The Mythcreant Podcast

You’ve created a world where loads of nameless extras and faceless NPCs get roasted to death each morning, where everything is terrible and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Surely that’ll be tense, right? Uh oh, your beta readers are still reporting boredom. That’s because while dark content can influence tension, the two are not synonyms. Listen as we discuss what the differences are, why authors often get them confused, and how you can actually use one to boost the other.  Show Notes Tension Agency Children of Blood and Bone  The Devils  Suicide Squad  Inverse Ninja Effect The Blade Itself  Fourth Wing The Ghoul A Fire Upon the Deep Transcript Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: 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 the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: So for this story, I’m gonna be talking about some really cool, dark, exciting things. Like there’s gonna be body parts and people burning to death… No one we care about, of course. Chris: So does this story introduce new characters because it killed off all the old ones? Oren: No, I just told you, it’s not gonna happen to anyone we care about. Chris: Ohh, I see. Oren: I’ve just gotta introduce a bunch of randos, and they’re all gonna die horribly. And that’ll be really exciting, right? That’s the same thing as tension. Chris: Yeah, sure. Are we also gonna have our protagonists participate in a big tournament where they’re in a lake? And it’s full of slaves that are, like, drowning around them, but they’re just trying to win, and they don’t care about the slaves? Oren: They wanna win. You know, winning the slave murder cup is important to them. [laughter] Don’t worry, we’ll say that there’s a thing they need that is in the cup, and there’s nothing else they could do to try to find another way to get it. It’s just not possible. Chris: Yeah, I mean, there’s just slaves dying everywhere, but they can’t do anything about it anyway, so… Oren: Yeah. So enough giving crap to Children of Blood and Bone, because I now wanna give crap to a different book that I’ve been reading. It’s Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, which is basically Suicide Squad, but in fantasy, is the premise. I did see some Redditors complaining that this book has Joss Whedon dialogue, which is just the perfect example of brain rot in literary discussion. Because now any book where the characters are irreverent and sarcastic is labeled as Joss Whedon dialogue. Chris: That is giving Joss Whedon way too much credit, okay. He did not invent being witty and irreverent and self-aware. Oren: Yeah, no. If characters make fun of the thing they’re doing, you have to pay Joss Whedon money. [Chris laughs] He invented that idea. No one else has ever done it. It’s just Joss Whedon. I just find that very funny. But, an actual problem that this story has, with some minor spoilers, is it has a serious tension issue, which you wouldn’t expect from Abercrombie, because his stories are really dark and full of death and murder. So how could there be a tension problem? And it’s because of the thing I just mentioned, or that’s one reason. There are others. But for this podcast, the reason is that when we have these big fight scenes where there’s lots of blood and guts and death, it’s just happening to somebody else. It’s like we give them a bunch of disposable guards so the guards can all die badly. And I’m just sitting here being like, okay, when are we gonna get through the nameless guards to someone who actually matters? And it takes a while. Chris: And again, there is also the inverse ninja effect. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Right? It’s just, when you escalate everything so soon, and again, it does feel like the guards were added just so that they can all get killed, but that also just makes people more meaningless, and pretty soon you have to add more and more fighters in all of your scenes. Because we know that having fifty people around doesn’t mean anything. Oren: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s another problem with this story is that after the first fight, the actual suicide squad, not just their nameless guards, is basically invincible, we’ve established, because they’re so powerful. So later on, there’s problems where it’s like, “Oh no, some bandits attacking us!” It’s like, yeah, I think your invincible squad of fantasy superheroes can probably handle it. So that’s its own issue, but it is weird. It felt like they were given these guards and then we had to contrive a way for them to be ambushed, to get rid of the guards. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: But I think you’re probably right. I think it’s the other way around. The guards were put there so we could have a bunch of nameless mooks who could die horribly. Chris: Yeah. I mean, knowing Abercrombie. [laughs] Oren: Yeah. Chris: I mean, I’m not familiar with this work, but I still remember in The Blade Itself, he has a whole POV from a torturer guy. Oren: Yeah. Although, I’ll give him credit for this, at least in that POV, he was willing to have bad things happen to his POV characters. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: He wasn’t just inflicting it on nameless mooks. That torturer character has been himself horribly tortured, and is like all kinds of messed up from it in ways that you don’t normally see fantasy heroes get messed up. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: He doesn’t have, like, cool badass scars. He has ugly, seriously debilitating scars. You almost never see that. And I didn’t enjoy that book, but I did respect Abercrombie for being willing to do that. Chris: I mean, if you go dark, then be dark. Oren: Yeah. That’s kind of how I feel. If you want this level of darkness, you should be willing to inflict it on your main characters. Am I going to enjoy that? No. But I’d rather have that happen than just cooking a bunch of extras in the background. [laughing] Chris: Yeah. You know, as opposed to Children of Blood and Bone, which is what I was talking about earlier with the tournament where the slaves are dying all around them. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: That was one of the books that inspired me to write by post on grimdark sauce,as I call it, where it’s weird because the scenery is extremely grimdark, but the story itself is not really dark, because nothing bad happens to the characters that you are actually following and actually care about. Oren: Yeah. Chris: That’s the one where when they need to escape, it feels like all of the soldiers attacking them just, like, pause so they can climb on the back of some giant cats and get away. Oren: Yeah. And that one is weird too because it does things like assure both the characters and the reader that, like, her grandpa will be okay, don’t worry about it. Which is kind of at odds with how dark everything else is. And, spoilers for later, but it turns out that’s wrong. It turns out their grandpa is not okay. And also then the protagonist eventually does get captured and tortured, but – by this point we’re so late in the story that now this feels like a jarring change. Like the story is breaking its promise to me, but also she is remarkably unscathed from her bout of horrible torture. Like she has the standard cool fantasy hero scars from horrible torture. Not the, like, this person’s body will never be the same scars that the guy from The Blade Itself had. Chris: Yeah, so in any case, let’s talk about the difference between darkness and tension. Oren: Yeah. There is something of a connection. The connection’s not entirely made up. Because if your story is super light, it is harder to create tension because for something to be tense, you generally need to have something serious at stake. And that requires a certain level of dark content, right? Not necessarily a lot, but some. Chris: I mean, I do think tension, particularly high tension, does make the story darker to some degree. And we can even call it one dark emotion or one dark aspect. But when we call stories dark, it can mean so many different things. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Tension by itself only goes so far in making a story dark. And also tension is just very specific. It’s a very specific emotion that’s that sense of uncertainty over whether or not something bad will happen, and so you gotta do something to keep it from happening. That’s what tension is for. It’s a very motivating emotion, and because of that it only goes so far in being dark. Whereas a lot of times when you get the really dark stuff, it can even kill tension because it tends to get really hopeless and gloomy. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Like no matter what we do, the whole world is gonna end. It’s like, okay, that’s very dark. It’s not actually tense though, because we know the world is gonna end, and so we kind of have to come to terms with that. Oren: Yeah. It’s like, you’ve a hundred percent established the world’s gonna end, so, all right. Uh, that sucks, but I’m not on the edge of my seat about it anymore, right? Chris: Yeah. Also, that’s the thing about having tragedy, and again, we’ve talked before about writers – what they actually want as their story continues is to make it escalate and have it more exciting and tense, but instead they just make it darker by having bad stuff happen.  Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: But having bad stuff happen does not necessarily raise tension, especially if – well, I mean, it’s already happened, so we’re not worried about it happening, right? So if you randomly kill off a character and then make readers really upset about it, that might not actually raise tension. That might just be sad. Oren: Right? And there are different ways this can go. If you kill off a character who is in certain respects, at least, similar to the surviving characters, that can raise tension, because you have actually shown that you are willing to follow through on the threats to characters. Is that a good thing to do? Eh, depends. Sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it’s not. It depends on how load-bearing that character was. Chris: And also like what type of experience you really wanna create. Let’s say you kill a character in a way that specifically shows that you are willing to violate plot shields. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Nobody has a plot shield. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And I think that’s what is most likely to raise tension. As opposed to if you kill the character that’s three weeks away from retirement? [laughs] That’s not gonna raise tension, because you’re just showing that you are actually following plot conventions in who dies. And so that’s not gonna make any of the characters who seem to have plot shields feel at risk. But generally, unless you are doing a really dark story, and that’s the kind of experience that you’re creating for people – it’s, like, horror, it’s really dark fantasy, that kind of thing – I generally find that it’s not good tension, right? Oren: Hmm. Chris: The average person who’s reading a nice old adventure story and wants some excitement doesn’t often want to genuinely worry about their favorite character dying. I think when I’ve seen that, that can actually be sometimes a little too intense for people. And so usually even with plot shields, people can buy into the story scenario and the idea that, “Oh no, people could get hurt” without that extra meta-knowledge of like, no, this author might really do it. And adding in, let’s say you want them to believe that this character can really die, I do think that it gets very intense if you add that second meta element on top of it where you think it actually could happen. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And is a little bit more stressful. So, again, if you have a dark-loving audience, then anything goes at that point. But for kind of the average exciting story, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that. Oren: Yeah, and of course there’s also, you have to consider the cost of losing that character to begin with. Because if it’s going to accomplish this goal of making it seem like other characters could die, then that character needs to be effectively a main character on their own. Like,  it doesn’t work to bring in an extra and tell us about their backstory really quickly. Or introduce a small child, and be like, “Aren’t they cute? Look at their big child eeeyes…” [Chris laughs] Look, that doesn’t work. So if you are actually going to accomplish this, you need a character that was doing something similar to the other characters, which means it is going to cost you for them to die, right? Chris: Mm-hmm. Oren: Because theoretically, people enjoyed reading about them. If not, you have a different problem. Chris: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And people will get upset. And some people, that will be their favorite character, and they’ll rage quit. And I mean, again, that’s why we recommend killing off characters like protagonists so rarely. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Basically only in very special circumstances, or again, if you’re just going with grimdark, if that’s what your story is sold based on, and you want your stories to be really unpredictable, and anybody could die, and that is the experience that you are selling to your audience, and they know what they’re signing up for, then sure, there’s a niche taste. Everybody likes something different. But in general, that’s why we do it so rarely. And again, so I kind of hinted at the beginning, there are some TV shows that end up reducing tension because they kill off so many characters that nobody wants to get attached to characters anymore. Oren: Yeah. If you’re like, “It’s not safe, you can’t grow attached to anybody, you know, you’ll have to cry.” It’s like, all right, well, I guess I won’t then. [both laugh] Especially once you’ve killed so many characters, there’s nobody left. It’s like, all right, well, all the characters we started with are gone. I’m not starting over from day one here. I don’t got that kind of time. [laughing] Chris: But yeah, when it comes to bad things happening – again, we talked about showing readers that you’re not gonna follow plot shields, which again, would be a niche thing to do, not a thing that everybody should be doing. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: The other situation is if you have something bad happen that then creates a new problem. It’s basically starting a new child arc of some kind that can raise tension. So rocks fall, destroy the town, and now we have to find someplace for everybody to take shelter. Okay, we’ve created a new task, avoiding further disaster. But the disaster that just happened that made everybody sad, that does not create tension. Oren: Yeah. Because what it is, tension is largely the fear that something is going to get worse. And once you establish a baseline of badness, it’s like, all right, well, that’s the baseline. Chris: It’s very forward looking. It’s always about what happens in the future, not what happened in the past. Oren: Right. Chris: What happened in the past can be useful for establishing what could happen in the future. If we see a pattern of killings, then we would be worried that it would happen again. So that can be useful, but it’s always forward looking. Oren: And this is why long extended descriptions of your fantasy city are likely to be boring, regardless of whether it’s a shining beacon of light or super grim and gritty with murdered people around every corner, because that’s just the status quo. That’s just how things are right now. You’ve set that baseline. Now it’s up to you to show me the possibility that things might get worse. Chris: Yeah. I think another thing that you can do – again, if your story is real dark and intense – then another place where they can be complementary is if you do show a horrible thing happening to somebody, and you’ve got, like, body horror, or what have you. And then you threaten the same thing for another character. Seeing how bad that is viscerally, I do think, again, does make those stakes feel more impactful. So that could potentially raise tension. So if you show a serial killer in gruesome detail doing their thing, and then the serial killer starts stalking another character, those gruesome details could make a difference. Because when it comes to stakes, it’s not just objectively how bad it is. There’s also an emotional element, and if you illustrate it in more detail and make it feel more real, the stakes do become more impactful. And you can also have characters imagine what could happen as another way of getting more details. Oren: Yeah. And that brings to mind the presentation of whatever it is. Because that matters a lot. If you have things that could potentially be really bad, but you summarize them or you don’t give them the gravitas they deserve, well, even though objectively that would be really bad, it doesn’t feel like it’s a real thing. Fourth Wing has this problem. In Fourth Wing, the protagonist’s life is technically in constant danger because of the murder school that she’s in, and all the murder that happens there. But it’s also summarized, right? Like almost all of it happens in summary, and all the solutions are kind of off-screen. There are only one or two instances where she really feels like she’s in danger. Even though technically she’s in danger the whole time. Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think I found that book a little more tense than you did. Partly probably because I liked Violet, the main character, better. Oren: Sure. Chris: I know that you just didn’t feel any attachment to her. So yeah, there were things that were summarized a little too much, but I generally found that book to be still pretty tense.  Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Because it did have a number of deadly challenges and high-stakes moments. But yeah, there were definitely some things that I would’ve liked to have seen more on-screen with her proactively troubleshooting instead of having it skim by. Oren: And that of course does bring another instance, because we’re talking about how much we do or don’t like the main character. That makes a big difference too. You need to have some attachment to a main character for there to be tension over what happens to them. And in dark stories, this can sometimes backfire because a lot of authors are like, “I’m gonna be dark and edgy. I’m gonna have my main character be a dick.” Like, all right. Well, now I don’t care what happens to them. [both laugh] You know, like, I might even want something bad to happen to them. Because they’re such a jerk, I wanna see them get some karmic justice. And if that’s your intention, that maybe – I’m not gonna say that couldn’t work. I’m just saying I have seen a lot of authors who have arrived at that situation accidentally. They clearly did not mean for this to happen. They want me to be worried that their jerk-ass puppy kicking protagonist is gonna get eaten. And it’s like, no, eat ’em. Definitely eat ’em. I’m mad at him from two chapters ago. Please eat him. You know? [laughing] Chris: Yeah. I mean, readers and audience in general are probably more sensitive than you think to character misbehavior. Anytime one character is hard on another character, readers can react pretty strongly to that, even if it’s something that is meant to be relatively harmless, like ignoring somebody, or running away when they ask for help. Oren: Yeah. Chris: As opposed to like these grimdark heroes who might just be, like, killing people. Alright, so in Fallout there’s this Ghoul character who has too much candy. Oren: Yeah yeah. Chris: But he also has a very charismatic white guy actor. And so people like him anyway. And the breaking point for me with his character was when he just shoots and kills a young man, maybe like a teenager or something. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: And the kid was attacking him first, but only after being severely provoked. So our like cowboy Ghoul character comes in and was like, “Hey, by the way, I just murdered your brother, ha ha.” [laughs] And this is just a teenager who – again, the Ghoul is super capable. So he is more than able to just defend himself without killing somebody who’s upset that, you know, his brother got murdered. But that’s the kind of behavior that I would expect to see all the time for a lot of protagonists in really dark works. And yeah, after that point it would be hard to feel tension. I certainly was hoping something bad would happen to the Ghoul. Oren: Yeah, I wanted the Ghoul to die. And that’s the thing, is that I’m sure when some people hear that, they’re gonna be like, “Oh, well why would you want the Ghoul to be nice? He’s not a nice guy.” It’s like, yeah, I mean, sure, if he’s that big of an asshole, that’s fine. He can be a villain. I’m just not gonna be happy if the story ends by making him seem like the new main character, which is what happens in the first season of Fallout. Now Lucy is kind of tagging along with him. Chris: Mm-hmm. If a character gets bad karma, but they also get their comeuppance, that helps to balance the karma, and it also does take off the edge when it comes to reader resentment, right? So if we say, see the Ghoul do something bad like that, then something bad happens to him as a result of his decision, that mollifies the audience, and actually can make him more likable. But the Ghoul just keeps getting candy. And there is some – he did have a tangle with Lucy where she got the better of him because he sold her to, like, a meat shop or something. [laughing] There was one instance in which he got some level of comeuppance, but most of the time he just doesn’t. And that’s part of the issue. Oren: The thing about the Ghoul that I found most funny is that he’s basically invincible. Like, except for that one time when Lucy is able to get the drop on him somehow, but in pretty much every other scene, he’s invincible. But the idea of just robbing these people who have all the medicine he needs, apparently that never occurred to him. Like, he was willing to almost die from this lack of medicine, because I guess we’re just supposed to assume that robbing these guys would’ve been impossible. But we see him take out like a whole squad of Brotherhood soldiers in power armor, so I know he could do it. Don’t pretend he couldn’t do it, show! Chris: Yeah. I did not like seeing him take out that squad at the climax. That was, I was so mad about that. Oren: It’s too much. He’s too good. That’s just some bullshit is what that is. Chris: Yeah. But anyway, if you wanna have an edgy character that maybe readers are not gonna like, that can negatively impact the tension. So that’s something else to think about is that that emotional investment in the characters is kind of required so that we want them to succeed, and we don’t want bad things to happen to them. [laughing] Oren: Yeah. Chris: Another thing to think about is, again, we’ve occasionally talked about the difference between conflict and calamity. So basically, when you have a conflict, you’re showing a character struggling to kind of solve a problem against something that opposes them. And we call that something the antagonist, and sometimes the villain. And again, there could be more than one antagonist. The point is that at least one character is struggling. But the key about the struggle is that if that character is, like, standing there passively, or is tied up, or otherwise it doesn’t feel like they can do anything, it’s not really a struggle anymore. They are not struggling.  Oren: Yeah. Chris: And we have seen some stories where it seems like the writer is trying to write a conflict, but just doesn’t get the kind of character agency part of that. And so what happens is often, in this case, lots of bad or supposedly tense things happen really fast, and it doesn’t feel like the character has the ability to respond. And they might not be tied up. It might just be, again, there’s a little bit of over-summary, but like things happen fast. We don’t get the feeling that this is an interaction the character is having where they can intervene, and they can change the outcome. Oren: Yeah, it feels like a cut scene is playing in the video game. [Chris laughs] And like you can have tension in scenes where the character is not doing anything. It just tends to be kind of specific and specialized, and it’s usually based on the possibility that they could. I think Chris has mentioned the possibility of a scene where the main character is, like, sitting on the couch playing video games, and a serial killer is sneaking up behind them. They aren’t technically doing anything, but there’s a sense of tension because we’re like, “Oh no, they could get stabbed! Or maybe they’ll notice the serial killer.” But if they’re sitting on the couch, and then just like a bunch of aliens rampage through the town, and they’re just sitting there and being like, “Well, I guess I’ll either die or I won’t, because maybe the aliens will kill me.” I don’t think that’s very tense. I just – not for very long, all right. Maybe for a short amount of time. Chris: Right. So what happens when it keeps going, and the character doesn’t intervene for whatever reason, is that the antagonist actually starts to look like a wimp. Because at that point, all should be lost if the protagonist is not intervening. So let’s say we have this serial killer sneaking up behind the character on the couch while they’re playing a video game. Oren: Yeah. Chris: And they’re not doing anything. But we know they can. But let’s say the serial killer just keeps hanging out, and for some reason still has not killed our protagonist, has not done anything. They’ve been playing their video game for this entire scene, but for some reason the serial killer still hasn’t killed them yet. After a while, it’s just like, “You’re not actually gonna kill them, are you, serial killer?” Oren:  Yeah. No, you’re just hanging out. You’re just watching ’em play. Chris: They’re still fine. So you must not have it in you to kill them. [laughing] That’s a weird example. But like this happens in – I think the book Fire Upon the Deep is where I saw tons of these. Of stuff just happening, and there’s one scene when they’re on some sort of space station with some, I don’t know, hills or outdoor landscapes, and it’s all collapsing, and they’re trying to get to their ship while the landscape crumbles around them. But this keeps going, and we keep describing landscape crumbling, but the protagonists aren’t really doing anything special. I mean, I guess they’re running, and they’re not dead yet. So I guess it’s meaningless that the landscape is collapsing, right? Oren: Yeah, NBD. [laughing] Chris: Because if they’re not doing anything effective to ensure their survival, and whatever’s threatening them still hasn’t killed them yet, then the threat must not be a big deal. That’s basically how it works. But if you see these scenes, again, where lots of bad things happen in quick succession, and there are no protagonist actions, that’s just gonna kill the tension. It’s just gonna feel like none of it matters and get boring, even if it’s supposed to be exciting, even if it’s specifically written to feel threatening and exciting. That’s why you need that conflict where the character comes in and intervenes. What you want is like the serial killer is chasing after the character, and the character crawls away, barely… Oren: Yeah. Chris: And they managed to make it in the closet just in time and shut the door. But now the serial killer’s got an axe, and they’re breaking down the door. And then the protagonist just finds something else to just barely scrape by. That’s what’s tense, right? Because we can see that the protagonist is just barely managing to take actions that avoid them being killed, and therefore, the antagonist also, what they’re doing matters. Because the protagonist has to respond in order to stay alive. Oren: And this is why I always have to laugh at this weird agency discourse that rears its head every once in a while. Because almost guaranteed, someone will point to a horror story and be like, “Well, surely you can’t say that agency is required, because these characters were disempowered. And that was still fun.” It’s like, yes. Or yeah, maybe not fun is the right word, but you know, still a good story. But being disempowered doesn’t mean there’s no agency, it just means things suck. [laughing] Chris: Yeah. Generally, when the character is very reactive, that feels disempowering, even if they have agency. So in this case, they’re attacked by the serial killer, and now they’re reacting to try to keep this serial killer from killing them, as opposed to that turn that usually happens towards the end of a horror movie where they’re like, “Now I gotta bring the fight to the serial killer.” And the final girl grabs a weapon and decides she’s gonna be badass now. That’s the change from reactive to proactive, and it does feel very empowering. By the way, I do get this question a lot when I talk about agency, they’re like, “Well, what if I want my character to be disempowered?” It’s like, “Well, then you make them reactive.”  Oren: All right. Well, now that we’ve firmly established what those terms mean, I’m sure everyone will always use them the same way we do forever, and we won’t have any problems. Chris: [laughing] I’m sure we’ve put an end to agency discourse forever. Oren: Yeah, it’s done now. Chris: It’s done. Oren: And, so, appropriately, we will now call this episode to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

No matter your book’s plot or genre, a lot of its words will be spent on narration. Rather than treating narration as an amorphous blob, it’s important to understand the different elements that make it up. That way, you’ll understand whether the story has too much description relative to action or when you need to add a bit of exposition. This week, we’re discussing what makes the different types of narration tick and also apparently referring to the Hugos as something that will still happen in the future. That’s just the nature of recording your episodes ahead of time! Show Notes The Five Types of Narration Dialogue  Description  Summary  Action Ministry of Time  Alien Clay Star Trek: First Contact  Shield of Sparrows  Crescent City Transcript Generously transcribed by Phoebe. 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: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris. Oren: And I’m Oren. Chris: Did you know there are five types of lines in a podcast conversation? Oren: Really? Five specifically. Okay. This sounds real. Chris: Exactly five. Uh-huh. Yeah, there’s, uh, informative lines, uh, joke lines. Subtly trying to correct what somebody else says lines. Oren: That one is pretty important. What about non-sequitur lines where I talk about spaghetti for five minutes? Chris: That definitely happens. Oren: There have to be sandwich discord lines, right? Like surely that has created a sixth category. Chris: Oh yeah, that’s good. And our fifth time can just be laugh lines where we’re laughing in response to each other. Oren: What about opening bit lines? Is that already covered by one of the types? Chris: I don’t know. That might be part of the informative line, or is it its own? Oren: There you go. You sorted it all out. Chris: See, I’ve got it. I’ve cracked the code. Now all we have to do in a podcast is just pick one of those lines, but like every time before we say something, we need to pick a line type. It’s gonna go well. Oren: Press it and then get some auto-generated suggestions. What could go wrong? Chris: Sometimes I do feel like that when people sort things into types, that it’s just kind of silly and arbitrary and like, okay, but what are they for? But at the same time, in many cases, it is really helpful because it takes something that’s sort of big and amorphous and makes it a little bit less amorphous, makes it less vague. So that you can get inspiration from different types or it can be ways of thinking a little bit further about it and kind of understanding it a little bit better, that kind of thing. Just like when we have turning points, we break it down into different types of turning points, that really gives people ideas for what they can do for their turning point. And so, five types of narration is just me breaking narration down into what I see as the sort of natural divisions, and they have some overlap and fuzzy areas. But I do think that it is important for every manuscript to have some text in each of these categories. And when we get manuscripts very frequently, one of them could be missing altogether, one of them could be underused, and that’s actually a really big problem. Whereas of course, they can be overused too, and that’s when people start to get bored. Oren: As an enlightened centrist on the topic of categorization, I believe that you should do it when it’s helpful and you shouldn’t do it when it’s not helpful, and I’m sure that that distinction is very easy to tell and there aren’t any arguments over it. With these particular types as outlined in the Five Types of Narration Every Novel Needs by Chris Winkle, I find these helpful because when I am working with a client, it is useful to be able to tell them there is a certain kind of narration in your work that needs strengthening, and I can tell them what it is because we have a term for it. And because these categories at least generally correspond to actual things in the work, these are useful categories that I can tell them as opposed to, we just made some up about how your categories are aura writing and spiritual description, and that would be meaningless. I could tell them to work on their aura writing all day and they wouldn’t know what to do with that. But I can tell them to work on their description and I can, you know, describe what that is if they don’t already know it, and then I can help them that way. And I don’t have to just say, work on your word craft. Just make it better generally. Chris: And I should mention that I think almost all of these terms come from the writing industry in general. I’m not sure I’ve made any of these up, like internalization maybe, but people talk about internal narration, I’m sure of it, all the time. So I’ve just put it into a neat list. We do look at narration. It always does generally fall under one of these types. Now, the other thing being dialogue. Which is not technically narration. Oren: The secret sixth category. Chris: Secret sixth category. As strange as that may sound, ’cause narration means that you have a narrator, whereas dialogue is also something that appears in live action, in a play or a movie when action is unfolding. So it’s technically not narration. We can talk about it a little bit, but unlike the other types of narration, it’s also optional. You can totally have a story with no dialogue and have it work just fine. The other ones, I think they’re gonna be problems if you leave them out. Not that people don’t try. Sometimes people try with some of them, but at least for a novel, when you have a really long work, I think you can do a lot more experimental things if you have just a piece of flash fic or a real short story. But I think any novel that tries to skip one category altogether is gonna run into serious trouble. Oren: I was just gonna say that I think a novel, it would be tough to do one without dialogue, but possible, whereas I don’t see how you could do a novel without one of these types of narration. I just don’t see how it’s possible. Chris: Okay. Should we get started? So number one is description. Oren: I refuse to describe what that means. I won’t do it. Chris: Description is anything that is focused on building a sensory experience that