You’ve written so many scenes of pulse-pounding tension, isn’t it about time to slow down and relax, maybe with your characters on a beach somewhere? After all, your heroes deserve some time to unwind, and readers will enjoy it too. Up to a point, anyway. The big question with R&R scenes is how long they should go on, along with how often to have them and whether you can use them for multitasking. At least, we hope those are the big questions, because they’re what we’re talking about today.

Generously transcribed by Scott. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[opening song]

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So, we’re actually gonna spend this episode just on the beach, sipping drinks and lounging in the sun.

Chris: We’re gonna do that snore cast that we talked about a couple episodes ago.

Oren: No worries, no concerns. Maybe a little emotional growth if there’s time, or rather, we will talk about characters doing that because it’s the Pacific Northwest in October, and there’s no sun. So, that’s not even an option for us.

Chris: What? You don’t wanna do a beach episode in the Pacific Northwest?  We can go to Golden Gardens… (sarcastic)

Oren: As long as it’s not raining. I love going to beaches when it’s cold out. If it’s raining, that’s a different story.

Chris: But that’s probably ’cause you don’t actually get in the water. Can’t have a beach episode where nobody gets in the water.

Oren: That would be hard. So, here’s the opening question ’cause we’re talking about rest and relaxation scenes in fiction. So, important question for the panel.

Chris: For the panel as in me then?  

Oren: Chris is the panel. (both Chris and Oren laugh) The question is, can you do beach episodes in a novel?

Chris: When we talk about a beach episode, are we talking about having an episode structure first of all?

Oren: Yeah. Not to put you on the spot or anything.

Chris: Okay. I would say actually no, because you can do an episodic structured novel. But it’s kind of a stretch. People aren’t really used to it, they expect a novel to have a much stronger through line, and I think that they can get used to it and it can still be fun, and we do have some episodic novels like travel novels that are very episodic.

But a beach scene is like an entire episode that is usually lower intention. That would be definitely weird in a novel ’cause I still think you would have a higher expectation, that the episodes will escalate to some degree. If it feels like The Witcher book, where it’s really just an anthology, with a framing device…(Chris laughs) If it’s an anthology, sure. But I think if it’s anything beyond an anthology, where we actually have some kind of through line holding together, there’s higher expectations for escalation.

Man, when we had beach episodes, that’s when we had TV show seasons that were like 20 episodes long. Now, big streaming shows are like eight episodes, and it would be a real waste to do a beach scene. We don’t got time.

Oren: Maybe a beach scene, not a beach episode.

Chris: Yeah, a beach scene. That’s true. Slip of the tongue but, yeah, we can do a beach scene, a single scene at the beach.

Oren: I think you would have the same issue with the novel ’cause, even a really episodic one like Voyage of the Dawn Treader which is our go-to example for episodic novels, doesn’t have that many episodes.

Chris: Probably 12 or something. I think I counted them honestly, and it’s in the range of 12, maybe 14 at most.

Oren: An entire episode is gonna be a pretty big investment of time.  

Chris: And the other thing that makes this work, is that the through line has to be extremely low key If we’re gonna take a break like that, because if the through line is at all tense, urgency is at all high, the audience is gonna represent the “filler” because they expect the story to have more movement, instead of characters doddling at the beach.

Now, don’t get me wrong, some audiences absolutely love these. If you go to AO3 and look at fan fiction, (Chris laughs) there’s all types of different fanfiction, but you quickly discover one of the biggest motivations for a doing fan fiction, is that there’s so many people who actually want more low tension, personal conflict, and a lot of very popular stories that are much higher tension and much more tightly paced. And that’s of course, because these really popular stories are trying to appeal to a very wide audience, and so they wanna make sure that they have the audience’s attention. Whereas, when you have a story that’s for a more niche audience, like cozy fantasy, it’s meant for an audience that does not want a high-tension story. Then it’s a lot easier to be like “Okay, yeah, we’re gonna do some beach. (Chris laughs) Beach time.”

Oren: In general, if your through line is less urgent and less tense, then you’re gonna have less of a problem. Moving past the concept of an entire beach episode in novels, because that’s already a little strange. Let’s look at the beach scene, as it were, which is a little more manageable. First thing to think about is “why?”. Why would you include a scene like that? Would it be a scene at all or would it be summary? Would it be beach summary?

Chris: I’m not sure why you would do Beach summary. I mean, if you had an entire book that was on the beach side, and you’ve already done a beach scene, then you could summarize “Yeah, my character went back to the beach to relax for the afternoon.”

But, if the goal here is to have a scene that provides some wish fulfilment where we don’t just want characters to relax, we want the audience to enjoy the coffee shop atmosphere. For instance, if we’re talking about Legends and Lattes. Then, summary is really gonna, I think, take away a lot of that. Not that you can’t do some wish fulfillment in summary, but I think that to a certain extent that defeats the point, summary is for stuff that is not engaging but necessary,

Oren: You’d be more likely to summarize a character recovering from an injury, than relaxing for pleasure.

Chris: If your character has an afternoon to themself and we have to explain what they do for that afternoon, or we want them to spend all afternoon at the beach, but only when the sun sets…does the love interest show up? (Chris laughs) So, we just need to get them to the beach, but that part’s not supposed to be interesting, then we have summary. But, I think when we’re talking about scenes of rest and relaxation, a lot of times we’re looking for something that the audience can dig into and enjoy at some level, get some wish fulfilment in. I don’t think that summary really serves that purpose very well.

Oren: Which, I guess, brings to mind the next question. “What are you doing in a relaxation scene?” It could just be wish fulfilment, especially if you’ve got a really cool, fun setup. But, I think you are also often using them to give audiences a chance to catch their breath, and these can also be just a little bit of a relief to see that the characters get some time to recover a little bit if you have a tenser story. Because some stories can be tense, and you still wanna have little bits of relaxation between the really exciting stuff.

Chris: First, if we’re talking about pacing, letting the audience rest is particularly important. After you have a really fast paced tense scene, like you have a big fight or battle, what happens is if you have that super tense scene where the audience is expected to pay attention, to any moment and any moment could be a matter of life or death or something like that, or heated argument might do this, where the audience has to be in high alert because every moment is really crucial. That gets exhausting after a while for the audience.

That’s when they’re actually ready for a lower tension scene, and a complete change of pace, and it’s when they will actually be able to pay attention through it. So, if you have a scene that’s only kind of tense, maybe we kind of introduce a new mystery, but it’s not super tense. Then if you do like a really relaxing beach scene after that, you might lose their attention.

Oren: Right? It’s like, “oh man, we found that the diamond has been stolen. All right, let’s go meet at the bar for martinis.” (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: Right! At that point, it just feels like now we’re de-escalating instead of escalating. We were just getting revved up to get started on this arc, that’s when it’s gonna feel boring, but if you put that same “let’s go to the bar” after they’ve had a hard fight, or they had a jewellery heist and just barely escaped from authorities or something like that, now we’re really ready for that bar scene. My simplest rule about pacing is, always put your lowest tension scenes immediately after your highest tension scenes, and then ideally between that you’re going up steadily.

Low tension scene up steadily until your peak, and then you drop. I think you’ve described it sometimes as alternating tenses and non-tense scenes, and I think that also works if your tenser scenes are tense enough. If every other scene was a scene where a character was in immediate danger (Chris laughs) then, yeah, I think you could probably do every other scene having a relaxing scene if it’s tense enough. But, in a lot of stories, we’re gonna have a lot of in-between scenes where we’re booting up the problem or something like that.

Oren: When I talk about alternating tense and untense scenes, I’m usually talking about that with a client who, kind of, has no idea how to arrange their scenes and needs something really basic, and this is how I get them to break up three scenes of the characters hanging out and talking. “Okay, you can have those scenes, but they can’t all be back to back like this.”

Chris: And sometimes people ask me, “okay, how long is it acceptable to step away from the stories through line?” and just have the characters tend to their relationship or work on a subplot, and my answer is “well, usually you’re safe for a scene.” Now, that is still actually pretty generic ’cause some scenes are long and some scenes are short, but roughly a scene is fine. I don’t know, stories are very different from each other, and some stories kind of have two through lines. Like, they have an exciting external plot that happens in the beginning and then fades away, where the character works on their personal problems, and then the more exciting action fades back in again. There can be complex things going on that changes that up, but generally…a scene, is the amount that is safe, but it’s not necessarily all or nothing.

Characters can be doing something that’s meant to solve the through line problem, but they’re not in intense conflict over it yet. Like, “Hey, we need to investigate what happened to this murder, so we’re gonna go over to the mortuary”. So, we are working on that, but once we’re at the mortuary, we run into our ex and then most of the scene is actually spent on personal drama, but they’re still at the mortuary and they still come away with some sort of clue that they used on their murder mystery, for instance.

But, if you’re completely stepping away from the through line, I think a scene is about the rule of thumb I would go for.

Oren: Probably not a super long one, you wanna probably keep that scene on the shorter side and I think, to just hit upon an important point which is that, a lower tension scene is not necessarily the same as an R&R scene. If you just had a life-or-death chase, and now you’re gonna go and research what that thing was that was chasing you, that’s lower tension but I wouldn’t call it relaxing. You have to think about “what is the purpose of the scene.” If you’re trying to move the story forward by having your characters do some non-physical conflict, they’re trying to solve a riddle or figure out a puzzle or something, that can also be good, but it’s not really relaxing. When you think about relaxing, it’s really more about the feeling you’re creating and the reader.

Chris: But at the same time, you can have problems and conflicts during relaxing if you want to. Usually, you would just be aiming for them to be a little lower key, but oftentimes relaxation scenes are when you work on the more internal arcs of the story. Oftentimes, especially if, let’s say your character just made a bad choice in their character arc and then faced consequences, you have a relaxation scene afterwards. That’s a really important time for your character to then process what happened and then be like, “Hey, maybe I made the wrong choice there…naaah.” (Chris laughs) Or whatever you want to happen.

Have them talk it through with another character, have those relationship arcs, have those characters spend time with each other. I mean, I do think one of the really important things about those lower key scenes, whether they’re technically relaxing or not, is that usually during your really tense, fast-paced moments, you don’t really have as much time to focus on internal arcs. It’s just harder to then talk about their feelings, than it is if they’re having a tea party, for instance.

Oren: Here’s something to think about. Timing. When you’re planning these scenes, and this is more delicate the higher urgency your story is, and urgency is usually something – first of all, it’s gonna be more present in higher tension stories – and it’s usually going to increase towards the end.

Chris: I bet you’re thinking about A Study in Drowning.

Oren: You know, I wasn’t, but I should be. (Oren laughs) Now that you say that. I should have been. (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: It’s such a great example of a relaxing scene. It’s a culmination of a romance so, the characters finally decide they’re gonna go to bed together, but it’s just at the wrong time, and it would only take actually a fairly small change…to make it okay…but it’s a situation where the urgency is actually really high ’cause there’s a big storm, and they’ve been staying at this creepy mansion where they’re trying to uncover some evidence, and the storm was probably gonna bring the mansion down.

Oren: They don’t have a lot of time. (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: And that’s when they decide “bow chicka wow wow” (Chris laughs) and we really needed to reduce the urgency of the situation a little bit.

Oren: Usually the way that you would have a scene like that, regardless of whether the characters are gonna get it on or not, the result of some successful conflict or maybe a failed conflict – the resolution of a conflict on the character’s part – which now puts them in a situation where they just kind of have to wait for a little bit. If your high tense plot is that your character “needs to get these plans to the rebel base as soon as possible, and you’re running outta time” you would have a sequence where your character fights their way through the spaceport, and just manages to get their ship off the ground, and now they’re in hyperspace for a little bit and they got nothing to do.

So, they can talk about their feelings or go to town, whatever they want, and because that’s the result of a resolution, it is less likely to feel like “maybe you should be doing something else right now” you know? In character you can make it make sense too. Those are both important.

Chris: And having just a required waiting period. If there’s no movement on the through line for too long, it doesn’t really fix that problem because the audience knows that you created this. It’s like “Nope, sorry, but we can do nothing but stay in this cabin for three months” and then narrating three months’ worth of content. It’s still gonna make them impatient, but what it does is it takes care of that specific urgency problem where it distracts the audience with “how could they be having dinner right now? Somebody’s dying!”

It takes care of that problem so that they’re no longer distracted, by feeling like the characters need to be doing something else right now. Just any, any reason that they’re hold up or they have to wait. They’re waiting to hear back from somebody, for instance, and there’s just not a whole lot that they can do right now.

Oren: It occurred to me that a book series that does a lot of scenes like this is actually Lord of the Rings – which I find interesting – and it does more earlier in the story, they become fewer and farther between as you go. But, after the initial Shire sequence, we have the characters do a little bit of traveling and it gets a little dangerous, and then they just stop at various places. They stop at Tom Bombadill’s house, they stop at Rivendell. Or first they stop at The Prancing Pony. Then they stop at Rivendell. The order of operations continues, and in the second book, I think that one point they stop and hang out with, uh, oh gosh. What’s Boromir’s brother’s name? The less-good Boromir brother. Faromir, that’s his name. (Chris laughs)

Chris: Technically, according to the book, he is the superior brother.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true. And then of course, as the story ramps up, they have fewer and fewer of those (scenes). By the end, they’re just exhausted ’cause they can’t ever stop. There’s nowhere to rest. Both narratively and literally.

Chris: If I remember correctly, the pacing for some of those scenes at the end still, is not necessarily high. There’s a difference between the tone and the pace. So, that long trip where they’re trying to dodge Orcs as they get closer to Mount Doom, I remember that being kind of a slog. The Hobbit also has this long sequence where they’re going through this…Oh, gosh, what is it called? This gloomy forest full of spiders.

Oren: Murkwood?

Chris: Murkwood, yeah, that’s it.

Oren: The hobbit’s not real, okay? We don’t know what’s going on in The Hobbit. Tolkien was having some kind of fever dream when he wrote The Hobbit, nothing in The Hobbit makes any sense. (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: But, we can have long periods where there’s just tons of narration about how miserable the characters are, that doesn’t make it exciting. It just makes it kind of depressing, and so that’s how I feel like a lot of the Lord of the Rings ends up being. Whereas, when something is exciting, that means there’s an active problem for the character to solve that is providing an immediate threat, and that’s what actually makes it exciting. And you can have that excitement without making all of the characters super miserable all the time.

Oren: The Red Wall series also does this in a way that I find very interesting, which is food porn. It’s like, “hang on, everybody, pause the story. We gotta describe this deeper never turnip and tater’ beet root pie in exquisite detail”. And sometimes it is a little much, in some of the books you’re kind of sitting there wondering, “do we have time for this? Isn’t there a bad guy? I thought we had a bad guy to deal with?”
“Hang on a minute, there’s still soup. We haven’t done the soup course yet.” (Chris laughs)

Chris: A lot of cozy fantasy is pretty much well known for having slow wish fulfillment scenes, whether we’re going into details on the coffee shops, baked goods, but not the coffee…

Oren: Not the coffee though, just the baked goods.

Chris: We’re never gonna stop teasing Legends and Lattes for having really lackluster coffee description, but the baked goods are, you know, described-

Oren: Baldree, do you just not like coffee very much? (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: “Maybe it should have been a tea shop. If you don’t like coffee, I don’t know.” Maybe he just didn’t really know very much about coffee. It’s like, “I don’t know how to describe coffee.” I feel like you could research that pretty easy.

Oren: That was the part that confused me. I’m not a big coffee drinker either, but I was immediately able to come up with various things that they could do with the coffee, because I have the internet available to me.

Chris: Or the obvious. So, you have chocolate and you have coffee. Mocha, how about that? The obvious implications of the ingredients you are already established to have.

Oren: I kept expecting them to do that and they never did and I’ll never get over it. It’s broken my trust. (Oren and Chris chuckle)

Chris: Or Teller of Small Fortunes. That one is interesting ’cause they travel around, and they have their little wagons and they invent fortune cookies, which is hilarious. You always gotta invent something that exists, but we go into details about how they make these fortune cookies for the first time, and sell ’em to customers…

Oren: Red Wall is a weird book because sort of cozy, but also not. It has sequences that you would recognize from a lot of cozies, and yet, it is also occasionally very dark and brutal. (Chris laughs)

Chris: I guess the question is, “is it just inconsistent?” As I said, I feel like cozy fantasy comes from lighter, classic fantasy stories that had a cozy element, but were all so exciting, but still were sort of lighter in tone. Like the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, or Howl’s Moving Castle, or some Terry Pratchet, where those all have definitely neat wish fulfillment elements. Like talking to Dragons, the first in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Technically, it has tenser action than you wouldn’t normally have in a cozy ’cause the wizards are all evil, but you can just defeat them by pouring soapy water on them and they just melt. So, it’s never graphic. (Chris laughs)

So, we technically have a big villain that we wouldn’t usually have in a cozy fantasy, but at the same time, the story is still very light in tone and a bunch of time is spent on problems that are very cozy. Like, “oh, I was just sorting the dragons hoard and organizing everything very neatly, and then I accidentally opened the bottle, and a genie came out. Now we need to figure out how to get it back in there.”

“God, these knights keep showing up, wanting to slay the dragon. I don’t really want them to slay my dragon, so how do I convince them to leave” and other things like that. But it sounds like Red Wall gets…darker than that. (Chris chuckles)

Oren: A lot darker. Red Wall, actually, is kind of infamous for having a major character die every book.

Chris: Wow.

Oren: Yeah, sometimes a character survives through multiple books and I’m like, “okay, they’re gonna die eventually” and then eventually they do. “oh, that character’s been around for a while.” (Oren chuckles)

Chris: That just sounds like a total disconnect. It reminds me of- In Wings of Fire, the first book has violence between these dragons, in a story that is supposed to be anti-violence but is clearly not, but it’s surprisingly graphic. We get surprisingly graphic about all these horrible injuries that all of these dragon characters are getting, and it’s like “this is a middle grade story” and it’s true. The author does actually lighten up on the graphic violence.

Oren: Yeah, someone talked to her between books.

Chris: Somebody talked to her (Chris laughs)
That was just a thing, she didn’t know that she was going too far. She didn’t know where the right level of graphicness or non-graphicness was at, and she corrected it after a couple books. It’s like, “okay, that’s understandable.” It sounds like with Red Wall, they are not the right stories to have a major character die.

Oren: That always struck me as weird when it happened. “Huh? I wasn’t expecting that. All right. I guess that character’s dead now.”
A final form of relaxation scenes that I find interesting are scenes that you find in books like Animorphs. Which are less about the characters catching their breath, and are more about – to a certain extent – almost like what the Save the Cat people would call “the fun and games”. Where in the case of Animorphs, it’s like “what if we turned into an animal and hung out as that animal for a while and had a fun animal time?” You could see it’s superhero stories, It’s like a sequence where the character just kind of enjoys having powers for a while. Unlike the Save the Cat people, I don’t think that that scene needs to happen at a specific point in the story in every story, ’cause that’s ridiculous. But, you do recognize that kind of scene when it happens.

Chris: When I originally read Save the Cat, what interpreted is that you have advertised this story as having a specific novel premise, and this is where you fulfill that promise. So, if you advertise “oh, look at the funny hijinks that will be in the story.” That’s when you have the funny hijinks. For Animorphs it’s like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you could turn into an animal? Child, wouldn’t you wanna read this?” And that’s where you’re like, “Hey! Here’s the part where I give you that novelty I promised, and that wish fulfillment I promised, about turning into an animal”.

Oren: You can’t be fighting aliens all the time as an animal, sometimes you just gotta have a moment to be an animal. Classic case of Save the Cat, noticing something that does happen and then universalizing it because that makes it easier to sell storytelling advice. (Oren chuckles)

Chris: But I would say that dark stories can also have rest and relaxation scenes, the tone might just be a little different. For a cozy fantasy, we’re really looking for a heavy wish fulfillment experience, whereas in a darker story, it’s more about – obviously giving the audience a chance to rest – but also making it realistic that the character can keep going. (Chris laughs)
You can only put a character through so much then it’s like “aren’t they just gonna collapse from their injuries at some point?”

Oren: It’s fine, don’t worry about it, they’ll just keep chugging energy drinks. Those let you go forever.

Chris: You do want some variation in tone too, in the story. Even if you have like a dark and edgy story, your edgy twists are not gonna…feel that shocking anymore if you do that every single scene. (Chris laughs)
So, some contrast is still there, but it still shouldn’t feel like a cozy scene and then have lots of graphic violence featuring protagonists. That would still be weird.

Oren: I think now that we have had a long and difficult high-tension episode, we are gonna go and have our relaxation at the cold, damp, dark Pacific Northwest Beach. (Oren and Chris laugh)

Chris: And if you found this episode relaxing, 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, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[closing theme]

We love a good sword fight or space battle; it is known. But what if it’s feelings you’re more interested in? How are you supposed to build an entire conflict out of those? For that matter, what if you want to combine the two? This week, we’re looking at how to build emotional conflicts. That means giving the stakes, urgency, a likelihood of failure, and everything else a conflict needs, but with more feeling!

Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

[Intro Music] 

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

Oren: And I’m Oren. 

Chris: So today I went into Barnes & Noble and I saw the novel Babel by R. F. Kuang on the front display, and on one hand, I knew that sabotaging a bookstore’s display is wrong, but on the other hand, I’m really angry at Babel. And this just caused an inward emotional conflict. Thankfully, Oren was there to tell me not to spoil Babel for shoppers by leaving a warning on the book.

Oren: We could have put a little decorative doily on it with a little embroidered thing about what happens that annoyed us.

[both laughing]

Chris: Do not read this book unless you wanna rip your hair out! 

Oren: Or you could just be like me and not form emotional attachments to what happens in the books, and then you’ll be better off. 

Chris: I just don’t honestly know why you would read Babel otherwise, because there’s very little plot, there’s very little tension, or anything happening for most of the book. So, if you don’t form any attachment, then why? 

Oren: It’s easy. You know, you read it so you know what everyone else is talking about.

Chris: But if you do form any attachment, you will be BETRAYED.

Oren: Hurtful! 

Chris: This is your warning. It is hurtful. It was very hurtful to me. Okay, so this time we’re talking about — not Babel, I mean, you know, except for when I talk about Babel.

Oren: Yeah. That’ll probably be coming up in the next few weeks of podcasts.

Chris: But emotional conflicts. So, first, what is that? Basically it’s when you set up an internal struggle over what to do, where a character has a dilemma, but the focus is not, I mean, it can have moral implications, but with a moral dilemma, it’s supposed to be hard to tell what the right thing to do is, whereas this is about two different impulses or two different priorities that the character has that makes a decision really hard for them to make personally. 

Oren: Yeah. It’s to make you angst. 

Chris: And again, the goal is not to let the character just think their way out of this dilemma. That’s not bad storytelling necessarily, and sometimes if the character has conflicted priorities and they think of some sort of clever solution so they don’t have to make any hard decisions, that can be a way of just procrastinating on something that they really have to work out or putting it off until later. But when we want the emotional conflict, the goal is to force them into that tough situation and just make things hard for them emotionally. 

Oren: Yeah, if the character is portrayed as having an emotional struggle, having them solve it with an intellectual plan probably isn’t going to be super satisfying. If they have two friends who are fighting and they’re caught in the middle trying to figure out what to do and who to support or not, having them concoct an elaborate plan by which to trick both of their friends into thinking that they’re the one the protagonist has sided with is probably not a satisfying way to end that story.

Chris: Right. I mean, it can’t be an ending. You would expect in any story you saw that what you would expect is for that to backfire on the character. Because they had tried to take the easy way out instead of actually solving their problem in a more genuine way. You know, if they’re trying to choose between two different job opportunities and they clone themselves, the expectation would be that it would go very wrong and then they would regret doing that.

Oren: Right, you could have, depending on how it’s pitched, you could have a similar scenario that would feel like an intellectual solution is fine. Like if the idea was more that this person needs to have two jobs to pay the rent, a solution that lets them do both — as long as it is earned and feels like a good reward for them being clever — that could work fine. But if it’s specifically about how I want both of these jobs. They’re both so cool, which one will I pick? Being able to do both is just going be a cop-out.

