How does one make less mean more? Well, you could always hack a bunch of dictionary sites to change the definition of “less,” but those changes always get reverted eventually. A more robust approach is to make sure whatever you add to the story actually matters. That way, you won’t have to add more to get the point across. How do you do that? We have a few suggestions.

Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

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Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.

 Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Now, what if instead of making the case for our story recommendations we just shouted them louder? “Don’t you dare put in that mystery! Meta-mysteries are the worst things in the history of the earth! Everyone who uses them is a loser!”

Oren: And we could do the whole article in all caps.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. I think that would be more convincing, right?

 Oren: Yeah. I don’t see any problems with this.

Chris: So, our topic is making less mean more, which sounds kind of vague, but I think it’s a good concept for a storyteller to keep in mind.

 Oren: Chris, this is profoundly un-American. We don’t make less mean more here. We make more mean more. On a good day, we make more mean more. Often, we make more mean less.

Chris: More! Always more!

Oren: This is an attack on my national identity.

Chris: [laughing] Okay, so the reasoning behind this is that as storytellers, we’re always trying to create a certain impression or evoke a reaction in our readers when we’re writing a scene or a chapter or what have you. And we have an initial tendency to try to get that reaction or make that impression by exaggerating things in the story, when what we actually need to do is make it feel like the things that we are featuring matter. And in fact, there are a lot of cases when exaggerating the situation that happens in the story can backfire. Sometimes it becomes comical. I’m thinking of a recent critique where a baby was tossed into some hellfire.

Oren: [chuckling]

Chris: And it was supposed to be sad or tragic—and the baby was just fine in the story, this was an invulnerable baby—but we were supposed to be shocked by it, but it was just, it was hilarious. And again, just because of the exaggeration of it. And if it doesn’t reach the point of drawing laughs unintentionally, it can also just feel a little bit overly sensational and tasteless, or, in some cases, it’s not in our interest to create a super strong impression and so it’s easy to just go a little too far and that can actually create problems for you.

 Oren: Yeah. Well, to a certain extent, if the thing that you’re doing is working, you may not need more of it, and if it’s not working, adding more is not going to help. If you have a message and you want the message to be that violence is bad. Then you would have a story where trying to use violence doesn’t work out and it causes more harm than it could solve. And okay, sure, that could work, but if you have the characters just repeating that over and over again then it’s like, all right, hang on. What are we doing here? What’s happening?

Chris: But Oren, what if I write a story where violence absolutely solves the problem but it’s super gory and the hero angsts about it a bunch?

 Oren: That’s a different problem, I think. I think you got yourself a different problem. That’s just the issue of the story being at war with itself. But in general, doing more with less is helpful just for a number of reasons. If you have more signal and less noise, people are more likely to get it. It’ll have a stronger impact than if you just throw the thing in over and over again. It’s the same way that you emphasize a point in a single line, but you don’t emphasize every point in a single line.

Chris: Yeah, it’s true. Tightening, right? Taking out the stuff that’s less powerful and letting the powerful thing stand alone can be a great way to emphasize something or call attention to it.

 Oren: Yeah. And then also sometimes whatever it is that you’re putting into the story has some impact that you may not want. And so if you do more with less of it, then you can get the same results, but with a lower impact. Like, a lot of readers don’t really want to read a bunch of gory details—and maybe you’re appealing to those who do, that’s a type of story you can tell—but assuming that you don’t want to scare off the readers who dislike gore, but you also want to show that your protagonist was in a fight and that that mattered and that they are hurt, you can make a lot out of a broken rib. Like a broken rib is bad. That hurts. Or even a cracked rib, that can be bad. You don’t have to go all the way to organs falling out.

Chris: [laughing] Yeah. I mean, especially with dark elements in the story, I think that’s where it makes the biggest difference, right? I think anything could potentially be exaggerated and come off a little bit cartoonish or comical, more than you want. But with dark elements especially where exaggerating tends to be more likely to feel tasteless or upsetting to people when that’s not what you needed.

I think a great example for me of making less mean more is bullying. So, we’ve covered sometimes the way that bullying is done in stories, especially in movies. It’s just, oh man, it’s so cliché at this point. Whave a school-age protagonist and because we want to create sympathy for them, suddenly we have a mob of bullies show up. Usually three. [laughing] Three is the magic number so that they outnumber the protagonist. And they always go straight to violence, punching the protagonist or whatnot. And it’s a lot. It feels cheap to me, very cheap.

