The Mythcreant Podcast

The hosts discuss the elements of constructing a mystery in storytelling, including the importance of resolution and adding stakes. They explore the use of mysteries as main plots or minor components, and debate the effectiveness of starting with a disconnected prologue. They also touch on the problem with big reveal moments and leaps of logic, and emphasize the significance of not outsmarting the audience. The podcast ends with a gratitude for existing patrons and an encouragement to support on Patreon.

You might think the answer is obvious: just have your villain be clean shaven! Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Villains need coherent motivations like anyone else, and they need aesthetics that won’t seem silly to the audience. How do you do that without leaving the villain drab and boring, or making them into the latest bad guy who is actually right but kills people so you won’t notice? Fortunately, that’s our topic for the week!Show Notes …or die  Does Your Villain Twirl Their Mustache?  Vadic Krankor  The Lord Ruler  Recursive Sauron  Napoleon Bonepart  Wildwood (The Dowager Governess)Transcript Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris and with me is… Bunny: Bunny. Chris: And? Oren: Oren. Chris: [evil voice] Mwahaha! I have tied Oren to the train tracks. Bunny, you must choose whether to save him, or your beloved drawing pad, which I’m dangling over a flame. Bunny: No! Oren: Yeah, you should probably go for the drawing pad, honestly. That’s pretty expensive. Chris: That’s pretty expensive. I’m sorry, Oren. You might feel a slight sting. Oren: Plus, the trains in America are really slow. You have time to go get the drawing and come back. It’s fine. Bunny: How am I supposed to complete my next comic, Chris? [laughter] Chris: Yes, it’s all part of my master plan to destroy Oren, or alternately, your drawing pad. Either one. Devious. Minions! Go forth! [evil voice] Or die. [laughter] Got it! So this time we’re talking about how to avoid mustache twirling villains. Oren: There’s actually a cheat code for that. You just make them clean-shaven, and you’re done. Chris: Yeah. Wow. Oren: I didn’t make this up, because Chris has a post on avoiding mustache twirling villains, and this came up in a Reddit argument where somebody was trolling someone by pretending to not know what mustache twirling was, and claiming that if somebody didn’t have a mustache, they couldn’t be a mustache twirler. And so this person was like, you’re obviously trolling me, here’s a post that explains what that means, good day. Bunny: Wow, I didn’t realize the fix was so easy. I need to stop writing villains with facial hair. Oren: Yeah, it’s solved. The character in question was Vadic from Picard season three, who, I don’t know if I’d qualify her as a mustache twirler. She definitely chews the scenery a lot. Chris: Yeah, I agree with that sentiment. I think she’s a little too far. So what are we talking about? What is a mustache twirler? Obviously not literally a villain twirling their mustache, although they have! That’s what it’s based on. Essentially any villain that’s one note or flat, and what happens is they tend to come off as comical rather than scary, just because they’re so over the top and kind of cartoonish feeling. And if that doesn’t happen, then they’re boring, because they only have one characteristic and don’t have anything interesting about them generally.  Oren: In the wild, I would say most authors don’t set out to write this. But the most common way I’ve seen it happen is that they set out to write either the Joker or Darth Vader, and don’t have an understanding of the very specific circumstances under which those two villains actually worked, and so they put them in the wrong story and they become mustache twirlers. Chris: Yeah. When people are trying to write villains, they don’t think of their villains like normal characters, and so their villains just do things because they’re villainous and those are villainous things to do, not because they have the same reasoning another character would have to take actions. Bunny: Capital V Villain. Chris: I think another issue is that villains often have a smaller part in the story, which just doesn’t encourage depth, doesn’t encourage a lot of character development. But yeah, a lot of times the storyteller is trying to copy a big bad that they’ve seen in other stories, and they don’t know what they need to do to make that villain menacing. And this is a really common problem. We see it in manuscripts all the time. It’s the most common problem villains have in manuscripts. It might be the most common problem villains have in general. Oren: Yeah, although nowadays we’re going in the other direction of the villain who totally has a point and is super sympathetic, but is still evil for reasons. Bunny: Gotta punch them. Gotta punch their bad villainous self and just leave the point dangling. Oren: Look, they might have a good point, and then they might blow up a room full of civilians for kind of no reason. Who knows? It’s impossible to say. Chris: Look, we want to punch people. That’s the most important thing, that there are people to punch. If the villain is not somehow really bad, how do we get our punchies in? Bunny: Look, gotta blow up a room full of civilians, or else how do we solve… climate change? Please applaud my messaging.  Oren: It’s really the only way. But that doesn’t tend to be a big problem in the manuscripts I edit. That’s a problem that, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s just a Hollywood thing or not, but I very rarely have picked up a client manuscript and been like, the problem here is that you’re trying to make your villain have a point but also be evil. Bunny: I think that Hollywood has noticed that people praise villains that are more than mustache twirlers, so it’s what do we do with that without working too hard? People like messaging, right? They like it when stories say something. Let’s have the villain say something. Then we can punch him. Chris: I’ve also seen writing advice where to try to make it more interesting, instead of looking for issues that are naturally nuanced, they just say, oh, take a black and white situation, and now graywash it. What if we have an issue that’s clean cut where somebody is trying to save the children and the other person’s not, but then it turns out the person trying to save the children only wants to sacrifice them? Or something like that. That’s like the mentality, and if you apply that to real world issues, it gets very messy. Bunny: At best it gets very weird. Chris: But a mustache twirler happens when the storyteller is not trying to do that. They’re not trying to have it be gray generally. Usually they’re looking for a much more clear cut villain, and they end up making a villain that is very flat. Oren: Yeah. One of the main causes that I’ve seen is simply that a lot of spec fic stories have end of the world level stakes, and it’s challenging to create a villain who would realistically want the world to end, because they live there too. And so that becomes a bit of an issue. You can do it, you can make reasons why a villain would want the world to end, but a lot of authors struggle with that, and so they just end up with a villain who’s like, I just want to watch the world burn, man. Because I’ve also seen The Dark Knight. Chris: So how do you know if you’ve written a mustache twirler? Honestly, if you’re not deliberately trying to make your villain sympathetic or well-rounded or not a mustache twirler, there’s a good chance your villain is a mustache twirler. People just end up making them by copying famous evil villains. But if you want to know, okay, what traits does a mustache twirler typically have? Okay, so cackling, threatening everyone around them, playing with weapons, that would be a typical villain type, but it could be something else. For instance, maybe your villain is just really snobby, and is just always snobby, and every sentence they say is another opportunity to be snobby. Or they’re cold and they constantly make cutting remarks, and that’s just like their entire personality. Take any trait that we would associate with an asshole, or a villain, or somebody that we’re likely to make into a villain, and just have them do that and not really have any other traits that are opposing that in some way, and you’ll probably have a mustache twirler. Oren: Yeah, the weapon playing with one is funny because I see that a lot in client manuscripts and even in some published stories, but it’s not super common in movies in my experience, which is usually where a lot of these authors are getting their bad habits from. So, I don’t know where that one came from. That just pops up a lot, the bad guy who’s so cool because he’s playing with a knife, and he’s doing knife knuckles or whatever. Chris: Gotta throw some darts, maybe? Throw some darts at the hero’s face on the dartboard? Oren: Yeah, that’s another common one. Various unsafe gun handling practices. Chris: To kill humans… for reasons. Humans just have too much spunk. You can’t let them run free or they’ll overthrow your empire because of all the spunk that they have. [Chris laughs] Their free spirit is unlike any other alien race in the galaxy. Bunny: Exactly, they’re too threatening because they’re so cool. Now, there’s one Mystery Science Theater movie, I’m forgetting the name of it right now. Prince of Space. That’s the name of it. But the villain is Kronar. His opponent is Starman, who is also an alien, but the conflict takes place on Earth for some reason. And Starman is just a man in a really dorky costume. I hope I’m remembering this one right. It’s because his spaceships are, like, gas powered? Chris: He wants our oil? Bunny: Yeah, I think he wants our oil or he wants our technology. Maybe in this humanity has just started developing a warp drive or something? And he’s like, I’m so tired of relying on my gas powered spaceships, which take forever to go across the galaxy. But I bring up Kronar because I feel like he’s the archetypal mustache twirler. Like he’s got this long pointy chicken nose, and a mustache, and he’s got an evil laugh. He goes, let me see if I can do it: Hengh. Hengh. Hengh. He does it like that. And yeah, I don’t know. When I think of mustache twirlers, I think not of manuscripts, but of Kronar. And I’d recommend if anyone’s is my villain a mustache twirler, if they resemble Kronar at all. Yes, they are. They are a mustache twirler. Do the Kronar test. Oren: But in Kronar’s defense, he at least has a motivation. He has a thing that he wants that will personally benefit him, which I’ll admit a lot of mustache twirling villains I read in manuscripts don’t. So why are they doing this? I don’t know. Because they hate joy or something. That’s where the Joker and Darth Vader come into it, because those characters, often it’s hard to really say that they have any particular motivation for doing what they’re doing. They’re just evil. But they have other aspects – mostly they have really high novelty that generally these mustache twirling villains don’t have. Chris: It also does matter that they are movie villains. Oren: Comic villains in the Joker’s case, but yeah. Chris: Because if you have visuals, then the aesthetics mean more, and they make a bigger impression. And both Joker and Darth Vader really have aesthetics that stand out. Then when you have an actor and I mean, to some extent an illustrator too, but I think actors especially, are very good at taking their lines, like an unremarkable villain line, and rounding it out and making it feel a lot more realistic. When you have just the text written on the page, you have to add more nuance to it to make it work and make it feel realistic, because you don’t have somebody who can play against it and round it out. I do run into a lot of writers who want to copy Darth Vader. And just the first note is that he is a movie villain, not a book villain. And so his outfit just wouldn’t have the same impression if it were in a book. There are some famous villains from books that are like Darth Vader, but they don’t really enter the story that much, like Sauron or in the Mistborn series, the Lord Ruler is like this too. Oren: Okay, so Mistborn books have a lot to recommend them. But honestly, the Lord Ruler is not great as a villain. He’s very average. He’s a generic guy. He has one interesting thing going for him, spoilers: which is that you think that maybe he was the former Chosen One and that the Chosen One turned evil. And that’s neat. That’s a cool concept. But that turns out not to be true. He actually killed the Chosen One and subverted destiny. Chris: Yeah, it’s weird to have a twist that makes the story less interesting rather than more. Oren: Yeah, so he’s basically just a less interesting Sauron. Because Sauron is at least serious and almost more like an Elder God kind of villain. Whereas the Lord Ruler is just a guy. Chris: Well, like Sauron, Lord Ruler is not really in the scenes. He’s just built up like Sauron is. And Sauron, you don’t even really see him at all. He speaks in like one scene -that should have been taken out, because it does not make him sound impressive. Oren: Excuse me, Chris, have you forgotten recursive Sauron from the Hobbit trilogy? We see Sauron all the time. We see him so many times. Chris: Oh, man. If anybody’s not familiar with recursive Sauron, it’s the funniest thing. It’s one sign that the Hobbit movies are bad. I think it’s the second Hobbit movie. I just remember seeing this in the theater and being like, really? They’re doing this? Where you stare at the eye of Sauron, and it shows a silhouette of Sauron as the pupil of the eye. And then it expands. And there’s another one. So it expands till the pupil takes up the screen. And then there’s a new iris. And then it just keeps going. It was a recursive Sauron over and over again. It’s like somebody thought this would be a good effect for the movie. Bunny: That’s very, very Microsoft Paint. [Chris laughs] Chris: But in any case, that’s part of the issue. Is that when you have a villain that’s flat, that’s just pure evil, sometimes as soon as they show up and you start depicting them, they come off really flat and looking bad. Bunny: Yeah, I will say just to add on to the villainous aesthetics thing. That can be used to make them look cool, as in the case of Darth Vader. But it’s also really easy for that to tip over into just looking goofy again, like a Scooby-Doo villain. Lots of pointy angles, or like Jafar, reds, billowing capes, booming voices, signature laughs. I’d also say that in regards to why these mustache twirlers are just uninteresting and not very good. Another reason for that is if you do want to make your villain something other than Mysterious Sauron or Darth Vader, there’s just not that many ways for them to engage with the hero in an emotional sense or in a non-cliché sense, because they’re all evil all the time and will probably just cackle at the hero. Chris: It’s gonna be hard to have a conversation. Bunny: Yeah, again, look at Prince of Space, which I just figured out that I was getting the villain’s name wrong. It’s Krankor, not Kronar. Krankor, just look at Krankor and don’t do that. Chris: Kronar would have been better, honestly. That would have been a better villain name. Oren: Yeah, Krankor sounds like he’s cranky. Bunny: He is cranky. His costume looks very uncomfortable. Oren: Truth in advertising, then. Bunny: [imitating Krankor’s laugh] Ehh, ehh, ehh. Oren: And there’s definitely also a question of shifting tastes. Because these things come and go, but I feel like my impression is that looking at books that are coming out now, the general taste is that villains who wear classic red and black with sharp costumes are considered cheesy to the point where it’s sometimes fun for the hero to wear those things to be like, aha, I’m the classic villain, but I only do good things. Whereas if the actual villain does it, then they really need something to make that new and fresh or it’s just gonna feel boring. It’s, oh yeah, hey look, the villain dressed as a villain, everybody. Give him a pat on the back for figuring that out. Chris: I do think that in books, the aesthetics, again, they don’t matter as much, so I don’t think you’re gonna have a villain who’s gonna seem as comical because they have a swashy red or black cape. But I do think that if you want to get something from it, you need to make it a little bit more unique. I suppose if you had an urban fantasy setting, or a setting with really high realism, and the villain walked in with a swashy cape and it just felt very out of place in the setting maybe, but usually it’s more about you need to have some level of novelty. Oren: And when I think of really good book villains, like the few I can think of that actually have an impression and stay with you for reasons other than them being bad, you’ve either got your Elder Gods style villains like Sauron, or you have villains who your hero can talk to, because you need that to build attachment to the villain. You need to be able to talk to them, otherwise there’s just nothing interesting going on in scenes where they’re in. And even if that conversation is hostile in some way, it’s still a conversation. There’s still something that they have to say to each other than, I’ll stop you, villain. Chris: [dramatically] No, you won’t. Oren: I think the most successful example of that is Napoleon from the Temeraire books, because he’s the villain, Mr. Actual Napoleon, and he’s just a guy the hero can talk to. They have a lot in common, they’re on opposite sides. He actually has a slight problem of being a little too reasonable, and at some points you have to ask, why haven’t the good guys switched sides to work with Napoleon? And I think Novik at some point realized that, because she reminded us that Napoleon reinstated slavery in the French Empire, so he wasn’t actually a super nice guy. Bunny: No, it’s a rather rude thing to do. Oren: But if you didn’t know that, there are a number of books before she reminds us of that, where you could very easily be forgiven for wondering why the heroes aren’t just working for the French now. Bunny: Another villain that I think really does it well, and I don’t know if either of you have read this book, but this is Wildwood by Colin Meloy. The first book’s villain is the Dowager Governess, who in the setting, there’s three locations mainly, and so she used to be the governess of this town. She was married to the governor and they had a child who died, and then she tried to use dark magic to bring him back, and people did not like that, so they cast her into the woods. And then they all think she’s dead. But what happens is that one of the protagonists of the book, Curtis, encounters her before we know she’s evil, and she’s really charismatic and kind, and she’s a capable, really charming political leader. She’s got a whole army of coyotes, and you see how she’s gathered this army is because she’s been strategic and mobilized this scattered, basically diaspora, the society of coyotes, which are looked down on and been like, hey. I can give you glory, and I’m going to treat you with respect, where a lot of other people haven’t. So you can see why she’s a formidable opponent, and also when Curtis is on her side, she can be genuinely kind, but very pragmatic. And it’s impressive how sympathetic, and not even necessarily sympathetic, it’s just how much we enjoy interactions with her, because they have so much nuance, even when the end goal of her plan is the ritual sacrifice of a child. It’s literally the killing babies thing that we say when we’re talking about villains being over the top, but Wildwood manages to make it work, I think in large part because we do have so much contact with this villain before we realize that she’s a villain. Oren: Yeah, although I might be concerned about authors trying to imitate that, because that sounds like it could very easily become another example of the villain who’s the leader of the marginalized group, which is a bit overplayed these days. Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. I think it also helps that when it comes to the coyotes, we have an understanding of why she’s able to lead them, but then we have individual coyote characters who aren’t just the bad guys that get shot at and die. There’s a- he’s still, in the scheme of things, a minor character, but Dimitri the coyote is one who defects, and we see more of them than your average mooks. But yeah, I think it helps that the book doesn’t really focus on whether the coyotes are oppressed, or whether they’re just a scattered subgroup that needs a collective identity, and she gives that to them. I don’t know, for me I just see that it helps because we see why she works. That she is cunning and smart and able to mobilize people, and we see why people would agree with her. Chris: I do think it’s worth asking, though, if somebody really wants a Sauron, because some people do. They’re very inspired by that archetype, and that’s what they want to write. What can we do to make the super evil villain come across a little less moustache-twirly? I would say that mostly you just have to tone them down a little bit from what you’re probably thinking of, and round them out. Making them polite and personable, because that’s one thing that Bunny just mentioned that made this villain so striking, is that she was really charismatic. And that’s one thing that is really missing from a lot of villains that come off as too moustache-twirly, is just making them polite can make such a huge difference. It really can. Bunny: Why would people want to hang out around this person? What makes them compelling? Chris: If you’re thinking about it strategically, again, they have every reason to want to charm other people. It’s just one other form of power. So that definitely helps, but mostly you just have to make their mannerisms less villain-like and more person-like, including some positives, usually. Bunny: I also want to say that when you’re thinking about including motivations, it also helps if their motivation isn’t just power, because that’s vague. I think it would help to be like, what do they want to do with the power? Or for what reason? Because I feel like in a lot of cases, we have a villain that’s just, they want to take over the realm. They want more power. And I think that’s been done so many times that it’s hard to make that not moustache-twirling if it’s devoid of anything else. Chris: I would add some kind of political philosophy to that, maybe. I think you could still have them be pretty evil, but have something that they want to do with the realm, for instance. Oren: Yeah, and at that point, you can tie it into real-world motivations, right? It can be, they want to take over the realm because they want to enrich their own country, right? Nationalism, everyone loves it. They want to take over the realm because they hate taxes, and they don’t like having to pay taxes, and the democracy keeps putting taxes on them. None of that. We’re going to get rid of that. I don’t like taxes for me. Again, very easy to understand motivation. Usually power is a means to an end, not an end in itself, unless you’re doing some 1984 stuff. Chris: And then it’s worth thinking about, if you want your villain to threaten people or lash out, it’s not that you can’t do that. You just have to think a little more critically about how it’s going to actually enhance their threat level, rather than just come off as over-the-top. For one thing, if they’re just harming people who are obviously less powerful than them, like their own minions, which just reduces their own assets and makes them feel out of control, which is the opposite of what you want, or just helpless victims, that doesn’t make them seem any more impressive, because that was easy. If they’re going to be going and just killing things, you should instead show them killing something that it actually takes a lot of power and skill to kill. So that actually shows off their prowess, as opposed to just puppies or whatever. Usually that’s because the biggest question that’s holding their threat back is whether they are able to achieve their dastardly goals, not whether they have dastardly goals. Usually it’s pretty easy to establish that they’re going to do something bad, so the fact that they are going to harm is not in question, and therefore killing puppies doesn’t really change anything. It’s just over-the-top. Bunny: Yeah, I think also people want to show that their villain is cruel, and there are ways to do that can A, show that they’re cruel, but B, also not show them being just cruel. You can show both that they’re cruel and that they’re strategic by having them be cruel in places where it gives them an advantage. And it doesn’t give you an advantage to, I don’t know, torture the lackey who failed to bring them the jewel or something like that. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but if you can show them being cruel in a way that furthers their own goals and isn’t excessive, I think that would work a lot better. Chris: And then the other thing you can keep in mind, if the question is not whether they can do bad things anymore, but whether they will, which only happens in narrow circumstances such as if your hero is a prisoner, and you have this prison overseer or guard, right? At that point, the hero is at their mercy, and the question is whether they will hurt them. At that point, it makes a little bit more sense for them to lash out, because that shows that the hero is actually in more danger. Whereas in a normal situation, it doesn’t. Oren: One thing that I think is useful to think about, because we want our villains to act menacing sometimes, right? Like a friendly villain is good, I am a fan of that, but I think it’s also reasonable that authors are going to want their villains to be scary and have an evil grin or something that really drives the point home. And I think if you want to do that, you want them to be menacing when they have achieved a position of power, and you use that. Because again, it’s just more effective that way, rather than depending on some actor to really sell the expression.  Chris: Certainly an evil smile is going to mean more if your villain has just gotten a big victory than if your villain is, oh, this failure is all part of my secret plan. Really, I’m going to turn this around. Evil smile.  Oren: Or even if the villain and the hero meet before the battle or something, and the villain is just like, aha, I’m evil! We haven’t fought yet, calm down. [laughter] Chris: That just goes to show that you can’t just use those kinds of trappings to make a villain feel threatening on its own. There has to be substance behind the style. If you have a character that’s just wearing the black cape and swishing it around and having an evil smile, but you don’t actually show them doing any damage, then it’s just going to feel like it’s all hype. Oren: Yep, that’s true. Alright, with that, I think we are going to go ahead and call this episode to a close. Bunny: We have killed the episode! Mwahaha! [laughter] Chris: If you would like to bring the episode back to life, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: Flawless segue. Chris: My promos make perfect sense. What are you talking about? Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie MacLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [closing song] Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.

