The Mythcreant Podcast

Everyone likes to rave about nuanced characters, but what does it mean for a character to be nuanced? How do you show different sides of a character without being contradictory? Is a random assortment of subtextual details enough, or does it require a more targeted investment? In this episode, we discuss the ins and outs of adding complexity to characters, when it works, and when the extra details add more clutter than depth.

Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Oren: And I’m Oren. 

Chris: Now, you listeners all know me as a voice on this podcast, but did you know I also have a physical presence? With a body and everything? 

Oren: Whoa. 

Chris: I know, right? Like, I actually exist in meat space. 

Oren: Sounds fake. Citation needed. 

Chris: I’m a full-blooded, nuanced person, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna let anybody see video of me.

Oren: No, obviously not. I mean, you gotta get the class for that. 

Chris: It’s true. 

Oren: You take Tension & Hooks, you get to see a video of Chris’ face. 

Chris: Yep, yep. That’s, uh, totally worth all the money of the course is just seeing my face. That’s what it’s about. But on this podcast, you just have to do with our bad voice imitations if you wanna see another side to us. So this time, we’re gonna be talking about nuanced characters. 

Oren: We shall indeed, but first, I would like to give a nuanced appeal, that doesn’t mean anything, but go with it, that if you’ve been enjoying the podcast we could use your help. We are currently looking for transcription volunteers to help us make sure every episode launches with a transcript. We are grateful to our existing volunteers, and we wanna make sure they don’t get burned out. We typically send an episode out every six weeks or so at most. So if you’re interested, you can just go to mythcreants.com/volunteer. 

Chris: Ooh, how subtle. How sophisticated. 

Oren: Yeah. People heard that appeal and were like, “Wow, there’s layers to that,” and the layers is that we would like more volunteers.

Chris: [laughter] I love the idea of layers, ’cause it just sounds so pretentious. And of course, I immediately think of The Other Black Girl, the show, where the main character is forced at her publisher because an author that is really famous got mad when she pointed out how racist one of his black characters was.

Oren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Chris: And so when she’s forced to give him an apology, which of course is terrible- 

Oren: Ugh. 

Chris: –- she’s like, “Well, see, I didn’t realize this character has layers.” 

[laughter]

Oren: Each layer more racist than the last! Which, to be clear, this was a very good storyline. It was just hard to watch. 

Chris: It was hard. It was painful.

Oren: The secondhand embarrassment of, oof, white people be like that. Ugh. 

Chris: But yeah, this time we’re talking about character nuance or complexity. They’re pretty similar. They both require that your character has more than one trait that defines them. Although with nuance, usually the emphasis is on some level of subtlety. And we did not have an episode on either of these issues, which is just shocking. After 600 episodes, we’ve done everything except for this apparently. 

Oren: Well, that’s because we’re a nuanced podcast and we don’t go for the obvious topics. 

Chris: Oh, we don’t, do we? 

Oren: That’s actually what I was wondering about. Is nuance synonymous with character development? Is a developed character automatically nuanced? 

Chris: We had a previous episode talking about how much development you need to do. 

Oren: Right. 

Chris: I think it’s a very literary fiction idea that every character needs to be super developed because in a story we have some characters that are central characters and some characters that are bit characters, and they have different roles.

Oren: Hey now, it’s not just a literary thing. It’s also a Blake Snyder thing, who is the most crassest commercialist you’ve ever encountered. 

Chris: That’s true. That’s true. 

Oren: And he also thinks every character needs an arc. Okay, Blake, calm down. 

Chris: Every single character!

[laughter]

Oren: Every single one! Except villains. Villains never have arcs. Shut up. 

Chris: Wow. So I would say that this is one thing that you typically do when developing a character further, but of course how much you wanna do it depends on the presence of the character, in particular. The more nuance and complexity just requires more time to communicate, clearly. So generally, the smaller the character’s presence is, the less time they have on the page, less complex they should be because you want distinctiveness first. First you want to be able to distinguish them from other characters and for that they need to have a memorable trait. And if you make them super complex and give them a half a dozen different traits and they only say two lines in a scene… [chuckles]

Oren: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s a lot. 

Chris: It’s not gonna work out. But the more you show the character, the more you kinda need them to be complex to stay interesting, and the nuance usually is we’re just taking that and making it so there’s a little bit of subtlety involved, maybe a little bit of subtext. Subtext. 

Oren: Ooh, I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards!

[laughter]

Chris: So that’s kind of what it is. And again, if the character’s important, they can just get boring or tiresome. And this is most common with villains, and we’ve talked about this with villains before, that a villain that is just pure evil and is actually on screen and talking gets dull really fast. But it can happen with other characters. We can talk about how it happens with other characters. It’s just for different reasons. Like for a side character, it tends to happen. Nuance and complexity tends to be lost just because, again, we want them to be a full-fledged character ’cause they’re like the main character’s best friend or something.

Oren: Mm-hmm. 

Chris: But in the plot we always use them for the same thing, like telling the main character not to go do anything fun. In which case they end up feeling very flat when you want them to be more complex. 

Oren: Yeah. I guess what I’m wondering is if complexity and nuance are generally the same thing, so like, to use a completely not controversial example, we have Fire Lord Ozai in the live action Netflix adaptation, which, you know, people don’t have any strong opinions about. A very normal way people feel about that show. 

Chris: Yeah. Honestly, I really wanna talk about the animated Avatar versus live action, even though everybody’s gonna get mad at us. 

Oren: The live action one, you certainly see more of what Ozai is doing, right? It goes into more complexity about the way that he is manipulating his children, whereas in the animated version he’s pretty flat. He does abuse his children, but in a very straightforward way. And is that nuance? Is his character more nuanced now? 

Chris: Yes. 

Oren: Yes? Okay. 

Chris: Yes, because we’ve softened the edges a bit. He’s not as exaggerated. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: For instance, when we have a scene in season two where he tells Azula that, “Hey, look, Zuko found the Avatar, and that’s a good thing.” In the animated version, maybe he praises Zuko at the very end when he thinks that Zuko has killed the Avatar, but him just saying good things about one of his children is different. So yeah, I would call that more nuanced. 

Oren: Notably, he is doing that to manipulate Azula, not because he suddenly feels warm feelings for Zuko.

Chris: Right. But he’s not cackling, you know, or… When we’re talking about nuance, we’re talking about adding a little more realism to the depiction and having it not be quite so exaggerated. I would say that an evil character who is doing evil things but not cackling, you know, and waving a knife around has gained a little more nuance. If we were to put it on a large spectrum, right? Not that they’re super nuanced.

Oren: I think people tend to assume when you say nuance, especially in regards to a villain, you are making them more morally ambiguous, which is not really the case here, right? Ozai’s not any less evil in the live action version, you just see a little bit more of the process of how he does things. And, you know, he’s just a little more active. 

Chris:  But I mean, you could make him more morally ambiguous and that could be a form of nuance- 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: I think. 

Oren: You could. 

Chris: You could do, you know, many things to express nuance. I think a lot of times if people are thinking about what is the most nuance, what if we nuance-maxxed our characters?

Oren: [laughs] Oh God, Chris 

Chris: That’s when we get things like people loved in The Last of Us, I remember one patron was talking about a character that was setting down a plate in front of the other and then turning it so the meat is in front, which is a thing that servers at fancy restaurants do. 

Oren: Mm-hmm. 

Chris: And that’s like a small, subtle little thing that enriches the depiction. If we’re talking about super nuance, we can talk about all these little signals that are designed so that people don’t have to pick up on them, but if you do pick up on them, they enrich your experience. Kind of like subtext. It’s how subtext should be. You should not have to pick up on subtle, super subtle subtext to enjoy the depiction, but it should enrich the depiction if you do pick up on it. There’s things like that, but I think we can put this on a big scale and say that if a character becomes less cartoonish, they’re generally more nuanced to some extent. 

Oren: ‘Cause when I think of a character that they made more nuanced, like the first one I think of is Gorothan from Murderbot, in the book versus the TV show.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. 

Oren: And that is a case where we made the character more morally ambiguous, ’cause in the book he’s just a jerk. 

Chris: Yeah, he’s just a hero hater, and he’s very shallow and flat. 

Oren: Whereas in the TV show he has deeper motivation, and he’s probably my favorite character. 

Chris: Yeah, no, he’s great. Again, there’s a depth to it that I think helps with the nuance where we know that he has a background in working for the corporations, and that was really bad, and that drives his fears about their safety. That makes him suspicious of Murderbot, and so we can kind of see that come through. 

Oren: Yeah, the fact that he and Murderbot are both much more conscious of how dangerous the world is than the other characters really helps bring that character out. And there’s like a tiny bit of that in the original book, but it isn’t really used for much, whereas in the TV show it’s really developed. And they, those two characters have a lot in common, which motivates them to not like each other, which I find fascinating. I thought that was great work. 

Chris: Yeah, and that’s a form of nuance in itself. They don’t like each other, but they have something in common that they can in some places actually agree sometimes. So we have subtleties to how this works, and it’s not just a flat, “I hate you.” “No, I hate you.” Those subtleties make it more interesting to spend more time with the character for longer. Going back to Avatar and getting in trouble again. 

Oren: Yes! More Avatar. 

Chris: The thing that was so fascinating to me, okay, not that the live action Avatar was a good project to greenlight- 

Oren: Yeah

Chris: ‘Cause it just didn’t have enough to do. But I didn’t really appreciate, until I saw the first season of the live action, the fact that when we look at an animated cartoon like Avatar: The Last Airbender, our expectations for characters and the level of realism and subtlety they have is different. We expect a cartoon character to be less nuanced and more exaggerated, and I think it really just goes with the lower level of realism of the animation itself often, and the simplified character designs. And those things just go together aesthetically, and we just accept a depiction that is more exaggerated. And some of the characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender, the animated version, are cool because they’re not nuanced, but they stand out so strong, and a key one is Azula. We don’t have to talk about her issues with Ursa that pop up at the very end, which we don’t really see that much of earlier.

Oren: The second most cursed discourse in all of Avatar fandom. 

Chris: But for most of the show, Azula is just delightfully evil. She’s really competent, which makes her a good villain, and when she actually starts acting nice to Zuko, we’re very suspicious. And that gives her depiction a little bit of complexity because we see her have a pair of friends and actually act like a sister to Zuko kind of.

Oren: A little bit, when it’s in her interests. 

Chris: A little bit, in the beach episode, for instance, when it’s in her interests. But what’s fun about her is just the fact that she’s evil and good at it, and that’s what we like. So but when we take things into live action and we have actual actors playing the characters and it’s not a cartoon anymore- It doesn’t look right when characters act like they’re a cartoon character. And so we kind of need them to have a higher level of realism to the way that their personality works and they act. And I thought it was fascinating to see how the showrunners aim to flesh out characters and add more nuance and complexity to them. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: Some of them I like better than others. I really like Sokka. Yeah, I think he’s goofy when he needs to be goofy, but also can be serious and that just gives him a bigger range. One character that’s been interesting to look at is Iroh. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: The Iroh in this, by the second season, I’ve concluded that Iroh is actually not as nuanced or complex as the animated version, and that has been a disappointment.

Oren: Yeah. Or at least the things they gave Iroh in the live-action second season to try to make his character deeper are completely removed from what Zuko is doing. ‘Cause they decided to play up his war guilt, which is totally reasonable. I can totally see where they came up with that idea, but Iroh’s war guilt is just, he’s having a separate arc from whatever Zuko is doing, and one of the side effects is that their relationship isn’t really that strong in the live action.

Chris: Yeah, there’s definitely a cohesion issue there in the plot. But when it comes to just the character, one thing about the animated version is that Iroh is a very jolly character who always sees the bright side and is always good-spirited. And then when we get to know him better, we see the level of sadness underneath sometimes. Like when he, you know, decides to take time off for his, I think it may be the anniversary of his son’s birth or death. 

Oren: Death, yeah. 

Chris: And so he, you know, we see that he’s really cheery and he’s cheering people up and he seems to be having a good time. And then he goes to the tree where his son died, and we see that this is his way of mourning his son.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: The thing that’s of course left out of the animated version is the fact that we don’t really see him reckon that much with the fact that he was a general who caused lots of deaths. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: He just seems to be over it. So I can definitely understand the showrunners wanting to loop back on that and make that part of an arc for him. The problem is that the Iroh in the live-action show is just very sad. 

Oren: Yep. 

Chris: He’s not jolly anymore. And so when we bring in this background that would be sad where his son died and he lost a war and he shouldn’t have waged it in the first place ’cause they killed lots of people, that doesn’t add anything new to his character. It doesn’t add any complexity or nuance. Now he’s just sadder and he’s just a sad sack. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: And if we had done that in the animated version where he’s jolly, it probably could have added more range to him. But since we’ve already made him sad, when we add that, we’re not seeing other sides of the character, and so it’s not enriching in the same way.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true. So how do we go about taking our own characters and making them more nuanced? Can I just make them contradictory? Will that do it? Like, can I have one of them want to eat a million cheeseburgers but feel bad because they have concerns about agricultural ethics? 

Chris: [chuckles] I honestly think that you can do contradictions. The key is that you have to be able to communicate them to the audience, which can be tricky sometimes. So if your character berates somebody for not being conscious enough about food choices and then goes and eats a bunch of cheeseburgers- 

Oren: Yeah. [laughs]

Chris: Right? We just, we need to know about why that was. We need to have a really clear picture of how those two things fit together. And in real life, people of course can have all sorts of cognitive dissonance in their brain that they use to hold contradictory ideas if it serves their interests, but that would be really hard to put on the page. 

Oren: Also, even if you could realistically portray it, is that really someone you want as a major character in your story? Like, God, imagine how annoying that would be. 

Chris: Very annoying. 

Oren: Imagine meeting that person in real life. 

Chris: A person who is like, “Yeah, no, other people should have responsible food choices, but I’m different, so I get to eat the cheeseburgers.” 

Oren: “I’m actually a philosophical zombie, so it’s fine for me to do it.”

Chris: Whereas if you had a character that was like, they were eating a really strict diet, and then they felt good about that, and then they berated somebody else, and then something devastating happened to them, and they just feel a sense of despair and give up, and were like, “Oh, it doesn’t matter anyway, I’m gonna binge on cheeseburgers”-

Oren: Mm

Chris: –Then we could see, like, what is the reason we have shifted gears here. That’s an instance where a character’s actually changing because something emotionally impacts them. If we have a weird contradictory idea that just continue to coexist, like “I hate all of these people except for that person.”

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: What is their framework? “Well, I hate all of those people because I’ve learned they’re all lazy, but that particular person I don’t think is lazy, therefore they’re okay.” 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: And what is going on that allows these two things to coexist? And I think those kind of contradictions, they can be really rewarding and really interesting, it’s just, it does take more time, again, which is one reason why complexity requires time in the story so that it looks like it’s part of the same character and the character’s not just being inconsistent. 

Oren: I’m trying to think. If you’re developing your character, do we think that they are gonna become nuanced as part of that process, or is making them nuanced a specific job you would set out to do?

Chris: I mean, it may depend how you develop them. The thing that I tell people to do when they’re developing a character that’s supposed to be complex is that we don’t want to just take all of the obvious choices because we end up with a stereotype. So if you’re like, “Oh, my character’s a nerd,” and then you’re like, “Okay, where should they work?” “Oh, well, they’re a nerd, so they work at the library.” “Okay, well they, what do they look like?” “Well, they’re a nerd, so they got wimpy muscles and they’re small and bent over and have glasses.” Like, if that’s your chain of thinking, where you’re just linking all of the traits that seem intuitive to you to go together, what you’re actually doing is pulling from a stereotype, and that character’s gonna come off as very one-note.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true. 

Chris: So the first thing you need for complexity is to create some contrast where it’s like, “okay, my character is a nerd.” “What do they look like?” “Oh, well, actually, they work out at the gym every morning so they’re buff.” 

Oren: Uh-huh. 

Chris: And that’s how we start to get the complexity. And then for nuance you want some level of depth, and this is where it can help people to come up with a character’s backstory and other details. The key, though, is that you have to know when to, like, not include those in the story. It can be helpful to be like, “okay, well, why does this person go to the gym?” Well, maybe they’re really self-conscious about their appearance. And then that allows you to, when you are putting them on the page, be like, “Okay, what would a self-conscious person do in this situation?” And then subtly change their behavior to be more self-conscious, and you get more nuance from that. 

Oren: I don’t know, Chris. I was watching a video about Brandon Sanderson’s tips for your first novel, and he starts with this tip about “do a little interview with your character.” I’m like, “Okay, I’ve seen this writing tip before.” And then he’s like, “You might wanna put this in the story.” Like, no! 

Chris: [painfully laughing] No!

Oren: No! Don’t–! Don’t put that in the story! Come on, Brandon, no! Brandon!

Chris: No! You were the chosen one! You were supposed to defeat the dark side, not join it. 

Oren: [laughing] He’s, like, talking about epistolary stories. And look, I love epistolary stories, but epistolary as a concept isn’t a reason to just put your getting into character interview right there on the page. Come on, Brandon!

Chris: No. Oh, man. Yeah, this is why I don’t listen to people’s storytelling advice a lot. 

Oren: [laughs] Although in that same video, he does a pretty good job of describing through lines, which I was surprised by. 

Chris: Yeah, people are getting better. People are learning. 

Oren: He doesn’t call them that obviously, but the terminology’s less important than the idea.

Chris: I mean, the funny thing is when I read … Oh, God, the book that the three-act structure comes from, I forget what it’s called. 

Oren: Are we talking about Syd Field’s? 

Chris: Yeah, yeah. 

Oren: No, no, the older guy. Uh, the Prussian who’s racist against Polish people. 

Chris: Oh, no! that’s not, for a three-act structure. 

Oren: Oh, right. That’s Freytag’s pyramid.

Chris: That’s Freytag’s pyramid. It is Syd Field. Like, I can tell that he is trying to describe a through line or a plot framework, he just doesn’t have any conceptual way to say it, so he just says, “you know, your beginning and your end” a half a dozen times. 

Oren: I should make it clear that Syd Field’s book did not originate the concept of the three-act structure, but his book is the one that a lot of people are referencing when they talk about the three-act structure.

Chris: Popularized. It’s the most popular version. 

Oren: Or at least became a defining idea of it. I don’t know how popular it was before he wrote his book. It may have already been popular in other forms. It’s just his version of it became very popular. 

Chris: Any case, so characters and nuance. 

Oren: Yeah. We have those. 

Chris: We have those. It can be really hard if this is somebody who’s a little different from you because, again, I found that when people are talking about characters with representation, for instance, what they want is the nuances. What they want is the small things, and those are small things that are things that people don’t talk about very often. They don’t tend to put in books. For example, I had a beta reader read one of my stories, and she was strangely happy that I had my main character put her hair in a ponytail before she went out. When she was gonna be going through a hike through the post-apocalyptic woods overground area. And it’s one of those things that- People who have never had long hair before generally don’t know that you don’t leave your hair down when you’re working out or exercising because it’s too warm. It’s like having a scarf around your neck. And also it gets tangled and gets in the way. And so, like, if you’re gonna go work out, you put your hair back. And so I’ve seen, for instance, people who just grow their hair out for the first time, and they often just don’t know that. But are women and other people who have had long hair for a while, are they going online all the time talking about how they put their hair in a ponytail? No, ’cause it’s taken for granted. It’s a small thing. They just do it. And so that’s one of those things that’s really hard to do if you don’t have personal experience to find those types of small details and include them. This is why actors I’ve seen, sometimes, they just observe people to try to get some of those small nuances in how people behave. My sister’s an actress, and she was doing a role that was a Hollywood, rich, housewife. She watched Housewives of Hollywood or, you know, whatever that reality TV series was, and looked at other people and was talking about things like they hug in a very specific way that’s meant to not mess up their nails and makeup.

Oren: I could see how that would be something you would probably not arrive at from first principles. You would need some experience with that. So what you’re telling me is that if I want to write nuanced characters, I have an excuse to stalk people? [Chris laughs] That’s where we’ve gotten here on the Mythcreants podcast with our legally binding ideas?

Chris: Oh, man. Again, I feel like that’s a problem that’s always just gonna be really hard to solve if you wanna get those subtleties that people don’t talk about. Sometimes if you are trying to represent somebody who’s different than you, just getting a consultant to give you ideas for subtleties is not a terrible way to go. Because, again, it’s not that they’re impossible to research, but they are very difficult to research. And people watching in some cases might work, but that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and you might not get very much from it. I don’t know of a really easy solution to this one other than just hiring somebody or talking to somebody if you have a good friend that has whatever personal experience and talking to them, because those are kind of subtleties that really do help make people feel represented in the story and help make a character feel relatable.

Oren: Well, with that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close. 

Chris: If you learned a few nuances about characters that you didn’t know before, support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

Oh wow, that’s six entire hundreds. Honestly didn’t expect we’d ever make it this far, and now we’re lacking a plan. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean your long series also has to lack a plan, or lack a smooth transition for that matter. This week, we’re discussing how to lay the groundwork for a story that goes on and on, hopefully in a way that doesn’t leave you trapped four books into an epic work of dark fantasy with no idea how to continue.

Generously transcribed by Manasa. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. 

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: I was there, Chris. I was there 3,000 years ago when some nerds recorded the first Mythcreant Podcast episode.

Chris: Oh, we’re so old.

Oren: I told them to cast it into the fire, and they dramatically said no, and then 600 episodes later, here we are.

Chris: Well, since we have another opportunity, we can cast it into the fire again.

Oren: No. We don’t, we don’t do that. We don’t cast things into the fire around here. You think fire’s free?  We can’t afford fire.

Chris: So yeah, maybe just cast the intro music into the fire.

Oren: I like that intro music, but we have had it for quite a while.

Chris: Yeah. A big thanks to Jonathan Coulton for, for giving us permission to use his song. It was great. It was just from a different time, having that long of intro music. It was time to modernize by just getting right to the episode. And I don’t know, maybe later we might add a more modern, shorter intro sometime if I get around to it. I, I might never.

Oren: We don’t say “100%” nearly enough to be a modern podcast. We have completely lost the lingo.

Chris: Well, maybe our retroness still has some charm.

Oren: People don’t realize….Before we get to the main topic, uh, if you have enjoyed the podcast, we could use your help. We are currently looking for more transcription volunteers to help us make sure every episode launches with a transcript. We are grateful to our existing volunteers, and we wanna make sure they don’t get burned out. We typically send an episode every six weeks or so at the most. If you’re interested, go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.

Chris: All right. So what is our topic today? Is it that we’re so old?

Oren: Yeah, it’s so old.

Chris: 3,000 years. It feels like 3,000 years. It does.

Oren: I was hoping that it would, it would work out to 3,000 days, but no, it’s more like 5,000 days. So it didn’t quite work out math-wise. Today we’re talking about how to craft a long series.

Chris: Long series, like this podcast. Which is totally the same.

Oren: Which we didn’t plan at all. So, you know, if you wanna end up like us, don’t plan, I guess, is the lesson here. Because, of course, the planning versus pantsing debate is eternal, and I’m not gonna try to solve it here. But if you are talking about a series, you do have to consider the extra wrinkle that unless you’re writing the whole thing all at once before publishing (which some writers do, but I don’t think most of us do), then there’s gonna be stuff that already exists in the world and that you would be very hard-pressed to change if you end up deciding you wanna take the story in a completely different direction.

So planning can be a little bit more important there because as long as it’s a single book, you can theoretically go back and change things if you decide, “To heck with this outline,” or, “I don’t do an outline.” But if you’re doing a five-book series, and the first two books are already published, well, you gotta kinda abide by what you set there, or you should. I suppose you don’t have to. No one has to do anything.

Chris: I mean, if you plan the first one and write it without planning the series, and again we could talk about the best case scenario versus the worst case scenario. In the best case scenario, if you do know what you’re doing, we will talk about how to leave things open so the story has some place to go even if you haven’t planned it out. If you leave things open instead of like writing yourself into a corner after the first installment, you can be okay. But you are gonna have more constraints after the first book because now you have to adhere to whatever you established in your first story. On the other hand, though, I have definitely seen people, you know, especially with their magnum opus, they jump into a series right away, and it’s almost like we have the same constraints but in reverse – which I think is worse – where now they’ve planned the end, and so the beginning can’t change.

Or I’ve even had people add scenes that feel really out of place in their first book because it’s intended to set up something for a later book. And the first book is hands down the most important. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re plotting because, of course, like any good plot, you wanna escalate and have the last book be like the most epic. But from the reader’s perspective, the first book absolutely has to succeed in order for anybody to read the later books. Again, depending on what kind of series we’re talking about. We can talk about anthologies later.

Oren: Yeah, that’s one of the most difficult things as an editor when you’re talking to the author and suggesting, “Well, this thing isn’t working. This plot element isn’t functioning well. We should revise it to strengthen it,” and they’re like, “No, that can’t be changed. We need that to set up for the twist in Book Four.” Well, you didn’t hire me to edit Book Four, so there’s only so much I can do about that. I ask for very broad details of what happens in the later books, but I can’t even read a full series outline. That would be a ton more work that no one paid for. So at some point, we do have to acknowledge that fixing the first book should probably be the priority. 

Chris: Yeah. I think ideally people would, as they practice writing and plotting, slowly scale up the size of their stories so that they don’t commit to a long series before they kind of know how plotting goes a little bit. Not that there isn’t… I think most writers still- they try something different and then they have surprises and things don’t go how they expect, right? So it’s not for a lot of people, it doesn’t necessarily become super regular. But I think the issue that happens in the very beginning is: if you start a long series like right away, but you’re still learning some like really important story fundamentals, you end up with something that is really complex and puts tons of constraints on the first book. And it’s just really hard to make that first book a success, which it absolutely needs to be. So that’s a situation where I might say, “You know what? Maybe you should just not plan. Maybe you should just write the first book and make sure that works.” Again, ideally planning can, can do worlds of good, but…

Oren: Right, and even if you are at the stage where starting to plan makes sense, I’m not suggesting that you need to plan every single detail and have like a super rigid plan to hold yourself to because as you write, things are gonna change. Things are gonna be different, and you will have to probably make adjustments. That’s just the nature of it. And if you get too rigid in your planning, that’s going to be a problem, and every writer is gonna have to find that sweet spot for themselves. I can’t tell you what it is for you. But I would generally recommend, if you’re serious about this series and you have like some experience with what that means, I would usually recommend at least some basic plotting of what you think the later books are gonna be, so that you’re setting yourself up for them early instead of trying to scrounge a plot out of the ether later on.

