in there, it doesn’t have to be cops. It’s just what it’s called because it’s associated with that genre. So, we’re just going to go ahead and read this aloud for the next half hour, and we should be good to go. [laughter] Chris: And I’ll just be like, “What? I wrote that.” Bunny: You could be like, “Oh, wow, that’s really smart. Oh yeah, that’s that sounds good.” Oren: To very simplify it. What we tend to think of as the buddy cop arc, and there are different stories that this label gets applied to. They don’t all fit this definition, but the most common version is basically two characters who don’t like each other forced to work together or at least be in proximity and then slowly overcoming their differences and being better together than they were apart, but usually as friends. And yeah, that’s very similar to a lot of romances. Bunny: Yeah. Enemies to lover is the classic romance, right? Chris: Yeah, if you have any romance where the world is forcing them together, they don’t want to be together. That’s the kind of archetype we’re going for here. Bunny: And usually the sort of buddy dynamic also as humorous elements. I won’t say that’s absolutely necessary, but it will be less recognizable as like a buddy cop dynamic if it’s just completely serious. Hence brom-com. Oren: And having it be funny is useful because that way the characters not liking each other can have less edge, because similar to a romance if the characters don’t like each other and are just crappy to each other for a while, it can just be like, “Okay, seems like maybe they shouldn’t be together,” but if it’s funny, if it’s comedic antagonism then it’s like, “Oh you scamp.” Chris: I think probably what you would end up with if you played it really seriously is the kind of thing where you have the villain and the hero teaming up. Maybe it would be like Loki and Thor, except for that probably has comedic elements as well. Oren: They do make Loki funnier as they are redeeming him. Bunny: Loki is already a comic villain, right? Comedic villain from comics, I should say. Oren: Nope. Mm-mm, Mm-mm, Mm-mm. Bunny: No? Oren: Assuming we’re talking about the MCU one, right? I don’t really know Loki in the comics, but no, when Loki first shows up as like the big villain, he’s not really funny. In like, the Thor movie, he’s got a joke here or there, but not much of one. He’s supposed to be serious. He’s not that threatening because his power is that he’s supposed to be good at lying and he can’t actually be that good at lying. So, he gets found out pretty quickly. But he’s not what I would call funny, right? He starts to get funnier as they work on redeeming him and granted, a lot of that happens in Ragnarök, which is a very, you know, they turned the humor up to Taika Waititi levels. Bunny: All right, that makes sense. I guess I’m going off of that. Oren: And there are some sequences where he is humorous before then, some of them ill-considered like everyone laughs when Hulk is thrashing him around. But to me, that just drove home how underwhelming he was as a villain. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re going to beat him because there’s just one of him and there’s five of them.” He has minions, but they don’t matter. Bunny: I can’t say I’ve seen a whole lot of Loki, but I guess, just the general impression. Now, maybe just because he’s played by a charismatic actor is that he’s like a goofy dude, and I guess canonical great mythology Loki was never all that good at lying either, but you know. Oren: Yeah. Although it’s hard to tell if him being bad at lying is because he’s supposed to be bad at lying, or if the people creating these stories just didn’t create very convincing lies- [chuckles] -like his lies are often fallen for despite not being very good. So, is that like a commentary on how gullible the other characters are. I don’t know. [laughs] Chris: But you could certainly have a drama about, for instance, estranged siblings who have to come together because somebody in the family died. For instance, we could say that’s not buddy cop anymore, but you’re going to find a lot of similar things without the comedy, I think. Bunny: Yeah, I do feel like the comedy is a pretty important part of it, even if it’s not absolutely necessary, and these elements still work without it. I think it’s pretty important. Oren: A lot of it’s going to come down to how strong an arc do you want because you can have characters be friends, but if there’s not a strong arc, it’s not necessarily going to scratch the same itch, and there will be different levels of it, right? Like in the show, Loki. Loki teams up with Mobius and he doesn’t like Mobius at first, but Mobius doesn’t have any problem with him. So, the arc is entirely one-sided. It’s just part of Loki’s general chilling attitude arc and it’s over pretty quickly. So, there’s an element of it, but most stories that we think of as being buddy cop movies have a stronger relationship arc because that’s a big central part of the movie. Bunny: Yeah, and I think the other key part of buddy cop dynamics is that the two buddies have to be different like you’ll have grumpy, sunshine or like one of them is shy and the other’s outgoing, one of them is earnest and the other one’s conniving, one of them is hip and cool, and the other one’s dorky, right? But no matter what their differences are, they need to have comparable skill sets, which is part of realizing why they’re better together than apart because usually they ultimately end up either teaching each other their skill sets or learning to play off of each other. So, we need a level playing field. One of them should not be like a tiny baby compared to the other one. Chris: So, when I was looking at duos, generally I think any duo, you need contrast of some kind and so usually they are designed so that they are very different. Having them be at the same level so that they’re equal in skill, I think if you want a kind of buddy story, I think that’s important. But for instance, we have a lot of important duos that people really like that are essentially hero and sidekick like Sherlock & Watson. Clearly, Sherlock is supposed to be more– This is complicated because the story is told from Watson’s viewpoint, which definitely muddies the waters a lot. I think it’s actually clear in a visual medium where we just take away that complication, that Watson is a viewpoint character and then it becomes more like a hero and sidekick dynamic. So, we could have important duos that don’t have them on an even level, but then the character with more skills is more central and the story is usually more about them. Bunny: Yeah, I don’t think every duo is a buddy cop. I don’t know if I would count those as buddy cops. Oren: I wouldn’t. Yeah. I’m just talking about different types of relationship arcs you can have. Chris: So given that we’re not doing buddy cops, since we’re not doing cops. [laughs] Another question is, we can cast a broad net or may keep it small and narrow depending on what we want to do and what we want the dynamic to be like. But if it’s like best friend buddy is the important thing, then yeah, we want them to be on the same level. Oren: Yeah, and you want them to be very different just– partly because that’s the trope, but also because that’s how you create contrast and it’s not as much fun to watch two characters who are similar in a scene together. This is like, “Okay well, do they really both have to be here.” Chris: I will say, I really like Gravity Falls, but like one thing that does annoy me is Dipper and Mabel are initially presented right there as two siblings, and they are equally important, but it’s very clear that the storyteller identifies with Dipper and thinks of Mabel as being the sister, and the story gravitates and prioritizes Dipper more. Which, again, I was personally annoyed by this because I thought that they should be on the same level. I would just say that’s why setting expectations is important. If you do want to have one character be more important than the other, people should know that from the start, so your audience doesn’t feel jilted- [chuckles] -when the character that they thought was important was shoved to the side. Oren: It’s just this, oh, it’s disappointing because Mabel just doesn’t really solve that many problems. Not like she never does, but usually, Mabel just does random stuff and creates chaos, and then Dipper has to fix it. It’s not inherently wrong, but it’s definitely a disappointment. Chris: I think if we were going to make the story about Dipper, and Mabel as one of the side characters, that’s just how it should be presented and packaged. Whereas the way that the show is framed makes it feel like it’s about them two as a duo. Bunny: I felt not so similar because they’re definitely a duo, but parts of the Good Omens show felt like Aziraphale and Crowley weren’t on the same level. Like in the book, they pretty much felt comparable, but I was watching the show and there’s like a montage where Aziraphale keeps just stumbling into situations and then Crowley saves him, which is one of those situations where it feels like one of them is a tiny baby compared to the other one. Chris: Yeah, no, it definitely has that problem where Crowley has all the candy and only Aziraphale makes mistakes. Bunny: You could definitely tell who the writers liked more, and Aziraphale just acts childlike and naive. Chris: I also think the problem there is that they’re trying to– Crowley is technically a demon, and I think that they are afraid of making him make mistakes because he would make immoral mistakes. So, they’re trying to start him off where he’s already learned to be good. He just has bad boy persona, and so, it’s riskier to show him– because he would do evil things. So, it’s easy to show Aziraphale making mistakes in the direction of being too lawful, for instance, and following the rules too much. Bunny: Although in some of those cases, it’s just like he’s trusting people too much which is like, “You’re friends with a demon. I think you can still be angelic. Give this guy a little side eye, you know.” Oren: One of the problems that Good Omens has is that it can’t decide if heaven and hell are actually good and evil, or if they’re law and chaos. And often it wants to make them good and evil, but if they’re good and evil, that’s a boring conflict and it doesn’t want it to be boring. It wants it to be two-sided and so the way that it handles that is by making the angels all just real not smart. [chuckles] That’s Aziraphale’s thing is that Aziraphale just makes very bad choices because that’s the only way they know of to write him as having anything to learn. Bunny: It’s not a level playing field If one of them is just so bubbly. It does feel like you can have one buddy cop be very earnest and genuine, and even a little naive, and the other one be cynical and street smart. In fact, that’s the Zootopia model. Judy, the– one of the buddy cops, the bunny cop buddy cop, is the earnest, dedicated loyal one, while Nick the fox is the conniving street smart, a little sleazy one, right? And the same is true in Rush Hour, Jackie Chan’s character, Lee is very loyal and devoted, and Chris Tucker’s character is brash and foul-mouth and so they clash with each other, but neither of them are like infants. Oren: [chuckles] Yeah. I do think it would be useful to talk about what it is you’re going to need if you want to do this arc without them being cops because there are some things about the cop setup that have been being grained that authors who leave it behind can find themselves lacking. Chris: Like for instance, they are assigned to the case together by their boss. Oren: Yep, that’s a really convenient thing that is used in the cop framework as not only do they have a reason they have to work together because the boss said so, but they also have a built-in problem they need to solve because in fiction cops solve crimes. Hot take, I guess so. [chuckles] That’s something that authors often forget when they are trying to do something similar without using actual police. And so, you end up with, “Why are these characters working together, like they hate each other? Why would they even bother?” Chris: Because they’re on an adventuring party and the GM told them to. [laughs] Oren: Right. And what are they trying to do exactly? Do something eventually. Be roommates. Bunny: This is another thing that you can take the page out of romance, right? Because a lot of the enemies to lovers’ arcs are like how do we put them together like forced proximity, not just for romance. Chris: Arranged marriage. [laughs] That’s it. I mean, I will say I do like arranged marriage romances, but this might not be the best time for that. Oren: No, no. You got to take the other thing from romance and have them be friends at first sight, but then constantly be like, “No, that person would never want to be my friend, even though we’re magically destined to be best friends, they hate me. They would never want to be friends.” And that’s just the entire story. Bunny: Brilliant. That’ll go great. Oren: Yeah, I love it. Just churning out good ideas over here. [laughs] Bunny: You know, I even managed to find one buddy movie where the one-bed trope comes up, which is planes, trains, and automobiles, where our buddies are Adele and Neil, and at one point they have to share our hotel room bed and there’s only one bed Oren: Oh no. [laughs] Bunny: I was like, “Oh my gosh, this really is just romance for straight dudes.” Oren: But you don’t necessarily need to have a boss who assigns them together, although you could, right? There are bosses in the world other than cops, so that’s still an option. Your characters could be study partners at a magic school, and they are put together by their teacher, and now that’s why they have to be together. But you can also create a situation where there is simply a recognized problem that both of the characters understand is important enough that they will try to work together despite their differences. Like they can be union organizers at a workplace, even if they don’t like each other. If they’re union organizers, they probably understand the need for there to be a union and will make some effort even if they have very different styles and very different ways of going about it. Chris: If they recognize they have the same antagonist or fighting the same struggle that will give them a strong incentive to at