It tends to normalize violence in a school setting, while downplaying the harassment. I feel that bullying usually involves a lot of harassment, and we tend to pretend the kid is on their own because we need a protagonist to face their own problems, which means we’re almost always absolving the schools of any responsibility for keeping kids safe. So, this happens in so many movies and I’m not a fan.

 Oren: Yeah. And I do want to acknowledge that this kind of violence does happen in schools, so it’s not like I’m saying this is not a thing. I do think that a lot of authors, particularly authors who did not go to schools where this sort of thing happened, don’t really understand the context in which that kind of violence can become commonplace, and they don’t present it in their stories. It’s like, yeah, this is a story where upper class American kids, or upper middle class American kids go, and it’s well-funded, and then out of nowhere we just have a brawl in the front courtyard. It’s like, well, where I went to school, that would’ve been a scandal if that happened. So, if you want that sort of thing, it can work, but you need the right context, and most contexts that we look at don’t have it. It’s just not there, and so you’re usually better off using less and showing the impact of just being harassed. That’s also really bad.

Chris: Right. Which brings me to Into the SpiderVerse, where we have a much better depiction where Miles is stressed out because he’s now starting a new school, and these are different students with a different culture and it makes him really stressed out. And the movie makes that feel compelling and creates sympathy for him without even having a bully show up. Just because he is stressed out about the impression he’s making and the interactions with these new students and his new school setting. We also have a scene ahead of time showing him interacting with the other friends that he knows at his previous school and is comfortable with, so we see what he’s losing. So, we make just that stress of moving to a new school really compelling, and we don’t have to have a random bully show up from nowhere and punch him or something.

 Oren: Yeah. I mean, the random bully is like… Again, does this bully exist when they aren’t giving your hero a hard time? That’s a thing that I see a lot in these stories where the bully just appears and then disappears once he’s done throwing the hero against the wall or whatever. And that’s a strange feeling.

Chris: Yeah, and so again, it’s not that you can’t have a darker story where a kid is facing violence, but in a lot of these cases, the story’s not really… it takes a lot more dedication when you’re doing something like that, and the story’s not necessarily prepared to handle that. And so, when we’re a storyteller and we’re just like, “Okay, I just have this moment, and I just need a problem to make my protagonist feel sympathetic, something to get the audience on board and start rooting for the protagonist.” That’s a very specific need that’s in one scene. We’re not usually looking to add an entire time-consuming plotline to the entire story. Those kinds of situations, I think this is especially likely for it to be too much to exaggerate things.

 Oren: Yeah, I agree. Horror elements are another common one. A lot of horror, arguably most or all of horror, derives some of its fear from the unknown, and the more you show the thing the less unknown it is. Even if you obscure what it looks like, the more it shows up, the more familiar it becomes and now it’s just not as scary anymore. And so, in this case, having it show up fewer times is often the solution. People talk about Jaws a lot and how you almost never see the shark or what have you, but that can apply to other stories, too. If you have a spooky demon and you want the demon to actually be scary and not just a fantasy element, you usually reserve how often it appears, and if you are going have it appear more often you have to be willing to acknowledge that it’s just not going be as scary anymore.

Chris: That’s when it becomes an action flick.

 Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So yeah, those types of horror, dark stuff, anything that’s sensitive is definitely a time to make less mean more. So, we have situations like the book A Study in Drowning where the main character was sexually assaulted by her advisor. We don’t show that happening, but we show the aftereffects on her instead, and the book still makes that very compelling and makes it great stakes. We really want her to get away from that toxic school. So that’s very powerful. We don’t have to show something that’s really sensitive and could potentially be triggering for some audiences.

 Oren: Yeah, and I also think this is a case where we can see the value in showing that discrimination and bigotry is a big deal even when no one is intentionally doing it. Because that’s a thing a lot of people imagine: that bigotry looks like yelling slurs or talking about how much you don’t like people of another race. And it can look like that, but often it doesn’t. Often nobody is trying to be a jerk.

I read a client story recently where the main character is passed over for a job because it’s just kind of assumed that a man is going to do that job. And it’s not like anyone in this situation thinks that they’re sexist, and it was very useful. It was very powerful. It was very compelling, and I’m not going say you shouldn’t ever have people be intentionally bigoted, just that we could use more stories where it is understood that intent is not required and that is often going to mean doing more with less. Because you aren’t depending as much on the shock factor of someone yelling those slurs or what have you.

