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New613 – Avoiding Sags in Your PacingNovember 8, 2026

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For Fantasy & Science Fiction Storytellers

Episodes 100

613 – Avoiding Sags in Your Pacing
November 8, 2026
Every story has its highs and lows, but slower scenes can easily become a slog for readers if we aren’t careful. This week, we’re talking about sags in pacing and how to avoid them. Join us as we discuss ways …
Show notes
Every story has its highs and lows, but slower scenes can easily become a slog for readers if we aren’t careful. This week, we’re talking about sags in pacing and how to avoid them. Join us as we discuss ways to rebuild tension after your heroes solve a problem, as well as tips for arranging your scenes to keep the plot from dragging.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: I know our listeners are used to us getting right onto the topic but what if I just took a nap here? I’m pretty tired.
Oren: [snoring]
Chris: Okay. Well, Oren’s already fallen asleep. He does have a superpower that lets him fall asleep immediately, so it may be just listening to him snore for this podcast. I’m sure listeners won’t get bored. It’ll be fine.
Oren: What could go wrong? I can also talk in my sleep. That’s another power I have.
Chris: So, this time we’re going to be talking about pacing, and in particular, those inevitable sags in pacing and how we might avoid them. So, first, what is pacing? That word is thrown around a lot, and the frustrating thing is it basically means different things depending on whether we’re at the prose level or the plot level that we’re talking about. We’re going to be talking about plot pacing this episode, which is basically the pattern of tension over the course of time throughout your story.
Oren: Does it relate to movement, too? Because movement and tension are linked but they’re not always the same thing.
Chris: Movement can affect it, I think, if the movement is slow, but I think that usually if the tension is actually high, I think it’s unlikely that people would call your pacing slow just because movement is slow. And again, movement is how much it feels like you’re actually making progress on the plot. Like we’ve hit milestones on the way to reaching the ending, and it feels like our main plot is actually advancing, and that the protagonist has reached the next step, that kind of thing. That’s what movement is.
So, I think if the tension is low and the movement is also bad, that can feel even slower. Slow movement does create an overall slow feel, but if the tension is really high and the story’s actually exciting but the movement is low, I don’t think people would say the pacing is too slow. Instead, they would say other things that are more specific to movement like this feels filler or a tangent or characters keep going on side quests that kind of thing or like nothing matters. They’re noticing things that are more specific to movement. So, usually if the pacing is slow there is almost certainly some kind of tension problem or possibly engagement problems in general but almost certainly tension is going to be low for people.
Oren: Right. You can also get a reduced tension if you have other really low engagement factors. Like if you have zero attachment tension will probably be lower because who cares about what happens to any of these characters.
[both laughing]
Chris: That’s a good point because people probably associate high pace with excitement. So, let’s say theoretically we have a main character who readers just don’t like at all and this character is technically going through a lot of action sequences, but they just don’t care if the character lives or dies. They still probably wouldn’t call that slow paced so I guess there are, again, factors in perception other than tension. But I guess we can think of pacing as, you know, does it feel stuff is happening, or is the story just kind of getting bogged down and we’re starting to yawn.
The thing to be aware of with this is that just about every story has pacing sags. We want to do our best because we don’t want a couple chapters where readers start getting bored. That’s no fun. Nobody likes that. At the same time, ideal pacing, like having it from start to finish, is really tricky. So, this is a kind of situation where we’re trying to do our best but there may be places where the pacing sags a little bit and it’s just hard or it’s not worth it to try to get rid of it completely. But certainly, we want to get rid of those where we can.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, I encountered that with the current manuscript that I’m working on. There are just some parts where there are, you know, a lot of relationship things to cover or there’s just some setup that I need to do that is going to take a little while. So, the pacing is not going to be as snappy here as I would like it to be.
Chris: And with setup work in particular, I’ve personally found that sometimes, you know, especially the beginning, usually a lot of setup work happens in the beginning. And if we put it off because we want our beginning to be engaging, because that’s the place where readers are least invested and they’re most likely to quit, is in your beginning. So sometimes writers, they really want their beginning to be exciting, and they put off setup work that’s necessary, it just happens later, and what that tends to do is just move the low-paced area to chapter two. It’s called the Chapter Two Slump, or sometimes it’s Part Two Slump, depending on how your story is divided up. It’s where we had a really exciting beginning, but we still had to do that setup work we just put it off, and so then right after our exciting beginning we have a sag. That’s hard to get rid of.
Oren: Yeah, and it can often result in a situation where the beginning, while exciting, is also very confusing. Or even, it’s technically exciting but the reader doesn’t care because they haven’t been given the context that would make them care. That can also happen sometimes.
Chris: Personally, I like opening with a problem but sometimes having a problem that’s not your highest stakes big world problem oftentimes isn’t the best problem to start with. Where something that’s much smaller scope and more personal to your protagonist generally allows a little bit more time. And we don’t have to open immediately with a fight. If your story has lots of fights that still might be a good option, but you don’t necessarily have to open immediately with a fight so that you have a little bit more time. And again, just building attachment to that protagonist so that we can feel tension later is just a good investment. But every beginning is different. Beginnings are super tough as is pacing. So let me just describe for a bit what ideal pacing looks like. We’ve talked about this before, but it’s been a while.
Oren: This is the ideal pacing graph. You may not like it, but this is what Peak Tension looks like.
Chris: [laughing] Uh, yeah. So, we want a point, what we call the pointy escalator. We could call it a series of mountain peaks but, basically, it’s a staircase but the stairs are too pointy. They’re like little sharp spikes that go upwards instead of regular stairs.
Oren: Yeah, it would be very uncomfortable to use this escalator.
Chris: Because what this is, this is just a graph of what we call the story’s throughline, which is the big main plot that holds it together and then that’s divided into smaller arcs called child arcs and each one has a problem and a resolution to that problem. And what we want is kind of like a slow climb of tension where each scene is tenser than the last until we reach some kind of peak, which is like some kind of exciting conflict is going to go there. Especially if it’s an exciting action scene, we don’t want that to go on forever, after a while, the audience is going to be ready for a change. They’re going to start to get exhausted if we have super intense action for too long, and so we want to resolve that and give them some satisfaction. And so, then we have a sharper decline in tension, so it drops a bit as that arc concludes, and then we want to slowly climb again to the next peak, and then sharp dropoff that’s shorter. But we want each peak to be higher than the last, and each valley that comes right after the peak to be higher than the last.
One thing you can do to create that shape, let’s say you do have some setup scenes that you need to get done, but it’s flexible where they go, so you can put your smaller, your personal, slower, maybe they’re a little more emotional, those scenes, put them right after your action scenes or your most exciting scenes. Just by doing that placement that will help because after something exciting happens is when the audience is really ready to slow down and take a breath and that variety is really refreshing to them. So that’s when they will feel the least slow and to be the most tolerated. And then ideally after you have that slow down breather scene, you start building up again and try to have each sequence that you put afterwards be a little tenser than the last sequence and build up. That’s kind of what we want. And again, this is all relative, so some stories are going to have a lot more tension than others. This doesn’t just apply to exciting action stories. This also applies to cozies and to low-stakes lifestyle stories. This applies to Legends and Lattes and its million imitators.
Oren: Yeah, it’s just a question of scale. Some stories are going to have much higher peaks in general, but that same shape will be there. When I was editing, there was a distinct feeling I got used to where we would have something exciting happen and then the main character would go and, like, you know, have a nice, relaxing cup of tea with their friend or spend some time petting their cat or something like that. I’d be like, “Okay, this is a nice change of pace. This is nice. This feels relaxing.” And then they would go to the library and check out a book and I’d be like, “Wait, hang on. Okay, this has been going on for a little while.” And then they would go swim some laps in the swimming pool. So, I’m like, “No, this is too long. Get me back in there. I need to get back in the excitement. We’ve been doing this for too many scenes. You’re out of time.” And I got very used to that feeling just because pacing’s hard and a lot of authors really struggled with having enough things for their characters to do to keep the pacing up.
Chris: Yeah, the total tension is almost less important than the relative tension from one part of the story to the next. So, if we see a sequence of several scenes and they’re generally going down in tension, instead of going up in tension, the same scene could feel boring or really interesting depending on where it’s placed, because once the audience gets used to higher tension everything else seems more boring in comparison.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: Until they’re ready for that change. Once we reach a peak we can go down again but that should be the climax of something happening, a big step, that child arc, and them making progress. So, we continue to see it’s never even. It’s never perfectly even, the slope, if we’re climbing up. It’s never perfectly even. It’s a fractal. There’s always more little pointy escalators. There may be pointy escalators even within a scene but that’s the general pattern that we are trying to create from start to finish where we can.
So, Oren talked about one way this goes wrong, which is that we have an exciting moment and then we have too many quiet scenes after this exciting moment. I feel this is particularly likely for writers that haven’t gotten used to structure yet, and they know, “Okay, I’m supposed to do something exciting periodically,” and so then they have a random fight scene or a random action sequence or something terrible happen, but they haven’t learned to build. You know, you want to start by introducing a problem that comes with possible consequences, that threat, those stakes, to build tension, and that should be looming over the protagonist for a bit and then come to a head at our conflict. If everything’s fine and we’re just doing our swimming laps and having tea and then suddenly the bad guys burst in and there’s a big fight that’s out of nowhere, that’s not really integrated into the story structure. Instead, it’s like, “Oh, the bad guys are coming. I need to find somebody who can help me deal with that. What if I have tea with this really important person who can help me deal with these bad guys who are going to burst in in two chapters?”
Oren: Yeah, there we go.
Chris: That’s what we should see, is that there’s a looming issue, and then the protagonist is trying to deal with it, and then it comes to a head. Not like everything’s totally fine until, you know, random action sequence.
Oren: Yeah. The one that gets authors a lot is the failing to restore tension. That one is particularly insidious because a lot of authors are getting some of their cues from video games, and video games, by the nature of their medium, are more likely to get away with having you fight the same boss over and over again, and have that kind of work, because the video game can just make the boss more powerful and then you as the player just have no choice but to accept that that is the new reality because you’re interacting with it. Which is not to say that it always works. I’ve still played video games where it feels, I feel bad beating this boss again for like the fifth time.
[Chris laughing]
Oren: But it is more passable in a video game just because, you know, a video game has numbers that it can say, “The numbers have gone up” and now I have to deal with those numbers. Whereas in books, yes, even LitRPG, the numbers are fake. None of them are real. So that isn’t going to work. And so, this is a problem that a lot of books run into and is one of the reasons why we recommend you not really having direct confrontations with the villain early in the story.
Chris: Yeah, let me expand on that a bit. Oren mentioned restoring tension, just reminders of what we were talking about with that. Tension depends on this feeling of uncertainty where we have to be kind of a little nervous about whether the protagonist is actually going to succeed in avoiding disaster or not. And how likely they are to avoid problems matters to that uncertainty. So, what technically happens during most stories is that your protagonist is probably going to get some kind of wins. They’re going to take some forward, make some kind of progress. They get a new enchanted sword, they, in a worst-case scenario, beat up the Big Bad early, like Oren is talking about, or maybe it’s just they beat up a minion early. Something is going to go well for them and it’s going to make it look like this problem is easier to solve than before and tension is going to go down as a result.
And again, we talked about tension being very relative, so we’re trying to keep it going up, not going down. This typically happens a lot after, like we talked about, having come to a peak, and then tension can drop, but we don’t want it to drop too much. We can have a quiet scene for a change of pace but we still want it to feel like there’s that looming disaster that the protagonist is going to have to deal with and that it’s going to be really hard to deal with. So, you want to do something after your protagonist gets any kind of win to show actually, no, this is still going to be really, really hard. In many cases you just make the problem harder in some way. Sometimes it just works if, for instance, they got a victory but it’s now that you’ve gotten that enchanted sword you have to go fight an entire army by yourself. And if they know the next thing they have to do is going to be really dangerous, for instance, that can be enough, just so that we have another source of tension to kind of pick things up after they get a big win that makes everything look easier. So, in the case of a video game where your protagonist is just fighting the same boss again and again, we wouldn’t want to do that in a story because that history of wins is just going to make this boss look like a pushover.
Oren: Yeah, and you also need to keep in mind how you’re going to make things look more difficult because it’s very easy to fall into the trap of, well, my hero has gotten a win, and especially if it’s a new power, and it’s not just like my hero has gotten a win like, “I was able to stop my family from being evicted or something. It’s like, my hero has gotten a win, now they can shoot fire from their hands. You need to avoid just feeling like, all right, well now I’ve given the bad guys a symmetrical upgrade to maintain parity. Otherwise, it’s going to feel like your characters are on a treadmill
612 – Writing Child Heroes
November 1, 2026
There are plenty of reasons to write stories about children, the most prominent being that children want to see themselves represented in fiction. However, child protagonists come with a unique set of …
Show notes
There are plenty of reasons to write stories about children, the most prominent being that children want to see themselves represented in fiction. However, child protagonists come with a unique set of challenges, especially when tasked with solving high-stakes problems that would normally fall to adults. This week, we talk about ways to set your child heroes up for success, as well as tips for maintaining believability and getting those pesky grown-ups out of the way.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: You know, the world is a dangerous place with fascism and AI that poisons people’s minds and global criminals. You know who I think would be the best person to deal with all of this?
Oren: I can only imagine.
Chris: I think a child is the perfect person to take care of all of our problems for us.
Oren: Their childlike wonderment would see a path through these intractable problems that we all haven’t figured out how to deal with. That’s logic. That happens all the time.
Chris: Maybe we just need somebody who will believe in a solution.
Oren: Maybe the real solution was the friends we made along the way.
Chris: That’s it. We’ve cracked it. So this time we’re gonna talk about depicting child heroes and child protagonists, which comes with its own trickiness and liability that you have to work around to make your story feel believable. First of all, why child heroes? I guess we could take this from two directions. Why are they the hero in the story, which is pretty important. Also, we could talk about why we write about children.
I think one thing that I find interesting is that it used to be that age brackets felt like they were a little more flexible in what the age of the protagonist was. So if we go back to The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, for instance, which most people read when they were preteens maybe, or pretty young, the protagonist is 16, but that is not a YA book, does not feel like it was written for an older teenage crowd.
It was basically one of the books that people read when they first start reading novels on their own at like, 10 or 12. But these days, generally, traditional publishers anyway, always want the protagonist to be the same age as the audience. So whenever we write for our kids, and I know lots of writers who want to write for their children, we usually end up with a child protagonist, which in many ways is good. Kids do like that.
Oren: I’ve heard so many different claims about how publishers view age of protagonist in relation to age of reader, but at least in my own experience with YA being the one I know the best, it’s pretty rare for a YA character to be significantly older and even rarer to be significantly younger than the main demographic readership of the book. And I haven’t read a lot of middle grade recently, although the ones that I’ve edited have generally had protagonists about the same age as their target reader.
Chris: I do think kids are more interested in protagonists that are slightly older than slightly younger. To a child, another kid who’s two years younger than them is like a baby.
Oren: At least that matches my experience where when you’re a kid, you desperately want to be older because then you’ll be more mature and you’ll be able to do more stuff, and the idea of being younger is an anathema. Why would you want that? You can do less things when you’re younger.
Chris: Or they feel like if you suggest something for them that has a younger protagonist, that you are suggesting they are that young, feel like they’re being talked down to. Then we have our child heroes, and of course the first question is why is this person, why is this protagonist the one to be solving these problems?
Oren: Well, ’cause the author wanted them to. That’s actually what it says in the story. We’ve solved that problem already. That was pretty easy.
Chris: [Chuckles] This isn’t a huge problem for every story. Some stories do have a scope that’s appropriately small, where it makes sense generally for a person to solve their own problems. And we can talk later about, how do we keep their parents from intervening to help them? But if it’s a survival story, for instance, with a kid, it’s not hard to understand, “Why is this kid doing this?” That’s the tactic that both Star Wars and Star Trek took recently with their shows. Prodigy had a group of kids that were in kind of, like, a slave mining camp.
Oren: It was great. Fun times.
Chris: Right. And of course, they get free, and then they find their own ship and take off with it, and there’s just no adults. Star Wars, they were not in a slave mining camp, but they still randomly find a ship that takes them out, and then they have to figure out how to get back. And so, since we’re not trying to save the world, that certainly makes it easier to figure out why this kid is the one doing it.
Oren: Skeleton Crew was such a funny show conceptually. It was the closest we’re ever gonna get, probably, to Star Wars portal fantasy. The scenes in the kids’ starting planet look so much like a modern American suburb, or at least an idealized TV one, that you could be forgiven for thinking that this was set in the real world. It’s amazing how much they wanted this to be portal fantasy, and someone decided they couldn’t actually do portal fantasy, so they just had to make it look like that as much as possible.
Chris: [Chuckles] I think that goes back to the idea that the protagonist always has to be a perfect relatable stand-in for the target reader. And I’m not gonna say that doesn’t give it a boost often. I think that people are capable of empathizing with characters that are different from them too. But it felt like with that show, they really wanted that fact where the kids are like, “Oh, I get to go to Star Wars. I get to explore the Star Wars universe.” And so they felt they needed to make the “weird suburban Star Wars looks like middle America environment.”
Oren: Yeah the suburbia planet. Every planet in Star Wars has one environment, and this one was suburbs.
Chris: That is funny. Obviously, we can have smaller scope yet with something that’s lower stakes if they’re dealing with personal relationships, for instance. Okay, that’s not too hard. But then, of course, the larger the scope of the story gets and the higher the stakes, if it has societal importance, if it’s like the world is ending, then we start needing to get more and more robust reasons for why the child protagonist is the one to do it instead of all of the other people.
Oren: At a certain point, you are going to have to hope that your readers like the story enough to ignore the logical issues. Once your story reaches a certain level of scale, there really is no explanation that will make kids solving this make sense in most cases. There might be some very niche scenarios where there is, but for the most part if you try at that point, you’re gonna end up with the Deadly Education problem, where your story requires ever more complicated world-building explanations to try to address an inherently illogical situation.
If you’re writing Animorphs, you basically have to hope people like Animorphs, and that their desire to watch the kids have cool animal morphing adventures will cancel out the fact that obviously these kids should tell somebody, and they have many options to do so.
Chris: That definitely helps. Again, if people enjoy the premise, they’re much less likely to call it unrealistic. They’ll give it some grace. So that definitely can factor in. It’s big enough you basically need to have a child that is like a chosen one that has very special unique powers that no one else in the universe has, or in some cases strong societal importance. Like the child ruler, the king or queen or other monarch died, and there’s kind of a reason why this person is of very unique, special importance.
Oren: Animorphs does have reasons, it’s just that they are entirely inadequate if you are in the mood to question them. And the story just kind of hopes that you’re not in that mood. It’s like, “Well, these kids are the ones with the special powers, and they can’t trust anybody ’cause anyone could be a Yeerk, and they don’t want their parents to be in danger.”
They have these different explanations, and those all fall apart on even minimal examination. But if you like Animorphs and you’re having fun, why ask those questions? It has a fairly simple, straightforward explanation. We’re not spending 20 chapters trying to build a Rube Goldberg machine to explain why the kids can’t tell their parents, which would not be really useful and would be really boring to read anyway.
Chris: Let’s talk more about getting adults out of the way. I think that kids not telling parents is something that’s just gonna have to happen. I do think that we should probably watch out for situations that are a little too close to real life, ’cause we have to think about what are kids gonna take away from this, and I personally, one of my biggest pet peeves is the numerous scenes of bullying in stories where there is no thought or consideration taken to the fact that adults have a responsibility to create a safe environment for kids.
Oren: But Chris, if you tell on your bully, you’re a tattletale, and that’s actually worse than being a bully.
Chris: [Chuckles] Noo. No.
Oren: I’m going to law school now, so I know these things.
Chris: Oh, no.
Oren: [Chuckles]
Chris: Doesn’t going to law school come with some kind of disclaimer? Don’t you have to be like, “Just so you know, people, I’m not a lawyer. I’m a law student, and I’m legally required to tell you that.” Don’t you have to say that?
Oren: If anything, I think lawyers are famous for not qualifying their statements. They just make really bold pronouncements and leave immediately without specifying. That’s what I’m learning at law school.
Chris: I’ve met somebody who is relatively knowledgeable about law but not a lawyer. They always immediately spout disclaimers. [Chuckles]
Oren: Lawyers also do that. They just do it slightly differently. They’ll be like, “Yeah, maybe, but that’s not my area of law, so I can’t really comment.” Or if it is their area of law, they’ll be like, “Maybe, but I’m not familiar with the specifics of that case.” So they also do it. Turns out that it’s impossible to actually know anything. Socrates had it right the whole time.
Chris: I’m gonna have to talk about Sophie’s World, actually. Getting into things like kids should be telling their parents, number one is bullying. If you’re gonna do bullying in a story, please use thought and consideration, and don’t use it as a quick, thoughtless plot device because that’s a real thing, and schools and parents and adults absolutely should be stopping it. It should not be the kid’s responsibility to stop it. And we don’t wanna teach our kids that they should not go and tell on their bullies, ’cause they should. They absolutely should. So I’m reading Sophie’s World, which is a philosophy textbook disguised as a novel, basically.
Oren: Oh, that sounds great. I wanna do that. I want people to read my philosophy and think it’s a novel.
Chris: I feel like it’s made way too many people think that this is gonna work out for them, and I don’t think it’s gonna work out for most people. But this author is pretty good at explaining philosophy in understandable ways, although… Let’s not go into my criticisms, other than the story ones.
14-year-old Sophie in this book has a secret philosophy teacher who sends her messages and doesn’t want her to see him or really know who he is. And then Sophie decides not to tell her mother about this. Pretty sure her father signed her up for this philosophy correspondence course, so it’s not like it doesn’t come with any parental approval, but her father is away at his job. He’s not with her right now, and she’s hiding this course from her mother.