least start interacting and coordinating a little bit, and then they might have to realize that, “Okay, it’s going to take two of us to do this thing, so we’re going to go breaking into this together because one of us can disable the alarm and the other can crack open the safe.” Or something like that. Bunny: And you can also have the comedy of circumstance too, right? Again, planes, trains, and automobiles. The two characters dislike each other, but they keep being forced together because they’re trying to reach the same destination and one of them always has what the other one needs. Oren: I’m a big fan of stories where both of the characters each have one piece of information, or maybe an item you could get away with, but usually it’s going to be a piece of information that is needed to accomplish whatever it is they both want. So, you might have two smugglers who are trying to find a hidden space treasure and one of them has the location and the other one has the code to get into the treasure vault that is otherwise impenetrable. And that’s a good reason, right? Even if they don’t like each other, they both want the treasure and they have to work together because otherwise with only one of them, they can’t get it. Chris: You could also do the Han Solo trick where one of them hires the other and usually with that, they have an arc, or at first, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t care about causes, I’m in it for the money,” and then they come to care. And then they’re like, “Okay, you’re not actually– actually I don’t want you to pay me, and I’m just going to help you from the goodness of my heart,” at some point. Oren: Generally speaking, anytime you have a character who starts off doing the plot for money, they will almost certainly want to develop a reason other than money for doing the plot, because after a certain point, money is just not a convincing set of stakes anymore. Bunny: It’s the thing– The opening situation, a thing that gets them together and then they must grow beyond that. Chris: You can also create and use magic or technology to just tie them together like Eddie and Venom, one of them being a parasite, or in One Dark Window, Elizabeth and the monster that possesses her and talks to her. I was honestly disappointed that the monster was not the love interest. Oren: Yeah, that’s so sad. [chuckles] Bunny: They shouldn’t have done that. Chris: Instead, we have a cardboard love interest, unfortunately. Bunny: More and more monster love interests. Oren: Or I think Chris will actually really like this one. You could have a science fiction show where the captain and his doctor love interest, get these little implants that require them to be close together- [laughs] -but also let them share their thoughts and they have like a bonding thing. And then at the end, they say, “Maybe we should be afraid.” [laughs] Chris: So, everybody knows this is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where they decided to have a romance episode between Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher. And they did this whole thing where they get these random implants, where they have to stay close to each other and they hear each other’s thoughts, and they do this whole thing where they realize that they like each other. And then we have this closing scene where they’re all dressed up in super romantic garb. Crusher has a fancy dress on, and even Picard has an open silk shirt or something like that. [laughs] And we’re like, it’s like they’re all ready to confess their love and then it just ends. Picard is like, “Maybe we shouldn’t be afraid to explore our feelings,” and Crusher is like, “Or maybe we should be afraid,” and then she just gets up and leaves. And that’s it. It’s like, “What? What just happened?” Bunny: Every great relationship is built on dramatic exits. [chuckles] Oren: One of my favorites is from Deep Space Nine with O’Brien and Bashir. Their story is interesting because it develops over a period of several episodes. There are three episodes where they go from not liking each other to being friends, and it takes some time, but you see them, they’re forced to be together because they’re on a mission together or trapped on a planet together. And they start to learn from each other. Bashir learns to be a little more circumspect, and not just rush off and try to do everything because O’Brien is there to give him caution and O’Brien learns that maybe he doesn’t have to be super grumpy all the time. [chuckles] It’s a valuable lesson for him to learn and that one, I could not find if this is true. That one in fan lore was added because Rick Berman was worried that Bashir and Garak were too gay. [chuckles] If that’s true, it’s unfortunate, but I actually haven’t been able to find any direct evidence that it’s true. I think this is the thing fans repeat, and since I’ve seen Star Trek fan conspiracies be born in real time, I’m not convinced until I see some evidence. But it’s still a good friendship regardless, like they do some cool stuff with it, and I get why. According to some writers, every one of the writers wanted to do O’Brien-Bashir episodes because they were just really fun to write. Bunny: Yeah, and I think you just also touched on the other crucial part to the buddy dynamic, which is that they bond through antics. Oren: Antics. Yeah, everyone loves antics. Bunny: They have to have antics; they’ve got to deal with crazy aliens. In Toy Story, Woody and Buzz are forced together because they get abandoned together essentially, and they have to deal with the mutant toys and catching up with the truck and stuff like that and playing trains and automobiles. They’ll need to deal with cars catching on fire, delays, breakdowns, and all the worst parts of travel. When The Emperor’s New Groove, Kuzco and Pacha have to escape crocodiles and outsmart the bumbling antagonists and get back to the palace. It’s always antics. Chris: Yes, certainly dropping the duo in trouble together is a good alternative to putting them on the case together where we just drop them in the middle of dangerous territory and have to make it back or what have you. Bunny: It can’t just be danger, it has to be antics, Chris. Antics. [chuckles] I mean, your danger sounds a lot like antics. That’s what I’m going to say. [laughs] Oren: It was sad as I was looking up examples. Man, this is a sadly gendered trope. There is no reason you couldn’t have this arc for women. There are a couple with a woman and a man, but it’s really hard to find this for two women, at least in my experience. I’m sure commenters can point us to some, but I was like– I was just digging through everything I’ve read or seen, and it’s, I don’t know, maybe Nancy and George from the Nancy Drew show. George is a girl in that version, and they started off not liking each other, but I don’t remember how much of an arc that was, or if they just got over it at some point. Bunny: I think George was always a girl. I seem to remember in the original, she was a girl as well, but I could be wrong about that. Oren: That’s very possible. I have not much experience with the original. Chris: I almost wonder if for one thing, movies that do this would be women’s movies- [chuckles] -and they might not get as much attention- Bunny: Chick flicks. Chris: -but I also, when I think about it, I think that relationship stories with women could have a bigger variety. So, there are some like Practical Magic, you can think of that as a story between two sisters. There’s also a romance in there, but the two sisters and their relationship is really important. I’m thinking there’s less stories about mothers and daughters, about groups of women. Often their stories about a group of four women who are all friends, have been friends as childhood and get back together. Ugh, when I think about it, I almost feel like there’s a greater variety and that men are given this one template. [chuckles] Oren: So, what you’re saying is we should let men have this one. [laughs] Bunny: Problematic, Chris. Oren: But what about the men? [laughs] Chris: No, I think there should be more women buddy cops, but also, I think there should be both. Bunny: It does seem hard to find this dynamic between female characters or just non men characters, which was probably a combination of bromance cop. This is the word that they come up with brom-coms because brom-coms, the target audience being male and then the fact that it’s cops, most cops being male and it has its roots in cops and then good old male default syndrome, probably a combination of those. Chris: If we’re not keeping the comedy requirement then Mad Max: Fury Road, I would say definitely fits this template between Max and Furiosa. That one’s a little unusual because instead of contrasting with each other, they’re actually very similar characters. Oren: And they hate it. [laughs] Chris: Which maybe is less necessary if it doesn’t have a comedy element. Bunny: I feel like, again depending on how narrowly we’re going to define it, I think the three elements that would make it most recognizable as a buddy cop dynamic, regardless of whether they are cops or not, is enemies to friends or coworkers with vastly different personalities with comparable skill levels bonding through antics. I think that is the most basic, “Does it have the buddy cop oof as those three things?” Oren: Although you can branch it out a little bit and I think people will still recognize it, like you could have a mentor or student type vibe, like something from Men in Black for example. Where Agent K and Will Smith, Agent J, they’re not on the same level. K has been doing this a lot longer and is clearly more skilled, but he’s also teaching Jay despite Jay’s best efforts. Bunny: That’s true. That one has a lot of the similar vibes. Oren: So, if you’re trying to make it something that people will be like, “Oh hey, this is like Rush Hour.” Then I agree that those are specifically the things you want, but there is a kind of deeper arc at play here that can look different on the surface but still have the same dramatic elements. Bunny: Yeah, no, definitely. I just mean if someone is looking at your story and you want them to go, “Oh, that is a buddy cop dynamic.” Those are like the three most recognizable things. Generally, the arc tends to be, again we talked about this, forced together against their will, and then the characters usually have some sort of active animosity, like sometimes including trying to humiliate each other and there’s like friction between their approaches to life or their personalities or their skill sets. And then through antics, they begin to build a grudging respect, and then they bond, which might involve dancing to War (What is it good for). [chuckles] Not to subtweet anything. And then eventually working together and playing to each other’s strength. Oren: All right, well with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. We’ve all clearly bonded and learned things from each other. Chris: If you found this episode helpful, support 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, he’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

One of the most common obstacles for new authors is making their story too complicated. When you’re first putting pen to paper, there’s a powerful urge to include everything you can think of. But this leads to stories that are either impossible to finish, collapse under their own weight, or both. Simplifying is the best solution, but it’s not always easy. This week, we’re talking about how to decide what’s really necessary, along with several options for removing the chaff in as painless a manner as possible. Also… The Machine.Show Notes Why You Shouldn’t Write a Masterpiece  Hades  Fury Road Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell Jeff VanderMeer Interview  George RR Martin Interview  The Rise of Skywalker  Is Backstory Necessary?  The Wheel of Time Interludes  A Deadly EducationTranscript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [music] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Bunny: Bunny. Chris: And… Oren: Oren. Chris: Alright. After more than 500 episodes, I’m afraid this podcast has just gotten too complex. Nobody can follow it anymore, so we have to decide what we’re going to give up. Are we going to give up Wraith McBlade? Bunny: No! Chris: Are we going to give up sandwiches? Oren: Hmm. Chris: What about the Holistic Cup of Depression? Is that going to go? Bunny: Okay, no. That’s the only thing that stays. Oren: Ever since Bunny joined the podcast, you two are now the ones whose voices people can’t tell apart. It used to be me and Wes. So I’m afraid we’re going to have to consolidate you into one host. I’ll just go and fire up the machine. Bunny: No, not the machine! Anything to save the holistic cup of depression. Oren: Yeah, we have to make sacrifices. Or you two, apparently, have to make a sacrifice in this scenario, is, I think, what I’m learning here. Bunny: I’ve made my peace. Chris: Maybe we should just diversify a little bit, because if we’re not fulfilling the same role, we’re less expendable. And we know Bunny’s the villain. Oren: Mmm, that’s true. Chris: So I think you need to be the love interest, Oren. Given that you’re not another protagonist. Oren: Mmm. Okay, all right, all right, hang on. Bunny: I noticed that you’re the main character, Chris. I’m sure this is coincidental. Chris: What? No, that’s just the only logical choice. Oren: Just writing friend fiction over here. Chris: This time we’re going to talk about simplifying your story, and I think the first thing to note about this is sometimes it’s kind of too late. If we’re being realistic about people emotionally, it can be too late. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: Look, I get it. I like trinkets, I like shiny things, and sometimes those mean pages-long worldbuilding digressions. Oren: It’s one of those things where, theoretically, any manuscript can be edited in any way, but practically, authors have a limit of how much they’re willing to change, and often, if you have finished the manuscript and you are at the point where it is too complicated, it will be difficult to simplify it to the point where it probably needs to be simplified. So often you are much better off incorporating these when you’re starting the story. Chris: Yeah. It’s possible for us to find targets for simplification with a story that’s already drafted. But part of the problem is that writers just get super attached to what they’ve created and they don’t like giving things up. And we try to convince them, but a lot of times they do not cut things that we think that they should cut to make their story stronger. So, again, simplifying as you come up with ideas and just being in this ongoing habit of keeping things simple as you develop the story is really key. And if you have that mindset as you start from the very first time you come up with that little flicker of an idea in your head, you’ll just be much better off and you’ll be able to do it much more thoroughly and come up with a story that is much stronger and simpler and easier to understand and doesn’t cause you headaches and all of that stuff. Bunny: Wow. I think the simplest solution is just to not write it. Chris: It is very simple! Well, actually no, that’s not true because, if you don’t write it down, it’s only going to develop in your head, and you’re going to think it’s simple, but you’re going to be wrong. Bunny: So you have net complicatedness. Chris: That’s the thing: actually, people’s first story is usually by far the most complex, what we jokingly refer to as the Magnum Opus, which is this often series (sometimes it’s a novel, but it’s often a series) that people come up with as their first huge project when they’re new to everything. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And it’s usually super duper complicated, and I think there’s many reasons, but I think one of the reasons is that, because it’s your first time writing things down, you let it develop in your head for a super long time before you ever actually start writing, and it’s really hard to tell how complicated things are when they’re in your head. They seem really simple. And only when you put them on paper do you realize, “Wow, I actually have a lot here.” Oren: Yeah. And there’s also just a factor of you don’t know what you don’t know, and everything seems easy when you’re thinking about it, and there’s a good chance you were inspired by some complicated story that you really liked. And I’ve been there, right? Some of my early stories were like that, and they were unworkable because of how complicated they were. Chris: Yeah. Bunny: And I think, when you’re first writing something too, you’re just really optimistic and maybe more excited because your expectations aren’t tempered by anything, by what you might have to simplify. Oren: That’s true. Yeah, the worst part of being an editor is having to tell an author that they are not as far along as they think they are. Chris: Yeah. Waa-waa. Oren: I hate having to do that. Chris: It’s a huge bummer. Oren: I wish there was a way I could outsource that to someone else. Chris: Yeah, I don’t want to be the one who has to disillusion you. Can somebody else give you your reality check? Bunny: Maybe that’s my role in this podcast. Oren: Yeah! Bunny: You can pay me and I’ll be the harsh truths person. Oren: Bunny will get a cut off all my editing going forward. I need you to tell the client. I don’t wanna do it. Bunny: “I’m sorry, client. Bunny’s going to step in here for a couple minutes.” Chris: When they see Bunny, they run away screaming. They know what’s coming. Bunny: I mean, I guess that’s consistent with villainesses. Oren: One that goes hand in hand with this kind of ambition we’re talking about is a simple lack of focus. This is also more likely to affect new writers, just because, when you’re first writing, stuff is cool and you see stuff and you wanna put it in the story ’cause it was cool. And my players in an urban fantasy game that I ran a few years ago noticed that there was a lot more Greek stuff in it about halfway through. It’s ’cause I was playing Hades and I loved Hades. It’s not my fault ’cause Hades is too good. Chris: I also think that the Magnum Opus stage also encourages that, because, instead of people thinking about having a long career where they write many stories and no one story needs to completely fulfill them, they have this idea of, like, “No, my grand big story! I’m going to be working on it forever! It has to be everything to me!” So this idea of, like, “No, that’s a cool idea. I should make another story with it,” that’s too far away. That’s not real to them. Your big grand story has got to have it. Bunny: Anecdotally, talking to people who are having their first big Magnum Opus moment trying to write everything in high school, were planning sprawling series. It’s never one standalone type of thing. You imagine this huge… Chris: I have encountered a Magnum Opus that is just one novel. I have encountered, but they’re often series. Or more likely to be series. Bunny: Yeah. Or at least I don’t think I know anyone who actually went through and finished a series. Usually, and this is myself included, the interest tapered out as you realized that this is maybe a little much. Chris: Yeah, that can happen for sure. Oren: One of the neat things about working with clients as opposed to reading a published manuscript is that I can ask them, “Where did this stuff come from?” And often it’s a direct one-to-one. There’s a car chase here in a story that I wouldn’t expect to have a car chase. And it’s because they saw Fury Road. Or the characters suddenly start focusing on comedy of manners two-thirds of the way through the book, that’s when they read Strange and Norrell, and I really like the comedy of manners aspect. And I suspect a lot of published authors have the same thing. If they’re successful, they’ve probably managed to tone it down a bit, but I’ll never know for sure because I can’t ask them. But with clients I can. Bunny: “Why is there a car chase in here?” “Oh, well, I’ve been playing a lot of Hades.“ Oren: It’s all coming into focus. Chris: Yeah. Oren: Sometimes authors give interviews, and in which case we do know some of this, I’m reading Absolution right now, the fourth Southern Reach book. It’s super scattered, it has all this random stuff, and Jeff VanderMeer did a bunch of interviews promoting it, as one does. And I’ve read one on Polygon where, at least the way he tells it, there’s just a bunch of ideas he had, and he wanted to put them all in the book. And you got the backstory of Old Jim and working in this encounter that VanderMeer had with a manatee in real life, and this big metaphor about the state taking away agency and following up on the rabbits from the previous books, and that all had to be in there. Yeah. That’s what this book reads like. It reads like there’s a lot of random things. Chris: Mm-hmm. Bunny: But Oren, every sentence was intentional. Chris: Every sentence was planned. Oren: Which is like, look, people say things in interviews that are off the cuff, I don’t wanna hold that to him too much, but he also says in that interview that he doesn’t remember writing big parts of it. How does he know they were all planned? Bunny: Shades of Memento. Chris: Yeah. No, I’m sure he didn’t actually mean that he outlined every sentence and then wrote it again in the draft. It just sounds very funny. Oren: And we also know this isn’t just VanderMeer who does stuff like this. We know that one of the reasons why Martin is having so much trouble finishing Song of Ice and Fire is that he was too ambitious. He made it too big, there are too many characters, and then he also killed off too many of the characters he needed, because it was shocking when he did that, and now he doesn’t… Nowhere to go. The garden has been overgrown, to use his metaphor. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Bunny: Is this something he admits about it? Oren: I don’t think that he said it in quite that many words, but I’ve looked at a number of interviews where he has talked about it, and there have been some instances where he mentions that the story has grown in ways he did not expect. And just from reading the books, I have no idea how to resolve this. If someone came to me as an editor with the first five books as they are now, and was like, “How do I end this series?” I’ll be like, “I don’t know. You killed all the characters you needed to end it. They’re all dead. I have no idea how to end it now.” Chris: Oren, I need you to plan Rise of Skywalker for me. You can’t change anything about the previous two movies in the sequel trilogy. Oren: Oh, no! Chris: But you need it to somehow make Rise of Skywalker good. Can you do it? Oren: I can’t. I can’t do it. Bunny: Could have done it better than what they did. Chris: There were some unforced errors in there. Oren: I don’t know why Rise of Skywalker has “Somehow, Palpatine returned” as a line. I know why they brought Palpatine back. I don’t know why that’s how they explained it, and I don’t know why there are so many scenes where a character seems to die and then didn’t die. That happening once is probably enough. But yes, this has been a thing I did for quite some time after Rise of Skywalker came out: “What would I have done with Rise of Skywalker, assuming I couldn’t change anything about the previous two movies?” And I do not know. It feels like an impossible task. Chris: Okay. I think we’ve fleshed out the problem. So what are some recommendations for keeping things simple? I said: be in the habit as simplifying as you make things up. And I think that the key thing here, and this is when we talk about consolidation, is, when you decide to develop a story or add new things, always reuse the stuff you’ve already put there whenever possible. Oren: Yeah. Chris: So if you’re like, “Oh, I need a character that does this,” always look at the characters you’ve already created and say, “Can I add a role to this character?” before you, for instance, introduce a new character. Everything. Always return to the story elements, the worldbuilding rules, everything that you’ve already created, and reuse those whenever possible instead of adding like a whole new person, place, item, or anything named that the audience is going to have to learn. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: Yeah, I think that your story should only be as complicated as it absolutely needs to be. That’s a good rule of thumb. I will allow for adding tidbits that make the world feel more fleshed out, even if they’re not directly applicable to the story, but it’s easy to get carried away with those, and they can consume your plot if you’re not careful. I think the most genuinely helpful piece of advice in terms of figuring out what to focus on in the story and building everything else around that, I’ve gotten from Mythcreants, is to center your darlings, and that can help the rest of those elements fall into place. Chris: I think we did go over this in a recent episode, but if you are starting fresh, right? (I think we should talk more about what if you’re not starting fresh), but if you are starting fresh, the very first thing to do is figure out as precisely as possible what is exciting to you about the story, and then build everything else around that to reinforce that. And that kind of gives you some idea of priority, what is important. And if something is unrelated, again, maybe that’s a thing to start a new story. Oren: Yeah. So one option, and this depends on the story, and you might need an editor to help you figure this out, because sometimes this can be hard to judge, but there are often parts of your story that simply don’t connect to anything else, and you could just remove them. I’ve worked with a number of clients that are like that, where it’s, “We have a story about the protagonist, and the main story is about the protagonist taking down the Dark Lord, but there are several chapters in the middle where they go and hang out in the Morpho Kingdom for a while, and the Morpho Kingdom is complicated and adds a bunch of burden to the audience’s attention, and then they leave and it’s like we were never there. And removing that is not painless. It will probably hurt, but it is relatively low on effort. Because it’s just not connected, and you can just try to run some thought experiments to be like, “If this never happened, if we took these chapters out, what would be different? What is it that the audience wouldn’t get later?” And you might find that the answer is very little. Chris: Yeah. I think that the thing that I find that usually can be simplified or cut is backstory. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Backstory, people, I think. Especially if they do character development and they come up with all this backstory to develop their character, they are very tempted to include it. Or it could just be, if you absolutely love this character, or something is an important part of them to you, that becomes really attempting to fill that in. And sometimes you do need backstories, or sometimes giving the backstory in brief is helpful, but in many cases, because it doesn’t actually take place during the story, that’s one of those things that can go. Or, if something about the backstory is really important to the character, like you have a character who… the villain killed their parents, right? That might be something you want to state, but you don’t need a sequence of ten events in their backstory detailing exactly how the villain went about killing their parents. You could usually distill that down into something much simpler. Meeting for the first time makes it easy to keep audiences on the same page with the characters if they just met. We know everything we need to know. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have characters with a long history. But you wanna use that history if so. Oren: I get it because I love the idea of two characters who’ve just been through so much together. That’s just very appealing to me. But that is hard. If the audience didn’t see any of that, communicating that in a way that will feel real is challenging. So I would say: only do it if that’s something you’re really interested in. It’s going to be hard to do casually. Bunny: I think backstory is also one of those things that people have the impulse to overexplain when it’s just not as necessary. You can allude to things, and the backstory might be not crystal-clear, you might not know exactly what the villain said to the hero when they switched sides, the exact wording of that, sure, but you can still get the point across, right? without so many words. Oren: Yeah. One option that is very useful, and is also fairly low on the pain threshold, is combining characters, ’cause you’ll often find that you have a character who’s doing one thing and they could also be doing something else, and you can get the thing you liked about both characters in one, instead of having to introduce another one. Bunny: I don’t know, or in your machine. Looks pretty painful. Oren: But in the current story that I’m working on, I had a thing where I needed a witch character to give some ooh! key foreshadowing. And I needed a physician character because there was a subplot where someone got injured and needed a physician and I was like, “Hey, hang on. Those don’t need to be separate people. I just have the witch also healing stuff.” And now the witch can give spooky foreshadowing while also providing medical services. Bunny: Give spooky medical services! Oren: Yeah, very spooky. Chris: Sometimes you have to keep characters away, write ’em off with a stick. I have a story where I have a main character who interacts with their sister, but I just don’t want to introduce the parents. Those two more people, you know? Even though the parents technically are… it’s an agricultural family, right? work in the same lands, so they’re just over there, tending a different plot of land, and I just keep them away. Bunny: That should be the excuse for everything. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: “Where are they?” “Oh, well, they’re tending a plot of land.” Oren: Um, as you were going, this is more of a series thing, although it could happen in one book, when you have magic, I always advise trying to figure out new ways to use existing powers than adding new powers. It’s not like you’ll never want to add a new power, but I would recommend doing it as after you’ve already exhausted all the new ways you could use your existing ones. Chris: And just say no to multiple magic systems. Do not need multiple magic systems! Oren: Yeah! Chris: Don’t do it! Bunny: Dare to say no! Chris: If you want it, the feeling of multiple magic systems, it’s still possible to just… they’re technically the same system, but two different groups go about it in slightly different ways, so the magic technically works the same, but it has different flavors. Oren: Yeah. Chris: You can split it into categories and do other things like that, but I think that, most of the time, when people have completely different magic systems, a lot of times it’s a legacy of D&D, where they’re used to just a sorcery versus divine magic or what have you. But you don’t usually want to do that kind of thing in a prose work. Oren: Which is very funny, because in D&D you have to explain, “Okay, sorcerers get their magic this way, wizards get it this way, clerics get it this way, druids get it this way.” And then you’re like, “Okay, so what do they do?” Pretty much the same thing. They don’t actually have any difference in their mechanics. There are some spells that are exclusive to certain classes, or that others don’t get, but they’re drawing a lot of the same spells. So it’s just this huge amount of worldbuilding effort you would need to go to for almost no benefit. Chris: Again, with magic, the same principles of always reusing what you have whenever possible instead of adding new things. Oren: If you’ve spent a lot of work explaining how wizardry works, and it’s complicated and there are a lot of different things you can do with it, you probably don’t then have to create a completely new system for druids. Even if you want there to be druids in your setting, you could probably have them use the same principles of wizardry, but maybe they call it something else and they’re slightly different with it. But you don’t need to start with a complete clean sheet design. Bunny: And I think this approach can be applied to scenes as well. Elements of your plot. Do your characters need to go to location A to do a thing and then go to location B to have a conversation? Well, no. They can probably do the thing while they’re having the conversation, right? Chris: And the multitasking. Again, I’ve told people it’s very useful if you do outline. Outlining is not for everybody. Some people really want to discover the story as they create it. But if you do outlining, if you lock out your scenes, it’s a lot easier to see where that stuff is happening, and you’re likely to have a conversation and then a whole new scene to do something else that’s small, when you can just combine them together. And that’ll be more efficient. But in general, I would look for anything that has the same role, ’cause those are the things that are most likely to be efficiently rolled together. So, if you have two mentors, for instance, you can have two mentors that have lots of contrast with each other and do very different things and justify their presence, especially if the story’s not already over complex, but those are good candidates to combine together. Oren: Yeah. Does your hero need two rivals? If you want to have a new enemy, does it really need to be a new enemy? Or can it be a minor enemy from several chapters ago who turns out to be a bigger deal than you thought? Now that one’s risky. ’cause if we beat this guy up several chapters ago, having him show back up to be like, “I’m more important than you thought” might not work. But if there was a minor confrontation with some bandit or something, you could be like, “Okay, here that bandit is going to turn out to actually be a local crime lord or something,” instead of introducing a different crime lord. Chris: And sometimes with locations. Do we have to go into the other city? We just combine them into one city and not have a traveling sequence. Oren: Yeah, traveling is a huge thing. Sometimes your story does need to take place across a large geographic area, but if it doesn’t, don’t force it. If it does, see if you can consolidate how many places your character needs to be. Chris: But how will I show off all the cities I created in my world? Oren: Yeah, well, just going to have to acknowledge that it’s better to give a more complete picture of one city than an incomplete picture of several ones. Bunny: That’s the first Wheel of Time book. Did that where it was just journey between different towns that were all the same, but had one thing different. Oren: I mean, yes, the Wheel of Time world is incredibly samey. Everything is the same. I could not tell you which nations were different, except for the one where everyone talks like a pirate. It’s like the only one that is different than any of the others. Bunny: Mm-hmm. Chris: And of course, if you have been listening to this podcast, you should know this, but let me just say it again: if you have any interludes, just imagine us sitting and editing your story with you. And I’m going to tell you: we’re going to look at your story and we’re going to say, “Just cut all of them.” Okay? We have now given you a custom edit. It’s imaginary, but it’s very real at the same time, and your editor has told you to just cut out the interludes. All right? They just have to go bye-bye. Bunny: That’ll be $200, please. Oren: Yeah. Another one that comes up a fair amount is what I can only describe as going with your world or story’s momentum as opposed to against it. And this is where you might have a plot point where your bad guy just needs to do something that is out of character for them, you know, you have a bad guy and the bad guy has been established as trying to conquer the world, but you need them to not conquer this one city. And so they come up with a bunch of excuses and it’s like, “Okay, that’s more complicated. Better to come up with an initial motivation for this villain that makes sense as to why they wouldn’t conquer this one city, as opposed to get there and then try to explain why it’s not going to happen.” I’ve critiqued Deadly Education for this problem, because Deadly Education is a project trying to justify inherently unrealistic worldbuilding concepts. And so it suspends so much of its runtime arguing with you that absolutely it makes sense, but it might just be easier to design a world that does make sense. Chris: I’ve said this before: explanations only help if they’re compelling. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And to be compelling, they first need to be simple. And then you should reuse what you have in your explanation. That’s the theme of this episode. Reuse the stuff you’ve got. Oren: Reduce, reuse, recycle. We’re just Captain Planet up in here. Bunny: Get your plot from Goodwill. Oren: All right. I think we’re about out of time. We’re going to avoid overcomplicating this podcast. We’ve given our message, and now we’re going to go ahead and call things to a close. Chris: If we didn’t make you mad by telling you to cut your interludes, please 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 is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [music] Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

The turning point is so vital that many authors instinctively try to include one, but it’s so rarely articulated that mistakes are very common while doing so. Authors forget to show how the hero’s actions lead to victory or establish why that victory is deserved in the first place. This week, we’re talking about those mistakes and how to make sure your story doesn’t fall victim to them.Show Notes What Is a Turning Point? Types of Turning Points   Star Wars Climax  Buffy The Vampire Slayer  Waymond  Dormammu  Technobabble  Three Parts Dead  One Dark Window Red Rising  Wax On, Was Off Age of Ultron Fury Road  I Have the High GroundTranscript Generously transcribed by Michael Martin. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [opening song] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren and with me today is… Chris:  Chris.  Oren: And… Bunny: Bunny.  Oren: So we’re about to defeat the big bad, but we can’t just do that by sword fighting better. Right? Something should happen. Maybe I’ll give a little speech about how we’re gonna win ’cause we’re all full of determination. Bunny: Yeah. I could use a pick me up.  Oren: Yeah, just a little pep talk and everyone will feel great and then we’ll win. It’ll be very satisfying.  Bunny: I need to be roused a bit. Yeah.  Oren: Maybe I’ll say something dramatic like, “Now it’s war.”  Bunny: Whoa.  Chris: [Deadpan] Wow. I didn’t know it was war. Oren: [Laughs]  Bunny: That’s pretty deep.  Chris: But now that I know it’s a war, it’s just totally different. Changes everything for me. I think I’ve got more spunk now.   Oren: Yeah. People will be like, “How is war different from what we were doing before?” And I’ll never tell. Bunny: [Laughs] Yeah. My sword seems spunkier too. I don’t know. Oren: Yeah. That’s great. So we’re talking about common turning point problems today. ‘Cause turning points—they’re a really important concept in storytelling to the point that a lot of writers instinctively know there should be something there, some kind of ‘extra oomph’ that gives the heroes the edge to win or makes them fail if you’re going for an unsuccessful resolution. But because the concept is very rarely articulated, there are a lot of mistakes.  Chris: Yep. Including just not having them. Oren: Sometimes they are just missing. They’re definitely one of the ones that I see people try to do incorrectly more often than other concepts that we cover. ‘Cause before Chris wrote her article about turning points, like, I knew there had to be something. And in my head I called it, like, the ‘extra oomph,’ which is not a great term.  Bunny: Copyright. Trademark. Do not steal. Chris: Very specific. That’s exactly what to do. All: [Laughter]  Chris: What you need is that Dragon Ball Z power to power up. That’s it right there. Oren: Yeah. Where they just yell. Oh man. I rewatched some of Dragon Ball Z for nostalgia recently. I’d forgotten how much grunting there is. Chris: [Laughs] That’s what you need. That’s the ‘oomph.’ You gotta grunt. Bunny: Yeah [Laughs]. It’s literally ‘oomph.’ Oren: Although the scene that I watched did have a turning point, it was just not a good one. It was an interesting example of a bad turning point, ’cause the writer knew there should be one, but didn’t know how to set one up very well. And in this case, it was a turning point where it just raised the question of, okay, I guess that was a clever deduction. You figured out how you could use your moves that way. Why don’t they do that every time now? Because he, like, figured out he could teleport to a place where the enemy wouldn’t be expecting it using his teleportation move and then blast him where his guard was down. Which makes sense.  Bunny: But is that clever? Oren: It’s not great, right? It raises the question of why they aren’t just always doing that.  Bunny: That would be the first thing I do with my teleportation powers. Chris: Let’s back up and talk about what a turning point is. Oren: If we must. Bunny: Oh, oh! I know, I know.  Oren: Oh yeah. Chris: Okay.  Bunny: It’s when you miss your exit on the highway and then you have to find a turning point, which is a problem, ’cause you don’t know that stretch of highway. Right?  Oren: Yeah. It’s that crisis when you get a reroute on your mapping app. Oren: Sometimes you take an exit assuming you can just cross over and get back on the highway, but that exit takes you to another highway and now you’re in Eastern Washington suddenly. Bunny: No!  Chris: So turning points: what are they? Just in case we have one person who has not listened to this podcast before. So, basically a typical plot arc or plotline starts with a problem and ends with a resolution to that problem. So, problem: “Oh no! The Empire has built the Death Star, which can destroy planets.” And then the resolution: “Oh, we’ve destroyed the Death Star. But it could also be, like, “The Death Star has destroyed all of the planets.” Oren: There are no more planets!   