kind of grounds you in the story world, obviously, what things look like, what they sound like, what they feel like. When it’s something that is there not to really build sensory splendor, but just to say, oh, this happened, like somebody shot somebody else, I might not call that description anymore, then I would call that action. But if you have movements that are part of the scenery, like birds flying between the trees, that’s not like an important event in the story, that’s scenery, then I would call that description. Description is pretty frequently neglected in the editing manuscripts we see. Oren: I wrote a book where it was neglected. My description’s average at best. I got no stones to throw. Description, much like some of the others on this list, is one of those things that people often have horror stories about, books that went on way too long with their description. We always make fun of Tolkien for that, and rightly so in some cases. And so as a result, that sometimes makes writers think that they should skimp on it. And also it’s hard to know what’s good description and what’s just going on and on. Chris: The thing I remember in a lot of epic fantasy books is they arrive at a new city and there’s two, three paragraphs telling me exactly what the city looks like, and I oftentimes can’t understand it. It’s boring. I start to skip it. That’s not great. But I do think description is often best when it’s intermixed with other narration instead of in big chunks because it does not move the story forward. It helps with immersion, it helps the story feel real. And when the story feels real, emotion is stronger and the story feels more impactful and that’s great, but the story also can’t move forward. It is stopping to smell the roses, which means that nothing is gonna happen. And so when you have big chunks of it, you end up putting the story off in some way. It’s also great for emphasizing what’s important in the story. Oren: Generally speaking, you describe things that are important more than things that are less important, because otherwise it feels like you’re wasting time. Partly it’s just down to expectations. Like if you describe a random guard with a lot of description, it makes it sound like that guy is important, and if he’s not, your audience is gonna feel misled. But it’s also just a question of being efficient. If you try to describe everything in lots of detail, your book will never get anywhere. So you focus on the things that matter. Chris: But what you do wanna do though, when you are in a scene, is to give readers a sense of the environment and a sense of place. And so a lot of times what I see in manuscripts is there’s just a new scene and a new place, and I have very little idea of what that place looks like, but also just what it feels like. A lot of times it’s about atmosphere. Are we in this sterile clinic with white walls and you can smell the disinfectant? Is that the kind of place you’re in? Or out on the beach and we can hear the waves and smell the salt. Can you smell salt? People talk about smelling salt. I’m not sure I can ever smell salt. Oren: I don’t know if it’s salt, but is a smell I associate with the ocean. Chris: There is a kind of a fishy smell, maybe seaweedy smell. Oren: There is a fishy smell. I don’t know. There’s a different scent that I don’t think of as fishy when I smell it when I’m near the ocean. And maybe that’s salt. I haven’t stood near like big piles of salt to try to figure out if they smell the same. I just know that’s the smell that I associate with the ocean and I have not smelled it, or at least I don’t remember smelling it when I’ve been near, for example, the Great Lake. So I associate that with salt water, regardless if that’s what it actually is. Chris: And if your character is like talking to other people, is everybody sitting around a campfire? Sitting around a table? Is somebody behind a desk? The basics of making it feel like you can imagine the scene. And you don’t wanna get too specific. You don’t wanna pin every aspect of the layout down. It’s about giving enough that readers can fill in the blank, ’cause they have a kind of idea of what kind of place it is, what position people are in, that kind of thing. And especially if you are introducing a fantastical world, like non-earth, then it becomes extra important because I’m curious, I wanna know, what do people dress like? What do the buildings look like? And again, you don’t have to spend tons of words describing every aspect of the building, but it’s a huge difference whether they’re like castles or shanties. Again, it’s about giving enough imagery that you can kind of create that feel, instead of having that blank void. Oren: The next one is action, which can get a little hard to tell the difference because again, we mentioned if you type out that someone is punching someone, did you not simply describe a punch? But it’s, I would say, different because it’s a fundamental difference in what you are portraying to the reader. It’s not a question of what it looked like. You are now describing an action, and if they don’t already know what it looks like, telling someone that a punch happened is gonna create some image in their mind, but not much. If they don’t know what anyone looks like, it’ll just [be] clothing mannequins punching each other, which is funny, but maybe not what you want. Chris: Action is about moving the story forward. These are the events of the story, basically, is what it’s for. And so of course it can be all kinds of things. It can be fights or people hugging each other or having conversation or landslide, rocks fall, everyone dies, any of those things actually happening, but the idea is that it’s a thing that somebody could actually watch. So if you were at a play or looking at a movie, it’s something that you could directly observe That’s action. And obviously its big benefit is that it moves the story forward. It is the main thing that readers are looking for in the story, is to see action unfold, but it also is just kind of weak by itself. Everybody has action. Action is not something that people leave out entirely as far as I know. I suppose there could be some experimental flash fic out there, but it also, when it stands alone, oftentimes it is very rushed and there’s no context that makes it matter. So there can be action, but nobody cares. Oren: I would say that action at least has the greatest potential to carry the story forward, but it doesn’t automatically do that, I would say. If you describe a bunch of random things your character is doing that has nothing to do with your plot, like a random encounter they get into where they’re investigating a murder and on the way to investigate a murder, they get jumped by an alley-worm and the alley-worm’s not related to the murder at all. Nothing about the murder plot changes and they fight the alley-worm. I wouldn’t really say that advances the plot just because by the end of it, you’re not any further along on the murder plot than you were before, just one dead alley-worm now. Chris: It does need the support of a story to be meaningful for sure. So action by itself is not necessarily gonna be brilliant. And you can tell when you’re overusing it, mostly because it starts to become more and more meaningless. If it doesn’t matter to [an] arc that’s happening. If it doesn’t make a difference to that arc, then pretty soon, even if it seems like it would be exciting, it’s going to cease to matter. So you can have a whole bunch of people with swords running and stabbing at each other. And if there’s like no story hook around that, then it could be boring ’cause it needs that story support. Movies and plays often really do have to work hard to try to deliver the information that people need to know. For instance, why is a character doing something? What are they thinking? What’s their plan? Why somebody is doing something is just very important information. And if you have a viewpoint character, that’s usually filled in with other aspects of the narration. Without that, a lot of times people are just confused or even what is happening, not just why are people doing what they’re doing, but even like, what is going on here are some very basic things that readers absolutely need that action cannot supply on its own. Another thing, I talk about this a lot because I just see it a lot in manuscripts, is also making sure that your action does not become summary, which we can talk about next. But basically when you’re in a scene and you want all of the really important moments of the stories to be scene, just to make sure that the story time does not unfold faster than reading time. And if you’re a speed reader, then definitely read out loud time. If you can read it faster than you can act it out on stage, that’s not good. That means you’re in summary and you’re rushing too much. So when people have too much action, not enough other things, they’re very likely to kind of summarize in that way. You just gotta get more detailed and step through the scene slower with smaller actions. Whereas if you have a lot of stuff like people opening the door and walking in and walking out and other little in-between bits, then you may have too much action and you should just try to cut to the chase. Oren: The third vital type of narration is summary, which, you can actually save a lot of time if you just use for the whole story. It’s actually pretty easy. It can usually take just a couple pages and you’re done. Chris: No. Oh no. Yeah, I’m sure that’s what whoever wrote Ministry of Time was thinking. Oren: Oh gosh, oof. Chris: I shouldn’t be so mean to her. It’s her debut work. She did get nominated for a Hugo though, and who knows? She might get it. So she’s doing pretty well for herself. Oren: If you wanna be mean on the Hugo list specifically for having too much summary, you should just be mean to Alien Clay. Chris: I’m sorry, Ministry of Time. Alien Clay is definitely the book that deserves my ire. Tchaikovsky! Oren: It’s like, Alien Clay is literally a book told almost entirely in summary, it is real weird. Chris: And that guy has two books that [are] nominated for Hugos too. Of course the other one is much better. The other one I understand. Oren: One of them’s good and actually deserves to be on the list. The thing about summary is it’s an important tool because a lot of stuff’s gonna happen in your story that is not that interesting, and it would take forever to write it all out and it would be boring if you tried, so you summarize it. The travel between important scenes, you know, your character, spending all day, cleaning the house in preparation for someone coming over. Stuff like that, that is important. You need to summarize it. I have occasionally read manuscripts where the author didn’t know to do that and it was bad. You gotta stop when something important is happening. Chris: But you gotta stop. And with summary [it’s] interesting because it’s still relating events that are at the current timeline of the story, shall we say, but sometimes it’s not really anchored in time. Sometimes it’s like, oh, over the next month, sometimes these things happened. There’s no specific place or time. We just know that this was kind of a trend that happened at some time during these passing moments. And other times it can get very specific. And then in the first week this happened and the second week this happened, but sometimes it’s just unanchored and if it’s ever un anchored and talking about general trends or often this happened instead of like a specific moment, then you definitely summary. Otherwise, that rule about story time versus reading time I think is a good way of judging whether something has veered into summary territory. One thing about it though, is that kind of like borderline, is it action? Is it summary? That is generally not a good area for your narration to be in. I think sometimes you might want it if you have, for instance, a scene and then you just want to skip over like 10 minutes while somebody’s waiting or something, then it might be useful there. But what I sometimes see also in manuscripts is there’s tons and tons of summary and the reason is because the summary isn’t actually summarized enough. Oren: There’s too much information. You spent the day cleaning the house, and you could have just summarized that by saying, I spent the day cleaning the house. But instead you’re like, first I cleaned the living room and I found five dust bunnies. And then I went to the dining room and I found several old raisins. And sometimes details like that can be nice, but if you’re doing a lot of it, ehhhh. Chris: If you find that you have a lot of summary, and again, sometimes you need a lot of summary, but for me, three paragraphs is when it’s time to like, check in. Do I really need three paragraphs of summary or should I condense it down? Is this important? Should I just cut it, or is there something actually important going on here that should actually be in a scene and I should make like a conflict outta that. So the thing about summary is it is very low immersion. It keeps you very distant, and so nothing that happens in there feels very real. So it’s not gonna be very interesting and it’s not gonna be very impactful. The whole point is to just get stuff over with quickly, especially if you have things like, realistically, my character has to do this, or else it’s just unrealistic. Well, nobody’s gonna believe that they didn’t try to go ask somebody for help, for instance, but it doesn’t matter because they’re gonna ask somebody for help and that person’s just gonna say no. And it’s not gonna make any difference. That’s the time when you’d be like, okay, I summarized. They went and called the administrator and be like, Hey, can you help me with this? The administrator’s like, no. Oren: Don’t worry about it. Chris: And then you could just move on. It’s good for that. It’s good for that kind of connective tissue. And in many cases where you have summary, another option is to just cut out and skip forward in time. But skipping forward does need a little bit of text to make sure that the transition is smooth, people can get a little disoriented, and summary still gives you some kind of sense of what happened. It has advantages over a jump. Sometimes a jump is better. Oren: Well, the one that gets me [is] summarizing large amounts of time passing, because obviously you can’t show all of that or even most of it, or even a fraction of it sometimes if it’s a long time. But at the same time, I just can’t get away from the fact that people change over long periods of time, even if no single event is worth pointing out as a scene. And so it feels really weird to me to summarize like several years passing because now it’s like, okay, the character should realistically be different now, but if they just act different from the reader’s perspective, it will seem like they changed for no reason. Chris: I think that’s gonna be a lot easier if you do something to prepare readers for the jump. If you have to do a several year time jump, the character will be like, all right, I guess I’m gonna be here for three years until the portal opens again. And then they start working on, I don’t know, building their hut in the wilderness or something and just start kind of grinding away. And then you jump forward and you see that they’re like, hut now, and they know how to live in this wilderness and they’re getting ready for the portal to open or something. We kind of have a little bit of preparation for such a big time jump like that. Again, we’ve talked about the expected trend rule. It follows an expected trend. It can be summarized. Otherwise, it’s too important. I was talking about the three-year time jump. Ah, geez. I have to wait three years for this portal, and I guess I better set up my hut. What you would expect from there on out is for the character to slowly kind of build up their life in this place and figure out how to patch their clothes or make the clothing they need, figure out their food. Make themselves [more] utensils. It’s expected that those things will happen, and so then therefore you can jump past them. So next we got exposition. Oren: Probably the most contentious one on the list, actually. Chris: I did notice something recently among literary writers, which I think is really funny, and I hope at some point somebody can explain to me why this is. But I’ve noticed literary writers seem to have two modes, which is, one is like the no exposition ever, and the other mode is like all exposition and summary all the time, and it’s such a strange thing. Are they like in two warring camps? I’m now fascinated and I want to know what’s going on here. But generally for the purposes of engaging readers, we want some exposition, but not too much exposition. Basically, exposition is kind of how you fill in the cracks when you need information that [you can] not work in, in other ways that are engaging, we should say, what is it? Oren: Yeah. What is, who knows? Chris: Well, maybe it’s the beginning of a story. I’m just kidding. There’s a stage, an exposition stage, that if you follow some story structures, like Freytag’s pyramid, they’ll be like, and it starts with exposition, and that’s probably where the name of this narration actually comes from. It’s like the explaining part. But exposition is anything that is just unmoored from the current timeline of events. Oren: It’s when the narration just tells you stuff that you need to know, or maybe you don’t need to know if it’s not good exposition. Chris: For instance, summary we talked about sometimes some things aren’t really tied to a specific time, but at the same time, oh geez. It’s not time to talk about time. Oren: We don’t have the time. Chris: We don’t have the time. That’s from First Contact, the best Star Trek movie in my opinion, but I’m sure Oren disagrees. Oren: That’s a hot take. We’ll come back to that later. Chris: Any case, at least with summary, we generally have like a time period that’s in the sequence of events of the story moving forward. Exposition is not the story moving forward anymore, although otherwise it can look just like summary, but instead it’s gonna be maybe back in time, or it’s gonna be things like just plain facts that have no specific time, like the world is round, for instance. So it’s basically just extra information that does not otherwise fit into the story, the sequence of events. And that means that’s a lot of different things and it’s very flexible and you will need that flexibility. But it’s also one of those things where a lot of times we wanna try to do stuff with other types of narration first and then use exposition where it is needed. And so that also means it takes a lot of skill to figure out when to use exposition and when not to. Oren: Also, a big part of it is honestly trying to arrange the story so that you don’t need more than the optimal amount of exposition. I deal with authors all the time who are trying to figure out, my story needs all this exposition. How can I deliver it in such a way that it won’t be boring? And it’s like, well, you probably can’t. Your story needs too much exposition. This concept is too complicated and it takes forever to explain, and it’s counterintuitive. There are better and worse ways to do exposition, but often you just need to control how much is necessary. Chris: Making your story too complex, when you kind of exceed your complexity budget, what happens is that you need tons and tons of exposition to try to explain it all, and readers are confused anyway. And there’s just no way of rescuing it at that point. It’s just gonna be too much. So that is why you just have to proactively simplify everything as you go and make sure that the story is only using what it needs. If you can combine two characters, you should, sometimes you need a minimum number for believability, but even then, if you have a whole ship crew, a lot of times you just try to make people blend into the background. So they don’t take space. You have to simplify to avoid having way more exposition than readers can actually handle. And then also when you plan scenes, scene planning is really important. Scene design is absolutely vital. And knowing how to write a good scene, it means factoring in what readers need to know, but also not letting that override other concerns, making sure you still have a good conflict, that it moves the story forward and we’re not just there to stare at things, so we get information, especially ’cause exposition can often give information a lot faster than showing it in the scene. We see some people who are kind of anti exposition purists and oh man, their stories feel so emotionally dead because you need information to react [to]  ’cause the reader needs to understand the context so that they can emotionally react to things happening. And when you take out too much of that information, metaphors can only do so much, okay? Word craft can only do so much to bring out emotion. You need story and context. And without exposition, it’s not working. Oren: I need to know what’s happening. Otherwise I can’t judge it and I can’t build any emotion around it. Chris: So real quick, we have one more. Oren: Yeah. The last one. Chris: Internalization or internal narration. Oren: Well, this one’s easy. We’ll just do it internally. No one has to listen. Chris: This is thoughts and feelings of your viewpoint character or your main character. If you’re running an omniscient and you’re kind of following one character around and yeah, it’s emotionally important. You wanna understand that character to get to like them, you wanna know why they’re doing what they’re doing, what the plan is, and all of that without enough internalization, that’s gonna hurt emotion. And then messes with the viewpoint too. Like I’ve had some stories that just don’t have enough internalization and it is jarring whenever I find out who the viewpoint character is, because they kind of didn’t feel like the viewpoint character. Oren: You don’t get to know them, you don’t understand how they think, which is like, I thought we were here to read a book about a character. Come on, show me the character, please. Chris: Internalization is also usually a doorway into exposition. Like you start with the character thinking and then they’re reminded of something and then you kind of lead into exposition. So if there is no internal narration, then usually exposition is also lacking, which is a problem as we mentioned. Oren: I would recommend though, if you’re like me and you’re working on some kind of very close narrated story that has a lot of internalizing, maybe you’re using a first person retelling narrative or what have you, I would recommend reading Shield of Sparrows because it will be a wake up call for how you can have way too much of that. Chris: If you write in first person, especially a first person, like a retelling, like a retrospective viewpoint where it’s a future first person looking back instead of staying in the moment. But Shield of Sparrows isn’t a retelling. It’s in the moment and it’s still too much. Anybody can be too verbose, but first person tends to get people in the mindset. It tends to encourage a casual conversational narration that tends to lead onto going on too long. So find that book that is for you just too much. Oren: I haven’t read that many authors who have had too much internalizing, but it does exist. It can happen. And Shield of Sparrows taught me that. It’s like, no, please, I don’t need another aside what you’re thinking right now. We’ve already had three of those in this scene. No more, please. Chris: The thing that gets me is during dialogue, because a lot of times authors really wanna explain not just what the viewpoint character is saying, but actually what other characters are saying. So this other character will say this subtle line, and then the viewpoint character will think like a translation of it for the reader. Oh, that must mean, here’s a deep [hint] and flavors of meaning behind this one line. It’s like, oh, come on. I understand the impulse to do this, but it slows the dialogue way down and just ruins the pacing. And that’s just something you should be showing. Show it by describing their body language and what they say, instead of telling exactly what they mean all the time. Oren: But what if the character that I am translating for is a really skilled actor who brings across their meaning so subtly that it can’t really be captured consciously. It’s just subconscious signals. Then can I do it? Chris: Well, they can just look into each other’s eyes and read their mind. Oren: Yes. Perfect. I’m glad we figured that out. Chris: Or characters thinking about their response. Like somebody just straight up asks them a question and then they think about their response for like several paragraphs and it’s like, uh, that person is waiting for you to answer the question. Oren: You could make that a thing. You could make them like, clear their throat, be like, yeah, are you okay? And they’re like, oh, I’ve been thinking for quite a while. Oops. Chris: Sometimes they do do that, but just be aware that any type of narration, when you put in more narration, it gives a reader a sense of passing time because well, reading it takes time. So time is passing for them. So the more narration you have, the more time passes, and so there’s this one scene in Crescent City where I think Bryce grabs a doorknob and is [about] to walk down into the stairs or through the hall or through a doorway or something, and there’s so much exposition at the beginning of Crescent City. She thinks about something and it goes in paragraphs of exposition, and then she still hasn’t crossed the doorway. And I’m like, she is just hanging out in that doorway, thinking really hard for several paragraphs. Oren: Yeah, she’s just hanging out. You’re trying to bust her for loitering. What are you, a cop? Well, with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: And if you found that informative, 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, and then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll 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.

Imagine this scenario: two characters start the story fighting but end it kissing. Sounds completely implausible, right? Surely, this could never be a trope that single-handedly keeps BookTok afloat! But if you were to try writing such a story, how would you do it? This week, we’re talking about what it takes to write a successful enemies to lovers romance, which of course starts with a debate over what exactly an enemy is. This is still Mythcreants; did you think we weren’t doing sandwich discourse? Show Notes Bully Romance Shield of Sparrows  Fourth Wing Personality Clashes Friendship Rifts Mara Jade  Spinning Silver  Crescent City The Cruel Prince  This Is How You Lose the Time War Gul Dukat Kira Nerys  Sorsha Madmartigan Transcript Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Bunny: Bunny. Chris: And… Oren: Oren. Chris: I’m afraid we have a new podcast nemesis. They’re constantly making snarky jokes at our expense, which, excuse me, is our brand.  Bunny: Ah! The nerve. Oren: We hates it.  Chris: I know, right? And these jokes, they’re really deep cut, like they’ve been listening to every episode. So clearly the only way to settle this is to challenge them to a podcast-off. Where their hosts come on our podcast and our hosts go on their podcasts. To fight. Of course. Just to fight.  Bunny: Yeah. We’ll get ’em. Chris: Nothing else. Nothing else going on here. We don’t even like them.  Oren: Well, what else could be going on here? I don’t even know.  Bunny: We hate their guts and they hate ours, and that’s all there is to it.  Oren: That’s all it will ever be.  Bunny: We are just enemies.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Chris: It’s interesting how we managed to make podcasts into people. Look, don’t wanna make a romance joke about the actual hosts of this podcast. So that’s what we’re left with. This is what we resort to. So we’re talking about enemies to lovers.  Bunny: We have had, by this point, multiple meta podcast romances in the setups of our episodes, I believe.  Chris: It happens every time we cover romance. [Laughs] Oren: It’s just something that needs to happen, okay? That’s just a ritual we have to perform now. Otherwise, the machine spirit will be angry.  Bunny: Yes, it’s true. It’s true.  Chris: It’s true. Podcast will take her revenge. We do not offer her proper tribute. Okay! So, enemies to lovers. So first, what are enemies?  Oren: From what I can tell, it’s when a man treats a woman like shit for 200 pages and she occasionally doesn’t like it. That’s been my experience with enemies to lovers books.  Bunny: That’s pretty mean of her. She should apologize.  Oren: She kind of went too far. I think we can all agree, right?  Bunny: Yeah. Oren: I found out recently there’s a subgenre called “bully romance” that maybe that’s what these books should be filed under. But then I looked up more of it and apparently that subgenre generally involves a big groveling scene where the guy admits he was wrong and begs forgiveness. Which, whether you like that or not, is more than some of these supposed enemies to lovers books have. So no, they can’t be bully romances. They don’t meet that bar. They’re too far down.  Chris: So Oren is thinking about Shield of Sparrows, which I read the beginning to do a critique post that is now out, and then Oren was like, “But I have to read it. The title is so good.” And I’m like, “Oren, this is not a good book.” He’s like, “No, but the title, it calls to me.”  Bunny: Oren, the title is not even that good.  Oren: I like that title. I’m sad that that’s the book that exists, is the one that got that title.  Chris: So he got it in audio and since he had it, I was like, “All right, I guess I’m listening to it too.” So we both listened to the entire book. Bunny: Trapped into listening to Shield of Sparrows.  Chris: And it’s advertised as enemies to lovers, but no, he’s just the biggest jerk. Then suddenly his personality changes partway through. Then he just kind of stops and then we just completely forget about it. So there’s no amends at all of any kind.  Bunny: So this is the one where she pretends she’s gonna jump off a cliff at the beginning?  Chris: Yeah. Mm-hmm.  Oren: Well, no, she’s not pretending she’s gonna jump off a cliff. Chris: She is going to. But–  Oren: The book is pretending that it’s a possible suicide, is what the book is pretending, but it’s actually just her jumping into the water, which is a thing she does regularly. So, that’s fun, I guess.  Bunny: Standing dramatically on a… cliff.   Chris: So she’s like, “What will happen? Will I fly, or will I fall?” And it’s like, you’ve done this before. Do you think something different is gonna happen than last time?  Bunny: I stand over the lap pool, goggles in hand. What if I jumped?  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: But this book is advertised as enemies to lovers and if I’m being fair, there are a lot of blurry things. It’s pretty common in romance for the lovebirds to hate each other at first. And knowing when it goes far enough that you call it enemies to lovers can be kind of hard. I’ve been in that situation before.  But, at the same time, this is just clearly not it, because it’s not going both ways. He is mean to her for literally no reason. I suppose this is kind of spoilers for chapter three, but it’s so obvious I’m not really worried about it. But basically in the beginning, the idea is that her sister is in this elaborate arranged marriage to become the crown princess of another nation. And of course we quickly swap that so that it’s her instead.  Oren: For reasons.  Chris: And the love interest is called the “Guardian.” He eventually gets a name, but not for a very long time. Basically chose her and decided that we should play switcheroo and she clearly doesn’t like it. So then after he basically forces her to get in this arranged marriage, not just asking her dad, but pressuring her dad into it. Then he’s just really mean and resentful as though this is her fault. That just happens and she probably never fights back and he just comes and just makes a point of following her around just to insult her some more.  Bunny: Oh my gosh.  Chris: So, it’s pretty unsatisfying.  Oren: And I have read a few other books, there is supposed to be a conflict between the lovebirds and it is not equivalent. This is, I think, the most extreme I’ve ever seen it. Where it’s like, that’s weird. It’s really weird how awful he is. And then he just suddenly stops and we never talk about it again. I am happy to say that’s a bit of an outlier. Bunny: They should have an equal number of dislike and an equal ability to get under each other’s skin. They should probably be on the same level, for instance, so that if it was a boss and an employee, that would be a weird dynamic. They should be able to punch evenly at each other rather than up and down. Chris: This goes back to what we were saying when we were covering banter, right? About how do you make the banter not… If you want them to be enemies, you may want them to be mean at some level. At the same time, there’s some ways that you can do that, that it seems fair and some ways where it just seems gross. Having them both doing it and being on the same level with each other is an important part of that. Otherwise, again, you’ve got more bully dynamic. And I’m not into that. I understand other people are into that, but having him grovel afterwards seems like the least you could do if you’re doing a bully romance. And also, what are the taunts about? One of the things that makes this so gross and makes him so unlikeable, this Guardian guy, is the fact that he makes frequent sexual remarks about her that feel inappropriate. She had a fiancé that they broke off that engagement, to force her. And then he decides it’s a great time to be like, “Are you spreading your legs for this other guy?” And it’s like, he was her fiancé, and you decided to take her away from him. This is weird. Again, a weird thing to get mad at and also makes it feel punching down because it’s a man talking to a woman. And luckily, this setting is actually surprisingly sexually liberated. Which, the kingdom is supposed to be patriarchal, so it’s a little unrealistic, but whatever. But nonetheless, the real world context is that kind of thing is just really gross. And so any kind of using slurs or punching down, it’s just always gonna feel particularly bad. Oren: Maybe this isn’t the expectation other people have, but when I see a book or any story advertised as enemies to lovers, I expect them to be enemies.  Chris: Okay, so what is an enemy? Now you gotta define it.  Oren: People who work at cross-purposes. That’s my basic definition of an enemy. I know a lot of people I don’t like, almost none of them are my enemies. They’re just people I don’t enjoy spending time with. I’ve only in my life had two or three people who I would consider even mild enemies because we were working at cross-purposes.  One guy at a place I used to work really didn’t like me, and the rumor is that he was the reason I never got a job higher up. Who knows if that’s true, right? But if it was true, he was at least mildly my enemy. There are a couple of other people like that, but it’s very rare. Most of the time I just don’t like somebody.  Bunny: You mean it’s not enough for me to get my dog’s leash tangled in the leash of a cute guy, and then we stumble into each other and the dogs wrap around us and I’m like, “Oh! Well I’d never.” And he spills his coffee on me and he’s like, “You got in my way.” Oren: Technically the dog is your enemy now. I’m sorry about that.  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: You are enemies of the good boy.  Bunny: Oh no, there’s no coming back.  