I feel like this is a nightmare parental scenario because this philosophy teacher is absolutely leading her astray when it comes to many things, teaching her to hate people who aren’t interested in philosophy and that they’re lesser and their minds are small. Teaches her to hate teachers. There was no self-awareness that this is in fact a philosophy teacher. And I don’t know, maybe the author’s strategy is whatever philosopher that he’s covering, he just goes with whatever their ideas are without questioning them and just presents them as the right answer. Maybe that’s just how he teaches.
Oren: At least his idea of what their ideas are. Lot of debates about what exactly these ancient philosophers meant.
Chris: But this poor mom, her daughter comes up and insults her for not liking philosophy and for being small-minded, and it’s like, this teacher is not having good influence on your kid. And she’s like, “You’ve been weird lately. What’s happening?” And Sophie pretends that this teacher is her boyfriend.
Oren: Oh. [Laughs]
Chris: Her boyfriend, she says, is her age, but it’s to explain why she’s really into philosophy now, instead of just telling her mother that she’s taking a philosophy course, which I don’t see why her mom would normally object to. She’s like, “My boyfriend’s really into philosophy and so I’m really into philosophy now, too.”
Oren: What a great scenario for a parent to find out, to have their kid come and tell them, “Yeah, so I’m dating someone, and they’ve been telling me all these things that have completely changed my personality and also made our relationship more hostile.” That’s great. That’s so much better than knowing it’s a weird adult guy in a correspondence course.
Chris: [Laughs] And her mother’s starting to wonder if she’s on drugs.
Oren: I don’t know, man. That seems like a bad situation.
Chris: I think with something like Animorphs where it’s like, “Well, there’s aliens taking over the Earth.” I’m a little bit less worried actually about us teaching lids not to tell their parents about that.
Oren: No, that’s too fantastical. It doesn’t really seem like it’s gonna map onto anything that kids will actually encounter.
Chris: But in some cases you can just tell the parents. In this case, there’s just no reason. I think Sophie’s World doesn’t have much in the way of conflict, so maybe the author’s trying to create more conflict with her mother by not having her tell the mother. But that comes off as very forced. Conflicts generally shouldn’t require characters to not communicate for no reason. That’s something we want to avoid.
Oren: Maybe the mom is supposed to be conservative or small-minded and anti-intellectual or whatever. That could happen. That’s not impossible. You’d wanna communicate that more clearly.
Chris: Right now she doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with this mother. [Laughs] Other than Sophie’s at home by herself a lot, which is a problem for kids for sure.
Oren: I’m just throwing darts at wall here, but it could be that in the author’s mind, this mom is a parallel for small-minded conservative parents, but the author doesn’t wanna actually put that in the book ’cause it wou
611 – Romantasy Hate
October 25, 2026
Fantasy and romance. It’s an intuitive pairing that’s been around for quite some time, but you wouldn’t know it from the discourse. People are raging about Romantasy as if it’s the end of literature, but why is …
Show notes
Fantasy and romance. It’s an intuitive pairing that’s been around for quite some time, but you wouldn’t know it from the discourse. People are raging about Romantasy as if it’s the end of literature, but why is this market trend given so much weight? This week, we unpack why this popular genre mashup sparks so much controversy, and why it’s being held to a higher standard than other fantasy works (spoiler: it’s misogyny).
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Oren, did you know our podcast isn’t really a podcast?
Oren: Oh, really?
Chris: Because it’s bad and people don’t like it, therefore it apparently just doesn’t deserve to be listed with other podcasts.
Oren: I mean, it being bad and people not liking it is the first trait of a podcast. Like, if it was good, it would be something else.
Chris: I’m altering the definition of podcast to mean podcasts I like, so pray I don’t alter it further.
Oren: Ah, yeah, I see. We’re changing the genre definition to be books that I think are good. This is the Oren core or Mythcreantspunk, or I forget whatever we called this last time.
Chris: So this time we’re talking about the backlash to romantasy. First, I just wanna be very clear, you don’t have to like romantasy. It’s okay if you hate romantasy books and don’t wanna read them. That’s perfectly fine. There are things that I find tiresome in many of them, too. However, how you respond to stories you don’t enjoy matters. It sends certain signals to other people about what is legitimate fiction and, and what’s not, and other things. And so when we notice odd patterns, it’s worth talking about, because you may not like many books, but are you arguing that all of those books you don’t like aren’t part of a specific genre, for instance?
Oren: Just trying to be normal about disliking romantasy books. There are dozens of us. Dozens. [laughter]
Chris: You don’t like something, you don’t have to write a think piece about how it’s destroying democracy or something like that.
Oren: Before you’re motivated to write a, a think piece about romantasy, I would ask, do you write think pieces about any other genre of fiction? Like, I’m not saying it’ll be good if you do, but, like, that would be my first thought. This is a thing that I see a lot where someone’s like, “Oh, man, I have to share my thoughts about this particular moral panic that’s sweeping around.” It’s like, okay, but do you have any expertise in that area other than that you’re upset about this thing that’s happening? Because if not, maybe you don’t really have much to contribute.
Chris: I think it’s helpful to notice when dislike of something starts to take a performative edge. It takes some self-awareness to realize it, but the difference is are you privately disliking this, or do you want everybody to know you dislike it? And that doesn’t mean performative dislike is always bad. I hate AI and I will also performatively hate it. I’m fine with that. I will perform my hatred of AI.
Oren: Yeah. We’re doing a little dance over here about it.
Chris: You know, that’s punching up. It’s a little weird when a specific genre, you’re performatively hating on it. You should just ask yourself why. Why is this the thing that I’m performatively hating, and is it a good reason?
Oren: [fake-astonished] Is it misogyny? Shh. It is. It is. That’s the reason. That’s not the only reason someone might dislike a romantasy book, but that is the reason why people are so weird about romantasy. I’ve been talking to my law school classmates, and I’ve had several people, almost the identical conversation, where I’ll tell them I’m a fiction editor and they will very carefully bring up that they either read or write romantasy, like they are expecting me to attack them over it. This has happened three times now.
Chris: It’s sad. So sad.
Oren: It’s because they get such bizarre reactions from people, despite romantasy being hugely successful. That’s a fun little contradiction.
Chris: And hugely popular, so lots of people feel the way they do. You know, we have people in our community, plenty of people in our community who write romantasy. We have editing clients who write romantasy. I have students who write romantasy. They are not on the fringes. They are part of our community But it does feel very much like pumpkin spice lattes in the performativeness, or like Twilight hate. These aren’t perfect books, just like Twilight isn’t a perfect book. There are many problems with Twilight. But Twilight also isn’t especially bad either. I’ve looked at lots of best-selling books. They all have problems. Twilight, among best-selling books, is not particularly flawed. It has its issues, but so do other books. Twilight has always been the book where people boldly criticize it without worrying about people getting mad at them, whereas any other popular book, people would get mad at them. And so there’s tons of Twilight hate out there.
Oren: On the bright side, the popularity of romantasy has more or less erased people telling us that our critiques of a certain book must be wrong because it’s popular.
Chris: I had hoped that we had made a dent, which maybe among our regular readers we have, criticizing popular books for so many years. But I will admit the argument that I would have against this that would just silence everybody was just pointing out that Fifty Shades of Grey sold 250 million books. If you think that, I don’t know, Name of the Wind with its, like, 10 million or something must be perfect, then that means Fifty Shades of Grey is 25 times better than Name of the Wind.
Oren: Beyond our comment section, when I look at other places discussing books, it’s not like I don’t see anybody make that argument anymore. I just tend to find that now the feeling has shifted in some of these places with this idea that actually, if a book is popular, that probably means it’s bad, which is equally wrong and silly, but people are gonna do that. Romantasy being visibly really popular – because romance has always been really popular, but in our section of internet and literary discourse, it wasn’t as visible because we just don’t have a huge amount of overlap with the romance writing and reading community normally. But now we’ve got romantasy, which is a fantasy subgenre and a romance subgenre, and it’s very visible, and it’s everywhere in bookstores with these big splashy covers. So you can’t ignore it anymore, which has led to this attitude that a lot of people have that books are worse now than they used to be, which, to be fair, has always existed, but I find it very common now. And when people say, “Why are books bad now?” They almost always mean romantasy.
Chris: One thing I do think is worth explaining to people, if you’re picking up romantasy and being like, “Oh, this book is just, like, terribly written. It has grammar mistakes everywhere,” or something, whatever genre is trending, what happens is that the number of writers writing it compared to the number of readers reading it works in the writer’s favor. And so publishers do get less picky about what they publish because it’s a less competitive category because so many people are reading it. And at some point in time, that wave crests. More people start writing it, demand often goes down somewhat. I think romantasy is here to stay, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it will stay at its current level of popularity. At some point in time, that trend is always gonna peak. But, like, whatever is just most popular, we’re gonna find traditionally published works that are particularly rough because it just takes less to break in. But that doesn’t mean that they’re all rough. Some of them are good too, and very competitive with other bestsellers. When I do my lessons posts, my lessons from bad writing posts where I critique the beginning of bestsellers, they’re usually ones that are pretty rough. It was interesting because I used to do a lot of YA because that was the books that were trending and really popular, and the floodgates were open. Now it’s really easy to find romantasy. There’s just so many popular books. A book that is not written as well has a better chance of becoming a bestseller. But that doesn’t actually say anything inherently about the genre, just the current state of our trends.
Oren: It’s wild to me the people who have been reading for a while talk about this like it’s a new thing. It’s like, were you not paying attention during the YA dystopian boom or the Tolkien-like boom or the Game of Thrones-like boom? Like, this always happens. It’s normal. It’s just a thing that goes on. But there is sometimes an issue of quality mismatch because, for example, ideally, a romantasy book would be good in all aspects, but maybe the author is particularly knowledgeable about romance and not very knowledgeable about other aspects of the story. That could happen. In that case, if you aren’t big into the romance, then you are missing out on the thing the author is best at because you’re not gonna like that no matter what. In the same way that if I write a book that’s all about airships and I give it to someone who doesn’t like airships, we might be in trouble. Maybe the rest of the book’s not as good as the airships, and then the main enjoyment factor is just not landing for that reader.
Chris: I do think with a lot of romantasy it is written by mainstream romance authors who are coming into fantasy for the first time, and I try to be a little bit more lenient because it’s like, hey, they’re new to fantasy writing. Let’s keep that in mind. It doesn’t mean that they’re not a skilled writer. I also think that, you know, some of the romantasy audience, but certainly not all of them, may be mainstream romance readers that have become interested in fantasy partly because speculative fiction has been mainstreaming. It has been getting more and more popular. I still remember the old days when there was [grumpy old woman voice] only one movie in the theaters at a time that was speculative fiction, and you had to go see it because it was the only thing available. [normal] Or back when people thought consuming fantasy and science fiction was, like, really weird, and it’s not true anymore. And with the big Lord of the Rings movies and Game of Thrones and all of these things, it’s just, like, opened up the door for a lot more people to become speculative fiction fans, and I think that’s great. But sometimes there may be kind of a transition period where we have some romantasy works. They don’t use the wordcraft conventions that a typical fantasy would. They’re more likely to have anachronistic words in them and things like that. Certainly not all of them. That happens, but it’s good. It’s good for speculative fiction to get bigger and more popular. And some of those mainstream romance readers may start picking up fantasy books that aren’t primarily featuring romance because now they’re more open to fantasy in general.
Oren: One of the things I occasionally see people argue when they try to argue that romantasy isn’t fantasy is this idea that there’s no crossover between the readerships.
Chris: To me that feels very much like somebody when they think of fantasy readers is only thinking of men. And I’m not saying, like, men can read romance too, and some men do absolutely read romantasy. But at the same time, like, there has always been romantasy, we just didn’t call it romantasy before. There has always been books that were romantasy as we would call it today before the label happened. They have always been included in fantasy, and there’s always been people who liked them, more likely women than men, but again, people have all sorts of different tastes. This idea of a fantasy reader who won’t read romantasy just feels like we’re only thinking about men, and we’ve kind of edited women out of the picture.
Oren: It’s just weird for me to imagine someone being like, “Okay, so you like romantasy because you really like fantasy and you like romance in it.” Well, I mean, Wheel of Time has lots of fantasy and lots of romance. Neither of it is very good, but you know, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people. It’s hard for me to imagine that if your tastes are calibrated to like romantasy that there is a super low chance you might like The Wheel of Time. There’s a lot of interest overlap there.
Chris: And there’s been some, again, Naomi Novik has done Uprooted, for instance. It has a strange detour where the protagonist goes where the love interest isn’t, which you wouldn’t normally do in a romance, but otherwise it just feels like straight up romantasy. Novik is a fantasy writer. She’s not known for mainstream romance. She’s known for writing fantasy.
Oren: The whole it’s not fantasy claims are just so funny. I hear people say, like, it barely has any fantasy in it. What does that mean?
Chris: What books have you been reading?
Oren: Explain. Explain what that means.
Chris: The story is full of dragons. How is that not having fantasy in it? I don’t understand. Romantasy has tons of fantasy tropes everywhere, all the time.
Oren: Sometimes if I press, I can get them to retreat back to, okay, it has fantasy elements, but, like, the world-building’s not very good. Either it doesn’t make sense or it’s too complicated or, in the case of something like Fourth Wing, it, like, feels like a modern setting with a very thin fantasy veneer over it. But again, that has happened with every genre. That’s not a romantasy-only problem. It’s really weird to act like that is a reason to say it’s not fantasy. It just logically doesn’t make sense.
Chris: I’m sure there are plenty of non-romance fantasies that also have fairly surface-level world-building. It varies. I mean, there are some romantasy books that, you know, their focus is just not on the world, and they have world-building that is just meant up to set up the fantasy conceits of the plot and the romance and just do what’s necessary. And that just keeps the cognitive load of the story from being too high and lets the writer focus where they want. And a non-romantasy fantasy could absolutely do that too, and it’s a fine trade-off. The story is still heavily dependent on fantasy tropes. Again, not every story has to be, like, max world-building. There’s room for all kinds.
Oren: To invoke a common frenemy of the pod, Ursula K. Le Guin, she had an essay like a billion years ago complaining about how a lot of fantasy books she was reading didn’t sound like fantasy. They sounded too modern. So, like, this has always been a problem. This is not a new thing. Romantasy didn’t invent it, nor is it universal across romantasy. Whatever you might think of it otherwise, if you go read The Jasad Heir, which I read recently, you can’t accuse it of not having a lot of really intricate fantasy world-building. You might not like it for other reasons, but you can’t say that it’s got the Fourth Wing problem. Are we gonna say that one counts but Fourth Wing doesn’t? Come on.
Chris: And of course, the other thing we see is a bunch of fantasy readers who don’t read romantasy being annoyed that because romantasy is popular, it’s like filling up all the listings and getting on all the shelves, and they feel like it’s in the way of the books they like to read. That’s reasonable. That’s just a problem with, like, filtering on a website or categorization, or shelving. I feel like for any other genre, we wouldn’t take that and then leap to romantasy isn’t fantasy. You know, if LitRPG gets really popular and starts filling up all of the listings and shelves, are we gonna say that LitRPG isn’t speculative fiction because, like, we’re annoyed that it’s there?
Oren: I’m gonna do that. I’m already prepared. I’m prepared to go complete 180 and be like, “I, I know I said that you can’t disqualify a genre ’cause it
610 – Making Sherlock and Watson Work
October 18, 2026
Sherlock and Watson are an iconic duo, so it’s no surprise many writers want to replicate their dynamic in their own stories. However, getting this pair right requires answering some tricky questions. Should …
Show notes
Sherlock and Watson are an iconic duo, so it’s no surprise many writers want to replicate their dynamic in their own stories. However, getting this pair right requires answering some tricky questions. Should you use a Watsonian point of view? How do you make sure both characters spend enough time in the spotlight? And how do we make Sherlock feel like Sherlock without sacrificing too much likability? Find out on this week’s episode!
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Oren: And welcome everyone to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren…
Chris: …and I’m Chris.
Oren: So Chris, I can tell you went to UW for college. Do you wanna know how I know?
Chris: Hmm, how do you know?
Oren: Well, I’ve cleverly put together some clues. Once I saw you smile at a cute husky. Two, you live somewhere in the vicinity of Seattle. And earlier you laughed at my joke about calling the main commercial road in the U District The Way instead of The Ave. And as a result, you must have gone to UW. There is no other set of circumstances that would fit those facts.
Chris: Hmm. Well, I did go to UW, and since you only revealed all of these clues once you’d already come to the correct conclusion, your deductive process must be brilliant.
Oren: Yeah, that’s just logic.
Chris: Or is it abduction?
Oren: I don’t know.
Chris: I always use the word deductive for just coming to a logical conclusion, but technically it’s a type of logic.
Oren: Yeah, I read an article about this, because if you hadn’t guessed by now, we’re talking about how to write a Sherlock/Watson dynamic. And I read an article a while ago that insisted that what Holmes does is not actually deductive reasoning. It’s actually something else.
Chris: Like abduction…
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: …or something.
Oren: Honestly, I couldn’t remember. I should’ve looked that up before the podcast started, but I didn’t, because I’m not the world’s greatest detective. [Chris laughs] And ultimately it’s not important to the joke I was making, which is that when Sherlock does that thing of like, “Oh, well you must have been X because of Y, Z, and A,” the problem with what he’s doing there every time is that he is naming a set of facts which could fit with a character having whatever trait or backstory he suggests, but it could also suggest other things. Like it would also fit with other explanations, and he just always happens to be right.
I especially noticed it when he did this with Watson the first time they meet and he lists off a bunch of things about Watson’s military deployment, but like those things could reflect any British military deployment in a number of their colonies. So somehow he knew exactly where Watson had been, even though those facts could have applied to people from a bunch of different places. Hmm.
Chris: Yep. The trick is that you don’t show your logic in process, so people don’t have any time to scrutinize it.
Oren: Yeah. If you’re trying to do something that resembles Sherlock and Watson today, that is one of the reasons why just writing Sherlock and Watson the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did is not on our list of recommendations. Because Doyle uses Watson’s viewpoint to disguise the fact that Holmes is actually not a very good detective, and that he only really solves mysteries because he gets access to clues you don’t get. Therefore, he is, you know, able to come up with these amazing deductions. And even then, we have to just depend on Doyle to make him correct most of the time. And that would be way more obvious if you were in Sherlock’s perspective.
Chris: Yeah. It would also be easier for us to just guess the answer if the clues were actually good clues…
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: …that would lead us to an answer. So it would be harder to preserve the surprise of the mystery. Not impossible, I will say, but certainly harder than if we just don’t tell the reader any clues that the protagonist is getting.
Oren: Right. And of course, the other reason that we talk about a lot is that giving the viewpoint to someone who isn’t your main character is always going to be extremely risky at best, because you’re building attachment in the wrong place. If this person is the POV character, and the audience likes them, then you’re building attachment to someone who isn’t the main character, which can build resentment when the main character goes on and does all the main character stuff. Or alternatively, they don’t really care about this POV character, at which point you’re wasting one of the biggest advantages that prose offers over a film story.
Chris: Yeah. Again, just to recap why it’s so important for the viewpoint character to be your main character. First of all, again, we’re trying to develop attachment and emotional investment in this character. And we want emotional investment in the main character because they are the most important. You know, obvious there. One thing that builds attachment is familiarity and exposure, and the viewpoint character is just gonna have the most page space and the most words.
And besides that, generally the viewpoint character, we are deliberately placing the reader in their shoes. They experience things as that character experiences them, so we are basically doing everything in our power to encourage the reader to empathize with our viewpoint character, because that’s the perspective that they view the story from. So it’s just a huge bonus to attachment. And of course, the problem is that what the author is attached to is not necessarily the same thing as the reader.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And so when you have a character, and again, we see this in other circumstances too, not just in mysteries, although it happens in mysteries a lot because of Sherlock, that sometimes writers want to present their main character as somebody who is mysterious.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And view it from the outside, usually because they wanna give that person lots of candy.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Like, see how cool they are. But that really kills the emotion. There are exceptions, but by default, we want the readers to feel some of the emotion that the main character feels. Again, it helps with that bonding, but it also just creates a more powerful experience if there’s some emotion to the story. So if they’re mysterious, they’re also very emotionally flat. Replacing emotion with mystique–and oftentimes this isn’t actually a very good trade-off when it comes to the main character. For side characters it works fine, because we already have our emotional anchor in the main character. But for our main character, they’re not gonna be as attached to that person. That person may be cool, but that’s not the same thing as being emotionally invested in them and wanting to root for them.
Oren: Hilariously, Holmes and Watson are an example of a story type that actually works better in film than it does in prose, despite it originating in prose. So I find that very funny, because in film you don’t have to deal with all this POV stuff, because there is no POV. It’s all the camera, babyyy. So it doesn’t matter that we’re not seeing inside Sherlock’s head, ’cause we wouldn’t do that anyway.
Chris: Yeah, although the BBC Sherlock still managed to have this problem.
Oren: I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are still bad Sherlock adaptations. But at least in theory it’s a lot less of an issue.
Chris: I think in the BBC Sherlock, even though we didn’t have a character viewpoint, we had some of the same dynamic where Watson was the relatable character that we understood, and Sherlock was presented as very eccentric.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And also sometimes kind of a jerk. Which again, typical for Sherlock, and a character you’re less likely to empathize with. And I got really frustrated with that show for making Watson feel too ancillary, and giving Sherlock all of these action hero moments that I felt should go to Watson instead. That balance between who your audience is actually attached to as a character, and which character is actually getting all the spotlight and all the moments of glory in the story, you want those things to align. You want your audience to be most attached to the person who’s also getting the spotlight and is saving the day, and when those things are misaligned, people start resenting the character that is getting too much spotlight. And so I quit that series because I just hated Sherlock after a few episodes.
Oren: Yeah, he’s really annoying. I get it. The show won’t stop giving him candy, and oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? He’s like Rick before Rick, where he’s mean to people, but it’s okay because he’s really smart and they deserve it.
