The Mythcreant Podcast

Uh oh, you wanted to have your characters go to a school for magic or discover the meaning of friendship on their quest, but because someone’s already written an article about it, that’s right, you’re thinking of using… a trope. It’s okay though! Just because something happens often enough to be recognizable, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. To prove it, this week we’re discussing our very favorite tropes, the ones we might use a little too often if our editors weren’t there to stop us. Download Episode 328  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/TMP-328-Our-Favorite-Tropes.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: The Endgame Portal Scene Unsullied Labyrinth Strange and Norrell Van Helsing (2004) Legend Mazes and Monsters Runaways Galaxy Quest Flerken The Happening Tier Zoo: Hippos Lucifer (Supernatural)  Good Omens The Last Ringbearer The Lords and Ladies Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Anonymous. 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] Chris: This is the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris and with me is Oren and Wes. And since we have this opening every single time and we always make bad jokes, is that a trope? Oren: If it is, I’m not doing it anymore. [laughter] Chris: Is our opening bit a trope now? Oren: Tropes are bad and I hate them and I’m never doing another trope. It’s the worst. Chris: Okay. No more opening bit. No more puns. Oren: Wait, what? No, you can’t take that away from me! That’s my favorite trope. [laughter] That’s the one I like! When I said no tropes, I meant only the tropes that I like. Chris: No only the tropes that you like? Okay. We’ll remove all the tropes that Oren likes. Oren: Nooo! Chris: We’re going to talk about our favorite tropes. And the reason we’re going to talk about our favorite tropes is we’re so busy usually, talking about what tropes are bad on our site and online, because frankly, that’s what people read. Sometimes people ask us, why don’t we have more positive articles? We do sometimes, we have probably have more than you think, but they don’t get the clicks! They don’t get those sweet clicks. People just want to read negative stuff. It’s sad, but it’s true. Oren: Literally nobody reads our positive articles. [laughter] Chris: When people talk about tropes, they tend to talk about tropes that they don’t like. Wes: And we’re probably also talking about this because the last time you talked about tropes, and all the ones that you guys hated, I wasn’t around. And you knew that I would not have partook very strongly in that negativity. And so you’re like, “Oh, Wes is back. Oh, we gotta keep things positive for him.” And so we’re clearly like, “Yeah, let’s talk about good things that we like. Cause I bet Wes loves all this tropey nonsense.” Chris: It is true that perhaps we’re a little bit more ready to tear things apart than you are, Wes. Wes: It’s cause I’m a Virgo. I want to sit back and hear it all out and be calm. Oren: There is a weird kind of fear that I see in writing Twitter and other writing social media spaces, that everyone hates tropes now because TV Tropes exists. I don’t think it’s that big a deal, but we have encountered a few Q and A’s from people who seem to want to not do something, specifically because it is a trope that has a TV Tropes page. I would just kind of like to show by example that just because something has been documented doesn’t mean it’s bad. What is or is not a cliche is kind of debatable, but just because something has happened often enough that people notice it, that doesn’t mean it is a bad thing and that you should stay away from it. You will run yourself ragged if you think that way. It will not help. Wes: We like identifying patterns and categorizing things, because then you get to draw on that. And then when those expectations get subverted or altered, it’s enjoyable. But without it, you can’t subvert something that hasn’t been established as a trope or otherwise. So in a way that brings you more novelty and joy. Oren: Yeah. I mean, I do think people could maybe do to read TV Tropes with a grain of salt. A lot of their stuff is not necessarily reflected in actual storytelling. They make some assumptions. But just the fact that they talk about tropes doesn’t make tropes bad. One of my favorite tropes is surprise reinforcements. I love it the most. I sometimes just watch the portal scene in Endgame when I’m feeling bad. I like it when friends show up to help. I would definitely overuse this trope if I wrote more fiction, and I probably overuse it in my RPGs. I did use it probably more times than I should have in one story that I’m still working on, and I’m trying to change one of those instances because I’d already done it. Don’t you want it a second time? If it was a good thing the first time, it would clearly be good again. Chris: Let’s just say, in your current campaign, I can count on, if I fail a role, that some NPC is going to show up and help out. [laughter] Oren: Yeah, but sometimes they’re an NPC you don’t like, and then it’s awkward. Chris: It’s not as much candy for my character, right? So in that case, it is not as rewarding as the successes. Of course we have tons and tons of NPCs in that game. So many of them to show up and help out at the last minute. Oren: Usually the surprise reinforcements trope is a prior achievement turning point, at least when it’s done correctly. It can definitely feel kind of contrived if it isn’t earned in some way. If good guys just randomly show up. “Ah, well I’m glad they came to help!” Chris: When you have many protagonists, you might have a main character who usually solves problems. But you also need your side characters to contribute. Once in a while, it’s okay for the side character to solve the problem instead of the main character, by showing up and saving the day last minute. It’s not something you should do for every conflict, but sometimes it’s worth it to have those side characters contribute depending on how long the story is. That’s a good opportunity to give some candy to a different character than your main character. Oren: I’ve also occasionally seen this trope used where reinforcement showed up when they weren’t necessary. Like, it seemed like we were already winning and then some reinforcements show up and it’s like, “Thanks, guys! Thanks for being here.” Chris: I think the reason why this reinforcements trope is so popular, especially in visual media, is they’re trying to make everything really dramatic. And they’re looking for [dramatic voice] “All is lost, the odds are so stacked against us,” have a way for people to not die. And having a whole bunch of reinforcements show up last minute—Game of Thrones used that too much, where it starts to become predictable. But I think the reason they did it is, again, they wanted that really high tension, all is lost, overwhelming odds. And then they just use the same tool to get out of that too often. But it can be really fun in moderation. Wes: Of course, it soundtracks nicely, because you can have the whole change in tone and atmosphere, and then hit the special music. And then suddenly there’s like a million more Unsullied, even though you’re pretty sure that they all got killed on the other continent. Oren: Where did they come from? Who knows? They came from the soundtrack, obviously. Wes: That score is incredible. Spawns more soldiers. Chris: I love creepy balls and masquerades. So, examples. Everybody loves the masquerade in Labyrinth. You know, dancing with the goblin king. The Addams Family ball. It’s great. If you’ve seen the Strange and Norrell miniseries, which is quite good, they have like a fairy abductor. When she sleeps, she goes into the fairy realm and there’s a ball and she’s made to dance. One that I keep thinking of is the 2004 movie Van Helsing, which was a bad movie. Wes: That was with Hugh Jackman, right? Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale? I was going to say Jeremy Renner, but I think he was in that gritty Hansel and Gretel. Chris: The one memorable scene is the ball scene. Where the vampire big bad is having this dark ball, and he’s dancing with the damsel. And they have a singer and music and everybody’s dancing, but then they want to have an interaction between the villain and the damsel. They just sort of stand there and talk to each other and it’s like, wait, what happened to the dancing? Why are you standing still? You should be dancing right now. You’re on a dance floor. You were dancing a second ago. There’s music playing. Why are you not dancing? Oren: Maybe everyone at the party knows he’s a vampire lord, and it’s just like, “Okay everyone, just dance around him. Like, I know it’s a pain, but we really can’t make him mad. I know he’s being really inconsiderate right now, but step around him and then continue the circle.” Chris: Or alternately, they watch him for cues and they’re like, “The vampire lord stopped, so we all got to stop to make him look like he fits in. And then we can start dancing again as soon as he starts dancing again.” Oren: Yeah. Plus everyone has to wear creepy masks because that just makes it cooler. Chris: There’s a scene that’s not a whole ball, but it’s still a creepy dancing scene in this old Legend movie, which has the young Tom Cruise and Tim Curry. There’s a scene where the damsel dances with a creepy dress. It’s like this completely black figure with just a sparkly black face. You can’t see eyes or mouth or anything on it. And it just comes and is like, [singsong voice] “Hey, dance with meee.” [laughter] She starts dancing with it, and then they’re merged together. And then she’s wearing this villainous dress. Oren: Usually when I get dressed in the morning, it’s not nearly that glamorous. Chris: Unfortunately, most stories that have creepy balls and masquerades, don’t do a really good job of integrating it super well in the plot. It’s just, hey, this is going to create some cool atmosphere and the villain happens to be here. Oren: There are a lot of ways to make going to a ball part of the plot. I have had some clients who have been like, “All right, well, I really want my character to go to the ball. So we’re going to take a break from the plot to go to the ball.” And it’s like, okay, but, imagine if someone that they needed to talk to was going to be there and they can’t normally talk to them. Or like, they need to snoop around and overhear what people are saying. Then they can go to the ball and it’s part of the plot. Imagine. Chris: Combining magic with balls works really well. Just like in Strange and Norrell. Like, imagine a masquerade where, when people put on their mask, they don’t remember who they are anymore, or something like that. You could do fun things with them. Wes: I am a big fan of abandoned places. It doesn’t really matter what the place is. If it’s a mine, even better. If it’s a mine where dwarves used to live, that’s probably the best. And if the dwarves aren’t there anymore because they dug too deep, that’s even better. I was trying to think, why am I attracted to this idea? I kind of jam on the forbidden knowledge trope. Even though I know that knowledge is good. We should learn things. Learning is great. But I still like the idea of, if you dig too deep in your quest for resources and prosperity, you’re going to get stung by a Balrog. Or if you read this book, there’s a reason the letters move. It makes your hair catch on fire. So I am a big fan of that kind of forbidden knowledge, at the cost of pushing the limit a little too far. Oren: I mean, abandoned places have automatic plot hooks, of like, why are they abandoned? What happened? And that’s not always part of the story. Sometimes you’re just an urban fantasy town, which has an abandoned everything. But if you’re using the trope to its full potential, part of the story is going to be, why was it abandoned? And that’s just a question that gets raised when you go to an abandoned place, and it provides some tension. It’s probably not going to be because it fell below housing code and is no longer considered fit for human habitation. It’s going to be, like, a ghost or something. Wes: In abandoned houses, mansions—I guess, condemned buildings, whatever—those are fine. A mine, it’s hard to grasp the concept of the limits of a mine. It’s easier for me with a building. It’s like, I know what a building looks like. I can kind of think about an ant farm and maybe that’s the mine, but only in two dimensions. Chris: Everything in the mine’s very hidden, as opposed to, I love castle ruins that are on the surface. But, you know, you can see where they end. I think I like imagining, seeing half of the structure and imagining the rest. Wes: There’s a really terrible—I want to say it was a Hallmark movie, but it stars Tom Hanks, and I don’t think he acknowledges it—but it’s called Mazes and Monsters. It showed up, I think in the eighties, kind of right after peak satanic panic kind of thing. Tom Hanks’s character goes off to college, having promised his parents that he would not play Mazes and Monsters because that’s the reason why he had to leave his other college. Because he became too obsessed with that game and flunked out of class. Chris: [laughing] Oh wow. Wes: He meets a group of enthusiastic young people who also enjoy playing Mazes and Monsters, and he starts playing with them and has a romance with one of them. But they decide to take their game to the next level. And one of the characters discovers an abandoned mine nearby. They start LARPing in the mine as part of their Mazes and Monsters, but due to a few things that happen and Tom Hanks’s character falling out of that romance, he has too real of an experience in this mine. And suddenly he can’t separate himself from his character, which is Pardue, a holy man. Then he goes on a quest to New York City. Chris: I did not expect that end part. Are you saying that was like the fifteen minutes in the beginning or something like that? Wes: The mine stuff lasts probably about two thirds of the way through, but then yeah, he starts telling them that he’s getting visions, that he has to go to the two towers. It was weird seeing the twin towers in a movie. He has to jump into a portal and we all see where this is going. He goes to the top of the building to jump into the portal, but then they save him. But do they? Cause then they go see him after time has passed, and he greets them as Pardue. And so he’s, like, broken forever. It’s a terrible movie. Oren: Man, I wish I could get players who were that into their characters. [laughter] Wes: So invested. [laughs] I liked the premise of that part. I thought there would be more with the mine, that things would get more supernatural instead of just sad. The atmosphere was just ripe for it. It was pretty fun for that scene. Oren: This is a little cheating cause I know Chris likes this one too. I love antagonistic parents. And I love antagonistic mentors. And I love antagonistic mentor parents the most. Three great things, all in one. It solves so many problems around mentors and parents if they’re antagonists. It gets rid of the whole, why don’t they fix the problem for you? Well, they are the problem. Deal with it. [laughter] You can’t handle the truth. And it also provides a role for the parents in the story. Because if the parents are around, there’s kind of this odd feeling of like, they should probably be important if the character is talking to them on a regular basis, as a young person probably would. A story can feel kind of weird if the character is technically in high school and lives at home, but never talks to their parents because their parents aren’t important in the story. And there are ways around that, but one of the best ways is if the parent is a bad guy. Now you have a built-in role in the story that doesn’t get rid of the protagonist’s agency. And it’s such great drama, especially if the parents, despite being bad guys, are still loving parents and still want what’s best for their kid in some way. Chris: I would put a dividing line between parents and, what would be in most stories, a parent figure. Which is the character that is “like my father” or “I thought he was my father, but turns out he’s not my real dad”. Because a lot of times those characters are characters that hate the protagonist. They’re just evil. Whereas the relationship becomes much more interesting if you have a genuine parent figure who actually wants the best for the protagonist, right? The other relationship is a lot more complex. So I would put that caveat on it. And it is a little sad that when people want to make a parent an antagonist, so often they reach for “not quite real” parents. It doesn’t say very good things. But they can be friendly and antagonistic. And so could the mentor. And it’s great. Oren: I really enjoy it. I find that there is built-in dramatic conflict because, in addition to having to try to overpower this antagonistic parent, you also have to deal with, well, they’re your parents and they love you and you love them. Probably. I think that’s what makes this more interesting. But you still have to defeat them or convince them to join your side. So I was super into The Runaways when it first started. And it floundered, but I really liked the premise. Chris: They had some logistical issues with power levels. Oren: For some reason, the parents in Runaways don’t have powers. I don’t understand that choice. All of the kids get powers and it just seems like the parents should also have them, but only one of them kind of does, but it’s actually just the power to use the staff. So once the kid has it, the parent doesn’t have that power anymore. And so now the conflict over being able to physically defeat them is just kind of over now, because they don’t have powers. So, yes, I guess you can. Chris: I would love to see more protagonists studying under antagonistic mentors. Where it’s like, “I don’t necessarily like what this person is doing, but for my own survival or benefit, or so I can become powerful enough, I have to study under this person and gain their skills.” Or, “I think everything’s fine, but it turns out my mentor is maybe not as good of a person as I thought.” I like that. I would like to see more of that. That’s more of a personal relationship, as opposed to “I’m going to infiltrate the system,” which just has a different feel. Less personal. I like things that seem innocent and end up being menacing or deadly. The cute aliens in Galaxy Quest. Where they’re like [high pitched voice] ooh, they look like cute babies! And then—this is how it always goes, right?—the cute animal, or whatever it is, open its mouth. And it’s full of teeth. Wes: You loved that scene in Captain Marvel then, right? Chris: Oh my gosh. Oh, the best. I love that cat so much. [laughter] I also think it works really well with plants. I really like carnivorous plants. Especially sneaky ones. In the Xanth books, there’s carnivorous grass where, it’s fine, but if you go to sleep in the wrong place, the grass will start to get to you. Later seasons of The 100 have the same thing, where they’re on a planet that has trees that are carnivorous. And again, if you lay down in the wrong place, the roots will start to entwine you and you won’t be able to get away. Oren: That’s a pretty strong case of a thing that looks familiar, but is different in a dangerous way. That’s the uncanniness right there. We’re pretty used to plants. There are some dangerous plants, but they’re almost always dangerous cause they’re poisonous or what have you. There aren’t any plants that will actively pursue a human, but in fiction there can be. And it’s like, that’s not how plants do. I’m weirded out now. I’m not comfortable. Wes: I hope you guys never did see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. Oren: [laughing] Oh gosh. Wes: Basically the plants come after everybody. It’s terrible. Chris: See, now I want to see it more, but you’re saying it’s terrible. Wes: No, you don’t. It’s bad. It’s not fun bad. It’s just bad. Oren: The reason why it’s bad is actually because the plants only come after people in the most technical sense, because people start killing each other for no reason. And the whole movie is the characters kind of running away, and for some reason, not succumbing to the same effect. But meeting people who have. It’s very inconsistent. And then at the end they’re like, “Oh, the plants did it. The plants released a pollen or something that made people kill each other.” And it’s like, I guess if you say so, it was the plants. Sure, it could have been anything. You could swap out that scene for him explaining that actually it was the kitty cats. The parasite that they give you mutated and made you murderous, or actually it was Fox news. And that would be more believable. [laughter] It’s only plants coming after you in the most technical sense of the term. Wes: So, Chris, do you just look at everything with suspicion? Anything cute, you’re like, uh-oh. Chris: I mean, I think this is part of the fact that I just like creepy things. And so if you take anything and make it more creepy, I will like it better. Oren: In real life, that’s how hippos work. Hippos are large, no matter what, but they look kind of cute. And then they open their mouths and they have these enormous fang things. And it’s like, what the heck? There’s a TierZoo episode about that. Wes: If the devil is involved in some way, and if the devil is sympathetic in any way, I’m here for it. I will watch that show. I don’t know. I mean, it’s been done so many times. It doesn’t have to actually be Lucifer or Satan. It could be a stand-in for the devil, like Dracula or something like that. Maybe I crave the gray morality that comes with this type of trope. [considering voice] “Well, you know, the devil’s got a point.” [incredulous voice] “No, no, you can’t trust the devil!” Seems reasonable! Chris: The devil always speaks truth. Wes: Having finished season five of Supernatural recently, I enjoyed the Lucifer character immensely, especially in contrast with those angels. I mean, I liked them, but they were terrible. Oren: The angels were rude. They were rude dudes. Wes: But the Lucifer character, [soothing voice] “I will never lie to you, this is why I’m doing this.” And coaxing, “Just trust me.” And it’s like, I know I can’t trust you, but I want to! Chris: Speaking of which, I just like villains that never lie. They just say the right things, but they are true. Wes: It’s just fun. When the devil is present, I expect that trope. Present, I suppose, as a character. In Good Omens, the devil shows up at the very end, but basically doesn’t do anything and it gets kind of banished. So they don’t work that angle there. If the devil has a role in the story, I want to know what the devil’s perspective is on events. Maybe that’s just ever since John Milton did Paradise Lost, like everybody’s like, “Oh, you know, maybe, there is a point to this.” Oren: I mean, I’m definitely at the point where, if there’s a devil and the devil is just kind of an evil monster or whatever, like, yawn. I’m legit impressed with the devil character in Supernatural, especially considering how the demons are just uncomplicatedly evil. They’re just really bad with no redeeming value at all. So the fact that they were able to get this devil character to seem like he had a point was, I thought, pretty impressive. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I want my devil character to be neutral. I don’t want them to be evil at all. I just want them to have, like, a different political opinion from God or Michael or whoever we have representing the heaven side. Wes: I forget which book in the Sandman series, but the devil just quits. He quits his job as the lord of hell. And then there’s a bunch of interests come to claim the territory. But I think I remember that book ending with Lucifer just sitting on a beach somewhere, and he takes a sip of a drink and says, “I’ll admit, sunsets are beautiful. You did good on that one,” obviously talking to God. And I’m just like, that’s nice. Chris: My favorite devil trope is the whole violin battle with the devil. Wes: That was nodded to in Supernatural as well. Come on, Sam, bet your fiddle for my soul, or something like that. Oren: We have time for at least one more. And mine is evil elves. I love evil elves. I’ve gotten to the point where, if there are elves in a story and they’re Tolkin type elves, they’re going to be evil for me. Why would you want good Tolken elves? It’s a human, but it’s kind of better than a human in every way. It’s like, “Oh, great. Those guys.” But if they’re evil, then it’s like, “Ah, that’s very scary.” Wes: Without resorting to, “Oh, the orcs are corrupted elves, corrupted by evil.” It’s like, no, they’re just elves, and they’re evil. Oren: Everything about orcs comes with all this racial coding and racist baggage. Elves can have that too. I’ve seen a number of stories where it really feels like the elves are supposed to be stand-in for East Asian characters. And that’s not great. But I don’t think they’re that way by default the way orcs are. Like, the way orcs have racist baggage by default. I love to use elves as my setting’s imperialistic bad guys. Because they’re very capable. People who like fantasy are familiar with the concept of elves being very good at everything. And they live a long time, so they can be ancient and mysterious, which really helps when you’re trying to make a bad guy threatening. And they’re beautiful, which is also very useful for a bad guy to be. For them to be appealing in some way just makes it a little more interesting than if your bad guys are all sludge monsters. Wes: A book that I read that did that really well—I think I brought it up on here before—The Last Ringbearer. It’s a retelling of the Lord of the Rings. Well, the first part is like the war of the ring. And then it’s kind of dealing with the aftermath, but it’s from Mordor’s point of view. And it’s like, the elves and Gandalf are using the humans for their own reasons to basically dominate this continent. The elves are terrifying in that. Plus they gave them cat pupils, and I thought that was a cool touch. Chris: As opposed to other parts of their body. Hopefully in their eyeballs. Wes: [laughing] Just had to clarify. Oren: My favorite one is always going to be Lords and Ladies of Discworld. Cause that’s the one where the evil elves really make their appearance. They show up on the periphery of a few other books, but that’s the one where they’re the real bad guys. That’s just a very good Discworld book and it uses evil elves very well. Chris: For my last one, I wanted to say that everything is better with wings. Put a wing on it. [laughter] Put some wings on it. There are wings. It could be bird wings. It could be fairy wings. It could be bat wings, just put some wings on it. It’ll be better. Oren: Probably should have an even number of wings in most cases. I’m willing to make some exceptions, but for the most part, putting one wing on something is going to be a little weird. Chris: But more interesting anyway, with one wing. Wes: It would have to spin like a helicopter blade. Chris: That’s true! It can be like a helicopter seed. One wing does work. Everything is better. [laughter] Oren: I’m glad we got that sorted out. We’ll go ahead and end the podcast on that as we all fly away on these wings that Chris gave us. Cause everything’s better with wings. Those of you at home, if you want to leave a comment explaining why everything is better with wings, name some things that would be better with wings. Cars, for example, way better with wings. Obviously. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have a Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com. Chris: They already have the wings, obviously. Oren: We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro music]   P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?     Related Stories323 – Plot Twists 327 – What Are Wizards? Five Ways to Include Dreams in Your Plot  

This week, we’re talking about wizards. Or at least, we were going to, but then we asked what “wizard” means anyway. Naturally, there were some strong opinions. Must wizards arrive precisely when they mean to? Are they defined by staves and point hats? Do they need book-based magic? The great debate rages on this week’s episode of the Mythcreant Podcast, plus plenty of pontificating about how this is all Tolkien and D&D’s fault anyway. Download Episode 327  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/TMP-327-What-Are-Wizards.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Gandalf Dungeons and Dragons Elrond Theoden Radagast Ged Ogion Unseen University BBC Merlin Harry Dresden Saruman Esk Obi-Wan Kenobi Owen Lars Willow Giles Sam Winchester Dean Winchester Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Raillery. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening theme] Wes: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is… Chris: Chris Wes: And… Oren: Oren. Wes: Today we’re talking about wizards. Yeah! Which is, I realized, an unhelpful catch-all word for magic users. By honing in on what I mean by that, I’m inviting Oren to get into a terminology war. Chris: It’s like a wizards’ duel, but about wizards instead of by wizards. Or is it? Maybe you both qualify as wizards by your definitions? Wes: I want to state for the record that I would like us to have the foundation be: what the word most strongly connotes, for better or worse. So those magical users who arrive precisely when they mean to, wear big hats, and have a great fondness for the halflings’ leaf, which is basically Gandalf. You cannot get away from Gandalf when you say wizard. Chris: And in the other corner we have… Oren: I’m going to counter Wes a gandalficus centerus with my spell, which is usefulnus definitionus. This is to say that we should have a definition of wizard that makes it useful in that it is different from others, because there’s all these different kinds of terms we can use for magic users and they’re all the same. They’re all interchangeable because magic is not real. Wes: What? I quit. Oren: Technically we can call any kind of magic user any term if we want to. They’re all equally correct. But I would argue that if we want the term to be useful and mean something- and I think this is how it typically gets used in fiction- it defines a magic user whose magic is academic; they learn through books, they write spells down, they’ve researched spells, they go to wizard school, and that sort of thing. That’s the useful working definition of a wizard. And by that definition, Gandalf’s not a wizard, which I will fight you on. Gandalf’s an angel. Chris: Wes, again, what is your definition of a wizard? Wes: A wizard is just a skilled magic user who’s clever. By clever, I mean rigorously intellectual. There’s the study element of the spell casting, so there’s no innate ability. If someone’s ‘a wizard at something,’ like we’re praising them for their knowledge and skill and acumen. I am on board with Oren’s point about that being a job class. We’re battling Tolkien’s connotations here, which the whole world has gobbled up. It’s important to talk about that in contrast to what we really would like it to be. Chris: A third challenger appears! I disagree with both of you. I agree with Wes in that I think that the associations are important, but I would say that a wizard is best defined by the aesthetics or the theming. And so what matters is that they have pointy hats, robes, they’re often carrying books, pens and papers, and a staff. Oren: That right there is like one of the strongest characteristics of wizards: they have to have a staff, they have to have books, they have to have robes. If you don’t have those things…sure, you could be a wizard. Chris: It’s sandwich theory. Maybe if they have all the stuff but they don’t have a hat, they could still have enough components to qualify as a wizard. Oren: Is a wizard a sandwich? I don’t know. Wes: It could be a very wise sandwich. Chris: Associating wizards with learned magic casters is a very logical way to define them, but people aren’t that logical when thinking about wizards and writing about wizards. Wes: There’s something about a role-playing game, like Dungeons & Dragons, that makes the distinction between someone who learns magic through study and someone who can just do magic. It puts wizards in the former category. Oren: It’s funny because in Dungeons & Dragons it basically feels the same, even though it makes this big claim about how wizards have to work hard for their magic but sorcerers get it naturally. You can say that ‘Your wizard does a bunch of studying.’ Do they though? I play a wizard and I don’t really do any studying. I can occasionally describe that I’m doing that, but I also can just not and my wizard will play the same way. The only thing that’s noticeably different about playing a wizard is the way in which I choose spells, which isn’t particularly academic. There is scroll scribing, which makes a wizard mechanically different from a sorcerer in most editions of D&D. Wes: And you need to learn new spells by putting them in your spell book. Oren: Yeah. I can steal new spells from wizards I’ve killed. The best part of being a wizard is that you can Highlander their spell book. Every time I defeat a spellcaster when I’m playing wizard, I’m like ‘Do they have a spell book?’ I always feel cheated when they don’t. ‘Give me your spell book, man!” Wes: To bring Gandalf back into it- I know Oren has reasons for why he’s not a wizard- Tolkien definitely used him in the etymological sense of the word. Wizard literally means ‘wise person.’ I learned that -ard is a suffix that basically turns adjectives into nouns. You’re saying ‘wiseness’ or something like that. Gandalf is like a sage advisor, so that’s basically it. Chris: Oren, why exactly is Gandalf not a wizard? Oren: Because this power is inborn. He’s an angel. Chris: But why can’t he be both? Why can’t he be both an angel and a wizard? Oren: Because he doesn’t do the thing that actually makes wizards distinct. Any kind of magic user can be wise and know a lot of stuff. Half the characters in Lord of the Rings are like that. By this definition, Elrond is a wizard. Elrond knows all kinds of stuff, but we don’t call him a wizard. Chris: Well, that’s because he doesn’t have the aesthetics of a wizard and Gandalf does. Oren: But aesthetics are meaningless and can be tossed into the void. Chris: No, they’re not! No! Maybe this means that instead of declaring that one of the classic wizards is not a wizard, maybe you should rework your definition a little bit. Oren: The data doesn’t speak for itself, Chris. Wes: What few spells he casts, he still casts spells. Elrond is really good with blades. Oren: Does Gandalf cast spells? He has some kind of innate ability. He makes light shine out of his staff. Wes: In The Hobbit he magic-missiles a bunch of goblins because I remember being stunned by that on a reread. Right before they get into the Misty Mountains, they get jumped by goblins and Gandalf just like ‘Brrrat!’ and drops four of them. But then, of course, he doesn’t join them after that and reappears later. Chris: Since anytime he uses any kind of magic, like a…, it could be spell casting depending on how spells work in the setting. His whole fight with a Balrog could be spell casting. Wes: And he exorcises Saruman from Theoden. Oren: Yeah, he did the whole ‘Hey, I got white robes under here.’ It was really surprising and that made King Crusty no longer crusty. Wes: It’s an interesting thing with the wizard being the wise sage who offers counsel in a king’s court. I know both of you have talked at length to this. If the wizard’s thing is that they’re very wise and incredibly smart, that’s very hard to portray. How is Gandalf any better at giving advice than most of the other people in the Lord of the Rings? He just runs away and shows up to say the thing and then leaves again. Chris: He has authorial endorsement. Wes: Yes, there it is. Oren: Let me put it this way: a wizard who knows a bunch of stuff because he’s read a lot of books is way easier to describe than someone who is super smart. Because like a wizard might not be more intelligent than anybody else, but they’ve read more and have more academic knowledge. That’s a lot easier to portray than like a character who’s supposed to be a super-genius. Chris: It’s not just learned knowledge that wizards have. It’s also pretty common for them to have observed knowledge or other kinds of arcane knowledge, maybe even from talking to creatures. Radagast would be a good template for this. He’s also an earthy wise mentor who’s very Gandalf-like. He just wanders the world and almost never does spells, but just observes things and learns their names. Oren: Yeah. Honestly, when I hear those characters described I’m like ‘That’s what a witch is.’ If I was going to start dividing these magic caster names among the ways that modern writers actually use them, I agree that my definition doesn’t necessarily meet with the Old Masters, as it were. But I would argue that we have moved on from them. Wes: I will offer a defining characteristic that I’ve been trying to suss out with wizards: even though Gandalf is part of an order and there are wizard schools and such, wizards tend to be solitary and do their own thing when they want to, regardless of anyone else. There’s not a lot of community focus that I think you get with witches. Chris: Maybe. Witches are pretty varied in that aspect. There’s a lot of witches that are community-focused, but also a lot of witches that are alone, especially if they’re portrayed as evil. Wes: An evil wizard usually doesn’t have a coven of evil wizards. Chris: Unless there’s a university or school, I think you’re right, like in Terry Pratchett. Wes: Exactly. Oren: Nowadays, if you call your magic-type person a wizard, I think you are creating the expectation that they learn their magic from books. That is an expectation you are creating in the story. Of course, this is all arbitrary and none of it means anything in reality, so you can call your magic users whatever you want. But if you call them wizards, they should probably do that, otherwise call them something else. Chris: I think that might depend on how much D&D your readers have played. Oren: That’s a fair point. Chris: I’ve played D&D, but I generally don’t think of things in terms of how D&D defines them, because I haven’t played enough. Wes: I would agree with Oren, but this is coming from someone who’s also played plenty of D&D. As long as wizards continue to be depicted in folklore and tales as wizened old Dumbledors, there’s the knowledge association that we assume probably comes from reading a lot of books. Or they’re depicted in a library, or, as Chris said with aesthetics, they always have their tomes. It’s like ‘What are they doing with those things? Ah, they’re reading and that’s why they’re powerful. Because the more you know the better wizard you are.’ Chris: I think that they are aesthetically associated with books. But that’s different than actually getting their power by studying. When people react to an element of the story or genre associations, it’s almost that superficial Wizard In Book that is more iconic and means more than an in-depth explanation that would require them to stop and think about how Gandalf or Merlin acquired their magic. Oren: Merlin gets his magic at the speed of plot. Let’s not beat around the bush here. Wes: There are  so many different versions of Merlin that it’s unclear what Merlin is. Oren: If we’re going to get it to sandwich discourse, Merlin’s a sorcerer. Don’t try to convince me Merlin’s anything but a sourcer. He’s not very smart, but he’s very charismatic and that’s clearly where his magic comes from. I’m not really disproving Chris’s D&D theory here. Wes: Nope. So we said books, but what about a staff? Does a wizard have to have a staff? Oren: I think that you should be open to creative interpretations of the word staff. If they have a bunch of cleaning people on hire, I’m willing to consider that as a staff. Wes: *laughs* Chris: I don’t think it’s essential. I would expect in most cases, if they didn’t have a staff then they have a wand. The staff is very iconic. Wes: They have a piece of wood that’s important to the craft. Chris: And often it’s a piece of gnarled wood, but not always. This again goes back to the idea of Gandalf and his gnarled wood and his wandering wizard type. Oren: If you’re going to wander around a lot, it’s helpful to have a walking stick. Wes: Very practical. A wand is slightly less useful for that, unless you’re batting away branches. Actually, I can’t imagine that working. Oren: Yeah. I don’t really know what use of a wand is if you’re not using it to cast magic. If you’re in a classroom, you could use it to point at stuff on the board and whap students who aren’t paying attention. Chris: I think that of any one item, the hat is probably the most iconic. But even the hat can be removed if other elements are present. If you have a magic worker who has a robe and a book and a staff, it’s fine if they don’t have a hat. They will probably still come off as a wizard. Oren: Or you could do the Dresden Files thing where everyone else does robes, hats, staves, and cauldrons. But Dresden is a hip young cool wizard and he does have a staff, but instead of a robe, he has a trench coat because he’s very noir. I think he has a bucket instead of a cauldron and a lot of his spells are in cheap notebooks he bought from the store. He’s like ‘Aha, now I’m a cool counterculture wizard. Deal with it.’ Chris: Yeah. Although looking at the covers of the Harry Dresden series, it’s almost like they’re using these noir aesthetics to mimic wizard aesthetics because in a lot of pictures he’s still wearing a brimmed hat, it just doesn’t have a pointy top. And his trench coat is meant to look long and flowing like a wizard robe. Wes: Yes, the aesthetics are shining through. Oren: In one of the versions of Dresden- I forget if this is the early books or if this was in the TV show, which was surprisingly good despite being canceled early- he has a hockey stick as a staff and I always thought that was great. Wes: That’s kinda fun. Oren: It was very distinctive. Wes: I like that, a good ol’ hockey stick. But it needs to be like a proper gnarled old hockey stick. Oren: I don’t know how you gnarl a hockey stick. Wes: Chris brought up Radagast and how there’s something of primalness to the wizards and then Oren mentioned it might as well just be an angel. There are two quotes from Lord of the Rings that speak to what wizards are. ‘A wizard is never late and arrives precisely when he means to’ supports this idea that they just do what they want when they want, according to Tolkien. Then Treebeard, upon seeing what Saruman has wrought at Isengard, says that ‘A wizard should know better’ and I like that sentiment for saying that what Saruman is doing and has become almost makes him not a wizard anymore. Oren: I thought that was a very powerful phrase. The wizards in Lord of the Rings are, again, semi-divine beings and it’s literally their job to protect the world and keep the knowledge and do all these things. Saruman betraying that is really bad because a wizard should know better. I’m not sure if that means he’s not a wizard anymore, but it definitely means that something very bad has happened. Wes: It also suggests to me that, at least according to Treebeard, wizards are good, or at the very least, they’re not bad. They don’t do bad things and ripping trees up is objectively bad, according to a sentient tree. Chris: Going back to the idea that a character can be both an angel and a wizard, I would say that this is a very angel dynamic. Not many stories have fallen wizards, for instance. Wes: That’s a good point. He’s betrayed everything that he was. Oren: Also, hot take: Radagast is a druid. Boom. Wes: Merlin’s probably a druid too. Chris: More important than the idea of academics is the idea of arcane knowledge. Like really esoteric knowledge in that it can come from any source, but it will still be wizard knowledge. And that doesn’t mean that other magic workers can’t have that, but I think wizards are the most associated with that. Oren: Yeah. Any kind of magic user can be mysterious, but I think wizards kind of have an edge there just because their knowledge is strange and hard to get a hold of. If anyone could learn it, then it wouldn’t really be wizard knowledge. It would just be Wikipedia. Wes: They also get to use their wizard title in their favor. If someone else is a druid or enchanter or necromancer- what we might consider specialties of wizards- you get an idea what they’re about, but just a wizard? It’s just arcane magic. No one knows; it could be anything. Oren: I would also say that when you use the term wizard, you imply that the position has some kind of social status. Again, this is all arbitrary and you can change things and put your own spin on it or whatever. But by default, if you say the word wizard that sounds like someone who is part of a power structure or has some clout, as opposed to if you said sorcerer, which sounds like they’re kind of wild, or warlock, which sounds vaguely sinister. Chris: So from what I understand, the Discworld wizards are Terry Pratchett’s commentary on wizard tropes. Oren: I would almost say they are Terry Pratchett’s commentary on academia or just powerful people. They are commentary on a lot of things. Chris: They are commentary on whatever he wanted to comment on in that particular book. Oren: The wizards in Terry Pratchett are basically useless because they have all this power, but they can’t or won’t use it. And so they’re kind of harmless, outside of a couple of exceptions. They mostly sit around and do nothing. The implication is that that’s actually for the best because they’re too powerful to be wandering around unduly influencing things. In the book Equal Rites, he had to make the wizards way cooler, because that’s a book about Esk, a girl, wanting to be a wizard. Why would she want to be one of these lazy old guys who never does anything? I know I would want to be that, but why would she want that if she’s a cool plucky hero we’re supposed to like? In that book, the wizards are significantly more active and do more stuff. But most of the time, they just hang out. In the early books, the wizards kill each other all the time and I think Pratchett got tired of that. So he semi-retconned it because he brought in a new arch-chancellor and was like ‘This guy put a stop to all the murdering.’ Sure, if that’s what you want, Terry. Wes: We’ll let him have that one. Chris: I always thought the fact that they never did anything to almost be a commentary on Gandalf because he supposedly has all of his powers, but he never seems to use them. Mostly he just walks around and so these wizards in Discworld are like, ‘I’m so powerful, but I don’t do anything and that makes me more wizardy.’ Oren: That’s what drove me up the wall about the Earthsea books, particularly the third one. It’s in all three of the original books because there’s a big time gap between when the next one was published. There’s this whole vague idea of balance and it’s deployed whenever a problem could be solved by wizardry and LeGuin didn’t want it to be solved by wizardry. And it’s like ‘I can’t do that because of The Balance.’ What does that mean? Why only now can you not do it because of the balance? Earlier, Ged made a bunch of Fish Nets of +5 Fish-Catching for his village friends. Is that not upsetting the balance? What about this spring that he made for this old couple who were nice to him? That’s not upsetting? ‘No, those were all fine, but this is a plot point where I don’t want to have this story solved by magic. So now it’s The Balance.’ I have no idea what Terry Pratchett had in mind, but that’s really what it felt like it was commentary on, because at least Gandalf is out in the world doing stuff. Chris: There doesn’t seem to be an extraordinarily long list of wizards that are supposedly really powerful but never do anything. Oren: The more books I read that were published before 1990, the more wizards I run into who have exceptionally vague powers, and the story just expects you to go with that. The idea that we should have some understanding of what kind of magic this wizard can do and that he would use it in any kind of consistent manner doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of these authors. Chris: I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure as people get more used to magic and speculative fiction becomes more popular, people expect more rigor than just the hand-wavy ‘Magic happened.’ Oren: That’s one of the things that’s weird about Earthsea compared to the other books of that era that I’ve read which, granted, is a small number. There are a lot of those books I haven’t read, but Earthsea is weird in that it really gets into how much wizards can do. They can do almost anything. They have such a wide range of powers that it’s odd that they don’t solve more problems. It feels like that’s where this whole balance idea comes from. It’s very like *funny voice* ‘I can’t do it ‘cause of The Balance.’ Sure. Wes: So LeGuin’s wizards are jedis? Oren: Yeah. Wes: Obiwan Kenobi in A New Hope meets a lot of wizard qualities if we’re comparing him to someone like Gandalf. Oren: They call him a wizard straight up. Wes: They do call them a wizard! That’s right. Oren: Owen Lars- who at that time was supposed to be his brother in George Lucas’s weird head canon of Star Wars- calls him a wizard and it’s like ‘I don’t know what that means.’ Then a couple of decades later in the prequels, apparently ‘wizard’ is a thing that kids on Tatooine say. Sure, George. Chris: And then we can bring up the fact that wizards are obviously associated with men, but that’s just more reason to not have them only be men in your story. Oren: Yeah, don’t. Please don’t. Chris: Just make them all genders. Wes: We probably know the exact answer to this. In Hogwarts, everybody could have been wizards. Oren: You especially shouldn’t do a thing where you have the same kind of magic and then there’s a masculine word for it and a feminine word for it. Wes: You should not. Oren: There’s no reason to do that, unless you’re really interested in exploring sexism and how we need to have different names for the exact same thing based on gender. That’s not what most stories are about. If nothing else, it’s needlessly confusing. It’s like ‘Here’s another term you have to remember.’ Wes: Plus they’re old words that conjure quite a lot to our imaginations. And if you’re just saying, ‘Eh, this one’s just the same but for these people.’ No, it’s not and I refuse to think of it that way. Oren: If you tell me that this is a witch and this guy is a sorcerer, I’m going to assume those are different kinds of magic. If you later have them doing the same kind of magic, I’m going to be confused. Then I’m going to have to go back and be like ‘Oh, you were just unnecessarily gendering everything. I get it.’ I have a few more hot takes about wizards. Willow and Giles are both wizards. Sam and Dean from Supernatural are both wizards. Chris: Sam and Dean are not wizards! Oren: They’re wizards! Wes: How are they wizards? Chris: No! They don’t have the pointy hat! They don’t have staves! They rarely use books. Technically they have some books that they look things up in, but most of the time Sam is on his laptop. Oren: This is all correct, but they have the most important trait that I would say defines a wizard. Chris: That you would say, personally. Oren: They know tons of magic, which they never use! Every other episode, they’re learning some new spell and then they just forget about it because that spell would be kind of inconvenient to the plot of the next episode. I would argue that makes them more wizardy than anything else. I think that’s beautiful. Wes, Chris: *laugh* Wes: Except that there’s no arcana to them. There’s divine and devilish stuff going on there and it’s not that wizards are incompatible, but… Chris: By that definition, there is an extraordinary number of wizards in our stories. They’re like all wizards. Oren: Yes, that’s my point: everyone’s a wizard now. We don’t have to argue about it because if everyone’s a wizard, we don’t have to discuss the definition of it. Wes: If you were wizards and had to have a color association, what would you pick? Oren: I would definitely go with blue, but that’s because blue is my favorite color. I don’t really have any particular knowledge of what it would mean. Wes: I don’t think it has to mean anything other than what you would pick. Oren: I’ve always just been fascinated by how in the Lord of the Rings they briefly mentioned that there are some blue wizards and then never talk about that. I was like ‘What about those guys?’ And it’s like ‘You could read the Silmarillion.’ Absolutely not. Wes: Hard pass. Chris: I’d have to say blue just because of the iconic image of the blue hat and robe with the white moon and stars. It sticks with me. But there does seem to be division between those flashy wizards with their bright blue robes and the earthy wizards that are wearing earth tones and like gray and brown. Wes: I’d like to be Wes the Red, but that would be like the opposite of who I actually am. Chris: Wizards don’t really go with red. Maybe you’re a sorcerer at that point. Wes: It’s a hard call. My favorite Final Fantasy class in the early games was the Red Mage, but he’s probably not a wizard. So it goes. Oren: Well, now that we know what all of our colors are and we can close this episode out. Those of you at home, if you want to comment and mention how right I am about the definition of wizards- Wes: *derisive booing* Oren: -you can do that on the website at Mythcreants.com. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel at thefantasywarrior.com. Finally, we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com and they all agree with me about wizards. Goodbye. Chris, Wes: *laugh* [closing theme] P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?     Related StoriesFive Tips for Using an Arbitrary Magic System 322 – Urban Fantasy… Again 321 – Why You Shouldn’t Include Prejudice  

Parents: Most people have them, but they really get in the way when your underaged hero wants to have dangerous adventures and save the day. Perhaps the parents should just be dead? That’s certainly an option, but there are others, we promise! If handled correctly, parents can be an asset to your YA story. It’s all a matter of setting the proper context, which is our topic for this week. Also, a hot transporter take. Honestly, is there any other kind? Download Episode 326  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/TMP-326-Parents-in-Fiction.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Transporters Shadow Weaver Runaways Legendborn Melissa McCall Madoka Magica Ocean at the End of the Lane Joyce Summers John Winchester Chris Argent Eleven Bumi Lin Beifong Tenzin Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Corwin. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. You’re listening to the myth green podcast, with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi West Matlock and Chris Twinkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is: Wes: Wes Oren: and Chris: Chris. Oren: And I’m sorry, folks, I can’t go on the podcast today because my parents say it’s too dangerous. Oh no. Chris: Oh no. Oren: Or maybe my parents are going to do the podcast instead, since podcasting is hard and they would be better at it. I don’t know. My mom was on this podcast once, she was pretty good. Chris: Are you sure they’re not just fan raging. [laughter] Stop all that dangerous criticism. It’s totally wrong. Oren: Unfortunately, this is an episode where I can’t get through exclusively simply by reading quotes from other books. Because today, we’re talking about how to handle parent characters, presuming that your story is about an underage protagonist. Because that’s really where it becomes an issue. It’s not so much of an issue if your character’s in their forties, their parents might still be around, but they’re not going to be causing trouble. So first I just want to lay out the basic problem because I genuinely see people who don’t understand this. If you have a story about a child or a teenager going on dangerous adventures, in any rational scenario, loving parents would want to stop that. You don’t want your child going on a dangerous adventure. It’s dangerous. [Wes laughing] No matter how self-actualizing it is, they could die. It’s like “yeah, I let my kid go run around on the freeway because it taught them a really valuable life lesson.” It’s just, no, never. “I let my kid go off to a war zone to learn the value of friendship.” It just doesn’t work, and it is completely unbelievable to anyone who is not in that story’s specific target audience. Teenagers in stories that are for teenagers and kids in stories that are for kids, will let the wish fulfillment carry them along. And that happens anytime you aim a story at a specific audience, the wish fulfilment of that audience makes them a little less critical, but, other people are going to read your story, assuming it even is specifically targeted at a certain age demographic, you might want a general audience, and also they might want to go back and read it again later when they’re older. And then it will be kind of weird if they’re like “oh yeah, it was very odd that these parents were just letting their kid go out on this super dangerous adventure.” And then of course the other problem is that often the parents are just in a position to do something about it. In a lot of fantasy stories the parents also have magical powers or what have you, in which case they would solve the dangerous problem for their child, because that’s what parents exist to do: is to stop your children from having to do dangerous things. Chris: I have to say there are some situations in stories where we definitely don’t want to encourage kids to try to solve problems on their own instead of going to an adult. Bullying in school is a big one. People don’t understand that schools should be taking care of bullies, and we have so many stories where we use bullies to make a kid protagonist the underdog. And it’s just not a good idea because we really should be making schools take care of that problem. Oren: You know, the kid who says “no, I’m not going to tell my parents because that would make me a snitch.” No, tell your parents, the adults should be stopping this. And that’s a particular issue because it’s a real world problem. Chris: Right. Whereas when we have a kid running off and finding the Dark Lord, [Wes laughing] we’re not quite as concerned about the real world lessons that we’ll teach kids. Wes: But maybe the Dark Lord’s also in middle school and you do just need to go to the principal. [laughter] Oren: My first tip is you should plan ahead. I see a lot of stories not planned ahead, and then basically have to continually come up with in the moment excuses why the parents can’t get in there and fix things. And this also applies to really any adult in a position of authority but parents are the most common version. It’s not that you can’t do that, but the more often you do it, the more contrived it will seem even if each individual explanation makes sense. So the first time you need the parents to be out of town so your kid can have a vampire fight in their house, you can say that they had a business trip. But if you do that a second time and be “well, they were invited to a dance, so they’re not here this time.” [We laughing] Even if it makes perfect sense for them to be invited to that dance, it’s really… Twice in a row. Chris: Pretty soon the parents are always gone somewhere and it feels very contrived. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, every episode they come up with a new reason why the transporters won’t work. Otherwise they could just extract the characters who were in danger from danger. [Oren laughing] Right. So they have to do that. Technobabble is never great, but we just know you’re just making things up because you do this every episode. Oren: It’s just a sign that you maybe shouldn’t have introduced that level of technology. I kind of feel like Star Trek might’ve been better if they’d had the money to afford that shuttle-landing scene. The reason why it has transporters is because they couldn’t afford shuttle landings in the original series. That would have saved so many problems later. [laughing] The point is that if you have a robust conceit to explain this consistently, you won’t have to come up with a new one every time, and it will just seem far less contrived. Of course the most obvious one that everyone goes to, is that the parents are dead. This is one of the reasons why we have so many orphan protagonists. Wes: [speaking creepily] Right, you got to deal with them, permanently… [laughter] Chris: The nice about dead parents is it doesn’t actually take very much explaining. Wes: That’s a good point. [laughing] Oren: I will say though, that dead parents are perhaps a bit overdone. It’s a joke. People make fun of stories that have dead parents, and I understand why people do it. It’s easy. I do think there are other explanations you might use that will help your story stand out. Parents actually have value as characters. They are actually useful, they’re not just there to make it harder for your protagonists to go on an adventure. There are other things they can do. Killing them ahead of time means that you don’t have those options anymore. I don’t think it’s bad for every story to have dead parents, or to kill them off, it’s just that if that’s their only tool we’re using, every story become very trite and predictable. Wes: If you don’t kill them off, but say that they’re on Wizarding business for the summer, is that still just leaving it open that they could just come back? Is that too much maybe temptation? Oren: It depends on the context. “It depends…” The editor’s favorite phrase. [laughing] If the parents are just away for the summer, that’s a decent explanation for a book that takes place within the summer. Now, of course, it could still get kind of ridiculous. If your protagonist starts setting off magical fireballs on a regular basis the parents will probably hear about it, and they would probably come back from their trip. [Wes laughing] But you know… The protagonist has almost died in a fire several times. Chris: I would also ask how old is your protagonist? If they’re not old enough, then there would be some other guardian there instead. Wes: It might be then worthwhile to also think and age depending, but maybe you just need to send the protagonist away for the summer. Go to summer camp and your parents could show up I guess. There’s other adults around too. Oren: So that’s the issue is that if you send your child somewhere else, then the parent responsibility kind of falls onto whatever adult authority figures are there. Now, of course, that does give you options. If, for example, you wanted to have a scenario where the adult authority figure was either indifferent to the main characters’ danger, or actively causing it. That’s a pretty big statement to make about their parents. It’s not that you can’t do that. There are parents like that, they are a legitimate thing to put in your story. But it’s a pretty big thing. That’s going to take a lot of focus and it’s going to significantly inform who the character is. On the other hand, if they go to wizard summer camp, and the wizard summer camp counsellors are just very bad at their job that doesn’t necessarily require you to completely build your character around that, because this is just a summer camp. These are not people who we’re supposed to raise and care for them. So I was just going to say that it’s a little more flexible, but it doesn’t completely solve the problem. Chris: Going back to parents as antagonists. Oren: Oh, yeah. Chris: Which is definitely underused. One thing I noticed is, yes, it’s definitely very intense to have a parent that is antagonistic. There are lots of writers who do want to do that, but I’ve definitely noticed a trend where lots of writers, they will do this, but then they will always make it an adopted parent, never biological parents. For instance, take Shadow Weaver and She-Ra where she’s a mother figure, she’s not Adora’s biological mother. That’s not making a great statement. I think that some of the times the writers might be doing this for the same reason as they think somehow it’s less intense, or there’s no way a biological parent could be abusive, which is not true. You know, we’re definitely putting adopted parents at a lower class. You know, if you have for instance, a father figure who ends up being a bad guy, I would think about why this person just can’t be the biological father. Oren: There’s a difference between being an antagonist, and being an abusive or otherwise bad parent.  Because your parent could be an antagonist and still be a loving, caring parent. That would just mean that they want to do something that the protagonist doesn’t want them to do, or they want to stop the protagonists from doing something. I really, really liked the premise of Runaways. Now I had some issues with its execution, but the premise of Runaways being that these are all loving parents who care for their kids, they’re just bad guys and their kids are not bad guys, and so their kids end up trying to stop them. I’m not saying that there’s anything necessarily wrong with having abusive parents in your story, it’s just that that is a very big choice. I’ve definitely encountered authors who have made that choice and don’t understand its ramifications, both in how it affects, or should affect the character, and just in how unpleasant that is to read. Now, there are still reasons to do it, but it is not something that should be undertaken lightly. Whereas having your parents be a super villain is just something you can do much more easily, right? It doesn’t have nearly the same level of distress you’re causing to the reader. Chris: There’s a big, very common trope that is very sexist about having a long dead mother. Where usually the father is still alive or he dies during the story, the mother has been dead for a really long time. And then as we mentioned in our last podcast, she is only described as beautiful and kind. That has been her entire personality. This happens, I think, largely because of stereotypes about women, and stereotypes about mothers, that their entire existence has to be for their family. They’re not people that live for themselves at all. Like there’s no way a mother can be antagonistic, she would obviously support the protagonists in every way, shape and form, so it’s easiest just to have her be dead. I would definitely discourage that, and if you are going to have a dead mother in your story, I would think about how our dead fathers like that presented? Every time there’s a long dead father the protagonist is always going to discover something cool and important about them. Like “oh, it looks like they’re descended from this line of kings, or, you know, he invented an important device that I have the key to.” That’s how dead fathers are presented, right? They’re glorified and they’re plot important and they have interesting personalities. So if you are going to have a dead mother think about that and actually making her something other than just kind of excellent. Oren: Yeah. And if they are both dead, another thing I see a lot is what if both parents are dead, it is extremely likely that the character, whatever their gender is, the character will be compared primarily to their father. It will be like “Oh, you get that from your father”, whatever their traits are. That’s just subtle sexism because these are adventure stories and we associate adventure things with masculinity. That’s just why that happens. At this point it’s common enough that I would say that if you are setting out to write a character with two dead parents, err towards having them take after their mom. Because there are so many stories about people with two dead parents who take after their dads that we just need to balance the numbers a bit at this point. Chris did mention emotional support, which is a great role for parents, particularly if the kids are super powered. If a kid is super powered, that’s one of the great explanations for why the parent can’t either solve the problem for them, or stop them from going in to solve the problem, because if the kid is super powered, then chances are there isn’t someone else who could fix it. Although that could change, if you’re in a story that has lots of superpowers, you might run into this problem again. Assuming that you’ve fixed that part of it, if your character is the only one with this power. Then the parent can’t really help them physically, but can offer emotional support and is a great person for the protagonist to talk to, vent to, figure out their problems with. As Chris mentioned, when this role happens, it’s almost always a woman, it’s almost always the mom. Look at it and see if you can make it the dad. I really liked the dad in Legendborn, the main character’s father who shows up. He’s so great. He’s my favorite character. He’s emotional support. I would say use that as a model. Chris: Another parent that I know I saw in your notes, Oren, is Scott’s mother from Teen Wolf. Oren: Melissa, she’s great. Chris: She is actually really handy, not just for emotional support. She sometimes provides Scott with emotional support, but actually, the cool thing is she’s a nurse. So every time they have a character who is injured, but it’s clearly in a supernatural way, or they have black blood or something, [laughter] and so it would be weird to try and bring them to a normal doctor, they go specifically to Scott’s mom, and she hooks them up with what they need in the hospital, to take care of their injuries. Because she knows about the supernatural. Oren: Melissa is also a great example of one of the ways you can keep the parents from interfering in the adventures, that is very hard to pull off with teenage characters, and that’s having the adventure happen behind a masquerade. Now, in some cases it’s pretty easy in Madoka or in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the masquerade is so intense that adults just don’t know and can’t know, they magically cannot perceive what’s happening. So that’s pretty easy. In an urban fantasy story like Buffy, or Teen Wolf, they basically have to lie to their parents and this causes conflict, and that’s okay, for a short time, after a while it gets contrived really fast, and that’s where Teen Wolf pulls ahead of Buffy, because Buffy has to lie to Joyce so often you’re eventually just like “please just tell Joyce what’s happening.” Wes: Joyce deserves to know. [laughing] Oren: And they do eventually tell her, but it’s too late. By then Joyce has already become a frustrated character, because she’s constantly trying to stop Buffy from saving the world, and she doesn’t actually know that, but it’s still just like “please someone tell Joyce what’s happening.” Whereas Teen Wolf handles it much better, Scott lied to his mom a little bit at the beginning, but she figures out what’s going on pretty quickly, and then basically becomes part of the team. It also helps that Melissa is just a better parent than Joyce and doesn’t publicly humiliate her offspring. Don’t have your parents publicly humiliate their offspring unless they are supposed to be bad. [laughing] Wes: Is there ever cause for if the parents are capable to step in, it just seems like that would be cheap. The kid protagonist is doing so much work. And then the parent’s like “all right, good job. But I got this now.” Chris: The thing you want to watch out for is if you do have a conceit that’s kind of illogical and you’re not pointing at it, you don’t want to make it more obvious by bringing in your parent once, when they should be doing that all the time. If it’s actually unbelievable that they would be letting their kid like run off until late at night and not asking where they are, what they’re doing… Then it’s better if you just don’t get them involved at all, because you could call attention to it. In other places if you have an actual good reason for them to not be involved, most of the time, having them step in once in a while can work. For instance, there was a scene in Buffy where Buffy is fighting Spike who is probably getting the better of her, but then Joyce comes in and hits Spike in the back of the head with an axe that she took out of the fire equipment from the school. It’s enough to just kind of scare Spike off, it’s not like he couldn’t take Joyce, but he already had his hands full with a Slayer. Having to deal with two opponents is enough. Even though Joyce herself is not powerful, she’s putting on a good show, she looks confident, maybe he doesn’t know how capable she is. So I felt like that was a fine moment that gave her some level of participation. But if you’re going to do that, you just need a reason why they’re not doing that all the time. Oren: Assuming that your conceit for why they aren’t doing it all the time is strong, having them step in can be a heart-warming moment. Now you don’t want it to happen at the big conclusion, unless it’s a really, well-made prior achievement turning point. Especially if it happens earlier in the story, it can be a nice moment. It can also be a mark of failure if the kid is trying to do things on their own and then their parents have to save them. That can be a decent way to show that things didn’t go well, and that’s a way for them to fail without dying. You need to have a pretty good explanation for why they’re not going to do that again later when it’s time for the actual final battle. Another thing that parents can do is to be mentors. I’m also a big fan of parent mentors, almost as big a fan as I am of parent antagonists, and also antagonistic parent mentors. [laughter] My three favorite things. But they can teach the protagonist things because that is partially a parent’s job is to teach their kids things. That is a very natural role for them. You do want to be careful, if there’s one archetype more likely to get readers to ask “well, why aren’t they solving the problem” than parents, it’s mentors. You need a pretty good reason why the parent mentor can’t solve the problem and it can’t be “because I want them to grow and face challenges.” [laughter] Wes: How else are they going to learn? [laughing] Oren: Unless you have very low stakes conflict. Chris: For parents to be mentors and actually teaching their kid how to do dangerous things you need a really hardcore family. Some stories have that believably, for instance, in the Supernatural setting, we have these hunter families. It helps of course, that Sam and Dean’s dad has just gone. The beginning premise that their dad has gone missing and they’re looking for him. It’s just clear that this guy is really hardcore and they were raised into it that way. Teen Wolf also has this hunter family, they’ve been doing this for generations, they’re just a hardcore group of people.  They also clearly have steps for easing their kids into it. They don’t just leave them alone in a room with a werewolf as a rite of passage. Wes: What I like about Supernatural though, is the whole tough them up and expose them to danger thing. It works in that story because of how Sam and Dean’s mom dies, and then they’re basically on the run non-stop because their dad doesn’t know if they’re going to get attacked again. They’re always in danger, which excuses weapons trading and being in violent situations and all of these other things that normally just wouldn’t work if you’re like growing up in a stable household. [laughing] Which is a little different with some other hunter families. But I liked how they did that in Supernatural. Chris: It is definitely trickier at that point to justify why the parent isn’t taking care of a lot of the problems. The parent could be injured for a while, or just have declining health, even though they’re still alive. Otherwise, if you just to have a cast where both the parent and the kid are important, sometimes they’ll get separated. That means the parent is also an important character and it’s not “teen saves the day” all the time. Oren: It’s much easier to have the parent be the mentor character if the parent is actually the protagonist. They do naturally step in when things are particularly dangerous. I’m assuming you’re not doing that. Once that happens you don’t really need advice on how to handle the parent. But this tends to work well in situations where the protagonist is the recipient of some mystical power that only they have, they have a really important responsibility, because that’s a good way to explain why the parent would be willing to train them for this, and why they would think it was important, because there’s no one else to do it. Also, if the parent has, for example, lost that power, if the power transfers from parents to child, or if they had some kind of injury that lost their power that’s a pretty good way to explain that. They might still be able to teach you how to use it, but they can’t use it themselves anymore. Chris: I think in some stories, a good explanation is just that there is a danger or antagonist that is specifically coming for the kid. The parent might still be pretty capable, they have to train the kid because the kid needs to protect themselves. The reason why the kid ends up in so many dangerous situations is because they’re the target. So the parents try to be around, but maybe the target is trying to isolate the kid. Wes: What about just giving the parents their own problem to solve? I’m thinking about Stranger Things, the kid protagonists, they have their own problems that are scaled appropriately. And then the parents and the adults, they have their own problem. Chris: I think that also uses a level of unawareness and it works partially because Stranger Things doesn’t take place over a long period of time. So I think that’s kind of a combo approach, the adults are busy handling their own thing. A lot of what the kids are doing also looks fairly innocent. For instance, when they meet Eleven that helps the parents stay unaware, and this isn’t something that lasts for years. Oren: Season one in particular is a really delicate balancing act, and it doesn’t work as well in two and three because it was very hard to do in the first place. That concept works better in television than it does in prose, because television is more used to spending time with different characters doing different things that are somewhat related. If you tried to do that in prose and had shifting POVs between your children, teenagers, and adult characters, I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but it would be really hard. I wouldn’t advise most writers try that, I just think that would be a waste of time. Chris: Avatar The Last Airbender is a pretty good example, it’s not a perfect example. There are definitely some scenes where you kind of wonder, but we have the parents that are less powered than their kids, but also the fact that there’s a war going on. Now Aang himself, he’s 12, and we make a big deal of the fact that he’s the Avatar and the importance of that role, but he’s still a kid. But for Sokka and Kotara it works a little bit better because there’s a war going on, and so in the beginning, their dad is off in the war. Oren: And the war being there just provides them with a strong reason for why adults aren’t around because they are all fighting this war. Now there are some places where it’s a little contrived, like “why doesn’t Bumi go with them?” And it’s like “because he has this weird nonsense about waiting around for no reason.” And yeah, I get it, he’s supposed to be eccentric, but he’s not incompetent. That reasoning was clearly just there because they couldn’t afford to have Bumi be this incredibly powerful earth bender flying around with the three kids. Wes: Although I do want to watch that now. [laughter] Oren: Yeah, that version of Avatar where Boomi just goes with them. But then they would never find Toph. Ah, that would be the worst. Wes: That would be the worst. We need to somehow have all of them. Oren: And you know, I’ve said this before, but that is actually one of the reasons why Cora doesn’t work as well, because Korra is surrounded by adults, some of which are parental figures. They aren’t very good. That’s kind of Korra’s solution is that the adults just are kind of bad at bending. Even though Lin Beifong seems really cool, when you actually watch her fight she’s not really that good, she’s not nearly as good as you would expect. And the same thing happens with Tenzin and a lot of the other more benevolent adult characters. Or sometimes the story just ignores them and pretends they aren’t around, so that in season three they send Korra, Bolin, Mako, and Asami, their most elite teenagers, on the frontal assault, while they have the trained soldiers make a sneak attack diversion. I feel maybe you should reverse those roles. Chris: I think Legend of Korra was facing one of the problems that you’ve seen sequels, where you introduce new characters, but you can’t let the previous set of characters go. They’re trying to both have their set of young uns and have the children of the previous set of young uns, who are now adults, and make that all work together. It just would have been better if they’d been able to just let the previous set go and focus on the new crew, maybe set it farther into the future, honestly, or into the past, so you don’t have to worry about that. But they just had too many characters and too many adults and a lot of trouble balancing all of that. Oren: Speaking of balancing things, we are just about at the end of our time. So I’ll just reiterate what I said at the beginning, which is that you can totally have your parents. They don’t have to be dead. And then that allows a lot of options for what you do with their characters. But you have to plan ahead. If you’re going to have a child protagonist or teenage protagonist doing dangerous things, you should figure out in advance what it is that makes them able to do it, despite the interference of their presumably loving parents. If that means their parents aren’t loving, that’s a viable option, you just have to be aware of what it means. That will be the end of this episode. Those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com. Before we go I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. If you like what we do, send a few dollars our way through our Patrion. Every cent goes into the hoard of gold we lounge on like dragons. Just go to patrion.com/Mythcreants. [closing song]   P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?     Related Stories325 – Ending Lines Five Tired Tropes About Teenagers 324 – Opening Lines  