Chris: So maybe it’s worth talking about: how do you leave yourself with somewhere to go? Let’s say you are just plotting the first book, but you wanna make it a series. You’re not gonna plot out the entire series because you’re gonna see how well the first book does before you commit to working on book two.

Oren: Right, like what I did. Admittedly, I was surprised at how many people saw the ending hook that I put in “Abbess Rebellion” and thought that it was a – even described it as – a cliffhanger ending. I was like, “Is that a cliffhanger?”

Chris: Oh, I mean, I certainly didn’t think it was a cliffhanger.

Oren: But there were definitely some people who read that and were like- even that hook was-…You know, they were like, “Well, where’s the next part?” And I’m like, “Well, the next part will be there if any significant number of people read this,” which, you know, they didn’t, as expected.

Chris: I mean, unless you have a huge marketing budget, that’s to be expected. And from what I’ve heard, if you’re gonna be indie publishing, it makes sense to finish three books before you start spending money if you wanna advertise yourself, because then there’s three things for people to read if they do start reading your work. So who knows? You know, we’ll see. I think there are a lot of people who did like “Abbess Rebellion” and wanted to see a sequel. So if things pick up, it’s possible. Um, you know, it’d be nice if you still return to that. 

Oren: You know, with all this free time I’m gonna have in law school.

Chris: Yeah, could be a long time coming. Okay, so let’s talk about it. The main thing that really screws writers over and makes it hard to do another installment is: when we tie up everything in the plot, and everybody gets a happy ending, and there’s just no problems left. Because at that point, if you want to create problems for the next book, it feels like we have to take the happy endings away from people, and that doesn’t feel great. We’ve seen a lot of…like the “Willow” show … A lot of these were, don’t get me wrong, fairly unforced errors. At the end of the “Willow” movie, the classic movie, you know, Willow now is like learning magic and he’s happy and doing great. And in the beginning of the show, he’s miserable, and it drags out the question of whether he can actually do magic for a surprisingly long time. When the whole movie was about him getting to the point where he felt confident in himself, and then he was ready to actually do real magic. So that was just so unsatisfying, the idea that he couldn’t do magic anymore. And, again, we can have new threats appear and that works, especially if you want relationships to grow, but everybody is like getting along perfectly and they’re like really close to each other, it may not feel…and you can create new problems, it’s just definitely easier if there’s some room for growth. The enemies become friends, but they’re not yet lovers, or what have you.

Oren: Yeah. Well, “Willow” is weird because “Willow” has basically zero world building. Like, there is so little effort devoted to what this place is like beyond that there’s an evil witch and we gotta stop her. Like, what we’re even stopping her from doing is very vague. So it’s not like they don’t have anything left to explore because they basically explored nothing, which is one of the reasons why the sequel series is so weird to me. But ideally if they had wanted to set themselves up for a sequel, there would’ve been a little bit more of an attempt to demonstrate that this world has things going on other than this one evil witch.

Chris: Yeah. Which, again, the world building, brings me to this also really matters for allowing sequels because if you have just like a single world threat that kind of defines the plot and it doesn’t feel like this is a world that has that same level of problems regularly, then it can be really hard to come up with “What’s the next problem?” Whereas if you have a world where stuff is happening all the time…So like for instance, in “Lockwood & Co.”, we have a ghost apocalypse kind of, so there’s ghosts everywhere.

And during the story they have to tackle different ghosts haunting houses, and then we climax with a big mansion that has tons of ghosts in it. It’s super creepy. We don’t get rid of all of the ghosts in the setting, right? We don’t fix whatever caused the ghost apocalypse and send all of the ghosts to rest at the end of the first book. If we did that, then it’s like, well, “the entire concept of this book is fighting ghosts, but now we took care of all of the ghosts. Where do we have to go?” Whereas if we’re just fighting, okay, “this is one mansion that’s particularly dangerous, this is gonna be our climax, the post-apocalypse is still here”, then we can just pull up more spooks and ghosts for future books, and we have plenty of room to keep writing sequels.

Oren: And I suspect that you wouldn’t have a Willow type situation in novels very often because Willow kind of gets away with the fact that it does zero world building because it’s a relatively short cult classic movie that doesn’t really need world building. It’s just got quirky, fun characters that people like, and it’s funny. Whereas with a novel, I think you would have a hard time getting people to buy a fantasy novel that had that flimsy of a world. Like even fantasy novels that aren’t known for their world building do more than that.

Chris: I mean, a fairy tale fantasy can be very flimsy in its world building, right? Because it’s really light and kind of low in realism.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

Chris: So there’s just like kingdoms everywhere, but, you know, we don’t necessarily have a map and it’s like “how many kingdoms can fit in such a small space? We have like princes and princesses running around everywhere.” So it may depend on the type of story. Willow is pretty campy. So I don’t know. But again, because it’s left open, right, there’s plenty of room to be like, “Oh yeah, did you know there’s another big empire next door that is headed by an evil wizard and the wizard wants to kidnap Elora or something?” You know, so there’s just … There is actually plenty of room to build on that because it’s not thoroughly explored and the premise of the original Willow is just magical people and armies running around on the map.

Oren: Yeah. Although Willow does highlight another potential issue which is that if you want to leave room for sequels, it’s usually best to be modest with your initial scale. Because they’ve saved the kingdom from a super evil powerful sorceress, and it’s not that you can’t escalate past that, it’s just what do you escalate to? It feels like that witch is about as powerful as a bad guy could get before the power levels start to become meaningless.

Chris: So generally the rule is, because you do want the series to be a non-anthology series that is closely tied together, you do want it to escalate. But you have other options. Instead of escalating the tension, which usually in many cases requires increasing the scope of the story…so it’s a town, now we’re focusing on the kingdom or what have you. You could also change things up more so that you’re adding more novelty to make up for the fact that the tension is not going up because something is new and refreshing in the new story. But then the question is: what is it gonna be? I mean, again, Willow is open-ended, right? Maybe we could add some unicorns or something. The unicorn lord. Something that’s different enough to make a sequel work. Again, that might be harder with something like Lockwood & Co., that is very specifically about fighting ghosts as opposed to a general magical epic fantasy setting like Willow. Not that you couldn’t create, add variety to Lockwood & Co., but like that would definitely be harder.

Oren: I want to talk about two very broad methods for series plotting. You got what I will shorthand refer to as the Lockwood method and then the Temeraire method. Because in Lockwood, there is a series plot about figuring out, like, what the heck happened with this ghost apocalypse, what’s going on, and we start to get towards solving that by the end. But that’s not apparent from the first book. In the first book, they don’t receive, like, the riddle of the ghost apocalypse, which is what I would probably recommend to newer writers. It’s something that is implied, but you don’t come right out and say it, and then that gives you the option to either continue it or to say, “All right, I’m done with this series,” before you actually get there. As opposed to in Temeraire, it’s very clear that the throughline is the defeat of Napoleon from the first book. And Naomi Novik does it. Nine books later, they get him, but that’s a nine-book series. That’s pretty ambitious for most of us teeny baby writers. And if she had started that and then decided that she was done with that series, her name would be George R.R. Martin. [laughter] Who opened with a very clear, obvious through line and then was like, “Eh, nahhhh, I’m done”. So, you know, just be aware that that’s a possibility.

Chris: I think it’s worth talking about just how overarching or how anthology-like series are, and what that difference is. So just to start, we’re often asked how to plot a series, and the thing about this that is funny is that you plot a series the same way you plot a novel.

Yep. Because plot structure is fractal, meaning you have the same structure repeating at different scales, and you can zoom in or zoom out and just see the same thing. Just like you would have your … we’ve talked about through lines for novels, right? You should have, using a typical tension structure, you have one tense problem… that you introduce near the beginning and that gets solved in the end.

Then you wanna break that up with sub-problems. You do the same thing with a series. You have one tense problem that represents the series, and then you break that up into steps or obstacles that make your child arcs. And then you can do one child arc. If it’s a novel, it’s per chapter, or [for a series] one child arc per book. Then that gives- completing that step in the throughline and making it feel like we’ve moved closer to the end gives a sense of satisfaction at the end of each book even though the throughline is still open.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But within that we can make a story more or less episodic, and basically how this goes is: if those child arcs have more tension than the throughline, you have something that feels more episodic where they feel more like episodes. Like a book like “Voyage of the Dawntreader”, for instance, is an episodic story where they have a quest where they’re supposed to find these guys that disappeared, but that’s not really tense. It gives it some level of holding it together, but that’s not really a big deal. Instead, the tension comes when they go to a mysterious island, that has something weird going on with it.

And then that creates problems that they need to solve. So those episodes are tense, but the bigger structure holding them together isn’t very tense. And the difference is what Oren was talking about, where when we have something like Lockwood & Co, we can see that there’s a big series throughline in figuring out what happened with this ghost apocalypse, but it’s not very present in the first book. That throughline is kind of implied, but not really there, and that means that we get a satisfying finish for the first book because it has its own problems. But it doesn’t necessarily feel like if it ended there, then we’re on a big cliffhanger. Whereas if we had a really strong throughline holding it together immediately, then… it has some advantages. If you know you’re gonna keep writing the series, then that inspires people to pick up the next book more. …Neither is bad or good, right? It’s just about prioritizing how much you want people to jump in or put something down versus how much you wanna really incentivize them to keep going and hold the series together tightly. 

Oren: Yeah, and the more emphasis you put on the series’ throughline, the more people will expect each book to directly deal with that. Whereas if you put more focus on the characters or whatever they’re doing, you can get away with some detours. Like in Temeraire, there’s one book where they get exiled to Australia, which is the fallout of some choices that the main characters made in the previous book. And that one’s not very related to defeating Napoleon. Like, Napoleon’s not doing stuff in Australia. That’s more about the characters and what happens to them. And I can see someone being kind of frustrated with that if they were really into the Napoleon arc. They’d be like, “Hey, there’s a whole book with no Napoleon. It’s just Australia, and those are different.” But I think for most readers, the Napoleon story was not so urgent that that would be a problem, and the story’s pretty good at building attachment. So yeah, we wanna see what happens to these characters when they have to pay for their crimes by going to Australia.

Chris: Whereas you have a really important plot holding your series together, there’s just a higher expectation that each book will move that series’ plot forward more, and then you gotta stay on task more. Yeah. So that’s kind of the difference. Then if we get all the way to the point where we don’t necessarily have a throughline, we get something more like Discworld. Which is mostly just a bunch of stories in the same setting that often share characters. And there are series within Discworld that are same storyline. 

Oren: Yeah, Discworld is like five different episodic series in a trench coat. But even those series are defined more by the shared characters than by a specific plot, right? Like, there are some arcs that run through them, but The Witch storyline: it’s not like in book one they encounter the evilest witch and they’re fighting that person for the whole series. Every Witch book is fairly independent of the others.

Chris: One thing that I think is really important if you’re making, especially with a long series, is you have to watch the chronic series bloat. … Okay, so again, if you add new things: what happens to a lot of writers, they add new story elements, they introduce new characters in each installment, they may introduce new places in each installment, magical abilities, whatever it is, viewpoints – I wish they didn’t, but often they do –

Oren: So many viewpoints.

Chris: So many viewpoints, and what happens is it just accumulates. It snowballs and gets bigger and bigger as the series goes, and gets really out of control to the point where nothing in the story has enough time, right? We don’t see the main character very often because their viewpoint switches off with everybody else’s viewpoint, for instance, and we’re trying to find ways for our two dozen characters to be involved in the plot. And then movement is just extremely slow, and it’s not cohesive anymore, and all of those things happen. You can have books introduce new things if you are willing to let go of other things, right? So if you have something like in Voyage of the Dawntreader, each episode we’re traveling to a different island, and then we say goodbye to the last island.

Oren: Yeah. We don’t try to keep bringing the island with us.

Chris: Or just like we have characters. These characters are gonna be around for this book because they’re heavily intertwined with the plot of this book, right? Like we have a detective character, for instance. This is the person who is the wife of the person who was murdered. And then the next story we have a new mystery with a new set of people that are, you know, suspects in the next murder, but we’re gonna leave them behind for the most part in the next book…

So if you’re willing to let things go and have them just be story elements that are for one book, it can be okay. But we know lots of writers who just get really attached to everything they introduce and just want to keep everything coming back and not let go of anything. In which case, you know, a prevention is worth an ounce of cure. Because it’s just gonna get out of hand, and get really, really hard to plot, and get really, really slow on the reader’s end, and really complex.

Oren: And for the record, readers, I know the saying is, “An ounce of prevention is a pound of cure,” but the part that Chris didn’t mention is that she’s talking with, like, a little gram of prevention, and that’s worth an ounce of cure, so it still works.

Chris: I did-

Oren: The unit measurements still, still work out …

Chris: What did I s- what did I say?

Oren: Uh, what you said was, “Prevention is worth an ounce of cure.” Oh, okay. Which is, you know, not wrong. I just needed to clarify your units.

Chris: Oh, amazing.

Oren: Yeah, it’s fantastic. I do have a question since we’re coming up on the end. There’s one thing I wanted to talk about, which is: how do you design characters, especially the protagonist, so that they can have multiple arcs? Because character arcs are cool. We like them. They help a character grow and change, and they feel l- you know, emotionally relevant, but, you know, if you just randomly give a character a new arc each book, it’s gonna feel weird. So how do you make sure that, like, by the end of book one you haven’t resolved all the character’s issues, and now they’re just a static emotional character?

Chris: Yeah, so internal arcs are really tricky, and this includes relationships too. So there’s several different strategies you can use. The first one is you can just make things worse so that you can come up with your external plot. Here’s the first step. So maybe we hate these other people who have been the mortal enemies of our country, and we want our character to soften up, for instance. Maybe at the end of the first book, the character, like, grudgingly agrees to work with them, right? And there’s one step, and maybe they’ll marry somebody from that culture by the end of the series or something. So you can make it more severe. For character arcs, though, this can be a big problem because if we make the problem too severe, maybe they won’t be likable anymore; readers can’t stand them. So we have to watch out for that.

For relationships you have to be willing to wait for characters to grow close, but some people will have, like, a really slow burn romance or something like that, or two characters be- enemies becoming friends over a long series. That’s one way to do it. Sometimes you can do something that’s more…layered, where you have one issue that seems like the obvious issue to take care of now, but when that’s solved, you realize there’s an underlying issue. So emotionally, for instance, let’s say your character is really into toxic guys. Has to learn they’re no good, right? And, starts to…finally breaks up with the toxic guy in their life and is over that, but then in that process realizes they have like a history of abuse with their father that resulted in them believing that toxic guys…were the way to go or something. And now they have… they’ve undercovered a deeper emotional issue they can solve in the next book or something like that.

Oren: Yeah. That makes sense to me.

Chris: So something that’s layered and then finally you can have new problems happen. … And you have to have a reason though. Usually you would have some event, right? Uh, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sokka watches Yue die, and then he’s really anxious when he meets up with Suki and is overprotective. So that kind of thing, but you can do it at like a book scale. It can either be an event in the first book, or if you wanna have something happen at the beginning of the next installment that opens up a new emotional issue they have to resolve. Same with a relationship, right? You could create some kind of wedge issue in an existing relationship that could open up new problems. Again, none of this is particularly easy. It’s definitely trickier than an external arc to make those longer, but those are kind of the options that we have.

Oren: All right. Well, I think with that we can go ahead and call this episode to a close, continuing our extremely long-running series.

Chris: And if you would like this 600 episode series to keep adding new installments, supporting us on Patreon is a great way to make that happen. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Cathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week

As everyone knows, everywhere in the world had exactly the same technology from 476 to 1453, which can be summed up as a “Medieval Tech Level.” Or, wait, maybe that’s not true at all. And maybe technology doesn’t advance along linear paths like we see in 4X strategy games. So, what even is a tech level, and why are worldbuilders so concerned about them? Fortunately, we have some answers.

Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

[intro music plays]

Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: What if instead of being an internet transmission in a cyberpunk dystopia, this podcast was an old-timey radio show?

Oren: [vague Transatlantic accent] Well, golly, I’d say that’d be right swell. Now pay attention and listen to these messages. There’s a new kind of toothpaste that’s barely got any lead in it.

Chris: I did not know that you were so good at imitating an old-timey radio show.

Oren: Well, you see, I’m pretty good at this caricature of early radio time shows. This is not what they actually sounded like. It’s just what people think they sounded like due to the amplification over time. [normal voice] All right, I’m not gonna do that anymore. Just wanted to make that clear.

Chris: Oh, man. So yeah, this time we’re going to discuss tech level, which is already a very artificial concept.

Oren: Yeah, what does that even mean?

Chris: So you mean societies just level up? You know, they reach level 10?

Oren: Yeah, now they have certain technologies.

Chris: I wonder how much of it is just based on the Civ computer game.

Oren: Yeah, just on video games.

Chris: Somebody was playing a lot of Civ, and we got this idea that technology just smoothly levels up.

Oren: And I mean, there have been various sci-fi and not sci-fi tech level related things. NASA uses the term tech level. They mean something completely different by it. To them, that refers to, like, the development of a mission is the tech level, because they need to build new technologies to make the mission work. But then, I forget what it’s called, but there’s that famous scale that is, like, zero, one, and two, and it’s like, okay, those are very broad categories. Like, zero is everything up to the present day. One is being a spacefaring civilization inside your own solar system, and then two is space opera. And it’s like, okay, those are very broad tech levels.

Chris: Yep. Technically, it’s not that technology has to progress in the same way. I mean, some innovations are based on previous innovations. So for instance, if your innovation requires factories and mass production, but there’s been no industrial revolution, how does that work? It’s just really hard to reason through how things would happen if the technology doesn’t evolve in the same way it has on Earth. Somewhere on Earth.

Oren: But when we say tech level, despite how arbitrary it is, it is still a useful term because it sets expectations. If you say medieval tech level, despite how that is a gross oversimplification, it gives certain associations. People know to expect swords and horses and castles and chain mail and farming by hand and, you know, not using any kind of automated machinery, even if that’s not strictly 100% true. And if you say age of sail tech level, people know to expect cannons and tall ships and frilly outfits, things like that, right?

And so this leads us to the big question people are always asking is, does the tech in my setting have to follow historical trends? Like, in the real world, first we had wagons, and then we had the steam engine, and then we had planes. Could it go in a different order? [“I don’t know” vocalization]

Chris: I mean, I think if you decide to do magitech, you might be able to be more flexible if it just works in a completely different way. Like, that list that you said there, while it seems really unlikely we would, because a wagon is so simple and a steam engine took hundreds of years or something, took a really long time to perfect, it seems really unlikely that any culture would end up with a steam engine before they had even created the very simple, humble wagon.

Oren: Technological innovation and advancement is incredibly complicated. It does not follow a straight line, but it does build on itself, right? Like, there are reasons why the Roman Empire was not on the verge of an industrial revolution, despite the fact that they had some steam-powered toys, because all of the other technologies needed to make the steam-powered industrial revolution happen did not exist yet. So those toys were novelties, but they did not have industrial power.

Chris: Yeah. I would love to see somebody who had done a lot of research come up with their idea of if the Industrial Revolution had not happened, how would technology and society continue to progress? Because the Industrial Revolution happened from a very specific synergy of coal and steam engines and mills.

There had to be a positive feedback loop where we needed the engine to take out water so we could mine the coal, and then we need the coal to power the engine, and then we needed some actual use where this could make money. It all had to happen at once, or else it would have never been able to mine and transport the coal, and we would have had nothing to feed the steam engine, or we would have had no use for the steam engine.

And so those things all had to happen at the same time. And so I do find it very interesting. Well, what if those things hadn’t happened? Would we still be in a land-based economy? Like, that’s really interesting, but it is a lot more work and a lot harder, and unless your story is very much focused on that and that is your passion, it’s so much easier to just be like, “Okay, my society is 1600s France or whatever.”

Oren: Yeah. Or roughly equivalent. The thing is, is that the chances are good that if you are a writer, you are probably not also an expert on the development of pre-modern technology, and certainly most of your readers won’t be. So we can argue back and forth forever whether or not a certain thing is realistic. For most writers, the question is really going to be is it believable?

Chris: Yeah. Can you get away with it?

Oren: Right. And maybe you are going to put more constraints on yourself than your readers actually require. Like most readers, for example, are probably not going to know that the classic knightly plate mail armor is a later invention.

It doesn’t correspond with a lot of the other things we think of as medieval. It’s from the 1400s, and so it corresponds with the development of early firearms. And these are still very early ones, right? These aren’t machine guns. But usually in settings that have that kind of knightly plate mail, you don’t usually include matchlocks, even though historically that’s how those things would have developed.

But most people aren’t going to notice that mistake. Now, if you want to be a little more realistic and have early firearms, I don’t think anyone’s gonna be upset at you for doing that. I think that could be cool. But that’s one of those things that you can kind of massage that and no one’s gonna notice.

Chris: Or just if guns would be around already, but guns are absolute pain in stories, you can just delay the development of a gun a little bit. Nobody will notice.

Oren: Yeah. Although it does have to be a little bit, right? You’re gonna get into the Korra problem before too much longer. And I don’t know, maybe no one else noticed this, but to me watching Legend of Korra, one of the issues was like, okay, this technology is clearly all 1920s or more advanced.

It’s weird that there aren’t guns because they have a bunch of things that only would exist for guns. Like, they have fighter planes, but no weapons to put on the fighter planes except for bolas, which, why do you have fighter planes if that’s the case? And the battleships have big turrets with huge gun barrels, and it’s like, okay, the explanation for that is that a firebender is inside the turret shooting fireballs through the tubes. Is that an advantage? Like, does that make the fire better? It doesn’t seem to.

Chris: Yeah. I think most people also don’t notice that it doesn’t make sense to have castles if there is something in the setting that can easily knock down castle walls, like dragons or something. Just ’cause the whole point of castles is a defensive structure, and those walls are not supposed to be easily knocked down or destroyed. If they are like, castles take forever to build, then you just wouldn’t build castles anymore. They’re not worth it if you can’t withstand a siege for years in there or whatever.

Oren: Yeah, or at least they would look very different, right? As has been pointed out very often, at least in terms of military technology, something is not necessarily rendered obsolete because it can be destroyed, but it tends to be rendered obsolete because something else can do its job better.

And in the case of castles, what you would probably see is fortifications that are more similar to what exists now, right? Dragons are weird because, in theory, they can attack with impunity, and there’s not really a whole lot anyone can do about it. So what effect does that have on warfare? I have no idea. That’s weird. That’s a weird thing to think about.

Chris: Yeah. We can talk about, what are the advantages and disadvantages of different eras? What are some things that we might wanna think about as terms of, okay, what do we want for a setting? And what are the different tech levels gonna have? How are they gonna affect that? We talked about weapons. I think weapons is what everybody thinks of first.

Oren: Right. Those have the most obvious effect on an adventure story.

Chris: Right. If you have action scenes, a lot of people know whether they want there to be guns. The answer is no. Okay, yeah. Some people want guns. I mean, if you have early guns, they’re probably a lot easier to deal with than later guns. It’s just once you add guns, it’s so hard to make the fight good. It’s so hard.

Oren: I mean, there are definitely some stories where they were written where the author clearly was writing them with this idea that only makes sense if guns exist, like the Lies of Locke Lamora series, specifically the second one where they do a bunch of ship battles.

They describe stuff in terms that would make sense if these were 16- and 1700s era sailing ships with cannons, but they don’t have cannons.

Chris: ‘Cause they’re doing broadsides?

Oren: Yeah, I mean, they don’t use the word broadside because there’s nothing to broadside. They don’t seem to recognize that what they’re doing now is basically land combat on the water.

Chris: It’s like the fighter planes with bolas all over again.

Oren: Yeah, it’s very similar to that. Or a lot of stories will have catapults instead of cannons, and it’s like, all right, well, that’ll work as long as nobody in your audience knows how a catapult works, right? Then you might have some problems.

Chris: So a lot of people know if they wanna use a sword. I can definitely understand that if you’re doing vehicle fights, and vehicles normally have guns on them, and that’s how they fight, why it would mess with things if you did not have guns.

Oren: Yeah, it just gets weird, right?

Chris: But at a smaller scale fight scene with individual people, it is just hard to make gun fights interesting and good and last any amount of time without people being really bad at aiming.

Oren: I mean, it does put a little bit of a damper on if you wanna have exciting sword fights, you first have to explain what happens to everyone’s pistols.

Chris; Obviously, there’s weapons, but not every story has all of those fights. Healing medicine, this can also matter because do you want people to get injured, and then how well are they gonna get patched up again? Because before germ theory, doctors were not very helpful.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, most stories that I have read do not have anything period appropriate, to the extent that that term applies to a fantasy world, medicine. They just don’t because if you followed the kind of medicine that would correspond with whatever other types of technology you seem to have, that’s gonna be both really unhelpful a lot of the times and also kind of tragically comic.

A lot of pre-modern medical treatments were, to our eyes, just ridiculous. And of course, people back then had reasons for doing those things. I’m not saying people in the past were stupid, but they did have very limited understandings of things that we, even now, people who aren’t doctors, have a general understanding of, you know, unless you’re an anti-vaxxer. Then who knows?

Chris: It’s true. Like, I mean, this is also if you do have a fantasy story, this is where magic comes in helpful. Can you make the magic do the healing, please? I don’t want my doctor to come in and start bloodletting or something.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, it takes a very specific kind of story for that to work.

Chris: Or just, man, we watched this show talking about Victorian pharmaceuticals—

Oren: Oof.

Chris: —and they’re all laxatives. All of them. ‘Cause that’s how you get the placebo effect because this medicine was almost all completely ineffective. To convince people it worked, it had to do something, and so generally they were laxatives.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, it does do something. You could say it had an effect.

Chris: Man. Okay, so other ones. Transportation has a huge effect on the story. Do you want traveling to be challenging? This can be an issue if your characters fly, too. I still remember in The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance how we have a bunch of, the characters have wings, and then we’re like, “Oh, look, this big barrier. How will we cross it?” It’s like, well, characters have wings. Maybe we could fly across the barrier.