Chris: To be fair, there are some audiences that really love candied characters.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Especially when they’re men, unfortunately.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true.
Chris: So there is a taste difference here, but if you can get all of your readers on board, that’s obviously better. So that’s why this sort of division where we have one character that seems to be the magnet for relatability and empathy and getting attachment, and another character that is doing the fancy cool stuff is just not really something that we should be doing. And I think most mysteries are doing it mostly because Doyle did it.
Oren: Yeah. Getting back to the idea of how might you do something like this in a written work, with a book and everything. The most obvious answer is you make Sherlock your POV main character. Or your Sherlock analog. Probably he’s not gonna be called Sherlock–although you could just call him Sherlock, public domain and everything.
But you gotta be careful with this one, because chances are that you are gonna run into the problem that every super-brilliant-detective story runs into, which is that your plot is about solving mysteries, and if you channel Sherlock as he has been portrayed in other versions, you have basically introduced a character whose power is solving mysteries. And that’s not ideal in the same way that, like, if you have a story about mountain climbing, you probably wouldn’t give a character the superpower to climb mountains. That just takes all the effort out of it. It’s not fun anymore.
Chris: Yeah. Sherlock, as he’s designed, being really good at solving mysteries is what he has going for him. Otherwise, he’s just a jerk.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: [laughing] So he kind of needs that, so you need to really remake the character, and it wouldn’t really feel like Sherlock anymore.
Oren: Yeah. So there are a few ways you can do this. You can do the just scaling him down, which some people do, and I think that can work fine. I think having a Sherlock who is a clever detective, but not playing nine-dimensional chess in his mind palace level of brilliant, is totally doable, and if he has a sidekick who is a little more relatable and gets on with people better, people will understand what you’re talking about, right? They’ll get it. And so I think that can work. If you want to really drag out how brilliant this mystery guy is, then you’re gonna need to either make your mysteries really beefy, really robust mysteries so that he has a lot to solve for the entire story, which you can do, but is challenging.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, maybe if you reveal it slowly. But after a while, mysteries can become so elaborate that they start to feel implausible and unbelievable.
Oren: Right. Can your readers even remember what’s going on? That was my problem in Three Parts Dead, which is a book I really like, is that at the end they have to do this big explanation of the mystery because there’s so many moving parts that I was just like, “What?” By the end I was like, “What is going on?” And it more or less made sense once you put it all together, which is more than I can say for some stories like that, but it was still not fun to have to, like, pause the story for 20 minutes to get an explanation of the mystery.
The other option, and this is arguably more reliable and has less dependence on just a completely brain-melting mystery, is that you put your brilliant Sherlock character into a scenario that they have no context for, like a complete fish out of water type setting. And this is one of the reasons why Sherlock versus magic is popular as a concept, because assuming that Sherlock doesn’t know anything about magic, and suddenly you introduce magic to Sherlock, then that’s like a whole thing he’s gonna have to figure out. And that can slow down his magical mystery solving abilities long enough for the story to happen, and that is probably your most reliable way to go in this scenario.
Chris: Or Sherlock walks into some political intrigue and has to figure out who each faction is and what their deal is.
Oren: Yeah, you take him into something he’s not familiar with, as opposed to, like, your standard bank robbery type scene or something
Chris: Technically, you can have Sherlock deduct most things, but then withhold an important clue for later so he just doesn’t get anything immediately. But I think that’s always really tricky. If you give readers too much information too early, then they can guess the answer, et cetera.
Oren: Right. That could also be frustrating for movement. If it feels like he’s just not getting the clue he needs, then it doesn’t feel like the mystery is progressing. That’s why I was suggesting that if you have, like, a really robust mystery, because then he can find a clue, and then find another clue, and, you know, so and so. But that leads back to our everything’s super complicated problem. And in this scenario, your Watson just has to follow normal side character rules, which is that they have to have a reason to be there, and they have to contribute and, you know, be distinctive and all those normal things. But you don’t have the contradiction of the side character POV anymore.
Chris: Basically, Watson generally should not have a viewpoint.
Oren: Right, in this scenario.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, you could still get away with occasionally, if the two characters are in different places, throwing in a Watson POV scene or chapter. But you would definitely want to give Sherlock more page space and screen presence so that people know which character is supposed to be the star of the story.
Oren: Right. You’re probably gonna wanna give this POV Sherlock, assuming that they are super brilliant, some spinach, otherwise they’ll be insufferable, except with the people who really love super candied characters and identify with them. But that’s probably not the entire audience that you want. So then, of course, the alternate is to try to make Watson work as a main character.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Which is, in my mind, doable, but I don’t know if I’ve yet seen it done. The closest I can think of is The Mimicking of Known Successes, which employs kind of a hybrid approach where Watson and Sherlock are co-protagonists, and it has scaled Sherlock down, so she, in this case, is less, you know, playing nine-dimensional chess and immediately solving everything the moment
609 – Reader Meta Knowledge
October 11, 2026
Stories spend a lot of time delivering information to readers, but what about the knowledge readers bring in from outside the story? Are genre-savvy readers likely to see your shocking reveal coming? Will …
Show notes
Stories spend a lot of time delivering information to readers, but what about the knowledge readers bring in from outside the story? Are genre-savvy readers likely to see your shocking reveal coming? Will spoilers for such twists ruin their experience? How much real-world logic are storytellers expected to abide by to avoid breaking immersion? Find out this week as we discuss reader meta knowledge!
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Oren, if I said something shocking right now, do you think our regular listeners would believe it?
Oren: You know, after 608 episodes, I suspect they would not.
Chris: Mm, am I not trustworthy?
Oren: I think it’s been pretty well established that you’re a lying liar who lies.
Chris: Hmm, I don’t know. I think our listeners are just cheating cheaters bringing in outside information to tell how sincere I’m being.
Oren: Yeah, they can’t be using the past 608 episodes against us, so that’s rude. They gotta judge us as completely new podcast hosts every episode.
Chris: Every episode.
Oren: It’s the only way it’s fair.
Chris: So, this time we’re talking about meta knowledge and how it affects stories. So, first of all, I have made up another term, sorry.
Oren: Yeah, well, I knew you were going to, cause I know you pretty well. I could guess that was gonna happen.
Chris: [laughs] After 600 episodes, people are probably used to me making up terms. So yeah, I’m talking about any knowledge or information that comes from outside the story, as in outside the story world, that is canonically supposed to be happening in the fiction.
Sherlock fans love to refer to this as a Doylean or Doylist perspective as opposed to a Watsonian perspective. They’re very proud of those terms. I’m just saying them right here because if I don’t, somebody in the comment section will be like, Oh, those are called Doylist and Watsonian.
And I know. It’s just those aren’t very intuitive terms, so I’m not gonna use them, sorry. But I know they exist, and they could also be used for this scenario.
Oren: We should go the Save-the-Cat route and name it something just completely absurd sounding that’s memorable but very silly. We could call it Dog Tail in the Sky.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: And then have a little anecdote about how one time I saw a cloud that looked kind of like a dog tail but actually it had an eye, and that made me think of knowing things. And there, that’s why it’s called Dog Tail in the Sky.
Chris: Maybe Snyder was trying to make his terms memorable and evocative. I don’t know, or maybe he just wanted to trademark them or something.
Oren: If you make it sound silly enough, it is memorable. I don’t think that’s a good thing, though. I don’t think that’s the right way to make someone remember your term.
Chris: Yeah. We want it to be memorable, but also easily connected with the concept because otherwise we could remember one or not the other. Want them to kind of go together. And if you think about Doylist versus Watsonian, if you stop and be like, Okay, so the author is Doyle, the character is Watson. There is a link, but I have to stop and think about it every time.
Oren: Right. I have to remember which one is which. I have to remind myself that this isn’t the perspective of Emma Watson, famous actress. It’s a whole thing.
Chris: It’s a whole thing. Anyway, but it’s definitely worth talking about outside knowledge, the knowledge we get in the real world, knowledge we get from other stories, knowledge we might have about the production, that kind of thing, and how it affects the experience, or doesn’t.
Oren: Well, there’s the most obvious one, which is spoilers. That’s a kind of meta knowledge, cause you know what’s gonna happen and the story didn’t tell you yet.
Chris: Yeah. That’s a big one, and really interesting. They don’t affect tension as much as you’d think, and this comes up a lot, especially when I’m talking about the uncertainty requirement for tension, which is basically about the likelihood that the threat will come to pass or the bad thing, the stakes will happen. So, people will ask me, Okay, what if the audience already knows what the ending is?
Most of the time they really do, because most stories end happily. So, a lot of times when we’re reading or watching something, we already know it ends happily if it does. Not all stories do, but enough of them do, [and] certainly in some genres it’s expected they will. So, in many cases we absolutely have an idea of what the ending is, but yet we still feel tension.
Oren: Right. Which is not to say that you should go around spoiling everybody and then be like, Ah, but it won’t affect your tension enjoyment that much! Cause first of all, rude. But there are other aspects that someone might not want to know the ending ahead of time. This isn’t a gotcha attempt, it’s just a description of how people engage with stories.
Chris: Yeah. There are some interesting studies. There’s a 2011 study from the University of California suggesting that spoiling a story actually improves the experience. But things like that need to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt, because we’d have to look at the specific stories they were testing, what engagement factors they were using.
And also, one of the interesting things about [that study:] it has a 4:1 ratio of women versus men in the study. And I’m not necessarily saying that people would have a different experience based on gender, but it’s always possible. This might just be toxic masculinity, but it’s pretty uncommon for men to say that something is too tense. Some women love tension, some women love horror. There’s never gonna be any general rules. But we don’t know without a lot more study.
But it does speak to the fact that if you spoil something, it doesn’t automatically just all fall flat just because you know what’s gonna happen.
Oren: Well, you know what they say, women do be discussing meta-knowledge. That’s the thing I always say in my observational comedy routine. The fellas know what I’m talking about.
Chris: [laughs] I think tension might be less affected than other engagement factors, just because tension is a very vicarious experience that really requires buying into the story because we’re worried whether a threat will happen to a character, right? When there’s tension in the story, the audience is never threatened, right?
Oren: Hopefully.
Chris: So, to even buy into the fact that there’s a threat, you have to buy into the story and make the story feel real. And that’s one reason why we’re not really thinking about the real world at that point. I think that’s one reason why if you have something that actually happens in the story that affects the likelihood that the hero will, for instance, survive, that has a much stronger effect than somebody telling us the hero’s gonna survive at the end.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true.
Chris: But I’m not sure that’s true for everything. In particular, I do wonder about threats that are mysterious because if you know what the threat is, if it’s no longer cloaked by fog or what have you, I feel like that might be more likely to change how that threat is interpreted.
Oren: Yeah, we talked about how curiosity is a lot more vulnerable to spoiling than tension is in general, and that feels like that would line up pretty well.
Because with curiosity, that’s not as vicarious. Like, you are wondering what’s happening, and so having that spoiled for you is gonna be more disappointing. So, I could believe that if there’s a mysterious threat, then there would be some crossover there.
I’ve also found that I find it pretty annoying when the story spoils itself in a way that is different than if someone tells me what happened.
Like mild spoilers, ironically, for the anime Goodbye, Lara. But one of the episodes has this weird thing where if you forgot to watch the post-credit scene of the last episode, it opens with what appears to be a flash forward of a new character showing up, a very mysterious new character. And I wanted to see that character appear in the story. I didn’t want to be told this character was gonna show up later, and I really resented that for a while. And then I figured out the reason this was happening was that I hadn’t watched the previous post-credit scene, and then I resented that for a while. And still do, cause post-credit scenes are a bane on television, and they should be banned. Hot take.
Chris: Not having adequate information was definitely the result of that. We missed an after-credit scene, and then suddenly the start of the next episode was really confusing. And instead of appreciating the experience that scene was supposed to give us, we spent it being like, What’s going on? Are we watching the correct episode? That kind of classic immersion break where we can’t really immerse ourselves in the story anymore cause we’re wondering what’s going on. And so yeah, that kind of experience was ruined.
I think in many cases, the thing is audiences also aren’t picky usually about how they get the answers to mysteries. So, I’m not sure to what extent if they get a spoiler for the answer, you know, maybe they’ll be really disappointed, or maybe it’ll be like, Oh, that’s what it is!
I’m not sure how picky they would be about getting the answer outside of the story because they’re just not picky about how they get the answers to mysteries inside the story, assuming we’re talking about just curiosity here and not tension anymore.
But the delivery of tension, of course, is important. And it doesn’t seem to be as affected as you would think by outside knowledge because we’re just focusing super hard on buying into the story and what’s happening in the story.
Oren: What about plot twists? Where does that fall on this question of knowing it’s going to happen ahead of time?
Chris: The question is what are you trying to achieve with a plot twist? If the goal is to shock the audience and they know it ahead, I do think that some of that shock is gonna be gone. But I don’t know, that’s not necessarily worse.
I sometimes wonder if storytellers like shocking their audience because it creates discussion that gives them free advertising and not because it’s a particularly good experience. I would expect some of that to wear off. But at the same time, if it’s a twist, a lot of the impact of the twist is still gonna be the same. For instance, if it’s a tense twist, I would expect that tension to still be there.
Oren: Yeah. There’s of course the inverse of all this because we’re talking about having knowledge of where the story is going because someone told you or whatever, but you can do the reverse, which is that you can guess where the story is going, not based on any in-universe knowledge, but just because you know how stories work or are perhaps genre-savvy, and so you can figure out, like, Okay, I think I know where we’re going with this because I’ve seen this before.
The most obvious example is guessing whodunit not based on any clues the characters have found, but by my method, which is to look at, okay, who’s had significant either screen presence or other narrative presences? It’s possible that it could be someone we’ve heard about, but we haven’t seen directly. That’s also possible. And then you compare that to the list of who-have-we-already-suspected, and whoever has yes for the first one but hasn’t been suspected yet is still in the suspect pool.
And you can then apply Do you know anything about the author?
More significant spoilers for Trade of Blood. I guessed it was Trecheo pretty early because he was, like, one of the last characters left who had significant screen time who we hadn’t suspected. But for a while, I wondered if it might be Dyn’s sister for edginess because Robert Jackson Bennett likes to be a little edgy sometimes, so I thought maybe that might be what we were going for. But towards about the last third, I was like, Nah, it’s definitely Trecheo. just because there’s no one else left it could be.
Chris: Yeah. Do you find that… First of all, are you intentionally doing this process of elimination, look at who the culprit is? And if so, does it improve your experience, or does it make it worse?
Oren: I mean, I mostly do it when I’m bored. And I was bored in the second half of Trade of Blood because all the stakes were gone, and it was just like, Yeah, I guess we’ll get him eventually. We have infinite time now cause he killed everyone he was trying to kill, so whatever.
Chris: I still remember when we were watching Teen Wolf. Teen Wolf has a mystery villain every season, and you guessed who it was, but there was no sign or any clues or any likelihood of this person actually being the mystery villain. It was just the only person left, and that was really unsatisfying, but it was unsatisfying because it didn’t actually make sense for this person to be the villain.
For a satisfied curiosity arc, you want it to be surprising, yet click into place. And if you just take the person who is like, Nobody suspects the dog, but there’s no clues that it was the dog.
Oren: And then you have to spend 15 minutes explaining how the dog did all this because it’s so silly, and then it doesn’t make any sense, and so you have to try to bludgeon the audience into accepting that it happened.
Chris: To be fair, in most cases, if the readers guess who the culprit is, but it’s still something that would be surprising and plausible—and it’s not super easy to guess but they still manage to guess it—usually they’re too busy being proud of themselves for guessing to feel unsatisfied that they didn’t get a surprise when it was revealed. And I don’t know, maybe they got that sense of surprise when they guessed it. Maybe they’re like, Oh, mind blown, I know who it is! and that gave them their satisfaction already. Maybe that’s what happens.
Oren: I think it’s probably different for different people. For me, it’s a weird set of requirements where if I’m guessing purely on meta knowledge, then usually I’m doing it cause I’m bored.
But if I’m not bored, maybe it’s between episodes of a TV show or something, that doesn’t really bother me for the most part. It’s like, okay, I recognize that there are only so many ways to tell a story, and the alternative to this is for the story to be bad. If the story is bad, it’s hard to predict cause it could do anything.
Chris: Right. That’s the thing about Bennett’s Anna and Din series, is that I can usually predict the culprit before the culprit is revealed. At the same time, I prefer that rather than having a completely nonsensical culprit pop out of nowhere.
Oren: Right. But then if I’m guessing based on clues, I feel a lot more clever at that point. I don’t really feel clever for guessing who it is based on screen time and the fact that we haven’t suspected them yet. That’s not clever. That’s just the fact that I’ve edited for a while.
Chris: It doesn’t feel as satisfying. That’s not the clues we’re looking for. We’re looking for in-story clues for that click-into-place feeling that we get with a good answer to a mystery. We need to have some story groundwork for that.
Oren: And of course, the danger zone is when I have figured it out either through my meta knowledge or through clues, and it feels too obvious. It feels like the characters should also have figured it out, and that’s hard for me to intellectually define when tha
608 – Are We The Baddies?
October 4, 2026
Hey guys, are we the baddies? Because the Lord of Shadows sure is asking us to kick a lot of puppies. This week, we discuss characters who realize they’re on the wrong side of history and where to go from …
Show notes
Hey guys, are we the baddies? Because the Lord of Shadows sure is asking us to kick a lot of puppies. This week, we discuss characters who realize they’re on the wrong side of history and where to go from there. What do such characters need to do to redeem themselves? How bad can they be before readers stop believing that they can change? What circumstances make such a radical change of heart realistic? Find out with us on this week’s episode.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Weed Eater. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: Now, as the captain of the HMS Orphanage Burner, I am proud to command an elite crew of puppy devourers. Surely, we are on the side of justice. You can tell because our courthouse says, “Guilty until proven innocent.”
Chris: Hmm. Very justice.
Oren: Uh-oh. Actually, wait. Maybe we’re the bad guys in this scenario. Is that possible, do you think, our very subtly named side could be the bad guys?
Chris: But see, if you didn’t eat puppies, then there would be puppies, and clearly that’s for evil.
Oren: Yeah, that just makes sense.
Chris: Maybe all good and evil is relative, man.
Oren: Yeah, we just need a balance, a balance between good and evil.
So today we are talking about heroes realizing that they are “the baddies” — AKA that one Mitchell and Webb skit from 2006. Which is funny because that, that skit is about two SS officers realizing they might be evil because they have very evil looking uniforms with skulls on them. And don’t get me wrong, that particular uniform does make for a very good, intimidating-looking villain. But it is worth noting that the skull as a military icon is not unique to the Nazis. It was actually quite popular–and it became less popular after World War II because of the Nazi connection–probably because soldiers kill people, and so a death symbol seemed kind of obvious.
Now, I’m not suggesting that things like the Totenkopf are not evil. They absolutely are. Don’t run for Senate if you have one tattooed on you.
Chris: Oh, gosh.
Oren: But I’m pointing out that historically, one of the reasons we think of them as symbols of evil is because of who they are associated with and so it adds a little bit of irony to that skit.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Interesting. The more you know.
Oren: Yeah. Dun, dun, dun, dun. Now, I actually tried to write an article about this, about having heroes who start off on Team Evil and then realize they’re the bad guys, and I realized I couldn’t because it’s actually not really a specific thing. It’s just basic character karma.
And, so once you realize that, it’s hard to write an article about it because at that point the only thing left to talk about is the bazillions of possible permutations that it could take in the story. But what else are podcasts for, if not talking about the bazillions of different permutations it could take inside a story?
Chris: Yep, yep, that’s where the podcast conversational mush really comes in handy.
Oren: Yeah, good. Thank you for the format, podcasting. But, the problem… the reason why this is something people think about is that if they want their hero to start on Team Evil, the problem is that they are on Team Evil, and that’s Bad.
And it’s not a problem for villains because it’s assumed that villains will be defeated at the end, and then when they are, the bad stuff isn’t really a big deal. Now, you do occasionally get stories that don’t have sufficiently bad things happen to their villains and that’s frustrating, but it’s not a huge problem. For one thing, most authors just kill the villain because that’s simplest, and that’ll get the job done. So, in this case, the author’s desire to tie up loose ends matches up with the karmic requirements of the story.
But in this case, you have a hero who starts off on Team Evil and they are at least related to some evil things. So, what happens when they decide that they’re not gonna be evil anymore?
Chris: Right. So, the question is: did they do anything bad while they were on Team Evil? Reasonably, they would have. Or there’s a scenario where no, they didn’t do anything bad, but that’s completely unbelievable and an “I don’t buy it” kind of a situation.
Oren: And, if they really didn’t do anything bad, it kind of feels like “why are you having them start on Team Evil” then, right? It feels like you’re not committing to the bit at that point.
Chris: Or are they on a Team Evil, where they’re going around saving cats while all of their teammates are kicking puppies? And it’s like, okay, why were they there? Didn’t they notice the rest of the team was kicking puppies? What did they think of that?
Oren: Right. Like, why are they the one good person who joined the evil recruiting squad? And I mean, if you want to, you can always come up with a situation where they aren’t really on Team Evil. They just happen to have to be there by circumstances. Like, your character could be the equivalent of the German communists who got swept up into the Wehrmacht and didn’t have any choice, and many of whom defected as soon as they could. They’re not really on Team Evil. Like, they didn’t have any other options. The really tragic one is the guy who defected to try to warn the Soviets of the German assault, and they didn’t listen to him. Poor guy.
Anyway, moving on from that. So that’s not really what most people are talking about when they imagine this sort of thing. They are imagining someone who actually believes that they are part of the right side, but they’re actually on the evil side. Otherwise, there isn’t really a realization moment.
Chris: Right. So, we think that we’re doing good, and then we learn–wait a second–maybe we’re the bad guys after all!