Last week, we discussed the line that opens your story. Now, we’re talking about the line that ends it. Even the best story must reach its final page eventually, and it’s important to know what that last line is even for. Should it wrap up the story’s throughline? Should it be a hook for next time? Naturally, we have a fine selection of ending lines to share and dissect, plus we finally reveal the name of our all-editors rock band. Download Episode 325  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/TMP-325-Ending-Lines.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Gideon the Ninth Legendborn The Yellow Wallpaper Edgar Alan Poe Annihilation Dracula The Name of the Wind Virgil’s Aeneid The Ocean at the End of the Lane Twilight Far Beyond the Stars Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Anna. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Opening theme] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is Oren and Wes. And of course I came up with a cool opening bit, but you’re not going to be able to listen to it until the end. Wes: Haha, nice! Oren: I have some concerns about where we’re putting the opening bit. I feel like maybe the end of the podcast isn’t the best place for it. Chris: So this time we’re talking about closing lines as opposed to opening lines. Wes/Oren: Ooh! Oren: Are we going to do middle lines next week? Chris: Yes. Wes: If everybody’s so lucky. [laughs] Chris: Cause those are very distinctive. They’re definitely different from every other line! Oren: The line in the exact middle of the book. That’ll do it. Chris: So the first question is, what is the purpose of a closing line? Right? Cause we all know what the purpose of an opening line is, it’s to draw people into the story. So…what about your last lines? Generally, it’s first setting the mood you want your readers to walk away with. We can talk about what that mood should be. For one thing, you can emphasize the atmosphere and concept of the story. For instance, if somebody read your story because it’s a humorous necromancy story, like Gideon the Ninth, one way would be to emphasize that it’s a humorous necromancy story and kind of remind them of that, you know, quintessential experience that they showed up for. Another way to do it is to emphasize the resolution of the big problems with the story, which helps to leave them with a feeling of satisfaction, right? Remind them that, you know, the protagonist is out of danger or that their big goal has been accomplished. It can help dissipate tension and the reader can walk away feeling at ease. The one thing I will say is usually at the end of the book, if it’s a first in the series, there will be a hook for the next book, but usually that hook is not the last lines [laughs]. I think if you were to end your last lines with a “dun dun duuuun!”, usually when people end one book, they can’t immediately pick up the next book. So a lot of books that have hooks in them, they have the hook, but then the last lines aren’t actually devoted to the hook. The last lines are usually hopeful about the challenges that are happening, like “we’re going to weather these challenges together!” because that way, the reader has some relief in between books and isn’t just, you know, like a cliffhanger and on edge. Wes: Although I have occasionally seen ending lines that feel a little weird. They feel like they have a completely different mood than the hook that’s been established for the next story. Okay, so this is from Legendborn, spoilers for Legendborn. This is the end line and I’m using like the last paragraph and then two more, really short lines after that: “I surge forward, and the strength of armies sings through my muscles. Survive. Resist. Thrive. Each pound of my feet echoes in my joints like a blacksmith’s hammer, ringing loud into bones and ligament and sinew until the forest blurs past in a stream of moss greens and umber browns. I sprint fast and faster. And then I’m in the air, leaving the earth and trees far behind me.” First of all, it seems to be implying that the main character can fly. She has not been able to fly in the book until now, nor is there any indication what ability would give her that, like, why she would be able to fly. Chris: Somehow this writer managed to make her last lines disorienting. [laughter] Oren: Yeah, and it’s just really confusing. And when I listened to it on audio, I was like, “I must have misheard, that can’t be what it is.” And it’s also just weird, cause this character just has a tendency of getting new powers, so ending the book with one is just like, “um, okay”. But I think more importantly, the stuff that happened right before this is that the main character has, you know, come into her own, like she’s mostly made peace with her powers and like knows how to use them now, which is okay, that’s good. But she’s also basically been put in charge of this war she didn’t want, like a two sided war because on the one side she has demons to fight, and on the other side, she has like racist mages. And then at the same time, her boyfriend, one of her boyfriends, has been captured by a particularly evil one of the racist mages. So like, it ends with a pretty significant problem. And so this kind of upbeat, like “yeah, I’m going to thrive and do great!” ending just felt very out of place. It felt like this was supposed to be the last line of this book back when it was standalone, when it just ended with the protagonist coming into her power and learning how to use it and winning the day, and that was the end. Then I felt like this ending, this ending line, would’ve made sense, but it just feels weird that it sounds like it’s a celebration when the fight has only just begun. Chris: I would say there’s a difference between hopeful and upbeat. I mean, a hopeful ending for that after, you know, Love Interest One gets kidnapped would be like, “Don’t worry, we’ll find him” or something like that. That’s hopeful. You’re taking comfort about the challenges that are ahead, as opposed to just like “Wheee, fly!” [laughter] But at the same time, if the book had just ended with like, you know, “Oh no, he’s captured!” and we just cough there, I think that would be a little rude because that way the readers walk away from the whole book on edge. So you’ve got this tension throughout the book, and we finally have some satisfaction that disperses that tension, and then you create a whole bunch more tension before they walk away between entire books. Wes: Yeah, I was just thinking about the premise and like, I definitely think the type of this story, I’m thinking about how you would want, when you’d want to leave somebody feeling unsettled.  And I have an example of one, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And so, the premise of this story is, to summarize appropriately what they’re not saying, the narrator has postpartum depression, which nobody’s acknowledging, and her husband is a jerk and a doctor and he’s prescribed a bedrest cure for her. And so she’s hanging out in this, you know, estate and she’s not to do any work for basically the entire summer. So you might imagine what happens to her as she just lays in bed all the time. Oren: She puts up some really nice wallpaper? Wes: [laughs] She starts staring at this wallpaper and starts seeing a woman trapped behind this wallpaper. So you might see, like, what’s kind of going on with her mental state, but the last three or four sentences as like the complete thought: “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” So the whole point is that the sentences that happened prior to that, her husband comes back into the room and she’s crawling around the wall, scratching at the wallpaper and ripping it down, and he just passes out, just faints right away. And she just kind of continues going around the room. Oren: Yeah. Whatever. Wes: [laughs] “Yeah. Whatever, like, I don’t care, get out of my way!” But it represents the culmination of this horrific situation she was put into. It’s really kind of funny because when this story was first published in the early 20th century, you know, of course all these men misread it as like, “Oh, that’s a good ghost story, and she gets like possessed or whatever. She trades places with the ghost in the wall.” And it’s like, no, this poor woman is suffering from postpartum depression, can’t do anything to entertain herself, and so becomes obsessed with this crappy wallpaper and then eventually just breaks down. And so the feeling you get at the end is just like, this kind of outright horror and disgust, and that’s the taste in your mouth at the end. And that’s intentional with that. And it’s good if you want it to feel that, you know, there’s no happy epilogue about like, “and then I got better, blah, blah, blah.” It just stops, as it should. Chris: Well, short stories generally have endings that are more like that in comparison to novels. And I think we’ve talked before, about how long should your epilogue be? For instance, an epilogue is basically after you resolved the story, how long do you have to sort of wind down time. And with a novel where we’ve had lengthy experience with lots of tension and high emotional investment in the characters because we spent so long with them, usually need to be kind of eased out of the story. And you’ve been going and experiencing that tension for a long time. Whereas with a short story, you’ve got to work harder to make that impression. And so it’s pretty typical for a short story, and you don’t necessarily need that kind of wind down time either because you’ve just spent less time with the story. Wes: The other key thing with the short story is, you’re kind of trying to convey one thing. I think Edgar Allen Poe thought that the whole point of a short story was to pick an emotion and try to just like, explore that fully, which you can see in obviously his stuff, but lots of other short stories do that well, and so the first line and the last lines kind of like, build on that. The first, what was the first line to The Yellow Wallpaper? I think I wrote it down. “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.” I like the understatement of that, paired with the last line of just like, her crawling over him all passed out on the floor, just some ordinary people hanging out in an ancestral hall. Chris: But also the other thing I want to point out is, when you see a story that ends on a dark note like that, that satisfaction is not just happy satisfaction. Any conflict can end happily or tragically, and that still disperses tension. It’s like, okay, we were worried about, you know, her mental health and now she’s had a complete breakdown. So what we were worried about has happened. I saw that in your notes, you also had the ending lines for Annihilation. Wes: Annihilation is, you know, she’s journaling. So it’s kind of, it’s an epistolary story.  And I also had Dracula. And it’s, you know, they’re both wrapped up differently because in Annihilation, she just kind of drops it off as like, “I guess if anybody finds this, like, I’m outta here.” [laughs] That’s kind of what it says. Oren: I’m off to become a whaaaale. Wes: Yeah, super whale, spaaace whaaale! Oren: No, just a regular whale, man. Not a space whale! Wes: Okay, fine. [laughter] Chris: In the case of Annihilation, we know that she’s just decided to just wander off into area X. And so from that perspective, we don’t exactly know what happens to her, but the ending lines emphasize the fact that she’s lost forever and she’s not returning home. Right, so from that perspective, we have sort of a resolution, a mystery that you know, that you’re never going to solve. Like this maybe doesn’t feel quite as resolved as if we solve the mystery, but it also brings some closure, right? Like we’re never going to know what happens. She’s gone forever. Wes: The penultimate line is quite good at that. The final line is “I am not returning home.” The penultimate one is “I am the last casualty of both the eleventh and twelfth expeditions.” And I think that is solid because the whole point is the mystery of like, what’s happening with these people? Some of them returned then died and were, you know, different and yeah, she tied it up really well with those, with that last line in particular, even if we just know that she wanders off into the marsh flats. Oren: Oh, the marsh flats are back, my precious marsh flats! [laughter] Chris can’t take my marsh flats away now! I would say that, uh, an ending line should on some level kind of feel like an ending. It should feel like a period at the end of the story, right? There are some ending lines I’ve seen that don’t do that. And if you want an example, may I present The Name of the Wind? Wes: Oh, once again. Oren: Yes, which is weird, cause it has two ending lines because The Name of the Wind has a framing device, which is completely unconnected from the actual story. The framing device is “old” Kvothe, he’s like 26. [Chris and Wes laugh] He talks like he’s 90. And then the actual story is like what young Kvothe was doing. The end of the actual story still has to work as an ending line, even though we technically keep going into the framing device because that’s a different story entirely. Well, here’s what we get. This is the end of the actual story in The Name of the Wind and what’s happened is that the protagonist has been brought down to like some underground ruins and seen some machines that may or may not be big or important and he says, “I had only the vaguest of ideas as to what any of the machines might have done. I had no guess at all as to why they had lain here for uncounted centuries, deep underground. There didn’t seem—” And that’s the end. Wes: No, boo! Oren: Em dash. [laughter] And It’s like- Chris: Why?! Oren: I see what you’re doing. What you’re doing is you are trying to create the impression that he just stopped telling the story because that’s the conceit. Kvothe is just telling the story to this other guy who’s writing it down and that’s what the framing device is. But what that means is that this ending just is nothing. It just stopped. It’s just a thing that happened. It has no satisfaction. It doesn’t even really feel like that part of the story is over, right? It’s just kind of like, “and then some things happen.” Your stories should not do that. Wes: In college, I read Virgil’s Aeneid, which is like the Roman Odyssey. Oren: Yeah, Roman Odyssey fanfic! Wes: And I remember the end; the whole point is like Aeneas is leaving Troy and he’s going to found Rome and find the place where these Trojan exiles can live. And I remember getting to the last stanza and I’m not gonna read the whole thing, but it basically ends with him in mortal combat with this guy, Turnus, and then just, plunging his sword into Turnus’s chest. And the last full sentence says, “The streaming blood distain’d his arms around / And the disdainful soul came rushing thro’ the wound.” And that’s it! I remember like, “Whoa, what happened?” Like, didn’t he set up a homeland for his people? Do I have to read a history book now, what’s going on? But at least we know that he killed the guy! Like, The Name of the Wind example is just Em dash to nothing. Oren: Oh, the Em dash to nothing, that’s going to be my editor band! [laughter] I get a bunch of editors together to do a band. It’s like “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome ‘M dash to nothing!’” [all laugh] Wes: That’s great. Chris: I have a couple examples of atmospheric endings that are there to kind of emphasize what the book was about. The first one is from The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. “Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk. ” So the reason why that one works pretty well is because the whole book The Ocean at the End of the Lane, it has a framing device. What touches people about this book is it has a very strong sort of mood that the framing device connects to because there is a guy who was middle aged and he’s like, “My life has been completely unremarkable” and he, somebody dies and he goes back to his parents’ house for the funeral. And then something just catches at his memory, this farmhouse at the end of the lane. And he goes there and sees this magical pond and then starts to remember what happened in his childhood. But it’s a very, just like, kind of a fleeting thing. And so this sort of ends that on that note, he had forgotten the story and then it was kind of gone again. Oren: Yeah. That really brings home the whole, like, the whole tension of the story of how much of this is the child’s imagination? Chris: Going back to endings that don’t quite fit, here’s one where it seems to be emphasizing what is attractive about the book, but it doesn’t actually work with the actual end. So this is the last line of Twilight. “And he leaned down to press his cold lips once more to my throat.” And you could see why that would be an attractive closing line. Cause it’s kind of like, sexy and dangerous. Again, if you have a romance novel about dating a dangerous vampire, that seems to perfectly fit. The problem is that, after the whole romance and the whole journey, by the time you get to the end, everywhere it’s not really cold and threatening anymore. And also the scene, the scene itself, Edward and Bella are at prom and it’s supposed to be kind of a heartwarming, casual moment, kind of a sweet moment between them? Then suddenly stating, you know, “he’s pressing his cold lips once more to my throat” is just, doesn’t feel like it fits anymore. [Wes laughs] Oren: Yeah, that’s sort of like the issue with the Legendborn ending, which was that like, I can see how the author would think this would fit with the overall theme of the story, but not with what is actually happening right now. If you didn’t tell me what had happened, what was happening right before that, I would have been like, that sounds like a perfect ending line for Twilight, what’s the problem? And it’s like, oh, they’re supposed to be at a more lighthearted prom date. All right. Now it’s weird. Wes: Ugh. Cold lips. Nope. Oren: Surprisingly, I must actually praise the ending line of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Whaaat? Yeah, cause you may remember I was a bit harsh on its opening line and how it meant nothing. Wes: That was the Talk-Talk one, right? Oren: Yeah, the Talk-Talk. And also the council not looking at this tax bill to outlying star systems. [Chris laughs] Yeah. But no, the ending line is actually quite good. And I’ll read it first and then explain the context. “Or not. Since Boom started quite a few young cobbers have gone out to Asteroids. Hear about some nice places out there, not too crowded. My word, I’m not even a hundred yet.” Now it’s still got that kind of, not-fantastic moon dialect going on, but the context of this is that they’ve won the revolution, but now there’s not really any place for the protagonist who was a soldier in the revolution? His fighting is done and he’s not a politician. So what’s he going to do now? And it’s like, well, I guess I’ll move on. I guess that’s it. That’s the end. It also really communicates how fast this all happens. Now, he says I’m not even a hundred yet; now in real life, not even a hundred yet wouldn’t mean anything, but this is the future, right, people live a long time. And so it just kind of brings home that he’s actually very young to have done all of these things cause events happen very quickly. Overall, yeah, I thought that was a very strong ending line. Chris: Yeah, sort of hopeful looking to the future. I’ve been surprised by how many closing lines have characters walking in them, [Wes laughs] because it’s just very symbolic, right? If we’re talking about transitions and looking towards what the character is doing next from the future, the whole like “walking into the future”. When you start comparing lots of closing lines, it does start to look like a bit much! Like here’s some characters walking again! Oren: Yeah. Not in Lord of the Rings though, because one does not simply walk into Mordor. [Wes laughs] Wes: Something else that you’ll see in closing lines is just what happened? You know, they’ll kind of tidy up and maybe just like have a recap. But I was curious when we were looking at this, I was like, how does Dracula end? So I looked and, you know, the final chapter, I think chapter 27, you know, it’s epistolary. And so there’s Mina Harker’s notes, which recounts the slaying of Dracula and the death of Mr. Morris. But then there’s, just called “Note” by Jonathan Harker at the very end of it, which kind of serves as an epilogue of sorts. But I really liked the last passage because there’s only three paragraphs, I think. And it’s kind of Harker talking about like, everybody’s put their letters together and they just think it’s like, no one’s going to believe anything that all of them have written down from this whole experience. Mina and Jonathan Harker have their baby boy and Van Helsing is there. And this last paragraph, Harker is basically like, “Hey, what do we do?” And then it goes, “Van Helsing summed it all up as he said, with our boy on his knee:— ‘We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake.’” And I thought that was just really well done, with Dracula preying on Mina and all the, everybody to like “Go get her back”, you know, it’s just like, of course Van Helsing provides the perfect summary to that story at the end, right? And he’s like, “I don’t care if anybody believes us or not!” Oren: I appreciate that Dracula is able to give some qualities to Mina as a mother character other than beautiful and kind. Wes: Yeah, brave and gallant are some good choices there. Oren: I’m presuming that that cliche didn’t exist yet when he was writing that book, but man, it’s always beautiful and kind with the mothers. So it’s just kind of nice that someone changed that. Chris: Another interesting end, the Dark Angel trilogy has a poetic prophecy in it and it just chooses to end by basically going over the last two verses of the prophecy. It works really well, partly because again, the atmosphere of the book and the poem match, but also because of course with the prophecy, it’s so cryptic. So when readers first get it, they don’t know what it means. And then they find out what it means. And so then repeating it another time allows them to get a new experience with the same poem by reading it and understanding what all of the cryptic references are. Wes: I was just thinking about, have you guys ever encountered a story where you’re like, “Man, that should have just ended sooner”? Like somebody should have chopped off the last several, I dunno, sentences, words, paragraphs, pages? Chris: Actually, with Twilight, there were some earlier lines that would have made a good, much more appropriate end. “It’s not the end, it’s the beginning” or something like, Bella says that. And it’s like, why didn’t you just end with that? Because that’s a great way to advertise that there are more books in the series, it sounds kind of hopeful, but no, we decided to go with the cold lips. [laughs] Like we could have just trimmed some of those sentences off and it would’ve been great. Wes: She clearly had that in her mind, like, no, that is the last sentence. Like, nothing will stop me. Chris: I do think It really benefits a writer when you’re doing your end to actually play around with that. And just like, okay, here’s my ending section. Now, what happens if I end here? What does it feel like if I end here? Test that out a little bit, because you might discover there’s a sentence that works much better. Oren: When I think of stories that feel like they should have ended earlier, movies are typically the one that comes to mind rather than books. And I think that might just be because with a movie, I really feel it if it’s dragging, right? Like if it’s overstayed its welcome, you know, I’ve been watching this thing for two hours, I gotta use the bathroom, I’m out of snacks, [Wes laughs] just like, please end the story. So if it goes on longer than it needs to, I really notice it. Whereas with books, it’s like, you know, I’ve been listening to this thing for 15 hours, nonconsecutively. So, if it goes on for a little longer, I don’t notice it as much. Were there any books you were thinking of, Wes, that felt like they should have just ended a little earlier? Wes: The example that I can choose is from kind of an obscure-er HP Lovecraft story. Basically the premise is, Random Researcher Guy is hanging out in the Northeast and it’s a torrential downpour, so he goes into this house and the whole house looks like it’s several hundred years old. Like all the furniture and stuff looks like it’s colonial, like that kind of stuff. Old man comes down, offers him a seat and they just kind of get to chatting, and old man has a really old dialect and then they start looking in book and obviously book has some racist components because HPL, but the whole point is that there’s this moment where you realize as the reader and the narrator is getting the slowly dawning horror that this old man is a cannibal and he’s somehow extended his life by eating humans. I’m going to read the last bit, and I’m going to stop it where I think it should stop. And then I’ll read you what’s left after that. “The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man whispered the words “more the same” a tiny spattering impact was heard, and something shewed on the yellowed paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red.” Hold on. I’ll skip ahead. “The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes.” And I think it should stop there. But the last sentence is: “A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.” [Chris and Oren laugh] Chris: It’s like he was forced to add a happy ending to it, after he’d written it. Wes: I know! Chris: Somebody was like, “I’m not publishing that unless you, like, make him live somehow.” Oren: That’s like in the DS9 episode, Far Beyond the Stars, when Sisko’s writer character writes a story that they won’t publish because it’s got a black dude in it. It’s like, “Okay, would you publish it if I added ‘And it was all a dream’ to the end?” [Wes laughs] and they’re like, “Yeah, alright, we’ll publish it if you say it was all a dream.” Wes: There’s something there, right? Like there’s something to this desire to try to tidy it up. But there can be much better stuff to just try to leave with what you showed and not just like, “Carry on”, but that can be really hard. I mean, you stare at that all the time and try to think through everything, but it’s kind of a fun exercise because honestly, when we were talking about prepping for this podcast, I was thinking, I don’t really pay that much attention to the endings. I think I’m, like, checked out by the last chapter. The whole book is in my mind, so the weight of the last few paragraphs or sentences, they’re not really there. But I liked going and looking at books for this particular reason. Cause there’s stuff there to enjoy when I’m not, I guess, tired and ready for the book to be over. Oren: Yeah, If I was enjoying a book then like, usually by the end, I’m at such a flow for lack of a better word, because I’m just enjoying the book so much that by the end, I might not even be paying that much attention. Just like, yeah, that was a great book. And if I don’t like the book, then it’s like “uuugh, when will this book be over?” Wes: (agreeing) Please stop! Oren: And so it’s hard to focus on the individual qualities of the words, because I’m just like, I just want the book to stop, please. Chris: That sounds sad. I mean, for me, depends on how much attachment I have to that book because books can become very addicting. If they get me attached enough to the characters and their journeys, I would really want that epilogue content, right, cause it’s like, I go through withdrawal when I’m done with the book [laughs]. So hanging on those last words can be important. Oren: And if I enjoy a book, then I also like the epilogue. I’m just, you know, I’m not paying critical attention to it as much as I would have earlier. Chris: “And with that, Oren, Wes and Chris looked into the sun and walk,” [Oren and Wes laugh] Oren/Wes: Dun dun dunnnn! Wes: Did we walk into the sun? Oren: Or maybe we flew! [laughter] Oren: Alright, well that will be it for this episode; for those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. [Closing theme] Need an editor? We’re at your service.     Related Stories324 – Opening Lines 323 – Plot Twists How to Teach World Terms Without Confusing Readers  

Due to the linear nature of spacetime, stories have to start somewhere. The first line is, by definition, a reader’s first encounter with your story, but is it really as important as all that? Yes and no. This week, we’re talking about opening lines. We discuss what an opening line should do, how to tell if one is working, and how important they really are. Get ready for a lot of quotes. \r\n \r\n Download Episode 324  Subscription Feed  \r\n https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/TMP-324-Opening-Lines.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. \r\n Show Notes: Four Functions of an Amazing Opening Line \r\n Elantris \r\n Winter World \r\n Peter Pan and Wendy \r\n Gideon the Ninth \r\n House of Earth and Blood \r\n The Maze Runner \r\n The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress \r\n Pravda \r\n Interview With the Vampire \r\n The Book of Three \r\n Coraline \r\n The Helsing Trilogy \r\n Eldest \r\n The Name of the Wind \r\n Area X \r\n Jump down to comments ↓ \r\n Transcript Generously transcribed by Bellis. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. \r\n [Intro Music] WES: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m your host Wes and with me today is… \r\n CHRIS: Chris \r\n WES: And… \r\n OREN: Oren. \r\n WES: And I gotta be honest. I spent quite a while writing some stuff down on my podcast notes, thinking what would be a really strong opener to this podcast. [laughs] But then I realized that it is just hard. And maybe that’s the point: A good, solid opening first sentence is really hard to write. [laughs] OREN: See, that’s why I always go with puns because no one ever accuses those of being high effort. \r\n WES: That’s a good point. \r\n CHRIS: [laughs] And it’s like the worse the pun is, the better? \r\n WES: Somehow, yep. \r\n CHRIS: Somehow? \r\n OREN: You can’t have a pun that’s actually funny, that defeats the entire point of a pun. \r\n [laughter] WES: So today we’re talking about opening lines. Maybe sticking with that first sentence of a story, maybe going a little further into that first paragraph, because sometimes you got to treat it as a whole. But this is a common topic, readers, writers, everybody seems to understand that there’s a lot of emphasis and importance placed on that first line in the story and its ability to draw a reader into the work, compel them forward. \r\n You know, it’s not everything. I mean, I often just kind of breeze by them. The thought that I would read the first sentence and throw the book across the room because it didn’t meet my expectations– I’ll give it a few pages. \r\n But that being said, I think that there are good examples of strong openers. And I wanted us to kind of build on Chris’s criteria from that good post on four straighforward functions of opening lines. And maybe try to get at the core of what is a good opening line and does it meet the criteria that I think they all should do? \r\n And I think Steven King put it pretty well and he’s like “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” \r\n And I was like, yeah, that’s pretty much what it is. The best opener’s like “Hey, keep reading.“ \r\n [laughter] CHRIS: Yeah. The primary job of the opening sentence is to get the reader to read the second sentence. \r\n WES: Yup. Very much. \r\n OREN: The way that I see it is that opening lines are not going to make or break the book. Very few people are going to stop on just the opening line. But if the opening line is good, it will set the tone and start readers off enjoying the story instead of starting them off being like, “Huh?” \r\n And that makes it much more likely that they will have a smooth ride through the rest of the story. It’s like how, if you’re starting a race, the race isn’t over when you take your first step across the starting line, but if there’s a rock in your way that trips you and your first few starting steps are awkward and flailing cause you’re trying to recover from being tripped by that rock, you’re going to have a much less pleasant time on the race. [hesitantly:] And I guess have a longer reading time… This analogy is getting away from me a little bit. \r\n [Chris laughs] WES: I mean, it was good for a little while. [laughs] Strong start, Oren. \r\n OREN: It had a good opening line, you could say. \r\n [laughter] WES: I think for me there’s something that helps me get past the hurdle of starting a book if the first line is good. Because more often than not, when I sit down to read, I’m actually kind of tired. It’s almost bedtime. And I was like, “Oh, maybe I’ll start this”. And that is where I either get dosed with energy or I just get put straight to bed and it’s like, okay, maybe I’ll like this, but I can’t be tired when I start it because it’s not a compelling beginning. \r\n CHRIS: I think it’s good to keep in mind how much effort is involved on the reader’s part. We’ve talked before about the fact that it just takes a little work to read as opposed to watch something and how that puts more burden on narrated, written stories to be entertaining. But also the first sentence and the first paragraph can just be extra work because you have no idea what’s happening. You have no context. And so there’s also a lot of figuring out that happens. \r\n And a lot of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen in opening sentences and opening paragraphs is just not making it easy for readers to figure out what’s going on. It doesn’t– You want to be creative and that can add novelty and make your opening lines appealing. At the same time, you have to be careful because sometimes if you go too far, you can easily make it disorienting and add a little bit of confusion in there that just makes it extra work for the reader. \r\n WES: Especially if your first few sentences are just a list of expletives. [laughter] Like I’m sorry, the novelty of that is long past if it ever was there. [laughs] OREN: I’ve noticed a very interesting difference in the experience of reading a book with your eyeballs versus listening to it on audio. And it’s sort of the difference between walking through an area and moving through an area on a conveyor belt. \r\n And if you’re walking through an area and there’s all kinds of debris and stuff in the way and branches getting at you, okay, you’re going to stop. Or you’re going to slow down and it’s going to be harder to keep going. And that’s what reading is like. So if you get to one of those patches where things are confusing or whatever, it’s just harder to keep going. \r\n But with audio, it keeps going regardless. That conveyor belt is taking you through there. So you end up getting smacked with branches and squirrels jump on you, presumably. I’ve never read in the forest. [laughter] So with audio books, you don’t stop or slow down even – and you can go back, but that’s hard – so generally you just keep going and you’re just like, “What was that, what just happened?” [laughter] So I find that an interesting comparison. \r\n WES: So Chris, remind us all of those four good functions of an opening line. \r\n CHRIS: Yeah. So basically some of them are just creating a hook, right? I talked about suggesting conflict, we could say conflict or tension. Which is usually, you put the character in what sounds like a very critical situation. \r\n You don’t have to introduce the main character, but a lot of times opening sentences do include the main character and their problem, which I think is a great way to start because then you get the bonus of introducing the main character. I’ll give you an example. This is from Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris: “Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all eternity.” \r\n WES: That’s great. [laughs] That’s so good. \r\n CHRIS: So, we have an obviously big problem. And we know who our main character is. So that’s tension right away. \r\n Or for instance, this one is from Winter World: “For the past five months, I have watched the world die.” \r\n WES: Aww, that’s a very sad one. \r\n [laughter] CHRIS: That one almost is going a little too far in that it seems gloomy. That makes it seem like there’s no way, cause it’s too large in scope, for the protagonist to turn the situation around. But that’s basically one way to do it. We introduce problems. Conflict, tension, curiosity! This is raising questions. \r\n Normally, when I’m talking about storytelling, I actually discourage a lot of storytellers from emphasizing curiosity too much. Not that curiosity is bad. It’s good. But they tend to make choices where it comes at the cost of other things that are more essential, like evoking emotion or caring about the main character. Instead it’s like “Ah, the main character is mysterious.” Because curiosity, it just doesn’t last very long. It’s very novelty based. But for an opening sentence it actually works really well because you’re just trying to get them to read the first paragraph. So an intriguing opening sentence that creates curiosity is a great way to go. \r\n My favorite is this opening of Peter Pan and Wendy: “All children, except one, grow up.” \r\n OREN: Hmmmm. \r\n WES: Yeah. \r\n CHRIS: It’s just an intriguing statement. \r\n WES: It is. \r\n CHRIS: Like, wait, that one child doesn’t grow up? What’s up with that? \r\n OREN: What’s up with that one child? I wonder who it could be… \r\n WES: It’s that little vampire girl. \r\n [laughter] OREN: Yeah. Or does it mean that one guy who’s still really immature that I knew from high school. [Wes laughs] It’s like, I swore he was going to grow up and he never did. [laughs] CHRIS: Another form of novelty is setting the atmosphere. I do think that this takes a lot more effort though than other methods, than creating enough conflict and tension and generate interest. Some books focus on atmosphere, but you really have to be creative if you are going to do that, to make it interesting enough to draw them in. \r\n OREN: I have an example of an opening line that does pretty well at setting atmosphere. And this is from Gideon the Ninth: “IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.” \r\n And I love this opening line. This was the best opening of the opening lines that I copied down to talk about if we have extra time. Because first of all, it just sets the irreverent tone of the story. It’s like “THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD”, and then explains what that means. And he calls him the “kindly Prince of Death”. It’s like, whoa. And Gideon has: sword, shoes and dirty magazines! Okay. That tells us something about Gideon and what her priorities are. And it also tells us a little bit about what the general setting is. Cause it’s fantasy-ish, cause there are swords, but also kind of modern because there are dirty magazines, which is not really a historical fantasy type thing. \r\n WES: Ye olde woodcuts. [laughs] OREN: Yeah. \r\n [laughter] OREN: I mean, maybe they’re just erotic woodcuts, but that’s not really what you would mean by magazine. So it communicates the combination of fantasy themes with scifi and modernisms that Gideon the Ninth has – for better or worse, I have mixed opinions on them – but they are there in the opening. It tells you what it’s going to be right there. No one can accuse this book of hiding what it is. \r\n And it also tells you about Gideon: That she’s trying to escape. \r\n CHRIS: Right. Which is conflict, actually, she has to escape from something. \r\n OREN: I love this opening line. I think this opening line is very good. I read it and I was like, yeah, I can see why a lot of people liked this and decided to read the next line. \r\n CHRIS: I have to say, though, I do feel like that opening line is just a touch misleading because she doesn’t escape. She doesn’t actually escape. \r\n OREN: That’s a fair point. It is a bit of a lie. She does not actually escape. \r\n CHRIS: It’s a pet peeve of was mine when opening lines lie. We really want them to work really bad and I know that maybe for some, in some cases it pays off. It’s like, well, it was a lie, but the audience was so engrossed in the story they didn’t notice later that it was a lie. I still don’t like it. [laughs] Okay. \r\n OREN: Admittedly I, in my head, translated that to “try to escape from the house of the Ninth”, because I read the book so I know what happens. So I think that’s why I didn’t notice that, but it’s a good point. \r\n CHRIS: It’s not as bad as some. For instance, this opening line from House of Earth and Blood: “There was a wolf at the gallery door.” \r\n WES: Right, this one. [sighs and laughs] CHRIS: This is a pretty good opening line when you first look at it. It’s intriguing, it arouses curiosity because there’s a wolf at the gallery, but then it turns out as you read on: neither wolf, nor gallery. [laughter] Shortly after this you find out the wolf is a woman. And it’s very disorienting. Again, the reader’s just trying to figure out what is happening in your first paragraph. And then it’s very distracting. Cause I kept asking the question, so is she a werewolf? Is that why you called her wolf? And then the gallery is this big library installation that I guess has some art in it, but definitely not a gallery, I would say. \r\n OREN: Right. And it’s extra confusing because this book can’t communicate clearly. It’s hard to tell, but the part that is referred to as the gallery is this small upper area, which isn’t a gallery either. It’s more of a place where people come when they want to buy stuff. I don’t remember if there’s any art even displayed there, but it’s a very small space. Like the book makes the point of that. So it doesn’t sound like a gallery. And then underneath that is a giant library, and that’s where the protagonist actually is most of the time. And that’s what you assume it’s talking about when it mentions the gallery door. It’s all very confusing. And eventually you figure out that this character is a werewolf. And she’s called a wolf, but when you say a wolf, it suggests an actual animal, like something at least in the shape of a wolf, not a person who can turn into a wolf if she wants to. \r\n CHRIS: I would accept it if she was a werewolf, but she was also metaphorically a wolf. Cause that means somebody menacing. \r\n OREN: I guess she’s a cop. \r\n [laughter] CHRIS: She’s the protagonist’s best friend, okay. She’s not metaphorically a wolf. [laughs] Here’s a more subtle one that I still found somewhat disorienting, but I can see how– Especially when you’re writing these sentences, you know what you mean, and so it can be a little hard to catch when they do too much. But this first sentence from The Maze Runner: “He began his new life standing up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air.” \r\n I find that disorienting because what does beginning his new life mean? And it almost makes you think of birth, but he’s standing up and I don’t think he was born standing up. And then if it’s metaphorically his new life then saying he’s standing up is completely unremarkable, right? [laughs] WES: I began my new life by opening my eyes and breathing. Great. Like, were you dead? \r\n CHRIS: It’s a normal thing for people to do, much of the time, is standing up. So it just leaves you wondering, is this literal, is this metaphorical? What does it mean exactly? So that I would consider to be a disorienting first line. \r\n OREN: Okay. So if you want to see a disorienting first line, may I present The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: “I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect—and tax—public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure.”  What. \r\n WES: I fell asleep. I… [sighs] OREN: Yeah, what? \r\n [laughter] WES: I’m gonna stand up and begin my new life. \r\n [laughter] OREN: Like, okay. If you know what Pravda is that could suggest that there’s some kind of social unrest, because Pravda is the name of a famous communist newspaper. But if you don’t know what Pravda is, there’s nothing in that sentence. It does tell you that you’re on the moon. I’ll give it that much. But there’s nothing in there to indicate whether this reading is good or not. Like, is it good that they passed on it? Is it bad? Who knows. Why does any of this matter? It’s your opening line and you’re starting off with the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems. \r\n CHRIS: Sometimes with these older books what’s happening is, it had novelty at the time it came out. So at that time, talking about city ordinances on the moon, and that contrast might have been enough to make that a really interesting opening line. And it’s not anymore. Just like with Interview with a Vampire. The book probably had a lot more novelty when it came out because there wasn’t tons of angsty vampires in all of our books. [laughs] And it goes into great detail about what life as a vampire is like. And that was unusual at the time. \r\n OREN: It’s funny because the second line, which I originally actually thought was part of the first line because the first line has so little context, is: “I see also is to be mass meeting tonight to organize “Sons of Revolution” talk-talk.” [laughter] Which is like, what? \r\n WES: Oh boy. \r\n CHRIS: It was probably not intended to be funny, cause this is not a comedy. \r\n OREN: But that’s how the characters talk. They have this weird I guess moon dialect or whatever that just sounds very silly. And I always recommend that unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise that you write your story in fairly standard English. Now there are compelling reasons to do otherwise, there are many dialects of English that are perfectly legitimate for storytelling. But I don’t think inventing a new moon dialect is one of them. I don’t think that is worth the confusion of trying to figure out what that sentence means. Cause what it sounds like if you read it, what is a talk-talk other than a meeting? So they’re having a meeting to organize a meeting. Is that what that means? Have we reached that level of recursiveness? \r\n [laughter] CHRIS: So, Wes, did you want to…? \r\n WES: I have a few good ones that I think succeed due to brevity. So I’ll go through a few kind of getting a little shorter as I go. One from Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three, it begins with: “Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horse-shoes.” \r\n OREN: Aww. \r\n WES: I love how much that says with giving you so little. \r\n CHRIS: It’s great characterization. \r\n WES: It’s wonderful. And we get two characters, easily introduced and we get a strong look at both of them in this one line. And there’s even this idea of the atmosphere of what we’re stepping into. Obviously if you looked at the cover of the book, you know that it’s high fantasy, but the idea of just “a sword, but horse-shoes”– You might immediately go in your mind’s eye, to okay, smithy or rural smithy even, with the horse-shoe component, not city industrial smithy who only makes weapons, that kind of stuff. So I feel like there’s a lot that you get to fill in yourself as the reader with just some very basic words in a pretty compact sentence. \r\n OREN: There’s also just a very strong characterization in, “I want to make a sword!” – “Nuh-uh: horse-shoes.” \r\n [laughter] WES: Yep. \r\n OREN: It’s just really great. It really sets the tone for that character. He does eventually get a sword, but it takes a while. \r\n [laughter] CHRIS: He has to be assistant pig keeper for a while first. \r\n WES: Yes. I like how that happens shortly thereafter. Cause he’s just like, “Ugh, but I need to do something cool!” And he’s like, “Okay, have a promotion: You’re the assistant pig keeper.” [laughs] CHRIS: It’s a great example of how giving your characters spinach at the beginning [Wes: Yes] helps readers sympathize with them and bond with them. \r\n OREN: That story taught me to expect promotions that have increased responsibility, but not increased pay. Ba-dum-tsh! \r\n [laughter] WES: Oh no. \r\n Another good one, it’s a little shorter, that does a lot of the same things, is from Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. And the first sentence is: “Coraline discovered the door a little while after they moved into the house.” And I love the contrast with, you discover a door in a house. Like there’s doors in houses. But it’s the door. And suddenly I’m just like, okay, what’s going on? I need to know what’s going on with this door. Houses have doors, what’s going on? \r\n And I like the verb there, ‘discovered’ as the first verb in a story is good because it sets the tone. The whole point of Coraline is she’s an explorer. And so she’s– The first thing she does in the entire story is discover this door that takes her on further adventures for exploring and trying to find things in that other world that she stumbles into. \r\n CHRIS: In the book is the door a little door like it is in the movie? \r\n WES: Yeah, I think so, yeah. \r\n CHRIS: Yeah. I think it’s a good line that creates curiosity. The only thing is, I think that if he had managed to work in that it was a little door…? \r\n WES: “… discovered the little door”? \r\n CHRIS: I’m not going to rewrite this nice sentence [laughs] addlibbing on the podcast. It might take more finesse than just adding the word ‘little’ before door, but I think if he was able to communicate that the door was an unusual door, like it was a little door, not a full-sized door, I think that would have added some additional intrigue and curiosity. \r\n WES: Yeah, a little bit. Because definitely the ‘the’ is carrying a lot of weight: ‘the door’. Having ‘little’ would help emphasize the specialness of the door. I think, yeah, that’s a good point. \r\n CHRIS: It’s something that’s again, novel and unusual that the door is little and not a normal size, not a full sized door. \r\n OREN: Does he do anything fancy with capitalization there, is door capitalized? \r\n WES: No, no, it’s not. \r\n OREN: I’m not saying it would have been better if he had, I was just wondering. \r\n WES: I transcribed that in my notes and then I was like, is that, should that be? And I looked back in the book, and oh no, it’s just, okay– [laughs] Fine. Just a basic door, I guess, in spelling. \r\n I’ll just share one more quick one and we can talk about a few others, there’s a few other good ones, but I like this one from book two in the Greta Helsing trilogy by Vivian Shaw. The first book and the third book had like meh openers, but I really liked this opener to Dreadful Company: “There was a monster in Greta Helsing’s hotel bathroom sink.” \r\n CHRIS: Oh, that’s good. That’s really good. That’s very good. \r\n WES: Very good. It’s very good. [laughs] CHRIS: Okay. So she has a monster in her sink, which suggests a problem. It fits in a sink, which is really intriguing. And we’ve introduced the main character and we know that she has a hotel. That’s a great opening line. \r\n WES: She’s somewhere new. Yeah. It was a good book too. I forget how I stumbled on the Greta Helsing books, but basically Greta Helsing is a medical doctor, but she treats supernatural and undead creatures. So she’ll do like bone replacements for mummies and like special diseases that affect ghouls and things like that. So it’s pretty fun if you want to nerd out on a lot of kind of funny medical jargon with a bunch of monsters. [laughter] I do like that you pointed out the monster in the sink part. Cause there’s the premise of some conflict, some questions. And then you go into, “Oh, it’s a well monster, well monsters like wet places and they like to steal shiny things.” [laughs] Like it’s so cute, I can’t stand it. \r\n OREN: That was some really good information density that just tells you what you need to know. And it’s not weird or confusing. \r\n WES: I like that since it’s using a ‘to be’ verb it’s just a statement. There’s no action. It’s just like, you can’t ask for a better way to set the scene and let the reader take anything they want from it. Cause they’re not being directed on how to view it, which is just brilliant. I think it’s really tight. \r\n CHRIS: The other thing that I notice sometimes happens, and this could cause disorienting or misleading sentences is when writers can really mess up their sentences just by trying too hard. And one of the ones that I think is the funniest is the opening line of Eldest, which is the sequel to Eragon. \r\n WES: Oh boy. \r\n [laughter] CHRIS: “The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.” \r\n WES: What? \r\n CHRIS: What is this supposed to mean? Because there are not literally undead singing in this setting. [laughs] So as far as we know the songs of the dead are people singing about the dead, living people singing about the dead, which is usually a lamentation. So it’s just saying lamentations are lamentations. That is the actual– if you were to translate what it means, that seems to be what it’s saying. \r\n [laughter] OREN: So we’re having a meeting to organize a meeting. It’s good that this is following in the literary footsteps of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. [laughter] What’s funny is that you can also interprete it another way that is way cooler, but also not what’s in the setting, which is if the undead are–or the dead–if the dead are singing and that causes bad things to happen with humans, or with the living, so lamentations. That would be interesting. It’s like the dead are singing and their songs are dangerous. That’s not what it means though. [laughs] CHRIS: Yeah. I mean, obviously it would still be disorienting and unclear if that were the first sentence of the first book. That would be cool, the setting does not have undead doing that. It opens on a battlefield and the main character is supposed to be thinking this, but he would not think this. [laughs] So it’s both very contrived and kind of disorienting and kind of nonsensical and the writer is clearly just “See, isn’t it deep?” Um, I’m sorry. You’re using fancy wording, but it’s not actually deep. \r\n [Wes laughs] OREN: Well, if we’re talking about fancy wording that’s not really deep, I have to mention The Name of the Wind. \r\n WES: Oh gosh, yes, do it. \r\n OREN: I am required by law. [laughter] Okay, I’m going to cheat a little bit and go with the first two sentences. Cause I don’t really think that the first one works by itself. First sentence: “IT WAS NIGHT AGAIN.” Second sentence: “The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.” \r\n WES: [weary] Oh my gosh. \r\n OREN: I actually liked the first part of that, “It was night again”, I think is actually a good opening line. And it kind of feeds into this idea that Kvothe is dying by being a bartender in this town. I don’t really know why, they don’t really explain that, but they sort of say that he is, so it’s supposed to be like, it communicates drearyness. \r\n CHRIS: It’s not a hook in itself, but it’s also very short, right? So it’s not a bad way to lead into the second sentence. \r\n OREN: Although, it’s funny because a lot of books do a little bit of capitalizing the first few words, for some reason. And in this one, it just happened to be that the capitalization was that entire sentence, which gave the impression that it was being yelled. \r\n [Wes laughs] CHRIS: It’s like some form of drop cap. And so for– \r\n OREN: That’s not the line’s fault. It was just a weird quirk of publication. The second part, though, that is a lie. There is no silence of three parts. It goes in to explain what that means and it just means the inn is quiet. And he just picked three things that were quiet and called them the silence in three parts. \r\n CHRIS: Right. And so it’s intriguing, but it’s promising something that he can’t actually deliver. \r\n OREN: Right. When it said silence in three parts, I was expecting some kind of magic. Because that’s not how silence normally works, right? There are not sources of silence, things either do or don’t make noise. And so I was expecting there to be something going on that was weird, but instead it was just like, no, okay, so these guys over here are drinking kind of quietly, and the bartender is cleaning a glass kind of quietly, and there’s no wind outside and that’s also kind of quiet. So, boom, three parts. \r\n [laughter] WES: …to make a whole silence. \r\n OREN: And it’s not even that silent, is the other thing. These people are still drinking. That still makes noise. It’s not even that silent. \r\n CHRIS: Also, we need to be done with silence and opening books now. It’s just– [laughs] I think there’s just so much emphasis on “Oh no, things are creepily silent”. I think we should probably look for other ways to make things creepy. Not that we should never use it, but it’s definitely getting an air of being clichéd. \r\n OREN: I’m sure there’s a think piece out there somewhere about how that’s why this opening is brilliant, because it’s making fun of the cliché of silence being creepy, because it’s actually not creepy. And it’s like, yeah, for sure. I’m positive one of those think pieces exists right now. [laughs] WES: You are right though, Chris, it’s so unnecessary to point out that there’s no noise. \r\n Just one last example that I had was the opening line to Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer’s book, and the line reads: “The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.” \r\n I don’t anticipate there being a lot of noise there, but I’m creeped out and he didn’t tell me that it’s weirdly quiet. [laughs] I’m just like, okay. Of course that clause ‘which was not supposed to be there’ is really taking an otherwise kind of creepy forest and adding an entirely new dimension. But… \r\n CHRIS: Yeah, that’s the phrase that really stands out. \r\n I would choose to make that opening sentence shorter. Long sentences can be very beautiful and lyrical, but because the reader’s ability to understand the first paragraph is already kind of, it’s already very difficult sometimes because they’re trying to get the context and figure out what’s happening. Just again, increasing the ease of reading and ease of comprehension in that first paragraph I think is important. And I think the sentence, that beginning without that last ‘and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats’ already sets the mood and atmosphere and scene well enough. I would choose to shorten it just to ease up on the kind of cognitive burden for the reader a bit. \r\n OREN: You can’t cut the marsh flats! That’s my favorite part. [laughter] I love the marsh flats. I will leave an angry comment about that. “Cut the marsh flats”, how dare you. [laughs][laughter] WES: Chris does have a point though. “Forest begins to give way to swamp and marsh flats” that accomplishes a lot of the same. You lose wind-gnarled trees though, and I love wind-gnarled trees. \r\n CHRIS: Well, you could keep wind-gnarled trees and get rid of something else instead. \r\n WES: Oh no! [laughs][laughter] CHRIS: The point is that if you’re going to have a first sentence and it’s going to be that long, it should really need to be that long. For instance, when we went back to the Gideon the Ninth first sentence, there was a reason why that sentence was that long. It was trying to accomplish a specific purpose and it really, for the most part, needed that many words to do that. \r\n This sentence seems like it’s longer than it needs to be, which just increases the cognitive burden. And it’s better not to do that. \r\n WES: Yeah. People are stepping into your book and story for the first time. Don’t put a lot on that first sentence. We’ve shared several good examples today that can fulfill, set the atmosphere, raise questions, provide some tension or conflict, introduce a character and there’s fewer than 15 words, you know? So you can do this and probably simpler is generally better. And then save your lyrical prose for, I dunno, chapter two or whatever. [laughs] CHRIS: Yeah. In this case, I would also have to say, since what’s really intriguing about the sentence is the tower that’s not supposed to be there, I would almost worry about going on too long setting the scene, that the reader would almost forget the tower. Which, that’s the thing that’s intriguing so the focus really should be there. \r\n OREN: Okay, well, that sounds like a pretty good place to end the story. I’m still sad about the mudflats having to be– or the marsh flats having to be cut. That just– You can’t take away my marsh flats, Chris! \r\n But those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com. Now, before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, he is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo, she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Need an editor? We’re at your service. \r\n \r\n    Related StoriesHow to Teach World Terms Without Confusing Readers\r\n323 – Plot Twists\r\n322 – Urban Fantasy… Again\r\n 