Chris: Okay, for instance, here’s an example that I think works, I don’t think you have to super lean into the cross-purposes if you have other stuff going on. So, Fourth Wing, Violet and Xaden, I think that qualifies as enemies to lovers. They do warm up pretty fast, so they’re not enemies for that long. But at the same time, what they have is family history. Once they’re in school and they realize that they both are actually pretty good people, they don’t have cross-purposes anymore, but they think that they might. There’s mutual distrust because of a background where their family members killed each other during this rebellion that happened.  When she goes to Dragon Academy… Actually, it’s really funny ’cause it’s just so tropey, so blatantly obvious. Where it’s like, “Oh, and last thing, don’t go anywhere near Xaden Riorson.” It’s like, okay, that’s the love interest, huh?  Oren: Don’t do it.  Bunny: “So, I went near Xaden Riorson.” Chris: And immediately, “Oh wow. This guy, he’s so hot. He’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen. Look at how hot this guy is. And what?! He’s Xaden?”  Bunny: “Xaden… who…?” I do think you can slot the types of adversarial relationships into a couple different buckets. And the one that you’re describing there is one that I’m calling “political factions,” where they’re part of adversarial factions with opposite aims or that they have bad blood, like… Romeo and Juliet isn’t enemies to lovers, but it is the “Montague/Capulet” dynamic. Or if Dune had a romance between the Harkonnens and Atreides, that would qualify. Oren: There’s a lot of fanfic about that, so sure.   Bunny: I’m sure you could find plenty on AO3. Officially. And then I think that’s also shades of the competitive rivals, for lack of a better word. Which is where it’s more circumstantial dislike, and they’re working against each other for a goal that they can’t both win. So both wanna be the concert master of the orchestra, or the starting quarterback, or they’re both competing for the same grant. I think that qualifies.  Chris: I think if you make rivals, you really gotta have them compete over something. To make it intense enough. But I think you could have a situation where there’s just kind of deep personal history that’s kind of bitter.  Bunny: I call that one “sworn enemies!” Deep interpersonal conflict! They’ve been wronged or they’ve wronged each other, or there’s a big misunderstanding. I feel like this one is difficult to pull off if they have a bad history with each other, because what you don’t want is for one of them to have had a very good reason to cut off the other one. If one of them has gone too far.  Chris: It’s the same with personality clashes. You can do a good personality clash that creates interpersonal conflict, but a lot of writers have trouble just not making either character a jerk. So I have an article that lists ideas for personality clashes where they can both be a little bit wrong. And, for personal history, I have one that I put out recently that’s how friends can have a rift between them, and that one’s meant for them to make up. But you could probably take some of my list there, for a past breakup and use something like that if you need ideas for how to have them have bad blood in their background and to make them both a little wrong. So it’s not just one person’s terrible.  Oren: I’ve noticed that, at least in successful stories, maybe this is just because the books that I read tend to have romance as a side plot. I’ve noticed that there are way more enemies to lovers in TV shows that I watched, than in books. I was really struggling to come up with ones with examples from books, but I think of TV shows, it’s like, “Oh, Catra and Adora, Buffy and Spike.” But it was pretty easy to find some, and with books, I was like, “Uh, Luke and Mara Jade, I guess?”  Chris: I think Spinning Silver, Miryem and the Staryk qualify. So that’s a situation where the reason I think it qualifies, is Miryem does kind of get him back at some point. As opposed to, there’s another romance in there that has some similar dynamics, but isn’t as good, between Irina and this prince. And at that point he’s got an evil demon in him and is doing bad things ’cause of his demon and she’s just, surviving. And that does not feel like enemies to lovers.  With Miryem, first the Staryk comes just like, “Hey, you can, basically metaphorically turn silver into gold.” Well, no, it’s literal but not magical. It’s not really metaphorical. “You could literally turn silver into gold. That’s useful to me. I don’t really care what happens to you as long as I get this gold because my kingdom needs it.” And then after he’s basically put her through enough, she finds a way to escape that ends up getting him in trouble. So she’s able to throw her own punches.  Oren: That would meet my working at cross-purposes definition from earlier. This part is kind of interesting. So on a whim, I decided to look up and see if the first Crescent City book is advertised as enemies to lovers because I wouldn’t describe it that way, but the two characters don’t like each other when they first meet, and sometimes seems to be all it takes.  It’s not advertised that way, which is interesting. Although it is advertised as “fae.” Which seems like false advertising to me. There are some fae in there, but none of them are the romance interest. Chris: In that setting isn’t everybody fae? Everybody magical? Oren: No, they’re all called “Vanir” for some reason. Might as well take a random Norse term, I guess. The main love interest is like, an angel, and the main character’s brother is fae. And admittedly, her brother is written enough like a rival romance interest that I kind of wonder if originally that’s what that character was. Chris: Interesting.  Oren: I didn’t like it. Her brother is really possessive of her. Granted, so is the love interest. So, whatever. But it was weird. It was like, this doesn’t really feel like a brother character to me.  Bunny: I don’t know how these are arranged, but if you look up enemies to lovers and then just go to the first Goodreads page that shows up, the very top one is The Cruel Prince, followed by Fourth Wing. Chris: Yep, yep. The Cruel Prince. I also did a critique of that, but didn’t get introduced to the love interest. Isn’t that one a bully romance? Maybe?  Bunny: I can’t help you there.  Chris: A romantasy I’m sure, because romantasy typically has some really high stakes, lots happening alongside the romance. So that’s where I would expect to see at least some enemies to lovers.  Bunny: “Danger boys.”  Chris: Mm-hmm. But anyway, obviously romance starts, you establish they’re enemies, generally working at cross-purposes. Usually they also dislike each other at some level. And then the next thing that has to happen is, you have to force them together. Oren: And I do wonder if maybe that’s also part of the reason why I tend to see this more in TV than in books. Because I think in TV we are just more willing to accept contrivances to get characters on screen together at the same time. This is my new working hypothesis. Whereas with books, I have often struggled to find reasons why the protagonist and the antagonist should be in the same space, even when I’m not trying to make them fall in love. I just need them to interact a little bit.  Bunny: TV series also have more time to unspool that. That might also be part of it.  Chris: This is again, what we talk about with the, I commonly call the “push and pull” romance, where you need something that pushes them together and something that pulls ’em apart. And a lot of romances, they are already into each other and it’s tough to figure out reasons why they can’t get together yet.  But if we start with enemies, then the first thing you need is something that actually forces them together. And that’s something that usually just has to be at the center of the story, has to be important to the plot. It’s not easy to think of that last minute. Need to be in the same room. So an alliance of necessity, even for enemies. Introduce another enemy, give them a common enemy so that they have to work together. Trap them in a place together, called “trapped in a labyrinth.” Or they get trapped in a haunted castle, something. Bunny: An elevator. Chris: [Laughs] Hopefully not a whole novel in the elevator.  Oren: I can see it working if they interact a lot because they’re going head to head in in various conflicts a lot. I can see that working as a way to build romantic chemistry. Now you need to be careful that the mood fits what they’re doing. It’s probably not gonna be good flirting if this is a super serious, gritty story about trying to protect refugees. It’s gonna seem real weird if your characters are flirting while fighting over that.  Chris: If they’re already classmates or coworkers, that’s certainly a lot easier. “Oh, they have to share a class.” Even then, it can be useful. Like, we have a competition in school. They butt heads. Then because they were fighting, they both get in trouble and then they do detention together.  Oren: That’s classic. They gotta clean the school or something. And then the school sends them to do something that is irrationally dangerous, that a school would never do, and then they have to bond. Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Oren: There. We solved it. We figured it out, guys.  Bunny: Or the “buddy cop” thing. And we have a whole episode on that, where they have a run in and they dislike each other and, “Oh, you got in my way during this caper.” And, “Oh, you shouldn’t have, you were the one who got in my way.” And then the boss summons one of them into the office and is like, “I’ve got a new job for you. And you’ll be working with… [Dramatic Gasp] That person you butted heads with.” Uh oh!  Chris: Yep. An authority figure who can–  Bunny: They’re like, “Fine, we’ll work together. But. Just. This. Once!”  Chris: –Authority figure who can put them on the same team of some kind is helpful.  Bunny: I do think they need to have face-to-face time when they’re doing something other than hitting swords together, because then they can see each other in a different context. But I do like flirting while they’re hitting swords together. That is fun.  Chris: Why do enemies to lovers if they’re not gonna flirt while they’re fighting with each other? [Laughs]  Oren: First one then the other, right?  Chris: You could probably have a situation where they’re in competition or fighting and it goes too far and they’re actually sorry, and then they talk to each other. That would be a little bit trickier to finagle. But I do think that something that forces a little bit more conversation besides them just opposing each other is helpful, anyway.  Oren: I do think there should still be some challenge and obstacle to them getting together because it’s possible to go too far in the other direction. And that was my main beef with This Is How You Lose the Time War. I think that’s the title? Chris: Yep, yep. Oren: Because technically we have two characters on opposite sides of a fight, but the fight doesn’t matter to either of them. [Chuckles] They have no attachment to their cause. Chris: That book, honestly, it doesn’t really have any tension. It’s just one long love letter. It’s just poetry. It’s an interesting work, but the plot doesn’t really function particularly well because you don’t really understand what’s happening at all. You can’t anticipate what they can and they can’t do. Everything is made up as the characters go along, and things just kind of happen, but it doesn’t have what it needs to create an actual tension or a sense of obstacles. But it’s very pretty. That one is kind of an odd case.  But certainly if you do something like, their factions decide to make up with a marriage alliance, and what do you know? Now they are supposed to get married to each other. You’re gonna have to switch… Again, was why I think it’s helpful to also have some kind of personal history, or dislike, or something where they butt heads without all of those external factors. So they have that to get through.  And also, it’s not as much fun if they’re technically at cross-purposes, but they’re really nice about it. That could be a fun dynamic, but that’s not really what we’re going for usually with enemies to lovers.  Bunny: That’s the “Aziraphale/Crowley” dynamic.  Oren: You usually want some kind of hostility, otherwise what are we overcoming here?  Chris: And then of course once they are forced together, usually having them work surprisingly well together is a good way to start to get them to warm up to each other. Oren: Then you gotta remember your basic romance fundamentals. They still gotta be better together than they are apart. They gotta have things that draw them together, that sort of thing. Can’t just be like, “All right, well now we’re stuck together and we used to fight, but now we kiss instead.” Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Chuckle] Bunny: No, they have to kiss. But in kind of an angry way. That’s how you know. Oren: That’s exactly right. If one of them is the villain, you wanna make sure that they haven’t crossed the moral event horizon. That’s why it would’ve been a bad idea for Dukat and Kira from Deep Space Nine to be a couple. It’s a little unclear if that was ever actually a serious idea, but you hear various behind the scenes reports that that was something they were considering. And thank God they didn’t do that.  Chris: That would’ve been bad.  Oren: That would’ve been real bad. And the reason is that– Bunny: Oops, all genocide. Oren: –Dukat, even before he became a full villain, had overseen a horrible military occupation that was just too evil. He can’t be a good romance interest for Kira after that.  Chris: I also think the actress objected to that.  Oren: I’ve seen different accounts of it. The most recent one I looked up, the writers talked about it and were like, “Yeah, that was never a serious idea, but it had been suggested by someone at some point.” And there were some episodes that made fans wonder if they were going in that direction. But your villain doesn’t necessarily have to have been a genocide guy to have crossed the moral event horizon. There are less extreme ways that they could become too evil to have a good romance with.  Chris: Just coming to mind ’cause we were talking about books versus movies… And obviously some of the enemies to lovers we have seen have actually specifically been TV shows like Adora and Catra. And TV shows have usually a lot of time to develop characters if they have the same cast. Not anymore… Oren: Now it’s a lot less. Chris: [Laughing] But once upon a time they did. They got enough episodes. Whereas I’m thinking of Willow, the original 1989 movie, which still is a surprisingly good movie. Has held up pretty well, and it has this romance between Madmartigan and, ah man… Oren: Sorsha. Chris: Sorsha. And I honestly think that they do a really good job of finding ways to have them interact and build chemistry despite the fact that they are on violently opposing teams. Where, first she captures him, then he captures her. If you need a way to force them together, having one side capture the other and then use him as a hostage or compel them to help in some way, can be one way of doing that while keeping up a lot of the antagonism. And we have a whole scenario where they have a love potion, but luckily they don’t get too creepy with it. Bunny: I still get a little creepy with it. That scene gave me the willies. Chris: Where he goes in and starts spouting love poetry to her in her tent. When he is supposed to be grabbing the baby and running.  Oren: At least she’s not using it on purpose to try to seduce him. That’s where the bar is on love potions. Chris: The fact is that she didn’t use it on purpose. He had another reason for going into her tent, I think is also important. He didn’t actually go into her tent to creep on her. He needed to get the baby back and then saw her and the love potion took effect. There’s some things that make it better than most instances.  But in any case, they have this back and forth, and then later he takes her hostage and it kind of gives them exposure to each other. But they didn’t have a good way in the movie, and I think partly ’cause they just didn’t have enough time, to get her to realistically come over to the other side. So she just spontaneously watches him kill a dragon and then she’s like, “That’s hot.” [Laughs] Oren: She’s into it. [Laughs] Chris: She just instantly is on the other side. It’s real weird. So, do think that books have the advantage there. But sometimes, if one side is supposed to be, “Oh no, we’re the baddies,” you’re gonna need time to give that character their own incentive to realize that or leave. Oren: They need to believably change sides, and with her, she went from being into Madmartigan as an enemy to suddenly deciding that that overrode her previous loyalties. Chris: To her mother. And her mother’s evil. But at the same time, she clearly wanted to please her mother before. She was clearly going for motherly approval. And something in there to help her reevaluate that. And it could have been caused by Madmartigan. If they’d had time. But that would’ve really helped that plot.  Oren: We needed another couple episodes worth of time to make that believable.  Chris: I do think with novels, one of the helpful things about enemies of lovers is sometimes, people can run out of obstacles. And so it does extend the amount of time that you can have their romance last, because they started out as enemies. And then once you get them past that, you have to introduce new obstacles. But that’s still more than if they started out, liking each other better. So it gives them more distance that they have to get across in order for the romance to happen. And that takes time. But a novel often has a fair amount of time, especially if you’re not splitting it into a million viewpoints. Oren: All right, well, with our evergreen advice to not split the story into a million viewpoints, we will go ahead and call this one to a close. Chris: If you enjoyed this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  Oren: And 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 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 and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

You shouldn’t have any problems keeping up with the references we make in this podcast. You just need to watch several TV series, a bunch of movies, read a nine-book series, and also study Irish history for some reason. Some books feel that way too, with characters making all kinds of pop culture references that readers might or might not have context for. And what should you do when your fictional world needs pop culture of its own? We’ve got some tips, and also some deep cut Star Trek lore, as always. Show Notes The Perils of Pauline Musketeers of Pig Alley Jolene The Irish Unification of 2024 The Troubles  Feed The Expanse  Post-Avatar Depression Ready Player One Artemis  Kaiju Preservation Society  Snow Crash Toss a Coin to Your Witcher Shield of Sparrows Murderbot Dead Cat Tail Assassins Holonovel  Neuromancer Environmental Storytelling Transcript Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [Intro theme]  Bunny: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is− Oren: Oren.  Bunny: And− Chris: Chris.  Bunny: And, you guys, lately I’ve been realizing that like every time we criticize a popular story, I feel like Pauline. You know what I mean? Chris: Oh yeah, totally. I definitely know who Pauline is.  Bunny: I keep expecting Blinky Bill to show up. Like, come on, we’re gonna end up on the train tracks if we’re not being careful.  Oren: Is Pauline Jolene’s cousin? Is she also worried that someone will take her man?  Bunny: No. You know, Pauline? Pauline stole Jolene? Oren: There are sapphic versions of that song, so don’t even worry about it.  Bunny: Yeah, what if we start feuding with another podcast? It could turn into a real Musketeers of Pig Alley situation, right?  Oren: Yeah, absolutely.  Chris: Yes, absolutely.  Oren: Were there also− How many Musketeers, did it say there were three but actually four? That’s a Musketeers reference I get.  Bunny: I know one of them’s called the Snapper Kid.  Chris: Wait, one of the Musketeers? Bunny: This is one of the Musketeers in The Musketeers of Pig Alley, which was a 1910s movie about gang violence.  Chris: Oh yes. The very classic Musketeers of Pig Alley. Oren: Look, it’s old. It must be good. That’s just how these things work.  Bunny: And The Perils of Pauline, which was another 1910s TV serial, and I bring these up very cleverly because we are talking about pop culture and fiction. And one thing that fiction referencing pop culture often does is that it is set in the future and pretends like pop culture from a hundred years ago is still the hot thing on everyone’s mind. Oren: It’s the Star Trek thing where they’re like, ah, the greatest people in their field: Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Gababoobadeeboo! And then you−our new character that we’ve just met−it’s like, wait, hang on. Who is that one in the middle? That’s just some rando that’s a Star Trek person. Chris: At least Star Trek tries. I still remember when they got in big trouble with the UK or Ireland because they added an event.  Oren: Yeah, the Irish Unification of 2024.  Chris: Created a political incident where that episode was taken off the air in certain countries.  Oren: That was a big deal at the time. That was not a good thing to have on TV.  Bunny: Oh my gosh.  Chris: And that’s, again, just because they were trying to make a list of important events, and they needed something to happen in the future, and they made the mistake of choosing something real.  Oren: Personally, I don’t think that was a mistake. I think that was on purpose. Chris: You think they were trying to make a political statement?  Oren: I think so. Nowadays we tend to−this is vastly oversimplifying it−but we tend to think of Ireland as a pretty peaceful place. But let’s just say that when the episode we’re talking about was made, the violence was a lot more recent than that. Chris: Wow, okay. (not sarcastic) Oren: So, I think that was on purpose.  Bunny: Most people only learn about the troubles in Ireland from like, I don’t know, Peaky Blinders.  Oren: A lot of people think about that era as being way longer ago than it was, which is interesting. But I do suspect that Star Trek episode did that on purpose. Bunny: Fascinating, I look forward to your manifesto on this.  Oren: There we go.  Bunny: Anyway, drop in the comments if either anyone got my timely references to The Perils of Pauline and Musketeers of Pig Alley.  Oren: I was worried because Disney Plus keeps trying to give me this new show called Pauline to watch, and I was like, is that what this is? Should I have watched that?  Chris: Oh no, there’s all this buzz about a show! Quick, we gotta go watch it! Bunny: Ugh, exhausting. I’m glad I’m not in some sort of position where I would be expected to keep up with TV shows because I’m on some sort of podcast and then just simply don’t. Oren: We hates it, Precious.  Bunny: So, the topic of this podcast is pop culture and fiction, both referencing real life pop culture and creating your own pop culture. And I struggle with this a lot−which is why I decided to lead an episode about it−because most references to real world pop culture and fiction feel really cringey and obnoxious to me. And, most folks do not spend a lot of time fleshing out their own pop culture if it’s separate from real life pop culture. But I do think hypothetically, probably, both can be done well.  Chris: One thing that I’ve seen a lot of in recent years, for obvious reasons, is shows especially that want to, or sometimes books though, that want to replicate internet culture in some way. Right? Within the story. And a lot of times it is bad. I still laugh at the Mira Grant book Feed, because the main characters are bloggers, but they’re really big bloggers. Like the top social media influencers we have today except they’re blogging, and they follow this politician who I think is−they say he’s a Republican, but it doesn’t feel like the audience is for Republicans. It’s one of those really optimistic works where you see, “I’m totally unbiased because I have a good Republican character, and see how reasonable he is?”  Oren: This was a little more believable in 2012 than it is now, but even at the time it did raise my eyebrows a little. Chris: So then they’re following along and covering his campaign, and unfortunately I know about blogging, so when Mira Grant comes up with titles for their posts, I know how bad they are, and that no one would click on them. And then they’re like, this blog post about this politician’s campaign is “number three” on the internet. And I’m like, what do you mean “number three”? Bunny: You know, when you open “The Internet”, it says “Trending”.  Chris: By what measure? In what way? And the idea that “number three” would be some political campaign and not a cute cat or porn or something…? Oren: I have so many questions about A) how they’re measuring that, and B) what gross stuff did they have to remove from the rankings? Chris: That one is just classically funny. But more recently, there’s stuff where people have content that goes viral when it obviously wouldn’t go viral. I mean, that one’s a tough one. If you want something to go viral in your story−because things only go viral if they’re really surprising−they have to be different than anything that’s come before, for the most part. So if it was possible to replicate, people would be doing it on purpose all the time. Instead, people who do make content to go viral, usually just spam tons and tons of content, and wait for something to be picked up a little bit.  Oren: One of The Expanse books ended like that. The big climactic ending was that they had like a viral crowdfunder. Chris: Wait, didn’t a character invent crowdfunding?  Oren: Yeah, a character basically invents crowdfunding.  Chris: That always cracks me up, when somebody events something in another world that exists in our world.  Oren: Again, this was early enough that crowdfunding wasn’t as big as it is now, but it definitely existed, and so it was very funny that A) this person invented crowdfunding, and B) their crowdfunding campaign went viral because they needed to save their daughter. And this is a space system that has 10 billion people in it. How many of those 10 billion need to save a child? And they’re trying to crowdfund that? Because that’s the world we live in today, where everyone’s crowdfunding is “I need to save this young child”. And often they’re real and horrible, and then sometimes they’re fake and horrible. So the idea that that would be enough to cut through the noise is absurd.  Chris: I will say if you want something to go viral, I think your best bet realistically is to set up some sort of societal context where something is going on, where people are just primed for this content, right? There’s a big controversy already. There’s a big news event. There’s a big tragedy. And then this content comes up as the perfect representation. You know? For instance, an image that goes viral because there’s a hurricane. And it’s a dramatic image of that hurricane. Or people are mad about something, and something happens that is a perfect representation of what they’re mad about. That kind of thing can kind of give it the leg up in making it feel more likely that people will be passing this around than just, “Oh, I did something funny. I made a funny noise, and it went viral!” Bunny: One of the reasons people do include pop culture references is just immersion, right? They grew up in the 2010s, and or they grew up in the 1910s and love Pauline and Peril. They might naturally reference these things. I do think that’s one of the less common reasons, though, at least in terms of explicit references. Explicit meaning direct references. You’re naming the specific thing rather than just being like, “Ah, that serial of times when a woman gets into peril” in a vague sense. Actually saying the name of the thing. I don’t find very often that authors do that to be immersive. Usually, they’re doing that as a shorthand for saying this thing is like this other thing. Or for humor. I think those are the two main things.  Oren: Pop culture jokes are pretty popular. I’ve found that they tend to work better in movies than novels because movies get stuck in development hell all the time, but at least in theory, a movie can come out on a shorter timescale, and you can edit the script to make different references before you start filming. And that can be a little bit easier, whereas a novel will often be stuck in your drawer for 10 years. So the references are more likely to age much faster.  Chris: I have evergreen articles where I couldn’t help referencing something going on that day, and when I look back at them I’m like, yeah, I probably shouldn’t have done that. It just very quickly feels dated, and fiction, again, takes a really long time to go through the publishing process often. I do think it works better when you feel like the story is actually about that time period in some way. If it’s an 80s period piece basically, then it makes sense to have a lot of 80s references in there. That feels like that story is meant to capture a certain time, a certain year, and there’s a purpose towards all those references, even if they’re a little out-of-date. I think that works a little better than if you have a piece, it feels like it’s supposed to be a little timeless, but then there’s random pop culture references from that year in there. Oren: Although, it is funny because what you’re really doing is making references to things that people in the modern day associate with that time period. Or at least that’s what most people are doing. It would be really funny to do a 2008 period piece and have everyone talking about Avatar, the James Cameron movie. No one talks about that anymore. The moment a new one comes out, we immediately forget about it. But it was super popular! Everyone was seeing it. But I don’t think that would evoke that time period in the same way that the campaign of Barack Obama would. That’s the thing people associate with that year. Bunny: And since you’re talking about classic 80s, I have to shit on Ready Player One a little bit. Which is one of those cases which−Okay, at least Ready Player One has an in-story justification for why everything is 08s-ified, which is that its creator built the platform on 80s worship. But this is probably patient zero of the pop-culture-hasn’t-advanced-at-all-since-pretty-much-the-eighties. Chris: Because this is a future that worships the 80s.  Bunny: The premise is that the creator of the virtual world really liked the 80s, and he’s designed a quest for control of the virtual world after his death that is centered on 80s references. So people spend their life devoted to studying obscure crap from the 80s, and we never see anything that suggests the 2000s existed. Or anything past 1995, maybe. There is nothing new. It’s all just 80s, 80s, 80s used in the laziest way possible, because most of it−and this is a trap that a lot of pop culture reference falls into−is instead of describing something, using a reference to describe it. Instead of describing something, you say it’s like the other thing. So if you don’t know what the other thing is, then you’re kind of adrift. And Klein, the author, will also do this in the vaguest possible way. Instead of describing colorful details, like the haircuts that people have, he’ll be like, “A variety of 80s haircuts”.  Oren: Oh, that’s nice.  Bunny: At one point he goes to a club, and I think the exact phrase is that he performs a variety of 80s dance moves. Which, like, great, if this is supposed to be a love letter to the 80s, can’t you be more specific? Chris: That’s definitely a show don’t tell issue there.  Bunny: That is a huge issue with over-reliance on real-life pop culture. You’re telling people what to think.  Chris: With the 80s hairdos, it’s also particularly funny because they’re not hard to describe. The US in the 80s, noted for having really curled, high volume, just lots of hair everywhere. Bunny: Yeah. Big hair. Hair helmet.  Chris: Big hair.  Bunny: Perms. You could rattle them off, so it’s insulting to the reader that he didn’t bother to add 10 extra words. Other books do this, too. Artemis by Andy Weir had something similar where our character is looking at the moon bases, and she was like, “They looked like the moon bases from every pop sci-fi pulp book.” Okay, thanks.  Oren: Those actually look pretty different, depending on which book you’re reading.  Bunny: She at least describes them as round, right? They’re bubbles. But at one point she does look at them and is like, (robotically) “They look like they’re from a sci-fi book.”  Oren: The bright side is that something like Ready Player One in book form is pretty rare in my experience. The nostalgia fests are much more likely to happen in movies, right? Because movies are really expensive, and people who make them are super risk averse, so they want to keep doing stuff that they know their target spending audience already likes. That’s why we have another Jurassic World movie, even though there is nothing left to do in that franchise. And it made a lot of money! So they were right.  Bunny: Go figure.  Oren: But in book form, there doesn’t seem to be a huge reason to do that, has been my experience. You’ll occasionally get authors who are a little obnoxious with it, but in general, I would say that at least in speculative fiction, which is the genre that I pay attention to, people are constantly pushing the envelope. When I see the books that are popular now, that’s very different from what was popular a few years ago.  Bunny: For sure. I think that if you do want to reference pop culture in your book, and your book is set in the real world and stuff, and you do it intentionally that you can for lack of a better word time lock your book. If you’re not trying to set it in vague “now” or five-minutes-in-the-future sort of stories that I’d argue probably most stories set in the present day do where it’s “now”! But if you want your book to be set sometime recently, but definitely a fixed time period, you could do something like what Kaiju Preservation Society does, which is that it’s definitively set during the pandemic. It makes references to the pandemic. It is set during those years, and so when it makes pop culture references−which I also find annoying, but at least they don’t have that problem−it makes sense because we know when we are. So it’s not going to age weirdly, because it’s fixed.  Kaiju Preservation Society kept doing this thing where the character would reference pop culture and the other characters would be like, “OMG, you did not! Wow! You named the Kaiju Bella and Edward? You did not. Whoa, you call yourself a Deliberator? That’s from Star Crash. Wow, I got that!”  Oren: Yeah, they’re proud of their references.  Chris: They’re very proud of that. I think Scalzi ended up writing Kaiju Preservation Society because of the pandemic. He had a rare incident where he wasn’t able to get out the work that he had been planning to write and had to tell his publisher that it wasn’t happening. And ended up writing Kaiju Preservation Society instead. So, I think part of the reason for setting that during the pandemic is that it was very much a product of the pandemic too. Bunny: Doing that was a good choice, too. With the backstory on that book being what it is, and in terms of keeping the pop culture grounded in time as well.  Chris: Should we talk about speculative pop culture? You want to make something up?  Bunny: Yeah, I feel like it is relatively rare in terms of going into a fantasy book and then the speculative world having a defined pop culture of its own− Chris: Although you should toss a coin to your witcher Bunny: −you’ll get vague references to that. Does Witcher do that?  