Oren: Yeah. And usually what you want is a situation where your character was involved in something but not, personally, with their own two hands inflicting horrible misery. For example, if your character is part of an invading army, that invasion is bad, but if the things we see them do are fight enemy soldiers, they’re probably not unforgivable because there’s an understanding that in a war you fight soldiers even if you’re on the wrong side. That’s not gonna be something that the audience will just never forgive them for doing.
Chris: Also, the assumption is that when you’re fighting the opposing side you don’t have a lot of time to stop and have deep conversations about who they are and what they believe to verify they’re a bad guy and that you’re the good guy. So, it’s just very easy for government propaganda to be like: “No, no, no, they’re the bad ones. You’re the good ones.” And if all you do is fight each other, how would you know better?
Oren: Right. And that’s also a common mitigation tactic, which is realistic, that you were told that they were evil, and that you were propagandized to, and you were convinced. And that also happens in real life. And that can insulate your character a little bit. Readers will be more understanding. But that, then, creates a problem of: “Well then, why–if they are so effectively propagandized–would they realize they are on Team Evil?”
Most soldiers in armies that we would consider to be evil do not desert when they start doing evil things, and it’s not because they were born evil, right? They were convinced to be part of the system through a number of means. So, what makes your character different?
Chris: Or else you get Drizzt.
Oren: Yeah, you could just have Drizzt.
Chris: I read those books so long time ago, the Drizzt trilogy. I don’t even remember what the trilogy was called, but it constantly bothered me the way that Drizzt just had inexplicable different cultural values than the culture he was raised in. Some people suggested, “Oh, well, his father was good and taught him.” I suppose that’s possible it happened somewhere off-screen, but it certainly wasn’t very present in the book. He’s also, for instance, into monogamy or other things besides like, “don’t kill innocents” that are just weird in his context.
Oren: Here’s the thing about Drizzt that is funny; Drizzt is part of a marginalized group within his society because he’s a man and the drow are, you know, big, evil, man-hating matriarchs who want to crush all men. Which is hot, but also evil. And so, actually, that does provide an interesting example of why he would not want to stay on Team Drow.
Because you can do that. You can have a character–it usually wouldn’t be men if you want your world-building to make any sense–but you could have a character who is, for example, part of a marginalized ethnic group within an empire. Even Avatar did this with that one river town, where they are clearly part of some… they are not sharing in the wealth of the Fire Nation, and so it makes sense that they are not as devoted to its cause.
What makes Drizzt weird is that he goes beyond that and also seems to have no cultural upbringing that the rest of the drow have, right?
Chris: Or, you know, what we would expect is a little bit more self-blame and guilt if he’s just inherently very compassionate and he’s taught to kill innocents, right? We would see more of a “Oh, I should be killing innocents” and “What’s wrong with me?” kind of an inner dialogue as opposed to just like: “No, that’s wrong.” That kind of thing. So that we can see, okay, what’s different is that he’s just inherently a little more compassionate and has a harder time doing this than the people around him. But he’s been still taught their values, and it’s gonna take time for him to kind of deprogram himself from those values.
It certainly is easier, though, for “We Are the Baddies,” if you do have a character who is kind of young and impressionable and perhaps is not out fighting yet, right? I think that definitely makes it easier to explain why they believe what they believe, how it is that they came to believe the wrong side is good, and then they haven’t really had enough experience to accumulate too much bad karma yet.
I think this is the tactic that we’re kinda trying to use for Fourth Wing… the only thing is that we have some unbelievable stuff in there. So, Violet grows up in a society where we have these dragon riders, and just like at dragon academy, you can kinda tell they must be the baddies because they’re killing off all of their cadets in dragon rider school when they could easily save them.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, I’ve only read the first Fourth Wing book and, I have to be honest, I don’t really know where the book thinks I should be drawing the moral lines here. The government is evil by any objective measure, but in the book, their biggest sin is that they are hiding the existence of an even worse enemy. Why are they doing that? I have no idea. So, at this point, anything’s possible if I was to read further into the series.
Chris: Again, usually an evil empire would want all of its citizens to know about another evil, because that’s an easy way to control them, being like, “Hey, you have to do what we want or the other evil will get you. But we can protect you. But you have to do what we want.”
Oren: It’s like imagining the Nazis pretending the Soviets didn’t exist. I’m not saying the Soviets are worse than the Nazis. I am saying that the Soviets are a genuine enemy that the Nazis had that they could use. It’d be so weird if they were propagandizing their people to be like, “There’s no such thing as communists. Don’t look for communists.” It would be so weird.
Chris, chuckling: Well, right-wingers today definitely want there to be as many communists as possible.
Oren: Right, they have to invent one, because there isn’t a real enemy for them to rally around, right? Imagine if there actually was one.
Chris: That would be quite the boon for them. Yeah, so [in Fourth Wing] this is really weird. And also, it’s just very difficult to cover up things like that. Like, in the Venin we have these mages that are super powerful. They’re not exactly subtle. And supposedly the dragon riders have been… well, maybe the idea is that they’re not fighting them, I think… and are just leaving the griffin riders to fight them and then making an enemy out of the griffin riders. It’s very strange.
Oren: At the end of Book One it could be anything, right? We just know it could be anything…. We just find out that there’s a super evil double enemy that’s been hidden this whole time, and how or why is a big set of question marks.
Chris: So, in any case, Violet is raised to believe Empire is good, the rebellion against the Empire was bad, and it’s reasonable that she believes that. And, controlling access to information of course, depending on what your bad group is. That could definitely happen, where people just have been deeply misinformed. In this case, it’s just a little strange because, again, it would be very difficult to cover up the presence of this particularly powerful enemy, and they wouldn’t even want to and that kind of ruins the effect. But otherwise, even the death that happened at the dragon academy is something that she could potentially be taught is justified in some way. And she doesn’t have to actively cause those deaths. She just has to stand by and not protest that they’re happening.
Oren:. A really interesting example is The Light Brigade by Cameron Hurley. To my mind this is like the gold standard of realizing “we are the baddies” type stories because it’s a main character. We’re not doing a dodge that a lot of stories do where the character who goes through this arc is a minor side villain, like Zuko, right? And Zuko of course is the main villain at the start, but he becomes less and less the most prominent villain as the show goes on. But he doesn’t have to be a main character for a long time, right? Whereas Dietz has to be a main character from the start and is deeply propagandized about how “the corporations are good, Martian separatists evil, do your bit for king and country–or money, dollar and country, I guess.”
And so the way that this works is that it takes an entire book to de-propagandize Dietz. And the way that Hurley manages it is by having Dietz be affected by this weird time-jumping thing that happens to her any time they use the teleporter to get into combat. This allows for Dietz to not ever do anything too bad. We never have to watch Dietz mow down a bunch of civilians, which I bet her squad mates absolutely did. Because any time that might happen, whoops, the time thing acted up again. Oh, oh, well. And it just works so well, and also the big selling point of the book is the time shifts. And it’s just a masterpiece. It is so good.
Chris: The other thing that I think is important to this story is the fact that we have our retelling-character-narrator. So we have future-Dietz telling what happened to past-Dietz. And that’s important because then when Dietz is like a fascist at the beginning of the story future-Dietz can be like, “Yeah, that, obviously I was wrong there.” I mean, it’s not said like that, but we can see the perspective is different, and so we have the narrator to assure us that no, of course what the protagonist currently thinks is bad, and the protagonist is gonna change their mind later. And then kind of some acknowledgement that this is bad. That really helps that kind of character go over better.
Oren: Now, let’s say that you, you don’t have a whole novel, right? You’re not as committed to the bit as Hurley is. A somewhat easy solution is to
607 – Flawed Protagonists
September 27, 2026
We’ve all heard advice about creating flaws for our characters, but what does that mean in practice? This week, we’re talking about flawed protagonists! We discuss the factors that make some flawed characters …
Show notes
We’ve all heard advice about creating flaws for our characters, but what does that mean in practice? This week, we’re talking about flawed protagonists! We discuss the factors that make some flawed characters compelling while others are reduced to being unpleasant. We also get into the ways flaws can be tricky to manage and why we believe adding a laundry list of them is a little excessive.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Albert Gallego. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Now, we might seem like nice people on the podcast, but maybe as soon as we stop recording, we rant about how our podcast is trash and everyone who listens to it has terrible taste. And then when we get fan mail, we write back telling that person to get a life. Also, I should say I’m secretly writing a literary genre novel. That’s my true passion, despite what I tell everyone.
Oren: It’s funny because, normally, the trope of doing that is writers do that with books that make them tons of money, but they hate ’cause, you know, making money is bad, actually. But our podcast doesn’t make us any money. [Chris laughs]
That would be extra funny if we had a character who’s like, “Yeah, I’m writing these completely unsuccessful books that nobody buys, and they’re secretly trash… and everyone who reads them is stupid.” We should do that. Some people insist that you can’t ever have too many flaws, so I think we should do that, have a character whose flaw here is both that they’re really judgmental and also just incredibly bad at deciding what they should spend their time on.
Chris: I’m also addicted to podcasting. That’s why I do it, even though I don’t like it, and also it’s not very popular and not earning me very much money. I said that because we’re watching Pluribus right now.
Oren: Yeah. Plur- [they both mumble].
Chris: Plur- whatever. It’s Pluribus.
Oren: It’s hard to look up posts about that because pluribus is a very commonly used Latin phrase, and it’s in an important U.S. motto. And so whenever I look it up, that’s what comes up. So it’s been hard to find actual commentary on that show, despite how popular it was.
Chris: That’s a naming mistake, for sure. Gotta have a trademark-able, extra unique name. No, that’s a bad idea. So any case, this time we’re covering flawed protagonists because sometimes writers wanna write about people who are messed up. There’s lots to say about people who are messed up, and some people find them very novel and interesting or just find them relatable or empathize with their flaws. There are lots of reasons to wanna do this, even though it is tricky and can create problems.
Oren: My favorite is when the flaw is only kind of a flaw. It’s like a little wink to the audience. We’ve been referencing the first episode of Pluribus in which our author main character thinks everyone who reads her books is a brain-dead walnut, and has no respect for them. And yeah we could say that’s a flaw, and maybe that’s part of a character arc. I’ve only seen the first three episodes, I don’t know. Fans tell me it’s part of a character arc, so we’ll see. But regardless of whether it is or not, a lot of people also feel that way, and the show is kind of winking at them, and they’re like, “Yeah, romantasy fans are brain-dead walnuts and are total trash.” So it validates them, and then we can do a little bit of an arc later if we want, and it’s no big deal.
Chris: Turns out the flawed protagonist was the audience all along.
Oren: Yeah, exactly. And so it works really well that way. I don’t really love that it does, but it does. You know, it would’ve worked on me if she had been writing a literary novel that everyone loved, and then she’d been like, “Uh, actually, literary fans are all snobs and, you know, don’t actually know what a good story is and can be tricked by just being told that the story is deep and meaningful.” That would work on me. I’d be like, “Yeah, okay, that’s a flaw, but also that’s- she’s so right.” [Chris laughs] So it’s just a matter of knowing who you’re appealing to, you know?
Chris: I mean, that is one strategy for dealing with frustration. This is one of the issues that can happen with a flawed protagonist is, if they’re flawed in a way that makes it so they create problems for themselves or others or are bad at dealing with problems and you’ve got the audience invested in those problems and solving those problems as usually you would want to… it can be very frustrating. But one way to get around that is to just make them do bad things or sabotage themselves or others in ways that the audience can actually root for, and this would be kind of an example of that technique. It’s kind of a niche technique, but especially if this is something like getting revenge, maybe getting revenge isn’t productive, but if you make a villain hated enough, the audience is gonna be like, “Yeah, but it would be really nice just to see this person gets what’s coming to them.” So even though this is self-destructive, I can probably root for it anyway ’cause I get something out of it. You could have something like that happen.
Oren: Of course, when it comes to flaws, we should acknowledge that there is a lot of misconception about them. That’s why if you go into any writing space, you will find a bunch of posts about how characters need flaws and how if a character doesn’t have flaws, that’s bad. You will hear the term Mary Sue thrown around a lot. And of course, in reality, many heroes do not have anything that would be realistically considered a flaw. What that discourse is usually actually getting at is whether or not they have too much candy, which is different. Like, Frodo doesn’t have too much candy, but he’s not really flawed in any meaningful way, not in a dramatic way. And I don’t think he would be a better character if he was. Someone like Othello is flawed, but Frodo’s not. Frodo’s just doing his best.
Chris: And again, character arcs don’t require flaws either because… if a character, for instance, is grieving, I would not call that a flaw. That would be weird and judgmental. But they’re, of course they’re grieving, so it’s natural that they’re unhappy and having problems, and as part of their character arc, they can heal. But I certainly wouldn’t say they have a flaw that they have to overcome.
Again, flaws, not really necessary, but writers like them for a variety of reasons. We can talk about what we would classify as a flaw, which is something that this person would be better if they did not have this trait.
Oren: This would be a better person, and I mean that in the real-life sense, if they did not have that. Something like greedy or selfish or cowardly or judgemental. You know, these are things where they go beyond what might be a healthy version of that feeling. Like, there’s actually a place for judging people. You don’t wanna just completely take everything you see at face value. At that point, you might have a flaw of being too credulous. But obviously you can be too much of that, at which point we start calling them judgemental, and at that point it becomes a flaw.
With cowardly, it’s like, okay, if your character is scared of something that is dangerous, that’s not cowardly. Or if they run away from something that they can’t possibly defeat, that’s also not cowardly. But if they run away from something that they could probably have overcome if they had actually stayed to fight, you could say that’s cowardice, and you could say that’s a flaw to overcome.
Chris: And again, it doesn’t have to be something that makes them a jerk. I was just reading Stay for a Spell, and the character’s flaw is supposed to be that she’s too nice, and it’s a problem because she ends up doing what other people want instead of doing what she wants. Those kinds of meek characters… I like them, but again, with any flaw, it can turn people against a character. So that is one that could create frustration, right? If you have a character who is nice and lets other people walk all over them, that’s a situation where the reader could be invested in them solving their problems, and get frustrated when they just let people walk over them instead.
As opposed to a quirk, which is what we call it when they have a trait that sometimes benefits them and sometimes disadvantages them. Quirks are great ’cause they tend to add a lot of interest. But you don’t feel like the quirk has to be eliminated. You don’t feel like it’s something that has to be a problem that has to be solved. It’s just a permanent interesting feature of the character that can create setbacks and advantages.
Oren: And we usually find it works best to focus on one flaw, especially at a time. ‘Cause if your character has a bunch of flaws, actual flaws as we’re describing them, that increases the chance significantly that your readers are just going to hate them and not want to read about them. But also it de-emphasizes the impact of any one flaw because you got all of them, so they just kind of become noise after a while.
I’ll never forget frigging “Save the Cat! Writes a Novel” recommending a laundry list of flaws, and… what are you talking about?
Chris: That’s a bad idea.
Oren: It’s especially funny after using Katniss Everdeen as an example in the beginning of Hunger Games. Like, she’s supposed to be flawed, and by flawed, you mean she’s a little grouchy? Is that a flaw? Wow, that’s, like, such a shallow definition of a flaw.
Chris: I won’t say that you can never do more than one flaw because sometimes they can be kind of related to each other or connected together. But what does happen, and I’ve seen this in many works, is that when you have too many, it really muddies the waters when it comes to the character arc. It just becomes really unclear what their problem is, and what they need to learn, and then what the solution is, and when they have actually made progress… because we’re juggling too many things, and they tend to blur together.
There’s just so much subjectivity, when it comes to a character’s personality and their emotional state, that we do have to focus on “Okay, what exactly is the issue here?” And if we have, like, five flaws, it’s really easy for those to blend into each other, and it just becomes, “wait, I don’t understand. What, what is their flaw? What do they need to learn?” And also, we’re not gonna be able to follow up on that many character arcs in the same book. That’s gonna be too much.
Similarly, we don’t want a flaw that’s super broad. Like immaturity, for instance, or selfishness are both flaws that can mean any number of behaviors.
Oren: Yeah, you’d wanna zoom in a little bit.
Chris: And that also just makes it really hard to deal with, whereas if we can pinpoint more specifically in what situations is this character immature, and how exactly do they act, or in what ways is this person selfish, and in what situations, and in what ways do they behave in a way that is self-centered, then it’s easier to address that and give that clarity, etcetera.
Oren: Say what we want about Pluribus, I do think it’s pretty impressive, especially in the early episodes, which is again, that’s what I’ve seen. They manage to give the protagonist, Carol, three pretty distinct flaws that so far haven’t really blurred together, which is always the concern. ‘Cause the first thing is that she is really disdainful of her readers, and again, that’s like a secret wink to the audience flaw, where a lot of the audience feels the same way, so you know, the impact is lessened.
Then she has serious anger problems, and then she’s also an alcoholic. And part of the way that they balance that is that her being an alcoholic doesn’t play a big role in these early episodes. It’s there, you can see it in the background, but it’s not brought to the fore the way her other flaws are. And then in the second and third episode, we focus much more on the anger problem because now if she gets too mad at the uwu murder virus hive mind, a bunch of people will die, so that’s a struggle that she has to try to keep it in check. And that one’s very sympathetic because the evil uwu murder virus hive mind is the most annoying thing anyone has ever invented. [Chris laughs]
So when she gets mad at it, I’m like, “Yes, it deserves for you to be mad at it. It’s the worst.” But she has to try not to because she doesn’t want to be responsible for people dying.
Chris: I do have a little bit of frustration when she thinks of it as her fault when people die. Yes, you should learn to control your temper. That’s a good idea, but they’re the ones who decided to infect the entire planet with a virus where people would die if you got mad at them. That was their choice. That was their doing. Also, in doing that, they killed far more people than she does when she gets angry at them. So I don’t know… I get annoyed with that because when somebody brings up that it’s her fault and then she just accepts that, definitely feels like there’s authorial endorsement at that point, that we’re supposed to believe that it’s her fault that people get hurt when she gets angry. But it’s, it’s not her fault.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard for me to say at this point, ’cause again, this is a show that likes to keep its cards close to its chest, and at only three episodes I don’t really know where it’s going, and I don’t trust anything anyone says about this show. [Chris Laughs] Because I’ve seen how unhinged the discourse about it is.
Chris: Yeah. We’ve had so many instances where we’ll say something on our blog, and then somebody will be like, “Oh, but this book,…” in the comments. And if we have actually read that book, it is very often misrepresenting the story. And so now we just don’t trust what anybody says about any story ever until we go read it ourselves.
Oren: I will say, I don’t like Pluribus. I find it really boring most of the time. But I do find it believable that she thinks that it’s her fault, because she’s basically being constantly gaslit by everyone around her, both the hive mind and the other humans. To me it’s believable that she thinks that because she’s been bludgeoned into it. I don’t enjoy that. It’s not a show I would watch if I didn’t have a blog to talk about it on, but it’s interesting. It’s kind of neat to see.
Chris: Yeah, I do think, find it very hard when you have an unpleasant protagonist who bad things are happening to them. That is typically something that I do not enjoy seeing. At the same time, and we should talk about this more, we can talk about Widow’s Bay, one of the strategies for dealing with a protagonist who audiences just find them unpleasant and don’t really like them is to just have bad things happen to them because we get schadenfreude. We get satisfaction at seeing them punished for their bad karma.
And I will say with Pluribus, Carol is, as far as I can tell, just a very unpleasant person, and the Pluribus hive mind is a very unpleasant being. And so I’m just watching them make each other miserable
Oren: Yep.
Chris: And also in many of these cases, the stakes seem relatively low, right? If there was another innocent person for them to hurt while they were going back and forth with each other, but I do get some amusement from that.
Oren: Oh man, Widow’s Bay. This is so… Such a cool thing. I hope you could do this in book form. So in Widow’s Bay we have the mayor, Tom, I think is his name, and he’s basically the mayor from Jaws, where he’s super obsessed with having the town make money, and the beaches are
606 – Conflicts Without Character-Antagonists
September 20, 2026
Authors generally know what to do when their hero is threatened by an assassin. The resulting sword fight may not be easy to write, but there’s an understanding of who needs to be stopped and how. But what …
Show notes
Authors generally know what to do when their hero is threatened by an assassin. The resulting sword fight may not be easy to write, but there’s an understanding of who needs to be stopped and how. But what about conflicts where the “antagonist” is a force of nature or simply people’s apathy toward buying baked goods? That last one can be a real problem for heroes who are trying to save their school through a bake sale. This week, we talk about how to write conflicts in which there isn’t a conscious force pushing back.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Steve. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: Uh-oh, there’s a flood coming, and I’m going to sword fight it. And then after that, we have to put on a bake sale to save the school, so I will argue with the brownies to be more delicious.
Chris: Oh, no, those brownies. They are very malicious, always trying to be as disgusting as possible.
Oren: ‘Cause that’s how conflict works when you don’t have an obvious human or human-equivalent antagonist, is that you just personify whatever is around, and then you use the same tactics against it as you would against a human enemy, right?
Chris: Did you know that we only sink in the water sometimes because the water’s very angry with us?
Oren: Yeah, it’s actually a character flaw on the water’s part. It is malice in the form of H2O. So today we are talking about conflicts with non-character antagonists. I’m probably gonna slip and say non-human throughout the episode. That’s not technically accurate because a character can be an animal in certain circumstances.
Chris: A character needs intent. An animal can have intent. You could say a robot has intent if you want. But we’re talking about, you know, antagonists that do not have intent or any kind of awareness or sentience.
Oren: Right. And, a protagonist needs to be a character, as far as I know.
Chris: Correct, because if they don’t have intent, then they don’t have agency. We could get into lots of theoretical stuff of what happens if you’re not using tension as your primary plotter, but this is about conflict, so we’re talking about tension here. And so we do need to have points where a character or protagonist has agency, and they don’t have agency unless they have intent.