You thought this episode would have a topic other than plot twists, but, twist, the topic is plot twists! On the one hand, everyone loves a good plot twist. On the other hand, plot twists tend to be one of the most contentious story decisions around. Why is that? What makes plot twists both so important but also so dicey? That’s what we’re talking about today, plus a special message from our sponsor, the Vulcan Dictates of Poetics. \r\n \r\n Download Episode 323  Subscription Feed  \r\n https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/TMP-323-Plot-Twists.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. \r\n Show Notes: The Vulcan Dictates of Poetics \r\n The 100 \r\n Zuko \r\n How to Use Failure In Your Story \r\n Turning Points \r\n The Last Colony \r\n Soon I Will Be Invincible \r\n Aang vs Ozai Fight \r\n Space Sweepers \r\n Ruby \r\n Carnival Row \r\n Ubervamp \r\n Zepfram Cochrane \r\n Mami \r\n The Martian \r\n Worst Case Scenario \r\n Jump down to comments ↓ \r\n Transcript Generously transcribed by Anonymous. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. \r\n Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. And before we start today, I want to let everyone know that we are hoping to find some more volunteers to transcribe some of these episodes. We’ve already had some great people help us out there, and we really appreciate it. What we do is we send you a rough copy of this transcript that’s made by some software. And then, because there are some things only a human can do we have you go through and make it readable. And that is just how we are able to have transcripts on our podcast. So if you’re interested in doing that, you can go to mythcreants.com/transcribe, and we really appreciate it. \r\n So now, plot twist: Chris is here with me. \r\n Chris: Yeah. \r\n Oren: Guess you weren’t expecting, well you probably were expecting that. \r\n Chris: what is a plot twist? Tell me, please. \r\n Chris: I would call a plot twist any unexpected event that changes the trajectory of the story. So it’s not just that we had an unexpected thing happening, but that has a big effect on the story going forward. So the story sort of changes direction. \r\n Oren: Does it have to have a reveal or are reveals a “sometimes food” for plot twists? \r\n Chris: I would say that the big issue with a plot twist is that you’re trying to make something that is really surprising, but it also still has to be believable to be fun. And so a reveal is just one way to do that, where if you reveal new information that people didn’t know before, after foreshadowing it of course, you have to foreshadow, that’s a reason why something unexpected happened is because there was something that the audience didn’t know. And now once they know it, that changes everything. The plot goes in different directions. But there’s other ways to do this, too. A really common one is to make your character fail. There’s just so many situations in the stories where we expect the characters to succeed especially if we do something where we have the protagonists come up with their plan for solving this big problem. Maybe they’re going to sneak their way into the enemy fortress so that they can get into the throne room so that they can steal the magic scepter. And you kind of assume that that plan is going to go forward to a certain extent, but if they get caught before they even go in, that’s going to be a surprising thing, because again, the audience will expect them to succeed for the plot to move forward. \r\n And in some cases like the show, the 100, it does this so often, it’s not really a twist anymore. The characters are failing at their plans all the time, but in some stories that are a little bit more conventional in how often characters succeed to move the plot forward, this could be something that’s really surprising, and that has very large ramifications for the direction the story goes in. \r\n So that’s another way to do it. Or you could have a character just make an unexpected choice. \r\n Oren: Like best plot twist: the end of Avatar, Season Two, when Zuko does not join the good guys. What, what was that? I was so surprised. I’m still surprised to this day, I think about it. And I’m surprised. \r\n Chris: The cool thing about this is that it’s definitely one of the things that makes Zuko’s redemption arc so compelling is that he actually backslides, but it makes perfect sense for his character to backslide in that situation. And it’s actually in the service of a redemption arc that works even better. But because people can see he’s on a redemption arc, they expect that to be the point at the end of Season Two, at which he just joins Team Good. So when he turns against them instead it’s just really surprising and it works really well. \r\n Oren: Yeah. And it’s worth noting that part of the reason why it’s so believable is that up until that point, although Zuko had been taking steps towards becoming a good guy, including things like helping Appa get free, he hadn’t yet given up on the thing that was motivating him to do bad things. \r\n Which was returning to his father’s good graces. Right? He still wanted that and he just didn’t think he could have it. And so his character had started moving in other directions. So then when that is offered to him, it is very believable that he would still jump at it. And it’s not until later when he realizes that isn’t actually what he wants anymore, that he’s able to make his full transition, his full redemption. \r\n Chris: And there’s also this subversion. And I would almost say that maybe the Zuko doing the backsliding would be an example of a subversion. But a subversion is when you have a plot twist that specifically bucks story conventions. So in some cases the audience expects something to happen just because that’s what other stories do. And I think the Zuko redemption arc would be one of those examples where we can see that Zuko is on his way to joining Team Good. We’ve seen this plot arc before, so we expect that to happen. And then when it doesn’t, it’s really surprising. But there’s other instances in stories where we could predict events, not based on what has happened in this story, but what we’ve seen other stories do. \r\n And when you don’t follow that, a lot of times that’s a twist and it’s called a subversion. And a lot of times they’re lots of fun because it’s great when you surprise people in that way. And it’s like, yes, we’re not doing what all the other stories do, but of course it still has to make sense. \r\n Oren: And it still has to be cool. Right? Why would you do a subversion and replace what people thought was going to happen with something less interesting? \r\n Chris: It’s true for it to be a good subversion, you have to be pleasantly surprised that it’s different. Like a typical subversion might be presenting a woman that looks like she’s a damsel, but it turns out she’s actually really kick ass. And she was there just to lure the monster in and fight it, for instance. That would be an example of a subversion that I’ve seen done before. And that’s a great subversion often because we are pleasantly surprised that she’s not a damsel because we know that that trope is sexist. Now as the whole “woman as damsels” trope gets more and more outdated, that subversion actually becomes less pleasant because we’re, for instance, less surprised when it’s subverted. And also, we’re just tired of seeing it at all, even to subvert it. But that would be an example of what a subversion typically looks like that the surprise offers value and it is a good surprise. \r\n Oren: Right. As opposed to something at the end of the story, when the hero has done what needed to be done and satisfactorily defeated the villain and earned their happy ending, and they trip on a rock and die. And that is a subversion, but it’s a bad one. It’s not, it doesn’t add things to your story. It just makes it less enjoyable. And I see authors who think that: oh, well, if I do that, people won’t be expecting it! And they won’t because they didn’t expect you to do something that was bad for your story. \r\n Chris: And then a case of a character failing at something that people expected them to succeed at and that providing a plot twist. Usually when that happens, first of all, you have to make sure that the story maintains its momentum. That it actually made a difference that they tried. We’re not just back at square one. And that [is] what Oren refers to as a restoring hope where we, it’s not just, they fail and all is lost, there’s no way to win now. That’s not, that’s not fun instead— The 100, when they do this there’s always now here’s our desperate plan B. We tried the plan A. Plan A was already desperate, but we failed at plan A, so now here’s the even more desperate plan. And so there’s still a way for the story to move forward. It makes a difference that they tried because they tried and then something bad happened as a result. And the audience gets [a] pay off in a lot of this situation because the failure escalates tension. So it makes the story more exciting. \r\n Oren: And the 100 of course is also just a very dark show by design. So they can afford to sacrifice things because their characters failed. Someone could just die or some beautiful location could be destroyed or what have you. And that’s, this is the mood of the show. The mood is very dark. If you have a more light-hearted show, which most shows are by comparison, there’s more of a limit on how much you can have your characters fail and suffer consequences before you lose the mood you want. So it’s probably not zero, but it’s also not as much as the 100 does it. \r\n Chris: But a failure is also a much bigger twist if you don’t have failures all the time. \r\n Oren: That’s true. \r\n Chris: Cause it’s more unexpected. \r\n Oren: Yeah. A little failure goes a long way. It’s also worth noting that a lot of turning points that we talk about are also plot twists. And in that case, not only do you have to make them believable and set them up in advance, you also have to make them karmically balanced. This is a problem I run into a lot, even when I talk to other editors where I’ll be like the end here is kind of unsatisfying and someone will be like, well, but it was foreshadowed. And it’s like, yeah, it was foreshadowed. It’s totally credible that this happened, but it doesn’t feel earned. \r\n And a good example of that is the end of The Last Colony by John Scalzi, where this book is several years old now, but I guess spoilers, if you haven’t read it. So they’re defending their colony from an alien attack and this is the big boss battle. The way that they win is that a side character brings them this device that disables all of the enemy’s guns. \r\n And it’s like, okay, that happened. And people didn’t like that ending to the point that John Scalzi actually wrote a companion novel to show where that side character got that item. But the problem wasn’t that it wasn’t credible. It was perfectly realistic within the context of this universe that this side character would go to some other aliens and get some tech from them. That wasn’t unbelievable, it just wasn’t earned. And so when the characters won, it was just, yeah, okay, I guess they won because we’ve got this fancy device. Thanks. \r\n Chris: The expectation here is that the protagonist saves the day. Right? That’s why we follow them. That’s why they’re the main character is because they’re the one that has to make the difference between success or failure in the plot. And I have also seen Soon I Will Be Invincible the book has this problem. There’s some other stories where there’s just this side character, this NPC on the side that’s the secret protagonist and the writer really loves this character. And then right when we’re getting to the climax, this character then swoops in and, didn’t you know, I was the bad-ass all along and then saves the day for the protagonist. That is not fun. Please don’t do that. \r\n Oren: If we wanted to have a situation where some aliens came in and the turning point was the aliens arriving and giving them this tech that allowed them to win, you could do that, but you would probably do it by something like a prior achievement where you had the characters go out of their way and sacrifice to help these aliens. If you have seen that meme floating around, you see a squirrel on the road and you swerve and avoid the squirrel saving its life. And then in your darkest hour, the squirrel returns and it shows a squirrel either piloting an airplane or in a suit of knight armor. It’s like that because you helped them earlier. You earned some good karma by doing that. \r\n Chris: There’s a lot of fairy tales that are actually like this. If you’ve read any of the number of fairy tales that are Oh, and then this character helped stop people from destroying the beehive. And then later the bees told them— helped them solve the riddle that the villain gave them or something like that, or fed the mice and the mice came to their aid. Those are all that kind of prior achievement where you helped somebody else out of the goodness of your heart. You didn’t expect anything in return. And then later when they come to help you, you earned that. So it’s not just somebody stealing your thunder. \r\n Oren: Yeah. And that’s how you avoid things like the big twist at the end of Avatar, which is just, I love Avatar, but man, that ending. Can we talk, can we talk about that ending? \r\n Chris: I can tell we need another Oren therapy session. So tell me how Avatar hurt you. \r\n Oren: So this is the fight between Aang and Ozai. And the big twist is that Aang defeats Ozai by taking his bending away instead of killing him. Right. But there are just so many problems with this ending. First is that by the time this happens, Aang has actually already won the fight and he did that by getting hit by a rock in the right place and it’s giving him back the avatar state. Which is just incredibly boring. It’s like, okay, well, good, I’m glad he was hit in the right place by a rock. I’m glad that that guru guy when he said you’ll never be able to go into the avatar state again, what he meant was you need someone to poke you real good in this part of your back. Good job guru. So at that point the fight was already over. And to be perfectly honest, that was the part of the story that I was interested in was defeating Ozai. I didn’t actually care that much whether Aang killed him or put him in jail or whatever. Right. All they had to establish at that point was that Aang didn’t want to kill Ozai because it violated Aang’s personal code. \r\n But this is a show where no one ever dies anyway. So this had never really been an issue before. So it was just kind of like, okay, well now we’re pretending that when you beat someone in a fight, they die. That’s never been the case in the show before, but anyway, so then Aang takes his bending away using this technique that a lion turtle who appeared from nowhere taught him with dialogue that’s impossible to understand if you don’t have subtitles and it’s like, what, what is happening? \r\n Chris: I will also say that they set up a very difficult moral dilemma for Aang where they were very specific about what your options are to kill this guy or maybe the premise was that if they put him in jail, he’ll just break out and cause problems again. I don’t know. But that was a moral dilemma they set up. And it also felt like it was a little bit of a cop-out to say Oh wait, you have another option. Magical third option comes so that you don’t actually have to make a difficult decision here. Right. Which felt like that was the place of growth for Aang is that he was supposed to be making a difficult decision. \r\n Oren: I’m not against the concept of, well, here is a difficult moral decision with two unacceptable options and then finding a third way to do things. I think that can work, but again, it has to be, it has to feel earned, right? \r\n Chris: Right, he didn’t earn the option. \r\n Oren: This was just, thanks, lion turtle for being here and giving us the power to not have to pick either problem. \r\n Chris: So there’s definitely a lot of a combination of things happening there. One is just a lack of foreshadowing. I mean, it’s basically deus ex machina turtle. Other things that are really common I find in plot twists that don’t work are just characters acting inconsistent, or one thing is if you’re going to make a big plot twist and you weren’t planning it from the beginning, please read your story again from the beginning and make sure all previous events actually work with your reveal if you’re making a reveal, because that’s something that just drives me up the wall. If you reveal something it’s important that all of the previous story events would still be the same. And that’s the tricky thing about it, right? Is because you have to make all of your events work with both sets of information, both ideas about what was going on, but that’s a really common problem. You don’t want characters— If you want to use a character choice, that’s unexpected just make sure your character is still acting in character. \r\n And then the other thing is sometimes twists are just really contrived. I think an example is in Space Sweepers, which we watched recently, and this is largely a tone problem where we have these main cast members that are just escaping these absolutely lethal situations all the time. We had a whole bunch of guys with machine guns shooting at them. They came out unscathed. They’re fine all the time. And then we have a sudden plot twist where all of the side protagonists are just slaughtered and that doesn’t feel like that was the type of story we had here because we had everybody escaping unscathed all the time, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means it’s like a lighter, rompier story. But then what happens is when we have a twist where a whole bunch of people died, because it’s a really big tone shift, it feels contrived. It doesn’t feel like a natural thing that occurred or events were naturally unfolding. It feels like a storyteller just randomly decided that we’re going to be killing lots of side characters off now because the story and the world is clearly just following a different set of rules than it was previously. So that can also happen in a plot twist. \r\n Oren: Also say that it’s probably not a good idea to do a plot twist that goes with the more boring option, because it looked like you were doing something more interesting. My favorite example of this is in Supernatural’s fourth season, the end of the fourth season, where Sam has been working with this demon, Ruby. And Dean is like, Ruby’s evil, she’s definitely evil. And Sam’s like, she’s not. And then it gets to the end and oh, it turns out Ruby was evil. And all the demons are evil. This is just a way less interesting ending than if Ruby hadn’t been evil. And I get why they were doing that. They were doing a fall from grace for Sam. But I think there were ways to do that with a more interesting end for Ruby. Like if Ruby had not been a demon. If she had been something else or if her plan had gotten Sam to fall from grace, but without her betraying him because she’s evil. If that was what her goal was just different. I don’t know. \r\n Chris: There’s also a reveal in here, right? Because to viewers it’s not clear whether or not Ruby is really evil or not. So when she ends up being evil, it is actually a reveal and it’s a reveal in the kind of, well, it’s actually more interesting if she’s a demon who’s not entirely evil and her being a demon who’s evil like all the other demons is the less interesting option, whereas they could have also in that situation not chosen to make that a reveal. And that comes with its own consequences. If we knew that she was bad the entire time, then there might be more wincing when Sam decides to hang out with her. But that’s part of that choice to make it ambiguous. So definitely played into the whole disappointment when we reveal what’s actually going on. It’s just not that interesting. \r\n Oren: There was a question and we went with the less interesting answer. I kind of wonder if maybe it would’ve worked fine if she had thought she was doing the right thing, too, and then it turned out to be bad and that she was as surprised by it as Sam was. \r\n Chris: I think that would have been better. Sure. Then of course there’s always the plot twists that happened because of a reveal and that we should not have hid that information. This is kind of similar to this. It wasn’t worth it. Wasn’t worth hiding the information to get your reveal and your plot twist. \r\n This is where I typically bring in Carnival Row where we have this main character who just seems like a really boring guy who was just the privileged guy. And we’ve this setting with lots of oppression of other people. And then it turns out like he’s in the closet. But we don’t know that until three episodes in, and for that entire time, he just seems like a really boring, uninteresting guy. We don’t understand why he’s making the choices that he’s making. He seems just like an ass when later we realize he has actual sympathetic reasons for making those choices, but we didn’t know what was interesting about him. We didn’t understand him or where his emotions were coming from. And he’s just way more compelling once we get that information. And this is in a show, but we see this in novels all the time. \r\n Oren: It would have been more interesting if we had known this from the beginning. \r\n Chris: This is more common in narrated works. Because again, usually when you’re watching a visual work, the assumption is that you can’t see in their head anyway. And this is a case where that problem still definitely happened, despite that. But again, if you want to have your protagonists have this hidden plan it really has to not cost you to hide that information. And often it just comes across as contrived that we don’t know what the protagonist is planning, or if they’re heading into a situation that looks like it’s certain death, it’s like, Why are they doing that? What is their plan? \r\n Oren: And remember to make your twist or reveal, because in this case they’re sort of similar, remember to make it actually change the situation. Again, this is more common a problem in TV shows, just because prose writers have time to think through things and describe things properly. I’ll always remember the fight between Buffy and the first super vampire in season seven, when she’s like, okay, I’ve got a plan for beating it. And what is the plan? The plan is I’m going to fight it again. But there’s a reveal that we’re doing it in front of all of the other characters and they treat that like a big reveal. They literally pull cloth off of spotlights and turn those on and bring up this big arena. Like, ah yeah, we’ve revealed the plan now! And this is exactly the same as the last time she fought it when she got her ass kicked. But I guess she’s going to win this time. \r\n Chris: This is also an example of we had a plot twist in that she tried to fight one of these creatures and failed. So we have a failure, but in the end we had nowhere for that to go, other than for us to just undo that failure by having her fight them again and this time win. Which is what you want to avoid if you’re going to have a twist where a character fails. It should mean that we got to switch to plan B or the story moves forward in a different way than it would have before. \r\n Oren: Some of my favorite twists are actually little character twists. They don’t have to necessarily be huge reveals, but stuff like in First Contact, the Star Trek film, when they go to meet Zefram Cochrane, who was the guy who made first contact and they all have these images of him being super cool and great. And then he turns out to be a selfish jerk. \r\n That’s not exactly groundbreaking. Lots of stories have done that, but that’s just fun. I love that. I love that as a twist, just having a character not be who you thought they were. \r\n Chris: Character deaths are often twists again it’s something that you have to be careful with with the tone of the story and the Madoka Magica the death of Mami for instance. \r\n Oren: Oh, oof, oof! \r\n Chris: But that works because Madoka Magica is already a very dark deconstruction. And so we almost, we were warned that life is not great for magical girls. And so there was lots of foreshadowing and it was that type of story. And so when an important character dies we haven’t, not like Space Sweepers, where we saw everybody live through unrealistic situations and we assume that all of the characters were going to have plot shields because the rest of the story set up plot shields for the characters. So it’s really contrived when characters die. But in Madoka Magica, it’s almost the opposite where we’re setting up an expectation that no, this is genuinely dangerous. It’s not idealistic. So when a character dies, it’s still very shocking, but it’s been foreshadowed appropriately by the tone of the show. It definitely changes things moving forward. \r\n Oren: Character death is one of those things that authors are often overeager to do, because they’re so often told that they shouldn’t. And they’re like, well, I’m going to do it. I’m going to be super cool. But there are reasons why we don’t usually kill major characters. It costs a lot. \r\n Chris: Yeah. I will say that Mami’s still basically a side character. We don’t actually know her that well in Madoka Magica. I think the reason why it’s so shocking is because she’s a mentor figure and, it’s not the mentors don’t die, they die all the time, but she dies really early. Right? Usually the mentor doesn’t die as soon as they start training the protagonist. Usually the protagonist has learned a lot of skills before the mentor finally dies. \r\n Oren: Right. At this point, Madoka hasn’t even agreed to become a magical girl yet. This is like if Obiwan was like, you have to come with me to Alderaan. And Luke was like, I don’t know. And then Obiwan just got shot in the head. \r\n Chris: That would be surprising and it would change the trajectory of the story. \r\n Oren: But interestingly, it would not work in Star Wars. If you took Star Wars as it is and made that change, it would be a worse movie for it. So it has to fit with your story. \r\n Chris: Again, it still has to fit with your story. Star Wars is once again, not a dark gritty story where people are killed left and right. \r\n Oren: If you want a story that has just twists everywhere and it’s nothing but twists, constant twists, I would recommend the Martian, which is just a good story in general. Everything that happens in that book is something going wrong that the main character did not expect and making things worse. \r\n Chris: That book is a continuous— and it’s especially impressive and necessary because the Martian is about one guy on Mars by himself. It’s a man versus environment story. To keep that going, it’s almost harder to plot and harder to create conflict. What we have is a very precarious survival situation, and he ups the tension by having things unexpectedly go wrong. And it’s really realistic that situation, of course, for things to go wrong when you’re one dude on Mars using equipment that was not meant to be used for this long. \r\n Another example of a story that has a twist that just isn’t appropriate, it’s foreshadowed a little bit, but definitely not sufficiently is the Voyager episode, Worst Case Scenario. This is a scenario where they find this holo novel on the ship and it’s about all of the characters on the ship. And some of them are having a mutiny. So we get into an inter-character conflict in this holo novel. Now, because it’s just a holo novel that doesn’t really give the episode that much conflict. They spend the first quarter of the episode pretending that it’s real before then, oh, twist, it’s a holo novel. All right. That’s actually disappointing. \r\n Oren: Yeah. This is actually a more interesting story in the holo novel than your actual episode. \r\n Chris: So first of all, it’s not a great twist because we need to be pleasantly surprised and not disappointed that it’s not an actual exciting episode that we thought it was. But then we have some interpersonal conflict where they discuss what to do with this holo novel, particularly since it’s missing its ending. Right. They want to write an ending for it. Tuvok, the character who is always right, but resented for it on Voyager, is like, Hey, we should not run this holo novel because it shows the crew members fighting each other and along a divide that’s real. We can create real tensions on board the ship by having people watch this story about themselves, which is true. It would be a really bad idea. And so they could have, if they wanted to, raised the tension by just having that be true by having it create interpersonal tension on the ship that then escalates perhaps almost having a real mutiny if they want it. \r\n But Voyager’s just very afraid of any interpersonal conflict. They just decided that that was a bad thing. So they were not willing to do that. So instead they have this villain that’s already been defeated, just randomly turns out she found this holo novel, and she reprogrammed it to be evil. They try to foreshadow it by having her appear in the holo novel as a character. But that’s perfectly realistic because in Voyager this holo novel was apparently written in season one when she was still around. So it’s natural that she would be, even if she’s not on the ship anymore, that she would be a character in the holo novel, because that’s when it was written. \r\n But apparently we were supposed to take the hint that because she was there that something devious was going on. And we had no— I don’t think she’d previously been a programmer. \r\n Oren: No. And like logically speaking, if Seska was going to leave a booby trap with the idea that it would spring after she was dead, why would she put it in this random holo file that as far as she knows, no one might ever open again? Because apparently she has the ability to take over all of the ship’s computers with this booby trap. So why not put that in the main computer and if it goes a certain amount of time without hearing from her it’s just like, well, alright, time to explode or maybe set a timer to explode and taunt all the crew a little bit first because Seska seems into that. \r\n Chris: So first we’re supposed to rely on the meta knowledge that, Oh, they decided to bring in this actress when they would not normally brought in this actress to foreshadow that she’s the villain of the episode. Then we have to believe that she’s this genius programmer when she’s never shown to be a programmer before. And then she has this very elaborate plan where she was going to get revenge specifically with this holo novel that was sitting in an auxiliary database because Tuvok tried to delete it. And just counting on them taking it back out and finishing it. \r\n Oren: Basically what I’m saying is that they need to pay more attention to the Vulcan dictates of poetics, which established that a character’s actions must flow inexorably from their established traits. And they were just being very illogical about it. \r\n And so with that, I think we are going to go ahead and end the episode. Remember to make your stories very logical, everyone at home. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. \r\n Announcer: If you liked this episode, a review on iTunes is a great way to increase our power. \r\n [Outro Music] P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in? \r\n \r\n    Related StoriesHow to Pace Your Story\r\n317 – Plot and Character Are Not Enemies\r\nFive Stories With Unsatisfying Endings\r\n 

Werewolves with smartphones, vampires on motorcycles, mages with school in the morning, and nightclubs. So many nightclubs! We’re discussing urban fantasy today, revisiting a topic we first talked about way back in the olden days. We look at what makes urban fantasy so beloved, what the potential challenges are, and how some of the genre’s well-known entries measure up. Also, is it still urban fantasy if it takes place on a rural farm? Yes, but why? \r\n \r\n Download Episode 322  Subscription Feed  \r\n https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/TMP-322-Urban-Fantasy-Again.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. \r\n Show Notes: Original Urban Fantasy Episode \r\n Masquerade \r\n Crescent City \r\n Mystwick \r\n Understanding Appropriative Worldbuilding \r\n Why You Should Theme Your World \r\n Teen Wolf \r\n Buffy \r\n Supernatural \r\n Dresden Files TV Show \r\n Grimm \r\n Jump down to comments ↓ \r\n Transcript Generously transcribed by Darian. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. \r\n [Intro Music] Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, and before we start today, I want to make sure everybody knows that we are in fact looking for new transcription volunteers, if anyone’s interested. What we do is, we send you a rough copy of the transcript that was made by a piece of software, and you get to both see some hilarious mistakes in what we’re trying to say and also feel a sense of superiority over the machines. And I also want to thank all of the people who have already transcribed for us because that’s how we’re able to get transcripts on these podcasts. We really appreciate it. \r\n Chris: If you want to transcribe for us, just go to: mythcreants.com/transcribe \r\n Oren: That’s good advice! So, it’s just Chris and I again today, and we are going to be talking about urban fantasy settings. Which we talked about, in… episode 12, I think? But in our standard format, I did not listen to that episode, because I don’t care what I said in 2014. I didn’t know what I was talking about in 2014! \r\n Chris: Also, our old podcasts are an hour long and I’m busy. \r\n Oren: Yeah, no one has time for that. \r\n Chris: And we chose this topic about four hours ago. [laughs] So, you know, that’s 25% of our time since choosing the topic. \r\n Oren: You know who had time to listen to an hour-long podcast? Oren. In 2014. That’s not the time it is now. \r\n [laughter] Chris: All right. So maybe we should start with: what is urban fantasy? Because I know this makes some people mad. I know this at least used to make YOU mad. \r\n Oren: Well, I mean, I wanted to call it “modern fantasy,” because a lot of these stories don’t take place in urban areas. And then you have high fantasy stories that take place in a city, that are NOT urban fantasy. And it’s like, NO. I’m grumpy, and I don’t like it. \r\n Chris: We’re stuck with it though. That’s what everybody calls it. It doesn’t mean it’s in a city, it just means it takes place in a contemporary, real-world setting. And it is a fantasy. \r\n Oren: There are some distinctions, but for the most part, it typically refers to a masquerade setting—although not always—and typically you have your standard lineup of urban fantasy creatures, like vampires and werewolves, but again, not always. \r\n Chris: Yeah. I think that those are the things that really define it. Like, they’re very common, but I would still call something an urban fantasy even if it didn’t have a masquerade, or even if it didn’t have… witches, and werewolves, and vampires, which are probably some of the most common fantasy tropes that you see. There are also some interesting cases like Crescent City, which is not in the real world. It is in a different world, but it is an urban setting that FEELS very urban fantasy-ish because it has real-world, modern-day technology, like cell phones. \r\n Oren: It’s got werewolves on motorcycles. \r\n Chris: It’s got werewolves on motorcycles. So is that urban fantasy? Uhh… I would say, sort of. Right? It certainly creates the FEELING of an urban fantasy, but technically it’s not in the real world. \r\n Oren: Yeah. And it gets around a lot of problems that I have because… I love urban fantasy, and I watch lots of urban fantasy TV shows, and I love to read urban fantasy books. I can’t WRITE urban fantasy, because I just can’t get past the logic problems, especially around the masquerade, and around issues of, like, which mythologies should I use? And should I address historical injustice? What did magical people think about that? I don’t know! But you can do the Crescent City thing, and just have a second-world urban fantasy. And that just gets much easier. Very good idea. Very bad book, but very good idea. \r\n Chris: Well, the worldbuilding was not the weak point of the book. But, just to be clear, we’ve talked about the masquerade before, and basically the masquerade addresses a big problem with urban fantasy. Which is: if you have all of these magical elements, or you have werewolves and vampires walking around, how is it that the world is the same as the world we’re all familiar with? Why isn’t it very different, just by the fact that all of these things are there? And so the masquerade in which, “oh, they are all there, and they’ve always been there, but they’re… they’re hidden. So most people don’t know they exist!” is one way to explain that. Besides just also adding a lot of tropes that people really like, where you get to discover something that’s been secret! And then you have to hide your secrets from the people you know! It comes with some tropes that people love, but also solves a big worldbuilding problem that happens with urban fantasy. And so, you CAN have an urban fantasy without the masquerade. If all the magic just, like, shows up tomorrow. Right? It hasn’t always been there. But generally that’s less common, because when people do fantasy, they want something that’s like… super old, ancient, mystical magic! \r\n Oren: I’ve actually seen recently an example of an urban fantasy story that did not have a masquerade, and it kind of showed why a masquerade is useful. And that was the novel Mystwick, which is about a musical magic school. And it’s not a terrible book, but one of the problems that it has is that the magic just feels very mundane. It’s just… kind of everywhere. \r\n And yet, somehow the world is basically the same as it is in real life? And so there are some small things like “oh, well, you know, in World War II, we had musicians playing to, like, stop German bombs.” It mentions that. But, you know, all the countries are the same. The various orchestras are still the same. The musical traditions are the same, which doesn’t make sense considering the rules of how music works, but that’s another problem. And there’s just… people around, doing music magic everywhere, and it just really takes away from the mystique? But at the same time, it’s not, like, a full on fantasy world which does have magic everywhere. And in that case, the novelty can come from just how different everything is. \r\n Chris: So I would say that’s almost like magitech, which is what it’s usually called when we have a setting where the technology is actually based around magic. And in that case, it gets novelty in the same way that a sci-fi story normally would, where now it’s not the fact that magic is mystical and wondrous anymore, but now we have cool tech! That’s based around magic! And so it’s… the world is different because we have this cool tech, and that adds all the novelty. We don’t need the magic to be super mysterious and mystical. But… [laughs] if we don’t have either of those things, if the world looks exactly the same, and magic is everywhere, then we just have mundane magic, and then where does the novelty come from? So, yeah, certainly the masquerade helps with that. \r\n The other thing that it helps with in many stories is explaining why the protagonists need to solve big problems. Because if we don’t have a masquerade, and there’s some big villain threatening the world, then we have some question of why the government is not involved in solving this problem. \r\n Oren: Why haven’t we sent the Navy SEALs to deal with the Dark Lord yet? \r\n Chris: Now, at best, we might have a superhero story, right? And it’s almost like the superhero is the place that this ends up going. [laughs] Where we have these people who openly do magic. We don’t call it magic a lot of the time, but it’s obviously magic. And they’re the only ones qualified to handle these villains. Not really, but we’re going to pretend they are, because they’re the only ones that can do magic. [laughs] Oren:  That’s the premise of the MCU, right? It’s like, “yeah, well, only Iron Man can solve the problem of this bad guy!” And I mean, I’m pretty sure a targeted airstrike could do the job, but whatever. We’ll send Iron Man! That’s the conceit we accept in these superhero stories. Whereas in most urban fantasy stories, the protagonist is not THAT powerful. Like, they’re not supposed to be so strong that it makes sense for the government to send THEM in, instead of, you know, the army. And so at that point, the masquerade helps because then you can be like, \r\n “Yeah, sure. We’re in Boston. But the part of Boston that matters are these two werewolf clans, and we have to make peace between them. And like, it’s the masquerade! So we can’t, like, get the mayor involved. That wouldn’t work out. So our protagonist has to do it!” \r\n Chris: I think if you had an urban fantasy story that basically didn’t have a masquerade, and you were using magic to explain why the protagonists needed to solve problems, it would end up feeling like a superhero story. And superhero stories are strange, because they have the weird superhero identity thing, which is almost like a mini-masquerade. \r\n [laughter] Chris: So they have various levels of their own masquerade because, again, they love the tropes around keeping secrets! But yeah, that’s definitely one thorny problem that happens with urban fantasy. You were just talking about the cultural appropriation element, which can become a big deal. \r\n Oren: Yeah. And it definitely feels… awkward. Because… if I only use the cultural inspiration from stuff that I KNOW isn’t appropriative, then it feels weird. Like, it feels like I’m saying that… other cultures’ mythologies aren’t as real? But that’s better than the alternative, of using sensitive material that hurts people to see it used incorrectly. So there’s clearly a better option between the two, but I don’t LIKE either of them? \r\n Chris: I mean, you might be able to do something where it’s like, “yeah, there are these other groups that exist, but we’re going to mention them very vaguely.” [laughs] And then the story is not ABOUT them. \r\n Oren: That’s generally what I do, is I imply that, yeah, there’s definitely urban fantasy going on in various non-Western cultures, but we’re not gonna go there today. We’re doing THIS thing instead. And like… that’s your best option, but it’s also kind of limiting, right? ‘Cause we live in… you know, part of the advantage of an urban fantasy is that you live in the modern day. With airplanes. And things that let you travel. So it’s not unreasonable that your story would go to a place where it would make logical sense for your characters to go somewhere, that then you’re going to have to make some serious choices about what you want to do, right? \r\n Chris: Certainly a lot of urban fantasies—if they’re not doing something that’s, you know, blatantly appropriative like using skinwalkers or something—there’s always that, like, one Irish person who’s a leprechaun. It’s like, AHHH. Just don’t. Don’t. [laughter] So if you’re, you know, a Western white person, you should probably just stick to the European stuff. It’s okay! \r\n Oren: It’s less of a problem if you’re using specifically pop culture things. Like, werewolves and vampires are so divorced from their mythological origins that… yeah, whatever, it seems fine that there could also be werewolves in Hong Kong. Why not? But a lot of urban fantasy draws on more… direct mythology, and it’s still not precise. Like the Greek gods that you typically see in urban fantasy stories are not actually that much like the Greek gods of traditional myth. But, you know, they’re closer to them than modern werewolves are to original werewolf myths. And so that’s when it starts to feel weird. \r\n Chris: So yeah, you can work around the cultural appropriation problem, but it certainly is an issue that urban fantasy can have if you’re not careful, because usually you’re sampling people and creatures from so many different folktales. So you have to be careful which folktales you use. \r\n Oren: American urban fantasy writers also have a problem, where part of the draw of fantasy is discovering super old ancient stuff. Well, America is very new, in terms of a country populated by a lot of white people. And if you go back any further than that, you’re running into your appropriation problem all over again. So that’s something you need to consider. There are still ways to do old ancient stuff, right? I’ve had setups where there are, like, old ancient ruins, and they got there as part of the explanation for the urban fantasy existing. There’s, like, a merging of realms, where the magic realm is merging with the human one. And so those ruins are from the magic realm. So they’re both ancient and also kind of new. Or, you know, you could go to Scotland. Or go to England. Right? [laughs] If you want your ancient ruins. Those are options. It’s just something, if you’re an American urban fantasy writer, I recommend planning ahead on that one. Because you don’t want to get into the Buffy situation where it’s like, “you know, somehow we’re constantly finding ancient ruins in Sunnydale, California!” [laughter] This town is maybe a century and a half old. There are just not that many ancient ruins that could be there that aren’t going to be Native American. And you just don’t want to do that. You don’t want any part of that. \r\n Chris: Another challenge of urban fantasy is just that it’s difficult to theme. Certainly, storytellers have more problems theming their world when they’re using the real world. And you CAN build a distinct atmosphere for your urban fantasy, but I think people aren’t in that mindset by default. And a lot of times they want to reuse a lot of the same people and creatures that are in other urban fantasies, which is very eclectic. And folklore is very eclectic. So if you’re sampling creatures from all the folk stories, you might end up with a very eclectic collection. You might want to be a little more selective about which folktales you’re using, and try to take ones that have similar themes and elements in them, so that you get something that feels a little bit more cohesive, that makes your urban fantasy feel different from other urban fantasies, because that’s a selling point. \r\n Oren: I was really impressed with Teen Wolf. It’s not as themed as something like Avatar, but it’s better than most urban fantasy. Most of the creatures that you run into are shifters of some kind, and they never meet vampires. I was so happy about that. \r\n Chris: We were continually impressed that there were never vampires in Teen Wolf. \r\n Oren: I just kept expecting vampires to show up. There is a strong temptation, and a lot of urban fantasy stories do this, so I understand why authors want to do it themselves, to just throw in basically any creature that White Wolf has ever made a sourcebook for. So you have vampires and mummies and werewolves and demons and changelings, and they’re all in the same soup pot, as it were. And then that just starts to feel kind of random. \r\n Chris: Again, think ahead about what you want your theme, or feeling, of your urban fantasy to be. And if you want it to be very folktale-based, you can do that too. A lot of urban fantasy, it doesn’t necessarily actually seem that… folktale-ish. So you can definitely emphasize those elements more. But, giving it SOMETHING, I think, is helpful for making your urban fantasy stand out and making it feel like a cohesive world. \r\n Another thing we’ve talked about before: we had a whole episode talking about teen—you know, high school—supernatural stories. So one of the big reasons that people like urban fantasy is because it’s in a familiar real-world setting, which means that they can have all of those fantastical elements alongside very relatable problems, like trying to ask that cutie out. [laughs] Or arriving late to work, or struggling with your homework, or what have you. But those two things can be really hard to have alongside each other. \r\n Oren: Yeah. And it’s really easy to feel like the more mundane problems don’t matter, and that you should just ignore them. And I’m not only talking about Buffy, but I am talking about Buffy. [laughter] Where it’s just… the idea that the Slayer needs to get a job is just… ugh. It’s very frustrating. Like, come on guys! Just take up a collection to pay her mortgage. You all need her out there slaying 24/7. She doesn’t have time to work a night shift at the local fast food joint! \r\n Chris: This is why Supernatural is really refreshing. ‘Cause all of the practical things that we need to explain how they get along? It’s like, “oh, they just commit fraud.” \r\n [laughter] Oren: Yeah. I loved that. \r\n Chris: They pay their way by committing fraud, they get people to answer their questions when they’re investigating a crime by committing fraud… [laughs] It’s just… any practical limitations, fraud! But like, at the same time, Sam and Dean also don’t have a lot of those really relatable storylines, right? They have, you know, family drama, but we don’t see them struggle with their homework. \r\n Oren: I think that the best balance there is to—not to continually toot Teen Wolf’s horn here—but it’s to basically do what Teen Wolf does, in which you can play up the relatable problems of, like, needing to study for a test that you couldn’t study for because you were out slaying or whatever, but only for a little while. Right? Eventually that stuff IS going to stop feeling important, and you have to be willing to transition into full-time fantasy-book mode. \r\n Chris: Just to clarify: Teen Wolf, as it goes on—it’s six seasons, or six and a half seasons—in the first season, there are a lot of high school-related problems. This one episode, that I think was especially memorable, there was this conflict where he’s on the lacrosse team—the main character—and on one hand, his coach is insisting he absolutely HAS to make that game, especially if he wants to keep his position. And then his werewolf sort of… mentor… is like, “you had better not go to that game, because you’re going to lose control and basically become a wolf in front of everybody or possibly hurt somebody.” And so he’s facing dual pressure on either side, and trying to decide whether or not he should play in this game. And so that’s part of his personal… transformation, of like, in the beginning he has to get used to being a werewolf, and make that adjustment. And so that personal conflict plays really well into that. And it has some… they are really good at setting up the stakes about how he’ll disappoint his coach, and he’ll disappoint his mother, [laughs] if he doesn’t go to this game. And so they do a great job. \r\n But as it goes on, especially as he’s adjusted to being a werewolf, the plot gets higher stakes. By season three or so, the high school problems are basically just not in the show anymore. And we just have less… but slowly. So it’s not a huge shocker, but we just feature less and less of them in each episode until… he’s still going to high school, and sometimes he has to do some difficult balancing between doing schoolwork and dealing with his werewolf stuff, but we see that he’s kind of managed to balance. He’s handling those things. So we don’t need to focus on them anymore. \r\n Oren: Yeah. And you can also make that work better with a premise where the characters are being introduced to the supernatural in isolation. ‘Cause if there’s a whole supernatural society that they can just go and, like, talk to people, then there’ll be expectations. Surely there are protocols for handling this sort of thing, right? So it’s harder to have drama based around needing to go do werewolf stuff and then study for a test, if you’re part of an established werewolf community. Because that community would definitely have procedures for doing that. So if your characters are introduced to the supernatural in a place that doesn’t otherwise HAVE a lot of supernatural, then you can spend a while with them just trying to balance, you know, magic, school—magic AND school, not magic school, that’s different—but, like, a magic life and a school life. And then you will sort of naturally, as you explore the supernatural world more and add more elements to it—either more creatures show up, or they discover more who are already there, or what have you—at that point, it’s going to feel less important to have the school stuff. Just go with it. That’s the natural flow, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to fight it. \r\n Chris: And when you have a high-stakes storyline in a personal story, you just have to make sure that you’re not creating a situation where there’s a high-stakes problem—that is, DOOM is looming on the horizon—and the protagonist could be working on averting doom, but is instead choosing to deal with their personal problems. ‘Cause that really ruins the fun of dealing with their personal problems, if it feels like that comes at the cost of, you know, letting some people die because you didn’t work hard enough to prevent the villain from killing them. [laughs] Right? Sometimes this means building up that high-stakes plot slowly, so it doesn’t actually seem like an urgent plot in the beginning, or doing other things so it doesn’t feel like the protagonist should be working on that when they are instead, you know, taking that cutie out on a date. \r\n Oren: Oh, one other tip that I found very helpful is: one of the things that you’ll run into as a problem is that if you go with this natural idea—that the further you go into the story, the less time you’re going to spend on the mundane, relatable problems—you may realize that certain NPCs that you liked from those conflicts are no longer really relevant in the story. So, for example, if the main character had a teacher who helped them through their school problems, and that teacher was a really popular character, and maybe you really liked that teacher, but now you’re sort of shifting away from the school problems… that teacher is going to lose some of their relevance. So this can be a good time to introduce THOSE characters to the supernatural. Or reveal that they were supernatural the whole time, or what have you. And so you can keep that character as you make the transition into a more supernaturally-focused story. \r\n Chris: Little did you know that that teacher was actually sent to keep an eye on your protagonist because they secretly knew your protagonist had magic powers! [laughs] Something like that. \r\n Oren: And you need to be careful with it, because you don’t want to end up in a situation where it’s like, “well, why didn’t you use your magic powers two seasons ago, coach!” \r\n [laughter] Chris: But yeah, urban fantasies. Those are all the challenges. Do you have any other challenges before we move on to some of the advantages? \r\n Oren: I think that’s basically covered it. \r\n Chris: Obviously we talked about how [urban fantasies] are very relatable, and that’s a lot of the fun. There’s a lot of fun in the contrast between the real world and things that are from a fantasy world. And because of that, they also have really good wish-fulfillment, right? Where anybody can imagine that the next day they’ll run into that fantasy world, and very much… place themselves in it. And so that’s tons of fun. They also make the world easier to explain. Especially if you have a masquerade, and your character starts out not knowing about the magical and then discovers it—which is true in many urban fantasies, not all of them, but many—it’s like you automatically have the advantages of a portal fantasy built in. ‘Cause your protagonist needs everything explained to them, so it’s easy to explain to the audience. And you don’t have as much to explain, because the world is mostly familiar. You only have to explain the ways in which it’s different. And that also often means you don’t have to do as much worldbuilding. You only have to focus on the super-fantastical parts. You’re not just making nations and deciding what their governments are, for instance. \r\n Oren: And the contrast is just very cool. Just the built-in contrast of like, “this is an ancient fairy from the old country, and they work at a cell-phone shop.” Or they run a coffee shop—as every fanfiction likes to do—you can actually just have them run a coffee shop, right? You don’t even have to wait for the fanfic authors to do that. \r\n [laughter] Chris: Yeah. You can have a bunch of… fantasy people, running a coffee shop together, if you want. \r\n Oren: Yeah. And that’s just very valid. I think that’s the part I like the most. Like, that’s the reason why I decided to run my latest roleplaying game as an urban fantasy instead of high fantasy, is like… I wanted those backdrops. I wanted you guys to go to a nightclub and go to a library and take out a fishing boat and stuff like that. \r\n Chris: Wait, there’s a library? \r\n Oren: Uhh, well. Hang on… \r\n Chris: [laughs] So, should we talk about some urban fantasy stories? We talked about Teen Wolf, we talked a bit about Buffy… \r\n Oren: Unfortunately, there still aren’t… the TV show landscape of urban fantasy is not fantastic. \r\n Chris: I think the problem is just with budget. I mean, definitely there’s more urban fantasy TV shows than medieval fantasy TV shows, because, I think, of budget reasons. But even so, a lot of shows, I think, struggle with the special effects that are required. \r\n Oren: Yeah. Or they just end up feeling kind of campy, and like… some camp is fun, is fine, maybe, but I’ve struggled to find high fantasy shows that I’ve enjoyed. And I really like Teen Wolf, and it’s a little disappointing that Buffy is still so high on my list after this long. But, you know, it still is. I liked the Dresden Files TV show. It was very short. \r\n Chris: I agree. Despite the fact that it was clearly low budget and is pretty campy, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit and I really wish it had gone for longer. \r\n Oren: It had almost no budget. It was amazing how in the first episode, when, like, Dresden needed to use magic, they would cut the camera away and show some flashing lights from off camera. [laughter] And it was like, “wow, this is low budget.” And by the end they had enough budget for him to throw a CGI lightning bolt. But I still liked it. I thought it was a good show. I was disappointed that it was canceled. I guess just… don’t be like Grimm. I guess that’s probably less of an issue for written stories, because Grimm’s problem is clearly budget-related. \r\n Chris: Grimm… It starts off with a specific aesthetic, and it doesn’t manage to actually carry it out. One of the interesting things about Grimm, and I think this is a budget reason—this one wasn’t a bad thing—where almost all of the fantasy peoples in Grimm—and they all have, like, German names, because they’re trying to go with a Germanic theme, although they don’t feel fully committed to it, unfortunately—but most of the time they just look like normal people. And then we only see flashes of their disguise fading sometimes. So that means that they don’t have to continually have everybody dressed up in makeup and costumes, or using special effects all the time. They would just do it a little bit. And I think it works pretty well. The show has some other problems that make the fantasy elements just feel very superfluous, but it’s not that. \r\n Oren: Yeah. I guess I misspoke. It’s really not the budget. It’s the… really, the issue with Grimm, especially in its early episodes, is just that it’s, like, a police procedural that… occasionally they remind us there’s magic stuff happening? And I just want to know about the magic. I’m not really that interested in your police procedural. Just tell me about the magic stuff. \r\n Chris: Have you considered—because the main character is a cop, which is not great—it’s like, have you considered quitting your job and instead just committing fraud? Like Sam and Dean do? \r\n Oren: [laughs] Yeah, just take a page out of the Winchester boys’ book, okay? \r\n Chris: So that way we don’t have to make every plot fit… something that you could put in your report to your boss. [laughs] Oren: Right. We just… what we have is bad guys committing MUNDANE crimes with MUNDANE means, but they also happen to be supernatural creatures. And so then he catches them ALSO using mundane means, and then they go to mundane jail. For the mundane crimes they did. And it’s like… ugh, okay, I guess. \r\n Chris: The issue here is that he’s a cop, and it’s like… why didn’t we just… we needed to NOT have him be a cop, so that we didn’t have to shoehorn all the fantasy things into something that could… allow him to justify why he needs to arrest these people. \r\n Oren: Yeah, I would agree. And supposedly they do eventually stop that later, but we’re a ways into the first season and it’s still going strong. \r\n But I do think we’re about out of time. So if people have more urban fantasy shows that they want to recommend to us, I think I’ve tried basically all of them, but there might be some I haven’t heard of. So please recommend them in the comments. Otherwise, I’ll just say thank you for listening! \r\n And I want to thank a few of our patrons before we go. First, we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber; he is an urban fantasy writer—speaking of which, very appropriate—and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week! \r\n [Advertisement]: As your eyes open, a haunting melody fades to silence. Strange symbols circle the floor, and someone lying next to you… is dead. Can you put the pieces together before you meet YOUR doom? Find out by playing our stand-alone RPG, The Voyage. For sale on mythcreants.com. \r\n [Outro Music] P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in? \r\n \r\n    Related Stories321 – Why You Shouldn’t Include Prejudice\r\n320 – Exploitation and Appropriation\r\n319 – Monsters of Fire and Flame\r\n 