In this podcast, Erica Ortegas, John Sheridan, and Kathryne Janeway discuss mistakes in character arcs. They explore the mismatch between problems and resolutions, analyze flawed character arcs in TV shows, and delve into the challenges of portraying character flaws. They also touch on out of character actions, abrupt endings, and the use of meta mysteries to conceal pasts. An entertaining and informative discussion for storytellers.

Even the most jaded and cantankerous critic was once a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed reader. Well, they were less jaded and cantankerous, at least. What books bewitched them in this time of innocence? What stories inspired their desire to tear apart every story you’ve ever loved and also to write their own stories that must then be torn apart in the great cycle? Listen and find out!Show Notes Discworld  Mouse Guard  Rainbow Magic  Fate: The Winx Saga  Boxcar Children Catwings  The Boat  Polar Express  Jumanji  Animorphs  Escape Velocity Nova  Belgariad Wheel of Time  Warrior CatsTranscript Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Bunny: Welcome to another heart-pounding episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is… Oren: Oren.  Bunny: And… Chris: Chris.  Bunny: And as you can see, I’ve boing, boing, boinged my way into regular hosthood and taken up residence in the big purple Mythcreants’ clubhouse where we all live. There’s no escape for me now. Sorry.  Oren: No, you’re trapped.  Bunny: [Chuckles] I’ve set up my little bunny hutch in the living room and have taken all of the TV controls, so you have to live with me.  Oren: Gonna have to just start having to get up to press the buttons on the TV like some kind of medieval peasant.  Bunny: Boo. Anyway, today we’re going to be talking about lovely, perfect, flawless books. Books that make our hearts a flutter and our nostalgia ooze out our ears like silken honey. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I wrote that line.  Chris: [Laughs] Bunny: Books that make you sigh for the simpler days of yore. Books that you’ve shared furtive pink-cheeked glances across the classroom with and might have kissed if you weren’t so worried about your braces locking together. I’m sure everyone has felt this way.  Oren: This is getting pretty steamy, admittedly.  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: But not just me.  Chris: I don’t know, Bunny. That would mean I have to not hate everything.  Bunny: I don’t know, it could be an enemies to lovers type thing.  Chris: [Chuckles] Or a lovers to enemies.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Chris: Sadly, that is my tale of first book love woe.  Oren: I hate everything except for the things I love which are perfect and can’t be criticized.  Bunny: [Fake cough] Discworld.  Oren: Yeah, it’s perfect. Nothing is wrong with Discworld. I have never once criticized it. You can’t prove that I did.  Bunny: [Fake cough] Mouse Guard. Sorry, I’ve got something caught in my throat.  Oren: [Laughs] Bunny: I think it’s a point. Chris: [Laughs] Bunny: Today we’re talking about our first book loves, the books that first inspired us, the stuff that we got into writing. And I have quite a few of these. And a lot of them started out as just very early things that I then tried to copy while trying to pretend that I’m not copying them because I don’t use the exact same characters. I use a character who is me and therefore is not canon in the novels. It’s legally distinct.  Chris: As long as you put yourself in there, it’s no longer what you’re copying anymore. Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: Look, they’ve got green eyes this time. So it’s different.  Bunny: Yeah, exactly. And for me, the first kind of book love, the very earliest, is the series called Rainbow Magic. Have either of you heard of that?  Chris: Actually, no. Oren: Only vaguely.  Bunny: It’s this massive, ridiculously massive by this point. And it was then too, I remember going into the library and there was a whole shelf that’s entirely these tiny little Rainbow Magic books. And each of them had a fairy on the cover. And the fairies were all themed, there were groups of themed fairies. The first ones were the jewel fairies. There was an emerald fairy and an opal fairy and what have you other jewels, fairy, sapphire fairy, that sort of thing.  Chris: That sounds very cute. Sounds like something I would have liked had I ever known these books existed.  Bunny: It was adorable. And I love these. And basically they all have the same plot. The villains are goblins. They’re led by Jack Frost because why not? What happens in each mini series in this greater series and happens in each book, was that Jack Frost has stolen something and the two main characters, Rachel and Kirsty, have to go and get it back by working with one of the themed fairies.  Chris: Oh, so the themed fairies aren’t actually the main characters. We’ve got a couple of relatable girls to work with them.  Bunny: We got Rachel and Kirsty, Jack Frost, maybe he stole all the original jewels or he stole all the sand so nobody can have nice soft sand this summer. There’s just a ridiculous amount of fairies by now. There’s sport fairies, the jewel fairies, there’s pet keeper fairies, which have dogs and rabbits, which aren’t the same thing as the baby animal rescue fairies. And then there’s the after school sports fairies, which aren’t the same thing as the sport fairies or the water sports fairies or the fun day fairies. Yeah, it’s a bit ridiculous.  Oren: I’m sensing some theming issues here.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Bunny: “Building Rainbow Magic. How Daisy Meadows failed to theme her world”.  Oren: I predict a highly divisive grimdark TV show adaptation in this series’ future. Chris: [Laughs] Bunny: Look, it’s owned by Mattel. Chris: Like the Winx?  Oren: The first time I saw this, I thought of Winx and how divisive that show’s adaptation was.  Bunny: I do remember seeing clips of that recently and looking at clips of Winx, the animated version. I would never have guessed they were the same thing.  Oren: Chris and I watched both to try to get a feeling for what it was about. And my hot take is that there were some issues with the live action version, but generally it was fine. It had some strengths too. I didn’t think it was a horrible betrayal of the original, but I didn’t have a huge amount of attachment to the original.  The biggest issue is that there was a little bit of whitewashing, which was unfortunate, but they also increased diversity in other ways, which was good. I’m not saying that cancels it out. There were both good and bad things.  Chris: So this book series you’re talking about, Bunny, were these middle grade novels?  Bunny: I think they were even younger, so probably elementary school is when I would have been reading these. They were very short books and having the same basic plot. It was the sort of thing where if you’re a little girl like me and you like little things and fairies and you got all these fairies that have common little girl names, so you’re like, “Which one is my name?” And you go looking for your fairy and then you’re like, “I identify with Rachel and Kirsty and I like fairies”, so you read the rest.  Chris: But they were still mostly text, I take it.  Bunny: They had pictures in them, like drawings, but it was mostly text.  Chris: Sounds like Boxcar Children level.  Bunny: Yeah, I would compare it to The Boxcar Children just a bit better because it’s magical.  Chris: [Laughs] Boxcar Children had its own wish fulfillment of being in a boxcar, which would not normally be fun. But of course, I think that was the charm, is that it made it sound like your fun hideout where you get to be free of adults and everything’s just fine.  Oren: Everyone go live in the woods.  Bunny: I did read the first book of that series. It didn’t hook me the way the fairies did.  Oren: There are fairies, that does help a bit.  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: I suspect the fairies have a little bit more novelty than The Boxcar Children does.  Bunny: I have massive nostalgia for one Rainbow Magic book in particular, which was one of the special edition books, which were like slightly longer. So when I mentioned that Jack Frost stole the stand from a beach, that was this book. And he also stole all the seashells and all of the something else.  So what makes this book a special edition is that instead of stealing one thing per book, now he’s stolen three things in this book. And it’s not part of one of the theme series. It’s Joy the Summer Vacation Fairy.  Chris: Did the book ever tell you what Jack Frost was gonna do with that sand? [Laughs] Bunny: He built a castle out of it, and then studded the walls with the seashells? I don’t know.  Chris: [Laughs]  Bunny: He just kind of seems like he likes taking stuff.  Chris: That seems like an unusual thing for a Jack Frost character to want. Doesn’t he have an ice palace or something?  Bunny: He does have an ice palace. So I guess he just wants a summer getaway home.  Oren: The fairy thing helps give the books a burst of, “Oh, wow, that’s neat”. That was basically the same thing with me. I may have mentioned this previously at some point on the podcast before, I honestly can’t remember. I really struggled learning to read, partly because of my dyslexia.  So by the time I started at a school that actually knew how to teach me, I was pretty behind. And at the same time, everything I tried to read was really boring. I’m not sure how much of it was actually boring and how much I just had a bad attitude. It’s been a long time. The stuff I remember was “See Spot Run” level stuff. I had no interest in that. It’s possible that my teachers tried to show me more interesting stuff and I just wasn’t interested for whatever reason.  Bunny: It’s very tense, though. What if Spot trips?  Oren: Yeah, what if he does? What if he doesn’t run? What if you don’t see it?  Bunny: Where’s your God now?  Oren: Yeah.  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Oren: The way I remember it is that I basically just didn’t read until fourth grade because of a combination of difficulty and not feeling like there was anything worth reading. Then I was introduced to Catwings by Ursula K. Le Guin, an author who I would go on to have no disagreements with.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Oren: As the book suggests, is about cats with wings. And I was super into that because I already liked cats and these ones had wings and they flew around and had adventures.  Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: This was literally all I needed. There wasn’t really a super complicated plot, except in the second book where we introduced one of them with trauma, which was pretty dark. They still had to go on adventures and explore a forest and that was all great. That’s really all it was. And I would reread those books for years because those were the books that made me think that there was maybe something worth reading, that it wasn’t all really boring nonsense.  Bunny: You still have similar critiques of almost everything that you read. Has that changed?  Oren: [Laughs] Chris: This is another series that it’s really weird that I’ve never heard of because when I was young, I was really into the idea of cats with wings. Maybe my parents just only gave me like “serious” quote unquote, not actually serious literature. They’re still geeks.  Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Bunny: Serious cat book.  Chris: [Laughs]  Oren: I can’t explain Catwings. The books Bunny was talking about are a little bit after our time. They’re from 2003. They wouldn’t have been an option for us when we were first learning to read.  Chris: Oh man, that’s the year I graduated from high school.  Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Chris: A little too recent.  Bunny: Little baby Bunny.  Oren: I can’t explain Catwings because that one is not only really well known, it’s by Ursula K. Le Guin, who is one of the high profile prestige authors that people love to heap praise on and talk about how deep she is.  Bunny: Nobody talks about Catwings.  Oren: Catwings doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Everyone is all obsessed with Earthsea and The Dispossessed. I’m like, “What about my cats with wings?” And they’re like, “No, we need to walk away from Omelas again”. And I’d rather not.  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: What are you talking about with The Left Hand of Darkness? What about the left wing of the black cat?  Oren: One of them is a black cat. It’s very dark. That’s the one with the dark backstory.  Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Bunny: I think I read like a few of those books because again, I was a very cat obsessed little kid. I’ll get to the way that intersects with Rainbow Magic in a moment. All I remember from those books is cats with wings. They go to the big city. There’s a book with the black cat where he has his own adventure. That’s all I remember.  Oren: There aren’t actually that many of them. There’s only four. There’s like the first one where they have to leave the city for reasons. And then there’s the next one where they meet the next cat with wings. I was always confused where that other cat came from because as far as I could tell, it wasn’t one of their siblings.  Bunny: Oh, Jane on Her Own.  Oren: And then there’s one where they go back and meet their mom again, which I liked because I was always really sad that they had to leave because I’d anthropomorphized them something fierce. There’s four of them. I think the ones that I reread were mainly the first two, but I’m sure I reread the other ones as well.  Bunny: I think I would have gotten really into those because the funny thing is, when I set out to “copy”, quote unquote copy, legally distinct Rainbow Magic, see it was called Tree Line Magic, which is very different. And instead of having jewel fairies, it was just a jewel fairy and her name was Ruby and she was not a fairy. She was a cat fairy.  Oren: That’s different.  Bunny: That’s completely different. An anthropomorphic cat with wings. Posed the exact same way that the fairies in the Rainbow Magic series are. It’s just more misspelled.  Oren: The misspellings give it flavor.  Bunny: This is how you add novelty. Spell things ways nobody spelled things.  Oren: Put some apostrophes in there. You’ll be good to go.  Bunny: I remember there’s a few notable misspellings, but because I live in the Pacific Northwest, the story was also set there. And at one point they ride the “fery”, F-E-R-Y.  Oren: [Laughs] Bunny: They see some “ocas”. Oren: [Laughs] Bunny: The sentence was, “Suddenly, ocas apart”.  Oren: Which is of course a huge mistake because it should have been “the boat”.  Bunny: [Laughs] Oh no, shut up. [Laughs] Oren: Probably shouldn’t have brought up that in joke on the podcast that literally no one else will get, but it’s fine. We’re leaving it in there. Everyone can wonder what the heck I was talking about.  Bunny: [Laughs] We’re leaving it in.  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: Why were you so mad that you said “the boat”? How strange.  Bunny: It’s a mystery. Don’t ask.  Chris: We know Oren loves boats. How could he be angry at this?  Bunny: [Laughs]  Chris: How could this be out of place?  Bunny: Spooky.  Oren: Alright, Chris, we haven’t heard from you yet. What’s your deal?  Bunny: Was it cat related?  Chris: No! I didn’t read any books about cats. Isn’t that sad? Bunny: Ugh, loser. Oren: I don’t know if we can let you back into the club, Chris. Bunny: [Chuckles]  Chris: I just had a deprived childhood. If I’m going to talk about something that I still think of positively, which is a rare thing indeed, and I’m allowed to go back to picture books, I think it’s worth talking about Chris Van Allsburg.  Bunny: I don’t know if I’ve heard of that.  Chris: Okay, but you have, because he’s the one who wrote Jumanji, for one thing, and The Polar Express, which have both been made into movies and absolutely should not have been made into movies. [Laughs]  Bunny: Oh my god, The Polar Express. That movie.  Chris: Yes, that movie was absolutely terrible, but here’s the thing.  Bunny: So gummy.  Chris: The reason why it’s terrible is because all of Chris Van Allsburg’s books have very little in the way of content in them. They’re all based on not telling you anything, so it all feels extremely mysterious. One of his stories just has a series of illustrations with one sentence to make it mysterious. The Polar Express is just a wish fulfillment story about a kid going on a train and coming back. There’s no story there, which is why it doesn’t work as a movie.  Bunny: It’s also weirdly religious. I don’t know. I never understood that. You must believe in Lord Santa.  Oren: That’s a pretty common Christmas trope. I’ve never liked it, but it’s not uncommon.  Chris: I don’t remember it being a particularly religious book.  Bunny: Believing in Santa is the premise of a lot.  Chris: But Jumanji is the one where the game becomes real.  Oren: Admittedly, I liked that movie.  Bunny: What?  Chris: That movie’s better.  Oren: Yeah, I liked the Jumanji movie. It’s not great, right?  Bunny: No, it’s not the Jumanji movie. You liked it? You liked? Wow.  Oren: Yeah, I like things.  Chris: [Laughs] Oren likes things.  Oren: I actually like a lot of the things I critique.  Bunny: Careful, you’re going on record saying this.  Oren: The movie Jumanji is very silly, mostly a comedy. It’s got some serious moments that are a little bit, sure, this is happening now. But it’s mostly just a Robin Williams vehicle, and I don’t dislike it for that. I think that’s fine.  Chris: Well, he has one book where a kid falls asleep and sees the future, and it’s an environmental message. He sees everything has gone wrong with the environment and the future, and it inspires him to recycle and stuff like that. He has just a lot of very magical feeling books, and they even did one where they took one of his books and actually got a bunch of speculative fiction writers to write short stories based on some of the lines and pictures that he had. And he wasn’t so into it. I think the point is the mystery.  Bunny: That’s a good idea, though, for an anthology.  Chris: But anyway, his work is really well known, and it is speculative, and if you have not seen his books before, they’re definitely worth, next time you’re at a bookstore, pick some of them up.  Oren: Chris, was there a specific book that kind of ignited your desire to write your own stories? Because Bunny’s mentioned hers. I’ve got one that I haven’t brought up yet. I’m just curious if that happened with you, or if your desire to write happened some other way.  Bunny: Yeah, what legally distinct fanfic?  Chris: No, actually. My inspiration for writing was insomnia.  Oren: Yeah, that’ll do it.  Bunny: Oh, woah.  Chris: [Laughs] You have to do something when you’re laying in bed for hours every night as a child, wondering when this mysterious thing called sleep will come. I found writing by hand, because I didn’t start typing until I was 10, because that’s when home computers started to become popular. I didn’t want to write very much. I did it a little bit, but it was too tedious, because I would write down a sentence, and then as soon as it was down, I would just want to rewrite it, and it was all on physical paper, and it just got mangled very quickly, and I didn’t like it.  When I was 16, I was finally inspired to actually write something, and that’s when I finally became a lot more fluid at typing. Until then, I had avoided typing, because I found it tedious, too. But no, I did not write any child fanfiction, unfortunately.  Bunny: Wow.  Chris: Instead, in school, I wrote morbid stories about a vampire cat that killed its owner.  Bunny: Cat! Okay, good. You’re welcome back. Welcome back to the club. Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]  Bunny: I wrote down that entire Rainbow Magic thing on paper. My parents had kept it in our family vault, which is how significant of a document this is, and it’s really something else. Yeah, I also didn’t really type until I got older.  Oren: For me, I started typing as soon as that was an option, but that wasn’t until I was a little bit past the age when I started reading. And before then, I had story ideas, but they were mostly just, “Hey, mom and dad, what if this happened?” Usually based off of some kind of Star Trek episode we’d been watching.  I couldn’t really write by hand very well, because every problem that I had learning to read, it was way worse learning to write, so that was just not on the table. It was all they could do to get me to do my school assignments. I had to learn to type first, and that took a while.  Then the books that actually inspired me to try to write my first novel were the Animorphs books. Those were, of course, the big thing at that time, right? They came out exactly at the right time for me to read them, and were very much products of that exact moment in 1996.  