Oren: Yeah, I think we can figure it out. You know, we’ll get there.

Chris: Think we can do that?

Oren: Yeah, we’ll get there eventually.

Chris: The other thing is that transportation used to take tons of time, right? If we want a character that is seriously globe-trotting and going to lots of places, and it’s just like, in this story, the character is gonna collect the five jewels in the five different corners of the world. This world is shaped like a star, apparently.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: And we don’t really want to be like, “Okay, now I’m gonna summarize the year the character spent traveling to the next corner of the world,” then maybe we want transportation that’s a little faster.

Oren: Yeah. It just takes forever to get anywhere, and it’s really hard. I mean, you can look at the casualty reports for a lot of these early long-distance expeditions that we have records for, whether those are European sailing expeditions or the various travels of Ibn Battuta, who just walked everywhere. And a lot of people died on those journeys, too, ’cause they were really grueling and hard. If you wanna get into the deeper world building, well, first just go read Bret Devereaux’s blog. Just power read it, and that’ll teach you a lot.

Chris: Admittedly, I do wish he had a TL;DR. I’m never going to ask an LLM to summarize his work ever, but I do kind of want the CliffsNotes sometimes. Because he’s like, “Okay, to answer this question, we’re gonna do all of this math.” And it’s like, okay, I trust you to do the math. How about you just do the math and tell me your results? Do I have to read about your entire mathematical equation and all the factors that got into it? Can I just—give me what’s a reasonable answer. But no, he has tons of unique, valuable information. His specialty is the Ancient Greek and Roman period, the Mediterranean, but he’ll also talk about other periods.

Oren: You can get really deep into this if you want to, right. You can think about, okay, does the farming technology exist to support the size of city that I want? And in most cases, most of your readers are not gonna ask that question, and as long as you aren’t super specific about how the farms work, even people who know the answer are probably not gonna ask. But if you have a really deep world you wanna construct, that’s something to think about. Things like literacy rates are huge, and those matter a lot to the tech level and vice versa. Like, does the ability to easily copy written records exist? How much does it cost to copy a book?

Chris: Yeah, that’s the question is, how many people have books? Before there’s much printing, books are gonna be really expensive if you want big libraries and well-read characters.

Oren: Right. And it’s not even just printing. Printing’s obviously a big one, but the material you make books out of is also really important. If you are writing things down on clay tablets, those are great for archaeologists ’cause they last a long time. But as far as societal record keeping, they have a lot of limitations that you might not have if you have something like, for example, paper, which doesn’t last nearly as long but is much easier to make at scale.

And so with paper, that’s going to support a much more literate population. Still not literate to the extent that we have today, not by a long shot, but it will support a much more literate population just because it’s easier to write things down and to make records.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I do find it refreshing when writers have characters that actually don’t read or don’t read very well. ‘Cause usually we want all of our characters to read, and honestly, there’s lots of places in the story where for plot reasons you may want them to read a message or read a book or read something. Then it can be hard for us to imagine, okay, how did everything work when people didn’t write, right? It’s like, well, people probably didn’t travel very much either, so they don’t necessarily need as many, like road signs.

They’re in their local area and they just know what everything is. But it’s very different, and certainly easier for us if our characters are reading to figure things out. But that’s always kind of interesting when people don’t do that. There’s a lot of things that are, like domestically, like infrastructure, like do we want electricity or do we want plumbing? Without plumbing, there’s chamber pots and people have to go fetch water, go to a well and get huge buckets of water, and then bear the water back—

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: —to the house.

Oren: It should be noted that plumbing is a much older technology than electricity. Indoor plumbing is ancient. Now, it isn’t as capable as what we have now, but the ability to use the bathroom in your house is not new. It just used to be a lot more expensive than it is now.

Chris: Yeah, I guess the question I would have about plumbing is, ’cause this seems like the kind of thing where it depends on who you are. So if you’re a tenant farmer, you’re a peasant, what are the chances that you have plumbing in comparison to a noble person, who probably [are] a lot more likely to have plumbing in their house.

Oren: I mean, if you’re a rural farmer, your chances of having plumbing only start to seriously go up quite recently. That’s a lot of infrastructure to lay out to a remote area.

Chris: Then there’s electricity. Okay, so there’s this funny thing that I have to mention. So we watch this kind of Gothic soap opera from the ’60s called Dark Shadows, slowly making our way through it, and the vampire character, Barnabas, he decides to move into the family’s old house. And this house was built pre-electricity, so it doesn’t have any wiring, and he decides he wants to leave it that way.

He doesn’t want any electricity in his house. So every time there’s a scene in this old house where the vampire lives, there’s just tons and tons of candles everywhere in the scene, just all of these candle holders everywhere. And he has one servant that something horrible happens to, so then he has no servants, and I’m like, “Who is tending the candles?”

Oren: Yeah, who is lighting all of those candles?

Chris: Who lights those candles? Who makes sure those candles don’t fall over and set the drapes on fire? Who is blowing the candles out? So many movies, even modern movies too, it’s like every time there’s a romantic candle scene, there’s just a billion candles. It’s like, did the character get a billion candles? We need to see the hour-long scene with the character just lighting candles one after the other to have their romantic date or something, or drink somebody’s blood, or whatever it is.

Oren: Yeah. These scenes often end with, like, they’re about to kiss, and then no, something happens, and one of them runs off. I need to see that afterwards, that they have to take an hour to pick all the candles back up, right? Of course, if you do have electricity, that’s a pretty clear way that your house can be lit. But if you don’t, there are still many different options for lighting your house. Like, obviously, lighting a house with candles is probably not practical.

Candles don’t give off that much light, and if you’re trying to light a large area, a candle is just not gonna do it. And even if you have the money to afford lots of candles, that’s a huge expense. You might be looking at lamps. Lamps are probably more common, and they are gonna burn some kind of oil. And of course, it could be whale oil, that one’s common, but there are many kinds of oil that lamps can burn. To say nothing about the fireplace. That’s gonna be a big source of light, or the stove. And of course, in pre-electricity era, often it’s just gonna be less done after dark, ’cause it’s just harder to produce light.

Chris: Yep, it’s harder to produce light, so you get up at dawn and you start working, and you’re done working around sunset. Like laundry used to be super time-consuming. Before laundry machines, it used to take up a lot of time and be very labor-intensive. There could be a question of, how much work do you want your characters to be doing?

Oren: Yeah, how much time do they have to spend doing laundry? That’s an important question.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: Personally, I think we could do with more stories that have a Bronze Age aesthetic. There just aren’t that many of them. And to a certain extent, it’s not that different, because you’re still gonna have mostly melee weapons and bows and arrows, and food is still gonna be grown by hand. But if you’re basing it off of the Bronze Age Mediterranean, you still have these fairly complicated hierarchical states that could support very large populations, which is how they were able to build these giant monuments, because they had mass labor available.

And that’s how they’re able to do it without advanced machinery, and that’s one of the reasons why the pyramids are built on such a grand scale, and then we wouldn’t build anything on a similar scale for thousands of years, because the capacity and the desire to do it did not exist.

Chris: Because the labor was more valuable or scarce?

Oren: Yeah, and for various reasons, ’cause after the Bronze Age collapse, Egypt doesn’t collapse, but it goes into a period of decline. And so that kind of labor becomes much harder to gather again. And it’s not like… I’m not gonna say that later civilizations couldn’t have done it. Like, I’m not gonna say the Romans couldn’t have built the pyramids if they wanted to.

I honestly don’t know. But it’s a combination of, you know, you lose access to that level of labor, but then you also maybe don’t want to anymore because times have changed. There are different things you wanna build.

Chris: We haven’t talked much about communication.

Oren: Yeah, that’s another big one.

Chris: We talked about literacy, but that’s a big one. I have been surprised by how easy adjusting to stories with cell phones in it has gone. I think it’s because as much as it can be inconvenient when your protagonists can always talk to each other with their phones, it also is very convenient sometimes for protagonists to talk to each other with their phones.

And also phones are unreliable enough that it’s not usually hard to be like, “Oh, phone’s out of battery. Oh, I have no cell reception.” There’s so many things that can go wrong with them that it just hasn’t really been an issue that much whether or not there are cell phones. I mean, if you want characters to take longer to say things to each other and there to be a lot of miscommunication or missing information in your story, then earlier communication that takes longer or is more unreliable, of course, might be better. But in too many stories it hasn’t made that much of a difference. Mostly if you have protagonists that live far from each other, that’s when it becomes more of an issue.

Oren: Yeah. The biggest problem with not even cell phones specifically, but that level of technology has had for stories is that it’s just harder for things to disappear.

Like, it’s really hard to explain nowadays how you’re not able to find someone unless they’re living in a cave somewhere. If you’re determined, you can find them. You can go to a shady website and pay $50 and get their address. So that’s a bit of an issue. But in terms of characters being able to call 911 for help, it’s like, ah, there are a bunch of different ways to deal with that.

I think it’s important to just think about, do you want communication to move faster than the speed of travel? Because for a long time it couldn’t. For a long time communication could move exactly as fast as a person carrying a letter could move. But eventually that changed, right? We developed telegraph lines, and then before that we have the Clacks Towers from Discworld.

Those are based on real things. They’re not nearly as capable as the Clacks Towers, but they do have real world equivalents.

Chris: You know, related to communication and travel and finding things, some stories depend on having some sort of isolated enclave somewhere, some untouched, undiscovered island or what have you.

Undiscovered, of course, to the protagonists. We’re always gonna reveal that there’s people living there, so they are discovered. And that kind of thing is, again, just more plausible if transportation and communication are less advanced.

Oren: Yep, that’s true. All right. Well then, I will simply end this with a plea to not introduce tanks into the middle of what I thought was a mid-1800s tech level setting. Looking at you, Six of Crows. Based on the Grisha TV show, I think maybe it was actually supposed to be closer to World War I level, but even so, the tanks just appear out of nowhere.

Chris: I mean, Avatar: The Last Airbender also has tanks show up, and that’s one of the first times we see any kind of technology that’s sophisticated.

Oren: Yeah, that’s a pretty big leap to, “suddenly they have tanks.” Oh, okay.

Chris: Suddenly they have tanks.

Oren: All right. Well, with that, we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: So we probably can’t become an old-timey radio show just because Oren can’t use the old-timey radio show voice all the time. But you can help free us from the cyberpunk dystopia by becoming a patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: You say that, but now I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson. She’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week, folks.

[outro music plays]

This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

An exciting new horror story has come out, promising spooky monsters and exciting twists that will surely have a satisfying payoff. This week, we address some tricky questions about common pitfalls in horror. How do you resolve a conflict with an overwhelming force without seeming contrived? How do you keep squishy heroes alive while also keeping them in danger? Should you kill your protagonist halfway through and replace them with some guy? Listen as we try to figure that out.

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[opening song]

Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: It’s time to read and/or watch the latest high novelty horror story everyone’s talking about. The opening is really cool and spooky. I’m sure I won’t be disappointed by the back half falling apart.

Chris: No, of course. It’s going to be cool and spooky the entire time, with the perfect twist that’s been perfectly foreshadowed.

Oren: It’ll be just as good.

Chris: It’ll be just as good. Never will we be disappointed ever.

Oren: Yeah, so this episode is about how to structure a horror story, and this has been encouraged by the fact that I’ve seen and/or read a number of really promising horror stories that just cannot follow through. And I wanted to talk about it, and then Chris can explain why that doesn’t work and how to do it better, ’cause I don’t know. I just know that it keeps happening. Uh, so there’s a good chance… We got to say this at the top: there’s a good chance there are going to be spoilers for Backrooms, the novella What Stalks the Deep, the novel There Is No Antimemetics Division, and then the movie Weapons. Backrooms is also a movie.

Chris: Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of this. We’ve seen a lot.

Oren: I don’t know if we’ll actually get to all four of those, but those are the things that motivated me to do this podcast, so there’s a good chance we’ll talk about them.

Chris: Yeah. So, first question is: All right, why are they falling apart? And I think there is a connection between the fact that these horror stories are really unique and novel and the fact that they are not lasting through to the end. And that’s just the fact that we can’t underestimate how many people out there don’t really understand storytelling very well. And, like, the haunted house, for instance, genre of horror: there are so many of them that people know what to look at, right? And so they know, like, “Oh, here’s the beats,” right? If I’m… And oftentimes even in screenwriting and movies, it is like that. They’re like, “Oh, this happens at this point, this happens at this point.” They just have a template that they’ve copied from other stories that they go off of.

Now, just to be clear to any listeners, we have had editing clients who have wanted to do this to help their plotting. They have a model work, and then they try to copy the plot. It actually does not… generally, especially if you’re doing it on your own, does not work as well as you would think, because almost always in these situations, there’s enough differences between one story and the next that when you try to do that, it will mean that the plot no longer works once it’s been transposed into your story.

But in the case of haunted house horror, for instance, there’s so many haunted house stories to look at, and they have many of the same constraints, where in particular you need a reason that people don’t leave the house. That’s, like, one of the central challenges of haunted house horror. But you can kind of see how that rhythm goes, and you know what to do there. But I think when people do something that’s less familiar and they have less models, it’s harder for them to figure out what they’re doing.

Oren: Yeah. And some of these, when I look at them, it’s a combination of, “Okay, this premise just seems genuinely very challenging to resolve in a satisfactory way,” and then also what just looks like really weird unforced errors. Backrooms is the perfect example because on the one hand, yeah, I have no idea how to resolve a story about thisinterdimensional utility corridor that kills people. That’s really neat and spooky and weird, but I wouldn’t know off the top of my head how a story about that should resolve. But I do know that it probably shouldn’t be by switching main characters halfway through.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: Very strange choice. It’s like, hey, and then resulting in this weird thing where we have the haunted spooky utility corridor that brings to life your, you know, psychological issues and literalizes them into monsters, but for some reason that doesn’t happen with the second protagonist, even though we spent a lot of time flashbacking to her horrible psychological problem. That never appears in the haunted utility corridor, and I don’t get it. What, what? What is going on?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think part of the issue is that movie’s running on analogy logic.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So, like, I’m pretty sure the Backrooms represent his mind specifically, so she’s not going into her own mind. She’s going into his.

Oren: Right. But, like, surely she would bring her own stuff in there with her, right? I would think. I don’t know… Maybe not.

Chris: Yeah. I don’t know. But it’s funny ’cause what you just said of switching main characters midway happens in two of these stories. It also happens in There Is No Antimemetics Division.

Oren: Yeah, why?

Chris: Why? I mean, again, that’s just a very basic thing that, if you’re… most storytellers know not to do, right? Again, somebody can always make the choice. Yeah, I understand this is going to have big consequences for audience engagement, but I’m doing it anyway, and that’s fine. At least in Backrooms, the therapist character is introduced pretty early as a character, so it’s not like some rando has just taken over the story.

Oren: Yeah. I mean the husband in ’-memetics Division is also technically introduced early, but he’s less important, right? The therapist has at least been sort of part of the plot till this point because she’s been talking to the first main character about his issues, whereas the husband is only, like, very tangentially related to what’s going on.

Chris: Yeah, I will also add that the therapist is a knowledgeable professional related to the area because the Backrooms are symbolic of the mind, right? And so that makes sense for her to be the hero. But the husband is, like, the non-professional who just happens to have some natural aptitude for seeing things that you can’t normally remember, and then he’s just, you know, a mediocre guy who skates on that.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Um, so anyway, not having a clear model, doing something unique does make it harder for writers, but to be clear, there isn’t actually anything super unique about horror structure, right? That’s not true for some other genres like romance, where there is unique things about how they work based on the engagement mechanisms they use. But horror is just running on tension. The only thing is that if you want it to feel like horror and not like action, you need the right atmosphere. And so that can add some additional restrictions, but we are just looking at normal tension structure here. I think the big issue is the fact that it happens at a small scale and we have a deadly menace, and we have a squishy person, and so it’s hard to figure out why it isn’t over. ‘Cause we want an underpowered protagonist because that disempowerment is part of how you build that horror atmosphere. Um, if you have, like, a muscled person with a machine gun that’s marching to the monster, it’s not… now it’s action; it’s not horror anymore really.

Oren: Right, which is why it’s like, okay, so in the Backrooms, that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been trying to figure out, like, what would a resolution to the Backrooms be? Because it probably can’t be, “And then we find the Backrooms’ secret weakness and destroy it, and now there’s no more haunted utility corridor.”

Chris: I mean, you could, though. It could, though. There are, like in the Poltergeist, it’s not exactly like that because the girl’s been taken to another dimension, but it is like, “Hey, we used this One Weird Trick to get rid of the poltergeist.” So you could absolutely have, “We found some secret mechanism to get rid of the Backrooms,” right? if the movie was set up that way. But it’s going to end either when the monster is defeated or, you know, our protagonists are killed. And we want lots of spooks, which means encounters with the scary monster, and our protagonist is extremely squishy. So there’s… it’s just difficult to figure out, “Okay, how do we keep this going?” Especially since we want those thrills. And I think for There Is No Antimemetics Division, I think part of the issue there with the second half just falling very flat is it just escalated quicker than it needed to. But, like, obviously the… qntm, the author, was really focused on making it exciting. And at some point in time, if you want to keep the story going, you can’t necessarily keep escalating that fast.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: But, like, there’s also, besides just, like, “Okay, why does one side not just kill the other?” there’s also definitely in Backrooms an issue related to movement. So: movement is the idea, like the feeling that you get that a story is progressing towards the finish line. And in order to get that feeling of progress, generally, there needs to be some sense of where you are going to. And if the storyteller doesn’t know where the story is supposed to go, I think it’s hard to create movement.

So, like, what happens in Backrooms is, like, the protagonist just runs around in all of these rooms, and there’s all of these spooky, scary, unsettling things in these rooms, but they don’t add up to anything. Nothing builds on nothing else. You could take any room out of the sequence and the plot would stay intact.

So as it keeps going, even though I started out being very engaged by this movie, it was increasingly like, “Man, this movie feels so long,” because nothing is adding up. It doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere because it doesn’t really have a proper resolution, right? And we could look at, “Okay, what are the arcs that are supposed to be here?” Because, again, there’s a couple of reasons why horrors don’t end instantly. And one is they have arcs besides just, like, “Do I kill the monster or does the monster kill me?” that spend the time and fill out that space. So a big part of horror is mystery. And you might’ve noticed in the Backrooms, we never solve any of the mysteries. It feels like, I mean, we do get kind of a monster, we find out what the monster is, but it doesn’t feel like we’re finding out how the place works.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, I have to admit I don’t want to know. It’s hard for me to imagine an explanation that wouldn’t just make it seem kind of silly or be kind of perfunctory, like, you know, “Ah, yeah, it’s a haunted utility corridor that brings to life your psychological insecurities.” It’s like, “Okay, yeah, I mean, I kind of guessed that from watching the movie ’cause that is what it does.” So, like, I guess we could add some kind of causal explanation, but it’s just hard for me to imagine that that would be anything other than disappointing.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, let’s use another horror as an example: Cabin in the Woods.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So: Cabin in the Woods, we have this company that is setting up this horrific cabin weekend, this evil company. We don’t know why the company’s doing what it’s doing, but we can already see it there. It’s not actually as mysterious to us as it would be to the characters. We see the characters make progress in trying to figure out what’s going on, right? Like they try various places to get away and find out there’s artificial technological barriers in the way, which gives them more information. And finally they find out that there is some technical mechanism that unleashed these zombies on them. And then they work their way back to the company headquarters, and then the actual horror kind of continues at the company headquarters, and we can see that that kind of allows them to make progress.

Now, the actual Elder Gods, the Older Ones that the company is trying to appease, that kind of remains mysterious, right? So we have a mysterious level there. But we can see that they’re, like, doing something, right? So in a haunted house, usually we are covering what is the history of this ghost oftentimes or figuring out how the house works in some way. And we can still have it be kind of magical and mysterious, but there has to be something for the characters to work towards as they’re running from this monster.

Oren: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess it’s just hard to imagine what that would be in the Backrooms, just ’cause the spooky aspect of the Backrooms is so visual and, like, so based on things like set design and cinematography and music choice that I’ve been trying to think, like, “What did I want this plot to be?” And I have no idea.

Chris: Well, I mean, I think the premise… I mean, they set up a whole premise where there’s a therapist and a guy in therapy, and it feels like they weren’t willing to be anything other than very obtuse about that, right? You know, we had a villain that is basically part of, you know, one of the protagonists’ sense of self. But, like, we don’t know anything about, like, what do those rooms mean to his psyche, and I think we could still have it be magical and that it represents his psyche, but also in some way understand his psyche, like, you know, you would have the therapist come in and be like, “Okay, the key to getting out is that we need to find his childhood self and make that self feel safe again,” right?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right? So you would have the therapist, you know, they would figure out something about maybe him and what’s going on with his psyche while they’re running around from the monster so they can do something that builds on itself. And then they would have to identify an objective that the audience can understand despite the fact that the Backrooms itself works in mysterious ways. But that objective tells us about, like, “Okay, so that child we saw crying in the other room, we have to go retrieve that child, right? And then we have to make that child feel better and safe despite all of the horrors.” Right? So we can kind of see what they have to do and see how, as they learn more about his psyche, that’s the kind of, you know… And so they had some of that in there, but it felt like they just wanted to be very cryptic and didn’t want to actually tell a story about these characters. Even though those characters both had emotional problems, it just didn’t feel like we really wanted to be explicit about what those emotional problems were or give them meaningful progress.

Oren: I would probably not have spent so much time establishing the psychologist’s traumatic backstory if the only outcome of that was going to be that it was related to the piece of concrete she used to hit the monster with.

Chris: Yeah, yeah.

Oren: Probably not worth that investment.

Chris: Right. But, like, in a different… in the story if that was actually, like, followed up in some way we could’ve… then maybe that would’ve been meaningful. It might’ve been hard to delve into two characters, like, deep emotional backstories and weave them into a plot, but I’m not going to say it’s impossible. But yeah, I mean, I think with Backrooms it’s a matter of like, “Okay, we didn’t actually know…” Well, the arcs there are pretty simple, right? We have a guy who is… he has emotional problems, and the resolution, you know, is that, spoilers… he does not solve his emotional problems, right? That is a resolution. The problem with the other character, the therapist, is: What is her arc exactly?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I guess she’s sad about this backstory. Is she still, you know, grieving? What does she need?

Oren: Yeah, nothing about that changed, right? Like, she’s in the same place emotionally she was before she went into the Backrooms. But she now knows that there’s a weird government agency tracking the Backrooms, I guess. You know, another thing I would probably not have included.

Chris: Yeah, but the conclusion of the man’s arc is very perfunctory, right? It feels very rushed. Like, as we noted, you know, he’s attacked, and then we just flip to another character. Then, when we see him again, it’s like he’s completely changed and we didn’t see.

Oren: Yeah, he’s a different person now.

Chris: So it’s like he failed off screen, right? And we needed to see that to fill in the movie. To make it meaningful, we needed to see that, and it just wasn’t given to us, right?

Oren: It’s probably pretty hard to convincingly have him go from flawed but normal guy to “I’m going to do like the Joker tea party scene where I cut people-shaped things open and put stuff from that onto food plates.” ‘Cause there’s not really a reason for a person to do that. That just doesn’t make any sense. So we just have him be off screen for a while, and we can trust that whatever happened to him made him into the sort of person who would do that.

Chris: Mm-hmm, yeah. So, like in horror for instance, we have time figuring out how the horror works. Like, sometimes people have relationship problems, right? And so people work on their relationship while they deal with the horror. Sometimes they investigate the mysteries, like what is this monster, how was it created? Or, you know, have to reckon with the fact that the supernatural is real, for instance. And those things fill out the story, take time, and, you know, give them something to do, because they can’t be running from the monster usually the entire time, right? We need to fill the story out a little bit.

And so for that, horrors usually have a pretty slow escalation where there’s lots of build-up time in the beginning. You know, like in a haunted house, the family moves in, and there’s usually some, like, fake-outs. Like, we think that something is going to be scary at first and then it’s not. We have one kid jump out at another kid and laugh, right?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So that we get, like, our little spooks in because it’s horror and we feel tense, but there’s not… actually the monster’s not here yet because we can’t spend the whole movie with the monster chasing the protagonist. And so that build-up builds atmosphere, you know, allows us to kind of build up a sense of mystery, allows us to build anticipation about the threat, right? Make it feel creepy, and that increases… that anticipation increases tension later when the monster finally shows up. And then just, like, takes time, whereas, like, Antimemetics, one of the things that’s so great about its first half is it really hits the ground running.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, my instinct, Antimemetics is easier to fix from my perspective because what I would probably recommend doing if the author had hired me for a dev edit is I would, instead of having the big bad take over the world at the halfway point, which feels like, “How could we possibly win at this point?”, like everyone’s turned into monsters or whatever, and then the way that they do win is extremely vague, don’t worry about it. What I would just have them do is have the midpoint be that the agency is destroyed, but the bad guy is still contained, like, within the agency building or something, right? And then have the protagonist not die because, again, we like this protagonist. She’s great. Don’t replace her with her husband. And then have her be on the outside, and now things are way harder because they have to figure out a way to stop this thing without the agency’s resources.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I also think we could have just waited longer until having this happen, right? I think that, when we establish what’s happening in Antimemetics Division, where employees are disappearing, it just goes much faster than I think it needed to go. Now, if it happened for too long and qntm didn’t have anything to do there, it’s possible that it would be a little bit too dragged out, right? We didn’t have anything to do in that space. But I just think that we could take longer to get to the point where the organization is destroyed, right? And, again, horror often relies on a slower build-up so it’s not over immediately. So yeah, that’s definitely one thing. Like Weapons. Okay, Weapons is really interesting because this has the opposite, where it is slow, but for the wrong reasons.

Oren: Yeah. Yeah, with Weapons, it’s less, I guess, that the back half falls off, and more that we start off with this interesting premise and this teacher who is suspected of being involved with her class’s mysterious disappearance. So she has, like, both the spooky disappearance and the human problem of people thinking she did it. And then we switch over to the parents of one of the kids, and he suspects her. It’s like, “Okay, this makes sense.” And then we switch over to the teacher’s cop ex-boyfriend, which is like, “Wait, whoa, okay, we probably don’t need this guy’s perspective.” And then we switch over to a random criminal that the cop ex-boyfriend arrests. It’s like, “Okay, is, like, her former roommate going to show up at some point? Why… why these guys?”