Prejudice and bigotry are inescapable aspects of real life, but they don’t have to be in stories. While it’s tempting to believe that by including prejudice, we’re making some kind of bold and progressive statement, more often than not, we’re simply reinforcing harmful norms. This week, we talk about why, in most cases, it’s better to leave real-life bigotry out of your settings. We discuss exploitation, normalization, and also more retcons than you might expect. \r\n \r\n Download Episode 321  Subscription Feed  \r\n https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/TMP-321-Why-You-Shouldnt-Include-Prejudice.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. \r\n Show Notes: Wheel of Time’s Sexism \r\n Daenerys and Exploitation \r\n Avatar: The Last Airbender \r\n The Bigot Who Learns Better \r\n Avatar Kyoshi \r\n Uhura \r\n Sulu \r\n Insufficient Reasons for Including Bigotry \r\n City of Brass \r\n Eleven \r\n Max \r\n Stranger Things Won’t Stop Besmirching Its Male Characters \r\n Jump down to comments ↓ \r\n Transcript Generously transcribed by Anonymous. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. \r\n Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren but before I introduce my co-hosts, I do want to ask for volunteers, if anyone is available and likes to look at weird software transcripts, because we’re looking for more people to help us transcribe our episodes, since that’s just great for everyone all around, it seems like. And what we do is we send you a rough transcript, which is made by a piece of software, and you get to see its hilarious attempts to figure out what we’re saying. \r\n I think my favorite one was when it translated Mythcreants as East Korean, which I don’t know what that is, but it sounds interesting. So if anyone is interested in doing that, there’s a contact form on the podcast and you’re welcome to just send us a message and let us know, and a big thank you to everyone who has already done that because that’s the only way we could bring transcripts to our podcasts and they have been just really great to have. So with that out of the way, my co-host today is Chris. \r\n Chris: Hi, I’m sure you’ve never heard me before. \r\n Oren: Yeah, very strange. \r\n Chris: Brand new. Who’s this new person? \r\n Oren: It’s just going to be the two of us for the next couple of weeks. Wes is taking some well-deserved time off, but never fear, he shall return. So for today, our topic is prejudice settings. This is settings in which there is prejudice, and we’re assuming it’s social prejudice. I’m not even going to bother talking about Wheel of Time where man magic is weaker than woman magic, because that’s a whole other thing. \r\n Chris: The assumption here is that it’s supposed to be prejudiced in this setting. Whereas, when you have something like Wheel of Time, it’s not just prejudice. Women and men are just inherently different. Didn’t you know? \r\n Oren: Or like the Belgrade where you have some humans that the gods created to be less intelligent. Yeah. No, thanks. That’s just bad. Just, just don’t do that. We’re talking about settings that have prejudices in them, and we’re also telling you not to do that, but with some caveats. \r\n Chris: Yeah. Not to do that most of the time, but at least we’re assuming that you know that prejudice is bad. \r\n Oren: Yeah, this is the general assumption. \r\n Chris: Low bar, but some people do not pass that. \r\n Oren: You know, also assuming this is an intentional choice, I don’t think that the Supernatural writers intended to send the message that all angels are dudes, but they kind of did, except for one. We meet like one angel lady in the first however many seasons, but I think that was just some unconscious sexism in the casting. I don’t think they meant to send that message. \r\n Chris: Yeah. So going back to this, this is something that we have discussed in the blog a little bit, but not quite as directly on the podcast, is you probably shouldn’t have a prejudice setting. Again, there’s definitely a place for them, but maybe we should start by going over the reasons why this becomes such a big problem. \r\n Oren: Yeah. It costs things. It’s not actually free to include prejudice in your setting because once you do that, you are making it harder for certain people in the audience to experience the fantasy of whatever this setting is. Because there are things there that they are not allowed to do or that they will have a harder time doing because of who they are. And this is most common in things like, sexism or racism, but you could also do it with any kind of ism. \r\n Chris: Yeah. So what often happens in these settings that is really what makes them bad is it’s very commonly exploitative. Specifically, that means that a privileged person is writing about the oppression of other people and often having privileged characters that are there saving other people. So if you’re marginalized and you want to discuss the oppression, you personally face go ahead. I don’t see anything wrong with that. But almost always, that’s not what people are doing. \r\n They’re not there because they want to talk about their personal experiences of oppression, they’re usually want to throw it into their setting for other reasons and then they’ll do things like exaggerate their oppression to try to show why it’s bad. And that really shows a lot of privilege, if you feel you need to make that oppression super extreme, just to show that oppression is bad, and it makes it just really unpleasant for people who are actually part of that marginalized group or are facing oppression in general. And so basically privileged people get the wish fulfillment, especially the wish fulfillment of being saviors and stopping oppression and the marginalized people have to be reminded of bad things that they deal with in their life. \r\n Oren: Yeah. We can just say Daenerys, right. Like we don’t have to pretend we don’t know who we’re talking about. \r\n Chris: Well, this happens in many different places, but definitely Daenerys is a huge one here. I had an entire post about how exploitative the Game of Thrones plotting is. \r\n Oren: And even when you write the character to liberate themselves, however that manifests, there is still just a very good chance that things are not going to work out well. And when you’re dealing with marginalization and hate that people face in real life for being who they are, this can cause a serious problem, not to upset the sacred Avatar: The Last Airbender, but we just watched the episode where Katara goes to the North Pole. And the sexist water bending teacher is like, “no, I won’t teach you” until basically he finds out that Katara’s grandmother was this lady he used to have a huge crush on, and then he changes his mind. \r\n And Katara also fights him, but it looks like that was actually the less important aspect of making him change his mind. And first of all, this is kind of hard to believe, he was so set in his ways because not only did he not want to teach Katara, he enjoyed making her upset over it. Right. So it’s hard enough to believe that he would actually change his mind based on the fact that he was in love with Katara’s grandmother. But even if you accept that, we’re still supposed to have fun with this guy’s lesson. Now he’s a fun, cantankerous old man. What about all the other girls whose grandmothers he wasn’t hot for? \r\n Chris: Yeah. That’s not really solving the problem. I don’t believe that he’s any less sexist, or he never even apologized. Right. We didn’t even get to see him do that. We don’t have any sign that the situation in the Northern Water Tribe has changed, which is another big reason why it’s often a really huge problem with the plot, it basically opens up all of these plot hooks, right? It creates these problems, and so often the storytellers aren’t actually interested in addressing them. \r\n They’re not interested in making their plot about solving these problems of oppression and so what we just have are these unaddressed problems that feel like pot hooks that are never closed. So that’s definitely true. The other thing is in the world building sense, this didn’t even make sense, because the Northern Water Tribe has been fighting the Fire Nation for a hundred years. They need all of the benders they can get. So the idea that they would have just not taught women bending when they needed more benders to fight off the Fire Nation. Yeah. I don’t believe that. \r\n Oren: Yeah. And it’s easy to imagine that “bigotry doesn’t make sense” in that, you could just talk people out of being bigots by being like, “Oh, but if you oppress women, then we’re missing out on all the women’s scientists and what have you”. And that’s true, but there are more complicated reasons for why structural oppression happens in real life. But once you introduce something as game-changing, as bending to the equation, sorry, I don’t believe that they’re going to ignore 50% of their benders when they’re in a war with the fire nation. \r\n Chris: I can believe that they wouldn’t treat women benders as well, or when benders would be given the bending work that was less desirable or what have you, but when it comes down to societal survival, usually that becomes compelling enough that some of those traditions are gonna be left behind. \r\n Oren: I wanted to bring up something that a commenter mentioned on this topic, when I like made a tongue and cheek blurb about it on social media, where they pointed out that it’s kind of upsetting to see a character who is able to like dispel sexism just by being good at the thing they do. It’s like, hey, women aren’t allowed to play chess, but hey, I’m good at chess so people all stopped being sexist at me because I was good at chess. \r\n Right. And I’m not actually calling out that one Netflix show about a lady who plays chess. I haven’t seen it. Chess was just the first example that popped into my mind. But you see this trope a lot, right? It’s like people are sexist towards this lady. And then she’s like, “I’m real good at this thing that I do”. And they’re like, “Oh, well, our mistake, we will stop being sexist at you”. And that’s just not how it works. It’s both wrong and it’s kind of insulting to people in real life who continue to suffer from marginalization from their coworkers, despite being very good at whatever it is they do. \r\n Chris: And in real life, what we’d have is the dude who’s good at chess, but it’s actually not as good as her, but is considered to be better. It was always like, “Oh, you know that one time he lost those games. Those were just like a one-off thing. He’s really brilliant”. Right? Whereas, we look for every excuse to discredit the woman. \r\n Oren: Right. We would make excuses or  we would point to the fact that well “she’s pretty good, but she’s not the best”. The best chess player is still a guy ignoring the fact that the vast majority of people trained to play chess are men. And so therefore just by statistics, the best player is probably going to be a guy. \r\n Chris: Yeah. We also have an issue with Avatar: The Last Airbender in how Sokka is introduced. And this is another thing that really feels like the writers were men and not thinking too hard about this. We’ve talked on the blog before about how you should not have a story about a privileged character that has some level of bigotry that learns better, and why that’s a really bad idea. And one of the biggest reasons is the only other privilege people are gonna like that character and think that character is worth redeeming. And introducing Sokka by just making him super sexist was not a good way to introduce somebody who’s on Team Good and is a protagonist we’re supposed to root for later. Even if you know, four episodes later, they teach him a lesson. “Look, women can be warriors too”. \r\n Oren: Maybe I missed some things, but it looked to me like what happened was they introduced him as a sexist dude, and then it kind of disappeared. And then in episode four, he was suddenly really sexist to do it again and then the sexism got punched out of him. Is that like what it looked like to you? And are there instances that I missed? \r\n Chris: I can’t remember if they demonstrate it, but it’s so close together that I certainly didn’t feel like it went away because we have the first two episodes, which is the intro where he’s sexist. Then there’s one episode and then the fourth episode in which they teach him a lesson. So there’s certainly not a long enough period in there of him not acting sexist, that we can assume that he’s just not sexist in, even if he didn’t happen to say a sexist thing in episode three. \r\n Oren: So this was interesting because a lot of people really liked Sokka. I really liked Sokka, but it’s worth noting that when I introduce new people to Avatar, I have to assure them that Sokka gets better because he’s just kind of obnoxious when he’s first introduced. And we all know that Avatar is great by the end, but there are definitely people who have bounced off of it because they didn’t like the way Sokka was introduced and I wouldn’t even really say there’s growth for him. He just kind of stops being sexist in episode four because they realized that was a bad character trait. And there’s no reason they couldn’t have just done that four episodes earlier and had it not be on screen. \r\n Chris: Right. Well, four is basically the plot constructed to teach Sokka not to be sexist. He has a specific plot about underestimating women warriors, right. And then they kick his ass and humiliate him. Right? Now, it’s of course, then his mind has completely changed about every aspect of sexism. He no longer thinks that women should be doing the sewing and it’s a very unrealistic term around, but it almost does feel like, “Okay, maybe we shouldn’t have done that. Let’s fix this.” This is the same episode where they introduce Kyoshi and in the beginning, and in fact, I think it’s even episode three, the previous episode, they show all of the previous avatars as statues. They’re all dudes and then immediately, oh, wait, one of them was a woman actually. \r\n Oren: Yeah. But I mean, to be fair, she is the best one. So really, I think it’s even. \r\n Chris: But what it speaks to is that it felt like the writers were realizing their mistakes very early on and correcting themselves. I can’t know exactly why that’s happening. I still appreciate that they decided to retcon that all the avatars are men, right. That was a good move on their part, but you can kind of see there’s some corrections being made there. \r\n Oren: Right. And it’s also a thing where once you start introducing bigotry that people experience in real life, they’re going to look harder at what you’re doing, and there are chances that you’re still making mistakes. In that episode, we still laugh at Sokka for wearing makeup and a dress. I guess we’re supposed to think that the Kyoshi armor is a dress and that’s both transphobic, but it’s also rooted in sexism. It’s also weird because Sokka put on face paint to go to battle like three episodes ago, so I don’t know what his problem is here. And then they have Kyoshi be like, “I am a warrior, but I’m also a girl”. And you would never say “I am a warrior, but I’m also a boy”. This is not a thing you would say. Right? It’s just very silly. \r\n Chris: Right. Well, it was in response to Sokka not quite learning his lesson because he’s like, “I treated you like a girl when I should have treated you like a warrior”. So he was implying that those two things were mutually exclusive and she was correcting him. But again, these are very complicated topics and the idea that we can, in a half an hour episode, explain all the things that we need to explain, again, it would have been better if they had just not gone there. The other reason why oppression is often a big problem in a setting is it tends to sideline the marginalized characters. \r\n Right? If we have a setting that’s a patriarchy, then suddenly all of the really powerful leaders can’t be women. Or not many of them can be, right. They’re always the marginalized people throughout history that have managed to be very successful despite the obstacles they faced. But again, if you’re making that setting, that means that privileged people are going to be in positions of power. And then it’s a lot easier to make them characters that can actually solve problems in the plot and have wish fulfillment and it’s much harder to then take, “okay, well, the women are all cooking and cleaning, but they are important too”. It’s like, yes, those were very important roles, but it’s a lot harder to plot around that and then justify how the people who are cooking and cleaning can then defeat the Dark Lord or what have you. \r\n Oren: Well, your story probably has a Dark Lord in it if you’re listening to Mythcreants let’s be honest. We’re more likely to write stories with dark Lords than not. And that’s a problem with Avatar to be perfectly honest, in the Last Airbender, we punch Pakku until he decides to be less sexist, I guess. But what that means is that now, if I want to set a story before the events of Last Airbender, which with the setting, with the kind of deep history that Avatar has, of course you’re going to want to do that at some point. That means that I can’t have female water benders from the Northern Water Tribe, unless I’d make up an extreme excuse in their backstory. \r\n Chris:  And if we wanted to do a story about a group of Northern Water Tribe warriors, right, unless we want to retcon what we already established, now there’s an automatic limit on how many women can be there. \r\n Oren: Right. Which to be clear, I always do. I think I’ve run four campaigns in Avatar land and I always retcon that. I say “whatever, I don’t care” because it’s better to retcon bad decisions than be forced to live with them, but it would be even better if I didn’t have to. \r\n Chris: And then the last big reason why you should just usually not have, especially real-world oppression in your setting, is because it just normalizes oppression. It just makes it feel normal to, for instance, have a patriarchy and makes that feel like the default and makes anything different, makes equality feel weird. There’s a consistent phenomenon where people always overestimate the number of women that are in any situation, any group, any party, whatever have you and that’s because men feel like the default. And if we have tons of stories where we have majority male characters, then when there’s a story where there’s 50% women, a lot of readers are gonna be like, “Wow, this story is like all women”. And again, the normalization perpetuates oppression. Right? So unless you’re willing to actually have the plot be about that and to really fully tackle it, then it’s only just continuing that cycle of oppression. \r\n Oren: Yeah and I get clients all the time who are like “I want to make a story that inspires people to be more progressive”. And I’m like, great. I’m glad you want to do that since you are creating your own world. And this isn’t like the real world where you would have to grapple with the realities of how things work, you can do that much more easily by simply portraying a more egalitarian setting, just actually have your marginalized characters of various marked states out there doing stuff without people acting like it’s weird. And that is probably going to be more effective, honestly, because especially if you are a privileged person yourself, it’s unlikely you have anything to add to this conversation that marginalized people have not already heard many, many times. So just do the Star Trek thing. \r\n Okay. Just do what Star Trek did. And now Star Trek of course, did it in a fairly subdued manner. Because there was so much that they were willing to, or could get away with, but at the time Uhura and Sulu being officers on the ship and no one thinking that their race or gender was a big deal was important and that was hugely inspirational. And we still have a ways to go. I know it’s tempting to think that that well is played out because Star Trek was in the sixties, but we still have so much work to do guys. \r\n Chris: Yeah. And again, Uhura inspired Whoppi Goldberg. So we can trace a lot of people back to their inspiration and positive examples are super powerful even if it doesn’t feel like you’re kicking oppression in its ass, you are just by showing a world without it. \r\n Oren: You’re just locking it up in a cage and telling it it can’t be in your story. Okay. That makes me feel strong. Imagining it in that way. \r\n Chris: Do you want to talk about some other reasons why people will include bigotry in their setting that probably is not a strong enough reason to do that? \r\n Oren: Well, I mean, I do have a blog post about that. \r\n Chris: One thing that I see a lot is you making your protagonist and underdog, right. People are looking for ways to give the protagonists problems and make their protagonist sympathetic, and they’ll use oppression to do that. But sometimes, they want their oppression to make their character an underdog, but they don’t actually want to address that oppression in any way. City of Brass is the big one I think of with this, where we have like a main character, who’s part human, and there’s like tons of oppression in this setting of part humans. It was really extreme to the point where more privileged people are not even allowed to give them medical treatment. \r\n Oren: Yeah. It’s out there. \r\n Chris: It’s out there. I’ve never heard of that. So again, we’re going back to sort of the exploitative exaggerated depictions of oppression, but the main character, she’s just remarkably uninterested in addressing the plight of her own people. And it’s just exaggerated in the background everywhere and again, like an open plot hook, it’s not addressed. It’s hard to take the problems of the story seriously, because there’s just brutal oppression happening in the background that just seems like a way bigger deal. \r\n Oren: Well, City of Brass is bad in a lot of ways. It tries to both sides oppression, where the part human spirits get their children are constantly kidnapped, they have no rights, it’s illegal to give them medical treatment, they have no jobs and no money. But the full spirits who do that to them and who are super powerful and have their fancy quarter of the city and all go around heavily armed. They’re also oppressed because people make fun of their religion sometimes. \r\n Even at the end, the King “withdraws his protection”, from the really oppressive group. And we’re treated to scenes of the marginalized path of half humans like running rampant and rioting and doing all kinds of bad stuff. And what would actually happen is that they would all be slaughtered by the heavily armed, magical spirits who hate them. They’re not even allowed to have weapons. Where did they get the weapons? \r\n Chris: At best, what we’re doing is creating a world where a group of marginalized people is responsible for the oppression against other marginalized people. And the people who are super privileged are just given a free pass right, at best. And that’s just, again, looking at your setting, looking at which groups have power, try not to like blame everything on the group that has the least power and is the most vulnerable, I know storytellers like to do this because they’re like, “Oh, but here makes an interesting gray conflict with moral dilemmas”, but it has a very troubling implications. And that’s just not how it works in the real world. \r\n Oren: Look, Chris, what matters is that I subverted their expectations. I mean, I haven’t seen people do that. That’s like where they’re like, well, they didn’t expect the poor marginalized people to be the villains. And it’s like, well, yeah, I didn’t cause they’re poor. Hard to be a villain when you’re poor. I’ve also seen another one and I guess this one is a little bit more along the lines of like, why are you even doing this, is when people like, make their character like marginalized or oppressed in some way so that they can do the, I’m not like other X and I’m not like other girls is the most common. \r\n I did recently read a book where the protagonist was not like other girls and did not like other poor people, which was just like, wow. Okay. And just really, really double-dipping it right here. This is the thing, I know it’s easy, especially when you live in patriarchy and whatever, and it’s like, “Oh, well my character, she doesn’t do dolls or makeup or whatever. She has cool things that are swords.” And I’m just asking you, please, please don’t. Believe it or not, a character’s aesthetic choices and the things that they do for fun are not an indicator of their value. And if you do that, it’s just going to look like you’re trying to make your character cool without doing any actual work to make them cool. \r\n Chris: At some point we could probably do a whole episode on I’m not like other girls because we see it so often. It’s very sad. \r\n Oren: Yeah. It just comes up a lot. \r\n Chris: Another reason why people, of course, put oppression in their settings, especially with any setting that has some kind of historical flavor to it, is the assumption that that’s the only thing that’s realistic. Usually they’re trying to create like a super gritty historical atmosphere and I’m not necessarily going to get too much into real-world history if you’re actually setting your story someplace on earth, that gets very complicated, but suffice to say, there are still successful marginalized people, even in historical settings when there is less of oppression and that too often used as an excuse to just exclude a diverse range of people and only have privileged characters. But in any case, there are lots of settings that are fantasy settings. \r\n They’re not on earth, they’re on a completely different world, right, where people will insist that well, if we make it a patriarchy, that’s what’s realistic and will make it feel historical. What I would say about that is there are so many ways to make your setting feel gritty and realistic that doesn’t rely on tons of oppression, right? There’s tons of historical real-world problems that we can deal with and if you’re not willing to show people throw their chamber pots in the street and be like walking around in sewage, then you’re not really dedicated to historical accuracy anyway. So if you really want something gritty, you can deal with things like disease and lots of other historical problems. \r\n Oren: Yeah. I mean, just get stabbed and then try to deal with that in a setting that has 1100s Western European medicine. Yeah, that’s going to be plenty gritty for you. \r\n Chris: Your character is really sick and then goes to the doctor and the doctor just gives them a laxative that doesn’t do anything. \r\n Oren: Yeah, extremely realistic. \r\n Chris: Extremely realistic. Nobody wants that part of historical accuracy. \r\n Oren: Yeah weird, I wonder why that is. One last thing before we go is, you often have TV shows, or movies, or what have you, that are trying to do a send-up or nostalgia or a callback to other stories, right. And this is often an excuse given for why we have to have prejudice. And I’m not just talking about Stranger Things, but I am talking about Stranger Things because Stranger Things has that really weird sequence in season two where Eleven decides that she hates Max because she saw Max and Mike in the same room together, and the justification that people keep giving is “Oh, well this is the there can only be one girl trope from the eighties”. And that’s a bad trope. Don’t include that trope. \r\n Chris: And just almost all the male characters in that show are sexist at one point or other. And I would like to have some male characters to just like and not to hate at some point when they decide to be sexist for no reason. Sometimes it’s not even in character. It’s like they somehow did a 180. They were fine before and now they’re suddenly sexist. And what happened? What happened to these dudes? I liked them both. \r\n Oren: Yeah, and that brings up just the whole thing of when you have a character who is participating in bigotry that just tanks their likeability, except with other people who maybe share some of that bigotry or at least part of the same privileged demographic. Right? Because bigotry is bad, it causes so many problems. It’s not a personality clash, it’s not like who had a bad experience and don’t like each other, or like a character who is just trying to earn a fortune for themselves and it’s kind of selfish. If your character decides to participate in the structural oppression of people with darker skin than them then that’s just going to make them like ugh, I don’t know. I just want the character to die now. Go away. \r\n Chris: Yeah. I mean, I would definitely think about tributes. The analogy I use is you should make your tribute, like you’re writing a eulogy for somebody who died. You’re going to talk about all the good things about that person. You’re not going to bring up the bad things. You’re going to let that rest and just talk about the good spots. And so if you’re doing a tribute to a story, replicating its problems, it’s not a tribute. You’re not doing that story justice. Do you want to remember the good things about it? So if you, for instance, have a TV show that is based on lots of eighties movies, you don’t want to then repeat the bad things that those 80s movies did. \r\n Oren: Just do the good things, please, unless, again, there are some situations where maybe you would really want to dig into that, especially if you are, for example, a girl who watched those movies and saw the “there can be only one girl”. I’m sure that there is cool stuff to be said there, but if you’re a couple of dudes, no. \r\n Chris: Yeah. \r\n Oren: Just don’t man. \r\n Chris: Again, if you were writing about the oppression that you personally face, that’s oftentimes a different story because you’re writing for yourself and for people like you, and you’re not going to be writing exploitative things that exaggerate, there’s lots of reasons that that’s a different case, but almost all the time that’s not what we see because generally people who are facing a oppression, they want to write wish fulfillment stories that don’t remind them of the uncomfortable things that they face in real life. Not always, but so usually privileged people are much more tempted to do this, than the people who are actually facing these problems. \r\n Oren: All right. Well, I think that was a good note to end this here podcast on. Thank you everyone for listening. Those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at Mythcreants.com. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He is a fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. \r\n Chris: If you like what we do, send a few dollars our way through our Patreon. Every cent goes into the hoard of gold we lounge on like dragons, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. \r\n [closing theme] P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in? \r\n \r\n    Related Stories320 – Exploitation and Appropriation\r\n319 – Monsters of Fire and Flame\r\n318 – Lost Knowledge\r\n 

It’s increasingly understood that some stories are not everyone’s to tell, but how can you know which ones? When is a story just a story, and when is it someone’s heritage? Why is this such a big deal? This week, we try to shed light on what it is that makes certain stories so sensitive, why it can cause harm, and why there are some topics that most writers should just stay away from. Also, an unexpected King of the Hill reference. \r\n \r\n Download Episode 320  Subscription Feed  \r\n https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/TMP-320-Exploitation-and-Appropriation.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. \r\n Show Notes: Appropriative Worldbuilding \r\n Six Rape Tropes and How to Replace Them \r\n Sexploitation \r\n Blaxploitation \r\n Japanese Game With American Names \r\n The Day of the Dead Is not Halloween \r\n Supernatural Angels \r\n Moana Appropriation \r\n King of the Hill: Are You Chinese or Japanese? \r\n Coco’s Success  \r\n \r\n Jump down to comments ↓ \r\n Transcript Generously transcribed by Kayleigh. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. \r\n Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] Chris: This is the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris and with me is… \r\n Wes: Wes \r\n Chris: And? \r\n Oren: Oren. \r\n Chris: And previously on this podcast, we have occasionally said that something is not our story to tell, would be one way we would put it, or said that we don’t want to use certain creatures from mythology in our stories because they are not ours. \r\n So, I just wanted to open by asking both of you — Oren, Wes — to tell me in your own words, what it means, that something, isn’t your story to tell. \r\n Oren: I would say that it is a question of does the story belong to someone who has been harmed by something that benefits me? So, for example, does the story belong to someone whose people have been the victim of imperialism, which then propped up white people and enforced white privilege that I benefit from, whether I want it or not. \r\n And if the answer is yes, then I would say, that’s not my story to tell. As opposed to say, if it’s just a group that I’m not part of, like if it’s Christianity — I’m not Christian — but I don’t think it matters. If I use an angel in my story, I don’t think that’s a big deal, and I’m not ancient Greek, but I think using Zeus is fine. \r\n For me, that’s a pretty good test. Has this group been harmed by something that is benefiting me on a structural level? And if the answer is yes, then it’s probably not my story to tell. \r\n Wes: Storytellers, we’re equipped to kind of tell stories through experience and practice. And if I’m thinking about these things “that’s not my story to tell;” I’m thinking to myself “I can’t tell that right.” \r\n If I’m having doubt, that translates to someone can tell this better, someone who has the right experience and toolkit and lived experience to share this. And it’ll make for a way better story than I ever could. So that’s another thing that kind of comes to mind for me, in addition to what Oren was talking about. \r\n Chris: I think for me, I could build an analogy that was more of a personal situation that I think actually covers it surprisingly well. If you knew somebody close to you who went through something traumatic, you would not just take what they went through and package it and put it in your fiction story, detail by detail, and then just sell it. \r\n Most people would know that that would just be inappropriate behavior and that it is really insensitive to that person’s pain and profiting off of that person’s pain. Sometimes it’s not pain-related even, but you have a friend who tells you — I feel a little silly for using the, the phrase story idea, because frankly story ideas are not valuable, but nonetheless — if your friend got really excited about their Buffy fanfic that they were planning and then you were to go to somebody else and repeat exactly what they told you. Hey, maybe they wanted to share that, that’s not yours. \r\n Those are kind of analogies, but usually when we’re talking about not our story to tell, we’re talking about it at a whole large group of people level. Some of those same issues come up where one group can take something that was traumatic for another group or inherently is associated with that other group and use it in inappropriate situations and profit off of it. \r\n To be specific, we’re going to be talking about exploitation and appropriation — which are not the same thing, but are pretty heavily linked, specifically cultural appropriation. \r\n So let’s just define each of those terms. Exploitation, generally, I have defined that on the site as being: when you use the pain of another group for the benefit of people who aren’t part of that group. Specifically, when that group is marginalized and it’s going to be benefiting people who aren’t part of that marginalized group. \r\n A common example is depictions of rape in our stories. There’s a lot of uses that storytellers have for rape. It could be for anything like, “Hey, look how gritty and realistic my setting is, it has rape.” Or it could be, “Hey, see this guy, he doesn’t rape this woman. Isn’t he a great guy?” \r\n Oren: Look how low we can get the bar. We can get it very low. \r\n Chris: Conversely, “Hey, this guy’s a rapist. So now, you know, he’s a villain.” \r\n Oren: Yeah, how else would I have known? \r\n Chris: A typical rape survivor is not going to enjoy a story with rape in it. If you use that, you are making it so that the people who actually had this kind of trauma happen to them can no longer enjoy your story. Therefore, it’s just for the benefit of people who aren’t survivors generally. \r\n And that doesn’t mean that there’s no place for commentary about rape. Usually people who are using rape in these situations, like the examples I gave, they’re not trying to make meaningful commentary about rape. They’re trying to use it as a storytelling tool and not thinking about what effect that has. \r\n Oren: If you look up exploitation films, this definition can start to get very muddled. I was very confused because when I heard terms like sexploitation and blaxploitation, I assumed certain things about these movies. \r\n But then when I looked up what some of these movies actually are, some movies got tagged as blaxploitation because they had a lot of black characters in them. Others were clearly more harmful because they portrayed a lot of negative stereotypes or were just racist in some other way. Whereas some didn’t have that, but they were still considered part of that genre of film. \r\n Be aware that films labeled with a -xploitation tag may or may not be actually exploitative. \r\n Wes: Appropriation inherently has aspects of that, especially as it relates to imbalances when we talk about compensation, but maybe we can step into that conversation here in a sec. \r\n Chris: A common phrase you might hear is the phrase called trauma-porn, which is often how exploitative stories are labeled. Usually a privileged group has really emphasized the painful aspects of some kind of marginalized experience, then it’s labeled as trauma-porn and usually the criticism there is that the story is exploitative. \r\n Oren: There is occasionally a bit of a hazy line between what is an exploitative story made about someone else’s pain and what is a story that someone who experienced that pain made to explore it or to critique it or to comment on it. That can sometimes happen. \r\n I’m going to say that in most cases, that’s not going to be the issue. If you do not personally suffer from that experience, in most cases, whatever it is that you’re thinking of is not going to fall into that category. It’s going to be a lot more cut and dried. \r\n Chris: Next, cultural appropriation and this one frustrated me for a long time and took a long time to get answered, especially since you go to con, there’s a panel on cultural appropriation, go to that panel, hoping to learn what is it? How do I not do it? And every time coming away confused. \r\n Oren: They tell you what it is and you’re like, okay, I know what it is now. Then they’re like, “Avatar” is great. And you’re like, doesn’t “Avatar” do all those things? And they’re like, yeah, but it’s, it’s fine. They’ll carve out the “Avatar” exception in, in real time. I’ve seen people do that, It’s weird. \r\n Chris: Cultural appropriation is basically things associated with a marginalized culture being used by the privileged culture. Also, there are different groups of people and different groups of marginalized people and I would say with cultural appropriation, what’s important is whether you belong to that particular culture or not. \r\n I wouldn’t say that one marginalized culture can never appropriate from another marginalized culture, especially when they’re doing so through the lens of a more privileged culture that engages in appropriation. It’s possible to have more equal cultural exchange, certainly. \r\n I wouldn’t say just because it’s not a privileged culture, doesn’t mean that it couldn’t happen all. \r\n Oren: Right, and that’s where I try to bring back the whole concept of who has been harmed here. I’m not French, but I don’t think it’s a huge problem if I use French history in my story. Or if I use some French folklore, I don’t think that’s going to be an issue. \r\n I think the reason for that is that France has never been colonized by America. That’s just not a thing that’s happened, so I don’t think it’s a problem. \r\n Chris: Well, I don’t think you can really appropriate from a privileged culture. Whether different marginalized cultures, for instance, can appropriate each other’s stuff, that’s one question. But any privileged culture, the main narrative about what their culture is, is packaged and determined by them. So if you’re an American, the ideas about what it is to be an American and what American culture is, you’re the mostly the one that determines that, because it’s a very privileged culture. And so privileged Americans are the ones that make movies about that and other cultural products about that. \r\n It’s very different when you have a culture that a bunch of white people are taking aspects of your culture, and then they are determining how your culture is going to be presented. \r\n Wes: Again, it doesn’t really matter to white Americans if some Korean film doesn’t depict America very accurately. \r\n I’ve noticed that in a lot of films made outside the U.S., the U.S. often looks like it’s stuck in the ’20s and that’s kind of neat. It’s kind of an interesting piece of trivia, but it doesn’t really hurt me in any way. \r\n Chris: Right. Or everybody from America is a cowboy, but who cares? We have no shortage of depictions that we determined, that we made ourselves. So it’s just funny because it’s not a sore point. \r\n Oren: Or there’s a funny meme going around that there was some baseball game that was made in Japan in the ’90s and they needed to make a bunch of fake, made-up American names for their baseball characters. \r\n Some Japanese developer tried to invent a bunch of American names and they sound horrendous. They’re all incredibly wrong and they don’t sound right at all, but if you’re a white American, your name being mispronounced is not a huge problem for you. There are exceptions, of course, if you have a European name, that could be an issue. \r\n But it’s not as big an issue, as opposed to, if you were — for example — someone who is of East Asian descent. \r\n You might have a name that people just refuse to pronounce properly, even though it’s not hard, you know? And in that case, if an American game did that and made a bunch of weird sounding Japanese names, that might actually hurt somebody. Particularly Japanese Americans; people who live in Japan might not care. \r\n Chris: Yeah. When you’re used to respect and you have no shortage of respectful treatment, when somebody gets something wrong, it’s just funny. \r\n If you don’t have that, if people are constantly disrespecting you and misrepresenting you, then it’s not funny anymore. Appropriation generally includes distorting other cultures just by representing them inauthentically. There’s almost always some element of “this is inaccurate” at some level to things that are considered appropriation. \r\n Definitely profiting off of representations of somebody else’s culture. If somebody makes a totem pole, for instance, that was not made by Native Americans and then sells that, they’re profiting off of Native American culture and therefore denying Native Americans who should be making those totem poles — if they’re going to be made — any profit that would have happened as a result of their heritage. \r\n Wes: And a further extension of examples like that is if you start, we’ll just say mass marketing culture from marginalized groups, then it becomes that much harder to allocate funds, to preserve cultural elements. \r\n And then suddenly you’re basically participating in cultural degradation. Because if totem poles are everywhere, then why does that one got to stick around and be protected? The mindset becomes popular and people don’t see it as anything other than something you can go by. So that can really hinder efforts with preservation. \r\n Chris: There’s also just a big element of disrespect that happens. Like a Native American feather headdress, that’s a sacred item that is supposed to be earned by the person who wore it. That’s not something that… it’s very disrespectful to just put it on whoever. That’s just not culturally appropriate. \r\n I don’t know a lot about Mexican culture, Day of the Dead, but I have to say seeing white people wear Day of the Dead costumes on Halloween — Halloween is for ghouls and horror stuff. And the Mexican Day of the Dead is about honoring your dead family. Those things don’t seem to mix very well. \r\n Those types of things can be very concerning where it’s, “Hey, that’s something that’s really special to us and you’re completely disrespecting it.” \r\n Oren: Can I mention something about the whole concept of authenticity, especially when we’re talking about using mythology or religious beliefs in fantasy. Because this is something I see authors get confused by a lot. \r\n They hear that this white author used this Hindu thing inauthentically or used this indigenous Australian thing inauthentically, and did they get confused? Fantasy is full of very inauthentic European mythology and religion in that it is not accurate to its original source material. The angels that appear on “Supernatural” are nothing like the angels from the Bible. \r\n Wes: What? [All laugh]. \r\n Oren: Yeah. You know, the way that the Greek and Norse gods are portrayed in most fantasy stories is nothing like they are in their original mythology. To the extent that their mythology is consistent in any way; often it’s not. \r\n But that’s the thing, as fantasy authors we often make these changes, and that confuses people. Why is it okay to change angels, but when I start changing Shiva, a Hindu God, that becomes a problem? \r\n And it comes down to who gets to decide what that change is. What it should be. And that’s just how it is and I get that’s a little frustrating. Because it can seem like a double standard, but you just have to go back to that question of who was harmed in that exchange, people of Hindu faith were colonized by the British primarily, but not exclusively, and they are still recovering from that. And in a lot of cases, specifically recovering from having their religion misrepresented. And so, it’s really not our place to decide what the epic fantasy version of Shiva should be. \r\n Now, if some Indian writer wants to do that. Someone who is Hindu and wants to show me their epic fantasy version of Shiva, that’s not really anything like what he is in the actual religion, then great. I will read that book. I will buy it from you. Sell it to me right now. \r\n Chris: Part of the reason it’s, we would say, it’s not our story to tell… Yeah, people should be able to benefit from their own culture. But it’s also, there’s a huge element of, can you actually do this right? And do you have the knowledge and the experience necessary to do that? \r\n Certainly with exploitation, the fact is that people who’ve been through trauma definitely depict it differently than people who have not. If it’s something that is… if you don’t have trauma around something like sexual assault or abuse, or what have you, it’s not a pain point for you. It doesn’t trigger anything and so usually it’s a lot more gratuitous. \r\n It’s just not at all sensitive to somebody who does have personal experience that makes that a lot more painful for them. Whereas if somebody were to write about their own trauma, they would just automatically write it differently because of that and that would just be more sensitive to the people who had those experiences. \r\n Oren: Abuse, like child abuse for example, is a different sort of thing than the issues of racism or cultural power that we’ve been talking about. But you can see the same dynamic at work in which if someone just randomly throws in that this character was abused as a child, that can seem pretty insensitive. And what is that? Just like a random piece of this backstory that you mentioned in the same line as Auntie went to Burger King once. \r\n That seems weird. So it’s not this case that I would never write a character who was abused as a child, but if I was going to, I would not simply put that in there as a random factoid about his backstory. Because like that has serious effects and there are people who suffer from that. \r\n Chris: I’ve definitely seen stories where the storyteller uses abuse to generate sympathy for protagonists. But what happens a lot of times in these situations is this person doesn’t know a lot about abuse and substantive abuse, and they feel like nobody’s going to sympathize with the protagonist, unless they make the abuse super extreme. \r\n Because without lived experience, you don’t know how hurtful things that to other people who have not lived it, might seem small. So they just layer it on really thick and that just becomes kind of trauma-porn. Going to exploitation when talking about just other groups, so people see the breadth of the issue. One instance that’s common is writers, cis writers who are featuring trans characters always focusing on the trans person’s transition. \r\n That would be an example of exploitation. That’s a very sensitive thing for trans people. You shouldn’t focus on a transition just because you have a trans character. Generally, it’s a lot easier if you bring in a trans character post-transition and anything involved in a trans character’s transition is just very sensitive. There’s definitely been trauma porn out there focused on transitioning and those kinds of things. \r\n There’s a lot of marginalized groups that have experiences that are very specific to them, that are either personal or painful, and it’s not a good idea to just go gung-ho on any of those. \r\n Should we move on to talking about whether or not this is something that can be done respectfully? \r\n Oren: Usually, no, I guess it’s not 100 percent, but pretty small. And, of course, there is a debate of even if you could, for example, write a story that takes place in a culture that’s not yours and you could write it and you were so good at writing it that no one could tell. \r\n Let’s just assume that somehow you manage that through the mother of all research, or maybe you lived there for a while. Who knows? But let’s assume you did it, then there’s really still the question of are you taking up one of the few slots for this kind of book that should probably go to someone who actually has that cultural background, so they could benefit from it? \r\n That’s a whole other question. \r\n Chris: For appropriation, a lot of times we’re talking about, for instance, if you’re a white person who is writing what you might call an East Asian-inspired fantasy setting. To me that has just tons of warning bells, just in that description right there. \r\n First of all, East Asian is way too broad. Cultures are very, very specific and a lot of times, when you hear people talking about cultural appropriation, one of the biggest complaints is people — for instance, “Moana” — taking a bunch of different Polynesian cultures and then just being like “Oh, we can just use pieces of all of them and just put them together.” \r\n No. If you’re like, “Oh, it’s inspired by this.” Okay, that means that what you’re doing is you’re not trying to make it authentic. Generally in that case, we don’t recommend… it’s okay, you can just base it off of Europe. It’s okay, really. And there’s plenty of ways that you can make your setting creative without that. \r\n But we’ve generally found about zero case studies of people who are not part of a culture actually doing this respectfully. And, maybe someday, if we find some great success stories of white novelists who did a great job of depicting their Japanese fantasy culture, or something, and Japanese people loved it and Japanese Americans loved it, and then we could find out: What did you do? \r\n Because usually traditional research just doesn’t cut it. There’s so many things that are part of culture that are very difficult to research. \r\n Oren: Lots of really subtle things that if you haven’t lived there, you’re not going to notice them. They don’t always get written down. \r\n This is another case where again, I know authors get kind of confused and it can be a little frustrating, because if you make a fantasy story that has elements of French, German and Spanish cultures all brought together in one fantasy city, no one cares. Like that’s fine. Most people will think that’s not a problem. \r\n If you do that with three different East Asian countries and mix them together that way, that can be a problem. \r\n And I get that this is kind of frustrating. It can feel like a double standard. Again, the reason is that in real life, white people have a tendency to treat everyone from East Asia like they’re the same. \r\n There’s a “King of the Hill” skit about that. Where they keep asking this guy if he’s Chinese or Japanese and he’s Lao. If “King of the Hill” gets it, I think the rest of us can get it. \r\n Chris: You know, there’s been maybe a couple movies. Like “Coco” has succeeded, and they brought in tons of consultants for all those little nuances. A novelist succeeding? We haven’t found one yet. \r\n Even if we found some could be successful and have works that were not considered to be appropriative, we still, as Orin said, have to ask the question of maybe the people of that culture should be profiting off of this instead. \r\n Oren: We say this a lot on the site, but just to reiterate, what we’re talking about here is not that your story should be all white, all the time. What we advocate for is diversity through characters, because we think that’s important for a number of reasons, and it’s simply easier than trying to depict an entire culture that you aren’t part of. \r\n And often you still have to do research and sensitivity readers are still good, but it’s more doable. And that’s what we recommend. \r\n Chris: For exploitation, it’s not quite such a high mountain. It’s still difficult. In most cases, what we find is a lot of storytellers who aren’t really doing it for the right reasons, are not willing to put in the amount of energy that it takes to get it right. But if it’s something that you’re passionate about, you want to make meaningful commentary on it, especially if you have personal experience with it, you’re doing it for the right reasons and you’re willing to put in work, you’re willing to get a paid consultant for something that could be exploitative, then it is possible. \r\n It does take a lot of effort and the average storyteller is just trying to write their story. They’re just trying to make their villain villainous and they don’t need rape to do that. They’re just trying to make their love interest look good and they don’t need him to choose not to rape somebody to do that. And again, abuse, we find lots of storytellers put abuse in their stories, not knowing it’s abuse, and once I tell them, they take it out. \r\n The average storyteller does not realize how much they are taking on by putting potentially exploitative content in their stories. But it’s not like it’s impossible to do it well. \r\n Oren: This is also a case where, moving it back to appropriation just a little bit, there is a lot of well-meaning, but incorrect advice out there about how people are tired of high fantasy that’s based off of medieval Europe. \r\n First of all, no they’re not. [All laughing] Second, what that is getting at is that people do like novelty in their setting. They like novelty, that’s a big part of the draw of fantasy. Being like, “Ooh, I wonder what this setting has in store for me.” There is, because of that advice, a number of authors — I have worked with some of them — who think that in order for their setting to be not boring, they have to appropriate from other cultures. \r\n And they didn’t think of it as appropriation at the time, because they had not considered this enfolds a complicated subject. But that’s what they were doing, because they had been told that no one wanted to read another fantasy story based on medieval Western Europe. \r\n There are just so many ways to add novelty to your setting other than taking from Japan or Thailand or the Aboriginal culture of Australia. You have so many good options that are better than those. You know, that’s a piece of advice I see a lot and I do think it is giving a lot of writers the wrong idea. \r\n Wes: There’s definitely a good list of things, like Oren’s “who does this harm” question, is a good one to ask. That example there, Oren was good about, if you’re looking at stories and you’re like “Oh, I need to mine something from another culture,” that’s the definition of cultural appropriation and exploitation. \r\n We’ve talked about “Supernatural” recently, and in season one, they deal with a wendigo, or a wen-dee-go, you should ask yourself what ethnic, racial or cultural group does this belong to? What significance does it have? Does my using this benefit me in some way and take away from the group it belongs to? And what makes it possible for me to engage with this in my story? \r\n So it’s definitely… you’ve got to ask yourself some questions. Especially the engagement and the harm stuff. You’re supposed to write what you know, and if you’re cherry picking from like other faiths, you probably don’t know it. \r\n Oren: Right. And I will just say real quick, sometimes this can be pretty complicated, but I have checked with a number of Native American advocates who are into SpecFic. The answer is almost universally, please do not use wendigos or skinwalkers or other mythological creatures as monsters. The majority of them are saying that, and even if you know some person who is from the relevant tribe, who says it’s okay, I would still not do it. Just because enough people have told me not to, that I’m going to err on that side. \r\n Chris: I’m not going to say permission isn’t relevant, but we always have to remember one person can never represent an entire group. So getting permission from one person doesn’t mean that when you write your story, that group is going to be, “Oh yeah, it’s fine you got permission.” [All laughing] You know we want you to succeed and we want what you write to be well received. So we have to be frank about what will do that and what will not do that. One other thing that a lot of people ask about world building is, “How do I come up with a theoretical world and a theoretical culture if I’m not allowed to take things from other cultures?” \r\n So if I have a culture that’s, for instance, living in a cold environment, how do I know what to do with them if I’m not allowed to take from the Inuit? In those types of situations, you have to think a little harder. By studying other cultures, you can find some logic that you can use in coming up with things that your own culture does that are different from just taking a specific practice from a culture. \r\n A great example is burial practices. You can look at a variety of all the burial practices around the world and you’ll find a pattern where people do whatever is the most practical to dispose of a body. If it’s easy to dig into the earth, they will bury it. If they have lots of wood to burn, they will burn it. If they don’t have either of those things, but there’s a body of water nearby, they will put the body in the water. From that you can kind of extrapolate from cultures. \r\n There’s also some practices that are in more than one culture. In that case, if it’s something that multiple cultures engage in, you have to think about how you’re packaging it. Are you giving it a label that’s associated with a specific culture or details that are associated with a specific culture? \r\n It’s not that you can’t use cultural research to come up with ideas for your world building, but it’s important that you think about your world and how it works separately and logic that out, as opposed to just transplanting something that’s taken from another culture. \r\n Oren: I think this is a good moment to end the podcast because we’re a bit over time. So thank you everyone for listening. If we said something that piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com. \r\n Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, he is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. \r\n [closing theme] P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in? \r\n \r\n    Related StoriesIs it Ableist For a Character to Impersonate Someone With a Disability?\r\n316 – Prescriptivism\r\n319 – Monsters of Fire and Flame\r\n 