And this was at the same time when we were doing this weird long-distance RV trip around the country that my mom had taken a sabbatical to do. So we were homeschooled that year, and I wanted to write this novel, and each chapter was also a geography lesson, because my mom needed a homeschool lesson. This was the only way she could get me to pay attention to geography, was if in each chapter the protagonists visit a new state and do something there.  Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Chris: That’s brilliant. I love it.  Bunny: That is very smart.  Oren: So it wasn’t a good story, but it was a good geography lesson.  Bunny: My dad would tell me Pascal and Princess stories, which are stories about these two little dogs and their owner, Peter. And the little dogs are small, white, and excitable, and they could jump as high as Peter’s knees. That was how the stories always started. And somewhat similar to the Rainbow Magic ones, this time it was gnomes. And the gnomes have stolen something, like, they’ve stolen all the baguettes in France. Oh no. Peter goes to “Special Red Phone” and calls up, “insert child property character I was into here”, so, The Magic School Bus, or Rudolph, and they will help track down the gnomes by going to various places and decoding riddles that my dad somehow came up with on the fly that were like rhyming. And then they would go find the gnomes, do a dance to put the gnomes to sleep, and then bring them back to Gnome Island, where they belong.  Oren: That’s pretty impressive to do on the fly. That’s some skills that most gamemasters would be pretty jealous of.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Bunny: I need you to run the Peter, the Dogs, and the Gnomes campaign.  Oren: I once had a session with a fairy character who spoke in rhyme, and I have never spent longer preparing for a session than that one.  Chris: Oh my gosh.  Oren: I wrote every single question I could imagine the players would ask her, and I wrote a rhyming answer for it.  Bunny: Wow.  Oren: And then I had a reason why she would have to leave the scene if I couldn’t think of a rhyme.  Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Oren: And I had a rhyme that was basically, “Stop asking me questions”, rhyme.  Chris: Did it work out when you ran it?  Oren: Yeah, it worked fine. I think the players were just so confused by what was happening that they didn’t push too hard.  Chris: Wow.  Oren: That session worked out pretty well.  Chris: That sounds brutal. I would never attempt that.  Bunny: That’s dedication.  Oren: I haven’t tried since, so you’re not wrong. Chris, Oren: [Laugh]  Bunny: That’s like you’re running a marathon.  Oren: That was like college free time level GM prep. I don’t do that anymore.  Bunny: You had free time in college? Man.  Chris: Somehow people in college manage to do an awful lot of GMing and roleplaying.  Bunny: [Chuckles]  Chris: We assume you must. I don’t know, or just all the energy.  Bunny: Oh yeah.  Chris: Maybe you don’t sleep. There’s another possibility.  Bunny: That’s true of many of my friends, yes.  Oren: Let me put it this way. I had more free time in college than I had either in high school or after college. I also realized that I went through phases. I would get excited to write, I would try, I would stop and burn out, and then I wouldn’t for two years. And this happened several times in between the ages of 12 and 18.  It was actually video games that got me more into writing than books did. Animorphs was the first time, but after that it was video games. And I think the reason is just that I felt more connected to the characters in the video games than I did in characters in books, because that’s the main advantage of a video game is you get to actually control your character so you feel more immersed.  My most serious attempt was after I’d been playing a really long Escape Velocity playthrough, which is a little space game where you control a single ship. I got through it, almost the whole game, in the same ship that I really liked and I spent a lot of time customizing it and it was my favorite ship. And I just noticed at the end of the playthrough, I clicked on its stats and I noticed that it had a crew of two? Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]   Oren: And so that meant there was some guy who’d been hanging out for this entire playthrough as I did stuff like become a alien god and awaken my psychic powers and then decided to stop doing that because it was evil. And he’d apparently just stuck around the whole time. Bunny: [Chuckles] Oren: And he’s not in any of the dialogue or anything. So I was like, “Who is this guy? What was his deal like?” That was the impetus for my first really serious attempt at a novel. Not that that went anywhere, but it was an attempt.  Bunny: That’s cool. That’s a good premise. Who is that random guy?  Oren: Generic space opera and the search for that one guy.  Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle] Bunny: I’d read it. I’d read it. Any other notable influences y’all would like to do a speed round?  Oren: Chris, you haven’t talked as much. It’s your turn to do one.  Chris: When I think back at the novels that stick out in my mind as the novels that were important to me, unfortunately, it’s the Belgariad.  Oren: Yeah! [Laughs] Chris: And I read 12 of them. Because you have two series, a series of five and then a follow up series of five and then you have some standalone books about some of the immortal characters. I quit sometime in high school and I was done partly because they’re just so racist and sexist and I even read some more series by David and Leigh Eddings. And again, the more books I read by them, the more I noticed how extremely problematic they were. They had one book where the protagonists forced the trolls to have less babies so they would eventually go extinct.  Bunny: Wow. Eugenics! Oh boy!  Chris: You have no idea. The Belgariad, one of its distinguishing features, all these countries in the fantasy world that are defined by a single trait. There’s the extreme greedy money country and the knight country where everybody believes in chivalry and unfortunately some of them, again, are really racist. We have all of these bad guy countries where some of them are devious and others are stupid.  Oren: They’re all racist, but some of them are more virulent than others.  Chris: Some of them are really bad.  Bunny: Oof.  Chris: One of the bad races, they decided to try to make them sexy by justifying why they had women on collars and leashes.  Bunny: Eww!  Chris: They’re secretly empowered!  Bunny: Great.  Chris: Yeah, I was a sucker for farm boy chosen one books.  Oren: Because it’s so surprising and a twist that a farm boy could be the hero. You wouldn’t expect that.  Chris: I could identify with the farm boys and then being chosen, it got so much wish fulfillment. And that’s what hooked me.  Bunny: That’s why you’re the queen of the realm now.  Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]  Oren: No, I had a similar experience with Wheel of Time because Wheel of Time was my first high fantasy book. Also the first time I realized that high fantasy really existed, that you could have a story about like swords and magic and stuff. Because before then I had mostly read sci-fi or low modern fantasy stuff. For me that was amazing and it also had the farm boy chosen one thing. Because wow, this random guy Rand? Name even sounds random. Is the special chosen one?  Now the beauty of Wheel of Time is that series went on for so long that I got old enough to realize that it was problematic. By the time I got to the last book that existed at the time, which was I think book 9. That was when I stopped. And then all of the angry Wheel of Time fan ragers were like, “How dare you stop at book 9 and still think you can talk about the series? You’re the worst”.  Bunny, Chris: [Laugh] Chris: Yeah, I read Wheel of Time around the same period, my farm boy phase, and I didn’t finish it because it just got too depressing. I knew it was real sexist, but I was still hooked for a while.  Oren: I tried to reread it and I got to book 4 and I was like, “All right, surely the slog will end soon”. And I looked at the forums and oh, the slog hasn’t started yet.  Bunny: [Chuckles] That’s telling.  Oren: Alright, we’re almost out of time. Bunny, give us one last one.  Bunny: Warrior Cats. Just Warrior cats. I had so much Warrior Cats. Continuing with the theme of my cat obsession as a kid. I got big into cats in late elementary school and early middle school. All of my friends were into Warrior Cats. I was into Warrior Cats. I was River Clan, of course. We all had different cat personas and we’d run around scratching each other on the playground.  Oren: As one does.  Chris: [Laughs] Of course you did.  Bunny: [Laughs] I have a terrible habit of biting my nails. I was always the weakest when it came to scratching, but I made up for it by hissing and yowling and confusing the playground monitors.  And that was the source of my second manuscript, another fanfic that didn’t want to be a fanfic. It was a mess. It was incredible as the main characters are Fallen Leaf and Tree Bark, which are very compelling names. Their mother was a powerful fighter, not a warrior. She was a fighter. There’s evil wolves who are coming after them. And there’s a tribe, not a clan, a tribe up in the mountains that is getting threatened by a cougar and the cougar is somehow their dad because I wanted an “I am your father” moment, despite never having seen Star Wars at that point. And then actually Fallen Leaf, who’s definitely not my self insert, is a reincarnation of an ancient other cat fighter named Blood Rose, which matters somehow. It was all over the place.  One funny thing about this manuscript that I’ll never forget is just, I was like, “How would cats measure things?” They wouldn’t measure things in feet. They would measure them in “robin lengths”.  Oren: Obviously.  Chris, Oren: [Laugh] Bunny: That’s intuitive. [Laughs] More intuitive than the standard system.  Oren: All right. I think that is going to be all the time we have.  Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants.  Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First we have Callie MacLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have 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 and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

In this podcast, the hosts delve into the differences and similarities between literary fiction and speculative fiction. They discuss the importance of plot, wordcraft, and deep characters in literary fiction, and the lessons that spec fic writers can learn from it. The hosts also touch on some juicy author drama, including the Ishiguro-Le Guin controversy. They explore the significance of world building, character development, and satisfying payoffs in literary works. Additionally, they examine the blurred boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, discussing works like Piranesi and the definition of magical realism. Overall, they emphasize the importance of creating quality literature and challenge the notion of intentional weakness in storytelling.

There’s just something about them. Maybe it’s the way they make jokes at just the right time, or maybe it’s the way they lift up your chin with the tip of a sword. They can’t just be a normal character after doing stuff like that – they have to be a love interest! That’s our topic for today: what makes a love interest tick, how to make them desirable without being exploitative, and, obviously, who the best love interests are.Show Notes Halle Berry’s Catwoman  Archetypes for Love Interests Agency The Spanish Love Deception  The Name of the Wind  Picard-Crusher Romance  Bashir and Ezri Isaac and Nigel Suletta and Miorine  Lucy and Lockwood Thorn and BoneTranscript Generously transcribed by Mbali Mathebula. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [intro music] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Oren: Oren. Chris: And we have a special guest, Bunny, here. Bunny: Hello! Chris: So, we’ve recently encountered another podcast. The tone is a little on the dark and broody side, but the voices sound really smooth. And of course, this podcast showed up last minute to dashingly fight off a bunch of regressive fan rangers. We’ll see where it goes. We’re only exchanging a few links now. It’s much too early to invite any of the hosts over as guests. We don’t wanna scare them off. We have to play it cool. This is what happens when joking about our hosts would be inappropriate. Oren: We have to personify the entire podcast, because that’s a little less weird. Chris: A little. Slightly. Oren: Moderately less weird. That’s a good tagline for us. Moderately less weird. Bunny: I’m trying to think of a podcast-related pickup line. Oren: Hey baby, you record here often? Bunny: Man, you have the audacity, don’t you? Oren: Ah! Oh, that’s good. That’s a good one. Put that down in the book. Bunny: I’m gonna take that to the bars. Chris: So, this time we are talking about love interests. So first of all, what is a love interest? Oren: Who is love interest? Do they have sandwich discourse? Chris: No, Oren. No love interest sandwiches. Bunny: Only tacos. Chris: Or is a taco a sandwich? Bunny: No. Not go there, probably. Chris: Okay, I’ll just say any character, the main character in particular, is on some kind of romance arc with. Or even just a potential slight hint. That there could be a romance arc, even if it doesn’t really go anywhere. Usually, they are counted as love interests. Bunny: I have a question. Somebody they’re already dating at the beginning of the story—does that count as a love interest? Chris: Not unless there’s an arc, I would say. Bunny: Okay. Oren: If someone is already in a committed relationship of some kind and that relationship is not a part of the dramatic conflict of the story in some way. Chris: If they’re just stable and happily together. Oren: Probably wouldn’t describe that as a love interest. Chris: But if they get in a fight in the beginning and they have issues to resolve. Bunny: Then they become a love interest? Chris: Yeah, then you would probably be more likely to call them a love interest at that point. And of course, you can give secondary characters love interests, it’s just when we say, “the love interest,” it’s almost always the love interest for the main character. And often there’s exactly one, but you can have as many as you want to. Oren: Maybe not as many as you want. Some of my clients want a lot. Bunny: And then I dated the whole kingdom. Chris: Too many characters. Oren: Yeah, but this is a question of too many characters. All the characters can be love interests if you’re devoted enough. It’s just a matter of how many your story has room for. Chris: So first, do you need a love interest in your story? No. Some writers definitely feel pressure to include romance. Bunny: Louder for those in the back. Chris: And feel like they have to have one. But only write one if you actually want to. Do not write romance unless you’re actually interested in romance. People will still love your story without it. And I have yet to hear anybody tell of a situation in which they didn’t put romance in their story, and then they submitted it to a publisher and an agent, and that person insisted they had to put it in. I have never heard that happening. So, obviously, there can be a lot of pressure since romance is popular and it can get worked shared online, and definitely feel like everybody else is doing it. So, we have to, but I would definitely say don’t sweat it. If unless this is something that you feel like doing. Oren: If nothing else, if you hate writing this romance, other people are probably not going to enjoy reading it. I suppose there are exceptions out there. There might be writers out there who can write really good storylines that they absolutely hated writing. But I don’t think that applies to most of us. Chris: I think the lack of energy in a romance the writer doesn’t actually want to write really shows. And readers can still get invested in it, but ultimately, they’ll probably be disappointed. Bunny: I think that the sort of publisher mandated romance element, I feel like that wouldn’t happen so much in publishing as it would in cinema and Hollywood because, man, do a lot of those romances feel unnecessary. I’m not in the writer’s room. I don’t know if this is the case, but it does often feel like someone was in there and they were like, but what if the woman character had a boyfriend? Oren: Or these two characters are on screen a lot together, and they are of different genders, so they should probably kiss. That certainly, at least, is the impression one gets from watching some of these movies. Chris: Yeah, that’s a too many cooks in the kitchen issue. Probably were. We’re not necessarily on board. Their lack of coordination about this, and somebody could easily mandate that if we’re talking about a big-budget production with a lot of people involved in it. Oren: Yeah, and I’ve encountered an occasional novel that has something like that where suddenly it’s, oh yeah, I guess those two are dating now. But I generally think that is more of an execution issue. At least from when I see the writers talk about those romances, in cases where I can find examples. It’s more of a execution problem than a, the writer put this in when they didn’t want to. Just because by the time you get to that level, you’re not really making that kind of mistake. You’re not putting in a romance just because you think you have to if you’re actually getting your story published. Chris: I’ve definitely read published works that really felt like that, but certainly it’s going to be more likely in a manuscript. Oren: The one that comes to my mind that both it felt like a contractually mandated romance but also, I think the author was into it, is The Wheel of Time. Where Elayne and Rand have almost their entire romance off screen. But that wasn’t because Robert Jordan didn’t want to put a romance in. It was just because he’s not good at romance, and he just wanted Rand to have another hot lady. All of the dating takes place off-screen. Chris: Yeah, I feel like he probably was less interested in the romance itself and more interested in the wish fulfillment of having lots of hot ladies. And the logistics of the story and the sprawling, bloated series with people in different places meant that they weren’t in one place very much. Oren: That romance is very funny because they have one meeting in book one, and then two and a half books later, they meet again, and I’m supposed to believe that they’ve just been burning with passion for each other based off of this one meeting. And then they date off-screen and are basically together when the story starts. It’s amazing. Bunny: So compelling. Chris: How do you make love interests attractive to audiences? Anyone want to take a crack at this first? Oren: Alright, you just describe how they’re conventionally hot according to very traditional conventional hotness narratives. Bunny: They done have the boobage! Chris: Fruit boobs. Gotta be melons or cantaloupes. Bunny: Oh yeah, they have balloons! Oren: Maybe some kind of cheese metaphor; I’ve seen that, like a nice brie. I guess I would say that there is something to physical appearance, but I think you can be more creative than, yeah, than they were traditionally attractive. Cause A: that’s boring; people have seen that a lot, and it also can just feel exploitative if you’re focusing on things like cleavage, or other aspects of the body. So, you generally want to go with something that’s a little more interesting. That they like something about the romance interest’s face. Or something about the way their hair looks in the sunlight. That’s just more interesting, then. And then there were breasts. Chris: Or mannerisms. We can have distinctive mannerisms too. Bunny: Certainly, that’ll make them stand out as a love interest more. In terms of there being a lot of love interests that are just described vaguely as yeah, they’re hot. Then having one where it’s, sure, maybe they’re hot, but the thing that the main character notices is the way they gesture when they speak or something like that. Chris: Yeah, I don’t think physical attractiveness, conventional physical attractiveness hurts usually, but I’ve seen too many depictions where that’s really all there is. And especially in narratives where, all the ladies in the story are super-hot. At that point, a love interest who is also hot, she just seems like all the other hot ladies. Honestly, this happens a lot in visual works too, where you have all the actresses are super-hot, and then there’s supposed to be a plot point that this actress is magically hot, and she looks like all the other actresses. Bunny: Alternatively, she has her hair up in a bun. She’s ugly till that point. Oren: Extremely undateable. Can’t even. Chris: They do that thing where they style the hair to look frizzy, just to emphasize how unattractive she clearly is because her hair is frizzy. Bunny: It reminds me of Halle Berry in Catwoman. They tried to put her in massive sweaters. She’s Halle Berry. She’s hot. Oren: At this point, it’s so common that it’s almost more funny than annoying, where it’s like, here, this lady, she’s not attractive as, huh. Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. I definitely agree that she’s not attractive yet. Wink. Chris has a whole six archetypes for love interest’s thing. Generally. You just want to make them stand out in some way. You want them to be cool, and that can be, traditionally they can be slick and badass. That’s one way to do it. They can be kind and caring. The kind of qualities that the reader would want in a partner. Chris: I do think that people generally like competence in a love interest. It’s less likely. With cishet men, just because there’s so much of that traditional rescue the lady stuff going on, but in general, even that is changing, in a lot of female love interests for male characters still are showing a lot of competence. And I don’t think it’s entirely just to cater to a female audience. So that one, I think we see a lot, and the risk there, of course, is having it so the love interest starts to overshadow the main character too much. Oren: So, I think what you’re telling me is the solution is to have the opening scene where the love interest shows up and is a super badass, so we can be like, ooh, she’s cool. And then she gets captured, and all of her badassness is just not there anymore. That’s what you’re telling me to do, right? Chris: No. Oh man, yeah. If you have a situation in which a man to rescue the woman, you just also have to find things that she does that make a difference even though he’s rescuing her. It’s not that you can’t have men rescuing women; it’s that you want her to also have agency, not just him. Oren: Agency is of course, the magic word here. Chris: So, she’s got her own role to play. She’s the diplomat doing the important negotiations, and he’s her bodyguard, for instance, would be one way to do that, as long as she makes a difference to the story and has a role of central importance. And of course, it matters what kind of conflict your story has. If your story relies entirely on action conflicts to steer the course and he’s the action hero and she’s not, that’s going to be a problem. But if it has a lot of political intrigue and then there’s some action on the side, then you could definitely have a main character who’s a diplomat and then have a love interest who does the fighting parts. Bunny: And certainly, one way to make your love interest stand out is to give them a skill set that nobody else in the cast has. Maybe it isn’t an action-type shooty-punchy thing, but this character is the one who knows how to build explosives, or something like that. Oren: Nothing more romantic than C4 on the first date. Chris: I think chemistry is pretty important. I would say it’s especially important in visual media. Bunny: Yeah, Chris, that’s what the C4 is. Chris: I think one of the issues with chemistry is that people want to go from enemies to lovers or hate to love, and their antagonistic chemistry is too antagonistic. Oren: Yeah, I was trying to think earlier: what is chemistry in this context between two characters? And I think it’s interactions that are interesting. And they can be sweet and wholesome interactions; those can produce chemistry, but often argumentative and adversarial relationships are also chemistry because they’re like, ooh, that’s fun to watch. That makes us interested in these characters, even if they, in theory, don’t like each other. But it’s easy to take that way too far and be like, now it’s just not believable, because they seem to hate each other too much for that to ever go away. Chris: Yeah, we wanted the more level of teasing or banter. If you want them to be a little more antagonistic, competition works great. Have them compete with each other for something; that usually creates a lot of tension, that makes good chemistry between them. Because if they have to fight for personal reasons, that’s when it’s more likely to just become too much, right? As opposed to them having just opposing goals or interests, that’s much easier to pull off. Oren: Yeah, and putting the characters in competition also really helps make sure that the romance is part of the story instead of a thing that you occasionally do when you’re taking breaks from the story. Because that’s a big problem, in manuscripts in particular, is the plot will be going, and then suddenly the plot will just grind to a halt, and we’ll go see our romantic interest, who isn’t involved in the plot in any way, and then suddenly the plot will lurch back into motion once we’re done with that scene. And that’s not ideal; you generally don’t want that. Bunny: I feel like in that, it’s useful to take some pages from actual romance novels books, because the plots are the romance in that case, so you can have conflict-filled scenarios that your characters can find themselves in, where the romance and the conflict are one and the same. There are common tropes that people just actually look for books on them, like fake dating, that’s one of them, fake dating turns into real dating. Oren: I do love that trope; I have to admit, I am a big fan. Chris: I’m also a big fan of fake dating. Bunny: It’s a good one. You might like, my roommate just read The Spanish Love Deception, which apparently does that very well. And then there’s Forced Proximity, which is another popular one, which is the, oh no, there’s only one bed and there’s a snowstorm outside. Only one bed. What do we do? But of course, then the challenge is making these feel fresh, which I think you can just do through character specificity, so like, why is it interesting for these particular characters to be in this particular scenario? Even if it is, we’ve seen that there’s only one bad thing a couple times. But now it’s these characters, and that makes it their particular interactions. Oren: And you’ll find all kinds of discourse about tropes and whatever, but the basic rule is that if a trope is popular, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but it does mean it will be under more scrutiny. So, you’re gonna wanna put a little more effort into making it your own. And also making sure it’s credible. Cause the whole, if you say there’s only one bed, and it would be really easy to resolve that by going to the front desk and being like, can we get a room with two beds in it, please? People are going to notice that. Because that’s a very popular trope, and people are going to be looking at it more critically. One thing that I see authors often neglect, most commonly for a male hero in a heteromance, although it can theoretically happen in other places, is reciprocity. We do a lot of work making sure that the love interest is someone that the hero would want to be with, but that needs to go in reverse. The hero has to be someone that it is believable that the love interest would want to be with. And sometimes I just, I don’t know what it is. I’m not just talking about Name of the Wind, but I am talking about Name of the Wind. Chris: I see this a lot, and the good news is that it’s actually a opportunity to give your main character a little more candy. Oren: Everyone loves candy. Chris: Everyone loves candy! So, that’s usually… In my opinion, the solution is, look, what’s special about your main character? Give them something cool that the love interest can be interested in. Bunny: Not just biceps with a scar on them. Chris: But often something where maybe other people don’t understand the love interest. And you wanna establish, in that case, a specific thing they don’t understand and show it in action. That’s a mistake if you just say, oh, nobody understands me, but you do. And you don’t actually show that happening. That’s going to feel pretty contrived. And then you’d wanna set up something about the love interest. That people don’t understand, and then you’d wanna show a few interactions between the love interest and then the person where the love interest has to correct them and or explain themselves a lot, and then show that they just don’t have to do that with your hero for instance. Oren: Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. Chris: Yeah. At the end of the day, people have a lot of different tastes, obviously. But what we find is that if you show how the two people are good for each other, even if somebody’s not into romance, that just helps them get on board with the value of the relationship and make it a little more compelling to them, even if that’s just not their type. Bunny: You have to be able to understand it. Oren: Another thing that is important for love interests, especially if this is going to be a love story that you want to draw out for a while, is why are they not together? What is stopping them from getting together? And I see this problem a lot in unpublished manuscripts. And the only one I can think of in real life off the top of my head is actually Crusher and Picard in TNG. Because other than maybe they should be afraid. Chris: They should be afraid. Oren: I have no idea why they’re not dating. I don’t get it. None of the arguments that they list make any sense. Chris: And to just be clear, that is a reference to the end of a romance episode they had. Where they get psychically linked. By some technology, of course, and then they, as a result of their psychic link, it starts to unearth their feelings for each other, and then they start talking about it, and then the episode ends with them basically going on a date. They’re all dressed up in these fancy clothes and getting together in private —in one of their quarters —for a really romantic scene, and Picard tells Crusher, you know, I was thinking we shouldn’t be afraid to express our feelings, and… Crusher is just like, no, we should be, and then leaves. That’s how the episode ends. And I was just like. What? What is this? Oren: It’s so weird watching the end of Next Generation, where they were allergic to love interests. They could maybe mention that maybe Troi and Worf we’re thinking about it a little, but then some dialogue suggests maybe that’s not gonna happen after all. And then you skip forward to Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and it’s like they can’t pair up the characters fast enough at the end. Bashir and Ezri are dating now. Chris: Talking about forced romances. Those two have their entire romance talking to other people about their romance. Oren: And also, Chakotay and Seven are dating now. It’s like we just have to pair off everyone immediately. Bunny: I think that is something that TV shows do suffer from is they can’t end the show single or something’s gone wrong. Oren: Yeah, in Voyager, it was particularly funny because I don’t even think that it was an issue of needing to pair everyone up. I honestly think it was they could not think of anything else for Chakotay to do in the finale, and they were just desperately trying to find some material for him. Chris: That’s how badly they had neglected his character. Oren: Because the writers have never liked Chakotay, and they have nothing to do with him. Because they abandoned his character halfway through season two. So, that was all they had. It’s like, I guess he could be dating Seven? Why not? Chris: One of the three characters they actually liked. Oren: Yeah. Chris: By the end. Oren: Seven was never gonna be with Janeway or the Doctor. Which were the two characters audiences actually shipped her with. It might as well be Chakotay; why not? Chris: So, any other good love interests? bad and love interests? Bunny: I think this is why I asked that question at the beginning; it’s because one of my favourite love interest question marks is Waymond from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. I love Waymond. He is such a cinnamon roll. Chris: Oh yeah, he’s great. Bunny: Yeah, and I think Everything, Everywhere, All at Once does a good job. They’re already together, but they have problems. So, it’s still interesting to watch them work on their relationship. Especially with the different versions of Waymond and the main character having to navigate both that and regret about her past and how he factors into that. I think Waymond’s a great character. Oren: Everyone does love Waymond. He’s fantastic. I’m super excited for him to be in season two of American Born Chinese. It’s not technically the same character, but in my heart, I believe it’s the same person. Bunny: We’ll take any Waymond we can get. Chris: Yeah, definitely. The characters are very different, so we can see how they might complement each other type situation. One of my favourites right now since we’re watching Ghosts, the American version. So this is a sitcom with a bunch of ghosts in a mansion. So, the character of Nigel, Isaac’s love interest, and I just think that they work really well together. For one thing, they are both soldiers in the Revolutionary War, but Nigel was fighting for Britain and Isaac was fighting for the Yankees, obviously, but they’ve been ghosts in the same property for hundreds of years, and so that old history is faded, but it’s still present to create some level of tension and to give them obstacles to overcome and they initially get together, and then later it erupts again when they realize they’re basically two enthusiastic fans for opposing teams. Oren: Yeah, it gives them a lot of drama to come back to, and it doesn’t feel forced because it’s the sort of thing you can believe that they would sit on for a little while, and then it would build up until they can’t hold it back anymore. Chris: Another thing that I think works really well is, again, because they’re from the same time period, even though they’re on opposing sides, in this context, we have ghosts from people who’ve died over the period of a thousand years. And so the fact that they come from the same time period also means that they understand each other’s social mannerisms and they have the same social conventions, which clearly gives them something in common that’s really important. But something that’s different, again, creates tension is that Nigel has more experience with a relationship than Isaac does because Isaac was in the closet his entire life. And Nigel starts to get impatient at how slow Isaac is moving because this is very new territory for Isaac. Again, gives them something that we can understand both of their sides, and it creates some reasonable conflict in their relationship, but they still have a lot in common. I like those in particular. Oren: My current favourite love interest, if anything that I’ve watched or read recently, is Miorine from The Witch from Mercury. And she and the protagonist, Suletta, just have big opposites attract energy because Suletta is the cinnamon roll, whereas Miorine is like the ruthless business leader, and they’re great together. They do the fake dating becomes real dating thing because some weird engagement rules that would take a million years to explain, but it’s very cute at the end of the show spoilers for season two, if anyone hasn’t seen it, but at the end they get married. And at first, I was a little annoyed because I was like, they never kissed! That was weird. And then I thought about it, and I was like, nobody in this story kisses. Not even the hetero couple’s kiss. This is just not a kissing anime. It ended up working just fine. But they just have sparks; they disagree on some things, and they support each other. They grow tomatoes together, which is very cute. And I didn’t expect tomatoes to be the symbol of love, but here we are. Bunny: They’re red like hearts. Oren: They are, and they are very charismatic tomatoes, the way they’re animated. I’m guessing that probably wasn’t cheap. Chris: I think a good one from comparison, before we go, is book Lockwood versus show Lockwood. Oren: Oh my gosh. Chris: This is, again, this show; it’s on Netflix, Lockwood and Co., and so it’s got one season, which is equivalent to the first two books in a five-book series. It covers basically the same plot points, and the writers did a fantastic job of faithfully adapting the books, but at the same time making lots of little improvements that really make a big difference. And so, my experience of reading the books afterwards was surprisingly frustrating just because those little things bug you and you’ve seen them fixed. And it’s hard to deal with the unfixed version. But in the books, you can tell that the writer, who is a man, again, even though the main character is a young woman, that he likes Lockwood better. And he’s more attached to Lockwood than to Lucy. And as a result, he’s giving Lockwood too much candy. I’ve definitely seen worse. It’s not like Lockwood gets all of the agency and Lucy doesn’t get any. Lucy gets agency. I would turn down the Lockwood agency a little bit, but again, I’ve seen much worse. But he just seems like a flawless character, and again, Lucy has a big crush on him, and so he needs to be attractive enough for her to have a crush, but it’s a little bit too much. It feels like she doesn’t really like him because her idea of him isn’t the real him. Oren: It definitely feels like she’s… put him up on a pedestal, and then it turns out that he actually just was that thing she put up on a pedestal the whole time. Which is just not that satisfying. It feels like she should have gotten at least a little bit of a let-down when she builds him up that high. Chris: So for show Lockwood, they just took a weakness he actually has in the books but then made it more present. And then they made it so that Lucy got fed up with him over that. Which is that he’s too reckless, and so that created a little antagonism, but they also created the romance a little earlier and made it feel a little more mutual early on, which I do think that in film really helps with the chemistry. I think the viewpoint character long after their crush actually works better in novels than it does. Oren: Because we can’t hear the protagonist’s narration in film, usually. Hopefully. Chris: We’re not in their head, and it really helps to see the actors play up their mutual attraction. I think that, again, bringing in his flaw that was already in the book and then actually showing her getting fed up with him sometimes really made it work a lot better. Oren: Bunny, you need to tell us one you don’t like. Bunny: Oh, one I don’t like. Oh, I’m sure there are many. The problem is I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction recently. Don’t come after me. One that I found a little strange, this is in the Bone graphic novel, the romance between the main character and Thorn, just because it’s one of those that feels… one-sided in the opposite direction of how it normally is, which is that the main character longs after Thorn. And sometimes it seems reciprocated, and most of the time it doesn’t. I’m not quite sure what to make of that. Oren: Aw man, it’s been forever since I’ve read Bone. I barely remember this character. Bunny: She’s one of the main characters, so the protagonist is Fone Bone. And then Thorn is basically the princess who’s been kept out of the public eye because of history that happened, and everything got overthrown by the rat creatures and she doesn’t know she’s a princess and she’s been kept in hiding, and then her powers start manifesting and stuff like that. She’s the granddaughter of Grandma Thorn, who is one of my favourite characters ever. Oren: Yeah, I can’t help but notice that in this story, this is one of those ones where the protagonist is a anthropomorphic shape, whereas the love interest is a conventionally hot lady. Bunny: Yeah, no, we don’t have any female Bone creatures, and I think they didn’t lean further into the romance just because that would be very strange. The Bone creatures are just these silly-looking little creatures, and they don’t really wear clothes, and… It would just be confusing to actually pair them up, but at the same time, they still have Fone Bone have this crush on her, so it’s just a bit strange all around. Oren: Where is that even going? Bunny: Yeah, and it doesn’t really go anywhere. He’s infatuated with her, and then, I guess, he settles into a, I don’t know, an appreciation of her? Which, that’s better than a lot of stories with this premise go. It’s an infatuated character who doesn’t become obsessed by the end of it. Oren: I long for a deep appreciation of you. Alright, with that, I think we’re going to have to close out this podcast. Will we ever get together with that other podcast we mentioned, who is definitely real and lives in Canada? Who knows? We’ll find out next time, maybe. Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. Just go to Patreon.com slash Mythcreants. Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, the professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

The Mythcreant Podcast discusses interactive fiction and the importance of choice in storytelling. They touch on topics like the Chooseco lawsuit, Mass Effect's ending, and character development in interactive games. The hosts also explore balancing player identification and characterization, as well as limitations in interactive narratives.