Chris: Yeah, Witcher has−again, in books, it’s harder, right? Whereas in an audio-visual work, we can actually have music. So, for instance, Toss a Coin to Your Witcher is a song that the bard character in Witcher sings that got really popular online. And that one was good because it fit the setting. I think if you’re gonna have pulp culture in your setting, you should start with what is the actual primary method of mass communication that people use? And if you have a low-tech setting that’s before widespread literacy, then basically what you have is people coming, meeting, and talking to each other. So having a song in the story where the bard’s like, “Hey, can you please give this other character some money?”, basically the bard Jaskier will make songs out of Geralt’s adventures, and then they sing that at taverns and stuff. So that’s fun.  Bunny: Considering what kind of mass media−quote unquote, because this will depend on the communication level of the world−people experience is definitely the first step you should take. What are people experiencing?  Chris: We’ll talk more about Shield of Sparrows in the next episode, but one of the funny things … that world is just not thought through. One of the things is that there’s newspapers, and it’s like, what? This is like a medieval− Again, we didn’t have novels in Europe until about the 1800s. You know, lots of them. Because that’s the point at which the printing press had advanced enough. And of course there’s also a chicken and the egg issue with printing and reading. If there’s nothing, people can’t buy things to read. They have no reason to learn to read. But also before they are incentivized to learn to read, we need to make printing cheap enough, and for a long time that was not true. Books were too expensive. So there were a number of different things that happened. But one of them was that the printing press made printing cheaper, and we finally had novels.  In this fantasy book Shield of Sparrows, it’s just that the books still seem to be pretty rare and expensive, but at the same time, there’s newspapers.  Oren: There are a lot of anachronisms in that book. One of the ships is named Cannon, as in the weapon, and this is not a setting with gunpowder. So… whatever. What does that even mean?  Bunny: It’s just a cool word that we made up.  Oren: It’s just a fun word that we thought might sound cool as a ship name.  Chris: But basically if you’re making a world and you’re anchoring it to real world technology levels, and it’s European-ish, we’re looking at the 1800s for books and printing to become more common. The earlier you get before that, the less people are literate and the less you’re gonna have printing and newspapers and have pop culture through that way. At that point, it’s a bard comes to town and goes to the tavern, and everybody’s excited and ends up singing the same song in town. And that’s their pop culture! Bunny: Or if you have a court or something, they’re all watching maybe the same play. Everyone’s attending the new kabuki production.  Chris: Traveling theater! Bunny: Yeah, theater!  Chris: Traveling band doing some theater and comedy and jokes and stuff. And then people go and see that together.  Oren: For me, when I’m looking at a setting, if it’s in any way a modern setting, I know that there is no possible way I’m gonna be able to communicate the complexity of real world pop culture in a book. I don’t have time to go into all of the references that we use in real life that you need to know a thing to understand them. I would have to explain the entirety of the MCU if I was telling a story set in the modern day to someone who didn’t know what the MCU was. It would be ridiculous. So I do my best to come up with something, some of the more prominent aspects that are easier to explain and use that to hint at the idea that there’s more, but we’re not focusing on that right now. We’ve got a plot to do.  Bunny: Right. I think that’s why it’s relatively rare. It’s because a lot of in-universe entertainment isn’t super relevant to the main story, or it’s just fluff and flavor. And, honestly, I love when there’s fluff and flavor about the universe’s pop culture. I like that Murderbot is always watching telenovellas, even if they’re not relevant to the plot. It’s a fun worldbuilding detail, and of course there are telenovellas.  Oren: I really liked how in the show other people had seen them and that became a plot point in a few points in a few areas. I thought that was very neat.  Chris: The show writers were really good at leveraging and making it part of the story.  Bunny: Another book that did in Universe Entertainment was The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, where the main character really likes pulp novel penny dreadfuls, essentially, and ultimately uses these to convince a couple gods to not kill her. Being like, “Hey, in this−” this is spoilers for the climax, I guess, “−in this penny dreadful, this scenario happened, and you wouldn’t want the scenario to happen here, would you? Because that would be bad.” I was like, that’s fun. You don’t see a lot of these stories within stories unless they’re serious folklore that’s relevant to the foundation of the world or whatever. Oren: I would also say that another option, if you’re just trying to make something that is to help readers understand the world and to feel like it’s a living place where people do things, is you can create pop cultural trends that are similar enough to things that are in the real world that readers can kind of get it, but not being exactly the same. Nowadays we’re inundated with superhero movies, right? And that’s a feeling that people will have. And you might not necessarily want to have your setting have superhero movies, but assuming that it has this level of mass media, your character could very easily talk about how all the advertisements for the next hollow films are this specific genre because that’s what’s popular right now and I feel like I haven’t seen anything that isn’t that for a while. And that’ll get across the same feeling. Chris: I would like to see more sci-fi settings where there’s pop culture that is in new mediums. Something that doesn’t translate to the internet or TV or radio or print, right. It’s like everybody sends each other these weird telepathic messages, and now we have telepathic memes. Oren: We make fun of Star Trek for seeming culturally stagnated because they only ever listen to classical music or watch movies that are in Paramount’s IP archive.  Chris: And that they pass around electronic tablets like they’re pieces of paper. Oren: They have a big stack of iPads they pass around. (laughing) No, but they also do, you know, the holo-novels were interesting, right? The series went on, and we saw that there were people who made these as−if not a job, because it’s the federation, you don’t necessarily need to work at least−as a serious passion. And that was an interesting concept. I liked that. Chris: That was good.  Oren: I’ve seen enough sci-fi where it feels like when they want to make something futuristic, they just take something that’s vaguely East Asian, and they’re like, “There! That’s the future now.” And it’s like, okay, I know we all read Neuromancer when we were kids, but maybe we could move past that a little bit. Bunny: And what gets popular in a society says a lot about that society. One thing I really like in games and stuff−which again, this is easier in games because there’s not so much… if it’s an open world game, you expect to be able to find things in that world, whereas in novels space is more at a premium and you can’t just throw things in that someone can run past and go “oh, ha ha”−but I love when games have artifacts around that you can find. Or posters for futuristic movies that don’t exist. You can be like, oh, this is an interesting look into this greater world that I’m just running around in.  Oren: It’s environmental storytelling, isn’t it?  Bunny: It is. That’s what we in the biz call it. Oren: All right. Well, with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close, because I’ve been distracted by a very cool in-universe ad for a product that I’m gonna go stare at for a little bit.  Chris: And if you enjoyed any of our references about references, consider supporting us on Patreon. Oren: Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 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−speaking of pop culture. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek, also pop culture. We will talk to you next week. [Outro theme]

You’ve finished a draft. Now what? Oh right, you have to show it to other people. If that thought made you groan, we sympathize. Getting other people’s feedback is often a real challenge, and once you have the feedback, what are you supposed to do with it? We have some thoughts on all that, and with any luck, they’re useful ones! Show Notes Beta Reading  Reader Feedback Bringing Back a Dead Character Contrivance  Branching Stories Joseph Campbell Transcript Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris:  You are listening to Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…  Chris: Chris Oren: …and… Bunny: Bunny. Oren: All right, so good news. My story is drafted and I’m working on a new idea where I’ll just put it in a drawer to age for a while until it’s like wine, and then it’s better ’cause it’s just been in there for a while, and then I’ll release it. That seems like a good way to handle a story that you’ve just finished. Chris: Of course, the important thing is to write for yourself. With heart! Bunny: I love it when a book has legs. You know when you kind of swish it around on your bookshelf? Oren: If it doesn’t have heart, then the legs won’t work. This metaphor, it’s all working together. It’s all connected, man. Bunny: It’s deeper than you can comprehend. 10/10, no feedback, end the podcast. Oren: The topic for today is getting feedback on your writing, which, uh… is hard. And I don’t like doing it. I would prefer if I didn’t have to. Bunny: [sarcastic] But Oren, people don’t care about me. They’re not taking days off work to read my doorstopper! Oren: You know, that is a problem. I mean, getting people to read a super long novel is not easy. People have lives and they have work and stuff. Chris: I would just say that I get into writing so that I can just sit alone staring at my computer. This means that I have to communicate with people. Oren: The worst! Bunny: Yuck, yucky people! Give me feedback, but ew!  Oren: Beta reading is a huge part of this, and we will definitely talk about beta reading or whatever stage of reading you want to call it. One thing that I’ve been thinking about a little bit, even before beta reading, is when you are asking questions about your story and trying to get advice, like it’s not even finished yet. You’re asking about ideas or trying to brainstorm. A lot of authors kind of struggle with this, and this is not a roast. I’m not gonna make fun of anybody because it’s difficult to know exactly what to ask. It can obstruct you getting feedback and make it harder for you to get any useful information from people when you’re asking. Bunny: I definitely made the mistake back in the day when I was a mere commenter sending an essay to you both in a Q&A being like, “Analyze my magic system, please! Does this make sense?” You’re not gonna get feedback that way. And you very kindly wrote back and were like, schedule a consultation maybe. I was like, “oh, I’m an 11th grader. I don’t think I can do that, but thanks!” Chris: There’s another blog that I read for a while where the blogger decided to try Q&As and he would get a question and then, like… kind of roast the person a little bit on the blog post, and I just thought that was really mean! It’s like the nature of getting questions from the internet means you get a lot of bad questions. People don’t know what kind of questions you need. They can’t read your mind, so you have to be nice to them. No surprise, this person did not continue doing Q&As. I’m guessing people did not really like that. Oren: I have seen this a few times and it always just kind of bothers me. We recently had to shift the Q&A to patron only, just because it was taking up too much of our time. Before we did that, we would get a lot of the same questions and yeah, it can get annoying. You’re like, “why are they asking me this? I’ve answered this question a bunch of times,” blah, blah, blah. Chris: Over time our guidance, like, here’s our checklist where we try to give you advice, it gets longer and longer. Oren: But it does weird me out a little bit when I see big blogs – you know, to the extent that there are any of those left – answering questions and seeming annoyed that you asked them. You guys have the Q&A form! Bunny: And answering them gives you traffic too. Oren: If you’re tired of answering these questions, you could just not. You know, there are a few questions where when we get them, we’re like, we’ve answered this question before, and we just link to it. We don’t put those on the site. That is actually something that is an issue when you try to like, “Hey everybody, [huge block of text], now give me feedback.” There are situations where that is useful, but be aware of the context you’re in. Like that’s the sort of thing you do with a critique partner where you’re exchanging big blocks of text to review. Like, here judge my magic system and I’ll judge your politics system or whatever. Usually that’s not the sort of thing that you’re gonna ask a forum or a Discord channel or whatever. You wanna try to make these questions specific just because the chances that anyone’s gonna be able to give you very good feedback on something that long are pretty low. Chris: Yeah, I think it’s also important that people are signing up for the amount of work you’re asking them to do. So we have some guidance on our Discord server where Discord naturally limits the length of posts. If people are asking for advice on our server, it doesn’t get too long. But we have a rule about linking offsite, like off Discord. And expecting people to go somewhere else and read something somewhere else, and then give feedback. Because that’s just like an extra step that you’re asking people to do and who knows what kind of format it’s in on the other side, who knows how long it is, all those other things. And so the rules are just: tell people what you have for them to look at. Describe what it is, how long it is, the format it’s in. Anything they need to know about the experience. If it’s a horror story, obviously that’s important for them to know. And just get volunteers before you just vomit something huge right on a channel where people are chatting. That’s the last thing. Asking a lot of people who have not engaged with you and have not signed up for that. Oren: Like when you are asking for full feedback, that’s gonna be a whole thing. But for now, if you’re only looking for advice on this specific thing, pare down the information as much as you can and be abstract because chances are most of these people have not read your story. They are not gonna know any of the context. So if you get specific, they’re not gonna be able to answer your questions ’cause they don’t know the context. But if you try to give them the context, that’s almost certainly too much information. Bunny: Seeing walls of text, just a general rule of the internet: the longer the wall of text, the fewer people will read it. Chris: I mean, when we did Q&A, we specifically had a 300 word limit, and it was kind of like, okay, if you can’t explain the situation in 300 words, then it is just way too elaborate and lengthy for just a quick question answer. Oren: So for example, if I were J. R. R. Tolkien, and I wanted to know if people thought it was a good idea to bring Gandalf back in The Two Towers. I wouldn’t try to give the whole explanation for how he’s coming back, because again, that probably isn’t gonna mean anything to most people. They’d say something like, I have a major character who appeared to die in book 1, but we never saw his body. Would it be contrived if he returned in book 2 after going through a series of divine interventions off screen? And the answer is yes, it would be, and it was. You can kind of answer your own question that way when you abstract it and stop trying to add all of these excuses you’ve put in, sometimes that can help. Chris: One piece of context that is really useful for characters is just what is their general role in the story, because sometimes that can matter, like whether they’re a protagonist or an antagonist. That can come with some very different rules for what you need to do with, you know, side character, mentor, love, interest, those really general categories, they only take a second to put down. That is for anything about characters can be very relevant information. Oren: Stuff like, I’m looking for advice with the climax. Specifying where in the story you are can also be helpful. So anyway, that’s the basic advice I can give if you’re just asking for a quick question. The sad part of this is that the ability to know what to ask is something you will develop as you get better at writing. So there is a certain amount of the chicken and egg thing. Just focus on the most important information and don’t try to deliver everything at once. Chris: If you’re asking a character or plotting question and you’re at the point where you’ve learned some basics of what plot structure is, then that’s kind of the information that’s usually most useful to convey with your questions. Instead of like tons of specifics about everybody’s circumstance, the general like, oh, I’m at the climax, or I’m trying to do a surprise reveal, or I’m at the opening, whatever it is. What you learn is what you need to tell, which is why it’s so tricky. Of course. Oren: Beta reading is of course the big, you know, elephant at the end of the writing process as it were. It’s hard, but you gotta do it. So how do we pick our beta readers? Chris: Because a lot of people get feedback from other writers, it comes with its own upsides and downsides, and I think it’s worth comparing that a little bit. The thing about writers is it’s possible for them to have a better understanding of what you’re trying to do if you tell them, and that sometimes they’re knowledgeable, but they’re also just a lot more likely, I think, to try to give advice and that doesn’t necessarily make it good advice. Lots of writers love their writing groups and think they’re very helpful, and that’s great. Obviously, writers teaching each other is much cheaper than hiring an editor. We are, of course, always cringing because we hear things that aren’t a good thing for people to tell each other. Oren: You hear stories of people giving the most wild advice in writers’ groups, and I’ve also personally seen this, right? This is not just a thing where I’m depending on other people, you know, I’ve gone to writers’ groups and heard like, “you should drop that entire plot arc.” And it is like, wait, should you? You barely know anything about that plot arc. How can you suggest that? Chris: When we’re doing editing, we also ask a lot of questions about what the writer wants and what they’re trying to do. And writers helping each other are very likely to skip over that part and not pay attention to what kind of story the person wants it to be. We generally are supportive of beta readers because we feel like they are a little bit more malleable. They’re less likely to tell you what to do, especially if you ask them not to make suggestions and more likely to just tell you what they experienced. The downside of that, of course, is that it does leave you to figure out, this is what my readers are saying, but like what does that mean and how do I fix it? Bunny: I’m all right if readers ask prompting questions. Like, “what if” questions just to get me thinking. I think that can be super helpful. Maybe I’m biased ’cause I also try to do this when I read other people’s work. Like this is something that occurred to me. What if you did this instead of this? What if you did the reveal here instead of later? Like, I’m not trying to prescribe anything to them, but I’ve found that that can be a helpful consideration, like a way to get you the creative juices flowing because genuinely having other people’s perspectives and ideas can help you cook the story in ways that putting it in the single pot of your brain wouldn’t, I don’t know. Chris: And then eat the metaphor, mmm! I think communicating what you want obviously is really important, especially if you know you’re in a place where you really need positive- If you’re feeling really down and you really just need positive feedback. You know, for me, oftentimes I’m in a stage by the time I get to beta reading where those kinds of questions are no longer helpful for me and leave me wondering why somebody said that. Like, did you suggest this because you didn’t like something? That’s my biggest problem with suggestions is usually they’re not something I’m gonna do and that’s fine. But if a reader is bothered by something… and for some people, they just can’t help it. They don’t know how to express what they’re bothered by, right? They can’t identify what it is about the work, and so it’s easier for them to make a suggestion than it is to put their finger on why they’re making the suggestion. But I think the problem with suggestions is they have a tendency to replace the information that a writer often needs, which is, well, why did you make that suggestion? Are you a little bored here? Or something else? Bunny: And certainly when you’re giving your draft out to others to read, you need to know what you’re trying to get back from them. Overall impressions are good, but I’ve found that, you know, the more specific you can be, I guess this is a balance. You don’t wanna be super specific, but you also don’t just want them to read the story and then kind of circle it back and be like, well, like that’s also not super helpful to you. Oren: I do like a little more guidance than that. Bunny: I mean, I just had to do this recently and Oren, you were one of my beta readers for a script for this dinosaur game. Oren: Yeah, yeah, that was fun! Bunny: A couple other folks from the Discord read that, which was very kind of you. What we did for that was at the end of each, essentially, level of the script, we gave a questionnaire, and the questionnaire was surprisingly difficult to design because you have to be very careful about avoiding leading questions. Like we had a villain reveal and we wanted to get people’s thoughts on what they thought of the character that would be the villain. But you can’t indicate too hard that there’s something up with that character because that means that the reader will be like, “oh, there’s something up with that character.” Oren: You just say, hypothetically, if this character was important later, and then at the end you say, now please, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, beta readers, ignore what was just said. Don’t pay any attention to it. Forget you heard that. Chris: Yes. Uh, jury, just, uh, forget it. Oren: That’s how memory works. Bunny: I think we literally said, what do you think is the deal with this character? I think that’s how we ended up phrasing it. You know, another thing that is useful to get information from beta readers on is how much they understand unusual terms in the world, right? You wanna make sure that they’re on the same page as that. And we had a couple of unusual terms referring to the moons in the world, and so we wanted to poll beta readers on whether they knew what those things are. So you can say, what are X and Y? Or you could say, who are X and Y? I think we went with “what are,” because they’re moons. But if someone was like, oh, they’re characters and didn’t realize until the question that they’re what’s and not who’s, then you’ve missed an important piece of information. Oren: I have always tried to come up with some questions to ask for things that if there’s something wrong, it might be that the reader doesn’t specifically notice, so they won’t think to report it. So I tend to ask questions like, do you feel like you know what the characters look like? Does the outcome of this storyline seem to matter to you? That sort of thing. Those are informations that sometimes a reader, especially if they know what sort of thing a story needs, might think of, but they also might just not notice the absence. They might not notice that they don’t know what the characters look like or that they aren’t super invested in what’s going on here. So that’s the sort of question I found can be helpful. Chris: Certainly if you have any concerns, putting questions at the end makes them less likely to be biased while they are reading. Oren: Yeah, always at the end. I sometimes put them in between like sections if it’s something at the beginning, and I don’t wanna wait until they get to the end ’cause they might have forgotten by then. But you don’t ask them questions about something that’s relevant that hasn’t happened yet, unless you’re being sneaky about it. If you’re sneaky, that could change things. But you know, you don’t just be like, “Hey, what would you think if that character died later?” Bunny: I think I’ve also found that depending on the number of people reading your story, which is probably gonna be a small number, we were quite lucky to get as many people as we did reading that script. But I found that a useful rule of thumb is that if one person brings something up and maybe is confused about it, it might not be a big deal. Like, file that one away. If two people bring it up, take note. If there are three or more notes on that same thing, you’re probably gonna have to change it. And of course that depends on what the thing is, but as I’ve gone through writing workshops and stuff like that. That has been a helpful general guideline in helping me parse feedback and what I need to focus on most. Chris: Especially if you were in a writing group, people can be really opinionated and besides a writing group, oftentimes for people, the first person to look at their story is their significant other, and I know we all want to please the people close to us. But sometimes people, I think, put a little too much stock in that one person who can also have their own weird idiosyncrasies and personal preferences just like everybody else. Oren: [sarcastic] Chris, it’s not my fault that every story you give me is perfect and shouldn’t be changed. You’re trying to, you know, make this about my biases. Maybe you are the biased one. Chris: Every time I talk about how I wanna tweak something to make it better, Oren argues against it. I’m serious. My own stories. Bunny: Oren, that’s not your job! Chris: He is like, “no, it’s perfect the way it is.” Or like if I get editorial feedback from another editor, you know, I’ll be like, oh, hey, this editor made this like great point. And then I can tweet this and he will be like, “hmm, don’t change it! Editor’s wrong!” Oren: Sometimes they are wrong. Chris: Don’t change anything based on one person unless they, like, sometimes I get feedback from one person and it’s like, okay, I can totally understand why they thought this, and it’s just a little tweak, a few different words. I have no problem making a tiny change because it’s easy. For anything significant, one person’s opinion is not something that you should be making compromises for or significant revisions for because everybody is different and there’s just outliers all over the place when it comes to readers. Bunny: Except if I’m the one. My suggestions are enshrined and you must follow them. Chris: But one thing I just want people to look out for, if you have a writing group that meets together and talks where they influence each other, what can happen in there is you’ll get some people who are like, “Hey, I didn’t really like this thing, I felt like it could be different.” And then other people will reflexively argue against them. Like, “no, it’s fine! There’s nothing wrong!” The people who like something don’t actually out vote the other people. There’s no negating somebody’s experience, and that’s where we go to the Pareto improvement. We’ve got like several people who didn’t like something and several people who thought it was fine. Can you make a change that will please the people who didn’t like it without making it worse for the people who did like it? People typically have experienced this story alone first before they talk about it with other people. Somebody else’s vote of confidence doesn’t get rid of the people who didn’t have a perfect experience. Oren: It can also happen in the other direction. You can have someone be like, this part was really cool for these reasons. And if that person is charismatic, other people might just change their opinion to go along with what that person is saying. I have seen this happen so many times that I kind of don’t trust giving feedback in group settings anymore just because it feels like the first person to speak can really influence what everyone else says. And maybe that’s not true, but it certainly seems like it’s true. Even in a chat situation, I can just kind of predict how the chat’s gonna go based on who the first person to reply is. Bunny: For any faults I had, I will say that my senior thesis workshop group, in addition to being small, which helped, and moderated by the professor, had everyone read and annotate the section we were critiquing every day, and then write up our feedback and print it out so that once we get there, we have our initial impressions in hand unchangeable to hand over to the other person after we discuss it. So perhaps that can be a strategy. Chris: Yeah, that’s a good move. Bunny: If you’re worried about a particularly charismatic feedback giver trampling or manipulating everyone else, evilly. Oren: Narcissistically. Oh boy.  Bunny: Gaslighting, even. Oren: People react to each other, hot take! And sometimes that’s gonna distort the results of what you might otherwise get. Chris: They can be convinced to go along with what the other person says, or they can be almost intimidated into silence in a subtle way. It’s like, oh, everybody likes this, so I just won’t speak up ’cause I don’t wanna rain on everyone’s parade or vice-versa. Bunny: I don’t want to evaporate the rain. Oren: In general when it comes to beta readers, I do recommend screening your beta readers if you have that option to make sure that you’re getting the kind of reader who you might actually want to read your book. You don’t give your high seas pirate book to someone who doesn’t like boats, and you don’t give your courtly manners book to someone who is really big on action and gets bored without fight scenes. You might not always have that option because not everyone has a big group of people they can call on for beta reading, but if you can, definitely do that. That’s one of the big advantages of using people you know, as opposed to just going to an online critique site. Then you just get the Wild West. You have no idea what is motivating any of these people to say what they’re saying. Bunny: They might think Joseph Campbell has some good points. Chris: I know not everybody has the benefit of friends with similar tastes in books, but I do think that often if you do have those, that is the best source of feedback because their tastes are similar to yours and because they’re friends, your friends are more likely to read your book and try to give the feedback that you ask them to as opposed to whatever feedback they want to give, take a little time for you. That kind of thing. Oren: I mean, this is basically the place where you try to figure out how to give things back in these relationships, right? That is one of the reasons why it can also be useful to do this with writers. Even though as we’ve discussed, writers can have their own baggage. If your friend is a writer and you beta read for them, they can beta read for you. And you know, that is a very easy way to keep this a two-sided transaction. But your friends probably aren’t all writers and so, I don’t know, give them cookies or something, be a good friend and they’re more likely to want to help you. Bunny: They’re not writers. They’re mentally sound and have real lives. Chris: The other thing that I think can come up, again especially if you are encouraging people to ask questions, is what kind of changes you make to the work based on their feedback. One thing is don’t try to answer everybody’s questions in the work. Some people will wonder about things, but if you answer every question that people wonder about, you can add too much exposition to the story and just bog it down and tell things that most people just don’t need to know. If you do find yourself getting defensive and arguing with somebody, there’s something wrong and you may need to change what you’re doing. Obviously, we all get defensive sometimes. It’s totally natural, but I think the goal is to eventually get over the defensiveness, do what you need to do to do that, and then get curious about why they reacted the way they did by asking more questions and finding out why they perceived something the way that they did. Oren: If you work with the same people often enough, if you’re doing well and writing a lot, you can get a sense of, “this person is very critical” and “this person tends to be very praising” and you know, you can calibrate accordingly, right? That doesn’t mean you throw out the critical comments of the person who’s more critical or just disregard whenever the nice person praises your story, but you can evaluate them. You can know that maybe you should give a little more weight to when the nice person critiques something because you know that they really mean it. A little more weight to when the critical person praises things. You know, stuff like that. Chris: Definitely don’t put in exposition arguing with them. Bunny: Nothing is cringier than when you read a book and you’re like, I can hear the comment that spawned this little tirade and the narration about how all this makes sense, actually. Let me just give it a couple hundred more words and I’ll prove you wrong, invisible comment! Chris: I mean, if somebody’s confused and they just don’t know something, and they really do need information, that happens. But thinking like, “oh, no! Well, I can justify this by putting in more exposition.” It’s probably not gonna work. It’s just gonna make you look silly. When it comes to defensiveness, another thing when we select the people who are giving us feedback, and some of us have more control over that than others. Sometimes people get defensive because somebody is actually being a little condescending or a little rude. You know, I personally had an experience where I found that I didn’t feel the need to argue with almost any of my beta readers, except for these two guys, who turned out to be guys who were pretty close to me in my life, hence why they were beta reading. And I realized I couldn’t resist arguing with them because they were actually condescending in the way they responded, and so I just stopped using them as readers. Problem solved. Oren: That’s the right choice. And then, you know, you’ll also just have the occasional beta reader who’s not doing something wrong, but you’re still upset because they critiqued your story. And how dare they, frankly. The solution to that is to, you know, cry on your floor for a little while and then send them a nice thank you email. Bunny: With cookies. Chris: Yeah, go complain to a friend, loved one or whatever for a while, and then be nice. Oren: Well, with the evergreen advice to be nice, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you got some useful tips from this episode, 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 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 Coulton.