Chris: Again, just to make this more emotionally loaded, if one job is the job that their parents approve of and they want to please their parents, and the other job is the job that is fulfilling their personal dreams and goals. So that we see there’s emotional weight and each job represents some sort of priority for them. And usually in that situation, we’d expect that the answer is not just to live your life to please your parents, right? But it’s tough for them to make that choice. 

An example that I really like is episode two of Teen Wolf.  It’s in the first season, where Scott is a new werewolf without very good control of his power. So, he could, if he gets too excited or angry or something happens, he could just lose control and start turning into a werewolf. And he’s been working really, really hard to get onto the lacrosse team and thanks to his new powers, he has finally done it so he’s finally going to actually play in a lacrosse game and the game’s coming up and then he’s warned that he shouldn’t play the game because he could lose control and expose himself as a werewolf.

Oren: And also hurt somebody. 

Chris: Right, and hurt somebody. At the same time, if he doesn’t play the game, he’ll be letting other people down. He could possibly lose his position on the team, because it’s expected that when he tried out for the team, that he would actually be playing games. So that is the kind of thing we’re trying to do, whether he should prioritize that dream he has been thinking about for so long versus that risk of losing control or hurting somebody. Something like that. That would be an example. 

Oren: The one that I really like, but I have a hard time creating this is, I like it when friends fight.  I like it when you have characters who are close or have some kind of existing relationship and then they end up on opposite sides of a conflict. I find that really cool and really compelling, but it’s hard to set that up. Partly because you need to actually demonstrate the friendship. And I don’t know how well it would work — and my guess is usually not very well — to have them be friends in the backstory. Maybe not never, but I just feel that’s going to not feel very real for a lot of readers.

Chris: Yeah, I do think it’s about how important it is, because definitely the first step in any kind of emotional conflict is that we need to design the two impulses or emotions that are at conflict but we also really need to make them compelling to our audience. And that’s what you’re talking about. If the character has to balance their friendship against what they think is right, for instance, in order to make this a compelling conflict, we need to make sure that the audience can care about both of those things because you want them to be in the shoes of your character who’s having this conflict and empathizing with this conflict as much as possible and feeling the dilemma with that character. So, you want to make both sides really compelling so that the audience feels like, “Oh, I don’t know. What are you going to do?” instead of just feeling like, “Ugh, why are you angsting over this. Just do that.”  You don’t want that to happen. 

So, if one side is a relationship with another character, you do need to make that relationship compelling and showing the relationship is kind of an important part of that. I would say that if that friendship is a really central part of the whole plot, then it is worth usually just a few scenes in the beginning to show them together. But you can also do a lot with exposition, right? It’s just, exposition is much faster and you want to show those details like when did the friend help them out? What has the friend done for them in the past? And to make the case for why this friendship is so valuable. But, if it’s really central to the story, then yeah, usually it’s probably worth some initial, at least one initial, scene in the beginning of the story, of course, is so crowded and usually has so many priorities, but if this is load bearing, then it’s often worth an extra scene in the beginning where they’re still friends with each other, for instance.

Oren: You can also have them be friends for a good portion of the story and have them split up towards the end and become on opposite sides that way. They have to cooperate at first to save the city from a giant meteor or whatever, but then at the end of the story, the big climax, is actually the different factions in the city are fighting over who gets to control the meteor and that’s a problem, and then they split over that. That sort of thing could happen. 

Chris: Yeah, you could definitely have how they’re facing a problem together, but at the end — and usually you would show fractures in their friendship earlier — they managed to keep things together despite the fact that they have a difference in opinion, and circumstances would conspire to make that worse.

Oren: This can also work well in sequels. I’m actually a big sucker for sequels where friends who used to be part of the same adventuring team have to fight. I’m not a huge fan of sequels where they’re all sad and depressed. 

Chris: Really? Are you saying you didn’t like Picard? Geez! Picky, picky. 

Oren: No, I wasn’t a huge fan. But sequels where before, especially if it was a fairly simplistic idea, like we’re on an adventuring team and we’ll be friends forever. I like sequels where things become more complicated and they maybe have to come into conflict with each other. Now I do want them to make up and be friends again. So, I have requirements, but that’s my favorite part of the Avatar comics, is when Team Avatar come to blows over something. There’s some problem that they can’t agree how to address do they end up in competition with each other. I find those scenes really compelling because I have this extremely big attachment built up to their friendship from the original series. 

Chris: Another thing to consider is if you need to add backstory. For instance, if your character is afraid of something. Again, you want to put people in their shoes and overcoming fear can be their conflicting impulses. They have a goal, but they’re afraid or they have a goal, but they’re angry and they have to work with somebody who hurt them in the past, for instance, they have to learn how to tamper down on some jealousy. Fighting impulses definitely works to make an emotional conflict, but you’re trying to justify their emotions as much as possible. So creating some backstory events and again, this can be worth just some exposition to flush them out can be quite effective if it’s not the whole story. Maybe they need to get over their jealousy, but the whole story isn’t about their jealousy. That would be unusual. And of course, you can use multitasking too, so if you have a scene about something else, maybe you can do double duty. But basically make up this is what they feel. How can I get readers to understand what they feel or the logic of it?

Sometimes writers really do need to explain why their characters feel the way they feel. Like if they’re grieving somebody and they’re not sure they’re ready to date again, is it that they feel like they’re betraying their dead partner? Or what is the reason why they’re feeling these emotions? And kind of spell that out a bit. 

Oren: Yeah, with the dating one, this comes up in some romance stories and also in some client work that I’ve done where there’s been a problem where the author wants to use emotional problems to keep the characters apart but isn’t willing to show those emotions. And so either we have to sort of guess why does this person not want to date? And it’s because they’re still  upset from the bad breakup they had last time but I didn’t even know that from the story. Or sometimes they’ll say it, but it doesn’t really feel like the character feels it, and that also seems contrived. At that point I’m just like, “Get together already guys. None of this matters.”

Chris: Definitely. And if it’s not a viewpoint character that obviously can get harder. Sometimes you may need to use dialogue or plan a stimulus that they can react to so you can see them react. Seeing the character react can also help to communicate what’s going on with them, but that can be a little bit trickier, which is generally why with a viewpoint character you can have more emotional depth. If you’re planning a romance in particular, this is definitely something that goes into the decision of whether your romance has one viewpoint or two. If you have a lot of really complex emotional obstacles for your love interest, that’s often a reason to add another viewpoint, whereas otherwise, that can actually make the romance less compelling. 

So, justify each emotion as best you can. Make sure that it’s compelling, that your audience sympathizes with it, and then the next step is to exert external pressure on them. Make it really hard, right? You’re trying to make things as hard as possible for them to make their choice, so really load the pressure. And again, this just goes to the fact that the emotions the characters are experiencing are really important, but we can’t only do internal stuff in the story. We need to have external things happening. It’s boring to have a page of just your character thinking and feeling things. We don’t want you to narrate them meditating, although actually some stories do have where they actually act out what’s happening in the character’s head. They have a dream sequence that represents their emotional turmoil or whatever. 

Oren: Those are really useful, those dreams sequences. 

Chris: We have a mindscape where one character goes into another character’s mind and then we play it all out like it’s an external scene. Some stories do that, but for the most part, you need to then make it so that external events hang on this choice and that there’s a lot of pressure externally. For instance, my example from Teen Wolf, Scott has pressure from on one side his werewolf mentor, Derek, who is really funny. 

Oren: Yeah, Derek’s great. We love Derek in this house.

Chris: Oh man, because he’s like the weirdest, least charismatic person ever who is trying to be scary and creepy but is mostly funny. Who just comes and is like, “No, you can’t play in the game. Don’t even think about it!” 

Oren: “Don’t do it!” And then he just aways like, “All right, I’ve given my command, I’m out.” 

Chris: And then he just disappears. It’s like . . . what? Okay, weirdo. And then Scott’s team coach is on the other side so when Scott then tries to tell his coach that maybe he can’t make it, his coach is like, “No, no, no, no,” and will not take ‘no’ for an answer. Making it as hard as possible.  We have a scene where his mother says that she’s proud of him and that she’s coming to see the game. 

Oren: They really twist the knife on that one. 

Chris: Yeah, exactly, it is about twisting the knife as much as possible so that we get good tension and power from the conflict. That’s why I like this episode so much, it does such a good job of setting this up as a really difficult dilemma for Scott. Obviously, the show runner wants Scott to play the game so we can have an exciting sequence of him playing lacrosse and trying to keep himself from transforming too much. And we do have to justify that, which normally if it’s something like this, it would be, oh well, this is dangerous and you could endanger other people, that would normally be a difficult thing to justify. Scott might look bad, but once we like really pile on the pressure enough, we can sympathize with that decision and understand why he plays the game even if it’s a bad idea. 

Oren: And in case it’s not obvious by this point, I’d say it is important if you have a big external conflict with high stakes: try to tie the emotional conflict into that. If you have a really high stakes problem of evil invaders are coming and they’re going get you, having your character be caught in a heartfelt emotional conflict about something like whether or not he can adopt this pet is not going to make sense, right? Even if in isolation that emotional conflict would be great, if there’s a big high stakes external conflict that is unrelated to it, those two things are going to clash. They’re going to compete for space.   

Chris: Yeah, and in the same vein, usually an emotional conflict would be part of a character arc. Otherwise, you’re usually stretching yourself too thin if you’re trying to do some other character arc and also have an unrelated emotional conflict. A character arc is all about making it so that your character’s emotions have a purpose to them. I mean, not every emotion, of course, at all times, it has to be directly linked to the character arc. But in general, it lets you add emotional depth to the story while making it feel cohesive and giving it a united purpose. So your emotional conflict should have some relationship and be part of that character arc in some way. Now of course, when I’m talking about this Teen Wolf emotional conflict, that’s part of a TV show, which is very episodic, although Teen Wolf actually is a great mix of having episode arcs with a strong season arc usually. So, this is kind of part of a growth arc for Scott where he comes into his powers and deals with having these powers in his life and adjusts. That’s how it connects to what he’s going through during the season. 

And then another thing to think about when we’re talking about external stuff is a character is likely to be inconsistent or go back and forth when they’re struggling over this and trying to decide, but we can’t just have them spontaneously change their mind.

Oren: Yeah, I was wondering how you have them do that without it seeming like you’re retreading old ground. 

Chris: Okay, so without retreading old ground, let’s say we have this as one step in a larger character arc. There are basically two things that we can do. We can have them sort of make a baby step, where maybe a character is adjusting to a change. For Scott, we had a situation where he was in denial. He was adjusting to being a werewolf and we could have one little arc where he’s in denial that he’s a werewolf at all and then can’t deny it anymore, for instance. In this particular emotional conflict, it might be about admitting that his life is going to have to change. That doesn’t mean he’s adjusted to all the changes. 

So, it’s about finding a baby step. And then the other thing that can happen is they can actually go in the wrong direction and cause problems for themself. This is what we’re talking about with if they find a clever solution to avoid making a decision that they have to make. Usually that’s going to come back to bite them, right? So that’s another way of doing it. They put it off, but they’ve actually dug themselves in deeper so we can see that that’s going to come back to bite them. That would be another way to divide up that larger character arc into a smaller conflict. 

Oren: [sarcastically] Or they could just get away with it with their clever idea that makes it so they never have to face the emotional consequences. I don’t see a problem. Like what could go wrong?

Chris: Talking about wavering, the other thing about that is that we need to see why they waver, which also generally is going to rely on some kind of external change or trigger. So instead of writing a page of them thinking through the entire situation in their head and finally making a decision you would have some outside stimulus. It doesn’t mean that they can’t do any thinking in their head or figuring out in their head, but usually we want that to be in small pieces because it does feel like the story’s not moving forward. 

Oren: Yeah. Probably if they’re dealing with like the fear of, Should I try to diffuse this bomb? Or should I try to escape? That’s emotionally difficult because it’s scary. You probably don’t want them to just be sitting there thinking about how scared they are. If you want their fear to be higher, you would prompt them with something like the bomb makes a weird noise and now they might have less time.

Chris: Right, we want to place things wherever the climax of this emotional conflict takes place. You want to place things in their environment that can have an effect on them or have things happen. And often it’s a character, just like I talked about with Scott, with his mother saying she’ll come to the game. It can be other people pushing in the various directions, but also it can be if they’re scared, again, with the bomb making a noise makes them even more scared.

Or something else, if they have a deep, dark backstory, there can be something that suddenly reminds them of the backstory, seems reminiscent of it. Anything that is a stimulus that they would reasonably have an emotional response to can then change their mind and cause them  to waver more in the other direction as long as the audience can see what that stimulus is and how that would reasonably have an effect on them. As opposed to just spontaneous mind changing, which comes off as really inconsistent.

Oren: One way that I like to use emotional conflicts, but again, is challenging for me, is sympathetic villains. Because they can, in theory, do the same thing where the villain is doing something and the hero has got to stop them, but you’ve built a relationship with them or you’ve made the hero think that maybe they have a point or something and that does create emotional complications. The problem is that I find myself always being like, “Nope, that villain’s gone too far. I don’t like them anymore. Now I don’t care about your emotional conflict!”

Chris: Yeah, that’s why they have to be usually the lesser antagonist or villain working under a Big Bad, because then you can have other minions and they don’t have to be responsible for everything bad that happens. And you can be like, “Oh maybe they killed somebody off screen, but maybe not. Who knows? I mean, we didn’t see it directly, so —”

Oren: Who’s to say?

Chris: Who’s to say? Might depend on how much time you have to devote to this character. I think one of the biggest issues of having those really complex emotional things happen is usually these are characters that we just don’t have as much time. Might not have a viewpoint, and that always makes things harder, so oftentimes we do need it to be a little simpler and less complicated. We can give them a sympathetic reason, for engaging in villainy, a revenge arc or   the big bad has an influence over them or something, and then we can see that they’re clearly guilty. And that usually makes for a fairly simple emotional conflict that is easy to observe from the outside instead of a complex conflict over their feelings of self-worth versus whether or not they deserve to be in a relationship, for instance.

Oren: Yeah. What do we think about the emotional conflict, in The Tainted Cup, which —spoilers for that book although it’s been out for a little while at this point — culminates at the end with the protagonist revealing to his boss that he got this position via sort of cheating a little bit, and that he has real trouble reading? Because he’s been thinking that he is unworthy of this job the whole time. What do we think about that? 

Chris: I feel like that was kind of underdeveloped. I mean, unfortunately one of the weakness of that series right now is that Din never solves any of his own problems. Ana always solves his problems for him, which I’m hoping will change in the future book. But gosh, I just think that conflict is just really underdeveloped. We don’t have a lot of instances where it actually comes into play in the story. Okay, there’s the cheating, but actually, if we make it about him being willing to admit about his, I want to call it dyslexia, but in this particular context it’s a magical feature that probably stems from dyslexia but has got other features.

So, he has photographic memory, but he can’t remember words whereas he would’ve been expected to. I will say that having Ana know, that’s the thing, is that Ana already knows, and we can tell that she already knows and that does take a lot of the pressure off of him. He still does have to come up with the courage to tell her, but at the same time, on the reader’s end, and I don’t know, maybe there was some reader who couldn’t tell that she already knows and was nervous about this, but I thought it was pretty clear. 

Oren: Yeah, Ana seems to know basically everything, so it would’ve been very weird to me if she hadn’t also known that.

Chris: Again, it’s a little arc for him, but calling it an emotional conflict, I feel like that’s giving it more power than it really had because we can’t really be in his shoes and it comes up not that often in the story and it’s solved pretty easily. That’s my two cents on that one.

Oren: Because I’ve just been trying to think of good examples from books, and again, it’s weird that all of my good examples are from TV shows. Surely there must be a book that does good emotional conflicts. 

Chris: I mean, TV shows have a neat plot every episode and with so many episodes, think of a Star Trek that has 20 episodes per season and seven seasons. 

Oren: Yeah. That’s true. 

Chris: I think one of the reasons why, is a TV show is like lots of little stories, so many that you just have tons of examples to work with. 

Oren: Yeah, well that is a good point. Speaking of episodes, I think we are about ready to call this one to a close.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

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

We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

Sometimes, fantasy is actually history, and I’m not talking about the claim that Middle-earth is actually ancient Europe. The historical fantasy genre has a lot of potential, especially for weird nerds who won’t shut up about fun historical factoids, but it does have some challenges. You usually want something that’s recognizably historical, but you also want to account for the differences caused by magic. Or do you? Listen and find out!

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[opening song]

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So I’m working on a story where, back in the ancient past, 5,000 years ago, a meteor came down. It gave everyone the ability to bend reality at will. The story is set in the present and everything is the same, except that, instead of debating gun control, we are debating reality-bending control.

Chris: We don’t have reality-bending dinosaurs from the meteor that hit?

Oren: No, not from 5,000 years ago.

Chris: Good point. Very recent dinosaurs!

Oren: They’ve been hiding those dinos. 5,000 years ago is recent enough that we might have some reality-bending mammoths up on one of those Arctic islands in the north of Russia.

Chris: I love the idea that you have a masquerade in your setting where magic is secret, but also dinosaurs.

Oren: Also dinosaurs!

Chris: Is that really a bigger deal than hiding magic? I think it would probably be just as hard to hide magic as to hide dinosaurs.

Oren: Depends on the size of the dinosaur, I guess.

Chris: Yeah, it might be easier to hide dinosaurs if they’re like the little chicken-sized dinosaurs also known as chickens.

Oren: Babby non avian dinosaurs. So obviously, I recently wrote a post about how history might or might not change in historical fantasy, and that might be out by the time this podcast comes out. Who knows when our posts come out? Not me. If it is, you’ve already seen that, and if not, you have that to look forward to. But I wanted to talk about it in a casual discussion format, because I still have thoughts, and if those don’t, you know, get out somewhere for content consumption, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.

Chris: Start talking in your sleep because you need to rant about this?

Oren: It’s called a snorecast, I’ll have you know.

Chris: I think it is interesting, when we’re talking about historical fantasy and what is the effect of magic, how similar it starts to feel to alternate history, which is its own subgenre of speculative fiction, because it’s almost like alternate history Plus.

Oren: I would say historical fantasy is almost by definition a kind of alternate history where one of the things that changed is that there’s magic now that’s generally not part of the historical timeline. There are some exceptions, right? Like, you can make a historical fantasy where you make everything self-contained, maybe it’s a masquerade, maybe the fantasy just happens in a very small area so it doesn’t really affect anything else, that’s all possible.

Chris: That’s the difference, right? Historical fantasy doesn’t have to get into all of that historical details if that’s not the goal, whereas alternate history, I think that there’s an expectation of higher realism. Because the point is that you have history diverging, there would naturally be more of a focus on that. Not that you can’t have that in historical fantasy too. I just think in alternate history that’s the point. And of course we don’t have magic to do the diverging, whereas in historical fantasy, you would definitely have magic be the reason why history is different.

Oren: No, historical fantasy where the south won the Civil War and unrelated, there are wizards.

Chris: Yeah, right? It just feels really random when you do that. Or you could just have dragons in the setting besides magic, something like that.

Oren: You can do the thing that we’ve seen several times, which is historical fantasy where magic is everywhere, it’s super well known and everyone uses it, but also everything is the same and nothing changed. I wish people wouldn’t do that. I don’t like that. It’s not something I’m a fan of. It just kind of makes me wish you were just doing normal historical fiction at that point, because at least I wouldn’t feel lied to. “Alright, here’s all this magic and everyone uses it everywhere.” It’s like, “Okay, wow, what’s the implications of that?” “None. Don’t ask about the implications. There aren’t any. We’re not doing that.”

Chris: I think people just want to have the aesthetics of the historical time period. They don’t want to have to do the whole figure out cause and effect. If you want castles and dragons, right? because we can have a whole conversation about how those fantasy elements actually change the setting, the problem is having castles and dragons is inherently a bit illogical. I mean, depending on the dragons, of course. But a lot of times we show dragons and they can just destroy castle walls as they fly by or something. And at that point, there’s no point in castles.

Oren: Your dragons don’t have to be Temeraire levels of dragon, where not only are dragons really big, but they work closely with humans and are in many cases basically human servants. Which does raise questions about: Why does anyone have big fixed fortifications? Because, as we see in the novels, dragons can just drop large rocks on them from way too high up to be shot at. And don’t worry about it, everything’s fine now.

Chris: It’s probably fairly likely, right? I don’t know if it would be everybody that you would get in a situation where you want the aesthetic coming from a certain time of history, but then you’re adding magic that would naturally outmode that aesthetic. It’s like the issue with people wanting characters to use swords in a setting where there’s modern guns; there’s not a lot of reason to use swords, but we just want swords, and so sometimes that could be an issue if you think about all of the effects that magic would realistically have.

Oren: I’m willing to grant some grace on this one. I’ll be magnanimous. Like, I get it. You know, the whole point of historical fantasy is that you want to be in a historical period. Being like, “Oh, well, you can’t, because your magic has been around and would have changed everything,” I get that that’s not a super workable approach, so I’m willing to meet authors halfway. And if they want to follow the Temeraire route, which is that everything is the same up until the story starts, and at that point, things can change because of how dragons work, I’ll accept that. I will be wondering, like, it’s a little weird that dragons being everywhere didn’t have any impact on the French Revolution or the life of this kind of obscure Corsican aristocrat who ends up becoming military dictator of France. A little weird that that all happened in the same way, but now that the story’s started, we have dragon airlifts and different colonized territories breaking away and battles that turned out in different ways. Yeah, cool. There we go. That’s what I want. See? That’s all I ask. It’s not unreasonable.

Chris: In the Temeraire series, is it just dragons? Is there anything else? Any other fantasy creatures? Any other kind of magic?

Oren: Just dragons.

Chris: Question two: At any point, does somebody scoff at the idea that there might be, like, a unicorn? Does somebody be, like, “What, you think that just because dragons are real, that other creatures are real? Shh. This is not a fiction. This is real life.”

Oren: I don’t remember. It’s been a while since I’ve read the nine books. There might be something in there where someone does that, but if so, it did not stick in my memory. There are some creatures that are like kind of pushing the limit of what a dragon is. There’s a giant sea serpent that hangs out near Japan, and it’s huge and it’s scaly and reptilian, but it doesn’t really have functional wings. So, like, is that a dragon? But, like, yeah, pretty much everything is draconic. There aren’t any griffins or manticores as far as I could find.

Chris: That is the key: If you only want one kind of magical creature, don’t mention anything else.

Oren: Yeah, it’s going to feel kind of pretentious if you’re like, “You thought there were unicorns? Silly!”

Chris: Or just like kind of mean. Fantasy writers like other stuff. It just kind of feels like a weird personal dig if you’re like, “Ha ha ha, you wanted unicorns!” And it’s like, “Well, of course I wanted unicorns. I’m a fantasy reader reading this fantasy book.” Sometimes what happens is the writer writes a setting that only has one thing in it, and then they get questioned by their readers and people they talk to, and they feel like they have to put an answer in their story, and that’s how they end up in that situation. It might not be because they’re scoffing.

Oren: Sometimes it’s supposed to be a joke. It’s not a joke I find very funny. But, you know, it’s like, “Ha! You thought vampires in this setting could turn into bats? Why would you think that? Are you stupid?” Turning into bats isn’t any more random than a lot of the other abilities vampires have. Why is that one unscientific?

Chris: Yeah, be careful. At some point in time you are going to have an ability that is just as unrealistic as a vampire turning into a bat. We don’t see a lot of alternate history urban fantasy. Usually the reason for using modern-day Earth setting is because you specifically want it to be familiar, and that would also motivate you to not have history diverge.

Oren: Imagine having to explain, like, “Here’s a modern-day-looking city and it’s got werewolves and mages.” And I got to explain all that. And then also I got to explain how this city is not part of the United States. It’s actually part of the breakaway micronation of New England. Because the Civil War went real weird. It’s like, “Okay, that’s a whole other thing I have to explain now.”

Chris: Feels like a theming problem where the story is not cohesive and the world is not cohesive anymore. Similar to, like, Carthage won, and also there are wizards, and those are completely separate reasons that history diverged in two different ways.