Many aspiring storytellers rightly expect to learn about their craft in school, be it K-12 or higher education, but there’s a problem: Schools aren’t very good at teaching how to tell stories. At least, not usually. This week, a special guest joins us so we can talk about what we actually learned about fiction in school, if we learned anything at all beyond the universal truth that reading a book means you deserve some pizza.Show Notes Once Upon a Trope   Ryan George: If Cats Had a Podcast  Zeugma  Cathedral  Iowa Writers Workshop Model  A Complete Guide to Beta Reading  Should Writers be Silent?  Magical Realism  The Charterhouse of Parma  Tech Bro Invents Hanging OutTranscript Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. And as a heads up, you’ve got just one more day to get our feedback on a thousand words as part of our 10 year celebration. So if you haven’t yet, go to patreon.com/mythcreants and sign up for that $10 or Pegasus tier. Oren: And speaking of celebrating, I would like to introduce our special guest, Bunny. Bunny: Woohoo! Who’s this? Oren: A new challenger! Bunny: Is that a boing boing I hear? Wow, it must be a bunny coming around the corner. God, that was awful. Oren: That’s the sound that bunnies make. It’s just science. Bunny: I see, you know, Bugs Bunny. Oren: And you may have seen Bunny’s work on the site. She does our excellent comic illustrations and has also done a few posts for us and has in general just been part of Mythcreants for quite some time now. And we appreciate having her in general. And she was kind enough to come onto the podcast to guest a few episodes with us. Bunny: Well, thank you. I’m happy to be here. I’ve been listening to the podcast for as long as I’ve been helping out with Mythcreants and probably longer because I was a commenter before that. So it’s exciting to finally ascend to the throne of actually podcasting. Oren: Yeah, this is the magic of podcasting. Just chat about various things. Bunny: I love things. Oren: People like things. We could do an offline podcast like that one tech bro got made fun of for suggesting, which was just hanging out. Bunny: Copyright, trademark! Oren: It’s like, what if you did a podcast, but there were no microphones and no one was recording? It’s like, that’s just called having a conversation with a guy. Bunny: And if you do it in front of people, it’s called a panel. Oren: I guess a TED Talk at that point. Chris: We did a panel once and audience members told us they could tell that we had a podcast. Bunny: I guess I’d take that as a compliment. Chris: I think it was. I think it meant that we blended our conversation together fairly naturally because we were used to all chiming in and then letting somebody else into the conversation and trading off and they could tell that we had that podcast camaraderie. Oren: Although we don’t say 100% or people don’t realize that much. We’re letting Ryan George down on his excellent podcast skits. I feel like we’re not living up to expectations. Chris: 100%. Oren: People don’t realize. Today, the topic is, school is now in session. We’re going to do writing school. And I’d say no sci-fi or fantasy. But surely that’s just a stereotype of creative writing programs in schools. Or is it? Bunny: Dun dun dun! [sarcastic] They never say that! Oren: Because we have people with various experiences in learning storytelling in school. Bunny is a little closer to it right now than either Chris or myself. So we figured this would be a good topic now that she’s here to guest with us. Bunny, why don’t you start? Tell us what kind of storytelling instruction you’ve gotten at your educational abode. Bunny: So I’m currently in college. So I’m going through it at the moment. And since I am majoring in creative writing, I’ve taken a few creative writing classes. And I don’t remember, going back all the way to elementary school, if there was any instruction then. I highly doubt it. Mostly I was writing Warrior Cats fanfic then. So maybe that counts as instruction. Nobody saw it. Oren: That’s self-taught is what that is. Bunny: Yeah, I guess I was self-taught. And then I got to high school. Through my high school, which is a public high school, I had exactly one opportunity to write anything fictional. Exactly one. I wrote some weird Greek myth thing, and then I didn’t get feedback on it. I also had to write it with two other people, which was a bit of a mess. And I think I might have been that group member who took over because I was sort of the only person who’d written anything like that before. That’s not like I knew what I was doing. Again, still writing Warrior Cats fanfic. Other than that, the high school proper program itself, we learned literature, we learned rhetoric, and pretty much just stuff that would help us do well on the SAT or the AP test. One of which, let me just say something about AP. AP is a lie. It’s like, “you can get college credit through this class.” No you can’t. No you can’t. Chris: I will have to admit, Bunny, it worked for me. Bunny: Okay, not all colleges take it. Chris: Yeah, I had an issue where I had two English AP tests, and yet I was required to still take English 101 at one of the schools I went to. I went to three different colleges. So they didn’t fulfill a requirement, but I actually was able to cash out that credit. But again, the school has to support it, right? If they sell you on it as a universal thing, and then you go to school and the school’s like “no,” that’s what you got. Bunny: Then you’re the first person I’ve heard who’s been able to put AP credits to use. Chris: Maybe it’s changed, because I went to college 20 years ago. Bunny: Took three different AP classes, did pretty well in all of them, and was able to use none of them. What a waste. Yeah, another part of that waste is just that I didn’t get to learn anything creative because we were studying what a zeugma was. Chris: A zeugma? Oren: What is a zeugma? Bunny: It’s a figure of speech in which a word applies in two different senses. Chris: So a pun? Bunny: Kind of? Apparently there’s a Zeugma Grill. Oren: Maybe that’s a place where food means more than one thing. I don’t know.  Chris: So the one thing that you learned about didn’t stick. Bunny: I’m sorry, Miss Story. I’m sorry. I know the word, though. It’s a cool word. Oren: According to Merriam-Webster, because we obviously have to solve this mystery right now, it specifically refers to a word that governs two or more things. And the example it gives is, “opened the door and her heart to the homeless boy.” Opened, in this case, is a zeugma and refers to both the door and her heart. That is apparently what it means, according to Merriam-Webster. And frankly, I’m just going to take that definition to the end of my days because the rest of this is too confusing. Bunny: I remember we had little tests where we had to come up with one. I have no idea what I wrote for those. The only opportunity to be creative was coming up with zeugmas. I don’t know if my high school even offered creative writing classes, period, full stop. But there was a community college nearby that, high schoolers could take classes at this community college, and they did offer a couple of different creative writing classes. So I was like, oh, that sounds good. I’ll take these. And they were terrible. Unfortunately, I must reveal that the stereotype of being not allowed to write anything sci-fi or fantasy was fulfilled by the first of these classes that I took. I think I took three classes and two of them let me write whatever I wanted. But that first one was like, no sci-fi or fantasy because literary magazines don’t accept it. That was their excuse, that they don’t accept quote unquote genre fiction. Chris: There’s always a very bad excuse. Bunny: These classes, okay, so they were mostly for adults who were taking community college classes on the side, but they were also just general creative writing classes. They weren’t classes on literary writing or nonfiction writing. They were just creative writing 101s, essentially. I don’t know what they were on about. I remember going into my teacher’s office and getting frustrated to tears over this, which is a stupid thing to have a breakdown over, but still frustrating. Also, I need to make a special mention to a short story that we had to read in every single creative writing class through that college, which is Cathedral by Raymond Carver. Have either of you read it? Chris: No. Oren: I’ve never heard of this story. Bunny: Oh my god. This story pursues me. Basically, the premise is a blind man, who’s the pen pal of the protagonist’s wife, comes to the protagonist’s house. The protagonist acts really weird towards him. The wife falls asleep. The blind man and the protagonist are watching/listening to the TV together. And then the TV is talking about cathedrals and the blind man asks the guy to describe a cathedral and he can’t. So then he draws one and the blind man holds his hand while he does it. So he gets a sense of what it looks like. I’m also haunted by the description of the wife having juicy thighs. Chris: Eugh. Bunny: That stood out. Chris: [sarcastic] That was necessary. I’m sure that was a very important part of this story. Bunny: Absolutely critical. The husband’s a weird jealous dude and I don’t know why we read this particular story so many times. Like, surely you have one other short story that we can read. That was the staple of my high school experience. And then when I got to actual college, where I am now, things are… they’re a lot better. I haven’t had any awful experiences. Creative writing classes are pretty good. And my biggest gripes, which I think will be echoed in both of your experiences, is just that nobody teaches you how to give feedback or how to edit. And so the feedback is extremely hit or miss depending on how much the student knows when they’re giving it. On some pieces, just people don’t know how to do feedback. You’ll get “this was good,” or “I’m confused.” Can’t do a whole lot with that. Chris: I would like to just look at what is happening underneath this. The reason why feedback is so important is because so many courses are using the Iowa Writers’ Workshop model, where the idea is that you spend a lot of your class time with students reading each other’s work and giving each other feedback. I’m assuming that feedback came from other students. Bunny: I think we did three workshops per workshop session in class. Everyone would read the piece, they would comment on it individually, they’d write a letter of feedback for the author, and then we’d sit around in class and discuss it. And for my particular teacher, I think this varies between teachers, he would have you read the opening section of your piece of writing and then be quiet, let everyone else talk about you in the third person, which struck me as a little odd. For some reason, it seems common in these types of workshops. Is that specific to Iowa? Is that like… Chris: That’s where it comes from. It comes with a very Romantic mentality. Romanticism is very popular in universities, and that’s the influence. In the United States, I think this was a model that was originally imported from Europe, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s was the one that was famous in the US. This is an educational setup where students are expected to teach other students instead of… I’m sure you got some professor feedback. Bunny: The professor basically did what the students did as well and guided the conversation. The professor was there, but they were doing essentially the same thing as the students. I think I did get the best feedback from professors because the professors knew how to give feedback, but I know other people have had poor experiences with professors. I’m sure you’ll get to that, Chris. Chris: To clarify, this wasn’t because the professor knew how to give feedback, was it because the professor was more knowledgeable than the other students? Bunny: They’re a professor, so one would hope. Chris: I just want to break down some… We get used to accepting what is normal to us, and this Iowa Writers’ Workshop is so standard in so many places that people don’t really question it, but I think it’s worth comparing it to other fields and other industries and realize that most other classes you would take in other subject matters, the students just aren’t teaching the other students. The professor teaches the principles and then you do assignments and then the professor gives feedback on assignments and grades the assignment based on how well they actually implement the specific lessons the professor taught. As opposed to, write a story. I’m not going to tell you how to write a story, just write a story. Okay, now that you’ve written a story, this other student who knows as much as you do is the one who’s going to give you feedback on your story and then somehow we’ll just give feedback to each other, which is the model used for creative writing in many cases. Oren: The Writers’ Workshop where you’re just giving each other feedback is, in my experience, a not great time. They don’t know what feedback to give, they often aren’t given any real instruction, and they are often giving recommendations on how to fix the story or they are simply getting too theoretical and trying to explain what is wrong with the story in ways that they do not have the expertise to explain. It’s just not a fun time. And that’s why when we talk about beta reading, we have this whole thing about how you need to be aware of what kind of feedback you’re trying to get and guide your readers into giving you that specific data and not just being like, okay, how should I make the story better? Because they don’t know, but they don’t know any better than you do, probably worse. Bunny: If the writer is supposed to remain silent, they can’t really ask clarifying questions or, “I’d specifically like feedback on this or that aspect.” Let’s just talk about the story as a whole. Oren: I remember there was a while ago, and it’s probably still going on, there was this big pushback about the “remaining silent” aspect. I see where you’re coming from, but I think you’re identifying the wrong thing as the problem here. Chris: I’m assuming that the base reason for that is because writers get defensive and they start arguing with the people giving them feedback. And that’s not helpful. That’s not going to add anything good to that conversation. At the same time, I just think the entire model is the problem. And it’s based on the idea that we just don’t know anything about storytelling and so we can’t teach it. So we’ve got students teaching students. Bunny: That just means that you don’t get a lot of helpful feedback. I went through my notes and dug up some of the feedback I’ve gotten. One of them, I quote, “I think the biggest thing to work on is to try not to spend all your time on things actually happening and spend more time developing the characters and revealing to the audience who they are.” Oren: Oh no. Chris: Sounds like somebody’s preference there. Bunny: Another one. “My question is why this relationship story is set in a sci-fi universe. What does the setting add to the central story? I would argue as written, it actually detracts from the central story.” This is a story about turning off a sci-fi device. Oren: See, that’s the other issue with attending a random writer’s workshop. You get a bunch of random people and it’s like, hey, I have my story about cool World War Two action ships and they’re fighting and then someone’s like, “I don’t like boats. I think you should take the boats out.” That’s not helpful.  Chris: Honestly, I think getting good feedback from beta readers requires accepting that they are not knowledgeable and that what you want is for them to convey their experience so that you can look and see, okay, this is the place where they got bored. And then you realize that you need to do something to fix that. But of course that leaves the writer not necessarily knowing what to do. But that’s the point, is that they can’t tell you anyway. Bunny: In a lot of cases, I found that teachers try to discourage you from presenting criticism as criticism. They want you to pose it as questions. I get it. But at the same time, I do have criticism for your piece. I just think that doesn’t help things either. Chris: I think that comes from a very Romantic mindset where there are no storytelling rules or principles. Oh, maybe if I just provoke more thought, then somehow it will become better. We don’t really give feedback. Oren: Plus, even the most politely constructed criticism is often hard to hear. I would never in my life choose to get real time beta reader feedback on my novel. My God, I have a hard enough time getting that when it’s written down and I can stop when I get upset. Trying to do that in real time with the person there telling me all the things they think I did wrong, God, I would lose it. It’d be really hard for me to take anything away from that other than being upset. Chris: The class that for me is notorious, did not really do that. It did a little bit with poetry and the experience was not particularly great. But that was not really its issue. This was a course that was so bad I dubbed it my uncreative writing course. It was supposed to be an intro to creative writing 101 and it was so terrible, I decided never to take another creative writing course in college ever again, even though I switched colleges twice. I never gave any other professor another chance. I’m going to say it’s at the University of Minnesota. I even met with somebody who was, I think, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota in the English department about five years ago and he said it had not changed. Bunny: Name and shame, name and shame. Chris: I’m not afraid of pointing fingers. Bunny: They’re going to come for you, Chris. I think I hear, [knocks] oh man, I think those are the agents of Minnesota. Chris: Actually, it was one of those intro courses that has a couple hundred students in it, but there wasn’t a professor. There was only a coordinator who invited authors to come and talk about their books. Because another thing that typically happens in this Iowa workshop is the idea that just by being around a successful author, somehow they have good cooties that rub off on you. They would invite an author in and then we would be required to read their work, which I never did because it was just stuff I wasn’t interested in. Then we would be given an assignment where we were told to just copy something they did by rote with no other instruction. For instance, we had this poem that we were given that used “where I’m from” to start every single line. I can see how it might be valuable, for instance, to teach how repeating phrases can be used for effect in poetry, how they can create rhythm. But we weren’t even given an assignment where we were supposed to choose something to repeat. We were just told that we had to create a poem where every line started with “where I’m from,” those exact words. Just copied, which is why I dubbed it my uncreative writing course. It banned genre works, although I managed to convince my TA to let me write what I was calling magical realism because it had the word realism in it. I didn’t really know what magical realism was. As I understand it, it’s associated with a lot of Mexican writers. I don’t know if my TA knew what magical realism was, but I used that as an excuse to sneak in speculative fiction. But we were not just discouraged from writing quote unquote genre, but also from fiction. In my experience in college, all of the writing you’ve done, they have wanted you to write about your life. Bunny: Ugh, I’ve had that experience. Chris: One of our assignments was like, write a story about a character who has your name and write about a piece of furniture. I just made up a horror story about this creepy witch who was on a bench. No, I’m not actually familiar with that bench. But that’s how it went and we were given no instruction whatsoever. The only thing we were told once is, trim down our story in half. That was like a universal thing we were all supposed to do. No one looked at our writing and was like, hey, your wording is a little cluttery or you’re a little verbose. My natural writing style was actually quite sparse. That’s how it went and my TA was just frustrating because he was really incompetent and that probably wasn’t his fault. He probably just didn’t get any support as far as I knew from the coordinator or the class. At the same time, it was still very frustrating because he was grading my assignments. I’d fill up an entire podcast with stories from this class because that’s how wildly bad it was. I didn’t take as much classes elsewhere, but the assignments I did get, like I had a story writing assignment in my just regular English class and it was much the same. Right, where we were told to write something specific from our life, given no instruction about how to write a story, and then marked down when it didn’t have the qualities the teacher wanted to have that the teacher hadn’t actually taught to us. Bunny: Yeah, I guess I should amend my earlier statement and say that outside of creative writing classes, I have been forced to write a crap ton of personal narratives to the point that I wrote a personal narrative about how much I hate writing personal narratives. Chris: Half of my assignments for this class were dissing the assignment. In their class. Bunny: As they should. Oren: I’ve been trying to think of what ways in which schools could do better and admittedly, I’m having some trouble suggesting anything that isn’t obviously self-serving. You should teach Mythcreants, problem solved. Bunny: I can get behind that. Oren: Because there are a lot of places that purport to give writing instruction that are not schools and so you might assume that the answer is that schools should take a stronger look at those and get books on how to do writing, but those books are all bad. Chris: I still think that would be a start. I think that it has to start with the professor taking responsibility for teaching the craft to their students as opposed to just the students giving each other feedback. And even if the knowledge is wrong, at least trying to develop a knowledge base about the craft and teach it is something. From there you can then refine what’s actually being taught but without taking that responsibility, without thinking of it as a craft that can be learned. A lot of professors in these situations that are teaching this workshop format have this idea that this is a talent you were born with. Can you imagine teaching people and being like you have to be born with it? You’re not really teaching at that point, are you? Bunny: I’m sorry, you have to be born a carpenter in order to be a carpenter.  Oren: You have to be born with it, but also it needs to be developed. So if you do learn how to be a writer, you were born with it. But if you weren’t, then it’s not that my class didn’t do a good job, it’s that you weren’t born with it. That’s how it works, right? But that’s also why you still need to take my class because it still needs to be developed. Chris: So Oren, you’ve got to share your story. Oren: My story is pretty boring compared to your guys’. The main thing that I noticed is that when I was at Evergreen, basically every large English program, because at Evergreen when I was there, they want you to take these big programs that are the majority of your credits instead of taking a series of small classes. Each and every one of them that involved English in some way would put creative writing on the list of things that would be covered and then we would find out that it did not mean what we thought it meant. Bunny: Did it mean personal narrative? Oren: It didn’t mean really anything. Professors would just put that on there and then we would never do any kind of fiction writing. It was standard essay stuff. Chris: Sounds like a surprisingly common practice from what I’ve heard where professors will put in misleading descriptions of their course to lure students to sign up. Oren: I did a total of one short story despite taking a bunch of classes which claimed to be creative writing related and the feedback I got back on it from my professor was that it was not good. I’m sure he was right, it was probably not good, but I feel like maybe he could have tried a little harder. Bunny: I feel like that’s not feedback, I feel like that’s just being an ass.  Oren: It was not good, it was a bad story, absolutely, but I think maybe I could learn something more. In my experience, another thing that I think would just really help would be teaching students to think critically about stories because Evergreen was great at that for nonfiction. Evergreen gave me incredibly valuable lessons on thinking critically about nonfiction writing, thinking about who the author is, what are their biases, what would make them say this, what narrative are they reinforcing, all of those things. Really important stuff. But when it came to fiction, we were suddenly just supposed to basically assume that the writer was doing everything correctly and that they meant whatever the professor thought it meant. They never do that for nonfiction. They know that’s not okay, but for fiction, suddenly the critical thinking went out the window. I get it, it sucks to hear your favorite story critiqued, you don’t like that, so maybe don’t assign your favorite story as reading. Chris: That is the issue with literature classes, right? The professor is completely in love with the stories they’re teaching and doesn’t want to hear students say anything bad about it. Oren: The best experience I had was when we did Charterhouse of Parma, which no one liked. A few people tried to praise it, but in ways that the professor who assigned it didn’t agree with. And you could tell that he was just really upset watching them give the incorrect interpretation of this book, which he had apparently read dozens of times. The other professor eventually had to talk to him to get him to calm down. Bunny: Oh gosh. Oren: Yeah, it was weird. It was a very weird experience. You can imagine how much he liked my spiel on it, which is that it was a boring story with no point to it. That didn’t go great. Chris: I do think that’s part of the big problem when it comes to the lack of a knowledge base for teaching storytelling. The culture of you don’t criticize things. Because if you can’t find problems, you can’t find opportunities for improvement. It has to start there, or else what do you have to work on? Bunny: One thing, as long as we’re talking about how can we improve these classes, certainly one thing that they could do is not just giving us stories that they think are exemplary of this or that, but stories that need work. And then having students go into it and practice giving feedback that way before they actually are confronted with their peers’ stories. Because that’ll give you both a way to critically read fiction and background in how to give feedback rather than just, here’s a cathedral again, it did a good job, now write your own. Oren: All right, we are about out of time. So I think that’s a good note to end this podcast on. Now we’re going to take an hour to each give each other feedback on how well we did in this podcast. Chris: But we can only raise questions, right? We can’t actually critique anything. We’ll just… “have you thought about this, or maybe you could be a little bit more deep on this subject.” Oren: And the person who is getting critiqued is not allowed to speak. If they speak, then all is lost. Bunny: Man, I have questions about that boing boing joke at the beginning. Was that a smart idea? Chris: All right, that’s it for this episode. Again, if you would still like to get our feedback on a thousand words, you can do that. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Oren: All right, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, 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 Coulton.

