The Mythcreant Podcast

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

Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Intro Music]

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

 Oren: And I’m Oren.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris: More! Always more!

Oren: This is an attack on my national identity.

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

Oren: [chuckling]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Oren: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris: Oh, no.

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

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

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

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

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

[laughing]

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

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

 Oren: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Oren: How did we get here?

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

Oren: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris: More realistic.

 Oren: Kaboom!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Outro Music]

Prequels: Why? We’re honestly curious. Despite just about everyone knowing that they’re a bad idea, they keep getting made. But since we can’t know the minds of media producers, our only recourse is to spend a whole episode talking about the constraints a prequel is under. Those are often a much bigger problem than fears over readers already knowing the ending. Also: Star Trek is still a pretty awkward setting for a xenomorph plot.

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

[opening theme]

Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So Chris, I am thinking that I’m gonna write my very own Star Wars prequel. ’cause as we all know, there haven’t been any of those yet.

Chris: Mmm, yep. Never.

Oren: So I think it’s gonna be easy because all I need to do is explain a few things, like how Anakin became Vader and nobody knows, how the Jedi are a myth after just a couple decades, why Obi-Wan barely changed his name, why Yoda is hanging out in a swamp, how Vader doesn’t know about his two kids, who Owen and Baru are, how a good person like Anakin could fall for the obviously evil Dar– Oh, well actually this is hard.

Chris: Just remember you also have to explain how Han Solo got his last name. Everybody’s wondering about that.

Oren: Mm-hmm. Because that’s definitely not just his name. There’s definitely a big ceremony where an Imperial guy gave him the name Solo. [quietly] Oh my God. [normal] Okay. I don’t hate the movie Solo, but that part is just real brain dead. It’s just like, who thought this was a good idea? It feels like that was put in there to be mocked. So we’re talking about prequel constraints, and the reason why is I am reading one of the two Kyoshi tie-in novels for the Avatar franchise. And it opens with this little author’s note talking about how prequels are challenging because the audience already knows how things turn out. And the implication is that there isn’t suspense. And while I won’t discount that entirely, I actually don’t think that’s the big problem here. I don’t think it’s that so much that the audience isn’t gonna feel tension ’cause they know how things go. I think the big issue is that you need things to end a certain way and it turns out that a lot of the things that go into making a good backstory don’t make a good story story.

Chris: I also think with Kyoshi in particular, we don’t really know… I mean, if you read all of the tie-in fiction, maybe people will know more about Kyoshi. But if you’ve just watched The Last Airbender, we know very little about Kyoshi. We know that she had to succeed in defeating Chin, the conqueror, but we don’t know if she died immediately after that, for instance.

Oren: Kyoshi is far enough back in time that I actually wouldn’t say this is under too many constraints. There are a few. Just because of the way that the Avatar setting works, with Kyoshi in particular, you have to explain, and this part has just never made sense to me, why Kyoshi only tries to stop Chin when he gets to her island. That’s not avatar behavior. And that raises this question like, does the avatar just not do anything about internal problems? Is the avatar’s only job to prevent nation-on-nation conflict? So there can be this huge civil war going in the Earth kingdom and the avatar just sits it out? That’s an interesting possibility, but I really don’t think that’s what we were supposed to take away from that. So that would be kind of hard, but also a Kyoshi book doesn’t necessarily even have to get to that part of her life. We could just ignore that.

Chris: I think Darth Vader’s backstory is obviously more challenging because we have a lot of the same characters, and so we just have a lot more detailed knowledge about how this is gonna turn out. And, and that can, again, it can, we get asked a lot, does it matter if people know there’s a happy ending? Can they still feel tension? The answer is yes. But there is a variety of ways in which knowing the outcome can affect the experience. In particular, it can dispel mysteries. So like for curiosity, it matters more than something that’s really tense, for instance. But a sense of mystery can also create more tension because it can make something seem scarier. So if you lose that mystery, you can not only lose the curiosity, but lose a little tension too. There’s a variety of ways. It does, you know, affect the experience, but it’s not like we can’t get tension out of a story where we have some idea of the ending and certainly with something like Kyoshi where we only have one event we know about, right. We could still definitely create tension in that situation.

Oren: Absolutely. And what makes Vader more challenging than Kyoshi is both the fact that we know so much more about him from the movies, but also because his backstory was changed between movies so that he could be Luke’s dad. That’s not part of the plan, and it raises a lot of questions when you look back at the first movie and you’re like, wait, wait, huh? Huh? Is Owen Anakin’s brother? Because that doesn’t make any sense. And so Lucas tries to explain it with this convoluted Tatooine plot that doesn’t make any sense, and it’s challenging. I would be hard pressed to explain that connection. It’s weird, right? It’s a difficult job.

Chris: Yeah. This honestly reminds me a lot of working with a client that has a magnum opus series, where it’s their first project. And of course, because it’s the first project, it’s often very, very big and it’s epic and they’re in love with it. And it’s a whole bunch of books. And what happens in those cases where normally when you start a series or somebody more experienced or more mercenary even starts a series, they’re really focused on that first book because they don’t know if the rest is gonna happen, right? So they focus on the first book and making that book great. And then sometimes they think too late about the sequels and they don’t have anywhere to go, and the sequels aren’t very good. That’s the risk here. But they focus on making that first book good because the rest depends on it. But when you have somebody who’s brand new and the idea gets away from them and it’s super huge, a lot of times what they’re in love with is where it ends, right? So they’re in love with that last book, and what that does is it turns the first book into like a prequel with all of these constraints. Because it’s like, okay, this book, it’s your first book, so of course it needs a lot of work. Then they’re like, no, because it has to all end this scene that I’m imagining in the final book that I’m completely in love with. And if we take out that character, then that character won’t be there to perform their role. And if we don’t have this event, then this won’t happen. And so it’ll ruin this scene in the last climactic volume

Oren: They end up putting the first book, possibly the first several books, in the role of building a story that will be fun once we get to the final installment.

Chris: Right. It’s like they get last priority when really the first book is by far the most important. If people don’t like the first book, they’re not gonna keep reading. That one absolutely has to be a success. The rest depends on it. So that’s the most important book. But when you’re thinking of the big story and you’re like, oh, well of course the climax is the most important, and that happens in the last book… This can happen if, again, too early in the process, especially before people know much about plotting and cohesiveness, they get really in love with that climactic volume. It can create a very similar problem where we’re only willing to change the first book where it doesn’t change that imagined last book.

Oren: Yeah, that is rough. I’d say that’s actually the most likely scenario that most people who go to Mythcreants are gonna run into this problem at, because the prequel problem tends to come up most often in Hollywood. Because I guess someone thinks that prequels are an easy way to make money on a setting without taking risks, and I don’t know why they think that. I have never been able to figure that out. Like, why is a prequel considered lower risk than a sequel? I don’t know, but they seem to think it is. So that’s strange. But most of us aren’t writing big franchises where this is a thing. So I’d say the magnum opus stage is very common. It happens to lots of us. But even for a novelist, you could still end up in a situation where you know you have the setting you really like, and now you want to tell a story earlier in the timeline. You wanna tell a story in the same setting and you know it’s not really gonna work to set one after your current story because your current story ends with your protagonists defeating the source of all evil. And so now there’s no conflict up left in the world or whatever. So you’re like, oh, that’s fine, I’ll just set it up a couple generations earlier. You think it’ll be easy and oh, now there are different problems for you to deal with

Chris: For one thing, sometimes you’re still facing the evil, but now it’s hopeless.

Oren: We can’t beat the evil because it still needs to be around in the later books. That was one of the big problems with the big courtroom episode of Strange New Worlds because they’re having a big courtroom episode over a legal problem that they can’t actually defeat, because it still needs to be there for Deep Space Nine. So if they actually did a bunch of stuff to try to defeat it, that would end up seeming pointless and frustrating because they would still end up losing. So instead they just don’t, really, and they spend the whole episode kind of giving speeches. It’s very strange. It’s a very strange episode.

Chris: One thing that comes to mind is the Dark Crystal TV show. Because in the Dark Crystal movie, there are only two Gelflings left. They were genocided. Now the show takes place where there’s still like Gelfling civilizations around. It’s like, oh, oh, this is not gonna go well. Are we sure we wanna watch this?

Oren: No, and that one’s perfect too, because it’s a prequel where they suddenly have to explain a thing that if you think about it for five seconds, is impossible to explain, which is, how on Earth did these nine Skeksis kill all the Gelflings. How did they do that? And the answer is offscreen. Don’t worry about it. There’s a part where, because the Gelflings, there are a bunch of them and they are the royal guards that the Skeksis have guarding their palace. So they have all the weapons and the combat training and then the Skeksis decide to kill them all. And we cut to later after they have killed them all.

Chris: Didn’t we see they were just starting to build the Garthim at the end of the first season. But they had to have some sort of force that was offscreen in order to be… How are they the rulers of the world? We’re not really sure.

Oren: And we also know that by the time of the Dark Crystal, yeah, they have some minions, but not a lot.

Chris: It really feels like in the movie that they’re in decline. They’re the evil overlords, but they’re the evil overlords in decline. I don’t know. I expected them to be a lot stronger in the show, but yeah, no, they’re exactly the same except for without their most powerful minions. So that was strange.

Oren: Which I think is another prequel constraint, which is that, especially if you’re using the same characters that audiences like those characters for who they were in the original story, that’s what they wanna see. They may not want to see the prequel version of these stories. Now with the Skeksis, I think it probably would’ve worked fine to have them be way more badass and powerful. But I can see why the people making the show we’re like, well no, we gotta make them like they are in the movie. Because that’s the thing everyone likes. Solo is another really funny example of that. Han Solo’s arc in New Hope is to overcome being a selfish jerk who only cares about himself, which is a tall order to make audiences like a character like that as the main character for a whole movie, which is what he would logically be in his solo backstory. There are probably ways you could have made that work. The most obvious is you could have had him fighting even worse people than him, and instead they decided to have him fight rebels for some reason.

Chris: I think we could have had him like working directly for the Empire and then breaking free of them is his arc. So then he’s no longer part of the Empire and that’s good, but he hasn’t learned to fight for the forces of good yet. Now he’s just in it for himself.

Oren: There are ways to do it. But you have to overcome these inherent problems. You have to be way more creative and be able to solve them. There are a bunch of new problems that you have, that you wouldn’t have if you were just telling a new story.

Chris: Yeah, for sure. And again, working with a character that already has that flaw that they have in their character arc can just be tough. Another one that I find really funny is when we have these franchises and they’re doing a prequel and they wanna include a team of two or more of the same characters that people love, but those characters met each other for the first time in what would become the sequel work. So it’s like, okay, what happened then iff they’re meeting for the first time. Do they get amnesia after this? Do we do…? And of course there’s the Discovery solution, which is hilarious.

Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it.

Chris: We’re like, okay, everything, all the adventures we’ve gone through together are gonna become top secret for some reason. And you never, never speak of this again. Like, okay.

Oren: And that one’s weird because, unlike most Star Trek series, the original series doesn’t start with the characters all meeting each other. They have in fact known each other for a while by that point, and their backstory is very vague. So in this case, there’s room for young Kirk to be hanging out with young Scotty. Now in Strange New Worlds it does start to strain credulity that so many of the future Enterprise characters are showing up on Pike’s Enterprise, and that was clearly something that they were doing in a now probably doomed attempt to get another show made. Which is a little sad. But you know, the Discovery thing where it’s like, yeah, actually Spock’s sister was super famous and like everybody knew about her.

Chris: But we’d never speak of her.

Oren: Yeah, we don’t talk about her because at the end of season two, everyone pinky promised not to. Like, guys, why is this a prequel? Why are you doing this to yourselves?

Chris: It reminds me of the Obi-wan midquel show, where it’s like, oh, apparently Obi-wan and Leia like had a lot more experience together than he had with Luke. Which is…

Oren:  The idea that Obi-wan and Leia had this whole adventure when she was a kid is just, it’s wild to rewatch New Hope with that idea in your head.That’s so obviously not what happened.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it is hard, often, to get them to line up perfectly, though. We made the mistake, after watching Andor, of watching Rogue One.

Oren: Yeah. [cackles]

Chris: You know, when I had not watched Rogue One again right after watching Andor they appeared to line up, but then when we watched Rogue One again we were reminded of things that do not seem to be true at all. Like, Andor’s statement that he’s been in this fight since he was six years old. It’s like, what are you talking about? No, you haven’t.

Oren: My favorite is that in Andor, K2SO is invincible. A choice I didn’t understand even in the show, but it certainly doesn’t line up with what he is in, in Rogue One, where he’s powerful, but he can still get shot and it still hurts him. But in Andor, blaster bolts just bounce off of him. Don’t even worry about it.

Chris: Such a strange choice. Don’t you want some tension? What are you doing?

Oren: I mean, in that case, okay, your prequel can sometimes be good enough that this doesn’t matter. Andor is so beloved that nobody is going and looking them up and seeing how much they don’t match. And the Obiwan midquel is, I think about as good as it reasonably could have been under the circumstances, but it’s still a lot harder.

Chris: Yeah. Obi-wan midquel was surprisingly good. Not perfect, but again, for what it was. I mean, we had a whole episode talking about constraints, and the fact that when you have lots of constraints that make your job harder, you could just expect the whole story quality to be worse as a result, because the storyteller had less options. So in many cases, they weren’t able to choose the best option. And they had to work a lot harder to figure out how things would fit together and all those other things.That’s why sequels and prequels are rarely as good as a first installment.

Oren: And we’ve been talking a lot about plot and character constraints, which are important, but there are also just setting constraints and these can get you, even if you do the clever thing and set your story so far in the past that none of the characters or plot points are super important. They’re not likely to interfere with each other because chances are that your world has changed over time and the way that people liked it, is it the way that it was in the main story, and was it like that in the backstory? Eh…

Chris: Well, what if I revealed that the big bad that the heroes defeated in the setting wasn’t the real big bad, it was just a minion for the big bad. And then I could just do it again.

Oren: Yeah, that could probably work. But I’m thinking about stuff like, okay, if you look at Avatar again, we like things like metal bending, we think metal bending’s cool. We like women being allowed to bend. Those are things we like. But if you go back in time, there’s no metal bending and the north pole is hella sexist because Katara hasn’t given her speech yet. I ran an an Avatar RPG one time, and. I really struggled with the fact that one of the Earth bender’s core abilities it gets is metal bending and that doesn’t exist yet. So I had to figure out how to house rule that real quick.

Chris: Yeah, so we’ve decided this is classified, so every time you metal bend –

Oren: You have to sign a waiver. Sign an NDA. I never really cared for the Northern Water tribe being sexist because I don’t find Katara’s defeat of northern sexism to be convincing anyway. So I just retcon that. But if you’re someone who cares about continuity more than me, then you’re gonna have a problem there. And it’s hard to deal with that.

Chris: Imagine if you did a story about childhood Katara and Sokka and you’re like, oh, well I guess I have to make Sokka sexist now because he is sexist in the first four episodes of The Last Airbender.

Oren: Which would be wild if you think about it, because nobody else in Sokka’s life is sexist. So if you did a prequel with sexist child Sokka, you’d have to be like, where is he getting that from? 

Chris: Who taught him to be sexist? This is awfully strange.

Oren: Is he, like, sneaking off to like watch Avatar YouTube? He is like watching an avatar manosphere guy, what is happening here? That whole thing is weird. The one that I find the funniest is in the Rings of Power, how devoted they are to the fact that orcs in the backstory of middle earth cannot travel by daylight. It’s so silly. If your enemy can’t travel by daylight, you have basically auto defeated them. There is no way you can lose a war against an enemy that can’t move around during the day. Unless you have, like, one guy and they have a million guys, but like Rings of Power commits to that bit, at least until season two, where it was too much trouble. But for the first season, the orcs are going around digging their tunnel and moving their whole army underneath big canopies to keep the sunlight out.

Chris: We’re just gonna pretend that tunneling is much easier than it is.

Oren: Right. They are just really into this concept and it’s wild. It’s such a bad thing to introduce that before now your enemy couldn’t do basic stuff like move around during the day. 

Chris: It reminds me of Lockwood and Co, where the main characters do hauntings and how every ghost story, it’s like, okay, but we wanna fight the ghosts at night. It’s like, how does it end up being dark every time they go to face a ghost  or go to the haunted house? How does it get dark so quickly?

Oren: Prequels are also, this can happen with sequels too, but prequels are a good way to discover that your setting only really has one type of story in it. You see that in the Alien movies. For example, you know the first alien movie is, hey, what if there was a monster and it was spooky. And then the second one is, what if there were a bunch of monsters and we sacrificed some spookiness to have more action? Those are basically the two plots you can have in the Alien universe. And every new Alien movie just confirms that those are the only two Alien plots, and they start to try to do prequels and you got Prometheus, which is just a bad movie and barely an Alien movie. And granted, if it had been good, maybe no one would’ve cared that it was barely an Alien movie. But I think people go to see Alien movies because they wanna see the aliens, right? They wanna see the Xenomorphs. I think that’s a reasonable expectation to have. And so going to like, oh, it’s actually about the engineers, and there’re weird biblical connections. Even if that wasn’t garbage, I think people would probably have been not happy that their expectations were not met.

Chris: But Oren, the Strange New Worlds alien episode was so good. All of them. All of them. 

Oren: That’s a different problem. 

Chris: Look, it’s just alien eggs. They just defeat all of their medical devices in Star Trek. They just don’t work. Yeah, no. They also break the laws of conservation of mass. 

Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it. They’re just immune to technology. It’s fine.

Chris: They’re immune to technology. They somehow accumulate matter without consuming enough matter and yeah, it’s fine.

Oren: That’s an example of taking a story that worked well in one universe and it not working well in another universe, because the characters in Aliens are either space truckers or Marine Corps soldiers. And so they’re either fighting one alien and having a lot of trouble with it, or they’re fighting a bunch of aliens with all their tech. And for some reason in the Star Trek episode, they were like, what if we gave our characters all the tech and had them fight one alien? And I was like, well, that’s not gonna work. And it didn’t. The Hobbit is also an interesting one ’cause technically the Hobbit is not a prequel. Technically the Hobbit comes out first, but is easily overshadowed by the Lord of the Rings. So when you’re trying to adapt the Hobbit, this seems to create a weird Catch-22 where the Hobbit is absolutely not the Lord of the Rings. And if you try to turn it into the Lord of Rings, you get the Hobbit movies and they’re not very good.

Chris: Yep. It’s true. It’s a story that really demands a very different tone.

Oren: Right. And you know, maybe that’s the thing. Maybe audiences would accept something that’s much more like The Hobbit, but at the same time, I don’t know. I feel like maybe they want Lord of the Rings again. So who knows? I don’t know what would happen if they actually released a Hobbit movie that was appropriately made for what The Hobbit is as a story.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, the thing about Lord of the Rings is it has a way to get rid of Gandalf, which is honestly really important because Gandalf is OP. And if you look at the Hobbit, the issue with making it into a super tense story is the fact that Gandalf is supposed to be with them the whole time, but he’s not. And what happens is you can see that they don’t know how to create danger for any of the protagonists. Well, Gandalf is there, so he just periodically takes off somewhere just so that the characters can get in trouble and then Gandalf shows up and saves them again. And that just happens repeatedly and it would be a little easier to accept if it was presented as a lighter story. But when we make it really epic, then it really calls attention to the fact that Gandalf can just take care of everything.

Oren: Another one that comes up a lot with prequels is that the arc that you want your character to have is often the one that they go through in the original story because that’s the thing they’re known for. And so with Solo, we saw already that they just decided he was a nice guy from the beginning. Don’t worry about it. But in Strange New Worlds, they have the same problem where they’re like, hey, Spock’s one of our characters. What should we do with Spock? Well, obviously we’re going to have him learn about his human side and explore his emotions, all right. But that’s what he does in the original show, and this technically takes place before then. So I guess he already knew all that stuff.

Chris: I mean, I’m guessing a big part of Spark’s appeal is the fact that he learns about emotions, right?

Oren: Like, what else would you do with that character?

Chris: Right? You can’t really not do it with him. It would be like a Data who doesn’t wanna be human.

Oren: And then it gets even weirder when they bring T’pring in where like they want T’pring to be a character, and in the original series T’pring and Spock, do not know each other when they first meet up for their arranged marriage. That’s an important part of the plot. They have no backstory and it’s a little weird. I can enjoy it. I don’t necessarily immediately rage quit the show when the continuity breaks.

Chris: Again, clearly this is classified and so they have to pretend that they don’t know each other.

Oren: Yeah, they just pretended that they didn’t have this whole relationship bonding experience.

Chris: Exactly. Exactly.

Oren: So the whole thing is weird and awkward and I think the Strange New Worlds writers are doing the best they can under those circumstances, because they’ve got Spock and they have to do something with him. And the thing Spock does is explore his human half. That’s everything we know about Spock. But it didn’t have to be a prequel there. There’s no overriding reason it has to keep being prequels. They just keep doing this to themselves. Well, not anymore because Paramount has decided we don’t get any more Star Trek. But you know, who knows what that’ll look like in the next 10 years when they finally decide to do Star Trek again.

Chris: Prequels are such a funny thing. I guess it really depends on are you trying to make this another installment in the series, and how close are you trying to link it with the rest? Right? Because I think the Kyoshi model is just a better way to go, where you’re just using your setting, mining your setting for nuggets that people are interested in and it doesn’t have the same main character that people are attached to, for instance.

Oren: Yeah. The one that’s weirding me out as we’re almost outta time here, is that there’s some Lord of the Rings midquels in the works. 

Chris: Yeah. They’re doing the barrow wights, I think that they’re called. So there are two projects.

Oren: There’s The Hunt for Gollum. Which I think is what it says, right? That’s the one that’s actually had casting 

Chris: That takes place between the Habbit and Lord of the Rings. I don’t know what they’re gonna do with that because it can’t be anything that matters.

Oren: Yeah. So that one’s weird. Then there’s this one that is much further out and it might not ever happen, which is the one that Stephen Colbert is talking about doing, and I love Stephen Colbert, but when he starts talking about how they’re gonna do a movie using the parts of Lord of the Rings that were not adapted originally. It’s like, what are you… what? Steven, what are you talking about?

Chris: [sing-song] Tom Bombadil. It’s Tom Bombadil.

Oren: Is that just the whole movie? Tom Bombadil?

Chris: Okay. The sequence that I think that they did not include is they did not include the part where they go to this other town full of hobbits, and then they leave through this creepy forest that tries to trap them, and then they almost get eaten by this angry big willow tree. And then Tom Bombadil comes and saves them and then they hang out with him for a while and meet his wife and then they, I think they, no– this must happen later. Because this is when they’re with Aragon, right? The barrow wights part, or does that happen after they leave Tom Bombadil?

Oren: No, the barrow wights are right before Tom Bombadil. Oh, okay. Aragorn is not with them at the moment. 

Chris: Okay. So then there’s also the barrow wights stuff, which is genuinely creepy. That could make for a good sequence. 

Oren: Yeah, but probably not a movie, right?

Chris: I would not think so. No, not normally. Especially not if, again, as far as I know, the Tolkien estate really cares about canon.

Oren: Okay. So here, let me read you the brief description that was given in this article. “Set 14 years after the passing of Frodo, the film will follow Sam, Mary, and Pippin as they set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Eleanor, discovers a long buried secret that explains why the war of the ring was nearly lost before it even began.” [with feeling] What? 

Chris: Yeah, it reminds me of how when somebody’s trying to adapt a classic book that doesn’t really have a through line and just wanders all over the place. They have to do a more memoir style arrangement where you create structure by flashing back and forward through time, because you can’t get your events to follow an actual throughline. So you create a framing device to try to give it a sense of unity and cohesiveness and this, “their future selves looking back,” you know, that’s what that says to me. That it’s kind of a mess. So they’re using these kind of heavy handed framing devices to try to make it feel like a cohesive whole.

Oren: I could only imagine this future framing device, and then the thing they discover is that Tom Bombadil happened. It’s like, that’s the secret. Oh, okay. Alright. Look, Stephen Colbert’s had a rough time. If this is what brings him joy after being silenced for his political criticism, I guess, who am I to judge? You know, if Mythcreants gets shut down by the fascists in power, I will make my own completely Ill-advised Lord of the Rings project. You’re allowed one when that happens.

Chris: Alright. To help keep the fascists from shutting us down, 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 is Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

Reading is an activity that takes effort, usually more effort than watching or listening to something. This is why it’s harder for you to get feedback on your novel than it is for your artist friend to show a bunch of people their cool new drawing. But authors can make choices that affect how difficult their work is to read, and that’s our topic this week. We’ll talk about how to construct paragraphs, when details aren’t enough, and why random strings of characters and numbers are hard to remember. Isn’t that right, U-3125?