Things are heating up this week on the Mythcreant Podcast, because we’re talking about monsters of fire and flame! From dragons to salamanders, from phoenixes to… actually, there don’t seem to be that many classic fire monsters. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this while also talking about the role these creatures play in stories and why so many fantasy authors invent their own special type of fire. \r\n \r\n Download Episode 319  Subscription Feed  \r\n https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/TMP-319-Monsters-of-Fire-and-Flame.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. \r\n Show Notes: Smaug \r\n Goron \r\n Firebending \r\n Salamander Myth \r\n Pliny the Elder \r\n Azers \r\n Zuko \r\n Calcifer \r\n Hellfire \r\n Soulfire \r\n Balefire \r\n Hellhound \r\n Mount Doom \r\n Torch Slugs \r\n Charmander \r\n Balrog \r\n Kyo \r\n Fire Keese \r\n \r\n Jump down to comments ↓ \r\n Transcript Generously transcribed by I.W. Ferguson. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. \r\n You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast, with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Opening song] Wes: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m your host Wes. And with me today is Oren and Chris. \r\n And maybe I’m just dreaming of warmer climes or maybe I’m just ready to talk about monsters again. Yeah. So we’ve covered monsters of snow and ice before and today we’re talking about those monsters of fire and flame. \r\n And there’s not so many of them turns out. \r\n Chris: I was really surprised. I expected to find lots, but I guess they’re kind of modern. \r\n Wes: We did hedge a bit on the snow and ice podcast. So, we’ll talk about some monsters. And by that we generally mean beasts, but we’ll probably broaden out to be some more just…creatures to try to encompass a wider range of sentient-type things that are composed of or exist in fire and flame zones. \r\n Oren: Fire themed in some way. \r\n Wes: The challenges that I was thinking here is the environment is just super hostile. I mean, how can anything of much size get enough to eat? We talked about that with Oren’s story with the last wampa That at least explained how something that size ended up in its situation. A dragon breathes fire, and it’s associated with fire. And I guess they eat. I mean, we see them eat on Game of Thrones, but Smaug just hung out in the Lonely Mountain. \r\n Chris: That’s true, Smaug didn’t eat much. I suppose we could say they eat gold. \r\n Wes: No, unless dragons eat gold. That’s the only thing that makes sense and why they raid. They don’t spend the currency; they’re just so hungry. \r\n Oren: They must not eat that much though. There was still a lot of gold in there. So unless they get something from it other than a traditional digestive process. Maybe they eat it and they absorb the greed that’s built up in it for a while and then it just comes out the other end as regular gold. \r\n Wes: Oren, I like that. I like the idea that dragons consume greed. That’s kind of cool. \r\n Oren: I can’t help but notice that in the flashbacks the dwarven mountain is not just flooded with gold. That’s not a thing. So you would assume that Smaug like went out and got some, but then you’d think that that’s something people would notice: if a giant dragon was flying out and grabbing gold, that would be a more active problem than Smaug is supposed to be. \r\n Of course, granted, that could just be the movie, right? It’s possible that Smaug somehow gathered all of the dwarves’ treasure into one room, even though he’s the size of a building. I don’t know how he got into the small rooms with all the gold in them. I have logistical Smaug questions, is what I’m saying. \r\n Wes: A few other quick things on environment. If you’re thinking about creatures of fire and flame, cruising through a monster manual or something, you’ll see environments for fire types include mountains, which usually means kind of volcanic activity, and also deserts tend to house some fire type spirits, and those are okay because at least in a desert, they’re not full of sulfuric gases and stuff. \r\n And there’s probably some water, you know, oases and things like that. \r\n And then mountains. If you’re a flying fire type Pokemon, you can soar down to the valley and get some fat, squishy thing to eat and it’ll be tasty. I want to make a special shout out to gorons because they’re the only ones in my cursory research for this podcast that make sense because they live in mountains, they like it hot, and they eat rocks. They don’t like gems because gems are not tasty. And so they get to trade with the other races in Hyrule. And therefore gorons are just the best. I think they can even just hang out in lava. The big goron in Ocarina of Time, I think was just in a bed of lava. So they are the ultimate creatures of fire and flame because of all the coolness about them. \r\n Oren: For all these reasons, you’re going to have a much harder time creating a fire themed monster that is made of meat—as we understand it—than a cold monster, because the places we associate with cold are often pretty hostile, but it’s still possible for large actual animals to live there. Like polar bears. What is a polar bear, if not an ice monster? \r\n Whereas the places that we associate with fire are far more hostile. And much harder for any kind of large creature to survive. If your creature is going to survive, it’s probably going to have to be magic, if it’s going to live in a fire themed area. It’s going to have to do something either like the gorons, you said they were called? Where they just don’t care about heat and they eat rocks, and they clearly put some thought into that. In a fantasy world, if there’s a lava spirit swimming in a volcano caldera, most people will accept that. Most people aren’t going to ask what it eats. \r\n Chris: I have to say there is a lot of variety on fire creatures about whether they’re actually sensitive to fire or not. Obviously if they’re swimming in lava they’re invulnerable to fire and many creatures are, but dragons are actually depicted both ways. Or sometimes they’re just invulnerable to fire, but there are also some stories where the dragon has certain biological protections against its own fire and that’s a weak point that you can exploit, if you turn the fire back on the dragon or something like that. \r\n Firebenders in the Avatar setting are actually pretty unique in that they both have fire magic, but they can be burned just as easily as anybody else—as far as we know. \r\n Oren: Well, you know, a firebending duel would be pretty boring if they were both immune to fire. It’s like, “I challenge you to an Agni Kai,” “Do you mean like a fist fight?” \r\n Chris: Okay, but in the cartoon show, they actually are pretty invulnerable to fire. Some would say that this is because it’s a children’s show and it’s not an intentional part of the world building, but you don’t know. \r\n Oren: Look, Chris, sometimes when it gets serious, they get anime scorch marks. That’s pretty bad. You get sent to the hospital for those. My favorite weird monster that’s associated with fire is the salamander. I looked up the backstory of the salamander because it’s so weird that salamanders, in a lot of fantasy literature, are associated with fire because salamanders are amphibians and they don’t do well if they get dried out, let alone with actual fire. They don’t like hot places. \r\n I looked this up and apparently, at least as far as western antecedents goes, the association of the salamander with fire goes back to ye olde Greeks. Cause what doesn’t. It wasn’t that they were creatures of fire, it was that they were so cold that they could live in fire because the coldness of their bodies would just counteract the heat of the fire. That was where the salamander-fire connection got started. \r\n And then the source that I consulted theorized that this might’ve been because salamanders would live in the wood chips that the Greeks would burn in their fires. And so you would put a bunch of wood chips in the fire and a bunch of salamanders would run out of them because there was fire there. And people would be like, “Whoa, the salamanders came out of the fire. Ooo!” \r\n Wes: Look at those little fire spirits go. \r\n Oren: …which is my favorite. I don’t know if that’s true. That was just a hypothesis I saw in one source, but I’m accepting it as my personal lord and savior. Apparently, Pliny the Elder tried to test to see whether or not salamanders were immune to fire and they were not. So thanks for finding that out, Pliny. \r\n Wes: Way to ruin it for everybody. \r\n Oren: But yeah, I could not find a fire spirit. I wanted one for my urban fantasy game, because I had a bunch of other kind of elemental type spirits. And I just could not find a fire spirit. I found a few possibilities, but they were all kind of appropriative, which we’ll talk about next week. \r\n And so I was like, all right, I’m just going to have to make one up. And I could just call it a fire elemental, but that just seemed like a cop-out—it seemed kind of bland. So I created a new kind of creature called an ignis. Cause it sounds like ignite, you see, I’m very clever. One Hugo please. So that was what I had to do because there were just not that many fire monsters around. \r\n Wes: Yeah. For that reason, you just see fire-skinned things in Dungeons and Dragons on the elemental plane of fire. You just get fire genies called efreeti and you also get azers, which are just dwarves. You can fight me on this, but they’re just dwarves. Their beards are made of flame, that’s it. But otherwise they are identical to dwarves. \r\n It’s just like, “We really need to populate this place, so we’ll just do…I don’t know, fire dwarves? Perfect.” “Wait, don’t we already have fire giants?” “It doesn’t matter.” \r\n Chris: It’s true. There are so many fire creatures that modern people are making up for games or whatever that are just like, “Okay, let’s just take a normal creature, you know, say it’s on fire. What does it do? It burns things.” It’s like, okay, well, that’s a start. It’s not particularly interesting. \r\n The thing about the phoenix, why the phoenix is so memorable is it actually has something unique about it. Burning itself up and being reborn from the ashes is just so memorable that nobody forgets the phoenix. \r\n Oren: Actually that myth comes from the legend of Prince Zuko, who was redeemed so well that it was like he was burned up and then reborn anew, and that’s actually where the phoenix myth comes from. True fact. \r\n Chris: My goal for a fire creature is trying to do something more than like, “it’s a creature, it’s on fire, it burns things.” Kind of neat about the salamander. The idea that it supposedly was cold. That would definitely make a creature that’s more unique as it has some kind of contrast like that. \r\n Wes: Calcifer is a fire demon. It’s Billy Crystal who’s the voice actor, and that makes him even more charming, as far as I’m concerned. But you know, that’s a good example of a fire elemental in a setting that kind of has a story and purpose. And then you find out that he’s actually just a falling star, too. And that’s also great. \r\n Chris: For anyone who’s not familiar, this is from Howl’s Moving Castle. The funny thing about this, of course, is that Howl uses him to cook eggs. Oh, actually, no, Howl doesn’t want to use him to cook eggs, Sophie insists on using him to cook eggs. He’s like, “this is undignified.” \r\n Wes: But he’s super powerful. He makes a deal with Howl, then that gets magic up, and then the resolution of that deal is important to the plot. \r\n Chris: But we also see him as a stove fire. So, small and friendly. \r\n Wes: Yeah. Lots of novelty instead of just fire elemental. But the fire elemental stuff holds true because flames just seem kind of alive based on their weird movements and stuff. So you can make fire your monster, if you want. It’s okay. It’s destructive and terrifying, and if it has a little bit of a personality, all the better. \r\n Chris: And I think if you’re going to make a fire creature that’s out in the wild—I mean, we’ve talked about this—but it would be a little strange if they lived in a grassland or forest, just because we’d have to ask why those things haven’t burned down yet. \r\n Prairies, though, are traditionally supposed to burn through once in a while. So you could potentially have a situation with a creature that maybe breathes fire in defense occasionally. Supposedly this ecosystem is developed to burn down once in a while. And it often starts with this creature that has a little defensive flame or something. \r\n Wes: So many of our fire monsters and creatures breathe fire or something like that. It’s tough to think of just normal creatures hanging out that have that ability. Game of Thrones tried to make it where dragons do it. Cause they cook their food, right? Like, “Oh, they’re the only other animal that cooks their food.” And it’s like, “that’s a weird adaptation.” \r\n Oren: There was a…not really a documentary, but a speculative documentary that made the rounds when I was growing up that posited this idea that maybe dragons were a kind of dinosaur that evolved hydrogen-storing organs inside of them. Which allowed them to fly at a larger size than you would expect. And then they would develop some kind of striking tooth that could cause some sparks. And so the flame was them expelling some hydrogen that they would then ignite with the sparking mechanism in their teeth. \r\n And I fell absolutely in love with that idea. I was like, “this is the best dragon explanation I’ve ever heard,” when I was a kid. And I still have a soft spot for it, so if you want to make your dragons fly by having bellies full of hydrogen, I’m way into it. It’s like, I don’t know where they get the hydrogen from, but, whatever, I’m sure that was in the documentary somewhere. \r\n Chris: The gold, they converted to hydrogen. \r\n Oren: Ooh, that’s why they need gold. Boom. Got that solved. \r\n Chris: They’re like alchemists. \r\n Wes: Man, we are really putting the pieces together on this one, you guys, \r\n Oren: One of the things I find fascinating about fire in fantasy stories is that fire is often associated with both demons and angels and it’s different fire. The Dresden Files did this, where for awhile, Dresden is using hell fire, which is this special kind of supercharged fire. He gets right with God, and he gets soul fire instead, which is from the angels. And it’s a different kind of special fire. And I was like, wow, there’s a lot of kinds of special fire around here. I just found that very interesting. \r\n Chris: Fantasy writers do like their special fire. I mean, think of how frequently magic is just fire that’s a different color. \r\n Oren: Wheel of Time has balefire, which erases something in time, which is kind of neat. I don’t know why fire would do that, but that’s a thing that happens. \r\n Wes: Yeah. The angel part is good because fire and heat can purify. So there’s that holy aspect of it. You can just hear some paladin that picks up a flaming mace and he says, “Oh yeah, to the tainted I bring fire.” This is like, “Okay, calm down guy.” \r\n Oren: Yeah. The whole idea of fire purifying is very common. It’s a very common trope. I find it a little weird personally, cause fire doesn’t really do that in most ways. I mean, if you’re talking about it from a chemical perspective, you can use fire to induce a reaction that can cause elements to separate. Right? So that’s sort of purifying, I guess, but for the most part fire just destroys things. That’s basically what fire does. \r\n Chris: I did read a fantasy book once—I can’t remember which book this was—where the protagonists travel through what is basically the center of the world. And at some point there’s some purifying fire in the center of it and it makes the main character, it makes her really hot. It burns away her imperfections or something, and so she’s like super hot now. \r\n Wes: Okay. Yeah. Sexy. I was like, of course she’d get hot. \r\n Oren: I’m really glad that that fire is tuned to modern beauty standards. \r\n Chris: Yeah. Going back to the angels thing. Another interesting thing I found is, one of the few creatures that we usually associate with fire are hellhounds. As you pointed out, Wes, they’re from all over and they’re only fire-ish if the culture happens to associate hell with fire, So, we might depict them as being fiery, but in many depictions they wouldn’t be fiery at all. It’s like they take on whatever properties the underworld is suppose to have. \r\n Wes: Is there a divine equivalent to…like, is there a heaven hound? There should be because they’re good boys. \r\n Oren: In some urban fantasy stories? Yes. But I don’t think that one’s as common. If you’re destined to go to heaven, you probably aren’t running away. Yeah. Okay. I’d like to go to heaven, whereas if you’re supposed to go to hell, it’s like, Hmm, hang on, I don’t think I want to, I think I’m going to try something else and then they have to be like, all right, release the hounds. That’s why hell typically needs hounds more often than heaven does, would be my guess. \r\n I’m also a big fan of not exactly monster, but fire with special properties, like the fires of Mount Doom. \r\n Chris: We’re taking a really expansive definition of monsters. \r\n Oren: I just liked the idea of like, you need the special fires for his first forging of the special ring, and then you’ve got to undo it with that. I just thought that was cool. I liked the rhyme where they explained that. \r\n Wes: A silly fun monster from a video game that I remember: Ocarina of Time had torch slugs and they were weird-looking, fiery, sluggy things, and you could try to slash them and eventually it would work, but that’s where you took the megaton hammer out, hit the ground, they flipped upside down, and then you could take them out. But I just like the idea of a torch slug. Let’s take this slow-moving thing and set it on fire. That works really well. \r\n Chris: Okay, I never actually played through that game myself. So they’re used for making torches? \r\n Wes: They were very large slugs on the ground that were just on fire and would attack you. \r\n Chris: Oh, so they’re just hanging out, slugging, on fire. \r\n Wes: Yeah. Like you do, I guess. \r\n Oren: Apparently that’s how they do. I always pick the Fire starter in Pokemon. Like always. I’m very basic like that. Okay. I need my Charmander. I don’t want this turtle or this weird green thing with a flower ball bud, but no, I want the tiny little dragon with a flamey tail. And then it goes through his awkward Charmeleon phase. And it’s like, yeah, he’ll outgrow this eventually. And then he becomes Charizard and you’re the cool kid. Cause you have a Charizard. And that was like social currency when I was little. \r\n Wes: I too, very much, am team Charmander, but I was looking at least at the first-generation Pokemon. I’m just most familiar with them. The other fire ones—there aren’t that many—I didn’t use them. I didn’t use Growlithe. I didn’t use Rapidash. I didn’t use Magmar I guess I just think a little Charmander is enough, as far as the Fire type goes. \r\n Oren: You probably don’t need more than one Fire type on your team and in gen one, most of the high tiers weren’t Fire type. Although I think Arcanine was. Arcanine is still pretty good. Okay. That’s a whole, that’s a Pokemon art mechanics argument. Save that for never. \r\n Oren: This is fire and monsters. One thing that I do get kind of annoyed by in a lot of fantasy stories is that whenever it’s like, Ooh, it’s a weird creature. How do we kill it? The answer is always fire. It doesn’t matter what it is, fire will always kill it. And it’s got to the point in some of my Hunter games that I’ve played in or DM’d where we wouldn’t even bother doing research on what the monster was and how to kill it. We would just be like, all right, well, if we burn it, that’ll probably do. We’re just going to go find it and burn it. Cause that works on everything. \r\n Wes: It’s just such readily accessible destruction. And as we’ve established, few things can not be harmed by it. \r\n Chris: Well, that is the nice thing about a fire creature, supposedly you can’t just kill it with fire—most of them. \r\n Wes: A creature of fire that we haven’t talked about would be the chimera, which I guess just doesn’t make any sense to me, if either of you know, but it’s like a lion goat snake that also breathes fire. It’s just like a whatever, plus fire. \r\n Oren: Might as well at that point, right? \r\n Chris: Seems like a creature made up by a five-year-old kid. \r\n Wes: And it somehow got popular and stuck around. Great, good job. I learned that, apparently, Tolkien—I’m going to say—invented the Balrog. I don’t know if that’s true. I think he made the word up, but I guess he wanted some kind of super powerful equivalent to dragons. He’s like, “I know I’m going to have dragons, but there’s gotta be something else. I know! Some thing of fire and shadow that is big and for whatever reason has a whip.” Because… \r\n Oren: Everything is scarier with a whip. \r\n Wes: Yeah. And everything’s scarier. \r\n Oren: Apparently there’s a controversy over whether or not the Balrog is supposed to have wings. But I mean, I think that the Balrog is not a dragon. I don’t know what Tolkien’s thoughts on this were, but it was a good choice because—especially if you’ve already read the Hobbit—the dragon has already been somewhat demystified. \r\n If it’s this weird, strange thing, having it not have a super clear physical form. It’s like it’s made of fire and shadow. That just makes it weirder and creepier. We already know how to kill dragons: we find their one weak point, we stab them. It’s like, how do we even fight this? What do we do with it? Does anyone have a hose? I don’t know. \r\n Wes: That was great. In the mines of Moria in The Fellowship. I remember the first time I saw that and Gandalf just like says that this is a creature far beyond any of them, to run, and you don’t see anything other than sulfuric smoke kind of just following them. That was done really well. That was cool. \r\n Chris: Yeah. I have to say the combination of fire plus shadow makes it different than all of the other fire creatures that are just on fire. Having some contrast sounds like a basically good recipe if you’re trying to make a fire creature so that it’s not like every other fire creature. \r\n Oren: I’m actually not sure where I picked this up, but I also kind of associate fire with passion and high emotions. I found that connection to be kind of useful. That’s why in my urban fantasy game, the fire spirits that I created, the ignis, are all kind of extra, and they have really elaborate names and get very enthusiastic about things. That’s not super important—none of my players are an ignis—but it’s just a thing that I came up with in the backstory. \r\n Chris: I mean, it reminds me of how in anime there’s always that red-headed character. So I did the red-headed character. I was going to be threatening to kill people half the time. \r\n Oren: You leave Kyo alone. He’s doing his best. \r\n Wes: That is a good thing to consider though, Oren. We talked about angels and demons, both have fire for their whatever purposes, but the emotional aspects, there are positive and negative qualities that come with that too, which could play into any creatures that you might want to consider creating. \r\n Chris: Well, I think we can agree that anything with lots of fire is probably pretty accurate. \r\n Wes: Except those torch slugs. \r\n Chris: Which are just, you know, chilling. \r\n Oren: I’m also just a big fan of using fire for creative purposes. I just think that’s cool. That’s maybe one of the reasons why I like Calcifer, cause he powers the castle, which I find cool. I like forges, you know, give me a forge sprite or something. I think those are neat. Give me a living forge that makes things. I’m very into that idea. You know, fire can be destructive. We’ve just been talking about that, how fire doesn’t really purify things, but it provides energy, which is important. And you can use that to make things. \r\n Chris: That would kind of turn the whole destructive part on its head. What if we created things instead. \r\n Oren: And that was one of the things that really blew my mind about Avatar. When I first heard about it, I was like, okay, so fire’s the bad guy, that makes sense. And they were like, well, the fire’s not evil in the setting. There just happened to be some bad guys who use fire. And I was like, Whoa, mind blown. What do you mean fire is not evil? \r\n Chris: Fire Nation does have steam punk technology, basically, that you find out later, like these big machines and stuff like that. Are those actually powered by firebenders? I know in Korra, they actually have firebenders that are powering things by shooting lightning. \r\n Oren: So we don’t see for sure, but I always assumed no. The way I always explained it in my head was that the Fire Nation’s technology advanced faster than the other nations, because through firebending they were able to more easily create advanced metalworking, which is really important. I assume at first that involved a lot more firebending personally, more fire labor as it were. But over time, they found other ways to do that because they already have the infrastructure in place. They’ve shunted more of their firebenders into their military. That’s how I assume it works. If I was doing a Fire Nation story, that’s how I would explain it. \r\n Apparently Nickelodeon just made a new Avatar division. So if anyone’s hiring, if you want me to write your Fire Nation history, I am available. Then let me pitch you my 200 season Kyoshi idea. \r\n Wes: So I guess the big takeaway here is that there’s not a lot of selection. If you really want a fire creature, just, I don’t know, pick a…a bat and say it’s a fire bat and it has fiery wings. I’m totally stealing that. It’s from the Legend of Zelda and they’re called Fire Keese. There’s also Ice Keese and Lightning Keese. I mean, it’s just all about the re-skinning. \r\n Oren: Got to love those elemental bats. \r\n Wes: Yeah. Elemental bat characters. You know, there’s some good classics and just maybe never underestimate using fire in creative ways and also just good little fire demons, like Calcifer, are always fun and simple. \r\n Oren: Like a little ball of fire with a face is always going to be adorable. \r\n All right. Well with that, I think we will call this podcast to a close. Those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com. \r\n Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory and Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Denita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. \r\n P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in? \r\n \r\n    Related Stories318 – Lost Knowledge\r\n317 – Plot and Character Are Not Enemies\r\n316 – Prescriptivism\r\n 

We all lose things, but what about losing knowledge? How is knowledge lost, and what effect does it have on your story? When trying to find the lost knowledge, is it always in the last place you look? That’s what we’re talking about this week, along with intersecting factors like genre, realism, and aesthetics. Also, way more discussion of Water World than you might expect. Download Episode 318  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/TMP-318-Lost-Knowledge.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: RSS Feeds Berlin Institute of Sex Science Greek Fire Damascus Steel The Eugenics Wars Shannara Chronicles Grimm Supernatural The Magicians Game of Thrones Bronze Age Collapse Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Ursula. 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 and with me today is Chris and Wes. Now gather around friends, ‘round the campfire, for today we’ll be telling you about the lost ancient myth that is the Mythcreant podcast. They say that podcasts once ran like water in the before times, but such knowledge is lost to us now… Can you guess what the topic is for today? Can you guess it? Wes: Oh, man. Something important. Chris: Is it how hard it is to work with RSS feeds? Because they’re just like a technical nightmare. I think that’s the lost knowledge you’re talking about. Oren: Yeah, that. Well, you got me. No, today we’re talking about lost knowledge, which is a very common trope in various types of spec fic. You get the really obvious ones, like in post-apocalyptic stories, where not only have we forgotten things, but we don’t know how to do technology anymore because of an apocalypse. Chris: Hence why podcasts are running on RSS feeds. We’ve lost the before times knowledge. Oren: And then there are other things like fantasy stories, which love to have ancient curses and the big bad that’s so old that nobody has written it down anywhere. Urban fantasy does that too. I do that in my urban fantasy campaign. Every other day, it’s like, “Hey, this NPC will tell you some lost history” and the other players seem to think that’s cool. So I’m part of the problem, to be absolutely clear. But I wanted to talk about it, it’s been on my mind recently, because I’m reading a book right now where reading is lost knowledge, which is weird and strange. Chris: Well lost knowledge is really cool. Especially with fantasy, it makes everything feel wondrous, and that’s what we’re going for most of the time. So it’s mostly, how do we find an excuse, so that knowledge can actually be lost. Wes: There’s something to it when it’s lost, and you need to discover it. In a world where we’ve seen so much, there’s robots on Mars and stuff – but it’s the archeologist, it’s the Indiana Jones of it all, kind of figuring it out and finding it. That’s cool. It’s fun. Chris: It’s way easier to discover something that, you know, somebody knew and put nicely in a book for you, and then the book was conveniently lost, than it is to do scientific method to regain all that. [Chris and Wes laugh] One definitely is more conducive to stories than the other. It’s like, “Here, now watch as we do very slow experimentation and iteration on this idea to figure it out.” That’s not as fun. Wes: God forbid you have to steal the declaration of independence and then find a secret map or riddle or whatever it was on the back of it in that movie. [laughs] Oren: I mean, it is really convenient when you find all the knowledge in an exposition book. Instead of having to discover what these weird new demons are and figure it all out by hand, you just have to go, “Hey, someone already wrote this all down, but then it was lost. So I only have to find the book. I don’t have to go and do like anthropological research on the demons.” Wes: And then you also instantly understand it. Oren: And to be clear, there, there are lots of instances in history where knowledge is lost. It just doesn’t tend to happen the way fiction writers kind of want it to. Chris: Do you want to give an example? Oren: Yeah. Okay. So probably the most obvious, and I would say biggest case of lost knowledge is when conquerors or just whatever dominant group destroys knowledge that is relevant to a marginalized group. You know, this happens anytime there’s a big conquest. It happened a lot with imperialism. It happened in the Nazi takeover of Germany. The Berlin Institute of sex research had a lot of really, at the time, cutting edge information and data on various sexual issues, including trans issues. And it was all burned. I’m sure some of it was backed up somewhere, but with a lot of that, you had to start over. So that’s a depressing way how knowledge is most commonly lost. But it should be noted that this is all knowledge that the dominant group wanted destroyed because it was better for their narrative if it wasn’t around – which certainly can be important to fiction, you can use that. But when most people think of lost knowledge in fiction, they think of something more along the lines of Greek fire or Damascus steel, and those are really weird exceptions to the general rule. Technology is rarely lost in real life. Chris: The problem is it’s too useful, right? Whereas something that’s cultural can be very valuable to that culture. And another group might want it erased, because again, it reinforces the value of that culture. But it’s not like I can just trade this in for cash instantly in the same way that Greek fire, for instance, would have been. Oren: Yeah. I can’t use this to light an enemy fleet on fire. So, “Eh.” Greek fire is an unusual situation, because it was a secret of the Byzantine empire and it was held very closely because the Byzantines didn’t want their enemies figuring out how it worked. And even then it’s kind of unclear in the historical record when it actually disappeared, because there are numerous instances of Greek fire being documented outside of the Byzantine empire. One account that I saw said that Saladin used it in his initial siege of Jerusalem. But we don’t know if that was actually the same stuff the Byzantines were using, or just a historian using a colloquial term for an incendiary weapon?We just don’t know the answer and there’s not really, as far as I know, a good way to find out. Then you have Damascus steel, which is a type of sword making, which notably starts to vanish around the time that guns become more prominent. And there are a lot of theories. I looked into this and it turns out there’s a huge controversy over whether or not we have in the modern day recreated Damascus steel and why it disappeared in the first place. A lot of people have a lot of different ideas and I’m not going to be the one to solve it, but I will point out that it started to disappear around the time we didn’t need swords as much anymore. So I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Wes: All those specialized blacksmiths out of a job. That’s a shame. Oren: Yeah. I mean, really, if you think about the rise of the gun, the true victim is the swordsmith. [laughter] Chris: There’s also a surprising number of future settings that have lost knowledge. I think that’s to add novelty. People like to take a future setting and then take something away that we have. Oren: I mean, that’s the whole idea behind most post-apocalyptic settings, right. But even if you’re not post-apocalyptic, like Star Trek, for example – in Star Trek, part of the premise is that in the nineties, there was a thing called the Eugenics Wars. And then after that we had World War III. So there are some Star Trek episodes where they find lost knowledge from the late nineties or early 2000s, and it’s like, “Oh, it’s kind of funny. It’s kind of quaint.” Chris: People are pretty bad at keeping secrets. And if it’s useful, people don’t have any reason to get rid of it. So those are the basic big obstacles. I know that a lot of writers who put it in their settings want to believe that something like a super powerful spell would be lost. I mean, I suppose if we had a Greek fire situation where only like five people knew it in the first place and all of them swore to take it to the grave, maybe you could keep a secret. But a whole group of people… if you have an entire society that knows something, people are not that good at keeping secrets. Oren: Right. It’s also worth pointing out that we don’t entirely know why Greek fire was lost. One theory, and this tends to be the case when technology disappears, is simply that the infrastructure for it no longer existed. Because the Byzantine empire, if you look at a time lapse of history, continued to shrink over time and the capacity to manufacture it may simply have been lost. And if you can’t make it anymore, and it was a closely guarded secret to begin with, you know, then it becomes more likely that they might not bother passing it on to somebody else because like, well, we can’t make it anyway. So why does it matter? Chris: I mean, that is used in some settings where the knowledge is lost because it’s not useful anymore. And the trick there is, why now? Because if we want to care about it during the course of the story, we need a reason that it’s useful again. But there are some things that really do depend on lots of infrastructure. So if you can’t – you know, I don’t know if we lost all electricity we would really forget how to make electronics all together, but we would probably forget some things. If it’s like, okay, we’ve got all these electronic devices, we can’t plug them in anymore. They can’t run. Oren: Yeah. Well, I mean, there are a lot of examples of electronics that we could work from, right. We could probably do some reverse engineering, Chris: Not to mention that they stay intact for a really long time. And that would make it very hard to lose. Even if we lost our electrical grid for some reason, somehow the rules of nature change and the electrical grids don’t work anymore. Oren: There was at least one TV show with that premise, it’s just like “electricity doesn’t work anymore.” And well, I guess that must not apply to the brain. ‘Cause that’s how I’m thinking these thoughts about how electricity doesn’t work. Chris: The problem with a lot of those shows is that they want it to be more than electricity. They want combustion to stop working or something, and it’s like, we’d need a very, very large change to the universe. Do you still want to have a basic fireplace? That’s going to be a problem. And if combustion works, then you can have other types of engines and other ways of powering machinery. Oren: I will say that there are some genre aesthetics that are just inherently unrealistic, and there’s not really a good way to make them realistic. Any post-apocalyptic story that doesn’t have guns in it is unrealistic. There is no way to credibly explain that. And I’ve seen countless stories that try and they each come up with their own weird explanation. None of them make sense. You are better off just not drawing attention to it if that’s something you want. If you want a post-apocalyptic high fantasy story, if you want something like Into the Badlands, which is a post-apocalyptic Kung Fu adventure, you know, you can do that. Those are perfectly viable genres. But in this case, your best option is to just not draw attention to the fact that there aren’t any guns. ‘Cause once you start doing that, it’s going to get weird. Chris: Because guns, once again, they run on basic combustion, right? So it’s really unrealistic for people to just lose the knowledge on how to make a gun. It’s not actually that advanced. Oren: Yeah, guns are actually very easy to make, is the trick with guns. They’re not hard. You can make surprisingly sophisticated guns by hand. But even in that case, even if you were just down to muskets, people would still be using those. And there’s one episode of Sword of Shannara, or Shannara Chronicles, I forget what it’s called, where they run into some humans who are like, “We have rediscovered our old technology, and we have a gun!” and it’s like, man, so those are just around? People could just go find those? I feel like more people would have by this point. Chris: Yeah. Shannara Chronicles is interesting because I do love the aesthetic that they have in the show, where you see old rusted cars and other things like that, that just make it look different than a typical high fantasy. But at the story level, it never feels like it matters that it’s post-apocalyptic, because the technology is never used. I mean, if they started using it pretty soon, it’d become magic tech or technology plus magic, or it would become something else, a different genre. It’s definitely just the aesthetic for the most part. Oren: Right. I mean, Shannara is a story that wants high fantasy aesthetics combined with post-apocalyptic aesthetics. And that’s kind of weird. That’s just very two very different genres. And it mashes them together for, uh, you know, varying levels of success. Hilariously, one story that I saw that had too many bullets was Waterworld. Wes: Yeah. How are they making those? Oren: ‘Cause Waterworld – I mean, as ridiculous as the premise of Waterworld is, we’ve been told that the whole world is flooded, and yet everyone has bullets, everywhere. How are they making the bullets? Where are they getting the metal to make those? I have so many questions. I watched Road Warrior and Waterworld back-to-back and in Road Warrior, I was frustrated, because there would be more guns. And then in Waterworld, I was frustrated, there should be fewer guns. Nobody has the right number of guns, goddammit! [all laugh] Wes: I was frustrated in Waterworld when he went swimming down, and you kind of see the submerged city and I’m like, wait, how deep is this? It seems like an ocean, super deep, but really it’s a few hundred feet deep. And I’m just like, okay, maybe there’s some shallow spots. There are, obviously. But that was a weird movie. Oren: It’s not impossible that they’re just scavenging materials from the ocean floor, right? You know, maybe the whole world is somehow uniformly covered in about a hundred feet of water. Wes: Yeah. [laughs] Oren: Who knows how that works. Chris: They do establish there’s some, cities with tall skyscrapers that you can bet are not that far. But you’d think that if they were doing that much salvaging, we’d see a lot more of it. Oren: Yeah. Of course, they also chose to make the main character a mutant and then basically have that not matter to the plot. So, you know, Waterworld: not-great film. Hot take. Wes: I haven’t talked this much about Waterworld, ever. [laughter] Oren: I do love Waterworld’s magical transforming catamaran though. That thing is rad. Okay. So let’s talk about lost knowledge and urban fantasy, because this comes up in my Sunday role-playing game a lot. And I don’t want to be told that I’m being unrealistic by some of my players, so I better figure this out. Chris: Urban fantasy has a bigger problem, of course, with secret knowledge usually than lost knowledge. Oren: Yeah. That’s, that’s basically how I justify it in my setting. I’m like, okay, so there are people who know this, but they’re all real grumpy and they don’t want to talk to anyone and they don’t want you to know this because it’s their secret or whatever. That’s how I do it. Chris: I mean, it is true that an urban fantasy having secrecy is so common that it has more believability shielding, just because people expect it of urban fantasy. There’s lots of secret societies. How did we not know of them? Eh. As long as you don’t call attention to it too much, you can get away with having a masquerade where thousands of people are all keeping magic secret. Just don’t explain it, as long as you don’t specifically do things where now the plot hinges on why we have to keep this secret. The problem is that too many urban fantasies are trying to make it so that the protagonist has to make sacrifices, like lying to their date or something in order to maintain the secrecy, and we have been given no reason why they need to continue this. As long as you don’t do that, usually you can do a lot of secrecy and secret societies in urban fantasy, even though it’s completely unrealistic. Because again, once a group of people is large enough, somebody is going to tell, especially if they could profit off of it in some way, like sell the information because it would be valuable to somebody else. Once again, useful information does not typically get forgotten, and is very hard to keep secret. Oren: Yeah. It also helps that most of my players made characters who are sort of outcasts and have a backstory that would justify them not knowing a ton of secret lore. So I can have my weird nerd NPC be like, “Hey guys, we want to hear about this secret backstory of this Island?” And they don’t stop to be like, “How come we’ve never heard this before?” Wes: I like the contrivance in the show Grimm where Nick – the main character’s name is Nick, I think – he finds out he’s a Grimm and he’s a Hunter, and his aunt shows up. She dies, but she’s got a trailer full of everything, and he just needs to spend enough time in there researching and he’ll find that lost knowledge. Because apparently there’s one book full of everything. And I remember thinking, wouldn’t you just sit down and read all of it? Take work off for a little while? But no, I guess not. He had to go consult the book in his trailer every now and then every few episodes. And then it had to broaden out to the other monster creatures giving him more information later because it’s all new. Oren: Well, let me tell you as a GM for players who want to just sit down and read all the books, I come up with reasons why they’re not allowed to do that. Chris: We aren’t allowed books anymore! They’re practically forbidden and he won’t give them to us. Wes: The reading is the lost knowledge and Oren imposed it! Oren: Look, I gave you a book once and you wouldn’t stop reading. So I had to stop giving you books! What do I look like, a book generator? [all laugh] Chris: But I mean, frankly, that’s another reason for having lost knowledge. Everybody likes magical mysterious books with arcane knowledge in them. It’s a favourite fantasy trope. And the books mean a lot more if the knowledge in them is super arcane. It’s an excuse to have cool books. Oren: If it’s magic knowledge, I’m actually a big fan of using a variant of the automated forget-me-field where magic knowledge doesn’t really mix very well with the internet. Just because, I don’t know, I prefer looking through ancient libraries to find what I need to using Google. In an urban fantasy story, I think it’s cool. Chris: I was going to say, you mean it in a fictional story, right? [laughs] Oren: Yeah. Wes: No. Real life. Chris: Or do you have some hobby about going to ancient libraries that I didn’t know about? Wes: That was a really funny part in – I want to say maybe seasons three, or four? – of The Magicians. Actually throughout, they’re occasionally just doing internet research, and learning about magic and the Hedge Witches, and share spells on the dark web and stuff… Chris: This is a trope that is so funny in both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural. They both have a web that looks significantly older than our internet. And they find the most obscure occult knowledge on random websites. Especially with Buffy, where the computers just look super old and the websites look super old and janky, and you know, not as much stuff was on the internet in the Buffy era as it is today. But somehow they’re finding these obscure, detailed guides to monsters on some websites somewhere. And in Supernatural, they also always find out how to kill it because we know that every occult book or book of mythology we’ve ever read also has instructions for how the reader can kill whatever it is written right there. Oren: That’s my favorite part. Because I’ve gone to occult websites, I’ve visited a number of them. And they never tell you how to kill the thing. I mean, usually if it’s a god – and it’s surprising how many gods they kill in Supernatural – it’s just sort of assumed you can’t. A lot of these sites are also kind of on the neopagan scale, so they probably wouldn’t want to tell you that anyway, ‘cause it’s kind of disrespectful. And if they’re magical creatures, most of them don’t have a built-in weakness. What is a satyr’s magic weakness? I think in Greek mythology, if you want to kill a satyr, you do it the same way you kill a person. With a sword. I don’t think you need a special gold-plated silver sword or something. But yeah, I love the idea of l them on Supernatura logging on to some occult fan’s website that is talking about how great the Fae are – which is what these sites are actually like – and then at the end being like, “Where does it say how to kill it?” And the webmaster being like, “Why would you want to do that? What’s wrong with you? You weirdos.” But I get why on Supernatural they do internet research. I understand it’s because they are fighting literally a new monster every week. If they did extended dusty library research for all of them, that would just be really unmanageable. Wes: And there’s that idea of the internet having democratized knowledge. Sam and Dean would need to go to better libraries or different ones, all the time. They can’t waste all that time driving around, no matter how much Dean loves that car. Oren: He does love that car, but they don’t have time for that. But even on Supernatural, when they really need to find something important, they spend a few episodes finding an ancient book or something. They don’t look up how to defeat Lucifer online, but if it’s just some random forest god – yeah, they’ll find the answer to that on a website. Very helpful websites. Wes: Now I really want episodes of them contacting and talking to the website moderators and the bloggers. Like, “Whoa, these guys, we keep getting all the information from them. How do they know this? Maybe we should talk to them!” Chris: They do have one meta episode where they have amnesia, so they forget that they’re hunters. And the way that they find out how to kill the ghost that they’ve encountered is by looking up these – there’s these recurring, comedic characters on Supernatural who are fake ghost hunters for their reality TV show and have learned most of what they know from the main characters. So they go look them up and are like, “Oh, these ghost hunters are so great. They said they learned how to do this from these two jerks they met.” And then they take that information from their website. So that’s a little more realistic than the random occult website that tells you how to kill the Fae or something. Wes: That’s good. Oren: Right, because they established that,we know why those guys exist. ‘Cause part of the premise of the setting is that most people don’t know about monsters, so it feels a little odd that there are so many explanations of how to kill them online. Of course, Supernatural also goes with, if they don’t have time for internet research, they just call Bobby, that’s their solution. Chris: That’s true. They do have a character they just call all the time. Oren: Bobby knows lots of stuff. It’s very impressive. You can take this a little farther. We’ve been talking about urban fantasy here, but if you want to bring cosmic horror into it, whether as the full genre or just to give your urban fantasy a little spice – I’m a fan of flavoring urban fantasy with some cosmic horror. Chris: Cosmic horror works surprisingly well inserted into other genres. Oren: It does. I agree. But once you introduce some cosmic horror aesthetics, you can introduce the idea that knowledge is corrosive, that some certain knowledge is bad for you. And once you have that idea, you don’t want to take it too far because it can feel like you’re in a setting where you’re being scolded for learning how black holes work. But for certain weird, dangerous, magical secrets, the idea that this knowledge is harmful to the people who know it is also a pretty good way to at least thematically justify why it’s lost and hidden and why you have to go on a quest to find it. Chris: One explanation that I think worked pretty well is in Game of Thrones, the magic is coming back into the world after being gone for a while. That’s a great way to explain something that has been forgotten if you have a world where there’s sort of natural cycles or an event that happens every couple of thousand years. There might be some records of the last time it happened, but if it only happens that infrequently, then it would be really easy for people to dismiss it or forget about it. Then you can go, “Hey, this is happening. It looks like there is actually a precedent for this.” And then go find that ancient knowledge about the last occurrence. Oren: Right. I mean, if magic stopped working it makes sense that over time records of magic might be lost. And that’s before you introduce the anti-magic conspiracy, that was in the end of the last book. Oh boy. [Chris laughs] Even without that, it makes sense that books are expensive and they take time and money to store and libraries burn. And if there isn’t an obvious use for magical knowledge over centuries – yeah, absolutely, I’d buy that it would disappear. That makes sense. You can have the same thing happen on a more mundane level if you have a sufficient enough societal collapse that the infrastructure to make things is gone. That’s your bronze age collapse, that’s your fall of the Western Roman Empire. Roman concrete is another lost technology that’s talked about all the time. From what I can tell, just from the research that I’ve done is the reason that Roman concrete was lost is primarily the economy to create it ceased to exist. Because the concrete of that time was expensive to make and required ingredients from all over the place, and the Roman empire had the might necessary to make use of a lot of this concrete, but as it fell apart, its various successor states did not. And since no one was using the concrete, the knowledge for it eventually got lost. So that seems reasonable. That’s a thing you can have to justify, but you know, don’t go overboard with it. There’s only so much that will explain. But it’s not a bad place to start. Wes: I like that about the infrastructure and the use and stuff. Because in The Elder Scrolls, one of the biggest mysteries is that this entire race just vanishes, the Dwemer. And I like that they parsed it out and you learn a little bit more or whatever during the games, but if all the people vanished – I guess there’s guardian machines and stuff that are deadly, but, where’d they all go? Oh, okay, let’s just go in there and pick up their files. They must’ve record-kept something in stone. Or at least go in and check out the machines. It’s been thousands of years and they haven’t figured out how to make any Dwemer machinery. That just doesn’t hold up as well. Like how you’ve described it, just because the people are gone… all the tech is there. It’s like what Chris said about our electronic devices: Just open them up and start looking. Oren: Right. Especially as those machines still work. Wes: Yeah, they still work! Oren: There would still be blueprints for them around. And in fact, you might have an easier time getting to them now that the Dwemer, the Skyrim Dwarves, they’re gone. You probably have an easier time getting their stuff, as grim as that is. Depending on what happened to them, there might not be records of it, because they might not have written down the alien invasion that came and took them all, who knows. But there would certainly be access to their stuff. That’s just the case of static technology and fantasy settings, where it’s been like 2000 years and no one has invented anything. It’s like, okay, sure. Wes: They finally got crossbows in Skyrim. It took them a while, but they got them. Oren: The Elder Scrolls engine can only handle so much, all right? What do you want from it? Wes: Good point. I like how you get crossbows, and then of course you go on some lost knowledge quest to go find out that yes, the Skyrim Dwarves had crossbows and they’re better than the ones we have now. Oren: Those dwarves, always lording it over us. Wes: They just can’t help it. Oren: All right. Well, thank you for discussing this topic with me, but I’m afraid this podcast is going to have to become lost knowledge because we are at the end of our time. But thankfully we have the internet, at least for now. So it will be propagated to all of the listeners, we hope. Maybe the use for the Mythcreant podcast will fall away and then the knowledge will be lost. We may never know. But for those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, he is an urban fantasy writer, and connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?     Related StoriesBuilding Crescent City: How Maas Remixed Old Tropes 317 – Plot and Character Are Not Enemies 316 – Prescriptivism  

Plot and character, the eternal enemies. Everyone knows that if your story has a plot, it means your characters are one-dimensional clichés, and if you have deep characters, it means your plot is non-existent. Will these two wild kids ever reconcile? Yes, they will, because character and plot are not enemies. In fact, they go together like peanut butter and chocolate. In this episode we’ll prove it by looking at what people actually mean when they say “character driven,” how plot actually strengthens character, and how it’s conflict all the way down. Download Episode 317  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TMP-317-Plot-and-Character-are-not-enemies.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet Fruits Basket How to Craft a Character-Driven Story The Curse of Chalion The Murderbot Diaries The Matrix Fast and Furious Flat Characters Story Development Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Nichole. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Voiceover: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is… Chris: Chris Oren: and Wes: Wes Oren: {Fight announcer voice] And place your bets folks, place your bets. We got a good fight for you today. We got plot versus character. Two cornerstones of modern storytelling into the ring. One cornerstone of modern storytelling exits the ring, shortly after the other cornerstone of storytelling exits the ring after being declared the winner. [Regular voice] Nothing, guys got nothing for me. [laughter] My gosh. So today we are talking about plot and character and how they are not enemies. But people think that they are, and it bothers me so much. I get so annoyed. [Laughter] Chris: This is basically a therapy session for Oren. Oren: I’m so mad. Chris: Like, okay Oren. Tell me more about how the bad people hurt your feelings.  [Laughter] Oren: They did. It was bad. Okay. I see all these posts about how I want a character-driven story that doesn’t have any plot or this story has too much plot and that meant it didn’t have any characters or whatever. And if people treat them like they are opposing values, to have more of one, you have to have less of the other. And it’s just not true. It’s, that’s just a fake, it’s false. And not only is it false, it’s a bad concept because it means that people mis-categorize what it is they liked a story in the first place. And mis-attribute things that are actually good or bad to the wrong story. And so what I think this is coming from is that people, when they say character-driven, in my experience, what they usually mean is that it has very little external conflict. In my experience, that’s usually what people mean when they say character-driven. Chris: So if I were to have a big action plot, but it only moves forward when the main character is proactively disrupting things to vent their angst. That’s not character-driven. Because there happens to be shooting in it. Oren: No, I’m saying that that could be. I’m saying people are using the term wrong because when people say character-driven, they almost always are referring to books, like A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet or Fruits Basket, the anime. But what I would argue actually defines those books or those stories isn’t being character-driven because different stories have different levels of how much the characters are driving the story. And how deep the character exploration is. What makes those stories distinct is that they have very little external conflict or in the case of Small Angry Planet they have very little external conflict until they’re suddenly a really big one. And then it’s gone and we don’t talk about it anymore. [Laughter] Because of this people imagine that if you have a lot of plot, like if your plot is big and exciting that your characters are going to suffer, but that’s just not true. What you do ideally is you figure out ways to make the character work with the plot and they work together. And they’re almost the same thing. Storytelling is too big to conceptualize all at once. So we break it down into categories, but that can have the effect of people assuming these things aren’t really related. It’s like, talking about whether a body is heart-driven or lungs-driven. Those are things that you need both. You need both of them. Chris: Going back to the terms, character-driven, and plot-driven. Are people using those as synonyms for this story that has a lot of character and little plot? And this story has a lot of plot and little character? Because when I hear the word driven, what I assume is it’s about the movement in the story, but that doesn’t necessarily seem to be the way that people are using those terms. Oren: I mean sort of, but also no. And this is why I brought up Angry Planet and Fruits Basket because Angry Planet actually doesn’t have very much character in it. The characters get very little development. They are around a lot and they talk a lot, but they don’t really move and they aren’t really complex. There’s a little bit of development on Lovey the AI and whether or not she’s going to choose to get a body or not. And then Rosemary has one scene where she gets over being guilty about her dad and she and Sissix are in a romance suddenly. Chris: Not a very well-developed romance. Yeah. It’s all… Oren: Right. It’s not very well developed and the other characters are all like that, right? Like suddenly in one scene, the engineer character Kizzy I think is her name, feels like she isn’t good under pressure. Which is weird cause she was just super good under pressure, but then she resolves it by talking to another character. And the captain kind of gets a little more okay with his girlfriend going on dangerous missions, but he was only a little, not okay with it before. So there’s actually very little character in the supposedly character-driven story. And what I think is happening is people are seeing the superficial element of it having a little external conflict. And assuming that means it must be character-driven when what they actually like about it is that its light. Whereas take something like Fruits Basket, Fruits Basket is not always light. Fruits Basket can get very dark, but Fruits Basket is also described as character-driven. And the reason it’s described that way is because it doesn’t have much external conflict, but it does have a lot of character because it has internal conflicts. It has lots of plot. Fruits Basket has a plot all over the place. It’s just the plot is inside. The plot was inside you the whole time. [Laughter] Wes: No Oren: Fruits Basket we have Tohru who will she choose romance? That’s a plot. We have, Kyo struggled to value himself. That’s a plot. You have Yuki recovering from his abuse. That’s a plot. Those are all plots. They’re just internal plots. They aren’t external. And so calling it a story that has character rather than the plot is just, it is just incorrect. It is just not the right thing to say. Wes: How are those internal plots different from internal arcs? They’re synonyms? Chris: Same thing. Some storytelling terms are used differently by different people. At Mythcreants when we say plots and arcs and threads and lines, those are all synonyms for each other. We just have lots of different words for that one thing. Wes: Yeah, cause I’m, I’m definitely picking up on the linguistic hiccups that are probably happening here because a lot of times plot is predominantly described as just a sequence of events connected by causing and effect. And that’s distinct from an arc, which is an interior. Chris: Right. Wes, arcs are traditionally used for internal arcs, right? Like character arc, for instance, that is an arc. Right. But we would also say external arc because they’re the same thing. The only difference is that one is about emotions and the other is about external threats for instance. But they’re both basically conformed to the same structure and work in pretty much the same ways. And so we just, again, we call all of those arcs or we call them plot lines or we call them plot threads. Yeah. [Laughter] Some of our different language comes from the fact that we’ve been writing for a while now, and our ideas on language have evolved over time. [Laughter] So we’ve used different things. Right now, I use the word arcs a lot and then more and more using the word arcs because I like the fact that it implies a specific shape and structure that line doesn’t. Oren: So I have a whole post on writing character-driven stories and I usually recommend that people use an external plot just because it’s easier to get readers interested in an external plot. It’s not like you have to, you can get readers interested in internal conflicts. But it’s just harder, but there are so many great stories that use external conflicts to get really deep into characters. If you watch TV, Deep Space 9 is one. The characters on Deep Space 9 are so deep and that’s all driven by external conflict. The writers like to create an external conflict, tie it to some internal problem the character is having, and they use that as a way to make you care about the character. And look character and plot working together, living in perfect harmony. If you want a book, I would recommend The Curse of Chalion. Also extremely deep into character. It’s basically a character study of Caz as he becomes less self-hating. Chris: As he recovers, basically from his trauma. Oren: As he recovers from his trauma. It’s great. And it has a strong, external conflict. So both of those have plots. Those all have plots. It’s all plots. It’s plots all the way down. [Laughter] Chris: Again at Mythcreants we also…Going back to what you were saying Wes about arcs and the association with the word arc with a character arc. Again we feel like that character arc is really just structured the same way you would structure, you know, an arc that’s about people shooting each other. Right. And so what I was saying, yeah it’s all plot. That’s, that journey that, that character went on that was focused on their feelings and emotion was character-driven or character-centered, is also plot. Wes: I mean, I was fascinated to hear everything Oren has said, especially when he pitched the idea because I’m less familiar with this. As far as I’m concerned if somebody says it’s a plot-driven story, that I’m just gonna understand that, “Oh, okay, the external plot is the primary focus.” There still is character stuff, you know. And if it’s a character-driven story, the characters take the primary focus. There’s still an external plot. I never kind of thought that some people would be saying that there wouldn’t be, but I mean, I like the idea that it can be hand in hand, but I think probably in practice, one is going to take up more screen time as it were. Chris: Well, that is possible, I mean, we’ve talked previously about multitasking. Just calling them inverse isn’t really correct because it takes off the pressure to multitask. And to come up with external arcs and internal arcs that work together really well. Usually, the instruction I usually give people is, “Okay, what is it that you want your character problem to be? What challenges are they facing? Now make sure your external conflicts forced the issue. Right?” If they are having trouble trusting people, make sure they go through an external problem that they can’t solve without trusting somebody. Right. If they need to be more, open-minded make them face an external problem that requires them to be open-minded. And so then we get that nice juncture where they’re working together. And we’re doing multitasking where it’s always possible for story elements to compete with each other on some level. If you have half of the story taken up by scenes that are just fight scenes, where people aren’t talking, it’s just a lot of shooting and car crashes, that may not have tons of character development in it. Wes: Right. And I guess that’s kind of my point. I think writers have, you know, some preferences in certain ways. And so at the end of the day, there’s only so many words and it’s going to lean. Oren: It will, absolutely. Wes: But to think that you do one at the expense of the other is kind of asinine. Oren: So what I’m trying to get across here is that the presence of an external conflict is actually independent of whether or not the story has a plot. Because the story can have a plot. It can be a lot of different things. It can be an external conflict. That’s usually the easiest way to do it. But again, plots can also be internal conflict and that is where you’re going to get your character development going. But a story that doesn’t have either, which is why I brought up Angry Planet, is not character-driven. People think it’s character-driven because they’ve been trained to associate the lack of an external conflict with character-driven stories, because in some cases if you don’t have a big external conflict that does leave you more time to focus on the internal ones. And that’s one of the reasons why Fruits Basket has so many internal conflicts, is because it doesn’t have any time to spend on an external one. It just can spend them all on internal conflict, but those are still plots, right? They’re just internal plots. Chris: Another story that I think again, merges them really well is I would say All Systems Red. The first book in the Murderbot series. And this the Murderbot books, they are actually, when it comes to the external conflict, they are episodic, right? We pretty much, I mean, there’s some things that tie over the next book. For the most part, we solve the big external problem in each book, but it has slow character growth throughout. And it’s that character journey that kind of unites them together. And the first book has a lot of action but also dwells on its main character a lot.  And the main character’s feelings a lot. Um, and so there’s, there’s definitely not an inverse relationship there. It manages to do both very well, but again, you’re right that there’s only so much page space, but what Oren is saying is that, when we have that character dream, that’s also the plot. Oren: In movies, for example, movies, you tend to get a lot of movies that have an external conflict that they give all the time, too, at the expense of any internal conflicts. And sometimes these movies are good, like The Matrix, and sometimes they’re less good, like the Fast and Furious. Uh, which is just, you know, not as good a movie as The Matrix, hot take. The Matrix has very simple character arcs, like internal character conflicts. It’s got Neo’s development into believing in himself. He has to learn to believe in himself. Uh, and then that allows him to fly. So he’s basically a fairy, now that I say that. And you know, Trinity has a little bit of a thing going where she sort of falls in love with Neo, a little if you squint real hard, you can see it. But The Matrix is a movie, it has a very limited amount of time. And so they chose to focus almost all of it on the external conflict of Kung Fu fighting The Agents. And in a novel that had more time, you would almost certainly have had more internal character conflict because otherwise, it would be very boring because these characters would just be around forever and never changing. Uh, you know, we talked to this a little bit in the flat podcast, a while back, where the longer characters around the more people will expect them to have some kind of internal arc, because otherwise, it’s just like, well, they’ve just been here forever and they’re always one note. Chris: Um, I will say another reason why people tend to think that plot and character are opposed is because they see what happens when bad character choices made by the storyteller are motivated by trying to get the plot to work. Right. And so if there is a plot hole and an order to cover for that, the storyteller just makes the characters do things that just don’t make sense. They don’t have good motivation. They’re out of character. They’re inconsistent with the character, they tend to assume that somehow this is like a plot versus character battle. When what really, what happened is that the plot was weak. It wasn’t like the plot took over the character, it’s that the plot had problems and the character was compromised to try to fill that plot hole. And they went burning down together. Whereas, if the plot had been better, that wouldn’t have been an issue. Oren: Right. So just for reference from now on, anytime you treat plot and character like they’re an opposition, you’re saying that the Game of Thrones finale had a good plot. So don’t, don’t do that. Chris: The Game of Thrones finale does not have a good plot. [Laughter] Oren: No, but that, but that is the one that everyone was talking about. There was a, you know, after the three-day, the glorious three-day period where everyone was just unified and understanding exactly what was wrong with it, the hot takes came. And one of the hot takes was, “Oh, well this is what happens when you spend too much time on your plot.” And it’s like, “no, they didn’t spend enough time on their plot.” Their plot was very bad. And as a result, their characters suffered because it’s all the same thing. If your heart starts to give out your lungs are not going to keep going like nothing happened. [Laughter] Chris: Conversely, we have some people who are saying, “Oh, well, you know, I can’t have any progress on my plot because this is just what my character would do, which is nothing.” [Laughter] Wes: Then don’t include it. [Laughter] Chris: Well, I think that the storyteller’s job is to look into that character and see what stimulus would motivate them. Right. What stimulus would get them moving, would change them, what have you. And if the idea that a person would never change under any circumstances, is obviously there’s something, there’s not nothing. So, you know, this whole herding cats concept, you’ve got, okay, once you know your character really well, it actually becomes easier to do that. Easier to build a plot around that character, because these are my character’s personal issues. This is their sore point. Okay. Now I’m going to bring in a plot stimulus that hits them right there and they’re going to react. Right. And that takes knowing the character well. Once again, a good like dynamic understanding of your character as a deep and changing person helps you build a plot that works for that character. But yeah, that’s another reason why people think that plot and character are enemies when they’re not. Oren: Right, I mean, it’s like if your character, if you’re having a problem moving the story forward because your character wouldn’t do the thing that you need them to do. Then, your options are to either craft a different plot that will work with that character or change the character. Those are your options. It’s gotta be one or the other. Chris: [Shocked voice] Change my character. Wes: Gasp Oren: And you know, both are valid, right? If your character can’t be changed, you can make a different plot. That’s a thing. Find the plot that works with the character. That’s how it’s got to work. Okay. You can’t have the heart and the lungs fighting. It’s just not going to work out. Chris: Yeah. Obviously, at Mythcreants we don’t get precious about our characters. You know, for instance, we want them to be likable. We talk about, “Hey, maybe you can make your character a little more, either sympathetic or selfless to make them likable”. So there’s no “gasp” over I’m making alterations to the characters. Oren: Well, I mean, I’ve just gotten darn good at hiding it. [Laughter] Chris: That’s true. Oren: Look, I hate changing anything. Okay. I love all of my words are beautiful and perfect and I don’t want to change them, but you know, I do anyway. Cause that’s what you gotta do sometimes. I just want to get to a point where I will stop hearing character-driven as a synonym for boring. Cause that’s where I am right now. Every time anytime someone says character-driven, I’m like, “Oh. What you mean is that it doesn’t have much happening.” And because you’ve identified the lack of external plot and assumed that it must be character-driven, but lacking an external plot doesn’t mean it has good internal plots the way that Fruits Basket does. Because internal plots are very hard. More often than not, when a story is lacking an external plot, it’s also lacking an internal plot. And then the characters aren’t driving anything. They’re not changing. They’re just around. They’re just all there. Chris: Right. And a good thing to keep in mind is that a internal plot is compelling, intense for basically the same reasons as an external one is right. You have a problem. And it has to, there has to be consequences that matter if that problem is not solved. Right. So it’s like, “why does this situation matter? Why is it a problem?” If the character, for instance, doesn’t trust people and that’s their problem that needs to change, why does that matter? What are the consequences that could happen if they don’t learn to trust people, right? How will that negatively affect them? And whether that matters also, you know, it depends on their likeability. The more we get the audience to care about this character, the more that it matters, if they don’t want to trust people. Because that negatively affects them. For instance, that is one of the tricky things about, internal arcs internal plot is that it does depend on a higher level of attachment to the character. It’s a lot easier to get people to care about a city being destroyed. Right. Because people will understand, “Oh yeah, lots of people dying that’s bad”. Right. But then when you lower the stakes down to like, “Hey. Can this character recover from their trauma?” That depends on caring about their character and caring about whether that character will recover from their trauma. So it’s really important to bond with that character. Oren: The reason that Fruits Basket goes so out of its way to make Tohru like the most likable character you could find, that’s all it’s got for a while. And then it also has a lot of novelty with the animal spirits cause the characters can turn into animals sometimes. And that also kind of helps. But if it didn’t have those things, if you don’t like Tohru, then nothing about Fruits Basket is going to work. Chris: Just to go into a little bit about what the show does. In the first episode, if you haven’t seen Fruits Basket, Tohru is living in a tent, talking to a photo of her dead mom. [Laughter] Oren: Oh, no. [Laughter] Wes: Oh gosh. Chris: Just like the optimum, but like, she’s also very, very positive about it and she’s like “I’m going to make you proud of me mom”. And it’s just like, Oh my God the cinnamon roll. The sympathetic cinnamon roll. But yeah, that’s the first episode, we discover that it goes out of its way to make her super sympathetic, but also to make her very overly kind and selfless in her behavior towards other people. So you definitely care about Tohru before the whole thing gets going and that’s what makes it work. Wes: So if somebody is looking to sit down to write a story. We probably should just then advise them, focus on everything, or should they try to build one of the two? It’s, I’m trying to escape a binary, but it seems like you need to build the entire ship at once, but you can’t. And so what parts do you pick first and, we talked about character and motivation, but if the plot forces decisions on a character, then the readers should know how the character arrived at the decision that they made. And so, how do you recommend that? [Laughter] Chris: We actually talked about, if you remember Wes, in our previous podcast about developing story ideas. Wes: Yes. Let me go listen to that real quick. [Laughter] Chris: Right. But the idea is that you can start anywhere and you know, it has to. Again, when I think of a story I think about looking at the whole thing holistically. Some people are discovery writers who don’t know what they’re writing until they get done writing it out to see where they’re going with it. And then they have to go back and kind of rethink it. But if you are planning at some level and most people plan at least a little bit, you start with what you’re interested in, and then you find out where that fits. Is it, is it the character’s internal journey? Is it an external conflict? Is it some piece of the world? And then you build other things around to support that. Right. And then hopefully once you’re done with that process, you already have an internal arc and an external arc that mesh with each other. Some people aren’t going to want to do that combo. Some people are going to want to just, they don’t like external conflicts that much, and they want to focus on their internal arcs. I do think that in most cases it’s just beneficial to have both. They compliment each other really well. External conflict keeps things moving and it makes it easier to create tension. And the internal conflict gives you a break from the action and adds emotional meaning and depth. And that’s just easiest. It’s not that people, yeah I can’t do other things. Wes: Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, you’re saying “Hey, things will happen in your story.” Please make things happen. And then your characters need to respond to the things that happen. Chris: Yeah. Now things can happen with just, as we were saying with Fruits Basket, things do happen in external arcs. So if you want nothing but relationships and character growth and those types of emotional plot, things can still happen. The plot can still move, but it admittedly is more challenging for the storyteller, because again for your audience to care, they have to be more attached to your character than they would for an external conflict. And most people just have more trouble coming up with things that move the story and plot points if it’s all internally focused, it feels fuzzier to people. Right. You can do the same things. It’s just having both is just an easier way to do it and works well in a wide variety of situations. And there’s also not like, you can have both and focus a little bit more on the internal arcs. You just have to be careful because in some cases, you’ll have an external plot that’s like “doom is at hand”. And then like five scenes where the characters like, “Oh, I know doom is at hand, but let’s have dinner together and talk about our feelings”. And it’s like, “Okay, but the doom is at hand. Why, why aren’t you paying attention to doom?” Oren: I’d say one of the most common issue that my clients have in this area is that they have an external conflict and they have an internal conflict. They just don’t know how to make them work together. So changing some details so that I’m not specifically talking about this story, but this is based off of a couple of stories that I’ve edited. I had a hypothetical manuscript where the protagonist just learned that they were a wizard and they had to learn to do wizard magic because if they didn’t then something bad was going to happen. Their arch arch-nemesis was going to come kick their butt. If they didn’t learn how to do wizard magic, real good. Chris: This is a very compelling opening. Oren: Right. But they also had a thing where they had this like really deep wound, a really deep emotional wound from this time that their sibling betrayed them. But this isn’t related to the wizard storyline. And so those two things are working against each other. As a result, what you ended up with is a story where it does feel like character and plot are in opposition because anytime the character is like, “Okay, I got to do some wizard training” and does a wizard training montage. It’s like, “Well, what about the sister? Where was that component? What about that sister thing? It was compelling. And she betrayed you, but like, you still love her. What’s up with that.” And then anytime that the character went to be like, “I need to figure out how I feel about my sister. It’s like, isn’t that wizard going to come to kick your butt. Shouldn’t you be training?” [Laughter] Chris: The obvious solution is to make the sister the wizard that’s going to come to pick your butt. Wes: Definitely. Yeah. Chris: Right? Oren: Sometimes it literally is that simple. Chris: Sometimes it’s not that simple, but sometimes it is that simple. Oren: I’ve got, I’m glad that you, you got where I was going with this. I’m glad we’ve reached that level. Chris: It goes back to multitasking. Right? We were talking about, making it so that everything is like, your story is consolidated. Everything is tightly connected and it’s easier to focus more than one thing at a time. Oren: All right. Well, with that example, I think we will wrap things up because while plot and character may not be enemies, time limits and podcasts are. So we have reached the end of ours. I appreciate everyone coming to my rant session, where I yell about this term that I don’t like. This is what you eventually reach when you run a writing podcast with some excellent, fine people. So those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber, he is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo she lives at the Rambo geeks dot com.  We’ll talk to you all next week. Voiceover: If you enjoyed this podcast and want to slip us some gold-pressed latinum. Head on over to patrion.com/mythcreants. We appreciate it. [Song out] Voiceover: This has been the mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton. P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?     Related StoriesSix Ways to Make Fantasy Travel More Interesting Five Common Story Fragmentations and How to Consolidate Them 315 – Flat Characters  