This week we have the pleasure of talking to a prolific author with lots of speculative fiction under his belt! That’s right, Jim C. Hines joins us to discuss his career and journey, from the early attempts at a magnum opus, all the way to his latest book about kite fighting in a world of eternal wind. Also, some of the strangest publishing drama you’ve ever heard. Show Notes Kitemaster Rise of the Spider Goddess Libriomancer  Goblin Tales Goblin Quest Book Cover Poses Magnum Opus  They’re Made Out of Meat Fighting Kites DAW Books Transcript Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [Opening Theme] Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is … Oren: Oren. Chris: And we have a very special guest today: Jim C. Hines. He’s published over twenty novels, over fifty short stories, and he won a Hugo Award for best fan writer after he took pictures of himself posing like the women on book covers! Oren: That was great. [Laughs] Jim: Thank you. Chris: And apparently, as I recall, that gave you some back pain? Jim: Some of the poses, yes. Trying to get both the chest and the backside on the same image. Um, yeah. You definitely need some ibuprofen afterward. Chris: Of course. ‘Cause the reader’s gotta see both boobs and butt. Jim: Well, of course! Oren: Look, the spine must be sacrificed. That’s just the way it works. Jim: Right. Oren: Well, welcome to our podcast. Jim: Thank you! Thank you for having me. Oren: So, we have some questions that we’re going to ask because you have written a lot of books and you have a very cool writing career, and we wanna know what you’ve learned over that time, and we wanna share that with our listeners in the hopes that we will all benefit from your wisdom. Jim: Wait, I was supposed to have learned something? Oren: Yeah. You know, they tell you that at the end, right? They’re like, “Hey, can you come tell people what you’ve learned?” And you’re like, scrambling. Eh? Probably something, you know?  Jim: So why didn’t you gimme a heads up about this thirty years ago when I started? Oren: First we have a term that we use a lot at Mythcreants that we call ‘the magnum opus.’ We use it ironically. It kind of means a mega project that is also usually the writer’s first, or maybe close to first, book that they start on. It’s really ambitious that they aren’t prepared for. It seems to be pretty common. Have you done that? Did you–when you were first starting off–did you have a magnum opus? Jim: Oh boy… All: [Chuckling] Jim: I had two, really. Oren: Oh! With the Magnum Opi. Jim: The first one, it was the first book I wrote. I was a junior in college and it was this grand fantasy adventure of my Dungeons & Dragons character. Chris: Yeah! [Laughs] Jim: His name was Nacor the Purple. He was just, very much the stereotypical cool elf character. And every night I would do classes or do some homework, and then go sit down and write more about this D&D character. And it was, looking back, terrible. It was full of cliché. It was sloppy, shallow world building. There was no real consistency. You know, he has a falcon companion that I think at one point becomes an owl. It was awful, but I didn’t know that. I just knew that I was having fun. I was loving getting into this character and writing all these cool action scenes and things that I thought were very dramatic and even emotional. And then – Oren: Well, it sounds like you discovered that the owl familiar had shape-shifting abilities and could become a falcon. That’s cool! That’s like a, you know, an emergent property, I would say.  Jim: Now, see, if I was writing it now, that’s exactly the BS explanation I would go for. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s totally, um … What I actually ended up doing with it, I think probably about ten years back, I had volunteered for a fundraiser that if, you know, if you raise this much or bid on this, I will read this awful fan fiction of my character while dressed as the character. Oren: Oh wow. Chris: Oh wow! That’s great. Jim: And then when I read it and posted the reading, people wanted to know more, which is like, really? My readers are masochists? What’s going on? So I ended up self-publishing it. It’s called Rise of the Spider Goddess, and it’s annotated. Chris: Oh. Jim: It’s the manuscript exactly as I wrote it. But then twenty-years-older and more experienced me doing the mystery science theater treatment throughout. Just all the snide comments, all of the, “Oh God, what was I thinking?” Chris: [chuckles] That sounds delightful. Jim: It was kind of fun. And, you know, I do like putting it out there as just reassurance that we all suck when we start and we get better. But it’s okay to suck when you’re starting out. Oren: This kids, is why you should never get rid of the novel draft, no matter how bad it is. You never know when you might need it for a fundraiser. Jim: Exactly. People might actually pay money to suffer through that. Oren: And you said there was another one? Jim: There was. There was a book called Hamadryad that I was trying to be … You know, this was a few years later. It was more ambitious. It was dealing with female characters and how they’re written and sexism and objectification and just getting into a lot of cultural issues. And I was totally not ready to write it. Chris: Mm-hmm. Oh man. We encounter so many writers that really wanna take on important issues, but you know, when you start writing, that’s the hardest time to take on something that’s, you know. It’s ambitious in its own right because it’s sensitive. Jim: Years later, the character came back in part of the Libriomancer books. But yeah, that was like ten more years of learning how to write, learning how to get a little deeper with the themes, learning how to not be completely heavy handed about it all. Oren: [satirically] I’m sixteen and I have just heard that religious discrimination is bad. I’m gonna write the quintessential novel about Islamophobia. Jim: [chuckles] Yeah. Oren: Right? Like, let he who has never done this cast the first stone. Jim: And it’s – I mean, you don’t wanna discourage it because it’s great that sixteen-year-old you has discovered this, and I’m very happy that you’re exploring. But yeah … Oren: It’s good that you want to, and then eventually you will learn the expertise and you can probably do something that will actually work a little better. Jim: Hopefully. Oren: Yeah. Like when I get clients who wanna do this, I always encourage why they want to and their motivations, and then I try to help them avoid the big mistakes that we all make. Right?  Chris: I mean, I try to encourage people to start by depicting the world they want to see. Right? Instead of taking on all of those difficult topics when they start. But yeah, no. We’ve all – my magnum opus was overly edgy and not trying to comment enough. So I’ve definitely done worse.  Jim: I think we’ve all been there, you know, one way or another. Chris: So, your list of short stories is very impressive. And I noticed going through your bibliography that the earliest one I spotted was Whisper of a Dream published in 1997, which is nine years before your earliest novel that you have listed. Jim: Yup. Chris: And it looks like you’re still writing them. So I’m always telling people to write more short stories, and I would just love to hear more about, you know, what you feel short story writing has done for you. Whether it’s, you know, your personal happiness or forwarding your career. You know, what you get from doing that? Jim: Oh, that’s a good question. When I was starting out, you know, mid ‘90s, that was the very common advice. That was what I was still hearing from the established writers is, “No, no. Start with short stories. Break in there, and then you’ll build your reputation, build your name, and then you’ll be able to sell a novel.” I think there was a shift going on at the time, and it didn’t really work that way anymore. Chris: I mean, if there was a straightforward path to success, everybody would do it and then it wouldn’t work anymore. [Laughs] Jim: Well, unless the path was hard. Chris: Yeah. It’s true. Very true. Jim: But yeah, it’s – most of the writers I talked to, it’s like, how did you break in? It’s, “Well, it’s a weird story.” Chris: Ooh, we love weird stories. Jim: It’s never just, oh, it’s a straightforward, “I did this.” It’s some weird circuitous mess. But that said, I mean, I enjoyed writing short stories. I learned a lot about structure, about plotting. Some of the basics of, just like, how to write dialogue, how to structure a paragraph; how to use a semicolon. It didn’t necessarily carry over directly to novel writing because a short story is a short story and a novel is a novel. And they’re different beasts. But some of the basic skills definitely helped when I started doing novels. And I still do them occasionally. I tend more toward the books because the books reach more people, they sell better. They, you know – I have children and cats to feed. But the short stories, they’re fun break sometimes. You know, it doesn’t take a full year for me to write one. I can explore ideas that maybe wouldn’t work at a hundred thousand words, but 3,000 words, this works great. Like, there is one that was a parody of Sesame Street where a werewolf shows up. Chris & Oren: [Laughter] Jim: I wrote it as a script for the show, and there’s just no way I could have done that at book length. But much shorter? This was fun. This was funny. It didn’t get too old by the end. This was great. You know, there are things you can do in the short format that you just can’t really do at novel length. Chris: It sounds like that, you know, was a good way to practice in your earlier years. Jim: To some extent, yeah. I do kind of wish I had started writing novels sooner, so I could have gotten better at that more quickly. But honestly, I can’t complain. You know, I’m happy with the short fiction output I’ve had. I’m happy getting my stuff out there in different … Oh! I’m blanking on words. Professional writer here. In different anthologies, different magazines. Just different ways for people to find the stuff. Oren: Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, because you’re absolutely right about there being some things that you can do in short stories that just would not work for novels. I’ve even run into a couple of clients who were trying something like that where it really felt like what they wanted was a short story that had a very cool high-novelty premise that works for, you know, about three or four thousand words and then it stops working. Jim: Yeah. Terry Bisson did They’re Made Out of Meat. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: Yep! Jim: And it’s brilliant. And it can’t be – it would never work if you kept dragging it out. Chris: Yeah. Jim: But at that length, it’s perfect. Oren: I do have a short-story-related question before we go to the next one actually. Jim: Sure. Oren: Have you ever thought of doing like, an anthology of – and maybe you already have and this is an obvious question to Chris – but an anthology of short stories that are like, you know, they’re not chapters in a novel, but they have the same characters and take place in the same world. Is that something that you’ve looked at?  Jim: Sort of a mosaic style? Oren: Yeah. Jim: The closest I’ve come, there’s a – sort of a chapbook thing called Goblin Tales that’s got five of my goblin related short stories. Chris: And was that published after the Goblin Trilogy? Jim: After, yes. Yeah, I’ve thought about it. I’m not sure I would … I’ve never seriously wanted to dive into it, but it’s been at the back of my mind sometimes. Oren: Okay, cool. Thank you. I just, I’m always trying to find out information on that. ‘Cause that’s another thing that my clients are often, you know, looking to do and they want to know how viable is this in the market. And, you know, all I can tell them is, well, short stories are hard in general. Yeah. So I’m always trying to find more specific information on that. Chris: Yeah. I will say a lot of times when I see short stories on the market and anthologies like that, it is as a follow up to a novel. ‘Cause then you already have a fan base, right? And people are like, “Oh, I’m out of the Goblin novels. I feel sad. Oh, I can read some short stories! It’s a nice way to wean fans off of the characters once you’re pretty much done.” Jim: Well and sometimes, you know, you’ve written these books, you’ve written these characters. And you know, I find sometimes I just miss them. Chris: Mm-hmm. Jim: You know, I want to go back and play in that world again. Or there’s an idea that didn’t quite make it into the books, but we can put it into a short story and get it out there. Oren: Very cool. Alright, so my next question is when you were, you know, still learning, did you go through any periods of disillusionment when you realized you weren’t as far along as you’d hoped? Jim: Oh, I love that you phrase this in past tense. All: [Laughter] Oren: Yeah. Never happens to any of us in the present. Don’t worry about it. Jim: Right. No, that’s been there pretty much – won’t say from the very beginning. ‘Cause when I was writing that first really bad D&D magnum opus thing, I thought it was great. And my girlfriend at the time liked it, which looking back was probably another sign of her … questionable judgment. But – Chris & Oren: [Laughter] Jim: Then a few years into it, when I started submitting and getting all the rejection letters, there was definitely a lot of discouragement. And in some ways it was harder in those first few years because I didn’t realize how – well, how bad I was. Oren: Yeah.  Jim: I didn’t know how much I had to learn. I couldn’t look at my own work and see the problems. And then – I don’t know – five, six, seven years in, I guess it was like flipping a switch. And you know, maybe it came from doing some writing workshops, working with other people, learning to critique. I started seeing the problems and you know, this was in some ways very discouraging. But in some ways this was great because, oh! I can fix that. I can go in and make it better. But the discouragement, the depression, the feeling like I’m not as good as I want to be. That’s always there, off and on. Even now, thirty years since I started doing this, you know? I am currently working on the first draft of a new book. And my first drafts tend to be really bad. It’s just, you know, vomit up all the ideas onto the page. We’ll fix it later. Oren: As is the nature of a first draft. Chris: Right. I mean, I might argue that by their nature they … [laughs] Jim: Right. But as I’m sitting there writing it, I’m still having that thing in my mind, that voice that says, “Oh, so this is the book that everybody’s going to realize you’ve been faking it this whole time and all of your other stuff,” you know? “You’re this horrible, terrible writer that you’ve just somehow managed to fool people.” Oren: Well, I mean, it’s gotta happen to us all. Eventually, you know, eventually they will figure it out.  Jim: Right. We’re just trying to postpone it for as long as possible. Oren: I have a follow up question, because you mentioned that you gained the ability to see what was wrong and that motivated you to want to make changes and wanna fix things. Was that, like, your main way of getting through the disappointment or did you have something else going on? Jim: Ooh. Getting through the disappointments? Um …  Chris: Tell us your coping strategies. We need them. Jim: Ice cream. Oren: Very good, very good. Jim: Probably the worst: the first time I almost sold a book to a major publisher and I had gotten all excited about it, and then they pulled the offer. Chris: Ouch! Oren: Yeesh! Jim: And I crashed hard. You know, looking back at it, it’s like, no, Jim, you wrote a book that a major publisher, at least initially, wanted to buy. This is good. Chris: Right. It was a sign you were getting closer, but – Jim: But, no. It’s probably the worst writing depression crash that I’ve had. And it lasted a month or two and the coping mechanism that brought me out of it was the birth of my second child.  Oren: Wow. Jim: I don’t necessarily recommend this for every time you get a rejection. Chris: [Laughter] Oren: Yeah. You can see how that might have … other consequences! Jim: Right! That could cause other forms of depression and overwhelm. Chris: I don’t know. Maybe you can just create your own readership. Jim: [riffing] Oh honey? Chris: Eventually you’ll have enough. Jim: Yeah, I’m fifty-one. I don’t think that’s happening at this point. Chris: Thank you. That’s very touching. We have a lot of people – obviously a lot of writers go through this disillusionment phase. I think, because a lot of us are lied to, basically, by culture about what it entails. Jim: Oh, yeah! Chris: And so, you know, all of those movies about like, “Oh, just write with your heart!” Jim: Oh God. Chris: [laughing] And it just magically assembles itself. Jim: Just sit down and the words flow. And a year from now, you’ll be in your limousine with your agent sipping champagne as you drive to your book launch. Chris: Mm-hmm. And man, if we just treated it like other professions, you know? Jim: Mm-hmm. Chris: I think people would be so much better off. So yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. So we’d like to hear about your writing process. Is it different now than when you started? I’ve heard from many writers that over process, I mean, over time they tend to do a little bit more planning when they find something – “Oh, I wish I had accounted for that.” And then they plan a little more. Is that you? Or do you have a, you know – Is it pure chaos? Is it very orderly? What’s your style?  Jim: It’s definitely more chaos than I would like. I’ve gotta have an outline. You know? I learned that pretty early on. My brain is not big enough for a whole book. I can’t hold it all in my head. I don’t – if I just write from the seat of my pants, I meander all over the place and I don’t know where I’m going. The problem I run into is, you know, what my process has evolved into is I write the outline, then I start writing the book. Then I get about 10,000 words into the book and I realize my outline is broken. So I go back and I write a new outline. Then I write the next part of the book. Get maybe halfway through, maybe even two-thirds, if I’m lucky. Break the outline again and you know, repeat until you finally have a messy first draft that I can work with. But I would love to be able to get the outline right the first time! And I keep feeling like, okay, you’ve written twenty plus books. You should know how to do this. But I think part of the process with every book is learning how to write that book. Because whatever you figured out on the last one may or may not apply. Chris: I’ve certainly seen many books by authors where there’s one book that just does really well because the author just happened to fit in that perfect formula. And then you see them just make a slight change to the books and suddenly it doesn’t, you know, work together as well anymore. And yeah, right. Stories are so niche in how they work. So it sounds like for you, you feel like when you ride into a roadblock, it’s something that you could have accounted for in the outline as opposed to you came up with a new idea and then started wandering away from where your outline was. Jim: It’s a bit of both. Sometimes it’s realizing that what I put into my outline was stupid or obvious or boring. And sometimes it’s more like you were saying that, you know, the outline is perfectly fine but, oh! wouldn’t it be cool if this happened? Or this character that I didn’t think was very important is a lot of fun. I’m gonna write them another scene and see what happens. Yeah, there’s definitely some discovery to it, at least for me. Chris: Sounds like a good way for your outline to break; if you find something fun and you want more of it. Jim: Hopefully … yeah. That’s a good way of looking at it. Hopefully it’s breaking better. Chris: Yeah, and like going back to your outline, I mean, that just sounds like the right move. You know, you find something new and fun, you go back and you know, account for it. Yeah, that sounds great. I mean that would not be something that I would worry about, but certainly with other things, you know, again, sometimes people just take more and more notes every time they outline. But you know, it doesn’t work for everybody. Jim: And this, it’s a frustrating process a lot of the time. But, it seems to work for me. Readers don’t see all of the outlines and all of the drafts. They just see the finished product. So, however you get there.  Oren: Once you have the first draft, you know, the one that we’ve been describing is, you know, often very messy. Is there a single process that you go through for revision or is it different with every book? Jim: There’s not a single identical process. Usually when I finish the first draft. At that point, I have a much better sense of the story and what it’s about and who these characters are. So I’ll read through it. I’ll make notes. But most of the time I’m pretty anxious and eager to just jump in and start writing it again from page one. And I’ll use that first draft as sort of the new outline and the new basis. But now I know where it’s going and now I can develop and add in all the description, and start layering in theme and foreshadowing and inside jokes and all of that fun stuff. Oren: Yeah, we love it. Jim: Yeah. The second draft is so much more fun than the first draft. Chris: That’s great. Do we have time for maybe one more? Oren: Yeah, I think we have time for one more ’cause we wanna make sure … Chris: Any preferences, Jim? Do you have a preference for what question if we have time for one more?  Jim: I do not. Choose your favorite.  Oren: So we’ll go with our last question ’cause we wanna hear about your upcoming project.  Jim: Okay. Oren: Tell us the story of how you got your first ‘trad’ publishing deal for a novel. Jim: Well, that would be Goblin Quest. That was the one that I was talking about that had the very tragic backstory. Goblin Quest was weird. Most books take me about a year to write. I wrote and revised Goblin Quest in six weeks. Chris: Wow. Oren: Damn. Jim: I had just moved back to Michigan. I was unemployed. I had no social life. This is all part of it. But yeah, I wrote it and it was the book where I stopped worrying about what I’m supposed to be writing and just had fun with it. And then started sending it out to publishers, sending it out to agents, collecting all of the rejections and getting on with life. Eventually, a smaller publisher said, “Hey, we like this. We’ll pay you a small advance. We’ll do a library edition. We’ll get this book out there.”  And by this time, you know, it had been rejected by pretty much everyone. There were one or two publishers that had been sitting on it for a year and a half with no response. So I figured, okay, this is great. I’ll have a book. I did email those last few holdouts saying, “Hey, just letting you know, you’ve probably moved on long ago, but I got a deal. So withdrawing the book.” Another year passes, the book comes out from the small press and two months later the publisher who had had it at this point for probably two and a half years sends me an email with revisions saying, “These are the changes, these are the things we want you to work on.” Oren: Oh! Jim: “And by the way, we wanna buy this book.” Oren: [laughing] Oh no. Jim: And I just say, “Wait, what? No. I already – but you. I can’t.” But – And so for a while. There was this sense that – well, the small publisher put out a hardcover, but they didn’t buy mass market rights, so maybe you could take the mass market rights, maybe I can salvage this. I was able to get an agent through this, just by querying a few agents and saying, “Hey, I have a really weird situation and I need help.” Oren: Yeah. Chris: Yeah. Jim: And Joshua at JABberwocky – I still remember the phone call. You know, he called and said, “We’d like to help you with your problem.”  The deal with that publisher fell through. Chris: Oh. Jim: I went into my depression until my kid was born. But I had an agent now, and the agent was saying, “Look, you’ve done this once, you can do it again. Write the next book. We’ll still be here.” And I ended up writing another Goblin book ’cause I didn’t know what else to do. Oren: Well it did get a publisher’s attention, right? Jim: So yeah, why not? So the agent sent it out to some publishers and we got some interest from two of them. And one of them said, “I really like this book. It’s a lot of fun. But it feels like book two,” you know? “It feels like it’s a sequel to something.” And my agent said, “Well, it’s funny you should mention that, because we do still have mass market paperback rights for this first book.” And DAW Books ended up buying both of them. Chris: Oh, that’s great! Oren: Nice. Jim: So it eventually worked out even better. But it was just bumpy and ugly and not how I would recommend breaking in. Chris: At the same time, it sounds like you did the right things, right? Part of the trickiness of the situations, agents want you to have a publisher. Publishers want you to have an agent. Jim: Right. Chris: So you’re able to use what interest you got to get an agent, you know? That sounds like you made the right moves, even though it was hard. Jim: I was trying to. And when you’re new, you don’t know how – you don’t know what the rules are. Did I screw up by going to an agent? Did I … should I have not submitted it until I got the official rejection two and a half years later or … ? It was rough. I don’t look back and think, oh, I really messed up here. It was just messy. Oren: It does sound really hard, but – I don’t know if I would say it worked out. But I’m glad that it had a positive ending at least. Jim: I mean, in the long run, I think it worked out great. I have been very, very happy with DAW. Almost all of my books have been with them. You know, I’ve been with them almost twenty years now. So I’m pleased. Chris: That’s fantastic. Jim: Yeah. Chris: So do you wanna tell us about Kitemaster? Jim: Sure. Ironically, not with DAW. This one was a smaller press title, because it’s hard to summarize. It doesn’t have a nice pitch line like my next. My next book with DAW in October is Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossed with The Golden Girls. Chris: [laughing] That sounds very new. Jim: Right. But Kitemaster, it doesn’t have that punchy one-sentence summary. Chris: That ‘high concept.’ Jim: Yeah. It’s this fantasy world, which is very much built on my sense of wonder. It started out, just because I read something about fighting kites and thought, oh, that’s really cool. Oren: They are really cool. So, you know, good instinct. Jim: I know, right? So I built a world around that. Where wind is eternal, it never stops. And so all of the technology and magic is sort of wind based. And you have ‘kitemasters’ who can manipulate the wind and control the things that fly on it. And you have kiteships, which – the physics were a little tricky, but – if you put a kitemaster on and mix in a little magic, you can fly around on these ships with huge ‘kitesails.’ And you’ve got stars that don’t actually work like the stars in our world. They’re more of a river of stars that flow through the night faster or slower. It depends on the wind. Oren: That’s gonna make horoscopes hard. Jim: Yeah, they don’t do horoscopes. Oren: That sounds super cool though. Jim: And you’ve got dragons who are, like, half a mile long who live in the stars. And when a star falls, the dragons eat them to keep the stars from hitting the world. Chris: Oh, that’s cool. Jim: It’s all of these ideas that made me happy. That made me think, oh cool, I wanna see that. And then layered onto this is the story of Nial, who is a twenty-one-year-old widow who discovers that she’s a kitemaster, and gets drawn into this, you know, fantasy adventure to stop the queen who is raising an army of kitemasters to – without getting into spoilers – do very bad things. So Nial, she’s grieving, but she’s also fighting and learning and exploring. And there’s sort of a found family thing going on with her two friends on the kiteship. And it’s a book – it’s one that I’m very proud of. I think it’s one of the best ones that I’ve done. But it’s definitely not quite as commercial as most of my stuff. Chris: I’m looking at the cover and I really think that it kind of conveys that sense of wonder. Jim: Oh, the cover’s beautiful, isn’t it? Chris: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Looking over this very pretty landscape and – yeah! No, that sounds great. It sounds like a wonderful read. I certainly look forward to testing it out myself. Jim: Thank you! I hope you like it. Chris: Alright. Well thank you so much for joining us. Jim: Thank you for having me. This has been fun. Oren: Alright. Well I think that will about do it for this episode. Chris: If you enjoyed 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 Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.  [Closing Theme]

Award season is almost here, and as you can no doubt guess, we have… opinions. Specifically, opinions about the six novels on the short list for 2025’s Hugo award. Are these books good? Yes, and also no. They’re a continuum, you might say. And somehow, Adrian Tchaikovsky is on both ends of that continuum. How did he get there? If you listen in, you might just find out. Show Notes 2025 Hugo Finalists  The Familiar The Last Murder at the End of the World The Spellshop The Warm Hands of Ghosts Legends and Lattes Love Interest Beauty Pageant Graham Gore  A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking What We Do in the Shadows Murderbot The Mimicking of Known Successes Transcript Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.  You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.  [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is: Bunny: Bunny! Oren: and Chris: Chris Oren: So today we are discussing the six best books of 2024.  [Chuckling] Oren: This is a very objective measurement of the best books. It’s definitely not just the six that were chosen by a kind of limited audience popularity contest. Bunny: Look, one of them was pretty good.  Oren: Yes. So, this is our Hugo episode because there are six Hugos. And let’s just go around and say how many of them we read. Bunny, how many of them did you read?  Bunny: Two.  Oren: Okay. Very respectable. Chris, how many did you read?  Chris: Well, I might say three. But the reality is that I read … [laughing] … the truth is that I did not finish most of them. I finished two and then I started three more, and one of them I was just, no. Not at all.  Bunny: And one of them that you did not finish was on the list for some reason.  Oren: Just remember, because I would never brag, I’m a very humble person, but I did read all six and I’m therefore a superior being.  Bunny: Ah, so this was a shaming question. I see. I am firmly in third place here. In my defense, I read a lot of other things on the proto-Hugo List you made, your prediction chart. I was constrained by what was at the library because I’m glad I didn’t buy some of them.  Chris: Well, you did finish Ministry of Time, right? I feel like that deserves a round of applause. Bunny: Woo. Okay. Maybe I can get bonus points for Ministry of Time. I read Ministry of Time and The Tainted Cup and a bunch of others that didn’t end up on this list. Which is funny to me because there were many on there that deserved to be on the list more than Ministry of Time.  Chris: Yeah. This year we tried to guess–I should say mostly Oren tried to guess, and some of us added a few additional books–what books might end up being nominated, which is an interesting exercise. The book that I was most surprised to not get nominated was Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar.  It has a lot of things that I feel like Hugo voters like where it’s got a historical setting that focuses on marginalization and also has the kind of wordcraft that I would expect that Hugo voters would be interested in. I do wonder if the fact that it was so focused on the romance hurt it. Now there are a couple other Hugo nominees that do have romances but I feel like they’re less conventional romances than what’s in The Familiar.  Oren: Yeah. So, okay, let’s run through this real quick what those six books are. I mean they’re on the show notes, but just in case. So, the six are Alien Clay, Ministry of Time, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, Service Model, and The Tainted Cup. So those are the six that actually got nominated for the Hugo. Then there are several others that we think maybe should have been on there instead.  Bunny: Yeah, certainly more than the existing one. I think that the other books from your list that I read, most of them, aside from Tainted Cup, which was the only one I could really wholeheartedly recommend, of the ones I ended up being able to read, I would’ve been a little annoyed if they had been nominated but far less annoyed than I was about Ministry of Time. Like Last Murder at the End of the World had a plot, things happened. The mystery, once it got started and you got past all of the convoluted worldbuilding, was fun. Ministry of Time was a slog.  Oren: Yeah. So, if I was going to modify this list, and again, this is already from a biased sample size, right, because I was reading books specifically because I thought they might be on the Hugo finals, but just based off of that sample size, I would axe Alien Clay and Ministry of Time, and I would replace them with The Spellshop and The Warm Hands of Ghosts. That last one, I think only I read. Chris: Probably why it wasn’t nominated.  Oren: Yeah, like I haven’t heard anyone talk about it despite it getting a respectable number of Goodreads views. But I liked it. And granted it’s also about World War I and about an aspect of it that I find really interesting, so, there’s a little bit of a targeted audience thing going on there. And I can see replacing A Sorceress Comes to Call with The Familiar. To me, I could go either way on that one. I don’t have strong feelings.  Bunny: I don’t know if I would put The Spellshop up there, but my feelings about The Spellshop are known.  Chris: I know you have different feelings about The Spellshop than we do.  Bunny: It’s not interesting enough. One of the funny things about the Hugos and any awards competition is that comparing these books to each other is always extremely funny, and I think it would be the strangest time for me to have to compare The Spellshop to The Tainted Cup. Like they’re just such different books. But you have to do that, right? You have to do that for the Oscars and stuff too, obviously.  Chris: And I voted for both of those to be nominated. It was pretty predictable that The Tainted Cup got nominated and The Spellshop didn’t. I do think that, just like romance, that cozies have a tough time and lighter stories have a really tough time getting nominated for the Hugos. Legends and Lattes did it because that one was kind of a big hit and a trendsetter, but I think cozies in general are going to, people just feel that darker stories are deeper, and it’s unfortunate, but it’s how it goes. Oren: Which is just funny because every so often there’s a think piece panicking about how light stories are taking over. It’s like, Calm down. Look at the ones actually winning the awards, friend. Chris: Yep, yep. Not actually happening.  Oren: Yeah. So, to me they have like a pretty clear scale of quality books where I just find Alien Clay and Ministry of Time to just be… I don’t get it. I don’t understand what we’re doing here.  With Alien Clay, yeah, it tells me that the author shares my politics mostly, which I guess is nice, but I can get that from reading his BlueSky account. There’s no story here.  Bunny: Nominating Adrian Tchaikovsky’s BlueSky account for a Hugo. That is innovative.  Oren: Yeah, there you go. I mean, I’m glad. I’m glad he’s anti-fascist. That’s good. That is a good thing, but I just don’t really think it has that much of an impact on his book.  Chris: For me, the funny thing, if we’re talking about Tchaikovsky, is usually I hear a lot of people refer to various writing as lazy, and I almost never do that. Generally, you don’t know what was going on with the writer. They were probably trying their best, got a lot on their plate already, but when I look at Tchaikovsky’s writing, you know, I don’t know if my perception is accurate, but the thing that really strikes me is it seems lazy and it’s like the only author where that is true.  Now, there are two Tchaikovsky books that were nominated, and one of them, I think, actually deserves that nomination. Just to add, make it a little more complicated. But Alien Clay…I did this love interest beauty pageant article on the site where I took out the introductory description of various love interests and kind of made it into a fun contest, and he describes the love interest when she enters the story as just dark and fleshy. And it’s just like, like how? How is she dark and how is she fleshy? Bunny: Me receiving a valentine that says, You’re dark and fleshy. That’s what I love about you.  Chris: I guess it’s creative in a way. I mean, maybe not the dark part, I suppose calling the love interest fleshy, but it also feels so slapdash. It doesn’t feel like you put in effort.  Oren: That’s basically the issue with Alien Clay, is that Alien Clay reads like a university lecture, and I’m sure its fans will tell me that was on purpose because the main character is a university professor, but it’s so dull and dry and it doesn’t feel like a story. There’s very little story. It’s just like, Hey, we’re hanging out. It sucks and it sucks a lot, but not in a way that feels dangerous or immediate, and then we win later, and don’t ask how, it just kind of happens.   Bunny: Look, the way to defeat fascism is to give in to a not at all suspicious hivemind.  Oren: Yeah, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Whereas Service Model, which has a very similar writing style, Tchaikovsky doesn’t really do immersive description as far as I can tell, but in Service Model, it works a lot better because Service Model is funnier, he’s using that very dry acerbic narration to make jokes, so it actually feels like it’s adding something,  and then Service Model also has a lot of novelty because we are really focusing on how weird these robots are in the way they make decisions and how that’s different from humans and that’s, to me, I think the big source of what made Service Model interesting. Whereas I didn’t feel like Alien Clay did anything with that. It was just, sure, there’s alien ruins, I guess, and that’s it.  Chris: Yeah, I mean, for books that get a Hugo, I just want to see that they have good knowledge of story structure and good storycraft. The Spellshop, for all it may have seem plain, I felt like it showed that. I felt like it showed a lot of deftness when it came to constructing a plot in a way that a lay person may not appreciate. Bunny: Are you calling me a lay person? I’ll have you know I’m an expert.  [laughing] Oren: It is kind of funny to me that most people who do a lot of reading or watching of movies or whatever, or any kind of consuming of media for a living, they almost always prefer weird out there stuff because they want to see something different. With Chris and I, it’s the opposite. It’s like, no, we want to see the basics done well because we almost never see that.  Chris: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I just want to see somebody who has nailed those foundations. And with both Ministry of Time and Alien Clay, they’re just like not there. I have not read Alien Clay. That’s the one I just said: No. Ministry of Time was one of the ones I did not finish, and it is just, oh, so much summary, so much exposition. I mean, we talked about it a number of episodes ago. It has the things that the literary crowd likes, but it does not, in my mind, show good storycraft fundamentals.  Oren: See, I did put Ministry of Time ahead of Alien Clay mostly because—despite the fact that it’s not a good book—there is at least a spark of passion for real life guy Graham Gore, historical figure. I can feel the author is interested in him.  Bunny: Oh, the author loves Graham Gore and this doomed expedition. Oren: Big fan.  Chris: We even have interludes where we go into his life. Oren: So, there’s something there, right? Whereas with Alien Clay, it’s like, it doesn’t feel like this story is passionate about anything. Bunny: If I could take the author of Ministry by the hand and be like, let me give you some advice about your ideas before you write this book I would say, historical fiction. Write it about this boat and this doomed expedition, but something goes fantastical and alternate history or something. You love this guy, let’s stick here. And not the tedious— Chris: But she’s writing what she knows and she has a super big crush on him, so she needs to write herself having a big crush on him.  Oren: Oh gosh. Bunny: It did sort of feel that way, especially since the character didn’t have a name. That’s very literary. Oren: To look at the books in the middle for a second because it’s easy to get obsessed with the two that are bad and then the two that are good. So, I find anything by T. Kingfisher, and this is A Sorceress Comes to Call, very funny because we know because of A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking that Kingfisher does know how to plot. She simply chooses not to most of the time. Chris: Yeah, we read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking first, and I was like, oh, because I’d heard a lot about T. Kingfisher from other people who are fans, and I was like, oh wow, she is quite good. And then several books later, it’s like, okay, those books all have basically the same problem, where it turns out she really doesn’t like plotting. She just wants to build a collection of characters she likes hanging out. Just hanging out with each other. That’s what she actually wants to write and that’s what most of her books are.  And A Sorceress Comes to Call has a great opening. It has a fabulous opening. It is dark, but it’s very good. It is focused on abuse. And that abuse has a magical element in this story, and it’s brought to life so vividly and it’s really good. But the problem is as the book progresses, the characters just hang around and I mean, at this point, I have to say Kingfisher probably doesn’t really care about having the plot happen, but the characters basically spent a whole bunch of time talking about how they should have a plan and when they finally come up with a plan— and I’m bored at the lack of movement—when they finally come up with it, it is so bad. It is: Let’s do this and then maybe we’ll find out more about what the villain wants, even though it’s kind of obvious. And then when we find out what she wants, maybe then we’ll come up with a plan. So, it’s like a plan to come up with a plan.  