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]

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Now, Oren, I was thinking: I’m just very proud of this new conlang that I created, which may or may not be mangled French, and I’ve decided I’m just going to write the whole story in my conlang. What do you think?

Oren: Well, it’s a little unoriginal. They already speak a mangled version of the Quebec language in some European country called France. So I wouldn’t… I don’t know, man, I wouldn’t do that.

Chris: But see how authentic it will feel. It will be like an authentic, real-world document.

Oren: Well, if you say it’s a real document, then all criticism goes out the window. Sometimes people write real documents badly, so it just makes sense.

Chris: Yeah, sure! So yeah, this time we’re talking about making narration easy to read. Conlang is not the primary reason why manuscripts are difficult to read. It is a problem with conlangs in general.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, conlangs are a reason that a manuscript can be difficult to read. They’re far from the most common, although they are one of the most noticeable.

Chris: Yes.

Oren: If a conlang is making the narration hard to read, you will be able to tell. This is just a big old flare over all of these fake words that the author is making up and that you’re desperately trying to understand.

Chris: Yeah. Whereas otherwise, I think a lot of times writers don’t know that their work is hard to read. So first of all, what exactly do I mean here? I mean, it should be obvious, it’s hard to read, but basically, if people have to stop and think to understand what is happening in the story. So it just becomes a huge mental effort and it is quickly exhausting and just burns the reader out, just because of the effort that it takes. We’ve seen manuscripts where this happens every paragraph, or even during most sentences. When it gets bad, you will have trouble just getting feedback, because people look at it and it takes them work to read, it takes them a lot of work to read, and especially if you’re used to really nice people who just don’t want to give critical feedback, ’cause some people are really timid about that, they might have a hard time telling you, you don’t see the problems, so you’re expecting people will just read through and comment on the story itself. It may be hard to tell you that, “Well, I haven’t been able to actually look at the story because the prose itself is just hard to absorb.”

Oren: Assuming that anyone listens to this episode beyond our main group of hardcore fans, I’m sure that there is someone out there who is thinking that they want people to stop and think about what happened, to try to figure it out.

Chris: Somebody who’s outside of our normal listeners.

Oren: Yeah, you know, someone who doesn’t quite share our philosophy on that, and, like, I would say for that, okay, that’s your prerogative, but like, let’s be aware of it, right? Let’s at least know what’s happening so that you can go into that with your eyes open and not do it by accident.

Chris: It’s enough mental effort that people will exhaust their brains, like burn out, trying to read it. So if you want people to sit down and relax and focus on a chapter, they may not get through a chapter, right? if it’s too much work. It’s just like lifting weights: if you make it too hard and people feel tired after one page, it’s just going to be hard for them to read your book. So it has a bunch of different causes. It’s not one thing, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer. To be clear, basic writing skills can be a cause. Basic writing skills is in grammar, spelling, you know, those things that we are all taught in grade school, but we’re probably not perfect at, even as professional writers. Paragraph breaks can be a big one that makes a surprisingly large difference. If your kind of grammar and spelling tends to be a little rough, right? obviously that can create this problem, but you could also have perfectly polished writing skills in other contexts and still have this problem in your fiction.

Oren: Yeah, I occasionally have clients who… their emails are perfectly legible and I can totally read them, and then, when I open the manuscript it’s like, “Oof, this is hard.” The sentences are just put together in odd ways that it’s hard for me to explain what exactly the problem is.

Chris: Besides just, you know, those basics, other common causes of narration that’s difficult to read is the fact that you don’t know what you know. Storytellers tend to overlook the basic information that they have and they kind of take for granted, but that readers need. Basic things like, “Okay, where is the character now? How much time has passed?” And a big one that I see a lot, that is kind of abstract, so it’s a little hard to explain, is: “What does this thing you’re talking about now in this sentence have to do with the last sentence?”

Oren: The sentences end up feeling kind of disconnected.

Chris: Right. That connective tissue, the flow of ideas and how they relate to each other and build on each other, that can get lost really easily and it’s just very disorienting, and then readers have a bunch of little ideas and don’t know how to place them together. And if they can’t place them together, they also can’t really remember them very easily.

Oren: That was the problem with The Marvellers, which was a magic school story that I read a little while back, that I bought a copy for you to take your own look at.

Chris: Yeah, The Marvellers is a fascinating case. It really is.

Oren: Because it had a lot of really neat details about what the environment looked like, and other kind of sensory notes, but I couldn’t for the life of me put any of them together, right? Like, I couldn’t tell how they related. It just became like a blur. It was like watching a collage on fastforward.

Chris: Yeah. So if anybody wants to see a published example, usually manuscripts that are this hard to read do not get published. Usually they just get filtered out. We see it in manuscripts and student work. We don’t usually see it in published works, but in this case, The Marvellers by Dhonielle Clayton, the prose is so lovely and has so many beautiful details that I think that whoever published it was like, “Okay, well, it’s hard to read, but it’s also so lovely.” So it made it out. I think that probably the book would’ve done better if it had been clarified a little bit, and that’s a pity because it is really lovely, but you can look at that as an example, and it’ll have some of the different things that we’re talking about that make manuscripts hard to read. Again, the relationships between things in The Marvellers… for instance, there’s a thing that happened in the beginning where they have this envelope of coupons, and the coupons are really fun because they’re like magical and they’re like auctioning against each other in real time, and that’s very fun. But it’s a little startling. You have to, like, “Wait, where did these coupons come from?” Because the envelope that they came in was mentioned like a while ago, and that connection between “Oh, these coupons came from the envelope” was only maybe weakly hinted at. Again, the big picture when it comes to your description: a really easy way to make sure your description is clear is to first describe the broad strokes or the big picture of the scene, and then add fun details to it. But in The Marvellers, that big picture description is often just missing. So when an airship shows up, I had to kind of guess it was an airship because Clayton describes all of the pieces of their ship, and again, her description is very, very lovely, but doesn’t describe the whole airship or tell us that it’s an airship. So you have to, like, “Okay, what could this be?” It’s like having a box full of beautiful puzzle pieces, but every page you’re trying to figure out how those pieces fit together.

Oren: Or like seeing an animal, but only seeing it at like 500x zoom and trying to figure out what it is. It’s like, “Okay, this is a neat thing. I’m seeing the fur follicles and everything,” but I don’t know it’s a cat because I’m never given an image that is recognizable as a cat.

Chris: It’s like, “Okay, so it has pointy ears over here, and over here I’m seeing some brown fur. I think it has sharp teeth,” right? And then eventually you have to piece together what the animal is.

Oren: I’m, like, inventing a cat from first principles here.

Chris: So that basic information, one thing that, again, I can see a lot is just being overly ambitious with your prose style. Which I sympathize, I have been guilty of this myself. So if you use a lot of fancy words, fancy metaphors, and are just trying really hard to impress, sometimes that actually makes… they’re very hard to read. It’s like too forced, and you just kind of ease back and be a little more laid back about it. I typically see this especially at the beginnings. The beginnings are very tricky, and we turn to work very hard in our stories’ opening, and so I’ve definitely noticed this is a problem when I see that the opening of the story is hard to read, but then it clears up. There’s other books where they have really beautiful style at the opening that kind of goes away, as the writer is not trying as hard, but if the beginning is harder to read than the middle, then that’s a big sign that it’s just being a little overly ambitious.

Oren: Yeah. One problem that I encounter quite a lot among my clients who are writing mystery stories is missing context. Like, they will introduce a new twist. It’ll be like, “Here, we’ve discovered that Mr. Paddington was at this location,” and the characters will go like, “Whoa!” I’m like, “Okay, okay, that’s cool. But can you remind me why that location was important?” I do a Control+F, and that location hasn’t been mentioned for like 50 pages, and I don’t remember why that location was so critical, because it was kind of a background thing. So remind me: Why does it matter that Mr. Paddington was there? You know, that sort of thing.

Chris: I mean, that’s a whole kind of information management issue. Obviously, information management is a complex art in itself, and you get better as you practice.

Oren: That’s why you have a whole series on it.

Chris: Yeah, but I mean, related to that, just keeping on too much complexity is also a common one, right?

So you know, this is the principle of cognitive burden. Ideas aren’t actually free, ’cause the reader has to spend their brainpower comprehending them, and they have limited space in their working memory to hold onto ideas. If your readers are mixing up names or titles, or can’t remember some things that were previously introduced, that’s a big sign that you might have too much complexity. Maybe you just need to remind them, but mixing up names often means there’s a lot of characters and a lot of names being thrown around, more than they can keep track of. Spatial information is a big one that is very hard to communicate. Don’t try to communicate a visual. I see a lot of writers that are like, “Hey, I have this beautiful picture or this beautiful drawing. Now how do I communicate that in words?” It’s like, “Nope, nope, you can’t, can’t do it.”

Oren: Pictures are way too information-dense to get the whole thing across with words. That’s just not going to happen.

Chris: You can only create vague impressions or, you know, important points. Again, getting back to the conlang, things that are unfamiliar add a lot of complexity and a lot of brainpower figuring out what they are. So if you have a lot of strained world things, throwing in or conlang terms…

Oren: Using multiple terms for the same thing is always a tricky one. And that one’s tough, because you want your world to feel real. And in the real world, we usually have multiple terms for the same thing. Like, we don’t always call it a car. We would also call it a sedan or a ride or a taxi. You know, we would call it lots of different things, but the more of those you introduce to things that the reader isn’t familiar with, the harder it is for them to keep up. Like, I always remember The Blade Itself had the Shanka and the Flathead, and I took me forever to figure out those were the same thing. Just because it gives no indication that those are the same thing. It just uses the terms interchangeably. And so I eventually decided they must be the same thing, ’cause otherwise there would be two things that Logan was fighting and he only seemed to be fighting one.

Chris: It also felt like Abercrombie was not going to any effort to tell readers what they needed to know in that opening.

Oren: Right. I mean, that opening had serious, like, not quite White Room Syndrome, because he did sort of describe the area, but like, who Logan was, there was no context for that. And the fact that his name was Logan, which sounds kind of modern. As I was reading it, I was like, “Is this a sci-fi story?” Like, “Is this guy like a sci-fi pilot who crashed on a fantasy planet?” No, that’s not what it is. I was just wondering, because there’s no context for who he is in that opening, nor is there any description of what the creature he’s fighting looks like. I just get the impression that he’s fighting like a white void in front of him.

Chris: Yeah. Another thing is just, again, when it comes back to the style of your sentences, it can really matter. So sometimes we do want to tighten and make our words efficient, but sometimes tightening too much can, again, get rid of important information or keep us from stepping through what’s happening a little bit more carefully and building those connections between ideas and taking one thing at a time. And so you get something that feels kind of disorienting and a little jumbled just because you’ve tightened so much that you’re kind of missing transitions and things that you need. And then the other thing that I really want to cover, and I have an example, is sentences that are doing too much, ’cause I see this a lot, and I think it’s really hard for people to recognize themselves. This is when we have sentences that are just too idea-dense, right? They’re introducing too many new things in a very kind of long clause. And it’s not that you can’t have long sentences, I’ll talk more about that, but long sentences have to be constructed in a particular way to keep from being kind of confusing and disorienting. So here’s an example of a sentence that is doing too much: “Sylvia’s attempts to get out of the way of a family heading out of the grocery exit were immediately halted when a cart bumped her from behind and sent her hurdling into a display of apples that were on sale.”

Oren: Oh, okay. Yeah, something was happening there, for sure.

Chris: But I see sentences like this all the time. Here’s a notable thing. Again, when you have a long sentence, they can work if each piece of the sentence builds on the last one in order, so that the reader can kind of understand as they go and they don’t have to hold on to the beginning of the sentence, and this sentence, just what we have here, “Sylvia’s attempts were halted,” that’s kind of like the base main clause of the sentence, but it’s broken into pieces. So what it actually says is, “Sylvia’s attempts to get out of the way of a family heading out of the grocery store exit were immediately halted,” right? So, to understand that “were immediately halted,” you have to go back to the beginning of the sentence, where it says, “Sylvia’s attempts to get out of the way.” And that jumping back and forth makes it impossible to assemble the whole picture ahead. You have to like hold on to the very beginning as you absorb more and more words and hold them in your working memory. That’s what makes it so hard to deal with: it requires holding the beginning in your mind and the end, and then, like, putting them together. The other thing is that it has a lot of elements that I did not previously introduce before I read the sentence. So we don’t know where Sylvia is. She’s trying to get out of the way, and then I introduce a family. Oh, there’s a family here. And by the way, they’re heading out of a grocery exit, so there’s a grocery exit here, and then she’s halted because there’s a cart. Like, okay, there’s a cart in the scene now. And then she’s sent hurdling into, oh, there’s a display of apples, right? So the sentence is introducing so many elements that, if we didn’t previously knew they were there or suspect them being there, that would just be like, “Oh, that’s a lot of new things that I didn’t know were present.” If we were to fix this, we would just, again, split this up and take the situation one step at a time with shorter sentences. Because when you end a sentence, the reader knows, “Okay, that’s a complete thought. I can kinda let go of that and move on. I don’t have to keep holding it.” So first, Sylvia sees she’s standing in the way of this family and the family wants to leave. Oh, she starts stepping back out of the way. Step two. Oops: a cart is bumping her from behind, and oh, she loses her balance, and then she tumbles into a display of apples.

Oren: Who among us, you know?

Chris: Right. We’re taking it one step at a time. We don’t have to, like, go back and forth and take a piece of one clause and add it to a piece of another clause and put it together. So again, that’s the kind of sentence that I very frequently see in manuscripts that gets people in trouble.

Oren: One thing that occurred to me as we’ve been talking, that makes the manuscript harder to read, is long strings of characters and numerals that aren’t words. Like I’m looking at you, There is no Anti-Memetics Division.

Chris: Oh man, that was so tough, because I really was enjoying… well, I enjoyed the first half of that book. I didn’t enjoy the second half so much. But there’s so many creepy antagonists, but I can’t tell which is which, ’cause they all have numbers and I can’t remember. And so I’m like, “Okay, are these the same big bad, or is there two different big bads?” And I did not know.

Oren: I remember Sunshine, which is the name that one of these critters has. I will remember that until the day I die.

Chris: Like, he names two of the Unknowns, as they’re called, and those I remember no problem, because he gave them a name.

Oren: Which is not to say that there couldn’t be too many names, right? It’s not to say that names are easy mode, but they are certainly easier than “U543-Alpha-Charlie.” Who is that? What? Which one is that? And honestly, “Alpha-Charlie” makes it a little too easy to remember, ’cause those are words.

Chris: And going back to the conlang issue, like, Sunshine is so easy to remember because it’s a real word and it’s associated with something about that entity, because it looks like a light in the corner of your vision.

That’s why it’s called Sunshine. That makes that name Sunshine incredibly easy to remember. I’m not saying don’t use a conlang to name things, because that, depending on how things are done, could add a lot to your story, and using descriptive names for everything is not for every book, but like, if it’s sounds that people don’t associate with a word, that is just one step harder to remember, so that is going to just add more overhead.

Oren: I have found that you usually want a mix of descriptive names and names that are, you know, just kind of a collection of sounds. Just because in real life there are places with descriptive names, but if you name everything a descriptive name, your world starts to feel kind of cartoonish.

Chris: Well, I’m doing it.

Oren: Yeah? Well, then maybe that’ll be fine, then.

Chris: You can tell me if my world feels cartoonish.

Oren: It just, you know, seems a little odd, but I guess we’ll see.

Chris: In any case we could, uh, give some tips. How do we fix this problem? So: obviously, using simple words… obviously we want our fancy words, that’s a hard one, but if you’ve been trying really hard to use very unique words, you could just take it down a notch and just use unique words sometimes.

Oren: I have found that, again, it’s a question of, depending on how intense a story this is meant to be, you don’t want to only ever use really common words, right? Adding uncommon words helps; it makes the story more evocative. Those words are useful. But using a bunch of them altogether is going to create a lot of burden. And you should ask yourself: Do you really need them? Is that really creating the effect you want?

Chris: And then, as we talk about short, complete sentences, and I have to emphasize the complete part, because another thing that I see is fragments, fragments can absolutely work, but again, they’re one thing that a lot of times what I see is, like, a noun clause in its own sentence and it’s alluding to something, but it’s often not clear what, so those connections that are missing, that are a big deal. A lot of times, fragments kind of create those missing connections. So just completing your sentences instead of using fragments can help. Frequent paragraph breaks. Things certainly appear easier to read if they have more paragraph breaks. And also, paragraph breaks are a great way to signal when there’s something important that people shouldn’t miss, right? And that can really help, but later, because if things are really complex and they’re already putting on a lot of work to understand, they are especially likely to miss important points you’re making, and then that can create more disorientation later when they don’t remember important points, okay? So adding paragraph breaks so that you are marking when there’s something important, right? isolating it in its own paragraph or putting at the beginning of the paragraph or something like that can kind of help those things be noticed. Also just, you know, a paragraph break when the focus changes to something new is a good idea. It helps people follow the narration.

Oren: I’ve found that in this case there’s also the importance of varying the length of your sentences and paragraphs. Like, if they’re all the same length, that creates its own problems. It’s a little hard to describe. It becomes fatiguing to read if they’re all the same length. It just feels weird, and then it’s harder to focus.

Chris: Yeah, it’s kind of monotonous. If the sentences are short, I would call it like a choppy rhythm, where it’s like constantly bah-bum, bah-bum, bah-bum, right? Where if it’s long, it’s a little too circuitous, and it also, again, it gets a little repetitive. So again, building slowly on previous sentences, doing things one at a time, make sure you’re explaining how something relates to something previously, spreading out the introduction of new words and the number of unfamiliar things in a small space, and then carefully transitioning time and space. That sounds very broad and vague, “Time and space!”

Oren: Whoo!

Chris: This is a big thing I see a lot. So this is, again, at the sentence and paragraph level, it’s as simple as: Okay, time. Put things that happened earlier first. Because there is sometimes a way that you can, again, arrange your sentences in paragraphs so that things are in a jumbled time order. But if you put things in a very neat order of cause before effect, that does help.

Oren: Usually you don’t want something like, “Abe lunged forward to grab Anne. Before that happened. Anne leapt out of the way.” It is like, “Okay, wait, hang on. Anne leapt out of the way before the thing you just described happened?” Uh, what?

Chris: Or, “He lunged forward after he…” comma after he would be another way that that’s done.

Oren: Right. Because remember that we are reading text in linear form. We are only reading it in one direction.

Chris: We are limited beings that are restricted to linear time.

Oren: Yeah. So, like, when you start adding things that it’s like, “Well, and before that thing you just read happened,” I went, “Okay, now I got to reorder my image of the scene.” Like I’m playing Jenga. And that’s dangerous. You know, the whole thing could come crashing down.

Chris: And then, transitioning space. So if you’re describing a scene, you generally want to start: Go from top to bottom, or bottom to top, or left to right, but not like back and forth, right? So you don’t want to describe something that’s down on the ground and then describe the sky and then something on the ground again. You want to make it a little smoother, and, you know, zoom out or zoom in, or just… again, like you’re moving a camera around smoothly. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t, like, “Oh, there’s somebody behind me,” right? And the viewpoint character turns around and sees them. But you would mark those transitions. So, “Oh, and then behind her!” right? You put that extra word there to mark that you’re moving the camera and focusing on a new thing. And then, as we talked about with The Marvellers, describe the big picture and then add details to that big picture. That really helps.

Oren: Alright, well, I think with that, we’re going to call this episode to a close.

Chris: If this episode was easy to understand, despite all of the wordcraft stuff we were talking about, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to 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’ll talk to you next week.

[closing music]

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

We want some characters to fall in love, but how, exactly? What steps are involved? It probably won’t work if they jump into bed immediately, as that’s not much of an arc. And it’ll seem contrived if they act like they don’t like each other despite obviously being perfect together. Maybe the key is a slow yet steadily growing attachment? Sounds like it could get boring. This week, we’re talking about how to give your romance structure!

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]

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

Chris: I’m Chris.

Oren: So, I’m working on a romance and I want it to have structure. So I figured I would just have the characters get into a fight over which of them should have this magic sword over and over again, ’cause those are basically child arcs, right?

Chris: Yeah, that sounds great. And then the next time you do another romance book, you can just do that again.

Oren: Yeah. That fits perfect. Nothing could go wrong. So this episode is about how to structure a romance. It is inspired by me reading The Luminous Dead by Kaitlyn Starling, in which it felt like the lovebirds were just kind of going in circles, but I didn’t really know what they should have done instead, ’cause my first thought was like, well, they should go from not liking each other to liking each other. But then my thought was, that would be like a smooth, linear increase, and that sounds boring. So surely there has to be something else to it other than them just doing the same conflict over and over again, right?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: So I’m just gonna let Chris talk about this for half an hour. I’ll go get a snack or something.

Chris: Okay, so now we’re talking about structure, but we’re talking about structure with something other than tension. Not that tension isn’t also gonna be present. Usually—

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: There is—the way that you construct a romance just also happens to create tension, which is good, right? We want tension.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: It also gives us more entertainment. But typically for, you know, a romance romance in the romance genre especially, or just romance arcs in general, usually what we’re trying to create is romantic tension, which I like to call longing, so I’m not talking about three different types of tension.

Oren: Yeah. There’s so many different types. So what’s the difference between a longing-based arc and a tension-based arc?

Chris: Okay. So let’s just look at, like, what is the story situation. So we could do a comparison for a relationship arc that is based on tension, for one that is based on longing. I’m also gonna add in desire, sexual tension.

Oren: Oh boy.

Chris: Because it also matters a lot in romance arcs.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: Typically. Not all of them obviously, but. Okay, so tension. “Oh no. My spouse is gonna be so mad when they find out what I did.”

Oren: Okay.

Chris: Okay. So we have a meaningful relationship that is in danger and we’re worried about it, right? And we’re worried about how the rupture in their relationship might negatively impact the people involved. And that negative anticipation is tension.

Oren: Yeah, this is pretty familiar because, you know, we generally operate on the philosophy that readers are gonna care more about bad things that might happen than good things that might happen.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Okay. So now let’s look at longing. “My dream babe is making eyes at me, but if I touch them, we’ll both die.”

Oren: Whoa. That’s a little different.

Chris: Yeah. So basically instead we have a romantic relationship in the making, generally, that is wanted but appears unattainable. Okay. So that’s based on positive anticipation, but it also—there also has to be a barrier that it’s running into.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right, and that barrier often creates tension, right, so we have a tension component in there, but at the end of the day, it’s about the wanting, right, it’s that positive anticipation.

Oren: Yeah. I certainly have worked with a number of clients who haven’t really put enough thought into what is it that’s keeping them from getting together right now?

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: And I even, you know, occasionally a published story has that problem where it’s like, all right, well, they seem to get on great and they seem to want each other. So what’s the hold up?

Chris: Which brings me to desire.

Oren: Ooh. Yeah.

Chris: Or sexual tension.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So instead of “my dream babe is making eyes at me, but if I touch them, we’ll both die,” desire is “my dream babe is making eyes at me, and any moment we’re gonna touch.”

Oren: Oh boy.

Chris: Okay?

Oren: Mythcreants After Dark over here.

Chris: Like, if I was not intending to talk about sexual tension and desire in stories, but it’s really important to account for this component when we’re talking about romances, right?

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So, you know, in this case, you know, we’re just hot and bothered over somebody and not yet sexually satisfied, and it doesn’t require the same kind of unattainableness that longing does. And so that’s why in many romance books that are, you know, particularly these spicy ones, but any ones that rely on desire in general will have a place where it’ll feel like the writer often is kind of neglecting all of these longing child arcs because they’re just relying on desire.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: Because it doesn’t require those barriers. Now, I honestly think it’s better if we can also, you know, maintain longing too, because they’re all engagement factors, as best we can, right, and some readers are gonna, you know, be more drawn in by longing and more drawn in by desire. You know, different romances do cater to different people too, right? Obviously.

Oren: Yeah. With desire, do you need the same kind of barrier that you need with longing, ’cause otherwise, why don’t they just, like, bang it out.

Chris: No, that’s why they keep—no, that’s why—

Oren: Like right now.

Chris: —romance writers keep doing this thing where people are humping each other and yet never have sex for very flimsy reasons. Because all it requires is to not have sexual satisfaction and get hot and bothered.

Oren: Okay. So this is like scenes where they’re like, you know, eye banging each other and you’re kind of wondering, why don’t they move on to the next step? Is that what we’re talking about here?

Chris: Yeah. Okay, so the thing that I always think of, I know a lot of people love this book, is Paladin’s Grace.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Okay. So Paladin’s Grace did not particularly work very well for me personally because it was kind of hard to see why the two, you know, Grace and the Paladin—

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: —our two lovebirds, you know, why they weren’t getting together. Instead, we have a lot of scenes where they kind of get really close to each other and maybe almost kiss or touch each other a little bit and say over and over again, “oh, what’s wrong with me?”