Oren: Wizards don’t even like Carthage. Why would they have anything to do with that? There are plenty of historical fantasy stories that have urban fantasy feelings. They use certain urban fantasy tropes, they have an urban fantasy aesthetic, but they aren’t actually set in the modern day. They’re set in a historical city, and sometimes the fantasy elements are used to help recreate some modern things that wouldn’t be there. Sometimes we don’t pay too much attention to that part of it, I’m not gonna say you couldn’t do it, but doing real-world fantasy stories with a big alternate history plot set in the present is already really weird. Urban fantasy or not, that’s just kind of unusual. You can go the other way, right? Because I’ve been complaining about stories that just have magic that’s been around forever and it didn’t change anything, but if you go the other direction and it’s like, “Oh, look, magic’s been around forever, everything’s different,” then you have to explain a whole lot, and it takes a while and it’s confusing, because you have this weird mix of real-world proper nouns and fantasy terms, and it takes a while to figure out what’s going on. I read this book called Cold Magic, and I first thought it was just a second-world fantasy setting, because it didn’t really seem to have anything in common with the real world. And it seemed like it was set in roughly 1700s-ish. But then they started using terms like Phoenician. That’s a real word. Hang on. And then I eventually found out it has this extremely complicated backstory of Carthage kind of winning the Punic War, and also huge magical natural disasters that made a bunch of people move around, and then also Carthage is destroyed later by a different magical thing. It was so complicated!

Chris: That reminds me of our conversation on post-apocalyptic fantasy, where there’s a bunch of books that just seem like other-world fantasy settings, and then you get this weird reveal that, no, actually it’s the future. Queen of the Tearling just seems like a typical other-world medieval -inspired fantasy setting, and then we suddenly learn that the main character has real-world books. Maybe that was people-fled Earth.

Oren: Yeah, it was scifi or something.

Chris: Sometimes it turns out it’s like planetary evacuation and colonization is supposed to be the backstory. Why? Why are we doing this?

Oren: With Cold Magic I definitely felt like this would have been easier if it was just a second-world fantasy story with some inspiration from various points in history. The weirdest one that I’ve read is The Devils. Everything’s different because of magic, but also, everything’s the same. Everything has a different name, but the dynamics are exactly the same. So it’s set in, like, late medieval period, you know, around crusading times. And there’s no Byzantine Empire because Rome was destroyed in the war with Carthage. This is another setting where Carthage won the Punic wars, interestingly. But there is instead the Empire of Troy, which fills exactly the same role. And then there’s like a different holy city with a Catholic-ish religion in Italy and it has a schism with the patriarch in Troy. And I’m just sitting here being like, “Am I losing my mind? What is going on?”

Chris: I wonder if some authors are just really intimidated by the idea of making changes. It reminds me of Kuang’s Babel. There is technically silver magic in the setting, but the setting is almost exactly the same as if magic didn’t exist. My theory was that maybe she just didn’t feel at liberty to change history, I don’t know, maybe because she wanted to make a point about colonialism, and if we changed history, then the point might be less relevant. Or maybe… She has this author’s note in the beginning of the book that’s really defensive about accuracy in her depiction of historical Oxford. Feels like really embattled with all these people saying, “My depiction is inaccurate. And yes, I, you know, took as little artistic license as I could to serve the story.” That sounds like she doesn’t feel like she has permission to change more of the setting because it won’t feel accurate anymore.

Oren: It’s weird for me to imagine the author who wrote Babel caring what anyone else thinks.

Chris: If she didn’t care, I don’t think she would have put that author’s note in the beginning.

Oren: That was weird, because on the one hand, I liked the author’s note because it had cool historical context, and I like that stuff. I like to hear what kind of research authors did and what changes they made. On the other hand, its bizarrely defensive nature, to me it felt less like someone who was embattled and more like someone who just likes to argue and wanted to preemptively argue with her critics. Which I get, I love to argue too, so fair enough. Maybe I misread the book. It’s just the book is so edgy. It’s so edgy and it’s so in your face about how edgy it is. It’s hard for me to imagine the author being like, “Oh, well, I can’t change anything because then people will be upset.”

Chris: Sometimes edginess offers a certain level of prestige. Like, I wish it didn’t, but I’ve definitely talked to many people who think that’s what makes a story good or profound, is just edginess and to shock people. Whereas being believed that your history is inaccurate… I mean, that could feel embarrassing.

Oren: That’s not going to get you on NPR or The New York Times or anything. It was so weird reading this where it’s like, okay, so in this setting, there’s this kind of silver-based translation magic that is powering the British Empire. And it’s like, how does that work? Well, pretty much the same way that the regular British Empire worked. It hasn’t done anything different. It’s just that we did like a Find and Replace, and instead of “coal,” we put “silver.”

Chris: Yeah, the Silver Industrial Revolution. We could even say the Silver Revolution. We had to also specify that it’s industrial. That was very odd because some of the things that we described, it feels like the silver would have the opposite effect as what we’re talking about.

Oren: We’re told that silver is putting people out of work in factories because it’s automation. But we’re also told that people are moving to the city to get jobs, like they did in the actual Industrial Revolution.

Chris: People are moving to the city to get jobs because there were factories that were offering jobs. So if silver is automating that and taking away from the jobs, why are people moving to the cities?

Oren: There was a reference to, like, “Oh, the Thames is actually clean in this timeline.” Okay, that’s different. That’s cool. But then they’re like, “Don’t swim in the Thames.” Like, okay, I mean, I get that you had to say that because it’s set in Britain, you have to say that. But also, that was, like, the one difference.

Chris: If anybody swims in the Thames, then somebody’s gonna DM Kuang and tell her that she’s got inaccurate Thames.

Oren: Oh, it does make one big difference towards the very end. Spoilers. The silver magic gives the British Empire a giant glowing weak spot, which, if you punch them there, they explode. Like, it’s nice that imperialism is so easy to defeat in this scenario. It does take them a painfully long time to think of this plan. They’re like, “We could capture the tower where all the silver magic is, and then we could demand that the empire be less evil.” How do you think that’s gonna work? And obviously it won’t. And then eventually they’re like, “Oh, I guess we could just blow it up. That’ll do it.”

Chris: No, as soon as we introduced these regional towers that power magic for huge swaths of England, I was like, “Okay, well, obviously we need to go and disrupt those towers.” And then, nope, the characters take forever to think of that.

Oren: That’s why it’s so funny that this book is so obsessed with the idea of how violence is necessary, and, like, that’s how you defeat imperialism, is through violence. Okay, sure. But like, you kind of gave yourself a cheat code here.

Chris: Not actually demonstrating that violence is the right answer.

Oren: It’s like if I wanted to make my story about how important democracy is and I invented a democracy crystal. It’s a magic democracy emitter.

Chris: That makes democracy work.

Oren: I guess, sure.

Chris: That doesn’t sound like democracy actually works, then.

Oren: That sounds like maybe I’m not confident in my argument when I do that. One way to do this that doesn’t get used that often as far as I can tell, but I really like it, is you just have magic be kind of recent, within a few decades.

Chris: Let’s say we applied this to Temeraire. That sounds like it would just be logistically difficult in that situation. I’m not saying this is a good idea. I think recent magic does have lots of advantages. Fantasy writers don’t usually want to use it.

Oren: The biggest problem that it has is that if magic is recent, then you can’t have a bunch of ancient magic traditions.

Chris: I’d be afraid that if we had recent dragons, they’d be like, the dragons are aliens that landed on Earth. And I’d be like, “No!”

Oren: Recently arrived dragons would be very hard to do what happens in Temeraire, right? You need a completely different explanation. That’s not the only way to include magic in a historical setting. You can also use books like A Master of Djinn. Magic returned, started in Egypt, so Egypt was the first to capitalize on it, and they used it to make a bunch of cool steampunk tech, which is why, a few decades later, Egypt is a rising power just before World War I. But, like, the world is still recognizable, right? You haven’t had this change ripple out through centuries.

Chris: I think the “magic returns” tactic is a really good tactic for this because then you could just be like, “When was magic last year?” “Oh, just a long time ago. Don’t worry about it.” Even Game of Thrones, when it brings back dragons, it’s like, “Okay, well, we have dragon eggs from the last time, so the dragons don’t have to spawn out of the ether. We have some remnants somewhere.” If it’s so long ago that it’s like prehistory, it does make it a little hard to say, “Oh, well, we have rituals that go that far back.” But again, it’s nothing that speculative fiction writers don’t do all the time. What was it? Dune Prophecy, where we’re like 10 million years ago?

Oren: Some absurdly long amount of time.

Chris: Speculative fiction writers always want to expand timelines into ridiculous extents. Like, no, you don’t understand. Human civilization changes so much faster than that.

Oren: Like in the Star Wars Andor show, where they brought out this statue. Like, this statue is 25,000 years old. That’s so old, man. You don’t know how old that is. In Master of Djinn, they have some ancient traditions by being like, “Yeah, there was magic around during, like, at some point when we had the ancient Egyptian gods. Maybe there was some magic then, so we can bring back worship of those gods as an old tradition.” Or you could have the idea that magic has been around, but it’s been hidden behind a masquerade. So you can have some masquerade magic traditions.

Chris: We had a masquerade for most of history, but then the masquerade has been lifted recently. And so now magic is everywhere. That’s a good combo. And then you can have your old rituals and what have you. What if you just want historical fantasy that is relatively low realism, you are not trying to sweat over every historical detail, the masquerade, of course, is a good way to do that. We have a previous episode on the Masquerade, which is this idea that magic is secret and most people don’t know about it, and it is just a technique for keeping the world the same. The key is that it’s usually unbelievable if you pay too much attention to it. You usually just don’t want to call attention to it and advise against making conflicts over the Masquerade, like where the hero really wants to tell their loved one they have magic, but they just can’t do it, it starts to provoke questions about the Masquerade. You don’t want to do that because you can’t answer them. And then the other thing we talked about, which is the scope of the story. If this is like a cozy, where we’re just like one coffee shop, one in, and we don’t really see a lot of the world, you’re raising less questions. Whereas if you talk about the current monarch or current politics or what wars are happening, or put in big historical events during the course of the story, that certainly cause a lot more attention to the state of the world.

Oren: A strange thing that is very common in a lot of historical fantasy that I’ve read, that doesn’t need to be, but it just seems to happen a lot, which is that when you’re creating a conflict in historical fantasy, there’s a tendency to only give one side magic. I’m not gonna say that never works, but it usually doesn’t.

Chris: I mean, do you want that side to steamroll everybody else?

Oren: Right, I mean, that’s the most immediate problem. If the magic is cool and fantasy-ish, chances are it’s pretty powerful. So that’s gonna create some balance issues.

Chris: Oren, what if I just give the other side guns?

Oren: I cast summon rifle level 5. Like, that was the problem in… gosh, I’ve forgotten the name of the story, but it was set during a quasi-real mill strike from the 1830s, and the strikers all had magic and the bosses didn’t. Amazingly, the strikers won.

Chris: Oh, jeez, I wonder how that happened.

Oren: It was not hard. That’s one potential problem. But, like, it also creates a lot of believability issues in a lot of stories. Like, why has nobody on the other side started using magic? This was the problem in Babel, but reversed, where only the bad guys have magic. And it’s just weird. Why hasn’t anybody else tried to make this? Apparently it’s been around since at least the Roman Empire. All you need is a silver and some translators to get started. It doesn’t have a high entry cost.

Chris: Everybody else forgot.

Oren: They got lazy and they didn’t think about it. Real weird, you know, not what I would expect. Even more basic: it’s just kind of boring. Here we have the cool magic people, and then the other side is some guy.

Chris: In Babel, I originally thought that the reason we’re using silver as part of the magic system is to justify why only the wealthy could wield magic. Honestly, any material that is the only material that can be used for magic, if it’s scarce at all, it’s going to get expensive. But silver could be even more expensive. But then the book specifically says that China has a whole stockpile of silver. But they’re way outmatched by England. So at that point, silver has been eliminated as the reason why other people can’t use magic.

Oren: They could still be outmatched. British magic could be more powerful. In real life, the Chinese had guns during that time period; they just weren’t as good.

Chris: We could have magic that just wasn’t as good because they don’t have the same amount of institutions to churn out translation words that power the magic.

Oren: Instead, it’s just like only England seems to have magic and maybe the rest of Europe. That’s harder to say.

Chris: Since this is a historical setting, this is not as big of a deal. But it’s just silver with two words on it. There’s no reason another person can’t copy those words. Even if England has Oxford, which is much better at creating these translation words to power your magic, it would be fairly simple for other people to spy on them and just copy them.

Oren: Well, we are now going to copy something that I’ve seen from many other podcasts, which is that we are going to end the episode because it’s over now.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

[closing song]

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

The sad truth is that your villain can’t be everywhere at once, whether they are a scary dark lord or an angsty tortured prince. They need minions to carry out their evil will, but that’s no simple matter. You have to think about how these minions operate, how strong they should be, and most importantly, ways to make sure they don’t get mistaken for those yellow guys. This week’s episode is all about making sure your big bad’s underlings don’t become a laughingstock, but also that they won’t be so strong that it’s impossible for the hero to win. 

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]

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

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: You thought we were in charge of this podcast, but actually we’re just the goons you have to get past to reach the mid-level boss. But nobody has gotten past us in 500 episodes, probably because there’s only two of us, which means we’re very tough and intimidating.

Oren: Yeah. If there were more of us, we’d get weaker. So, you know, we have intentionally killed off all the other hosts to gather their powers.

Chris: [laughs] Yeah, and I guess the boss must be really scary since if we can, you know, keep back the heroes for 500 episodes, that must be one tough boss. Making our boss look good.

Oren: Yeah, it’s Podcastia, is who it is. [laughs]

Chris: Ohhh!

Oren: Get past us, you have to face her.

Chris: Oh geez. That is pretty scary. So, this time we’re talking about making the most of your minions.

Oren: When I saw this podcast topic for a second, I thought we were talking about the minions from Despicable Me.

Chris: No.

Oren: I was like, oh no. [laughs]

Chris: You know, this is funny, but I’ve never seen Despicable Me, but I find the minions really annoying.

Oren: Yeah, no, I have never seen any of the movies. I don’t have an opinion on the movies.

Chris: Maybe I would like them better if I actually saw Despicable Me, but I don’t know, they just, maybe they just look irritating.

Oren: It’s because they’re everywhere. It’s, they hit saturation point and now they’re not cool. Now they’re annoying.

Chris: And I’m gonna judge them from my ignorance.

Oren: Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s like, okay, it’s like if you had never seen Frozen and you know, suddenly just Frozen was everywhere. You were like, what?

Chris: Or you know, for anybody who has not seen KPop Demon Hunters.

Oren: Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

Chris: [laughing] By now you must hate K-pop Demon Hunters. Okay, so why do we have minions? Why minions?

Oren: Because storytellers are lazy and they don’t want to have to fight actual people, so they just send in faceless mooks. There. Podcast over. Done. [laughs]

Chris: [laughs] Yeah. I mean, technically everything we do for a story could be just a sign of laziness. I mean, we could do it without that, it’s just harder, right?

Oren: Yeah. I mean, the real reason is that usually you’re spending most of your character development budget on characters who are good guys, ‘cause that’s who your protagonist is gonna hang out with the most, and that’s who you’re gonna build attachment to.

And there are some individual bad guys that you’re gonna develop, right? Almost every story is gonna have that. But they’re not usually enough to fill out the entire roster of Team Evil, so you need minions. That’s like the core storytelling reason. And then there are a bunch of other logistical reasons that we fill in.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, their primary role is just to save the big bad for later, so the big bad doesn’t have to enter the story too soon. Instead, we can build their mystique and make them real threatening in the background and have the minions kind of provide some level of antagonism in the meantime.

Oren: Yeah, and usually the bad guy is powerful and has, you know, people who will work for them and the ability to command resources, and so at that point, minions make sense.

Chris: So you also need them to just fill out the world, right? It’s like, you can’t have an evil army without soldiers. At some point you’ll need to put some in, but usually for some sections of the story, they are the main antagonists the heroes are dealing with.

I mean, not necessarily. You could have minions that only show up when there’s a big bad around commanding them. That’s possible. But most often you don’t want, you know, a slower escalation of threat. And so usually for the beginning portions of story, we first start with just a minion fight, for instance.

Okay, so then, next question, what makes a good minion? What are we aiming for for our minions?

Oren: I mean, minions follow most of the same rules as any other enemy, which is, the most important one, is that if you want them to be threatening, you can’t be beating them up all the time. That’s just the way it is. Once you start beating up stormtroopers, they aren’t threatening anymore, and technically you could try to make them threatening again, but the amount of work you would have to do to do that is pretty high.

That’s why the most threatening enemies in Andor are not stormtroopers, the stormtroopers in Andor are about as weak as anybody else. It’s the guys who operate more like modern day special forces, like the dudes who go into the hotel towards the end when they’re trying to rescue what’s her face, those guys who wear kind of stormtrooper looking armor, but not the same. Those are the threatening minions.

Chris: [laughs] Those guys, so threatening, shaking in my boots.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: I mean, I might argue that the purpose of the minion is ultimately to lose in place of the big bad, right, but that basically, you know, create an escalator of threats and you can have more than one level of minion to do this, right? You can start with the stormtrooper and then go up to the special forces and then go up to the red guys who are guarding the emperor, whatever they are.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And then Darth Vader. We have a kind of minions that are at different levels getting more and more threatening towards the top. And part of the reason for doing that is because, again, sometimes we just need our heroes to actually win a fight. And when they win, whoever they win against becomes less threatening, is less capable of creating tension. And so at that point, we need to kind of discard them and move up to the next bigger threat in order to just maintain tension in the story.

However, I would definitely say that, you know, it could be bad if that escalator is moving too quickly because if every single minion anywhere on that hierarchy just quickly becomes defeated, after a while, I do think that the audience is like, okay, well that last one wasn’t a big deal. We beat them, so I’m sure this one will be fine too. Whereas if you really want tension, having the minions actually be scary at first, basically try to extend their shelf life a little longer. Also, just again, we just see less easy victories and that also helps with the big bad later.

Oren: Right, and you just need to think about how much are we gonna be fighting these guys?

Because in Star Wars, even though we could do that escalator of threat, we really don’t in most of the movies. It’s just stormtroopers on stormtroopers. And you know, in the initial confrontation, the stormtroopers were pretty scary. And then they just immediately lose that once our heroes actually fight them.

But that’s all we’ve got. So we keep sending in stormtroopers. That’s the thing to think about, right? In [Star Trek:] Deep Space Nine, the Jem’Hadar are like the main minions of the Dominion, which is an interesting sentence.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: And these are the guys that we have to fight for the back half of the show, and the writers either by accident or planned, preserved their threat level by not having us just defeat them a bunch of times.

Like, in the early confrontations between the Jem’Hadar and the main characters, usually the best the main characters can hope for is a draw, and we do have the Jem’Hadar win a fair number of times, and that just keeps them scary in a way that they wouldn’t be if they just lost a bunch.

Chris: You had a great post where you were comparing Sauron and—god, what’s his name, Aaron or Arawn? Chronicles of Prydain?

Oren: Oh, it’s Anwyn or something. It’s Welsh. [transcriptor’s note: It’s Arawn.]

Chris: Ohhhh.

Oren: I don’t remember how to pronounce it though.

Chris: But like, the one thing this big bad had going for him was the Cauldron-Born.

Oren: Yeah. They were great.

Chris: Where it’s just a minion that actually is way scarier than any other, because they just can’t die, period, right. There are a form of undead and usually on other undead you might have to do something special to kill them, but these ones just can’t die in any way.

So literally the only thing the heroes could do is run. That’s it. If you see them, you run. And that just made them very scary. And when a few of them mattered, and then when there was a whole army of Cauldron-Born attacking, that was just genuinely frightening. And so they worked really, really well since you couldn’t win against them, right. It just made sure that they never lost and they’re always, you know, threatening.

Oren: Yeah. And it worked out well because once we destroyed them, they all died. It was like, all right, that’s done. We don’t have to deal with those guys anymore.

Chris: [laughing] Yeah, yeah. At that point you need a load-bearing boss that you can defeat and just watch them all die at once.

Oren: It is also worth thinking about if you do want to use the minions to escalate threat, you should be thinking about, “why are my minions weaker than the later guys I’m gonna have my characters fight?” ‘Cause I love Avatar the Last Airbender. But one of the problems it would have if you tried to tell it as a novel for adults is people would ask, okay, why are the soldiers less trained than the elite teenager squads? Why when the nations are serious, do they send in their angstiest 16 year olds?

Chris: [chuckles]

Oren: You know, that’s a question people would ask, and it’s like the same problem if you have your setting in a more realistic or grounded or modern setting. If you’re doing like, a mob story, you’re probably not gonna have it so that, like, all right, I beat up the big mob enforcer, now I’m gonna go fight the mob leader. It’s like, he’s not gonna be any better at fighting than his enforcer dude, right.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: You know, you’re gonna need a different kind of escalation at that point.

Chris: I do think one thing that we’ve seen is that, again, sometimes the storyteller’s goal is just to create a bunch of wish fulfillment and empowerment at the beginning of the story by having the hero wipe the floor with a whole bunch of minions, like, Hey, look how cool he is.

And that does make things really hard. If you have a big badass and all you wanna show is that, see, he’s so badass, he wipes the floor with 50 demons, after that, it is gonna be really hard to make those demons intimidating. I’m thinking about that cartoon we started watching, what is it? Devil May Care?

Oren: Devil May Cry or—no, yeah, Devil May Cry. That’s what it’s called.

Chris: Devil May Cry. That’s it. If you can have the hero, start with, again, if he just fought a bunch of humans instead in a tournament or something, I think that would have saved the demons to be a little more special, that would’ve helped.

But yeah, you can’t really have it both ways there. You gotta choose. And it does definitely reduce excitement if you choose to have a hero that can just wipe the floor with a whole bunch of minions at once.

Oren: No, I need you to see how cool my hero is when I want him to be cool. And now I need you to forget that happened and act scared now that I want him to be in danger.

Chris: Gosh, one of the other things that people do is, okay, so your hero has leveled up to the point where they can defeat a minion. Now let’s add more minions. Well, the problem is that it quickly becomes impossible to choreograph a solution where your hero wins against so many people. This is why in Blue Eye Samurai, we have multiple sequences where the protagonist takes on impossible odds and just wins in contrived ways, right. Or the other thing that can happen is that suddenly all the minions are super weak.

Oren: Yeah. I always recommend using fewer rather than more minions because you can always add more, but it’s really hard to deescalate them. Once you establish that your hero can beat 10 minions, you’re gonna need way more than that to challenge them again. So pace yourself.

Chris: Right. Same with monsters, right? If you have any enemy that appears in numbers, at some point in time too, it gets so ridiculous that you can’t really add more and have it feel like more. We already have a horde of these demons. So you could say the horde is twice the size as before, but nobody’s gonna care because it already feels like the maximum number of demons that I can imagine being in this scene. [laughs]

Oren: It’s like, now we have two times infinity demons!

Chris: [laughs] And it’s like, okay, if you really want that wish fulfillment, you really wanna give, you know, your hero candy, again, balance the concerns how you want to. But for the purposes of having an exciting story, it’s always better to have fewer minions, have stronger minions, have them last longer before your hero can easily defeat them.

Oren: Yeah. Also, just having fewer of them means that you can make them more interesting, right? You can give them a little more personality, you can give them a little bit more description, and that’s harder to do the more of them there are.

Chris: Speaking of personality, I think the other thing that I’ll want to avoid in my minions is just not to have them feel like they are dehumanized people. So basically if they are like, monsters that are just—vampires actually are a good example because vampires do not have, well, I mean it depends on the setting, but usually they are formerly people, right? They’re not really a group that were born that way, and so they turn into monsters.

Or you could have monsters that are just like, a bunch of shadow creatures, don’t seem to have any will or minds of their own, and those are fine. You can make them super vicious, you can make them super evil if you want. Or you can have humans or people who act like people and have their own concerns. They can be bad people, but they’re not gonna be 100% pure evil in every context, usually, in their life.

And also if they think they’re gonna die, they will run away. [laughs] I cannot emphasize this point enough. They think they’re gonna die. Same with animals. I mean, I don’t really like having characters kill animals personally, but you may have a fight with an animal, right? If an animal thinks that it’s outmatched, it will run away, typically.