Oren: That’s a good plan. Bunny: Matryoshka doll plan. Chris: And I just found that I almost stopped there. Like I took a break because I was so frustrated, and then I continued and then stopped later because I was frustrated.  Oren: It has a decent ending. It takes a while to get there, but it does have one. Kingfisher is too successful for plots now. It’s like if I ever become a successful author, all of my books will be weird airship terminology, and you’ll just be like, Oren, what is a keel corridor? You forgot to say what that is. What is goldbeater’s skin? Why are you talking about this so much? And I’ll be like, you can’t stop me! Anything I write will sell now!  Bunny: Well, the funny thing about A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is that it’s two well-plotted books that are very different in tone stuck together. Oren: Yeah, but there’s baking in both of them. Bunny: That’s true. There is baking. There is continuity in the act that the protagonist performs. We have a mystery and a war story, and both are good on their own and yet they feel weird in the same book. That was my take on that book. Chris: I have to say, the way it comes together in the end is not quite right, which is common, though. That’s a lot of times the hardest thing in plotting, bringing the end together, and so even with A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, we can see some cracks there. At the same time, it still feels like it shows a lot of skills that Kingfisher does not show in her other books.  Oren: She doesn’t have to anymore.  Chris: She does not have to. There’s also just some fundamental things about the story that don’t quite work. It’s kind of misogynist, honestly, which is surprising from Kingfisher where we have this villainess who has tons of magical powers, but all she wants to do with them is seduce a rich man.  Oren: No, hang on. It’s even weirder than that. She doesn’t even use her powers to seduce rich men. She just also has a lot of magical powers. And then seduces men. Those are just two things that are true at the same time. They’re just unrelated.  Chris: The characters have a lot of debates: Oh, should we tell the guy that she’s seducing that she’s an evil sorceress? Nah. And so they have to come up with excuses for that. It just has a lot of fundamental things that are not quite working either, but it has a fantastic opening. I see why it got people’s attention. And also, Kingfisher has gotten Hugo’s before, or at least one Hugo before, so not terribly surprising, that this was nominated. Bunny: Look, can we make a pact that if one of us is being seduced by an evil sorceress, and the other two know about it, that they will tell the third one?  I think that’s just what friends do, you know? Chris: I think we can make that agreement.  Oren: No, we wouldn’t want to upset you. Don’t worry. Apparently, he wasn’t that seduced because (spoilers) at the end, when he finds out that she died horribly, he’s like, Eh. He has the most nonplussed reaction you’ve ever seen. And they never tell him that she was evil. They just tell him that she died horribly. And he’s like, oh, well, you know. So it goes.  Chris: So, let’s talk about Someone to Build a Nest In, because this is a pretty unique story. It’s not my favorite, but I think being nominated makes sense for this book. It stands out: it has a monster as the main character, who has a unique voice, it also features abuse, abusive family situation, it has queer romance.  I had trouble with it because after the initial novelty of the monster POV started to wear off, I didn’t have great attachment to the characters. As opposed to A Sorceress Comes to Call, where I like the characters pretty well, but the plot, it’s really sagging. Someone to Build a Nest In has a decent plot with twists and turns but the main character is a little on the selfish kind of hypocritical side and the love interest doesn’t have a lot of agency.  Oren: This is the thing I don’t get about the main character, is that it feels like the entire character portrayal of her, because she’s always talking about how humans suck. Humans are the worst. And it just kind of depends on you not remembering that she murders people when she wants a snack. And that’s not part of the story. She never does that on screen or particularly seems to want to, we’re just told that’s the thing that she’s done. And I don’t understand why. Why not just have it be that she’s only ever had to kill in self-defense since it’s not part of the story anyway? I don’t get it.  Bunny: Look, someone liked in What We Do in the Shadows.  Chris: She is put in a position where she’s on the defensive in the beginning of the book, but at the same time she’s so powerful that I can never quite feel sympathy for her. And so if she was more of an underdog and she was not killing people, if we didn’t hear about her escapades killing people, I feel like she would’ve been closer to Murderbot probably, and a character that I could get a lot more on board with. She’s still a very unique character. I’m sure some people love her, but I couldn’t quite. The novelty wore off and the attachment wasn’t there to replace it.  Oren: She definitely rubs me the wrong way because I’m just not into characters who are constantly going on about how humanity sucks. Because it’s like, I don’t know, man. You try to do better, you know, make your own species and show me how that goes. We’re doing our best here, all right. So that just always irritates me and the fact that she’s clearly the worst, except for during the story for whatever reason, it makes that hit harder.  Chris: But she has one weakness, because she’s too powerful, and then that weakness is negated. Oren: Right, because having weaknesses is hard. Why would we want that? It would be like if in the beginning of a Superman story, he said, Oh, my only weakness is kryptonite. And then someone fired a kryptonite gun at him, and then he’s like, Ah, but you see I also wear a bulletproof vest, so NBD.  [laughing] Chris: So yeah, there are places that it’s not as tense as it should be. Oren: Yeah, it does have a very cool twist at the end which I really liked. That makes it a lot better. It’s just like a lot of stories, we were talking about this a couple episodes ago, they have a strong start because we put a lot of effort into it and then a cool, exciting climax. And then there’s just a middle where stuff happens, we kind of mill around until it’s time for the ending. Bunny: I will say having not read the book that I would nominate it for a Hugo just for having a good title.  Oren: Yeah, I mean it’s a memorable title. It’s a hard to say title, though. It’s like, Hey, have you read Someone You Can Build a Nest In? That’s awkward. That takes like five years to say. Bunny: That’s better than The Mimicking of Known Successes, though. Oren: It is better than The Mimicking of Known Successes. It at least has something to do with the story. I started shortening it to Build a Nest, but even that doesn’t really work I don’t think.  Chris: But still I could give that one full points for creativity. I can see how it got nominated. Oren: I won’t be mad if it wins.  Chris: I won’t be mad either. Oren: I will be mad if The Tainted Cup doesn’t win, though. I guess I will be mad if any book but The Tainted Cup wins because The Tainted Cup should win because it’s the best one. But other than that, I wouldn’t be mad. Bunny: Despite it only having a single tainted cup. That’s not terribly important in the scheme of the book. It was very, very good. Oren: Relation of title to book is not high.  Bunny: There is a tainted cup that comes up at the end. I was waiting for the tainted cup to appear, but it did not play a prominent enough role for me to cheer when it showed up.  Chris: Well, it has gravitas, which is probably what they were going for. Bunny: It does. Thematic, I guess.  There were a lot of tainted things and a cup was among them.  Oren: It’s better than the working title, which was Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but it’s Roman Empire, Kind of, and also There’s Lots of Cool Plant Magic. Bunny: That would be harder to say than Someone You Can Build a Nest In.  Chris: Okay. The thing I don’t get about the setting is why you would do a somewhat Roman empire setting and then make up a bunch of titles of officers that are not real Roman titles but are still extremely confusing and hard to keep track of.  Oren: Yeah it does have too many ranks. Chris: Why would you do that?  Bunny: It absolutely needed the list of ranks at the beginning because otherwise I would not have been able to follow it. Chris: If they’re not real title, why not make them easier to remember and understand?  Oren: I was really confused when I was looking at the list of titles because it’s like, princeps, okay, well that’s a Roman rank. It’s not the rank they’re using here, but it’s Roman. Where are all these other ones from? Like, are these real ranks? I just don’t know about, did he just grab one from, you know, every country he threw a dart at? I don’t know. Is there a real place somewhere with the title immunis? Who knows.  Chris: It’s also not that Roman, honestly, the titles are one of the most Roman things in there, and they’re not real Roman. I feel like you could just take out the Roman element.  Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s got legions and senates and patronage. It has some less blatant Roman inspiration.  Chris: Okay. But anyway, it’s weird. We actually really like this book. We’re just complainers. We’re just big complainers. Oren: That’s just how we do.  Chris: So I was talking about the few things that I have to complain about with this book.  Bunny: How this is on the same list as Ministry… It’s shocking to me. I guess Din doesn’t step back and think briefly about how racism is bad and then go about his day. I guess that’s the difference. Oren: Look, the Hugo contains multitudes, okay?  Chris: So this is a Sherlock mystery with a really cool bio-cosmic horror setting that really adds lots of novelty and is recounted in a lot of depth. I think also the wordcraft is pretty good and the description really helps bring it to life. I very much like the main character, Din, I find him very lovable and we’ve got the eccentric Sherlock that he works for in the background but she gets overstimulated easily, so she can’t go around to the crime scenes herself and so our Watson does that, and he’s basically the main character. Oren: And he’s also dyslexic.  Bunny: Yeah, it does a great job using its magic system, for lack of a better word, to also portray characters with disabilities or disability equivalents. So, Din is dyslexic and Anna has sensory issues. She gets overstimulated really easily and stuff like that, which I thought was very cool and well done.  Oren: It’s funny to me because I’ve gotten so used to weird portrayals of dyslexia that I didn’t recognize that he was dyslexic until Chris pointed it out. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense. And that’s not a knock on the book. Like I don’t think that Bennett needed to make it more obvious. It’s just, it didn’t occur to me because the last time I saw a dyslexic character in a big sci-fi property he was immune to time madness because he sees everything backwards already and it’s like, okay, I guess that’s what dyslexia is in Star Trek. [laughing] Chris: You’re making it weird, Star Trek. Bunny: The linguistic shift, let’s say. It’s not the same. Thanks, Star Trek. Chris: I will say the ending to the mystery is a little predictable for me anyway, but honestly, I would much prefer an ending that’s a little predictable to one that doesn’t make any sense. And my experience is it’s going be one or the other because a lot of times it’s just people are trope savvy enough and can see where things are going enough, it’s extremely difficult to have a super surprise ending that actually follows all the foreshadowing you put down. So even though there were some things about it that I predicted I was still pretty happy.  Bunny: And here’s the thing, is that something being predictable is often used as an insult to it but often what it means is that the foreshadowing was good and readers were able to tie the foreshadowing to the conclusion and that means that the conclusion followed logically from the foreshadowing. When people start calling something predictable as a universal bad then we get Game of Thrones trying to outsmart Reddit. [laughing] Oren: I would say that it’s an ending where you can guess what’s going to happen but it doesn’t feel frustrating because it’s not something where it feels like the characters should have guessed it already. And that is often the sign of a good mystery because we want to solve the mystery. That’s part of the reason we read mysteries in the first place. Chris: So, yeah, that one we’ve been passing around talking about it with our followers on Discord. It seems to be pretty popular. There’s no book that’s universally liked, but generally people have been very positive who’ve read it. So that’s a good read, as long as you’re okay with something that is a little dark, it’s not very dark, but people die in horrific ways, killed by plants bursting out of them and stuff like that. So if that’s okay with you then it’s a great read.  Bunny: And that’s not a spoiler because that is the first scene. Oren: At least some of them deserved it, though. Chris: Yes, true. Some of them did deserve it.  Bunny: Yes. It’s quite a good mystery with a distinctly okay climax and I hope that one gets it.  Oren: Yeah, it’s just a very good book, you know. It’s just good. All right, well, I think on that unusually positive note, we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.  Chris: You can reward us for saying good things about books by supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/Mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few 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]

We love it when a character does cool things and gets cool rewards, but only to a point. When a character goes past that point, they get annoying, contrived, and frustrating. They have too much candy, but it’s we who get the stomach ache. Fortunately, this is not an automatic state of affairs. Characters get too much candy when authors make mistakes, and it’s possible to avoid those mistakes. This week, we’ve got a few tips on that! Show Notes Candy and Spinach Mary Sue Calvin and Hobbes Kvothe  Luffy Eda Clawthorne Raksura Kelsier Mysterious Badass Bondrewd  Black Swan Oz the Great and Powerful Transcript Generously transcribed by Aiden Lumb. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I am Chris and with me is… Oren: Oren. Chris: And… Bunny: Bunny. Chris: We are of course cohosts. We’re completely equal partners, but I happen to have a secret dramatic backstory. So… the next ten episodes are going to have to be all about me and how shocking but cool my backstory is. Oren: We’re all equal, but some of us are more equal than others. Chris: It’s okay, Chris. We love you. You deserve this. Go for it. Bunny: I want to learn more! Chris: You’re so correct about how these next episodes should go. Oren:  Well, hang on. I think I’m actually going to disagree with Chris, just so that she can show how right she is, of course. Like, I’m not going to try to actually argue. I’m just going to put up some really pitiful objections that will be easily smacked aside. Bunny: Don’t listen to him, Chris. He’s a jealous hater. Oren: This might literally be a sign that I’ve been mind-controlled by the villain. Chris: Yeah, did you know that I used to be a rebel who wouldn’t follow anyone’s rules? That’s right. They called me “the book ender” because I would sneak around finishing people’s unfinished manuscripts. But no-one ever knew who I was. But… ta-dah! Shocking. I am the book ender. Oren: That’s so cool. That’s just the greatest thing that has ever happened. Bunny:  Oh my god, your eyes just changed colour! Chris: I know! They change colour depending on my mood. Bunny: They’re new and exciting and sparkly! Yes. And your hair, too: interesting. Chris: It’s also a sign that I am the chosen one and I have the secret power that’s needed to defeat the villain. Oren: Yeah. But you’re very modest, obviously. Bunny:  Of course. Chris: Naturally. In fact, that’s why I’m the chosen one: I’m so modest. And only a modest person can defeat the villain. Don’t worry, I’ll win every verbal smearing match with him, though. So… making fun of candied characters is always very easy. So, we’re talking about how to fix over candied characters and just a review. Most people listening probably know what we’re talking about, but again… So, a candied character is one that gets lots of glorification. Lay people are most likely to call these characters “Mary-Sues”, which we don’t use because it’s a gross and sexist term. It specifically targets women, even though in really big budget popular works they are far more likely to be men. Bunny:  Also, what if I don’t want to marry Sue? Oren: You don’t have to marry anybody. You can be single for as long as you want. Chris: The other thing that’s weird about Mary-Sues is it kind of conflates having a self-insert character with having glorified character and while those things can go together, they are also others that are… who will put in a self-insert character and really beat up on them. Oren: Yeah… which is way worse! It’s so uncomfortable to read a book about a character who is obviously the author’s self-insert and then the book just craps on them. And I’m just like: “author, are you okay?” I don’t know, maybe you need to talk to someone. Chris:  I think oftentimes it’s their younger self, where they’re like, oh, why couldn’t I be more like this when I was younger? But hey, stories are an outlet for our deep feelings— Bunny: Psychology… Chris: —Sometimes making them more transparently obvious than we would choose. Oren:  In reality most of the time you will never know if a character is the author’s self-insert or not. And for the most part, that never comes up. It only matters when suddenly people are looking for a reason to dislike a character and they’re like: “ah, this is definitely the author’s self-insert.” Like, if you say so bro. Bunny: Sometimes a self-insert character might be an incredibly boring, everyday person. I’m kind of reminded of that Calvin & Hobbes strip, where Calvin says he’s writing a book and Hobbes asks what it’s about and he says it’s about a guy who flips through channels with his TV remote and Hobbes looks to the camera and kind of walks away. And he’s like, “they say you write what you know.” Chris: Again, there’s something wrong with self-insert characters. They’re fine. But in any case, if we’re looking at candy, which is different than a self-insert character, we’ve covered some of the typical signs. Always being right is a thing that a lot of candied characters have. Usually, they are more quirky and unique than the characters around them. You can see that that’s where the creative energy’s going. They typically solve problems easily; being exceptionally good at an unusual number of things, like having three sets of professional skills that they’re the best in the world at, for instance. Oren: They have so many PHD’s. Chris: Having special physical features, like bright eyes or colour changing eyes. Or, you know, red red hair instead of just red hair. Bunny: Redder than red. True red! The colour of flame. It’s like, wait a second. Chris: Flames aren’t true red! What!? Bunny: It’s blue at the roots. I don’t know. Chris:  So, is it the colour of flame, or is it true red? Bunny: I should just say the colour of blood, in that case. Chris: And then, oftentimes they get lots of social recognition because in many cases, the storyteller is looking for excuses to give them social recognition. So, like them being famous; being the chosen one; having people admire or, alternatively, envy them, right? Like those jealous haters, for instance; having them die or fake die so that everyone can be super sorry about it. Bunny: This one is the most reliable way to identify them, for me. If there is a gratuitous funeral sequence where everyone weeps and talks about how cool they are, that, my friend, is a character you need to take some candy from. And I know it’s because I used to do it and… they’re absolutely self-insert manuscripts. Chris: Right. And I do think actually that young people, like kids, tend to have more taste for candied characters. They like more candy than adults do in general. But there’s lots of personal variation, I should say. Just because a character is candied does not mean that story is for kids. I just have to be firm about that, because there’s a lot of people who say things like that that’s not good. But, kids in general do seem to like candy a lot and I think a lot of us have had the experience when we were young of making our super-candied character in our stories. And that was fun. And it was fine. Oren: But, you do have to evolve a little bit. Chris: Kvothe in The Name of the Wind was the true red her[ring]—red as flame, is pretty much the quintessential example of a super-candied character. So, candy is not bad altogether. It’s just… once you get to a certain level, it can start causing a lot of problems, especially in the beginning of a story if it’s the hero. But, it also can be very, very enjoyable because it’s a way of getting vicarious validation, which is a very powerful form of wish fulfilment. Everybody wants to feel special, so it allows the audience—if they like the character; if they’ve already bonded with the character—it gives that vicarious feeling of validation. And that’s really fun. The problem almost always comes when the audience is either not super into the character or needs to be sold on the character still, that it causes lots of issues. Oren: Right. Because it’s harder to invest in a character when you start off by being told how great and cool they are. It’s like, that’s not anything like me; it seems like a weird space alien that you’ve created right here. Bunny: Alternatively, maybe the character is being endlessly beaten up on. Surely, that’s more relatable? Oren: Yeah. You go too far in the other direction, right? Bunny: Yeah. Chris: Yeah. Generally, you do want your protagonist to have some candy. And again, there are audience members who will really just love a character who has some candy just right out of the gate. At that point, I don’t think it’s optimal for talking about the hero of the story, just because I think that you can… if you do a few things to help mitigate it at the beginning you can get a wider appeal. Right? Get those people who like candy, and then also additional people. Whereas, if you go with tons and tons of candy, anybody who is just ready to identify with that character instantly, they might love that; there are some people who just like candy. So, I’m not going to say that if you really love candied characters and find an audience for that and that’s enough for you, that that’s a bad thing you shouldn’t be doing. But, for most of us, we’re trying to get a little bit of a broader audience onboard and this divisiveness of force—also why there’s unfair double standard and why we’ve got this Mary-Sue label blaming women, because if men are the ones who have the most influence, they look at these female characters with lots of candy and they don’t identify with these female characters, so they’re like, “ugh, Mary-Sues.” Meanwhile, Kvothe gets a free pass. So, in any case, that’s kind of the low-down on candied and over-candied—I like to use that to specify that they have too much candy, as opposed to assuming every character that has a lot of candy has too much. I think Luffy, for instance, in the live-action One Piece, I think he’s generally a good character. He has a lot of candy, but it’s kind of kept just under wraps enough through most of the show. At the end of the first season I think it goes a little too far. Oren:  Yeah. He becomes too much of an unstoppable badass and you’re kind of left wondering: why are the other characters here? Like, why did they bother to get out of bed that day? Bunny: Everyday can’t be Halloween. Candy must be spread out. Oren: But Luffy has the obvious benefit of—he’s a real goofball. Characters who don’t take themselves as seriously can handle a little bit more candy than characters who do take themselves more seriously, just because they don’t rub it in your face; they don’t act like they’re so cool. Because when someone starts acting like they’re so cool, you immediately want to be like no you’re not; you’re not cool, because we’re all contrarians. Whereas Luffy’s like, “I’m just a guy, I just like to steal stuff or be pirates.” He doesn’t really like stealing, but he does like being a pirate. Chris: Yeah. I think humility and kindness work really well for candied characters,  because then them being so cool and such a badass is not so in-your-face. And it also helps to prevent them from actively mistreating or pushing aside other characters. So, Luffy, for instance: his entire goal in the beginning is to get his own pirate crew. So, he’s really nice to the side characters; he wants to charm them, instead of being like, “oh, I’m a cool, badass loner and I don’t need any of you.” He’s just a really nice guy and you don’t know that he has all of these skills. Obviously, if we were writing this from the movie’s viewpoint, we wouldn’t want to pretend that he doesn’t have any powers for a long time, but… if he’s naturally a humble character he could still downplay them in his head a bit and do that kind of thing. Bunny: The thing about candy is that it can come across as boastful or boasting on behalf of the character, because boastfulness is annoying. Then, we’d want to see that character taken down a peg or two. But, when the character exists to be cool, they probably won’t be and that’ll get irritating. Chris: It’s starts to accumulate—it feels like an arrogant character, starts to kind of give them bad karma. We feel like, okay, they have all these rewards they haven’t earned and we have a natural sense of fairness and so, we want to see them kind of punished at some level. Now, the other thing with the hero is, again, when you’re introducing them, we usually want them to have sympathy and if they have so much candy—that absolutely kills sympathy. So, if you can just delay some of their coolness a little bit, so that you can give them the dark backstory or actually make them struggle (especially in the beginning) and have a hard time, that’s really helpful. Have them do cool things so that they earn being famous. Again, everybody enjoys candy once they’re actually attached to the character and they feel like the character has done something to earn it, right? Everybody likes… As far as I know… Somebody out there is going to say that they don’t like it. But in general, if you watch this underdog character struggle and then they do something cool and they earn a cool new title and get some hero-worship: we usually all enjoy that, because at that point, we’ve had time to get attached to them, we’ve seen them as underdog first and then we’ve seen how much they’ve done to earn people admiring them. Oren: Yeah. And you’d be amazed how much of this problem you can head off by just having your characters earn their victories and have to work hard, or demonstrate perseverance, cleverness or sacrifice, right? If you can have them demonstrate those things, their wins will just be more natural and they will not feel like you are just making them seem more cool and on one hand, that seems obvious, but on the other hand, it turns out it’s kind of hard to do, so, I can see why authors struggle with it. Chris: And, of course, there’s the tension issue, too. Because, if you have a character who always gets everything right, is never wrong, and shows off by solving problems really easily, then pretty soon, your tension is gone. And so, there’s a whole trick: if you have a super-candied protagonist, a lot of times, making them a fish out of water—okay, yes they are the most baddest of fighters in the entire world, but this time they have to do diplomacy. Or, another thing that I see frequently with characters that people really want to have tons of candy, is they give them a curse, because that’s a way of tricking your brain—“no, this character is inherently to most specialist of characters that ever was.” But they just happen to be under a curse right now. Oren: We’ll get back to that later, don’t worry. Chris: Yeah. This is, for instance, used in Owl House… oh man, what’s her name? Oren: Eda? Chris: Yeah. Oren:  Yeah. Chris: So, Eda is way too candied in the first season of Owl House, but she has a curse and that kind of starts to take over and reduce her power level by the second season. So, then she’s more balanced out. Oren: I’ve got to be honest: I was impressed and amazed that that happened. Chris: Yeah! Oren: The first season, Eda just does everything and I just assumed that was going to be the state of affairs for the rest of the show, but they actually fixed it and… they could’ve done that earlier, but better late than never. Chris: One reason these characters seldomly get fixed is because the reason they have so much candy is because they’re the storyteller’s favourite character and the storyteller just isn’t on the same page as the audience, because it’s their own character and they love them. Oren: Right. And a big one to think about is: where does this put the character in relation to everyone else? Because it gets much worse when it seems like this character is overshadowing others. So, if your character is kind of on their own and solving problems and they’re the only one who does that sort of thing, it’s not as big of a deal. But if you give them a team and we’re like, “yeah, you’re a team of cool martial artists.” But any time there’s a martial arts fight, only your protagonist ever really does anything, then there’s your problem, right? You gave them a team—they actually have to matter. Chris: So, it’s also worth talking about different roles. So, the protagonist—the nice thing about having a protagonist that’s candied is that that is the character that people are supposed to be attached to anyway. So, giving it candy to some level does align the interests of the audience with what you like to do. The problem is just the beginning, mostly. There could be problems later but the beginning especially when you need to get them attached in the first place and candy can stop that from happening. But then there’s other characters in the story who can also have too much candy. Candied side-characters, particularly those who are not love interests, I think is usually the worst situation. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Because if they’re a friendly character, they’re an ally. Again, this is exactly the Eda situation. Why it causes so much issues is because they want to help the protagonist and now, because they’re candied, they have tons and tons of powers and that’s where they oftentimes push the character that the audience is supposed to like the most aside and just takes over. And I think that is extra likely to create resentment. I do think—sometimes I have seen candied mentors that did okay, though. I mean, Eda, once she’s levelled down. But in the Raksura books, I think there’s a candied mentor that’s really powerful in those books too. But Martha Wells finds ways to toss his name to stone, to get him just to go away for a while so that problems can happen. It’s kind of like the Gandalf problem, right? Gandalf is super powerful. In the Hobbit, he has to away every single time they get into trouble. Bunny: I mean, that’s kind of Kelsier in the Mistborn Book One where he’s very good at fighting and stuff, but he needs a team. He’s charismatic and he’s good at fighting but they’re trying to incite a revolution and he’s kind of made himself the figurehead of that, because his ultimate plan was to become a martyr. So, he’s kind of like… make himself larger than life. And the other characters teach him about this and are suspicious of him over it. But the book is very obviously… you can be as cool and good at fighting as you’d like, but you need someone on the inside; you need someone gathering the troops; you need someone attending the balls and turning nobles against each other, and so forth. So, while Kelsier has tons and tons of candy, there are multiple roles happening in the book so it doesn’t feel like he’s taking away the other characters’ jobs. Oren: Yeah. And Brando[n] Sando[erson] in those books spent a lot of effort on the question of: why does Kelsier have to be somewhere else right now? He’s got other places to be. Chris: He’s a busy guy. Oren: Yeah. We’re focussing on Vin now. Kelsier is somewhere else, don’t worry about it. Chris: Right. And if you gave a candied side-character like that the level of social admiration that often storytellers want to give to a candied character, I think it would get out of hand and create a lot of resentment. It’s a little bit better when the side-character is a love interest, because oftentimes being super-competent makes that love interest more attractive. But, they can still be obnoxious… But there are definitely—especially in heteromancy—there’s definitely quite a few women who want the male love interest to just be the most candied. So, that’s partly a matter of taste at that point. Again, we have the same problems with him completely getting rid of her agency and that kind of thing. But, I think it’s often not quite as bad because there are also some benefits to having a candied love interest. Oren: Well, he does have to brood a fair amount. So, there is that. Bunny: Brood, but in a cool way. Chris: And sometimes if you have a side-character that you super love or is really candied, maybe you should consider making them your main character. Oren: Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes they would be the worst as the main character, though. Chris:  Yeah, it depends on the situation. But there are times when that might be a better solution. Of course, I do feel like sometimes people get attached to the side-character because they know they shouldn’t make their protagonist so candied—that the protagonist can just breeze through all of the challenges of the story. And they also cannot get away with making their main character super mysterious. And so, that’s why they build up a candied, mysterious side-character, which—I don’t know what to tell you—it just doesn’t work well in prose. It just doesn’t work very well. Oren just had an article about that. And the finally, there’s villains, which also are supposed to be competent; they’re supposed to be threatening. And so, they can tolerate candy. In fact, having people admire them could be a great way to make them more interesting and have them than, “oh everybody admires them, but it turns out they’re really evil.” Even so, I have still seen villains that are too candied. It still happens. Oren:  Once the villain gets to the point where it feels like the writer is into the villain and wants you to believe that the villain has a point when the villain does not have a point, that’s the classic, right? It’s like, “yes, I had to torture the babies for the greater good. It’s deep, you see and yes, you have to stop me because I’m contractually obligated to make the show where the heroes win, but I’m going to get several monologues out of this.” Chris: For me, the point at which I noticed that villains have too much candy is when the protagonist suddenly are worse at things, suddenly become less competent whenever they’re around that villain to make the villain look good, right? The villain gets in their last word and the protagonist is just speechless in response. Or, the protagonist forgets how to do something, so the villain can point it out. Something like that in a normal scene, the protagonist would have a verbal response, or remember something, or do something well. But suddenly they can’t. So, I think in Nancy Drew, Constance—is I think here name[?]— Oren: Yeah. That was frustrating. Chris: She’s a very, very frustrating villain. She’s a witch that apparently Nancy Drew is descended from and in all of their interactions you can just tell the writer just loves this villain, because she always gets that last word in and somehow her plans can never be undone, unlike all of the other villains. She’s always got ahead of them. And again, some of that can be fine. Getting one over on the protagonist can raise tension. But, at the end of the story, usually the villain is supposed to lose. And even if the villain wins, usually we’re doing a tragedy and it’s not about the villains winning; it’s about how the protagonist did something wrong. So, the focus is not on the villain. If the story is really all about how the villain wins, because the villain is super cool, there’s usually something wrong there and maybe you wanted to make that villain your main character. Oren: Right. Well, in the case of that character specifically: Constance. Part of the issue is that writing for Nancy Drew goes steadily downhill as the show continues. And by the time of Constance, it’s just not very good. And so, they have a really hard time giving Constance plans that actually work. Her plans are all really bad, but they have to work otherwise the show can’t keep going. And so, they just kind of work anyway. And so, you can tell that this is not a good plan and it’s just succeeding by a for real fiat and it’s annoying and it makes you feel like they’re saying the character is cooler than they actually are. Chris: But we also had—man—there was this one villain. The villains in Maiden Abyss, this anime that we did not finish also. You could tell that the writer loved them way too much and some of them were very gross, [for example] child torturing. Oren: That was the guy I was making fun of with the child torturing. It’s like, he’s torturing children. That’s bad, I guess. Like, okay, I do hate him now, but this was supposed to be a villain with something to say? But there’s really nothing to say about that; it’s not a complicated subject. Chris: And also, the protagonists have to struggle very, very hard against him. But they are still never allowed to defeat him. They just get a false victory and move on. And then we’re like, “oh, but don’t you know? He was fine; this was all part of his plan.” It’s just.. shut up. Bunny: Puppeteer villains are— Chris: I wanted to kill that guy. Personally, with my bare hands. Bunny: Ah, but that means they’re doing something right, Chris, because you’re not supposed to like the villain. Chris:  No! I don’t love to hate him—I hate him! Bunny: See, what people don’t understand when they make that argument is that there’s a difference between hating the villain and hating the villain as a character in the story. If you want to stop reading the story because the villain is bad, then that’s not good. That’s not the kind of dislike we want. Chris: Yeah. Bunny: Puppeteers and puppeteer villains are maybe the worst kind of over-candied characters just because by definition, they remove everyone’s agency. Chris:  Yeah. Like, was it Black Swan in Wanderers? Oren: Oh, yeah. In Wanderers, goddammit! God, I hated that. Chris: Black Swan is this—okay, this also combines the trope of having the little cute character be secretly a puppeteer, because in the Wanderers, there’s this AI that only communicates through this—is it like a little phone, or something? Oren: Yeah. Chris: It has little light pulses or something. And it’s clearly designed and fashioned in a way where it’s supposed to be cute, but we could tell almost immediately from the beginning of the story that this Black Swan was a puppeteer doing everything. Bunny: Look, it’s an AI called Black Swan. Chris: And, of course, [the] author loves it and—yeah, that was not great. But again, the purpose of a villain, they’re supposed to get bad karma and then that bad karma is supposed to balance out at the end of the story when they get their comeuppance, okay? So, if you don’t balance the karma, if you don’t do your karmic counting and you just leave them with that bad karma tab: that’s going to be really unsatisfying and perhaps make the audience want to strangle them with their bare hands. Oren: It’s like being in a role-playing game and the GM just gets way too into their NPCs. It’s like, that’s not what the story’s about. Calm down, right? Chris: Which, again, same goes for some of the other things we were talking about. That kind of social validation that often comes with candied characters. Even if you get a character who is, okay—they’re nice to other characters; they’re humble; we get them to struggle enough in the story, the last thing to look out for is—just when you start to kind of make things feel unnatural or derail things just to give them more social admiration. Just like the funeral scene, where everybody’s balling… Star Trek: Voyager actually has one of those in it, does Babylon 5 have that too? Oren: Yes. That was in my article where I was pointing out that Sheridan and Janeway are basically the same character. Chris: They’re basically the same character. They both have the funeral scene with people gushing. Bunny: The Sherlock show, as well, we can’t forget that. Chris: Ah, yeah. But, the backstory reveal: this is a key one, again, that I very commonly see with candied characters, because the thing about a backstory reveal is oftentimes, [the] audience doesn’t care. Like, no one cares, okay? If you reveal that this character has a backstory where they used to be a rebel, or they used to work for the other side—it only matters if it affects the plot in some way. And you can tell that the storyteller really likes this character if it doesn’t actually change anything, but it’s delivered in the story as though it’s a really big twist or a really big deal. Bunny: Be impressed! Chris: I don’t care, and— Bunny: Be impressed, Chris! Chris: But, it’s an important moment for the storyteller because the storyteller absolutely loves this character and it’s a way of giving that character more candy. Oren: This was why—hot take—this is why all the attempts to do a Wizard of Oz prologue with the wizard as the main character are doomed to fail, because the whole point of the wizard is that he’s a clown and that he only succeeds because everyone in the Emerald City is even more of a clown than him. So, trying to make him seem like a cool protagonist… No, that will never work. He’s a loser; that’s the whole point of the story. Alright, and now that we’ve successfully established that very important factoid of the Wizard of Oz, I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If this episode gave you some vicarious candy, 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 (who have the correct amount of candy, just to be clear). First is Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and 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.