The term “prescriptivism” gets thrown around a lot, often to describe some pretty bad behavior, but what does it really mean? That’s what we’re investigating this week, because we don’t want to be prescriptivist about it. We discuss how language changes depending on context, what effects technology has, and why it’s a bad idea to make word pedantry your entire personality. Also, is prescriptivism just for grammar and wordcraft? Does it apply to storytelling advice? WHO KNOWS!? Download Episode 316  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TMP-316-Prescriptivism.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Singular They Because Internet Red Pencil Conference Christy Abram AAVE Bryan Garner Bloodletting Language Governing Bodies Dyslexia Content Editing The Hero’s Journey French Academy Rules Books on Writing Science Fiction The Book Thief Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Olivia SB. 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, Wes: Wes, Chris: and Oren: Oren. Chris: Now, I say that we need to have a half hour podcast. And since I requested this topic, I’m going to need to introduce it, and then at the end of the half hour, I think Oren should call it closed and say that our time’s up and list some patrons. Now, the question is, am I being prescriptivist? Wes: Ooh! Chris: Let’s hear your yea or nay. Oren: This is a hot spicy take! Wes: I’m an immediate nay. Oren: What I’ve discovered from researching is that prescriptivism means different things depending on who you’re talking to. I would say no, that just sounds like deciding on a format for the podcast. Now, I would say it would definitely qualify as prescriptivist to me if you were like, ‘Every podcast must be half an hour, introduced by Chris and then ended with a round out by Oren, all podcasts everywhere’. Also, that would just be a lot of work, I don’t think we have time for that. Chris: So it’s not merely making a prescription that makes me prescriptivist, it’s specifically making a bad description, a prescription. Oren: As far as I can tell, in the circles that I run in, a prescriptivist basically means demanding that everyone conform to what’s currently in the dictionary and that language never change. Or at least what the person thinks is in the dictionary- it’s hilarious because sometimes they’re wrong, like sometimes the dictionary has moved faster than they have. Chris: Yeah, let’s go over what the definitions are, and I have one, and if you have your own, Wes, or you want to say more, Oren, you can. So, Wikipedia. Again, prescriptivism and calling something prescriptivist, if you’ve ever been on any online discussions of fiction writing, you’ve almost certainly seen somebody say this, and call something prescriptive or call somebody prescriptivist. So, Wikipedia says ‘Linguistic prescription, or prescriptive grammar, is the attempt to establish rules to finding preferred or correct usage of language’, as opposed to the descriptive approach, or descriptivism, in academic linguistics, which observes and records how language is actually used, and in linguistics that can really make a huge difference as to whether you consider language constructs to be a matter of what we are actually saying, they’re all equally valid, or you tell people that one way of saying something is correct. Like you can’t ask if you can do something, only if you may. You remember with the teacher like, ‘Can I go to the bathroom?’ ‘I don’t know, can you?’ Oren: Yeah, that whole thing. I mean that’s certainly what most people I encounter mean when they say prescriptivist, is they just mean someone who insists that it was in a grammar book they read once, so it has to be correct forever, in all circumstances. Chris: What’s interesting is that this is very much tailored to the linguistics field, and it’s obviously what- when people use it for fiction writing, it’s obviously derived from this, but it also doesn’t really quite fit because this, again, is tailored to linguistics. Wes, do you have any input on this? Wes: Yeah, I think every kind of casual discussion about this on the internet is just using it wrong. So allow me to just point out that your personal language preference is yours. Go for it. But your usage preference is not a usage fact and it should not be held as such. Opinions and facts are two different things. If I think that this sounds better, or if I suggest that anytime Oren says ‘I’m done’, and I say, ‘No, you’re not done, you’re finished, you’re not well-cooked’, Oren should just say, ‘You’re welcome to think that, and I’m going to continue saying this, end of conversation.’ And if I’m being a reasonable prescriptivist, I should accept that, and then go look in a dictionary and find out that usage for saying ‘I’m done’, meant to mean completed or finished, has been around since the 14th century, so. Everybody who decides to find an obscure rule to justify their preference is doing this wrong, and I hate them. Oh my gosh. Cause I generally lean- I’m a copy editor, I have strong prescriptivist tendencies, but I’m reasonable about it. Why can’t we all just be reasonable about it, you guys? Oren: Well I guess the other extreme from the person who’s like, ‘No, no singular they, because it wasn’t taught in grammar school when I was a kid’, would be the linguistic nihilist who thinks that nothing matters and you can just type whatever letters you want in any order and it’s all equally useful. Fortunately I’ve never encountered a person who actually thinks that. I have seen memes about it, but I know for a fact that the person making the meme didn’t think that, because if they had then I would not have been able to read what they wrote, because the meme itself was made according to certain conventions and best practices so that it would be spread as memes are. And if it was really just like, ‘Whatever, nothing matters, you can just do anything and it’s all equally valid’, then it would just be gibberish, and that’s not what anything is. No one actually thinks that, some people joke about it, but it’s not real. Wes: We struggle with breaking out of binaries. You’re either a prescriptivist or a descriptivist, and they’re not opposites, good descriptivism includes a measure of prescriptivism and vice versa. A prescriptivist might say ‘Irregardless is not a word, it should not be in the dictionary’, but a descriptivist should say, ‘People say it, it should be in the dictionary, but if you put it in the dictionary and don’t point out that it’s generally not considered standard, then it’s a disservice, because there’s no context, there’s no information around it.’ So you have to have both, if you want to accurately convey information to people, and then they can decide on what to use. Chris: Or a descriptivist could also say that people use it, it means the same thing as regardless. Wes: And they do, they do do that. That’s kind of my point, is a good dictionary includes words- look up ‘literally’, all dictionaries include the two senses of the word now, but they’ll point out which one is sense one, which is considered the main definition of that word, but they will point out that people will use literally to mean figuratively and, it’s good to know that. It’s just, dictionaries do a lot more work in providing people with etymological context and things like this, so, it’s not a Bible, it’s just a record. Chris: Yeah, I think that the issue here is that when we’re talking about just studying linguistics and the way that people speak, we’re talking about, again, descriptivism is about recording what’s there, it’s not about making recommendations, and it’s not about how do we meet our goals for communication, descriptivism doesn’t genuinely fulfill that, that’s not its purpose. It’s purpose is simply to watch and see how things are changing and evolving and what people are doing, and so if you want to meet some goal with your communication, you have to have some level of prescriptivism that is simply based on our goals. Whether it’s sounding sophisticated or just being clear, like I know, Oren, you’ve mentioned that you read a short story in a magazine that had no double quotes around the dialogue. Oren: Yeah, it had no quotation marks, it was really hard to figure out what dialogue was, and it was like, yeah, that’s a thing that no one would let you get away with, except in this case this was written by a famous author, so they were allowed to get away with it. Because that actively made the thing harder to read. I thought it was actually a mistake. I emailed the magazine asking if I’d gotten a bad copy and they were like, ‘No, that was an authorial choice.’ It’s like, okay, well, it was an objectively bad one. It made the story harder to read. And I don’t know why you would want to do that, that just seems like a bad idea, and you can only get away with it when you’re famous and the magazine just wants to have your story. And I would say that in general, language changes regardless, it’s gonna change, it just does, that’s just how language do, especially when new modes of communication are discovered and become common- certain forms of communication are better suited to certain technologies. There’s a great book called Because Internet that goes really into the details of how different online communication forums influence the way people write. Chris: And if you really want to see the descriptivist mindset that’s also a really great book because there’s been so much pushback about, ‘Oh no, internet writing is terrible.’ And that book works actively against that to show that it’s not actually gonna get rid of nice, formal writing, because casual writing exists now and it has a purpose and it’s not just crude, right? Oren: Right, and I mean, in my experience, generally speaking, if a linguistic convention is not helpful in communicating, it just won’t stick around. I don’t know, I’m not an expert, but that’s been my experience, is that people don’t use linguistic conventions of any kind that aren’t helpful, because they’re unclear and they’re confusing, so people stop using them, unless you’re in an environment where they’re being enforced for some reason, and the internet, they aren’t, so, you end up with very specialized types of communication that might not work well in a academic essay or in a long form piece. Like I wouldn’t, I don’t write Mythcreants articles the same way that I chat about the last game session we had. Wes: Now I want to see that, though. Chris: But the funny thing about this is that it’s quite possible that the author who wrote this short story without quotes around the dialogue felt like, ‘Oh, the idea you have to have quotes, it’s very prescriptivist.’ Oren: I guess. Chris: You know, we don’t want quotes there for the sake of having quotes, we want quotes there so that the communication comes across, so it’s easy to tell what is dialogue and what is not, and it’s not confusing the reader. We have a goal, a communication goal, which is to be clear about what is dialogue and what is regular narration, and that is what we recommend, having quotes, in order to achieve that goal. But from somebody else’s perspective, that’s prescriptivist. Wes: Interfering with my art! Oren: I think that your goal, presumably, is to communicate clearly in most cases. That’s usually assumed to be the goal, a good editor is going to help you with that. And in some cases that may involve being like, ‘Okay, so you’re doing this thing that isn’t really appropriate in this context.’ And that can get a little tricky, especially if there’s some marginalized aspect involved, but there are still- just because you did something non-standard that doesn’t automatically make it a good idea, people make mistakes. My favorite anecdote about this was when I was at the Red Pencil Conference for the Editors Guild here in the Pacific Northwest. This was in the before times, of 2019, wooh. And I took a workshop taught by Christy Abram, who was great, and it was on AAVE, African American Vernacular English. And part of the workshop was that she gave us all a sample of work written in AAVE and we were supposed to edit it. Now of course, we’re a bunch of liberal white editors, so we at least knew better than to put our foot in it by marking every AAVE convention as wrong. So we all chose to be very cautious because we didn’t want to mark something wrong when that’s actually just how AAVE works. But as a result we ended up missing a number of actual mistakes, and if we had been paid to edit that that would have been a disservice to the author who paid us. So the lesson there was that if you’re going to edit AAVE, learn AAVE, learn how it works, and then you can edit it properly and you won’t be crossing stuff off because it’s not standard, quote unquote, English, but you also won’t miss mistakes because you’re trying to be light-handed. Chris: So, Wes, do you want to talk a little bit more about what would be considered prescriptivist in copy editing? Because we just talked about the fact that descriptivism just doesn’t cover the idea of giving recommendations to meet your communication goals. Wes: Right. Chris: But clearly one copy editor will call other copy editors prescriptivist. So then the question is, since you all are making essentially what are prescriptions, technically, where you would draw that line and how do you think of it in the copy editing context, as opposed to in the linguistics context. Wes: So, if you’re making a prescription from your own personal preferences, you shouldn’t do that. That’s wrong. That’s not what prescriptivism is. Good editors who prescribe their advice are basing that on a style guide or a style sheet that they make when they’re working on a manuscript. And so, we’re being prescriptivist in the sense that we’re drawing on an established authority, ideally you’ve agreed with the writer on that established authority, so you know what words, etcetera, you can use, but you might imagine that in larger editing houses where there are editors on teams doing certain passes, and one editor feels like this should just be fine, we don’t need to change that, and somebody else says, ‘No, per our style guide, it has to be this’, and then they get into an argument over what’s the harm- if you say ‘not only’, do you always have to say ‘but also’ to finish it off? And, for a long time, a lot of people in constructions have said yes, in most of the style guides, and then the copy chief of Random House, Benjamin Dreyer, says, ‘It’s fine, you can just say “not only” and then “but”, it’s fine, that “only” can probably be better used elsewhere.’ So there’s definitely things that come with these kinds of discussions of, ‘We’ve used these types of structures for a long time, do they still serve a practical role anymore?’ And that’s why, we’ve talked about dictionaries, but usage guides- Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage is a great example of generally a descriptivist kind of book, even though he has prescriptivist tendencies, just saying how we’re using these things. There was, for a long time in the 20th century, this idea that you shouldn’t use sentence level adverbs, like saying ‘Hopefully it’s not going to rain tomorrow.’ And Bryan Garner was like, ‘Look, no one’s winning this. Just let it go, I’ll update my book.’ But generally in my own experience of copy editing, there are things that just come down to preference, and so it’s not, it’s tough, because you should allow people to use their preferences, and the writer should get to use the writer’s preferences. If the copy editor has a preference, that copy editor had best be backing that up with some serious facts. If the writer is using this word and the copy editor says, ‘I’m very unfamiliar with this word, I went and looked it up and turns out it’s a variant for this word, and it’s not in much usage, so your readers might be confused’, that, finally we’re getting somewhere, but, like I said, it’s being reasonable about it, not saying that the fact that you said that word it’s wrong and you red pen it. Chris: I will say, because I think this is relevant when we’re talking about style guides, I used to have this boss, and I was a designer, so it was a completely different context, but I would talk about trying to make the design consistent, and he would just keep quoting them at me, ‘Oh, you know, pointless consistencies’- Wes: Oh no! Chris: And I was trying to point out that consistency also creates a impression of professionalism. So in some of those cases, if you have a style guide for one work, that sort of makes the work look more professional, because it has consistent rules that it follows, whereas when it’s inconsistent, it’s probably also just more likely to be disorienting or confusing because you’re changing what you’re doing, but also it just looks less professional. And so in some cases it’s hard to articulate why you’d want to use consistency or why it’s important, but there’s still a reason. Now, granted, if there was a big, compelling reason to not be consistent in that case- I think what our actual argument with my boss was, was the advantages of being consistent versus the advantages of breaking consistency in that particular instance. And clearly I didn’t think his reasons for breaking consistency were compelling enough and he clearly didn’t think that my reasons for being consistent were compelling enough, but we would have had a much better discussion if we had talked about those reasons, as opposed to just talking about what is the point of consistency or criticizing or that kind of thing. Wes: Yeah. And those discussions are really important, because you could see how in any kind of similar situation, you might find some common ground, and then you start locking things down, and then at that point you suddenly are on your way to kind of creating best practices, and you’ve- what is a style guide other than a bunch of people who get together, hash things out, find what they like, and then they put that work out into the world, and if the world starts liking it, then it gets adopted. Because they’re like, ‘Oh, these are great consistent rules.’ Mythcreants is very particular about how we stylize headers and use other types of things in our style sheet, and we do some of our compound words and hyphens and things like that and spacing differently than Merriam Webster’s and stuff, so we consider those- and we’re consistent with them, they’re just representative of our best practices, and like Chris said, they keep us consistent and we think it shows off a more polished website. Oren: I certainly prefer websites to be consistent unless they have a strong reason not to, or any place where I am reading a thing. I just get used to reading things a certain way, and if they start changing how they do stuff, it’s kind of irritating. It’s like, ‘It was like that earlier, hang on, I got to refigure my brain, that takes longer than it used to, okay? I’m getting old, cut me some slack here.’ Chris: So probably in the copy and ink context when you say prescriptivism or you’re calling somebody a prescriptivist, ‘You dirty prescriptivist!’, that’s usually talking about following the rules to no purpose, or maybe not updating conventions, because again, as we mentioned, the dictionary changes. Not updating them quickly enough, etcetera, is that a fair summary? Wes: Absolutely fair. And people cling to things because maybe they had to learn it and it was really hard to learn it and they finally got it, and now the world is telling them that they’re wrong now. And it’s an unfortunate position to be in, no one really wants to be wrong, but if it’s the world you live in or the profession that you do, you need to stay curre. Think of a doctor still treating you with bloodletting and being like, ‘Oh, you guys, no, you’re ruining medicine by not bloodletting.’ Oren: I mean, they do that. Wes: I should’ve picked a different example, leeches or something. Oren: Well I didn’t mean specifically bloodletting, I meant that when there are changes in medicine, there are also medicine professionals who resist them. Wes: Oh, they don’t do that, yeah, that’s very true. Oren: They don’t quite happen at the same speed that language change has happened though, usually you can see them happening at a slower rate, and they don’t come around as often, whereas language is changing every day. And I get it to a certain extent, sometimes I get annoyed when someone starts using words that I’ve never heard and they expect me to know what they mean, and I can understand how that could be a little annoying, but in most cases, the solution is to try to figure out what those words mean, you can Google them, it’s not usually that hard, instead of, for example- random example that I totally didn’t see in an editor’s group today- write a long thing about how English should have state mandated protections the way that French does, which is like, ‘No, oh God, no, please, please don’t, I get it, I was also kind of annoyed when I found out that “fight me” means “don’t fight me”, but we don’t need to get the government involved in this is.’ Wes: That is a fascinating thing though, because English is one of the few world languages that doesn’t have a governing body. Most do. And that fascinates me, because it really points out that we speak a language that morphs constantly, it’s a dirty pirate language, and it can do whatever it wants. And other languages have a harder time with that, mostly because of how things get published. Basically they have a national style guide and English doesn’t belong to anyone, and so anyone can change it, and that’s tricky at times for sure, but also fun and exciting. Oren: Yeah. I guess I can see a little bit more- because I’m dyslexic, and so it took me a long time to learn to read because just memorizing different words was very hard for me, and there aren’t a lot of consistent rules in English, so I could see the appeal of having those be really consistent and making them really easy to learn, but I still don’t think getting the government involved is a good idea. I still think we can just agree not to do that. Chris: I do think that English is great for writers because of the large vocabulary. It’s very useful to have lots of synonyms for things, so that you don’t end up being redundant. Wes: I know, with enough dedication you can just do a whole sentence with words that start with ‘w’ if you really wanted to, you just gotta be patient and figure it out. Chris: So let’s move on to talking about prescriptivism as it does or does not apply to storytelling. So we started with linguistics, and it’s easy to see how those linguistics concepts translate over to copy editing. But now when we get to storytelling, it just takes on a whole new level of ‘What?’ Oren: In my experience, in storytelling people call you prescriptivist when you try to explain that there are best practices in storytelling, and that not all choices are equally good, and that they won’t all produce an equally compelling story. Especially because usually the person is making one of those suboptimal choices, and they don’t like that you said that that wasn’t a great choice, and then they get mad at you and call you a prescriptivist. Not usually my clients though, because by the time they get to be my clients, they have decided to pay me money, so usually they’re past that stage, but a lot of angry commenters are like that, because Mythcreants has opinions that, for example, stories need conflict, and that character karma needs to be paid off, and those two really piss people off, they get so mad. Chris: Or likability, likability really pisses people off. Oren: Oh yeah, likability too. ‘I should like reading about them.’ Chris: So basically going back to the whole idea of goals, so people want to meet their goals. Generally at Mythcreants we assume that if you’re storytelling that you want to engage your audience, that you want to give them an entertaining experience, that you want to them to feel satisfied at the end so they recommend it to other people, and so we are assuming that those are your goals, now, all other goals of course are totally valid, but usually if that’s not your goal, you don’t need writing advice at all. Because you can just write whatever you want if you don’t need to please other people, if you only need to please yourself. So there’s no reason to go to a writing advice website, just write whatever makes you happy. But usually if you want your book to be accepted by an agent or publisher, you want it to sell well, your goal is to make other people like your work and engage them. So when we make recommendations we assume that those are your goals and our recommendations are tailored to those goals. From that perspective, it’s just kind of wild to call things prescriptivist, because once again, a descriptive- if we were just, ‘It doesn’t really work,’ we could say, we do hear commonly, ‘Well, you can’t say that’s bad because this popular book did it’, so we could be generous and say that we’re being called prescriptivist not just because the average work did it, which would be descriptive, this is what people happen to be writing, but that doesn’t support goals, or it doesn’t instruct people on how to meet those goals, but we could say, ‘Well, this popular best-selling book did it’. We’ve talked about this fallacy numerous times and why it doesn’t work, and yeah, there’s a correlation between popularity and quality, but it’s just not strong enough, and every book has flaws, so you can’t necessarily say that because it’s in the popular book it’ll work for you. But the strange thing is I’ve also seen some commenters say that others are prescriptive but we aren’t. Oren: To a certain extent that’s correct, because for example, we don’t tell people that they have to use the hero’s journey, or that they have to have this specific plot for this specific genre, because people get weird about writing, where at Mythcreants, we understand that storytelling is simple in concept but difficult in execution, and people often get mad at us because they want to try to change the concept, because they think that will help them at the execution level, but it never does. And then you get other people who think that there’s only one way to do the execution, and that you have to do it this way or it won’t work, and that’s almost never true. And we don’t do that because we know better. I’m sorry, there are only so many ways to say that we know storytelling better than a lot of these other people. If I wanted to be a jerk prescriptivist, I would just follow the rules from the French Academy in the 1600s era theater. ‘No ghosts, none of that, all stories must take place within one day, they can’t take longer than that. No action, action’s bad, get out of here with that action. There, now I’m a prescriptivist. Do you like me now?’ Chris: Well, again, there’s always going to be what you would consider needlessly restrictive advice. For instance, I have a blog post where I compare different books on writing science fiction, and there’s this one book, Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy by Crawford Kilian, that just has all of the stuff in it that’s just like, ‘All magic is about symbolism and ritual, and all science fiction and fantasy is about power and how to use it’, which, I mean, you could say that’s true, but you could also say that’s true for all stories, period. And he goes on about all of these traditional archetypes and tropes and about how crones mean evil knowledge or impending doom, and to me that just sounds like a lot of needless- why are you just telling people to copy already cliched tropes in their work? That sounds needlessly restrictive to me. I wouldn’t call him prescriptive because it just doesn’t mean anything. It seems to only mean that you think the restriction is unnecessary and has no value. It’s just a pejorative, but a lot of the people who are using it, they wouldn’t say that there are no rules for storytelling themselves, they’re the ones who might look at a story and say, ‘Wow, these characters are too flat’, as we’ve discussed, themselves. So if you ever criticize a story, you are implying that there are story best practices, which implies that at some level you support some kind of prescription, otherwise you couldn’t criticize anything, it’s just descriptive. Everything is valid. Wes: And more likely than not it, again, going back to play this melody, but, they’re probably harping on just personal preferences. For example, if I’m going to just use an example on a word level, I might point out that if one of you used decimate to mean utterly destroying something, and I say, ‘Well, you know, it actually means to reduce by one 10th.’ Now, I should pause, and before I move to correct the next person who uses decimate to meet utterly destroyed, I really should consider, ‘Hey Wes, is this the hill you want to die on? Do you want your legacy to be that guy who endlessly groused about decimate? Are you happy with the life that goes-?’ But then the point is, if I make that choice, then am I going to also be okay with maybe Oren or Chris pointing out, ‘Oh, okay, so you don’t have any problem with that particular etymological purity, but what about words like nice or Frankfurt or half the month names in the Gregorian calendar?’ ‘I’m sorry, the ninth month is September? No, September means seventh month’. So people pick and choose, and that’s why we like to fall back on well-defined established rules over time, and Mythcreants has a very large catalog at this point of best practices to fall back on. So, hey, be prescriptive- I think we are appropriately prescriptivist. Chris: Right, again, the big question is, is this a word that has enough meaning, that we could call ourselves prescriptivist, or is it just nothing but a pejorative, and it means nothing other than, ‘This is needlessly restrictive, and I don’t like it, and you’re not my real dad’? Oren: I wouldn’t call myself that just because people who I hang out with use it to describe a real problem, which is people who get mad about marginalized uses of language, even if that’s not a particularly consistent definition, and in reality it would mean other things. I do sometimes want to call myself a prescriptivist just to rebel against the people who are mad that I tell them their story needs conflict. Because those people annoy me, so I sometimes want, to spite them, to embrace the prescriptive label, but I’m not gonna. Wes: I don’t know, Oren, step onto this side, man. Chris: The problem is it just doesn’t mean anything, the way that people use it, it means nothing, at least in storytelling terms. I will say one of the interesting things is when we’re talking about guidelines or recommendations or rules, that a lot of times when we give recommendations, we have commenters that are like just bursting at the seams to tell us what exceptions they think that there are to our guidelines. And in this case, most of the time when they mentioned, ‘Oh, I think this story actually did it well’, it didn’t, I’m sorry, most of the time it didn’t, but there are exceptions. Most rules have exceptions that doesn’t make the guideline moot. For instance, we recommend against omniscient first person. The existence of The Book Thief, which I haven’t read, but as far as I know does it well, doesn’t mean that that’s a bad recommendation. We recommend against omniscient first person because in almost all cases what you have is a character in the story that has no believable reason to be all-knowing. And that’s kind of unsatisfying, and it’s usually, often they’ll hide who the narrator is only to reveal it later, and you’ll be like, ‘Wait, it’s that guy? But how did that guy know these character’s inner thoughts? Wes: Oh, that book was hilarious (!) Chris: Right? So, but The Book Thief, for instance, has Death as the narrator, but it’s a very special case, whereas most people who are doing omniscient first person are not writing The Book Thief. And if we did this for every single recommendation- we stopped to qualify the niche, sometimes very, very tiny niche cases in which we could see this working- we just wouldn’t get anywhere, it would just take too long, we wouldn’t be able to write anything, and we also honestly keep in mind what we think is the skill level of most writers, because some things we don’t recommend because yeah, it’s technically possible, but I just don’t want to set people up to fail, I don’t want to tell them that they can do something that I know they’re going to go off and do and then they’re going to get really bad results, I want them to succeed. So we recommend against those things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s never an exception anywhere, or that the guideline isn’t useful just because there is an exception. Oren: All right, well that’s a good thing to end this on, because I’m going to be prescriptivist and say that we’re over time and you have to end the podcast prescribing an end to it. So those of you at home, if anything we said piqued your interest you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com, but before we go I want to thank a few of our patrons, first we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek, next we have Ayman Jaber, he is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel, and finally we have Danita Rambo, and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music] Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast, opening, closing theme, ‘The Princess who Saved Herself’, by Jonathan Coulton. Need an editor? We’re at your service.     Related Stories314 – Levels of Editing 313 – Cutting Clutter 312 – Bias Free Language  

We’ve all called a character flat before, usually when we didn’t like them. “Ugh, this villain is only doing evil for evil’s sake, how flat!” But what is a flat character, really? Where did the term come from, and is it always bad? Today, we’re discussing that very subject. We talk about when it’s appropriate to use flat characters, whether characters are actually flat, and what the heck is up with MCU villains. Seriously, can anyone even remember most of them? Download Episode 315  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TMP-315-Flat-Characters.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Flatland A Modest Proposal Frodo Aspects of the Novel Ripley Morpheus Leia Picard Data Blank Characters Darth Vader Once Upon a Trope Neelix Malekith Kaecilius Sauron Saruman Arawn Eragon Ozai Dracula Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Coming Soon. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?     Related Stories314 – Levels of Editing Five Ways to Make a Selfish Character Likable 313 – Cutting Clutter  

Most writers will seek out editing at some point in their careers, but what kind of editing should you get? Wait, there are different types of editing? Oh noooooooo – sorry, the writer in us got a little excited. This week, we are joined once again by special guest Ariel to discuss how the different editing levels work, which is right for you, and why it’s probably not proofreading. Plus, Wes takes a crack at Checklist ASMR. Download Episode 314  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TMP-314-Levels-of-Editing.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Edit Your Darlings Copy Editing Levels Widows and Orphans Words Into Type Amy Einsohn Content Editing Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Kayleigh. 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] Chris: This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris and with me is… Wes: Wes. Chris: And we have a special guest with us… Ariel: Ariel. Chris: And Ariel is a senior copy editor at Mythcreants who works on our blog post behind the scenes and she has her own podcast called Edit Your Darlings. Ariel: Today, we’re talking about a question I get asked a lot. I get approached by authors who think they just need a proofread or maybe a light copy edit. Beautiful. And then I opened their document and maybe they could use some line editing and they’ve never even heard of that. So, today we’re going to talk about what is the difference between line editing, copy editing, and proofreading, and how do you know which one’s right for you? Wes: Do either of you have any idea why people just default to: “Hey, can you proofread this?” Chris: Start with beginner’s hubris. Let’s be honest, writing is full of that. And there’s a culture around fiction writing, especially, that encourages it. It encourages people to be overconfident about their abilities, mostly because there’s tons of messages. It’s like just write with your heart and it’ll be brilliant. You know, it sounds like it’s supposed to be encouraging and inspirational, but I don’t think that’s a good message to send. The point is that there’s a culture that encourages beginner’s hubris. So, if you overestimated your abilities when you started writing, it’s not your fault. Most of us have to go through a disillusionment stage. You know, people are really happy with what they’ve written and they’re afraid of editing being heavier than they wanted. So they’re just like: “Okay, what if you didn’t really change what I wrote? But the misspelling is gone and the punctuation is corrected” and they don’t really know how much work and expertise is involved in copy editing. To them, it’s just change a few punctuations and I’ll be fine. That’s definitely a reason and I think the word proofreading is just used a lot. It’s used casually by people like: “Hey, can you proofread my essay before I hand it into the teacher?” So I think people are just used to that word, as well. Wes: Which is kind of funny because, in a way, they’re almost asking for a beta read of it. I want you to read this and just tell me it’s okay. Ariel: And maybe catch some typos, no big deal. Chris: Especially when you get to the bigger levels of editing — content or developmental editing —  does this person really want to pay me this much money for, you know, a pat on the back? Send it to us, but they’re really hoping that we’ll tell them it’s brilliant. But it’s a very expensive pat on the back. Is that what you’re hoping to get? Ariel: I mean, they were hoping to get a less expensive pat on the back but they’ll take this one. Wes: When they ask for that, Ariel, do you find that they maybe just don’t quite know what goes on? Ariel: When they’re asking for just a proofread, and I open it and it’s clear to me that it’s not ready for a proofread. You know, I immediately assume that they’ve never heard of copy editing and I direct them to: What are the different levels of editing and what do you do at each stage? Chris: Maybe we should define proofreading. I think proofreading is based on the word proof. Proof is something in publishing where you see the documents that’s basically laid out for printing so that you can review it for last errors. You’re basically coordinating with the printer off often. It’s basically a preview of it in its printed shape. It’s already been laid out and designed. All of that visual work has been done and in my experience in production work, it’s actually a lot easier to find, especially small errors, once it’s designed nicely. Right? There’s less visual distractions and the problems stand out more because everything else looks good and has been laid out nicely. It’s very useful, once you’ve done everything else you possibly could, including copy editing, usually copy editing has already been done. Basically, you had a manuscript. This manuscript is perfect, it’s ready to print. Let’s lay it out. You take one last look at it before it actually gets printed and you can’t take anything back anymore. Just to find typos and whatever things are remaining that weren’t caught, because copy editing never catches everything. It’s impossible. Wes: I would add that a proofreader is going to catch some things that a copy editor can’t. Because as Chris rightly points out, something has been designed. A good example of this is if the copy editor was working on a word processor and then it gets proofed and it’s put into something that maybe has two columns. The proofreader might notice on the left margin of the column of text there’s the same word. That’s something a proofreader would notice that a copy editor could not point out because it’s an error that was introduced as part of typesetting and design, not related to editing. Chris: When you get to the stage where a document has been designed, usually editing it is much more cumbersome and difficult. Because the copy editor is inexpensive. Copy editor does not usually have Adobe InDesign on a computer. I mean, if they’re in house, maybe they do just for this purpose, but a lot of times somebody else is going in on a special design program to make these little tweaks. And if the changes are too big, suddenly all of the line breaks have to be re-managed in many documents. If you carefully got rid of all of your widows and orphans. That one leftover word or a headline that’s an awkward place. You move like a paragraph… that can mean that you have to go over the entire document again and manage where all of your page breaks are. Ariel: A single word can break in multiple places. And so if you are messing with a single word, it might change just the word or it might change an entire line. It might change an entire paragraph. It might change an entire page. Wes: I remember learning about proofreading. Thinking about the times when I’ve spotted an error in a published book, and then thinking like: “Oh no, I’m not great. I didn’t catch this.” They knew: “Nope. We don’t have time. It’s too expensive.” Ariel: When I’m proofreading,I really have to think about: Is this an error that is embarrassing? Is this something that absolutely has to change? Chris: If you asked an editor for proofreading, that’s what you’re asking for. Which is not what most people mean. Ariel: When you back it up to copy editing, Wes, you have a really beautiful, bulleted, double column list about what goes on in copy editing. Wes: Oh, I do. Thank you. Ariel: Oh, you do. Can you just read that really slowly to me? Wes: We editors are not meanies. We all want your writing to be its best. We want to also, though, advocate for your readers while keeping your work credible and professional. Copy editing is just massive. Following here are some of the vital tasks that we perform in addition to just correcting spelling, punctuation and grammar. Editors are the reader’s advocate. We want to make sure people can comprehend what they’re reading. And so we also simplify complex language. We make sure that all important information points are covered. We, as Ariel mentioned, do our best to keep embarrassing errors from being published. We will, you know, depending on the writing, remove libelous statements. We’ll make sure that the article chapter or book flows well. So with pacing issues, we’ll take out inconsistencies and wordiness. We will point out factual errors for writers to correct. We will, see previous podcast, remove bias and other discriminatory language. If there’s jargon, we’ll probably cut it or, or query it and say: “Is this an important jargon?” If there’s misinformation and disinformation, we’ll get rid of it, unless you work for not reputable places. If there’s information holes, we will say: “Hey, please fix this. We don’t know what’s going on.” And if there’s quotes, those need to be properly attributed, as well. Ariel: I love it. It’s such a beautiful list. The only thing that I would add to it that I think gets missed a lot when people talk about copy editing, about what they do, what the writer gets out of copy editing. The most valuable thing, I think, is all of the work we do to put together the custom style sheet. Because that’s going to include the grammar exceptions we made to the standard style guide that we’re going off of. It’s going to include a list of all of the words that you feel are important to capitalize throughout your book or other proper names. It’s going to include your characters. It’s going to include a timeline of events. So we can keep everything consistent and we know what day everything happened on. It’s amazing. I love style guides and it’s the best thing about copy editing. Wes: It’s such a gift for the writer to receive that. I haven’t done nearly as many as you have, but I remember working for a client for a short book that he did. I gave that to him and he was like: “What is this?” I’m like: “It’s your book!” Ariel: It’s your book. It’s your entire series sometimes. It’s super important for series, for maintaining consistency across each book. Chris: That’s one thing I think people underestimate when they don’t know much about copy editing. They think that there is one standard that everything adheres to, like the Chicago Manual of Style that covers everything. When there are so many choices and the most important thing is consistency in the work itself. Those decisions have to be made and then you have to keep track of them. Mythcreants has some weird things. One of the things that we do differently is we only italicize for emphasis, nothing else. Whereas most websites will italicize, for instance, the titles of books. One of the main reasons we don’t do that is because when we were starting out, we were so inconsistent about it. After a while, it was just easier to say we’re not doing it because that will at least make us for the most part consistent. If we start doing it now, it’s going to be a big departure. The other reason is that we’ve always had a policy of, at least the first time a book title was mentioned, of linking it to that book. All of those titles were marked with links. Ariel: What is line editing? Wes: I wanted to consult some books and there was one in Words into Type and they talk about line editing in such detail, and then I was looking at the Copy Editor’s Handbook by Amy Einsohn. Words Into Type: Third Edition is from several decades ago, like the ’70s. It’s still a good reference for really obscure things, but Amy Einsohn mentions it in passing as: “It’s kind of still a thing, but you probably just mean heavy copy editing.” As I defined line editing: You’re actually making heavy copy edits, but you’re forcing a type of style onto something. I think of a line edit as: Reporter goes out to get the scoop, brings it back in, and then that line editor has to make it conform to the style of the publication within a certain timeframe. So, I think of line editing more in that kind of news realm, instead of a fiction realm. Chris: I think I approach line editing from kind of an unusual place, because I’m not a copy editor. But I do what I call line editing. I’m not even sure if there is a standardized definition of line editing. I’m a content editor. As part of that, I often drill down to the level where it’s usually a little larger than copy editing. But now instead of futzing with the big sections or ideas in the work, I’m futzing with the individual statements. Again, depending on whether I’m editing fiction or nonfiction. For a blog post, which is just simple so it’s easy to use as an example, content editing would be what I would consider: I want you to remove this section. I want you to add this content that’s not there. That would be directions that I would give the writer. When I’m doing what I call a line edit, it’s like: I need this to sound professional and feel professional. I need the ideas to flow smoothly and I do this before I hand it off to copy editors. I do a lot of clutter cutting. Which also a copy editor would do. I move around… Sometimes I move full paragraphs, but I’ll do a lot of cutting entire statements or moving them. So again, could be a heavy copy edit. I feel like a lot of times copy editors, they’re trying harder not to step on a writer’s toes. Whereas when I’m giving somebody direction at the large, big-picture level, whether it’s a blog post or a story, and I’ve already given them advice on how to structure their plot, and then I get down to one paragraph in the story. When I know that the purpose of this plot element in this section is to create tension but I see that the way that they’re implementing in this paragraph is downplaying that and it’s going to make that less effective. I will do line editing to try to bring out the tension there. I do sometimes actually add words that I’ve written myself, but they’re almost always things like transitions. If I move a paragraph from one place to the other, oftentimes it doesn’t just fit there seamlessly. Some of the transitions have to change in order to fit seamlessly. So, I will go in and add a transition, but it’s not usually, you know, a big idea. I’m not usually adding additional ideas to their piece, I’m just making it flow smoothly from one paragraph to the next. And, of course, it would be marked for the writer to review. I’m looking at the content, but now drilled down to a small, fine level. I’m making sure that the same argument is not made twice, for instance. Where it’s like redundancy at the wording level would be: “Make sure you don’t use this same word too many times.” What I would consider personally aligned editing level is: “Okay, you already said that in the intro, so I’m going to strike it out here because you don’t need to say that same thing twice.” I might strike out several sentences for that reason. Ariel: There’s so much power in line editing. It shapes a piece so much, and that’s why it’s so important to make sure that you and your line editor are on the same level. What really line editing comes down to for me is voice. They are making sure that the voice of the piece is consistent throughout. So if an academic tone has snuck in, in chapter three, for no good reason, your line editor is going to change that to make it fit the rest of the piece. Chris: Yeah, removing academic-ese, as I call it, is a big thing that I do for nonfiction works in line editing. That usually involves a lot of clutter cutting and jargon. Ariel: As often as I’m asked to do just a proofread, I’m also really delighted when I get an author and he was like: “Please, please tear my work apart with your line edits” and I can come back and just be like: “Your voice is so good. I don’t want to mess with that, let’s do a copy edit.” Chris: And I’ve seen you do that a number of times. When we get a quote request in from people who want to hire Ariel for copy editing — you can hire Ariel for copy editing through our site, by the way — sometimes you come back and you’re like: “I know you asked for a line edit, but actually I don’t think you need that much.” Which that’s gotta be a nice ego boost for a writer to hear. Ariel: I will say that line editing is more expensive than copy editing because it takes more time and it takes a lot of skill. Wes: It takes a lot. If you feel predisposed to line editing, you might just be a writer. Those of us who don’t feel drawn to it might just be editors. Chris: What you said, Ariel, while you’re in a big position of trust as a line editor, it’s absolutely true. I think that’s why for me, it goes as part of the content editing. Because content editing is bigger picture than line editing, I’m in that position to basically be almost an art director and I know what the bigger picture goals are and there’s always reviews by the writer, every time. They see all of my changes and I invite them to push back and be like, actually, I don’t like this change. Wes, do you ever do line editing? Wes: Well, certainly not for Mythcreants. The last time I did some freelance work, I got a series of short stories. They weren’t connected, but it was just like a bundle of short stories by the same writer and I went through planning to copy edit, and then I channeled my inner Chris and Oren and ended up doing my first real run at content editing. Doing a whole lot of querying, rearranging and suggestions related to like through lines and characters and stuff like that. So, no, I haven’t done a lot of line editing because I don’t think I’ve been in that sweet spot where I think I would do it. I don’t know if I’d be comfortable. I’m getting more comfortable at bigger-picture edits with content and developmental stuff, but I’m still most comfortable in just straight copy editing. There’s definitely a scale tipping point where I’m just going to write a query and I’m just going to say: “Hey, maybe this would be a good idea.” Chris: I kind of suspect that even though I do something that I would consider to be the line editing at a level and Ariel does line editing that our line editing is a little different because of my content editing down and Ariel’s copy editing up. Again, I’m looking at more content issues when I do a line edit, then Ariel would be, whereas Ariel’s probably looking at more style and consistency. Do you think that’s right, Ariel? Ariel: Wes has helped fully included the different levels that Mythcreants copy editing talks about with light, medium and heavy. When we do a heavy copy edit, in addition to all of the things we do for regular copy editing, we talk about issues with characters, themes, plots, problematic messages, stereotyping. We might reword sentences, rearrange paragraphs or mark content for deletion as needed. I am looking at: Does this character feel real? Is this line of dialogue believable? And if it’s not, I make a suggestion or I might just let the author know that: “Hey, there’s some room for improvement here.” Whereas if I was just copy editing, you know, I would make sure that it’s legible. copy editing makes it readable; line editing makes it pleasant to read. Chris: At Mythcreants, we have a light edit, a medium edit and a heavy edit. The heavy edit is basically what we’re talking about as far as line editing goes. You can kind of choose what level you think is right for you and we have examples even, but then we have a whole core process because again, depending on the state of your prose, the amount of work that needs to be put in by the copy editor can be really different. You need somebody to actually look over it. And Ariel specifically will give you advice about what level she thinks you need. Ariel: I’m interested in the way that Wes approaches copy edits too, and finds stuff each week that’s already gone through me. I talked about this a little bit on my podcast, and I reached out to Wes for commentary on this. It still felt incomplete to me because I didn’t get to hear it in his voice. Chris: For some context, every Mythcreants blog post is copy edited twice. This, most of the time, would be considered unnecessary. The main reason that we do it is because when we first started our editorial process, we didn’t have professional copy editors on board. Even so, we keep doing it because a second copy editor can always find stuff because it’s just impossible for one editor to catch everything, especially in one look. There’s somebody who’s on copy edit one, and they do most of the work on the fees and then there’s somebody who’s on copy edit two and they’re looking at a piece that’s already been copy edited, and they get to read it and make a few tweaks here and there. Wes, Ariel wants to know how you continue to find things to change in work that she has already copy edited. Wes: To be fair, when Ariel asked me to send her examples: Some weeks I barely touch it and some weeks there’s just more and it just depends. copy edit two, we mentioned all those things: checking facts and accuracies and stuff. You guys all know there’s posts that deal with a lot of proper nouns and Ariel generally gets all of them, but sometimes they slip through. That’s something that I’ll make an effort to double-check. Other things in copy edit two that I find that usually slip by: “Today we will look at this kind of thing.” I always cut those “wills.” I chop them right out. That might have more to do with me than anything. Chris: We’ve had discussions about what tense the blog posts should be in. Wes: I like to keep numbers the same. I pulled up an example I sent Ariel. The original line read: “It’s very common for storytellers to accidentally make their big conflict too easy.” I edited that to make it conflicts, because we’re talking about storytellers. It happens all the time, we try to do multiple subjects, but then we have a collective singular predicate that I think is odd. Ariel: I think we argued about this in our copy editing class, because I would still argue that those storytellers each have one big conflict. Wes: But we’re, especially in this case, we have plural storytellers with plural pronoun “they’re” possessive. Ariel: Or is it a singular pronoun. Wes: There’s no antecedent for that. Chris: I think I see what you’re saying, Wes. It does seem that it should be plural. That would be technically correct. I can’t help but feel in some of these cases, not all of them, that occasionally when I try to make it consistently plural, it just sounds off. Like, there’s a word that I’m not used to hearing in plural. We help organizations with their missions. That just sounds a little strange to say missions instead of mission. Wes: I would say mission statements. Chris: But it’s not their mission statement because the mission statement is the actual statement about the mission. Their mission is what they actually do. That’s a content change that’s incorrect. Wes: I have found that as much as I am a stickler for this, it depends. It very much depends on what the noun is. I’m happy to concede on some of these things, but in some cases when it’s just like plural, plural, singular, I’m like what’s going on? This can easily convey that we contain multitudes. Chris: And I’ve caught myself doing that too, and try to correct myself. Ariel: Different copy editors have different backgrounds and have different things of grammar that they care so much about. I think that the differences in our approaches and the differences in what we’re each going to find, speak to our background every bit as much as it speaks to what is actually staring at us on the page. Wes: Ariel and I certainly have some differences, but we both abide by the code of: Do not introduce error. Feel free to introduce things that might be worthy of discussion, but that’s the golden rule of editing. Chris: The wonderful thing about having more than one copy editor is when something is brought up, you can get another opinion. And there can be a discussion and for a blog about writing, that’s fascinating. I’ve learned lots of things from the two of you about writing. And if I write a blog post about wordcraft, I have two copy editors who know more about grammar and punctuation and literary devices and what they should be called than I do. That’s a huge bonus for us. Wes: We’re just all trying our best and no piece of writing is ever done. Chris: We’re at time, so we’ll bring this to a close. Before we go, I’d like to thank a few of our patrons. First, Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek; Ayman Jaber, an urban fantasy writer and connoisseur of Marvel; and Danita Rambo, who lives at therambogeeks.com. Thanks for listening, we’ll talk to you next week. Ariel: If you have a story that’s not quite working, we’re here to help. We offer consulting and editing services on Mythcreants.com. [Outro Music] P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?      Related Stories313 – Cutting Clutter 312 – Bias Free Language 311 – Delivering Information in Stories  