Oren: You need to think about who these minions are and what is their motivation, and are you showing that in the story? You know, are you showing that they have the kind of unquestioning loyalty that they will fight to the end every time? You could. Again, not to toot DS9’s horn too loud here or anything, but that is one of the things that makes the Jem’Hadar so dangerous is that we establish that they do have that kind of intense loyalty and they will fight to the death no matter what.

But that’s something that we take some time to establish. We don’t just expect you to assume that about every alien species we encounter.

Chris: And you know, we find out they’re basically an engineered species and they’ve also been purposely addicted to a drug to keep them in line. So extra measures are used to force them into this position.

They’re just not like your average soldiers.

Oren: Right. And because Deep Space Nine is a long show, we have time to do a little bit of complication of the Jem’Hadar. We meet some renegade Jem’Hadar who have rebelled for different reasons, which is interesting.

Chris: I would be especially cautious if you’re using—you have a real world and you have people who are basically criminals or even prisoners.

Like, there’s this weird cultural mindset that a person is either a criminal or they’re not. And if they’re a criminal, they’re just a dehumanized person who will just auto-attack. [laughs]

Oren: Yeah, they’re just zombies, you know?

Chris: Who’s just auto-hostile and then will keep attacking until they die. And it’s like, that’s just, that’s not how humans behave.

And people don’t fall into two neat categories of criminal and not criminal, because we’re humans.

Oren: I mean, and that’s the thing. It’s always funny when you watch shows where the writers seem to think that an area with high crime rates operates like a Final Fantasy game, where you go into it and if you take a certain number of steps, a random encounter will show up.

It’s like, look, your characters might get mugged or something, that could happen in the right story. Often they are so huge and badass, that would not happen.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: But even if they are relatively normal people, they’re not just suddenly going to summon crime boys.

Chris: You don’t understand. This is an aggro zone.

Oren: [laughing] Right?

Chris: Soon as you step in, you agro the nearest resident. [laughs]

Oren: Right, and now there’s criminals. [laughs] It’s like that’s just not how it works.

Chris: Again, especially in a prison sequence, okay, because especially in the US we can be extremely cruel to prisoners and these are people who are serving their time. If they’re in prison, they were not sentenced to just execution immediately, so we shouldn’t be beating them up until they die, for instance.

So, you know, treating them like they’re not real people who have real reasons for doing things is just not a good idea.

Oren: It’s so funny in the third Nolan Batman movie when Bane breaks open the jails and a bunch of people come out to join his revolution and it’s like, you could tell that the writers have read enough history to know that’s a thing revolutionary movements do, but not enough to know that the reason that works is that in those contexts, the prisons are full of revolutionaries.

Chris: Right. They’re their own members of their own organization who have previously been captured and put in prison. They’re not just like, you know, the random drug dealers who will join their violent organization.

Oren: It’s like, just imagine you’re in there for like, dealing cocaine, and Bane comes in and he is like, would you like to fight the US government? It’s like, uh, no? [laughs]

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: What? [laughs]

Chris: Oh man. Again, people end up in prison for all sorts of reasons, but at least in the US the majority, I think the biggest or the biggest number, the plurality perhaps, is drug offenses. Those people are not necessarily violent, they weren’t just, fight for any villain that lets them free.

Oren: But even violent criminals aren’t gonna do that, right?

It’s like, the violent criminal who is in there is someone who, I don’t know, beat his wife, right? Is the wife beater suddenly gonna join up with your dark lord? [disgusted/uncertain noise]

Just think about it a little bit, is all I’m asking.

Another thing to think about if you do want to use lots of minions is just to remember that your main characters can be smart and that a smart main character will not fight all of the minions at once out in the open. You have your main characters. If you want them to fight, like 20 guys, have them retreat through narrow areas or use hit and run attacks or things like that so that you don’t have a situation where you have to describe how they’re somehow fighting off attacks from five directions at once. And that just makes the numbers a lot easier to handle.

Chris: And it also just makes your minions look better if your hero has to put in some effort to defeat them instead of being like, Nyah-na-nyah-na, boo boo [laughs], and, you know, which I think, sometimes with like the stormtroopers. Or man, the, the droids in [Star Wars: The] Clone Wars are the goofiest…

Oren: Oh gosh. Pfft.

Chris: They make very bad jokes while they’re being killed and not only does it make them look comical, but also it calls attention to the fact that they’re actually thinking beings and maybe we shouldn’t just be slaughtering them perilously all over the place.

Oren: It’s really weird how the battle droids are weak on purpose. George Lucas has interviews where he talks about how, yeah, they’re pretty useless. The Jedi could just kill thousands of them. And why, George? [laughs] Why did you make them that way? [laughs]

Here’s something you can think about that’s important. We’ve been talking about minions from the perspective of the villain, right? What about when the heroes have minions?

Chris: I mean, that’s not typically what we mean. Are these like pseudo-villain heroes?

Oren: No. Like, what if your hero is the captain of the USS Enterprise?

Chris: So you mean sidekicks?

Oren: I mean, are the Redshirts sidekicks? I don’t know if I would describe them that way.

Chris: I mean, usually we would call them Redshirts in that case.

Oren: [chuckles]

Chris: But I mean, sometimes we do have pseudo-villain heroes that do have what we would literally call a minion. And in Megamind he has little robots, which is useful because on one hand he kind of treats them like they’re his children. But on the other hand, they are robots. They’re not actually, as far as we know, they’re not independently thinking. So if he needs to make them explode, he can do that. And we don’t think less of him.

I mean, I think that is one difference, right, is, if you have a villain and they don’t need to be likable, then they can put their minions into danger. But if you have Mando in The Mandalorian and he literally picks up a droid just to make that droid go through a very deadly situation and he didn’t wanna do it himself, that was a low point, I gotta say.

Oren: Yeah, no, that was bad. That was part of Mando’s weird racism against droids arc. I don’t know who thought that was a good idea.

Chris: I mean, so I think that’s a key difference. Whereas I guess the idea with a Redshirt is that you are trying to establish that the antagonist is dangerous by having people that you can kill off, but you actually don’t want anybody to mourn them.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Which is, I don’t know. I think that’s to be avoided if you can avoid it.

I mean, not that you can’t have minor characters killed off, but I think if you should have somebody that your protagonists know who dies, that should mean something, ’cause a person died.

Oren: Yeah, if you’re going to have characters dying, it probably shouldn’t only be background characters that no one cares about.

Just in general, especially if you’re using it to build up threat or something.

Chris: And you know, again, if you have like a big war, of course, there’s gonna be some people who are in the background dying, but usually at that point you would also have somebody that we care about dying too, instead of having just like, oh yeah, the war was terrible, but you know, don’t worry about it.

Oren: The war was terrible for someone else presumably. My group came through it just fine. [laughs]

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: So this is another thing with minions, is that when you’re thinking about how they work, you don’t just need them to be, you know, rush at the hero with fists punching, right? Again, for the right kind of story, that can work fine, but for a lot of fantasy stories, you’re also gonna want your minions to be a little more interesting than that, right?

You’re gonna want them to have magic powers or cool tech, and that’s a good way to make them stand out. That’s actually what makes certain enemies in Star Wars work better because once they do start introducing steps of minions, they actually get a little more interesting ’cause they can fly or they have armor that actually works.

Stuff like that. That’s a good way to help them stand out.

Chris: Yeah, and of course you can also make some minions that are actually named characters. Which is really useful if you do, again, we don’t typically recommend giving your villain a viewpoint. That causes numerous problems, including demystifying the villain and making them less threatening. And it’s hard not to give information that you don’t wanna give away, et cetera.

But if you do need to share something going on on the villain side, you can potentially give a minion a viewpoint. Or a minion can be a useful way if you want them to tell the hero something. Let’s say the heroes do something nice for a minion, they defeat the minion, but actually then when the minion is about to fall and die, fall off the edge of a cliff or something, the heroes are like, no, actually I don’t want you to die. The minion’s grateful, gives them information, that kind of thing.

Of course, now that I’ve said that, we have to talk about torture—

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: —because there’s so many stories. Look, torture doesn’t work. Okay. That’s the problem, is that when people are being tortured, they just say whatever the torturer wants to hear. So you have no way of knowing if that information is any good, and usually the hero just ends up going on a wild goose chase.

There was actually a pretty good sequence in The 100 where they actually did this, right. There was actually, somebody was threatened and gave bad information, and then it caused a massacre because that show’s dark. [laughs]

Oren: Or if it’s not guaranteed that that’s what’s going to happen, but that happens often enough to make the process unreliable.

Chris: And yes, you could introduce magic to fix this, but you shouldn’t.

Oren: [laughing] Yeah, I wouldn’t.

Chris: Because torture, again, doesn’t work. And creating a scenario—adding magic just to make it work just feels weird because in real life it doesn’t work, right? And so we just shouldn’t be creating stories where heroes use it because it’s cruel and it doesn’t work.

So I know some stories are dark and edgy, but I just feel like we can be dark and edgy in other ways, right. I think we have lots of ways to be dark and edgy if that’s what we want.

Oren: Well, there was just a really cool thread that I read a while back talking about how, okay, if you are trying to do this, if you’re like, “well, torture works in my setting ’cause we have the Zone of Truth spell or whatever.”

It’s like, okay, are you really prepared for the implications of that? ‘Cause people would operate completely differently if that was a thing. If information could be reliably extracted, there would be just completely different methods of sharing information because it’s a huge vulnerability all of a sudden that everyone knows about.

So unless you’re ready to go that route, which most people aren’t, I wouldn’t.

Chris: The other thing that happens sometimes with minions giving information regardless of how it’s done, is that we don’t think the heroes will trust it. So then suddenly we have spontaneous lie detection magic added.

We had a whole episode on lie detection magic. But nobody is ever prepared for the repercussions. And again, detecting a heartbeat is not a reliable way to detect lying.

Oren: This is true.

Chris: So [instead of] just suddenly giving your character lie detection powers, just make the minion convincing or have them give the heroes some collateral or something.

So usually you can either have the minion choose to give information, maybe in exchange you can have the hero convince them, Hey, I know you’re just doing this for money, but if you can help me defeat this boss—maybe they hate their boss. Maybe the villain has forced them to do this. So you can have lots of ways.

You can also have the heroes find clues on the minion.

Oren: Yeah, that’s my favorite way to do it.

Chris: Right, so like, well, we looked on the minion’s phone, we found a note in the Minion’s pocket. We looked at a label on the clothes the minion was wearing, and that can be another way for them to get information out of a minion.

Oren: Right. And if you want it to be a little conflict, then you can find some clues that don’t immediately—like, you don’t find a map, but instead you do the old Sherlock Holmes thing of like, okay, so there’s some red gravel on his feet that’s kind of interesting. And some, oh, and there’s a—he had a candy bar wrapper in his pocket, but this candy bar is only sold in this specific part of the city.

Right? And then you figure it out that way. That will replace the dramatic tension of a torture scene, which is often why authors use those scenes to begin with. All right, well, now that we have our annual don’t do torture message out, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you found this episode helpful, 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, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[outro music]

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

Everyone knows that werewolves and vampires hate each other. It’s just a fact of urban fantasy life. But… why, exactly? For that matter, why are any secret magical factions in conflict with each other? And when they do fight, why doesn’t the one with more powerful magic just auto-win? You would think that wizards could just drop orbital strikes on everyone else without leaving the sanctum. Do we have suggestions on how to handle those issues? You’d better believe it.

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] 

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

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: So I’m putting the final touches on my urban fantasy setting. I’ve got a faction of mages that keep magic locked down real tight, so there are no rogue casters. And also a faction of werewolves that spends all of its time hunting down rogue casters. I don’t see a problem with this. I think this will be fine.

Chris: Hmm. Maybe the rogue casters are coming from inside the house.

Oren: Inside the werewolf house.

Chris: Werewolf house. [laughing] Werewolves just hunt themselves down.

Oren: It’s fine. Yeah. So today we’re talking about planning urban fantasy factions. Why do urban fantasy factions need their own episode? Because I felt like it. And also because…

Chris: We can do what we want!

Oren: Yeah. You’re not the boss of us! [laughing] Partly because we watched The Order recently, which is one of this crop of two season Netflix shows that was urban fantasy. And it had a lot of problems, and one of the problems was that its worldbuilding was real garbage.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: But I also just think that there are some differences in how you think about urban fantasy versus, like, high fantasy, or scifi, or steampunk or whatever. And partly it’s because they tend to be all mixed together, because there’s usually a masquerade, and so what you have are factions that exist within or alongside human society. And so you have to think about how that makes things different. And then at the same time, they also tend to have a more kitchen sink approach to worldbuilding. Which is not a hundred percent, right? There are examples we can talk about that don’t just throw everything at the wall, but there’s sort of a default expectation that, you know, if you’re gonna have some kinds of magical creatures in the modern setting, that sort of implies you have all of them.

Chris: I mean, I think when people think about urban fantasy, often their expectation is, if magic is real, then it must be linked to all of the folklore that we have about it.

Oren: Or in some cases the pop culture, right? Like, a lot of urban fantasy tropes are really, really divorced from any folklore, but…

Chris: What we think is folklore, right? [both laugh] And I think obviously that’s very eclectic and comes from all of these places. It’s not like we crowdsourced, like, tidy worldbuilding.

Oren: Right.

Chris: And so it just results in a very kind of eclectic world with lots of different magic users that work in different ways.

Oren: And lots of different creature types.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: If I’m making my own fantasy world from scratch, I can sort of decide what types of creatures I want to be there, and I can limit the magic more easily. But if I’m making an urban fantasy setting, it would be kind of weird if I was like, the only kind of mages are elemental mages. That’s all there is. It’s like, really? That’s all.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could have – some urban fantasy settings have a very specific, there’s a door to another world that’s where magic comes from. It’s not like you have to go with all the folklore. It’s just popular. I think the other issue is, you can exclude a faction if you have a nice tidy theme that makes it intuitive what is included and what is not included. But that is rarely combined with our typical urban fantasy. The closest I think I’ve seen, or at least one of the closest, is Teen Wolf. At least in the first seasons.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Because you know, originally it’s like, okay, just werewolves. Alright, just werewolves, also druids and banshees. I’m like, okay, that’s… a little random, but we’re still going with a kind of werewolf nature theme. And then they add other types of shapeshifters that shapeshift into other types of creatures, so they’re kind of werewolf-like. And we still have no vampires, you know, like we add kitsune, for instance…

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Okay. And then they bring in steampunk mad scientists and like, what? [laughing] What are the steampunk mad scientists doing here?

Oren: They’re here. Don’t worry about it.

Chris: And then later we get ghost cowboys.

Oren: Everyone loves ghost cowboys.

Chris: [both laugh] And so eventually it’s just, okay, well why not vampires at this point?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But for a while there, we had a pretty tidy urban fantasy setting where it was just, you know, people shape-shifting into creatures for the most part, and that kind of kept it together. But if we had several different types of creatures from a wide variety of pop culture-ish folklore, folklore-ish pop culture, and then didn’t have vampires, that would be weirder.

Oren: Right. And a lot of it is gonna come down to what are you choosing to show, and how long is a story going for? Like, it was weird to me watching The Order that we have mages and werewolves, and that’s it.

Chris: And nothing else.

Oren: Right.

Chris: Right. I kept expecting vampires to show up.

Oren: Yeah. And that seemed strange to me, but at the same time, the storylines were so narrow that I was like, all right, I guess we aren’t really exploring the world at all. Maybe there are other magical things that…

Chris: Oh, there’s also a golem.

Oren: Yeah, they do make a golem once.

Chris: Best character.

Oren: Yeah, we love that golem. The one that really got me was in the Kate Kane books. They have werewolves and mages again, odd. Odd that that happened twice. But the mages are all necromancers, which again, okay, sure. But they have vampires, but the vampires are, like, undead…robots…

Chris: Harsh!

Oren: …that the necromancers pilot around. That seems, yeah, that seems mean.

Chris: Why aren’t they zombies?

Oren: Yeah, I don’t know.

Chris: Why not make them zombies? That’s what zombies are for.

Oren: Like if someone picks this up and he’s a vampire fan, it’s like, oh…sad. The vampires in this setting kind of suck.

Chris: I mean, we always do tell people to add your own spin, right?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Maybe we should have given a caveat there. Okay, “Add your own spin, but please don’t make it disappointing.”

Oren: Yeah. It’s like, I don’t know, “Be creative except when it’s bad, then be less creative.”

Chris: Be creative, but if you use a creature, try to retain what people think is cool about the creature. I mean, I have talked a bit about, like, at what point should you not call it the same thing?

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Because in general, I always recommend reusing words people are familiar with because it just lowers the cognitive load and makes things easier to understand. And I’ve seen all sorts of… But this typically happens only in high fantasy. Like in high fantasy we can have, you know, vampires and werewolves and wizards and elves, but they would be called other names to make it seem like they’re not vampires and werewolves and elves.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: When they are. When they obviously are. [laughing] And they would all be names that are hard to remember, which means the fans just call them werewolves and vampires and elves.

Oren: How dare you? Those are my lupine changers and my, uh, sanguine draw-ers, and my eternal fair folk. [Chris laughs]

Chris: At least urban fantasy worldbuilders are not trying to pretend that they’re using something new when they’re not. But at a certain point, again, reuse the name, but at a certain point, you lose the essential something that makes it feel like it’s anywhere close. And so vampires that act like zombies, that’s a little…

Oren: Yeah. I just don’t know why you would call them a vampire at that point. Just seems misleading.

Chris: Yeah, I don’t know, did they daintily suck blood instead of just bite into people’s necks?

Oren: No, they’re just monsters. They’re just combat robots basically.

Chris: Okay. But yeah, I mean, I do think, again, there’s a lot of expectation, like once you add werewolves, are there gonna be vampires? I think there’s slightly less expectation that if you have vampires, there will be werewolves, just because we have so many vampire books that are just exclusively focused on vampires.

Oren: Yeah. And while we’re talking about werewolves and vampires, there’s other things to think about. But one thing that I really recommend thinking about, especially with urban fantasy, is if you want your factions to come into conflict, why? Because this is a thing that has always been a little confusing to me, and I’ve run into this problem when I’m running World of Darkness, which is that if you look at these fantasy factions, especially when they’re divided by creature type, they very often don’t compete over anything.

Like, you know, vampires like to suck blood, and in most settings, werewolves like to live in the woods. And so they don’t really have any direct reason to fight each other. But they always wanna fight each other, right? Like, that’s what authors want. So what is the reason for that? It’s easier to do this in a classic high fantasy or other setting because you just have, you know, they fight for the same reasons that humans fight, for control over territory and resources and stuff. But that doesn’t really make sense in an urban fantasy setting most of the time because they’re already sharing their territory with humans, right? Like again, they live alongside humans, so it’s clearly not an issue there. Is there something they both want and there’s not enough of it? What’s going on?

And this is why in my big urban fantasy RPG from a few years ago, I invented Essence, which is like the supernatural energy MacGuffin. What does it do? Don’t worry about it. Everybody wants it.

Chris: Hey, it was nutritionally important to young, magical people.

Oren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s important. Don’t worry about it. Don’t look too closely at that.

Chris: [laughing] But yeah. Gave them something to fight over. I think there’s also a question of, okay, are we only making factions for the purpose of having them fight? Do they have to fight? Can they all just hold hands and sing Kumbaya?

Oren: Yeah, I mean, I would say they don’t have to fight. I would say that if you are creating factions, it’s probably because you want there to be some tension between them.

Chris: Maybe I just want one character to start a coffee shop.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, you might, [both laugh] in which case the factions don’t matter nearly as much. Because they’re not gonna play that big a role.

Chris: Right. Like in Legends & Lattes, which is like in a D&D setting. It has the different D&D ancestries or, you know, groups, just because that’s what’s in the game. Not because the story actually needs all those factions, but everybody’s already familiar and knows what gnomes and orcs are.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So it also just doesn’t add any information overhead. So the story can afford to add a bunch of factions that it’s not actually going to use in the plot in any important way. And just adds color to the setting. And you know, you could potentially make up your own factions and do that. But I think that is, again, a benefit of urban fantasy. Usually if everybody knows what a werewolf and a vampire, etc. is you can just add them to the story and make less of a big deal about them because you didn’t have to spend a whole bunch of time to explain them.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

Chris: I think mainly you do want sources of conflict in your world, right? So especially if you’re planning on writing a whole bunch of stories in one world, and you need new conflicts for sequels, having the different factions fight is just an intuitive way to do that.

Oren: Or like the threat that they might. I’m not saying every urban fantasy story needs to have a big war in it. Just that there’s a good chance that if you are building a setting from scratch and you are creating these factions, it’s probably because you want them to be at odds in some capacity. And that’s gonna be easier to do if you think of some underlying thing that might put them in competition with each other in the same way that different groups of humans and/or orcs, elves, dwarves whatever are kind of in inherent competition with each other over limited resources.

Chris: Mm-hmm. I mean, in that big urban fantasy role playing campaign you mentioned, you also had political dynamics of a kind of a joint governing system. And the more powerful groups had representation and less powerful groups didn’t.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So, but you know, theoretically, honestly, if you have magical people in a real-world setting, they’d probably have tons of money. So the idea that they need to like – having a joint governing board assumes that they have to pool their resources to accomplish shared goals in some way. I suppose if they’re trying really hard to maintain the masquerade, they could have fights over how that’s done that just require cooperation because any one group could, you know, spill the beans, but that’s honestly looking too hard at the masquerade. You probably don’t wanna do that.

Oren: Yeah. [Chris laughs]  And that’s what makes that so challenging, is that you can’t usually use, like, the vampires and the werewolves are fighting over, you know, a building they both wanna own. Well, why that building? What does that building matter?

Chris: Okay. How about magical global warming? Like the, uh, God, what was your – the, like, skeleton…?

Oren: The Necro-Industrial Complex.

Chris: [laughing] Necro-Industrial Complex!

Oren: I mean, The Order actually had this, and it was really cool. It was just introduced in like the last two episodes out of nowhere, which was this idea that the more magic is done, the bigger the chance of these, you know, dangerous eruptions that happen that can eventually reach apocalyptic levels. Which provides the justification for why the magical organization clamps down on rogue casters so hard in the first place, and creates a reason why different mage organizations are in competition, because they’re fighting over their magic carbon budget, basically.

Chris: Yeah. I thought one dynamic of that for this particular show was that you’re supposed to pay for your magic by doing – I mean, they call it a sacrifice, but for smaller spells, it’s just like you cut yourself and bleed a little bit, and then you magically heal it, so it’s fine.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But I think what was happening is that there were specifically too many people neglecting sacrifices, right? So they were using magic a little lazily, which honestly, if you had magic spread far and wide, that would totally happen.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, they were a little inconsistent about how that worked. But sure, like you could also have it be not a strict carbon budget, but more of like, you know, not-super-well-trained practitioners are more likely to do this, so we have to keep it really focused on only letting the people who we approve of do the magic, that sort of thing.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, no, it was a good conflict that, of course, was not handled – was not taken advantage of very well by the show.

Oren: Right. I’m also a big fan of, like, magical locations. Because you can create areas that different factions would want for different reasons. You know, if you have a special glade that is sacred to the moon cult, then you could also see why both werewolves and certain kinds of mages would want to control that, that sort of thing.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Oren: So it doesn’t always have to be like one thing. It’s just good to think about what it is that’s gonna bring them into competition with each other.

Chris: Yeah. Maybe ley lines are super important.

Oren: Yeah. Everyone loves ley lines.

Chris: We gotta fight over control of the ley lines.

Oren: They’re very flexible ley lines. They can do a lot of things. [Chris laughs]

Chris: I mean, I do think that one thing that’s tricky is once your factions start fighting, then you have to be more fussy about whether the power is balanced in the way that you need it. Because – I mean, otherwise your job just gets hard, like if you’re planning a big battle between wizards and vampires, but your wizards could just fireball the whole building where vampires sleep during the day?

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: The conflict is over, and you don’t wanna have to be like, oh no, just forget about that. Or, you know, make up very silly excuses for why your wizards are not doing the obvious thing that they should be doing. And it just becomes really distracting and contrived really quickly.