It’s not the beginning or the end, not the first or last book. But rather, the book in the middle. Usually, this means book two in a traditional trilogy, but it can refer to TV shows, movies, and any other type of story. Sometimes the middle story isn’t the second installment, but the third, fifth, or even a group of stories in the middle of a series. These all have similar problems though. The writer has already deployed their big guns to get readers into the first book, and it’s not time to wrap things up yet, so what happens? Fortunately, we’ve got some tips! Show Notes Sophomore Album Fractal Plotting The Well of Ascension Movement Three-Act Structure The Bone Shard Daughter Mass Effect Transcript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Bunny: 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 Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me today is… Chris: Chris. Bunny: … and… Oren: Oren. Bunny: Today we’re talking about middle books, which have a couple issues unique to them, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. So, for instance, they’re easily angered and they’re more likely than other books in a series to become delinquents. They also often feel pretty neglected compared to the first and last books. Chris: Do they? Oren: The first book is the one that everyone has high expectations for, and then the last, youngest one is the baby. So, yeah, the middle books, they have some issues to work out. Bunny: They have to fight for attention, which is something that is true of both middle children and middle books, which I realized when setting up this joke. Chris: Instead of either middle children or middle books. I have to say: people get way into birth order discourse. Bunny: They do. I was looking at middle child stereotypes and people go quite far down that pathway. Oren: If we’re not categorizing ourselves by birth order, what is even the point, I would say. Do we even have an identity at that point? Bunny: I love when they conflict, where it’s like, “They’re quick to anger and to provoke their siblings, and then it’s like, “They’re peacekeepers.” Okay, if they’re both, then they’re just, like, a person, and sometimes they’re angry and sometimes they’re peacekeepers. Chris: Maybe we should start giving book astrological readings. Oren: Whoa! Bunny: Ooh! Chris: Based on the day you started the project. Actually, I would not be surprised if some writers waited until an auspicious astrological day to start writing a new book. Bunny: That has to exist. Oren: That’s such a Pisces thing to do. I’ve never heard anyone say, “That’s such a Pisces thing to do.” As a Pisces, I feel left out. It’s always like, “Oh, that’s such a Virgo.” “That’s such a Leo thing to do.” No one cares about Pisces, is my point. Bunny: Hey, it’s better than everyone only having bad things to say about Gemini, which is my issue. “You’re two-faced and pretty evil” and, okay, thanks. I was just born in May. And if we’re talking about the actual star alignments, I’m actually a Taurus, but let’s not broach that debate. So, yeah, we’re talking about the second books in series. Specifically in trilogies, the middle book. It’s the sophomore effort, the difficult second album, the middle child of the book world. And as it turns out, they are pretty often neglected. Chris: The book that often does not open the series or end it. Therefore, what is it even for? What do you do in middle book? Bunny: It’s middle books all the way down. Chris: Yeah, it goes deep, man. And they all get your hand-me-downs. Oren: What do you do in the middle of a single book, for that matter? It’s all connected. It’s all fractals. Bunny: I feel like it’s pretty uncommon for me nowadays to see just a pair of books. I don’t know if this is just the circles of books I’ve been reading, because maybe spec fic is especially apt to being divided into three, but usually what I see are either standalones, trilogies, or long series. I can’t off the top of my head think of a complete pair of two books. Chris: There are duologies. At the same time, I do wonder if traditional publishers encourage the trilogy by frequently doing three-book deals. Oren: I don’t know to what extent publishers want trilogies. I do know that authors think publishers want trilogies. This is one of those things where it’s often really hard to read what publishers actually want. They’re not really open about it, and you have to scoot around the edges and try to find people who work in the publishing industry and are willing to talk on their podcasts. It’s hard to say, but it’s pretty easy to tell that writers think that publishers want trilogies. So that certainly influences it a little bit, at least. Bunny: At least we seem to be done with that thing where you make a movie trilogy, but you split the last one into two. I haven’t seen that in a while. That was kind of the teen dystopia symptom, came along with that. Chris: I’m sure as soon as we have a super profitable adaptation of a really big IP into a series of movies, that will happen again. Oren: Honestly, we’re overdue for a big romantasy adaptation. I’m surprised that hasn’t happened yet. Bunny: Don’t speak it into existence. It’s gonna be Fourth Wing or something. Oren: It’s gonna; there’s so much money there. What are you talking about? Chris: That’s true. It’s true. It’s probably grinding through the Hollywood meat processing plant at the moment. Chris: I would watch that instead of another MCU movie, especially since the very samey first-person narration that every romantasy seems to have would not… probably not be that present In a movie. Bunny: That’s true; that would make it a lot more tolerable, at least for me. So I do think that middle books have some issues unique to them and not to the first and final books in a trilogy. I just read the second Mistborn book, and boy, did it have some Middle Book Syndrome. I think they have a couple particular challenges. In each book, you want to have a complete arc. You want to have the beginning, middle, and end, and the first book usually does that well, but then the second book, it doesn’t always do that well, but it seems like the first book, it does the resolution better than the second book. The second book is often there to build to the third book, which means it can’t resolve too much, especially if the series isn’t planned out in advance. That’s a huge issue. Chris: Actually, I would say the problem with middle books is that an arc doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end. I think that is an oversimplification that comes from Aristotle, and then Syd Field just repeating that over and over again. But an arc has basically a beginning, and then if it’s a tension arc, an end that’s a turning point resolution that usually comes pretty close together. And then it’s like we don’t know what to do with the middle. And the answer is more arcs, more smaller arcs. A lot of times that’s very nebulous. A lot of different things can go there, and so that doesn’t give the middle in the series as much of an identity and doesn’t leave people to know what they should put there. Oren: Well, from a practical standpoint, especially for less established authors, when you’re writing the first book, you want it to be as engaging as possible. So you bring out all the big guns as early as you can. You’ve got coolest villain and your cool powers, and you don’t want to save cool stuff for later, because there might not be a later. You don’t know. And then you get to, “Oh, this was reasonably successful; I should do another one.” And what is there left to do? I have encountered a number of books that seem to have that problem where it kind of feels like you wrapped everything up in the first one. What are we doing here? Chris: Again, as Bunny pointed out, if you plan the series, and you understand how structure works, which a lot of people don’t, so… but if you do, then you can plan a series plot and you can give each book its own arc that’s like a child arc of a series plot. But, see, even with that, it’s hard to estimate how long a certain arc will take. I’ve definitely noticed this in my own writing, where I’ll be like, “Surely this will be three chapters,” and I get there and it’s one chapter and, “Oh no. I could have tacked this on to the end of book one, but I promised my publisher a trilogy.” Oops. Bunny: Between planning and realization, but at least in that case, you’ve left something open. Or instead, if you’re not planning a series at all and you just do book one, a big problem could be that you just tie up everything really neatly and then there are no problems left to solve. So at that point, you need to invent a new problem and split that into two to get your second and third book if you’re planning a trilogy. Oren: This is an interesting one, is that you very often get a book one that is kind of self-contained, and then with book two, it’s more like just part one of book three, and I don’t entirely know why authors do that. Maybe it’s Empire Strikes Back‘s fault. Empire Strikes Back isn’t exactly like that, but you can see how some authors might get that idea where the first Star Wars movie is like, well, the series could mostly end here and it would be fine, but clearly Star Wars can’t end at the end of Empire Strikes Back. It needs another movie after that. Chris: I think there are a couple reasons. One is, just as we said, a lot of times when a storyteller plans a standalone work, that’s all they’re thinking about. But if they do book two or story two, that’s the point at which they often know that there’s also gonna be a story three. And if they don’t think about, “Yeah, the middle book also needs to have some payoff at the end,” they might just make a story that lasts two stories and then just chop it right in half without any good closure. But also, there is a tradition of having the penultimate story have more of a cliffhanger ending to sort of like rev the audience up for the final installment. Doing it with a trilogy feels a little mean. Sometimes I wouldn’t judge it too hard, but at the same time, that feels like a more dramatic choice than, for instance, if you have a series of five and the fourth book has a more cliffhanger-y ending. Oren: At least with some authors, they have a thing where they, assuming they are planning, they’re like, “Okay, I know how my story starts and I know how it ends,” and then they have a problem filling in everything in between. And so when you blow it up to a trilogy, or even not just a trilogy, sometimes more than that, you have that problem but for an entire book, where it’s like, “All right, I imagine how my story begins, and then I know what the finale’s gonna be, and in the middle something should happen, presumably.” Bunny: The risk is a lot of dragging. So you’ve planned a trilogy, and the second book, you’ve overestimated how long it would take, or maybe you planned the trilogy and you had this part in mind, but now that you’re there, you realize it’s not like meaty enough to sustain a whole book, and then the book feels like the characters are just spinning in circles and killing time until the next installment. This was a lot of what I felt in Mistborn 2, where we have some of the least compelling parts of the first book kind of brought to the forefront, like Vin’s romance with Elend, which was never very interesting to me. I guess, spoilers: it ends in marriage (question mark), which I was very confused by. Oren: I think that book’s old enough that you don’t have to spoil or tag it. Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, spoilers for a, what? 2000s book, early 2010s. Oren: That book is old enough to drive. If you were trying to read it without spoilers, it’s probably too late by now. Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. But then it felt like a lot of time wasting, like we introduced a character that I very much dislike as an inclusion in the book, called Zane, our One Direction boy, because that’s the only other place I’ve heard of a Zane, who comes in to tempt Vin to just, like, run away. And he’s insaaaane! Oren: I was hoping he was gonna be Zany. That’s a better pun. Bunny: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Chris: Ooh, that is a better pun. They couldn’t go for it, though. I thought he was supposed to be like the Danger Boy alternative to the Love-and-Trust. Bunny: He is, but it’s unclear. It kind of felt like it was teetering on the edge of a love triangle, but Vin mostly seems like philosophically interested in him, and for there to be an excuse for Vin to have a bunch of stakes-less fight scenes with him where they’re just sparring. Oren: I think, therefore I romance. Philosophical interest, you know? Bunny: Pretty much. Here’s one of my big issues with Sando, is he’s so good at writing friendship. Why can he not just write friendship? You could have not done the thing with Elend. The dynamics between all of the friends are so much better than that dynamics of any romance in these books. Chris: He’s so big it’s definitely not pressure from publishers. Because sometimes with newer authors, they could be like, “Oh, well, this book isn’t marketable unless you add romance to it,” or something, and they can feel pressure. But with somebody like Brando Sando, you know that’s not an issue. He can do whatever he wants. Oren: Though he was less big in 2007. Bunny: This was pretty early in his career. I think he was just coming off of Wheel of Time, right? Chris: Oh, that’s true! That’s right, Mistborn, maybe he did feel pressure at that time. Bunny: I don’t know if it feels forced in the sense of the way that a lot of movies will force a romance, like it feels forced in the sense of he’s like, “The most interesting relationship to have between the male character and the female character is romance, so I’m going with that.” In fact, he’s very good at writing interesting friendships and quite bad at writing interesting romances. Chris: If it’s not interesting, that for me raises the question if no interest is going into it. So if an author just doesn’t really have much interest in a specific plot element and a specific arc, it tends to become bland because it has no detail and no creative energy, and it’s just kind of neglected. Bunny: And it was like that in the first book. And that’s kind of an issue with the second book as well, because that’s supposed to be driving Vin and Elend’s arcs. Well, Elend’s arc is more like… God, someone’s gonna come into the comments and tell me it should be Eh-lend. Ee-lend. We’re going with Ee-lend. Chris: Look, this is how people know that we read a lot, is that we mispronounce all of our words, okay? You gotta take pride. Oren: I’ll call him Eye-land just to round out all the possibilities. Chris: Even better. Bunny: Yes, Eye-land. His arc is about getting cleaned up essentially and being a better king. But Vin’s arc is like, “What if I’m too special and they’re using me?” which is why we have to have Danger Boy. Oren: What if she is too special, though? She’s pretty special. Bunny: She is pretty special, which is another issue, but we don’t have to get into that too. Chris: I do think this kind of dinking around, which is what a lot of times the second book feels like, where there’s no direction, because this book doesn’t have the beginning of the series, it doesn’t have the end of the series, so how do we use this space? And a lot of times it lacks good structure and characters are just twiddling their thumbs and talking with a Danger Boy, but with no chemistry or what have you. I think something that’s very related to that, that tends to happen, is often the second book is when the bloat begins. So we’ve talked about… ugh, it’s probably been a really long time. We’ve talked about chronic series bloat, is what I’ve always called it, where this pace of the books gets slower and slower and slower with each new installment because the storyteller keeps adding more viewpoints and keeps doing more worldbuilding and adding more places, because the assumption is like, “Oh, well, now I’m doing a series, therefore I can expand it into my huge grand vision,” but you can’t keep things moving at a good pace at that point. Oren: Chris, you can just say Wheel of Time. It’s fine. Bunny: Talk about something that’s not a trilogy. Oren: It’s interesting to hear about this in regards to Mistborn, because I only ever read the first one, and part of the reason I only ever read the first one was that at the end of the first one, they defeat the big bad, the super evil emperor guy. And I’m like, “All right, I guess the story’s over.” Like, it seemed odd that there was even a sequel. And this kind of reminds me of a more recent book that is new enough. I will give a spoiler warning for The Bone Shard Daughter. And I think this demonstrates a similar issue to what Chris was talking about with the series bloat, but also an instance of the author shifting from a kind of story they are very good at and clearly prepared for to one that they are not as good at, ’cause the first one is this very, for the most part, tightly plotted story of this princess with an evil king dad who uses creepy bone magic, and she’s trying to figure out what the heck is he up to and how is he doing his creepy bone magic? And she’s trying to figure all that out, and then that story ends and she defeats her dad and decides to stop doing creepy evil bone magic. And so what’s book two about? ’cause there’s not really much in book one to indicate what the sequel would be, and so then the sequel is like her trying to rule this empire, but the story is just not good at that. It was good at this really tight, focused drama. The big epic politics just end up not making any sense. Chris: You could take this as inherently in a very different position if in book two they are ruling. Bunny: I mean, that is also kind of Mistborn. In book one, it’s kind of a heist book, like they’re trying to kill the emperor guy and cause political uprising. And in book two they have the city now and it’s like a siege, like, that’s the main conflict of the book, is it’s a siege, and that means they’re sitting around in the city a lot. Oren: My first tip is: don’t write characters under siege. I mean, unless you know how sieges work, and you, know, do the whole active defense thing. Just sitting around while you’re under siege is not exciting. Chris: I imagine you have to really understand sieges to make a cool, fun, exciting conflict out of a siege. Otherwise, everybody’s just eating rats. Sounds like it would be really bleak. And not actually tense. Oren: They’re kind of miserable and grinding. It’s funny ’cause if you… they go through this weird curve where, if you don’t know anything about sieges, you’re like, “Oh, there’s some bad guys camped outside. Oh, well,” and then you can kind of continue life as normal. If you know a little bit about sieges, it’s like, “Oh, well, everything sucks, now we’re eating rats.” And then, once you know a lot about sieges, you’re like, “Oh, actually sieges are very dynamic and have a lot going on.” You just need to show that part. Bunny: It was definitely supposed to be more of a political conflict and like playing two different armies that are sieging the same city against each other. But that’s the sort of conflict… that’s like a couple of meetings. Oren: This chapter could have been an email. Bunny: Right? And the rest of it is like Vin hopping around playing with Zaid or Zane or whatever his name is. And then Elend getting tidied up, and some genuinely good scenes between Vin and her kandra, which, again, friendship being the best Sando type of relationship, and between the two terrorist people, which is a very small romance. I’ll give him that one. That was a good tiny soft romance. Oren: Here’s the thing, actually; in the past I have recommended to authors: “Hey, if you get to the end of your book and you think that that storyline has gone as far as it can go, one thing you can do is change the kind of story you’re telling.” So, in abstract, it’s not like I’m against going from a story that was kind of personal or heist-based to a story about ruling, but you gotta be ready to do that. You do have to acknowledge that is a different kind of story. Bunny: Admittedly, I thought the type of story this would shift to, I thought it would turn into an adventure story where we’re, “Oh, we’re gonna go find the Well of Ascension,” because the first book was setting it up as being in the mountains and stuff, and then the ending of this book was like, “Actually it was underneath the city all along.” Okay… So much for the adventure story. Oren: Oh. Well, that’s nice. We didn’t have to go anywhere. Chris: That does bring up the question of how many changes in book two are too much changes. Because you do have to cater to the people who liked book one, because that’s an audience that’s going to read book two. And I do think that you can have a totally different plot, like, if you want intrigue now because the protagonist is ruling, but similar types of conflicts I think is probably for the best. So if you have, for instance, lots of fights in book one, and you’re doing intrigue in book two, you should probably find reasons for fights to happen in that intrigue. Oren: I think that your second book should open with your original main character dying in a really embarrassing way, and then another character can turn to the camera and be like, “What, did you think it was about the same character? Wow, how trite.” That’s my favorite way to open a second book. Chris: No! Bunny: What book hurt you? Chris: Did… did somebody do that? Oren: Not directly, no. You could say I am synthesizing a number of different, really up-their-own-ass openings of different books that I’ve seen. Bunny: The problem is I could totally believe a book would do that. Chris: I am pretty skeptical of changing main characters. Generally, I think if you want to switch to a new character, it’s better if you start a whole new plot. So basically you have different books in the same world, but there’s less expectation that somebody has to specifically read through with first one main character and then the other main character. Instead, they can pick up either book in any order. I think that’s better and it sets expectations better. The exception I make is when we have set expectations, well, where we have like an ensemble, a team, that they’re together for the entire series, and each book focuses on a different one. For instance, Wings of Fire. That would be an example I think that’s fine. Because, again, the important characters are still pretty central to the story all the way through, and it sets expectations well. Oren: Theoretically. Chris: Theoretically it can. But we can say that about any storytelling advice. “You should do this.” “Oh, but what if they mess it up?” Well, I can’t stop people from messing things up. Oren: I just remember how every Wings of Fire book opens with what feels like a specially made premise to get the other four dragonets out of the way. “This is weird, man. Why are we doing this?” Bunny: I will say, now that you said that, I could see a direction Sando could’ve gone with this, that would’ve gotten me the adventure plot I was looking for, is just to follow,… Oh, no, I’m gonna get corrections on this one too. Sah-zed? Sayzd? Sa-zeed? The Terrisman character. Oren: Skarsgaard. Bunny: Skarsgaard. To follow Skarsgaard, who is traveling around at the start of the book and then goes to Luthadel, which is under siege, and so now he’s part of the siege. But I found him traveling around in quite an interesting part of the book, so if the series had been completely different and followed him in the second book, that could have been a direction to go with. I could see that having been something that worked. I don’t know. It would probably disrupt everything else, but, you know. Oren: I’d read a sequel about this… Saw Gerrera guy, I guess. That’s his name, right? Bunny: Yeah, yeah. Chainsaw Massacre, I think. Oren: One of the ones that I find really baffling, and I have seen this one, although it was in a video game and not a book, is when they introduce an unimaginably large problem that we’re gonna have to deal with by the end of the third installment. And if you’re like, “Okay, well, the second is definitely gonna be about getting ready to fight that thing, ’cause we need to get ready. We’re clearly no match for it right now.” And then they just spend the second one just chasing off some random baddies, and I’m talking about Mass Effect. Bunny: You knew we were getting there eventually. Oren: The end of Mass Effect 1, the Reapers are coming and they’re basically unstoppable and you’re not even on the same level as them. And all right, well, Mass Effect 2 is gonna be about trying to find a way to kill Reapers, right? No. Here are some new bad guys: the Collectors. They’ve always been here. Chris: Especially since Mass Effect desperately needed that time to find some way to defeat these all-powerful bad guys. Oren: And then they just don’t. And Mass Effect 2 ends and we’re no closer to defeating the Reapers than we were at the end of Mass Effect 1. And so Mass Effect 3 has to introduce the Star Child to brute-force us there. And it’s just… why? Chris: If I were to give a role to middle books, at least on a lot of speculative fiction, I would say the middle book is where the protagonist gets ready to do a big, intense final showdown against the baddie. And meanwhile, the baddie is maneuvering in place to do their master plan. And that’s not necessarily… you still have to make a problem with stakes to go with that, but that’s often where the protagonist does a lot of leveling up and training and other things like that. Oren: I mean, you still need to make that an arc. They can’t just be lifting weights for the whole book. But yes. I’m just imagining if this had been how Lord of the Rings was written. And so, in Fellowship they’re like, “Man, Mordor is really far away. We gotta get there.” And they make some progress. And then in Two Towers, instead of continuing to Mordor, they spend the whole book hanging around at some elf city, and then at the end they’re like, “Oh, crap, we needed to get to Mordor.” And then the eagles show up and take them the rest of the way. It’s kind of what it feels like. Bunny: See, I almost feel like that’s also something Mistborn was trying to do, because you have what’s going to be probably the ultimate villain, which is the Deepness, which is a shadowy, cosmic horror mist creature. But after the siege, it almost felt like an epilogue where they go and they find the Well of Ascension in the basement, and then it turns out that this power that the Hero of Ages is supposed to release, that’s the Deepness, actually. So now the Deepness has been released upon the world. Thanks, Vin and also Bland Boy Elend is a Mistborn now, which I am not a fan of, but we’ll see what they do with it in the third book. Oren: Oh, wait, so this Chosen Hero actually did something bad? Bunny: Yeah, I know. Shocking twist. So here’s what the Deepness has been doing, which should have been a bigger part of the book in my opinion, is that it’s been actively corrupting the prophecies and stuff like that. Like it’s implied that it might have made the prophecies to get itself out of there. Oren: I owe Brando Sando an apology, because I have complained for years that the thing that I really didn’t like about the first book was that it came really close to subverting the Chosen One trope when we thought the evil emperor was the Chosen One and that he was evil. But then we found out the last second, no, this guy is not the Chosen One, he killed the Chosen One and subverted the prophecy, but then it turned out the prophecy was evil the whole time! So there you go! We did it! We got there! Bunny: There you go. Forgiven. The third book is called The Hero of Ages, and I have not read it yet, so maybe we’ll retract this criticism. Oren: That’s how I look at stories, for sure. Chris: That’s the official Mythcreants standpoint. We are finally adopting the position that countless fanrages have chided us to do. Oren: Don’t critique until you’ve read the whole series. And don’t critique after that, ’cause someone might always add more books in the future. You don’t know. Chris: The lesson of this episode is apparently: always read the second book, because it will erase any mistakes in the first book. Bunny: We’ll see. One of my friends who has read the series asked me, “Oh, who do you think is the Hero of Ages?” And I’m like, “It seems like Vin would be too obvious.” If it’s Sah-zed, I’ll be confused but pleasantly surprised. If it’s no one, I’ll be satisfied. If it’s Elend, I’ll riot. Oren: It’s definitely gonna be like a Sazbod Bodsaw. That’s the Hero of Ages right there. Bunny: Hero of Ages name if I’ve ever heard one. Oren: Now that we’ve figured out who the Hero of Ages is, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. Chris: If you found this episode useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [closing song]