Behold, an introduction, a beginning if you will, that is the place where the paragraph starts and I shall, heretofore, lay out the topic. The topic is clutter, if you couldn’t guess. This week, we discuss the nature of clutter: what it is, how it works, why writers use it, and when it should be removed. We’re joined by special guest Ariel, meaning we now have three wordcraft editors on the podcast. How long can they go before they start editing each other’s sentences? You’ll have to listen and find out! Download Episode 313  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/TMP-313-Cutting-Clutter.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Sword of Shannara Forty Four Words to Seek and Destroy Breaking Your Prose in the Right Places The Witcher Five Wordcraft Questions Writers Fight Over  Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Diane. 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: Welcome to the show we call the Mythcreants podcast or the Miscreants podcast if you say it wrong. We’re about to get started soon, but due to the fact that you may need to know who is who I will introduce myself as Chris and with me is my co-host and fellow podcaster… Wes: Wes… Chris: And he should know that joining us in this podcast is our very special guest who is not usually a host on this podcast: Ariel! Ariel: Hi that’s me. Chris: Ariel is a senior copy editor at Mythcreants and she has her own podcast called Edit Your Darlings. If you haven’t guessed, we’re going to talk about clutter. Did you enjoy my introduction? Wes: I thought you were just really building it up. I felt such weary expectation of you, waiting for you to get to the point. Chris: It’s like after waiting that long for an intro, it’s like, ‘okay, better be good’. Wes (laughing): You probably could have thrown in a few extra ‘verys’ and ‘quites’, though. Chris: Next time we’ll have you ‘de-edit’ (laugh) reverse edit where you add mistakes instead of taking them out. Okay. So first of all, what is clutter? Wes, do you want to give me a definition of clutter? You are the definition podcast host, as far as I’m concerned. Wes:  I like to think that clutter in writing is words that don’t add value. That definition has generally served me well, because some people are very attached to particular phrases and you can cut and query but there’s a lot of deleting, in editing… Chris: …strike through tools, my favorite! Wes: …but the goal is not to hack things apart and trim them down to nothing. We can always make a sentence more concise but, that might happen and actually take value away from the reader. We like to enjoy language and style and different writers have different styles. And so some of them are going to have more verbose statements, and I wouldn’t necessarily call that clutter if it’s providing value to the readers. Ariel: Who doesn’t love a page-long paragraph. Chris (laughing): Yeah. I know you love your long sentences, Ariel. Wes: Punctuated well, that’s fine. Ariel: Clutter is going to be the things that don’t add diction…they don’t add tension…they don’t add to the plot. They’re not adding to your setting. They’re just your filler words. They’re like ‘ums’ and ‘you knows’, but in your prose. Wes: And those are a lot more forgivable when you’re talking. When you’re writing—this whole idea that “your writing needs to sound like how people talk”. No! It’s completely different. I’m sorry. Chris: Even dialogue is significantly different from how people talk. Wes: It is! People don’t get to sit and have a conversation that takes hours because they’re, you know, going through drafts in their brains trying to figure out how to get it perfect. Ariel: Maybe YOU don’t…(laughter) Chris: I tend to think of clutter as words and phrases that are just not bearing their weight. Like they add more in length than they offer in value; there’s a lot of subjectivity there. Sometimes it’s like, okay, this adds a little bit, but considering how many syllables this takes, it’s not adding enough. But there are some situations in which a sentence is just long and awkward and kind of hard to read where I will suggest cutting parts that do have meaning, but I think that, okay, this sentence reads so much smoother without them, I think this is a necessary sacrifice. But that wouldn’t usually be considered clutter. Usually clutter is what we call something that really just isn’t adding much in the way of meaning or other types of value to the sentence. So, why is it bad in our Clutter 101 before we talk about our clutter pet peeves. Ariel:  It’s bad because it’s going to get in the way of your pacing. It’s going to give readers an opportunity to get bored and put the book down. When you have scenes where the character is just alone in a room getting dressed and nothing happens. We could all picture that every day of our lives, let’s get on with the action. Or meaningless dialogue with greetings from every single person in the room, just basically standing up and saying “hi…” (laughter). We can follow along with that, or we can just skip forward just a smidge to get to the good stuff. We don’t want the writing to become about mundane things. Chris: So that’s like clutter at a larger scale than I was thinking, but that’s completely right, because that doesn’t add value. Sometimes it is funny to look at the phone conversations that happen in movies. It’d be like, ‘those people just hung up without saying goodbye. That’s… weird’. But usually the audience doesn’t even notice. One thing about clutter besides the fact that it obviously, as Ariel said, it makes things longer and more boring, is a lot of it adds kind of a wishy-washy tone because so much of clutter words are people’s way of not standing behind what they’re saying—of adding little caveats. If you have a lot of clutter, often it has a tone issue as well. Ariel: Those hedging terms… Wes: Just say what you mean! Chris: And honestly, if you’re writing a provocative blog post, even if you put in caveats, people will still get mad at you. Just speaking from personal experience…(laughing).. Wes: If I’m writing a blog post, and then somewhere in my post, I say, ‘I’m of a mind that’, Ariel would strike that down, probably, as you should. I can’t stand things like that. Just say ‘I think’, I don’t need to say ‘I’m of a mind that’. It’s wasting time. Ariel: I might allow it for voice. It’s got some flavor. Wes: That’s a clutter that I consider awkward. It’s a lot of words that can be replaced by a single verb. Chris: Yeah, I guess to me, it depends on what the overall tone and phrasing of the piece is. Certainly in most, for instance, blog posts, ‘I’m of a mind that’ would not fit in. Wes: If fewer words can do the job, you should use fewer words, generally. And clutter is also wrong if what the clutter is, is wrong. We’ll get into the pet peeves but, for example, saying ‘exact same’, ‘same’ means ‘exact’. Or ‘free gift’. A ‘gift’ is ‘free’. Sometimes clutter is used to try to add emphasis to something that’s already defined as that, like ‘an advance warning’; all ‘warnings’ come ‘in advance’. Or ‘a closed fist’. I’d love to see what, uh, an ‘open…fist’ is. They’re just wrong, but we say them for emphasis, but I think clutter is used kind of as an emphasis crutch sometimes. Oh, dang it! I just used some biased language right there, and I would like to direct you to the podcast from last week, especially my last comment about how some things are so ingrained that I don’t think about them on the fly. A better way to say that is that sometimes clutter is used as a poor excuse for emphasis when actually the sentence can be better constructed and use more accurate words to convey what you mean. For example, you could say: ‘that is very bad’. Well, you could just say: ‘that is bad’ or maybe ‘that is horrible’ or ‘that is terrible’, or any other thing that the modifier ‘very’ is actually trying to upgrade ‘bad’ to. Just be more specific. Chris: You’d be surprised, sometimes in writing, it actually is stronger if you take out the extra word, because shorter means more emphasis. So sometimes just saying ‘that is bad’ actually sounds stronger than saying ‘that is very bad’, just because when we pull out like a really short phrase like that and put it in its own sentence, it packs a stronger punch. Yeah. One of the things that we get, again, with blogging is ‘you didn’t say this was just your opinion’. It’s like, well, it’s obviously my opinion. We’re not going to add a caveat saying: ‘It’s just my opinion…’ Ariel: … but you’re an authority on the matter, on all matters, Chris, all of them. (Wes laughs). You could, instead of saying ‘that is bad’, you could show it: their eyeball is out of their socket. That is bad, but you don’t need both. Chris: This is such a common problem that we see in manuscripts. Ariel: It’s a matter of showing and telling, instead of just showing or just telling. Telling has its own place. Maybe you just want to say that someone was hurt and not specifically how… their… eye…balls…(fades away) Chris: Right, you don’t want to actually get into a graphic description of somebody’s eyeball being out of their socket. Thanks, Ariel! (Ariel laughs) Wes: I’m curious if the showing and telling tendency is also a ‘speakingism’ that’s getting into the writing because, anecdotally, when I’m sharing stories or talking with other people and receiving stories and they describe something about, an eyeball falling out of the head or something. And then I’m quickly told how I should interpret that. Maybe because my face is not registering the desired emotion of the speaker as fast as they would like. But this idea of like: “you’re in a story! You’re telling them this is happening, this is happening, this is happening! And you need to understand! Just in case you didn’t pay attention before, I must tell you how to feel!” No, that’s okay. We’re reading at a slower pace and we can take it in. Chris: Sometimes it strikes me as a lack of confidence with dialogue, for instance. If you do a good job making your line of dialogue expressive, a lot of times you don’t need to then add, ‘this person is bored’, afterwards, if you make them sound bored. To me—sometimes it feels like the writer is not confident. Again, maybe it’s a habit from speaking. Maybe it’s…they’ve read the same patterns in other works and it is just something that people have to be trained out of. Ariel: I think that that’s why so many people are anti-adverb, because they see adverbs as clutter so often—often they are cluttered in there with the dialogue to try to explain something about the dialogue that’s often already conveyed to the reader—but if they had just chosen the correct word then they didn’t need the adverb. And so people take that as a ‘every adverb is bad’ sort of idea. Chris: There’s also just sentences outside of dialogue. Where it’s like saying ‘very’, the adverb is used to try to change what the tone is that you can just use a better word. For instance, you could say: ‘they walked slowly’ when you might want to say ‘they sauntered’ or something like that instead. And now obviously sauntered has other connotations, so that might not be the right word. That also happens a lot where we’re trying to modify things a little bit and there’s a stronger word. Just like, instead of saying ‘very bad’, you could say ‘horrible’. Ariel: Yeah. There’s also something to be said for trying to avoid echos. And so that we’ll end up with clutter because like the word ‘saunter’, like that’s going to stand out pretty hard and I’m going to hear that echo 20 or 30 pages later if you’ve use it again but, ‘walked slowly’, I might just walk right past that one. Wes: Nice. Chris: The big culprits that I see a lot in fiction are words like ‘suddenly’ and’ immediately’. And this is something that if you don’t understand well enough how narration works you might think that you need those words and that they’re adding value. The reason why they’re clutter words is because that’s a matter of pacing and expectations that you set in your narration. So to make something feel sudden you have to make it unexpected and then speed up the pace. If you just say, it’s sudden— say ‘it happens suddenly’— it doesn’t feel sudden to the reader. It almost has a melodramatic edge because you’re trying to puff up the narration to feel more dramatic than what you’re actually showing in the scene. Wes: For a word that’s meant to convey surprise nowness. It sure has a lot of syllables. Chris: There may be some cases where you’d want to narrate depending on what style and perspective you’re using: ‘And then several things happened all at once’. But usually you can just cut that kind of commentary and just make things feel like they’re happening at once. In some cases you may want that but, in many you don’t need it. Another one that gets into the wishy-washy part is ‘seemed to’. I think this might happen a lot, particularly in things like fantasy when we’re trying to make something feel magical. A lot of times that ends up being clutter and a lot, when I see that it’s not necessary. Also, ‘begin to’, or ‘start to’ when it comes to character actions: ‘She started to scream’. Unfortunately, it’s always a ‘she’, that’s another thing: when we’re talking about bias language notice who was screaming, please, it’s almost always women. Instead. You would just say, ‘he screamed’. Wes: Unless they were opening their mouth and were prevented. Chris: ‘He started to scream and then she put her hand over his mouth and cut it off’. Not cut off his mouth, cut off his scream. Just to be clear, we’re not getting into graphic injury, that is bad. Ariel: But you could simplify that to: ‘She cut off his scream’. And then you would know that he was about to scream, but then didn’t. Chris: ‘She put her hand on his mouth, cutting off his scream’. Because you also have to communicate how she’s cutting off his scream; it might seem like she just murdered him… Anyway, let’s not edit,  three editors in a podcast. (laughter) (musing): ‘how many editors does it take to edit the things that we say during a podcast’…Okay. Some examples. I have a couple of examples from works I’ve critiqued. This is one of my favorite from Sword of Shannara: “The unusual stillness that seemed to have captivated the entire Valley…” Wes: Seemed to have, huh? Chris: Instead of just “the stillness that captivated the Valley”, because ‘the Valley’ implies ‘entire’. You don’t even need ‘unusual’ because, in this context, it’s clear that it’s unusual.  This character is paying attention to it, wouldn’t be remarking on it if it wasn’t unusual. ‘That seemed to have captivated’…this is what I was saying where there’s just no reason to say, ‘seem to’ here. Another one from City of Bones.This is another one of my favorites: “Long hair, nearly the precise color of black ink”. The thing that gets me about this is that we’re adding the word ‘precise’. So we want to say it’s the precise color of black ink, but then we add ‘nearly’ because it’s not the precise color of black ink. Somebody is trying to add style but without substance. It has kind of a lyrical flow to it, but it says nothing. And that makes it feel kind of empty. ‘Her long hair is black’ is basically what that says. If you wanted to say it was ‘inky black’ I feel like you could, maybe the word ‘ink’ would add something but, that’s not something I would usually say: ‘well for stylistic reasons’, just because it feels very empty. A lot of times context will change whether a word is worth having. For instance, if you say ‘a black sky filled with stars’, maybe the word ‘black’ there is useful, depending if the sun was just setting and the sky is getting darker, or maybe a sky filled with stars implies the sky is black. And it’s really unnecessary to say the word ‘black’. Ariel: I wonder if it’s more important to cut clutter in different mediums? Yes, Wes. I said medium. Wes (protesting): I’m fine with ‘mediums’ (laughs). Ariel (accusing): Are you? Chris: …Because ‘media’ is often the plural of’ medium’. Isn’t it? Wes: If there’s any kind of, like, ‘the plural should be this Latin form’, no, it’s English. It’s ‘octopuses’. You can say ‘octopi’ if you want. You can say that, it’s fine, but don’t get mad at me for saying octopuses. Because it’s English. Ariel: What color is an octopus’s ink? Wes: Black? Is this a trick question? Ariel: Is it…inky black? (laughter) Wes: Oh, I walked into that one. Ariel: But I wonder if cutting clutter is more important to, say, a short story versus a novel or to a flash fiction versus a short story. Chris: The quality of the wordcraft just gets more important the shorter the story is. So for instance: poetry. People will put tons and tons of effort into every exact word. Is that clutter Wes? Should I not have said exact there? Wes: We’re speaking off the cuff, you guys it’s okay (laughter). But if you would’ve written that down I would have struck it. Chris: Three editors in a podcast and suddenly they are editing each other’s sentences and it’s all downhill from there. Wes: You know what is a fun way to cut clutter? Using punctuation effectively. Three examples. I will give you the cluttered version first: ‘let’s face facts that this is the most corrupt galactic empire ever’. I suggest revision: ‘let’s face facts (colon) this is the most corrupt galactic empire’. Colons draw emphasis—’ever’ isn’t needed and ‘most’ can convey that. So I like colons. Somebody at one time said a colon is like putting a megaphone in your text saying, ‘Hey, what comes after this Is profound’ or loud or something. Chris: I would say like a pointing finger or an arrow, pointing at what comes after it. Wes: Semicolons draw the connections between the two, the colon is meant to have the second part kind of be amplified a little bit more. My next example has a semicolon in it: ‘The bandit apprentices had no choice because of how little money they had left’. We could use a semicolon: ‘The bandit apprentices had no choice; they had little money left’. The semicolon is actually a great way to take out a ‘because’, because a ‘because’ is indicating a relationship between these two sentences. The semicolon can kind of cut that. You shouldn’t do it all the time, of course, but it can pick up the pace a little bit saying, ‘they had no choice; they had a little money left’ without that ‘because’ in the middle can kind of speed things up, which is nice. My next one: ‘On the one hand Operation Space Ghost deals in justice. On the other hand, they deal in blood.’ We could revise this to: ‘On the one hand Operation Space Ghost deals in justice (semicolon); on the other (comma), blood’. Ariel: I’m uncomfortable with that because that literally puts blood on their hand, not just ‘dealing in blood’, but literally on that hand, there is now ‘blood’. Wes: This one is one where I wouldn’t probably make that edit. I would offer it up to the writer. The rules here suggest that if you have two independent clauses that are basically the exact same structure, you can introduce the second one with a semicolon with the introductory phrase (then) a comma (then) omit the part that is basically the same, and then just include the changed element. So instead of having to repeat myself to say ‘they deal in justice, they deal on blood’, I can just say ‘they deal in justice’ and then I can just trust that the reader will pick up that I’m using the same thing again, and just provide the new predicate at the end. But, Ariel’s right. Maybe my example isn’t great, because: blood on hands (laughter). It’s more concise. Operation Space Ghost probably has blood all over themselves. If they’re out there dealing justice and blood. Ariel: One of the small tweaks that I make with punctuation that removes just a teeny bit of clutter is the difference between ‘and then’, and ‘(comma) then’. I play with conjunctions a lot, technically the Chicago Manual of Style—at least the last time I read it through—didn’t really allow for that. They specified that you need ‘and then’, but it’s an exception that I add to most style sheets, I’ll be perfectly honest. Just taking out the ‘and’ and putting a comma in takes out a lot, a lot of repetition of the word. And you’ll be surprised, if you hit control F in your document and search for the word ‘and’ it’s in there millions of times. And most of the time you could just float right past it. But every now and then there’ll be a sentence that has like six of them and a couple of ‘then’s’. So, just take out one or two and add in a comma. It’s fine. It’s great. Wes: I always edit based off of…no, I’m sorry….it’s ‘based on’ and I will fight you on this! Ariel: Based off of what? Wes: Based on the truth, you guys (laughter). Ariel: What truth are you basing this off of? Wes: Correct style and Merriam Webster. And the origin of that expression is from a ‘foundation’ where you base things on a ‘foundation of truth’. So how do you base something off of something else? Ariel: Like you base jump off of a cliff… Wes: You base jump off, but that’s ‘base jumping’. Ariel: You could just take it out and put a comma in. Wes: I know you totally could (laughter). Chris: we also say ‘rip off’. Wes: When you say ‘based off of’ that’s unnecessary, because ‘based on’ is shorter and conveys exactly the same thing. Chris: I agree with you that it is shorter and more concise and therefore superior. I just don’t know that it’s more accurate. Ariel: My pet peeve—I have been learning to embrace it over the years. I used to, every single time, take it out. And then I had some authors push back and educate me on why they do it. It’s phrases like ‘there are’, and ‘this is’, and ‘here are’  instead of, you know, just getting to the point. Chris: Now you know why Mythcreants blog posts never start with those phrases in the intro anymore. Ariel: That’s not true. They do sometimes. And it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s fine. Wes: Is it? (laughter). Ariel: Those phrases are everywhere. We use them all the time. And now I’m starting to understand that it’s the author’s way of really subtly changing the emphasis in a sentence, because if I don’t think that it’s what they intended to do I’ll probably suggest changing it, but most of the time they are trying to take the emphasis off of whatever it is and say that that thing exists. Wes: It’s the same thing when people say you should never write a passive sentence, it’s like… Chris: …there are definitely reasons to use passive sentences. Wes: You’re choosing the subjects appropriately. Chris: I will say that sometimes, again, your point is that something exists. So just saying:   ‘there are reasons to do blank’, You’re saying those reasons exist. Other times in our intros, blog posts, we’re just trying to find a transition statement to then discuss the post itself, which there has been an unusual amount of discussion about how we talk about our blog posts, about the meta language of blog posts. And so sometimes we (say) like: ‘here I will outline…’, or ‘here I outline..’. Now we usually say ‘let’s’ as a kind of a more active way of talking about our material: ‘Let’s cover this’, or ‘let’s cover that’. Wes: You know, when you say “I will do this”, it’s technically already done because a published piece of writing stands outside of space and time. You shouldn’t assume somebody is going to walk temporally through it. They could skip ahead. And there’s no doubt, either, ‘will’ only means that something’s about 90% certain. Chris: Saying ‘let’s cover…’ whatever the material is certainly sounds more inviting—active— than say ‘here we cover’. I do think in many cases, when you’re saying, ‘there are’.’ here are’, ‘here is’, can usually be revised to be something better. One of my pet peeves that I run into specifically in nonfiction is ’you should know that’, ‘I think that’, ‘remember that’— sometimes ‘remember that’ is a good thing to say because it’s changing the emphasis to being conscious about something—but usually you can just say the statement without prefacing with ‘you should know that’, or ‘I think that’. You could cross that entire phrase out. Ariel: How do you feel about ‘obviously’? Chris: ‘Obviously’ is such a tone difference. So I would say that it is actually changing the content because it’s changing the tone of the sentence. In most cases, maybe not in all cases. But if somebody was using it all the time, that would definitely be a bad sign. Okay. I think we’re out of time. In fact, we might even have to cut some clutter from this episode. Before we go, I’d like to thank a few of our patrons: Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory and Star Trek,  Ayman Jaber, an urban fantasy writer and connoisseur of Marvel, and Denita Rambo who lives@therambogeeks.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you next week! [closing theme] P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?      Related Stories312 – Bias Free Language 311 – Delivering Information in Stories 310 – Productivity in Writing  

We use words every day, but we’re not always aware of what they mean. A phrase that sounds perfectly harmless to one person can be deeply unsettling to another. Changing a few words can completely alter the meaning of a paragraph. This is the reality of biased language, and it’s the topic we’re discussing with special guest Ariel. We discuss why a word’s meaning can change so quickly, how to spot problems, and resources for doing better. Plus, why sports metaphors and high fantasy might not go together. Download Episode 312  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/TMP-312-Bias-Free-Language.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Edit Your Darlings  Editing Services Origin of “High Brow” Singular They Fay’s QAs Bast A Spell for Chameleon HAL 9000 Queen’s Gambit Evil Georgiou The Conscious Style Guide Red Pen Rabbit Copy Editor’s Handbook Writing With Color Writing Alchemy Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Ursula. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Chris: This is the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock and Chris Winkle. [intro music] Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris and with me is Wes, and we have a special guest: Ariel. Ariel: Hi, that’s me! Wes: Woo! Welcome. Chris: Welcome. Ariel is our secret copy editor at Mythcreants. So you may not hear her name a lot, but she is hard at work copyediting our articles, and she also has her own podcast that she started recently, called Edit Your Darlings. Wes: Great title. Chris: So, Wes, do you want to introduce our topic today? Wes: Sure. Today we’re talking about bias-free language. I think something a lot of us are aware of is that biased writing in general has undergone a lot more scrutiny and revision in recent years than pretty much anything else going on in English language stuff. And that means that terms that were in general use for the 20th century are now scarce. Things like the generic he – saying “postman”, “congressman”, “actress”. Or, saying “flesh-colored”, when you actually mean pink or beige; or words like “crippled” or “handicapped”. People have moved on, rightly so, to find acceptable terms. Sometimes those terms might not be short and it could be a little more convoluted, but, you know, the challenge is always worth it, when we’re basically talking about being bias-free and respecting people. Now, speaking specifically as a copy editor, since we’ve got Ariel on, copy editors are expected to query or revise anything that promotes stereotyping that might be based on gender, ethnicity, religion, age, any other designation – anything that marginalizes groups of people or that’s insensitive to cultural and other differences. And, upfront, just to be clear, authors are free to express their views, publishers are free to publish them, or not. And copy editors are free to quit if they cannot abide the content of a manuscript. So the principle for today is, if any author wants to say their bigoted, politically incorrect or otherwise views, they can do that. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about those ways that things can unwittingly get in there without thinking about it or without noticing it. Or simply maybe to make you aware of some of the things that copy editors will pick out. That’s kinda what we’re talking about today. All kinds of fun examples, I hope. Fun/sad sometimes. Ariel: Ohhh, yes. [all laugh] Chris: Yeah. When we’re working with writers, more often than not – well, okay. At Mythcreants, we have a specific type of audience that generally does not want to have bigotry in their work, more so than a general audience. But even so, usually when we find those kinds of things, people just are not aware that what they’re saying comes off that way. It can happen at the word craft level, which is what we’re talking about now, or in bigger story themes. And we just try to promote being aware of what it is that you’re saying, so that you only say what you want to. That’s really important. One thing I just want to add is that this terminology can update very quickly, and a lot of people get frustrated. They’re like, “But yesterday you told me to say this, and today you’re telling me to say this, and will it stop changing?” I think a lot of that is that people aren’t used to changing their language. When you first are asked to change your language, there can be some defensiveness, and feeling confused or disoriented when you feel like things are moving on without you. But this is something that, as it happens, will start to feel a little bit more normal. Where if somebody corrects a term you’re using, you’re like, “Oh, okay, that’s the right term now”. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It’s fine. Just update it. And just be aware that the frequent updates, a lot of times, are due to bigotry. What happens with a lot of these terms is that they’re respectful at first, but then they become slurs because bigots start using them as slurs, and that’s where they get the bad connotation from. So some of these terms are continuously updated to stay ahead of the bigots, which is sad. Be aware that these terms change because of oppression, and when we fix oppression, they’ll stop changing so much. [Ariel and Wes chuckle] Other terms are just coming up with new and better ways to communicate about something, or because people’s ideas of something have gotten more complex and nuanced. Like for instance, once upon a time, people would describe a trans person as “trapped in the wrong body”. Today, that would be really regressive because if someone is a woman, she has a woman’s body. Regardless of what physical features that body has, it’s the body of a woman. So that’s real disrespectful today. But when people were first trying to communicate what being trans was, that language was different. And they had to use some of this language, just to try to get across to clueless people what their experiences were. So that’s another reason why these things keep changing. Just be aware of that. And it’s okay if you have to change. I have a whole list of words and things that we’ve changed over the years at Mythcreants. Wes: Some examples? Chris: Yeah. So, “underprivileged” to “marginalized”; part of the reason for that is just that some privileges nobody should have. Wes: Oh, Chris, that totally reminded me of an anecdote I saw on Twitter like twenty minutes before we started recording. Do you guys know the origin of “high brow entertainment” and “low brow entertainment”? Chris: No. Ariel: Does it have something to do with cavemen? Wes: It has to do with fake sciences from the 19th century and your brows. Europeans reportedly had “high brows” and were more desirable, but people from Africa had “low brows”. So those expressions are rooted in physically oppressive pseudosciences that talked about skull shape being desirable or undesirable. I had no idea that the “brow” was literally the brow on your face until today. So speaking about us learning things and adapting language, that’s a new one I’m no longer using. Chris: Yeah. Another thing: When we first started, I would alternate he or she. Ariel (jokingly): Aaah! Chris (laughing): Yeah. Ariel: I can’t believe I’m still finding that in manuscripts today! It’s still happening! Chris: Still happening. It’s so awkward, too. Singular they is so much easier once you start using it. I mean, now if I have example characters, I might put three of them and have a man, a woman and a non-binary person. But otherwise, if I’m just talking about a random character and I’m not giving that character a name in my example, I just use singular they. Wes: The alternating always confused me, you’d think the editors would never back that because it’s really not consistent. You could go, “Oh, I’m being consistent with the alternating”. And it’s like, no. You keep changing it. Just pick one and move on. That’s why a singular they definitely took off in that respect. Chris: Yeah. I mean, it can be fun if you are going to use, in a theoretical example, a gendered pronoun to deliberately buck gender stereotypes. I think even when I was doing that, I would often try to specifically arrange it. And again, even when I’m having examples on the blog today, I try to go against the grain when I can. We have ditched tons of ableist terms. We had a whole meeting. Do the two of you remember our meeting, where we talked about ableist terms and how we were going to stop using them? Yeah. We had a whole team meeting about that and we had a discussion about how nuts, the food, are okay, but nuts, as in crazy, isn’t. Wes: I love when you take some time to think about words that you use that you maybe think aren’t doing harm, and they are. A good example is “lame”. That one I think is going to be a hard one for a lot of people to kick. But dammit, be specific! I think what bothers me about that word is someone will just throw their head back and say, “Ugh, lame.” And to that I say, “What do you mean?”. You might as well knock your head back and go, “Ugh.” I mean, are you exasperated? Are you unsatisfied? I love the thought of somebody instead of saying that word, just going, “Unsatisfying.” Chris (doing an exasperated voice): “Disappointed!” Wes: “Disappointed” is also perfect. We have those words. Use them. Chris: Hercules reference there. Wes: Yes. Good one. Chris: Yeah. That’s the thing about the word “crazy”. It’s used in so many different ways that there’s no one word that can replace “crazy”. So I use alternatively “ridiculous”, “wild”, … Ariel: “Wild”. That’s my favorite. Chris: Or “chaotic”, sometimes. If you’re talking about your schedule, I like “chaotic”. Wes: Speaking of specificity, I think Fay had a really good Q&A on that that we should put in the show notes. Chris: Recently, in an article I changed “preferred pronoun” to “correct pronoun”. That’s another one that maybe when we were still starting to communicate about how important it was to use somebody’s pronoun and not mis-gender them. If you had said “correct pronoun”, people might not have understood what you meant. So “preferred pronoun” was used to indicate you should use the pronoun that this person tells you to use for them. But at this point, people understand in the right context, specifically on Mythcreants at least, that if you say “correct pronoun”, you’re talking about not mis-gendering somebody. Wes: I like that that conversation has made such good progress, because I filled out a form just the other day, and the form said, what are your pronouns? No modifier necessary. I totally understand what they’re asking. Great. Chris: Then there’s other things, like saying “somebody who identifies as a woman” – you mean … a woman? Wes (laughs): Yes. A woman. Chris: And again, I get that sometimes these older terms may be needed for clarification in certain situations, but at this point it’s usually not necessary to say “identifies as”. Just say “a woman”. Or another one: “a woman and a trans woman”. You mean “women”? Gender is a huge one. Wes: Gender is a huge one. And a lot of editing out biased language focuses on that, which is obviously important. It dominates a lot of the discussion, but some of the other things that you find out with this type of stuff is how constructions can demote people’s status in different types of ways. An example that I used with our crew when we were pitching this podcast was, “The pioneers crossed the mountains with their women, children, and possessions.” And of course we immediately know that this sentence is telling us that only men are pioneers. But it’s also saying that women and children are equal to possessions. So it’s basically saying one group is the subject and the rest are lesser. Chris: That reminds me of a sentence in Name of the Wind where there’s this character named Bast, who’s supposed to be this mischievous seducer of women, but they specifically refer to them in the dialogue – I don’t remember which character says it – as wives and daughters. I think the idea is that, you know, “Oh, he’s such a scamp. He seducing men’s wives.” But it frames women as being the possessions of men. Wes: Exactly. Yes. Oof. Chris: So it’s not “single woman” and “married woman”. It’s “some man’s wife” and “some man’s daughter”, is what that means. Wes: That’s a good example, yeah. Chris: Ariel, do you have any that you’ve seen in editing that you want to mention? Ariel: Along those lines? Hmm. Chris: Whatever lines you’d like. Wes: Take us where you please. Ariel: Yeah. Um, anything that equates a human with just their body parts, like “she’s more boobs than brains.” It’s so, so insulting, because that means that that’s all that she is. She’s just boobs. And maybe a tiny, tiny bit of brains, but nothing else. She has no arms. She has no eyeballs. Chris: And there’s an inverse relationship between boobs and brains. Ariel: Yeah. One is better than the other. Clearly. Chris: She grows a larger brain, somehow her boobs shrink. [all laugh] Wes: Oh no. Chris: I mean, I’ve seen that. A Spell for Chameleon, that book has a character in it, a woman. Her magical “power” – it’s not really a power – is, she cycles between being ugly and super smart, and being beautiful and … not smart. Ariel: Oh no! Wes: What? Chris: Yeah. So her intelligence goes down as her attractiveness goes up and she just cycles back and forth between those two extremes. And that’s supposedly her magic power. Wes: And she had control over it? Chris: No. Wes: No. If she had control over it, she’d be like, “Okay. Time to get super smart, but I know I’m going to be really ugly.” Chris: That would actually be more empowering and interesting. Wes: Yeah. Definitely more empowering. It’s not a power if it’s just random like that. Chris: Right. It’s like everybody else has their one superpower – not all of them, some of them are passive, but most of them – that they consciously choose to use. Wes: I’m just imagining the TV version of that with the side characters looking at something like, “Oh, but don’t worry, main hero will be able to figure it out.” And then they look at her and they’re agape, because she’s gorgeous, and they’re like, “Nooo!” Chris: The same character also gets mean every time she gets smart. Yeah, that’s great. So anyway, my point is, we can take something that’s a little phrase like that, “she’s more boobs than brains”, and draw a line between that and something that is much larger in a story and connect those dots where somehow we’re saying that women, if they are smart, they are unattractive and mean, and that’s not desirable. Wes: I have an example that maybe is not commonly thought of when we think of biased language. Metaphors are popular for adding energy and color, but depending on your audience, you could risk alienating them, which you don’t want to do, if you choose metaphors that they might not be familiar with. So, for example, if you read this sentence: “As emperor, you need to know your tolerance for risk. On fourth down in two, would you punt or pass?” Ariel (shuddering): Oh, that’s such a bad sentence. Wes: Here’s another example: “Every commander dreams of making the Hail Mary pass or the three-point shot at the buzzer.” If your audience doesn’t do sports…  It was a pain to think of these examples and write them down, because I barely do sports. You don’t want to leave someone out when it’s such an unnecessary metaphor. It’s not very applicable. If somebody’s not into sports, they won’t know what a Hail Mary pass is. Or “fourth down in two, would you punt or pass?” That’s pure jibberish if you don’t have any context. So, yeah. Be careful with metaphors because bias can creep in. Chris: The thing that gets me about those, which maybe it shouldn’t, is the fact that what sounds like a fantasy element, an emperor, isn’t compliant with modern day sports metaphors. [laughs] It’s not that there can’t be a modern day metaphor… Wes: That’s a good point. It’s definitely not about bias-free language, but depending on your setting, anachronisms like that can show up and copy editors should fix that. Chris: Anachronisms can be really hard because sometimes something sounds anachronistic and it’s not. For instance, Oren has a story that takes place in the Byzantine era, and his main characters name is Sophie. Or Tiffany, Tiffany is much older than you think it is. Some of these names, they might be modern day names, but they’re not necessarily new. That’s a tough one, because there’s a lot of subjectivity and it’s more about what people imagine the past to be like than what it was actually like. Ariel: So Wes is talking about jargon and anachronisms and other things that copy editors point out, and he talked in his introduction to this episode about how copy editors are allowed to say “no, thank you” to a project if they’re not comfortable with the language. I just wondered where you draw the line between flagging biased language and suggesting a full sensitivity consultation. How many instances of biased language would an editor need to put up with in order to feel like it was okay for them to nope out of a contract? Wes: Well, I do think it depends certainly on the relationship that the editor has with the writer. If the writer is confronted with a handful of queries and doesn’t want to change anything, that might be a red flag. I was also thinking though, kind of in the context of that introduction, that if you’re still told to deal with this, if you’re working for a publisher, then you should walk away. Because the publishing house might have different motivations and you shouldn’t stand for that. Which is hard, because I know that people need money, but this type of stuff needs to be dealt with, and addressed more strongly if you’re in a position to. That said though, the type of biased stuff that we’re generally talking about right now, I do think that if you’re pointing this out properly via queries, most people will respond well to them. Because so many of these things can easily be recast. Earlier I used that example of the pioneers and relegating women and children to the status of possessions. Another mishap that you could see would be according a possession the status of a person. Like if HAL from Space Odyssey was actually a grand master of chess and then you say, “HAL sacrificed his bishop, but three moves later, he could not avoid losing his rook to Kasparov’s pawn.” HAL is a computer; you’d think “it” would be preferable. And also, let your writer who wrote that sentence know that competitive chess has a stereotype as a man’s game, Queen’s Gambit notwithstanding. So HAL having that “he” pronoun supports the notion that chess players, computers, and the computer programmers of chess-playing computers are men. I think the context of the phrasing is important because a lot of people just aren’t thinking through what that conveys. Chris: Usually for Mythcreants, I have most experience in content editing rather than copy editing level with this, but whether or not we send somebody to a sensitivity consultant usually has to do with how much they are getting into really sensitive territory in their manuscript and how much they’re dwelling on it. So we would send them to a sensitivity reader if, for instance, it’s more than they’re just mentioning disabled people in ways that we find disrespectful. Then we can usually link them to some online resources perhaps, or tell them to look it up. But if they have an entire chapter dwelling heavily on this, then that emphasis… Or they’re dealing with something like recovering after getting a new injury that will result in a disability, for instance, that’s just really a sensitive thing to talk about. So then we would send them to an sensitivity consultant. Although at the more word craft level, sometimes we’re asked questions about things. And if you read something that just makes you feel kind of uncomfortable, but you’re not sure why, and you don’t have the expertise necessary to actually tell whether or not they are doing something wrong, but it seems fishy to you, but you can’t say authoritatively that it is bad – I think that’s also another really good time to recommend a sensitivity consultant who can actually evaluate it and give authoritative feedback that you can’t give. Ariel: Something that I find fairly often is writers who are sort of straddling the fence, where their characters are encountering other characters who do have those biases and are putting them on display. So the author has a reason that they’re using biased language. You have to be so careful to make sure that there’s not that authorial endorsement for the biased language, that the story is saying, hey, this thing that’s happening right now is not okay, and we’re going to work towards educating this character and try to change that aspect of them. Chis: Yeah. That’s hard because that’s more at the content editing level, of what message the story is sending. And a content editor would definitely tell somebody, “Hey, if you have somebody just say these things and you don’t specifically do something to counter that, that’s an endorsement.” Or, “You just shouldn’t add bigotry in your story to no purpose. These aren’t good reasons to add it. That says something and your audience is going to react to that.” I do think that there are some instances where that can get down to the wordcraft level. The big thing that I find in a lot of stories that does come down somewhat to language that a copy editor probably could respond to, is when we are too excusing of somebody who’s done something really bad. So we’ll have, for instance, an abuser in the story, who does some extremely severe abuse, and then we have overly sympathetic wording. It’s not that it’s bad to build sympathy for villains, but it can be to the point where we excuse everything they’ve done. I’m going to use Discovery as an example, where we have this character, evil Georgiou, who basically spends her time just doing as much psychological damage to the people around her as she can. She specifically goes for things that she knows are their weak spots, the sensitive spots, and she just hits them, gives them a good punch in the stomach, as we could say, but psychologically. Then we have a whole scene right before she’s about to leave the show where these characters are suddenly very nice to her, and are like, “Oh, I learned so much from you.”, and just treating it like she wasn’t abusing them. So some of those lines where they put in equivalency and pretend like, oh, we both are wrong, in a situation where it’s not equivalent – I think it would be easier for those specific lines, because that’s a lot of times where those problems appear, to be like, “Um, is this what you meant to say? Because this person did this, this person did this; this seems like a consistency issue in your manuscript.” So I think there are some instances like that, where you would probably say something as a copy editor. But I think the real question with a lot of these really bad messages is, as a copy editor, what you’re comfortable copyediting, when it comes to the content and messages of the work of copyediting. Ethical dilemma there. Wes: I noticed that you and I both had the expression “confined to a wheelchair” in our show notes. If I were asked to copyedit a story, and the first line was, “Though confined to a wheelchair, Granger nonetheless writes at least five stories a year” – Chris: Oh, no, that’s bad. Wes: – I might put push that back. Technically I could query and revise depending on the copyedit level. But if that’s early on in this manuscript, that tells me quite a lot of the – perhaps unconscious and unwittingly – biased language that’s going to be in here. The scope of fixing that is probably going to be quite large. Because it’s a mobility aid. It’s not a prison. You’re confined to jails and prisons. And that “nonetheless” suggests that the wheelchair is an obstacle to being a prolific writer –  what? So that level of error is definitely where the scope of what you’re doing probably needs to get pushed back, or you step out of that sample, and talk to a content editor or a sensitivity reader too. Chris: The funny thing about the phrase “confined to a wheelchair” is, every time you watch an anime that’s a mech anime, where the characters get in their big mech suits so they can fight like a dinosaur or something – do you feel like “oh, all these characters are confined to their mech suits while they’re fighting”? [laughs] They use the mech suit because it gives them greater mobility. It’s a tool that they use, they’re choosing to get in the mech suit. Ariel: Let’s talk about tools. So, resources for how to keep up with this evolving language. My favorite is the Conscious Style Guide. I also follow @redpenrabbit, Crystal Shelley, on Twitter, and it’s always opening my eyes to something new. Every single week I learn something. Chris: That’s great. Wes: It’s hard to keep up on things, but if you like reading books on style and editing – I know I’m speaking to a small crowd here, mostly Ariel [Ariel laughs] – there’s a lot of web sources for bias-free writing now. Any valuable book on editing should include that. I remember when Ariel and I did our editing certificates, that was a section of the course. I remember that from our course work. And style guides should be mentioning it now. The Copyeditor’s Handbook by Amy Einsohn has a section on it. It’s just more in the conversation. It’s a good example of how English, or just language, is always changing. You’ve just got to find some people and enjoy words, and pay attention. Chris: There’s a specific link we can share for April’s terms in the show notes. But since I usually do things at the more story level, a good resource for just knowing what’s respectful is the Writing With Color tumblr. There’s a lot of Q&A there, people will submit their questions and you get a lot of answers. They’ll also sometimes do profiles of different people, so you’ll learn more about different people, more people of color or of a certain religion. So that can be useful for writers. And then obviously Fay Onyx does a lot of consulting for us, particularly in the disability department. Her website is writingalchemy.net. Fay has tons of great information there, on disability specifically. Wes: So if there’s one thing we really want you to take away from this is that bias persists, consciously or unconsciously, but good editors, good writers, and just good people will try to pay attention to this and identify it. Even things you’ve spent your whole life saying might not be appropriate. A good example is, we “commit” crimes. So be careful how you use that word “commit” in relation to other things that are ostensibly not crimes. Just analyze your language, try to keep up on things and, you know, be forgiving. Most people probably aren’t using it with malice. And if you’re going to point out an error to somebody, use that as a teaching moment. Chris: Okay. I think we’re at time. Before we go, we just want to thank a few of our patrons: Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek, Ayman Jaber, an urban fantasy writer and connoisseur of Marvel, and Danita Rambo, who lives at therambogeeks.com. Thanks for listening. Have a great week. Need an editor? We’re at your service.      Related Stories311 – Delivering Information in Stories 310 – Productivity in Writing How Legendborn Created an Enthralling Love Triangle  

Readers need to know things to understand your story. They need to know a whole bunch of things. But writing is a linear art form, meaning you can’t just download all the necessary info at once. So what are authors to do? That’s what we’re talking about today: how to get your audience the information they need. That means discussing the much maligned exposition, of course, but there’s a lot more to it! We’ll talk about what order to put information in, how to signal it’s important, and when it’s better to leave information out. Also, why fights with a sexy rival are a golden opportunity for exposition. Download Episode 311  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/TMP-311-Delivering-Information-in-Stories.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Beyond Lies the Wub Fight Scenes Legendborn Interview with the Vampire Describing Your Viewpoint Character Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Bunny. 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] Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is… Oren: Oren. Chris: And… Wes: Wes. Chris: …And, you know, I think the next time I’m writing a book and I want to tell the audience something, my characters will just start a podcast and then they can just discuss how magic in their setting works or what all of their backstories are. Bam, done. I don’t have to do any exposition at all. I’ve given all the information I want to my audience. It’s the perfect solution, right? Oren: Yeah. I’m sold. All right. I think we’re done with the episode. That’s how you do it. Chris: Wait, wait, wait. Wes, what is your backstory? Wes: Oh yeah. I forgot. I need to dump my backstory in right here before we get much farther. It’s very important because I’ve been secretly writing a podcast about this podcast to explain why we’re talking about information on this podcast. Oren: Oh, my goodness. Chris: Oh no. So recursive. Oren: We have reached podcast-ception. [Laughter] Wes: Oh… podcast-ception! Oh no! Chris: So this time, we’re revisiting the topic of exposition, which we’ve discussed before, but with a focus on how to deliver information in your story, particularly since in speculative fiction (scifi and fantasy), there is usually a lot more that you have to deliver. Any story needs some, but with explaining how the world works and how magic works – if you’ve got magic or technology or all of those things – it’s extra tricky. It’s a really important skill to give the audience the right information. I thought I’d open with: what information does the audience need? I think that’s a really nice thing to cover because choosing what you need to give to your audience and when is probably just as important as how you deliver it, even though I do think writers tend to get caught up with, like, “How do I make this sound not awkward?” That’s a good thing to know, but I think just what to tell and what not to tell is even more essential. So I thought maybe we could just all talk about what we think the audience should know and what you should keep in mind. Wes: I always thought that… people say that it’s never more than is necessary in that moment, but that’s abstract. Chris: What is necessary is abstract. Right? Wes: Yeah. Chris: Which is like, “Yeah, learn all of storytelling now and then you’ll know what is necessary.” [Laughter] I do try to list things for people so that they have ideas and they can start to get a sense of necessity, but that is always a thing where as you know more about it, it will get easier. Wes: A good example here, I think, is that I’ve done some nature walks with my nephews, and I don’t stand at the trailhead and describe what they’re going to see in the forest to them. I’m not just like, “Hey, so we’re going to go into this forest and inside this forest, you’re going to find this and this and this, and this is why that’s there. And this is why that’s there. And there are these things there.” Instead, I say, “Okay, this is the entrance to the forest.” Brief introduction. And then we start walking, and as things come up, we talk about them. And I think that works here, because stories are journeys, and you got to have something happening as a way to give some information about why that thing is happening. Chris: Yeah. For a lot of things that work, there are a few things where you do have to set them up ahead. I think they’re normally things that when they appear, they’re supposed to have some kind of emotional impact. You need to do some context ahead. For instance, you have your protagonist walking around and then suddenly an old friend shows up and they’re angsting over this old friend. And it’s like, “Why are you angsting over this old friend?” And if you don’t know why they’re angsting over seeing their old friend again, there’s no way you can feel that with them. Right? So, we would have to go back and set up how they parted ways with their friend and what was involved in that situation and deliver that information so that next time when they see their old friend, suddenly it means something. So, there are some exceptions to those rules. Things like solutions to problems, right? It’s Chekhov’s gun. If you want your protagonist to use a gun, we can’t just have a gun pop out of thin air when they want to use it, or that’s going to seem contrived. And so we need to know ahead of time what means they could use to solve problems. Then, when they reach for the gun, we already knew that gun was there. So that’s more information that’s like foreshadowing that needs to be delivered. Oren, do you have any comments on that? Oren: It’s hard. This is one of those things, because I am a content editor and not a copy editor, that I don’t tend to intellectualize as much. I can tell when something’s wrong. In that one story Beyond Lies the Wub, there was a weird description where the captain puts his gun away, but he was never described getting it out. So I had to go back and edit in that he had his gun out and then that he put it away. So I know that that bothered me because looking back on it, I can see, “Well, obviously I needed to know he had his gun out before I knew he put it away,” but I’m not sure I would have been able to intellectualize that before I read it. You know, I’m not certainly not the world’s greatest scene setter, but to the extent that I know how to deliver information into a story, it’s largely what I’ve just kind of picked up from reading other stories that did it reasonably well and trying to copy the ones where I wasn’t confused. And then also from trying to internalize what editors have told me. I’d say my most useful guideline when trying to figure out what your audience needs to know is to prioritize things that are part of the plot. This can have some downsides. It can backfire a little bit where, like, if you describe a person that the protagonist sees with a little too much detail because you know that they’re important later, that can seem a little silly. It’s like, “Well, why is the protagonist staring at that one person?” In general, it’s helpful to start with, like… you’re going to spend the most time describing the magic love interest who will be there for the entire story, as opposed to the random college bros who are there at this laser tag night. They’re not going to be there anymore, so we don’t need to know as much about them. Chris: That’s also important for setting expectations, right? If you do that wrong and you make those college bros seem more important than they’re supposed to be, the reader can be like, “What happened to the college bros?” And it’s like, “No, they were never meant to be important. Oren: No! College bros, come back! [Laughter] Wes: Okay. So you’re reading a story and there’s a scene and there’s college bros. We’re just going to go with this, I guess. Oren: Yeah! Wes: Author wants to describe the fact that, hey, there are some college bros there. But I feel like there’s obviously a balance here. If I use too many words to describe the college bros, they’re going to seem very important. But if I use too few, maybe it’s just a tantalizing bit that adds some kind of mystery. Maybe these college bros who I just offhandedly mentioned are going to be really important later. And you’ll remember that only when you go back and read my book a second time. Chris: If they’re supposed to be a tantalizing mystery, there will also be quite a few words spent on them. When we’re talking about characters in particular, especially a group of characters like college bros, plural, how much we distinguish them from each other is also a very important signal. So if I were to describe each college bro separately, in a way that meant that you were supposed to think of them each as unique individuals, maybe I would even give them a name or some other epithet. Wes: Bro the First. [Laughter] Chris: Bro the First. That’s definitely a signal that they might be important. Whereas if I just call them generically college bros, and then I describe them as a group and don’t describe any of those individuals, that generally signals that they’re less important. I could still bring them back later and be like, “Huh? Aren’t those the college bros from yesterday?” But that would be like a reveal that they were more important than you thought. Oren: That’s when you figure out that you’re trapped in a weird hell dimension, where all the faceless college bros are slowly closing in. [Laughter] Oren: Why are they here? No one knows. Do they have names? They’re just the bros.  Chris: I have some posts about information delivery that try to list a bunch of things that you would need. In particular, planning your opening passages. I talk about what I think is most important in the very opening, including what I think you should signal in your very first paragraph. So we can link that in the show notes. I have some information on there. I would just, again, add in some basic things like what is happening right now. If your protagonist knows it, the audience should too. That’s very basic, but usually the reader does need to understand just what is happening in the scene. There’s some basic information that I talk about in a recent post on making over your narration to maximize tension. What is the problem they’re facing? What bad things could happen? Why is it urgent? That’s all information that supports the story and is necessary for the plot to work. Basic motivation is also important. What is the protagonist doing and why are they doing it? If you don’t know why the point of view character is doing what they’re doing, that’s usually a problem. When we get into fight scenes… this is relevant right now, because we’re currently reading Legendborn, which has a lot of strong aspects, but it also has all these fights where magic is important and the magic rules are just way up in the air. And as a result, you can never tell how everything works during a fight scene and therefore you can’t extrapolate what the protagonist’s chances are of success or failure or what she could do that would work in this fight scene or wouldn’t work in this fight scene. And as a result, they’re much less riveting and they’re much less satisfying. When you have a protagonist facing problems in a fight scene, your readers need a way of understanding the rules that the characters are following and what possible actions would result in success and what things could happen that would result in failure. Then you can actually follow what their chances are of success or failure when things are happening. All of that information is important information to have. Oren: Yeah. And I would actually expand that a little bit to say that if it’s important to the conflict, it’s important information. We’re talking about fight scenes here, and this can happen a lot with fight scenes, especially once you add magic into the mix. It’s like, “I don’t know, how strong is this bone golem? Is hitting it with a sword actually accomplishing anything?” These are things that you need to know in order for the fight to make sense, but this can be true of arguments. It can be true of chases. It can be true of investigations. Conflict is what makes your story go, and so that is where people really need to know stuff. So if you have a social conflict-heavy story, and there are small things that in perhaps a more action-oriented story might not be that important, like what the character is wearing and the way that they have their hat adjusted and stuff like that, then you need to explain how that works. That’s because if there was a big blowout at the cotillion ball and now Aunt Mary and Sister Sarah aren’t talking to each other, and that’s really important, and you don’t tell me it’s because of the way the fruit was arranged, I’m going to be confused and upset. So you have to tell me about the fruit, okay? You have to tell me about the fruit. That’s all I want to know. Chris: There’s a whole category of information that I would say is maybe not plot-essential, but it’s still important to work in there because it adds emotional impact. This is exactly the example I was giving of the old friend showing up. We need to know how meaningful that is for the protagonist. Lots of things are like that. If they have to make a sacrifice, readers have to know what that means to the character, such and such. There’s a lot of information to deliver. And then of course, if you have a fictional world, there’s the question of, “What is that? What is an eedee? Is it a person, place, or thing?” Because sometimes writers will just throw made-up words out there and you don’t even know whether it’s a person or a vegetable. Wes: And if you’re wanting us to rely on context clues, you need to make them more than clues. They need to be road signs in a lot of these cases. It’s so often just like, “Oh, just look at how it was used in the sentence!” And I’m like, “I did. I don’t know what that is.” Chris: But as far as exposition dumping, which is when you have information that you’re just giving the audience that the audience doesn’t need, I have to wonder if that happens not because writers think that the information is necessary for readers to know, but instead just because the writers are not thinking at all about what readers to know. Maybe they’re in a discovery process and writing this exposition is how they worldbuild. Or something else. Maybe they have some other process that results in exposition dumps, and they don’t know what’s relevant to the story yet because they’re writing as they go, and then it’s never clipped out. Things like that. I’m not sure if it actually happens because they think that the information is necessary. Which is why, again, thinking about what your audience needs to know and doesn’t need to know is a really good first step. Oren: This often happens. Sometimes you have stories where the conflict is very complicated and the author thinks that the solution there is to have a bunch of exposition before the conflict starts or before it arrives. They’re like, “Well, you need to know all these things. My conflict is about the space politics between the Antares Republic and the Crab Nebula Monarchy. And so you need to understand the Battle of the Quintessence Stars and the assassination of Duke Hamilhar, and you need to know all of these things. And so I’m going to tell you all of them and then you’ll get what happens when the conflict starts.” And I understand that thought. I understand that desire. But what usually that means is that you need to start with a smaller conflict and work your way up to the bigger one if the big one really is that complicated. Chris: That’s a time when we need to use Wes’s “going on a walk” philosophy and seeing the birds. Wes: Yeah! Chris: Especially with introducing characters. You should almost never introduce a character. That’s not actually in the scene. Oren: Right. Audiences will be way more interested in your information if it’s clear how that information is relevant. Then they will actually want to know more. For example, if you start off just describing the features of these alien colonies, I wonder why I need to know that. This is boring. But if you start off with these colonies being attacked, in that context, now you’re explaining their features. It’s like, “Oh, well, this is interesting. Tell me more about these colonies.” That’s generally the way to make this exposition more engaging and thus make it easier to communicate to your reader. Wes: It seems like a good tactic that people do. I mean, I’m going to say “good” here, but maybe “common” would be a better word. The point of view matters a lot in how you deliver information. And so if you’re wanting to go into more of a fantasy or sci-fi-ish kind of realm, then if you just portal the main character, that’s like, “Oh, okay. Now I can give the information that’s necessary to this character at that moment, because this character has no idea what’s going on.” Chris: Yeah, let’s go into vehicles for delivering information and the different ways that we can do it. Cause that’s really relevant to, in particular, dialogue. In general, I actually recommend just using regular exposition in the narration over using dialogue. Dialogue can work if you have that ignorant character. They are super useful for both if you’re in their point of view or if you’re just around to talk to, because regardless, they have a reason to think about things, and they have a reason to ask other characters about things. But unless you have a character like that, I think that dialogue is just a bad vehicle for delivering information because it very quickly starts to sound unnatural. It’s really hard to try to make it sound natural doing that. It happens a lot in film, and a lot of writers watch a lot of films or TV shows, which can give them the wrong idea about whether or not you should do this. The reason that it’s done in films is because there’s just no narration, or, well… technically there’s voiceover, but voiceover has a very bad reputation because it’s kind of like a violation of the medium. Generally, when you have visuals, people expect to just watch the story unfolding, and the voiceover is just adding narration on top of that. Wes: You can always watch a long stream of text float into the cosmos. That works too. [Laughter] Chris [muttering]: Star Wars… Oren: Even a heavy-handed voiceover does not have even close to the same level of exposition capacity as a narrator. Go watch the film adaptation of Interview With the Vampire. That movie has way more voiceover than most movies do, and it’s still not nearly enough to cover even a fraction of what the book narrates to you. Chris: Nobody comes into a movie expecting the entire movie to be just voiceover, hearing the narration and watching it at the same time. Usually the voiceover is used for transitions and between scenes and passing time and things like that. But the point is that basically, in a visual medium, it’s either dialogue or it’s flashbacks, and flashbacks are so heavy-handed that dialogue is actually the more subtle choice. Whereas in a narrated work, that’s not true. But if people know how your exposition is actually relevant to the story, it’s not usually boring. And people have association with exposition being boring, but if people know how it matters, it makes it a lot less boring than it would be otherwise. Oren: Right. And the reason people think exposition is boring is because the only ones that they remember are the ones that were boring. If the exposition is not boring, you don’t think of it as exposition. It’s just part of the story. It’s just finding out what’s happening. Chris: Yeah. It’s one of those things you only notice when it’s broken. Oren: I will say, on the subject of exposition, that nothing is ever as obvious as it seems to you. Be aware that you have thought about this story so much and drafted it and outlined it and thought of it and probably revised it. It seems obvious to you because you know what it is, but everyone else reading it doesn’t know that. They don’t know what the full picture is, and it will be a lot less obvious to them. So I always err on the side of explaining things more often. And, yeah, you can get too much. Your beta readers will help you point that out. But it’s better for that to happen then for your beta readers to not know what’s going on, because then the rest of their feedback is basically useless. Wes: That’s a good point, because really when you’re introducing somebody to this world that you’ve created in this story, you’re the expert. You’re actually having to teach readers about your world as they go. Pick a thing that you yourself are really knowledgeable on in real life, and then go find someone who knows nothing about that and try to tell them about it. You’re not just going to yell at them the whole time. Like, “I know everything about content marketing, gaaah!” They’re just going to be like, “What is Google?” Chris: If you’ve ever trained a new employee before, it’s always amazing how much they need to know that you just took for granted and didn’t realize. It’s always at least five times as long to train them as you think because of all the stuff that you just didn’t think about that you do automatically. Wes: I think there’s a stat that when you’re just receiving information, you’re going to forget at least 80% of it, something like that. And so, if you’re truly trying to deliver information, and you want it to be retained, then it needs to be used and checked. And so I think stories that deliver information well will prime you for the information and then check your knowledge of it a couple times. Then you know that it’s important because it keeps showing up and you get a chance to keep using it in your brain. You guys have talked about this a billion times with naming characters that aren’t important. Well, I don’t care about Bill. He didn’t need to be named. He just could have been bro. And everybody would have been happy. Oren: Ooh, the bros are back. Wes: The bros are always back. They’re never gone. [Laugher] Chris: Yeah, we can definitely talk about, again, the complexity and whether stories are overburdened. You have excess stuff that’s going to make everything harder to remember. But I would also say that if people are having trouble remembering what you’ve put in your story, how you’ve communicated it can sometimes make a really big difference. When you have a beta reader who’s like, “But this!” And you’re like, “Well, I said the exact opposite right here. It’s in the text.” And they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t see that.” For a lot of writers, it would be easy to say, “Well, okay, that beta reader was just wrong.” But when that usually happens, it’s because you communicated it in an unclear way, especially if more than one person has this problem. One person can always be an anomaly. The way that you communicated it must have signaled that it wasn’t important. For instance, how it’s put in the sentence, in fact, is important. If it is put in there like it’s an aside or just like it’s in passing, there’s a big difference between that and if you have it as the point of the sentence. If you signal that something is important, the reader is more likely to remember it than if you just make it sound not important. So that’s something to keep in mind. Going back to vehicles, besides dialogue and exposition, another thing that somebody has brought up is news. This is something that comes up in films, where the characters just happen to have the TV on and there’s a newscaster saying what the villain just did. That’s a pretty funny one. I think it does work in film better than it works in a narrated work, partly because I think it’s easier in film to just have a news program running in the background and then bring it into focus, whereas I feel like if it was in a narrated work, readers would feel like there was more intent behind it. It would feel more contrived that the author made a point specifically of sticking it in there. Oren: Yeah. People also have more tolerance for coincidences in film. Sure, it’s a little unlikely that this person would happen to have the news on to the exact channel that is talking about the thing they need to know, but in film, whatever. It goes by pretty fast, so, eh. Whereas in prose, your reader has more time to think about it and be like, “Ah, I don’t know about that.” Getting back to the fact that prose is just harder to experience, it requires more work on the reader’s part. It’s harder for them to get swept away. Wes: And that gets at what Chris is talking about with setting context or what we talked about with priming. Maybe before that newscast scene shows up in the book, you have to establish that this is a place that always has the TV on. And maybe they’ve had to go in there before and yell at the bartender to turn it down or change the channel or something like that. But today, no, they don’t change the channel and they turn the volume up. Oren: I mean, one of the nice things about the digital age is that if you’re writing a story in the post-internet world, you can have it set up so that your protagonist has Google alerts set or what have you to send push notifications if something happens with the bad guy. So you could set that up as a reason. They’re having a conversation and it’s like, “Oop, I just got a notification that the bad guy robbed a bank. I’d better get on that.” Wes: So Google is clearly the ultimate omniscient narrator of our lives. Oren: Yeah. There you go. Chris: Another thing that I’ve seen – in several stories, actually – is making one of the characters a tour guide. Wes: Aw. I love that. Chris: Very specific. But then it’s like, “Okay, they’re giving a tour now.” So now they’re going to deliver the exposition about this place and its weird history. I think the problem with that is if too many stories do it, it’s going to get hokier and hokier, like describing your character by having them look in the mirror. It feels forced the more stories do it, but it’s kind of cute as long as it’s not too frequent. Oren: Yeah. I mean, you might be able to get away with it once. I wouldn’t try more than that Chris: Then, of course, the question is: what justifies a flashback? Oren: Nothing. Over. Done. Boom. [Laugher] Oren: I dunno, I find flashbacks in written work to be fairly tedious. It almost never feels like we actually need a full flashback in a written work. It just seems like overkill. I can enjoy the story in most cases more if it’s a little mysterious and it has some mystique to it. If it’s like, “Oh yeah, I remember him. I remember that night. I remember the bullets and my friend dying.” I’d rather read that than flash back to watching this guy shoot a friend. I feel like that’s better. Chris: Once you know how important stuff has to be before it justifies a scene in your story, as long as it serves that same function, it can be back in time. Usually if it’s advancing the plot, it’s not normally back in time. But if you were able to advance the plot by showing a scene from the past, instead of showing a scene that’s the next day, then you can. I think what happens most of the time is that the information or what the flashback serves just isn’t important enough to justify a flashback. Oren: Yeah. I mean, this is a thing where you just have to be disciplined. A flashback might sound cool to you because you’re imagining your favorite flashback from TV, but in most cases it will actually be more effective to do something else. I’ve even had this in my roleplaying game, which is a little different than a prose novel. When the campaign that I’m running right now got to the point where the players were actually interested and invested enough to want to know what happened in the past, I actually think it was more effective to have NPCs who were there tell them what happened with their own colorization to what happened in their own slant on it than to have a flashback. And I have had a couple of flashbacks, so it’s not like I never used them, but I’m very sparing with them. And I just find that that’s more effective. Wes: What about delivering information through dreams? Chris: If you can make it clear. I mean, the problem with dreams is that anything can be fake. [Laughter] Chris: That probably follows the same rules as a flashback, because if you’re having a whole dream sequence that it’s its own scene, does that justify a full scene? And it has actually the same problem as a flashback would, where if it’s taken out of time, is it really affecting the story in the way that every scene should? Because it’s not real. That said, some dreams, especially if you add a magical component where magical things are happening in the dream, could actually affect the character once they wake up, then that might work. But again, if you’re going to narrate a full dream, is what happens in the dream important enough? I know we’re about out of time, but there’s one other thing I want to mention before we go, just because we have so many questions about this. How do I tell information that is so basic and taken for granted by the point of view character that they don’t have any reason to think about it? And this is assuming we’re not in an omniscient viewpoint, because in omniscient that wouldn’t matter. We’re in a limited viewpoint and they have no reason to think about this information, and I have to somehow get it to the audience. How do I do this without being awkward? The appearance of the point of view character would be one of these types of information. I also have a Q&A in the side about somebody asking about the basics of their magic system. The protagonist has been using this magic system for years, and I need to communicate the very basics of how it works to the audience, but it’s so basic to the protagonist that they have no reason to think about it. Oren: I can solve both of those problems with the same idea. Chris: Let’s go. What is it? Oren: Put your protagonist in a situation where they are competing against their sexy rival. [Laughter] Oren: They will have to be like, “Okay, I got to get my magic just right and cover all the basics and the fundamentals to show up my rival. And man, they look sexy today. Do I look sexy today? I don’t know. Am I letting them out-sexy me? Are they as into this as I am? Who knows?” Done, solved it. Sexy rivals for the win. [Laughter] Wes: Yup. That’s it. There’s no better answer. Oren: I mean, I’m joking, but that is exactly how I’m planning to start a story that I want to write at some point. That’s also not a joke. Chris: So I now have an article with nine ideas for how to describe your viewpoint character, but all of this basic information stuff boils down to pretty much the same thing: regardless of how taken for granted something is, there will always be situations in which it matters. Maybe because there’s something surprising happening about it. Maybe because somebody entered the scene and what the point of view character took for granted is actually not irrelevant with them, so there’s a reason for comparison. Maybe it can break down or malfunction, whatever it is. That can include their appearance; appearance can break down if you’re having a bad hair day. Or the breakdown can be “Oops, I made this really basic magic error and I feel embarrassed about it.” And there’s always going to be situations that will remind the viewpoint character about it and just bring it to mind. And again, you can always add a little bit more than what a person would naturally think about. For instance, if they’re feeling their hair and thinking, “Oh gosh, my hair is frizzy,” it’s really easy to just stick in a quick descriptor of the hair color, even if they wouldn’t be thinking about, “Oh, my red hair is frizzy.” It’s not gonna sound awkward if you just slip the word red in there. Again, whatever it is, just ask yourself, “In what situations would this actually start to matter to the character and the situation they’re in, or what would remind them of it?” Oren: All right. Well, I think that is a great note to end this podcast on. Those of you at home. If anything we said piqued your interest, you can leave a comment on the website at mythcreants.com. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First, we have Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And, finally, we have Danita Rambo. She lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you next week. Voiceover: Do you have a story that needs another pair of eyes? We offer consulting and editing services on mythcreants.com. [Outro Music] Voiceover: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening, closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?      Related Stories310 – Productivity in Writing 308 – Fanfiction 307 – Constructing a Tragedy  