Oren: Oh, yeah, that’s an interesting line. I hear that a lot in stories where the author doesn’t really have a good reason for them to not be together.

Chris: Right. It’s like they just find it very unreasonable that they are attracted to each other. It’s like, well, what do you mean, what’s wrong with you? Obviously, you’re into this person. I don’t— right. But for somebody who’s like, hot and bothered, right? It’s not gonna seem as repetitive as it did to me, who is not hot and bothered.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Right. It’s just a matter of, you know, which of these engagement factors are working? And different romances will definitely cater to different groups because taste is really important here, but, you know, typically a romance in the genre is written for people who will feel that longing. And, you know, depending on how spicy it is, desire might matter more or less.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: But not everybody’s gonna feel it. And again, sometimes when I talk about this, people get a little confused because they are not used to thinking about this in terms of what the reader experience is. They think, oh, well, the characters are experiencing longing.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: The characters are experiencing desire. It’s like, no. The goal is to get the reader in the same place as, you know, viewpoint character or protagonist typically. So we need the reader to get hot and bothered and we need the reader to feel longing. This isn’t just for the characters. We can make the characters feel whatever we want. It’s not gonna do it for the reader.

Oren: Right. When they get that confused between character feeling and reader feeling, is the issue that they are telling too much? They’re like, “oh, well, this character thought the other character was hot. There, I said they were into each other.” Or is it more that they just aren’t thinking about what might get the reader turned on as it were?

Chris: You know, I’m not sure, ’cause this is, you know, something that happens in my, you know, followers and students and—

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: —that they—I think they’re just used to thinking about it a certain way and not, you know, used to thinking of romances.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: These are two people falling in love and not thinking about in terms of, well, the reader is also falling in love.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Right. That’s our goal. And obviously it’s not the same as happening in real life, but that’s how it is for all story.

Oren: Right. I mean, and you get that sometimes in other types of storytelling scenes too, right? Where sometimes the author will think, “oh, well my character is scared, therefore the reader is also scared.” And it’s like, all right. But.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Oren: You know, the character being scared does matter, but if you don’t convince me that the situation is dangerous, I’m not gonna be worried, right.

Chris: Right. By default, we want the reader to feel what our protagonist is feeling.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Right? So that they can have that kind of vicarious experience. So we need to—and just saying the protagonist feels a certain way or even showing them feel a certain way is not gonna do it. And, a lot of, you know, storytellers have to learn, “no, no. I have to show the source of their feelings so that the readers can feel it with them, ’cause the readers are then responding emotionally to what’s happening in the same way the protagonist is.”

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Which is a little different. So anyway, the goal here is of course, to create, we’re talking about longing.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So there’s three different things here, which makes, you know, again, romance seems simple, right? You know, people refer to it [as] formulaic, but what’s actually going along is there’s a lot of different engagement factors that puts romance under a lot of different constraints, which—

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: —tends to result in, you know, certain patterns of how we maximize these things. So it’s actually a result of more complexity, not less.

Oren: I used to work with people who would sometimes kind of derisively joke that if their chosen career path didn’t work out, they would just go write romance novels. And I’m just like, go do it, man. Go do it. If you think it’s that easy, go do it. Seems like free money. You know, none of them ever did as far as I know.

Chris: So longing, again, it’s about positive anticipation and for it to work, first of all, you have to have a taste fit, okay? So you need at least one character that fits the reader’s romantic tastes, or else it’s probably not gonna work.

Oren: Yeah, that would explain one reason I was having trouble with The Luminous Dead, because I did not want that romance to come to fruition. It’s like no, main character, you get away from that lady. That lady is dangerous. That is a bad person. You don’t want to be in a relationship with them.

Chris: So, yeah, that’s a starting requirement. And then what you want is, you know, what I call the clash of the positive charge and negative charge, right? The positive charge is the things that make this relationship compelling and desirable, doing chemistry and showing bonding and mutual appreciation and just, you know, describing a person as attractive.

Oren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, sure.

Chris: Those kinds of things. Whatever, you know, tropes or personality traits this particular audience likes. And then we have our negative charge, which is that sense of unattainableness. That barrier, you know, being rejected or feeling like the love interest is inaccessible or whatever. “Oh no, they’re already betrothed to somebody.” We got some logistical barrier in there, and I think the higher both of those things are, both the positive charge and the negative charge, the more longing you get. So you build your positive charge, you build your negative charge and lightning strikes.

Oren: Okay, this makes sense so far. When I’m thinking of a normal tension arc, the way that I imagine it in relation—the child arc in relation to the through line is that I imagine that a child arc is bringing us closer to the resolution of the through line while also seeming like it’s gonna be harder for the protagonist to get, you know, the thing they’re trying to get to win the day in some way or another. Like, you know, if you have a child arc where the protagonist gets a magic sword, you need to usually temper that by like, “oh no, getting the magic sword also awakened the evil army that’s gonna conquer your city or something,” ’cause otherwise it’s like, “oh, they have a magic sword, it seems like they’re doing great,” and you don’t usually want that. Is there an equivalent for that in this longing setup we’re talking about?

Chris: Yeah, so there does have to—it is very similar to tension in that there also has to be movement.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Right. Just so for tension, child arcs, again, as you described, we want to make it feel like we’ve taken a step forward towards the finish line, but now we’re making it harder in response to maintain the tension. Longing is very similar. So, you know, we might start with a situation priming the pump where, hey, let’s say love interest seems cool, but oh, it’s never gonna happen for whatever reason.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Right. And then we go back and forth, just like tension, you have like a problem or obstacle for each child arc, right? And then you go through the same, you know, turning point and resolution. For longing, we have kind of moments of bonding and moments of separation. And the separation would be like the equivalent to the obstacle or problem. So, you know, I think typically it’s almost like we start with bonding and then go to separation. So—

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: We have our bonding moment where they have a positive interaction and if there’s a previous barrier, it’s overcome, and we’ll talk more about the barriers ’cause it sounds like that’s the problem with the book you read.

Oren: Well, a problem.

Chris: A problem?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Okay. So movement is created as we see characters A) getting to know each other, getting to care about each other more. Their interest is piqued more.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Right. And we kind of see that their relationship is developing, right. That they are moving towards having a relationship.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Like movement. Yeah. Pretty simple. And then we have, usually this comes shortly following this where, as we kind of—as they start to cozy up to each other, we have, you know, an abrupt separation, right, where their positive interaction abruptly ends, leaving readers wanting more as a new barrier asserts itself that separates them.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right. So, and I have seen, I mean you talked about this like slow progress, I have seen some romances that seem to focus less on this kind of like strong child arc structure and have more of, kind of slow progress with, you know, and I think those are just gonna be, you know, capitalizing on longing a little less.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, that’s what I sort of think of when I’m imagining romances that are a small subplot where it just kind of feels like, yeah, these characters sort of spend a little more time together and they start to like each other more, and then they tie the knot or what have you, right? Like, that was sort of what it was like on Deep Space Nine with Worf and Dax. I don’t remember there being any big obstacles to them getting together, it was just…

Chris: Yeah, so subplots don’t really have to carry the story in the same way ’cause they’re relying on the through line for that. And so they typically don’t have a lot of this interior, or, I mean, they can have this interior structure, but it’s just less important.

Oren: Back to The Luminous Dead. I think that I’m starting to be able to diagnose some of the problems here. Beyond the fact that this romance does not match my tastes, ’cause it’s a romance where the love interest is basically super evil and really obsessed with trying to get something at the bottom of this cave and is willing to kill the protagonist to do it. And is also like, real mean. That doesn’t match my taste. But I know there are people who love these really emotionally fraught, I would say toxic romances and find them thrilling, so, sure, right? Maybe that’s just a taste mismatch.

Chris; Sounds like the sapphic version of Shield of Sparrows.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, not wrong.

Chris: That was one where it’s just like, this guy is the worst. He’s making sexually degrading comments about the protagonist and she didn’t choose to be here. He chose her and now he’s being super mean to her.

Oren: Yeah. And so as I was reading Luminous Dead and I guess, spoilers for this book, it’s been out for a while, but, so Gyre is the protagonist, and Em is her handler, you know, the woman trying to get her killed in this cave. And I can tell, as the story goes on, I can tell that Gyre is getting more and more into Em, and I know that because the narrator tells me that’s what’s happening. So I guess in that way you could see that there’s movement and you can kind of see that Em is kind of into Gyre too, so there’s some movement there, but what I think was causing me problems is that it seemed like they kept having the same arc, which was, does Em care about Gyre or does she just want to sacrifice Gyre in this cave? 

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: And it felt like we would do that arc and it would seem like Em cares about Gyre. And then a little bit later she’d be like, okay, but Gyre, I want you to go get yourself killed in the cave.

And then we would like, start over again. I think that was, in retrospect, what made it feel like there was no movement.

Chris: Yeah, so I mean, you do have to take these problems or these barriers and break them down into pieces. Although, granted, most romances will have more than one barrier, right? Like sometimes if it’s a very character-focused romance, each character will have their own emotional problem. Trying to rely on just one barrier for an entire romance novel, for instance, that would be hard. Usually you need more than one to sustain the story.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: But yeah, you do have to sort of break it down into pieces. And with these kinds of emotional character problems, it’s very similar to character arcs where sometimes people have trouble figuring out how to break down and make baby steps that, you know, bring people forward, but don’t take care of the entire problem and in this case, leave enough [of] a problem left to cause issues. So, you know, we would usually wanna see that, okay, we don’t think this person cares about me, well—

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: —maybe there’s certain basic courtesies that this person starts to extend.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That is a notable change from before. So, you know, let’s say they’re talking to each other while one person is in a cave, right? So now starts, you know, the person in the cave is like, stop insulting me, boss. And the boss is like, okay, you know what? I’m sorry. You’re right. That is hurtful. And then the person in the cave feels better temporarily, but that hasn’t actually resolved [the] bigger issue with, for instance, the boss sending the person the cave out to die.

So then something happens that you know, okay, even though this one aspect is better, that was like a first little baby step. Something happens that reminds the person in the cave, oh, well, I guess my boss cares about my feelings, but she still doesn’t care about my life.

Oren: Yeah. So, okay. So it’s interesting that you say that because now that you say it, I can look back and I can see what I think are attempts to do that.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: And maybe, again, maybe I am just being uncharitable here because I didn’t like Em, maybe that’s what’s happening. But like, there is a bit where at first Em won’t call Gyre by name and then she starts calling her by name and there’s like a bit where she keeps wanting to inject Gyre with drugs that Gyre doesn’t wanna be injected with.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: And then she stops doing that. So, you know, I can see those. I think maybe in my mind those always seemed incidental.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: Right, it sort of seemed like those things just kind of happened. They didn’t seem to be the focus of arcs. It was more like eventually Em started calling Gyre by name and said she wouldn’t do the drugs anymore. Whereas the conflicts always seemed to be over the cave thing and again, maybe I’m misattributing what was happening, but that was just my impression.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I do think with a lot of changes in character behavior, a common problem is readers want to see what the cause is, right, what is the stimulus that caused a change in behavior? And I think a lot of storytellers end up neglecting that. It’s like, oh, it’s time. We’re at the time of the story where this person should act nicer, right.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And this is kind of one of the issues I’m having with—for our Patreon book club we’re reading the book Godkiller.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And there’s a romance in there between Elo and Kissen. And you know, Kissen is like a real grump.

Oren: Yeah, but her name sounds like “kissing,” so how could she not be?

Chris: It does sound like kissing. I could not help but notice that.

Oren: Some of the names in this book are kind of funny when you say them out loud.

Chris: And then we have an incident where it’s not really his fault, but he attacks her, right. And then after they fight, she’s much warmer to him. And it’s like, why, right? And it’s not because I can’t think of anything, right. I can imagine justifications, but they’re not in there, right? So—

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: If they had a conversation afterwards and she was like, you know, I thought you were a coward before, but now we had this fight, I realize you’re not, and that makes me respect you more, then we would understand why she acts warmer. So maybe that’s part of the problem that you’re running into is like, well, you know, asshole boss stopped, but I don’t know why. So I didn’t feel like there was a building [of] momentum behind this relationship and you know, that kind of thing. And so the movement is not coming across very well.

Oren: I did, as we were talking, think of a recent example I’ve seen that’s a fairly straightforward way to have, you know, this kind of, you know, we’re getting closer together and then there’s a setback, and now we’re far apart again—

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: —that was pretty straightforward, that was from the show Dark Winds, which we’ve just started watching. And you’ve got, this is a cop drama set on the Dine Reservation in the seventies. And so the two lovebirds in season one are Jim and Bernadette. And at first their obstacle is that Bernadette’s real mean, and Jim’s pretty dismissive, so they don’t like each other very much. And then they start to warm up and they start to get past that problem. And then boom, you reveal that Jim has secretly been an FBI agent this whole time, which we knew, but Bernadette didn’t.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: And that causes a new, different rift between them that has nothing to do with the fact that Jim was previously dismissive and Bernadette was previously really mean. And I was like, yeah, there you go. Now it feels like there’s been progress, but we also have a push-pull. It’s not just a steady, smooth climb to romantic bliss.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So those [separations] sort of, they act as a hook, right, and those are typically the most powerful places for longing.

I mean, the most powerful moment is, this is why in movies, people interrupt kisses so often because that denial, like, “oh, I thought I was gonna get a kiss.” That denial is just a very powerful hook there, right? And then the bonding gives the audience some satisfaction besides creating movement, right? So we’re not just stringing people along, so it feels like they’re getting something, which is very, again, very similar to a tension child arc, where we’ve got bits of, you know, tension and satisfaction. So it works in a very similar way. But like as an example, Oren, of when you have done this before, I still remember our big COVID campaign.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That we ran largely over text while COVID was happening, ’cause we couldn’t be in person. And we ended up having four romances.

Oren: Four romances, but only with three of the characters, ’cause one player wasn’t really interested.

Chris: Three out of four players decided to romance at least one NPC, one of us romanced two.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: One of us got two romances.

Oren: Which was your fault, incidentally, you started the second ship of—actually, you started both ships for that player, so.

Chris: Uhhh, yeah, I think…

Oren: It’s your fault. You did this.

Chris: I do like romance. I think I was making little suggestions. Look, there was just lots of chemistry between that player character and the big villain, okay. It was just obvious.

Oren: Yeah, it did happen.

Chris: Anyone could have seen it. But like you would set up, there’s a couple times when you would set up like, okay, let’s do a romance scene, and you would set up a date.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right, with the NPC in question, the love interest NPC and everything would go well and there would be bonding time, and then something terrible would happen, right.

Oren: Yeah, yeah, I did do that.

Chris: Right. Like for the date with the big villain, right. They had, you know, this cutesy time studying a dark magic book together.

Oren: Aww.

Chris: Did some bonding.

Oren: Hey, it was a regular magic book. The villain was just using it for dark purposes, okay. It was a legitimate piece of magical scholarship.

Chris: And then the villain started getting, you know, controlled by the big cosmic horror entity and started going kind of evil. But then we would alternate with like, Ron for like, tragic separation moment, right. So you’ve done these before, so you know how this arc goes, you know, if you think back to your just like GMing, you’ve already done it.

Oren: So what you’re telling me here is that I kind of absorbed these things without really understanding them. So I’m basically like a large GMing model. I’ve just Hoovered up all these ideas and now I’m just like, yeah, that looks about like what I’ve seen. Eh, it’ll probably work out.

Chris: I just think sometimes the knowledge is already in there somewhere and you have to connect to it, right?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: It’s like the knowledge of how to do a romance child arc is already in there in your head, ’cause I’ve seen you do them.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: You just had to consciously connect to that knowledge and maybe intellectualize it a little more.

Oren: Yeah. Well that’s a constant struggle for writers, right? A lot of writers understand things instinctively, but struggle to explain them. It was really interesting. I think the turning point was like the strongest example of that that I’ve ever seen, ’cause I think most authors on some level understand the concept of a turning point because when you were explaining them to me, I knew what they were. I could think of them, but I had never seen anyone explain it before.

So that’s like—there’s a lot of things like that. So it’s not surprising to me that I would, you know, have seen this enough that I kind of have a sort of instinctual understanding of it. But then when I’m trying to explain how it works, like, oh, I don’t know, maybe they’ll kiss, who knows?

Chris: Yeah. One movie I think does a surprisingly good job with its romance arcs, you do have to kind of ignore the creepy love potion.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: Is the original Willow, um, between Sorsha and Madmartigan. It’s not that there’s not issues, there’s the love potion and then Sorsha’s character also turns around weirdly fast.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right? But like, did you see how they set up the romance scenes between Madmartigan and Sorsha? You can see this pattern where Madmartigan, he’s under a love potion. He goes in her tent while she’s sleeping. She has a nightgown on.

Oren: Of course.

Chris: He starts spouting all of this, like, lovespeak to her. She gets into it, right? Then people start crashing the party and he has to suddenly take off, right? So then we get the sudden separation.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Right? Later, you know, he takes her captive, the love potion is worn off, but she’s still into him and they have this—but he like, is oddly determined to take her hostage and take her with them, right? And then they have a bunch of like long stares and looks and they talk over, “what happened? You know, you said you would, you know, live in darkness without me, and then you’re just saying it went away.” Right? And then they have—and then a sudden separation when she manages to escape because she’s mad that he’s not under the love potion anymore. Right? So.

Oren: Look, I don’t like love potions really in any context, but as far as love potions go, that one is not really that bad by the standards of love potions, right?

Chris: It really isn’t. By the standards of love potion stuff, for sure.

Oren: Like nobody—like she doesn’t give it to him to try to get him into a relationship. He doesn’t do anything significant while he is under it, other than spout some poetry.

Chris: Spout some poetry. He does kiss her.

Oren: He does kiss her. All right. That’s not ideal.

Chris: So that is a non-consensual kiss, but like we’ve seen much worse. So, you know, that kind of, you know, they get up close, they do some stares, it looks like they’re about to kiss and then sudden separate.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: It doesn’t have to be that dramatic, of course, to work, but that kind of, it looks like an oscillation, but again, you always wanna move forward and feel like they’re coming together and taking steps towards that eventual relationship at the end.

Oren: Well, with that, I think I more or less understand where I was having problems with the Luminous Dead, and perhaps I will be better able to elucidate these concepts in the future. So we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: Well, if your positive charge from liking this episode is enough to overcome the barrier to supporting us on Patreon, consider going 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 and Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[outro music plays]

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

Your hero has sworn to kill their archenemy in a bloody revenge quest. But when the moment comes, should they pull the trigger? We dunno, do you want them to? Revenge stories are often debated as moral issues, but the reality is that how you craft them generally determines whether readers find the results just or not. In a shocking twist, we have some advice.

Generously transcribed by Sofia. 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 Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So, Chris, do you remember back in 2014, 12 years ago, we had a debate about multiple points of view?

Chris: Mm, yeah. I couldn’t forget that because I won.

Oren: Yeah. See, I pretended to change my opinion and I’ve been planning my revenge for all that time, which is why now you need to beta read my new novel with 500 different POV characters each in their own universe and time period.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: Or maybe not. Maybe I’ve decided that you’ve suffered enough and that I forgive you.

Chris: I feel like that’s a self-own. I feel like that’s self-revenge right there.

Oren: [laughs] So today we are talking about the concepts of revenge and forgiveness in fiction, specifically in fiction. I’m not making any claims to real life, mind you. That’s a little more complicated.

Chris: Yeah. I could describe what causes a large group of people in general to forgive a person that they do not know personally. Like a character or a public figure. In general trends, I cannot predict what any individual person needs to forgive somebody in their life. Those two things are very different.

Oren: So first, there’s a concept that I see storytellers talk about sometimes with a lot of concern, and it’s this idea of a character being forced to forgive someone.

Chris: I can definitely sympathize that. I think that’s what happens when the GM creates an antagonist that you just love to hate. But then instead of letting you fight them and beat them, he decides to make them sympathetic and then so pathetic and compliant that you’re not really allowed to beat them up anymore. So, you grudgingly start working with them and then the other players think your PC is unreasonable for not forgiving them. Does this sound familiar, Oren? Does it sound like a familiar scenario?

Oren: [laughs] Yeah, well. I mean, this is a whole different ballgame when it comes to role-playing games because those characters have free will and you can’t edit the story, but—

Chris: You couldn’t force me to forgive. But some of the other players were like, really? You can’t forgive this person? No, never. Not doing it.

Oren: There is a prose fiction analogy to that, which is that the reader might disagree with the character. That can happen.

But when it comes to fiction, the way that I would advise people to look at this is you are not trying to force your character to do anything. You are trying to create proper circumstances so that this character, given what you have established about them before, will do the thing you want them to do.

So, if that means you want your character to forgive someone, you have to create the circumstances under which it makes sense for them to do that.

Chris: Yeah. I wanna be fair because I do think some narratives create this impression of forcing forgiveness.

For one, there’s the obvious thing of the other side characters who are clearly supposed to be the storyteller’s mouthpiece insisting that somebody has to forgive.

Oren: If you have direct badgering of your protagonist or some other character by another character in the story, that is definitely gonna change the dynamic of it.

Chris: Right. And again, we’re talking about situations where somebody has seriously wronged another person. Just to be clear: what we’re going off of is the idea that nobody is entitled to forgiveness by somebody they hurt.

So there can be obviously situations where the side characters act like the storyteller’s mouthpiece and insist on it, which is clearly a sign of that pressure. But I do think that sometimes there’s almost nothing that is necessary for a character to forgive in order to do. Because character functionally can take all the same actions, usually to succeed without technically forgiving. Forgiving is different than, for instance, cooperating.

Oren: That gets into the next part of the question, which, what is forgiveness exactly. Like what does that mean? Because that can mean a lot of different things and it matters in this case, this isn’t just a silly semantics question.

Because I think some writers tend to imagine it as we’re friends now and we’re on the same team, and I’ve decided that I am no longer upset by whatever it was that you did.

And that can happen but that’s not the only thing that I think we would think of that way. Right? It’s not the only way this kind of story can play out.

Chris: Yeah, I would think of a lot of different things as alternatives to forgiveness. I think if I were to pick one thing that is forgiveness, it’s that you are no longer holding whatever they did against that person. And that’s, in a lot of situations, still not reasonable. It’s an emotional thing.

Oren: This sort of thing can happen when you have your bad guy do something really bad. They did a real nasty thing, but then you kind of end up liking them. You decide, oh, but they’re kind of cool and they have a sympathetic backstory. And now I want them to be on team good. And I want my main character to hang out with them and for it to not be constantly unpleasant.

And if your reader is reading this and they’re like, well, hang on. That horrible thing happened; I felt that. You did a good job making me feel that I don’t like this.

And of course there’s the two questions. There’s the question of does it feel like it makes sense that the main character did this? And people will argue about that because that often gets tied into the question of is it satisfying that the main character did this?

And if someone doesn’t feel that it’s satisfying, they will often express that by arguing that it does not make sense. Regardless of whether that part is true or not, right? You might actually have made a character who is super forgiving. Maybe your character is Tohru from Fruits Basket who forgives everything immediately. But that might not be satisfying to your reader and you could still find them arguing with you that it doesn’t make sense cause that’s often how readers express themselves.

Chris: I do think that in situations where the readers are still upset after a character like Tohru forgive somebody, there’s probably something else going on. Because people do resent a character who does terrible things and then is successful. People wanna see that karma balanced out.

And I would say that the issue there probably isn’t completely just the forgiveness itself, but that that character hasn’t gotten their karma balanced, hasn’t suffered in accordance with the wrongdoing.

Oren: In Fruits Basket I had a problem with that the matriarch of the family—who is just the worst—I felt like she got off completely scot-free for all the horrible things she did, and is now having a great time. And I did not like that. No, that person sucks. I don’t want any of you to be associated with her anymore.

Chris: Right. I mean, this is the issue with a lot of abuse narratives, right? Because that was an abuse narrative, she was very clearly an abuser.

Often when people are writing these narratives, maybe they feel like it’s too black and white to just say, Hey. That person is bad and we’re just gonna, for at the very least, not have them in my life anymore. For the protagonist part.

And I think it’s an effort to try to make it nuanced. They try to absolve them or make excuses for them and be like, they’re a person too.

That’s very common and it’s not great because unfortunately, in real life, abusers will absolutely use any shred of sympathy you give them. They will apologize and pretend they’ll never do it again, only to do it again cause they’re manipulative people. That’s how abuse is done. That’s definitely a problem there.

And that might be part of the fact that people don’t like Tohru doing it. But I do think that there are some storylines where if the author equates working with somebody with forgiving them and there doesn’t seem like we’re presented with an option of, no, you can cooperate, but you still don’t have to forgive. Or it doesn’t feel natural for the character. There can be other reasons where it just feels a little too contrived.

I think some storytellers do equate forgiveness with this is just how the arc should end. Because the arc hasn’t ended unless there’s forgiveness. For instance.