Behold, for in the ancient year of 2013, a new writing advice site did appear upon the internet. ‘Twas full of snark, and many articles did it publish in the form of ye olden text. But among that sea of written words did appear a podcast, wherein opinions were spoken and hot takes given. It’s been 10 years, folks. Thanks for listening!Show Notes Netflix Subtitle Lawsuit  Lincoln and the Bardo  22 – Are Multiple Points of View Good or Bad? Critical Role Last Ship of the Republic A Oneshot Review for FAITH Is a Hotdog a Sandwich  The Best Angry Review We’ve Ever Gotten  334 – Monarchy in Spec Fic 339 – Annoying characters 279 – City in the Middle of the Night  Pitch Meeting Transcript Generously transcribed by Suzanne. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.  [opening song] Chris: You’re listening to the 10th anniversary episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…  Wes: Wes.  Chris: And…  Oren: Oren.  Chris: As a reminder, we’re celebrating ten years by giving every patron at the $10 a month or Pegasus tier feedback on a thousand words. So if you want to join the celebration, go to patreon.com/Mythcreants and sign up by August 14th.  [Chris makes static noise] This is Chris from ten years in the future. You have to stop. Our advice is being used by the super app X to make humans into mindless story addicts.  Wes: No! Chris: If only we had stopped raising engagement while we still could.  Oren: Oh no. Hoist by our own petard.  Chris: In the future, you have both been replaced by generative AI story bots. Now they’re coming for me. They’re here! Aaaaaaah! [Chris makes static noise] Wes: Don’t struggle, Chris. It’ll be alright.  [Laughter] Oren: Hello, I am Oren. I dislike things, but like other things. It is confusing.  Wes: I’m Wes, and I pipe up every now and then to say things. [Laughs] Oren: Nailed it.  Wes: Nailed it.  Chris: I’m Chris, here to give you advice on writing your novel using the three-act structure. Start with an inciting incident.  Oren: No! It’s wrong!  Chris: Then use strong characters who have goals and go through conflicts.  Oren: The future is horrible and I don’t like it. I want to go back. I want to go back to the 90s. The 90s when we didn’t have any of this nonsense.  Chris: So yeah, for our 10th year anniversary episode we’re gonna be talking about the Mythcreants podcast. All meta, all the way down.  Oren: Our topic is ourselves. And if we can’t talk about ourselves, what can we talk about?  Wes: What have we been doing this whole time, really?  Oren: I mean, who can say? I have no idea, honestly.  Wes: We’ve been doing it for a while, though, so there’s probably some kind of history to it.  Oren: Every time we come up with a topic, I’m like, have we already done this topic? I have to search the site, because I have no idea. If I find out we have, I’m like, yeah, but this time we’ll call it revisiting that topic. Which is a very fancy way of saying we’ll do it again.  Chris: I mean, at 450 episodes, it’s like, what topic have we not done? [Laughter] Oren: Revisiting, revisiting romance arcs.  [Laughter] If you weren’t here at the beginning, this podcast has been part of Mythcreants since it all started in the ancient year of 2013.  Chris: Which was before podcasting was cool.  Oren: I mean, is podcasting cool?  [Laughter] Important question. I think it was my idea, because at the time I had a very casual Star Trek podcast.  Chris: Two hours every week about Star Trek! So much Star Trek!  Wes: That by definition is not casual.  Oren: It was casual in that it was very low effort. One of the things about this podcast that I learned is that once it was part of a business, it mattered how we sounded. And the Star Trek podcast, we just did our best. I would sometimes edit out background noise using automated tools, but I would almost never do anything serious. Because it was two hours, and it was for a casual Star Trek chat podcast.  Chris: Right, and editing two hours of audio every week, oh, that is so much work.  Oren: Yeah, that would have just been impossible. So I barely did anything. It only took a while before I realized that wasn’t going to cut it if we had a podcast that was supposed to project professionalism to the extent that our podcast has ever done that.  Chris: Not sure we ever got there.  [Laughter] Man, I just remembered that back in 2013, when we started this, again, podcasting wasn’t so big. Now there’s these fancy podcast hosts that do everything for you. I don’t think those existed when we first started. Creating a podcast technically isn’t that hard. It runs on RSS technology, which is very janky. Now it’s kind of a problem that the technology… it had been created for something almost very different, which was this idea of the web, that everybody would syndicate their content. That all of these blogs would publish articles, and then separate aggregators would grab them and remix them. It was always a power user thing and never really took off. So then RSS was just kind of abandoned until suddenly it was the basis for podcasting.  Oren: Yeah, why not? Now we have the fun issue where if we include more than like 100 episodes, it breaks all of the small podcatchers that people use. But then when we don’t do that, all the people who use Apple podcasts or Stitcher email us and be like, hey, how come only 100 episodes are available in your archive?  Chris: You want more than 100 episodes?  Wes: Bless you. Thank you.  Chris: You really want to listen to my voice that much? Over 100 episodes of me talking? I don’t understand.  Oren: I’m not sure that you do, to be perfectly honest. If you go back a couple hundred episodes, I’m not sure we’re worth that much time. We’ve gotten a lot better at staying on topic to the extent that we stay on topic.  Chris: I mean, you can only stay on topic so much if you have a discussion podcast, right? Because you gotta let the discussion go where it goes. You don’t want to railroad the discussion.  Oren: Unless it’s about trains, then you do want to railroad it.  Chris: Oh no.  Wes: Ten years of these puns.  Oren:The kind of humor you’ve spent ten years listening to.  [Laughter] But the podcast has improved a lot, if not necessarily through us. The production values are much better now. We have very generous volunteers who help us out. We have better tools. The Audacity’s volume leveling tool used to be hot garbage, and now it’s actually quite good. That’s one of the reasons why we’re easier to understand now then we used to be. We have some external software that removes a lot of the filler words that we use, which get kind of annoying to listen to over time.  Wes: I really like listening to the published versions of this, because we sound better.  Oren: We do. And of course, that’s also down to our editing volunteers, right?  Wes: Yes. Yes. Thanks to them.  Oren: And we have transcripts now. We added those back in 2019, I think. I admittedly vastly underestimated the utility of transcripts. I just assumed they were a disability accessibility thing, and they are. They are important for that. But they are also useful for everyone else, regardless of disability status. People really like to read podcasts, which is not a thing.  Chris: And that’s the case for most accessibility features, right? They’re not just for people with disabilities, they’re also for people who only have one hand free at the time, or are half paying attention to something else, or just that’s what works best for them, or a huge variety of situations. Oren: Thank you to the people who sued Netflix in, I think it was 2011, to make them put subtitles on everything.  Chris: Yeah. So, in the beginning, I was not part of the podcast.  Oren: Yeah, that lasted about three episodes, I think.  Chris: Some three or so episodes. And then it was like, Chris, can you please come on the podcast?  Wes: Chris, did you listen to it before you hopped on?  Chris: I think a little bit.  Wes: Chris listened to like 20 minutes and was like, nope, nope, nope, nope.  Oren: It wasn’t like the hosts that we had at the time were terrible, and we needed to replace one, but it was literally just that one person overcommitted, and the idea that Chris wasn’t going to be part of anything super big that we were doing in Mythcreants, that just didn’t work out. Way back in the day, we had this idea that Mythcreants was going to be a very large team of people who contributed occasionally.  Chris: That does not work.  Oren: Nope. We realized that didn’t work, and so it became a small team of people who contribute all the time.  Chris: Yeah, and it’s also partly a matter of chemistry among the hosts. So, after somebody dropped out, and I subbed in, Oren asked me to stay, because he felt that we had the right chemistry between myself, him, and Mike, who was one of our first hosts.  Oren: And Mike had a lot of gaming knowledge and deep lore understanding, and that was nice to have on the podcast, but I also really appreciated when Wes joined us in 2017 and brought both copy editing expertise and knowledge of literature that Chris and I—that’s not our thing. We do not know much about that.  Wes: Yeah, all the books that Mythcreants hates, I’ve read them. [Laughter] Oren: I just had someone send us in a question that was like, hey, what do you think of Lincoln and the Bardo? And I’m like, hang on, I’m passing this off to someone who can actually answer that question.  Wes: Yeah, I love that book.  Oren: Yeah, great. It’s a great answer. You guys will be able to read it on the site in a couple weeks or so.  Chris: And when we started, it was one hour every other week, which is why we’re not at episode 500 after 10 years. But we had this issue, again, we had a lot of loose contributors who contributed every once in a while. We got to this point where I was posting something every Friday, an article, and Oren was posting something every Saturday. And then Sunday we switched off between the podcast and an article that was by everybody else. All of the other looser contributors, only we only needed to get something from them once every other week. And that was the day we were always struggling to fill our schedule. So finally, Mike suggested that we go down to a half hour every week and no more articles on Sunday. And that worked great.  Oren: If nothing else, it allowed us to cover more topics because not every topic has an hour of content in it. So at half an hour, we can talk about more, some people are in a rush, so we’re a little easier to listen to. It also gave us something to do every Sunday.  Chris: So I made an effort to try to trace back the meta jokes, where we temporarily open with a joke about ourselves. I have not yet found the source. I opened episode 53 with a meta joke. So we’ve been doing them for a really long time. I think it used to be more common that we would introduce the topic of the episode first. And then somebody, usually Oren, would come in and add a little meta joke until, I think about the time that you came in Wes, it became a standard thing to start with a meta joke.  Wes: Yeah, I think it was just a fun kind of way to just change it up. We share short show notes, but wouldn’t always loop each other in on the starting joke. So a lot of time we just kind of catch each other off guard. Those are always really fun moments.  Chris: Other experiments, we had a debate cast, a debate between myself and Oren. I even created a separate category on the website for it, assuming we would do more.  Oren: Yeah, for all the other ones we did.  [Laughter] Chris: And yeah, we never did them again, which I think is honestly for the best. I like how lively the debate is, but I just think maybe it’s a little too combative, especially when I’m doing debating.  Oren: Look, I already get nervous and stressed out when you guys disagree about something. I don’t know if I could handle a debate cast between anyone else.  [Laughter] I’d just be over here being like, oh, no, the other hosts are fighting. No! Chris: [Laughter] And we had the recorded role-play.  Oren: Yeah, those were a lot of fun and way too much work, it turned out.  Chris: Yeah, it’s really hard to just get everybody coordinated and get a good recording put together. It’s just…  Oren: They were technically very challenging and the number of hours they take to edit was absurd. Even before we kind of realized that our role playing audience was sort of too small to support dedicated content on the site, those were still… You know, we had a few people who really liked them and that always made me feel good. Right. I loved it when people said they liked our recorded role-playing sessions. We still don’t have a good term for those. It’s 2023. I hate it. I’m not calling them actual plays. That doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, you know, when people say that they liked them, it makes me feel great. I love it. But just most people do not have the time or interest to listen to those because we’re not Critical Role or any of the other people who have whatever it is that gets people to want to listen to those at a regular time, on a regular basis.  Wes: Charisma.  [Laughter] Oren: Yeah, maybe that’s what we’re missing. I don’t know.  Chris: Right. I do think that the production budget kind of has to be higher to make those work. Usually they have actors on to play the characters. And just a lot more. They’re a lot showier. So, no, I don’t think that was feasible for us. But I do not regret my role as a capitalist bug.  Oren: That was good. Capitalist bug was good. I’m still very proud of our ten-part Star Wars show.  Wes: Yeah, I can’t believe you guys did that. Can’t imagine how much work that was.  Oren: A lot. Now, the sound quality on that is still not fantastic because we were literally just all recording it in one room around a microphone. But, you know, we did our best.  [Laughter] Chris: So sometimes people ask us about the in-jokes and what we’re talking about, because I mean, ten years. I mean, we don’t have a huge list of in-jokes, but we definitely have some.  Oren: And it is a secret we will take to our grave.  [Laughter] Chris: First, we occasionally reference Podcastia, Goddess of Podcasts. That’s from our Pantheon’s episode. It’s 226.  Oren: There was, of course, the now famous sandwich discourse, which people occasionally email us to be like, what the heck are you talking about?  Chris: Why do you keep talking about sandwiches? What do you mean?  Oren: This started back in 2019 in episode 232, as far as I can tell. And it, of course, references the meme, Is a Hot Dog a Sandwich? Which, of course, had been on the Internet since 2011 because I’m nothing if not sedate in my references.  [Laughter] The reason I brought it up was just because I was noticing that every podcast, we would have to start with this long discussion about terminology, because all storytelling advice is hampered by this problem that we all have different definitions and words mean different things. And sometimes we use made up terms because there wasn’t a good one. And people have independently created different terms for the same thing. And then you just have concepts that are inherently fuzzy, like genres. And so we spend a lot of time defining what we mean by things. And that’s where you get into sandwich discourse. Sometimes it can get a little silly.  Chris: I honestly find sandwich discourse would be a lot of fun because it, you know, you discover interesting things that you did not think about before that, like, for instance, dragons always either have wings or special breath power. Right, and if they don’t really have either of those things, they’re not usually considered a dragon anymore. And you don’t really think about that when you’re thinking about dragons. But when you try to break apart all the different things that make a dragon and look at what you can take away, you know, and what pieces are essential, you can come up with some very interesting answers.  Oren: I mean, it’s all, you know, fun and games until you’re trying to eat a piece of fried chicken and someone insists you call it a calzone.  [Laughter] And of course, there’s our favorite reference that we’ve made since just last year, which is, would you like a cup of depression?  Wes: Oh, my gosh. Nothing’s going to top that one either. It’s the best thing that’s ever been said about us.  Chris: Yeah. I mean, if you don’t like to learn by watching people drown, you’re not a Mythcreant. That’s all I’m going to say.  [Laughter] Oren: And you have put on the Mythcreants saddle of soulless commentary. This is all from an angry review that we got in June of 2022. This person is clearly very upset, but they are so creative that I give this review five stars. Like they gave us two stars, but this is a five star effort. That is what this is.  Chris: We’ve definitely got five stars worth of joy out of this two star review. That was lovely because you can just go on Apple podcasts and look at the reviews of our podcast and see it. Read it for yourself. See exactly what this person said. It’s amazing.  And last but not least, let’s not forget Wraith McBlade.  Oren: Yeah, we haven’t talked about Wraith McBlade recently.  Chris: The Bladenator.  [Laughter] Oren: That one’s from episode 376 is the earliest reference I could find to Wraith McBlade. I think it was just a fake Grimdark Edgelord character name I came up with.  Chris: Yeah, and we thought it was funny, so we kept using it.  Oren: All right, everybody. Everyone needs to pick a favorite podcast memory and/or episode. If we have time, we can pick more than one. But I really, really liked our discussion on Monarchy in Specfic episode 334 because we’re not a political commentary podcast or a political commentary blog. We do talk about politics when they are relevant to storytelling, which is a lot. But we don’t go into political theory. Right. I know where my expertise are. But I still have opinions about political theory. And that episode was great because it let me voice those opinions in an area where my expertise was actually relevant. Wes, what about you? What’s your favorite? You got a favorite podcast?  Wes: Oh, boy. You know, we’ve done a lot on characters. And so most of our character content is really fun. But the one we did on annoying characters in the late 300s.  Chris: Oh, my gosh. I put that one down, too.  Wes: Yeah, that one it’s just too funny. I mean, maybe it’s low hanging fruit, but it was just funny. And that was the moment we really just went all in on fart bending from Korra. Oh, my gosh.  Chris: For me, just the hilarious noise you made. Because for anybody who has not listened to 390, OK, my idea was to give Wes some sort of gimmick that would be really grating. Right. Because a lot of annoying characters are comedic characters that just are very repetitive and it just gets very old. And so I just told him to make a weird gimmicky noise. But the noise that he chose was genuinely funny when it was not supposed to be. It was supposed to be just annoying.  Wes: That was fun.  Chris: For me, one funny thing I like to talk about is the time I made a blanket fort. I recorded with Mike and Oren. This is when we still recorded together in person using the same mic. The reason we did that is because being in person allowed us to use body signals to trade off. Right. Who is talking when and later we just got used to doing it remotely, and that allowed us to record on three tracks. It just led to better quality. But for a long time, we did it in person. And we had this problem where suddenly all of the recordings were just crap. It was just terrible quality and we were having a hell of a time figuring out why. So we did a bunch of tests and tried to… and so I tried to isolate any type of background noise or echoing or what have you. I just basically put together what was a blanket fort to try to insulate the room. When we sat in a blanket fort and recorded a podcast. It turned out to be the sound card on my computer. It was a weird thing because I would do tests and it would turn out fine. And then we would record again and it would just turn out to be crap again. But until I talked to a sound engineer and he asked me about my computer, and I realized I had not taken into account which computer was being used. So I just didn’t record on that computer again, and that was solved. But in the meantime, I have a blanket fort memory because of this.  Oren: It was the snuggest podcast ever recorded.  Wes: I also really liked when we were reading books for the Hugo Noms the other year, but it was just like a little too time consuming for us to really do that feasibly. But that gave us The City in the Middle of the Night.  [Laughter] And that’s… I mean, we probably have brought that up a lot since that initial podcast, because talk about a story we just love to hate on. I mean, it’s so weird.  Oren: It’s fun to roast. It has so many bizarre choices that I don’t understand to this day. I’ve read reviews of people who loved this book and I don’t understand any of these choices.  Wes: Fascinating.  Oren: Why are they called crocodiles and bison? I still don’t get that.  Wes: The bison are like all teeth. What’s going on here?  