Chris: Yeah, and with these kinds of problems, I really do think that showing the smaller level of the problem and making that feel like it matters kind of sensitizes people to the issue, makes it feel more important. As opposed to exaggerating, which I think has the effect of making anything less feel like it doesn’t matter, right? Like, if the only depictions of bullying where we take bullying seriously that we see are always violent, then kids who are harassed in school, that just seems small in comparison. Where that’s also an important part of a safe school environment, not facing that kind of harassment. I think for a lot of sensitive things especially that’s really good. So, I think it’s worth asking, how do you make something matter?

 Oren: Well, you could make it matter. There. That’s my advice.

Chris: [laughing] Okay, because that’s how we make less mean more, right? We focus on a smaller thing and then we show readers why it matters.

Okay, so to start, you need to know what emotion or effect you want to evoke. And again, this is just something that over time people get better at. When they start, they don’t necessarily know why they’re doing something. They’re like, “Hey, how about this in the story?” They’re not necessarily very intentional about what is the purpose of this scene, what is it supposed to do to strengthen the rest of the story, what experience it’s supposed to give. But if you want to make something matter, what exactly you need to evoke is very relevant, especially for those dark events. And I do have a recent article where I go through a whole bunch of reasons for inserting a dark event and give directions for each different reason. But it makes a difference whether something is, for instance, supposed to create tension or sympathy. They call for a different technique, bringing out different things. Sympathy calls for a feeling of ongoing unfairness that is creating a hardship for the protagonist, whereas for tension, you want a looming threat on the horizon. So, they just call for different things and knowing what you want to create and why is just an important part of that.

Then the really key thing that I think a lot of storytellers who are doing this kind of exaggeration are missing is that you need to build emotional investment in the key story elements that are involved.

So, if something or someone is threatened, that’s not going to mean a lot to readers until they care about that someone or something. If you want somebody to cry over a character that just died, and you need the right type of story for that, but if that’s your goal, they need to care about the person who died. If you just introduce a brand-new character only to immediately spill their guts, that’s not going to do the trick.

 Oren: But Chris, what if I made the brand-new character a child and they were cute?

Chris: Oh, no.

 Oren: What if I did that? Wouldn’t that have an emotional effect?

Chris: Then they’re probably very annoying and people will celebrate their death. Not in every case. I have run into cute children where I was actually angry that they were killed off. Spoilers, The Road to Ruin actually succeeded in doing that and I was mad. But most stories where I see that the kid, in an effort to make the kid precious, the kid was just really annoying.

 Oren: Yeah, I mean, I found it can be both, right? I’ve read a couple of stories, The Skin of the Sea comes to mind.

Chris: Yeah, that’s the one where the kid is very annoying.

 Oren: Yeah, they introduce this kid, and he’s really irritating and then he dies and I’m like, “Well, I didn’t want him to die, but I also don’t really care that he died because I didn’t like him.”

Yeah, so it’s a very awkward situation where it’s not like I’m celebrating the way I would if Neelix died, but I also don’t really feel sad, which I think I’m supposed to.

Chris: Yeah, and also when it comes to it—and I have another article on killing off protagonists and the things you should think about—but just so people know, you need to find this middle ground because if you do something like kill off a child, it generally feels manipulative to readers because they know you designed that character just to make them feel bad when the character was killed off. Whereas if you have a random character they’ve just met, they don’t feel anything. Usually, you’re going for something in between where it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to make them feel as bad as possible but also that it still matters a bit. So, they can be a little sad that this person died but not angry with you.

 Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That’s usually the goal there. In any case, that takes time usually. I mean, I’ve seen it done. If a storyteller is skilled, it’s possible to do it relatively quickly, but it takes some upfront investment and some upfront time to create that attachment to things and get that emotional investment. That really makes a big difference.

And so, when people exaggerate, a lot of times it’s because they are not trying to put in the time to make this matter. But it’s not the same. It doesn’t work very well.

So then, okay, we’ve built attachment. We know what we’re trying to do. Then it’s just time to make the case for the emotion you want to evoke. You need to show things. Generally, showing is more powerful than telling but that doesn’t mean you have to create a bunch of scenes. Detailed exposition, if you have the right details in there, can do a surprisingly good job. I mean, it’s not as effective as a full scene, but in many cases, it’s much faster and effective enough. But you want some good details about the situation that are evocative, that make it just feel real enough. And rather than saying, “Oh, my parents were so unfair to me,” you want to show what exactly did the parents do and show that so that the reader can witness for themself how fair or unfair something is, or how sad things are, or that kind of thing. If you just say it, the protagonist often comes off as whiny, and the emotion doesn’t come out.