Chris: That would be a hard one, because to resolve things in a tragic manner you have to have that the worst has already happened. Right? There’s no possibility for hope left. Bunny: I thought you were gonna say that’s a hard one, ’cause there’s a lot of planets. Chris: [Laughs] There are a lot of planets. So, the Death Star’s pretty much gonna be threatening and create the sense of tension, which keeps that plotline going until it’s destroyed all of the planets. Oren: Well, in Star Wars—probably—it would’ve been, I think, not too hard because we imply that the, like, Rebellion is like the only hope for stopping the Empire. And they all live on this one moon. So the Death Star doesn’t have to destroy every planet, just that one. And then that would’ve been a negative resolution. Good guys lose. Everyone’s sad. Chris: Right. If we’re talking about the threat actually being the Empire, and the Empire is gonna use this Death Star to take control, right? Once the Rebellion is completely quashed and the Empire has complete control, and doesn’t need the Death Star to destroy planets to intimidate people anymore we could say that that might be a way of permanently resolving it in a tragic direction. But in any case, for that ending to be satisfying you can’t just have the resolution happen in any way that you want. It has to come out in a specific way, which means the protagonist has to do something to earn that resolution. And they can do it in a positive way or a negative way. They can have an action that we would say earns them good karma, which means it feels like they deserve something good. They’ve earned something good and then you have success. Luke trusted in the force. That’s the thing that he did that was good and now the Death Star is destroyed. Or they can do something that makes it feel like they’ve earned a tragic ending if we have a tragedy. Which is, of course, less common at the climax. But you can still do that. And you can have multiple turning points if you want. But basically, we have a specific moment that for the story, all for all, it’s gonna be at the climax. But arcs aren’t just at the climax, right? They’re all over in the story. So you can have a smaller conflict. That smaller conflict will still have a turning point. It’ll just be less impressive. And that will determine how the conflict goes and whether the protagonist succeeds or fails, usually. And it’s that one moment that makes it feel like that has been earned. Oren: Yeah. And you’re usually having the character demonstrate some aspect of cleverness, selflessness, or perseverance. There are others, but those are, like, the most common. And that shows both how the protagonist was able to win and also why they deserve to win. ‘Cause it’s just not satisfying if they just win by being really good at stuff. Or by, in the Dragon Ball Z case, figuring out a pretty obvious exploit to these two moves they have. Chris: So, they do something that, for instance, makes it feel like they earn a good ending. And it has to be the cause. That’s the other thing. Has to be a clear cause and effect where they persevered, and because they persevered in an impressive way—not just in a normal way, in an impressive way. That’s why they succeeded. Or they were impressively clever and that’s why they succeeded. So, that causality has to be there for it to work. And yeah, some people do not like the simplicity of the good karma versus bad karma, and … I but…Sorry I didn’t make that up. That’s just how it works. All: [Laughter] We’re just describing what we’re seeing here. We’re not being prescriptive on this one. Bunny: As we established, Chris speaks nothing but facts. Chris & Oren: [Laughter]  Chris: But you could have multiple—if you wanna make a more complex story—you could have multiple turning points that go, and one of them can be happy and one of them can be tragic. And there’s still ways to have complexity and ambiguity in your story if you want that. It’s … you just, you know. A turning point has either a … sort of a positive or a negative charge. And that’s how it goes. Oren: Yeah. And if, look, if you wanna have your character do everything wrong and still win; I mean, I can’t stop you, right? Like, we’re not gonna tell you you can’t do that. It’s just not gonna go well. Chris: Right. I mean, mostly we want people to know how it’s likely to affect the audience. It’s, like, people will be unhappy, but if it’s your, like, art piece and you’re cool with that … Right? I’m not gonna say that’s bad, right? Just want you to know what effect you’re probably gonna have on the audience, that’s all. Bunny: Fly free, little bird. Oren: That joke we were making earlier about giving a speech is an interesting example of a case where a writer knows there should be a turning point, but doesn’t know how to make one. And this was very common in the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are just, I think, half a dozen times. Chris: Okay. So, a speech can be a turning point. Oren: Yes. Chris: Let’s not say that a speech is not necessarily a turning point. But, just because somebody gives a speech doesn’t mean it’s a good turning point. Do continue. Oren: That’s the thing: it’s that close, right? Because it could be perseverance. And I think that’s what it’s supposed to be when they’re all beaten down and Buffy’s like, “No, we are gonna win and we are going to defeat the bad guy.” The problem is that the turning point is in the wrong place because that speech could be a decent turning point for the team wanting to give up. Like, they want to give up, they don’t wanna fight anymore and Buffy gives a speech. And they, like, show perseverance and they don’t give up. That could work. But they’re used to explain how the team is now able to defeat an enemy that Buffy could not defeat before. And that’s where it breaks down, right? There’s no connection between the speech and why we were able to beat the super vampire this time. Chris: ‘Cause it doesn’t require the team. She’s just doing it by herself. She’s doing exactly what she did before and for some reason this time she succeeds. And I think that is probably, especially in popular media, the most common mistake I see. It’s that the protagonist fails and fails, and then suddenly they succeed. And it’s like, well, why did they succeed this time. Right? We haven’t demonstrated that anything changed. Bunny: They were … better. Oren & Chris: [Chuckling] Bunny: They fought, and then they fought better and won.  Chris: It’s like they didn’t have enough spunk before. Now they do for some reason. Sometimes I also refer to this as the ‘emergency mode turning point’ where the idea is that the character fails and fails. And then when it matters, they succeed. So when they’re suddenly faced with a crisis and life or death is on the line, they do the same thing. And this time they just do it just fine.  And again, I feel like that could work if we filled in a reason why being backed into a corner and having lives on the line makes a difference to the character. So if they were lacking in resolve before and we showed that, and then having a crisis causes them to really rally and show that kind of perseverance and … we could do something like that. But usually that’s not what happens.  I mean, again, I do have some sympathy with storytellers in visual mediums that have a little bit harder time flushing out what is happening inside the character. Because I think to a certain degree a lot of turning points, they feel very about what is inside, and what the character’s thinking and feeling. And those things are just hard to show without any kind of internal narration.  Bunny: I was trying to think of turning points where a speech does work. And one that came to mind was Waymond’s speech at the end of Everything Everywhere All at Once, which critically is not how Evelyn, the main character, defeats the villain in this case. Because, not to spoil too much, but she doesn’t really defeat the villain. She gives the villain a hug essentially, and things become all right again. But, if I’m remembering this correctly, Evelyn is teetering on the edge of nihilism, becoming like her daughter, who has essentially become this nihilistic, universe-spanning thing that’s built a donut that’s destroying everything. Don’t worry. Oren: Excuse me. It’s a bagel. Bunny: Oh, that’s right. It’s a bagel. Oren: Uh, pardon you. Oren & Bunny: [Laughter] Chris: Yeah. Isn’t it an everything bagel? Bunny: It’s an everything bagel. It’s a bagel with everything on it.  Chris: [Chuckles] It’s ‘everything’ is the entire universe is on the bagel. Oren: It has the power of bagel puns. Bunny: [Laughs] The donut is from the other good movie, which is Knives Out. So, I’m getting them confused. And then Waymond is like, “Please.” And he comes up and this is … you know. Evelyn throughout the entire movie has been pretty dismissive of her version of Waymond. She thinks he’s kind of pathetic. And then he comes up and he’s like, “Please, be kind.” Like, “Stop doing this,” essentially. And that pulls Evelyn back from the edge of nihilism.  So, I think that’s a turning point that kind of works where she realizes that, no; Waymond’s optimism and what she’s interpreted as naïveté has validity. And that allows her to defeat the nihilism in her daughter. Oren: And that’s, like, a perfect example, because the issue in that scene is that Evelyn is about to give up. And so we have Waymond, and everyone loves Waymond. It’s true. Bunny: Everyone loves Waymond. Oren: Who has the superpower of perseverance and inspires Evelyn to keep going, right? So that’s the perfect turning point for a speech of some kind. Bunny: Jobu! That’s the name. I was like—I kept thinking Dormammu and I was like, that is not it. Oren: No, that’s from Dr. Strange. Bunny: Jobu. Oren: The turning point in Dr. Strange is also very funny, ’cause it’s like it’s supposed to be a clever deduction where he figures out he can use his superpower time stone to do an infinite time loop on the bad guy. But it’s like, okay, how did you figure that out and why can’t you do it on anyone else? Bunny: Look, that’s easy. Every Computer Science 101 student accidentally writes a wild loop without a break function. Oren: Yeah, it just happens sometimes. Chris: Which reminds me of another common problem I see when the audience cannot follow the reasoning of the clever deduction or can’t follow what’s happening. So they have no understanding of how this turning point worked.  And this generally happens with either technology or magic. Technobabble or magic babble, in most cases, it’s all nonsense to the audience. So basically the storyteller’s just declaring by fiat that, “Oh, they were clever.” Which is not particularly satisfying, right? We expect there to be foreshadowing. We expect to be able to understand and see, oh yeah. See for ourselves. How impressive, you know, putting the clues together was and coming up with this new insight. I’ve called it the ‘clever ex machina,’ because it really is just a thing the storyteller made up on the spot. Or could be. Might as well be if you can’t follow it. Bunny: “We can reveal the anomaly source by creating a phase-induced reverse particle beam and bouncing it off of the deflector dish while we eat pretzels.” Oren: That language always confused me, ’cause they say bounce it off of the deflector dish. So, it isn’t emitted from the deflector dish? Where is it coming from? It’s being deflected. Bunny: That’s why it’s called a deflector dish. Oren: Where are they shooting the beam from to hit the deflector dish? Is there some other part of the ship that has this beam on it? I have questions. Bunny: The afflicter dish. Oren: [Chuckles] Chris: That’s true. It’s like, it’s going out in space, right? What is reflecting it back so that it hits the deflector dish? All: [Laughter] Oren: That issue can be one of two things. One is it can just be complete nonsense, right? Like Star Trek, technobabble is nonsense. There is no rhyme or reason to it. They make it up for every new episode. Or it could be something that, in theory, does make sense, but is simply beyond your capacity as a writer to explain in a way that doesn’t confuse a good percentage of your readers. And I would argue in most cases those are functionally the same. Like, I remember the end of Three Parts Dead—this isn’t exactly a turning point, but it’s close enough—when the bad guy is, like, explaining his evil plan. And I’m like, okay. I think that makes sense if I, like, stop and listen to it again and take some notes and create, like, a flow chart of who was doing what at what time. But I think for most people, they’re just gonna be like, “What are … what are you talking about?” All: [Laughter] Bunny: It’s a lot of work to go back and check. Oren: Yeah. So, be careful with that. Even if you take your audience to court and prove that your ending does make sense, if they didn’t get it the experience is gonna be the same.   Chris: Another one that can happen is just the karmic action not being exceptional enough. If what the character does … And again, if this is just for a small conflict within the story it doesn’t have to be super exceptional, right? Just one idea for how to solve the problem is usually fine, or one simple act of kindness, or what have you. It doesn’t have to be super exceptional, but the bigger the arc is, the more exciting that climactic scene is, the more you have to do something impressive. And if it’s not impressive enough, like for instance a clever deduction for something that seems obvious, then that becomes a problem. A recent instance I saw—spoilers for One Dark Window, which is a dark romantasy—There’s what should be a sacrifice turning point at the end where the protagonist decides that she is going to give over control of herself to this, like, monster that’s possessing her, right? With a request that the monster help her love interest, but she’s gonna kinda lose herself to this monster that’s possessing her. And in most cases that would be just fine as a turning point. The problem is that she solves every turning point, like, every problem in the story that way. So she is continually asking the monster to do things for her and it takes her a surprisingly long time to catch on that she’s actually—the monster’s getting more control over her every time she asks, even though it’s obvious. Oren: I kept forgetting that she was supposed to not know that. Like, it’s so obvious. They keep saying that magic has a price. Every other paragraph they say that and it just never occurred to her. Chris: Like at one point she asked for the monster to give her night vision because she just wakes up in the morning while it’s still dark. And it’s just like, really? Anyway, she keeps doing it after she knows. I think that one even comes after she knows. Bunny: Yeah. Just get a flashlight. Chris: Yeah. Bunny: Use your phone. We all carry around phones with flashlights. Chris: I mean, it’s fantasy. But she can light a little candle or something. So after she solves every problem that way, it’s not exceptional enough once we get to the climax anymore. So, it just doesn’t feel like a turning point that she’s earned. So, I would say again, another reason to vary your turning points and vary the ways that your protagonist solves conflicts throughout the story. Oren: Another thing that was wrong with that turning point was just that the implication that it gave—because she used that ability so freely and, like, without any thought to the consequences—it made it seem like a foregone conclusion that this monster was gonna take her over, because she apparently just has no self-control. So, like, when she does it in the climax it’s like, okay. I mean, I guess it might as well happen here as opposed to some other time. Chris: Maybe she’s, like, giving up a week. Oren: Yeah, maybe. Before she needs to see in the dark again, right? Bunny: Just stumble around and bang your shins on things like the rest of us. Oren: [Deadpan] It was like, “Ah, minor inconvenience. I guess it’s time to be possessed.” Oren & Bunny: [Chuckling] Chris: I think this is also a reason why it’s really important that things seem hard enough and difficult enough at an important turning point like the story’s climax. And just the more difficult it is and the more they have to struggle, usually for the turning point to work, the better it works out. Now, I think some storytellers just put in the struggle and don’t know what else to do. But, you know, that does help. Oren: And of course, even if that turning point had been good, the repetition at a certain point—this is a little less common, but I’ve seen it twice now; there was One Dark Window, like we mentioned, and then I critiqued Red Rising for this problem, where every single conflict is resolved via a hidden plan. Where we just reveal, yeah. The hero, he had a plan this whole time. He just didn’t tell you what it was. And it’s like, okay. The first time that was kind of cool. But then afterwards, the second, third, fourth and fifth times, it’s just like, all right. Now I just know there’s no danger. Because every danger that arrives, the hero will have a plan for it.  