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Episode Transcript (by Rekka)

[Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music]Rekka: This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books.

Kaelyn: I love MacGuffins.

R: Or weenies. I think we should start calling them "weenies" again.

K: Go back to the original name. Yeah, it's funny because like, I think MacGuffin has like a negative connotation around it and I love it as a plot device where it's just like, there's this thing. And everyone wants it. In some cases we don't even really know what it does. There's like oh, the suitcase from pulp fiction. That's a great MacGuffin.

R: That was going to be my example.

K: In one of the Mission: Impossible movies, the one with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, you know, they're trying to get this, this thing from this guy. And Phillip Seymour Hoffman is this like the most terrifying crime lord in the world. And he can't get this thing. We literally never find out what it does, why they need to keep it out of his hands so badly and, and have it for themselves. But yeah we kinda conceived of this episode is talking about MacGuffin versus plot devices. So, let's be clear. All MacGuffins are plot devices, not all plot devices are MacGuffins. So as I always like to do a, you know, a little bit of history here, MacGuffin the terms often chalked up as being coined by, Alfred Hitchcock and his friend and screenwriter, MacPhail, but it actually goes back quite a bit before that there was an actress in the 1920s named of Pearl White, which I can only assume as a stage name.

R: Her movies brought to you by Colgate.

K: I genuinely hope that's a stage name. But she was in a lot of spy movies or action movies where everyone was chasing after something. And she was in so many of them that she started calling the items in question "weenies" because it didn't matter. And the, it was almost getting a little formulaic in her movies that it could have been, you know, like a roll of film, a document, a, a key that opens a certain, you know, safe or something. It really didn't matter what they were. It was just, you know, these suspense action inspired movies, everyone trying to chase down the same object.

R: The reason that it doesn't matter is because no one actually ever really uses it. You just want to have it, right?

K: Yeah. Yeah. It's frequently MacGuffin-related plots are resolved by "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way," which is one of the more infuriating endings.

R: I like friends.

K: Friends are great. Yeah. But like, okay. So I was going to get to this, to this later and the thing that, like one of my favorite examples of a MacGuffin that becomes un-MacGuffinned and is National Treasure That film is very rare in that they actually find and maintain hold of the treasure in the end of it, think of like, you know, like the Goonies or Pirates of the Caribbean, like Treasure Planet, they all find the treasure, but they don't really actually get to keep any of it. National Treasure really upended that by, by letting those characters not only find it, but then we find out how much money they got for it.

R: And Disney's Atlantis. They did have the treasure at the end, too.

K: That's true.

R: They didn't tell anyone they had treasure. They just suddenly