Oren: Yeah, and of course we were talking about this in terms of revenge, which adds another wrinkle to it.

Because for example, you could have a story where the protagonist chooses not to take revenge, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they have forgiven whoever wronged them. It could mean that they have decided that this is more harmful to me than it is satisfying to get whatever this revenge is. So I’m going to stop, but that doesn’t mean that we’re friends. That doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped holding that against them.

Chris: Yeah. There are a lot of different things that can happen besides just forgiveness and revenge. And I think talking more about what the alternatives are is a good thing.

Personally, I think self-forgiveness is underrated. If we have one person who’s being redeemed, for instance, in another person who wants revenge on them or just is angry at them, have the person forgive themself even if they’re never gonna get forgiveness from the person they hurt. Eventually, once they’ve groveled enough. Of course.

Oren: Once they’ve had kind of a rough time.

This also, of course, raises the question that comes up in a lot of these revenge stories: Is revenge a compelling motivation? The answer is maybe.

Chris: If you get one of those characters that you make it so the audience really hates them that much and wants them to take them down a notch, it can be compelling. I personally wouldn’t try to rely on that.

Oren: For revenge to be the stakes, you have to really make the audience want that to happen, and so usually for that, you’re depending on them really liking your main character. Which is always a gamble because sometimes that’s not gonna work right away. And you are gambling on that they will really care about whatever the thing is. So that means you often have to make it pretty intense. And some people just go for that. Some people really like revenge stories, but others will kind of be like, well, the thing that they we’re trying to get revenge for already happened. Getting revenge isn’t gonna undo it. So is it that important?

Chris: Yeah. Isn’t that why in John Wick, the bad guy kills a dog? Because people get really upset watching a dog die, and so that’s a way of getting them upset enough that they really want to see the antagonist die. A bit harsh. I wouldn’t wanna do that, but it’s clearly worked for the franchise.

Oren: Yeah. Well, it’s so well-known with John Wick now at this point. I feel like if you did it, it would be hard pressed to not look like you were copying John Wick.

Chris: But I certainly wouldn’t want wanting to see a villain suffer, getting that schadenfreude be the only thing driving the story forward.

Oren: Which is usually why authors will add some additional stakes. Like this villain is still doing bad things and so a part of getting revenge will be stopping them. Or sometimes they’ll make it more of a broader justice issue, like this person has wronged a lot of people and so we have to get justice for them.

Chris: I also think when it comes to stakes, if you have something, some level of support, you can do a lot with just putting your protagonist in danger in order to get revenge. If we have a John Wick situation where we think that the audience is very likely to sympathize with this revenge quest and sympathize with our protagonist and we don’t have larger stakes, but we can make it feel like the protagonist is in danger when they are going to get revenge, that is stakes in itself.

It’s just, you need to tide the audience over before your protagonist gets in danger. And of course, you need a strong enough motivation for your protagonist to head into danger. But with revenge, I think that’s not too hard. If we’re going with John Wick as a power fantasy, that maybe doesn’t work as well because then John Wick is probably less likely to feel like he’s in serious danger, and so the stakes then become a little bit less compelling.

But in a lot of works, that would be just fine if you don’t have some evil plan that the antagonist is about to do.

Oren: Yeah. The other—of course—issue is if you do decide to add supplementary stakes, and then you end up wanting the protagonist to decide that actually they’re not going to take revenge—It’s like, all right, but what about all the bad stuff the bad guy is still doing right now? It feels like you’re shirking your responsibility.

I see this happen sometimes in stories that are inspired by superhero comics. Where it’s like, no, I won’t get revenge on the villain. It’s like, all right, but the villain is holding the city hostage, so maybe you still gotta stop him.

Chris: Yeah. I think the problem with a lot of the superhero stuff is, the assumption is you can’t really put them in jail ’cause they’ll just get out again for the next installment.

Oren: It’s weird because that’s almost never a thing in the story. It’s just a thing that infects fan discourse because it’s a meta problem.

Chris: But it’s hard to unsee once you know that’s always gonna happen.

Oren: It’s like, oh, this is kind of predictable that they’re gonna break out again.

Chris: I swear it’s gonna be very permanent. Prison has become very permanent this time.

Oren: That’s one of those things that superhero comics can get away with, that if any of us tried it, it would immediately get us left outta town. I mean, first of all, writing on a series long enough for this to be an issue is unlikely for most of us anyway.

But if you had a series that was several books long and the villain kept breaking out of jail to go do more mayhem and cause more destruction by like the second or third time this happened, your readers would just not continue if your main character was like, yep. Back to jail with you, Mr. Jail Escaper!

Chris: [laughs] Well, I think in most cases the villain would just get very old. People just like, well, you already beat that person. That’s not scary.

Oren: Which is fortunately not a problem most books have. In my experience, that problem is much more common in visual media…

Chris: Yeah, because you have an actor and the villain is more charismatic.

Oren: Or in the case of comics, because the villain is a brand.

Chris: Yeah

Oren: The only time I can think of off the top of my head that this happened in a book series is the first three Wheel of Time books where we fight the same guy and beat him three times.

Chris: That is too much.

Oren: It’s like the rule of three, I guess.

Chris: Yeah. The other thing to point out if your character is gonna reconsider is: have they been murdering any minions? Because if you wanna do the big action sequence where they have to get through all of the goons before they work their way up to the big bad, it’s a really bad luck to then agonize over whether you’re gonna kill somebody after you’ve been throwing people off of roofs.

Those people died and you didn’t agonize over whether you should kill them, even though they’re just earning a paycheck. They could have been strong armed into taking this job. They could be desperate, not have any other options and killed them without a thought. But no, the big bads gotta go to jail and that’s just very tiresome.

Oren: They shouldn’t have been wearing helmets, Chris. If they wanted me to think of them as human beings, I should have been able to see their faces.

Chris: I do think one of the more interesting parts of the Jessica Jones show was the fact that because the minions were just blatantly being mind controlled, she had to avoid hurting them too much when she was fighting. And that did make things harder for her.

Oren: That was very good.

Chris: So that could be interesting, intense. I think a lot of people don’t wanna do it cause they just want their power fantasy, or it takes more thought to avoid killing anybody.

Oren: I will say that also, if you want your character to take revenge, you can just do that. Most of the time. There are some things I see writers do that make that a little weird, but you just go for it, man. We’re not here to have to write our stories to say that revenge is always bad and you should never do it. That’s not one of our moral hills that we’re prepared to die on.

Chris: Have your protagonist take revenge and then the villain’s kid will get really mad and vow revenge on the protagonist. And then you’ve got book two.

Oren: Yeah. That is a scenario where you do have to think about this sort of thing, right? Yeah. If you are doing a really realistic cycle of violence, you know, I’m getting revenge on them because they got revenge on me and now they’re gonna do it again. Then you have to consider what you’re doing at that point, if they get feel good revenge and everything works out great. Uh, now you’ve kind of betrayed your premise.

Chris: Them realizing that, okay, I wanted to get revenge on this person for killing my parents and learning they were actually getting revenge on my parents would be an interesting twist to have at the end. Another thing, if you wanted to change things up.

Oren: Another one that I see sometimes happen that authors sometimes struggle with is that if it feels like the villain has already suffered a lot, it might feel like a little much to then kill them.

You know, this is the thing I see happen sometimes where it’s like, oh, this villain did something bad and maybe it was off screen, or maybe in retrospect it wasn’t as bad as the author thought it was or whatever. But as part of making them pay, the villain loses everything and suffers a lot, and then you’re starting to feel kind of bad for them.

Chris: Yeah. Cause at that point their karma’s been balanced and they’re starting to look sympathetic. And that resentment that is there initially goes away. And that’s the position where you can normally start actually redeeming a character and killing them at that point just doesn’t have any…no fun.

Oren: Yeah. This is often where you get into the issue of things that happened on screen versus off screen. And it’s just a fact that if something happened off screen, your readers will not feel it as much. They won’t care about it as much. It will not seem as bad as something that they saw or something that they personally witnessed the aftermath of.

Chris: Certainly, people judge how bad the crime is emotionally. So, it’s also a bigger crime to kill a character they care about or a cute dog, than it is to kill some unnamed person. That’s how humans work.

Oren: Or at least it’s how readers work.

Chris: Well, this all happens outside of fiction too. It’s just in a context where we’re talking about large groups of people, not individual people. And you don’t know anybody personally.

We see these things happen on social media where sometimes, what happens is there’s social media posts where people brag about killing some wild animal on their hunt. And then there’s a huge negative social media reaction and everybody’s really upset. They killed this animal. And then there’s like a second wave of people who are like, how come you care so much more about this animal than you do about all the people who are dying?

[laughs] They’re very predictable.

Because they saw a picture of the animal and it’s a cute animal and so devote to emotion. And all those people are nameless, and they blur together and so they don’t evoke emotions. And this is what I mean when I say this is just how people work.

Oren: Yeah. It do be how people be doing stuff.

Chris: Yeah. The two things that I have found in your stories, what are the biggest judge of how bad it is—and therefore how much work it takes to redeem somebody, and how hard would it be to forgive—is:

How much damage was actually done. If they try to kill somebody but fail, that’s a lot more forgivable than if they succeed.

And then the second one is, what was their motivation? If somebody is desperate, they were being blackmailed, their mother was being held hostage and somebody threatened to kill them unless they assassinated somebody or something like that, that is a lot more forgivable than if they were just evil. Or selfish in some way.

Oren: So here’s a question. What do we think about the two revenge stories that immediately came to my mind? Which are of course from Avatar the Last Airbender.

The one which is about a main character, the Southern Raiders. This is where Katara goes on a revenge quest against the guy who killed her mom and then eventually decides she’s not gonna kill him.

And then the other one is by an NPC, Hama the blood bender, who has decided she’s gonna get revenge by harassing travelers around this Fire Nation village. In a real spooky way, real spooky harassment and imprisonment.

Chris: And she doesn’t actually kill them. We want this to be light, so she just kidnaps them. She does not actually kill any of them, even though realistically she would.

Oren: Kidnaps them and puts them in cave jail for a while, and it’s like, this is a very strange revenge thing you’re doing Hama.

You know, watching that episode now, it’s like, okay, this is a good episode. It’s real spooky and weird. But I also kind of feel like maybe you could have been like, Hey, Hama, how about instead of harassing the people in this village, you join us and help the war effort. And then get real revenge. Who could make that offer?

Chris: The issue there is the fact that she’s not actually targeting the people who genuinely did… Most people would say that an entire nation is not responsible for the actions of its soldiers, for instance. So, the fact that she’s just targeting civilians would be a reason that’s just not considered moral. But conveniently, she doesn’t actually kill any of them, so I think that she is forgivable in this case.

Oren: Yeah, it worked out. Everything was fine.

Chris: Granted, realistically, those people would be very traumatized. They were puppeteered, and how long were they kidnapped anyway? I don’t know.

Oren: A couple weeks at least.

Chris: Don’t think about that.

Oren: Yeah, it’s fine.

Chris & Oren: [laugh]

Chris: The one with Katara, I’m trying to remember. Because I do remember when they finally presented the object of her revenge, he was just kind of old pathetic.

Oren: Yeah. What we found out is that the Fire Nation retirement package suuucks. This guy was a high ranking naval officer, looked like he commanded squadron of ships, and in his retirement he is carrying a bag of shitty groceries. It’s like, wow, okay. I guess they didn’t pay him very much.

Chris: Yeah. That clearly felt like it was part of an arc where her getting revenge was just supposed to be bad. And I can definitely see somebody looking at that and thinking that is an instance of forced forgiveness. Because Zuko is totally fine with her getting revenge, but I don’t think Zuko is supposed to be the morally correct one in this scenario.

Instead she goes off wanting revenge. I think that’s supposed to be bad. And then she happens to find that this guy is kind of old and very dumb on his luck when she could have found something else.

Oren: If he had been having a really nice retirement with all of the plunder that he got for years of commanding a raiding squadron, that ending doesn’t work at all. It’s already a contentious ending, but if he had just been living the high life, like, no, you better kill him. Katara. [laughs]

Chris: Yeah. It would also feel inappropriate for Avatar the Last Airbender, tonal wise though, for her to just go off on a quest to kill a guy.

Oren: Right, because no one kills anybody in Avatar the Last Airbender, except suddenly in the end of season three, where there’s a big concern about it.

Chris: And there’s not really a whole lot of opportunity for them to kidnap Fire Nation commanders and bring them to justice. Because the Fire Nation is still conquering during the time of the story. I’m not sure there’s a lot of ways to do that storyline that would actually fit the show.

Oren: I have been thinking about what on earth the political situation in the Fire Nation would be like after the show. When I try to think about it in terms of how this sort of politics usually works, it just completely breaks my brain. I’m like, the Fire Nation was never really defeated. They did lose one battle around Ba Sing Se, and then their leader was quasi assassinated and replaced by a pro-peace heir, who sort of came out of nowhere.

So the Fire Nation certainly doesn’t think it’s been defeated. Its military hasn’t been defeated. Are they gonna listen to Zuko when he says, okay, war over. We’re all going home. Are they gonna pay war reparations? Is anyone gonna stand trial for what they…?

Oh man. That is such a rough thing to imagine.

Chris: I think what we would wanna show to make that better is the toll that the war effort is taking on the Fire Nation. That it’s costing a lot of money that the people are going through a rationing. Soldiers are coming home in body bags. And so, there’s general popular discontent over the war. And I think that would be a lot easier to justify than an heir stepping on the throne of just being like, yep, we’re not doing this anymore.

Oren: Yeah, I know. But instead we see the opposite. The people, the Fire Nation seem very happy.

Chris: Because the Fire Nation’s gotta be threatening. So it has to seem super successful.

Oren: Which is not unrealistic, but it does make it really weird to imagine what happened after the show ended.

Alright, with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: And if you forgive us for our transgressions, consider supporting us on Patreon. And if you want revenge on us, you could totally do that by supporting us on Patreon. Then you’ll be on our Discord and all that.

Oren: Yeah, we hate it so much.

Chris: The best revenge plot for sure. Just 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]

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

Your characters start in one place. You would like them to be in another place, and the magic system doesn’t include teleportation. That means it’s time to depict some travel, which can range from the best moments of a story to the equivalent of needing to eat your veggies before dessert. Which end your story falls on depends on both understanding how travel works and properly setting expectations. Also, having more than one horse per person. That’s very important.

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

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

[Opening Theme]

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

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: So Oren, I want my protagonist to go on a dangerous journey to the center of this dark, enchanted wood. But then I realized I also want a friend from their hometown to just to be there when the protagonist arrives. And to be clear, this is somebody that the protagonist left behind at their hometown.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So they needed to get there ahead. And I was just thinking, well, I suppose the town could just invent a transporter while they are traveling. You know? Problem solved.

Oren: Is that you the later seasons of Game of Thrones?

Chris: [Laughter]

Oren: Which is funny because I never watched later seasons of Game of Thrones. That’s just a thing people say about it. To me, reading the books, it was the opposite. Suddenly in the books it takes forever to get anywhere.

Chris: Yeah, that’s sort of hard. The catch-22 of travel where you want something to take a long time, but you also want it to be super fast whenever it’s plot convenient.

Oren: Right. We made the mistake of being into fantasy, and usually in fantasy stories you don’t have super fast transit. You know? Usually a hallmark of fantasy is that you’re limited in how quickly you can move around. Which, you know, is cool and flavorful until you need to be somewhere. Then it’s a pain.

Chris: I do suspect that in space it’s easier to make everything just move at the speed of plot. ‘Cause you know, space is big and amorphous and it’s not that you couldn’t establish, like, Earth to Alpha Centauri-whatever takes this such and such time, and then later have it be a different time. But …

Oren: I mean, that is something that has been increasingly noticeable to me in every iteration of Star Wars and Star Trek, which is that travel times seem to shrink. And I don’t know for sure. It’s not like I’ve measured them. But I’ve just noticed that, especially in the newer versions of Star Wars and Star Trek, it kind of feels like when they want to go somewhere they’re just immediately there.

And maybe it was just more about the pacing of the actual scenes than real travel time, but it certainly felt like it took a little longer to get places in older iterations of both franchises.

Chris: I mean, I can believe that because usually the pace of stories is also continuously kind of sped up as times pass. But in this case, it’s partly about the believability of how fast. Does it feel real? Does it really feel like they’re traveling if they go there instantly? But like, once the audience gets used to, “okay, we could get there, but it felt like a day passed.” And that becomes realistic, you can kind of keep pushing the boundary if you want characters just to show up instantly.

Not that there isn’t reason to want some delays in travel. We can talk about fantasy. That’s one thing that’s interesting is just by being in different settings fantasy tends to have a very different relationship to travel than science fiction often does.

Oren: Although, I mean with certain magic systems, if you want, you can just start introducing teleportation magic and say, “I don’t wanna deal with that anymore.” It’s not my favorite.

Chris: Yeah. You better put some restrictions on the teleportation magic.

Oren: Yeah, it’s a huge ability. It has a lot of ways that it can potentially interfere with the plot. It’s not something I typically like to introduce.

Chris: Yeah I mean, I think if you wanna use teleportation magic, again, it’s a lot easier if you make it more an analogous to modern day travel or you travel to a portal zone and then you can go from one portal to the other as opposed to spot to spot teleportation.

Oren: Yeah, just being able to teleport wherever you want is gonna ’cause you some problems.

Chris: I mean, it helps if you have to have been there before or if you need an accurate picture of it. I mean, in modern day an accurate picture would be nothing. In some fantasy settings an accurate picture would still something, but I think even those will wear down.

Oren: Oh man! This is a great new plot idea. So you need an accurate picture of something, right? And in modern day, that’s not a problem, except because the internet is now flooded with slop. You look up a picture; is that really what it looks like? Is this a real picture? Who knows?

Chris: [Laughing] I just love the idea of like—so what happens to you if you tried to teleport into something that’s been like slop-ified. So it has something weird in the picture. Like a crab turning into a cabbage, you know?

Oren: Not good things happen to you. Let me tell you.

Chris: Do you go to the alternate slop dimension? Ah man.

Oren: you come out really convinced that you can replace forty percent of your workforce with an LLM.

Chris: [Burst of laughter] Oh no. Let’s get back to the speculative fiction. Let’s escape again, please.

Oren: Yeah. The optimistic fantasy world.

Chris: [Chuckling] Let’s go back to the optimistic fantasy world.

Oren: [Laughter]

Chris: So yeah, science fiction, it’s not that there’s no considerations. I do think that the trope of aliens leaving behind warp gates is particularly interesting.

Oren: Yeah, sci-fi authors love alien warp gates because they both give an explanation for where this technology came from and why the rest of your setting doesn’t seem that advanced. And they help create a reason why people don’t just blow them up if there’s a problem because you can say that they’re made of, like, special alien stuff or like, we can’t rebuild them or they’re invincible. Because that’s a problem with if you have some kind of warp gate system, it makes any kind of interstellar fighting very hard.

And you see this in Babylon 5, where in Babylon 5, after a while they just kind of gave up and every ship could open its own warp gates now. So the actual warp gate next to the station really didn’t seem like it mattered that much. Whereas in like, The Expanse or in Mass Effect their teleportation gates are made outta weird alien stuff. And so they either are afraid to mess with it or it’s too difficult to destroy, so you just have to accept that ships are gonna be coming through that.

Chris: I did notice in Star Flight Academy how they did have to come up with a reason why Discovery—the Discovery ship couldn’t just use its special drive to come to their rescue.

Oren: Yeah. They had to give a reason for that. It’s funny. The spore drive would’ve caused less of a problem if it hadn’t been a prequel, but it’s still kind of a problem. It’s like, your ship can teleport anywhere? Like, alright.

Chris: Again, it’s that point to point teleportation. Because at some point in time just having every single ship, every single force on the enemy or on the good guys be able to go anywhere instantly—that’s just a very different kind of conflict with very different logistics.

Oren: Yeah. I’m not gonna say you can’t do it. I am gonna say that most writers don’t know how to write that. I certainly don’t. 

Chris: I mean, for the purpose of storytelling, we usually need stories where our protagonists are isolated. ‘Cause usually, you know, we have our little scrappy hero who is supposed to be the person who saves the day. And we have to come up with reasons why more powerful people can’t help them. And being physically isolated is a pretty important component of that. So if people are doing teleporting anywhere that certainly makes that harder. Which is why Starfleet Academy of course decided, oh! You know, Discovery’s just busy right now. Can’t come.

Oren: Yeah, they had a techno battle thing about it. Don’t worry. It’s fine.

Chris: The other thing that’s interesting is the fact that technically the speed of travel should usually affect the speed of communication.

Oren: Yeah. That’s another thing that is hard to wrap your head around as a modern person. The idea that messages in a lot of fantasy settings can’t go that much faster than a person can travel. There are some options. Fantasy settings can have limited communication over distances. You can set up smoke relays. If you’re a little more advanced, you can do something like the clacks towers from Discworld, which are based on a real thing. The Discworld versions are a lot more capable than the real version, but you know, they exist. And the more advanced you get the more options. But generally speaking, there isn’t a lot of information that’s going faster than a human can travel. And that’s also the same in some sci-fi settings actually. In some sci-fi settings there’s no intergalactic wireless. Messages move at how quickly a messenger ship can get there.

Chris: Although I do think in a lot of Star Trek episodes don’t they have some very long distance video calls?

Oren: Oh yeah, yeah. No, Star Trek doesn’t work like that. In Star Trek you can Zoom with anybody at any. And they have an explanation for that. They call it “subspace buoys,” which is how they explain how you can call Earth to anywhere in the Federation. But Voyager can’t call Earth ’cause there aren’t any buoys in the way.

Chris: But Voyager does eventually. Is it when they reach the buoys?

Oren: No, they access an ancient alien communication network. So sort of, but not Starfleet’s. I think it’s the Hirogen who used to be real big on building interstellar communication networks, and then they decided to be “diet Klingons” instead. Interesting cultural evolution.

Chris: I guess the useful thing of having all of your protagonists doing a long journey—traveling from one place to another—is if you have like one spot where people have the ability to communicate across the galaxy, then they’re only gonna be there for a temporary time, and then you can just take it away again.

Oren: I mean like, if you’re having it based on infrastructure you have a lot of flexibility. Because if you want your characters to be able to get messages and not have to go across the universe to get them, you can say, oh well, we stopped at a planet that had a big subspace antenna and so we were able to get some mail. But now we’re going out into the less developed area, so we’re not gonna be getting those.

Chris: But I will say that if you do want—kind of regardless of what you do, this is one of those things where if you’re doing it consistently it’s probably gonna constrain you at some point. There is no perfect solution that means that everything is plot convenient for you when you’re plotting as possible, but still is gonna seem perfectly consistent to the reader.

Oren: And you have to decide how much do you wanna lean into this? Because if you look at, for example, just a relatively recent example in real history in the run up to the American Revolution a lot of what happened had to do with the speed of travel. There were several attempts to cool down tension between the colony leaders and Parliament in the UK, but these messages take weeks to get across the Atlantic. And very often something happens while you’re waiting for a message.

Like the British general is waiting for a message from Parliament and the message says, “Don’t do any fighting stuff.” But before he gets that message he sees the colonials are up to something shady and he decides, “Well, I don’t have a message saying I’m not supposed to fight them yet, so I’m gonna go fight ’em.” And you have that kind of dynamic, and that can be fun, right? It helps. It makes your world more immersive. It helps you feel like you’re not just modern people wearing costumes.

But it also gets confusing and difficult. The further you get into a long story the harder it is to keep that up, because the more times you’re gonna risk your character, like missing the crucial information they need to be at a certain place for the story to work properly.

Chris: Yeah. And today everybody’s so used to having their cell phones that the default mindset is like, oh, this is really inconvenient. That character’s over there, but I just want them to know the things.

Oren: Right. Oh man, in role-playing games that’s especially bad because all the players are sitting around the table and they can just talk to each other.

Chris: Yeah, at this point I swear when I’m role playing, it’s like whatever. The team just has a hive mind.

Oren: Yeah! The party hive mind. Recently, we did a little mini Delta Green game and it was set in the ‘60s and I gave you guys walkie talkies. The idea was supposed to be that these were not as effective as regular cell phones. They were supposed to have limited range, and they were supposed to be kind of dangerous to use because they operate on a frequency that other people can listen in on. But after a while it just became clear that that was not what you guys were thinking of them as, and I hadn’t really made that clear in the game. So I just let them function effectively as cell phones, because that was clearly the direction we were going and I didn’t feel like fighting that.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, unless you really are in the mindset to leverage those communication gaps for drama, it just becomes too cumbersome to like, okay, you know? The other players just watched us play this out, but now I gotta repeat it over the walkie-talkie in character. But again, if you want actual travel adventures, which is what fantasy tends to lean into, because by nature it kind of is usually in a setting where traveling is a lot more cumbersome. And we were talking about Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which is a travel story where clearly Percy is supposed to be having travel adventures, but it’s awkward because it’s in modern day. So we have to start with an excuse for why he can’t fly.