Oren: Yeah, so barring some extremely weird edge case that I haven’t considered, the main character, your hero, needs to be a character of some kind, but the antagonist, the force opposing them, doesn’t necessarily have to be a character. This can be obvious in the form of a natural disaster, or in, maybe in the case of a panicked crowd, which isn’t a character. It’s technically made up of people, but it doesn’t act like a character. Or, it could be that you need to make money at a bake sale or something. Or, maybe in the more specific example, at a bake sale it would be that people are kind of suspicious of your brownies ’cause they look a little odd ’cause you used non-standard ingredients. But they’re actually very delicious, and so you have to overcome people’s hesitancy to try the odd-looking brownies. Something like that, right?
Chris: Yeah. Those are some great examples, but I think this instance of the odd-shaped brownies making people hesitant really highlights kind of how artificial this concept of a quote-unquote, “antagonist” is. Because really what these are, are just plot problems, right? They’re obstacles. And so treating them… When we say antagonist, treating them that it’s a thing- or like it’s one thing – is in all cases very artificial. Like in this scenario with the brownies, is it the odd shape of the brownies that’s the antagonist? Is it the people? Is it their hesitancy itself?
Oren: Is it the social construct of money?
Chris: [Laughs]. Capitalism. Capitalism was the antagonist all along.
Oren: Uh, excuse me. You can’t give capitalism credit for the concept of exchanging money for food. Wow, that’s super capitalist of you. Really capitalist-centric. Pardon me.
Chris: Oh, no. Maybe the antagonist is my capitalist-centrism.
Oren: Yeah, exact- very. I don’t know what we’re talking about anymore. But yes.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. But the point is that when you have a conflict, you have your protagonist Who is facing, and they could actually face a variety of obstacles which we could all call antagonists, right? And they can have more… It’s not like there’s just one antagonist. Like, when you have a villain, usually what happens is your hero does something, the villain does something, and the villain is directly responsible for most of the obstacles your hero faces. But I find in a lot of non-antagonistic conflicts, they appear as often a little bit more like bad luck, where there’s not just one antagonist. There’s a variety of things that go wrong, and every time there’s a problem or obstacle that’s technically an antagonist. So again, for simplicity, it’s convenient to use the word antagonist because we have to talk about what is opposing the hero, but it’s also kind of a very artificial concept, especially when you don’t have a villain who’s actually opposing the hero on purpose.
Oren: Yeah. And so it’s worth asking, why does it matter? Like, why are we talking about this? And the reason is that as I have edited manuscripts over the years, I have discovered that authors…it’s not like they are always great at writing a traditional conflict with a human-ish villain, but they tend to have an easier time with that than when the conflict lacks a character antagonist. Because when there’s an enemy, there’s an assassin, and they’re trying to get you, so you punch him. That’s pretty straightforward. Or if it’s a social conflict, you argue the chancellor down so he doesn’t pass the evil tax cut bill, or you mind meld with the alien rock monster so it doesn’t eat the town, et cetera.
That’s… Not like there aren’t a billion ways to mess that up, but I have found that writers tend to get it better than the bake sale example that I mentioned. They will often…I will read stories where there is a bake sale, and it’s important. The bake sale is gonna save the school maybe. But how? How is that going to work? And it’s very difficult for a lot of authors to make that real enough to be a satisfying conflict. And so you often end up with conflict where stuff just kinda happens And it’s like, yeah, I guess we made enough money, or we didn’t make enough money. But why?
What was the turning point? What was the dramatic effort? What made that compelling other than just watching things happen? Authors struggle with this a lot.
Chris: Yeah. I feel like we’ve read a lot of cozies and we have an obstacle, and then the protagonist just tries one thing and it automatically works, right? Like in Legends and Lattes, oh, I know, we’ll just… We need customers. Let’s just do this one thing. Oh, look, we have tons of customers, right?
Oren: Yeah, it worked actually.
Chris: It worked.
Oren: [Laughs]
Chris: That was super easy. Barely an inconvenience. Yeah or my favorite one of course was in that story where they had the bread maker. God, Skin Map.
Oren: Yeah, The Skin Map. Not a title for a book you would think was about a bakery.
Chris: [Laughs]
Oren: There is also a skin map in it.
Chris: Yeah. There’s multiple POVs in that book, and the bakery was just the best POV where it’s basically a side quest. But again, we had problems getting customers, and then we just did one thing. Oh, wow, it’s so easy, you know? We have sweets that people will buy ’cause the coffee’s too bitter, nor why people wanna buy coffee.
Oren: Yeah. Don’t worry about it. And then it can go the other direction too, and I don’t know of as many published examples of this just because readers are sensitive to failure. The character can also be like, “We’re gonna save the school with this bake sale.” And then the bake sale happens, and it didn’t work, right? We made a big thing about it, and they just didn’t make enough money. And it’s like all right, well, that’s frustrating. Why didn’t you make enough money? What occurred that made that not happen? And that doesn’t happen as often in published stories I think ’cause it tends to get weeded out more, but I see it a fair amount in my unpublished manuscripts that I work on. And so the end result of all of this is that you end up with characters that are just kind of milling around. They don’t really know what they’re doing. The reader doesn’t know what it is they’re trying to accomplish, and that hurts tension, and then it hurts satisfaction. And if you do that too many times, you won’t be able to create tension again ’cause the readers won’t believe you, and it’s a vicious cycle.
Chris: All right. So how do we do this? How do we create a detailed conflict when we have a non-character antagonist?
Oren: Well, in some cases, if it’s something like a natural disaster, you can sort of treat the natural disaster the same way that you would treat a character antagonist. Like, “Oh no, there’s a flood. We have to escape the flood.” Well, that’s a life and death situation. It’s fairly straightforward. You still need to create the back and forth that Chris has described a few times.
Chris: Yeah. So I’ll get specific about the back and forth. So in a conflict, we should see a pattern where both the protagonist and the antagonist are acting, and this kind of reflects tension structure. So the antagonist strikes first, creates a threat. The protagonist has to scramble to sort of respond to that, and then the antagonist responds to the antagonist. This is very much just like a conversation where people respond to the last thing that the other person said. That’s kind of ideally what you want to happen, and you want both sides to go back and forth.
We’ve seen a lot of stories where this happened in “Skin of the Sea”, where we had kind of a situation that was supposed to be a conflict but wasn’t really. More like “Calamity”, where the character is out and they’re fighting a storm, but there’s… The storm is happening to the protagonist, but there’s no sense the protagonist can actually intervene in events and do anything, right?
And that’s the purpose of the protagonist. That’s what the protagonist is for. And then what happens in that sort of scenario where, oh, we’re being buffeted by the wind, and the waves are crashing over us, and all of these things are happening…but there’s no sense of the protagonist responding to them and doing anything, is that we kind of start to tune out because it just doesn’t feel like it matters anymore. There’s no edge of our seat, you know, will the protagonist make it or will the antagonist make it? The antagonist is just gonna get to do what they want, and we’re just waiting till it’s over. And this, I think, is one of the things that people find tricky when they have a non-character antagonist, right?
So, oh, the wave is in the boat. All right, now the boat is sinking ’cause it’s full of water. Okay, so the protagonist has to intervene in order to avoid complete disaster. So okay, I’m gonna grab something that can hold water and start trying to bucket out the water. And then we have something else happen, and again, it can be hard to think of if this is not…’Cause, like, a villain or something with intent can always choose how to respond, whereas it looks more like luck when it’s a non-villain antagonist. So what bad thing can happen? Oh, well, maybe when my protagonist was leaning over the side to dump out water, they accidentally tipped over, and that’s kind of…It looks like accident, it looks like bad luck, but it’s also they would be less likely to tip over if they were not in the middle of a storm, and that happened because of their last action, because they were trying to get the water out of the boat, and that went wrong.
Oren: Could do the classic thing where you’re putting the water off the side of the boat, and then because of the shift in the wind or whatever, the big spar that holds the sail swings around and bonks you right in the head. That’s classic scenario. Uh Yeah.
Chris: So in any situation, that’s kind of what we’re looking for. Like, in “Legends and Lattes”, what if we’re like, “Hey, customers, I’ve got this magic elixir. Come into my coffee shop. I know you don’t understand what coffee is.” They’re like, “Ooh, we like magic elixir that makes us awake.” And then, you know, they try it like, “Oh, gosh, this is bitter. You’re trying to poison us.”
Oren: [Laughs]
Chris: Right? What kind of bad luck, what can go wrong to kind of create those obstacles and create that kind of back and forth between the protagonist trying to intervene in some ways. And again, the protagonist doesn’t have to do good things when they intervene. They’re trying to… they should be trying to succeed generally. But they can do the wrong thing and get a bad result, as long as they do something and change what happens. And that’s why a protagonist, of course, needs to be a character and needs intent.
Oren: Yeah. And so with this one we have a fairly straightforward set of stakes and/or thresholds that the character has to meet in order to succeed. And the issue with this kind of conflict with a natural disaster or with having to climb down a steep cliff face or something like that, is that writers often have a difficult time creating that back and forth that Chris was describing when there isn’t a character-level enemy doing that stuff. And Chris has described how you get past that.
The next stage of difficulty is the kind of conflict that doesn’t have the inherent clear-cut what success or failure looks like. And these are the things I’ve been talking about. These are the things like the bake sale, or writing a paper, or making a sword. What does success at the bake sale look like? That’s not as obvious. Or how do you know if you have succeeded at “sword”? How will the reader know that you did good or bad?
Chris: If you accidentally create a shield, you have failed at “sword”.
Oren: Yeah, if you did, if you did a bad enough job, you’ve created a different implement.
Chris: [Laughs]
Oren: And if it’s, like, really short, it might not be a huge thing. I’m remembering the swordsmithing scene in the Prydain books, and it’s pretty short. He doesn’t spend a lot of time smithing, so it’s not as big a deal that we don’t know what it means to make a good sword. But if you were doing that as an extended thing, and making a sword can take a while, you would need some way for the reader to be able to judge how you’re doing. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of question marks. Yeah, I guess the sword is being made, presumably. I’ll take your word for it.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And in particular when we’re talking about, okay, what does success look like, obviously conflicts need tension, so this should have stakes of some kind, right?
So what disaster, what bad thing are we trying to avert by doing the bake sale, by making the sword, or whatever else it is? If we have to make a sword to impress somebody who will then train us in sword fighting, what is the threshold that the sword has to meet in order to avert getting kicked out?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And not having any training, for instance. Or for a bake sale, assume that we’ve got some issue with money involved. And you can, of course, be sneaky and do a little switcheroo later. Conflict doesn’t always have to work out exactly the way it looks like it’s going to, and often it’s more fun that way. But for example, with a bake sale, a pretty standard way of trying to make so readers can understand how your characters are doing is to set an amount of money you need to raise and have the character be able to have an idea of how close they are to that goal. They’re not necessarily tracking every dollar and cents, but know that you have to make $5,000. And then you can have an idea of how close you are. And once you can do that, then you can set child arcs and try turning points to get different things done. You can do the back and forth that Chris has described. And then you might end up with a different result. You might end up that they don’t make the money actually, but they tried so hard, and that impressed someone enough that they’ll put in a good word at the school board meeting or something.
So there are different ways you can change what ends up happening, but readers need some idea of how well your characters are doing, otherwise nothing that’s happening matters.
Chris: Yeah. So again, at the end of the day, do we avert the stakes or the worst case scenario, or
605 – Copying Other Stories
September 13, 2026
These days, talk about copying stories is often related to LLMs and other slop generators, but did you know that writers can copy each other without any need for abominable intelligence? Sometimes, it’s not …
Show notes
These days, talk about copying stories is often related to LLMs and other slop generators, but did you know that writers can copy each other without any need for abominable intelligence? Sometimes, it’s not even a bad thing to do! But other times it is, and we’re gonna get to the bottom of it. Or at least, we’ll get to the “I know it when I see it” of it.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Abby K. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: This time we’re doing “Breaking the Fourth Wall,” an episode that we absolutely did not just do last week.
Oren: This is a new episode. It’s different. Why would you say it’s the same?
Chris: It’s on the moon now. We’re just talking on the moon, so it’s very different and that will have a very large impact on this episode and how we talk about breaking the fourth wall.
Oren: We’re talking about breaking the fifth wall, because moon stations are pentagons. That’s just how it works.
Chris: That’s right, the fifth wall. Completely different than the fourth wall. Absolutely not inspired by the fourth wall in any way.
Oren: Yeah, don’t even worry about it.
Chris: Today we’re going to talk about should you copy a story for your story? Is that a good idea, a bad idea? When would you, when shouldn’t you?
Oren: Yeah, how literal is that phrase, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal”? That’s the question. That’s really what we’re trying to answer today.
Chris: Obviously copying can mean a lot of different things. It’s pretty broad. But it can mean anything from, this is where you get some very loose inspiration from, to very specific. [Laughs] We have seen some things that I found kind of shocking in how on the nose they were with what they were copying.
Oren: Yeah. Occasionally you’re like, “Really? This is just a book that I’ve read before.”
Chris: We hear this a lot — and I think it can happen later too — but we hear this a lot with newer writers, right? A lot of times it is trying to be some kind of copy of our favorite story. I think because, you know, that was magical and we’re just trying to recreate the magic. So, if you really like Lord of the Rings, you might write Eragon.
Oren: Yeah, and it’s interesting because to a certain extent, that is a function of how old the story is. Once a story is old enough, it stops feeling weird to do “my” version of it. At this point, even Lord of the Rings is still too recent. We had a Lord of the Rings-like boom after Lord of the Rings, and now we’ve finally moved past it, and now if you’re like, “I’m doing Lord of the Rings, but different,” people will be like, “Try something new.” They will give you the side eye. But if you say, “I’m doing ‘Hansel and Gretel’ but different,” they’ll be like, “Ooh, that sounds interesting. Tell me more about this Hansel and Gretel retelling that you’re doing.” We can’t do Lord of the Rings retellings yet.
Chris: I mean that is still a copyrighted work that you’d have to spend so much money to write something that is officially Lord of the Rings. But at the same time, so many people have made off-brand copies, right? That it’s almost cliche but also forbidden simultaneously. That’s not a great place for it to be in.
Oren: And I mean a lot of it is just sort of set by the legality of United States copyright durations. But, like, I don’t know, technically speaking, Winnie-the-Pooh is public domain now. But outside of these low-budget horror parodies, I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of people doing a Winnie-the-Pooh retelling. It just doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen yet.
Chris: I mean, maybe. I guess it’s a kid’s story, right?
Oren: Right.
Chris: I never consumed Winnie-the-Pooh when I was a kid, so I don’t know. But that kind of seems like if it’s public domain, it might show up in new Winnie-the-Pooh stories in the children’s books section, and we might not hear about it because it might not get the level of buzz of the stories that we hear about, but maybe something like that might happen.
Oren: An example that people were totally doing this even when the stories were technically still in copyright is, like, Sherlock Holmes, for example. Well, some of the later stories were in copyright longer than you would’ve thought, but people were still doing retellings of Sherlock Holmes even when it was partially still copyrighted, and that didn’t seem weird, right? That didn’t seem creatively problematic. It was just cool to do because people like to see different takes on Sherlock Holmes. You still need to do something interesting, but even if copyright wasn’t an issue, I don’t think anyone would be interested in my “What if Wheel of Time, but they’re all crabs!” take. I just don’t think that would be interesting to people.
Chris: I’m sure somebody wants to read Wheel of Time as crabs, at least for a laugh. But it’s not really the same, though.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I mean, if it is really in the public domain, right, because we were just talking last week about, for instance, Little Women, and how many adaptations there are because it’s public domain. And so if it’s a famous story and anybody who wants to can make an adaptation, there’s tons of adaptations. So if you don’t have a super huge budget, like you’re making a movie, then you need to put a spin on it, or you don’t really have anything to sell your story on, why would your story get attention?
By the way, past Chris Winkle could benefit from this knowledge. Not that she really cared when she did a “Snow Queen” retelling.
Oren: Follow the Sound of Snow is an excellent novella.
Chris: Yeah. It happened to hit at a time when the fairy tale retellings were receding as a trend, which is the worst time. But also, it just didn’t have an easy hook, right? It’s not like “The Snow Queen,” but Gerda is dead or something.
Oren: “The Snow Queen,” but crabs.
Chris: [Laughing] “The Snow Queen,” but crabs. Or like Cinder House, which is a Cinderella retelling that did actually get nominated for Hugo, right? Yeah. It’s Cinderella, but Cinderella is dead, is a ghost in the house, right? Just something that’s really obvious you can sell the book on where it’s different.
Oren: That one definitely deserves to win. That’s easily the best of the six novellas that were Hugo nominated this year.
Chris: If it’s public domain that’s what you want. But what happens with a lot of new writers is they see their favorite story, and then they just want to write their own and recapture the magic. And usually that’s something that doesn’t work out so well because it doesn’t have– Again, we want the author to put in their unique vision, and a lot of times you’re just doing the same thing that somebody else did, but not as good.
Oren: Right. I mean, the classic scenario that we run into a lot with our clients is that the story has all of the problems of the work that it’s copying, and none of the things that made the work it’s copying good. It’s easy to copy the mistakes. It’s harder to copy the parts that worked well.
Chris: Yeah, because you need the same situation, and you’d be surprised how much changing one thing breaks something else and it doesn’t work anymore. So that’s something that happens. I think it’s good for people to, if they’re going to take inspiration from another story, just go into it intentionally.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And of course, when we have that first big idea, then we just have to write it. There’s often not a lot of intention that goes into that. And sometimes I feel like people just aren’t necessarily consciously aware of where their inspiration comes from. Like, I had one client that the story was clearly very based on a video game, and I asked him what his inspiration was, and he named some other things. Now, it’s also possible that he knew it was heavily based on this video game, and he just didn’t want to say that because he thought it would make him look bad or something.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But it was a situation where the same world elements from this video game that were named the same things that just made it very obviously on the mark, right? And he was like, “Oh yeah, now that you mention it, maybe I did take inspiration from that video game.” It’s like, you didn’t know? Because when I was looking at the work, I was like, “Why is this named this? That’s a weird name for it to be called. I wonder why it’s named that.” And it turns out it’s just because that’s what it was called in the video game.
Oren: Really weird to be reading a story inspired by Solitaire, let me tell you.
Chris: [Laughs]
Oren: My general advice for writers is when they are thinking about if they see something in a book that they really like, and this is not an old book where you could copy it and then put your own spin on it and call it a retelling — we’ll assume that’s off the table — you can use that, but you have to change it to the point that it can’t be recognized. If a lot of people can read this and reliably say, “Oh yeah, you took this from such and such,” that’s not great.
Chris: We do get people, though, who ask us because they’re worried about copying where it’s just fine, because there are so many repeated tropes and things like that, that like, okay yeah, your model book has this, but tons of books have this. So a particular type of character or a particular type of plot, right? Those things oftentimes are so common that they’re not going to really make your work stand out. Just like that copyright case, Oren, you were looking into where broody love interests came up.
Oren: So this was the case of Lynn Freeman versus Tracy Wolff, in which Freeman was suing because she claimed that Wolff had copied her YA vampire romance novel. Wolff’s book is actually published. The series is called Crave. I read the first one because I was really curious after I read the whole, like, 200-page ruling. And the ruling was against Freeman, that no, actually, there was no copying here. And in fact, actually there’s a twist on this. Wolff was just awarded attorney’s fees in that case because the judge basically acknowledged that, yeah, this actually didn’t have any merit and the plaintiff should’ve known that, and the only reason that it took so long to resolve is that none of the previous judges who had this were willing to read the books to see if the claims were accurate.
Chris: That judge read like six different drafts.
Oren: Yeah, she read all four published Crave books, and then two more later just for fun that were published during the proceedings, and then she read all five or six of Freeman’s unpublished drafts, which, oh boy, I’ve done a lot of reading for some editing projects. I’ve never done that much.
Chris: There are so many situations where I see people make assumptions that if there’s similarities in the story that somebody must have copied their work. I will say that unless your work is a published bestseller, it’s really unlikely that anybody would want to copy it, and in this case, things that seem like people copied your idea are almost certainly just a coincidence. Because ideas just don’t really have much value, right? The value is in the work, and people will repeat the same ideas quite a bit. So it’s only that plagiarism happens because people are, for instance, trying to sell something with no effort, in which case they’re going to copy something that’s popular. Or now they just use AI.
Oren: Right. Now they just create a bunch of slop books. That case is actually really interesting because I think it has something that is valuable here. So for example, it was ruled that the fact that both books feature vampires who are broody in Alaska, that’s not copyrightable, right? Those are not similar enough to give rise to any kind of legal action, even if Wolfe got the idea from reading Freeman’s unpublished drafts as the accusation went, or having the information given to her by her agent, I think, was the specifics.
Chris: Right. And also, like, a broody vampire in Alaska is not going to sell your book, right? Those ideas are not success, right? It’s implementing those ideas.
Oren: You know, Judge McMahon — correctly, as far as I can tell — pointed out that even though these are two vampires in Alaska, they are very different. They are in very different contexts, right? The unpublished one really sounds like it is in a very Twilight-y situation of characters being in a small town, and then the published one, Crave, is basically at a magic school, which is entirely different. But I still think that this is not a copyright issue. This is not a legal issue, but I do think Crave, the published one — I can’t speak to the unpublished one because I haven’t read it — suffers from channeling too much Twilight.
I think that its love interest is just not very interesting because he’s just Edward again. He’s Edward. I’ve read Edward before. I’ve read a lot of Edwards. This character is very stale at this point. And he also is Edward in ways that don’t really make sense. Like, he’s supposed to be a cool loner, but he’s not a loner. He has a posse that follows him around everywhere. As a result, he seems like a total loser. He’s like, “Yeah, I’m the cool loner. Everyone respects me,” and he’s backed up by, like, five identical guys.
Chris: [Laughs] I mean, that is the risk also of copying, right? Again, you need to add something so that it stays interesting because the more an idea is used, the duller and more boring it gets to everybody, right?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So bringing something unique to it is important, right? When you’re taking inspiration for something else. Like how much copying is where we get to the point where, as Oren said, it’s uncanny? You can not only identify the source material, but it kind of feels like we’re crossing a moral line, even if it… And I don’t know in these cases. Some of these cases, honestly, I would be… in copyright court, I would wonder if there could be successful lawsuits there. At least for me, just setting the law aside, what feels like too much?