Chris: Yeah. And just to be specific, the hidden plan is what we call—it’s very popular in heist movies, where it looks like everything is going wrong and then it turns out that everything has actually been going according to the hero’s plan. So they were never really in any danger. You just thought they were. And so as soon as they revealed your plan, everything suddenly goes their way. And so it doesn’t lend itself to a terribly exciting climax. And you have to use sleight of hand to be like, oh yeah. They looked like they were struggling. Oren: And there are ways to do a hidden plan that’s not quite that, like, everything-was-going-the-way-I-wanted-it-to. A hidden plan can be, like, a small thing you had planned that might not work or whatever. And then it feels a little bit less like, oh, well I guess there was never any danger to begin with. There is a strong temptation to make it like, “Actually we were always going to win because I was playing nine-dimensional chess.” But, it doesn’t have to be that way.  Bunny: I gotta say one of the worst kinds of hidden plan, or I guess maybe prior achievement turning points, I’ve ever seen is—and this happens multiple times in this movie, which is Now You See Me … and all of the problems turned out to have been solved before the movie started. Oren: Well, that’s nice. [Chuckles] Bunny: So, they perform a magic trick and you’re like, “Wow, how’d they do that?” It turns out they robbed a bank, like, months ago, and that’s why there’s money coming from the ceiling now.  Chris: [Laughing] That definitely sounds like a ‘deus ex machina’ at that point. Bunny: I mean, you could just tell whoever wrote it was just so impressed by these characters being so smart that we can’t have them be smart on screen. They have to have done everything like weeks in advance before the movie started. Incredibly frustrating. Chris: I should probably specify what is … when you say prior achievement. So, we talk about this turning point having a kind of karmic action by the protagonist that is the cause of the resolution. But actually, the karmic action can take place before the climax. It can take place much, much earlier in the story and then we can reveal— Bunny: —But it has to take place in the story! Chris: Yeah. It does have to take place in the story. Bunny: Not years ago. I saved someone long before the story started. Chris: But the key is that they have to actually earn the good karma. We have to see them earn that good karma. I’m assuming this is a happy ending earlier in the story. And they have to be … get no reward for it, right? So, it’s almost like they still have that positive balance, right? They’re still owed something for doing something good in the audience’s mind. And then we can connect it to the outcome at the climax. Right? So this is what we do with the characters that, like, you know, doing the training montage where they’re like, “Hey, you just need to learn your basic footwork” or “your basic breathing.” And the protagonist doing the training is like, “Oh, but that’s boring. I wanna do flashy moves!” But then they do it right and they put all that work in, and it never seems to matter until the climax when they’re, like, exceptional, extremely basic thing like breathing or footwork wins them the day.  Bunny: “Wax on, wax off.” Chris: So that would be … “Wax on. Wax off.” Exactly. So, that’s what we’re talking about. But yes, you have to actually earn that good karma early in the story. And again, the protagonist has to not get any prior reward for it or else it doesn’t work. It’s already paid off, essentially. Oren: Yeah. And this is, like, a big way that you manage to do the, like, surprise reinforcements trope in a way that doesn’t feel like a ‘deus ex machina.’ Like, you have your protagonist take a big risk or incur some cost to help someone, and then later that person, like, shows up and returns the favor. And yeah, that feels satisfying. That was earned.  One of my favorites is what I’ve started calling the unrelated virtue. Where the characters do something that’s like, oh wow, that’s a cool thing they did. And then they win. But there’s no connection between the things. Like, the most stark example is from Age of Ultron, where the city they’re on is falling to earth and everyone’s gonna die and they can’t evacuate everyone in time. And so the heroes are like, “Okay, we could leave, but we’re gonna stay and face our fate with the civilians.” And it’s supposed to be like a really noble moment. Chris: It’s like, why?  Oren: And I would certainly argue it’s not really noble because it’s not like them staying there is helping. It’s not like they’re giving up their seat on the last transport. Chris: I don’t think they’re the captain of this ship as far as I know. Bunny: Oh, he is the captain of America though. Oren: So, there’s that problem. But even if they were right, even if it was like, no, Iron Man takes off his jet pack and gives it to a kid so the kid can escape or something, what then happens is that Nick Fury shows up with a helicopter—or excuse me, a helicarrier—and evacuates everyone. But, like, he would’ve showed up anyway. Like, if they had left, he would’ve shown up and they would’ve been like, I don’t know, thirty feet away from the city and been like, “Oh. Hey Nick. Thanks for bringing that.” And then turned around. Chris: Yeah, so the causality is missing there. Oren: Yeah. Chris: It seems complicated, like how your protagonists do something incredible that directly causes their success. But once you witness enough of them, once you watch enough stories, you’ll see that usually there’s a way to do it that is not too difficult, that matches whatever you’re doing with your story. Oren: And one that authors tend to fall back on a lot is just telling you that their character’s putting in special effort. Like to win this race I ran harder than I usually do. You gotta be more specific than that and sometimes it can be very simple. There’s a classic moment where the character has, like, a rifle and is trying to line up a difficult shot, and they, like, take a moment to pause, breathe, and then take the shot. And that’ll often do it, right? Because that’s them showing wisdom in not taking the shot too fast and risking losing their target. Chris: And I think the discipline—I think that kind of ties into the perseverance. The fact that they have to keep themselves from panicking in the moment and show kind of discipline. I feel like that kind of strength of will … I mean, I don’t really like the word ‘strength of will’ because I feel like it feeds into a lot of misconceptions about will and how will works in human beings. But nonetheless, that’s the idea behind this perseverance is that if you are really determined and you put in a big effort that you deserve something. Oren: Whereas, like, a failed version of that would be the author just narrates that the protagonist, like, aimed better than they ever had before. Like, you gotta give me some specifics here. Bunny: I think that the scene in Brave is the one that you might be referencing where Meredith splits one of the arrows down the center. That’s very much the, like, she focuses, breathes, ignores her mother and then fires the arrow. I don’t know if that counts as a turning point. Oren: That was pretty early in the movie, right? Bunny: Yeah, no. That’s quite early in the movie. But it does feel earned that she got the shot, I suppose. Oren: I mean, and that’s fine, right? If that was the ultimate climax I would say that’s probably not enough. But for an early turning point, especially a turning point where we turn from what the preview said the movie was gonna be about to what it was actually about, that’s … I think that could work fine. Chris: I like the one in Mad Max: Fury Road. Max’s turning point is giving the gun to Furiosa and having her take the shot instead. Bunny: Yeah. That one’s good. Chris: Which, I dunno. It shows humility, right? He earns it by admitting that maybe he’s not the best person to take the shot and that’s why they succeed. Bunny: I’ll tell you something else that’s not a turning point. Oren: Oh yeah?  Bunny: Having the high ground. Chris: Don’t do it. Don’t do it, Anakin. I mean, what that is supposed to—again, if we talk about downward turning points, right? That’s supposed to show carelessness—right?—on Anakin’s part and a lack of perseverance in succumbing to temptation, which is actually a fairly typical thing that you’ll see in downward turning points. The explanation for it was just exceptionally silly. Bunny: It’s shown by Obi-wan somersaulting over his head. Very deep. Chris: [Laughs] But sometimes what you’ll see is there’ll be a turning point that’s not. When you look at it it isn’t really a turning point for the protagonist. It’s a turning point for the antagonist where they do something to earn their failure. And, I don’t know, I think usually it’s better for the protagonist to be in the driver’s seat, but these aren’t always bad. But most often you’ll see them; the protagonist has a turning point where they win and then the villain has a downward turning point where they die. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: [Laughs] Chris: They die as a result of their crime, so the protagonist doesn’t have to finish them off. Bunny: They usually fall off of something. Oren: Thanks, gravity. Bunny: Or a chameleon trips them and kills them. Oren: Good job, chameleon. Chris: Usually one of their victims comes back and then drags them away. Oren: Alright. Well, I think we are just about out of time. We’ve reached the turning point where we win the podcast by having podcasted real good. Chris: And if you think that we’ve earned some good karma with this episode, 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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson. She’s a 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 Colton.

We all know that, despite sayings to the contrary, books are guaranteed to be judged by their covers. However, there’s another important component in getting readers to hand over their hard-earned cash: sales blurbs. Whether on the back of a physical book or the top of a web page, these blocks of text must be both short and appealing. They can’t describe the entire book, so they must describe the idea of a book instead. Or maybe they could just tell you the book’s great and leave it at that. Is it true? No one knows!Show Notes Lessons Posts  Holistic Cup of Depression  Throughline  Dunkirk  Legends and Lattes  The Girl From the Sea One Dark Window Piranesi  Where Peace Is Lost  A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive BakingTranscript Generously transcribed by Phoebe Pineda. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [intro music] Bunny: Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is– Chris: Chris– Bunny: and– Oren: Oren. Bunny: Ah, it takes three to make a podcast. Life was normal for struggling high school student Bunny until the day she discovered Mythcreants, a website after her own heart. From that day forward, her life felt pretty normal except she had something more to read on Fridays and weekends. Analytical and irreverent blogger Chris had run Mythcreants for years doing website things and writing articles about stuff alongside her opinionated and wisecracking co blogger, dad pun Oren. That is until a mysterious new reader going by Bunny appeared in the comments raising their SEO ever so slightly by a macron or two and not really changing much else. What these three don’t know is that the Great Goddess Podcastia had sent their lives on a very slow, very gradual collision course towards joining forces. Will Bunny depose Wes or will Wes depart on his own? Will the ever vengeful fan ragers simmering on Reddit take Oren out? Will Chris ever launch the new version of the website? Most importantly, will the Mythcats ever get the scritches they deserve? Listen to this podcast. Or die. Eh? Eh? Oren: Yeah, I’d buy that for a dollar. Chris: Honestly, my favorite part is the fact that Oren is opinionated and I’m not. I just state the facts. I just state the facts. Oren: Just the facts. Nothing but facts. Bunny: I never said it was a good blurb. I am very bad at writing blurbs. Maybe it was a little misleading, which is a commentary on blurbs. Chris: No, I think that’s the general reputation that Oren has. He’s the opinionated one. I’m just factual. All of my opinions become fact because I said them. Bunny: I thought about mentioning a lessons post, the one place in which people will probably agree that you’re quite opinionated. I also thought about calling Oren provocative, but that didn’t seem like the right word. Chris: We are provocative sometimes. The difference is that we aren’t actually provocative for the sake of being provocative like you would think. We’re just–take our opinions and put them out there without being shy. Oren: I’m just a very naturally abrasive person, okay. I don’t have to work at it. Bunny: Oren is just a jerk! Chris: Also, that was my experience. I’m always a person who is critical of everything and piss people off. That’s just my natural personality. Bunny: And you do it so well. So that’s why we’ve got a blog going here. And you know, I did actually notice, so we don’t have a sales blurb. The podcast page just says “for fantasy and science fiction storytellers” and not a single mention of the holistic cup of depression, I gotta say. Oren: Very sad. We really need to update our lore. Chris: No, here we go. In a world ruled by the Iowa workshop.  