Oren: This is why as a rule, when I am making an urban fantasy setting, I actually don’t like having witches or mages as their own faction. I know that’s like a big trope, but the moment you do that, it becomes really hard to balance them, because again, urban fantasy lends itself to a kitchen sink approach to magic. And if your wizards can do almost anything, as a group, how can there be competition against them? Because their powers are so flexible.

Chris: Right. If you look at every faction like it’s just a mage, and look at their spell list. You’ve got werewolves, and on their spell list, they can turn into a big beast. Maybe when they want. [both laugh]

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And the vampire spell list is like, okay, I’m immune to certain types of damage. And depending on the story, maybe they have some strength powers, and perhaps they can hypnotize people a bit. But they also like, again, have a major weakness about not going out in the sunlight in some stories. And then wizards and witches have a spell list that’s infinity long. 

Oren: Yep.

Chris: And can do anything, right? And it starts to become obvious how a fight between these factions is not gonna work. And again, following the whole, like, pop culture of folklore, people really want their wizards and witches to basically cast whatever spell. And so that makes it really hard. I mean, you can tone it down, but they might feel a little lackluster. Like if your witches can only fly on brooms and occasionally get vague visions of the future, that’s not what we’re going for with witches. We want witches that are cool and powerful and, you know, put curses on people.

Oren: Yeah. It’s hard. It’s a difficult problem that I don’t think has a single solution.

Chris:  The other thing that I’ve seen is you can try to even it out by boosting the other groups, like give werewolves and vampires more powers. But you would still have to reduce the powers that witches or wizards have, and then they can also end up feeling a little bit more of the same than you’re looking for. Like 4th ed. D&D for instance really focused on balance, but everybody felt like all the different classes were the same.

Oren: I mean, that was literally what happened in the Dresden Files, right? You get to the most – once you get far into the Wizard-Vampire War to the point where Dresden is basically a walking weapon of mass destruction, and it’s like, okay, how are vampires gonna deal with this? And the answer is that the vampires are now also wizards. And it’s like, okay, well, I mean that does explain it, but, kind of boring.

Chris: Yeah. I will admit that I do like the idea of witches that can cast magic spells, but it always takes like several weeks so they can’t do action spells, you know? But that would only help a little bit. It’s still bad if you let them, for instance, spend weeks making a bunch of magical bombs and then throw the bombs. Like you can’t let them do that either.

Oren: Then you’re just getting into the Batman problem. How much time does he have to prepare? [both laugh] Yeah, I have found that there are basically two ways you can approach this. You can either just not have mages as their own faction, and instead if you want to have a flexible magic system, have it be available to anybody, and then just have different kinds of creatures. Or you can just, you know, really limit what your mages can do, but find clever ways for them to use it.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Oren: Right. And so at that point, the mages basically become, not a powerhouse, because they can’t stand up to anyone in a direct fight, but they can cause lots of problems around the edges. And so that’s a reason why no one wants to mess with them, even though they aren’t real strong face-to-face. And that’s, like, the lore in World of Darkness, for example. It just doesn’t match with what mages can actually do.

Chris: I mean, if you have witches and you just don’t put them into full warfare with any other faction, and then you would also need to make them purposely neutral, right? A faction can be more powerful than any other faction without plotting headaches if they just don’t get involved in the fights. Instead you could have them as, like, neutral arbiters that sometimes you have a conflict over convincing the arbiters to decide with you, for instance.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And that could be something that’s challenging, but you don’t try to have a tense war of, like, witches versus werewolves.

Oren: Right. Another thing to think about here, beyond just the raw power of your factions, is you have to think about the areas in which they compete. Because if they compete in completely different areas, that’s often not gonna make for a very fun story. Like, if you have dream spirits whose entire thing is that they attack you in their dreams versus werewolves, it’s like, what’s the story here? Right?

Chris: [laughing] What are they competing over? That would be interesting.

Oren: Like, how are they supposed to be in competition with each other?

Chris: Well, when a werewolf eats somebody, they expect to be able to eat their dreams, too. But if the dream spirit is already in there, it completely ruins the meal. [both laugh]

Oren: It’s the same problem that you get into with vampires when they can’t go out during the day. It’s like, okay, if you make them powerful enough to auto-win at night, then you’ve just got like rocket tag, basically, with whoever attacks first just wins. And that’s not very interesting either.

Chris: Yeah, that’s a hard one.

Oren: Another avenue to think about with this, and again, this tends to be a specific urban fantasy problem, is just for one, first of all, how organized is your world at all? Because that is a question that has huge repercussions, and it’s easy for authors to neglect it, especially if they are bringing a character across the masquerade for the first time, and you only explain a little bit of the setting at once.

Chris: By organized, you mean like does the magical world have its own government, for instance?

Oren: Yes, exactly. Like, are we talking about, you know, supernatural creatures are solitary and just kind of hang around humans and don’t have an organization? Do they have small groups? Do they have organized factions? Do they have a one-world government?

Chris: How about if we pretend they’re really isolated at first, but then we realize we need someplace to take our second novel, so then we say that there’s been a government all along that’s been ruling them?

Oren: Yeah, I mean, that is a thing that happens sometimes, and it’s a real problem, you know? [laughter]

Chris: I mean, you could do that, but it would be hard, right? It would be hard to create the idea of isolated individuals and then have that stay consistent with a world where there’s a government. Maybe you could do something like, oh, well actually the werewolves we met were just the outcasts that were thrown out of bigger society, for instance.

Oren: Right. I mean, you could have it be like okay, there’s magical government in the cities, but in the rural areas, it’s kind of a free-for-all. Yeah. Like that’s possible.

Chris: Yeah. This is – Supernatural did something like this, right? Where everybody seems super isolated and then we find out there’s somebody who, like, makes her money stealing magical items, which is…

Oren:  Okay. Yes, but that’s a different problem. [Chris laughs] So the issue with that was that the supernatural is secret, but also there’s an entire underground society of rich people who know about magic. And there’s a lady who buys items, like artifacts for them. It’s like, who are these guys who are buying these artifacts that they know are magic? Eh, don’t worry about it.

Chris: Maybe they’re magic ghoulies, very rich magic ghoulies?

Oren: Yeah, maybe. We don’t know. We never hear about them again. You do run into this problem, again, whenever you try to split like the Hunter RPG in World of Darkness. This is why it doesn’t mix with the other settings very well.

Chris: And Hunter is basically like Supernatural, right? The premise is that we’ve got a couple of humans who are by themselves hunting supernatural things that are also isolated.

Oren: Yeah. And you can introduce big hunter organizations if you want to. I hate doing that. I think it completely ruins the game. But some people like that. But even in that situation, it still doesn’t really work. Because it’s like, okay, so now we’re like, there’s a vampire feeding on people. Okay. We’re not just hunting the vampire. Now we have to think about, like, what are the political implications of killing this vampire?

Chris: Is this gonna start a human-vampire war?

Oren: And like, I’m not gonna say you couldn’t make an interesting story out of that. It’s just not what default Hunter is set up to be.

Chris: I mean it’s also, you know, again, why it’s weird when Buffy suddenly has the government in season four starting to, like, manage the supernatural. It’s like, okay, well if that’s true, Buffy should always be able to call the government for help anytime, you know, the hellhole gets out of control. But yeah, that’s…

Oren: I love how the government got involved in season four, and then just was like, “Eh, I guess not.”

Chris: Somebody cut funding. You know, there was DOGE coming in there with its AI, and just like, how about we just pull the plug on this program? I’m sure it’s fine.

Oren: Yeah, we’re spending how many millions of dollars to stop the apocalypse? Eh, that doesn’t seem efficient. [both laugh] Move fast and break things, and things being the world.

Chris: Okay. So how about guns? I mean, generally we discourage guns, if you don’t have to have guns in your setting, because guns are just, like Oren was talking about, the insta-win, right? If you have an ability where whoever attacks first they win. Guns are like that, because they’re so deadly, so quickly, and it’s just, it’s very difficult to write interesting gun fights.

Oren: Yeah. So I would say, basically, I would say that it’s okay if you want your characters in an urban fantasy setting to use guns. They can. It’s just that you have to be aware that once you open that Pandora’s box, you cannot close it. You can’t have them use guns some of the time.

Chris: Right. It’s like, well, why didn’t they bring the gun this time, you know? They could’ve done that and won this fight. Also, are we prepared for, like, werewolves wielding guns?

Oren:  And if you do that, you have to realize that you’re signing up for a very different kind of story. I mean, there’s a reason why nearly all of the enemies in the early seasons of Supernatural are ghosts. And partly it’s budgetary reasons, but it’s also just way more threatening if the enemy they’re fighting is not physical.

Chris: Right. You can’t just take a machine gun and mow them down.

Oren: And once you make it physical, it’s like, okay, you can say that, well, it’s immune to bullets. It’s like, all right, is it immune to, you know, 5,000 rounds a minute? Like, that’s just enough physical force to cut it in half at that point, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: So you just have to be aware of that. And a lot of stories don’t think about that because they want their sword fights and their, you know, kung fu battles. Or they want magic missiles to be cool, and then they introduce guns and it’s like, well, wow. We have a problem here.

Chris: And then there’s Teen Wolf with, like, humans use guns. Nobody else uses guns. Why?

Oren: Reasons!

Chris: Reasons. [laughing] Like, I’m pretty sure vampires, or – well, no, this is Teen Wolf – everybody else could also, werewolves could also wield guns.

Oren: Right? Especially since the werewolves don’t have to, like, fully transform, right? In fact, they mostly don’t, most of them, when they transform, they just like grow more facial hair.

Chris: So what if you had all the magical people, you know, basically can’t get too close to metal? Can you make guns out of, I don’t know, ceramics or something?

Oren: I mean, yeah, they’re called ghost guns. They’re, I mean, in the modern day, they are not a particularly advanced form of firearms as I understand it, because they’re really, their only use case is to sneak them past security. So, you know, they haven’t been given a whole lot of thought, but yes, you could do that.  Also, then you wouldn’t be able to use swords and things, which I found that a lot of urban fantasy writers really want.

Chris: I know. That’s the thing. That’s the problem with, like, can’t get near metal. I don’t know, maybe bone swords? Stone swords?

Oren: Yeah, I mean, I would honestly say that in most cases, if you don’t want guns in your urban fantasy setting, the best solution is to just not use them, and don’t bring it up. [Chris laughs] You know, maybe you can make, have some throwaway dialogue about how like, yeah…

Chris: Okay, but Oren, what about this? None of my characters use guns. And then suddenly I need my character to be very clever. [Oren laughs] And so then this is the first person to think of using a gun, and then pulls it out in a dramatic moment and like, “Hey, check out this!”

Oren: We’ll come to your house. [Chris laughing] Like… I will personally find you and explain why that’s wrong.

Oren: But, okay. Real quick, because we’re almost done, I wanna make sure I actually say this, which is that in general, if you don’t want guns in your urban fantasy setting, the best solution is just not bring it up. You can maybe have a line of dialogue saying that guns don’t work on the supernatural, and then refuse to explain further. Do not take questions. [Chris laughs] And if you’re consistent, your readers will probably just go with it.

Chris: Yeah. You want people to just forget guns exist. So too much explanation is only gonna make it worse.

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

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, 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, 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.

We all know that a boring scene can slow down the story. But what if. The words you wrote. Also had an effect. On pacing? This week, we’re discussing how to use wordcraft to control the speed of your story. Sometimes that means speeding up, of course, but it can also mean slowing down. Readers enjoy a relaxed scene to appreciate the scenery just as much as they love pulse-pounding action. They’re less likely to enjoy scientists explaining stuff for a billion paragraphs, though.

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]

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

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Alright, I’ve heard we need to pick up the pace on this podcast. So, what we’ll do is record normally and then just speed up the recording during audio editing and publish that.

Oren: That sounds fantastic. I don’t know what could possibly go wrong.

Chris: Yeah, it’ll be fine. Everybody will like listening to that.

Honestly, I have been told many times that I speak too fast. Supposedly being a good speaker just means talking like you would talk to your friends, but I don’t think that works for me.

Oren: Yeah, I don’t know. I just try to do what I would normally sound like.

Chris: Right. And you sound great. [laughs] But sometimes if I get excited, I start talking really fast and skipping words, and slurring words, and nobody can understand what I’m saying. I hope I’ve gotten better, at least when I’m paying attention. Or maybe I talk slower now because I’m getting old.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: [laughs] This is about pacing in word craft. It’s kind of frustrating that pacing means two different things. But I didn’t choose this. Not my term.

Oren: I didn’t choose the pacing life. The pacing life chose me.

Chris: So, most of the time when we talk about pace—cause we talk about plot so much at Mythcreants—usually when we’re talking about pacing, we mean plot pacing. Which I think is best defined as the level of tension as the story progresses. So that pattern of which scenes are tense relative to which other scenes. And how that goes.

But now we’re talking about wordcraft pace, which is a measure of how verbose you are for the content you’re covering. It’s a little more analogous to plot movement than plot pacing. Cause plot movement is basically, does it feel like you’re making progress on the story? So, wordcraft pacing is like, how quickly are you actually getting the story content in there in proportion to how many words you are using.

Oren: Yeah. It’s the difference between if we’re having a scene that is at an ice cream shop and we’re just hanging out there for many pages. That’s just a slow story choice. As opposed to I am describing an action scene, which could be fast or slow, depending on how I describe it.

Chris: We could go to the ice cream shop, but describe that so concisely that the word craft pacing is fast, but the plot pacing is slow.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: If you do have pacing that is much too fast in your wordcraft, it’s also possible that the story will feel slow because you’ve basically killed all the motion, right? And so, people will get bored and won’t know why. So that happens.

But your wordcraft pace can be too slow or too fast, and people naturally fall in different places on the spectrum. There are people who are naturally very verbose and people who are naturally very concise. So if you have a problem here that are habits that you have to change, it’s not like you are uniquely bad at this. People come at it from multiple directions.

Oren: Yeah. I have an example actually, that I wanna talk about.

I recently read The Shattering Piece, which is the most recent book in the Old Man’s War series from John Scalzi. And I noticed Scalzi’s writing tends to go through phases.

And right now, he is in what I call the scientists-explaining-things-to-each-other phase. Where that’s a fairly large percentage of the book [with] scientists explaining things. And to be sure any amount of exposition is gonna slow the pacing down a little bit. Cause you need to explain things, but I just noticed that the explanations were so long for things that we absolutely did not need to know.

And it seemed like when he starts saying, you don’t have the math for that, it’s like, okay, I get it. That’s a line from the first book. I know. But you’re gonna explain it anyway. Could you just skip the part where you say you can’t explain it? Cause I know you’re about to.

Chris: And this is in dialogue?

Oren: Yeah. This is in dialogue.

Chris: Yeah. So not very long ago, we had a podcast on the five different types of narration. And one of the reasons that’s useful to keep those in mind is if you have a big chunk of the same type of narration, it’s more likely to be your big pause—that is too slow in the narration.

There is reason to have lots of dialogue. Sometimes there’s a situation where one character needs to recount something that’s genuinely interesting and very relevant to another character, and maybe that is worth several paragraphs.

But usually, it’s unusual to have one character talking for that long, especially without interruption. And so that could often be a lecture that is boring and shouldn’t be in there. Sometimes writers want to fit in more in their story than they can reasonably fit. And so instead of making the story about the subject matter, they just have a character do a lecture about all the things they care about that they wish could fit into the story, but don’t have time for.

Oren: Well, what makes this book interesting—And this is something that I think Scalzi picked up from his previous two books—which is that it’s not just one character doing this. There are several scientists who are all talking to each other. God, help me if you tried to figure out which one was which. I don’t know. They’re all the same, but they’re technically different characters.

Chris: Yeah. I remember that issue in Kaiju Preservation Society.

Oren: Yes. That’s where I first noticed it, and I liked that book anyway, but it has gotten worse.

As an example, mild spoilers, they go out to a system where an asteroid colony has gone missing, and the information that is actually being communicated to you is that there’s nothing there and we can’t detect anything on any of our sensors. This takes pages to explain.

Chris: Did he study science and now he really wants to share the science he studied? Is that what happened?

Oren: I don’t think so, cause it isn’t very technical. It’s not quite techno babble, exactly. It’s a little more consistent than that. But I wouldn’t call it hard science either.

And the main character’s not involved in any of this—which is a different problem, that the main character has a very odd skillset for this story. So she is kind of watching a lot of this play out—but we could have communicated that there was nothing there, that nothing showed up on their sensors in way less information than it took to do this.

That’s one of the reasons why I got to the end of the book and realized very little actually happened. It’s maybe a novelette’s worth of story stretched out over a novel.

Chris: Yeah. It reminds me: you read Empire of Silence and I didn’t. It’s not out yet, but maybe it will be out by the time this episode comes out. A critique of the beginning.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And that one’s so funny because it is extremely verbose, but at the same time, it’s almost like you can’t judge pacing because there’s just no story to speak of.

Oren: Yeah. There is nothing. Empire of Silence is a weird book because it technically does cover a lot of stuff. It’s just that none of it matters. It is just recounting the main character’s day is the best way to describe that book. Whereas the shattering piece is not doing that, but it is still somehow taking forever to cover a very small amount of in-universe time.

Chris: Yeah. One way that you can tell… a key sign of pacing that is too slow is when the dialogue cannot flow naturally because it’s interrupted by big chunks of text.

And that definitely happens in Empire of Silence, where people should just be talking to each other naturally, but the writer can’t help putting exposition for a paragraph between each line. That’s not what you want your dialogue to sound like. You want it to sound like people having a conversation, which typically happens pretty fast. People don’t wait and then think for several minutes before answering.

Oren: That’s a pretty awkward way to have a conversation.

Chris: You can have large blocks of description, especially if you’re trying to describe something in terms of schematics. And a picture is worth a thousand words. But not in your narration. It is not worth taking a thousand words to describe a picture.

Oren: It’s just not worth that much. I don’t need a picture for that many words.

Chris: I mean, sometimes writers have a picture in their head and they’re like, okay, how do I make readers see this picture. And just… Don’t is the answer. Don’t, don’t do it.

So those kinds of big pauses, those exposition dumps are obviously a huge one. Other kinds of big chunks of narration… Again, sometimes we do need several paragraphs of dialogue, dialogue in particular. But you know, if you have the same type of narration for a while, it’s just a warning sign to check it out and see if you maybe could be a little more concise there.

Oren: And you know, we’ve established by now that this can happen in any perspective. Like Empire of Silence is third—No, first person. Wait. Is it first person retelling? It is first person retelling.

Chris: It can happen in any perspective, but I do think character retellings in particular [do] tend to be rambling.

Oren: Well, that’s good. Cause I was about to talk about other character retellings that do this, and I thought I had to qualify that statement by saying that this other book we just talked about wasn’t a retelling. But it turns out it was. So, actually this is only a retelling problem. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Chris: [laughs] Again, any perspective can have this, but I think that it tends to encourage it.

Maybe omniscient too. I read fewer works in omniscient. Both a character retelling and an omniscient narrator give the writer the freedom to just say whatever they want at any time they want. And with great power comes great responsibility and all that.

Oren: Though it is interesting to see how it can happen in different ways.

Deadly Education admittedly, part of that is just because the magic school is so complicated that there’s no short way to explain that. But beyond the magic school, the main character just rambles a lot and talks about her backstory and magic and stuff. That probably could have been condensed a bit. Which is what we normally tend to think of when we think of slowing down the pacing with rambling.

But then you have something like Shield of Sparrows, which has so much internalization that it just takes forever to get through a scene. Where it’s like, hang on, we need to give the characters like witty internal thought reaction to everything. I like giving the characters internal witty thought reaction to stuff, but I don’t think we need this much. I think we could dial it down a little bit.

Chris: Yeah, certainly character thoughts can go overboard.

Shield of Sparrows is really funny because if you just read the text, the, the constant, like internalization and thoughts feel more like they’re supposed to be kind of witty or smart ass.

But then if you listen to the audiobook, they get a really good audio narrator—oh, I can’t remember her name—But she makes it sound a little angsty instead, like it’s self-deprecating. And it’s still way too much, but it is more tolerable.

Oren: It does make her seem more sympathetic.

Chris: It makes her feel self-conscious and nervous, instead of just being a smart ass about everything.

Oren: Yeah. It’s a little harder to be like, oh no, poor you. When you’re constantly being a smart ass about stuff, it’s like, I don’t know. Seems like maybe you don’t think it’s that big a deal.

Chris: So, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have over-summary, which I’ve talked about before. This is the worst-case scenario for it being too fast.

Where you have an important moment, something that you really want the reader to experience in full. And if you’re a naturally concise writer I am and Oren too, I think is on the more concise end of the spectrum…

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: By default, you are gonna have prose that just moves too fast because it’s a little too distant and vague and it isn’t getting enough detail. It isn’t narrating moment by moment enough.

So that can be a really big problem because the story doesn’t feel real, it eliminates immersion, and everything just falls flat. Nothing is exciting because, one thing that I’ve been emphasizing lately—cause it’s important that people get this—is that tension requires anticipation. You have to anticipate the threat and have time to feel it. So, if it just whizzes by your head—

Oren: whoosh

Chris: [laughs] …you have no time to anticipate. And so, it can really kill tension too. Something that should be exciting if it happens too fast is actually less exciting.

Oren: Yeah. I noticed that in Fourth Wing. I’m so proud of myself. When we’ve been—spoiler alert—building up the bad guys for a while and then suddenly we just see some and it’s just like, yeah, they’re over there in that town. We see some. Oh, okay. There’s some venin over there. Oh, is there? Are there now?

Chris: Just seeing them as little specs from far away probably isn’t the most intimidating way to introduce the villains.

Oren: I don’t know. I would’ve described it as there’s something, we don’t know what it is. We just see huge gouts of flame or something. Just anything other than just like, those are some venin, I guess. It’s like are there? I don’t know. Do you know what a venin looks like?

Chris: I think Yarros does try to build up the venin with stories about them. But the issue is that we get a basic definition for what they are, but we don’t know that they’ve done anything. And I think that’s because we’re so busy with this idea that their culture has covered up their existence.

I don’t know why. If you had a nationalistic military society, usually you want to exaggerate the enemy threat to keep people in line. You don’t usually wanna pretend the enemy doesn’t exist.

Oren: Yeah. They’re obviously fake. You read that and it’s just like, I’m sorry. Because I’m genre savvy, I know that you’re building to the venin being the big bads. But they just feel like nothing. There’s no detail about them. And what little detail there is, is extremely generic, evil bad guy stuff.

So, by the time we actually meet one, we have really no conception of what these guys are supposed to be, other than evil dragon riders. And the normal dragon riders are also evil. So what does that mean? What’s the difference?

Chris: Yeah. I don’t know. Again, if we saw them do things, I think that is one key thing for a lot of villains is actually seeing them do damage and hearing what they’ve done.

But any case, we digress.

Oren: We do. We tend to do that.

Chris: We do tend to do that.

Oren: I did get some beta reading comments, if I remember correctly, about The Abbess Rebellion, feeling like it was too fast paced. How much of that do you think was due to the word craft? Go ahead and roast me.

Chris: [laughs] Uh, man. Again, because pacing is used for both the wordcraft and for the plot, I would have to know more. That’s just so context dependent. Maybe your big battles. Maybe they were exciting at first, but they got exhausting. Which is what happens when the pacing is too fast in like the plot.

Or maybe it was that the word craft was rushed.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I do know that at least a couple of my readers wanted more complicated politics. Which isn’t really a word craft issue, that’s a plot issue. But I suspect the wordcraft probably had something to do with it. My prose is utilitarian, would be a kind way to describe it. So, I imagine there’s probably some of that in there too.

Chris: I think Utilitarian Prose is perfectly good prose. I think we all have different preferences and plenty of people love utilitarian prose.

Oren: Yes, that’s definitely true. Plenty of people love your prose, Oren. it’s fine. It’s fine!

Chris: [laughs] I’m not sure if when it comes to [The] Abbess Rebellion, lots of people are gonna be like, that was the perfect prose for me. I wanna pick it up just for the prose.