 Oren: Yeah, and this is a big weakness that a lot of authors have, which is that they open the story with the protagonist narrating about how mean other characters are to them. And it’s like, “Bro, I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are or who the other people are.” And this creates the same impression that you get if the first time you meet somebody, they immediately start dumping their drama on you. And I’m like, “I don’t have any way of knowing if you’re not the asshole in this situation, and the fact that you’re so eager to tell me makes it feel like you might be.”

Chris: Yeah. Oftentimes, the protagonist comes off as the asshole if you tell instead of show. So, give the readers details of a specific situation where they can then draw conclusions from the details that you give. And if it’s really important, it might be worth a full scene. If it’s like, if I don’t make this matter, then the story doesn’t have stakes, well, that’s pretty important. That’s worth a whole scene just to show the situation, for sure. But there are other situations in which you just want to get readers on the same page as your protagonist. The emotions you’re evoking are smaller. When some kind of detailed exposition can do the trick.

And then another really good tip for making small things matter is just consider the ramifications for a little while, okay? For instance, let’s say we have a situation where you’re thinking of killing off the protagonist’s parent. But instead, what if I demoted that parent instead? Well, that has all sorts of ramifications that you might think about. Maybe the family doesn’t have money to send the protagonist to their school anymore. Maybe the parent has to work late now and is never home. Maybe that causes any younger children in the family to go without supervision at key times, or older children have to go to work or care for the younger children. Like, that creates a lot of different ramifications, some ripple effects and ongoing hardships, as a result of that one unfortunate event.

Now, obviously, that takes more time. There are some situations where the reason we kill off the parent is just because we don’t want to have to depict the parent because we only have so much room in the story. So, I’m not saying you shouldn’t kill off parents, but that’s the kind of thing that in general, if you look at something smaller, you can think about when and how would this matter? And think about those ripple effects that you can bring to life that create additional hardships.

 Oren: Yeah, this is another situation where the consequences of an injury, for example, are really important. Because if a character can be injured and then just be fine, then that injury didn’t matter no matter how gruesome it was. And I’ve found that this is basically the same regardless of whether the way that they become fine again is through narrative hand-waving or through in-character healing magic. Once you introduce healing magic that can just bring someone back up to full health after a fight, it’s like, all right, well, now it feels like none of these fights matter. Even if technically speaking, being injured in these fights hurts just as much as it does in real life or whatever, the fact that they could just be zapped back to normal is…all right, well, it’s just not that important anymore. Whereas if they’re injured and they have to deal with that for a while, hey, that mattered, right? That, that affected things going forward.

Chris: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot because of all of the superheroes and other characters that are getting stabbed through the midsection only to finish the fight.

 Oren: How did we get here?

Chris: Yeah, I just… I’m so mad at this now. Now even the new, oh god what’s it? The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: It’s like this is a Game of Thrones setting. This is supposed to be a gritty, relatively high realism for a fantasy setting. Injuries should matter. Stabbing somebody in the gut, they shouldn’t be able to walk that off. Now, I don’t know if in this particular case when the protagonist gets stabbed— literally, I think he gets stabbed in the midsection like five times—maybe this is supposed to be a mysterious act of the godsto boost his strength. If that was the intent, it was not really communicated well enough.

 Oren: Yeah, it really seems like he should have died, like probably after the first hit, to be honest. Like, he gets really badly stabbed.

Chris: Yeah. So why is this gritty, dark fantasy show using the same level of realism for injuries as Marvel movies do? That’s weird. That doesn’t feel right.

 Oren: It’s wild how much the arms race of characters being injured has risen.

Chris: And I realize that, okay, so there’s this turning point that a lot of storytellers like to use in the middle of a fight because it’s honestly easy to depict. The battle of will where the reason your protagonist wins is that at a key moment something is hard and they persist. And in this case, that’s what they’re using this midsection stab for, right? The Marvel superhero is getting stabbed in the midsection, and you think they’re down, but no, they rally and push through and that allows them to win. And so that’s the key turning point in the fight. But it feels so cheap and meaningless now. And I think that the fact that they are just shrugging off huge injuries, and also that they can continue fighting, is a key reason why.