Chris: Right, and each person is again, going through… They happen at approximately the same time. Maybe they work forward in time a little bit, right? So it’s like we’re repeating the same time and each person has to kind of rediscover the situation. So there’s very little forward movement. But again, it feels like, “Oh, we didn’t have enough actual content to fill the space, so now we’re just going to repeat it a bunch of times.” It feels like the same issue, but, like, with a different bad solution.

Oren: Right, and instead of having the characters figure out what’s going on, we just reveal it at one point in, like, an infodump. Uh, it’s like, “Yep, that’s, uh, it’s a witch. A witch did it. Good job.”

Chris: We’ve seen a lot of that lately, where storytellers add flashbacks or switch POVs instead of just letting the protagonist uncover something. And I suspect it’s just because they feel like it’s challenging. They don’t know how to let the protagonist find out all these things. And also, I will say that it can be hard to dump a whole bunch of information at once if the protagonist is clue-finding. So maybe they just think it’s easier. But yeah, it’s like you could have spent that time with the protagonist actually solving a mystery and earning information instead of just, like, switching viewpoint and giving it to people.

Oren: Yeah, just the fact that we have to watch the cop and the criminal guy figure out a lot of the same stuff that we already had the teacher and the dad figure out is just mind-numbing. Like, no, I don’t care about either of these two, and I’m not learning anything new anyway.

Chris: But yeah, this little introduction allows you to make things spooky. Also, it’s often used to develop characters a bunch, right? Like in The Shining, Stephen King spends a whole bunch of time setting up the family and what their deal is and their problems, which of course matters a lot later when, you know, Jack becomes part of the evil hotel, basically. But that’s kind of how it’s used, and we get that slow build-up. Um, and then yeah, we need something that characters can work towards so that the story actually builds off of itself and has proper movement.

Oren: Yeah. And the last one that I mentioned that has a weird one, that has potential spoilers is for the novella What Stalks the Deep. And that one is interesting because its problem seems to be the halfway point twist, where we had thought that there was a monster stalking the land and the mines, and then we… Twist! No, it’s not a monster. It’s just an unusual life form. Uh, it’s not evil. And, like, that’s a perfectly fine twist to have, but what it ends up meaning is that the first half of the story doesn’t really tell us any of the information we need to know. And so then, when we find out what’s actually going on, we require this huge infodump to explain the new premise now. And oh boy, is that boring.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, my biggest issue that I had with that is that, because the actual monster was similar, was the same type of creature as this person they meet that turns out to be not threatening, we completely demystify the monster. And oftentimes, if you want your horror monster to be scary, it does need to be mysterious. It’s just far less scary if you dispel the mystery around it. And so just having like, “Hey, I’m a special strange creature from the deeps. You know, I’m your buddy.” It’s like, okay, well, now the actual monster is not scary anymore.

Oren: Right. Now we know exactly what the actual monster is. And there’s also like a while where we’re waiting for the actual monster to show back up, because we weren’t investigating it. We had just like heard foreshadowing that it existed, right? It’s also a problem where we are now treating both the monster and this new guy, who they thought was evil but turns out is just a strange life form, as characters with motivations that are understandable. But, because we barely know them, they just kind of have to tell us their motivation. Like at one point, the bad guy straight up just says, “Uh, I will not return to the hole.” And it’s like, “Okay, I mean, I know that’s your motivation ’cause you said it out loud, but man, it would’ve been cool if I had been able to infer some of that from your actions.”

Chris: Yeah. Um, the other thing structurally with this one is we have a creepy old mine shaft, and that’s great. The mine shaft is great. But we have a situation: it’s like people have a campsite outside the haunted house, and they’re safe if they’re in their campsite. So they, like, periodically go into the haunted house, and we have scary encounters there, but then they just retreat to their campsite, and there’s like… Once they’re in their campsite, there’s no tension because there’s no time limit, right? or urgency. But they’re like, “Okay, we would like to get these answers from the haunted house, but we don’t have to get them… You know, it probably won’t actually make any difference if we get them today or tomorrow,” right?

Oren: Yeah, the lack of urgency is a problem, for sure.

Chris: So they’re just, like, casually camping around outside the house, and occasionally they go in. That’s what this mine shaft is like. And so, again, you know, you need that high-level structure, that big-picture structure and not just, like, exciting individual moments. Again, Kingfisher, her books often just aren’t very tense. But the first one in that series, What Moves the Dead, that one is much more tense. That’s definitely the best one so far, and sadly, I think the reason why she made a change in this one is because that one has, you know, an organism that just turns out to be evil. And she might have been like, “Oh, we shouldn’t treat other beings that we haven’t met before as though they’re just, like, monsters to be killed, so I’m going to make it better in this next one.” It’s like, okay, but now it’s not scary.

Oren: And here’s the thing: I can totally imagine ways to fix this one because what we would want is… so we would need some urgency, right? Like, we need some urgency in exploring the mine, and because both the actual evil thing and the guy who turns out to not be evil are shapeshifters and can look like anything, just have them be people that we meet. And then we can build some attachment to them or learn about them that way before we make the big reveal, right? That just seems obvious.

Chris: Yeah, it’s true. We can have a normal person and then realize that person is strange later after we’ve been spooked out by the monster for a while. That’s a good solution. It’s nice. But again, overall, the thing about horror again is it uses the same structural principles. Usually it has, like, a mystery element to it, so it’s like a story with a mystery subplot, right? You want your protagonist to be disempowered, and you want them to be reactive at first, generally. So it’s just easier to create that horror atmosphere if the monster comes after them and they’re not, like, again, getting out all their guns and chasing down the monster. Um, slow build-up with spooks and then, you know, add some other arcs that they can work on while they’re doing that. But its structure is pretty similar to other stories. It’s just about trying to, again, keep that escalation from happening too soon and not having the monster kill the protagonist or the protagonist kill the monster immediately, and having somewhere to go with it.

Oren: Yeah. All right, well, with that, I think this is a good point to call an end to our spooooky podcast.

Chris: What if this podcast were to disappear mysteriously? Does that not spook you? Is that prospect not scary? Well, maybe you could strike back against this menace by supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[closing song]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

Characters sometimes feel sad. But what if they felt… extra sad? If it’s sad enough to be a big deal, probably the saddest they’ll ever be, we call that a low point. Much has been made of low points, with some giving them fancy names like “dark night of the soul” and insisting they must happen at a certain point in a certain way. Most of that is pure puffery, but it’s still useful to understand how these moments work and the best way to utilize them. It’s also important to understand that Mark Zuckerberg is getting sued by a bunch of porn companies. That’s not super relevant to storytelling, but it is funny.

Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Intro Music]

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

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Oren, I don’t know if I can podcast on. The tech companies are stealing all of our content, Google is stealing all of the web traffic, and you’re leaving for law school! I think I’ll just lay down in the Pit of Despair.

Oren: Ooh, are you having a Dark Night of the Soul!?

Chris: [chuckling] I don’t know. Maybe my soul likes the dark.

Oren: Could be. Could be very dark, but fiction has taught me that when, you know, things seem really bad, they’re about to get better. That’s how fiction works, so probably it’s fine actually. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

Chris: Well, I do have to admit, it is getting a little bit boring in the Pit of Despair since I am just, you know, curled up doing nothing. So maybe you should just give me an inspiring speech so I regain hope and then I can get out of the Pit of Despair.

Oren: Oh, boy. An inspiring speech, huh?

Chris: Yeah, and remember, you have to start with a speech that sounds really bad, so I can be like, “Oren…” and then it suddenly corrects itself into a good speech. That’s how story speeches work.

Oren: Okay, have you considered that Meta is being sued by a bunch of porn companies for scraping all of their video files?

Chris: Hmmm.

Oren: Doesn’t that make you feel better? [both laughing] It makes me feel better.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, that would be great. If that-  

Oren: I’ve got no idea if they’re going to win, but they did just survive a motion to dismiss, which is cool.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, for me, the thing about that lawsuit is it looks it might hinge a lot on them pirating the porn, which, again, that’s definitely better than nothing, but I really think they need to pay for the training data, for stealing training data, even if it didn’t involve pirating files. And I may, as a person with content online that you can read for free, may have a vested interest in this.

Oren: Yeah!

 Chris: In any case, well, I think we have climbed out of the Pit of Despair.

Oren: See, now we’re back in the fight.

Chris: So, we’re discussing low points, AKA Dark Night of the Soul, in the Hero’s Journey, there’s the Ordeal, I think it’s called, or sometimes people call it an All is Lost Moment. It’s really funny that this thing is so—even though people have different terms—but it’s so widespread. And my theory is that it tends to be a favorite of pseudo-structures. Which, we recall, is when people give you a structure that is not really story structure, like the Hero’s Journey, it’s mostly just vague inspiration. I just think that people are trying to figure out how a story structure works and they’re not getting it right but they can point to, hey, there’s a moment where bad things happen and the hero feels despair and, repeatedly point to that so it’s just easy to identify. Also, it’s dramatic and people like dramatic things.

Oren: Well, right, and it’s also by its definition always going to exist unless the hero’s emotional state is a flat line for the entire story. Because there will always be some point that is the lowest and if you don’t really care about how useful this concept is you can always just point to it and say, “Yep, there it is. That’s the lowest point.”

The low point in Star Wars is when Luke is sad because Obi-Wan died. Never mind that it lasts like two minutes and he’s just a little sad. The low point in Lord of the Rings is when Frodo gives into the ring. Never mind that that is during the climax. And the low point in Wrath of Khan is after the climax because Kirk’s friend has just died. So, you know, there is always a low point somewhere in that some point in the movie has to be the main character’s lowest emotional point.

Chris: It reminds me of midpoints where just by the law of averages or whatever, you can find, usually, an exciting point that’s vaguely in the middle of the story.

Oren: Right, if the midpoint is a false victory and/or real victory and/or false defeat and/or real defeat that happens somewhere around the middle of the story.

Chris: Oh, is that from Save the Cat Writes a Novel?

Oren: It is. [both laughing] Yeah, I bet you’ll find one if you look for it.

Chris: So, the point here is that I usually define a low point as something that is exceptionally devastating, which means that not every story has it nor is it necessary. If you want to say it’s necessary, then, I mean, you can do that if you make it milder and milder, the definition of how low does it have to go, but then it’s happening all the time and there’s not one distinct low point. Or if it’s just the lowest point as Oren said, then we could technically find that in any story, and that doesn’t help us become better storytellers. It’s not useful information.

But, despite that—we can totally make fun of it because it is worth making fun of—but at the same time, low points can be useful. But they have trade-offs. They have advantages, they have disadvantages. They’re not going to be the right solution for every situation or every story, but they are another tool in your toolbox. So, I’m not saying you shouldn’t use a low point, especially if you just…again some people just like the drama of it. They like the highs and the lows and that kind of thing. And if you enjoy it, yeah, go ahead. It’s just fine.

Oren: All right, so that’s what is low point, but why is low point? What is its purpose in the story? What does it actually do?

Chris: Well, I mean, if we’re talking about characters and their low points, we can talk about the character level and the bigger story level.

For character level, if we specifically want a character, because, again, depending on how you define a low point, since you could define a low point in any specific plot arc in your story, which will have multiple, or for any specific character, but if you’re specifically thinking, “I want this character to have a low point,” usually there’s a couple things you can do.

One, maybe you just want to push the character to change. And so, in their character arc, often they have to learn a lesson of some kind and one way to teach them lessons is to have them do the wrong thing and then suffer for it, for instance. Or maybe they just need a little whip crack to actually do something a little more desperate or radical. And when we talk about this being an All is Lost Moment, this is often a time when we had a previous plan for saving the day and that was taken away. So that’s a time when they would have to change tactics in most cases.

Oren: Right. And then now they’re willing to do something they weren’t willing to do before. And that can be a positive thing, it can be what’s needed. If what’s needed here is for you to completely abolish the aristocracy and you weren’t willing to do that until your mild attempts at reform prompted an aristocrat to assassinate your wife. So that’s your low point and now you’re like, “I’m gonna take down that aristocracy!”

Or it can be a negative thing, where you were trying to avoid using the magical death ray that devastates the countryside but then someone precious to your character died and then they decide to use the death ray and that’s a downward turning point for them.

Chris: The other thing is, lots of writers may do it because they like the themes involved. The kind of like death and rebirth or defeat and hope. Some of them just want their characters to go through a moment when the character has to deal with a serious loss and then kind of recover from that and rally emotionally in some way, and that kind of emotional journey is just what interests the writer.

On the plotting level, for movies that have a big, what I would call a dramatic reversal, where generally this low point will happen shortly before the climax and the goal generally there is to raise tension. So, we make everything look as hopeless as possible so that coming out on top of the climax just feels really, really difficult, thereby making things tenser when we head into the climax.

Again, there are so many ways to create tension. I talk about, here’s the actual essential ingredients of tension, but there is no specific trope that you need to create tension. There’s lots of ways. So, this is used to create tension but is by no means necessary to have adequate tension going into the climax.

Oren: Yeah, and this is another case where the thing that pseudo-structures often call the low point or the Dark Night of the Soul or whatever, is just a result of the fact that you want tension to be highest at the climax and a way to create tension is often to make the situation much worse. And if your characters react to that in a naturalistic way, they will feel really bad. So, you know, that happens a lot. Just as an emergent property.

 Chris: But outside of setting up the plot or setting up the climax, a low point often happens after, again, somebody dies or something really goes wrong or that kind of thing. So yeah, I don’t know. Some writers also are edgy and might just want somebody to die.

Oren: Yeah, sometimes they just want that. Is a low point as we’ve been talking about it, a conflict? Like is it something that the protagonist needs a turning point to resolve?

Chris: I mean, I would say that an emotional conflict you could say, or an emotional struggle, but the problem is it’s not typically a very exciting conflict.

Oren: Right. What I’m thinking is: is it going to be unsatisfying if we set up this tragedy and the protagonist is in despair, and then they fall asleep, despairing. And after a night’s sleep they wake up and decide, “Okay, well… everything sucks, but I have to fight anyway.” Is that going to be disappointing because they just kind of got over it? Or do I need more of a clear, “this is how they moved past it” moment?

Chris: Well, it’s definitely an arc, right? So, we can split the plot up into child arcs. If their hope seems lost and the protagonist is giving into despair, which is common in these low points, I feel like if you had a low point where something bad happened and then the character doesn’t … I mean, as we said, pseudo-structures will define these really broadly to try to say, “See, our structure is totally valid. All of these stories fit it.” And they’ll be, “Oh, you know, that could be kind of a Dark Night of the Soul.”

Oren: Yeah, sure. As long as, you know, you don’t care about it meeting most of the requirements, absolutely.

Chris: Yeah. But I mean, I think for me, something that I would actually call a low point is devastating enough that your hero is going to have an emotional reaction. And depending on how it’s framed, it can be different ways, like it could be the protagonist is just giving into despair, and that’s a problem, right? It’s a problem that would start a child arc and we would expect them to earn the solution to that problem just like for any other arc.

Or, if we’re thinking more about the plot outside of just what the character is going through, and what often happens here is we kind of eliminate the path to victory, I mean, that’s also an issue that has to be resolved. And again, whenever you have a plot arc start that because you present a problem, generally the hero is going to have to earn that solution.

But, depending on what your goals are, a lot of people might want to do deep, emotional soul-searching there. Hence why the Dark Night of the Soul label. But you could have a prior achievement turning point where the character earlier helped somebody else and then in this moment this person comes back and reminds the hero of what they accomplished. So, the hero is basically benefiting from earlier good deeds that they did, and that way it’s still earned but they don’t necessarily have a big emotional struggle.

Oren: Right. A prior achievement turning point feels pretty natural as a way to resolve this low point arc. You know, this is where you would have maybe another character who your protagonist has been helping out, lend emotional support, something that. Although lending emotional support could also be part of the protagonist resolving it themselves, right, as an emotional resolution.

 Chris: Yeah, I mean, you could definitely have somebody say something and then the hero has kind of a realization. Or, you know, something else that this is worth it or whatever have you, but you wouldn’t just want to shrug it off. If we’re really presenting this as a problem, we need something to show that we’ve earned getting out the other side. Especially if it’s dramatic.

 Oren: I’ve been thinking about how one creates a low point and I realize I have two, like, requirements that are both a little bit in opposition to each other and also very hard to intellectualize. So, I’m going to go through ’em and we’ll see if we can get something more useful than “I know it when I see it.”

First is that I feel the reaction has to match what has happened. If your hero probably isn’t, shouldn’t be, throwing a fit and be completely devastated because they lost their cool shirt. I’m not going to say that’s impossible to make that work, but in most cases, that’s going to seem like a big overreaction to me. Even if it is realistic for the hero, in most cases, I’m just not going to care because the hero is acting a big baby.

And then the other thing is that I feel like the cause of the low point doesn’t need to be exaggerated or really shouldn’t be exaggerated. Like it’s enough for a friend to die. That’s tragic enough. They don’t need to explode from agony maggots. [Chris laughing] And I don’t know exactly how to figure that out. I just know that when I read a story where I feel the hero is overreacting or I feel the tragic event is being really exaggerated it bothers me and I’m not sure how to advise on that.

Chris: Right. Well, one thing about, if a character’s going to die here, is that it shouldn’t feel like it’s designed just to make the reader feel as bad as possible. Because that feels manipulative to the reader. Again, some authors have a habit of choosing children. Just introducing a child character who’s there just to be killed off, you know? And that can feel manipulative, or something about the death, right, is there to just maximize and try to make the audience cry as much as possible. Generally, we don’t want to do that. People have definitely noticed on TV shows where we take a B-cast member and then suddenly we dump their backstory and then we kill them off.

 Oren: Yeah, super goofy.

 Chris: Just so that we can feel something when they die. So, the construction of the story with the character who dies has to feel natural and not like it’s designed just to manipulate emotions. I mean, you could have things other than characters dying. For instance, Legendborn, I think, has a good low point where the main character has been doing the whole plot just to find out what happened to her mother, because her mother’s dead. And after infiltrating this secret society and everything,, she finally gets to their files on her mother and just finds out it’s just what it looked. Her like: her mother died in a, in a car accident.

 Oren: Yeah, that’s rough.

Chris: And a factor in this is that she is still grieving the death of her mother, and that helps her reaction feel more natural. But she reacts to that, so nobody had to die there. It just has to be something that we’ve set up that the character has some kind of attachment to, or something that’s really important to them.

For instance, maybe they spent the whole story believing that they could go back home again and then they find out that’s never going to happen. But we’ve seen how emotionally invested they are in that thing. And, and then ideally also, you want the audience to feel it with the character to a certain extent. Generally, the goal is to have the audience feel sad with them, but not so much that the audience gets upset [laughs] and doesn’t want to read anymore, which is one of the liabilities of low points, I should mention. We haven’t gone over liabilities yet, but one of the liabilities of low points is often they are caused by something bad happening in the story, and whenever you have that dark content, that is a place where readers are more likely to get alienated. So, for example, if you were to take a character that is people’s favorite character, their precious, precious cinnamon roll character and kill that character, audiences would be really angry with you, the writer.

Oren: They’re not going to like that.

Chris: Right, so we’re looking for something where we can feel it with the character, we can kind of feel the loss with them a little bit, but we, as the readers, weren’t super invested in the thing that’s being taken away. So, we can build up this home the hero’s trying to get back to, make us understand what’s so great about it, make us understand what the hero loses by not being there, maybe some family are there, and the hero’s thinking about those relationships, or something that, so that we’re a little sad with the hero when it’s lost.

And then you would have the hero react, but, again, it’s not about how extreme the loss is and how extreme we make it. We just want the character to realistically react that way, and also readers to feel it on the right level, and a lot of that is going to depend on how invested we get readers in the thing that’s taken away, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be an upsetting death.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, that definitely helps with the second one, which was about the because not being exaggerated. What about for the reaction matching what’s happening? What’s the way to do that?

Chris: Well, I think that having the emotional reactions at the right level is just something that many writers have to practice and get better at in general.

Oren: Ick, practice? I hate it.

Chris: We’ve now encountered both writers who have a problem with melodrama, where the emotions are too much everywhere and we’re making what seems like a normal everyday scene into something that is a crisis, which is too much, or writers who go around making things that should be exciting or engaging feel they’re kind of shrug-worthy, like, “Oh, this is just another day. It’s just another moment in my life.” And they just don’t have enough emotion in there, and for some people, they have to get that balance right. But usually, if we’re talking about exactly how do I configure the hero’s reaction, I mean … But I will say there are some behaviors that are really over the top and you should almost never use, like howling.

Oren: [laughing] Yeah, they probably shouldn’t howl.

Chris: Probably shouldn’t be howling. Moaning doesn’t often have exactly the right connotation.

Oren: Nah.

Chris: [laughing] So, if you’re thinking, “Oh no, this is a super tragic moment, how does my hero react?” It’s not like screaming and flailing, you know.

Oren: Only use “shrieking” if you want the image to be grating. And maybe you do, people ugly cry, sometimes the reaction to grief is ugly, but just be aware that is the connotation you’re giving if your character is shrieking about something. It’s just a very unpleasant implication.

Chris: Yeah, and women don’t shriek all the time, just in case anybody, or scream.

Oren: Yeah, who is shrieking also matters.

Chris: I mean, screaming is just an interesting thing. We could talk a lot more about screaming, but it’s probably not the type of emotion we’re talking about in this. So, getting that right, you know, when somebody dies, you can think, in your life, when’s the last time that somebody who was important to you died? You know, you probably cried. You probably didn’t howl.

Oren: Probably not.

Chris: Sometimes just anchoring it to, “What is a similar thing that’s happened in my life? What was my reaction to that?” That can help you get a baseline for what is realistic for people reacting. But I also think there’s just a level of … people have to learn to add more emotion or take emotion away sometimes, too.

Oren: Shall we talk about the downsides more? Because you mentioned one, which was that your readers might hate you.

Chris: [chuckling] Yeah. Readers might hate you, so anytime we’re doing something that is, something bad happens in the story, which again, usually precedes a low point. So, we have that this something could be upsetting. Another thing that can happen is frustration, and frustration happens when readers are screaming at the main character to not do that and they do it anyway. Or can you just get up and do something? And this happens because readers are actually very invested in the story, which is good. It’s just like somebody looking at a sports game and being, “Just pass the ball. Just pass it!” [both laughing]  

I’m not actually a sports person, but I’m pretty sure sports fans do that. So, if we have the hero make a mistake, and the audience is really invested in this arc going well and they can see that the hero’s choice is going to lead to bad things, and the hero does it anyway, they can get very, very frustrated. It will make them like the hero less. It will make them enjoy the story less, and that can be a tricky one. Sometimes, if you have a character arc and you want your hero to do something wrong, you know, the best you can do is try to make the thing that the hero did wrong, or, one option, is to make it a little bit milder. Sometimes we, people, do things that are only a little wrong, but then it causes much bigger consequences. Right? So that’s a common thing you would do. Oops, I forgot to lock the door, or I forgot to close the gate, but then the animals got out and that led to tragedy.

Oren: Right. For example, I copied an order for an unjust execution and therefore I am responsible for that execution happening, and everyone can, you know, dump on me for the whole story. [Chris laughing]

Chris: No.

Oren: Thank you, Raven Scholar.

Chris: So, you can try to make it milder and then give it outsized consequences, or you can just try to make it more understandable. So, if the audience better understands the character and why the character made this choice and sympathizes with them that also makes it easier.

Or maybe they don’t know it’s a mistake. Maybe they’re like, “Oh, that seems the right thing to do.” Then, of course, you need to make it believable that it wasn’t and not just contrived. Based on information the character didn’t know and couldn’t predict, this is arbitrarily the wrong thing to do.

Oren: Right. It’s like, “Oh, obviously I need to cross the river to go put out that fire.” And so then, “Oh, I should’ve known that today was going to be the day the bridge collapsed. All of it’s my fault,” you know? That sort of thing.

 Chris: But we don’t always want the hero to be super at fault. Sometimes, that could be an important part of a low point, that the hero has self-blame or legitimately did something wrong and has to learn from it. But depending on your low point, it may be just that the hero has an issue where they don’t feel they can do anything right and they are blaming themself for things that are not their fault.

You can have situations where you want a low point that’s not super blame-worthy for the protagonist, too. That can happen. And so, something where, “Oh, I took a little bit of a risk and it turned out bad for me, but it could have turned out well and it was still the right decision, but now I hate myself for it.” That could be a situation that you would have and that would certainly be less frustrating for readers because when they saw the hero make that decision, it was a reasonable decision to make.

And then the other one, the other big one we see with these low points a lot, despite the fact that they are often used to create tension, they also destroy tension.

Oren: Oh?

Chris: Yes.

Oren: Do tell.

Chris: Because tension relies on hope.

Oren: Rebellions are also built on hope!

Chris: [both laughing] So, tension is like a motivating emotion. It motivates us to do something, like, turn the page for instance. And so, it feels like, A., the thing is simple and we don’t really need to put in any effort to do anything, then that has no tension, and not motivating. But also, if it feels like anything we do is pointless and nothing’s going to make a difference, that is also not motivating and that also kills tension.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: So, generally when we have an All is Lost moment, that’s kind of, by definition, not tense. The tension will recover later after the hero finds a new path to success, regardless of how tenuous it is, and that’s the point where we can get more tension out of it, but not in the moment itself of despair itself. Also, a lot of times, heroes have given up and so they’re not doing anything, which is not particularly interesting. So, that’s the kind of thing where it’s important not to make these last too long.

Oren: Yeah. It also occurs to me that you can preempt the problem of it seeming like the conflict is now impossible to win by having the low point be caused by something more personal. Like, again, we keep going back to a friend dying, surely it could be something else, but a friend dying doesn’t necessarily mean it’s impossible to defeat the Big Bad. And at that point, the hero giving in to despair can actually generate its own tension because, well, if they give in to despair, we’re definitely not beating the Big Bad.

Chris: Right. Or if the hero, for instance, was doing this in hopes of finding a way home that has been taken away, but there’s still a Big Bad to defeat.

Oren: Right. Exactly.