But I do think there are a lot of people who are like, I don’t wanna think about the prose. I don’t want it to be showy. I just want it to be ”invisible”.

Oren: My ideal audience is people who don’t care about the prose [laughs]

Chris: [laughs]

There are also errors that you can have in the prose that it doesn’t have, right? It’s also not invisible if it’s convoluted or hard to understand or awkward or all of those other things. So it utilitarian prose still take skill, okay.

Oren: What if it had the phrase “rain of arrows” nine times in one chapter? Be a really nice thing if the copy editors caught that. Thank you, copy editors.

Chris: Oh man. I had one short story that Ariel copy edited and she’s like, you’re just using the word “know” way too much. And I looked at it, I was like, wow, I really am using that word a lot. It felt like such a normal word. I wouldn’t have to worry about it repeating, but…

Oren: Such personal attacks from the copy editors. I know.

Chris: I know maybe there is some writer out there who is perfectly able to keep track of all of their usage of all terms and phrases and make sure they never repeat too much. I don’t know that I know that person.

Granted now that I say that, somebody will pop up on our Discord server and be like, oh, I have this software. And I can perfectly keep track. There’s always somebody, but that seems unusual to me.

Yay for copy editors.

Oren: So here’s another pacing question: How much does sentence length matter?

Chris: Technically it is an independent feature, but I do feel like people who use longer sentences are more likely to be verbose. Technically you could have a rushed long sentence or a run on sentence where everything happens. But I tend to think that people who use longer sentences are often the verbose kind because they’re trying to stuff in more words.

But I also have people who have sentences that are really hard to understand because they’re putting really important things in a subordinate clause. Or mentioning really important things just in passing. Like, no stop, that’s too important. You gotta slow down and introduce that properly.

I also see that so it can go either way.

The ultimate measure of how rushed it is—we’ve talked about comparing it to real time. So ideally, the time in your story world does not pass faster than reading time. So you should basically be able to act out what’s happening in the story in the time it takes you to read it. So of course, that’s subjective.

Hilariously, I do have some speed readers in my family that complain about books being like too much of a emotional rollercoaster because the story goes by so fast for them. And I’m just like, well, should you maybe not speed read if it’s, if that’s an issue.

I mean, maybe they can’t. Maybe they can only speed read at this point, but they did specifically learn a speed reading technique, so…

Oren: They shouldn’t have to change, Chris. The book should have to change.

Chris: [laughs] But yeah, if you’re a speed reader, maybe judge this by reading out loud. But it’s also a very rough measure. We don’t have to be precise.

But if you do find that you’re having this problem where you’re rushing things too much and you’re wondering why everything falls flat, you need to add more small actions in between what you have. And almost certainly more description. Usually more description is necessary, possibly more thoughts and feelings too.

And that’s kind of the cure to moving too fast. I’ve had it described as savoring the moment, but I found that very vague. When my writing was washed and somebody told me to savor the moment, I didn’t know what that meant.

Oren: Chris, just stop and smell the flowers.

Chris: So I tried to get more specific than that, so you know what to do.

Oren: What about length and complexity of the words themselves? If you’re using a lot of big words, is that slowing your pacing down?

Chris: Well, it’s slowing down the reading speed. Not necessarily, no. It’s more about how vague or specific you are. Even if you’re in like a reasonable range there are still important choices you can make that help shape how different moments in your story feels and different moments in the story can call for a different pace.

So again, when we talk about too slow and too fast, obviously there’s a lot in between, huge explanations like we talked about, and rushing past everything so that you can’t actually feel anything. And this is basically a balance between immersion and immediacy.

So immersion—we’ve talked about before—basically it’s how real everything feels. So, the reason why over summarize prose feels dead, just doesn’t come alive, is because immersion is completely lost. So a story has to feel a little bit real for us to feel emotion.

Another way we talk about immersion, of course, is if something interrupts your immersion by calling attention to itself, like an error. So that would be lost immersion because something throws you out of the story, for instance. But otherwise we’re just talking about a more slow gradient with the level of realness.

Oren: Like you thought you were reading a high fantasy story and suddenly someone talks about genetics. It’s like, hang on, you guys know what genes are.

Chris: So generally, a slower pace often helps with this, but not exposition.

Oren: but not exposition.

Chris: Exposition is not immersive because—I pretty much define it by being stuff that is not the here and now. So, we’re imparting general facts. We’re imparting something happening somewhere else or in the past. Because it is not the here and now, it is not immersive.

That’s one reason it’s so bad to overuse it. But it’s also so easy to overuse because it’s so flexible. You can say anything in exposition.

Oren: That’s why you should never say anything in exposition. Just don’t do it.

Chris: Noooo, don’t do that. That’s bad.

Oren: Just trust your readers to pick up on things, Chris!

Chris: You need exposition!

Oren: Trust your readers.

Chris: [laughs]

Description though is really immersive, which is why, if you’re over summarizing, it’s usually really helpful to add more description. Action is immersive. Dialogue is immersive. Internalization and thoughts like, hmm, maybe. A little bit can at least maintain immersion. But if you start to go overboard, then I’m not sure that’s so good for immersion.

Oren: Although it should be pointed out that dialogue can be used for exposition and it doesn’t magically become not-exposition if you put it in dialogue.

Chris: It is true. We tend to think of dialogue as exposition when it feels a little bit forced. And it doesn’t feel like that’s what the character would naturally say in the moment.

So basically, you want your really emotionally powerful moments—Usually they benefit from higher immersion, and so it makes sense to have more description, be a little bit more verbose. Dig in a little bit and let readers appreciate the moment.

I also think that a slightly slower pace with more description is really great for building anticipation and atmosphere. It’s not so great though, when you want something to be really exciting because you’ve got fast-paced action or something that feels desperate, it feels like an emergency.

For that, usually you want higher immediacy, which is basically urgency on steroids. So, you still don’t wanna over summarize, but generally that calls for a little bit conciser language that moves the action a little faster. Thrillers would typically have a lot more concise language for those fast moments.

Oren: Yeah. You would have your more elaborate description of the underground base when your character is brought into it for an interrogation, less so when they’re trying to escape it as it’s exploding.

Chris: So, in a scene, you can vary it from one to another, even during dialogue. You can create a pause during the dialogue. Characters stare into each other’s eyes and describe their eyes for a little while to create an emotional moment.

Even during fights, sometimes it is useful if there’s a particularly tense moment in the fight to put this fight into slow-mo so that you can experience the tension of the moment. Your character is pinned down and somebody is bringing a blade down on them and they can’t move. Like that’s a good time to like, actually, I’m gonna slow down a little bit here and build anticipation for that strike instead of making it feel fast and desperate.

Oren: And what does that look like exactly? I don’t imagine we’re saying and then time slowed or is that what we’re imagining?

Chris: No. There is a difference between when you slow down, it does make a difference what words you use. As I said, description is usually a really good way to slow down because it adds something, it adds immersion, and it can also be used for atmosphere. As opposed to if you’re just wordy or you have overly technical language.

Like, they brought down their blade at a 75 degree angle from left to right or something like that. That’s obviously technical language that does not add to the moment. But if you say their blade flashed in the firelight and the grimace on their face, their red eyes bore into me as they brought their blade to bear or something.

Oren: That is what red eyes tend to do as a blade is brought to bear. Conventionally speaking.

Chris: Yeah. Unsurprisingly, I’m not very good at coming up with great description on the fly, but yeah, something that is embellishing. Oh, the villain pressed on close and I smelled their breath or something. And describe what their breath smells like.

Oren: Ew. Do we have to?

Chris: [laughs] But the point is, that’s very visceral. And so, it helps get you in the moment. And so that’s the kind of thing that you wanna use to slow down, typically.

And if you’re not sure what to do, whether you wanna be faster or slower, I would just focus on: what are important actions right now? What matters?

Like narrating the protagonist, reaching out the hand, turning the doorknob and swinging the door open does not matter. That’s trivial, it’s not important.

Whereas if you just said, then Sally knocked Sam out. That would be very vague. Like, okay, wait, we seem to be missing things here. Did Sam see Sally coming? Did he have a chance to react? What did Sally actually do to knock Sam out? Swing a frying pan or what? There’s lots of things missing from that picture. By default that’s what you can use to judge.

Oren: Well, now that we’ve covered all important frying pan pacing issues, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you found this episode useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

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

And 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.

What’s that strange sound overhead? Is it a magical creature landing on the roof or just a common crow? If your book is shelved in the fantasy section, it had better be a magical creature! But that doesn’t mean you can’t tease your readers a little, makin’ ‘em sweat, wondering if they’ll get the sweet supernatural content they crave. To what I’m sure is your great surprise, we’ve got some tips for that!

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You are 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: Hey, did you… did you hear that? I think my mic is picking up these weird sounds that I can’t hear myself, but when I listen to the recordings from the microphone, it’s like quiet, inaudible voices whispering… with faint notes of a song I haven’t heard since childhood. It’s probably the neighbors. 

Oren: Don’t be silly, Chris. Despite having encountered supernatural things many dozens of times, I am going to be skeptical of this one. 

Chris: Hmm. When will you acknowledge the truth before your eyes, Scully?! 

Oren: Scully’s very cool. I would like to be 5% as cool as Scully, and if this will get me there, I’m willing to do whatever it takes.

Chris: So this time we’re talking about the questionably supernatural.

Oren: Is it supernatural?

Chris: Is it magic? Is it not magic? 

Oren: So here’s my hot take. It better be.

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: No. How could you diss Ann Radcliffe that way? Disrespect. 

Oren: Ann Radcliffe and me, we got beef. My beef is that supernatural was fake and not real. I’m like the people who get real hung up on the idea that romance has to have a happy ever after. As far as I’m concerned, if you hint that there’s supernatural stuff, there had better be supernatural stuff. 

Chris: Say, that is true, if you are writing speculative fiction, there should be some things fantastical. But I still think we might need to acknowledge that there are works outside of speculative fiction in which that might go down a little better.

Oren: Hmm. Agree to disagree, except that I don’t agree. Hmm.

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Oren: I think that it’s fine if you do that as long as it is a book that is never going to be read by me. 

Chris: [Laughs] Well–

Oren: That’s my stance. 

Chris: I don’t think you’re gonna pick up the average non-speculative mysteries. So I think we’re…

Oren: Oh they’re safe then, or are they? 

Chris: It is really funny to read some non-speculative works and see how they use speculative elements as dress up.

Oren: Mm-hmm. 

Chris: “Oh, see, I can add novelty to my word craft by using metaphors of this being a fairytale or treating this element as though it’s supernatural. But of course, we all know thats ridiculous.” 

Oren: “Obviously.” [Chuckles]

Chris: That’s how those stories go and it’s always weird. I critiqued a mystery story that, apparently it does have some level of supernatural elements in it, but I could not tell because it kept using metaphors. Okay, I know he’s metaphorically breathing fire because he’s angry, but could he literally breathe fire, please? That would be so much more interesting. [Chuckles]

Oren: That would be neat. Who knows? Maybe. 

Chris: I know this house only sort of looks like a cyclops because of the windows, but what if it actually was a cyclops? That would be better. With the speculative audience, you definitely don’t wanna taunt them with something that is fantastical only to, “Uh, sorry.” In the same way, you don’t be like, “Well now that those kids grew up and are adults, the magic goes away. ‘Cause they gotta act like adults now.” Nobody wants that. Don’t take the magic away. Don’t do it. 

Oren: The most popular trope that everyone hates. The weirdest concept. I suppose someone must like it, but everyone I talk to hates that trope and it’s always funny to me how common it used to be.

Chris: How could you do that to Kiki? How could you do that to her? 

Oren: [Chuckles]

Chris: I definitely feel like it comes from this outlook of, “Oh, well that’s not realistic. Of course, we gotta grow up so naturally the magic has to go away,” instead of thinking about what’s actually enjoyable for readers. 

Oren: Also, we were talking about Mary and the Witch’s Flower that does that. Not Kiki’s Delivery Service? 

Chris: Doesn’t Kiki’s Delivery Service also do that? She grows up.

Oren: I thought Kiki’s Delivery Service ended with a different weird ending, which was that her search was to find her element and then the ending is that her element is flying. 

Chris: Maybe I’m getting that mixed up.

Oren: Which was also unsatisfying because every witch can fly and it didn’t really establish that she was especially good at flying. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: I felt like that didn’t work either, but I think that’s a different ending than Mary and the Witch’s Flower where the character excitedly yells, “I’ll never use magic again!” It’s like, what? Why Mary? Why? Magic rules. 

Chris: I know that there’s a story other than Mary and the Witch’s Flower, but Mary and the Witch’s Flower is particularly funny because apparently the storyteller’s goal was to condemn magic, but it makes magic so cool that you would barely know that. If you look closely at the plot, you can see where the storyteller was attempting to do that. In any magic story where magic is cool, you would have villains doing something bad with magic. That’s just normal. That doesn’t seem like you’re condemning magic. 

Oren: You were just showing me villains doing bad things and they were magical. That’s all that was happening. 

Chris: [Chuckles] Any case, back to the questionably supernatural. So why do it? Why have things that maybe or maybe are not magical, supernatural, fantastical in some way? 

Oren: Other than enraging me personally. 

Chris: [Laughs] Well, just having something mysterious is not gonna do it. It’s just the ending. Obviously creating a mysterious atmosphere, if you don’t know whether or not something is fantastical or if it’s normal, that opens up kind of a mystery, creates lots of atmosphere, which is a big reason to do it. 

Oren: Mystery enhances a number of other traits. If the magic is mysterious and you want it to be scary, that’s much easier than if it’s well known. And if you want it to be wondrous, that’s also easy. If you don’t know for sure if it’s magic or not, you can create this feeling that there might be magic anywhere around any corner, which is very cool, even if there’s very little actual magic in your story. 

Chris: I also think that it might be useful for slowing down the action in the story. I think this is good for horror in particular because we don’t necessarily wanna heat up things too soon. Any kind of monster is only gonna be threatening for so long. And a lot of horror stories, we build the mood first with a few events that seem not quite right, but aren’t overtly magical. And that helps the creep factor, and it also, frankly, uses some of the runtime. 

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: Well, building up the threat so that later we can confront it. We don’t confront it directly at first. So if we’re not even sure if it’s something supernatural, then that takes more time to reach the point where you’ve actually got it unveiled or have to fight it, for instance. 

Oren: Another advantage is that if you’re in a world where the main character doesn’t know if something’s magical or not, doesn’t know that magic exists, that’s less you have to explain right off the bat. That’s just a practical benefit. Because if your main character is already a wizard or knows about magic, that’s more stuff you have to info dump. And if they don’t, then they can learn at the same time the reader does. It reduces your overhead, and that’s not the main reason to do it or anything, but it is a benefit.

Chris: And I think with horror in particular, a lot of times we don’t want to have magical protagonists because we wanna disempower the protagonist. It just doesn’t make sense to have somebody coming in with magic. Instead, they’re being introduced to magic for the first time because we want it to be intimidating. But you could do this with a light story as well. You could have a story that’s really about discovering something that is wonderful and whimsical. 

Oren: That’s like using a similar concept to hit a very different narrative experience. What you’re doing is, you are building the fantasy of, ”I might find magic, little old me living in my little suburb,” or wherever. That’s obviously a very different experience than a horror story being, “Ooh, is that thing spooky or just a serial killer?” But you use a similar process. 

Chris: The only real difference is that we want all of the fantastical things to feel positive in nature in some way. Instead of finding blood, you find flowers. [Laughs] 

Oren: Special glowing flowers. But were they glowing? They seemed like they were glowing, but during the day now you’re not sure anymore.

Chris: Just for an instant, I leaned my ear next to one and I thought I heard some fairy bells, but it could have been in my imagination. 

Oren: It was probably your imagination. 

Chris: Let’s talk about how you do things that are only questionably supernatural. What are the tricks and techniques? I would say first any event with an unknown cause. We’ve got, “Oh, why are all the doors open after midnight?” Yes, technically somebody could be opening it, but we don’t know who, and that’s a strange thing for somebody to do. That’s your bread and butter.

“This thing changed while we were looking in the other way. [Chuckles] We don’t know who did it.” Or strange unidentified music is another one. “At this time in the middle of the night, we hear strange tinkling music.” And somebody could be creating the music, but that’s a strange thing for a person to do. And maybe we wander outside looking for the source of the music and we can’t find it. When we wander different directions, it seems to come from different places. But again, that could just be a trick of sound echoing. 

Oren: Here’s a question. At what point does it become a problem that it might be magic? Because I’m thinking specifically of the “locked door” problem, where you have a murder and the victim was inside a room that was locked from the inside. And in that situation, finding out that its magic is actually a disappointment because you were trying to figure out what was the clever way the murderer did this. And if the answer is that they have a spell that teleports them out of the room, that’s kind of boring. So when does that happen? When do you risk doing that? 

Chris: That’s a good question. I do think one of the issues with the “locked door” problem is that the original expectation you were setting, is that there’s not gonna be magic. If we had magic in the setting where people could just say a few words in Latin and unlock doors, none of the characters are gonna ask, “Oh, how is this possible?” It wouldn’t even be worth bringing up. 

This goes back to if we have an actual curiosity arc, is that different? When we’re setting up something that’s a mystery and usually there’s an active protagonist who is contemplating certain questions about the crime, and then to evoke curiosity, we’ll be like, “Oh, but this body was in three different locked chests that were locked from the inside” or whatever. You have impossible situation. 

I do think that you kind of need to establish the rules for a mystery like that. Usually the expectation from the reader is that they will be able to, if they pay attention, they’ll able to guess the answer. And that the answer will follow certain rules. And so if you don’t tell them early on that this is a setting where people can just say a few words and unlock that, then that would be kind of cheating. “Wizard did it” is cheating. 

But also that makes the whole question less profound, less wild. ‘Cause that’s what you’re doing to try to evoke curiosity. You’re trying to create a really wild situation that leaves people guessing. It’s not always backwards looking. We can create curiosity in a variety of ways. So it is curiosity evoking to have, let’s say, mysterious music coming out. But I think if this is a story where the supernatural is expected and you’re creating less curiosity and more anticipation that you’re gonna get something cool.

If we, for instance, hear fairy music, it has its mysterious aura of mystery, but it’s not as curiosity evoking as the weird… like, A Drop of Corruption is really good at this. This is the sequel to A Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. And sets up a really perplexing, “How could this murder have happened?” We have no idea, we think somebody died, but there’s no body and we don’t know how he could have possibly left the room, is the starting situation. But that’s really curiosity evoking. 

I think when we have something like weird fairy music, it’s less curiosity, but it has more novelty. We know that the book is supernatural. We have expectations set. So we know that a possible answer could be fairies. As opposed to if you just like, “Oh, well he got out of the room because fairies did it.” That would not be acceptable in A Drop of Corruption. 

Oren: And to some extent it’s almost like I know it when I see it. ‘Cause if we have a mystery with the locked room thing and it was magic, I’d be disappointed. But if the mystery is, “We found a murder victim and his organs are missing, even though there’s no marks on his skin.” And then I found out that that was due to an ancient cult performing dark magics. I don’t think I’d be disappointed. I’d be like, “Oh, cool. An ancient cult performing dark magics.” Even though technically that could be a mystery. Like, “How did they get those organs out?” 

Chris: If you were given something else enjoyable, that can soften the blow. But generally, if you’ve invoked a lot of curiosity, you’re looking for the answer to fit certain constraints. Or it’s surprising, but it still makes sense with what you know, which is what a lot of mysteries do. 

And I think in that case, if it’s like, “Oh, it’s disappointing that it’s not supernatural.” Well, if you have a mystery audience that are looking for a mystery answer that makes sense, more than they are looking for the novelty of real fairies or elder gods or what have you, then they’re looking for a different type of payoff. And it’s about those expectations that people come in the door with. And that you set as a storyteller. 

But I do think that might be the key in some of these situations. As I mentioned in an earlier episode, I’ve recently listened to Anne Radcliffe, who is a late 1700s, early 1800s gothic novel writer, and she had a habit of doing a lot of supernatural things that then she reveals to not be supernatural in the end.

Oren: Why would you think they were supernatural, silly reader? 

Chris: Well, it’s interesting because she clearly had a specific beef with people being superstitious and how that was bad and you should not give into superstition. 

Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: And in the context she creates, I can’t say that that’s wrong. [Laughs] That was her deal. And I think she tried to answer it with various levels of nonsensical-ness. One of the ones that I liked is when she uses, “Oh no, what is that little flame on tip of somebody’s spear? That’s so scary.” And then it’s static electricity from the storm overhead.

Oren: [Chuckles] It’s literally Saint Elmo’s Fire is what it is. It’s an actual thing in which the end of some kind of rod, like a ship’s mast or whatever, will glow blue, and it’s just a weather phenomenon. It’s caused by charged particles in the air. It’s very strange looking. 

Chris: At first, people are like, “Oh no, it’s so ghostly.” And then the character’s like, “Oh, this just happens when there’s a storm. I don’t think it’s ghosts or a portent of doom,” or whatever. The funniest one though is when she has a character that’s horrified, and this is like a total meta mystery, basically, because it’s written omniscient, but she won’t say what her main character sees. And we imply it’s a dead person.

There could be a non-supernatural dead person there. But it’s really funny when she then later needs to tie that up and she’s like, “Oh, actually it was just a wax doll. It was a wax doll, because you see…” And then of course she has to give this whole story of why a wax doll that looks like a dead person is there.

It’s like, “Well, you see. This guy, he caused so much trouble and the church wanted him to repent, so they ordered him to make a wax doll of a dead person, then have him stare at it every day to contemplate his mortality so that he would think about being a better person.” 

Oren: Just contemplating my wax doll over here.

Chris: “And then he decided that it was a good idea and then stipulated that his descendants would have to keep the wax doll of the dead person to contemplate their own mortality or else they would lose some of their inheritance to the church.” So they were required to keep it around, but they didn’t wanna look at it, so they put it under this veil outta sight where the main character found it and thought it was an actual dead body and was too scared to look closer. 

Oren: I have a really important tip for writers who are implying that there is something supernatural and then revealing it was something else. Don’t do that.

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Oren: If you have to launch into a big backstory explanation to explain it, that’s probably not a good idea. That’s true in general for any mystery. If once the mystery is revealed, you have to be like, “Okay, here’s two pages of exposition.” Something has probably gone wrong. 

Chris: This is the method of, instead of just having events with unknown causes that are weird, Anne Radcliffe would actually have people see things that they thought were supernatural, and then it just turned out to be some guy who maybe was doing something a little unusual, but we would explain. Like at one point bandits are hiding their goods in the part of the castle that previously was abandoned, and so they see a guy in a dead woman’s room and they’re like, “Oh no, it’s a specter! It’s a ghost!” Because we have to assume that they didn’t look very closely.

I think it’s a little hard when we have movies with such good special effects. In our thought of, “Well, couldn’t you tell visually the difference between a ghost and a person?” But the assumption here is that no, ghosts could just be like people walking around, but we think they’re ghosts for some reason.

Oren: They could be. Who knows? [Chuckles] 

Chris: Did you ever watch, was Scooby-Doo a thing? 

Oren: Yeah!

Chris: Scooby-Doo is pretty famous for having people faking supernatural things. 

Oren: My brother loved Scooby-Doo, which part of my deep seated childhood resentment that he was allowed to watch cartoons when I was not at his age. His standard older sibling experience. He loved Scooby-Doo and so I watched fair amount of it just by osmosis ’cause that’s what was on. And yes, the older cartoons, the joke is that it’s always an old rich guy who is trying to scam someone in a monster costume. Which of course raises some serious questions like, “We saw that guy punch through a metal door. How did he do that?”

Chris: Again, not having really watched much Scooby-Doo I know the thing it has a reputation for is having obviously supernatural things happen, and then trying to weakly explain how the effect was created by some normal scheming guy in ways that are very unrealistic and definitely could not have created.

Oren: It depends on the episode. With some of them, all that really happened is that a guy chased them around and it’s like, “Well, that was actually a guy in a monster suit that chased us around.” Okay, sure, that could happen. And then in other episodes they’re like, “Ooh, how did he do all of this weird stuff?” Well, he used a fog machine and magnets, and those have varying degrees of credibility. 