Oren: ‘Cause Zeus is mad at him.

Chris: Zeus is mad at him, so he better not get in a plane.

Oren: Fortunately, he can’t take a high speed train because this is the United States, so he can’t do that. And for reasons only he and two other twelve-year-olds are allowed to go on the trip, so they can’t drive either. So you know, that worked itself out. [Sarcasticly] Don’t pay too much attention to the explanation for why only him and two twelve-year-olds can go. Just don’t worry about it.

Chris: But yeah, the same thing goes for, again, that balance between do you wanna have a venture while traveling or do you want people to get somewhere instantly? In a lot of fantasy settings one of the tricky things is anytime there’s water people will travel by water. But boats are just kind of—oh! Oh no! I was about to say boats are boring and Oren is— [Laughter]

Oren: [Indignant] How dare—I do beg your pardon, madam!

Chris: Look, there’s just less things for characters to do when they’re on a boat than there is when they’re land traveling.

Oren: Look, they got so many different kinds of knots that need to be tied and there’s a lot of cleaning. You gotta clean boats all the time.

Chris: [Noncommittal] Yes. Uh, it’s very exciting.

Oren: [Chuckling] That is actually an example of the difference between what I was in my notes referring to as active travel versus sedentary travel. Whereas in active travel, you’re either walking or riding a horse maybe. Like, the idea is that it requires constant effort on your part as opposed to sedentary travel where you are just sitting down waiting. If you’re a passenger on a boat or if you’re on a train or in a car that’s mostly sedentary travel.

It’s easier to skip over all that. People don’t expect you to cover it as much because it’s just sort of assumed, yeah, the boat will get where it’s going eventually. Whereas if you’re traveling on foot, it’s like that’s a little bit more of an effort. Readers may expect a little more from you there. 

Chris: Yeah. Let’s talk about that, because that is an issue with fantasy. Do you have to show the traveling? Just because there are many stories where that’s not really what the writer has in mind as far as what they want to depict. Now I’ve discovered that I apparently like depicting traveling, and so I basically designed the plots for my stories to have tons of travel adventures, and that’s part of the fun for me.

But if you’re like, doing a political intrigue and your character just has to move from city A to city B, but you feel like you have a setting where that journey is really perilous for some reason, then it becomes a lot harder to deal with. Because traveling also doesn’t feel like it should be part of the story, but you also don’t feel like you can skip it.

And the reason is basically if there is an expectation by the reader that it is gonna entail a lot of hardship or danger. That it is risky in some way. Then that means it’s basically an arc that kind of starts a plot arc right there.

Oren: And it can be a little frustrating. Because if you’re like, okay, this story is about the dangerous politics of “Elftown,” but between you and Elftown is the cursed forest. And I’m like, okay, I guess it should be hard to get through the cursed forest. But I really wanted the politics of Elftown. Like, this cursed forest is taking a while.

Chris: Yeah. So that’s tricky. Again, one thing you can do if you can: make the travel feel more routine and easier than—basically it’s more natural to skip ahead. And it’s not all about like, if you’re walking or sedentary. If this is like a really well traveled road that is maintained by some empire, there’s not a lot of bandits because the security is good, and there’s tons of people on it that feels a lot more like modern roads. That feels very routine, matter-of-fact. And then instead of making a big deal in your narration, I mean you do want to mention how long it’ll take, but instead of making a big deal out of the fact like, oh, I gotta travel across X, Y, Z, you just focus on the destination presented as not a big deal.

Oren: Yeah. I’m trying to remember what the order of operations was when I was editing the travel sequence in my novel. ‘Cause I remember, I think what happened was that readers were feeling a little bored by it until a more exciting thing happened partway through. But I didn’t feel like I could just skip over it, because as part of the tension I had in fact set up that this was gonna be kind of a dangerous trip.

So I think in that instance, the solution ended up being to more properly set expectations that this was gonna be risky, and then have the risk kind of discharge itself in a major conflict scene. And then afterwards set the expectation that now I’m gonna summarize ’cause now we’re assumed to be safe, so don’t worry about it.

Chris: So I think there were multiple things going on in The Abbess Rebellion. One of them actually was the fact that you just had a lot of information to convey, given the fact that it’s got political intrigue. And so you have, I know, some early character conversations that were there that were really important for setting up the story that were just happening while they were traveling. And so one of the reasons we couldn’t make that tighter is because that was actually information that the audience needed to know. You also did set up an arc, but it didn’t come to a head right away, of that maybe there would be danger on the road. And then later the summary—again, I think a lot of this was just the setup work that also happened to happen at the same time as the travel when there was quite a bit of summary that was covering here’s what the land looked like, the different provinces looked like along the journey as they got closer to the capitol. And again, that was kind of a way to tell readers here’s what the state of the empire is. Because that matters to the story. And so there was a lot of setup being done, and I think that was part of that. In that situation, it wasn’t just the management of tension that was the issue there.

But I do think if it’s just tension in a lot of cases, kind of something similar to what you did where you do have an initial arc, but then you resolve it and then you skip ahead is a good technique. So basically I’d try to identify, okay, what is the central issue that you’re gonna have with traveling? 

Is it just an issue of like, oh, well my character has been very sheltered and pampered and so they’re not used to like the hard life on the road and we need to show them adjusting. Is it like, okay, they’re gonna be locked on a boat with somebody they don’t like and there’s an interpersonal issue that could be there? What is it? Or is there some initial dangerous step in the journey that can end after they get to a more crowded road, for instance. And then have a little arc over that that then shows readers, okay, this is what traveling is like, and here we’ve gotten over—me and this person who I don’t get along with have learned to coexist in some manner. Or, here I’m sore, but now I’ve adjusted to riding on a horse. Or whatever it is.

Try to make it an interesting tense arc that’s fun. And then get done with it. And then just, alright well, the rest of the journey is gonna be routine now. Then jump forward to the destination. And then fill in, oh, this is the state of my character. They’re so tired, they’re so stinky. They’re so dirty, they’re so worn out. Whatever it is. And then you can kind of backfill: oh, the journey was routine or there were a lot of long days or whatever it was.

So that’s kind of like a middle ground that, alright, we recognize that there is some inadvertent tension created over the traveling and so we’re gonna keep up to that, but try to keep it as short as we can.

Oren: And I realized as I was talking that this is a situation that I’ve seen a number of authors struggle with. Which is your leader is in the capitol or whatever, and you want to have them go check out something that’s happening out in the provinces and go look for and see for themselves. And in a modern story this would be easy. Your character would hop in a helicopter or in a car, and it wouldn’t take too long. But if you’re in a fantasy setting that is a long time to be gone from your capital, especially if plotting is afoot. So this is the thing that I’ve definitely noticed. It feels like everyone just takes a pause, like, “Nah, we’re not gonna do any plotting while the main character’s gone. Don’t worry about it.” Which is incidentally, in real life why the court often traveled with the king. ‘Cause the king needs to go see things outside the capitol, but he can’t afford to have all of his nobles like, scheming while he is not there. So he brings them with him.

Chris: Wow. Does that mean that they were often coerced?

Oren: I mean not necessarily like, “Come with me or I’ll kill you.” But like, “Everyone else is doing it.”

Chris: “You will feel my displeasure if you don’t come with me.”

Oren: Right. Like, “I’ll be upset.” And also everyone else is doing it. So if you don’t do it, then you’re not gonna get the influence ’cause you won’t be where the king is.

And you know, various kings have done this to various degrees. King—I think he’s Louis XIV. Whichever one the Sun King is of France. He was famous for getting all of his most powerful nobles really isolated in his relatively tiny castle and palace area, and just having them be constantly in very close proximity to him with very little contact with the outside world. 

Sometimes they would do stuff like that, but at its most basic the traveling court is basically a way for the king to be able to keep tabs on all his powerful people. And in return, the powerful people have access to the king which is something they want. So it works out for everybody.

Chris: I think another good question when we do want travel adventures is how dangerous should travel realistically be? Because there can definitely be something where it’s like, oh! It’s super dangerous. It’s like, okay, but how do people trade? Because people should be trading and it can’t really be that dangerous if every single person is set on by bandits.

Oren: Yeah, I do wish people wouldn’t use bandits like random encounters. It’s not like banditry never happens, but I do think it deserves a little bit of setup. I don’t think you should just assume that the moment you walk outta town, you’re likely to be attacked. Because if that happens people are going to respond differently. Like if the countryside is that dangerous then the way people travel will be very different.

First of all, where are all these bandits coming from? Bandits don’t just materialize out of the air. Who are these bandits and how have they been able to hang out in this area that is apparently both rich enough to support them robbing people, but also doesn’t have the resources to drive them out?

And there are answers. You can come up with solutions to these questions. I just think you should think about them. Same thing with monsters. If monsters are constantly attacking travelers then there aren’t gonna be very many travelers. Travelers will adapt.

Chris: I just want people to stop using wolves. Like they’re just murderbots or something.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, animals will almost never attack a group of people. Especially a group of armed people. Mmm-mm, no. That’s almost not going to happen. Not impossible, but extremely uncommon.

Chris: Yes. Wolves are not murder machines. Other wild animals are not murder machines. So I mean, you could increase the likelihood of danger by giving your protagonist a unique misadventure where they kinda lose their way. And then there’s more danger off the main road, for instance.

Oren: Yeah. Having to go through an area that isn’t well traveled is already a danger, right? Maybe they have to do that. That in itself, that’s gonna suspend a lot of what we were just talking about ’cause it’s specifically not well traveled.

Chris: It’s also worth noting that in a low tech setting, like many fantasy settings, roads really do require maintenance. It’s interesting how long Roman roads were used past when they were built, because of just the work that it takes to build roads and maintain them. But having those pathways established is actually really essential because that determines whether you can use wheels or not. ‘Cause wheels require a flat surface. So I mean, if you have just a dirt track and an open prairie that’s already flat you might be able to make wheels work, for instance.

But in most forested, hilly areas you can’t use wheels unless there are actually roads. And for that there has to be somebody keeping the roads clear. So if you have a situation where you’ve got a bunch of isolated villages and you’re supposed to be really far from civilization and there’s no big empire that’s got crews manning the roads, then that’s not gonna be an option for people. Which is why animals are more useful in those situations.

Speaking of animals, animals can be really fun. It’s definitely a good thing to do a little research. And in many cases you could use something other than a horse to give it a little variety. But note about horses: you do need a horse for every person and then another horse to carry any packs. 

Oren: Yeah, that was something I really liked about The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is that he has multiple horses.

Chris: Yep, multiple horses. So if you want your humans to ride a horse rather than walk with the horse, there should be more than one horse per person. But other than that, the animal that’s used really does change the travel experience enough that it’s worth looking up.

For instance, oxen have probably better stamina than horses, but they have to rest midday when it’s hot ’cause they’re sensitive to the heat. So that means you kind of have a long lunch break every day. Camels apparently got very good stamina, but they’re very hard to get going in the morning. So like people sleep on camels, because once you get them going you want really long days and you never wanna stop because once the camels stop they won’t walk again. I find those differences very interesting and they can add some interest to travel.

Oren: So sadly, no research yet on traveling by bear, but we’re working on it.

Chris: Yep. [Chuckles] I’ve been trying to research reindeer for doing a story that has just a little minimal mention of reindeer. And I’m finding what I can, but the information on reindeer—I wish it was a little bit more plentiful.

Oren: Well you heard it, folks. Please send us all of your reindeer sources.

Chris: Yeah, do it.

Oren: We have a need. Alright. Well with that I think we will call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you would like to fuel our tanks or feed our four horses, since there are two of us…

Oren: [Snickers]

Chris: …you can support 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 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]

Yes, obviously. But maybe not in the way some people think? This is a weird question that comes up every so often in The Discourse, and it inevitably reveals more about emotional states than it does the craft of writing. It’s worth investigating what people actually mean when they ask this question, what role reading actually plays in writing, and why Interview With The Vampire is a fantastic adaptation.

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

[intro music]

Oren:  Welcome everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. 

Chris: And I’m Chris. 

Oren: So, I have a book that I want you to buy and read, but I will never buy and read your book. I actually hate your book. I think it’s worthless. I hate the whole concept of your book. No, please buy my book. 

Chris: Oh, no. 

Oren: This opening bit is actually also setting context for an important part of our topic today, which is the question of: Do writers need to read question mark?

Chris: Is there really a question mark? Is there a really a−

Oren: I mean−

Chris: −question?

Oren: −sometimes. 

Chris: Is this really any question? 

Oren: I mean it’s a weird bit of perennial discourse that pops up every once in a while, and it’s like, I think it is 90% motivated by fear, in my experience.

Chris: Definitely feels like rage bait discourse. 

Oren: Yeah. I have no idea how many people there are out there that seriously think that they can write a novel without ever having read a novel. Every once in a while you see someone who claims that, and I’m like, are you a real person? Who knows? I’ve certainly never met one of these people in real life. But at the same time, writers are scared that these people exist. And it’s for the reason I just described. At least, in my opinion it is. I’m doing a little bit of armchair psycho-analysis here, right? 

You know, we’re all scared−for a bunch of reasons−but in this most immediate reason is that we all see the news articles about how reading rates are falling and who’s gonna buy and read our books if no one is buying or reading books? And then you’ve got these maybe real people who want to sell us their books, but refuse to read ours in return. And it’s, uh, it makes us very mad.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, even without the falling reading rates, it’s just so competitive. And we want people to buy more books so that more of us can have careers, or there could be kind of an implied insult to the medium itself. Like, well, if you’re not reading, it feels like the easy conclusion to take from that is that, well, you don’t enjoy reading. It’s not a fun pastime for you. So, if you don’t like this art medium, why are you creating stories in it, for instance? So, again, that can be a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but that is certainly how… I think, why it enrages people so much. I mean, that combined with just the fact that people really want to complain about new books and how they’re worse than yesterday’s books. 

Oren: Yeah, they do like to do that.

Chris: I honestly think it’s the reverse. Over a long enough time span, I think books are getting better, not worse. It doesn’t mean that this year’s books are that much better than last year’s books.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: But yeah, it’s just always very popular to complain about the books these days. Just like we complain about the kids these days. 

Oren: Right, and if anyone has been able to find a well-known book by an author who never reads, I don’t know of that. I don’t think that’s a thing. 

Chris: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s a thing either, but it certainly plays into the fear. It’s that like, oh, all of the books are now bad because writers don’t read anymore. 

Oren: Right. And of course this combines with the young people panic, right? Every once in a while there’s a viral story where some professor will be like, the people in my class don’t know how to read books anymore. And it’s one of those things where on the one hand “kids these days”, this is a perennial complaint. Everyone always complains about kids these days. But I don’t want to entirely dismiss it because the education system is worse funded now than it used to be. 

Chris: It’s worse funded. Yeah. 

Oren: And of course there is the brand new, very fun variable of LLMs being everywhere, and we don’t really know exactly how that’s going to affect people. There are some preliminary reports that are pretty scary, but it’s still only, it’s still actually fairly new, and it’s hard to separate the real data from the panic pieces.

Chris: Yeah, it is. The idea that kids aren’t, for instance, not just not writing their own papers, but they don’t have to read books anymore because they’re just summarizing them, you know, it’s scary. I don’t know how much that’s common, right, but it’s−

Oren: −and to be clear, that happened before LLMs.

Chris: Mm-hmm. 

Oren: Right? 

Chris: Yeah, no, all the CliffsNotes. We were always doing that. I mean, I didn’t personally do that, but I assume lots of other people did. People who−

Oren: −yeah, I mean, I’m−

Chris: −were more reasonable with their time− 

Oren: −I’m not− 

Chris: −sometimes.

Oren: −I’m not gonna say that I never did that. 

Chris: When I look back, at the time when I read through all of Atlas Shrugged, I was like, why didn’t I do that? Why did I make myself read over a thousand pages of Ayn Rand?

Oren: Right. So, but anyway, this all ties into the anxiety that people have about this supposed cohort of authors that don’t want to read books, and as a result, people are primed to jump at some random account with 15 followers that claims you don’t have to read books and may or may not be a real person. But at the other hand, at the other end of it, I’ve noticed another defensive reaction, which is from people who don’t just not read but maybe don’t read as much as they feel like they should read. And they feel judged by this whole thing. You know, like people who have read a lot but maybe don’t read much or at all anymore for whatever reason. That’s a pretty common narrative. You talk to people who are like, yeah, when I was in high school I read like a book a week, and now I just can’t get myself to do it.

 And these people then feel judged, and they get upset, and then it just becomes a round and round and round endless cycle, and it gets… at that point, it’s less about the initial question of do writers need to read and more about how cool of a nerd you are in one way or another. 

Chris: I do think that if you’re one of those people who feels a little insecure about how much you read because you don’t read as much as you would like to be reading, personally, I don’t think that’s the person that everybody else is panicking over.

Realistically, I think that when people get this negative reaction to the idea of writers not reading, they’re imagining a very stereotypical person who just hates books, or is, you know, at all… right, and doesn’t think that they need to put any work in and or whatever. They’re not thinking about the person who actually does like books and has read many books that they loved, but is doing a million things and raising kids, and taking care of their aging parents at the same time or whatever it is that you’re doing. Right? And is having trouble squirreling away the time to read. I don’t think−, that’s not the type of person that people are thinking of.

Oren: Right. There is a specific breed of writing advice giver whose first advice to any question is always go read lots of books.

Chris: Because they’re bad at their jobs. 

Oren: It’s not good advice, right? Like yeah, reading… it can give you some help, right? It can be useful for your craft, but this idea that like more books equals more better writing, it’s not true.

Chris: If somebody gives that advice on top of also giving lots of good craft advice, okay, fine. But like−

Oren: Sure.

Chris: −I definitely feel like there is some, oh, you know it when you see it. I don’t want to have to personally do the work to figure out what that means or what the rules are to teach it to somebody else, so just read and you’ll just know it when you see it, too, if you read enough, right? 

Oren: Yeah. There’s this attitude that if you read a lot of books, you can kind of absorb the skills through osmosis. 

Chris: And it’s not impossible to do that, but it’s certainly not reliable, and it’s definitely slower than actually sitting down to really learn.

Oren: Right, because if you do want to learn from books, you have to be able to read critically, and that’s a kind of confusing term for some people because some people what they think that means is you should read a book and just trash everything in it. And don’t get me wrong, trashing will be involved, but you have to be able to do more than just find problems. You have to be able to look at the reasons why things are happening. And often this means looking past not only your own positive reactions, but also your own negative reactions.

 Like, you didn’t like something−, this is something that I have to deal with, for example, when I’m reading a dark story, because I don’t tend to like dark stories very much, and so it’s easy for me to assume, “Ugh, I hate this character because they are a bad character and they’re terribly written.” It’s like, okay, is that really the reason or is the reason that I just didn’t like that they did dark things in a dark story? That sort of thing. Or, another big one is like, “Oh man, I hate this hindrance character so much. I wish that hindrance character was dead. This book would be so much better if that hindrance character was dead.” But is the issue really the character or is it that the author doesn’t want to move the plot forward and if that character wasn’t around, they would find some other reason? 

Chris: Yeah. There are a lot of things that storytellers do that get blamed on characters, but we also hear from a lot of people who, again, when they’re new to this and they’re still learning to do critical reading, it takes some long time to figure out, “Okay, I’m not into it. Why? I don’t like this. Why?” And that just basic pinning down−, first of all, recognizing what you feel, which right can be a big step. Again, a new storyteller generally does not know what tension feels like. You have to pay attention to that and pay attention to your own feelings and learn that, and then from there, try to figure out why you are reacting the way you do. And then from there, you can start to get sort of storytelling lessons as you read material, but a lot of that takes a lot of introspection. And sometimes if you can’t tell right away, it might take: I’ve read several novels and was able to compare this one to this one, and it didn’t bother me in this case, but it did bother me in this case, and I think here’s why.

That takes a lot of time and introspection, but it does help for sure. 

Oren: Yeah. And then there’s the more immediate benefits of keeping up with reading. Either, if it’s your own genre, then you know what people are doing in the genre. You have some idea, and that can help you decide which story ideas to pursue. I’m not suggesting you try to write to the market. I don’t think that’s viable for most people, but if you didn’t read modern fantasy these days, and by modern I mean fantasy written today, not fantasy set in a modern period, if you didn’t do that, you might think we were all still publishing Lord of the Rings clones, and that’s just not the case. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and you wouldn’t know that. So, you could end up being like, yeah, I’m going to write my own Lord of the Rings clone, and it’ll flop because everyone’s like, we’ve all read Lord of the Rings, man. Or maybe the genre is set for a resurgence, and there’s Lord of the Rings clones all over the place!

But if you don’t read in the genre at all, you won’t know any of that. You won’t be able to make an informed decision. 

Chris: Again, we don’t encounter this very often, and so we don’t−, it doesn’t usually need to be said, but generally you want to be a fan of the genre that you’re writing in.

Oren: Probably. 

Chris: That may seem obvious, but occasionally we run into somebody who has never read that genre before or is kind of like, oh, that genre’s so bad, I’m going to do it better; doesn’t really like it; doesn’t have an understanding, therefore, of what fans like about the genre, right? And that could be, like, if you read that subgenre and those types of stories and you don’t like them, then trying to mimic them is probably not a good idea. 

Oren: And I understand writing out of spite. I’ve done that more than a few times. But there’s still like, what is it about this genre that you do want to have in your story? It’s probably gotta be something, right? Otherwise, why this genre? Pick one you like better. And this is a very long way of saying that if you are able to read critically and do this kind of analysis, that’s more important than the number of books you read. You don’t have, there’s not like a, I gotta read 20 books in a year. There’s no point in measuring it like that.

Chris: Obviously, people like to brag about their Read pile sometimes, although I think sometimes writers like to talk more about their To Be Read pile and how hopelessly big it is. So, if there’s all these books that you intended to read and never do read, you’re at least in good company.

Oren: That’s a very sympathetic problem to talk about these days, and it also helps them justify why they haven’t read whatever book you recommended to them. It’s like, oh, I totally would, but my To Be Read pile… it’s so big! 

Chris: It’s so big, I can’t do it! 

Oren: One talking point that I hadn’t seen before but has come up more recently is this idea that you can tell someone doesn’t read books because they don’t have any internalizing, which I find very weird. 

Chris: I mean, I could see why somebody would make that assumption. That’s what it looks like. That’s why we call it film POV. 

Oren: Yeah, and you can imagine some… you’re like, oh, okay, well, they’ve never read a book, so they don’t know what an internal narration looks like, so it’s all described from the outside like a camera. But this is one of the reasons why it’s hard for me to remember that not everyone has the same experience we do because I read lots of client manuscripts and they are often like that, and it’s not because the author doesn’t read. Now, certainly someone who doesn’t read could make that mistake, but also a number of authors that I’ve worked with who are voracious readers have made that mistake.

Chris: It’s funny because I’m sure if somebody stares at text−, and again, I say stare at text because I personally consume a lot of books on audio because that’s how I fit them into my schedule, right? I listen to them while I’m cooking, for instance. Otherwise, it would be a lot harder for me to consume as many books as I do. But a lot of readers, if you are looking at text on a page, a lot of times you would assume that people would know basic things, but everybody picks up some things and not other things, and so we get new clients that don’t know paragraph breaks. Just don’t know how to do them. Either they have almost no paragraph breaks or they just have too few, and so there’s huge chunks of text, for instance. 

Oren: Or, people who haven’t learned the basics of when to start a new paragraph around dialogue or around character actions, that sort of thing. 

Chris: That’s very common. Dialogue is pretty futzy. Another one I see is they don’t know how to integrate thoughts into the narration. There’s some of these things that writers, once you just get a little experience, you start to take for granted. But new people, they don’t know that. It’s not like when they’re reading a novel they’re staring at the text when somebody thinks and is like, okay, that’s how you do it. So, they just don’t pick up on a lot of those things. Naturally, they have to learn it. 

Oren: One thing that I find funny, which is that a thing that’s a weird bias that sneaks up on you if you are the kind of person who reads a billion books, is that you can develop your own bias where because you read so many books, you start to crave something weird and different in a way that the average reader doesn’t. And I found that can kind of color people’s perception of stories, and I just find that funny. It’s like, that’s a taste thing. That’s not inherently good or bad. It’s just weird when you see that leaking into someone’s review of a book where they’re like, this book is so cliche. It’s like every other book. I’m like, is it? They’re like, well, not really.

But I can see how if you have read 500 books in this genre, you just desperately want something different. 