Whereas if I saw that a Marvel superhero get stabbed and they’re on the floor, and all they have to do is push a button, but in order to push that button they have to slowly crawl across the floor inch by inch while they groan in pain because their injury is so debilitating, I just think that would make the turning point so much more powerful. Because you can see how much the injury affects them, it means more when they push past it. But if they just get up and keep fighting, that in turn means the injury is meaningless.

 Oren: I think we might be describing the end of Captain America: Civil War. Or not Civil War,Winter Soldier.

Chris: Yeah, he does that. I think I heard about that. I haven’t actually seen that movie.

 Oren: Yeah, I think that’s in Winter Soldier. Okay, so we’ve confirmed Captain America: Winter Soldier grittier than A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. More realistic, actually.

Chris: More realistic.

 Oren: Kaboom!

Chris: Again, the nice side effect of making less be more is that things in the story continue to be meaningful because you’re not playing one-upmanshipwith yourself and continually escalating things and making them mean less and less as you go.

 Oren: I do have an important tip for making less mean more for writers, and this is one that’s been passed down to me, Wisdom of the Ancients, which is that you make your font a little bigger, and then you make the margins a little smaller, and you adjust the line spacing, and before you know it, that 5-page essay is ready to go.

Chris: Oh, and I’m sure your teacher will never notice.

 Oren: They’ll never guess. This used to be easier to get away with when we turned in printed assignments. It was kind of fun to be like, “How, how big can I make the font before they notice?”

Chris: Or before they take the time to call you on it, because think about it. If you’re a teacher with, I don’t know how many students turning in this essay, do you really want to stop and talk to every student who blows up the font a little bit?

 Oren: Everyone was cheating a little bit. It was just a matter of not getting greedy. Oh man, law school’s going be great! [laughing]

Chris: Another thing that we haven’t talked about that I want to mention in terms of less meaning more, is bad behavior by characters, and this definitely includes character arcs. Again, there are a lot of things that we try to communicate to readers, and they don’t get it, and we learn that we have to be clearer, more blatant, and sometimes tell awkwardly, but there’s one area where at least regularly readers tend to be more sensitive than storytellers expect, and that is when characters act like jerks.

Especially, it becomes an issue if you have a character that engages in bad behavior and then you want them to be somewhat likable later even if you’re redeeming them, because that’s … If you keep it as light as possible as you can, while still achieving the effect you need, it’s going be so much easier to redeem them, or they’re going be likable to so many more readers.

Whereas what happens is if that behavior is exaggerated to get drama out of the situation or whatever, again, a lot of times readers are more sensitive to characters being jerks. Sometimes these are readers who, let’s say they like your plot and they like your worldbuilding, but they’re iffy on your characters. People who already love your characters might be like, “Oh, yeah, that’s totally fine.” But to a reader who’s only like, “Oh, they’re okay,” that looks very, very different, and that can definitely kind of compound on itself where the more they dislike a character, the more they read everything that the character does in a negative way.

So that’s definitely a time to think about how if I have a character arc and my character has a flaw that starts the arc, how little can I make this while still making it clear that they have it, and making it noticeable? But not letting it take over.

Oren: Yeah, this is one that I see a lot, which, in particular, is when you want a character to have done something bad in a war. Let me tell you, that happens a lot, and it happens a lot in normal war. But writers are always being like, “I need this to be an exceptionally bad thing by war standards.” So, they’re like, “So this character ordered a whole city of civilians to be slaughtered and now he’s sad about it.” And I’m like, okay, he didn’t need to do that to have something in a war that he regrets. Regular war generates plenty of that. You don’t need to go all the way to crimes against humanity. It’s bizarre to me that people seem to think that they need this startlingly extreme scenario rather than just using the regular horrors of war to create this storyline.

Chris: Yeah. And again, if you feel like this isn’t enough, just work on making it feel like it matters. Describe the situation in a little bit more detail and it will be enough. Be a little more evocative with it instead of just being, “No, this person killed an entire city’s worth of people.”

Oren: Okay. Well, on that very cheerful note, I think we will go ahead and end this podcast.

Chris: And if this short half an hour podcast was enough, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Man, we should’ve gotten meta and done this as like a 15-minute episode. That would’ve been great. Oh, well.

All I have left to do is thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

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