But then there are also times when they just do things that there is no explanation offered or attempted. I think there was an episode where a vampire turned into bats, and then later it turned out he was a guy in a suit, and it is like, “Well, hang on… the bats thing.” I think that happened. Granted, it’s been a while, so maybe not. But I do know there were several episodes where the monsters clearly had superhuman strength and that was just never explained. 

Chris: I think part of the problem is not only is it increasingly hard to believe that something that we see could be ambiguous is about it being supernatural, but also if the audience knows it’s gonna be supernatural and there’s obvious signs it’s supernatural, I lose my patience. Of people being like, “Oh no, maybe it’s not supernatural.” It’s like, can you just accept a supernatural already? We know it’s supernatural. It becomes tiresome after a while if characters see something that is obviously supernatural and then drag their feet for a while, even if it’s realistic. It’s like, we’ve all been there. We’ve seen this happen in countless stories. 

Oren: I find myself really torn there, and this is actually why I so often prefer to start with characters already knowing about the supernatural. Just because on the one hand, I know it’s boring for them to go continue to insist it’s not supernatural for a long time, but at the same time it’s also really hard for me to believe that they would just accept that something was supernatural unless they had some pre-existing beliefs in that area. 

Chris: We just enjoyed T Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead. Which is basically an adaptation of Fall of the House of Usher. Although, Fall of the House of Usher is so brief that it sticks close enough that I think it’s fair to call it an adaptation. But again, it has so much plot that the original doesn’t because the original is just a tiny little story. 

But I think it’s a really good novella and I think in that one, we have weird things. And I think the important thing there is it’s not necessarily that the characters accept outlandish ideas immediately. It’s that they’re willing to move forward, not being sure, so that we don’t delay too much arguing about it. They don’t just refuse to take action, which is frustrating if we know. It’s that they pursue things reluctantly, not knowing what the explanation is, but hey, “Why don’t we try this because we need some solution.” And I think that works pretty well. 

Oren: It does help a little bit in What Moves the Dead, that, spoilers, the explanation is that it’s a spooky fungus. The characters are more willing to accept that because they don’t know a whole lot about fungi. And this is the 1890s where mycology is still kind of in its infancy, so it’s a little easier for them in that context to accept that maybe fungus can do this. 

Whereas nowadays, at least for someone who is knowledgeable about fungi, it would be like, “What? No fungi can’t do that. That’s ridiculous.” Although perhaps not a normal person ’cause I have talked to several people who think that The Last of Us is based on real science. 

Chris: [Laughs] No.

Oren: And are genuinely afraid that fungus is going to do that. You should be worried about increased fungal infections for a number of reasons, but they’re just the boring kind that will kill you. Not the kind that will turn you into a cool zombie. 

Chris: We should be worried about more epidemics, but we don’t need to worry about zombies specifically. But I think that works well. If the characters can’t fully embrace it, but they have limited options of their situation, they need to do something. They can just keep an open mind and take what actions they can think of that might do something. 

Another thing that we see often in gothic stories or in other stories where we need to make fantastical things ambiguous, is using dreams. Dreams are just very convenient because there’s all sorts of tropes about people getting visions or portents that are actually real in dreams.

Or you can have something that is ambiguously a dream. If you have a dream where the character gets outta bed and walks around and then sees something supernatural and then suddenly wakes up in their bed, you don’t know if that was actually a dream or not. And so that can be really convenient for making something ambiguous or having the character be like, “Okay, well obviously that didn’t really happen.“ But maybe it did. 

Oren: But maybe.

Chris: Or maybe something invaded their mind. You can have your antagonist that attacks people in their dreams, which happens. Another Kingfisher one, What Feasts at Night would be the sequel. So dreams really offer a lot in terms of creating ambiguous situations. Is that a magical dream? Is it a normal dream? Or was I actually walking about in the middle of the night and saw things? 

Oren: So here’s a thought. At what point does it cross the line from something that it’s okay to leave ambiguous, to something that you really need to explain by the end? I can think of some stories where if this character has an arc about regaining their faith, I don’t really need to know if the good luck they had at the end was actually an angel or not. I’m okay with that being ambiguous. I think that if someone was going around doing murders and the witnesses were all like, “It looked like an angel killing people with a flaming sword,” I’d want to know if that was real or not. 

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: And so presumably you cross a line somewhere. I just don’t know where that is.

Chris: That’s a good question, but certainly I think when it’s more closely related to actual plot arcs that need to be concluded. I think that’s the first question I would ask. Is there a plot arc here that we need to close? And sometimes that might be a curiosity arc. It might be, again, “We had a murder done in a weird way.” We really do expect that to be explained by the end, because that’s the expectations you set with a mystery audience. If you’re gonna evoke so much curiosity that it’s designed to create enough engagement for people to keep going. That’s probably something that needs to be answered.

Whereas it’s something that we’ve closed up all the arcs, but this could be one way or the other. I also think that it might be easier to have something that has two different options instead of something that’s wide open. Was that really the ghost of my mother or was that just a dream or hallucination when I was on shrooms? [Laughs] We have two different options. 

Whereas if we have a situation where we never find out where the strange music is coming from at all, that’s not an either or. That’s a wide open. So I really think that ambiguousness and ambiguous endings, you really do best when you paint what the possibilities are. It’s either this or that. And we don’t know which, but we can imagine either one. 

Whereas if you have a wide open question, that could be anything. “We didn’t find out where the strange unidentified music came from,” so that doesn’t give us anything to go off of or to think about. Whereas if you have, “Oh, we thought that that music came from this person, but then somebody else said that they were dead before we heard the music.”

Oren: Ooh.

Chris: Did they make a mistake or did that person play music from beyond the grave? 

Oren: Hmm. 

Chris: [Laughs] We have two options. We’ve closed off the plot arcs. I guess that’s where I would start. 

Oren: Well now we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close and no, we’re not gonna explain if that stuff at the beginning about special voices hearing on the microphone was magic or not. You’ll just have to wonder. 

Chris: …Or will we? 

Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Chris: Okay, well, if you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few 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]

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

What’s better than an ally you can trust? An ally you can’t trust! For storytelling purposes, of course. In real life, you want your allies to be dependable and steady; in fiction, they should be wild and unpredictable, plus a bit sexy. If you’re going for the drama of an unreliable ally, that is. And after listening to this week’s podcast, you’ll obviously want to. Unless we were the unreliable allies all along. Oh, noooooooo-

Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

[Intro theme]

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

Chris: And I’m Chris. 

Oren: Did you know that one of us is actually a shapeshifter? I tried to look up what the shapeshifter archetype actually is, because I only use it kind of casually, and I discovered that nobody knows. I found various definitions, and I always assumed that the Shapeshifter was a character whose loyalties we were uncertain of.

Like, maybe they were gonna betray us. Maybe not. That’s what I thought it meant. I have now seen it defined as first any character who ever does anything sneaky has become a shapeshifter. But also, you have to be an actual shapeshifter according to some definitions, which is very funny, and I tried to look up the original definition in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and I found it. I found the chapter labeled Shapeshifter, and I have no idea what the heck he was saying. I don’t know what any of this means, guys. I don’t know. 

Chris: No, Campbell does not write in a clear manner. He is very hard to understand, anything that he’s saying

Oren: And to my surprise, it doesn’t look like Vogler mentioned it.

Chris: He must. He must. 

Oren: I couldn’t find it. 

Chris: I’m pretty sure he’s who I got it from. 

Oren: I searched through his book, The Hero’s Journey, or whatever vastly specific title.

Chris: The shapeshifter is listed on my Hero’s Journey Archetype post. And that is largely inspired by Vogler. So if Vogler had not mentioned the Shapeshifter, I don’t think I would’ve put it in my post either.

Oren: Maybe he does somewhere, but I couldn’t find it either by searching the text with Ctrl+F or by looking in the table of contents or the index. So, if it’s in there, it’s very well hidden. Maybe he spelled it weird

Chris: Spelled with lots of hidden GHs. Some silent GHs. Several times.

Oren: S-H-A-E-P-E. The sheeAPEshifter.

Chris:  There isn’t a very good word. I don’t really like the word shapeshifter for this anyway, but there just doesn’t seem to be a great term. I looked it up on TV Tropes. And TV Tropes has like 20 different categories, which is not helpful. Depending on the exact shade of untrustworthiness or the pattern of behavior this character shows. For storytelling purposes, we just want to group together characters that are between team good and team evil. 

Oren: That’s just how I’ve always used it. I thought it was a pretty useful term for that. I thought it was easily the most applicable of the various Hero’s Journey terms that get thrown around, but now I have no idea.

Chris: We really just need one term for this kind of character. And Shapeshifter is what I got. I don’t got a better one. 

Oren: Specifically, we’re thinking about unreliable allies today, and shapeshifter is kind of the cool way of referring to that character type. They may or may not actually change shape. 

Chris: We have disagreements about a lot of terms, like TV Tropes, for instance, is very insistent that you can’t call something a MacGuffin if what it is matters to the plot at all. Its only purpose has to be for people to fight over it, and it doesn’t matter what it actually is. And it’s like, that’s not useful. Okay? That is too narrow. That’s like the original meaning of ironic. Yes, I know what the original meaning of ironic is, but that’s too specific, and it’s not a useful word if we use that definition.

Oren: LOL. We got our MacGuffin purists over here being like, “Don’t you call that a MacGuffin. They used it at some point! It does something.” Seriously got into an argument one time or watched other people be in an argument about whether or not you could call something a Mary Sue if you didn’t have proof that it was an author insert character.

Chris: Now we need proof! 

Oren: Okay, well, I don’t like Mary Sue as a term for other reasons, but that seems kind of unreasonable to me. 

Chris: So yeah, unreliable allies. These are generally good characters to have. First of all, they’re generally extremely helpful because they make it easy to add more tension and conflict, especially to down scenes that are not normally that exciting. These are the scenes where something exciting has already happened and now your characters are resting, recovering, planning their next move, that kind of thing. But you still want a little something. You still want a little light conflict, a little light problem-solving to happen in those scenes.

Maybe some emotional growth or some heated conversations, and so, these shapeshifters−now I’m thinking about it every time I say it−just make it really easy to add a little more drama. Because, do we want them around? Who invited them here? What should we tell them or not tell them? And then you can have them, “Oh, I could help you with that.” Make them very suspicious. 

Oren: It’s not my fault that it’s hot, okay? We were all thinking it. 

Chris: And then you can also have their help come at a cost more easily. Maybe they make demands, which are difficult to deal with, or maybe their advice isn’t actually trustworthy. It’s technically−at best−kind of correct, and then the heroes get into trouble that they have to deal with. Just opens up so many great opportunities for tension and conflict and makes those easy to add. That’s why they’re usually great characters to have around. 

Oren: Although I have discovered a fun little contradiction, or maybe it’s more of a conundrum of the unreliable ally, which is when you spend a lot of time asking, can we trust this guy? It’s really difficult for the answer to be no and have it not be disappointing. Most stories that I know of that have an unreliable ally where we make a big deal about it, that person ends up being on team good. And, on the rare instances where that’s not the case, it’s always disappointing. And I have a few theories about why, about why this is more difficult. 

The first one is that if someone’s trustworthiness is questionable enough that you have to ask, “no” is already the least surprising answer. It’s like, oh look, that guy’s acting hella suspicious. Can we trust him? Well, uh, probably not. He’s acting really suspicious. A trustworthy person wouldn’t do that. That’s the obvious answer. And then it can also make the heroes look really silly because why did you trust this person who was being really shady before? 

Chris: Or be frustrating in the same direction if they are deciding to trust a character that is clearly, obviously not trustworthy−which is not what you want for your unreliable ally; they need to at least be partially credible−and you see the character decide to trust them anyway, that’s just going to be frustrating. And then it blows up in their face. That’s not good. 

Oren: Also, I’ve noticed you build attachment to unreliable allies if the story’s doing its job. And then, if you are attached to them, you don’t want them to be evil. You don’t want them to die or be put in jail for forever or whatever. You want them to win because you like them. So, it’s like, no, be a good person. Come on. I need you to be a good person. Still edgy. 

Chris: I do think it works well for them to be partially trustworthy, which is why I’m joking about like, well, technically what they said was true. A character that makes deals and follows them to the letter but there’s a little catch there that hasn’t been mentioned, that’s the kind of thing that we could justify. Okay, we got in a lot of trouble, but we still ultimately were able to achieve our objective that we couldn’t have done without taking this character’s dangerous advice. And now we know their word can technically be trusted if you pay close attention, so surely it will go fine next time. 

Oren: I’ve also noticed that at least some stories tend to−I’m not just thinking about Teen Wolf, but I am thinking about Teen Wolf−use former big bads as their untrustworthy allies or unreliable allies.

Chris: Teen Wolf is so funny because they refuse to kill any of their villains. There’s a couple villains that die, but for the most part, I think they kill some early on, and they’re like, you know what? That was a mistake. We shouldn’t have done that. Let’s never kill a villain ever again. And so they just collect! There’s six seasons and some of the seasons have two parts, which are basically two seasons. On top of that, every season has two villains. Okay? So there’s so many former villains in this show. They just are really useful. 

Oren: They are, but there is a problem when occasionally they try to turn them back into main villains, and it often doesn’t work because we already beat this guy. 

Chris: Right. Only Kate. 

Oren: Kate works because she went through a whole transformation process, both literally and figuratively, to become another main villain. Whereas with Peter, we beat him in season one, and he was a great villain in season one. Then he was a great unreliable ally for several seasons, and then we fight him again. But we’re all 10 levels higher than the last time we fought him.

Chris: No, Peter can never be a villain again. Why did you do that?

Oren: I’m pretty sure we can take him, you know?

Chris: There’s also Sylar in Heroes. His problem is he continues to shift between a hero and a villain so many times you want to just get rid of him. You get so sick of him. With Peter, okay, he’s a big deal in the first season, but then he is a minor side character who’s untrustworthy, and he works well in that role. We’re not making a big deal out of him, but with Sylar, we’re supposed to care about his fourth transformation between hero and villain, and I just don’t. I can’t care anymore. He’s just annoying now. 

Oren: Heroes, man, I haven’t thought about heroes in a while. 

Chris: Oh, I know. Oh, I know.

Oren: That’s classic. That’s the show that most exemplifies monkeys banging on typewriters producing Shakespeare, because it really looks like that. The first season was kind of an accident. Obviously, the second season was pressured because there was a writer’s strike, so we accept why that one’s bad, but every season after that is equally bad or worse.

Chris: Although I should point out, we had an episode about storytelling constraints. That it’s also true that the first season is always the easiest to plot because it has the least constraints. Unless you’re doing a prequel or a mid-quel, even. 

I think luck is unfortunately−in storytelling−a much bigger factor than we might think it is. There are lots of authors who just have one book that is much better than the others because they happened to hit on the right formula, and things worked out and were easy for them, and then they did something different and didn’t realize its ramifications and didn’t know how to adapt to it, or didn’t realize that it was different from what they were doing before, and suddenly nothing works anymore.

That’s unfortunately a repeating pattern, so I’m sure luck had something to do with it, but also constraints are also a big deal. So, if it’s easier to plot, and you can just do whatever you want, then you can solve your problems more quickly. Besides having an unreliable ally that’s on team good, another thing you can do is have somebody who is on team evil but is sympathetic to team good. 

Oren: Yeah. The unreliable evil vizier kind of character. 

Chris: Right, that way if your protagonist gets captured and thrown into a dungeon or something, you would have the lieutenant come up and be like, here, maybe I can help you.

Oren: There may be a price to pay. 

Chris: Should I trust you? Well, your alternative is remaining in the dungeon, so…. You know?

Oren: This is convenient for storytellers because you really don’t want your characters hanging out in a dungeon. It’s real boring. 

Chris: As soon as they get in that dungeon, you should show some way forward for the story to move forward. Whether it’s making friends with one of their guards or something to make it seem like they’re gonna solve this problem. 

Oren: Personally, I’m just a huge sucker for unreliable ally love interests. Like I said at the beginning, they’re hot. I’m sorry, they just are. It’s just the law. If you make them of questionable loyalty and sexy and a little bit mean? Yeah. Gets me every time. Not a hard formula to crack. 

Chris: It’s true. Elsa in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, she’s a great character that goes back and forth where she starts with Indy, betrays him, then she ends up on the bad guy’s side−team evil−but then is still kind of sympathetic, and eventually also betrays team evil to side with Indy. She’s a great character that works really well for that story. 

Oren: Then she has an unfortunate end. 

Chris: She has an unfortunate end, but it’s still one of the best downward turning points I’ve seen. There’re so many great downward turning points in the Indiana Jones movies. They’re really about people doing bad things and getting divine comeuppance.

Oren: Shouldn’t be using these spooky artifacts, man. That’s not what they’re for. Don’t look at the arc. Don’t look at it. 

Oren: They belong in a museum, or usually they belong buried somewhere. Failing that, a museum. 

Chris: Yeah, that one definitely did not belong in a museum. 

Oren: Here’s something I noticed, and this is similar to the thing I was thinking about with villains is that when I was thinking about unreliable allies that stuck in my memory, they’re all from TV. I could think of maybe one from books off the top of my head, and that’s Little Finger from the first Game of Thrones book. We know that he can’t really be trusted. He even tells Ned he can’t be trusted. He also plays up how he super cares about Catelyn, so maybe we can trust him. Spoilers: No. 

Chris: What about Dresden Files? 

Oren: It must, but I can’t think of one. They must have one somewhere, because Dresden Files does every noir trope, and noirs love the femme fatale who you can’t be sure if you can trust or not. I’m sure Dresden Files does that. Maybe Susan counts?

Chris: Oh, I know! Skull. From Lockwood and Co. 

Oren: Oh yeah, yeah. The skull. The skull’s good. Skull’s great. 

Chris: The skull is a fantastic character. Lockwood and Co. is like a ghost post-apocalypse, almost a ghost dystopia, we might say. 

Oren: A ghost-calypse. 

Chris: Ghost-calypse, where in the setting, everybody stays inside at night because there are too many ghosts roaming around and young people can sense ghosts, but past a certain age, like 22 or something, they can’t anymore, which gives a reason why we have a team of teenagers who are doing ghost control. So they’re a little ghost teen ghost control agency, and they have a talking skull in a jar. And Lucy, the main character, is the only character who can actually hear the skull because that’s her special power, and the skull is very rude, says many mean things about people, and they can’t let the skull out of the jar because there’s a ghost embodied in it that will probably just kill them all. But slowly! Over the course of five books, Lucy and the skull grow closer together and they are more pals. And the skull grows less evil.

Oren: To be fair to the skull, it does say mean things about people, but so does Lucy. Lucy is really mean. 

Chris: This is one of those unintentional characterization things where there’s too much telling about negative things about characters, and that is interpreted as Lucy being a negative person, when I think it’s that the author is a negative person. Anyway, this happens sometimes, and I don’t think it’s intentional that Lucy just thinks negative things about people, but so many people are described in really negative ways except for crushes, golden boy Lockwood, who she has a crush on. But again, I still think it’s unintentional.

But the skull, being a ghost, can sense things that everybody else can’t and has information, which is how it is with most unreliable allies, especially former villains. Obviously, we need a reason to keep them around, and it’s usually that they have really valuable information or expertise from their days of villainy that nobody else has access to.

In this case, it’s a ghost with access to ghost information, but ghosts are for the most part malicious in the Lockwood setting.

Oren: The needing a reason to keep them around thing is important. Teen Wolf got a little lazy about that sometimes with the hunter dude−Gerald, I think is his name−he was the evil leader of the hunters for a season, and they keep him around because he’s been really badly poisoned and he’s been dethroned from the leader of the hunter clan, so he doesn’t pose a huge direct threat, at least as far as they can tell. Turns out he has got some plans going on, but it’s pretty obvious that they think that they can handle him, and he has information that they need. But they also have characters like Deucalion, who is super evil and murders tons of people, but then he stops being blind.

Chris: Oh God, it’s so ableist. It’s not good. 

Oren: It is ableist, but I also need everyone to understand that beyond being ableist, it is… so silly. It just makes them look really not smart. 

Chris: He was only murderous because he was blind, and now that he is sighted again, somehow he is not murderous. 

Oren: They don’t even say that out loud. They just kind of imply it because I think they know how silly that would sound. They would sound so ridiculous. They can’t bring themselves to say it. 

Chris: I know that he murdered tons of people, even people who were his own followers in his own pack. But it’s fine. I think he’s a good guy at heart. 

Oren: Yeah, he is fine. They give him a stern talking to. They’re like, if you ever try this again, we’ll come get you. 

Chris: Meanwhile, the Druid that season gets like a permanent end, and she’s a sympathetic character! She’ll only sacrificed a few people!

Oren: Who among us! You know? 

Chris: I do think that if you were going to take mercy on one of those characters and leave the character alive, you should leave the Druid alive.

Oren: I even liked Deucalion in the later seasons when he showed back up as a good guy. He had a cool role, but man…

Chris: It’s a charismatic actor. Maybe that’s why it’s less common in books. 

Oren: I do think that’s part of the reason, but I think it’s also that TV shows have an easier time developing characters other than the protagonist. A big draw of using an unreliable ally is the character arc, which you can do in a book. It’s not that you can’t; it’s just a little easier on a TV show. So I suspect that’s part of why it’s more common. 

Chris: One thing I do think is worth mentioning with the skull is one of the things that made the skull work is the skull’s utter helplessness. That allowed the skull to be more evil because I think that is one of the tricky things, especially if you don’t have a charismatic actor. I do notice that a lot of writers have trouble creating a certain level of antagonism, making their characters a bit of jerks, without going too far and pissing off readers. You just need to make them a little bit of a jerk. Readers are really sensitive, and it’s easier to underestimate how sensitive they are and make a character much more of a jerk than you needed to.

In this case, when you have a character that is a bad person or a selfish person, making it so that they are in a fix and can’t really do any harm can be important, and the skull is able to just insult people all the time and just be overtly evil because it’s a helpless ghost inhabiting a skull in a jar. It is completely unable to do anything to hurt them. All it can do is scream at them. So it has no teeth behind anything it says. Anytime they don’t want to listen to it anymore, they have a little valve on the top of the lid of the jar. So if Lucy doesn’t want to listen to it, she can just shut the jar. And she does eventually figure out that it’s lonely, so we can use a lack of contact as consequences when it does bad things. 

Oren: We can send it to its room.

Chris: Sit in a corner and think about what it did. 

Oren: The fact that it’s such a jerk is also what makes that premise not super sad. If the skull was a better person, it would be like, oh man, this is really mean. But the skull’s a huge jerk, so who cares? 

Chris: If you have a character that needs to be a little more of a jerk and you’re having trouble with that balance of making them only slightly jerky, making them more helpless is a good balancing factor. And you could do things like, if they were an intimidating villain, like Spike for instance gets the chip in his skull that causes him pain whenever he tries to inflict harm on anyone that’s not a demon. So we have some sort of fantastical restraint on him. 

Oren: Season four is not great, but Spike with the chip in his head was a stroke of genius. That worked out super well. 

Chris: That worked out really well. And then later we had a conflict when Spike had grown enough as a person over whether he should still have a chip in his skull. And then Buffy argued that, no, at this point it’s immoral to keep it in him. We need to take it out. So that could also be an interesting conflict if you have. Some kind of fantastical constraint on a former villain, then at some point, if they redeem themselves a bit, there can be arguments. Have they actually changed or did they just behave that way because it offered them personal benefits? And can we trust them if we take the constraints off? 

Of course you can also have a character that’s like, here, I’ll make a deal with you, but I can’t fulfill my end of the deal unless you take off the constraints because I have to use my magic for this. That’s always a fun one. 

Oren: And at that point you get into the redemption arc, which is a whole other pile of discourse. We have several articles about redemption arcs. In general, you just keep in mind how bad you showed this character being and what the mitigating circumstances might have been. And there’s so many factors that go into it. With Spike, it’s one of those things where if you think about what Spike is actually said to have done it’s like, nah, he’s an irredeemably evil. But if you look at what he actually does and then compare to how long he has had the chip in his skull, it’s probably fine. It’s probably fine. Don’t worry about it. 