Chris: And some genres have a lot of constraints that make it so that they have a lot of things in common, because that’s what you have to do with the constraints that it’s under. I feel like it’s very unfair, for instance, to accuse romance of being formulaic because it’s under a lot of constraints. With everything that’s going on, it’s actually quite complex, and that complexity means that it’s almost harder to do things that are different because it has to fit all of the constraints.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: So who knows? I do know one person who is a speed reader who said that she didn’t like short sentences because the periods make her stop. Otherwise, she reads really fast. But I don’t think that’s a normal taste that most people have. I don’t know, maybe that’s a common thing among speed readers. I couldn’t say for sure, but that would be a little different than average. 

Oren: If your story has too many short sentences too close together, people will start to describe it as “choppy”. But it will also have a similar problem if sentences are too long, too often. You need a mix of both most of the time. 

Chris: You need variety in your sentence length and form. For sure. 

Oren: Another kind of emotional aspect of this discourse sometimes seems to be this fear over authors who originally wanted to do like an anime or a TV show or a comic book, and those are expensive and hard to do, so they want to write a book instead. And it’s like, okay, again, I get it. I understand the emotional reaction. But first of all, it’s 2026. Let’s just be grateful that they are actually trying to write something themselves instead of just using a slop generator, which is a thing that some people do now. So it’s like, let’s not punish the behavior we want to see.

Chris: I think we all need to keep in mind, again, it can be, if you’ve been doing this for a while, it might be easy to lose touch with what you were saying, with the level that people start out at, right? Which is very basic. And if somebody−, let’s say you had somebody who really wasn’t into books, right? They like to play video games, watch shows, and then they had just had a story idea. As many of us do at some point. And then it was like, okay, well I can’t make a video game and I can’t make a show, but I can write a novel. That person is in for quite the workout when it comes to learning all of that stuff that they need to learn. And they’re not going to make it unless they can deal with words. They’re just not. That’s tough. That’s really tough. It’s a huge, huge thing to take on if you don’t like the written word at all. So, yeah, I think that person is probably just mostly in for a load of hurt if they don’t… unless they actually take to it, unless they actually appreciate the medium.

Oren: Which is what my advice to them is. If that’s something you want, right? If you are like, hey, I haven’t read books much, but I play these video games, and Baldur’s Gate 3 has really inspired me and I want to write. Okay! Great, but much the same way as if you were a novelist who wanted to do a video game, you gotta learn what you’re doing or you’re just going to crash and burn. It’s not gonna be a fun time. And, we don’t get to see that reversal that often because it’s actually very hard to get into a position where you can have the resources to make a video game or be in charge of a TV show. But every once in a while we see a novelist put in that position without a lot of experience, and, uh, it shows. 

Chris: It shows. Different mediums are different! Which is one thing when I get worried when a novelist gets an adaptation and gets too much control and is gonna be running the screenplay…

Oren: Yeah… no thank you. 

Chris: I think the latest one is, it looks like Sanderson is going to be writing some of his own screenplays, and he at least is humble enough that I believe he will get help. So, if it’s okay, that’s going to be why. 

Oren: He has oddly talked about how he wouldn’t want to do that in the past because he has acknowledged that screenwriting is a different skill. So…

Chris: So he appreciates it. He appreciates it. But his humility might pay off for him there, right? But for a lot of writers, novelists, that would not work out and not be a good idea. Plus, the thing is about having somebody else do the adaptation is if they’re any good, they can spot problems that you did not spot and do neat little fixes for them. 

Oren: Yeah. Get you someone who loves your book the way the people who made the Strange and Norrell adaptation loved that book. Man, that is a loving adaptation. Same thing with the Interview with the Vampire show. At least, the first season. Just like. Wow, they clearly are so into the material that they not only faithfully adapted it, but they actually improved it in ways that are really hard and that, like, book nerds tend to assume never happen because the trope is that the adaptation makes it worse. 

Chris: Or like the Lockwood and Co. adaptation to the TV show where it looks like it’s almost all the same, but if you read the book right after you look at the show or vice versa, you’ll see there’s all these like very neat, you know, small edits that do a world of good, and really smooth the story out and fix all its little flaws but keeping it mostly the same.

Oren: For one, the biggest example is that they toned down the degree to which the main characters are mean to each other just a little bit. Like, they toned it down just a little so that now they are, they seem like they’re stressed out and sharp-tongued and they give each other a hard time as opposed to sometimes in the book, it really boils over and just makes it seem like, wow, they hate each other, I guess. You know, I really wish the show−, I mean, I wish the show had continued for a bunch of reasons, but I was really curious what they would’ve done with Holly. Because in the books, Holly is introduced to be the next like, because Lucy, the main character, has sort of settled enough of her differences with George that they aren’t constantly fighting, so we introduced Holly to be the next character, the next coworker that she doesn’t like. 

But it’s kind of gross. It’s very like, “ooh, girl fight” kind of thing. And I don’t like it. It’s not my favorite. And I was really curious to see what the show was going to do with that.

Chris: And I stand by my assertion that it was all Lockwood’s fault, and he completely escaped any blame for that situation.

Oren: He did cause a lot of that problem by being a bad boss. But as we know, he’s a beautiful, special boy, and he can’t be blamed for anything. 

Chris: I don’t think that it’s really a problem for people to change mediums because if they don’t like the writing medium, they’re just going to get in trouble. And I understand why people do it, too, right? Because it’s something they can do on their own. Some people can write comics on their own, but you have to really−, with comics, it’s really all about the drawing. And if you just want to write for a comic, trying to find an artist−I’ve been asked about that before−you cannot count on fighting an artist if you want to write for a comic because it’s really the artist that gets to call the shots usually. Unless you’re already a famous writer or something like that. Generally, that’s the person who has the more obviously hard skill I would say, instead of soft skill, so it’s the artist that gets to pick the writer, not vice versa. And often artists want to write for their own comics, but if you really like drawing, that’s another one you can do besides writing. But, you’re going to spend most of your time drawing, not making up the story. 

Oren: Yeah, drawing comics takes a long time. All right. Well, with that, I think we have more or less answered the question, which is actually very easy to answer, but it’s more interesting to explore the reasons why it becomes a question in the first place. So, I think we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: Now, if you want to read with us, you can join our Patreon to participate in our quarterly book club coming up. 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 music]

We all dream of the day our characters turn into beloved household names, or perhaps feared household names, in the case of villains. But before that can happen, we must introduce our characters to readers, and how are we even supposed to do that? There’s so much information that must be balanced, to say nothing of what happens if you need to introduce multiple characters at the same time. Fortunately, we have some tips.

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: Hello, I am Chris. I have blue eyes and brown hair, and that is all you need to know about me. Now you have a very clear picture of who I am and what I look like. 

Oren: (Intense voice) There is also… Podcaster 2. He is very tall and he has a very distinctive gravelly voice and many weapons. Don’t worry about why he has those. He’s not important. He’s just a background character. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: Normal guy, Podcaster 2. 

Chris: [Laughing] Is that like a video game NPC? Is that what that is? 

Oren: No. He’s got five paragraphs of description because he’s actually the secret villain or love interest or rival, or… 

Chris: [Laughs] That’s what I was gonna say, love interest. 

Oren: He’s a secret something or other. We don’t know exactly what. 

Chris: Both villain and love interest perhaps. 

Oren: Could be both of those things. But the important thing is that the author is trying to disguise him as a normal character in the scene, but obviously we can’t do that ’cause we need to say how cool he is.

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: It’s been a while since I’ve read something like that in a published manuscript, but I still see it in client works. You’re like, “There was a guard by the door and there was a courtier, and then there was a spooky figure in the shadows with the robe over his head and a jeweled staff. Anyway, moving on.” I’m like, “Okay, so that’s the villain that we just saw.” 

Chris: [Laughs] If it is a romance, I can see having, there’s a royal guard there, like, “Oh, that one guard is really hot.” And that is supposed to be the first time the protagonist notices the love interest. And then we’re gonna build on that later. But if we’re really trying to make a character blend in, adding a bunch of description is not gonna do that. 

Any case, this time we’re talking about introducing characters. For a storyteller, this is not usually the most challenging task, but there are still a bunch of different little things that can go wrong. And we often see this in manuscripts, so it’s worth kind of talking about how you do character introductions. 

Oren: You say it’s not hard, but I spent the last two weeks trying to revise a scene where I introduced two characters and it was too much. It was too confusing, and so I had to revise it to introduce one at a time, and that was really hard. 

Chris: That is one of the trickier things is getting the timing right. First thing I wanna mention, there are characters that don’t need an introduction. But they’re not important, so they’re only usually kind of barely characters. They also have a label that explains specifically why they are in the scene. If your character walks into the lobby and sees the receptionist, that’s a label. We know why that person is there. They’re called a receptionist. We don’t really need more than that if we’re just walking by them briefly or saying just a few words to them. Doesn’t really need much introduction there. 

The thing that we see in a lot of writers who don’t know how to do introductions, when we’re looking at manuscripts, we just drop a name. “I was going to the store and I stopped by home and George said, ‘Hi,’ and then I kept going.” And it’s like, “Who’s George?” I don’t know who George is. What is the relationship between the narrator or the protagonist and George? Why is George there? 

As opposed to like, “Oh, I saw my neighbor George” or “I saw my coworker, George,” tells you what the relationship George has to the other elements in the story. It can be really funny in speculative fiction works because a lot of times we’ll just get proper nouns and I don’t know whether this is a person, a place, or a vegetable.

Oren: It’s like a fantasy story, and they say, “I saw ‘Gula.’” What is Gula? Is that a person? Is that a soup? What is that? 

Chris: [Laughs] Oh, is that a strange monolith in the middle of the street? I don’t know. 

Oren: It could be. Anything’s possible. 

Chris: [Laughs] We literally have no idea what this thing is, whereas at least if it’s in a contemporary setting, I know George is a person. 

Oren: But it could also be a cat. If you don’t describe it at all, it’s like, “Is that a person or an animal?” 

Chris: It could be really jarring if George walks in and you assume it’s a man, and then the protagonist starts petting George. 

Oren: Hey, I don’t judge. Live their lives however they want. 

Chris: That’s the first rule, is don’t just drop in names. Give “George, my neighbor.” That two words is everything. And if you’re writing in a really close, limited perspective, don’t overthink it. Somebody might normally not think to themselves, “Oh, there’s George, my neighbor.” But don’t overthink it. Just put it in. 

Oren: You’re already editing what the person’s train of thought is. When you see another person, you don’t just register their name. You almost certainly have other associations with them that if you tried to write them all out, would overwhelm the narration. We can abstract that down to “my neighbor.” 

The one that I struggle with is when we introduce a character once and then they show back up again several hours, or hundreds of pages later, like I’m supposed to know who that is. Yeah, technically we did mention them, but I don’t remember who that is. It’s been too long. My memory is not that good. 

Chris: Definitely if we’re doing a reintroduction, and it’s been a while, sometimes what actually needs to happen is we need to consolidate the characters. If we have lots of characters who only perform very small roles and there’s no logistical reason they have to be different. For instance, if your character is traveling, that’s a reason why people need to be different. ‘Cause otherwise you get the Kazons. It’s like, “How are they following us?” 

Oren: There’s that one Kazon guide. He’s always there. Well actually we know how he’s keeping up. It’s ’cause Voyager keeps stopping to do side quests.

Chris: [Laughs] If you have the same character show up in different places as your protagonist travels, that will require explanation. But otherwise, if you have lots of little characters with tiny bit roles and they’re actually named people, not “the receptionist,” a lot of times you wanna merge those together and make it one person who reappears more times. So that helps. 

Even so, there may be reasons to have one person who pops up early and then disappears for a while and pops in again. In some of those cases, your readers may kind of generally remember the incident and that there was somebody there, but pretty unlikely to remember exactly what their name was. 

Names especially are very hard to remember. In that case, your kind of reintroduction needs to include some kind of reminder. Unless your protagonist sees this person all the time, this can often be framed as like, “Oh, who is that again? Oh yeah, that person.” 

Oren: Assuming this is a significant character we’re introducing, I’m never sure, how much descriptive information do I need? I tend to go with a lot because I like describing characters and theoretically I put work into figuring out what this character should look like. But I always feel like I’m overdescribing them. Do we need to know all that? Who knows? 

Chris: People definitely have different preferences here for how much description they like to put in. Some people do like to do a lot and some people don’t like to do very much. So there’s definitely some subjectivity. Probably one of the biggest signals for how important the character is going to be is how much description you have. And so what that means is if they’re important, you have some description. If they’re gonna be hanging out for the whole story, usually you want some description of them. 

Whereas if they’re a bit character like the receptionist, you can say a few things about how the receptionist in the lobby looks if you want to, but you really don’t have to. The other thing is how long is this story? Makes a lot more sense to spend more time on description if the story is longer and you’re gonna be spending more time with those characters.

That leads into the question of, should you give away that a character is important? There’s multiple options. Usually, yes. Particularly if this is a protagonist. If the reader knows a character as a protagonist, I do think that they will kind of give that character a little bit more of the benefit of doubt, and they’re more willingly, emotionally invest in them.

If the reader doesn’t think the character’s important, that can be fine. If they have a bit role, it can be fun to have a character that seems like a minor character, and then for their role to grow and then to discover they’re important. So that’s not necessarily bad, and in fact that works better than the reverse where we think a character is important and then suddenly they’re not important. ‘Cause that could disappoint somebody who liked the character. 

Oren: What gets me, this happens occasionally when you have a main character who is an ambassador or some kind of politician or other social character. And they have a bodyguard and they get attacked and the bodyguard has a fight scene, and I’m like, “Oh heck, that unnamed bodyguard seems cool. Tell me about them.” And then that bodyguard dies at the end of the scene. I’m like, “No, what? I wanted to know about that character. That seemed cool.” 

Chris: [Laughs] It was better that you did not get attached. 

Oren: That happened in one of The Bad Batch episodes. Some senator who was trying to do some behind the scenes politicking had a random guard who had this whole badass fight scene. And at the end of that he just dies. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: I guess he’s done now. 

Chris: Bodyguards are for redshirting. 

Oren: If they get redshirted, whatever. But it was just weird how long and drawn out that fight was. And it feels like we were treating this as though it was her fight. But she’s not fighting ’cause she’s not a fighting character. So it’s just her unnamed bodyguard.

Chris: I wonder if it’s because of all the stories where bodyguards are important characters. If the person who was depicting that, that rubbed off a little bit and is like, “Oh, well it’s her bodyguard, so this person must be really important to her and somebody she knows well and must be badass to be a scientist or bodyguard,” but that doesn’t actually change their role in the story. [Chuckles]

Oren: That could be. 

Chris: That kind of thing where you set up that expectation. If you describe them and they’re really cool and unique, it definitely makes it feel like they’re gonna be important and it could get audiences interested in them. So after that, if it turns out they’re just not important, that could be disappointing.

Whereas if you have a really important character and they have a bit role at first, you can do that and then expand. But you just have to be conscious of the fact that if you don’t make them look important, readers will likely to forget them or not gonna get attached to them yet. When they bring them in the second time, you might need to be like, “Oh yeah, that was Guard #5. Oh yeah you were one of the guards over there.” 

Oren: I’ll never forget you, Guard #5. 

Chris: Just reintroduce them. Remind readers what they were doing and then build off of that. I don’t want them to be a jerk if they don’t seem like they’re gonna be an important protagonist. In general though, it works fine if you completely give away a character is important and do that by giving them a budget description. 

As for what description to give, that’s another important question. I was joking in the intro about just hair and eye color, which is a thing that people tend to default to just ’cause that’s the fun description, I guess. 

Oren: Hair color, sure. That’s something you would generally notice. I’m not sure how many people notice eye color most of the time. 

Chris: Authors of course make the eye colors, like, violet.

Oren: I’ve occasionally met someone with really bright blue or green eyes and been like, “Wow, okay. Pretty intense.” But it’s not common. Most of the time I would never be able to tell you what color someone’s eyes are. 

Chris: That’s an interesting one. It can have a surprisingly strong effect on somebody’s appearance, but you wouldn’t consciously remember exactly what their color of eyes are. But no, it’s very popular to be like, “Oh, and they were bound with flecks of gold and black.” Flecks are all the rage right now.

Oren: People love flecks. 

Chris: Instead, what you really want is to give the big noticeable things first so that if the reader fills in the rest with their imagination, and then you describe more, it’s not jarring later. If you don’t specify a character’s age and then their age is not what the reader expected, that’s very jarring.

That’s the experience I had at the beginning of Sword of Shannara. I don’t know that anybody had the same experience that I did because when I looked at it, there’s just a few lines in here where his face is “weathered” and then he’s also got a whole “calm but alert.” Any person’s face can be weathered, but without any other context, that kind of worn downness. The things about it seemed to make him feel like he was like a really seasoned traveler that was used to the road. That was the impression that the first paragraph about him created. 

So then we find out he’s really young. The associations we have with youth are more fresh faced and excitable and impulsive and energetic. Not all young people are that way, but when you don’t have that information, readers just fill in whatever feels natural. 

Oren: I had the opposite experience. I was reading the beginning of a fantasy book, and it starts with the protagonist and she’s whimsically laying down in a field and looking at the clouds and skipping her chores and thinking very rose-colored lenses about traveling and how wonderful it would be to see the world. She would love to visit new things with her aunt and talking to her imaginary friend, and I’m like, “Okay, so this character is like, 12?” 19. 

Chris: [Laughs] I’ve met some like less mature 19 year olds that would do those kinds of things. 

Oren: It’s not like a 19-year-old can’t do any of those things. If they are mature, maybe you just enjoy being in a field and thinking about traveling.

Chris: And you still skip your chores. 

Oren: And you still skip your chores, lots of people do that. But it was just a combination of things made me think this was a fairly young character, especially since they seemed to have very little concept of social relationships. I would expect a 19-year-old to care more about what their peers might think. 

Granted, young kids care that way too. But that’s the thing I associate with late teenagers, is that they think about their peers a lot, and this character doesn’t seem to do that at all. Could be that’s just a trait of theirs, but wasn’t specified.

Chris: And of course, your character doesn’t have to be a stereotypical whatever. The point is that you wanna give that information early so that it feeds into that first impression. Instead of them forming a first impression without context and then finding it really jarring when you introduce information that contradicts what they imagined. Age is one, race is another one. And again, we want to specify race for everybody. Including white people. So finding some time to specify people have pale skin is a good thing to do. 

Oren: It is weird to me when second-world fantasy settings use modern racial categories. That’s a little strange to me. It’s like describing someone as white or black. That’s such a context-specific term. Obviously all English words are context specific and everything’s being translated anyway, but it’s still just strange to me. It feels almost like calling someone Asian in a continent that doesn’t have Asia. 

Chris: Oh man. Let’s not even go there. Because race is a social construct, there are some races that you can only communicate via cultural signals. That’s something that’s especially hard for somebody with no expertise in the culture, to then not only communicate those cultural signals, but translate them to a fantasy setting and make it feel right. That’s a difficult thing. 

But if you want an Asian character, that’s kinda what you have to do. You have to have some cultural signals. ‘Cause otherwise, if you try to describe them physically and you say more than the fact that they have, for instance, black hair, it’s just gonna come off as racist. So be careful about those things. 

So basic demographics or anything else that would really stand out. So if they have scars all over their face, that’s probably something a protagonist would notice first thing. If you don’t mention it and then it comes up later, the readers would be like, “What? Oh, there were scars all over their face? Been imagining this person for three chapters, I didn’t know about these scars all over their face.” That’s a big enough impression that would kind of change. 

Oren: One that I see strangely often is if they have a weapon, that should probably be described pretty early. People notice weapons if nothing else, because they’re dangerous. Very weird to have a character who you’ve known for several pages to a chapter or so, and they suddenly talk about drawing their sword, like, “Whoa, they have a sword? They’ve had a sword this whole time?” 

Chris: And if you introduced a character as a guard, that would probably be less necessary. If they’re a guard, we assume they have a weapon of some kind, but if we don’t have the context to foreshadow or make that fit into place, that might be something important. This is a setting where everybody just walks around with longswords. 

Oren: If you establish a setting where everyone is armed as a matter of course, you wouldn’t have to describe it every time.

Chris: Should we talk more about timing? 

Oren: Yeah, as in when to introduce? 

Chris: Yeah, about the timing of introducing characters. 

Oren: So it’s basically in the first third of the book. Or if you’re introducing characters as a teaser for next time, in the epilogue, and nothing in between. 

Chris: [Laughs] If you have a traveling story, I think that you can get away with having characters that are at a stop along the way that are named from that one place because expectations are different then. But then that character wouldn’t show up and be a big help with the climax.

We would assume that we would say goodbye to them as opposed to, 2/3 of the way through, we stopped in a town during our travels and we met a named character, and then that character decided, “Oh, I’m coming with you now.” That would be too late. It can feel weird and lopsided. Or it can feel in the worst case scenario, like they’re an interloper and they’re stealing the spotlight from the characters that we have grown to care about.

Oren: There are some exceptions. The most obvious is for the villain. Very often it won’t really make sense for your characters to come face to face with the villain before the 1/3 mark. Usually in that case, what you wanna do is you want to establish this character by the effect they have on the world, not necessarily by their name or what they look like, although that might also be part of it. Depends on the specifics. 

But especially if you have a secret murderer who’s killing people spookily at night, we might not actually meet them or know that we’ve met them until much later. But you show the murder scenes. You plant the image that this villain exists. 

Chris: There is foreshadowing. We can foreshadow characters exist instead of introducing them early. 

Oren: And that tends to work best for villains. It would be kind of weird to do that for the love interest. 

Chris: [Laughs] Maybe in a series. And the romance is really mostly for book 2. 

Oren: We spend the book foreshadowing, “There’s this really hot person people sometimes see in the middle of the night,” and then they show up at the 2/3 mark.

Chris: [Laughs] The more I look at villains, the more I feel like they’re less like protagonists in their story role and more like plot hooks or plot problems in the way that they kind of behave in the rules. They feel more like story hooks, whereas a protagonist is somebody that the reader is supposed to be rooting for and has attachment, and so you would have to handle that.

You have to think about the fact that somebody could really care about this character if you’re gonna do something horrible to them. Maybe try to prevent people from getting too attached to them. All of those rules, they can apply to villains if your readers get attached to your villain, but that’s less likely, especially if your villain is powerful enough. If your villain is underpowered, it’s more likely to happen. 

Oren mentioned this earlier, but having lots of characters introduced at the same time. I can’t give any hard and fast rule about how many characters you can introduce at once. It’s about the total complexity. How many details do you need to communicate about them? How easy are their names and other details to remember? 

And sometimes if two characters play off of each other really well, they’re best introduced together because they’re kind of conceptually linked. So if you introduce two twins, it might make sense, if you have a way to clearly contrast them with each other to introduce them together. Because that association between the two of them almost makes them easier to remember.

Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe does get away with introducing the four kids, the four protagonists, right in the beginning, but there’s just not much else going on. Otherwise, it’s extremely simple. So we have to learn four first names for characters that are all in the scene, but we don’t have to learn anything else. Because everything is just focused on them and that’s the only thing you have to learn, it actually works to have four new people together. 

But in many other times, especially in a speculative fiction story where you have to introduce the world at the beginning, that’s gonna be too many. So you kind of have to find ways to put one character, make an appearance first, give people time to get to know them, and then wait the next scene for the new character. Or just push people back, delay them, take them out of scenes, that kind of thing. 

Oren: You do have a fair amount of runway. You don’t wanna wait too long, but the first third is a lot of book. They don’t all have to be introduced in the first couple pages. 

Chris: The thing that I see that really doesn’t work is when somebody tries to put in a big meeting scene early in the story and then tries to introduce everybody in the meeting. Don’t do that, that’s not gonna work out. People cannot remember that much information. 

And also you don’t have time if you’re introducing that many characters at once to have them have a significant role in the scene because it’s more than the introduction. You also have to reinforce that new knowledge by making that character matter in some way. If you introduce 10 people in a meeting, not only can people not absorb all of that information right away, but how much can you make all 10 of these people matter in that one scene so that readers retain that information? 

Oren: Before we go, there is one thing that I think is important to consider. The appropriateness of making a character seem cool when you introduce them. If you’re introducing any character, it is a good chance you want them to be at least a little cool, depending on the type of story you’re telling. If you’re telling a story that has a reasonable amount of action, you probably want them to seem a little cool, especially since it might make your protagonist seem a little more sympathetic if they’re meeting these people who seem all cool and put together.

But, A, if you make them too cool, they’re gonna be annoying, especially if they’re an ally. They might steal your protagonist’s thunder. If they are a rival, you can lean harder on making them seem cooler because they’re gonna be messing with your protagonist and that’s fine. If they’re a love interest, you have to strike a really careful balance ’cause you want them to be cool and desirable, but not make them seem like they’re gonna take over the story. As often happens with heteromances. 

Chris: That’s hard. And definitely the trend we see is writers often fall in love with their new characters and really wanna make them cool. Usually when we’re writing, we use our own feelings as a proxy for what the readers will feel. But sometimes they’re just not on the same page with us.