I would say that if you’re trying to imitate — and I mean yourself with your own brain and your own hands typing on the keyboard, not with technology — one specific aspect of a story, where let’s say you really like the main character, or you like the character dynamic, or there’s a plot point that you really like, or there’s a wordcraft style you really like, or something about the world you really like. Just imitating those things in your own story is not a big deal because you’re going to make lots of other creative decisions that are completely different from what your inspiration made. And then if you’re doing a good job, you’re going to adapt, right? So your main character put in a different world is going to be different, and all those things are going to change. They’re all going to affect each other, and by the time you’re done, again, you probably won’t have … Your inspiration is likely not going to be that recognizable anymore, and most of the book is going to be your own, right?
Even if you were to take like a main character from one story and a plot point from another story and a world from a third story, if you actually can meld them together and have them work together well, I think in the end they’re all going to be pretty unique. But when I see works taking more than one aspect of the same story, that’s when it starts for me to feel like it’s beginning to cross a line, or it’
604 – Breaking the Fourth Wall
September 6, 2026
As writers, we spend a lot of time crafting our narration to feel natural and immersive. But what happens to that immersion when we break that illusion to address the audience directly? This week, we’re …
Show notes
As writers, we spend a lot of time crafting our narration to feel natural and immersive. But what happens to that immersion when we break that illusion to address the audience directly? This week, we’re discussing fourth wall breaks: what they are, how they’re used, and why some feel like endearing jokes while others are just awkward interruptions.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: Did you know that we are actually recording a podcast for an audience?
Chris: You mean we were inside the podcast the whole time?
Oren: Yeah, that’s why I often have to make jokes to break the tension. It’s not just a normal, natural thing I do. It’s part of a bit.
Chris: Wow! I thought we were just talking.
Oren: Yeah, you would think that, but actually this whole thing is organized by the “Shadow Mage.”
Chris: [Laughter] Oh.
Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it.
Chris: Don’t worry about it. Not gonna be a problem ever again.
Oren: So today we are talking about breaking the fourth wall, which is a kind of a hard topic to adjust to a podcast opening bit. Not really a narrative format.
Chris: Yeah. We tried, okay?
Oren: So now I’m going to read the whole text of “Why We Use the Fourth Wall and Why We Break It” by Chris Winkle, because, you know, that basically just has everything I was gonna say in it already.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, let me introduce what the fourth wall is. I do find the origin of the term to be very interesting and revealing.
So it comes from plays—which a lot of things do because that’s the oldest form of professional storytelling. It’s not that we didn’t have books around, but they were much rarer and people went and saw theater. So a lot of our, like, old storytelling terms all come from theater.
Oren: It’s certainly quite old and the theater predates the novel by quite some time. I don’t know if it’s the oldest professional form of storytelling, but it certainly has a venerable history.
Chris: And there might be some, like, really old novels, but they weren’t—they didn’t come into vogue until printing got cheaper.
Oren: Well, like, the first novel I think is generally considered to be The Tale of Genji. Tale of Genji is from 1021, and I’m sure that you can quibble about whether or not that is actually the first novel, but that’s 1021 CE, whereas theater exists in thousands of years BC. So theater definitely predates novels.
Chris: I mean, in the West it’s in ancient Greece, but not ancient Egypt. I’m sure in China it’s older.
So the fourth wall basically means that when the actors are acting on stage, instead of that there’s an audience there watching them, they pretend that that border of the stage between them and the audience has a solid wall. And so they cannot see that people are watching them. They just act as though the audience is not there.
This basically now is what we used for any convention, which is in most, almost all stories to some extent, where we’re pretending that the story is real instead of being fiction. Because if actors were to acknowledge the audience, they would also be, like, calling attention to the fact that this is a fictional story. Because you know, in like, Romeo and Juliet, Romeo thinks that Juliet is dead. He doesn’t also think that there’s people watching him mourn Juliet. To make that immersive we gotta cut that out.
Oren: There are various stages of it. Like, if a character in a story straight up says, “Wow, this chapter’s kind of boring, huh?” that’s probably a fourth wall break. Unless you’re doing some kind of story within a story, in which case they’re only breaking the inner story’s fourth wall. That gets confusing. But in most cases that would pretty unambiguously count.
But then you have things like characters having monologues, which is weird. Like, obviously that’s not something that a character would do just on their own, like they’re not soliloquying to themselves. But they also don’t directly acknowledge that they’re giving this to an audience, so, eh, gray area.
Chris: Breaking the fourth wall, of course, like literally in theater is when we do something other than pretend there’s a solid wall there. But like now when we’re thinking about it metaphorically, we mean something that just calls attention to the fact that the story isn’t real, and that reminds people of the fiction in a way that’s often disruptive.
What we’re doing when we suspend disbelief we’re pretending the story is real, is we’re engaging in compartmentalized thinking on purpose so that we can hold two facts in our mind simultaneously, where we have the real world where we know that there are actors on stage, or if we’re reading a book, we know that this book has an author.
But then we can also hold it to be true that the characters are real, and they’re in a real fantastical place. Even though those facts are contradictory, we can play along with both of them, and so that’s compartmentalized thinking. But we keep them separate. We don’t want to think about, like, Romeo and Juliet usually within the context of having an audience, so we have to compartmentalize them.
But if we were to break the fourth wall in that moment, we would have to reconcile all of these scenes of, you know, Romeo and Juliet having their, like, private love affair that’s like secret with the fact that they’re being watched by an audience. That mix of reality and story can, like, create cognitive dissonance that we would then have to, like, reconcile.
Oren: It kills immersion. It makes it harder for you to immerse yourself in the story and to, you know, let the events carry you away. Because once you start thinking, “No, none of this is real, none of this matters,” it’s like, that’s not good most of the time. Usually, that’s not how you approach fiction. That doesn’t mean that you should never do it, it’s just why it isn’t the norm.
The most obvious use for it is when you want to make a joke. That’s probably the most common, at least in speculative fiction. You see it a lot on TV. If something is supposed to be funny, there’s gonna be lines like, “I’ve lived in Sunnydale for a long time, and you know what I’ve never seen? A big honking castle.” That’s kind of a fourth wall break. That’s calling attention to the fact that this thing is not real.
Chris: So a fourth wall break, as we said, it’s gonna break immersion typically, and it’s going to lower the sense of realism in the story. Events just have less impact when they feel less real and credible. You know, realism is really restrictive, so you don’t necessarily want super high realism in your story, but you also usually want as much realism as fits what you’re doing.
If we’re coming up with a joke that breaks the fourth wall, the question is, why are we not worried about breaking immersion and, like, lowering the realism level? Now with something like Buffy, where we’re making that joke, it’s already really campy. The realism level’s not very high, so not really worried about putting in a joke right there.
That one is also a “lampshade,” where the expectation is viewers of that episode seeing a castle and knowing this is just a small town, what are the chances in a small town in the United States that there would be a castle? There’s a good chance their immersion is already gonna break with this very contrived thing that’s just showed up.
Oren: It’s a silly episode.
Chris: And so there’s already something unbelievable that’s likely to break their immersion. So by lampshading it, we’re able to smooth it over and just have a laugh over it and then move on. Yes, we acknowledged a castle’s not realistic. And so that’s why breaking immersion to make this joke in particular pays off. There’s already not very much realism, and there’s already not very much immersion.
Oren: And you can compartmentalize it too. Like Avatar is famous for doing “The Ember Island Players” episode, which is self-contained, and in that one they make a bunch of fourth wall breaking jokes like, “Did Jet just die? It was kind of unclear.” That sort of thing. And that’s a weird thing for them to say. Like in context, they would probably not say that about Jet’s death considering that it was pretty upsetting. But the point is to make a joke about the production.
Korra actually ends up doing the same thing in the last season because they had an episode that they didn’t have the budget to make. So they had to use a clip show, which would normally be terrible but it’s full of hilarious jokes. Or at least it was in like 2014 when I watched it. We’re in a re-watch right now, so we’ll see if I still like it when we get to it.
Chris: Breaking the fourth wall is great for jokes because it is usually surprising. Maybe it wouldn’t be surprising if you have a story that is just constantly breaking the fourth wall. Then it would probably lose some of its surprise value and not be as funny.
We don’t normally break the fourth wall. Usually that’s the exception, not the rule. So then when you break it you get the surprise, which is required for jokes. It’s easier to create humor that way and so we can get some very funny jokes. Like the Buffy, you know, “Dawn’s in trouble again. It must be Tuesday.”
Oren: Which is an interesting example of breaking the fourth wall without making it kind of absurdist. I think partly because when she says, “Must be Tuesday,” I didn’t even realize until you wrote that in your article that that was a reference to the fact that the show airs on Tuesday—or at least it used to. I had no idea. I thought that was just like the character making a dark joke about how Dawn is always in trouble. It’s interesting. That one worked on several levels.
Chris: Because it’s very similar to “for him it was Tuesday,” which is another way of saying, yeah, it happens all the time. I always saw that as a fourth wall break.
That was, in fact, the first episode of Buffy I ever saw! I just happened to be at a con and there was a sing-along with that episode. And so to me that’s always been a fourth wall break, but yeah, that one can kind of disguise itself as maybe not a fourth wall break.
Oren: Some people use fourth wall breaks to introduce commentary.
Chris: This one is interesting because usually there are better ways to do commentary. Obviously, there’s lots of ways of sending messages in the story itself through character opinions or what people are struggling against and all that. But like, if you want to comment on storytelling itself, what most writers do is they use a fictional fourth wall break instead of a real one.
Funny to think about whether breaking the fourth wall itself is real or fictional! But basically, if you put a story in your story, then you can have your main character engaging with the characters that are in their book they’re reading. That’s how you create that sort of meta commentary about storytelling.
If you’ve ever seen The Princess Bride and we open with the kid and his grandpa, and they’re reading The Princess Bride, the story’s always stopping so then they can discuss the book some more. That would be like a fictional fourth wall break. It doesn’t really risk jarring the actual viewers—the real world viewers too much because we already know the story within a story is fictional. We’re not… In The Princess Bride maybe there’s a little exception because we spend so much time with the inner-story characters, then it’s more like a framing device—the kid and his grandpa. We’re really fully immersed in the whole Westley and Buttercup story. But again, if you bring the fourth wall break often enough. So maybe that could be considered a true fourth wall break because of how much time we spend in that inner story. But if you bring it back often enough people get used to it and it’s not jarring anymore.
Oren: That’s the technique used by common friend of the show, Interview with the Vampire; season one to greatest effect and then season two to a certain degree. It is an actual interview. The guy doing the interview is asking questions and probing and poking at inconsistencies, which is super cool and an interesting use of commentary.
But we know that the outer level story containment is intact. They don’t turn to the camera to be like, “I wonder if this interview is also an interview with somebody else,” looking at camera, right? They don’t do something like that.
Chris: [Laughs] That one is almost a bit like the equivalent of unreliable narration. Because it’s not purely fictional, the story that’s being told in Interview with the Vampire, right? It’s supposed to be the character’s actual history. It’s almost like we don’t really have a fourth wall there because we’re both in the same world, but then we’re pointing out about the unreliability of the character speaking his own history. So I almost think that’s a little bit more analogous to unreliable narration.
Oren: And you can also have something like Discworld, which has things that kind of look like fourth wall breaks, but in the context of Discworld are not necessarily. You know, Discworld has characters talking about how if you have a one in a million shot it will always hit. But if you have like, a one in a 999,000 shot that’s gonna miss ’cause those odds are impossible.
Chris: So I would definitely classify that as a fourth wall break that is both joke and commentary. ‘Cause we’re calling attention to the fictionality of the work, but we’re also making a joke about stories in general. So we’re making some commentary on storytelling, and it’s just a good joke.
Oren: Discworld is also just a place where that sort of thing is sort of literally true, at least sometimes.
Pratchett will sometimes turn that off when he doesn’t wanna deal with it, but often that’s just literally how the world works. Over time it kind of stops feeling like a fourth wall break. It just becomes a thing the characters do ’cause you get used to it.
Chris: The nice thing about that, of course, is when Terry Pratchett is doing that he’s commenting on stories in general. He’s not commenting on his own story. Because storytellers who comment on their own stories are often kind of obnoxious!
Honestly, when we saw Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, that was actually one of the lesser where she actually had something to say about the story and about the author who wrote it. For anybody who’s not familiar, the character Jo in Little Women, who is often called the main character but honestly in the book she doesn’t really seem more important than the other sisters in my opinion. But she’s based on the author of the book. So in the Little Women she writes in the original book—but in the movie they always have her write the book in the movie, so she writes Little Women in the movie Little Women. Not a thing that is done in the book. And it’s a little recursive, but not necessarily a fourth wall break, ’cause you could tell the story of how you wrote a novel in your novel if you want to.
Oren: It’s a little meta, but it’s not quite a fourth wall break.
Chris: But then she has the character Jo meet with the publisher to talk about the ending. And then after they make an agreement about the ending, then we move to the actual ending in the movie. The intent there was to make the end of the movie seem fictional because the author wanted a different ending and the publisher forced a particular ending on her. But we also are not willing to actually take that ending away because now it’s classic.
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603 – Common Beginning Mistakes
August 30, 2026
We all know how important it is to make a good first impression, but it can be a struggle to convey enough information in an opening scene without a confusing infodump. Not to mention, you need to set the right …
Show notes
We all know how important it is to make a good first impression, but it can be a struggle to convey enough information in an opening scene without a confusing infodump. Not to mention, you need to set the right tone and keep things interesting or risk alienating your audience. This week, we discuss common mistakes people make while crafting their beginnings, as well as ways to avoid them and make those first sentences shine.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: Hello, I am your very important host, Daisy. Today we will talk about… Oh, no! The villain has me! Ah, I die…!
Oren: Well, that’s fine. You were probably not the real main character anyway.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast, where we have lots of prologues. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren. Hang on a second, though. I have to explain to you my backstory for 10 pages, because that’s what you’re here for, right?
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Exposition dump me.
Oren: Okay. All right. [laughs] Getting a little spicy in here. Anyway…
Chris: This time we’re talking about common beginning mistakes, which I see a lot of because I frequently do analysis of beginnings of bestsellers that could use some improvement. And also, when I’m looking at my clients and followers and their works, it’s always easiest to take the beginning and analyze it, because that doesn’t require any context. So I’ve just seen a lot of beginnings, and they are also probably the trickiest portion to write. The climax is also tricky, but beginnings are really, really tricky.
Oren: The first mistake is beginning your story, because if you never begin your story, then you can’t make any other mistakes. So if you think about it, the beginning of the story is actually responsible for more mistakes than any other choice you might make.
Chris: Maybe we can just cut it in the middle and make… Oh, no. The middle has become our beginning.
Oren: Uh-oh.
Chris: It chases us. No matter how much we cut the story down, we can never escape the beginning.
Oren: Due to the linear nature of time, your story will always have to begin somewhere. Even if it’s a weird, wonky story that jumps around, it’s still gonna have to have some entry point where the reader engages with the story. Now, of course, I suppose you could do something really weird like a book with multiple places that readers are supposed to start at random, but then it would just have multiple beginnings, so you’re back to the same problem.
Chris: Are you saying every story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending?
Oren: Yeah, technically that is true. The most technical truth that has ever happened.
Chris: I know that when people say that they have something in their mind, they have some structure, when they say that, it goes to show that we haven’t really intellectualized some of that knowledge.
Oren: I think most people when they say that, they mean that there’s an introduction where you have to set the scene, and then there’s a bunch of stuff that happens, and then there’s a climax, is what I think people are trying to communicate. It’s just not a very helpful concept on its own. If someone doesn’t already know that’s what it means, then the words are not helpful even to that extent.
Chris: I think people use it when they don’t have an intellectual understanding of plot, but they kind of have a feel for it, and so they don’t know how to otherwise put it into words that their story has plot, so they just say it has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.
Oren: See, one common beginning mistake is getting sidetracked with a different topic in your podcast about common beginning mistakes.
Chris: I think with exposition, kind of the big demon for most openings is too much exposition. Although the opposite can also be a problem. We can talk about that. I think the trick that happens, it’s not necessarily that people get super sidetracked with their exposition, it’s mostly that the devil is in the details. The readers do need to know about this, but they don’t need to know all of these details about this. And really honing it down to what’s important, that can be something that happens.
Oren: The most straightforward example I’ve seen of too much exposition is not even a book: it’s the first episode of the Netflix live action Avatar show, where the characters exposition dump a bunch of information in dialogue that we don’t need to know yet. And the reason I know we don’t need to know it yet is that this show follows the animated version very closely, and we didn’t know most of that stuff by this point in the animated version, and it was fine. We did not need that information so quickly.
Chris: I think they explained what the Avatar is three times, and it’s just, hey, you already had a really colorful intro that was based on the animated show intro that said what the Avatar is, and now you’re saying it again? Yeah, it’s technically possible somebody wasn’t there for that part, but if so, this is on Netflix. They can just replay it if they’re confused.
Oren: I wonder if anyone’s used that as one of their writing-for-the-second-screen examples. Because the show as a rule doesn’t really do that, so I don’t think it would qualify. It’s just that the first episode is loaded with exposition for some reason.
Chris: One thing I’ve seen in a couple novel openings is that the author really feels like they need to get in a lot of information, and this is possible that what’s lost is between the outline and drafting, where they made a cool scene in their outline, and they’re like, “Okay, I just need to add a few notes of information so that the readers know what’s going on.” But then when they actually started writing the scene, it was tons and tons and tons of information, and it just spiraled out of control. And what you end up with is a scene where you have the main character just standing around doing nothing, walking around doing nothing. Literally nothing is happening, and the scene is just a bag of exposition.
And in some of those cases, if those details are really important, that’s definitely a sign when you should just add more scenes to your beginning. And you do want to make sure there’s some kind of conflict in them, interesting and engaging. But if you have groundwork that’s that important that you have to lay it in your beginning, then maybe you just need more scenes to bring it out. I’m thinking of Shield of Sparrows, where the main character is just standing around thinking about whether to jump into the water and swim and how envious she is of her sister. That one is an odd one.
Oren: Yeah, it’s always tricky to tell when you’re looking at something that has too much exposition. Is the problem that this exposition is just being inefficiently delivered? Could we fix this by reducing how much exposition there is and adding information later when it’s needed? Or is the issue that the concept is just too complicated? Because that was my problem. The Abbess Rebellion just has a lot of backstory because that’s my toxic trait. My characters have tons of backstory, and there was a bunch of important stuff that had happened in the backstory that set the tone for certain relationships, and a number of important characters from the backstory were dead, and them being dead was really important. That was a problem. And the solution that we came up with was to add a new first chapter and then flash forward in time.
I wouldn’t personally call that a prologue. Some people will. Whatever. But I would say that it’s an imperfect solution. I didn’t love having to add in a big time jump, but it was the only thing that we could do realistically to manage the amount of information that I had set up, just because otherwise it was too much. Readers couldn’t keep track of it.
Chris: What I’ve seen is like in Shield of Sparrows, for instance, you have to look at it and what task is this supposed to perform? In Shield of Sparrows, author Devney Perry is trying to build some sympathy for her main character, and also trying to compare her like, “Oh, see, she’s treated so poorly,” whereas her sister is their parents’ favorite and gets all of the attention. And you kind of have to do that beforehand because once you move on in the book, we quickly get the plot going in actually not that long. We could maybe emphasize that. I think there’s some scenes where they get ready to meet the new ambassadors who have just arrived, so maybe we could fit some of the family dynamics in there.
But at the same time, creating sympathy for your main character so that people like them right away is a valid reason for having a scene. And part of the problem is that the main character comes off as really petty because all those… that resentment of her sister is all told and not shown. So, if we saw, we witnessed firsthand how everybody is treating the main character unfairly, then the main character would be sympathetic. But when we’re told in exposition, it sounds petty.
Oren: And it literally feels the same way as if you meet a stranger and the first thing they do is start complaining about somebody else and about how bad they have it and about how this other person is super mean. And it’s like, I don’t know you at all. Why do you think I have any context for this? And it makes you suspect that maybe they are actually the asshole. We don’t know for sure, but that’s the feeling it gives.
Chris: And They Mostly Come Out at Night had the same issue with its beginning, where the main character is just a ball of anger. Well, that’s a separate issue, but he’s just wandering around looking at things as an excuse to exposit. There’s actually a really eventful backstory scene that’s when he was a kid that sets the stage for everything. And I was just like, you know, you should’ve just called for a time jump afterwards. You still should’ve done it. You still should’ve had that backstory scene as your opening instead of expositing about everything and how everything’s unfair now. Show the source of the unfairness, how this event happened, how the main character was unfairly blamed for it, so that we can sympathize with the main character and not just witness him walking around seething at everybody.
There’re definitely some situations where if you have tons of exposition and it’s supposed to make your main character sympathetic, lay other emotional groundwork, or establish characters then you might just need more scenes instead that are supposed to show those things instead of tell them. In general, in the opening, the information load is always so high because the reader is coming in fresh and they have to learn everything. So generally in the opening, if you can delay giving information in the opening scene, you should delay. Another thing−I see this a lot−besides exposition is just did you have to name the country or the kingdom yet? Was that necessary? Can you just give the name of that later? Or we’ve got minor side characters, maybe we could learn their names later. All those little details, because every name or label that you put on something, that’s something that the reader has to learn and remember. Just using titles for minor characters, saying “that’s the bartender” instead of naming the bartender even if the main character knows their name, people won’t know the difference. But it’s really helpful for delaying how much the reader has to learn initially. Space is just so precious in the opening because you have to teach the reader necessary things, but you’re also trying to engage them, so things really have to be very important and essential for the opening to include them in your opening.