Chris: Look, we didn’t personally watch all of those murders, so…

Oren: He did a lot of murders, but I don’t know what the principal in season seven is so mad about. I didn’t actually see his mom die, although I did see the fight where she died at the end of it, but I didn’t see the actual death, and I didn’t know her, so I don’t know why he’s so upset. 

Chris: A more recent example that’s also interesting is Saw Gerrera from Andor.

Oren: He is really interesting. 

Chris: He’s a really interesting character. In this case, we have not really on the same team as the heroes. One of the things I liked about Andor and Rogue One is capturing the fact that just because you have a resistance doesn’t mean that everybody’s united on the resistance side. 

Oren: I loved how Saw is basically a bandit. He does like hurting the empire, but he’s also largely in it to get rich. He likes money. A lot of revolutionaries start out that way. Truly fascinating to see that on television. 

Chris: Or you could have a situation where there are two groups that could be allied with each other, but they want to go about things in very different ways. Maybe one group wants to be nonviolent, and the other one is using violent means, for instance. Or have some other disagreements where they both have a common enemy, but they actually have very different objectives. That kind of thing. In Saw Gerrera’s case, it’s really interesting because we see scenes where it looks like other resistance groups are trying to collaborate with him against their common enemy, but he does not care about maintaining those relationships. He’s happy to sabotage other resistance groups so that he can do his own thing. 

Oren: The problem with Saw was that he had one scene where he listed a bunch of different rebel groups and their affiliations, and I think one of them was Neoseparatists. And I’m like, hang on, tell me about those guys. What’s their deal? And no, we’re moving on. We don’t have time for that. 

Like, no, bring back all those random rebel groups you were talking about. I want more interesting rebel politics. 

Chris: They’ve been afraid of politics since the prequel trilogy. 

Oren: They did add some back in Andor. Maybe if Andor had gotten the number of seasons it was clearly supposed to have, we would’ve gotten more of that.

Chris: Oh yeah. So many good TV shows that would’ve been better if they’d just gotten the amount of episodes they were supposed to have. 

Oren: It’s okay, Chris. We all agreed to pretend that Andor’s sister was never supposed to come back. We have been told it was always the plan for her to be dropped and never mentioned again. That’s just how it is, and we all accept it. See, I’ve now become the unreliable ally. 

Chris: How could you! Well, if you didn’t find us too suspicious, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our most reliable allies, that is, our patrons. First is 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]

Your story follows its protagonist around as they perform feats of derring-do. But what if several years pass between each exciting moment? That’s realistic, but does it make a good story? It’s tough to recount such vast stretches of time in fiction, but this week we’ve got some ideas that might make it a little easier. Plus, we explain why ancient Greek and Roman writers are judging you.

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: Wait, wait a second. Something isn’t right here. My schedule says we’re recording for only a half an hour. And where is Mike?

Oren: You know, we should probably tell the entire story of how Mike used to be on this podcast. And then Wes used to be on the podcast. And then Bunny was on the podcast, who we hope will be on the podcast again. And how much time do you have? ‘Cause that’s gonna take like, ten hours.

Chris: Whoa! Who are those people? And we’re on episode 558?! What happened? I swear it was just yesterday that we were on episode 50. That’s not right.

Oren: This is a simpler time. Back when we recorded hour long podcasts.

Chris: Oh no. It’s like we started a podcast and then jumped forward until we were seasoned podcasters with one of the oldest podcasts still going ’cause we’re too stubborn to stop.

Oren: That’s a weird thing to think about. This podcast is so old.

Chris: This podcast is so old. I mean, I don’t know what the oldest podcast is. But at the same time, we are definitely up there in oldest podcasts. We have to be.

Oren: We’re definitely older than any of the podcasts I listen to.

Chris: Mm-hmm. So any case. We’re gonna be talking about long stretches of time and covering them in stories. And in podcasts apparently.

Oren: And in podcasts. See, ’cause I—surprising everyone I’m sure—have a bone to pick about this.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: Because I’m reading a book called The Empire of Silence, which is trying to do Name of the Wind, but as sci-fi.

Chris: Why!

Oren: And it’s so boring. I don’t get it.

Chris: That’s interesting. What essential parts of Name of the Wind is it trying to transfer to the sci-fi context? ‘Cause, I don’t know. I get the feeling that the setting is what makes Name of the Wind. Or at least the atmosphere. So what is the point?

Oren: So the essential Name of the Wind-ness that it is using is the idea of a super famous guy who did something bad telling you his memoir.

Chris: Okay.

Oren: Something that you don’t know what it was. It’s implied to be bad, but also cool. But The Name of the Wind series is called The King Killer Chronicle. So presumably he killed a king. We’ll never know now, but we’ll never know because we’ll never do the third book. Yeah. I forget what this series is called. I don’t remember if it’s called “The Emperor Murderer Series” or whatever, but it’s that premise. And like, Name of the Wind feels like it is just trying to tell us the entire life story of this character.

Chris: Aristotle says, don’t do that.

Oren: He says not to. And we have strayed from his ancient wisdom!

Chris: [laughter]

Oren: We are off the path. Aristotle, come back.

Chris: We’ve known that’s a bad idea for a really long time,

Oren: And I’ve noticed that when books try to do this, it’s always really boring and I’m not sure if that’s a requirement? In theory, my head tells me that what you should be able to do is just be like, okay, well we’re telling this part of his life. This is gonna be a little episode. And then that’s gonna be done, and then we’re gonna skip forward. And then we’ll have another little episode. And in theory, those could work independently and not be boring, but they always are.

Chris: Right. I mean, you can have an actual tension arc—and I can talk more about the difficulties and how to make it work. An actual tension arc that lasts through somebody’s whole life or longer.

Oren: Right.

Chris: You can do that. But I think the issue with this kind of Name of the Wind thing is that it’s being done instead of an actual throughline, often.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Or, okay. Does this “Space Name of the Wind” open with something equivalent to the giant demon spider threat that’s actually more interesting than the backstory only to abandon it?

Oren: No, it doesn’t. It’s actually worse in that respect, because it doesn’t have an interesting framing device that it abandons. It starts you right in the memoir with a little aside to tell you this is a memoir being dictated by somebody who did something bad. Both of them go through like, all right, this is his childhood. Now he’s a street urchin ’cause something bad happened. And it’s not exactly the same.

I wouldn’t say this book is copying or plagiarizing Name of the Wind. It’s just clearly heavily inspired by it. But both books have the problem of, there’s not really any tension. We’re just sort of watching things happen. There are maybe one or two moments where something might be tense, but mostly we’re just being told what this guy did for long periods of time. It’s almost all summary.

Chris: Look! Look, folks. Horace says that you should not start your story when Helen of Troy hatches from an egg. That’s just too early.

Oren: [laughing] Just don’t. If you won’t believe Aristotle, surely you’ll listen to Horace. Our good friend, Horace.

Chris: Anyway, but no. It is interesting that they talked about these things so long ago. I think when in Aristotle’s case, there must have been playwrights at the time we were trying to do that, and I do wonder if mythology had an effect on that. Mythology has a lot of origin stories.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And so people, instead of actually having a cohesive plot—if people were trying to be like, “Here, all I have to do is just cover one person’s life or one hero’s deeds, and then automatically we have a plot.” And Aristotle’s like, “No, you need the ‘unity of an action,’” is what he called it.

But I don’t see any reason why it has to be that way. I think in this case, the starting forward in time, it’s like using a flash forward as a hook.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: To try to make up for the fact that starting with just like, okay, well the hero was born and then started to grow up, is just dull.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Which is why before adding a flash forward to your beginning or any other little tricks, you just need to make your beginning good first [chuckles]. So do your best you can to make your beginning good. And then if it’s beneficial, you can think about something like a flash forward if that will help engagement.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But I do feel like in a lot of these cases when writers are trying to add prologues or flash forwards or other things where they’re jumping around at a time in the beginning, that can be happening because they just haven’t put in the effort necessary to make their actual first chapter engaging.

Oren: Right. The classic is the first chapter is boring, so we put a more exciting prologue right before it or something. That’s not ideal ’cause I still have to deal with this boring first chapter you wrote. I just have to deal with it a little later.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: In this case, I am trying to figure out what is the good way to try to write a story that takes place over such a long period of time.

Chris: Right.

Oren: Most of the big series that I read, they cover a surprisingly small amount of time. Sometimes it’s comical. Like The Wheel of Time covers about two and a half years. In fifteen books! And that’s a little much. But like Game of Thrones only covers—the ones that are written anyway—only covers about maybe three or four years, and those are all very, very long.

Now granted they have series bloat with all these extra POV characters that they keep adding. But the longest one I can think of that I thought worked pretty well was Temeraire, which covers about eleven or twelve years in nine books. And that seemed like a lot, and I was hard pressed to figure out how would you cover more time than that in a smaller number of books.

Chris: Yeah. No, you can. I mean, magic school ones are one of the ones that typically cover more time because we’re encompassing a school year.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: The question of ‘how’ gets into different technical issues. I think maybe you should start with ‘why’ [laughs]. Why would we do this?

Oren: ‘Why are’ though? [chuckles]

Chris: I mean there are downsides, right? It’s harder to manage tension. And then there’s disorienting time jumps. And it can cause confusion, all those things. So there are disadvantages. So what is the payoff that we get if we incur those things? You know, one is, I think with the magic school, we’ve just got important events that would realistically take place over a long time.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So we wanna do the first day of school. We also wanna do graduation.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And also school year provides a nice bookend. You know, school year ends, everybody goes home for the summer. Kind of gives it a nice start and end to the story. Some people really wanna show their character growing older.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Maybe that’s the case in this Name of the Wind and ‘Space Name of the Wind.’ We just needed a plot that would work with that.

Oren: Yeah. Well, I mean, they are clearly modeled off of memoirs. So I guess that is the motivation. We’ll go from, you know, childhood to when they did this super famous thing. Hilariously, Name of the Wind—his character when he is telling the story is supposed to be very young, which adds another weird wrinkle to it. I have no idea how old ‘space Kvothe’ is when he’s doing his memoir reciting.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I do think that for even a lot of books, if you wanna show the character growing older … Again, a series gives you a lot more time. And I think what you can do is have each book. Over some events with their own plot and you have a less mature character, grow a little more mature or learn an important lesson about adulthood in that time. And then you skip forward between books when they’re a little older, and then they have another adventure in which they learn another adult lesson.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And if you have a series of books, that’s probably gonna work a little better than having tons of time passed during each book because people expect time to fly between books already. 

Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s basically what Novik does, right? Time generally passes at what you could consider to be real time during a book, and then there’s a year between each book. Which is, you know, about how she covers that much time in nine books.

Chris: Yeah. And I would say if you can tell your story doing that, then you probably should. As opposed to ‘imagine school story,’ which has a specific reason to cover a longer period of time.

You could have a story where you want to show a whole society change. And again, I do think that books that cover several generations or hundreds of years, to the point where they have to change main character, are gonna be working at an engagement penalty. But I also wouldn’t say that we shouldn’t tell those stories, right?

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I get it, right? Like I play Crusader Kings and the idea of a story that covers the entire reign of one of my monarchs, or even my whole family line is like, oh, that sounds cool. But then I’m like, oh, how would I … how would I write that that wouldn’t be boring as hell? [laughs]

Chris: Right. I do think a lot of times if you’re not gonna have a main character, you really should make the story shorter.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: If you wanna keep up, you know, engagement. Now, I don’t know, in some cases maybe people would love your world building so much they’d stick around. But to me part of that feels sad knowing they’d be more engaged if you just had a main character. I guess you could have an immortal main character [chuckles]. 

Oren: Yeah. Just hanging out for thousands of years. I mean that works.

Chris: I suppose we could do the same thing with the series, but like, have a hundred years pass between each book in the series.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And have your immortal character see how the society changes.

Oren: Yeah, I mean that seems okay. What gets me is that—and maybe this is just me personally, I don’t know. I have a thing where when there’s a big time jump, it weirds me out that either the characters didn’t change and it feels like they should have or they did, and now it feels like I don’t know them anymore. It feels like it’s a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation. Maybe no one else feels that way.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that could be a difficulty. And of course it’s a matter of finding that sweet spot, but surely that will be a little hard.

Oren: Right. I mean, there’s extreme examples, right? Like when The Expanse does a thirty year time jump and everyone is on the same ship, in the same job with the same social dynamics thirty years later, and I am like, mmm—oh. Mmm, no.

Chris: Be careful with that monkey’s paw. ‘Cause you might get Picard where everybody has changed, but they’re all miserable and they have horrible lives, and some of them have died. 

Oren: People just seem to really like that idea. It’s like, “Hey guys, we’re doing a legacy sequel thirty years after. All the actors are way older. Well, they obviously should all be sad.” It’s like, shut the—

Chris: Yeah. I don’t think people liked the sad part. I think at least people I’ve talked to who liked Picard, it was because seeing the actors, again, seeing the characters again means so much that they just do not care about the rest of the content. Or it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they will like it anyway. Despite the content being sad. 

Oren: The most well received of the Picard seasons seems to have been season three, based on at least the reactions I was seeing. And season three is just one giant nostalgia fest. And, uh, it’s not good. If you tried to tell this story with any other group of characters you would realize how bad it is. But because it’s all the TNG characters we’re like, yeah, we like those guys. They’re doing cool stuff from TNG. Or many cases, not even from TNG, but sort of things we’ve imagined they might have done since TNG.

Chris: I think we should have just stayed with Riker and Troy and had them make pizza for an entire season.

Oren: Heck yeah. I’d watch a season of Riker and Troy making pizza. And we could find out what happened to their daughter instead of having her just randomly disappear later [chuckles].

Chris: Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. That’s what they should have done. Anyway [laughs]. Yeah. I mean, you could stretch it to the point where … if that’s what your concept supports, right? If you really wanna do, more than anything else, is to show how things change beyond the scope of one person.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Sure. Tell a story you wanna tell. I personally would recommend making it on the shorter side because I think it’s going to be harder to keep audience attention for a longer book. There’s some concepts, in other words, that are just harder to do if you don’t cover a long stretch of time. 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Whatever your goal is that you wanna express in the story. But it’s gonna come at a disadvantage. So. ‘How?’

Oren: Yeah. ‘How do now?’ We’ve covered ‘why.’ Now the other part.

Chris: Okay. So the first thing, and—this is, you know, you’re not thinking about this, Oren. I think because it’s basic. But the first thing is to not make the story entirely summary.

Oren: I don’t know. I’m pretty basic. I was thinking about that.

Chris: [laughter]

Oren: I’m mostly thinking about that because ‘Space Name of the Wind’ is mostly summary. 

Chris: We’ve read a lot of books recently that have too much summary.

Oren: Oh my God …

Chris: Including some Hugo nominated books that have too much summary.

Oren: So much summary! My God.

Chris: Or for me, I just listened to thirty hours of The Mysteries of Adolfo, which is a book from the 1700s. And back then they just had not cracked scene technology yet.

Oren: No, they didn’t know.

Both: [laughter]

Oren: We can’t judge them by the standards of our modern time. We can judge them by the standards of Aristotle’s time though.

Chris: So a lot of these older books just have lots and lots of summary because they were not thinking about that. Whereas generally today, that’s considered a bad practice to have too much summary. So if you’re gonna have a story that takes place over long stretches of time, it’s really easy to … if you’re not thinking about this, which is why I often recommend blocking out scenes when you are outlining.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Because it just gives you time to stop and think about specific events in the story that you can depict happening in real time. Instead of describing the stories as a series of gradual changes that have no specific time and place to them. ‘Cause you’re gonna have to translate it over.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: Certainly you can have summary between events, but if fifty percent of the story is summary, that is too far.

Oren: Too much!

Chris: I don’t have a specific number. Right? Certainly the way you write can make summary more or less entertaining if you have a quippy, omniscient voice that makes jokes you can probably get away with more summary, but I don’t know … ten percent. Let’s go with that. I pulled that randomly outta my ass. I have no idea [chuckles]. But the point is that you want to minimize, generally, the percentage of the story that is summary. 

Oren: In my head there are kind of two ways I imagine this working. And maybe this is too limiting. There’s one way, which is that you have your initial chapter and then you have a time jump. Which I don’t love, but I did do it in my book. So I can’t throw too many stones, but it was a solution to a difficult problem that I didn’t really have a good way to fix.

Chris: Sure. And there’s lots of story situations in which we don’t, we have to to make the story work.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Especially if we don’t have time to revamp everything. That may not be the ideal way to do things, but are what’s practical for us right now.

Oren: Right. So that’s one way I imagine it. And then the other way that comes to my mind is basically a series of vignettes with time in between them. When I try to imagine other ways of doing it, like the first half of the story is told more or less in real time. And then you have a ten year time jump in the middle. And then the rest of the story takes place ten years later. I don’t know. To me that sounds really weird and disorienting.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: Am I wrong? Am I prejudiced?

Chris: No, I mean, this is interesting because I do think that it’s about setting expectations. And when you have patterns that are for setting expectations, usually regularity is one of the things that helps.

You know, I tell people with their chapters to not vary them too much in length. You have really short chapters. You can have really long chapters, but if you have a couple really long chapters and then you have a chapter that’s like five pages, that’s just weird.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: And it’s a little off-putting. And so I think time jumps are one of those things that they automatically take some adjustment from the reader and are a little jarring. But readers can absolutely get used to them if they know what to expect. And if you have some level of regularity—all the stories, they just have one backstory beginning of some kind, or like a flash forward. And then they do one time jump and people kind of know to expect that, especially if there’s a prologue. But then it’s expected that there won’t be another one. Whereas if you get three chapters in and there’s a big time jump, that’s gonna be more unexpected. But if you have a time jump every three chapters …

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Right. But I do think it’s about more than how many words are between. It’s about ‘how does the story support this?’ So, jumping to the tension thing a little bit: so you can have problems that require a really long time to solve. They’re a little bit pressing, but it just takes somebody their entire life to solve the problem. And most of that is pretty dull.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: But, I think in many cases, if you have a story that takes place over a really long period of time, it is a bit episodic. That means that there is less tension for the whole through line and more tension for each episode that takes place at the same time period.

So let’s say we have the story opens with Sleeping Beauty style angry fairy, “Oh, you’re gonna die.” And they prophesize your doom in some way. And then you sort of jump forward and then you have an episode where the child encounters the source of doom. “Oh no, I ran into a spinning wheel.”

Oren: [sarcastic] Waaah!

Chris: “I have a conflict versus this spinning wheel.” And then you get away and you know, manage to avoid spinning wheels for five years. Then you have another episode: the spinning wheel now can chase you.

Oren: Oops.

Chris: This is very silly. But the point is that you can have a situation where it’s basically episodic. Something becomes urgent when you see it, which is what you need, okay? Because urgency is the thing you lose when you take too much time. You need some level of time pressure. And so in most cases, even if you have a magic school story over one year, you kind of have to manipulate urgency a little bit more.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: So after you do like, a time jump something happens that reestablishes urgency for a period of time which you’re gonna stay in real time for the most part. Another problem occurs that problem is urgent. We get past that child arc, we make a step forward in solving the big throughline. And that immediate problem becomes less urgent and then you can jump forward.

Oren: Right.

Chris: In some cases maybe nothing happens and that’s what establishes it’s not urgent, right? 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: It’s like, oh, well this person swore that they were gonna attack and kill me. But you know, it’s been three weeks and they haven’t. So I guess it’s not that urgent. Who knows when this will happen? We jump a year later. Oh, the attacker has finally showed up.

Oren: Yeah. That sounds obvious when we say it. And yet I’m just wondering why so many books I’ve read haven’t done that. Like, the foundation seemed like it was custom made for this premise of every so often there’s a ‘cell in crisis,’ they’re called. And every generation or so we have to deal with it. But they don’t do that. Instead, we time jump and then summarize through a problem. Is it because they don’t know how to do smaller episodes? Is that why?

Chris: Yes.

Both: [chuckling]

Chris: I mean, a lot of authors are just feeling their way through this, right?

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: The actual teaching specific things, not a lot of people are doing it, these specific ingredients for tension. So yeah, I think a lot of people are just feeling it out. Or various levels of intentionality go into different works.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: Certainly the foundation could have had more tension, but it didn’t. But there are countless, countless books that you could say the same about.

Oren: Yeah. And I was thinking about the book. The show has different problems entirely.

Chris: Yeah. The show is its own beast. I don’t even wanna start on whatever that’s trying to do. 

Oren: How do we feel about the so-called daisy chain plotting, which is what like, World War Z does?

Chris: Well, that’s basically an anthology. So it’s just episodic, but without a through line basically.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: There’s like a thematic link. If we’re talking about traditional daisy-chain, that’s the thing where you pass an object around that provides some connection. But the actual plots are entirely separate. So it is an anthology.

Oren: Right.

Chris: It’s just a chain of completely separate stories with their own tension, and then it has some sort of thematic link.

So you could do something like that, certainly. I think you can have a long-term problem to connect things a little bit stronger than a daisy-chain. You know, you have a slow moving problem that flares up periodically.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And we deal with a flare up, and then maybe the last flare up we can finally resolve the problem for good.

Oren: Yeah, that would make sense. That’s basically what World War Z does, arguably. Whether it does it well … But you know, the story starts with various vignettes about the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. And then we go through the different phases of the zombie apocalypse and then by the end we’re cleaning up the zombie apocalypse.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: An interesting choice that World War Z makes is that it’s more like the zombie apocalypse is what ties the stories together, but the stories are not really about fixing the zombie apocalypse.

Chris: No, they’re about people’s experiences during the zombie apocalypse.

Oren: Yeah. 

Chris: But those people aren’t really fixing the problem.

Oren: Yeah, except for the one episode with ‘zombie FDR,’ by which I mean he’s their version of FDR during the zombie apocalypse. Not that he’s an actual zombie. That would also be fun. I’d read that.

But no, he’s the FDR figure who comes in to, you know, be the wartime president America needs and do a ‘zombie new deal’ and all that stuff.

Chris: You know, it’s really sad that that sounds like wish fulfillment to me right now.

Oren: Hell yeah!

Chris: We’d have to deal with zombies, but we’d get another FDR as president. I’ll take it! [laughs].

Oren: Yeah, we get back FDR. He’s so great compared to what we have now, right? I mean, nevermind the redlining and the internment. I’d still take it. Whatever. We’ll take what we can get.

Chris: Yeah. So yeah, basically that’s it. You kind of reestablish something urgent. And it can be the same problem, but there’s a reason it’s urgent after the dump. We’ve said it many times before but say it again—this is basically when is it acceptable to summarize over versus when it is not?

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So you can summarize it if it follows an expected trend. So character starts at their new job and then turns out they’re decently good at it. Then you can jump forward in time and it will be expected that they will gain more experience. If you jump forward in time and somehow they’re fired, you’re like, wait, that was an unexpected change that did not follow the expected trend. How did that happen? Whereas if you show them at their new job and they’re not doing too well … That one maybe [chuckles]. I don’t know. In that case, getting fired might still feel like too much of a notable event to skip over. But you can also have, you know, a ship does a few battles, wins the battles. We skip forward in time. It’s won five more battles in the meantime. 

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Those would be notable events on their own, but since you’ve already shown a couple, it’s expected that more will happen. And so then you can skip over them. That’s the expected trend rule. And so what you don’t want is to skip forward in time and something strange and unexpected has happened, and we didn’t get to see how or why or what caused it or led to it. That’s the goal.

Oren: Alright. Well, since we’re almost outta time, I have one more strategy that you can employ if you want to tell a story over a long period of time, is first begin publishing in 1983 and then publish forty-one books up to 2015. And this will allow you to cover quite a bit of time. And also you will be Terry Pratchett.

Both: [laughter]

Chris: Well, I think everybody would just wanna skip to the “be Terry Pratchett” part.

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

Chris: If you found this episode helpful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

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

[Closing Theme]

Normally, you can’t just wish for a story to be good. But if that actually works, then watch out, because you’re almost certainly in a morality play about how something you get without any work isn’t actually worth having. That’s just what wishes are usually used for in fiction, and it’s our topic for today. We’ll discuss earning a wish, the difficulties of wish contracts, plus the one time a wish-horror movie turned into a rom-com.