And when we come with a cool new character that we’re attached to, it takes them time to also become attached to that character. Isn’t the raccoon who is pulling everybody’s strings so funny? Who is really behind it all along? So cute. It’s so funny, so devious. 

Oren: I hate it. 

Chris: [Laughs] That can be something that just seems cute, funny to us, or we really like that. “Oh, it’s so cool,” to us, but the reader has gotten attached to the characters that are important that we’ve already introduced. And so often, these cool characters can come and show them up in a way that builds a lot of resentment from the reader. 

Oren: Well, with that, I think we will have to introduce the ending of this podcast.

Chris: Consider introducing yourself to us by becoming our patron. That way you can chat with us on Discord and everything. Just 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’ll 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’ve heard of fantasy romance, steampunk mystery, and paranormal thrillers, but don’t those seem a little… normal? Mixing genres is nothing new, but it does tend to fall into patterns. Some genres are more compatible than others, and those are the ones we see combined over and over again. We think it’s time to get weird with it, mashing up genres that were never intended to go together. Literary thrillers, slow burn litRPG, and cozy tragedies. Okay maybe not that last one; we don’t want the readers to burn down our house!

Generously transcribed by Manasa. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So we’ve heard about science, fantasy, steampunk, romance – all that stuff. That’s old news. Get ready for my time-travel, slow burn, LitRPG, character-driven thriller.

How’s that for a genre mashup? Is that the same but different enough to please the Publishing Gods?

Chris: “Slow burn”: so does that mean it’s a romance?

Oren: It’s a slow burn LitRPG. It means that they do, like, one LitRPG element. They’ll call up the game menu and then 10 chapters later, they’ll select their inventory.

Chris: Oh, I see. I see. Well, I suppose that might make it easier to fit other things in there if we’re basically like, “I swear we’ll have LitRPG later.”

Oren: As little LitRPG as I can legally get away with- I’m not a fan of LitRPG. I don’t know what to tell you.

Chris: Oh no.

Oren: I should try to maintain an air of “neutrality”, but that’s hard, so I’m not gonna.

Chris: I’ve looked at a bunch of openings for them, and I honestly haven’t found one that’s both really popular and is bad enough that I want to critique it.

Oren: I’m not saying they’re all bad. Dungeon Crawler Carl’s a good book.

Chris: I’ve seen really bad ones, but they’re not the super-. It’s hard to tell what’s a mega hit in the LitRPG space because I think a lot of their traffic happens on Royal Road and other places. So I’m not sure-

Amazon with its easy-to-see ratings… numbers is the best measure, always.

Oren: Plus, as Men’s Fiction, it’s not really that relevant, let’s be honest

Anyway, so today we are talking about weird genre mixes and/or “Genre Mashups”, I suppose,  is the technical term. 

Chris: What even is a Genre Mashup? Are they all Genre Mashups?

Oren: So, that’s actually an important question. At what point does it stop being a Genre Mashup and become its own sub-genre? For example, “Science Fantasy” is like a mashup of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but it’s also just sort of recognized as its own thing now.

Chris: Yeah- I think that once it starts to have its own tropes that it’s uniquely known for, then it starts to get to be its own- like Science Fantasy just has a number of things where it’s not just a unique mix between Science Fiction and Fantasy: we know there’s probably gonna be space royalty, for instance, a very specific trope that often appears in those works, and I think that’s kind of when it becomes its own thing and isn’t really a mashup anymore.

Oren: It’s also things like Sci-fi Western, is that a mashup or is that- I’d say that’s probably its own genre at this point. Its own sub genre.

Chris: Is it? What is there- what am I missing that’s a Sci-fi Western?

Oren: I guess the things you expect from a Sci-fi Western are basically various combos of Sci-fi and Western, right? Like, you expect people to be riding horses even though they have spaceships. Why do they do that? Who knows?

Chris:Admittedly, when I think Sci-fi Western, only Firefly comes to my mind. What am I missing?

Oren: Well, there’s a lot of books that are Sci-fi Westerns… I guess you could argue Cowboys Versus Aliens, right?

Chris: But that one, that one definitely doesn’t seem – that’s definitely a mashup, right? Because they’re even getting novelty and humor out of the fact that it’s a mashup.

Oren: And here’s the thing: if you trace the origin of a lot of Sci-fi TV, even though it isn’t exactly what we would think of as a Sci-fi Western in the way that Firefly does it, they are heavily influenced by Westerns. Like a lot of older Sci-fi serials have a very Western – as in cowboy movies – flavor to them. You get that famous line of Gene Roddenberry describing Star Trek as “a wagon train to the stars”, which is not really accurate. like at all. But it was a way of pitching Sci-fi shows that producers understood. Because Sci-fi was relatively new, Westerns were pretty established, so you could convince producers that you were just doing something that was kind of an iteration as opposed to like a weird, spooky new genre.

Chris: I guess you could call the Mandalorian a Sci-fi Western. Although, that’s almost subtle, right? It’s like Western-flavored Star Wars.

Oren: The Mandalorian is more – again, it’s Sci-fi with Western themes. Like Firefly is a lot more direct with its Sci-fi Western-ness. ‘Cause again, they actually ride horses and have cattle ranches and spaceships. But in The Mandalorian, it’s more like we have put Sci-fi things in place of Western tropes. So, but yeah, that’s another Sci-fi Western for sure.

Chris: Yeah. -, maybe I’m just not familiar enough with Sci-fi Westerns, but to me, they don’t meet the Science Fantasy benchmark where it kind of has its own tropes. Instead, it feels like each Sci-fi Western is its own unique mix of Sci-fi and Western because it’s copying, it’s not copying other Sci-fi Westerns, it’s copying Science Fiction or Westerns.

Oren: What’s funny to me is I was wondering about-  is Fantasy Western a thing?

Chris: The Gunslinger. The Gunslinger Series, I think would be the biggest. But that – again – not that common, I don’t think.

Oren: Well, that’s the thing, right? Is that it sort of is, but in a not obvious way because the subgenre called the Weird Western.

Chris: That is its own subgenre.

Oren: Right. That’s definitely its own subgenre. And you could definitely say that that’s a Fantasy western. It’s just like spooky fantasy, mostly. Right?

Chris: Yeah. I, I think that that when you look at speculative fiction as a whole, I don’t know that it always has things that are that recognizably fantasy, right? Like Wild, Wild West – for instance – was a lot more Steampunk, but that would still be classified as a Weird Western

Oren: So I don’t know how many people have actually played this game, but a role playing game, which seems to have inspired a lot of people’s ideas of what a Weird Western is. It’s called Deadlands. And that one’s kind of again, its own mashup. It has Steampunk elements, but it also just has straight up spooky magic. Like there’s vampires, and I think Abraham Lincoln might be a vampire hunter in that series. I think that might be where Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter came from. Don’t quote me on that though, but like it has, you know, classic monsters, uh, many of whom it turns out are actually very appropriative. So, uh, ignore that.

Chris: One of the things that I’d have to say isn’t a mashup, because, that’s just standard. But before I knew, what really struck me was realizing that there’s cosmic horror in Conan and Sword&Sorcery stories. And I didn’t know that until I read The Eye of Argonne, which is just, you know, some kid copying Conan, right? I’m like, wow, okay. Suddenly this kid who clearly doesn’t know much about writing is clearly copying cosmic horror. And then found out, okay, wait, the original Conan also did that, and it’s such an odd thing.

Oren: Like Howard and Lovecraft and a bunch of other writers from that period all knew each other. They were all exchanging ideas and borrowing each other’s stuff. They all published in magazines, like Weird Tales, if I remember my early Spec-fic history correctly. In that case, that was like a mashup that came around because a bunch of writers happened to know each other, which is interesting. It’s not how it usually goes nowadays.

Chris: I just think that without that influence, the type of villains that would’ve existed in some of those stories would’ve been very different, had a very different feel to them.

Oren: I think that’s probably true. It is interesting to look at which genres are easier to cross and which ones are a little more challenging. You’ve got genres that are defined by a type of plot and genres that are defined by a type of setting. Those are almost so easy, you don’t even notice.

Chris: Right, right. Which is why Romantasy works and it is both Romance and Fantasy. Just in case we have that one listener who wants to think Romantasy is not Fantasy. It is. And there have always been romance plots included in fantasy. They’ve always existed. 

Oren: But the Sci-fi Mystery, the Fantasy Mystery, those are so basic that you probably don’t even think of them as Genre Mashups. And then Romantasy has clearly become its own sub genre. It has, at least I think it has, specific tropes. Then again, I don’t read a lot of the Classic Romance that romantasy evolved from, so maybe it’s just doing those things, but also elves.

Chris: I’m trying to think of  what Romantasy would’ve evolved from. There are some early Fantasy Romance that probably influenced, and we’ve looked at some of those.

Oren: We’ve talked about how a number of romantic authors have made the jump from Non-speculative Romance. My thought was that probably there was some cross-pollinization at some point. For all I know, some of the tropes that I’m familiar with – like the love interest, having to be eight feet tall and three refrigerators wide – maybe that’s a Classic Romance thing that I just don’t know about because I don’t read a lot of those books.

Chris: I don’t read Non-Speculative Romance typically either, so I wouldn’t be able to answer that question.

Oren: Did Bully Romance originate in Romantasy or did it migrate to Romantasy from Non-Fantasy Romance? I have no idea.

Chris: But like for instance, Uprooted. That came before the big Romantasy, I believe.

Oren: That’s definitely before the Romantasy term came around

Chris: It’s not as turned up to 11. It’s not as intense as a lot of the current Romantasy, but it has a lot of things in common with the kind of type of romance it is. There’s some other ones like the – I can’t remember – the inspiration for Court of Thorns and Roses… That Dragon series.

Oren: Oh, The Lord of the Fading Lands.

Chris: There’s that one, but there’s also the other one where people get magic based on dragon scales.

Oren: Huh

Chris: Yeah, they have Dragon magic. That one is also very melodramatic and intense like a lot of current Romantasies are. But yeah, that’s another one that the Court of Thorn and Roses, I think is known for – you know – copying from.

Oren: It is interesting to trace how each new iteration of a very popular genre often gets more and more intense. I remember the same thing happening with YA Dystopias. The Hunger Games, when I first read it, I was like “wow, this is pretty intense. The bad guys seem almost cartoonish.” And then by the time that particular genre wave crested, I was like, “oh no, please give me back the Hunger Games. Those villains were so grounded.” They seem so realistic compared to what came afterwards.

Chris: If I were to guess. I would say that a lot of the tropes from Romantasy actually come from early Fantasy Romance. And that got popular enough that Contemporary Romance readers started to jump on board. And then from there it attracted Contemporary Romance authors, if I were to guess. But again, I don’t know for sure. It’s hard.

Oren: An interesting one that I have seen slightly more of these days is Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy. So you’ve got the most literal interpretation, which is like the Shannara Chronicles, where you have the real world and an apocalypse happened, and now there’s elves. Which- like if you look at the funniest thing about the Shannara Chronicles is that the magical species are all the results of the apocalypse: except elves. Elves were already around, which I can only assume is because the author felt like elves had to be ancient, and the apocalypse was long ago, but not that long ago.

Chris: This one definitely. I’ve seen a number of these, but they definitely still feel like a mashup to me because again, they all feel a little different in how they go about it. Like do we have a typical Post-Apocalyptic with like radiation or a plague, and then somehow that causes fantasy things to exist? Or is there a fantasy!cause of the apocalypse, for instance?

Oren: Well, that’s interesting because you can kind of go the other direction and have it be entirely fantasy, and there was an apocalypse and now you’re in a fantasy world where an apocalypse happened to a different fantasy world. Breath of the Wild, the Zelda game, is like that: it’s pure Fantasy. There’s no modern stuff in there. There’s no tanks or motorcycles or guns, right? But there was a cool fantasy kingdom, and then something happened, and there was a big explosion in an apocalypse, and now there’s ruins everywhere.

Chris: Do people consider that to be Post-Apocalyptic?

Oren: It is literally Post-Apocalyptic. Is it part of the Post-Apocalyptic genre?

Chris: It is technically Post-Apocalyptic, but it doesn’t seem to have a lot of the tropes.

Oren: It has some of the tropes, right? It has the “discovering the lost advanced stuff in the ruins of the previous civilization”. It’s just that it’s a magic sword instead of a gun.

Chris: Yeah. Fantasy does that all the time, even if it’s not Post-Apocalyptic. All the Zelda games: they’re all have their ancient temples and-

Oren: -it does, that’s true-

Chris: -et cetera. I was just wondering about- I was thinking something like-  we have an Urban Fantasy setting and then there’s a fantasy!cause of the apocalypse. Or like what you would often have is a setting that is just, there’s no magic, and then suddenly magic appears and destroys everything.

Oren: I think part of the reason you’re less likely to have, for example, a Dresden file style Urban Fantasy setting that an apocalypse happens to is that you first have to explain how the Urban Fantasy setting worked, and then you have to explain how the apocalypse happened. And that’s just a lot of explanation to put on a setting.

Whereas, you know, Shannara Chronicles, except for the elves, the magic stuff is all a result of the apocalypse. That’s like only one thing you have to explain. And elves.

Chris: You could have something that is magical and causes the apocalypse, but then it sticks around afterwards. So it’s integrated to the story and gives you an opportunity to explain what it is.

Oren: I think the Eberron D&D setting is a Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy…could be wrong about that- There is a D&D setting that is Post-Apocalyptic D&D.

Chris: That’s the Magitech setting.

Oren: I think it is also a Magitech setting.

Chris: Well, that’s quite the mashup then. Magitech Post-Apocalyptic.

Oren: But Magitech in Post-Apocalyptic makes sense. Especially if you wanna replicate a lot of the conventional Post-Apocalyptic tropes.

Chris: Right. Where we’re piecing like scrap together in contraptions.

Oren: We just read The Road to Ruin, which is, it’s got the desert, and it’s got the big lizards, which are pretty common in post-apocalyptic stories.

Chris: I was like, where did these come from? Does every post-apocalyptic story have like dinosaurs and why.

Oren: It’s not “everyone has dinosaurs”, but big lizards are very common trope in desert based, Post-Apocalyptic stories, and so moving from there to dinosaurs is a- I’d say not that big a jump. But in that story, there’s also the Magebike, which is a magical motorcycle so that you can have. Like the post-apocalyptic courier zooming through the wastes…Only motorcycles, though. Whoever made it didn’t make any other magic vehicles. No magical four-wheel-drive for you.

Chris: Look, four-wheel-drive is just not as cool as the motorcycle.

Oren: The motorcycle is cool. I do like, you know, fantasy motorcycles.

Chris: I think one combination that makes genres particularly tricky to combine is if you have a High Realism and a Low Realism genre.

Which is why I’ve encountered some Sci-fi Fairytales…That just don’t seem to work out as well as expected. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it, because you can translate the fairy tale and make it much more grounded if you want to. But I’m still reminded of The Dark Angel series where it seemed like a very Low Realism Fantasy series, but also takes place on the moon, that’s been terraformed, and they came from earth.

Oren: The novel Cinder was like that.

Chris: That’s the other thing I was thinking about is- it’s a Sci-fi Fairytale that I didn’t feel worked very well. Although I think that novel just had a lot of miscellaneous problems. It wasn’t all necessarily “High Realism plus Low Realism issues”.

Oren: I could totally see a Sci-fi story that has the general shape of a fairytale, but this was definitely trying to make it a little more literal. They were trying to do arranged marriages and – I don’t know, man. Like those are hard enough for me to accept in a Space Fantasy setting. This was like a normal, sort of gritty Sci-fi setting. And then also, you gotta marry the king of the moon or whoever she had to marry. I forget.

Chris: I know some people really like Cinder, but that book is still in my mind as the book that somehow managed to punch down at every marginalized group at least once.

Oren: Probably not a direct result of trying to be a scientific fairytale, but you never know.

Chris: That’s all it is in my mind. Yeah, no. Probably not related, but I’m just like, how did you, how did you manage to do this?

Oren: Look, it’s efficiency. Okay. You move on, you punch down at Women. We can get in Disabilities at the same time, if it’s a woman with, like, a broken arm or something, we can get all – we can get it all in at the same time.

Chris: Get it all in.

Oren: Smacks the roof of the book. “This baby can punch down at so many people.”

Chris: The other one besides High and Low Realism, again, if you translate. All of the Low Realism stuff to High Realism. You can make it- but you’re gonna have to give up some things to do that. The other one is things that are distinguished by their tone and have different tones because there’s no way- Like if you meet in the middle…then it’s just nothing.

Oren: Cozy Tragedy.

Chris: No, it’s not

Oren: Just a regular Cozy Fantasy story. And then at the end, one of the characters dies horribly. Cozy Tragedy.

Chris: That’s, no, it’s not….

I have read those manuscripts before and… no. This is the type of thing that a client turns in, and I’m like, “all right,” I sit down, “we need to talk about the tone in this work.”

Oren: Look you, you can do it. I’m not saying you should, but you can.

Chris: We’re not the boss of you, so of course you could do anything. Technically the question is, does it get the results you want from your readers?

So yeah, you can’t really combine two different tones – like atmosphere maybe. Because atmosphere then adds in like the aesthetics. There’s things that are part of atmosphere besides the tone, but two different tones.

Although I do think that you might be able to do something like Gothic Cozy, where we’re taking some of the dark aesthetics, again, of that gothic atmosphere and combining it with the coziness. The little living rituals and the wish fulfillment, you know, of living in like a gothic castle or whatever.

Oren: Not to be a smart ass, but it’s called The Addams Family. The original TV show – what came later wasn’t really cozy. The movies are much more focused on the comedy and, you know, the weird, horrible things this family does to each other.

Chris: But the sitcom, yeah,.

Oren: But the sitcom is very much Gothic Cozy. I’ve noticed that Urban Fantasy is, at least in my mind, harder to mix with other genres than High Fantasy is. And maybe that’s just because I haven’t seen it done enough.

Chris: High Fantasy is so very flexible because it takes place in another world, and so you can do anything that you want with it, whereas Urban Fantasy is already a mashup of two different worlds. Basically, you already have to take the messy reality and then adapt it.

Oren: Right, and that’s part of the draw of Urban Fantasy is seeing either A) “wow, there’s all this secret, magic below the surface of the real world”, or “how does magic affect the real world?” Right? Those are kind of two different draws. So you try to put that into Sci-fi, and now it’s weird. You made it weird. I’m not gonna say you can’t do it though. My experience with it is limited…I was trying to think of, have I read any books that might qualify, and I guess there was Blindsight.

Chris: No, that is the thing, is that once you add Sci-fi, it’s like you’ve got into Superhero settings that really have no theme to them. It’s just like, “yeah, sure. Everything that could possibly exist in a speculative fiction story is in here. That’s what we’re doing now.”

Oren: It’s all here, baby.

Chris: Again, Marvel has a reason for doing that: it’s because we’ve got this huge, complicated comic books and they’re all different, but we also want crossovers to attract fans.

Oren: People do like crossovers, or at least they used to. Maybe they’re not liking them as much anymore. 

Chris: Maybe

Oren: Kind of hard to tell, 

Chris: But because of the crossovers, they have a reason to throw all of those things together, even though it completely destroys any coherency in the setting.

Oren: Which I think is another reason why Superhero novels have really, really struggled. I’m not gonna say it’s the only reason, but I do suspect that people have a certain idea of what Superhero movies are, and with a novel, it’s really hard to deliver that and not have it just look completely absurd.

Chris: I think it’s become pretty clear as we’ve seen the streaming bubble pop and what shows are coming out, that one of the reasons that Superhero film and TV shows are made is because it’s cheaper than High Fantasy…Right?

Oren: To be fair, most things are cheaper than High Fantasy.

Chris: “Most things are cheaper than High Fantasy”. It’s cheaper than a lot of other stuff because it just takes place in a, like a normal urban setting. Again, there’s been a lot more Ghost Shows, there’s been a lot more Urban Fantasy. So I think that its popularity is boosted above what it would normally be in the market because it’s cheaper to make. But we don’t have those restrictions on a book.

Oren: Yeah. That’s possible.

Chris:I don’t know. There’s probably multiple reasons.

Oren: It’s hard to ignore the MCU elephant in the room, right? Like the MCU made a billion jillion dollars, and so there’s, you know, gonna be a lot of properties either directly linked to it or just trying to coast on that.

Chris: That’s true.

Oren: That seems to be ebbing at the moment. Although, again, it’s hard to tell because movies are doing badly across the board, so it’s hard to tell what any specific franchise is up to. 

Chris: Plot. We haven’t talked about plot genres and mixing those together. 

Oren: Mystery Romance. Sure. 

Chris: Mystery Romance. There’s lots of those. They work great together, mostly because a lot of romance stories also wanna have a little more tense throughline. And a mystery story – it’s really easy to just have your love birds work on the mystery together, and that gives them an excuse to be together and, you know, gives them something to do, or makes them suspect each other. It’s just very useful. So those ones are very compatible. You know, I think at some point if you add enough stuff like that, you could potentially get into questions like, okay, do we actually have room?

Oren: Genres aside, at some point you have too many plots.

Chris: I think a Romance and a Thriller is still possible, but could be a little trickier because a lot of Romance writers wanna have a little bit more downtime to have their lovebirds get cuddly or whatever. And so keeping a really high tension, constantly moving thumping plot might interfere a little more. Not that you couldn’t do it. I think you probably could, but I think that would probably be a little trickier.

Oren: Is it the everpresent I can make this “Literary” crossover, which is, you know, what does that mean?

Chris: Anything can have an author self insert and a bunch of experimental word craft, okay? It does have, High Realism is one of the conventions, but I think a Literary work doesn’t have to be High Realism. That’s only one of many conventions.

Oren: Certainly a lot of the fantasy I’ve read that is described as Literary has not been any Higher Realism than anything else. Like The Sleeping Giant is, if anything very Low Realism,

Chris: Probably more Surrealist, right?

Oren: Yeah, it’s, it’s super Surrealist.

Chris: That’s also common Literary work. You could probably throw Literary genre conventions on top of most other things. I do think that if you had, again, something that was really high tension, that might be a little harder. Because Literary, I mean, Literary writers, they have different writing styles, but as I mentioned, a lot of times they like to put a lot of summary and exposition. Or no summary in exposition, sometimes they like to take their time and the work craft pacing is really slow and that could get in the way of something like a thriller. I think a Literary Thriller, again, not impossible, probably a little less compatible.

Oren: I’ve occasionally gotten a book that’s really good and has tension and is also described as Literary because it’s so good you can’t deny it anymore. Piranesi comes to mind.

Chris: Not Literary. It’s not,

Oren: it’s de- it’s described as Literary that’s-.

Chris: No. you’re wrong. How dare they?

Oren: Certainly, most books that I have read that get described as Literary do not have anything close to High Tension. They seem to be set up to reject that concept, so a Literary Thriller. I don’t know what you’d be doing to make that happen

Chris: Is House of Leaves thriller-ish?

Oren: I have no idea.  I only know what people say about House of Leaves, which is basically controlling, because you know,  reading House of Leaves is basically a hazing ritual you do to yourself, so you can’t actually describe House of Leaves to anybody because then they wouldn’t have to read it. It’s be like telling them your secret Freemason signs.

Chris: It’s maybe it’s a Thriller for like the reader who has to go through all of these trials.

Oren: You have to like read the book upside down in public. That’s pretty thrilling.

Chris: Yeah. Maybe it’s worth, before we go, mentioning a few, you know, popular stories that are pretty big mashups. -, we mentioned some things that are have Western one that I watched. I didn’t realize what a big mashup it was until I had to describe it to my mother. Which is Bon Appetit, Your Majesty. It’s a time-travel, romance cooking show.

Oren: Hell yeah. 10 out of 10, no notes.

Chris: So the protagonist goes back in time and romances a real historical figure who is like a tyrant, who killed people who did some purges and, but she charms him with her cooking. And so every episode she cooks a new dish.

Oren: This is why it’s really cool to live in a country that’s very old and has a lot of old history. You can’t do that in the US. You can’t have someone go back and romance – one of our really tyrant-y presidents – because they’re too recent. It’s like you can’t have someone go back and romance Andrew Jackson because of all the murders he did are still affecting us today. That wouldn’t be cool. We need like. A 2000 year history and then we can go pick some historical tyrant who no one cares about anymore.

Chris: There is a Ministry of Time.

Oren: Yeah, that’s a book for sure.

Chris: That is a book. I don’t think that mashup works particularly.

Oren: No, I wouldn’t say so.

Chris: Particularly since you know, again, I read through it to about the two thirds mark and I was like, this isn’t really a Romance. There’s no chemistry building at all. But apparently after the two thirds mark, they have tons of sex.

Oren: They do a lot.

Chris: It’s like that in itself just feels very uneven. Right? Which you don’t want, right? You want the same group of people to be interested from the beginning to the end. Also, I think the Science Fiction elements are pretty uneven, and the parts I read were just a very slow kind of Literary slice of life.