Oren: Then it describes them and they are nothing like crocodiles or bison in appearance or in action or in thought. You could call them anything and it would be just as accurate. You know, like they could be called mosquitoes and wombats and it would have just as much relevance.  Chris: Honestly, I think it would be more relevant if the bison were called mosquitoes because they at least fly.  Wes: Yes, that’s right. They fly, too! Oh, my God.  Chris: I don’t know. I mean, I don’t actually know if the bison fly. That’s one of the very confusing things. But they’re incredibly fast and they disappear in a second. I just don’t know how they would do that if they don’t fly.  Oren: They’re just real sneaky. You know, they hide in plain sight.  Chris: Whereas, you know, bison are herbivores. So I don’t think that grabbing people in a blink of an eye is… I would go with mosquito instead. Wes: Maybe they don’t eat them. They just like to murder.  Chris: Gosh, in episode 252, Weather and Fiction, this is probably my favorite exchange. Oren is saying how, quote, generally snow is just nice. It’s cool. It’s nice snow. It’s pretty. You can make snowmen out of it. And me, having grown up in Minnesota, is like, all right, I will say this is clearly spoken from somebody who isn’t the person who has to go out and shovel the snow whenever it falls. And then Oren says, I’ve shoveled a snow.  Wes: The day we made snow countable. That’s right. One snow, two snows, three snows.  Chris: And this, of course, I had to point out that Oren grew up in Hawaii after that. So that’s probably my favorite exchange in the entire history of the podcast.  Oren: The joke, though, is that whenever I go somewhere that has snow that needs to be shoveled, I’m like, yeah, I’m gonna go shovel snow because I’m only there for a week. So it’s still fun and novel. I haven’t had to do that for five years running entire winters.  [Laughter] I also had a really fun time. This one’s more recent, but I really enjoyed the one we did with Ari on Wizards of the Coast’s shenanigans. I just felt like all three of us, Ari, me and Wes, were just really in sync. And we were talking about something that mattered, but was also fun to talk about. We don’t do a lot of current events on the show because often they’re very depressing. This one was important, but even if it had gone the other way and Wizards of the Coast hadn’t reversed course, I wouldn’t have felt like I was discussing some existential threat. It was important enough to be interesting, but not so critical that people’s right to live depended on it.  Wes: That was a good one.  Oren: Yeah, it was just a fun, fun chat. I just enjoyed that one quite a bit.  Wes: I think periodically as we’ve, you know, each of us have rotated out and brought in a sub, I mean, our guest podcast contributors, those have always been… We know some pretty good people that are fun to talk to about stuff like that. So… Chris: Okay. So obviously we’ve talked about stories this whole time for a decade. So do you think about stories differently today then when we first started or when you first joined the podcast in your case, Wes?  Wes: I can say that my thinking about stories has profoundly shifted having spent all these hours with the two of you. I still like things that violate all of Mythcreants’ advice, but now I notice that and I can speak about them. And I feel like I think about stories differently because learning with you and talking about it over the years, I have a much better lens for articulating things that maybe would have kind of bothered me. But I wouldn’t quite know how to talk about it. And so, yeah, I’m pickier. When people talk about a show that they like or a book that they read, I can, I usually say like, yeah, that’s fine. It violates everything that Mythcreants have to say about it, and let me tell you why. So I become that person, which is fine. I enjoy being that person. But normally I wasn’t. I would talk about other kinds of things, but I have a better frame of reference for it. When we talk about point of view and plot and throughlines, and character development and all those goodies and the ANTS and things like that. So, yeah, I think just a more thoughtful, consistent way to think about stories is definitely what I’ve acquired. It’s not great, but definitely from where I was coming from, I think I had taught for almost ten years teaching English and teaching literature the way it’s kind of taught. And then it’s like, what about actual real story telling advice? Oh, that’s what they’re doing here. Huh. Well, OK, let’s do that.  Chris: What do you mean you can give advice about stories? Aren’t they like ephemeral and like, you know, magical and mystical?  Wes: I know. Yeah, it was Romanticism all the way down. And now it’s no. It’s actual advice. Brilliant. Who’d have thought? Who’d have thought you guys?  Oren: The thing that’s been funny with me is that I have, of course, become more critical as my job has been to critique stories. But, and this is probably hard for people who know me through the podcast or the blog to understand, I have actually become less critical in my casual interactions because I’ve gotten better at judging when is the right time to bring that up. I definitely used to have, and to a certain extent still do, but less than before, a problem where if people would bring up a book they like, I’d be like, yeah, it’s bad for these reasons. And, you know, in casual conversation, that’s just not a great thing to do. The other person is probably not prepared for a deep, critical analysis, and they’re not going to respond well, even if everything you say is correct. I’ve just gotten better at knowing what the right time is. And of course, this is the podcast: by definition, this is the right time.  [Laughter] Chris: Yeah. I mean, it’s also interesting that conversely, if you have somebody who’s starting a critical discussion about something, coming in and being like, oh, that’s my very favorite story. And then defending everything is not necessarily the best. Not that you can’t defend and engage as part of discussion, but you can also enter in sort of an attitude that I need to enjoy this. And I don’t really like that you’re criticizing it and make that feel unwelcome. Right. So, I mean, when discussing stories, it’s good to see, OK, who started the conversation? Right. What kind of conversation do they want it to be? Right. Do they just want to celebrate this or do they want to analyze it? And follow their tone. That’s a good courtesy in a discussion about a story.  For me, I had this whole idea very early on that I was going to categorize and rate stories based on how good they were at characters, plot, world building, different things separate and that different people wanted, cared about world building or another person cared about character, you know, or something like that. That was discarded almost immediately. Not that taste can’t be important, but it was overly simplistic. And I quickly pivoted away from categorizing tastes and tradeoffs into looking at understanding stories universally and what improves engagement across the board and finding that actually the question of, OK, yes, there’s lots of tastes. But how do we improve engagement without sacrificing anything else? Right. And try to get as many people on board as possible was ultimately more interesting. And I think eventually I might, if I kept going at this indefinitely, I might branch out again. Right. And start looking more at different tastes and see if I could categorize people a little bit more by taste. Right. And look at, you know, different things. Yeah, I definitely diverged from that. And along with that, I when I came in, I had a lot more conventional thinking and outlook that I actually parodied earlier on in this episode because, you know, started by reading books and looking at how other people were talking about stories, including things like, quote unquote, strong characters, which is always very vaguely defined. Right. And you need lots of conflict and all those things like that that are just kind of standard talking points into coming up with my own way of conceptualizing stories based on my own observations and prioritizing what I thought was important. That kind of thing.  Oren: Yeah, I guess that’s the other thing that’s changed is I’ve become extremely cynical about other sources of storytelling advice, which is probably a little self-serving because I’m like, no, only come to us for advice. But I just haven’t run into much that’s good. Like most of the advice I find is at best too vague to be helpful and at worst actively misleading.  Chris: People sometimes ask us to give us recommendations for other stuff. And it’s like, well, it’s not that we haven’t tried. It’s just that we have really high standards, and we’re not impressed with what we see from other people, unfortunately.  Oren: Except from Pitch Meeting by Ryan George, apparently.  Chris: Ryan George has such good analysis because he actually surveys the Internet and sees what everybody is saying and crystallizes that. So, yeah, that’s what makes him so good.  Oren: Well, we are about out of time. We’re actually a little over time, but yeah, that’s it’s been ten years, guys. We’ve been doing this for ten years. Thanks to everybody for listening. I don’t know if we have anyone who’s been listening for all ten years. If you have, feel free to leave a comment and let us know. But for everyone else, just, you know, we appreciate you listening and being here with us and hearing what we have to say.  Chris: And again, if you’d like to join our ten-year celebration, just go to patreon.com/Mythcreants before August 14th.  Oren: And before we go, I just want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie MacLeod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you all next week, which will be ten years and one week. [Outro Music]  Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

As content editors, we’ve seen many different types of manuscripts at all levels of development, and we’ve learned which problems are most likely to sink a story. Today we go over those fundamental issues, along with why they happen and what authors can do about them. Plus, a fun announcement for our upcoming 10-year anniversary!Show Notes Tears in the Rain  Content Editing  Throughline  The Three-Act Structure  Hero’s Journey Story Circle  The Problem with Multiple Viewpoints  Pacing Movement  Malazan  Lockwood & Co The Masquerade  Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Giving Your Protagonist Agency When Things Go Wrong Turning Points Black Panther  The Winter SoldierTranscript Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [intro music] Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. Chris: And I’m Chris. Oren: Hooray! Chris is back! Transcribers will be less annoyed with me now. Chris: Is it because they couldn’t tell the difference between your voice and your brother’s voice? Is that what…? Oren: And Wes’s voice. It was all mixed together. It was all one voice. One amorphous voice talking about D&D. Chris: Yes, I think that is a particular problem with having your sibling on. So first, some big news. Mythcreants is about to turn 10! We’ve been doing this for a full decade now. Oren: Ah, that’s so long. Chris: So long, yeah. So to celebrate, next week we’ll be doing an anniversary podcast talking about running Mythcreants and what it’s like to have a podcast for a full decade. And we’re giving all patrons who are at the $10 tier and up, that’s the Pegasus tier if we’re going by fantasy animal names… Oren: Fancy fantasy animal names. Chris: …feedback on a thousand words. You can submit an excerpt from your draft, a short outline, a flashfic, a world description, whatever you want. Then tell us your goals, questions, what kind of feedback you’d like, and we’ll write something up just for you. The celebration ends on August 14th, so join us by then if you are not already at that tier to get our feedback. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants and choose that Pegasus tier or above. It’s going to be fun to see what everybody gives to us. Oren: We may or may not crush your dreams. Who knows? Anything’s possible. Chris: We’re not going to just crush people’s dreams. Oren: I don’t know, Chris. I’ve seen things. I’ve seen things you listeners wouldn’t believe. I’ve seen manuscripts with plot holes bigger than the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched character arcs fizzle in the dark near the anticlimactic ending. But all those moments will be improved, like words on a page. Chris: Or all those words will be lost in time because I’m going to use my strikeout tool on them. I’ll strike that out. Oren: I might not improve all of them, because I’m a content editor. I don’t really improve words. Honestly, words make me nervous. If you could just give me the general vibe of the story, I’d feel more comfortable. Chris: So yeah, we’re going to talk about tips from our content editing work, reviewing manuscripts. Content editing is where we give writers big-picture feedback. I don’t actually use my strikeout tool during content editing. We don’t change anything in the manuscript. We just review it and find out what your goals are and then help you achieve your goals by giving you feedback and telling you what to focus on. I think for a lot of writers, this saves a lot of time because people get caught up worrying about little various things in their story and don’t really know where they should focus their energy. Oren: It’s hard to assess your own story, because it’s your story. You wrote it. And even if you are not convinced that it’s the greatest thing ever, it’s just hard to know where it actually needs fixing and what those priorities should be. And that’s why we do things like we look at biggest issues first. We’re trying to be practical here. So we’re not going to tell you to fix the ending of this battle scene if we’re also going to tell you that the battle needs to be revised, because that would just be pointless. And we always focus on actionable recommendations because most authors, at the state of writing when you’re looking for a content editor for the first time, aren’t going to super know what to do with just a list of problems. “Here’s what’s wrong with your manuscript.” “Great. What do I do with that?” As a writer, I don’t know what to do with that. So I need more specific advice. So that’s why I try to give to other people. Chris: We give suggestions, but we always describe the problem well enough that people can make their own choices. The suggestions, people can take them. A lot of them are also just examples of how something would be solved. Oren: Yeah, you don’t have to take my advice. I’m not your dad. I’m just telling you the problems as I see it. I’m offering you suggestions on how to resolve them and then you do with that what you want, because you are a free agent in all of this. So far. We’ll see what happens later. So by far the most common fundamental problem that I run into in manuscript editing is the missing throughline. Chris: Yeah, that’s definitely the biggest issue. And we look at that before anything else because the missing throughline essentially means you don’t know what your story is about. And that means you may have to rewrite large portions of it. And so it is definitely the thing that calls for the biggest revision. So we’re not going to tell you to futz with chapters when huge portions of the manuscript need to be rethought. Oren: And the throughline is, for if you’re not familiar with our nomenclature, it is the thing that ties the story together. It is the problem that you introduce at the beginning that drives the plot and then you resolve at the end in the climax. That’s the throughline. And the reason a lot of stories don’t have one is that a lot of writers don’t know what it is. Chris: Yep. Oren: It’s very important, but it’s also often not talked about. And I suspect that might be because of a desire to not limit what your story can be about. But as we’re fond of saying, your story can be about anything, but it can’t be about everything. Chris: I think plot in general is just really poorly understood. People are like, “Three-act structure,” and then we get a headache. Oren: What is the three-act structure? It’s literally nothing. Chris: It’s not anything. Same with most of the structures out there. They don’t actually do what a plot needs to do, or like they’re not incompatible with a plot, but they don’t actually… And so people follow these and they don’t realize that’s not actually going to make their plot work. Oren: It’s like they tell you things that could be in a plot, not things that need to be in a plot. And if you don’t already know what needs to be in there, then these don’t help you or worse, you end up damaging your plot, trying to contort it into these arbitrary steps that they’ve given you. And that’s why the most popular of these writing formulas tend to be the ones that are the vaguest, because on some level we know that if a formula is telling us to do a million different little bits, it’s hard to follow because how are we supposed to do all those things? Where if it only gives us like eight very vague steps that can mean kind of anything, we can be like, “Yeah, I followed Story Circle when I wrote this.” Sure. If you zoom out and make it look real fuzzy enough, maybe that’s Story Circle. Who knows? Chris: Whereas when we talk about throughlines and a problem in resolution, that’s very abstract, but it’s not actually vague. We do mean something very specific. It’s just that everybody else is trying to be very concrete. Your hero goes traveling, for instance, when we’re like, “You need to create a sense of uncertainty over a possible threat. That’s what a problem is.” And so you can look at those two things. One is very specific about exactly what the hero does, which just isn’t flexible enough. And we’re looking at, “This is the feeling that you need to evoke, that makes it feel like there’s a plot there.” Oren: And that’s, of course, where the vagueness also comes from on these structures, because they’ll say things like, “Your hero has to go traveling.” But it’s ridiculous to say that every story needs to literally include a character who goes traveling. What is that even about? So instead, they’re like, “They have to be metaphorically traveling.” At that point, it can mean anything. And so you haven’t actually limited any options. Whereas if we say, “There has to be a problem, there has to be uncertainty over the outcome of this problem, of this threat,” that is a specific thing your story needs to have. It can still be a lot of different things. But it does need to be that. It can’t be a metaphorical problem. It has to be a real problem. Chris: I will say that I feel like we saw this and we shouted out. So we shouted about it a bunch on the blog. And since then, I feel like I can tell when somebody actually reads the blog, because their plot is more likely to work better. I’m sorry to say, dear listeners, that when I get a podcast listener as a client, that is less likely to be true. I think it’s just because we go through topics so much that shouting about the throughline every episode would just get really old. And so those kinds of things are more likely to be missed. Oren: The throughline is also just very complicated. And we haven’t explained all of it here because it would take more than half an hour to do that. So I’m going to be linking instead to our articles where we do explain that. So there’s just… there’s only so much you can get across in a podcast. Chris: I’ve had a few clients that they did have a throughline, but they still didn’t really understand the plot structure inside of story. And it’s really the same thing, right? Just understanding what a problem is and turning point and resolution. And that happens at multiple scales. That’s a little bit more unusual, but I’ve also seen it. Oren: Now, since we’ve been zoomed out, let’s just talk a little bit about what it looks like when you don’t have a throughline or your throughline is not being brought out. And usually this manifests as the story meandering. It doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere. Chris: If you’re not sure how to end your story, that’s a big clue. Because usually, once you have that problem, you know that once that problem is solved, that’s your end. So if you can’t figure out how to bring things to the end, that’s a good sign. Oren: You often end up going on tangents. All of these things are signs that a throughline is missing. Chris: Yeah, a throughline definitely gives you direction. So if you’re like, “I have… the plot could go absolutely anywhere and I have no idea what to do,” right? That’s… you might be missing. Again, we can never say anything for certain. These are only possible signs. Oren: So to use a randomized example, which is combining several different things from different stories I’ve edited, because I don’t want to like trash talk any of my clients directly on the podcast, a story that’s missing a throughline could look like it starts in a post-apocalyptic town and the protagonist is going around being like, “Wow, post-apocalyptic life is real