 Chris: But now the hero’s, like, curled up in a ball, you could do something that’s like that. If it’s not your throughline, where all hope is lost, if it’s some other arc, then you could still have tension. But in some cases, just keep in mind that there won’t be tension in an arc where there is no hope. You can have a scene where your hero deals with their despair, but if it lasts much longer, it is going to get old. Legendborn has a nice little montage. Where with Bree, the main character, it realistically would take her some days to recover from this, but we’re going to just kind of flashforward through the story, flashforward through those days in a very montage-like manner, and I thought it worked well.

Oren: Yeah, we don’t gotta deal with this. She does, but not us.

Chris: [both laughing] She’s going to take days, let’s not take days reading this.

Oren: I do have one final question which fits since we’re coming up on the end of the episode. Do we feel like the post-climax low points are filling a different role than what we’ve been talking about? Like when I mentioned how in The Wrath of Khan, when Kirk feels really awful because he finds that Spock has died, or in Empire Strikes Back when Luke has lost to Vader and is hanging out from the end of this dangly bit below Cloud City, those, colloquially, you could call those low points, but they might be doing something else because the main action of the story is already over at that point.

Chris: Yeah, I mean those are tragic resolutions. So, that’s if the arc, when the throughline ends badly, is generally what those are. And so that’s… I mean, you could call it a low point, I suppose, but generally what often happens when you have a story that just has an unhappy ending instead of a happy ending, like the hero fails, is oftentimes storytellers to lift the mood a little bit at the end by adding a little bit of hope. A little bit of hope or just something positive at the end.

And so that may look pretty similar to a low point and coming out of a low point, especially if it’s, you know, like with The Empire Strikes Back, well, it’s in the middle of a trilogy, so in the whole story there is three movies. So, what’s… I mean, stories are fractal. What’s the difference? There may not really be much difference there. And even in the middle of the story, a low point typically happens when the hero fails an arc of some kind. So, I guess when you think about it, it’s kind of the same thing, just at different scales.

Oren: All right. Well, that answered my question. And I think with that we can go ahead and end the podcast.

Chris: You can help us out of our low point by becoming a patron. It does really make our day when we see a new person has decided to support us. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Alternatively, if you are a porn company, sue an AI company near you. That will also make us feel better.

Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We shall talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

Writers often have difficulty portraying other people’s jobs. There are so many little details to get right, tricks of the trade that are difficult to research, and perspective that can only be gained from years of experience. But you’d think if there was one profession writers could get right, it would be writing. Absolutely not the case. 

Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Intro Music]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Chris, I have a question. Have you ever researched a profession or job that you were going to write about?

Chris: Um, I plead the Fifth?

Oren: Oh, well, trick question. I know you have, ’cause I saw you researching farming, and your character’s not even a farmer, they’re just from a farm.

Chris: Okay, I guess I have. I always feel like my research is not enough, okay? I always feel like I could do more.

Oren: I mean, that’s technically true in that you always can do more. But I would say that in general, writers at least have an understanding that they should probably learn about a profession if they are trying to portray it, and do their best. They don’t always succeed. Certainly there is a lot of content out there about, you know, physicists or pilots or doctors or whatever, watching stuff about them and seeing all these mistakes. But you would figure that if there was one profession that writers could get right, it would be writing.

Chris: Yeah, you’d think maybe they should research it more. 

Oren: And yet!

Chris: And yet! 

Oren: And yet they’re often very annoying. Now, granted, a lot of this is probably just because I have a different opinion about writing than the people who are giving these portrayals. Nevertheless…

Chris: Yeah, it’s probably a combination of that and, like, if we see it in a story, somebody’s trying to make it fit what they think is a good story.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: But to be perfectly honest, like, some of these things that I see that are obnoxious, they’re the same things that made me go “oh!” when I started giving writing advice and realizing how many aspects of writing culture make it hard for people to learn writing. And that’s why there isn’t better writing advice out there. It’s all connected, man.

Oren: Well, I mean, it is all connected, ’cause it’s all Romanticism.

Chris: Yeah. Okay, okay, yeah. It’s all Romanticism. It ruins everything.

Oren: Not 100% Romanticism, but so many problems about the way that writing is portrayed in fiction is about how you just need to disconnect from the world, stop looking at anything, just go deeper and deeper into your own mind. Just unblock your editor, stream of consciousness, hot alien lady, drain the life force from me to create the perfect book.

Chris: We’re, we’re definitely gonna have to talk about that one. But the weird thing about this is, so I was reading a book about agents recently, Laura McGrath’s Middleman. And one thing it mentions is how much the book industry purposely continues spreading Romanticism as a way of selling books.

Oren: Oh. Yeah, right.

Chris: Right? Now, is it really necessary to sell books? I don’t know, but there’s a big focus on genius, and certainly I think it might be easier to sell an author and books by a particular author if you’re like, “Oh, they’re just a genius.”

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: Which is sad.

Oren: Well, I mean, it’s, it’s hardly a surprise that if you are marketing a piece of art, the artist is often just as important as the art, right? And I think most people would understand that on some level.

Chris: And I would not call that exactly a bad thing in the age of AI.

Oren: Yeah. There’s that. But I also think that at least part of it is that a lot of writers wanna be Lord Byron. And, you know, Lord Byron is famous for, uh, being a huge weirdo, is the most generous way to describe him, and then dying young. So you know, we never had to deal with old, uncool Byron, just like normal, young, exciting, abusive Byron. He did a lot of abuse is all I’m saying. 

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: And I think a lot of writers want to be that, and I think that’s where that one Deep Space Nine episode where, uh, Jake runs into a hot alien lady who drains his life force to write a better book, where that’s coming from.

Chris: Yeah, okay. We’re just gonna have to get into this episode. 

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: And it’s, uh… Oh, it was supposed to be the B plot, but it became the A plot, right?

Oren: Mm, something like that. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. So you know, Jake starts writing a book. It’s not very good. Hot alien lady shows up. She recognizes his natural genius, of course.

Oren: Mm-hmm, which he has.

Chris: And she’s gonna teach him to write better, but of course, she does it not by, like, actually teaching him how storytelling works or how writing works at all, but by just starting to feed off his brain juices to keep him from censoring himself.

Oren: Uh-huh. Mm-hmm.

Chris: Yeah, ’cause that’s, that’s all it takes, folks, is you just stop censoring yourself. Just write the most unhinged stuff imaginable on the page and it’s gonna be brilliant. That’s all it takes.

Oren: Right. Also, use a pen that famous authors use. She gives him, like, a famous author’s pen.

Chris: Yeah, make sure to use a traditional inkwell pen on physical paper.

Oren: Yeah. That’ll work great. That will definitely help.

Chris: Mm-hmm, yeah. And make sure you have a study with a big fancy wood desk and shelves full of books, you know?

Oren: Yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I can totally see how being in the proper atmosphere might help you relax and get in the mood for writing. Uh, but the way that it’s presented in the s- in the TV episode is very… almost like this pen has magical powers, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: And of course, you know, that feeds into the whole, you know, we hate editors. We don’t like the idea of studying this because that would make it less magical. It’s gotta be just pure soul. And this is a thing that continues with Jake’s character for a while, right? The show continually emphasizes this idea that he is a good writer because of his natural genius that he just has to figure out how to get out of the way of, right?

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And again, it goes to hiding… You know, most of the time editors, agents do not talk about what changes or suggestions they’ve made to a book. They pretend, “Oh, no, it’s all the author,” right? So we can build this aura of genius around them, which is… Again, I’ve said it before, it’s very toxic to writers because how is a new writer supposed to live up to this idea of being an automatic effortless genius, right? So is it worth doing this for selling books? I think readers would still buy books without Romanticism.

Oren: I mean, I don’t know. They barely buy books now, so who can say? This also ties into another one that I’ve just increasingly found annoying, which is the instant mega hit overnight success. And it’s not that this never happens, but it’s quite rare and it doesn’t usually happen the way that it is portrayed in books, right? Like, usually even if your book is very successful by book standards, you’re still not usually going to be a millionaire immediately, right? You know, if you get a six-figure advance, that’s a lot of money- And it’s potentially life-changing money, but it’s not like 1% money.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Oren: Which is what I think people think that’s what a successful book looks like. You know, a successful book means that you are a bazillionaire now, and I can’t prove this, but I also suspect that part of this is why book piracy is as common as it is, is that people think that authors are rich. They think, “Oh, well, it’s okay to pirate this guy’s books because, like, they were on the New York Times bestseller, and the only way that that could happen is if they are rich.” And I mean, I know that at least some people think this, ’cause yes, they say it on social media. They argue with the author that it’s okay to pirate their books, which I’m just… How are… How did you not die from shame doing that, is the part I don’t understand.

Chris: Oh my gosh.

Oren: Like, the idea of telling an author that I’m pirating their books and it’s okay, how did you not just combust instantly from doing that? I have no idea.

Chris: Meanwhile, many bestselling authors have day jobs. So you know, not great. Not a great look.

Oren: And of course, even the authors who do reach great success, it is almost never like, “And then I opened the inner floodgates and let my story out,” right? There’s almost always, when you dig into it, multiple drafts, and there’s editing. Even if they are discovery writers, which some of them are, they almost always have to make changes. They usually have books that they released first that didn’t do very well, or books that they maybe trunked because they weren’t marketable. Not necessarily worse, just not what the market wanted at that time, right?

Chris: Yeah, this reminds me of all of the, like, TV episodes where as soon as the protagonist puts something online, it goes viral. And rarely do they write anything that I think in real life had any chance of going viral. It’s like, well, it’s really hard to make viral content, because it has to stand out, and it’s a moving target. But everything goes viral in a story. But yeah, no, related to that, I was very annoyed with the ending of La La Land. This is a movie about two artists, an actor and a musician in Hollywood, who are trying to, you know, get their breakout. And one thing that really struck me about this is we’re clearly going with the idea where we don’t want a super happy ending, ’cause it would be too pat. And these two people are having a romance with each other. So to me, it made sense that, because again, most people who go to Hollywood don’t make it big. Right? More people who go into acting end up just… It’s so hard to get roles. It’s amazingly difficult to get a role as an actor, just amazingly difficult to break in. And ’cause, you know, people only look at you if you already have acting credits, so how do you get your first acting credit? It’s very similar to trying to break in and get an agent, for instance. So, well, I was expecting them to end up together, but not actually break out. But instead, they both become, like, huge successes.

Oren: Oh, good.

Chris: And one of them, by putting on a one-person play that literally almost nobody goes to, like the theater is totally empty, but apparently one of the few people in the audience is a casting director who happened  to love her. And it’s like, really? Casting directors are super busy, and they have tons of people. They create acting workshops and charge people money to give them acting coaching, similar to agents charging money for pitches, to give them pitches in person at conferences.

Oren: Oof, I don’t like that. Yeah. That’s not my favorite. 

Chris: No, it’s not my favorite either. So, like, the idea of a casting director just going to some unknown person’s one-woman play and then like, “I’ve discovered you,” and then that person becoming super successful, it just… Man, it feels like it undermines the experiences of most people who go to Hollywood and never break out. But see, the ending’s not pat because they don’t end up together as a couple. And it’s just like, what?

Oren: Look, man, most of us end up dating somebody eventually. Very few of us are gonna get breakout Hollywood roles.

Chris: And, ah, man, I would like, at this point, more stories about somebody trying to become successful as an artist and then realizing they’re never going to get paid a living for their art and then having to deal with that, right? And decide what they’re gonna do. And appreciate the art for the art’s sake, for instance, keep doing their day job or whatever it is.

Oren: Yeah. Somewhat related to the Romanticism thing is… and I know this one is touchy, ’cause this, like, affects authors in real life too, is this thing that I’ve noticed in a number of books where the narrative acts as though the author has zero responsibility to finish a series they’ve started. And I know why they do that. It’s because people were huge entitled dicks to George R. R. Martin and, you know, obviously went way over the line, and it’s probably why we’re never gonna get Game of Thrones over, ’cause at this point, if I was Martin, I would never finish the series, right? But at the same time, it’s weird to act as though there’s no responsibility because you’re effectively selling someone an incomplete product with an implied completion at some point. And if you go full caveat emptor and say, “Well, it’s on them for buying it,” is that really the attitude we want readers to take? That they should not buy a series until it’s finished ’cause they have no assurance at all that it will ever be finished? ‘Cause that’s a problem authors have is that people don’t wanna buy their series until the series is finished.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Oren: So I just think maybe there’s a little more to this than some of these portrayals would have you believe.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I think the problem is that you can’t have it both ways, right? If authors are under no obligation… I mean, again, authors are a single human being. Stuff can always happen, right? So it’s not like anybody’s a bad person for not finishing their series. Stuff happens. At the same time, I do think, you know, when we make certain promises to readers, we have some level of obligation to meet those promises if we can. And we can’t really have it both ways, right? Either we’re not gonna worry about doing it, and that means readers are reading a series at their own risk, and oftentimes they’re just not gonna wanna do that until it’s complete, or we have a serious obligation and we can ask them to trust us if the series isn’t finished yet. And we just kind of have to choose which way we wanna have it.

Oren: I just think that stories that do decide to go into this territory should acknowledge that this is a little bit of a both sides situation. Not like both sides as in “it’s okay to yell at George R. R. Martin,” obviously that’s wrong. But I just think that they should acknowledge that you’re not causing zero problems by not finishing a series you started, right? Like, that is a choice that- assuming it is a choice, maybe it’s not, depends on what’s happening, right? But if you’re making that choice, that does have some consequences.

Chris: Yep, it’s one of many obligations. Again, there are other things that could be more important. But… and certainly we shouldn’t do that and then, you know, tell readers they should start series that are not finished yet.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, you could go that direction and be like, “All right, well, you know, just don’t buy a series until it’s done.” Just, oh boy, that’s probably not a great message.

Chris: I wanna talk about Stranger Than Fiction.

Oren: Oh yeah?

Chris: Another one of those weird movies that depicts the writing process and is, and maybe it’s not as bad as the Deep Space Nine episode with Jake and the Seductress, but again, goes out of its way to be as anti-intellectual as possible about the writing process because of Romanticism. We’ve got this famous author, and because she’s so brilliant she can’t, she cannot use any organized process. So she has writer’s block because she’s trying to find a way to kill her character. And she can’t think of the perfect way to kill her character, and she gets a new agent who brings her, like, “Here, try these, like, exercises-

Oren: Yeah, try it!

Chris: to stimulate your creativity.” But of course, she has to automatically spurn them because if she used any systematic thought-out way of trying to help herself or foster her creativity, that would make her less of a genius. Oh, this is also the character that types on a typewriter, not a computer.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: So the words, like… And so, and we don’t see her revising anything, right? She just types it start to finish, and then hands the pages from her typewriter to the agent. All done! Uh, the other thing that happens in that one, ’cause they talk about storytelling and writing, that I just… this is just a very big popular idea of writing that I just think is really nonsense, which is this plot-driven versus character-driven framework.

Oren: You can only have a plot or a character, Chris. You can’t have both. Pick one.

Chris: It’s like, okay, so when people just talk about this casually, what they usually mean is either the page space is very focused on tense problems that are exciting and moving forward quickly, that’s called plot-driven. Or, for a character-driven book, they mean something that has a lot more internal narration and a lot more relationship arcs and character arcs, and just puts more of its page space into focusing on characters. Although, that’s not always what they mean. They can mean just about anything. But like technically what this literally is supposed to mean is whether the character takes actions that move the plot forward, like every book does. Or whether the plot… so in Stranger Than Fiction they do a test to see if it’s a plot-driven or a character-driven story. And so he orders this character who is in the story to just do nothing and see if the plot comes to him. And we see a random boulder come through the wall of his apartment because he’s been doing nothing. And it’s just-

Oren: Does that make it plot-driven or character-driven?

Chris: Yeah, it’s just a nonsense distinction, right? Every story has characters that should have agency, that make decisions that change the trajectory of the plot. And like that’s completely different from how much time we have devoted to characters or to exciting action, for instance. Like they’re completely different things, and it’s just, it’s a distinction that doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know why people keep insisting on using it.

Oren: Especially in that context, right? Like I think what people usually mean when they say plot-driven versus character-driven is they’re imagining you having to choose, okay, am I gonna spend my mental real estate on an exciting plot or am I going to spend it on deep rich internal characters? Which is also a false dichotomy. You can have both, but that at least makes some sense as opposed to whatever they were doing in Stranger Than Fiction, that bizarre definition. I don’t know what’s going on there.

Chris: Right. The idea is like, so in a plot-driven book characters are just reactive all the time? Like there’s just monsters chasing them everywhere, ’cause that’s not how tense books actually work.

Oren: Yeah, so in this case, are you saying that Star Wars: A New Hope is plot-driven because the characters are reacting, and then Star Wars: Return of the Jedi is character-driven because the rebels are the ones doing stuff? What?

Chris: I mean, maybe if we followed it literally, right? It just doesn’t… If you try to be literal about it, and again, because stories basically, their structure all works the same way, we would first have to come up with a distinction where we can actually tell the difference between something that’s character and plot-driven, like reactive or proactivity, for instance. But then we would probably find that that’s not a useful way to categorize stories.

Oren: Yeah. Okay, so this one’s a little different, but it’s still just increasingly bothering me, which is when you have a story where the main character is an author, and then you make me read their work, and then you tell me how good it is. Like, nah, nah, nah, I’m the one who decides if it’s good or not. I just had to read it. You made me, I didn’t want to. You made me do it. Two of the current Hugo nominees do this, and I had to read both of them. Mild spoilers for The Everlasting and Death of the Author. And in both they’re like, “This is the most amazing thing ever written,” and I’m like, this is highly summarized, very dry, and to the extent that they have plots, very weakly plotted, right? Because what else could it be? You’re trying to cram one novel into another novel. How could it be anything but half-baked and underdeveloped?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it would probably work better if they didn’t directly quote the inner book.

Oren: Right, or just quote very isolated parts of it, right?

Chris: I mean, that’s what Middlegame does, right?

Oren: Right, and in Middlegame, Middlegame has its own problems, but that part of it, I think works okay … 

Chris: ’cause we leave, though we leave the series of books vague enough that we can still, like, imagine they’re good. ‘Cause we know very little about them. We just see small excerpts. 

Oren: Yeah, and we see small excerpts, and we, like… Although apparently they exist now as full books, which is-

Chris: Yeah. Don’t look into it. Don’t look too close.

Oren: That’s wild to think about. But, like, they’re vague enough that the characters describe, “Oh, hey, this situation in the real world is sort of analogous to that thing from your story.” I’m like, “Okay, sure, I’ll buy that. That might happen.” But, like, when I actually had to read the words that the characters are currently gushing about, I was just, “No, don’t do that. Cut that out.”

Chris: Yeah, I mean, Ten Thousand Doors of January as well, we have this extremely summarized story of her parents meeting and instantly falling in love, and then she’s like, “How dare you if you don’t like my love story?”

Oren: Yeah. Technically, The Name of the Wind is also like that, although, it’s a little less… you could forget, but technically speaking, the entire Name of the Wind is Kvothe dictating his memoir.

Chris: Right, and he’s like, “Every single word I say is intentional. Don’t you dare change a single thing. It’s all perfect the way it is.”

Oren: It’s so good, guys. It’s so good.

Chris: Yeah, that’s weird. Also, Interview with the Vampire, with the boy.

Oren: The boy!

Chris: The boy! So Louis, the main character, is narrating his life story, and that’s the actual story. But, like, there’s technically the “interviewer” there who is, like, a boy, but the boy doesn’t really exist to ask questions. He exists to be Anne Rice’s, you know, what she wants her readers to react like. So he’s always extremely awed by everything Louis says. Is very impressed.

Oren: Can you imagine a vampire? Whoa.

Chris: This is why so often I don’t like framing devices, ’cause it feels like an astounding number of framing devices are just some character being in awe of the story. Now, to be fair, the Princess Bride movie did it pretty well, but that’s because the kid doesn’t like it at first, and we also have very charismatic actors helping.

Oren: Right, and the kid is funny, and he kind of misunderstands, so there’s, like, some commentary.

Chris: Right. It’s not just lavishing, “Oh, this is the best story ever.” The kid is like, “Ah, I don’t want the kissing scene.” And then he just warms up a little bit, but we’re not doing the weird gushing that the boy in Interview with the Vampire does.

Oren: Yeah, and I mean, to give the Interview with the Vampire family its due, the TV show, at least the first season of it, is amazing in this regard, right? Where the boy is back, but now he is a man.

Chris: A grumpy old man! Cranky!

Oren: And he’s, like, redoing the interview, and he’s calling bullshit on all of Louis’ nonsense, and it’s so great. I love it so much.

Chris: It is very cathartic after reading the book.

Oren: Like, people say that one thing is in conversation with another thing, and I often have no idea what that means, but I am here to tell you that that series is in conversation with both the book and the early ’90s movie, in that you can see the way that it is combining elements from both and commenting on them in this just wow, like, amazing way. And it makes the interviewer a part of the story, which is the reason to have him. Otherwise, you don’t need him. You could just have the story happen, right? Now I have no idea what the third season of that show’s gonna be like, ’cause we’ve moved beyond that framing device now and we’re doing the vampire Lestat. But whatever. The first season was beautiful. I can’t imagine them doing that better.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, fingers crossed for the third season. I really didn’t like the second season, unfortunately.

Oren: Yeah, the second season wasn’t very good. Especially because they had done this amazing abuse story and then were like, “Actually, no, the abuser Lestat is cool because he’s the star of our next season.”

Chris: Right. Oh, drat. We made this an abuse story, but, uh, now this is really popular and the abuser’s the star of the third season. What do we do?

Oren: Right. Also, like Anne Rice did that also, in the books. So you know, I guess they felt they were stuck.

Chris: Yeah. It’s just less obvious that he’s abusive in the book.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: Whereas it’s much more central to the show.

Oren: And last, ’cause we’re running out of time here, this one of course is no surprise to anyone who follows Mythcreants. I don’t like it when writers in stories act like pseudo-structures are real. Like, that’s a thing they do sometimes where it’s like, “Okay, now we’re gonna talk about the hero’s journey and the elixir.” I’m like, okay, but I’m begging you to go back and actually read the book that that’s from. Like try to read it and come back and tell me if you think that’s real. This is a real “emperor’s new clothes” situation here, where you need to go and realize that this is all made up and none of it means anything.

Chris: Yeah, unfortunately it’s hard to tell sometimes what people actually believe. Like in that Voyager episode where we have a discussion between Tuvok and Paris, where Tuvok’s into actual rigorous craft, and Paris is like, “Yeah, you know, if we have a twist where characters act out of character, people like twists.” And I just, like, wanna throttle Paris, but he’s also usually one of the writers’ favorite characters, at least in the beginning. Not later. And it’s just, did they come up with this because they were actually having discussions between themselves that were very like this? You know, is this argument directly transplanted from the writers’ room for Voyager?

Oren: I mean, if I had to guess, I would say it is, and I think it might be especially relevant for TV writers, because they need to come up with a new script for the same characters every episode, especially back then when they were doing this for 22 episodes a season. And they need to somehow make the story that they have work with the existing characters, and I could see that being very frustrating after a while, where you’re like, “I need one of these characters to be a maverick wine enjoyer, and none of them are. But that’s the only thing that will make my story work, so I guess today Chakotay likes wine,” you know? So I don’t know for sure, right? I have no idea what the behind the scenes was on that episode, but I could totally see that being an actual argument that they had.

Chris: Yeah. The other thing that adds another layer to this is when we have something like a movie, like Stranger Than Fiction, but we’re talking about a novelist. We’ve seen in many contexts that people consider novels to be more romantic than other mediums in many cases. So it’s like there could’ve been a screenwriter… I don’t know if the screenwriter believes in any of these things. Also, in Hollywood, those scripts, so many people have their hands in them. They’re definitely a work of quite a number of people with, like, executives, the director, and everybody giving feedback, right? So it’s like, is this writer so Romantic? It might be ’cause that’s what a screenwriter thinks of a novelist. I don’t know. Maybe the scriptwriter thinks that about their own work. It’s possible. I mean, again, film writers can also be Romantic. It feels… It’s a little different flavor of Romanticism, but they still have it. But, you know, maybe this is just them, their idea of what a novelist is, or they think that this is what people want to buy as far as a movie, you know? It can be hard to tell.

Oren: Yeah. All right. Well, with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. 

Chris: And if you’ve enjoyed hearing us complain about Romanticism a bunch, always our favorite topic, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

It’s time to narrate a deadly fight or a thrilling chase, but unfortunately, readers expect more than comic book action bubbles. Pretty unreasonable, if you ask us. However, let it never be said that we shirk from a challenge, so this week we’ve got advice on how to describe physical clashes. We talk about making sure each action matters, keeping track of multiple combatants, and why you probably can’t replicate one million punches on the page. 

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

[Promo for Tension & Hooks 2026]

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]

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

Oren: And I’m Oren. 

Chris: Kapow! I unleash a whole storm cloud of kicks while I simultaneously throw a grenade at the enemy. A whole bunch of them fall down at once. The blood is running in streams as the bodies pile up, but the horde keeps coming, impaling themselves on the blade which I now have.

Oren: A whole horde? 

Chris: Yeah. 

Oren: On one blade? 

Chris: Yeah. 

Oren: Wow, okay. 

Chris: I’m skewering them like a shish kebab, just a bunch at once. 

Oren: They’re just all getting on there. Okay. All right. Got it. 

Chris: It happens in Eragon, so I don’t see why I can’t do it. 

Oren: That’s a fair point. Eragon sold well, so you should be able to do whatever it did.

Chris: Uh-huh. Next, the leader is bearing down on me, so I’m gonna run up the wall and do a back flip and land right on the leader’s head. It goes smoosh, and then everybody runs away. 

Oren: Are all the bad guys still shish kebabbed on your sword while this is happening? 

Chris: [Chuckles] But it’s a good fight scene because I have blood running in streams, and it’s very dramatic.

Oren: That’s where blood typically does run, so that tracks. 

Chris: It is funny how many writers completely neglect description until it’s time to talk about blood. 

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Oren: Look, they all saw Sin City as kids, which has, everything’s black and white except for the blood, which is red, and it’s all cool and aesthetic, and they’re like, “I want that. That’s for me. That’s for my book, thank you.”