Anyone who’s read Mythcreants for a while knows that we’re very critical of pseudo-structures, those things that promise your story will be great if only you arrange it just so. And yet, no matter how much critique we heap on these literary lemons, there are always more. This week, we’re getting into the nitty gritty of why these structures don’t work, why they can’t work. It’s not a question of us preferring a different option; the thing they are trying to do just doesn’t make sense. Show Notes Save the Cat Save the Cat Writes a Novel  Three Act Structure  Hero’s Journey Hero With a Thousand Faces Kishotenketsu Virgin’s Promise  Story Circle  Freytag’s Pyramid Heroine’s Journey Transcript Generously transcribed by Sofia. 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 to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is… Oren: Oren Bunny: …and… Oren: Chris. Bunny: Recently I found out that we’ve been doing podcasts wrong. Or rather, we’ve been thinking about them wrong. Or perhaps we haven’t been a podcast at all because we’ve been doing it the wrong way. Oren: Oh? Bunny: There’s, there’s actually an easier way in all podcasts throughout time and indeed all conversations throughout time, analogue or not, have followed the structure. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be conversations. Chris: Ooh! Oren: The monopod. Chris: That sounds so deep and meaningful! Really, it’s a guide to life. Oren: [laughs] Bunny: Yes, precisely. And there’s a number of very clear, specific and easy to follow steps. First, we start the podcast. Chris: Wow. That’s great. Bunny: Yes. It’s not called an intro though. Oren: No. Bunny: it’s called auditory birth. Oren: [laughs] Oh, God. Oh no. Chris: [laughs] Oh, man. Okay. Bunny: And even if it’s not the very first episode of the podcast, or if we’re not babies, don’t worry, it’s still called auditory birth because it’s symbolic. Oren: Oh, it’s a metaphor. Okay. It’s all making sense now. Chris: Yeah. It’s arisen from the collective unconscious. Bunny: Exactly. And now to make your podcast: Best listener, Chris will state our theme at three minutes. At minute 15, we will lapse into a terrible depression. Then Oren and I will argue and reconcile by minute 27 using a polarity realignment. Oren: This is really optimistic about how long we can restrain ourselves on the opening. Those have just been getting longer and longer as the podcast has gone on. Bunny: Look, we’ll hit minute three and then Chris can state what the podcast is about if you haven’t looked at the title yet. Oren & Chris: [laugh] Bunny: But after minute 27 the podcast is basically over, and it’s a free-for-all and we can talk about what we ate for dinner. Chris: That’s when we return with the lesson of the podcast to give to all. Oren: The audio elixir, as it were. Bunny: Yeah. Chris: The audio elixir. Bunny: And then we experience podcast death. Chris: [laughs] Oren: Though hopefully that one will just be metaphorical death. Bunny: [laughs] It’s a cycle that all podcasts and conversations go through. Another: fun fact, all podcasts are motivated by desire for sex or fear of death. Because podcasters get laid constantly. Oren: It’s the most sexually charged profession, if you think about it. Goddammit. Bunny: They really do make you think. Oren: Blake Snyder. That one’s a little specific. We should probably reference where that’s from. Bunny: Yeah, that is Save the Cat, I believe. Chris: Excuse me, but I believe it is time for me to state the theme. Bunny: Yes. Chris, what is this podcast about? Chris: It is about pseudo-structures. Bunny: Yes. Chris: Deep ones that are symbolic of regular structures, that are symbolic of pseudo-structures. Bunny: And now we are rising. Chris: Oh, sorry. I should probably tell people what that is. Since it is actually a relatively new term that I made up. Cause I can’t stop making up terms. Oren: It’s just what we do. We make up terms. That’s our thing. Okay. Don’t try to censor us. Bunny: We are so good at making up terms that we have all the candy. Chris: So yeah, these are basically things that are advertised as story structures, but they don’t represent what a real plot structure does. And they don’t really teach people plotting. A lot of times they’re popular because people are looking for fun, easy steps and coming up with ideas is hard. And storytelling is so dependent on all of these factors and it’s complicated. But it’s so easy if somebody just tells you, Step one, do this. Step two, do this. And they have various tricks that we can talk about to make themselves seem more legitimate. And there is a blurry line right to between what—Because sometimes that really seems like a pseudo structure. I know that the writer does have a gut level understanding of how stories work, but is just so bad at expressing it, that it basically becomes a pseudo-structure. So what is and what isn’t can be kind of blurry. But basically a real structure should actually tell you how to structure your plot in a meaningful way and not just give you fixed points that seem easy and you do them, and then you don’t actually get a good story out of them. Oren: Right. And so some of these, these are things like Save the Cat, three-act structure, Hero’s Journey, Kishotenketsu, the Virgin’s Promise… There’s so many of them. And some of them are pretty vague and relatively harmless. They won’t really help, but they’re not super likely to sabotage your story either. And then some of them are weirdly specific. But they all have one thing in common, which is that they are telling you things that could be in a story. They’re not telling you what actually needs to be there. And sometimes the things they tell you could be, there are just bad ideas. You should not do that. Bunny: Some of they seem to be both universalist and prescriptivist, depending on the scale you look at them and like how they’re being sold to you. Universal claims are things like the monomyth, where it’s like every story falls into this structure. Oren: Right. Bunny: This preexisting structure. And the ones that are more prescriptive are things like Save the Cat, which are geared toward writing advice. But all of them have elements of universal and prescriptive, at least if they’re writing advice because they’re usually pulling on things like the monomyth. And yes, it’s circular logic. Oren: Save the Cat—both Snyder’s version and Brody’s version—both claim that basically all stories do this. Which is hilarious, cause clearly many of them don’t. Snyder doesn’t even seem aware of this contradiction. And just like all movies do this except movies I don’t like, they don’t do it. Bunny: Every story falls into the hero’s journey and what defines a story? It’s something that falls into the hero’s journey. Oren: Yeah. Bunny: And Story Circle, which I hadn’t heard about until I started researching this episode, says this explicitly, you can apply the story circle to any story. What makes a story? Something that the story circle can be applied to. Oren: That’s nice. That’s a nice Story Circular definition. Chris: [laughs] Bunny: That’s true! It’s meta! Chris: Yeah. If you can’t identify real story structure, then you’re caught in this impossible contradiction between either: A) being like, Hey, put that event there. But not every story needs an event there. And so, you’re being way too specific and people can automatically tell that that does not fit. They shouldn’t have to do that because so many stories are not doing that Or you can get extremely vague and be like, oh, but I meant that metaphorically. It’s metaphorical death. It’s a metaphorical journey. Oren: Right Chris: It’s a metaphorical despair or whatever you want. And then it’s so vague. It could literally mean anything. And so people might be inspired by it and might be like, oh, I’ve got an idea for like a metaphorical death I could do here. But now it’s no longer meaningful in any way. Cause you could make anything match that. Oren: Right. And what’s funny is that sometimes like people will get really vague about even these bizarrely over-specific ones. This is the big difference between Snyder Save the Cat and Brody Save the Cat. Cause Snyder saved the cat is just hyper specific to a bizarre degree. But people still say like, oh yeah, I wrote this with Save the cat. And you look at it and you’re like, where is any of the weird stuff that Snyder was talking about? And they’re like, well, it’s there, it’s a metaphor of the thing he was talking about. Whereas like Brody cuts out the middleman and is like, yeah, all of these really weird claims that Snyder made, they’re all real, but also they can be anything. So, don’t worry about it. You can write anything and then say you’re following Brody’s version of the Save the Cat. Because the steps are all so incredibly vague. Bunny: Well, the thing it has to do is that it has to say that all these stories that you like fall into this structure. And so when it’s being used that way, the definitions of each of these moments has to be broad enough that you can slot in House of Cards episode one and the Emperor’s New Groove. Oren: Yeah. Cause those are both good things that people like. Bunny: And two, they have to both follow the structure. But then when you’re trying to give advice to people, then suddenly these structures get like super specific. With Snyder in particular, he’s giving you the pages that you need to to put these things on. Oren: Yeah. My favorite thing about Snyder’s is, if you just tried to make a movie following Snyder’s advice, it would be incomprehensible. It would be both really boring and weirdly paced. He’s got this 10% that’s supposed to be the debate of the movie. You’re supposed to spend that long debating to go on the adventure. Of course, none of the examples he cites do that because. Why would they? Why on Earth? Who thinks that’s gonna make the story better? Bunny: And like you can have a scene with a hero debates something. Sure. But to say that that’s both necessary and obligatory is just wrong. Especially since we have many stories that start after the hero has decided to go on the adventure. Chris: Yeah. Bunny: Or they’re just fully in. There’s no question. Oren: Right. They don’t always need to be convinced. And even for the ones who do need to be convinced, you probably aren’t gonna spend that long on it. Because it’s just not that interesting. Bunny: Can you imagine if 10% of a Brandon Sanderson book was debating whether to go on the adventure? Oren: Oh, no. Oh God. Bunny & Chris: [laugh] Oren: You could fit a normal person’s novel in there. Chris: Yeah. Okay. About that. This is interesting because some of this idea where you have this introductory segment comes from Freytag’s Pyramid. And then some later books… a bunch of those books, if you actually look at the text of them, they’re like, oh no, this should only be like a scene, or this should be as short as possible. Or from Kenneth Thorpe Rowe—whose book I’m reading right now—he is like, oh, well actually this can happen alongside other events if you can work the information in later. So they’re not actually intended to be originally this huge segment, but then you go later and you get to Syd Field’s three-act structure and it’s like, oh yeah, this huge section, one third of the story, should just be a whole bunch of setup. Oren: Yeah. Chris: You know, with maybe a few important plot points in it. And now we’re just making it really long. It’s not a good idea because you’re supposed to start the plot. You should start the plot as quickly as you can, and then think for your individual situation if it makes sense to delay a little bit so that you can do important setup, that makes it matter. But those trade-offs are different for every story, and so just telling everyone to delay when it would only benefit a few people is not a good idea. Bunny: Well, here’s the thing about Freytag’s Pyramid and the three-act structure. The thing that makes three-act structure so bad is that it’s Freytag’s Pyramid bastardized by a long train of dastardly Polish people who have been plotting. Chris: [laughs] Okay. I think we need to—for listeners who have not read my post on Freytag’s Pyramid. And again, most people don’t recognize the term Freytag’s Pyramid, but you have probably seen the simple triangle chart where there’s rising action and there’s a climax in the center for some reason, and then falling action at a downward slope. Sometimes they modify it to put the climax in the place we would put it now. But that’s Freytag’s Pyramid. And Freytag who made this pyramid really hated the Polish. He has at the beginning of his book, cause I’ve read it, he has an introduction where he actually does sound like a proto-Nazi. He’s weird. He never mentions the Polish, but he has a weird emphasis on racist that is kind of creepy. Oren: He’s old timey, European racist. Nowadays in America, we tend to think of racism as being between black people and white people, or white people and Asian people. Old timey, European racism is the heck with those Italians. Or if you’re Italian, the heck with those Venetians cause I’m from Naples. That’s the real old timey stuff that he was big on. Chris: But Freytag, apparently circulated pamphlets talking about how they should conquer Poland, except for Poland had already been conquered by Russia. So these were like, we should conquer Poland if they get free from Russia. That’s a lot of effort into fantasizing about subjugating Polish. Oren: Don’t worry everybody. The competition between Russia and Germany for control of Eastern Europe will never cause any problems. It’s fine. Don’t look into it. Bunny: Oh no! I think he does name drop the Polish people at some point in the book. I remember seeing that. Just to get a little dig it. Can’t let them think that this book about story structure is not racist a little bit. Oren: So, it’s not like everything Freytag says is wrong, but a lot of it’s wrong. And then a lot of it is in very different contexts to the way that we tell stories now. Storytelling has advanced a little bit from the tragic plays of the 1860s. Chris: Yeah, it’s just for tragedies. The part of the structure of the end is actually supposed to be the hero dies. Oren: Yeah. [laughs] Chris: Right? So, that’s one of his points, is the hero dies. So, it’s not for non-tragedy. It really isn’t. Again, this gets into the blur in this. I know that what Freytag’s trying to do, and I think it’s like less of a pseudo-structure than something like Save the Cat is. Freytag’s Pyramid is still very general. I don’t think it’s a good structure, but he’s at least trying to do what a structure is supposed to do, which is talk about the broad outlines of how the story works. Whereas something like Save the Cat is very like at this moment you do this very specific thing. And it’s removed from what even farther, removed from what structure should be. Oren: Save the Cat is honestly weird. A lot of these books, I can see how they catch on, even if I don’t think that what they’re saying makes sense. A lot of these structures. I don’t get Save the cat, especially Snyder’s version. Snyder’s version reads like a fever dream conveyed by the most annoying kid you knew in high school. It’s so strange. Everything is written with these really off-putting names that don’t make sense and it’s hard to figure out what he’s talking about half the time. I just don’t get how this became popular. At least with Brody’s version, I get how it became popular beyond the fact that it’s linked to Save the Cat, because it’s super vague on purpose, right? So anyone who doesn’t like being told what to do can just do what they were gonna do already and then like retroactively fill in the part like that they’re doing Brody’s thing. That’s hard to do with Snyder’s. I just don’t get it. I don’t understand. Chris: Remembering when I was young. Oren: Mm-hmm. Chris: [laughs] relatively. Bunny: [old voice] When I was young… Chris: And I liked Save the Cat. Bunn: …And naïve. I was still saving the cats. Chris: [laughs] I remember liking it because it just seemed fun and easy. And if you don’t know what real story structure is, you never know what’s missing. Oren: That’s true. Chris: The funniest thing for me about Save the Cat is that Snyder very briefly references A plots and B plots. Which are actual things in a story, actual structural elements in the story, but never explains what they are. It’s just a passing reference. Oren: This is so funny. Chris: And the rest of the time, no reference to plot lines in this book, except for this passing reference that he doesn’t explain. It’s because for him it’s so second nature that he doesn’t even think it’s worth saying, and so it doesn’t go in the book. Whereas Syd Field with his screenplay, the Foundations of Screenwriting was his book. This is the one where this like “three-act structure” comes from. Oren: Or at least the version of it that many of us are familiar with. Chris: Yeah, I think Syd Field really was trying to communicate story structure. He just doesn’t have a good intellectual understanding of it. And so, he keeps saying, oh, you need a beginning and an ending, and a beginning and an ending. But he cannot get down what they are. So he will ask some questions, oh, well, does your character get married or divorced. He will ask questions. He’s clearly looking for like a hook and resolution. That’s clearly what he means. He doesn’t know how to define it. For him, it’s just gut level. It’s instinctual. So, he can’t say it. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Same with turning points. He has no understanding of fractal structure, right? So, or how child arcs work, right? So for him, oh you know, there’s a plot point that twists the action around. It’s like, okay, look, every single plot event in a story changes what happens going forward. They’re all do that and they can be anywhere. Bunny: I mean, the point you’ve made before is that these structures are only useful in as far as you already understand the other storytelling fundamentals. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oren: And even then, like if you understand the storytelling fundamentals, you can probably make a good story that follows these structures. Although, honestly, Save the Cat’s gonna be kind of a challenge. But you probably can. But at that point, what are they giving to you that is worth restricting yourself like that? Why not just tell the story you want to tell at that point? Chris: Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised that maybe somebody could pick up Syd Field’s book and by thinking on it really hard and looking at examples, come up with some better idea of hooks and resolutions, even though he never says it. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Right? Maybe they could start paying attention to, okay, I need to figure out what the ending is to do the beginning, and the beginning has to match the ending, and that sets them on the wrong direction. I do think it’s a step better than, for instance, the Hero’s Journey. Which is just a bunch of metaphorical things that don’t really try at all. Oren: I mean, the thing you have to understand about the Hero’s Journey and the Monomyth is that it’s made up, it’s fake. Like Campbell doesn’t demonstrate it ever. Bunny: It’s a-spiritual-theory-of-storytelling-as-it-exists concept. Oren: Yeah. Trying to read the original Hero with a Thousand Faces is just an exercise in masochism because Campbell’s not a good writer and what he’s trying to say is extremely hard to figure out, and he’s just goes on and on, and he like writes in this really weird cryptic style. And then he’ll make bizarre claims out of nowhere. Like all ancient cities are built on the four cardinal directions. That’s just not true. And he just doesn’t feel the need to support these claims at all. Chris: He won’t say all, he’ll just say ancient cities. And you’re like, what do you mean? What ancient cities? Where in the world during? What time period. And so, you’re just left with just so all ancient cities? And he’ll make statements like they had a temple in the center too. Apparently ancient cities had a temple in the center and entrances in the four cardinal directions. This is just how ancient cities are. So, he is just a bad scholar. He is not, he’s not a good scholar and he does not actually prove his thesis in any way. Oren: He seems to resent the idea that he should. That’s just not what he is here for, okay? He’s already figured out the answer and now he’s here to like make it sound mystical to you. It’s just fake. It’s just made up. Bunny: What’s very funny to me is that a lot of these structures are like explicitly based on Monomyth, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Hero’s Journey, blah, blah, blah. But the fact that none of them agree with how many stages there should be is something that none of them really reconcile. Can these all be true at once? I don’t know. Does it have 3 acts? 18 beats? 5 acts? 16? Or 14 Or 8? Oren: It’s very funny watching people try to reconcile these completely unrelated, made up pseudo-structures. Trying to figure out how the three-act structure works with the Hero’s Journey. It it doesn’t, cause they’re both fake. They’re just fake from different directions. The three-act structure is just made up. You can divide any story into three acts if you want to. There’s no real reason, but you can, and like Syd Fields’ version of it at least has some specific advice. It’s just weird and not very good. Chris: Syd Field took an attention arc and tried to express it, but didn’t know how to actually describe it. And then built an arbitrary set of events around it. Like dividing the story into three. You could have three big child arcs, that each of them makes the story a little different, because they twirl and each of them spins the story in a different direction. As he was saying. Oren: Always twirling, twirling towards freedom! Chris: That’s an option a story could have. But that’s a very arbitrary thing to say that every story should have because if you don’t understand the multi-leveled fractal nature of plot structure, you cannot describe where things go because they could go anywhere. Bunny: They also don’t specify how long these should be. If you look at the charts and diagrams of, for example, something like the Story Circle—that are like meant to be visualizations—it looks like they should all last the same amount of time. But then you’ll read them a little bit and it’ll be like, this one can be as short as a single line. I won’t argue that huge moments that are important to the story can happen in a line or two. Like, all right, sure. But then in what sense is this a structure? Oren: Right. Why did you use a pie graph? If the actual size of these things doesn’t relate to the pie? Bunny: His claim is that because biology. It’s bullshit about like psychology and it’s a circle because of biology. I think that is what the article says. That’s about what I’d expect from a structure based on Campbell. But you know… Oren: Yeah. I love Story Circle. It’s like they return to their familiar situations. Do they? Why? Most of the time they don’t. And what is the purpose of dictating that as a requirement? Chris: I mean, some stories do it and it gives a sense of closure. Oren: Yeah. Chris: Right. Or revisiting the past and seeing how you’ve grown. It can be done, but it certainly doesn’t have to be done. Which is again, a lot of how these suiter structures are. They don’t know how to identify what real story structure is. So, they only have two options. One is demanding that you include something you don’t need to include, or being so vague that they’re not really giving you anything at all. Oren: Right. Bunny: If I was going to express a progression as a circle, that would imply that you can start at any point on the circle. And that’s also not true of the structure. Oren: [laughs] That’s a good point. Bunny: It’s not like other structures. Trademark. Chris: [laughs] Oren: [laughs] My favorite is when things that are not pseudo-structures get roped into this. Like a while back, I did an episode on this myth that you could avoid the need for tension and conflict in your stories by using this one weird trick, pseudo-structure. And the main show of that was a Kishotenketsu, which is harmless set of potential plot points. Chris: If I understand though, this is a structure that we don’t understand very well, right? Oren: Yeah. In all of my research, I could not find any well-sourced information about Kishotenketsu, other than a set of YouTube videos by some Japanese manga creators who don’t really get into it all that much. They use it as a guide for tension in their story. They don’t get into the specifics that much. Chris: Right. So, it might similar to the three-act structure a bit. Oren: Or maybe not. Chris: One is we don’t have good English sources on this, so that makes it hard for us to know exactly what it is. Chris: Yeah. I’m not making any claims about the actual Kishotenketsu as it’s used in Japan. I don’t know how they use it there. I just know what English language blogs say about it. The other one that I was looking at in that article was this thing called Daisy Chain plotting, which is not a structure, it’s a concept. Instead of having a single main character who you stick with for the entire story, you have a group of vignettes that all you relate to the same thing. Chris: So, I would, I would call Daisy Chain somewhat a structure in that it specifies that there is a chain of vignettes. Because that is a specific structure because you have a story that starts and ends for each vignette. Bunny: Oh, and each of the mini stories follows the three-act structure. Chris: [laughs] It’s not a very specific structure. It just means if you say, Hey, this story is an anthology. Or this story is episodic. Or this story is very serial/overarching or whatever you wanna call it, that is structural information. Oren: Yeah. Chris: About where plot hooks start and where they end. It is very vague and broad, but I would honestly give more credit to the Daisy Chain. Calling it a structure? Okay. Maybe in a kind of vague, broad type of way. Oren: Yeah, and I don’t have any issues with Daisy Chain. I think that that’s a perfectly legitimate way to tell a story. There are certainly trade-offs, right? There’s a reason why we tend to stick with a single main character. But if that’s the kind of story you wanna do, that’s totally doable. It isn’t gonna do any of these things that the people often claim that it will. Chris: It doesn’t get rid of conflict and tension. Oren: Yeah. It has nothing to do with those things. Daisy Chain seems perfectly fine, and it’s being used as this weird prop in this fight that some authors have against the need to put tension in their story. Dave Daisy chain didn’t ask for this. It’s just a neat little story concept. Bunny: Can we take a moment to appreciate just how bizarre Virgin’s Promise is? Oren: Uuuuuh… Bunny: A moment of silence for the fact that we’re talking about virgins. Like that’s not a bizarre, misogynistic concept in 2020, when that article came out. Oren: Supposedly, it’s one of those things where like the person writing it is like, no, this doesn’t have to be about gender. Anyone can be any of these roles. Okay, but why did you name the dark reflection The Whore? Did you have to do that? I don’t think anyone made you do that. Bunny: Here’s a line I pulled from it. Just as females can be heroes, males can be virgins whether or not they are gay. Oren: Yeah. I mean. Bunny: Thanks. Oren: That’s technically true. [laughs] Chris: [laughs] Somebody’s trying. Bunny: True in the literal sense. Chris: And failing to be sensitive. Chris: It’s also nothing I could find in that. And admittedly I just skimmed it because I didn’t feel like I wanted to spend a lot of time on that article. I don’t think that the Virgin ever explicitly has to make a promise, nor do they have to be a virgin. Oren: It’s sort of like the most obvious example of the thing I talked about earlier. This isn’t telling you what needs to be in a story. It’s telling you some things that could be in a story. If you ignore the weird, like virgin/whore-language, this is sort of about a story with the idea that it’s about a woman who is under pressure to do feminine coated things and wants to do masculine coded things and then has to reconcile those things. Sure. You can tell a story about that if you want to. There’s nothing wrong with that. Plenty of good stories are about that. But calling it a structure is weird because this doesn’t really tell you what needs to be in there. It’s just a list of inspiration ideas. Bunny: It’s a feminine plot. That’s also what the article calls it. Oren: Uhm. Oh, no, no, no. Bunny: I also don’t know if it’s related at all to the Heroine’s Journey. I don’t know if that’s the same thing or something else. Chris: What Oren was just saying, sounds like Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey. Oren: It’s similar. It’s very similar. Chris: I wrote about it back when I was more into the hero’s journey and then I learned better. But at the same time, if you want your character to go through growth and have big change, it can offer inspiration for doing that. It’s basically what I would say about it now. Oren: Yeah. Chris: I suppose you could say there are kind of some emotional structure in that there are periods in which the character appears to be learning and that would take tension down, and then having problems again, which would take tension up. But it’s mostly just for inspiration. Bunny: I mean, that does seem to be the best case scenario. Oren: Yeah. And it doesn’t call anyone a whore, which is kind of nice. Bunny: [laughs] yeah… Oren: Just in general, I would be very careful about the idea of story types having genders. I’m not gonna say there’s never a situation where that might be useful, but you get carried away with that almost immediately. Chris: Yeah. I will say with Maureen Murdoch, the thing is that—and I have not actually really clarified while in this post—is that she was a therapist for women and so the inspiration for her was the things that she heard from her patients. And their emotional journeys. And so the gender in that one, the Maureen Murdoch’s Heroine’s Journey, I think of it not as prescriptive, but as descriptive. She’s describing what a group of women went through emotionally at a particular time in response to patriarchy. And that’s where her idea for this Heroine’s Journey comes from. Oren: There is one more thing that I think is really important about this is that also, bisexual, non-binary people can be virgins. Just so we’re clear. Chris & Bunny: [laugh] Bunny: We’re all represented here. This podcast says you are valid as a virgin. We witness you! Oren: That’s definitely the message we want to end this on. Bunny: I think my conclusion after studying all of these pseudo-structures is that A New Hope is to blame for 99% of it. Chris: But I love A New Hope though, because I can use it to show people what an actual throughline is. It’s like, oh, you thought that a new hope was successful because of the Hero’s Journey? Well, guess what? It’s not! Here’s the actual… yeah. Oren: Now you’re gonna learn something. Chris: I had one editing client who told me that after he read this article, where I demonstrated through example that it wasn’t the Hero’s Journey that made it successful, but just having a throughline, that his mind was blown. Bunny: Heck yeah. Oren: We love to hear it. Bunny: Keep blowing those minds. Down with pseudo-structures. That should be your takeaway. Oren: I think with that we are gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close. Bunny: Oh damn. We forgot to have a big row and talk about our dinners. I guess this podcast will not hit the tops of the charts. Oren: Yeah, that’ll be part two. Bunny: Perhaps that’s not a podcast at all. Oren: We metaphorically discussed our dinners. Bunny: Yes, true. Yeah. Chris: If you would like us to stop and not discuss our dinners, you can consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: And 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. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will see you next week. [Outro Music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.