How to put words on paper? Should you write every day, or just when you’re feeling inspired? Is there any point to tracking your word count or using specialized writing software? This week, we’re talking about productivity in writing, something that seems to be on everyone’s minds even more than usual, what with the plague times and political instability. How to be productive, or whether you even should be, is a very personal thing, so we don’t have a one size fits all approach. Instead, we talk about different options, how to manage expectations, and what bad ideas to be wary of. Download Episode 310  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/TMP-310-Writing-And-Productivity.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Should You Outline  Human Factor How to Outline Your Story Plotting With Note Cards Escaping Writer’s Block Storytelling Muscles Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Bellis. 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] Wes: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is… Chris: Chris… Wes: and… Oren: Oren. Wes: And look, you’re not alone. All of us wish that we could just put more words down on page, faster, quicker, crank out those stories. And if you hop online and search for something like “How do I write faster? Please God, how do I write faster?”, there’s hundreds of posts detailing all those possible hacks and productivity tips to get this done. And they’re always framed as those simple things you probably just forgot to do, like turn off your internet or dictate your first draft, or maybe spend a few hours training up your typing speed, or the best one yet: Just write while you’re tired, that way your inner critic won’t get in your way. [laughter] Oren: Hm. Chris: Do you know that you should just deprive yourself of sleep? For your Art? [laughs] Wes: [sarcastic] Clearly, that’s the way to go. Chris: Then we’ve got some writing martyr syndrome. [laughs] Wes: [laughs] Right. And I mean, it’s not to say that some of these tips might have some merits depending on the person, but the problem here that I kind of wanted to talk about is that any kind of hack or quick tip conversation is usually framed in terms of being productive in writing. And that doesn’t really address the full complexity of the topic. And if you’re only talking about how many words you can get down on the page or how productive you are in terms of word counts or page counts, you’re running the risk of fostering unhealthy approaches to writing practice. And so I kind of wanted to push back on this productivity notion by focusing instead by talking about how we can write more effectively, because more is definitely not always better. And I’m tired of high word counts being lauded as a sign of success. In publication too. [laughs] I don’t care that the novel was like 400 pages. It probably only needed to be like 150. [Chris laughs] Wes: While there’s nothing wrong with trying to improve how many words you can get down in a session, I want to talk about healthy habits and ways to maybe consider your process a little bit more intentionally and hopefully find out what works best for you. So, with that guys, what do we got? [laughs] Oren: Can I share an observation I made that was very freeing to me? Wes: Yeah. Oren: Unlike most of the stuff that I say on this podcast, everything I say has to be qualified with “Well, this worked for me” because this is very personal and process is very personal. But I did some thinking and I realized that only a very tiny percentage of writers will ever be able to make a financial living from it. That’s just the way the math works out. And that number is going to shrink in all likelihood, especially as self-publishing grows, because right now, one of the few things that keeps a larger number of writers being able to have a full income from it is that the runaway successes on big publisher’s lists subsidize the books that don’t sell well. And this is not saying that those books are bad. I’m saying that for various reasons, a very, very small number of books ever make back the money put into publishing them, let alone generate a significant profit. In my opinion, there isn’t any particular reason why writing has to be your main source of income for you to be a writer. It’s fine to write one novel or two novels, if that’s what you feel like writing, or one short story every year, or what have you. There isn’t a productivity goal that once you have this many books out, you’re a real writer. None of that matters. And it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will ever be able to make their full living off of writing, anyway. So to a certain extent, and this is a financial privilege that not everyone has, but if you can, writing can just be something you do for fun that you want to be good at, because it’s fun to be good at it. Not because you need it to put food on the table. Wes: Oh man, yeah, well said. [laughs] Oren: That was just freeing for me. That made me feel better. Because I was like, I will get out my novel and maybe before I die, I’ll write one or two more. That’s fine. I can still be good at writing and not make my primary income from it. Wes: That’s really well said, Oren. There’s something with that word “writer”. I mean, any kind of identity that you want to take on, it’s like “I’m a Writer”, so you have to think that that’s all you do and you need to make that your thing, but hey, we contain multitudes, man. [laughter] Wes: Yeah, I like that. It gets in the time factor. You read some kind of process advice that tells you to treat it like a full-time job and sit down for eight hours a day, because that’s the only way you’re going to be serious about this. Then that person can just… probably go write another book. Cause I’m pretty sure that was Stephen King, but [laughs] you know, that’s just not healthy. And it’s not practical anymore. A lot of us don’t have that privilege. Chris: Yeah, you definitely can’t condense how effective you are as a writer down to a number [laughs], which is what it feels like people are doing with word counts. And the other strange thing is it only accounts usually for the drafting stages of the project, doesn’t say anything about the other phases of the project, like revision or anything else. Just that first draft. In many cases, taking more time with your first draft means less revision later. So it’s not even necessarily faster to increase your word count per day. You don’t know, it’s so individual. Wes: Yeah, it is. And also, all writing sessions are different. None of them are created equal. If you’re working on a particularly emotional scene in your novel, it might exhaust you to get through those, like what, 2000 words or something like that, because it’s taking a lot out of you to actually do that. And then you need to take a break for a few days. That’s okay. That sometimes happens. But this idea that you’re just summarizing things and you can just like focus on how fast you can type is just silly and not realistic. Chris: On one hand, many writers do have to push a little bit to make sure that they make time for writing. And it’s hard to find the balance here sometimes because probably a lot of the people who are maybe saying things they shouldn’t say like “you have to write every day” [laughs] are trying to encourage people to set boundaries with their family or do what has to be done to carve out that time, because you do have to find time and that can be difficult if you have a really busy life, as many of us do, but it’s just too easy to take it too far. Or again, absolute statements like “you have to write every day” are just ridiculous here. Wes: You know, what helps you become more successful at writing or just doing anything, is just achieving some successes. When you succeed at something, you’ll feel good and you’ll want to do that again. And so if you’re wanting to write more frequently, let’s say, maybe not every day, but you can say, “How long do I think I can manage to write for today or tomorrow?” And you say, “I think I’m going to try to do it for just 10 minutes” and you set your egg timer. If anyone still uses those. [laughs] Oren: Yeah, your relic from the past- First step, go to an antique shop, find an egg timer. [laughter] Wes: We just did like a holiday cooking thing, so it’s in my brain. Set it for 10 minutes and stare at that paper and maybe put some words down. But the goal is to have your focus be on that thing for 10 minutes, not how many pages. So you should consider it a success if you sat down and whatever happens, happens. But if you did it for those 10 minutes, that’s a win. It doesn’t matter if there’s pages or even any words on the paper, you kind of focused yourself on that effort, in that moment. And you should feel good about that. And I don’t think that that kind of effort gets enough praise, because it’s hard to focus, especially now when you’re interrupted by whatever tech you have around you, like every 10 minutes, there’s an interruption. And then you have to train your focus again. And that takes on average like 20 minutes. And then you’re just so in and out and in and out, it’s just– Any work, even if it’s just some quiet thinking about your book, should be treated as a success, not as a failure. Oren: The whole concept of “Well, you need to cut yourself off from social media because that’s distracting you and stopping you from working.” And it’s like, you know, that could be true. I’m sure for some people it is. I once, fairly recently actually, ran an unintentional experiment where I changed my work setup so that it was impossible for me to check social media while I was doing podcast editing, thinking that surely I would edit podcasts faster. But what actually happened is that I was just so bored and miserable that it took way longer. [laughter] Oren: And once I changed my setup so that I could have Facebook open while I was editing, suddenly it was faster. So that was more productive. [laughs] This is just another example of why these things are so personal and why you really have to try different things and find whatever combination is, that works for you. Wes: That’s a great example because Chris mentioned earlier, words on the paper for like a drafting stage. Writing craft is a ton of different things: researching, brainstorming, drafting, writing, revising, all of those things. And so if somebody says “Shut down your social media when you’re writing.” Well, okay, for what part? [Oren laughs] I think some solid process advice is, whatever you’re going to do that day, figure out what you’re going to do that day, first. And if you’re having a brainstorming day, then maybe you kind of want to allow yourself to be distracted because that might help work through some things. Or if it’s an editing day or revision day, maybe you actually read something, know you need to think on it, know you need to distract yourself and then come look at it again. There’s a lot of different things that we take on during this process. And so, again, that universal “shut off your social media” is not going to work in this kind of situation. But bringing intent to your writing situation generally is helpful. I mean, for anything really. From baking to gardening, to all those things. It’s good to just take a breath and think, “Okay, today I’m only weeding” and maybe you’ll do more, but if that’s the thing that you set out to do and you did it, you’ll feel better. And then you’ll want to do more. Chris: Personally for me, one of the reasons why the whole “write every day” just does not work is that I have a fairly large startup cost when I am about to start any kind of large project or a project that takes a lot of concentration. And for me, writing fiction takes the most concentration of anything I do. It takes me a while to get into the mindset, but it’s easier to keep going once I get started. If I spend my first hour writing relatively– not really getting anywhere, just trying to get back into the mindset of the story again, but after that I’m much more productive, it just makes way more sense for me to block off an entire day to do writing, as often as I can, than it does to try to do a little bit every day. It wouldn’t work. I would spend all the time trying to get back into the story again, instead of actually doing what I set out to do. Oren: Whereas I wrote the entire manuscript for my short novel in the 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM time slot on weekdays, when I was done with normal work but it wasn’t time to watch something before bed yet. So, you know, I’m a weird man, okay. I’m not claiming that this is a normal process. [laughs] Chris: I’ve met other people who love having daily writing as part of their routine, that it keeps them inspired and motivated. Again, it’s different for everybody. I couldn’t do that. I have to reserve writing for when I have, you know – I’m fully “on”, it’s early in the day, I’ve got the most energy, and then clear off my schedule for that day so that I can’t procrastinate [laughs] and work on other things instead. Make sure that, no, this is your only job today, so that’s what you need to focus on. Wes: Do you guys experience, they call it like a flow state. Do you guys experience that very much anymore? Or is it kind of harder to get into, where you suddenly look up and four hours have gone by. Maybe not four, but -insert time here- and you’re shocked that that much time has gone by without your notice. Oren: Never. Wes: Yeah, same. [laughs] Oren: I don’t think I ever experienced that. Certainly not when writing. Like I have occasionally, I don’t know, when I’m being entertained, sometimes I’ll lose track of time that way, but not when I’m working to put words down. Some things have gone more smoothly. Like when I was really inspired to write this short novel, time went faster than it has been in other writing projects where I was not as inspired and was trying to force it because I wasn’t as passionate, but I’ve never been like, “Oh man, I’m just writing so many words, I lost track and oh, I blinked and five chapters were written.” [Wes laughs] Oren: I don’t know. That’s just completely foreign to my experience with writing. Chris: Well, I certainly can concentrate and get very intent on what I’m doing. Again, once I get going, I don’t want to do anything else and I’m very focused. But the way that people describe flow as “it just like goes and you don’t notice the passage of time”, I don’t know if I’ve never experienced flow before, or I haven’t recognized it when I do, but that idea is foreign to me. Wes: I bring it up because that also comes in discussions of being productive or efficient with your time. And if it’s something that you’re into and passionate about, you’ll get into this flow state and then suddenly, you’ll forget to like eat lunch because you’re being so productive and blah, blah, blah. I asked this to a lot of people, do you get that way? Like I remember being that way more as a kid, but I had way less worries. [laughs] This conversation around this and like the passion and the flow of it and things, I’m just like, no, maybe that can happen, but there’s a lot more demands on us as well. And I think that it undercuts a good value, which is kinda like grit or just perseverance that both of you have kind of talked about. “Well, I’m going to get done what I can get done.” Some days it’s a chore and that’s okay. Chris: I wonder if it might be more discovery writers on their first draft that talk about flow? I think about this cause my dad is very much a discovery writer. He’s like on the opposite end of the spectrum as me. And he loves this blank page and all the possibilities that it has. And he actually enjoys dictating to write, where he’ll talk into a recorder. And then try to use software to get it translated into words on the page. And that’s how he likes to do his first draft. I think for him, the process of writing is a lot more about just exploring the imagination and seeing where the story takes you, which is the experience that discovery writers love so much. And I can definitely see in that kind of situation, this idea of flow and time passing really quickly. But for me, I like to plan as much as possible ahead of time because that narrows down what I have to focus on when I’m writing the draft. And for me, it’s a very intellectually intense process where I’m focusing on exactly what words I want to communicate what I want to communicate. It’s not an “open inspiration, see where it takes me” type of process. [laughs] And that might make a difference there. Wes: Oh, I think I lied. I have experienced some flow states recently, but it’s only for editing and it’s only for clear mechanical edits on nonfiction. [laughs] I rarely have to query what the writer meant and I’m just fixing punctuation, fixing errors, and I’m just like, “Oh, okay, that went by relatively quickly.” Because it was almost just rote: Okay, I know what I’m doing. Chris: Sounds like you were able to be more on autopilot and again, it wasn’t very intellectually intense for you. Wes: Exactly. Your dad’s story is interesting. I’m sure a lot of discovery writers are like that, because to me, it sounds like his flow is just telling himself a story. Chris: Mhm. Wes: I think that’s cool, but it’s completely foreign to me. Chris: For a lot of these writers, the fact that they don’t know how the story is going to end is a big motivational factor. Most people are some hybrid between the type of rigorous planner that I am and the type of absolute discovery writer my dad is. [laughs] We’re both on both ends of the extreme. Most people are somewhere in between. But for the people who do discovery writing, they don’t want to do planning, even if it saves them revision later, because that’s what motivates them to finish the story, they don’t know how it’s going to end. Whereas if you plan, you do. And so you don’t have that tension as a motivational factor anymore, or not as much. That’s a very different experience and therefore calls for a different process. Wes: What motivates you guys when you’re writing for your sessions? Oren: Usually I just find some topic that’s really neat. And then I write a story about it. So in the space future, if spaceships are fighting and they’re so far away from each other the light delay becomes a thing where they can’t just see where their opponent is, they see where they were several seconds ago. That’s kind of weird. What if I wrote a short story about that? Boom! Now there’s lasers and stuff. And that’s basically my entire inspiration process. Wes: When you were putting that story together Oren–cause I think I read that one, which was super fun–as you worked on that, I don’t know how long it took you, but did you not feel satisfied throughout the process or did you? Cause I think that’s a good question because some people think, “Oh, it’s a short story or a novella, I’ll only be satisfied when I’m done” and they won’t acknowledge that maybe they had a good day of writing. Oren: I mean, I’ve reasonably enjoyed writing that story. The ones that I don’t enjoy writing don’t get published because they’re a lot worse. So I enjoyed that one a reasonable amount. Like that one, I was also combining my weird phobia of being replaced by a machine. It’s like, well, now I’m going to write a story about that. Eff you, machines, eat laser beams! Ha! This is a healthy coping mechanism. [laughter] Oren: So you know, that one was fine. There are other stories that are trunked because I… I got them written. It’s not like I regret writing them, but they were much harder to write. They were not nearly as smooth. And they were not nearly as well conceived to start with. And it just isn’t worth the emotional energy it would take to edit them. So they live in the trunk folder. As experience points. Chris: I think that each story I have something different that I’m really interested in. And one thing I’ve learned is that the amount of motivation has to be equivalent to the length of the story and my commitment to the project. With short stories sometimes it’s just a novel idea that I want to explore or a point I want to make. Another Day, Another Diamond is about a character in a utopian world where nobody has to work anymore and she’s the very last worker and it discusses the value of work. So that was an interesting idea. I decided to write it in omniscient and I worked really hard to make the wordcraft pay off, despite the fact that it was more distant and that was a lot of work. And by the time I was done with it, even though it was a short story, I was like, I’m very much ready to be done with this story. Because that was an interesting idea to me, but it wasn’t so compelling to me. The novelty of new ideas wears off [laughs] and I was just ready to be done. There’s no way I could have done a novel about that, it wouldn’t be in me. Whereas for longer stories, I need something that has a lot more emotional pull. Where, yeah, I know how it ends because I’m a very rigorous planner, but it has some emotional pull, like I’m very attached to the main character and the main character’s emotional journey. And a lot of times there’s something about their experience or the atmosphere that I find very compelling or intriguing. And so I need more than to know the ending, I need to really see it come to life before I am satisfied. I love having works with lots of variety, but I think as I get longer, probably my works will have less variety, unfortunately. Just because what I’m interested in [laughs] is a more narrow thing. And like I’m often interested in stories that are kind of dark. And so my stories just might get darker as they get longer because I have to meet that requirement. Yeah. Being motivated and liking what you write is also a really important part of being effective. Wes: I just really liked how both of you touched on, a primary motivation is actually just problem-solving. You both talked about your process as being kind of identifying something cool and you just wanted to see how it works. With a good narrative, that’s the key thing. I think that there’s gotta be some similarities with discovery too, because discovery writers are going to set out and problems will arise and they’ll want to solve them. So I think that that’s kind of a neat way to maybe think about your writing and writing more effectively is, you could sit down and approach your page on day two and say like, what’s the problem that I’m working through today and see how much progress you get on it. It’s like working through doing – I don’t want to reduce it to like math homework or anything like that, [laughs] but there’s a sense of progress when actually you’ve identified a problem and you can start working towards it, is a healthy way to start thinking about your work in terms of delivering more satisfaction. Because maybe you solve the problem in two pages and maybe you solve it, it takes 200. But either way, that’s your goal and you’re working towards a way of feeling more accomplished with what you did instead of sitting down and saying, “I need to write a 300 page novel because… that’s what I need to do apparently.” Chris: [laughs] Yeah. Going back to motivation, and some of the obstacles that writers often have that I hear that they have, one of the big ones is the novelty of a new idea. And I definitely have times when I’m just like at a normal day of work, trying to make my dollar [laughs] and a new story idea hits me and suddenly I can’t concentrate on anything else and my brain is assembling the story and I can’t even work at my day job anymore. And I have to [laughs] start writing down the story. And many writers get interrupted by this, where they have trouble committing to the same story and ever finishing it because they have that new, sexy idea that shows up. And some writers have an issue where they get enthralled by a new idea and they start writing it and then they lose that interest because it’s just novelty and so it fades very quickly and then they can never finish a project. So this kind of like excitement curve is a real issue for many writers when it comes to actually getting their writing done. My recommendation if you’re having that problem is: While you’re still excited about the novelty of the idea, to try to put in something, some emotional hooks that are compelling to you so that you have something that you’ll stay interested in after the novelty of the cool world-building idea or whatever it is, fades. Could be different for every person. What about the two of you? Do you have any experiences to share about staying interested in a story? Oren: I would say, never underestimate the power of spite. [laughter] Oren: On multiple occasions, I have been motivated to keep going by thinking of a time when a successful author did something wrong and I’m going to show them! And they’ll never know about it, but I’ll have shown them. Then they’ll be in their place, egg on their face for sure. Chris: [laughs] “This is how it can be done right.” Basically. [laughter] Wes: Similarly if I get to a stuck point, or if I’m working with a client who’s turned in something and take a look at it and say like, okay, we’ve been working on this for a while or I’ve been working on this for a while and say like, I get weirdly motivated, whatever I do write, I write so slowly because no sentence is ever finished and that’s my task and my problem to work through. But I think there’s always fresh takes by kind of interrogating what I have or what a client has by saying, like, “Well, what happens if this goes away or we introduce something else or if we revise?” I think a lot of my motivation ends up being revision focused, even when stuff isn’t necessarily complete, which is also a hindrance to conventional productivity, but it helps keep it fresher for me. And it keeps conversations going with authors that I work with. So that’s helpful I think. At least they don’t seem to mind it. But there’s definitely a lot more dialogue back and forth. But maybe at the core of that is just, sharing is helpful for keeping motivation up after the idea that strikes you like lightning cools a bit. Oren: All right, so since we’re kind of getting towards the end of our time, I did want to bring up specialized writing software. Since I have some opinions about that. There are a lot of them. I haven’t tried them all, so I don’t know what all of them do. My thing that I would recommend to people is that if you are going to try something like this, see if there’s actually some value that it adds first, because the ones that I have tried don’t offer much beyond an organizational system. And maybe you’re someone who has enough trouble with organizational systems that it’s worth paying $60 or however much they cost for a built-in organizational system. But I’m guessing that for a lot of people, they could do that without too much trouble with some files and folders. If you watch the commercials for these writing softwares, they’re always like “Keep track of your world in this cool thing!” and they show you this like graphic that they made to represent their file storage system. And it’s like, that’s not what the file storage system looks like. It looks like a normal file storage system. In a lot of cases, these programs are being sold to people who are a bit on the desperate side, because you know, there’s so much that we all want to be writers. And there’s a hope that maybe this software will finally be what does it. And it’s not like there’s nothing useful in there. I’ve heard some people get really excited about different writing styles- or typing styles, like there’s one style I believe on Scrivener called typewriter mode, where the cursor stays in one place and the text goes out from the cursor instead of the cursor moving along with the text. And I’ve seen some people claim that that really helps them. And I absolutely believe those people, but like people also claim that writing in Comic Sans really helps them. And I’m going to go ahead and believe those people too, but if Comic Sans cost $60, I would definitely try to make sure you know it works for you before you bought it, is all I’m saying. [Wes laughs] Chris: I will say for myself, just going back to the Comic Sans issue, why I can believe that works, is because when I need to do brainstorming sometimes to solve a sticky problem, if what I’m writing on looks too neat and finalized, I have a problem just putting out ideas that I know are bad. Sometimes in order to solve a problem, I need to do a brainstorm, I need to just start putting out ideas, even if I already know they are terrible, and just keep writing whatever comes to my head. And if I do that, I will eventually find a solution that I actually like. But I find myself unable to do that if I’m doing the neat typing on a computer. Cause I just feel like what’s supposed to go on that page should be relatively polished. So often I actually move to physically writing on a notepad, but I’ve also sometimes gone to the actual notepad program [laughter] and used fonts that are different, that feel rougher, because it doesn’t feel like what I’m writing is final or has to be neat or tidy anymore. And so putting your font in Comic Sans, where it’s like, wow, this is… I can’t take my writing seriously in Comic Sans, but that’s what I need. Because now I actually feel free to let myself write something, even if I know what I put down might not be perfect. And for some people that works better. Wes: Okay, so, I guess by means of kind of wrapping up here, we know that discovering an effective writing process takes time. There’s tips and techniques that might seem an obvious fit for your natural tendencies, but as Chris just noted with type faces and stuff, you might need to trial other options to kind of determine what’s right for you. And when you’re doing that, the hacks and tricks and tips are probably going to come into play. But I think trial and error is important for figuring out what works for you. If it was just this one weird thing to solve all your problems we would have figured it out long ago and everybody would be published authors and whatnot, and you wouldn’t need to consult the many great articles that Chris and Oren have on our blog that you should all read. So just remember that as you develop your practice, there’s going to be days where the result of your best efforts just don’t feel like much and that’s okay. And it should be more than okay, because being an effective and efficient writer doesn’t demand a staggering outcome. It’s just asking that you focus on your best work with the resources available to you. Oren: All right, well, that is a great note to end this podcast on. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our patrons. First we have Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next we have Ayman Jaber, he’s a fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Danita Rambo and she lives at therambogeeks.com. We’ll talk to you all next week. Voiceover: If you enjoyed this episode, consider leaving us a review on iTunes so we can continue to grow like a swarm of nanites. [Outro Music]. This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?      Related StoriesFive Ways to Build Your Storytelling Muscles 298 – Episodic Prose Stories 308 – Fanfiction  

Sometimes a story is created as one thing, but you want to make it into another thing. Books to movies, TV shows to video games, graphic novels to roleplaying games – all of this is adaptation. Today, we’re nerding out on how adaptation works, how it can go wrong, and why the book is not in fact always better than the movie. Plus, a special tribute to everyone’s favorite live action adaptation: The Last Airbender! Download Episode 309  Subscription Feed  https://mythcreants.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/TMP-309-Adaptations-Again.mp3 Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton. Used with permission. Show Notes: Episode 41 Nicholas Meyer Lindsay Ellis: The Hobbit Forgotten Realms Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets Annihilation Interview with the Vampire The Rook The Haunting of Hill House Serenity Roland Hilda Locke and Key Jump down to comments ↓ Transcript Generously transcribed by Nichole. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. Voiceover: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [opening song] Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is… Wes: Wes. Oren: and… Chris: Chris. Oren: And today we are adapting episode 41 of the podcast into episode 309 of also the podcast. An episode about adaptations. The only difference is that we’re all smarter than we were many years ago and the episode will also be shorter, and also I didn’t listen to the episode before we adapted it. This isn’t for the hardcore fans of episode 41. This is for the new audience that we’re going to bring in. Maybe, who knows. Chris: I really think you should have to be a superfan of the old podcast in order to do an adaptation. Oren: Ooo, I have strong opinions about this. [laughter] Chris: Oooo, [laughter] let’s hear these strong opinions. Oren: Look, I’m just really tired of the idea that you need to be a fan of the original to adapt it, because I swear it’s like publicity people use that as a shield against criticism. It’s like look, “We got these people who are such fans of the original.” And they’re always talking about that. Maybe it’s just the Star Trek adaptations, I don’t know. I don’t know if this happens in other franchises, but every time there’s a new Star Trek show, they’re like we’re such fans of the original. It’s getting to the point where I feel like you shouldn’t be allowed to say that. Wes: Especially if you just go in your own direction, it’s like, “I love blue but I’m going to go in like an orange, from here on out.” [Laughter] Oren: Right, and especially since like probably the most successful Star Trek adaptation of all time, The Wrath of Khan, was made by someone who had never seen a Star Trek episode until then. Now he did his research, right, he went through and watched the original episodes and found one that he was like, “That’s pretty cool, that had some open ends, we could make a movie about that.” And he did, his name is Nicholas Meyer, I’m just not convinced that there’s any real correlation between how big a fan the person making the adaptation is and how good the adaptation is. Chris: Yeah, I have to echo that. I think one of the advantages of adaptations where we see they are strongest is, particularly when we’re going from books to movies, the ability to cut down to the strongest parts of the story. As with authors who often don’t cut out parts that they should cut out because they are attached to them. I think a fan is more likely to have the same problem. And the nice thing about somebody who’s not attached is they can be more ruthless when cutting out what’s not working. Especially when you have to go down in size. Oren: On that note, here I have a question for the two of you. Everyone always gets excited when a book is being adapted to a movie, why doesn’t anyone get excited when a movie is being adapted into a book? Wes: Does that happen? [Laugh] Chris: Oh yea, there’s novelization of tons of movies that are popular. Wes: But is a novelization… I mean, I know it’s an adaptation if it’s crossing mediums, but aren’t novelizations just like, “Hey here’s the film, but you can read it?” Isn’t it just like the same thing, I’ve never read a novelization because I just assume, no scratch that, I’ve read 2001: A Space Odyssey. But I think that he wrote that while they did the movie, it’s like the exact same thing. Oren: The answer is sort of yes and sort of no. And this actually is why people don’t get excited about novelization as much, or at least part of it, there are a lot of reasons. But one reason is that, when a novelization happens, it is an adaptation, but novelizations are almost exclusively bad. They’re just worse than watching the movie and the reason is that they aren’t allowed to change anything. And the thing about adaptation is, usually to make a successful adaptation you will need to change things. Different mediums have different strengths. And that’s what we see in basically all good adaptations, is that they were willing to make changes to preserve what worked and make a new, better story. The people who write novelizations of successful movies are not allowed to do that. The only thing that is ever different is that they put in more dialog to justify things that don’t make sense. Like if you read the Star Wars novelizations, and I’ve read a few, they are basically, “This is what happened in the movie, but it is in prose you don’t get to see it, with more narration and dialogue trying to explain stuff.” Like in trying to explain that in the Solo movie, the droid wasn’t enslaved, they say, “She wanted to become part of the Falcon,” [chuckle] “we promise. That’s what happened.” They just do stuff like that. Why would I want to read that, it’s a movie, it doesn’t actually make that good of a book because it’s a movie. Chris: Right, novels often have a lot of fluff that you can cut down, not all novels, it varies, but a lot of them have fluff that you can cut down that actually makes a really effective movie. Whereas if you try to take a movie and fluff it out to a novel that’s going to be really hard to do without having lots of filler in there. Oren: Right, there’s just not enough content. I mean like the Lord of the Rings movies are actually pretty unusual in that they are fairly long books, although not super long by fantasy standards. They are reasonably long, and yet they converted very well into movies because so much of them is description, and frankly a lot of it’s unnecessary. We did not need to know all of the bannerman that show up to Minas Tirith and all of their backstories, Tolkien. I didn’t need to know that. Cutting that out really loses nothing and preserves almost the entire story, but like you can’t really do that with a Game of Thrones. Which is the reason why Game of Thrones works much better as a TV show. If you tried to turn the 300-thousand-word Game of Thrones novel into a movie, a 2 hour or even a 3 hour movie, it would have been a disaster. Chris: Yeah. It was also a series, right? But even a single book probably wouldn’t have translated to a movie very well. Oren: Right, I was only talking about the first book. The first book of Game of Thrones is nearly as long as the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. To make that a movie you would have to cut so much that it would be hard to recognize it. Which is why they made the choice, I assume, why they made the choice to make it a TV show. I think that was the right choice. And I think there are a lot of books that are easier to adapt into TV shows, just because there’s more story there. Wes: What about when there’s not more story there, but they decide to add a bunch more? Since we’ve been talking about Tolkien we could talk about The Hobbit. Oren: This is a bad Hobbit [ba dum] [chuckles] That’s a pretty obvious case of, we want some more money. Lindsay Ellis has a really good deep dive video into the production of The Hobbit and why it is the way it is. And there were just very strong financial incentives to create three movies, instead of 1 or 2. Chris: It originally was supposed to be 2 movies. And then they changed their minds to make it three, like mid-production. Which, not a good idea. Wes: “We need more time you guys.” “No, we don’t.” “No, we do, trust me.” [laughter] Oren: And also in one of the greatest “what if”s, we’ll never know what Guillermo del Toro’s The Hobbit was doing to look like. Chris: That’s so sad. I want to watch his Hobbit. Wes: It is sad. Oren: But the studios decided that they wanted it to be more like Lord of the Rings, which is kind of ironic because that’s been a problem for fantasy movies ever since Lord of the Rings came out, and is trying to make them like Lord of the Rings. Even when the source material doesn’t really work for that. That’s why Tim Burton’s Alice movies are so bad, is because they are trying to make them like Lord of the Rings, but they also want them to be at least somewhat like Alice in Wonderland. They aren’t willing to do the extreme changes you would need to make Alice in Wonderland actually work with Lord of the Rings. It was just kind of funny to see that happen to another Tolkien product. It’s like, “This needs to be like Lord of the Rings, but The Hobbit is nothing like Lord of the Rings. We still want it to be Hobbit-esque, it’s still kind of a comedy but it’s also epic and action-y.” What is going on here? These are movies at war with themselves. Wes: Don’t forget you have to make some of the dwarfs sexy. [laughter] Chris: This is an ongoing problem that happens with any large company that is in the creative industry or sizable enough with executives, is they are focused on marketing, and they are risk averse, which means they are always looking at what made tons of money recently and trying to copy it. But when you have anything that’s creative, people get tired of the same thing. And so it only works for so long. And then try to fit stories into molds. But it also happens with video games and other creative products. There’s always a lot of copying that happens. It’s too bad. Oren: Can I talk about why video games are really hard to convert into movies and why they almost always fail? Chris: Let’s do it. Oren: I have a theory okay, so part of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Video game movies have a reputation for being terrible. There is a certain “well we’re going to make this and it’s going to be a quick cash in, we’re not going to be put people with skills or talent. We’re not going to put a lot of money” so there’s that aspect. But I think even more importantly, and the original cause of this problem is that video games sell themselves primarily on interaction. They are the primary facit of the video game medium is that the player gets to do things and that’s what makes video games enjoyable. Most video games have barely a coherent story to mention, what would, honestly what does a Mario movie look like? Wes: Did you guys see that live action Mario movie from like decades ago? So weird, it’s horrible. Oren: It’s horrible and bad, but try to imagine what a good Mario movie would be like. You know, especially in the older era of Mario games. Nowadays Mario games do have something of a plot but in some ways that makes them even more ridiculous. It’s like “hey the new Mario game is about finding the cosmic stars that will save the universe.” It’s like, “who’s doing that?” “I don’t know, some little Italian guy and a plumber. I don’t know. What is his backstory?” Chris: First of all, it would definitely be animated because the whole aesthetic of Mario, it being almost absurdist, and surreal, just doesn’t work in live action very well. I think it’s way easier to sell that esthetic in, if you’re doing animation. Even the choice to make it live action is just poor taste, in my opinion. Oren: And even games that sell themselves on story, like Mass Effect, the good ones. I’m talking about Mass Effect 3 here. Those stories are at best average space opera, once you take out the interactive parts. That’s not uncommon, because what video games are doing, the main selling point of a video game is that it lets you be in the story. You the player. Which no other medium can offer. I guess except role playing games maybe but that’s a separate thing. Movies can’t do it, books can’t do it. Not even choose your own adventures can do it. To do that, certain corners have to be cut in terms of storytelling. I’m not at all interested in a Mass Effect movie because Mass Effect’s setting and storyline are good enough to sell the immersive interactive elements, but on their own, as like pieces of storytelling, they’re average at best. And that’s just the case with most video games. There just isn’t much to adapt. Chris: Yea this is why I don’t play very many video games, is because I’m not really interested in the game component. I’m only interested in the story component. And sometimes that’s enough for me to play them for a while, because I’m interested in meeting the characters, but in the end, their story is never as good as I can get just by reading a novel or watching a TV show. Because it has to fit the game components. Oren: I love video games. I play video games. I enjoy being part of the story, but I recognize that certain sacrifices have to be made in order to make that happen. It’s similar to why you can’t make a good Dungeons and Dragons movie unless it’s a comedy, because Dungeons and Dragons is already trying to imitate classic fantasy stories. So unless you’re going to make a comedy movie, which has been done many times but there’s no reason to give it a multi-million dollar budget about how attacks per round are very silly, like what is a Dungeons and Dragons movie? I guess you could make a forgotten realms movie if you wanted to but then you have to assume that people know what forgotten realms is and it’s just a mess. There’s nothing Dungeons and Dragons about that. Anyway, you can tell I have some opinions about this. [laughter] Wes: I’m just thinking about some of the games, trying to wrack my mind for some of the games that are more story driven. I really enjoyed Final Fantasy 7 and 9. Especially 9. There were definitely a lot of cinematic cutscenes, but those are not really story components. I’ve sat down and watched on YouTube all the cinematic cutscenes from start to finish for the whole thing. And you don’t really know what’s going on. It’s just like, “Oh, here comes another summons and it’s going to destroy this thing and oh there’s another one. And there’s Kuga”. And so much of it happens with small interactions of the game play, but when I was kid, first playing those games it was like “Oh this is great, it’s like a movie”, but I think that’s the trick of the animation which is a gripe of mine with certain film adaptations that they just use CGI to excuse story, by, I don’t know, having a dragon chase Harry Potter all over that 4th movie. Oren: Or anything with transformers logo on it. I mean look, people like things that look cool and if your thing looks cool enough it can make up for a lot of other weaknesses. Not always. Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets is a prime example of a completely beautiful, gorgeous movie that was not only panned but that bombed really badly but I think that had more to do with marketing that with the quality of the movie. Chris: But it was a very bad movie. [laughter] Oren: It was very bad. Ridiculously bad. Chris: I think it might be worth talking about what’s easy to adapt especially going from books to films or back and forth. And what’s not. Sometimes we see some really interesting things where people do things to make up for it. I think the adaptation of Annihilation in the Area X series is one of the more interesting adaptations because that book, Jeff VanderMeer, has spilled to much atmosphere in his narration and has an unreliable narrator that is used to build suspense and all of these things that don’t really translate to a film, very well. When they did the film, instead of relying on that kind of psychological uncertainty to build suspense, they just made it more visually creepy. Whereas technically in the book Area X mostly looks like a wilderness. Like a Florida wilderness, I guess. Without tons of weird stuff you’re looking at but there’s other things to produce that psychological terror. Whereas in the movie they made Area X look super weird and creepy and that replaced the narration and I thought that was really well done. They had other issues in the adaptation that were still, in the book did not have a perfect plot and the adaptation didn’t either. [chuckle] Oren: Yeah and, okay okay I love Annihilation as an example because everything you said they did a great job replacing the creepy narration with creepy visuals, right, and I love that, that was great. I thought they did a really good job adding a bit of urgency because the book, it’s kind of unclear why they’re even here or what the stakes are. And even the main character seems a little confused and my guess is that VanderMeer himself didn’t know and was hoping it would come to him as he wrote the book. In the movie they have a thing where they know that Area X is expanding so there’s some stakes and tension, that’s cool. I like that. The movie also shows what happens when you encounter a flaw in the book that you don’t know how to fix. Which is that the book doesn’t really have an ending, it just kind of stops at one point. There’s no climax. There’s no real satisfaction. And in the movie, they were like, “We can’t just have the story stop, the film executives will expect it to have a satisfying ending, I guess she’s going to do a weird mirror dance with a guy in a black motion capture suit.” Which is what the thing she beats looks like. And it’s like, “What is happening for the last 15 minutes of the movie?” [laughter] It’s like, “Well, we ran out of material, there was nothing to adapt so we threw this weird dance scene together and then she burns it with fire.” The most boring possible way to end the movie. So that’s often what happens in adaptations. People talk about, “oh that adaptation was really bad, so much worse than the book.” And sometimes it is, but often what you’re actually seeing is problems that were in the book too, that were easier to ignore because you didn’t have to watch them happen. And that’s an excellent example. I love it. Chris: I mean, I do think what closure the book had was events that didn’t make for a visually interesting climax. Right, they were just looking for some way to bring this whole thing to a head and in the books she, the main character, she just finds a notebook and then just goes wandering off into the wilderness. [chuckle] And in the movie they were like, “But we want there to be an exciting scene at the end, how do we embellish this into an exciting scene?” And it’s just why, why is this here? Oren: It also helps that Area X is fairly short. That is one of the reasons why it works okay as a movie. Where as a lot of books don’t. I started thinking about it in terms of compressible material. Because some books can be compressed and sometimes its because the books themselves are too full of fluff or sometimes they just have a bunch of stuff that doesn’t affect the plot in any way, looking at you Interview with a Vampire, but regardless, there are books that you can squish down without losing too much. Then there are some that you can’t. Some that actually have truly meaty plots that you can’t cut a lot of stuff out of because if you don’t everything stops working and that’s when you really need to start looking at a TV show adaptation. Because trying to adapt it into just one movie is not gonna work. And sometimes it’s the case of the filmmaker not knowing which one is which. One of the problems with the early Harry Potter movies is that they basically just feel like the book on fast forward, because it’s like we have to put everything in there, it was in the book, it’s gotta be in the movie. We have to zoom past all of the stuff and then in the later ones they started making changes and cutting stuff and it’s an improvement. Chris: I have to say I wonder how much of that was JK? Because she had control of these movies. That was one of her criteria, that she needed to have a lot of say so. And I have to wonder if the unwillingness to cut anything, which really needed to happen just for pacing because the pacing is just too fast, goes through things too quickly, came from her and then after a couple movies she realized that wasn’t gonna continue working. That it was degrading the quality of the movies. Wes: Well the physical size of the books shows Oren’s squishable compression hypothesis in action. You can’t squish much of the first book or the second, but after that you can squish them pretty deep. Chris: Yeah, although they also get longer. Wes: That’s kind of what I’m alluding too, you know, the sheer volume increases of words on page, the amount of material she put into each one. Chris: Yeah, but I’m not sure book three has less viable plot than book one or two, it would still, if you didn’t do any extra cutting it would still have the same pacing problems, but it doesn’t. My guess. I would have to look and outline the whole thing and I don’t want to do that. [laugh] Wes: Not right now anyway. [laughter] Chris: A adaptation that was to a TV show and struggled just because of things that were difficult to adapt is The Rook TV show. Which comes from an urban fantasy book and the problem here, even though the adaptation actually changed some things that were cool, is that the book there’s a lot of mystery solving that is private that the protagonist does by herself. She looks through files to try to find out what happened to her, because someone gave her amnesia and she’s trying to put this puzzle together. And there’re just a lot of scenes that are plot important for her doing that but in the TV show was just like, “Okay, now we’ve got some scenes of the protagonist by herself looking at some stuff on the ground.” [chuckles] You know, sometimes, it’s just, if a lot of the real plot and activity of the story is happening inside of the protagonist’s head as they put things together. In some cases, I think some adaptations would do well just by adding in additional characters for them to talk to. Oren: They need a buddy. Chris: Right. In this one though it was supposed to be that she doesn’t know who to trust and she’s really isolated and that’s why she has to do it by herself. Which is extra weird, because in the show they changed that. There are definitely people it feels like she can trust, and she then she just doesn’t talk to them for no reason [chuckle] that we can tell. So yeah, that was kind of messed up a bit there too. But any story that is, again, really just has the plot happening in the protagonist’s head can be really tricky to move to film or when we don’t really see all of that happening. Wes: In the Annihilation example was pretty good one because they pretty clearly recognized that and they were like, “Okay, we have got to do something else.” I think that is just something that needs to be hopefully discussed more. In other psychological horrors examples, the Haunting of Hill House, which has had movie and TV adaptations since Shirley Jackson first published it. That’s really hard. It’s a psychological horror, the whole POV is Eleanor Vance’s and she’s the one who meets the ultimate end, at the end. But you think everything is wrong with the house but it’s only really happening to Eleanor. How do you do that on a show? I mean you adapt it and say inspired by…And it’s not like, “Hey, we like elements of a Haunted House but we realize that we can’t put readers directly in her head, the audience directly in her head, but that would be more of disorienting experience or we don’t know who to do it or make it satisfying so just enjoy a haunted house ride.” It’s just not the same kind of thing. Oren: Although supposedly good, I don’t know. I didn’t have the stomach for it. Wes: The Netflix show was definitely the better adaptation. The movies had some good moments. I don’t know. Maybe it’s unfair, I’m just judging it on the book and maybe I should just try to treat the adaptations on their own. I mean I don’t know, should we do that? Oren: I mean, I usually do. I find I have very little nostalgia for books that I liked, when an adaptation comes out, I don’t usually mind if it’s different. What bothers me is when certain things are clearly preserved because they were like that in the original, but now they’ve made changes that no longer fits. My article on Interview with a Vampire is probably out by the time you’re hearing this, but that’s basically what happens in Interview with a Vampire. Certain things in the movie are significantly improved because they were willing to make changes. Like they made Lestat much more of a smooth, dark tempter, instead of a chaotic, unstable jerk. Which is what he is in the books. And I totally get why they made that change. Both because it’s more entertaining to watch and because they were probably hoping they would do sequels and it’s frankly kind of weird that Lestat from the book is eventually going to become the prince of all vampires. But I can believe movie Lestat would be like that. Then you get some weird stuff, like at the end, the ending of the movie is still Louis going and taking a victory lap on Lestat who’s all pathetic now. And in the book, that’s sort of works, because Lestat was kind of his abuser. So Louis being like, “Yeah I’m cool now and you suck” was a satisfying moment, but in the movie Lestat is not his abuser, that scene is very strange. It just doesn’t make sense. You can see stuff like that all over the place. It’s not even always with books. This happened with Serenity too. Where the movie Serenity, the adaptation, or the sequel to Firefly, was in this weird place where it was clearly trying to appeal to fans from the original show, but also trying to draw in people who had never seen the original. So it had weird stuff where the characters were in different emotional places than they had been, which is okay. That’s a little odd if this is a sequel, but then there was also stuff that I had actually watched Serenity first, and I had no idea who Inara or Shepherd Book were. Wes: Same. Oren: Who are these people? I was so confused and that was just a case of the movie not knowing which audience it wanted. Wes: They definitely went for the one season and a movie and you’re going to have to do a lot of leg work on your own. Oren: Right, but also, if you do all of that legwork, you’re going to be frustrated because we changed everyone’s emotional status, even though theoretically, in this movie universe, the episodes of TV also happened. That’s just an interesting halfway point I got caught on. Chris: What about? Wes: Graphic novel adaptations? Cause I know that certainly Firefly/Serenity universe has several that are more like filling in the gaps in other stories. But other ones that come to mind, there was once again a terrible Dark Tower gunslinger adaptation, even though I was really excited about Idris Elba playing Roland. But that was just a bad movie. Because, I don’t know, there’s a compression issue where they’re going to take a seven-book series and do like one video. It’s the Game of Thrones example again. Chris: Hilda is a comic book adaptation. Wes: Oh yeah. That’s a good one. Chris: It is. In fact, I bought one of the comics to compare and it’s largely the same. It’s like they took the comic and they just gave it another layer of polish. Where we just tightened up the plot a tiny, made the drawings just slightly better, but it’s largely the same. I mean again, I only looked at the equivalent of the first episode or two, up to when they move to Trolberg. I haven’t looked at the rest and how much it deviates. But it’s, these are both much more compatible mediums cause they are both visual. Comics don’t have audio but for the most part, we don’t have the same issues where, how do we translate internal narration into visuals. And it feels very much the same, that’s a good example. One that is much rougher, but I don’t think necessarily had to be, is Locke & Key. [chuckles] Is a dark graphic novel that was changed to a TV show. I think the issue was some of the decisions that were made about what type of TV show it would be. This really is kind of horror-ish, definitely dark graphic novel, but the main characters are young, and it felt like they decided they wanted it to be kind of a family show. [chuckles] Which is not a fit for Locke & Key, and it felt like it had low production values and was otherwise rough around the edges. Oren, you saw the TV show, but I don’t know if you read the graphic novels though. Oren: I read some and there were definitely some things that were easier to do in the graphic novel than in the show. I just noticed there were different priorities. Like when I read the graphic novel there was a much heavier emphasis on the creepy mystery and I just felt that in the show they were like “let’s do high school drama” and it’s not like high school drama inherently bad, but this high school drama is pretty unrelated to the supernatural mystery. I think that was just a mistake in focus. I think that if they wanted to do high school drama, it needed to be connected to the mystery and they either didn’t know how to do that or didn’t think they had to. And so in that case, I think it was an issue of bad choices. There were some production limits, like they had to change what the key that opens your head does because that was going to be really hard to show visually. But I thought they did a fine job of that. You put the key in and a door appears and you go through the door and now you’re in someone’s head. Like sure, that’s fine. Chris: Any animation or drawing to live action you’re gonna to have to change the visuals a little bit, for live action constraints, right. There were some issues with them looking at this, Locke & Key has a very slow burn plot, but it felt like in the show they wanted to make sure that there was good stakes and progress right away. And it felt the plot got messed with because they took things that were supposed to come later and moved them earlier and tried to add more stakes. Do those kinds of things, but there was a careful balance in the graphic novel that they disrupted by moving things around. That’s kind of how I felt about it. That one definitely struggled more in the adaptation from graphic novel to a TV show. Oren: I do think there is one adaptation that we’ve been leaving out. Which I think we can all agree was a true masterpiece. Which was the live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. [laugher] Wes: Masterpiece! [laugher] Chris: Of course I should have known, and then the adaptation attacked. Wes: Let’s take one of the benders, just one of them, and completely and fundamentally alter their abilities. Oren: Yeah, it’s fine. Also pronounce the names wrong for some reason. Why, why is that? To say nothing of the racebending. I’m glad that movie exists though because we have a term for that now, it’s called racebending. Which we didn’t have before. Wes: When I think about that movie, which is kind of randomly often sometimes, the thing that always stick to my mind is when Iroh has that big confrontational moment towards the end and the other firebenders are like, terrified screaming “He’s making fire from nothing!” [laughter] Like, “Yeah, it’s bending, come on.” [laughter] Oren: Hot take. That was actually one thing about the movie I didn’t hate. Wes: I know, that’s probably why I think about it. [chuckles] Oren: It was the idea that firebenders need a source of fire to do their bending. I could see why someone would think that, because the other bender can’t create earth, air, water from nothing. There needs to be some around. It’s a little different though because it’s way easier to have earth or water or air, just around, than it is with fire. So, again, I see why the original show made it so firebenders can conjure fire, because otherwise it would be just like debilitating to have to carry a torch around everywhere. Chris: I also just want to point out, cause we were talking about how much story there is and pacing, that one of the many, many, many things wrong with this adaptation was that he tried to take the entire first season of the show… Wes: Yes, yes. Chris: …And condense it down into one movie. It’s like there’s no way to do that, you can’t do that. Oren: Look Chris, we now have proof that you can. [LAUGHTER] Chris: You were so busy asking whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think about whether you should. Oren: You no one will legally stop you, apparently. [laughter] But I am going to have to legally stop this episode because we’re already over time. So we’ll just leave you with that. With that beautiful Last Airbender movie in your mind and just imagine in a few months or years, or however long it takes, soon we’ll have a live action Netflix adaptation to hate. Wes: Oh boy. Oren: I mean who knows, I guess it could be good. I don’t know. I have no hope for anything. Chris: Why live action? I don’t understand. Oren: The only thing I hope for is our wonderful patrons who support us. Several of whom are: Kathy Ferguson, who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next, we have Ayman Jaber; he is a fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Danita Rambo; she lives at therambogeeks.com.  We’ll talk to you next week. Voiceover: If you enjoyed this podcast and want to slip us some gold-pressed latinum, head on over to patreon.com/mythcreants. We appreciate it. [Song out] Voiceover: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton. P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?      Related StoriesFive Popular Stories With Conflicts That Are Too Difficult Interview With the Vampire Shows the Strengths and Weaknesses of Adaptation What The Black Company Teaches Us About Dark Stories