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: Tells you something about the writer’s priorities. So this time we’re talking about narrating fights and action. Fairly similar. They have some special concerns. Nothing that you won’t see anywhere else, but when you have these kinds of scenes, first, they happen very fast, and so we kind of want them to feel fast, and so the pacing starts to really matter. There’s often a lot of spatial logistics involved in these kind of high-stakes movements, shall we say. 

Oren: “Where is everybody standing?” suddenly becomes very important. 

Chris: And did we know there was a wall there before I ran up it to do a back flip? And of course, we want them to be very tense because they’re exciting moments.

Oren: Incidentally, this is one of the few places where you can actually get away with more doing this in a role-playing game than writing it down. Because normally, if you try to do anything contrived in a role-playing game, your players will be like, “Uh-uh. No.” They’ll be on you. 

But if it’s in a fight and you’re like, “Yeah, you’re close enough to hit the enemy. Don’t worry about it,” they won’t. Whereas with readers, if you start to lose track of where everyone is, they’ll notice. They’ll be like, “Hey, hang on. Weren’t they across the room a second ago? What’s going on?” 

Chris: I think some people notice more than others. I did do a critique of a book where there was running around a house, and I thought about how things were laid out, and I’m like, “I don’t… No house is laid out like this. I don’t know what’s happening. Are we in the upper floor? Are we in the bottom floor?” It’s like all the bedrooms are along a hallway that has a door. Usually the hallway’s open, so if you come in the front door and there’s a hallway on the first floor, you can just see down the hallway.

Things didn’t make sense. The protagonist was facing the wrong way. And it’s funny to think about that because that does require me to map it out all in my head. But most of us are familiar with how most houses are laid out to some degree. So it’s like taking a very familiar thing and then putting people in really unexpected places, and putting doors where I didn’t imagine there could be a door, and that kind of thing.

Oren: The one that I’m always gonna remember is that bizarre fight scene from The Ministry of Time, which involves things like the love interest pulling the unnamed narrator out of the way of a laser blast. Like, uh, no, step out of the way of the laser.

Chris: Very slow laser blast. 

Oren: The world’s slowest laser. Which for some reason the bad guy aimed at her feet, which is weird. You would think he would aim at her center of mass, but no, instead he aims at her feet. And then suddenly the love interest teleports to him so that they can wrestle, because I guess it would be kind of awkward if he shot the love interest as the love interest was trying to close the distance. Which gives me, either the love interest teleported or this is a muzzle-loading laser gun that takes two business days to reload.

Chris: Okay, I have to say, one of my now most hated tropes is the trope where somebody pushes somebody else out of the way and gets shot instead of them, because it never feels like that’s how it would happen. Why are you pushing them? Why don’t you just run with them? If you have time to get them out of the way, I’m pretty sure you could get out of the way too. Why are you just pushing them and standing there? 

Oren: You could imagine that if you hit them some of your momentum is absorbed, so maybe you would stop, but often there’s clearly plenty of time for you to keep going. 

Chris: I’m not gonna say that there’s no circumstance in which this makes sense. Or somebody steps in front of the person about to get shot instead of grabbing them and moving them or something like that. I’m not gonna say there’s no situation in which this is not plausible, but I’m increasingly noticing how implausible it seems, and then sometimes it’s extremely frustrating, particularly if somebody dies. Like in Babel. So angry with that book. 

Oren: That book makes some choices, for sure. 

Chris: So if it’s really contrived and then something upsetting happens, that’s the worst combination.

Oren: I’m upset, and so now I’m just gonna pick apart everything. 

Chris: The author personally hurt me, on purpose. The logistics of that, I don’t think they work very well in most cases. So trying to get spatial stuff and communicate that is always extremely tough. I suppose if you have to, you can use the o’clocks. Something’s at 2:00, something’s at 6:00, if that helps. I think mostly you have to keep it simple and not try to do something too complex. 

Oren: One thing that I think new writers need to understand, because I see a lot of people asking for advice, is like, “How do I narrate this cool action sequence from a movie that I’m watching?” And it’s some kind of kung fu scene where the characters exchange 30 blows in the space of a minute. And you probably can’t, is the answer.

Chris: And you shouldn’t. 

Oren: Because if you try to do that, what you’re gonna end up with is one of two situations. You’re either gonna end up trying to describe every punch, which is not going to work. That’s too many punches. Or you’re gonna do something like, “He let loose a flurry of blows.” And now you’re summarizing the fight scene, which you also don’t want. And I’m not saying you can’t do kung fu fights in prose, but I am saying they are probably going to be less extended than the ones you see on TV, because those ones are visual spectacle.

Chris: On the plus side, they could be, in some ways, more realistic because they’re short. 

Oren: Exactly. You’re gonna make less mean more. I think we did a podcast about that. Fewer blows will mean more when they are written down. 

Chris: And again, human bodies are fragile, so many of the things that we see in movies are not actually plausible. The fight lasts too long, somebody would go down with just a few hits. We could talk about battles. Battles, the bigger it gets, the less we can really stay in the moment. But I think by default, what I try to say is, we want this to be exciting, and what makes exciting is how meaningful it is. 

Instead of the visual spectacle, we have to make meaning out of these actions. And if you start summarizing the blows, then those blows become meaningless by virtue of you summarizing them. So we want to, by default, minimize summary and make the fight in-story shorter. 

Now, with something like a chase, ’cause we’re talking about all kinds of action scenes, obviously the equivalent is almost like footfalls. Those don’t matter. So we obviously don’t wanna focus on every footfall. So depending on what kind of action scene you want, you have to look for the actions that could make the difference between winning or losing in that conflict. Those are the actions that matter, and you wanna focus on that. 

So if it’s a running scene, for instance, jumping over a hurdle would be a make it or break it moment. So that’s the part that’s important. Maybe rounding a corner fast enough, that kind of thing. Those are the parts that you wanna focus on. But in a fight scene, a punch can put somebody out for the fight. So a punch really should matter, and we don’t wanna decide to exaggerate and rely on spectacle at the cost of making it feel like a punch is insignificant.

Oren: And what’ll end up happening if you try to describe a flurry of blows is that, well, now you feel like you’re writing a Marvel fight, where everyone’s made of rubber, and it’s just not that exciting. The Avatar Kyoshi books have that problem, and you can tell because in the TV show, the bending battles often involve a lot of punches and kicks and blasts of elements.

And so the writer is trying to directly adapt that instead of altering the way the fights work to make them fit better in a written format. ‘Cause I 100% fully believe that you could do a cool elemental bending fight on the page. I just think it would have to look a little different than most of the fights we see in the show.

Chris: And related to that, we have these make it or break it moments, and in running that could be jumping over an obstacle. In a fight it could be a punch or a block or a dodge, what have you. In some of these moments, your protagonist would naturally not succeed. So the thing we wanna show is that it matters.

This gets back to people being rubber or not. We wanna show why it matters when they don’t succeed. So if they, instead of jumping over something, they trip and fall, we can see, oh, if maybe they’re running from somebody, we can be able to describe that person gaining. We can see that there are consequences for that.

If they take a hit to the stomach, maybe they’re winded, and it gives the antagonist an opportunity to hit them again, that kind of thing, and actually have injuries. The more you can make injuries, and you can have injuries during running too. Somebody could sprain an ankle. We want to have them, but also have them feel like they matter and that they’re actually doing something to change the course of the action scene.

Oren: You also need to consider, and this is another thing, I’m just pulling stuff from The Ministry of Time fight scene ’cause it’s so rare that it’s so clearly laid out like this. You have to remember what everyone is doing. That includes both your character’s allies and the other side. And I don’t mean that you need to be fully describing every single character. Most of the time, that will be impossible. But you need it to feel as though the character didn’t just disappear. 

So if you have an ally, you might describe the thing that they’re about to go do, and then not mention them for a little bit because they’re doing that thing, and then they come back. Or if it’s the enemy, you have to keep in mind, “Okay, what is the enemy doing in response to the things my characters are doing?” 

‘Cause often with really badly written fight scenes, you have enemies that just kind of stand there, this is how you end up feeling like turn-based combat. Now, of course, you are actually taking turns. Due to the linear nature of time, you can only write one thing at a time that the character is doing.

Chris: You can stop and say everything happened at once. 

Oren: Right, but that means nothing. 

Chris: [Lauhgs] It doesn’t make it feel like it happens at once. There may be niche situations. I don’t like that so much ’cause it’s very heavy-handed. I want the reader to just look at how the fight is written and how it feels, the pace of how it feels. There may be some scenarios in which you need to specify two actions happen at once and just trust me, reader. I know it feels like they’re happening in sequence, but I swear they happen at once. It’s just to be avoided. Related to that, when you have multiple people, it’s easy to lose track of somebody, so we don’t know what they’re doing. 

And then another thing is, is what they’re doing take an equivalent amount of time? So there’s a problem that I refer to as time dilation, which is pretty common in action scenes, where the timing does not line up. The time seems to stretch out in some way, and one of the reasons that happens is because people aren’t doing things that take equivalent amount of time.

A really funny one is in the beginning of the first book of Mortal Instruments. They go into this storage room that some nightclub owner forgot to lock, or some door that says storage. I assumed initially it was a closet. It’s a door that says storage, and they go through it, and it’s like I kept revising it to make it bigger and bigger. Because I thought this was a closet, but this is a room for one person to be tied up and for several other people to interrogate the captive person, so I guess it’s a room. 

But then we have an action scene where one person is running inside this space while somebody else, I think they get knocked down and have to recover, which would naturally take a little time. And think of how far somebody could run while another person gets knocked out and recovers. Quite a long distance. So at that point, the storage room is very, very large. But that’s the kind of weird time dilation that happens. 

Oren: That happened in Ministry of Time too. There’s a sequence where the boyfriend and the bad guy are wrestling on the ground, and for some reason, the boyfriend lets him go even though the bad guy still has the gun. And so there’s time for the boyfriend to have the protagonist run to a motorcycle, stop grappling, and then also run after her, get their helmets on, and get away on the motorcycle before the bad guy can shoot at them again, which really raises the possibility of the muzzle-loading laser gun, I think would solve this problem.

Chris: We saw the same thing in Children of Blood and Bone, where they’re surrounded by enemies, but they need to escape, so suddenly people come on, like, giant cat mount, and they’re able to climb aboard the cat mount with nobody shooting arrows at them, and then leap away. So that’s another thing that I see that causes time dilation, what I would say is kind of balancing the urgency of the situation.

It happens when we want the situation to be extremely urgent so that it’s exciting, but then the hero needs time to do stuff. So then we have weird pauses where the enemy apparently is not shooting while the hero gets on a mount. Or you can have this happen with, “Oh, somebody’s coming. I need time to prepare.” Okay, how close did you say they were? If they’re right outside the door and they’re about to walk in, you don’t really have time to make a makeshift weapon out of the ordinary objects in the room, for instance. 

Or in some kind of chase, if the antagonist is close and is about to chase after, we have to think about, “Okay, how much faster is the antagonist than my character, and how far away were they?” Because if they seem like they’re really close, and then we start a chase sequence, and then it takes a really long time and they don’t seem to be catching up, then that feels a little off. 

Oren: Here’s a question. When we’re talking about describing these exchanges during either a fight scene or a fast action sequence, theoretically I still want my words to be good sounding. I still want them to sound like a cool thing to read, and so I don’t want to be like, “And then he attacked with sword.” But I also don’t wanna spend a ton of time on details ’cause this is supposed to be fast. So please bridge that gap for me. 

Chris: You want to be specific, but not technical. So I will call it technical if we specify exactly which limb. And when I say this, there are always times when it matters. So if your hero, for instance, has one injured arm, then it does matter whether or not they’re using the injured arm. And in many cases we can assume they’re not using the injured arm, but you might wanna specify. 

But normally you say that they kick, say that they punch, say that they grab something. You don’t need to say what body part is used for any action. Usually that is too technical. Sometimes I guess if they’re shielding their face and their hand is gonna get hit and injured because they shielded their face, you might want to mention their hand specifically. There might be some niche cases.

Oren: But what if my protagonist is using two daggers, dual wielding, and one dagger is enchanted with poison damage and one dagger is enchanted with toxic damage? Then how am I supposed to tell them apart? 

Chris: I think we need to go backwards in time to your earlier decisions.

Oren: [Laughs]

Chris: In fact, I know somebody, colleague of mine named Oren, who wrote this blog post on converting D&D to a written story, so maybe you could start there.

Oren: I think you wrote that. I don’t think that was me. [Laughs]

Chris: You wrote one! 

Oren: No, I think we actually wrote several articles on this topic.

Chris: I think we have several articles on this topic. That’s getting so technical, we’re almost in magic system territory. We do have another podcast on magic systems for fight scenes that you probably have to visit our website to get to at this point. It’s probably older than the last 100 episodes. I don’t know, maybe not. 

But anyway, so which limb is usually too technical. The exact direction, left to right, up to down, is usually too technical. So just say specifically what the action is. Is it a kick? Is it a punch? Or if they have a weapon, is it a thrust? Is it a slash? Is it a stab? So try to use specific verbs, but then focus on what actually matters. Is the limb they’re using, does that matter? Probably not. If they’re taking a step, in some situations, taking a step during a struggle could matter. If somebody tries to hit them and they take a step to the side so it misses them, then the step matters. In many cases, the step is not gonna matter. 

So I think that’s really what it’s about. We wanna use specific verbs, and then we wanna focus on what actually makes a difference in the fight, and that’s how we keep the pacing super tight. Now, but that said, going back to the spatial ramifications and trying to communicate, I like to keep fighting tightly paced most of the time if I can.

But on the other hand, it’s really important for readers to understand what is happening as clearly as possible, because you don’t want them to just know what happened. You want them to know what are the ramifications of what happened. So if somebody struck somebody else, or if somebody managed to jump over an obstacle, what does that mean for the fight going forward? And kind of understand how things work, because that’s gonna make the conflict a lot more riveting. 

And if you have to slow down the pacing to make sure they thoroughly understand, I think that’s often a worthwhile trade-off. Because if they don’t understand, then they’re gonna start tuning out, and nothing’s gonna matter, and at that point, trying to make the prose tighter so it moves fast just doesn’t pay off anymore. So for instance, oddly enough, I’m going to use Shield of Sparrows for a positive example. [Laughs]

Oren: Hmm. Wonders never cease. 

Chris: Wonders never cease. So we have a sequence in there where there’s a monster in this tree house village. And the protagonist wants to save this boy of indeterminate age from this monster, and so she grabs him and she starts climbing up a rope ladder with him while the monster is on the ground. So we have this sequence. And by the way, this is the same protagonist that apparently is not strong enough to lift a sword. A sword which at max are usually, like, six pounds. 

Oren: That’s a really heavy sword, six pounds. 

Chris: And even six pounds is a really heavy sword, so she’s not strong enough to lift a sword, but she can climb a rope ladder while lifting a boy who’s probably 50 pounds at least.

Oren: That’s maybe a very light boy. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Maybe that’s a three-pound boy, Chris. You don’t know. 

Chris: But any case, there’s a lot of description that really does slow down the pace of this fight, but at the same time, how she’s climbing that rope ladder and where the monster is, is really important to the scene. And looking at that scene, I don’t know that it would be any better if we tightened it up, because the really important thing is that we understand what’s happening.

Oren: Well, and in that scene, she’s covering quite a bit of ground, if I remember correctly. So I think that it makes sense to slow down a little bit. It’s weird to slow down when your characters are chest-to-chest knife fighting, but if you’re leaping around from one platform to another, that does create some space, both literally and narratively.

Chris: The other thing to keep in mind is that sometimes slowing things down is a good way to build anticipation, and that can happen during your action scenes. Often, we would do that before the action starts, but if you have a moment in the action where things are particularly tense, doom is nigh, sometimes it’s a good time to actually purposely do a little bit of slowing down time.

So the protagonist feels helpless, sees a blow or something coming their way, and we do a lot of embellishing description, a lot of sensory description to increase immersion while slowing down the pace on purpose to build anticipation for this thing that is coming. So that’s one technique that you can use. It doesn’t always have to be fast-paced. 

Oren: There’s also one other scenario that I think is useful to think about. It’s a kind of an expert level, but it’s still cool, is if you really establish the mechanics of especially a specific type of fighting, you can almost use that the same way that you might use a rational magic system. And at this point, details that might otherwise be too technical can be really helpful. 

And the example I’m thinking of is the book Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey, which I can’t swear if this is accurate or not, ’cause I don’t know anything about boxing, but the main character is a boxer, and we establish very firmly how boxing works and the mechanics of boxing. So when she has her plan of how she’s gonna go at the other guy and what kinds of blows she’s going to throw, that matters more because we’ve been taught what those mean. And so if you’re gonna do something like that, you have, I would say, more room for technical details than if you just have two guys meet in an alley with knives.

Chris: Definitely trying to front-load things because we do want the pacing to not be too slow usually during our conflict. Looking for ways to take that information, if we wanna understand boxing and give people an idea of how boxing works ahead of time, so that when we’re in a really tense moment of boxing, maybe we just remind them a little bit or maybe we don’t have to because we already explained that ahead, can be a really good idea to do.

Oren: Well, I think with that we can deal a knockout blow to this podcast, thus calling it to a close. 

Chris: If you’re ready to come to blows over this episode, you can battle with us much more effectively if you become our patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. Or if you’re not ready to come to blows with us yet, but you are still somehow listening right now, you probably got something from this episode, so consider going to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: I like how you got them either way. That’s perfect. There’s no escape. 

Chris: No escape. 

Oren: So before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

You ever spend three months planning a first date and think, “This is going a little fast”? Then slow burns may be the genre for you! But there’s more to a slow burn than just making readers wait an inordinately long time. You’ve also gotta make the waiting fun! We’ve got some thoughts on how to do that. 

Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

[Promo for Tension & Hooks 2026]

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

[Opening Theme]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. 

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: I have a story about two characters who are gonna kiss, but I would like to sell ten books and I know people are gonna stop reading the moment that they kiss. So I’d like to wait. 

Chris: Oh, are they? Well, I think I found your problem.

Oren: That’s what’s gonna happen. I just know it. So I would like the kiss to not happen until the end of book ten, and I think I’ll call it a “Slow Burn” for marketing purposes.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: Is this gonna work, do you think?

Chris: That would be a slow, slow, slow Burn.

Oren: The slower, the more burn-y. That’s just how it works, I think.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. The slower you go, the more you burn. I think generally, especially in a full romance, if there is a kiss at the end of the book, that would be considered a Slow Burn. 

Oren: I was wondering about that. At what point does it become a Slow Burn? How slow does it have to be before you start calling it that?

Chris: I’ve heard, for instance, Warrior Princess Assassin is referred to as a Slow Burn by many of its reviewers. And there is a sex scene at the end of the book. It’s … Okay, this is a little silly, because in hetero terms it would be still holding back for a sex scene. It’s pretty detailed, but the spice doesn’t go up to a sex scene until the end, and that would be considered a Slow Burn.

But I’ve seen other books where they just have a kiss at the end. Again, we can talk about a full romance versus a romantic subplot. But in a book where I’ve seen—like Midnight Girls, where it ends with just a kiss—I’m concerned about that leaving people too unsatisfied. 

Oren: Yeah, there’s not enough romance in this romance at that point.

Chris: Right. We want that satisfaction. That satisfaction comes from seeing them kind of hook up a bit. You can withhold some relationship milestones, I think, and save those for a later book. But only a kiss … In Pride and Prejudice, that was famous for not having any kisses, but that’s because of the time period, and they’re still an official couple who are getting married at the end.

So it can kind of vary depending on the book’s spiciness level because the heat level and how many sex scenes we have will just vary from romance to romance. It’s not really the best judge probably. But certainly I think if it is less spicy, it’s more likely to be referred to as a Slow Burn.

Oren: You could have, for example, a story where the romance part is about whether or not they’ll get together and get married, but they’re banging the whole time ’cause they fell in lust immediately. And I don’t think you would generally call that a Slow Burn, even if it takes a long time to resolve.

Chris: The primary feature that I would say a Slow Burn has is that the relationship escalates slowly. If they get together and break up, or they’re banging each other a lot, I don’t think that people would call that a Slow Burn. On the other hand, though, a kiss at the end to indicate they’re together is pretty typical for a romantic subplot.

Though I don’t know that I would call a normal subplot where they kiss at the end just to make it official a Slow Burn. Just because, for the amount of content that romance probably gets, that could be completely normal because it’s taking up a lot less page space than if the whole book was a romance novel.

Oren: Does that mean we think that to be a Slow Burn it has to be like a full romance plot and not just a subplot in a larger story? Or does it just take longer for a subplot to be considered a Slow Burn?

Chris: There’s no hard line, ’cause you could have a really prominent romance subplot, but technically it could still be a subplot or kind of blurring the line in between.

I’m not saying that a subplot can’t be a Slow Burn if it gets a lot of time. I think we have to see … The thing that I think people like for Slow Burns, one of the things they like is pining. That’s one of the features that Slow Burns often have, and of course it can be done in different ways. But I think you wanna see a lot of time. We wanna see that there’s a lot of time for them to interact and have kind of development and also build chemistry without actually taking the next step in the relationship. So that requires page space. 

If you had a subplot that was a very slow building and had a decent amount of page space, and maybe it doesn’t have a kiss until book two, that could certainly be considered a Slow Burn. I just would be hesitant to take the normal romantic subplot with the standard ending kiss and call that a Slow Burn because I think in many cases, while the romance just doesn’t get that much development, it doesn’t have that much page space, there’s not really that kind of long simmering time that a slow burn romance is supposed to have.

Oren: When I think about a long, normal plot, not romance, but just like an external plot of some kind, I plan it out in terms of what needs to happen for this plot to resolve in one way or the other. And I imagine those as important events and I add more of them if I want the plot to be longer. Do you want to be planning out a slow burn romance the same way? Or is that gonna be too confining?

Chris: How many plot events do we have?

Oren: ‘Cause like, in a normal plot I wouldn’t just be like, “And then my characters sword-fighted for twenty pages.” I would be like, “So the plot is that we’re defeating store brand Sauron and to do that we need to first take Minus Terith.” That’s gonna be what my city is called. Don’t sue.

Chris: [Laughter]

Oren: And then after that, we need to get it to the gates of Lessghoul, and I would plan it that way. But I don’t know if that has a direct comparison in a romance story or if they are just longing.

Chris: If you think about the movement in the romance, we’re talking about the escalation in the relationship. So normally when we have a romance and we’re looking at “longing structure,” for instance, we have chemistry and then we have some development of the relationship that makes it feel like things are progressing, and then usually our kind of down note or our sort of separation point.

In a Slow Burn, we want that movement to be real slow in comparison to the amount of time they get together. I have seen complaints from people reviewing romance books that something is not a real Slow Burn because there is not enough time with the love birds together. They spend too much time apart. We don’t have enough page space. That is a frequent romance complaint.

Oren: Like saying it’s a slow burn because they meet on page one and then take a two-hundred-page vacation from each other. That’s not gonna work? They need more actual contact?

Chris: Yes. Romance audiences just want them to have lots of time together, interacting with each other. [Laughs]

That would be a complaint. That’s not a valid Slow Burn. We want kind of slow progress or we want it to take a long time before we get to a certain point in the relationship. I do think that sometimes might be challenging to stretch out in some ways if you’re just relying on the romance itself to create structure.

We had another episode on Enemies to Lovers, and I do think that gives it more time. It has more miles to cover. And so you could do a Slow Burn a little easier if they start out as enemies. Then we have a lot more milestones that we can fit in. But I also think it’s worth considering whether we want to have an additional plot in there so the relationship doesn’t have as much structure and we can afford to have the relationship milestones go slowly because we have, for instance, a high tension plot.

Oren: That’s my instinct. If you want the romance to take a long time, you attach it to a long external plot which gives you something to do so you don’t have to explain why they’re constantly longing for each other but not together yet. 

Chris: The external plot—depending on what it has, it may not save you from that. But what it does is it provides another form of structure using tension. Ideally, again, the external plot supports a romance. But in this case of a Slow Burn, all you might want is an external plot that gives them a reason to be together all the time. They’re stranded out on an island, whatever. They’re traveling together, something that makes them in close proximity all the time so that if they’re not in love yet, they can be. I’m not gonna eliminate that from consideration. 

But if they were doing something like Enemies to Lovers, we need something to push them together when they’re enemies so that they spend time interacting, for instance. And so I think if you had to do strong plot that provided some level of excitement but just had them together a lot in their scenes, then you could sort of take a step back and not worry as much and just give them a lot of chemistry as they interact together and have that kind of slowly blooming relationship.

Oren: We mentioned the possibility of Enemies to Lovers, but obviously that’s only one way you can do a romance. Not every Slow Burn is gonna wanna be an Enemies to Lovers. So what else do you do to set up the situation where the characters have enough chemistry that we would want them to be together, but also they aren’t gonna get together for a long time? What’s the play to keep them apart?

Chris: Well, sometimes with a Slow Burn they are friends for a while. And there is definitely a trick to making sure that the readers feel some level of chemistry or the readers are invested in it without the characters being too invested in it.

I guess what we’re trying to avoid is—I’m thinking of Paladin’s Grace.

Oren: Yeah.

Both: [Burst of Laughter]

Chris: Where they’re like, all over each other, and it’s just like, “What’s wrong with me?” It’s like, why? What is the hang-up here? Why aren’t you guys together now?

I think that in many cases sometimes people really like the opposite of love at first sight. They like the slowly developing feelings. They’ll just be focusing on each other a lot and only very slowly coming into awareness of their attraction and their feelings for each other. But will still be focusing it a lot and still be creating that chemistry.

But in other cases, there may be something in the way of them getting together that provides a reason why they don’t get together. Like forbidden love or something like that. 

So Warrior Princess Assassin has characters that as soon as they get together they have obvious attraction. This is a throuple romance. Maybe it helps a little bit that the time is divided between three different romances. [Chuckles] Because a throuple romance is three romances. That makes it easier to stretch those out for a novel. 

But two of them are already in love, but their, like, relationship is forbidden because one of them is a princess. And then they meet their kind of like joint love interest, but there’s a lot of drama and political intrigue, and then a lack of trust between them.