One podcast offers a holistic cup of depression. Bunny: One podcast stands against the storm.  One podcast speaks out in workshop. But yes, today we’re talking about what makes a good sales blurb. I’m not very good at these, which is why it’s gonna be interesting to discuss, but I have been reading a lot of them lately and have noticed some trends and themes and good things and bad things, and Discord discourse. Chris: Our specialty is craft, not marketing. So we’ll talk about them, but again, this is not an area where I claim to be an expert. Oren: I have feelings, okay, and what is a podcast for, if not feelings? Bunny: Feeeeeelings.  Strong feelings. Oren: It’s like legitimately really hard to measure what effect the blurb has on sales of a book. Like even though the blurb is a really important part of marketing, it’s like, if the blurb is bad, how much did that affect whether the book was a success or not? Chris: I think it’s safe to say that the cover is more important than the blurb. Oren: Probably. Bunny: The cover is the thing that gets you to read the blurb. At least in my experience. If I think the cover is silly, I probably won’t pick it up. Oren: Sorry. There are so many books. I have to judge them at least a little bit by their cover. There’s too many. Bunny: That’s what the cover is for. Chris: Covers are also actually surprisingly good and most of the time at conveying the general genre of the book, people like a pretty cover. I think speculative fiction fans especially and fantasy fans, especially like a pretty cover. Bunny: And pretty deckled edges. Chris: But also if I see a book, it’ll often tell me whether something is speculative fiction or not, and if it’s not, probably not interested, probably not gonna look at that blurb. Bunny: But looking at the things that I’ve noticed on most sales blurbs, whether they’re done poorly or not, the characteristics that they usually have are the story background or the setup. So, answering the question of where we are when the story starts, the major characters, so who are we following, what’s their relationship? The setting, where does this take place? This is definitely more important in spec fic than it is in other genres. And then the conflict. So. The throughline in Mythcreants parlance, and then the stakes. Chris: I’d be willing to bet that a lot of times the back blurb does not actually clarify what the throughline is because it’s just supposed to be intriguing enough to get people to read it, and sometimes the throughline requires some explaining. Again, looking at what you need to engage. A lot of them start with a protagonist and their general starting position, but we’re looking at, what details make you interested in reading about this character or this world? And then there’s usually going to be a tense plot twist in the blurb somewhere, and sometimes it tells you what the throughline is, but I don’t think it necessarily has to. Bunny: I don’t think it’s necessary, but it is common. And I think most blurbs are trying to point towards that, at least. Chris: I think the big question is, does this give you a good idea of what the book is gonna be like? ‘Cause sometimes if it’s misleading and we don’t know that this is a big political intrigue instead of just a thriller, for instance. Like, that might be an important distinction. Oren: One thing that some blurbs do that I just can’t stand, and so I hope that means it’s less effective–like, sometimes that’s not the same thing. Sometimes things you hate are effective at marketing. What I hope is ineffective is when it tells me what a good book this is. Bunny: Usually does that in the quotes. Oren: If they wanna put quotes. Sure. Sometimes the quotes themselves make me go, that can’t possibly be real, even if it is real. Sometimes the blurb itself will be like, “In this heartwarming tale,” it’s like, don’t tell me it’s heartwarming. That’s, like, a qualitative assessment. I’m the decider around here. That’s my decision. Bunny: That’s for me to decide. That’s my heart being warmed. Chris: Obviously those are very telling and flattering. At the same time, I do think that they do play a role in telling somebody what kind of book this is, because heartwarming does indicate tone. Oren: Yeah, I suppose. Bunny: It does feel like you should be able to get that from other parts of it though. I don’t know. I kind of feel like that the same way I feel when movie trailers do that, when the narrator comes in and is like, “In this heartwarming tale of friendship and bravery.” It’s also one of those things that’s just quite vague. Chris: A lot of these sales [blurbs], they start with a bolded line at the top. And I think that’s a good idea because that tells people, okay, if you’re only gonna read one sentence, this is the sentence I want you to read. And they tend to be less descriptive because there’s not much space, a lot more buzzy. And sometimes it is a description of what’s in the book. Here’s one of the ones that Oren was talking about, and this is for Wintersong: “Dark, romantic, and unforgettable. This riveting debut for fans of Labyrinth and Naomi Novik tells a fantastical story of a young woman’s journey towards love and acceptance.” Bunny: That’s so vague. Oren: At least there’s some comps in there, or some comparables, I should say. Like at least Dark Romance is a genre, right? Chris: Yes. And that is part of it, is we have a lot of these, if they’re not that descriptive, they have, “here’s the other bestselling books that we think you’re reading, that if you read Labyrinth or you like Naomi Novik, just in general, I guess, we didn’t wanna name one of Naomi Novik’s works.” Oren: They need some help, okay. Chris: This is for fans of the Temeraire book, of course. Oren: When I look at a blurb, what I’m looking for is something that will give me at least some idea what kind of story it is and something that will make the case for me, something that will set the story apart, and I tend to judge anything where it just tells me that this is a heartwarming or a pulse pounding story, I immediately discount that because that is just a thing they can say. They have no shame against putting that on the cover of a book that is actually very boring or not at all romantic. Chris: [At] the same time, dark, romantic. We have some–we know this is probably romantasy. Naomi Novik has a couple romantasies. Of course, “tells a fantastical story,” it’s like, oh really? I thought this was not fantasy. Is it fantastical? Bunny: I thought this was going to be Dunkirk. Chris: But I mean, I don’t know. Somebody might not know it’s fantasy and neither were fantastical there. We don’t know that Labyrinth is a fantasy work. Bunny: I think the distinction here is not necessarily whether it’s accurate or not, it’s whether you, the reader, find that it would be something you’d want to read. And for Oren, that’s, “you’re preaching to me, you’re just saying things,” but at the same time it is getting at something. Chris: At the same time, they’re still telling whether or not the book is particularly tense. Like, if they’re advertising an edgy book, they’re not gonna put heartwarming on it. And if it’s like Legends and Lattes, they’re not gonna put “pulse pounding” on it. Like they could. They could be lying. I can understand the logic if you have your one sentence teaser of putting descriptors in there to identify the type of book as opposed to the longer blurb, which has more room to actually give you details about the story and show rather than tell things like that. Make it sound heartwarming. Make it sound pulse pounding. But if you’re doing one little line, I can see how that would be harder to do. Bunny: I also think that one little line is much harder to just do well in general. Like, I was grabbing books on my shelf to see how they did their blurbs. And one of my favorite books, The Girl From the Sea, [the] one liner is, “One summer can change everything,” which is extremely vague and not what I would highlight about the book. Chris: Is that a speculative fiction? That doesn’t sound like–to me, that does not sound like speculative fiction. Bunny: It is. So The Girl from the Sea, and this is a graphic novel, so you’d know kind of from the cover, it’s a selkie romance essentially, and it happens at a whirlwind over the summer, which is what they’re getting at. But you can’t really tell anything about the book from that phrase. Like, I guess that phrase is supposed to be, I guess, a theme of the book, but it’s not very helpful for someone trying to decide to read the book. The rest of the description on the back for that one is fine. It’s nothing special, but it never mentions anything about the fact that this has fantasy elements. We know that Morgan, the main character, is queer, and that Keltie, who turns out to be a selkie, is mysterious. But the fact that she’s a selkie, which is a big selling point for me, is not mentioned. Oren: Sometimes there is, of course, the fear of spoilers in the blurb. So if her being a selkie was a mystery, I can see why they wouldn’t put it in there. If it was revealed right away, yeah, I get it. I could see. Bunny: For this one, so you can kind of tell from the cover that there is something mystical about Keltie, and from her first appearance, it’s pretty clear that she’s not just an average person, but when Keltie shows up, she’s like, I’m a selkie. And of course Morgan is like, no, you aren’t. But you as the reader are like, oh, she’s a selkie. Chris: Sometimes they don’t specify things like that because they don’t think it’s competitive. They don’t think that selkies are drawing in readers, and so they wanna leave it vague and be like, oh, maybe people will think she might be a mermaid, ’cause mermaids are more popular. Bunny: They’re wrong. They’re wrong! They’re wrong! Selkies are in. Oren: In with the bunny demographic specifically. Bunny: Yes. Demographic of one. Selkies are very in. Oren: One thing that I guess we should have mentioned earlier is that the nice thing about blurbs is that if you’re traditionally published, you almost certainly don’t need to care about them because your publisher will probably make it for you, or at least that is my understanding of how the traditional publishing industry works. Chris: I wouldn’t be surprised if you, especially if you have a small press, if somebody runs ’em by you. That also means if somebody does a bad job, it’s gonna be hard to get it changed Oren: And that’s a problem. But at least you don’t have to come up with this. Chris: Although, honestly, I do think that there’s a significant overlap between the way that you need to write for your back blurb and how, if you wanna query. So if you are interested in querying, I feel like it has some of the same, you need to write a teaser version of your story and figure out how to condense it down into something that sounds interesting. And I think you could probably reuse some of the same stuff in your query, and not everybody’s querying either. Bunny: Definitely the Novik comparison feels like something out of a query letter. Back in the day I was trying to query, and in hindsight a book that would never have been picked up by a publisher. I was just optimistic about it. So I had written a couple of query letters and read some of the literature and how you’re supposed to write them. And one thing you are supposed to do is situate it in the genre, like, “what are its peers?” So saying “this book is like this other book and this third book” is definitely the sort of thing you’d put in a query letter. And so I kind of wonder if that blurb was drawing straight from that query letter. Chris: Well, I think that’s actually–can be kind of normal to draw from query letters because again, usually a query letter also has a little synopsis, not necessarily a synopsis, so much as a teaser, very similar to what you see in these back blurbs. Because if you’re querying, you’re trying to get the agent intrigued about your book, just like a sales board is trying to get the customer willing to buy the book, right? You’re still trying to sell the book’s merits, and an agent is going to be primarily concerned with whether they can sell the book to an acquiring editor and how pitchable it is, whether it has a high concept and all those other things. “Do we have an interesting premise?” And so you kind of still want to do very similar things in a query letter. Oren: What birthed this topic was some discourse over on our Discord server–which you can join by becoming a patron. Plug!