Oren: Yeah. Stuff just kind of happens.

Chris: Stuff just kind of happens.

Oren: You know, it’s sad because the initial premise sounds interesting of “Hey, the main character’s job is to help time travelers settle into the present. That sounds neat. What’s that about?” It turns out nothing. She basically never does that. She’s just around to hear them talk, is basically the premise she’s around to show us real life guy Gram Gore and how cool he is.

Chris: Uh, so what did you think about the genre for Revenger? Because when I looked at the beginning of that one, it looked like Retro/Cyberpunk/Space Opera.

Oren: Retro Cyberpunk, Victorian Space Opera Pirates.

Chris: Yeah. It’s got a lot going on.

Oren: It’s got a lot going on it… it makes some choices for sure.

Chris: And then the last one I can think of, which I, again, this is one that I do not think worked so well is Sweet Tooth, although I suspect that worked better when it was not in live action because that comes from a comic, I believe, or a graphic novel. I think again, that makes it Lower Realism. It’s a Post-Apocalyptic setting that has like cutesy animal-people, but then it does terrible things to them.

Oren: There’s a horrible plague and somehow the horrible plague created a deer person. Sure Why not?

Chris: It’s definitely Cognitive Dissonance World. But I suspect that wouldn’t have been quite as hard to swallow if it was, again, drawn, right? Instead of Live- Action.

Oren: Yeah. I don’t know. It’s been so long since I’ve watched Sweet Tooth. I barely remember what exactly the issues were with that show, but I do remember that we-

I have to end the show. We are already somewhat over time.

Chris: Mm-hmm. All right. Well, if you would like to hear more about fascinating and very viable sub genres like Gothic Cozy. Support us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Schaber: 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]

In an unusual twist for the Mythcreants podcast, we’re talking about current events (gasp)! Don’t worry, we won’t make a habit of it. But when we heard that a Big Five novel had been pulled over accusations of LLM generated text, we had to look into it. Honestly, the story is way weirder than much of the coverage suggested.

Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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: [pretentiously lofty voice] On this podcast, we give advice. Not business advice, not process advice, just craft advice. Advice that lifts you up like hope, that lulls you like peace. That pulls you forward like ambition. It’s not words, it’s education.

Oren: God, I took psychic damage hearing that. Oof! [Chris laughs] Oof, Chris, you gotta warn me next time!

Chris: I’ve now learned too much about what AI-generated prose sounds like, or AI-generated text.

Oren: You’re absolutely right. What a great idea!

Chris: Sorry about giving you that psychic damage. I’ll be sure not to do it again.

Oren: Three seconds later… [both laugh]

Chris: Three seconds later, on this podcast…

Oren: So we’re doing something that’s almost current events on the podcast today. Kind of unusual. We’ll see how quickly we can actually get this out.

Chris: Current events, and I also wanna kind of broaden this into talking about, what does AI-generated fiction look like? What patterns are we seeing? What are some potential ways to recognize it, knowing that there’s still a lot of uncertainty here, and it could totally change with every new version or between different LLMs. But a little bit more useful stuff too.

Oren: Since we’re gonna be referencing the novel Shy Girl a lot, can I give a brief timeline of events?

Chris: Yeah. Let’s give you the timeline of events around this Shy Girl controversy.

Oren: I don’t have exact dates for most of these events. I’m just gonna give you the rough order they happened in, and they happened over the course of the last few months. So, the novel Shy Girl is self-published by an author who at the time went by Mia Ballard. It gets a little bit of traction online. It eventually reaches about 4,900 Goodreads ratings, which is not bad, not a runaway success, but better than a lot of authors do. People start to wonder if it’s LLM generated. There are Reddit threads. The YouTuber frankie’s shelf makes a nearly three hour video dissecting it.

This guy named Thaddeus Mackleroy – I believe that is how it’s pronounced – I’ve seen some MickIllroy, but Mackleroy appears to be the more common version. [Transcriber’s note: The name is spelled “McIlroy”; this is a discussion about pronunciation.] He hears about this, and he decides to investigate. As you will see later, he is not our friend, but for now, he knows people who run an AI detection company, which he sends the manuscript to, that he has acquired through ~means~, and they come back claiming that 78.4% of it is AI generated. Not that they have a 78.4% certainty, but that 78.4% of the document is AI generated. That is how he phrases it.

So he goes to the New York Times with the story. They then go to Hachette and Ballard for comment – Hachette being the company that is publishing it through their imprint Orbit – and Hachette/Orbit decides to pull the book. They make some vague statements about doing their own investigation. Very unclear what that means.

Ballard makes like one statement in an email to the New York Times claiming that she’s innocent, she didn’t do this, but also makes a vague allusion that her editor is responsible, with the exact quote being, “All I’m going to say is please do your research on editors before trusting them with your work.” She then claims she can’t say any more because she is pursuing unspecified legal action. Her minimal online presence vanishes, and then McIlroy publishes a blog post explaining all of this on LinkedIn, which is partly how I was able to put together this timeline. I also looked at, of course, the New York Times article and what Hachette said. And I wanna talk about that blog post later, but it’s probably not the most important thing in this story.

Chris: [laughing] To be clear, we don’t have access to any more information than the stuff we’re telling you that is freely available online, and by looking at the text of the book, and nothing is 100% for certain unless we traveled back in time and transported ourselves to see Mia Ballard and what she did to put this book together.

Oren: I realized, I think in that timeline that I put together, I forgot to mention the most important part, which is that Hachette/Orbit decided to pick up the book after it achieved its modest self-publishing success.

Chris: She got indie publishing success, and then was picked up by a trad publisher that did publish her in the UK, I believe, right before pulling it. But it had not been published in the US yet.

Oren: Most important part of the timeline, I obviously forgot it.

Chris: [laughs] But then completely pulled the book after the New York Times started investigating. Again, what I said is, we don’t know anything for 100% certain. At the same time, that said, I personally think that we can be all but certain that large portions of it were AI generated.

Ballard kind of admitted it when she said, “Oh, you ought to be careful who your editor is.” Look, it is not normal for an editor to contribute that much text to your book, and when I say that much text, I’m not even talking about the 78%, and we’ll talk more about what its narration looks like. It is very uniform. There are some places that are perhaps a little bit more quirky and human, which might reflect places where Ballard actually did some work herself. But this is not a situation where the AI style is isolated to little bits here and there, or in a few places that an editor might have done something.

All of us who are writers who care about our stories, I cannot imagine sending my work to an editor and then getting back something that was changed enough… That would be ghost writing, not editing.

Oren: Here’s the thing, I was talking to some other editors about it, and they were like, “well, surely she would’ve reviewed the changes that any editor made.” And from the way that I was looking at this book and how many just like incredibly obvious formatting mistakes it has, I wouldn’t be surprised if the author reviewed no changes. I still don’t believe this “the editor did it” story.

Chris: That’s what they all say. Every single time an author is caught using AI to generate text, they all claim it was somebody that helped them or they hired or something. It’s not very believable. At the very best, it would mean horrible negligence on their part, and also that they don’t really care about writing their own work anyway, because somebody else would be writing their work for them. That’s kind of the only way that this works, because this work, it’s very kind of monotonous and repetitive in the way that it’s narrated, so it’s everywhere. It’s the entire thing.

That’s just not how editing works. Generally, editors, if you get them to do heavy editing, they will supply more suggestions. Changes are tracked. They are making an effort to adhere to your voice and keep things consistent with the way that you normally narrate. If you had sort of AI software that was making constant suggestions, that would basically rewrite every single paragraph…but it’s just not feasible. Not if you’re the type of writer who actually writes your own work.

Oren: I have seen accounts from authors who claim that they hired an editor, quote, unquote, off of some race-to-the-bottom website, and what they got back was just their manuscript had been fed through an LLM.

Chris: You get what you pay for, folks.

Oren: It’s not impossible that that happened. It does strain credulity that the author would then go on to publish that. And even if that is what happened, I’d say they are equally culpable at that point. They had a responsibility to check their work.

Chris: Just wanna say what I think the biggest tell of Shy Girl is, because even things that seem nonsensical or inhuman can just be bad writing. We see unpublished manuscripts, and writers do a lot of weird things, a lot of nonsensical things. When people are trying to pound out thousands of words at a time some weird stuff ends up in there by accident. Some awkward phrasing ends up there, and you could look at any of that and call that inhuman if you wanted to. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s AI generated just because it doesn’t seem to quite make sense.

However, the thing that is really the big tell for this one is the contrast between the fact that for most of the narration, the spelling and grammar is just fine, but the formatting and production quality is incredibly sloppy. Because the cover image of the original indie book was stolen, and it was like blown up, so it’s poor quality, but also the formatting of the book is just extremely sloppy. There are breaks in the middle of paragraphs.

I’ve seen indie authors, they don’t have a lot of money, they’re trying to put their book out. So they don’t necessarily know what good design is. They could try to do something themselves, and it might not turn out right. But a normal writer, even a really bad writer, who has actually spent all of that time writing, loves their book. That is the difference. This book is their baby. If they got a paperback copy, they would wanna open it up. They would wanna be really proud of it. If they see things like that, they would fix them, almost certainly. And if they’re so neglectful, then it’s weird that there aren’t any spelling errors.

Oren: Yep. That is very strange.

Chris: Because if they’re not neglectful, they’re not gonna be polishing…because it takes polish to get the spelling and grammar everywhere to be that smooth. And if they’re so sloppy in the formatting, they’re probably not hiring a professional copy editor to look at it. So how did it get that smooth, if they’re that neglectful?

Oren: You would expect way more typos that a basic spell check wouldn’t pick up, like incorrect words that are spelled correctly, but are the wrong word. That’s the sort of thing I would expect. The manuscripts that I edit are often extremely rough, and they can be rough in weird ways. So I am super hesitant to say that a certain thing is AI. I’m gonna be honest, if the author had not basically acknowledged that it was true, I would still be hesitant to say this was AI, just because I’ve seen so many weird things that human writers do, but there is a lot. There is a lot here.

Chris: But I think it is worth knowing… We also have some personal experience with plagiarizers who have taken our material from our blog and done various stuff with it. And one of the things that you get to learn, if this is done to you, [laughing] is that plagiarizers are just super, super lazy. Because that’s why they’re plagiarizing. And they don’t cut those big corners just to spend their time carefully formatting things, and carefully marketing things and packaging things, typically. So this kind of sloppiness of the production is what I would expect with a plagiarized work. They’re plagiarizing in order to not spend time, so they’re not gonna spend time. So that’s pretty par for the course with them too. And that’s something to be aware of.

The spelling and grammar being pretty good really suggests some automation happening there. That sort of is a little helpful because it gets out of some of the subjectivity that can be true, because a bad writer can create anything, or it will cover a lot of things that are characteristic of AI-generated fiction. It got that from actually good works. It got that from strong written works, and the most notable one being the em dash, which a lot of people came forth to defend. And the reason it’s so attached to em dashes is because professional writers are a lot more likely to use em dashes. And so the AI associates em dashes with strong writing. So if you would tell it to give you strong writing, it’s like, oh, well that means em dashes.

Oren: Obviously, that’s what everyone else is doing.

Chris: [laughing] Right? It’s a funny thing, because people seem to not even be able to tell it to get rid of the em dashes. It keeps using them. It can’t not use them.

Oren: So what are the specific signs in Shy Girl that we were looking at?

Chris: We did watch the three hour video by frankie’s shelf. And it was a good video. I’m gonna give Frankie credit for that. If you’re thinking, “Oh, I don’t wanna watch three hours, but I would like to just come in at the end of the video and watch some of it,” you can do that, but it’s not gonna have the same effect. And the reason is because Frankie spends those three hours just showing you the patterns, because this is about the repetition, the thing that really kind of emphasizes it. It’s the frequency of repeating the same things over and over again through the entire narration that really makes it stand out as possibly generated work. 

And if you don’t read the book, or watch three hours of Frankie describing this repetition, it can be hard to understand what’s so unnatural about it. But basically it uses some words with strange frequency, like in particular “sharp,” and “heavy,” and “humming.” It has a lot of similes that are either slightly awkward, or just overly dramatic. It uses tons of adjectives to tell readers what to feel. And some of those adjectives are just like similes that are literally true, [laughing] which I have also seen authors do. I have seen authors write similes that are literally true, and therefore not similes, before. This is all something an actual writer could do.

Then I think personally, the thing that can really stand out as an editor is just the fact that the narration never changes to suit the moment. It feels melodramatic, because it has just exactly the same amount of drama throughout the entire thing.

Oren: Which is funny, because this is supposed to be a super dark book about torture and abuse.

Chris: But it never gets more dramatic. Or less dramatic. Everything is equally dramatic. It has like one little backstory summary near the beginning, but it doesn’t seem to pause to do a deeper dive to set up later events where it can be faster, for instance. It’s just the same amount. And when the character has what should be a serious emotional blow, it never stops to do more internalization, to explore the effect that it has on her in a deeper way. So even though there is internalization, even though there are emotional reactions, it ends up feeling shallow, because it never stops to lay more groundwork, give more background, dive deeper into her head. It just continues forward at the same kind of not-very-fast, kind of melodramatic, pace.

And that kind of monotony of the narration kind of reminds me of, honestly, AI-generated voice narration that I heard recently. It was like somebody had picked a setting where they wanted the voice to sound kind of bizarrely dramatic, and then that sort of dramatic style was applied uniformly to the narration, even in situations where it just did not fit. Like the intro to the audio book that was just saying here’s what the title is was in the dramatic voice. And the opening had a character who was bewildered and found themselves a new world and was saying casual modern day phrases in what I imagine Phantom of the Opera voice would be [laughing] – not actually being that familiar with that story – just like uniformly everywhere. It’s not what – it’s not normal.  A new writer could totally do that. And then Frankie brings up some places where people just don’t talk like that, like an eviction notice that says, “pay rent or quit,” even if that’s technically accurate.

When I did the intro to this podcast, that was an imitation of AI style, like a little section. When I hear it, it starts to have a very distinctive voice that you could recognize. It has a lot of short, succinct fragments that are meant to add drama. And the pacing could almost feel stilted, and I can kind of recognize it because I automatically start reading it in that voice that I used at the beginning of the podcast – this sort of stilted, overly dramatic… So in this case, here’s just like one paragraph:

[dramatic voice] “Rent. Bills. A parade of due dates I couldn’t outrun. My brain gnawed at the problem, like it could chew its way to a solution, turning it over and over until every angle was frayed. Borrowing money felt like begging. Job applications felt like flinging darts in the dark, the targets moving further away with every throw. What I needed wasn’t politically correct – em dash – I needed something that was immediate. Radical.” [/dramtic voice]

Again, it’s very dramatic. Those kind of one-word sentences throughout the paragraph, the em dash… The other thing about the em dash, it is a very dramatic punctuation mark. It adds a lot of drama to a phrase, so it also can make things feel melodramatic. But that kind of slightly stilted, overly-dramatic phrasing with a lot of repetition – which is not normally bad – in the way things are phrased, is kind of what it sounds like.

Oren: The first really interesting feeling that I had, looking at this whole thing, this whole scandal, was relief? Because if this is representative of where the AI slop book makers are, then the solution is don’t read really crappy books, like even if you can’t recognize that it’s AI or not. And I was already doing that.

We should point out that we don’t know that. This could just be a particularly bad example, and that’s why it got caught. But my first thought was, okay, I think who this really indicts is Hachette, who was willing to publish this because it got a modest amount of social media traction. And it’s like, I don’t know, Hachette, try not publishing crappy books. I’m not a businessperson. Maybe publishing crappy books is where the money is now. It just seems like maybe that’s the solution to this.

Chris: It’s interesting, because certainly LLMs by themselves cannot write a good novel. I feel like somebody who tried to put more of their own legwork in mixed with LLM-generated text might be able to go further, but at the same time, we kind of know that the nature of this is A, people are more likely to choose generative text if they are lazy and don’t wanna do the work themselves, and that people tend to quickly become dependent on LLMs in many cases, and over time are likely to cede more ground to them, and also let their guard down. Because AI makes mistakes. Unfortunately, it makes them just infrequently enough that people can’t maintain their vigilance when it comes to checking it.

Oren: And that’s sort of what I’ve been bracing for, because my experience with LLM-generated text is primarily nonfiction, as far as I know, because I run into it a lot on blog posts and social media. And the way I know this is that often the person who does it will admit that they did that. They’ll either brag about it, or they will admit it under pressure. Which I’ve always wondered why they don’t lie, but often they don’t. And the characteristic of these are that it has grammatically correct sentences, each of which is a proper sentence, but that it doesn’t add up to anything. And that they tend to be very long, and they tend to have a lot of organizational formatting that doesn’t mean anything.

But of course all of that is things that a person could do. A person could write a really long Reddit post with a bunch of bolded headings for no reason that never gets to a point. So that makes it kind of impossible to tell. It’s just that it’s bad, and that’s the more useful metric at this point. So that’s why I was expecting that to be the big scandal, and I suspect we will probably still get there. There will probably be someone who is willing to put in the work to make an AI-generated book not so obviously terrible, and then they’ll eventually get caught out, and that’ll be a big scandal. I’m sure that’s gonna happen eventually.

Chris: I’m sure that an actual human working with an LLM could go farther than just the LLM. But I do think that would mean very bad things for that writer long-term. Because we’ve seen people’s skills degrade, have a hard time remembering the story if you don’t write it yourself, all sorts of things. I think it would just be very easy to become dependent. And also a lot of the things that Frankie felt that were bad about this novel was just the fact that the similes weren’t there. And they either were too literal, or, just, I don’t know what that’s supposed to convey.

If you’re a person who is going over and has to check all of that LLM text, the idea of not letting any of that through seems unlikely to me. Eventually, you’re gonna start kind of accepting more of it and just letting it… And, as I see more about what AI-generated text looks like, there are more commonalities. I also think that if there are becoming more books that are written this way, people are more and more gonna recognize its voice, because it has its own voice. Even if we can’t identify – because other people might start copying it inadvertently, because there is style pollution. If you read a book with a certain style, you’re more likely to sort of subconsciously start copying that style. That’s how it goes. But at best that’s gonna be the general background style against which if anybody wants their style to stand out, and they’re writing to stand out, they’re gonna have to deviate from that.

A really funny anecdote – there’s an NYT article by Sam Kriss on what AI writing looks like that is quite informative – that apparently if you ask AI to write science fiction, it has an uncanny habit of naming the protagonist Elara Voss, specifically, and male characters are usually named Kael.

Oren: God dammit, Kale!

Chris: [laughing] Like K-A-E-L. And so, according to Sam Kriss, there are now hundreds of self-published books on Amazon featuring Elara Voss or Elena Voss.

Oren: Yeah, of course there are. That cannot be a surprise. That’s just exactly what we all knew was going to happen.

Chris: [laughing] I just find that very funny. So if you read sci-fi and the main character’s name is Elara Voss, or Kael, just run in the other direction.

Oren: And I do think it’s important to emphasize that there are no good guys in this story. It’s been pointed out that Hachette either knew or should have known that there was something fishy going on with this book. Because presumably they would’ve looked into its social media history, since that was in theory the reason they got it. And they would’ve noticed that there were a whole bunch of people asking, “Is this book AI generated? And also it’s really, really bad.” They at the very least were negligent. And I mean that in the colloquial sense. I’m not suggesting they were legally negligent, not a lawyer.

But also I wanna take this moment to talk about our good friend Thaddeus McIlroy, who is the one who brought this all to light. Because his blog post about all this is bizarre. First, he mostly wrote this blog post to complain that the New York Times didn’t give him enough credit. And if he was anyone else, I would agree with him, because the New York Times barely mentions him. But you then start to wonder, okay, Mr. McIlroy, why did you launch this investigation in the first place? Because he is actually very upset at what happened, that Ballard lost her book contract and had to give up this pen name. Like, he thinks that was an unjust result.

Chris: Was he thinking, like, “see this book is AI, glory to the AI”? Is that what he was doing?

Oren: I don’t know. He’s really unclear why he decided to do this. He has a section where he says, “Trade publishers are (somewhat) quietly adopting AI tools themselves, dancing delicately around whether this conflicts with their public-facing ‘principles.’ I was more than happy to use this story to highlight the conundrum.” So maybe he thought he was gonna pull a gotcha on Hachette, and they were gonna be like, “oh yeah, actually LLMs are fine”? Surely he didn’t think that was going to happen. If so, he’s extremely deluded. There is no way, especially not with a book this bad.

So then he’s upset that this is what happened. This obviously predictable result of his actions is what happened. This is a bit like a cop bemoaning that after catching someone for assault, that person went to jail. It was like, “Well, I didn’t want them to go to jail. All they did was beat up a bunch of people.” Well, okay, why did you catch them then? [Chris laughs] Remember, he’s claiming that these AI detectors, they work really well according to him, and this idea that they don’t work is like an outdated idea from when they were bad. And he lists some studies that claim that the AI detector he’s using has an error rate of 0.5%. That’s how accurate he thinks these things are, but he also thinks that we just have to accept that books are gonna be made with LLMs now, because there’s nothing to do about it.

What are you doing here? He is both bemoaning witch hunts, selling witch detectors, and also telling us it’s impossible to do anything about witches. The most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen accusations that his blog post is AI generated by people who ran it through AI detectors, and maybe it is. Maybe he’s just bad at writing. I cannot believe what I read. As I was reading this, I was like, what was the purpose of this thing you did?

Chris: That sounds like somebody who thought that “here, if I reveal this book as AI, then Hachette will be forced to defend it and forced to defend its use of AI,” and thought it would go the other way. “If I bring AI out into the open, then it will cause AI to be acknowledged and lauded instead of canned.”

Oren: Instead of the obvious thing that was going to happen. We do know that a lot of AI boosters are completely disconnected from reality, so maybe that’s what’s going on.

Chris: Or just surrounded by other AI boosters, so they don’t seem to know how many AI haters there are. We hear again and again from so many people that they’re surprised when they do an AI thing and it’s controversial, and it’s like, who are you hanging out with that you didn’t know that?

Oren: It’s just so weird that the people who are selling us the product which is supposed to be the solution to the problem, do not want us to use their product to solve the problem.

Chris: Well, maybe that could be one reason, if they’re not reliable.

Oren: I don’t think they’re reliable. And he doesn’t think they’re reliable, because he’s like, well, you gotta presume innocence. And it’s like, do you? With an error rate of 0.5%? I don’t know, man. That’s your study, not mine. I’m just saying you seem to think it is.

Chris: Before we go, I’d love to talk about, just go over quickly, some patterns of AI writing in general. It tends to have very specific tells that you can learn. Again, these things will be found in writing, especially strong writing, because that’s where they come from, unfortunately, and it could vary with different versions.

We talked about the em dash. Professional writers love it, but LLMs like to use it a lot. Sets of three. That’s another thing that culturally we just find pleasing. If there’s a set of three, that’s another thing a strong writer is likely to use, but LLMs use them a lot. Repeating similar phrasing, using the same phrase is a way – that’s actually a lyrical technique that makes the words, you know, the style more rhythmic. But of course LLMs have picked up on that, so they have a lot of repeating phrasing. And then there’s specific imagery and words that LLMs tend to like, like “quiet” and “silence” and “humming,” and apparently they love ghosts, and phantoms, and the word “delve.”

Oren: Okay. [laughs]

Chris: The other thing that really stands out, that is very present in Shy Girl, and I think that there is a name for this, but I cannot find it anywhere. It’s a specific literary technique of basically pairing a tangible thing with an intangible concept, a concept that is often kind of emotionally loaded. For instance, in this case, when we say the main character’s mother is about to abandon her, we say that her suitcase is big enough to hold forever. So the forever would be like the intangible concept in the suitcase holding forever, and it kind of creates contrast, and can be kind of evocative, which is why this is a well-liked literary technique.

A lot of the writing tends to feel very, like, kind of flowery, and it gives it the illusion of having emotional depth. Even though it doesn’t really, if you actually keep reading it and look deeper, try to put it together after it’s done a paragraph of this. But the interesting thing about this is it’s a replacement for something LLMs seemed to be having trouble doing, which is sensory description. If we were to describe the suitcase physically, or like how it smelled or felt, that would basically put more burden on accuracy. It would really require knowing what a suitcase looks like, or feels like, or smells like in order to do that. Whereas if we just say it’s big enough to hold forever, you could associate forever with all kinds of tangible things as an artistic strategy, and so it gives the LLM more leeway. But eventually you’ll see that these intangible concepts are kind of nonsensically paired with things, or they’ll be mixed metaphors, or they’re just not used in as thoughtful a way as a human would do it. So that’s another thing that’s very common.

Oren: With that list, I think we’re going to have to finally call this extra-long episode to a close.

Chris: If you would like to support some actual human writers, [laughs] you can always become our patrons. 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, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

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