In the case of one character, there’s some trauma where he isn’t comfortable often with people touching him. They spend the book just like, building trust with each other slowly and kind of overcoming those things. There are some external problems, but there’s also a lot of emotional problems.

Oren: I have another idea. You could make a huge deal about how this is a sex-negative society and you can’t just be having sex, and then have sex and nothing happens.

 Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: ‘Cause we’re done with that. That’s over now.

Chris: In Midnight Girls, that one has two rival witches’ apprentices, that they have a long history of being rivals with each other. And this was actually confusing for me at first because I wasn’t sure if they knew who each other were. But no. So they both have their regular identity, and then they have like, their monster form. They’d only seen each other in monster form before. 

So near the opening, they meet each other in normal girl form and kind of become a little attached to each other without knowing who each other is. And of course, then at some point they can find out and fight each other a little bit, and then decide that they need to ally with each other.

Oren: Use my most powerful transformation: normal girl form. [Chortle]

Chris: That one’s kind of like an Enemies to Lovers too, where we have an external reason why they think they shouldn’t be together. Something that provides a barrier.

Oren: So if you’re plotting a slow burn romance over multiple books, we’ve established that you probably want something a little more substantial than a kiss at the end of book one. You don’t gotta leave people feeling a little high and dry, as it were.

Chris: I don’t think we should think of this just in terms of what sexual act they take, because we can have different heat levels. Kisses may or may not be particularly sexual. I think the thing about Midnight Girls that feels really taunting about it is at the end there’s a kiss, and then one of the girls just, like, runs off.

Oren: Flee!

Chris: And then later we kind of hear that one of the girls, they came back. But we don’t actually see them together. They part at the end, and then we hear one of them is nearby and that they’re about to kind of reengage in their rivalry, but we don’t see them as a cute couple.

Oren: I’ve read a couple books where there’s like a romance going on, and then one of them leaves, and I’m like, “Alright, bye.” And then they come back, and then the book ends.

Chris: Yeah. Having a resolution that is too perfunctory is a common issue with romances that is … makes fans real grumpy. Just have some scenes at the end with them just like being a cute couple together, please. [Laughs]

Oren: That happened in Uprooted, but it was weird, ’cause I didn’t like the romance. I was like, “Yay, he’s gone!” And then he came back.

Chris: [Laughter]

Oren: No. Go away. I don’t know if I would qualify Uprooted as Slow Burn. It’s not a super long book.

Chris: Really? That book felt like forever to me.

Oren: Yeah, that’s ’cause it’s boring. It’s not long, it’s just dull.

Chris: It’s not? It felt really long. Well I mean, we start with one plot and then we abandon it for the protagonist travels to a completely different city without the love interest. That part without the love interest would not be good for romance.

Oren: OK, I take it back. It’s 17 hours and 44 minutes in audio.

Chris: I knew it was long!

Oren: It is long! You’re right, it is long. It’s also boring. [Laughs] Or at least parts of it are, not all of it.

Chris: I started a book that was supposed to be a Slow Burn romance, but put it down because I didn’t like it. This just came out this year: Weaving Shaw. And the issue that I had is I really felt that there was a complete lack of chemistry to the romance. And maybe some people who are more into the love interest than I was felt differently. 

Even if it’s a Slow Burn and even if they’re not romantically interested in each other yet, or they don’t know they’re romantically interested in each other yet, I think the reader should still feel some attraction. Some of that positive charge, as I call it.

And in this case, it was just, I felt like that positive chemistry was completely lacking, where the love interest, yeah. He’s powerful, I guess and young. I don’t remember him being particularly attractive. Maybe. He’s probably supposed to be.

Oren: Just so hot. You don’t even know, Chris. And that’s literal. You don’t know.

Chris: But he’s just like the cold-hearted boss of the protagonist. And it’s definitely one of those things where he’s supposed to come off as more heartless than he ends up being later. I just felt like the chemistry wasn’t really there. And then, of course, I got fed up when he threatened to start destroying one of her family heirlooms when she didn’t do what he said as like, an employee.

Oh, this whole employment contract is based on like an actual literal contract that they made. And I’m like, what gives him the right to destroy her personal belongings if she doesn’t obey him at work?

Oren: I tell you what, after I finish law school I’ll go back and read it, and I’ll let you know. I do definitely feel like at this particular moment in time a lot of people are a little too riled up at the wealthier classes to tolerate that sort of behavior.

Chris: Right. That’s the problem. Is that Weaving Shaw—it definitely feels like there’s a big world issue where the rich are taking advantage of the workers, and then we have a love interest that is just like one of the rich taking advantage of workers. 

Oren: [Chuckles]

Chris: I think that part of my issue is that I think that most of the people reading these romances do not get angry at men who mistreat women as easily as I do.

Oren: Yeah, that does seem to be a feature.

Chris: Yeah. I understand that I’m supposed to find him a Danger Boy who’s like dark and sexy. But I’m just angry and I want to tear him apart. That’s not appealing. But even in a Slow Burn we want to have some kind of chemistry initially, even if it’s a little subdued, so that we can enjoy that. Even if they’re supposedly just friends, even if they’re enemies to start with. We wanna feel it.

Oren: Once I am set on building my Slow Burn across books—

Chris: Across ten books?

Oren: Yeah, ten books. But let’s just go with the second book for now. We’ll get to ten books later for sure. But let’s say that I have successfully developed the relationship enough that readers don’t feel like I just didn’t give them any romance in book one, but I also haven’t like completed it, right? It’s still got room to go. 

At the start of book two, it kind of feels like the romance should hit some kind of setback. Like, it shouldn’t just be like, “Alright, now we will continue from where we left off.” Is that wrong? How does that work, do you think?

Chris: Generally, yes, if you’re trying to prioritize a romance. You want something to separate them. The nature of that thing can vary quite a bit. 

If we’re thinking about “Is this a subplot?” one thing I tell writers who wanna know how much they have to structure their, like, character arc, how much they have to structure their relationship arcs. It’s if this is just a subplot and this is not what we’re leaning on, then—and you have an external plot that has lots of structure—you can just have them slowly become closer if you want because you’re maintaining interest with the tension arc.

But if you wanna make this romance, add some longing arcs and make this romance have more power to it. Generally they should be facing obstacles that will become problems during the course of the relationship. That could be drama like revealed secrets! Oh no.

Oren: [deadpan] Oh no, my secrets.

Chris: [emotionless] “I was undercover this entire time.” 

Or it could be some external thing like, “Sorry, my family has betrothed me to somebody else.” 

An external problem could be an emotional thing. “You did something and now I feel all of my bad exes are coming back to me, and I feel like you’re up to no good, and I can’t trust you anymore.” So yeah. There are a lot of different ways to do that. But usually at some point in time we wanna see after the relationship grows, then we wanna pull them apart again. So it’s always like two steps forward, one step back.

Oren: Let’s talk about what is undisputedly the best slow burn romance of all time. And that is Julian Bashir and Ezri Dax from Deep Space Nine.

Chris: Oh my God! Why would you bring those up? Why would you do that?

Oren: It’s so great though, ’cause you see he kind of was into her previous incarnation like six seasons ago.

Chris: Has anyone ever called that a slow burn romance?

Oren: Yeah, I just did right now! 

Chris: [Laughing] Oh, I see. Just to troll us and the listeners.

Oren: What are you, a gatekeeper? [Laughs]

Chris: Yeah. You know what? I will be for this one

Oren: Gonna keep this gate. Gotta keep out.

Chris: Man. I mean, at least you didn’t say Kes and Neelix. 

Oren: Well, ’cause they are just together from day one, as much as I wish they weren’t. Until she breaks up with him through the power of Space Napoleon. Best arc in Voyager ever. ‘Cause she breaks up with him while she’s possessed and then they never get back together. They’re just broken up after that. It’s brilliant. I love it so much.

Chris: Yeah. What was possessing her detected that she really wanted to break off this relationship and just hadn’t got up the guts to do it.

Oren: Thanks, Space Napoleon.

Chris: TV shows are a whole thing, because they often have logistical problems where they’re not left with enough time, and many people have noticed they have a tendency to be like, “Okay, we have this spare man person and this spare woman person, so relationship!” [Laughs]

Oren: “Spare man person” definitely describes a few people that I’ve interacted with online recently. That’s a good description. Hello, Spare Man Person.

Chris: Do you know anything about the behinds-the-scene on that one?

Oren: On Ezri, with Ezri and Bashir?

Chris: Yeah. For anybody who is not familiar with Deep Space Nine, basically there’s a character named Jadzia. Because her actress left, they killed off the character. But she’s a Trill, and they have a form of reincarnation where like, the symbiont alien can be implanted in a new person, and that person will have the memories. Then they bring back her next iteration, Ezri And then Ezri gets together with Bashir, who back in season one—maybe a little later—had a crush on Jadzia.

When they do it in the last season, suddenly they both turn to one of their friends to be like, “Oh, by the way, I’m super into this person.” And as viewers, we’re like, you are?!

Oren: Are you now? Huh.

Chris: When did we see this? When did this happen? There’s just sudden declaration of love and then that’s it. They’re together.

Oren: I don’t know this for sure. I know that there is a lot of speculation that this is an anti-shipping move, because of course people were shipping Bashir and O’Brien, and Bashir and Garak. But I don’t know that. I just know people speculate about that a lot.

Chris: Oh no. I hope not. Whereas Bashir and Garak, that would be a great Slow Burn.

Oren: We eventually got in Lower Decks—

Chris: Yeah, an alternate universe, but better than nothing.

Oren: I think it’s just as likely that they just wanted to pair people off, because they also suddenly have Odo and Kira together again. Which is not as random. Like Odo and Kira have had a little more going on over the course of the series. But Odo being super into Kira, that’s not been a thing for a little while. 

I think that they were just looking at characters and they were like, “Well, we need something for these characters to do,” and Bashir and Ezri are barely in the last few episodes. So, I guess they banging now and that’ll be their content. That would be my guess.

Chris: The key to a good Slow Burn is lots of development time. That’s what it’s about. It’s about lots of time for pining and dwelling on the relationship that can’t happen. Or showing people very slowly fall in love with each other, and feeling it’s not rushed, that it’s really thoroughly developed.

And so anything where there’s a huge lapse in content with the two people seeing each other or interacting with each other is not a Slow Burn, or at least not a good one. Now that we have—let me remind you—officially declared Bashir and Ezri: the best slow burn romance, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: Oh no … Well listeners, if you haven’t fallen in love with this podcast yet, we have almost 600 episodes for you to enjoy and slowly fall in love. But after the most recent one hundred, you’re gonna have to take that next step of going to our website to download them. And at that point, you might consider making the relationship official by supporting us on Patreon.

Damn, alright. That was a pretty satisfying arc you got there. Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. 

[Closing Theme]

Take a break, sit and relax, put your feet up. Maybe enjoy a refreshing hot beverage or a home-cooked meal. If you have time, you can read one of the panic pieces about how a new-ish genre is ruining literature. Obviously, this is a cozy fantasy episode, where we not only talk about what cozy fantasy is but why cozy fantasy is. Plus, a look at all the books falsely categorized as cozy fantasy and a glimpse at our own totally real upcoming bestseller.

Generously transcribed by Manasa. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

[Promo for Tension & Hooks 2026]

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

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: It’s a rainy day, but we’re all snug inside with some hot tea and our kitty cats, making content for our struggling small business with big dreams.

Oren: Whoa, hang on. It–it can’t be struggling too much, right? It’s gotta be – like – just a little struggle.

Chris: Just a little struggle, yeah. In fact, you know what we really need here is a magic amulet that automatically makes Mythcreant successful.

Oren: Yeah. There. Solved. Easy.

Chris: Yep, yep. I would very much like one of those. [laughter] If anybody makes magic amulets.

Oren: Okay, technically speaking, it doesn’t directly make Mythcreant successful. It just mind controls talented, driven people and brings them to us to work for free. [laughter] And we do have some of those, but we need more. So we need to strengthen the amulet …

Chris: …maybe so that as soon as I try anything to bring in more fans, suddenly it just works really well and I’ve got droves of fans.

Oren: It just makes sense.

Chris: Or it does in Cozy Fantasy.

Oren: Yeah, yeah. That’s true.

Chris: So, what is Cozy Fantasy? If you have not heard this genre term before, it’s relatively new. This is a sub-genre of fantasy: it’s light in tone; we’ve got no violence, no deaths – there could be deaths in the backstory, but generally no deaths during the current story; definitely no gore. The scope tends to be small: instead of it being like an epic over the fate of the world, we’re dealing with personal scale or the welfare of the community. I think the thing that really sets it apart the most is just the focus on idyllic living. We’ve got usually a plot that features problems that can be pertained to running a household or a business or an institution generally. And it’s got a lot of wish fulfillment when it comes to opening your new coffee shop or running a library or whatever cute thing that you would like to do – but only if it’s easy. [laughter] And not like a real business.

Oren: It’s a combination of wish fulfillment and low tension in a, if not domestic, then a comforting setting. Wish fulfillment can be a lot of things for different people, but this is a specific type of wish fulfillment. 

The chaos gremlins over on Goodreads will put anything in this category: you got The Hobbit, you got Howl’s Moving Castle, you got A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking – which I get, that one. That’s a trick, ’cause it has “baking” in the title.

Chris: And it is cute baking magic, it’s just there’s – too much tension.

Oren: There’s like an assassin running around. People are getting murdered.

Chris: There was a book that came out this year, The Library of Amorlin, and we looked at the description like “is this a Cozy? Is this not a Cozy?” And it was kind of, maybe it’s borderline a Cozy. And then when I started reading it, the main character is, like, being forced to kill these magical animals,and we describe the bodies of these dead animals. Like nope, nope, nope: that is not something you put in a Cozy.

Oren: Doesn’t sound very cozy, I would think.

Chris: I mean, later what’s gonna happen is she’s gonna join the love interest who is trying to protect the magical animals, and protecting magical animals is something you might do in a Cozy, but you would never actually show them dying or dead, right? That is not part of that.

Another interesting case is right now I’m reading Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, and this book is a Cozy, but it has a problem, which is that it’s about a cat shelter, but it’s not. Because the plot is about these magicians making trouble…

Oren: What?

Chris: …and how we need to get rid of them. So instead of focusing on running the cat shelter, Agnes is like, “Nope, I don’t have any time to deal with the cat shelters now because I need to go and categorize this magician’s magical artifacts.” And in most stories I’d be like, “Yeah, cool, magical artifacts,” but in this story I’m like, “Hey, I wanted to hear about the cats.”

Oren: Ugh, I don’t have time to eat this delicious meal. I guess I have to go snack on some leaves. No, thanks.

Chris: The plot is built around something that in another book could be just fine. Having magic battles between misbehaving magicians. To get their power they have to go into this creepy forest. In another book that would all be great and I would be very interested in it, but in this one there’s cat shelters and I wanna hear about the cats because that’s what the Cozy is typically about, and that’s what we set up, right? We set up that she’s desperate to find a location for her cat shelter because nobody wants to lease their location to her once they hear she’s gonna bring in cats. It’s a very compelling problem that gets you attached to the cat shelter, and then suddenly having the plot be like, “No, we have to leave the cats behind to deal with these magicians now,” now I just hate the magicians.

Oren: Get outta here, magicians.

Chris: [laughter] Now I’m sure it’ll come together at the end. Again, this is why a typical Cozy is about the success of the shop or the household or the institution. That’s what the plot is about and those are the activities that the protagonist engages in. Like in Legends & Lattes, it’s about a coffee shop. To engage in the plot and solve problems, the main character runs her coffee shop and finds new solutions for her coffee shop. She doesn’t, like, run off and deal with the mafia.

Oren: The way that that happens does have some problems, but it is definitely focused on the thing the story is about. The same thing with The Spell Shop or The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. I’m not saying these are perfect stories, but they know what they are about, and they don’t introduce it and then try to take you away from it.

I do get why stories like The Hobbit and Howl’s Moving Castle and Defensive Baking get on Cozy lists: it’s because they have cozy elements within them. There are all the food sequences in The Hobbit, there’s the taking care of Howl’s castle when he’s not around in Howl’s Moving Castle, and then of course there’s the baking in Defensive Baking.But I wouldn’t sell those as Cozies because I think someone looking for a Cozy is gonna pick these up, and it’s not gonna meet what they are looking for.

Chris: I would say the book Howl’s Moving Castle definitely feels lighter and lower in tension and, and more cozy than the movie. Than the anime movie.

Oren: Sure, that’s true.

Chris: Technically they do have a villainous witch in the book that they kind of fight at the end, but it has a lot more just hanging out, cleaning Howl’s castle, that kind of thing. I do think that things like Howl’s Moving Castle and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, which is another one that is not really cozy because it has too much danger. Generally in a Cozy, the protagonist is not facing a villain that is threatening to kill them. If they face any threat that could endanger, like cause injury, it’s usually something like a storm or some other natural disaster. It’s not like “somebody’s gonna murder me.”

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So Going Postal is not a Cozy, but this process of finding this old post office with all of these undelivered letters, and then inspiring the two remaining postal workers, and then starting to redeliver all those letters again and cleaning it up and coming up with new ideas to revitalize the post office: those are all activities that are just prime cozy activities.

Oren: Right. And a story where you take over a beloved institution and bring it back from the dead and strengthen it, it could not be a Cozy, right? It could be very high tension, but it will have some of the same wish fulfillment as a Cozy.

Chris: Yeah. If it’s good.

Oren: Yeah, if it’s good.

I was sad to discover that I think the era of Cozy Fantasy panic pieces may be over.

Chris: Oh, no. We need more silly pieces to make fun of.

Oren: ‘Cause there used to be every so often someone would publish a panic piece about “how Cozy Fiction was destroying literature and maybe also turning us into fascists”, depending on how spicy they felt. And I can’t help but feel like, maybe those went away because we suddenly had a lot of real problems to deal with and we had fewer people who had their heads far enough up their ass to write something like that. I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true.

Chris: It just feels so unfair to me. It’s like we had so many people pushing grim dark stories for so many years, and it’s like– look: the people who are sensitive to tension just wanna have their own stories to read, okay? Just let them have their stories.

Oren: It’s bad to want those, Chris. It is a moral failing. [laughter] I tried to find another one for today’s podcast, and the closest I could find was some guy on Bluesky being mad when a reviewer mentioned that they take the book’s genre into account when deciding how to judge it because in theory the publisher might have misfiled it in the wrong genre, so how could you punish the author for that? [laughter] Which was silly, but not nearly as silly as a Cozy Panic piece.

Chris: Another kind of Cozy Fail I’ve seen is at the beginning of Enchanted Greenhouse, which is the sequel to Spell Shop. There’s just a sequence that some readers would find very harrowing. I think the author just assumed this was not a big deal. We heard about this happening in the first book, but it was, you know, happening to a minor character and was not shown in detail. The protagonist is turned into a statue, a wooden statue, and at the beginning of Enchanted Greenhouse we find out she was conscious the whole time she was a statue.

Oren: Blah

Chris: And hear all about her being a statue in detail. That’s just – again – that’s the stuff of nightmares. It just doesn’t belong at the beginning of a Cozy. The whole point is this is a feel-good fantasy, and we’re going for positive feelings. 

Oren: It is definitely a case of– if you do get readers who are like, “Hell yeah, trapped in a statue unable to move, but conscious of your environment for years, give me more of that,” and then they keep reading, they’re like, “What the heck is this greenhouse?” [laughter] “What’s, what’s, why, what did you trick me for, right?” There’s no win in that. That’s a lose-lose scenario.

Chris: I do think it is worth talking about Cozies and tension in general because I think a good Cozy has just the right amount of tension, it does have some tension. Like, for me, the sample Cozy reader is my mother, who is real tension-sensitive: she doesn’t like adversarial contests between people; she wants everybody to get along. And definitely prefers not to have violence in her stories, so she … Cozy Fantasy, as far as I can tell– if it’s not her favorite genre, is at least one of her favorite genres. But she even has a point at which she’s like, “Yeah, that was kind of low tension,” even though she doesn’t typically like tension that much.

I also think that, okay, there are always the readers who are like, “Yeah, I don’t care if this has tension as long as some characters I like are hanging out,” and that’s fine, but I do think having just that right amount of tension definitely helps broaden the audience. Some people liked, for instance,Bookshops & Bonedust, which was the sequel to Legends & Lattes. I was so bored because Legends & Lattes has a real tight plot, cohesive plot with problems. Bookshops & Bonedust is just fragmented and has no tension to speak of, and I couldn’t get through it. So again, I think there’s just a sweet spot to be had here, where we have just enough that there are actual problems that feel like they matter for the protagonist to tackle, but it is not supposed to be scary. 

It’s not supposed to be a thriller, it’s not supposed to be particularly exciting. Basically, don’t want high stakes usually, and by “high stakes” that means somebody’s life is threatened. Instead, you want stakes that are, like, medium to low, where the institution is at risk or the business is at risk or something like that. A lot of times emotional stakes: somebody’s emotionally hurt and they need to heal. Or you could have somebody’s threatened in a lesser way, right? They’re gonna be conscripted, they’re gonna be jailed, they’re gonna be sent away, and that’s gonna cause them deep unhappiness and that’s enough.

Oren: Legends & Lattes is actually a fascinating example to consider tension in Cozies through, because it’s clear that the author, Baldree, does know the story needs some tension because he sets up problems. Not huge problems, but real problems, like getting the coffee shop off the ground, and then he sets up this distant but more serious problem of the local mobster wanting to charge protection money. And those are, I’d say about right for a Cozy. The mob’s not gonna break down her door tomorrow, but it’s something we have to deal with. And then, you know, not getting the kitchen extension on the coffee shop’s not gonna kill anybody, but it matters.

The problem is that every single problem is then resolved by her having magical friends who do everything for her. And by her, I mean the protagonist, Viv. So that’s an interesting case where the author knows that some tension is needed, but actually the problem is that he doesn’t know how to resolve problems satisfactorily.

Chris: Or in The Spellshop, the stakes are that “we’re not supposed to have these magic books because we’re kind of in an uncertain political situation in The Spellshop. But there was a previous empire that basically wanted to hoard all the magic for itself, so nobody else is allowed to have these books. But the community is suffering because it is actually dependent on magic, but because of the hoarding of magic, things on this idyllic little island are falling apart.” So the protagonist is trying to solve these problems, but also is trying to not get caught by any potential authorities that come by. And then later we have an inspector come by so we can worry about the protagonist getting caught. But that is as much tension as we have for the most part. And then they deal with a storm, but it doesn’t really feel in that storm like anybody’s gonna die. I mean, we have one, I think, situation where people are out in the water and we’re a little worried about them, but for the most part, you know, we’re not worried about people dying here. That’s kind of the level that you want for a Cozy. 

I will say though that if you want lower tension, it does really help if the story keeps moving and has good novelty. So for instance, Teller of Small Fortunes, that one is a Cozy that has probably some of the lowest tension I’ve seen in a Cozy, but it actually kept my attention despite how low the tension was. It helped that it was a traveling story, so the characters moved around and encountered new people and did new things. That variety also helps retain attention. In Teller of Small Fortunes, instead of having a community problem, we just have four people that each have their own personal problem that’s not particularly urgent, and they travel around together and kind of work on their problems.

Oren: Yeah. If you have a high novelty that you can maintain, you can make up for a lot of other problems with that.

Chris: Just having the story move and having people encounter new things and do new things. Whereas if you take longer for everything that you cover, that is gonna make it a little bit harder to keep attention.

Oren: And when you’re planning your story, assuming that you do plan your story, it’s important to think about, “okay, is the activity that I’m selling, the thing I am putting in the title to let people know what this is, do I know how to create in-character problems around that?” And if the answer is no, you may wanna rethink things, because that’s partly what’s going on with Mystical Cat Shelter, is that we’re often just being dragged away to do other things. But there are lots of things you could do with running a mystical cat shelter, right, that could be fun little cozy problems to solve.

Chris: I kind of wonder if part of the issue is that the Mystical Cat Shelter author just wants to write Howl’s Moving Castle.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: ‘Cause the love interest in that book definitely feels like he’s inspired by Howl.

Oren: Does he go to Wales?

Chris: He does not, no. No.

Oren: The best part of Howl’s Moving Castle, when they go to Wales.

Chris: Actually, this story takes place in, like, historical Europe somewhere.

Oren: Huh. So it is Wales. Or it could be. Probably not.

Chris: Actually, they could all be in Wales for all I know. I’m not exactly sure where they are. But Howl is French.

Oren: All right. Yeah. He could be in Wales. He could be stirring up dissonance against the, uh, against the English.

Chris: So it’s actually not in a fantasy world, no. That was very, very silly. Howl should not come from Wales.

Oren: Yeah. [laughter]

Chris: For anybody who has not actually read the Howl’s Moving Castle book or seen the movie, it takes place in, like, a fantasy world. So it’s just very random when we discover that Howl comes from real world Wales and has, like, a door to go back there.

Oren: To be clear, the issue is that he comes from the real world, not Wales specifically.

Chris: Not that he’s from Wales specifically, no. It’s just weird that, like, it’s not important to the story in any way. It’s just a random thing that takes some time. But he has a portal door to, like, go back to Wales, and it’s like, “why are we doing this?” I dunno.

Oren: Which is funny because you can tell in the animated movie that they were like, “Okay, we’re obviously cutting this real world backstory bit, but we still wanna have that, like, mysterious magic door. Where does it go? Like, I dunno, like a black place maybe? Don’t worry about it.”

Chris: I liked the black mysterious mist, the weird black void. I thought that was a good addition. 

Oren: Yeah, kind of interesting. It’s just by the end I feel like they maybe didn’t really know what they were doing exactly with that movie.

Chris: Another book that is not cozy, but I think it’s inspired Cozies is Dealing with Dragons. 

Oren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure.

Chris: Where basically she goes to live with a dragon, and then she organizes the dragon hoard. There’s knights who are coming to rescue her and keep threatening her dragon, so she has to find ways to make them go away because she wants to stay. Then she’s visited by the other princesses who are the captives. I mean, they’re technically the captives of other dragons, but this is like a fairy tale setting where this is just a traditional thing for princesses to do.

Oren: Yeah, it’s more like an internship.

Chris: Yeah. Ugh, unfortunately, reading this book again recently brought up how misogynist it is, which is so sad.

Oren: Yeah, it is, for sure.