–about comparing blurbs that either did tell you a lot of what the throughline was, at least theoretically going to be, versus ones that just hinted at it and built atmosphere. And my hot take is that those can both be good. Specifically we were comparing Piranesi to Where Peace is Lost. The first one is by Susanna Clarke, and the second one is by Valerie Valdes. Now I’ve actually read Piranesi. I love it. It’s one of my favorite books. And this blurb, it hints at what the plot is, but it doesn’t really say. What it does is try to build atmosphere about this strange place that this protagonist lives in and this weird other who he talks to. Whereas Where Peace is Lost has a much more detailed like, “and this is what the plot’s about.” And assuming that is accurate and that it’s not a lie, ’cause sometimes these lie, I also love this. This is a great blurb as far as I’m concerned. I would definitely read this book. In fact, I’m planning to. My hot take is that I think either of those can work. If you’re describing the plot, make it sound exciting. And if you are not doing that and you’re building atmosphere, make the atmosphere sound intriguing. That’s the best advice I can give. Chris: Well, this is also where comparables come in handy. Look at books similar to yours and see what their blurbs sound like. And I feel like that’s gonna be your best guide to what your blurbs should sound like. I still think that even with Piranesi, you see the kind of same rhythm of, we start by setting up an interesting premise and character, and then we set up one plot twist that adds some tension to the blurb, and then we end with like a vague teaser about the future. We put a little bit more word count into the kind of starting premise because Piranesi has such a kind of unusual and interesting premise. If you have some novelty in your story, you want that in front, but just don’t forget to add the details because it’s the novel details that really matter, not just like the general concept. So for instance, a good example is Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. So our kind of starting paragraph that adds the novel premise and you know, gets people interested in this character says, “14-year-old Mona isn’t like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can’t control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread.  She has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery making gingerbread men dance.” Now, some key things about this paragraph, and it’s just the same skills you build as a storyteller in miniature, honestly. First, we have some, a little bit of sympathy and spinach with Ramona, because she doesn’t like the other wizards, she can’t control lightning or speak to water. Giving her some spinach, some sympathy that makes her more likable. Then we have the novelty when we have specific details. A familiar that’s a sourdough starter. Magic that works on bread dancing, gingerbread men. And if we’re just like, oh, she does baking magic, it would not be the same. We have to give those details. It’s those details that bring out the novelty of the premise. Oren: Yeah. Without the details, it would’ve been half baked. Bunny: [groans] I need to delete “wisecracking.” And just put it with “dad puns.” Oren: We’ll get the audio editors to deal with that. Chris: And then it proceeds with our tense plot twist of the teaser. “But Mona’s life is [turned] up upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona’s city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target.” Then we have the tension. It’s funny because on Goodreads, this book had the word “cozy” attached to it, which people seem to be putting on everything. And yes, it has the baking magic, which does resemble a cozy fantasy, but the assassin, it just– it [does] not qualify. Bunny: There aren’t usually that many assassins in cozy stories. Chris: And then we have our vague teaser that’s about what comes next. “And in an embattled city, suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona’s worries…” Dot dot dot. But that kind of like, I see that same structure in just a lot of them, right. And that also works for querying when you’re giving an idea of what your book is about. Bunny: And this also still hits those five notes that I identified. We start with a character, so Mona. We get the setting, there’s a city full of wizards. The setup is that she has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery, making gingerbread men dance. That’s the setup. That’s where we are. And then we have a conflict. Mona’s life gets turned upside down. There’s a dead body, there’s an assassin, and then the stakes, Mona might be the next target. And then also this bigger thing about the embattled city. We have all of those points there. Chris: I do think that the key here is to just use the same storytelling skills that you normally use to create novelty, to make your protagonist likable, to add tension, do all of those things. Just do them in little miniature bits. Bunny: That’s our tip. Do the same things in little. Chris: Little, which is not easy. Bunny: Little is harder in my experience. Chris: Admittedly, ’cause trying to explain the story without putting in tons of details that are just logistical, like even Piranesi, the back blurb has some parts of it that just feel like they’re there as logistical details to set up the twist. And sometimes you can’t get away from that. But the idea is to try to simplify that as much as possible. Oren: Or, and we could address the elephant in the room, which is what I sometimes call black hat blurbing, where you’re just making something that sounds neat. It just does not reflect the book at all. I don’t like it. I can’t say it doesn’t work. But I hate it. I will be disappointed in you if you do this. An example is on the Amazon sales page of the Three-Body Problem. It makes this big deal about how it’s set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution. A secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens, and then it talks about the aliens a little bit. And it says different camps start to form on earth about whether to welcome or fight them. And let me tell you, that is not what this book is about. The Cultural Revolution stuff is briefly there in the prologue, and the aliens are there, but they never show up. We occasionally get some interludes with them, and then the camps they’re talking about is the tiny cult of alien lovers and everyone else. And that’s it. That’s not really what dividing into camps typically means. If there’s 5,000 people in one room and three in another room, you wouldn’t call that two camps. Bunny: Two camps, Oren. I’ll have you know that the world is divided into two camps. One camp, which is–in which selkies are out, and one camp in which selkies are in, and I am the only one in the second camp. Two! Oren: Looking at this blurb, you would have no idea that most of the story is an extremely slow mystery trying to uncover why a bunch of scientists are dying by suicide and spending a lot of time in a weird MMO. You just wouldn’t have any idea that’s what the book’s about by reading this blurb. The blurb does not sound like that kind of book. Chris: I do think it’s hard for them to advertise a book where people are dying, but it’s still boring. It’s like, what do you say at that point? They probably try to make it sound like it’s a thriller or something because people are dying, but it’s not. Bunny: It’s a boring book with boring death. Oren: You can also look–there are some warning signs to look out for in blurbs. Anything that has two different characters who are just described as doing their own thing. Because at that point the book’s just telling you that it has a fractured story. ‘Cause if they couldn’t make the characters feel like part of the same story in the blurb, the book almost certainly isn’t doing that. Unless you are okay with that sort of thing, stay away from that book. Also, if, if the blurb feels really vague, you read it and you’re like, what does any of that mean? That probably means that the story is really unfocused and whoever was writing the blurb doesn’t know what to do with it. “How am I supposed to tell them what this is?” And they don’t wanna lie, unlike whoever wrote this Three-Body Problem blurb. Chris: I would take a book that had a back blurb that was like a romance and had a little intro paragraph for each character, and then the next paragraph was like, “oh yeah, and here’s how they end up meeting each other.” Because if it’s a romance, I know that they’re gonna spend their time together. They’re not gonna be on other sides of the world generally. No, that’s not true. We have seen epistolary letter romances, but that would be unusual. Bunny: That’s pretty common in romance. Oren: They’re writing letters to each other, right? Chris: They’re still interacting. Bunny: They’re interacting. Romance also shows a case where what counts as a spoiler varies from genre to genre. If there’s a teaser for a romance and it’s like, “X has feelings for Y. Will X and Y start a relationship?” If this is a romance novel, then yes. It’s romance. So suggesting a “will they, won’t they” isn’t really a spoiler because it’s like, well, we know where this goes, but you can’t reveal a huge source of tension in the story. You can’t reveal a reveal in the teaser. That’s a big one. If part of the tension comes from who’s the villain, and we have a secret villain, you can’t reveal who the villain is in the teaser. Trailers do this sometimes. One of the recent Mission Impossible trailers, I think for Mission Impossible: Fallout, spoiled that Henry Cavill was the villain because the trailer had a shot of him shooting an AK 47 at Tom Hanks [actually Tom Cruise], and it’s like, “Ooh, he’s a baddie.” But that’s supposed to be a twist in the movie. Don’t do that. Sorry. Spoilers, I guess, for a several years old movie. Oren: Oh, no. Rude. Sometimes there’s no option there. Like if we’re talking about trailers now, like the movie Abigail, the trailer gives away the entire twist that the first, at least 40 minutes of the movie is building up to, but on the other hand, without the twist, there is no reason to see this movie. It’s just a kind of average movie if you don’t have that twist, and I have no idea how you would advertise it without mentioning the twist. Chris: We have a blog post coming out about this. It talks about the fact that sometimes people wanna make the basic premise of their story a reveal. And that leaves you with nothing to advertise and that’s a big problem. I think the thing that Abigail should have done was plotted the story like Megan, because Megan, it’s similar in that the thing that’s the big draw– Bunny: The title that’s a girl’s name? Chris: Well, Abigail is about a ballerina vampire who kills people, and Megan is about a doll who kills people. I do think that they appeal to a very similar audience. But, in Megan, the beginning of the story is written with the idea that people will know that Megan is gonna turn into a killer. So it uses that to build suspense, whereas Abigail is trying to hide it and build up to it as though it’s a reveal. So then it’s just an underwhelming reveal and we’re not seeing any of this ballerina vampire ahead of time. Bunny: There’s a larger issue of blurbs that set up the reader to just wait and wait and wait, wait for the things in the blurb to happen. And this is a peeve of mine. The way I approach blurbs, and maybe this varies from person to person, but the way I approach it is like, this is giving me the general sense of where everyone is when the story starts. Two thirds of the blurb is usually like, “here’s how things are normally.” And then the last third is like, “and here’s what’s changed,” and that’s the story. So I hate it when it takes 150 pages for the story to fulfill the things it promised in the setup. Chris: I do wonder if some of these books are just under some constraints. Piranesi has a really novel premise that it can spend a bunch of word counts on the back blurb, and then it’s just kind of a contemplative story. Whereas if you had a story that kind of goes places and you couldn’t tell from the beginning moments what kind of story it’s gonna be, I can see the temptation to add more events to give a better idea so that people know that this is a war story, ’cause it doesn’t seem like a war story early on. Now granted, that’s also a thing the storyteller could proactively address, but sometimes we’ve got the story we’ve got and we’re just trying to advertise it the best we can. I can see there being issues there, but I generally agree that it’s better to not go halfway into the book with your plot twist, if you can avoid it. Bunny: I’m gripey about this because I’m reading a book called Swamplandia and I’m 150 pages into it, and the blurb promised me four things. One, the main character’s mom dies. Two, her father withdraws. Three, her sister falls in love with a ghost. Four, her brother goes to work at a theme park. And then it says that the main character goes on a mission to save them. And I’m 150 pages in. Those events happen in a different order. The mom’s death happens in the first couple pages and the brother leaves, and then the sister falls in love, and that’s just happened, and I’m still waiting for the mission to save them to start. Chris: Here’s a question. [Does] the story feel slow? Bunny: I don’t know. It’s one of those stories that’s definitely trying to be literary, so yes. Chris: Sounds like yes. This might be less of a complaint if the story wasn’t slow. And again, that might be why the back blurb pulls in so many later events is because actually, the story is kind of slow and doesn’t have enough tension, and we’re trying to make up for that by taking later events and pretending they happened earlier so it seems like a tenser book than it is. Bunny: It definitely has been like 70% the father withdrawing and then the rest of those other three things. Chris: But it sounds like a more interesting book if you imagine all of those events happen in the beginning. So the real issue here is that the book is not engaging enough. A salesperson is always gonna have an incentive to mislead, to get people to buy the book. And some of ’em just want sales. But I think they also hope that if we just trick enough people into buying it, that some of them will become true fans and the book will succeed anyway. Because it’s hard for a book to succeed without word of mouth, I think, or become real big without word of mouth. Bunny: Wow. I’m gonna have to erase “irreverent,” and replace it with “cynical” in your blurb, just to be more accurate. Chris: No! Oren: So we’re definitely out of time. We’re like five minutes over time. It’s time to call this, the blurb has gotten too long. Bunny: But we were complaining, Oren! Oren: I do love to do that. There’s more I could complain about, but we don’t have time. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support 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 Jabar. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [outro music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.