Oren: You can also shape how much information your opening demands immediately by creating the circumstances in which it takes place. If you were writing a steampunk adventure story about a cool inventor, you would maybe open with them in their workshop trying to get this cool device to work properly, and okay, that’s stuff to explain. You gotta explain this cool device, you gotta introduce who this character is, and suggest this is steampunk, but that’s a lot easier than trying to introduce your character in the middle of a giant mecha battle. I’m not gonna say you can’t introduce your character in the middle of a giant mecha battle, but you are making things harder for yourself.
Chris: The thing that I see that’s on the opposite end of the spectrum of having a character just stand around while you dump exposition is having problems that don’t have time to breathe. The reader does need time to anticipate and feel things. Again, the goal of the problem is to create tension, and tension is based on negative anticipation of a possible bad future event. The readers need time to anticipate. If you have in your opening scene, in the very first paragraph, suddenly a mecha shoots at your main character, that doesn’t offer time for anticipation.
Oren: You can open with some kind of high-stakes conflict. That can be done. It’s just do you have the ability to establish what those stakes are and why they should matter in such a short time? You usually wanna err on the side of simplicity if you’re doing that.
Chris: It’s not impossible to open with a fight scene. I do think some extra paragraphs to appreciate who is the opponent, who is the antagonist your protagonist is about to fight, size them up, and be like, “Oh no, I’m in deep trouble now.” Or, if it’s a more complicated world problem, it’s time to explain. I do think that personal problems tend to be better openers because they allow you to multitask introducing your main character with introducing some form of tension, a tense problem. And introducing your character and giving them the best introduction you can give them and making them often sympathetic or what have you is really important.
Personal level problems, I don’t mean it just has to be an emotional problem. It could be, like, oh, the person doesn’t have anywhere they can go, or something that’s like, “Oh no, I can’t pay rent, and I’m dealing with an eviction notice.” That’s an external problem, but it’s also a problem for them personally, as opposed to a world problem where ther
602 – Does Speculative Fiction Have a Canon?
August 23, 2026
Fantasy has plenty of cannons, and so does scifi, if we include beam weapons. But does either of them have a “canon?” The concept of a literary canon is squishy to begin with, and it is not the gold standard of …
Show notes
Fantasy has plenty of cannons, and so does scifi, if we include beam weapons. But does either of them have a “canon?” The concept of a literary canon is squishy to begin with, and it is not the gold standard of quality the way some people insist, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. This week, we’re discussing whether speculative fiction has something similar, which books would go in it, and what that even means.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: Recently, I heard someone asking if science fiction and fantasy had a canon, and I thought that was weird ’cause, yeah, like, lots of them. Like, what kind of cannon do you mean? Like, there’s… flintlock fantasy is a whole genre, and if there’s, like, laser cannons, that’s even more! But then I realized they were spelling it with one N, and they meant does it have, like, a literary canon, and I don’t know. I wasn’t sure if it did or not. So that’s what we’re talking about today.
Chris: I mean, that’s not a formal thing, right? I mean, we do have extended universes, which are generally non-canon. So is it maybe everything that’s not in an extended universe?
Oren: Well, it may be, but before I answer that, if you’ve been enjoying the podcast, we could use your help. We are currently looking for more transcription volunteers to help us make sure that every episode launches with a transcript, and we are very grateful to our existing volunteers. We just wanna make sure that they don’t get burned out. We typically send an episode every six weeks or so at the most, so if you’re interested, go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.
Now, yes, I think that’s actually the answer. We have many canons, because spec fic nerds won’t stop arguing about what’s canon and not canon. But of course, the first question is what is the literary canon? And the answer is it’s very nebulous.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, this is just the books that people worship, right?
Oren: I mean, more or less. You know, they are books that people with literary clout both think are influential and also good, right?
Chris: See, I guess, I definitely don’t always like the idea of having a list of books that we’re supposed to be worshiping. That’s unhealthy, right? It’s unhealthy to hold up these works because a lot of times they’re treated as though they’re perfect in some way, and all stories are flawed, and it’s important we understand that. And it comes along with the idea of “the greats,” right? There’s these people who are destined for greatness, who write great literature, and it’s not a matter of skill so much as it is a matter of cultural clout that somebody is treated like that. And trying to aim for that level is… again, in the end, I don’t think it’s healthy, right? We’re trying to aim for something unattainable that depends on the validation of others. So, you know, I don’t like that idea in general. However, I do feel like we could maybe separate the ideas of what’s influential from what’s perfect.
Oren: Right. And there are a lot of books that are influential that would never be considered part of the literary canon because they don’t, you know, get lauded in the same way. Like, a book has to be lauded to count. And I’m not asking whether we should have one, I’m just curious if we do have one. I think the answer is yes, whether it should be or not.
Chris: I mean, I can certainly list books, and I’m happy to do that, that I think would be part of the canon if we were looking at what is influential and has helped shape and define the genre or subgenres. You know, we could definitely go over that list. I would just want to specify: the goal here of this list is not to treat every influential book as though it’s a masterpiece.
Oren: Right. ‘Cause in the literary canon, these are books like Grapes of Wrath, uh, anything by Tolstoy. If you had to read it in high school literature, there’s a good chance it would be considered part of the canon. People, of course, argue about what books do and don’t belong there all the time.
Chris: Yeah. I do think that there’s this old idea of there being a set of classic books that all educated people are supposed to have read, right? And this is a point that I think Wes made in an old episode, where one book would allude to another classic book because that was its way of saying, “Hey, I’m knowledgeable. I have, of course, read the books I was supposed to read.” Right? And that, that group, that list of classic books that everybody who’s educated reads then becomes part of the cultural conversation and how you prove that you’re educated, by having the knowledge of these classic works. And it creates this exclusive literary club. Again, I don’t think this is a great idea, but I kinda wonder if the canon is tied to that idea where, of course, you know, you have to read this set of books or you’re uneducated.
Oren: Yeah. And I do get the appeal of, like, what if there were certain books that everyone had read? Because then we would have a common base of reference.
Chris: Yeah, it’d be easier to have examples that people were familiar with if everybody had read the same books.
Oren: I mean, that is one of the reasons why I use examples from Lord of the Rings so much, right? Lord of the Rings and movies, because it’s much easier to guarantee that a larger percentage of my audience has seen those. Whereas if I’m using, even from relatively popular book series, like, you know, Temeraire did very well, but I have to explain a lot more of the Temeraire example for it to work, right? Whereas with Lord of the Rings, nearly everybody who comes to our site is at least aware of Lord of the Rings, even if they haven’t read it. So I understand the concept. I just don’t really think it’s workable because the moment you try to do that, you are having to exclude a bunch of books, and it’s hard for me to imagine any criteria you would set up that would A) be something you could get other people to adopt, and B) would not be, like, exclusionary along some lines that you don’t want to exclude books on.
Chris: Yeah, it would definitely introduce a lot of potential for bias. Not that the bias wouldn’t happen anyway, you know?
Oren: Sure.
Chris: I think there is a lot of bias when people share around books and what books they worship. There are certain patterns in who the authors of those books are.
Oren: Yeah, we’ll never know what those patterns are. Impossible to know.
Chris: So I guess that kinda happens anyway, but I think the problem is when you have a set classic list of books that everybody’s supposed to read. Hopefully in time books will change and you’ll diversify that list, but then it becomes really controversial if people are like, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t read Catcher in the Rye in class.” And it’s like, “What do you mean? It’s a classic!” It’s like, “Okay, but should it be, though? Should it be?”
Oren: Maybe we should read something else. I mean, because that is sort of the thing. If you’re going to have a canon and you wanna add books to it, you have to take some out, otherwise the concept is meaningless and it’s just all books now. But looking at speculative fiction specifically, it’s pretty clear that we have some books that people do treat the way that literary people treat their canon.
Chris: Lord of the Rings is probably the most obvious one.
Oren: Right.
Chris: It’s interesting because Frankenstein is another one that’s really famous, but Frankenstein is probably less referenced among just speculative fiction fans and more among actually literary fiction. It is science fiction, and it is, I would say, part of the canon, but definitely Lord of the Rings… because its influence, I think, is greater or considered greater or more relevant today anyway, right? That is the one that immediately comes to mind for everybody as being an important thing that everybody knows and everybody references. Even if you haven’t read it, even if you haven’t seen the movies, there are probably some things you know, like that there’s an evil ring in that story, for instance.
Oren: Yeah. And then there are, like, a handful of others, and then it starts to fracture based on your subgenre. You know, Dune is another one that is, you know, not only influential, but it’s also highly lauded as having a special kind of literary merit. Obviously, I don’t agree.
Chris: Is it?
Oren: Yeah, absolutely!
Chris: Okay. Yeah.
Oren: For one thing, there’s Dune fans, and they are, like, easily the most pretentious of the fan group that I’ve upset. But just the way people talk about Dune is that it’s, like, extremely deep, right? You have people quoting Herbert’s ideas from outside the book about how a charismatic leader will lead us to damnation. You know, as if that’s very profound and not something that everybody says at all times, and arguably isn’t even in the first book. But that’s the way people talk about Dune, and people talk about Song of Ice and Fire the same way. That’s a much more recent one that I would say is treated the same way that literary canon books get treated.
Chris: Yeah. So what do you think about Wheel of Time, since Wheel of Time is clearly derived from Dune?
Oren: Derived from Dune and derived from Lord of the Rings.
Chris: Very true.
Oren: Personally, I don’t think Wheel of Time is there, and this isn’t a quality judgment. As I’ve stated, I don’t really think that being considered part of the canon makes a book better. But I don’t think that there is the same attitude towards Wheel of Time as you get for, like, Dune or Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire.
Chris: So you’re judging this not by, like, how many books have imitated this book, but by the worshipfulness with which people talk about it.
Oren: I think it’s both. I think it is a combination, and I think one often causes the other. You know, for example, Twilight was hugely influential, but no one is ever gonna talk about Twilight the way they talk about the literary canon. They might do that for Hunger Games. Like, Hunger Games is starting to get there. Gut check here, right? I can’t scientifically test this, but just the way people talk about Hunger Games as, like, how important its messages are and how insightful it is. And, you know, I like Hunger Games. It’s a good book. I’m glad to see it getting recognition, and I think that it might get there, and it’s also extremely influential.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, with Twilight, I think Twilight is influential, and I hope someday it will be less disparaged. Not that it’s a perfect book, right? I just don’t think that there’s anything about it that deserves the kind of ridicule it gets. At the same time, we can go back to Twilight and see, well, I would say The Vampire Chronicles are the ones that would be considered part of the speculative fiction canon, the Anne Rice vampire series.
Oren: Oh yeah, that’s definitely one. I should’ve thought of that.
Chris: Because that influenced Twilight, right? So if we go back, that’s what started our paranormal romance vampire subgenre, it started with Vampire Chronicles.
Oren: Yeah, and it has the veneer of awe, right? The way people talk about Interview with the Vampire, which is extremely funny in the context of Anne Rice firing her editor on Facebook.
Chris: Because her every word is perfect.
Oren: That’s such a crass thing to do for the author of a series that people talk about the way they talk about Interview with the Vampire.
Chris: Yeah. But it speaks to how much he was worshiped that she just didn’t feel like she needed to be edited. There’s a lot of arrogance in that move that probably comes from being worshiped too much.
Oren: Yeah. And Discworld, people talk about Discworld in a similar way. I just don’t know if Discworld has reached the level of popularity that I would say is required to make-
Chris: Really?
Oren: Uh, yeah.
Chris: Well, maybe I just hang out with a bunch of Discworld fans.
Oren: You do.
Chris: ‘Cause it feels like Discworld definitely, as a whole entity, is there. It’s definitely worshiped. It’s very popular. I would be surprised.
Oren: I mean, you definitely do hang out with a certain subgroup, but also, you’re not wrong. Like, Discworld is popular, and people both rightly and wrongly laud Discworld for its supposed brilliance. It’s just to me, I don’t think we’re quite at the worshipful level yet. But I could be wrong. [sarcastic] Maybe we are, and I just don’t see it because of how amazing and beautiful Discworld is. It’s outshining the way people worship it.
Chris: Yeah. Well, let’s just say I think we still have a plugin, it’s possible that I had to disable it on our website, that is a tribute to Terry Pratchett ’cause it sends messages over the interwebs that represent the clacks messages.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Right? Like, you know, that was one of those things that I feel like people had a great deal of reverence for, calling him Sir Terry Pratchett, so yeah.
Oren: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that very well could be right.
Chris: And he was knighted, right? I do think that speaks to a certain level of cultural reverence.
Oren: Yeah, he did get plenty of recognition. He was not toiling in obscurity.
Chris: One book that I have to say, you know, I might begrudgingly put on this list is Name of the Wind just because I’ve seen enough knockoffs of Name of the Wind now. I can’t point and say Name of the Wind started this specific subgenre, but people definitely speak of it in very worshipful tones, which annoys me. And again, we’ve seen a couple of extremely blatant knockoffs, one of which is its own bestseller, which again speaks to the fact that people are inspired by it and are copying it, and so it definitely has some level of influence.
Oren: Yeah, it’s possible. Name of the Wind did pretty well for itself. It sold a lot of books, and certainly a lot of people talked about how brilliant it was. At the moment, I haven’t seen the kind of extra-textual discussion that I associate with people talking about canon works. Like, you know, I haven’t seen anyone quote lines from the book as wisdom the way they do with Lord of the Rings and Dune. And Pratchett, honestly – and so I think that that speaks to your point actually that Pratchett probably does count.
Chris: Yeah, in fact, I think I quoted Pratchett myself in one of my blog posts. Um, although actually the funny thing was I was quoting another author quoting Pratchett.
Oren: I haven’t seen that sort of tributes for Name of the Wind, but maybe.
Chris: Yeah, and maybe it’s a little new and it will get there or something like that. You know, we’ll see what happens with its cultural influence if it spreads. What do you think about Narnia?
Oren: Yeah, I would say so.
Chris: I mean, it’s very popular… I feel like almost everybody has been exposed to Narnia or was when they were kids. I’m kind of struggling to think about what books were inspired by Narnia. I mean, it is a portal fantasy, so we’ve had other portal fantasies. It’s probably not the first portal fantasy. We’ve got Wizard of O
601 – Crafting Nuanced Characters
August 16, 2026
Everyone likes to rave about nuanced characters, but what does it mean for a character to be nuanced? How do you show different sides of a character without being contradictory? Is a random assortment of …
Show notes
Everyone likes to rave about nuanced characters, but what does it mean for a character to be nuanced? How do you show different sides of a character without being contradictory? Is a random assortment of subtextual details enough, or does it require a more targeted investment? In this episode, we discuss the ins and outs of adding complexity to characters, when it works, and when the extra details add more clutter than depth.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Now, you listeners all know me as a voice on this podcast, but did you know I also have a physical presence? With a body and everything?
Oren: Whoa.
Chris: I know, right? Like, I actually exist in meat space.
Oren: Sounds fake. Citation needed.
Chris: I’m a full-blooded, nuanced person, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna let anybody see video of me.
Oren: No, obviously not. I mean, you gotta get the class for that.
Chris: It’s true.
Oren: You take Tension & Hooks, you get to see a video of Chris’ face.
Chris: Yep, yep. That’s, uh, totally worth all the money of the course is just seeing my face. That’s what it’s about. But on this podcast, you just have to do with our bad voice imitations if you wanna see another side to us. So this time, we’re gonna be talking about nuanced characters.
Oren: We shall indeed, but first, I would like to give a nuanced appeal, that doesn’t mean anything, but go with it, that if you’ve been enjoying the podcast we could use your help. We are currently looking for transcription volunteers to help us make sure every episode launches with a transcript. We are grateful to our existing volunteers, and we wanna make sure they don’t get burned out. We typically send an episode out every six weeks or so at most. So if you’re interested, you can just go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.
Chris: Ooh, how subtle. How sophisticated.
Oren: Yeah. People heard that appeal and were like, “Wow, there’s layers to that,” and the layers is that we would like more volunteers.
Chris: [laughter] I love the idea of layers, ’cause it just sounds so pretentious. And of course, I immediately think of The Other Black Girl, the show, where the main character is forced at her publisher because an author that is really famous got mad when she pointed out how racist one of his black characters was.
Oren: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris: And so when she’s forced to give him an apology, which of course is terrible-
Oren: Ugh.
Chris: –- she’s like, “Well, see, I didn’t realize this character has layers.”
[laughter]
Oren: Each layer more racist than the last! Which, to be clear, this was a very good storyline. It was just hard to watch.
Chris: It was hard. It was painful.
Oren: The secondhand embarrassment of, oof, white people be like that. Ugh.
Chris: But yeah, this time we’re talking about character nuance or complexity. They’re pretty similar. They both require that your character has more than one trait that defines them. Although with nuance, usually the emphasis is on some level of subtlety. And we did not have an episode on either of these issues, which is just shocking. After 600 episodes, we’ve done everything except for this apparently.
Oren: Well, that’s because we’re a nuanced podcast and we don’t go for the obvious topics.
Chris: Oh, we don’t, do we?
Oren: That’s actually what I was wondering about. Is nuance synonymous with character development? Is a developed character automatically nuanced?
Chris: We had a previous episode talking about how much development you need to do.
Oren: Right.
Chris: I think it’s a very literary fiction idea that every character needs to be super developed because in a story we have some characters that are central characters and some characters that are bit characters, and they have different roles.
Oren: Hey now, it’s not just a literary thing. It’s also a Blake Snyder thing, who is the most crassest commercialist you’ve ever encountered.
Chris: That’s true. That’s true.
Oren: And he also thinks every character needs an arc. Okay, Blake, calm down.
Chris: Every single character!
[laughter]
Oren: Every single one! Except villains. Villains never have arcs. Shut up.
Chris: Wow. So I would say that this is one thing that you typically do when developing a character further, but of course how much you wanna do it depends on the presence of the character, in particular. The more nuance and complexity just requires more time to communicate, clearly. So generally, the smaller the character’s presence is, the less time they have on the page, less complex they should be because you want distinctiveness first. First you want to be able to distinguish them from other characters and for that they need to have a memorable trait. And if you make them super complex and give them a half a dozen different traits and they only say two lines in a scene… [chuckles]
Oren: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s a lot.
Chris: It’s not gonna work out. But the more you show the character, the more you kinda need them to be complex to stay interesting, and the nuance usually is we’re just taking that and making it so there’s a little bit of subtlety involved, maybe a little bit of subtext. Subtext.
Oren: Ooh, I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards!
[laughter]
Chris: So that’s kind of what it is. And again, if the character’s important, they can just get boring or tiresome. And this is most common with villains, and we’ve talked about this with villains before, that a villain that is just pure evil and is actually on screen and talking gets dull really fast. But it can happen with other characters. We can talk about how it happens with other characters. It’s just for different reasons. Like for a side character, it tends to happen. Nuance and complexity tends to be lost just because, again, we want them to be a full-fledged character ’cause they’re like the main character’s best friend or something.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: But in the plot we always use them for the same thing, like telling the main character not to go do anything fun. In which case they end up feeling very flat when you want them to be more complex.
Oren: Yeah. I guess what I’m wondering is if complexity and nuance are generally the same thing, so like, to use a completely not controversial example, we have Fire Lord Ozai in the live action Netflix adaptation, which, you know, people don’t have any strong opinions about. A very normal way people feel about that show.
Chris: Yeah. Honestly, I really wanna talk about the animated Avatar versus live action, even though everybody’s gonna get mad at us.
Oren: The live action one, you certainly see more of what Ozai is doing, right? It goes into more complexity about the way that he is manipulating his children, whereas in the animated version he’s pretty flat. He does abuse his children, but in a very straightforward way. And is that nuance? Is his character more nuanced now?
Chris: Yes.
Oren: Yes? Okay.
Chris: Yes, because we’ve softened the edges a bit. He’s not as exaggerated.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: For instance, when we have a scene in season two where he tells Azula that, “Hey, look, Zuko found the Avatar, and that’s a good thing.” In the animated version, maybe he praises Zuko at the very end when he thinks that Zuko has killed the Avatar, but him just saying good things about one of his children is different. So yeah, I would call that more nuanced.
Oren: Notably, he is doing that to manipulate Azula, not because he suddenly feels warm feelings for Zuko.
Chris: Right. But he’s not cackling, you know, or… When we’re talking about nuance, we’re talking about adding a little more realism to the depiction and having it not be quite so exaggerated. I would say that an evil character who is doing evil things but not cackling, you know, and waving a knife around has gained a little more nuance. If we were to put it on a large spectrum, right? Not that they’re super nuanced.
Oren: I think people tend to assume when you say nuance, especially in regards to a villain, you are making them more morally ambiguous, which is not really the case here, right? Ozai’s not any less evil in the live action version, you just see a little bit more of the process of how he does things. And, you know, he’s just a little more active.
Chris: But I mean, you could make him more morally ambiguous and that could be a form of nuance-
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I think.
Oren: You could.
Chris: You could do, you know, many things to express nuance. I think a lot of times if people are thinking about what is the most nuance, what if we nuance-maxxed our characters?
Oren: [laughs] Oh God, Chris
Chris: That’s when we get things like people loved in The Last of Us, I remember one patron was talking about a character that was setting down a plate in front of the other and then turning it so the meat is in front, which is a thing that servers at fancy restaurants do.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And that’s like a small, subtle little thing that enriches the depiction. If we’re talking about super nuance, we can talk about all these little signals that are designed so that people don’t have to pick up on them, but if you do pick up on them, they enrich your experience. Kind of like subtext. It’s how subtext should be. You should not have to pick up on subtle, super subtle subtext to enjoy the depiction, but it should enrich the depiction if you do pick up on it. There’s things like that, but I think we can put this on a big scale and say that if a character becomes less cartoonish, they’re generally more nuanced to some extent.
Oren: ‘Cause when I think of a character that they made more nuanced, like the first one I think of is Gorothan from Murderbot, in the book versus the TV show.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely.