Chris: For me, it’s … you know, I read it as a girl, and so did many other people, I’m sure, in our generation. It still has a lot of fun stuff in it, but the misogyny is very apparent now.

Oren: I mean, it could be worse. It could be Wheel of Time.

Chris: That’s true. It could be Wheel of Time.

Oren: That’s, that’s what I read as a kid and then went back to and was like, “Oh, no.”

Chris: But Dealing with Dragons has a great example of how you take a scenario like that and you add little problems that are fun for the protagonist to solve to give it some, like, plot structure. 

Oren: We should also note that one of the most useful sources on how to write a Cozy is the article “What Is Cozy Fantasy And How To Write It” by Chris Winkle.

Chris: You flatterer.

Oren: And importantly, it has tables that you can roll on to generate a Cozy premise, which is – as everyone knows – the most important part of writing.

Chris: People certainly had a lot of fun with that Cozy Fantasy story generator.

Oren: And so I would like to do that together now, as a family. Because once we’ve done that, we will basically have written a Cozy novel. Just to be clear.

Chris: Yeah. That’s all it need.

Oren: So first, if we start with step one:

I would like to run a… and then I will put 1 to 21 into my little random number generator. It’s 15. Oops, sorry, that should be 1 to 12, not 21. My bad. 

Chris: I didn’t make that many options.

Oren: Six… Okay, I would like to run a garden. All right. Good. We’re off to a good start. Okay.

Chris: The story’s about a garden.

Oren: It’s about a garden that’s in a…1 to 16… that’s in a city. Okay. It’s a city garden.

Chris: That’s useful. Garden in the city.

Oren: Yeah. People in cities don’t see as much greenery as they would probably like to, right? Okay.

So we’re running an urban garden, and is filled to the brim with…here’s the 21…generating that to a…10…That is filled to the brim with stews…Oh, I see. We’re getting a little off topic here. 

Chris: Hey, maybe we use the garden ingredients to make stews. So we harvest the vegetables from our garden, and then we make stews outside for people.

Oren: Yeah, yeah. So it’s a food garden then.

It’s an urban food garden. For the benefit of… 1 to 19… 10 again: for the benefit of giants. Oh man, they would need that in a city, right?

Chris: I mean, we do have to keep them from stomping all over the city. So like maybe if we can generate enough stew, we can appease them and they’ll go away.

Oren: Right, and this has to be like a magical garden, ’cause how else are we gonna grow enough calories to feed giants, right?

All right, so it’s full of giants who have been…who have been lost. Hmm.

Chris: So maybe they’re heading to like, there was an old giant city nearby…that is either hard to find or fell, and so the giants keep coming and searching for this legendary city.

Oren: Right, and we’ve made this garden to get them stew every time that they come by as like a way to make, you know, to be good neighbors, right?

But thanks to this place, they have all found… healing. Well, that actually, that just basically fits already, right?

Chris: Yeah, so these giants are lost and they’re in bad condition after traveling. They’re probably injured, they’re probably tired, and they haven’t eaten enough. And, you know, when they’re in that condition, they probably make some trouble for our city. So we’re just gonna make big healing stews, take care of these giants so they don’t cause trouble anymore. 

Oren: That sounds like a pretty good Cozy Fantasy, actually. I’d read that

And you know, so into that, we would have little problems. Like, we would need to get magical fertilizer to prepare for the giants to arrive, and we’d need to be able to cook the vegetables.

Chris: Maybe we need to find a type of stew that the giants like. Maybe they have different taste buds than most people.

Oren: Yeah. And then while we’re doing that, we might have to keep the peace between some of the giants who are kind of stressed out. If there are townsfolk who are a little leery of the giants, we might win them over with our stew.

Chris: And maybe we need to expand our garden so that we have enough for all the giants so the giants won’t fight over the stew. So then we, like, end up befriending a giant, and then we convince the giant to plow an additional area so that we can kind of expand our garden outside the city a little bit.

Oren: Yeah. Or, like, we talk to some building owners and they let us use their rooftops.

Chris: Mm. Yeah, rooftop gardens.

Oren: Yeah, okay. See? Yeah, yeah. This could be great. We could have lots of fun little conflicts that end with the giants realizing that the real city they were looking for was actually this one with the great stew, and the friends they made along the way.

Chris: I can imagine for that one, I’m trying to think of, like, what would be the climactic– ‘cause there usually is a climax that’s somewhat exciting. Maybe what they were looking for actually appears, but it’s bad in some way, like they’re gonna fight over it. Or something is wrong there and we wanna keep the giants from fighting each other, and so we have to create peace. And of course, we do that by making the best stew ever, and they’re all in such a good mood they can’t fight anymore.

Oren: No one can fight when this stew is served. It’s just that good.

Chris: I think when I added the stew option, I was thinking about: what if you’re running a shop or a restaurant or something. It’s filled to the brim with stew.

Oren: What, you’re telling me that story elements aren’t 100% modular? You can’t just swap them in and out however you feel like?

Chris: With a little extra creativity, maybe….But yeah, no, that element of personal healing, where we’ve got this effort, this household, this business, this institution, this community – and it’s for a group of people that have been suffering, and now we’re gonna help them heal– is also really key to Cozy. Those healing themes and emotional wellness is pretty key. 

Oren: Well, on that actual wholesome note, we will go ahead and call this podcast to a close. 

Chris: And if you would like to join a cozy little community that has good feelings, consider supporting us on Patreon and joining our Discord and getting our little personal rambles. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First we have Amon Jaber: he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, Professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

After 13 years, it’s hopefully clear that we recommend against having villains trip over their own feet. In most stories, if the villain is a pushover, there won’t be much tension or satisfaction. But why do villains become pushovers in the first place? And what should be done about it? Fortunately, we have thoughts.

Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. 

Chris: I’m Chris. 

Oren: Oh no, the bad guy is going to conquer our planet with their mega space battleship as soon as they can get an orbital parking permit. There’s a long wait list, and obviously they’re not gonna invade without a permit. Can you imagine the kind of ticket they’d get? 

Chris: Well, it’s okay. Once they do manage to park, we have all of the big weapons anyway. 

Oren: Yeah, but they’re very scary ’cause, like, they had some dialogue about how they would want to see the world as a diamond that they wear on a ring. And it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s… Sure, bro. 

Chris: Well, they are keeping one person hostage and threatening to kill that person, so we should probably… you know, we’re just gonna have to surrender all of our weapons. 

Oren: Just have to give them everything they want, as opposed to just put someone in charge who isn’t that hostage’s parent? [laughter] Pro tip! West Wing did a whole story arc about this, about how, like, the president has to step away when his kid has been kidnapped, ’cause the president can’t make logical decisions at that point. Come on, guys, West Wing figured it out! [laughter] So this week we are talking about when the villain is too weak. And I’m including both villains who are just straightforwardly underpowered, like they’re just not powerful enough to defeat the heroes, or also villains who, in theory, should be, but just make comically bad choices to the point that they should be easy to defeat at that point.

Chris: What about villains that the storyteller just doesn’t like, and so they just fall on their face? 

Oren: Yeah, I guess there’s always the, like, they didn’t technically make a bad choice, but they are just constantly– failed anyway, right? Like, they constantly have bad luck or whatever. 

Chris: Actually, this usually happens, I think, in a lot of children’s cartoons or other lighter stories where the heroes are just not allowed to lose. You know, so, the most recent She-Ra had this problem, too, where it’s like, okay, we need to see the heroes triumphant every single time, and so then by fiat, the villain just always loses. It’s, you know, hard for them to not feel too weak. 

Oren: Right. Well, and, and She-Ra has that problem from multiple angles, right? Because it has the issue where the heroes just always have to win, right? They are never allowed to lose. But they also are just, on paper, way more powerful than the villains, right? Because each of the princesses is, like, at least as strong as any of the bad guys, and there are only, like, two or three named bad guys who can fight worth anything, and there are eight of these princesses or something like… Oh, gosh, maybe it’s not eight, but there are a bunch, right? 

Chris: Yeah. Maybe we should cover signs your villain is too weak because, again, a lot of storytellers do this, they don’t realize their villain is too weak. Like, obviously, a big one is, is the villain outnumbered? And to be clear, minions don’t always make up the difference. Like, if you put some time and effort into your minions, the minions can matter, but there’s just a lot of stories, especially if they escalate too quickly and the heroes are just steamrolling over hordes of minions immediately, where the minions just don’t feel significant enough. And then all we see is that, well, the villain is one person who has superpowers or incredible abilities or whatever, but then the team good is like, five people, and that just– doesn’t look even.

Oren: Yeah, we’re just gonna gang up on him. And also, authors often do this when they want to portray the villain as, like, scheming. Sometimes because they think that makes them look more evil. Uh, looking at you, C.S. Lewis, with the scheming White Witch. Oh, she’s scheming! But what you neglect to notice is that, A, every adaptation has made the White Witch hotter than the last adaptation. [laughter] So we’re doomed already. But also, the White Witch is the one putting in all the work to come up with this clever plan against a much more powerful enemy! 

Chris: Right. If your villain has to be clever to win, they’re not powerful enough. 

Oren: And She-Ra also had that problem sometimes because Catra would often come up with these clever strategies, and then Adora’s strategy was, “What if we just ran right at them because we have, like, a bunch of powerful princesses?” And I’m like, “Oh, it feels … Uh, Catra kinda earned this one,” but nope, she still loses. 

Chris: This is why everybody loved Loki, who was originally a villain in Avengers, is because he’s clearly the underdog in this situation, and he has to be clever to get anywhere. Like, how could you not root for him? Also, he’s good-looking. How could you not root for him? [laughter]

Oren: Yeah, and he’s tortured a little bit. 

Chris: And he’s tortured. Angsty boy. 

Oren: Yeah. In The Avengers, it worked okay for a while because there was this period where, like, the conflict was over whether the Avengers could work together, and Loki was very powerful in stopping them from doing that. But once they start working together, it’s like, can six Avengers beat Loki? Half of whom could beat Loki in a one-on-one fight? Yes, it turns out they can. [chuckles]

Chris: And again, Loki is supposed to have minions, but, like, in those Marvel movies, minions just don’t mean anything, right? They’re just there so that we can have more, bigger, flashier fight scenes, and the minions are instantly just fodder for our heroes.

Oren: Yeah, there are a number of Marvel movies that have this problem. Age of Ultron had the same problem, where it’s, like, Ultron is here, and he’s about as powerful as Iron Man, and he’s fighting the whole Avengers team. And, like, yeah, you know, I think we’ll get him. I think we will. 

[both laugh]

Chris: So yeah, another thing, if your villains have powers that are just to negate the hero’s powers, that is a bad sign. That is a bad sign that your heroes are too powerful in comparison to your villains. If they have to have, like, the mutant ability neutralizing collar or what have you, that strongly suggests that the villain is underpowered. 

Oren: Right, and I mean, and that’s the case anytime you have to introduce a countermeasure just to, like, turn off an ability or a piece of tech that you’ve added, because that’s just a boring way to handle it. It’s like, oh, well, I wanted to see them use that. Well, too bad, they’re in the can’t-use-that zone. It’s like, all right, well, now it feels like you might as well not have added it. 

Chris: Oh! Bees. 

Oren: Yeah, the Inuyasha bees!

Chris: Yeah. 

Oren: It’s like, “Hey, we gave this guy a black hole in his hand that defeats all enemies.” It’s like, “Well, I guess everyone has bees now, and the bees make the black hole not work.”

Chris: [laughs] That’s just so funny. The bees. Okay. 

Oren: So we’ve talked about villains being outnumbered. That’s a big one. Um, villains being clever. There’s also just the straight up, like- The author loves the hero too much and isn’t, you know, willing to let them ever face enemies who actually know what they’re doing. This one doesn’t come up as often in published stories just because it’s pretty well known by professional authors that your hero is, like, measured by the strength of their villains. There have been enough, like, Batman essays for us to internalize that message. But it still happens occasionally. The Name of the Wind, of course, has this problem because, like, Kvothe is the greatest guy ever, and so when he actually has a rival, his rival has to suck ass and Kvothe is super cool and the best. Weirdly, in The Wheel of Time, Rand has this problem after about book three. He’s just way too strong, and the only way that we keep him from completely winning is by continually cutting away from his POV to a million other characters. 

Chris: Doesn’t Dune have this issue with the rival guy? 

Oren: Yes, Dune absolutely has this problem, where after, like…The first third or so is, you know, House Harkonnen living large, and they’ve got their evil plan, and they’re totally badass. And then as soon as Paul makes his alliance with the Fremen, every fight they have is basically a foregone conclusion, and he just steamrollers over all opposition. There’s one scene just to, like, to really drive home. There’s one scene where the Sardaukar, who are the imperial elite soldiers, ambush a group of Fremen non-combatants, which the book of course describes as women and children, and then have to, like, run away with their tails between their legs ’cause they got beat up so bad by the Fremen non-combatants.

Chris: [chuckling] Oh, no. 

Oren: And this is, of course, where the Dune fans will claim, “Oh, you see? That’s because Paul’s not the hero. You’re not supposed to want him to win.” And I’m like, “Okay, first of all, no.” 

Chris: Yes, you are. [laughs]

Oren: In the first book, you are absolutely supposed to want him to win. Don’t lie to me. But second, if you aren’t, what is the point of any of this? It goes on for a while. Like, that’s arguably worse. If I’m supposed to spend however many chapters watching two people I don’t care about fight? C’mon. 

Chris: Yeah, I don’t know. I have run into a couple books that- were like, villain origin stories or something, and I’ve always been kinda baffled, like, what is the appeal of this? But I mean, if they’re good, they still get you to root for the character. 

Oren: Yeah, I mean, the way that those usually work is they have them fight, like, someone who is more eviler, right? Assuming they’re an actual villain origin story and not just a popular villain that we have reimagined as a protagonist, right?

Chris: Okay, so those are signs that your villain is underpowered. So, you know, what should we do about it? 

Oren: Okay, so the main thing that you have to be thinking about here is what kind of conflicts is my villain getting into with the hero, or in general, right? Like, what are they doing? And you need to plan for that sort of thing. Now, if you have a show like Deep Space Nine, in Deep Space Nine, the Dominion War is not going to be decided by Sisko punching the changeling leader. That’s not a thing that’s gonna happen. So it’s not a big deal that there are fewer named characters on Team Evil because this is not a personal contest. Now, it does kind of become one in the finale when, like, Sisko has to go down and have, like, a personal confrontation with Dukat, but that’s a separate issue. That doesn’t… I would argue that scene doesn’t work very well. But the Dominion War itself is not about that. So in this case, that’s a situation where minions work great, right? The Jem’Hadar are very threatening, and they do what they need to do. But if you’re imagining that your story is mainly going to be about the hero and the villain, or at least important named characters fighting each other, then you just have to balance them for that. And often that’s going to mean making more named villains or making the villain so strong that they can fight all of Team Good at the same time.

Chris: I mean, I also encourage people to not depower minions too quickly. You know, if you can make the minions actually intimidating when the story starts. And I think one reason this happens is the storyteller wants the hero to be, like, super badass immediately, right? And so they show them fighting the minions. So this does sometimes require a hero that’s sort of designed for growth, right? Instead of having that super badass hero immediately, you have your scrappy hero, and then your scrappy hero becomes badass during the story. But it’s certainly easier to keep tension up that way, right? If you have, “Oh. Oh, no, these minions, they’re gonna get me” and then, you know, progress to the point where you beat up the minions. It helps. It makes the minions more intimidating, so we’re not feeling like they don’t matter and it’s just a number of named characters. 

Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s, you know, basically how Avatar does it, right? Like, early in the show, Fire Nation soldiers are a pretty serious threat, and then as the show progresses, that becomes less true. And, you know, by the time they get Toph, we’ve basically given up the idea that unnamed Fire Nation soldiers can threaten them, which is when we introduce Azula and her crew. So that’s why that worked out as well as it did. It is also important to think through the implications of the powers you give your heroes, ’cause I just mentioned Avatar. The Avatar State’s a huge problem. Like, “hey, we gave the, our main hero a god mode ability, and, uh, yeah, I guess it only turns on when he’s about to lose. Hmm. Y- yeah, okay, I see why that would be an issue, actually.” Now, of course, later, when the Avatar can control the Avatar State, it’s even worse. But even in the original show, if you stop to think about it for a minute, you realize that Aang can’t ever lose fights, barring something really clever like what Azula ends up doing. And so that’s not great. I would probably recommend not doing that. 

Chris: Yeah. And again, if you’re wondering, what do I do when the hero and villain confront each other? If your hero just runs away and focuses on escaping as opposed to defeating the villain, right? You can still have a very exciting conflict that comes to a conclusion that is triumphant for your hero because your hero gets away. But if they don’t beat the villain, then the villain is still much more intimidating than they would be if they were defeated. 

Oren: When it comes to villains just making really bad choices, one that I found that’s an interesting one is when we are shifting from the villain that we thought was the bad guy to reveal the true bad guy. And then there’s this weird period where the protagonist has basically won, but we’re kind of acting like there’s still a chance that the villain could beat them. And the reason that we’re doing that is because we’re about to bring in a new, different villain. 

Chris: See, I assumed the causality was reversed, where, oh, the hero has to defeat this person to move the plot forward. Oh, what do we do? I know, we’ll bring in another villain. 

Oren: Yeah, that’s possible.

Chris: It could be either way, right? We decide, oh, we have a bigger, bad villain we’re ready to introduce, therefore, we now can make our hero defeat the villain we’ve been working on finally. Or, okay, well, uh, that came to a head. What do we do now? Bigger villain! 

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I was thinking of the big confrontation in the show Paradise, spoilers for that show. We have this weird sequence where the main character and his friends have gotten all the guns and have all the power because the villain at this point has no weapons, and so the main character should just be able to march up and take her prisoner. Like, what is she gonna do, right? Her guards have, like, little tasers. But we spend a whole episode with them being like, “Whoa, look at our clever plan for how we’re going to defeat her.” And part of this is rotating her out of being a villain. Like, she’s maybe gonna come back. Unclear, right? But we’ve sort of rotated her out of being a villain. But when you do that sort of thing, it probably should happen in a much shorter timeframe, right? You should treat them like a normal villain who looks like they’re gonna win, and then they are defeated, and there’s this brief period where we think the heroes have won, and then we reveal the new villain.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, we definitely wanna time it so it’s clear that the story is gonna continue and we don’t actually think this is the real end, so you don’t get a false ending there. But yeah, it can get really dull if we’re like, “Oh, okay, they won, so there’s no threat on the horizon.” Yeah, the thing with Sinatra in Paradise was very strange because first, okay, we find out she has a hoard of guns when no guns are supposed to be allowed in… They’re in this, like, post-apocalyptic large bunker, basically. And so then we just give the heroes all the guns, and, like, the storytelling didn’t have to do that, right? They could’ve gotten their hands on a few guns. They could’ve… But no, we’ve established that the heroes now have, like, maybe there’s a few in enemy hands, but they have the mother lode of guns. And okay, that was an unforced error, so now they’re way more powerful than the villain. And then we need the hero to do something that to me seemed very unwise, right? And his daughter is taken hostage, but at this point, if he has all the guns, I feel like he could solve that problem without giving back all the guns.

Oren: Right. I mean, for one thing, he could take the villain hostage and be like, “Okay, well, now I have you as, like, a surety that my daughter won’t be hurt, right? ‘Cause presumably you care about being alive.” And then it was even weirder because for some reason, the other good guy who was sort of his, had become his partner, she also gave in even though she has no attachment to his daughter.

Chris: Why did she give up the guns, right? Like, if your side has all the guns, you’ve won, right? That’s how this works. I- I’m thinking about this and I’m like, should they have just not had guns, or the guns were locked up the entire time, maybe we only learn about them next season? ‘Cause I’m thinking about this, I’m like, I don’t really think we actually needed guns for any of this.

Oren: ‘Cause they have this whole plan to, like, trick the villain and all of her supporters into a bunker that they then seal off, right, to imprison them, and the villain’s you know, aha moment is realizing that’s what they’re doing and then not going into the bunker. But, like, it doesn’t matter because the good guys have all the guns, so it doesn’t matter if she’s in the bunker or not. But if we hadn’t done that, if we hadn’t given the heroes all of the firepower, then the heroes could have done their plan to, you know, shunt all of the bad guys into a bunker prison and then the main bad guy could have realized it and not gone in, and then that would’ve been like, “Oh, damn, she’s not in prison. Our plan didn’t work. Now we have to try to take her out, like, personally.” And that would be different, right? That wouldn’t feel like an auto-win. 

Chris: Yeah, I mean, considering that this story, Paradise, one of its issues is that it’s supposed to be post-apocalyptic, but it never feels like it. Because their bunker is designed to look like just a normal town on the surface, and so it just– it takes away a lot of the novelty of the scenario ’cause it feels too normal. If we were to have all these modern-day people with smart devices and everything in this town, but there were no guns, and they were figuring out how to combat and fight each other without any guns present, that would be actually more interesting. 

Oren: Yeah, they’d have to work a little bit at it.

Chris: Yeah, yeah! That would’ve been a really interesting sequence, and I feel like they could have done pretty much the same thing and just… you know. But yeah, that was a weird one, ’cause we gave the good guys all the guns for some reason, completely unforced error, and then the hero just gave them all back, and it’s like, “Don’t do that!” This is the issue, again, guns are not the easiest to use in stories because they’re just too powerful. 

Oren: Yeah. Another place that I see this come up a lot is in stories where the author wants the villains to kind of start their own downfall via, like, overreach or just to demonstrate the way that villains in real life often make very silly mistakes. And that can work, but you need to bring in some real-life dynamics to that. It isn’t gonna work in a story where the heroes are operating on more or less the same plane as the villains, even if they’re a little less powerful. If this is a clash between near equals, you can’t have the villain just, like, messing up and causing their own problems. You can do it if it’s a clash between an insurgency and a giant empire, like Andor for example. It works there. A lot of the rebellion is caused by the Empire’s own overreach, but the Empire is so powerful that we have room to do that in. Whereas if this had been a traditional space war story where it was gonna be decided by Luke Skywalker fighting Vader in little fighter planes, you can’t have Vader just tripping over his cape one day. That’s just not gonna work. 

Chris: Yeah. Same goes with other things that reduce the villain’s threat a little bit, where you can get away with them if your villain is threatening enough. Like, for instance, making jokes at the villain’s expense. Usually, that is not something you wanna do, but like in Cabin in the Woods, they do it and it’s fine because these zombies are really scary. And so they have, like, threat to spare, basically. But yeah, that’s also an issue that happens in the new Star Wars movies. 

Oren: Yeah, that happens a fair amount. There’s also, like, you know, when stories that are trying to make the villain sympathetic by giving the villain problems to deal with. And like Kingpin in the original Daredevil, and by the original I mean the one on Netflix– 

Chris: –Oh man, I just don’t like him.

Oren: Yeah, he’s just bad at his job. He keeps pissing off the other criminals and getting them to fight him when he doesn’t need them to. And it feels like if you really want, you know, not to be cliche, but if you want your villain to be sympathetic in this scenario, usually you want it to be for some reason other than them just messing up their evil plan.

Chris: And acting childish and–

Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s another problem with Kingpin is that he’s, like, supposed to be clever, but he acts like a baby, and that’s… I don’t know why they made the decision to have him do that. 

Chris: And again, he’s been in enough shows now that he has to continually, like, lose. 

Oren: Yeah, that’s another weird part about Kingpin is that he, like, he showed up in several different Disney Marvel shows just to get completely rolled.

Chris: They must really like working with that actor ’cause I don’t know why they keep having him come back when he’s already just lost all of his threat. But yeah, if we had a scenario where a Kingpin was acting a bit childish, but he was just really, really powerful guy, then it might work a little better. Again, it’s hard when, like, real people who are evil act cartoonish, but if you’re really dedicated to, you know, making your story super realistic, that’s a reason to do that. But in many cases, there’s just no reason to have a villain that acts goofy and makes bad choices. 

Oren: So one thing that’s especially tricky is if you’re trying to make a villain that doesn’t make bad choices. Because to a certain extent, this is like how good are your planning skills as an author, right? Like, you know, just have them have a good evil plan. Like, all right, I don’t know how to make a good evil plan. So part of that is, I mean, you just think about it more. Like, I personally like to run the scenario through as if I had my players from my RPG campaigns in it. Like, what would they do? And I found that that works. 

Chris: Always finding solutions to problems even when you don’t want them to. 

Oren: Yeah. And if you’re really devoted, you could just run that as an RPG. Uh, you could run that scenario and see what your players do. 

Chris: Right. Or even, like, talking to a friend sometimes can be helpful, right? You can ask your friend, “What would you do in this situation?” and see if they come up with something that, you know, is interesting. 

Oren: Yeah. This is a situation where beta readers can be very helpful because it’s not really a storytelling expertise thing. It’s just making sure you didn’t miss any big implications.

Chris: And probably mentioned when we’re talking about villains making bad decisions. If you feel like your villain has to make bad decisions for your hero to win, right, that’s a sign of the reverse that your villain is too powerful, right? Whereas a very clever villain suggests your villain is not powerful enough. Like, you can have a clever villain that’s powerful enough, but if they have to be clever to win, like the White Witch has to be in order to have any chance against Aslan, right, then that’s… right? So you know, something to think about. Like, is the villain for making bad choices just to give the hero a fighting chance?

Oren: Yeah. It is possible for the villain to be too strong. Another thing that I meant to mention earlier is that if you wanna have, like, a scrappy villain who is an underdog villain even, usually that is best as like a lieutenant or something. Like, there’s a pretty classic lieutenant villain shows up, is threatening for a while, but then gets defeated by the PCs and then becomes a little scrappy underdog, like little hate goblin, and we either redeem them or they are destroyed by their own hubris and inability to grow, right? You could do something like that. But that’s probably not gonna be your main villain. 

Chris: At that point, they’re kind of our lesser lieutenant and we have a Big Bad that replaces them. Or, I mean, usually you have both. It’s your Zuko and your Fire Lord. 

Oren: Mm-hmm. All right. Well, with that, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you would like us to build a ray that we can automatically use to strengthen your villain without you doing any work, just like, you know, zap, then, uh, we will, we will work on building that, but we will need more funds, so you should consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory and Star Trek. We will talk to you next week