bad, and we’re all upset constantly, because it’s bad time, because we don’t have our technology and what have you,” but there’s not really anything that needs to be fixed, there’s nothing that can draw your attention. And so the protagonist just hangs out for a while and then suddenly raiders attack. OK. And so then the protagonist fights the raiders for a bit and the raiders leave. And then, maybe a little while later, the protagonist goes and like chats with their sweetheart, and they talk to their sweetheart for a while. And then maybe later they go and deal with the corn, because maybe the corn has some problems. And this story does technically have conflict in it. Not all of them do. Some of the ones I look at don’t have conflict at all, but this one does. It’s just not going anywhere, right? None of the conflicts build on each other. They’re all just things that happened. And now, of course, you could make the throughline the general survival of the town if that seemed to be in question. And then you could incorporate different problems like raiders and crops and sweethearts, maybe. Who knows? Chris: Sweetheart could be very vital to the town. Oren: Yeah, you really need that sweetheart. Chris: The load-bearing sweetheart right there. Oren: But if you aren’t doing that from the beginning, you’re going to have a story that just feels like it wanders around until the pages run out and now the story is done. But it doesn’t ever feel like it ended. So that’s what it looks like. So how do you fix it, Chris? How do you fix a missing throughline? Chris: We… you start with a problem, and you get to the resolution, and then the trickiest part. So, you know, the problem is survival. This town is in danger of falling apart. Resolution is anything that permanently settles that question. So it could be: “Town has fallen apart.” If you want it to be, most people prefer, “The town is saved, no longer a danger of falling apart.” But then you gotta look at your chapter events and they should be things that ultimately lead to that end. So if you can take them out and that… the end, the way that issue is solved is exactly the same, they’re not really structurally part of the throughline. So you want to get all of your big events so that they build on each other, they make a difference. It’s like a dominoes effect, that one thing leads to the next. If at any point in time, something can just be extracted and your readers would never notice that part is missing, everything else works seamlessly together, you know you have something that’s not really fitting in. So another really common thing we see is: Managing characters can be difficult. And it’s very common for manuscripts to first just have too many characters. And that spreads things really thin and divides up the story and makes it so that no character gets enough time or development. We could start with a main character that’s working really well, and then… but half of the story is spent away from that main character with other characters that are less engaging, is what often happens. And this often comes with confusion about who the main character is. And sometimes our clients are divided on that. They may have started the manuscript loving one character and then came back to it later and then decided they liked a different character better. Sometimes they’re divided because they feel obligated to make one character their main character, but they like a different character better. Oren: Yeah, that’s especially common if the manuscript was written over a long period, because people change. And if you’re writing your manuscript over multiple years, by the fifth year of working on this manuscript, you could very easily identify more with a different character than you did at the start when you first started writing it. And now you’ve got a problem. Chris: And again, just like I was talking about with plot, if you can just take a character out and everything works, you should probably take that character out. Oren talks a lot about the smallest viable change, which is the smallest amount of change that will fix the problem. I tend to think of it more as easiest viable change, where cutting is not necessarily the smallest change, and it can be really hard for writers. We get really attached to what we have. But it’s kind of like ripping off a bandaid, where it hurts at first, but then it is often so much easier and faster than doing things the hard way. And when it comes to things like cutting, especially if you have a character that is just extra and doesn’t need to be there, cutting is a lot faster than trying to find things for them to do. Once you get to a certain point and you have way too many characters, it becomes really difficult to keep them all distinct so that people remember all of them and can keep track of them, but also to give them all a role so they feel like they have a reason to be there. Oren: Because that’s the question everyone always asks, is like, “How many characters should I have?” And it’s: You should have the minimum number that your story will work with in most cases. Because if you start adding more, they’re not really going to do anything. There will just be more names to remember. Pretty soon you find yourself adding a Dramatis Personae. Chris: With 92 characters. Oren: 92 characters, including the Son of Darkness and the Knight of Darkness. Darkness, darkness, darkness. Chris: Yeah, we’re referencing Malazan, which I did a post on recently. Oren: Best post. Love that Malazan post. It was very serious. Chris: Very serious. It’s a very serious story. So with this one, making a list of your characters, testing what would happen if I removed them, and then a lot of times what we do in editing is we tell the client to prioritize things. Make an order of priority. Which one is the most important? Not just to the story, not to the plot as it is, but to you. Which one do you like the most? What character do you enjoy writing more about, and would be really painful to reduce their presence? As opposed to this character that you, like, “I don’t know if they’re important to the plot, but I just feel obligated to write them. I don’t actually enjoy writing that character.” Now, the funny thing is, sometimes we do find that clients give us answers that we have fairly certain are not correct when it comes to what their priority is. We can tell in your manuscript how much you would love a character, genuinely. There’s some very strong signs, and again, sometimes people will put their top character as a character they feel obligated towards. This is the character they’re supposed to love, but we can tell in the manuscript that they’re not putting energy into that character like they’re putting into another character. Oren: Yeah, I’ve had a few clients who, after I have pushed a little bit, have admitted that actually they don’t really like that character the most. That’s just their main character, so they felt like they should rank them higher. I’m trying to think if there’s a better way I can ask that question that will encourage them to be more open the first time. But until then, I’ll just have to depend on my amazing ability to suss out which character you like most. It’s usually not that hard. Because it’s the one that has all of the development and gets to do the most and usually has the most candy, although not always. Sometimes it’s the one who has the most bad things happen to them, because now the story can focus on them more. Chris: So yeah, just think about that. And then what you want for a main character is that they should definitely be the star of the show at the climax. Sometimes that can get lost. You should spend the most time with them. Definitely make them a viewpoint character. Or, if you’re writing an omniscient, that just means you follow them. Viewpoint character film style. Give that person the most investment and focus. And other people could support that main character. Not that there aren’t ensemble stories or those can’t work, but that’s actually a very niche situation. I have not… Oren, have you gotten many manuscripts that you would say, “Yeah, this is an ensemble?” Like, ensemble is an equal focus on multiple characters and that actually works in the story. Oren: No, not that actually works, really. I have seen a few stories where the author had that idea, but just didn’t know how to do it because ensemble stories are difficult. And so I would talk to them about, “Okay, is this something you’re really interested in? Because if it is, we can try to work towards it. But it is going to be more work.” And when I explain that to them, they usually go for a single main character. Chris: So it’s not that it’s impossible, but it is a really niche scenario. And in the vast majority of cases, there’s one character. Even if you have a Team Good, protagonists that are hanging out, there’s one character that’s the most important. Oren: I have had one client who had a pair of dual protagonists. And I thought that actually would have worked fine. But in the end, she decided to consolidate it down to one for her own reasons. And that also worked. The story worked very well, but I think she could have kept both of them as the double protagonists. So that’s a situation where that could have worked, but that’s one client. I’ve worked with more than that. Chris: If you’re writing a romance, I think it’s more common to have two characters where you have viewpoints from both people on both sides of a relationship. Even in those, I’ve often seen that one character feels a little bit more like the main character than the other. But that would be probably the most common reason I’ve seen it evenly spread over more than one character. Another character-related thing that, again, this is really important for your main character and assessing who your main character is and spotlighting them appropriately, it’s very common for the main character to not have enough agency. Oren: Oh boy. Chris: Especially if your character is young or a woman. Oren: Yeah. Chris: It’s not that I’ve never seen adult men, male protagonists with not enough agency, but that is significantly less common. Oren: I’ve seen it a few times, but surprising no one, it’s usually young and female is the reason, is the characters who don’t have much agency. At least when it’s a woman, that’s usually a matter of preconceptions and baggage that I can explain why that shouldn’t be the case, and then that can be changed. There are occasional exceptions, like when an author wants to write a story about… that takes place in a really patriarchal world, but wants a plot that depends on someone who isn’t under patriarchal restrictions, but they want the protagonist to be a woman, that’s complicated. But usually it’s not that complicated. Young protagonists are a lot trickier. Chris: Yeah. With young people, it’s like, there’s a lot of logistics over whether there are also adults that should be taking on these tasks, which makes it partly a worldbuilding issue in many cases. Having a built-in reason why young people… That’s one thing that, I don’t know if we’ve talked about in Lockwood & Co., that was a neat part of the premise, is that only young people have the ghost abilities to detect ghosts, therefore we have a built-in reason in the world why they’re going into danger. And that really helps, but not every story is going to have something like that that is easily usable. Oren: Yeah, and when it comes to young adventurer heroes, there are ways to make that feel more realistic, but in a lot of cases it’s going to come down to a similar situation to the Masquerade, which is: often there’s just not a way to make it super plausible, but your story kind of depends on it anyway. And so sometimes you’re going to need to deploy some handwavium. Chris: Basically, just don’t call attention to it. If you point out that there’s a bunch of adults right there who could handle the problem, this is the issue I keep having with some recent Marvel shows, including Ms. Marvel and Moon Girl, where they want to bring in S.H.I.E.L.D., but once S.H.I.E.L.D. is there, it’s like, “Why isn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. helping this young person deal with their enemies?” Oren: Because Maria Hill’s not taking their texts anymore, because Casey texted her too much. Chris: Oh, gosh. Oren: That’s a real reason. That’s a real thing. Apparently people are mad about the way Maria Hill was treated in the Secret Invasion show, but I’m mad about the way she was treated in the Moon Girl show. Chris: It’s like, “We sent her too many texts and she’s already blocking our texts, so we just have no other way of contacting S.H.I.E.L.D. for help. We just can’t do it. Texting was our only method.” Oren: I’m actually worried that season two is going to play up how worried the rest of the family is about Moon Girl and how they think that she shouldn’t be a superhero, because I hate that storyline, because they would be right. She shouldn’t be a superhero, but she needs to be for the show, and I want to watch the show. So it always ends up feeling really contrived. Chris: Yeah, if you have a child hero going on dangerous adventures, just don’t bring in that kind of social conflict. Just don’t have the parents be like, “I don’t know, this is dangerous,” and do a conflict over it. Just don’t. Leave it alone. And again, in this situation with Moon Girl, the answer was to not bring S.H.I.E.L.D. in. If you have a child superhero, you just pretend like other people can’t do anything and aren’t there, and adult authorities aren’t there, and just don’t exist. But in any case, so again, with agency, you’re looking at making it so your main character is making important decisions that have an impact on the plot, which often means that they come up with ideas and come up with plans. If you have a group of protagonists, they’re doing that and guiding what actions the protagonists take next. Now they have to do it alone, but we need to see that they really have an impact. And also, they’re the one that is most responsible for solving problems, because: Always Be Solving Problems. We talked about that. Oren: And there is one last thing I want to touch on in this topic, which is: I often get a question that boils down to some version of, “Does my protagonist have to be a badass to have agency?” And the answer is: If the conflicts you have in mind require specific skills for a character to participate in them, your protagonist should probably have those skills, whether they start with them or get them before the conflict arises or something, because otherwise it’s just not going to work. If your story is about sword fighting, your protagonist should be able to sword fight, at least on some level. And by the same token, if your protagonist is a huge badass and has all these skills, but you create a scenario where none of those skills ever matter, then having all of those skills doesn’t compensate for their lack of agency. I’ve seen this happen a number of times with female protagonists, where the author will be like, “They’re a huge badass, they can swords fight and shoot arrows and they have magic,” and whatever, but then none of those skills ever matter, like they’re never in a position to sword fight or shoot an arrow or use their magic, and they just get carried along through the plot for some other reason. Chris: Oftentimes in these cases, when we have a protagonist that does not have enough agency, giving more skills, taking away any other characters that are solving problems for them can be important. If they have a parent hanging around, if they have a mentor hanging around, that’s just solving everything for them, you’ve got to reduce that mentor’s powers and abilities or take them away entirely and then give your main character more skills until they can actually make that impact and have agency. And as a last note, if you are having trouble because you want things to go wrong, and you’re like, “If my main character is able to solve problems, then things wouldn’t get worse, and I want things to get worse,” I do have an article on that that we can point you to, on how to keep giving them agency, even if you want everything to go downhill. Oren: And that actually is a good segue, because we’re almost out of time, but there is one last common problem that I want to cover, which is lack of turning points. Because turning points are another really important thing that most people don’t know about, at least not intellectually. A lot of people understand them instinctually, but don’t have a name for it. For a long time, I called them the extra oomph moment, because I was very eloquent until Chris came up with turning points. This is the point in the conflict where the protagonist goes from losing to winning, or winning to losing. It’s where they demonstrate not only how they’re going to win/lose, but why they deserve that outcome. And if you don’t have one, then you can just describe the conflict as, “And then the character fought really good, and then won.” Chris: “They swung their swords back and forth, and hey, what do you know, that sword swing chopped somebody’s head off. Yay!” Oren: A very famous example of this is in the Black Panther movie, the first one, the final fight between Killmonger and T’Challa. They just fight for a while, and then suddenly T’Challa wins. This time he throws a knife, and it works this time. It wouldn’t have worked other times, the guy just would have dodged it, but it worked this time, because the fight’s over. Chris: And you’ll see the films will have them do something fancy, to try to create… it’s not a good way to create a turning point, but what they’ll do in most of these cases is they’ll, like, “Okay, the protagonist is down,” and then suddenly, “Cool move!” And it’s… Oren: Why didn’t you do that before? Chris: A cool move is not… Oh, the latest Marvel thing is like, how you win is by getting stabbed through the midsection, and then somehow through force of will, getting up and attacking the enemy anyway. And it’s like, I… that is not a good turning point. Oren: That one’s actually really interesting, because that is taking a good idea and taking it so far that it’s a bad idea. Because what they’re trying to do there is they’re trying to demonstrate persistence, which is one of the qualities we talk about in our turning point posts, because usually the three qualities your protagonist is demonstrating to show why they win is they’re either showing cleverness, persistence, or selflessness. And there are others, but those are the three that’ll get the job done most of the time. And persistence often takes the form of persevering through pain, and that can work. We can see that in The Winter Soldier, when Captain America gets shot, but he is able to push through that and do the thing he needs to do. The problem is that now we’ve… like, getting shot’s not enough anymore, so we’ve upgraded to getting impaled. Chris: And it’s just clear that the Marvel writers don’t really know what to do, so they just keep copying what they know works, but that means doing the same thing over and over again. Which is, I think, one of the reasons why it’s escalated so much, is because it’s lost its impact. So instead of changing to a different kind of turning point and doing something unique, they’re just making it more. Oren: And at that point, even if you could argue that they’ve demonstrated persistence, it just destroys credibility. They should be dead. They got stabbed through the middle. Like, you don’t survive that. Unless you’re Wolverine. I’ll accept it, maybe, if you have a specific healing power that can fix that, but if you do, it’s probably not a good turning point anyway. Chris: Yeah. We’ve got several articles on turning points. They are one of the more advanced storytelling concepts. I often don’t go over turning points with clients until other pieces of the story are looking pretty good. Certainly, if there’s no throughline, I don’t usually talk about turning points. Focus on the big picture stuff first. But the climax is never going to feel quite right until you have that turning point down. The climax, especially. Turning points happen everywhere, but the climax is where you want the turning point that really just knocks it out of the park. Because that’s your most important moment. Oren: This is true. And speaking of turning points, we have reached the end of the podcast, where we go from recording to not recording anymore by demonstrating cleverness of checking the clock. Therefore, I think we can call this point turned. Chris: And if we said anything that makes you wonder whether or not you’re doing it right, or you have a good throughline, or you have good turning points, you can join our 10-year celebration and get that personalized advice from us on your story or project. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants and join at the 10 USD or Pegasus tier or above by August 14th, if you’re not already at that level. Oren: Alright, and before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie McLeod. Next, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you all next week. [outro music] This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.