Oren: And that is a case where we made the character more morally ambiguous, ’cause in the book he’s just a jerk.
Chris: Yeah, he’s just a hero hater, and he’s very shallow and flat.
Oren: Whereas in the TV show he has deeper motivation, and he’s probably my favorite character.
Chris: Yeah, no, he’s great. Again, there’s a depth to it that I think helps with the nuance where we know that he has a background in working for the corporations, and that was really bad, and that drives his fears about their safety. That makes him suspicious of Murderbot, and so we can kind of see that come through.
Oren: Yeah, the fact that he and Murderbot are both much more conscious of how dangerous the world is than the other characters really helps bring that character out. And there’s like a tiny bit of that in the original book, but it isn’t really used for much, whereas in the TV show it’s really developed. And they, those two characters have a lot in common, which motivates them to not like each other, which I find fascinating. I thought that was great work.
Chris: Yeah, and that’s a form of nuance in itself. They don’t like each other, but they have something in common that they can in some places actually agree sometimes. So we have subtleties to how this works, and it’s not just a flat, “I hate you.” “No, I hate you.” Those subtleties make it more interesting to spend more time with the character for longer. Going back to Avatar and getting in trouble again.
Oren: Yes! More Avatar.
Chris: The thing that was so fascinating to me, okay, not that the live action Avatar was a good project to greenlight-
Oren: Yeah
Chris: ‘Cause it just didn’t have enough to do. But I didn’t really appreciate, until I saw the first season of the live action, the fact that when we look at an animated cartoon like Avatar: The Last Airbender, our expectations for characters and the level of realism and subtlety they have is different. We expect a cartoon character to be less nuanced and more exaggerated, and I think it really just goes with the lower level of realism of the animation itself often, and the simplified character designs. And those things just go together aesthetically, and we just accept a depiction that is more exaggerated. And some of the characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender, the animated version, are cool because they’re not nuanced, but they stand out so strong, and a key one is Azula. We don’t have to talk about her issues with Ursa that pop up at the very end, which we don’t really see that much of earlier.
Oren: The second most cursed discourse in all of Avatar fandom.
Chris: But for most of the show, Azula is just delightfully evil. She’s really competent, which makes her a good villain, and when she actually starts acting nice to Zuko, we’re very suspicious. And that gives her depiction a little bit of complexity because we see her have a pair of friends and actually act like a sister to Zuko kind of.
Oren: A little bit, when it’s in her interests.
Chris: A little bit, in the beach episode, for instance, when it’s in her interests. But what’s fun about her is just the fact that she’s evil and good at it, and that’s what we like. So but when we take things into live action and we have actual actors playing the characters and it’s not a cartoon anymore- It doesn’t look right when characters act like they’re a cartoon character. And so we kind of need them to have a higher level of realism to the way that their personality works and they act. And I thought it was fascinating to see how the showrunners aim to flesh out characters and add more nuance and complexity to them.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Some of them I like better than others. I really like Sokka. Yeah, I think he’s goofy when he needs to be goofy, but also can be serious and that just gives him a bigger range. One character that’s been interesting to look at is Iroh.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: The Iroh in this, by the second season, I’ve concluded that Iroh is actually not as nuanced or complex as the animated version, and that has been a disappointment.
Oren: Yeah. Or at least the things they gave Iroh in the live-action second season to try to make his character deeper are completely removed from what Zuko is doing. ‘Cause they decided to play up his war guilt, which is totally reasonable. I can totally see where they came up with that idea, but Iroh&#
600 – Crafting a Long Series
August 9, 2026
Oh wow, that’s six entire hundreds. Honestly didn’t expect we’d ever make it this far, and now we’re lacking a plan. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean your long series also has to lack a plan, or lack a smooth …
Show notes
Oh wow, that’s six entire hundreds. Honestly didn’t expect we’d ever make it this far, and now we’re lacking a plan. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean your long series also has to lack a plan, or lack a smooth transition for that matter. This week, we’re discussing how to lay the groundwork for a story that goes on and on, hopefully in a way that doesn’t leave you trapped four books into an epic work of dark fantasy with no idea how to continue.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Manasa. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: I was there, Chris. I was there 3,000 years ago when some nerds recorded the first Mythcreant Podcast episode.
Chris: Oh, we’re so old.
Oren: I told them to cast it into the fire, and they dramatically said no, and then 600 episodes later, here we are.
Chris: Well, since we have another opportunity, we can cast it into the fire again.
Oren: No. We don’t, we don’t do that. We don’t cast things into the fire around here. You think fire’s free? We can’t afford fire.
Chris: So yeah, maybe just cast the intro music into the fire.
Oren: I like that intro music, but we have had it for quite a while.
Chris: Yeah. A big thanks to Jonathan Coulton for, for giving us permission to use his song. It was great. It was just from a different time, having that long of intro music. It was time to modernize by just getting right to the episode. And I don’t know, maybe later we might add a more modern, shorter intro sometime if I get around to it. I, I might never.
Oren: We don’t say “100%” nearly enough to be a modern podcast. We have completely lost the lingo.
Chris: Well, maybe our retroness still has some charm.
Oren: People don’t realize….Before we get to the main topic, uh, if you have enjoyed the podcast, we could use your help. We are currently looking for more transcription volunteers to help us make sure every episode launches with a transcript. We are grateful to our existing volunteers, and we wanna make sure they don’t get burned out. We typically send an episode every six weeks or so at the most. If you’re interested, go to mythcreants.com/volunteer.
Chris: All right. So what is our topic today? Is it that we’re so old?
Oren: Yeah, it’s so old.
Chris: 3,000 years. It feels like 3,000 years. It does.
Oren: I was hoping that it would, it would work out to 3,000 days, but no, it’s more like 5,000 days. So it didn’t quite work out math-wise. Today we’re talking about how to craft a long series.
Chris: Long series, like this podcast. Which is totally the same.
Oren: Which we didn’t plan at all. So, you know, if you wanna end up like us, don’t plan, I guess, is the lesson here. Because, of course, the planning versus pantsing debate is eternal, and I’m not gonna try to solve it here. But if you are talking about a series, you do have to consider the extra wrinkle that unless you’re writing the whole thing all at once before publishing (which some writers do, but I don’t think most of us do), then there’s gonna be stuff that already exists in the world and that you would be very hard-pressed to change if you end up deciding you wanna take the story in a completely different direction.
So planning can be a little bit more important there because as long as it’s a single book, you can theoretically go back and change things if you decide, “To heck with this outline,” or, “I don’t do an outline.” But if you’re doing a five-book series, and the first two books are already published, well, you gotta kinda abide by what you set there, or you should. I suppose you don’t have to. No one has to do anything.
Chris: I mean, if you plan the first one and write it without planning the series, and again we could talk about the best case scenario versus the worst case scenario. In the best case scenario, if you do know what you’re doing, we will talk about how to leave things open so the story has some place to go even if you haven’t planned it out. If you leave things open instead of like writing yourself into a corner after the first installment, you can be okay. But you are gonna have more constraints after the first book because now you have to adhere to whatever you established in your first story. On the other hand, though, I have definitely seen people, you know, especially with their magnum opus, they jump into a series right away, and it’s almost like we have the same constraints but in reverse – which I think is worse – where now they’ve planned the end, and so the beginning can’t change.
Or I’ve even had people add scenes that feel really out of place in their first book because it’s intended to set up something for a later book. And the first book is hands down the most important. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re plotting because, of course, like any good plot, you wanna escalate and have the last book be like the most epic. But from the reader’s perspective, the first book absolutely has to succeed in order for anybody to read the later books. Again, depending on what kind of series we’re talking about. We can talk about anthologies later.
Oren: Yeah, that’s one of the most difficult things as an editor when you’re talking to the author and suggesting, “Well, this thing isn’t working. This plot element isn’t functioning well. We should revise it to strengthen it,” and they’re like, “No, that can’t be changed. We need that to set up for the twist in Book Four.” Well, you didn’t hire me to edit Book Four, so there’s only so much I can do about that. I ask for very broad details of what happens in the later books, but I can’t even read a full series outline. That would be a ton more work that no one paid for. So at some point, we do have to acknowledge that fixing the first book should probably be the priority.
Chris: Yeah. I think ideally people would, as they practice writing and plotting, slowly scale up the size of their stories so that they don’t commit to a long series before they kind of know how plotting goes a little bit. Not that there isn’t… I think most writers still- they try something different and then they have surprises and things don’t go how they expect, right? So it’s not for a lot of people, it doesn’t necessarily become super regular. But I think the issue that happens in the very beginning is: if you start a long series like right away, but you’re still learning some like really important story fundamentals, you end up with something that is really complex and puts tons of constraints on the first book. And it’s just really hard to make that first book a success, which it absolutely needs to be. So that’s a situation where I might say, “You know what? Maybe you should just not plan. Maybe you should just write the first book and make sure that works.” Again, ideally planning can, can do worlds of good, but…
Oren: Right, and even if you are at the stage where starting to plan makes sense, I’m not suggesting that you need to plan every single detail and have like a super rigid plan to hold yourself to because as you write, things are gonna change. Things are gonna be different, and you will have to probably make adjustments. That’s just the nature of it. And if you get too rigid in your planning, that’s going to be a problem, and every writer is gonna have to find that sweet spot for themselves. I can’t tell you what it is for you. But I would generally recommend, if you’re serious about this series and you have like some experience with what that means, I would usually recommend at least some basic plotting of what you think the later books are gonna be, so that you’re setting yourself up for them early instead of trying to scrounge a plot out of the ether later on.
Chris: So maybe it’s worth talking about: how do you leave yourself with somewhere to go? Let’s say you are just plotting the first book, but you wanna make it a series. You’re not gonna plot out the entire series because you’re gonna see how well the first book does before you commit to working on book two.
Oren: Right, like what I did. Admittedly, I was surprised at how many people saw the ending hook that I put in “Abbess Rebellion” and thought that it was a – even described it as – a cliffhanger ending. I was like, “Is that a cliffhanger?”
Chris: Oh, I mean, I certainly didn’t think it was a cliffhanger.
Oren: But there were definitely some people who read that and were like- even that hook was-…You know, they were like, “Well, where’s the next part?” And I’m like, “Well, the next part will be there if any significant number of people read this,” which, you know, they didn’t, as expected.
Chris: I mean, unless you have a huge marketing budget, that’s to be expected. And from what I’ve heard, if you’re gonna be indie publishing, it makes sense to finish three books before you start spending money if you wanna advertise yourself, because then there’s three things for people to read if they do start reading your work. So who knows? You know, we’ll see. I think there are a lot of people who did like “Abbess Rebellion” and wanted to see a sequel. So if things pick up, it’s possible. Um, you know, it’d be nice if you still return to that.
Oren: You know, with all this free time I’m gonna have in law school.
Chris: Yeah, could be a long time coming. Okay, so let’s talk about it. The main thing that really screws writers over and makes it hard to do another installment is: when we tie up everything in the plot, and everybody gets a happy ending, and there’s just no problems left. Because at that point, if you want to create problems for the next book, it feels like we have to take the happy endings away from people, and that doesn’t feel great. We’ve seen a lot of…like the “Willow” show … A lot of these were, don’t get me wrong, fairly unforced errors. At the end of the “Willow” movie, the classic movie, you know, Willow now is like learning magic and he’s happy and doing great. And in the beginning of the show, he’s miserable, and it drags out the question of whether he can actually do magic for a surprisingly long time. When the whole movie was about him getting to the point where he felt confident in himself, and then he was ready to actually do real magic. So that was just so unsatisfying, the idea that he couldn’t do magic anymore. And, again, we can have new threats appear and that works, especially if you want relationships to grow, but everybody is like getting along perfectly and they’re like really close to each other, it may not feel…and you can create new problems, it’s just definitely easier if there’s some room for growth. The enemies become friends, but they’re not yet lovers, or what have you.
Oren: Yeah. Well, “Willow” is weird because “Willow” has basically zero world building. Like, there is so little effort devoted to what this place is like beyond that there’s an evil witch and we gotta stop her. Like, what we’re even stopping her from doing is very vague. So it’s not like they don’t have anything left to explore because they basically explored nothing, which is one of the reasons why the sequel series is so weird to me. But ideally if they had wanted to set themselves up for a sequel, there would’ve been a little bit more of an attempt to demonstrate that this world has things going on other than this one evil witch.
Chris: Yeah. Which, again, the world building, brings me to this also really matters for allowing sequels because if you have just like a single world threat that kind of defines the plot and it doesn’t feel like this is a world that has that same level of problems regularly, then it can be really hard to come up with “What’s the next problem?” Whereas if you have a world where stuff is happening all the time…So like for instance, in “Lockwood & Co.”, we have a ghost apocalypse kind of, so there’s ghosts everywhere.
And during the story they have to tackle different ghosts haunting houses, and then we climax with a big mansion that has tons of ghosts in it. It’s super creepy. We don’t get rid of all of the ghosts in the setting, right? We don’t fix whatever caused the ghost apocalypse and send all of the ghosts to rest at the end of the first book. If we did that, then it’s like, well, “the entire concept of this book is fighting ghosts, but now we took care of all of the ghosts. Where do we have to go?” Whereas if we’re just fighting, okay, “this is one mansion that’s particularly dangerous, this is gonna be our climax, the post-apocalypse is still here”, then we can just pull up more spooks and ghosts for future books, and we have plenty of room to keep writing sequels.
Oren: And I suspect that you wouldn’t have a Willow type situation in novels very often because Willow kind of gets away with the fact that it does zero world building because it’s a relatively short cult classic movie that doesn’t really need world building. It’s just got quirky, fun characters that people like, and it’s funny. Whereas with a novel, I think you would have a hard time getting people to buy a fantasy novel that had that flimsy of a world. Like even fantasy novels that aren’t known for their world building do more than that.
Chris: I mean, a fairy tale fantasy can be very flimsy in its world building, right? Because it’s really light and kind of low in realism.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true.
Chris: So there’s just like kingdoms everywhere, but, you know, we don’t necessarily have a map and it’s like “how many kingdoms can fit in such a small space? We have like princes and princesses running around everywhere.” So it may depend on the type of story. Willow is pretty campy. So I don’t know. But again, because it’s left open, right, there’s plenty of room to be like, “Oh yeah, did you know there’s another big empire next door that is headed by an evil wizard and the wizard wants to kidnap Elora or something?” You know, so there’s just … There is actually plenty of room to build on that because it’s not thoroughly explored and the premise of the original Willow is just magical people and armies running around on the map.
Oren: Yeah. Although Willow does highlight another potential issue which is that if you want to leave room for sequels, it’s usually best to be modest with your initial scale. Because they’ve saved the kingdom from a super evil powerful sorceress, and it’s not that you can’t escalate past that, it’s just what do you escalate to? It feels like that witch is about as powerful as a bad guy could get before the power levels start to become meaningless.
Chris: So generally the rule is, because you do want the series to be a non-anthology series that is closely tied together, you do want it to escalate. But you have other options. Instead of escalating the tension, which usually in many cases requires increasing the scope of the story…so it’s a town, now we’re focusing on the kingdom or what have you. You could also change things up more so that you’re adding more novelty to make up for the fact that the tension is not going up because something is new and refreshing in the new story. But then the question is: what is it gonna be? I mean, again, Willow is open-ended, right? Maybe we could add some unicorns or something. The unicorn lord. Something that’s different enough to make a sequel work. Again, that might be harder with something like Lockwood & Co., that is very specifically about fighting ghosts as opposed to a general magical epic fantasy setting like Willow. Not that you couldn’t create, add variety to Lockwood & Co., but like that would definitely be harder.
Oren: I want to talk about two very broad methods for series plotting. You got what I will shorthand refer to as the Lockwood method and then the Temeraire method. Because in Lockwood, there is a series plot about figuring out, like, what the heck happened with this ghost apocalypse, what’s going on, and we start to get towards solving that by the end. But that’s not apparent from the first book. In the first book, they don’t receive, like, the riddle of the ghost apocalypse, which is what I would probably recommend to newer writers. It’s something that is implied, but you don’t come right out and say it, and then that gives you the option to either continue it or to say, “All right, I’m done with this series,” before you actually get there. As opposed to in Temeraire, it’s very clear that the throughline is the defeat of Napoleon from the first book. And Naomi Novik does it. Nine books later, they get him, but that’s a nine-book series. That’s pretty ambitious for most of us teeny baby writers. And if she had started that and then decided that she was done with that serie
599 – Tech Levels
August 2, 2026
As everyone knows, everywhere in the world had exactly the same technology from 476 to 1453, which can be summed up as a “Medieval Tech Level.” Or, wait, maybe that’s not true at all. And maybe technology …
Show notes
As everyone knows, everywhere in the world had exactly the same technology from 476 to 1453, which can be summed up as a “Medieval Tech Level.” Or, wait, maybe that’s not true at all. And maybe technology doesn’t advance along linear paths like we see in 4X strategy games. So, what even is a tech level, and why are worldbuilders so concerned about them? Fortunately, we have some answers.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[intro music plays]
Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: What if instead of being an internet transmission in a cyberpunk dystopia, this podcast was an old-timey radio show?
Oren: [vague Transatlantic accent] Well, golly, I’d say that’d be right swell. Now pay attention and listen to these messages. There’s a new kind of toothpaste that’s barely got any lead in it.
Chris: I did not know that you were so good at imitating an old-timey radio show.
Oren: Well, you see, I’m pretty good at this caricature of early radio time shows. This is not what they actually sounded like. It’s just what people think they sounded like due to the amplification over time. [normal voice] All right, I’m not gonna do that anymore. Just wanted to make that clear.
Chris: Oh, man. So yeah, this time we’re going to discuss tech level, which is already a very artificial concept.
Oren: Yeah, what does that even mean?
Chris: So you mean societies just level up? You know, they reach level 10?
Oren: Yeah, now they have certain technologies.
Chris: I wonder how much of it is just based on the Civ computer game.
Oren: Yeah, just on video games.
Chris: Somebody was playing a lot of Civ, and we got this idea that technology just smoothly levels up.
Oren: And I mean, there have been various sci-fi and not sci-fi tech level related things. NASA uses the term tech level. They mean something completely different by it. To them, that refers to, like, the development of a mission is the tech level, because they need to build new technologies to make the mission work. But then, I forget what it’s called, but there’s that famous scale that is, like, zero, one, and two, and it’s like, okay, those are very broad categories. Like, zero is everything up to the present day. One is being a spacefaring civilization inside your own solar system, and then two is space opera. And it’s like, okay, those are very broad tech levels.
Chris: Yep. Technically, it’s not that technology has to progress in the same way. I mean, some innovations are based on previous innovations. So for instance, if your innovation requires factories and mass production, but there’s been no industrial revolution, how does that work? It’s just really hard to reason through how things would happen if the technology doesn’t evolve in the same way it has on Earth. Somewhere on Earth.
Oren: But when we say tech level, despite how arbitrary it is, it is still a useful term because it sets expectations. If you say medieval tech level, despite how that is a gross oversimplification, it gives certain associations. People know to expect swords and horses and castles and chain mail and farming by hand and, you know, not using any kind of automated machinery, even if that’s not strictly 100% true. And if you say age of sail tech level, people know to expect cannons and tall ships and frilly outfits, things like that, right?
And so this leads us to the big question people are always asking is, does the tech in my setting have to follow historical trends? Like, in the real world, first we had wagons, and then we had the steam engine, and then we had planes. Could it go in a different order? [“I don’t know” vocalization]
Chris: I mean, I think if you decide to do magitech, you might be able to be more flexible if it just works in a completely different way. Like, that list that you said there, while it seems really unlikely we would, because a wagon is so simple and a steam engine took hundreds of years or something, took a really long time to perfect, it seems really unlikely that any culture would end up with a steam engine before they had even created the very simple, humble wagon.
Oren: Technological innovation and advancement is incredibly complicated. It does not follow a straight line, but it does build on itself, right? Like, there are reasons why the Roman Empire was not on the verge of an industrial revolution, despite the fact that they had some steam-powered toys, because all of the other technologies needed to make the steam-powered industrial revolution happen did not exist yet. So those toys were novelties, but they did not have industrial power.
Chris: Yeah. I would love to see somebody who had done a lot of research come up with their idea of if the Industrial Revolution had not happened, how would technology and society continue to progress? Because the Industrial Revolution happened from a very specific synergy of coal and steam engines and mills.
There had to be a positive feedback loop where we needed the engine to take out water so we could mine the coal, and then we need the coal to power the engine, and then we needed some actual use where this could make money. It all had to happen at once, or else it would have never been able to mine and transport the coal, and we would have had nothing to feed the steam engine, or we would have had no use for the steam engine.
And so those things all had to happen at the same time. And so I do find it very interesting. Well, what if those things hadn’t happened? Would we still be in a land-based economy? Like, that’s really interesting, but it is a lot more work and a lot harder, and unless your story is very much focused on that and that is your passion, it’s so much easier to just be like, “Okay, my society is 1600s France or whatever.”
Oren: Yeah. Or roughly equivalent. The thing is, is that the chances are good that if you are a writer, you are probably not also an expert on the development of pre-modern technology, and certainly most of your readers won’t be. So we can argue back and forth forever whether or not a certain thing is realistic. For most writers, the question is really going to be is it believable?
Chris: Yeah. Can you get away with it?
Oren: Right. And maybe you are going to put more constraints on yourself than your readers actually require. Like most readers, for example, are probably not going to know that the classic knightly plate mail armor is a later invention.
It doesn’t correspond with a lot of the other things we think of as medieval. It’s from the 1400s, and so it corresponds with the development of early firearms. And these are still very early ones, right? These aren’t machine guns. But usually in settings that have that kind of knightly plate mail, you don’t usually include matchlocks, even though historically that’s how those things would have developed.
But most people aren’t going to notice that mistake. Now, if you want to be a little more realistic and have early firearms, I don’t think anyone’s gonna be upset at you for doing that. I think that could be cool. But that’s one of those things that you can kind of massage that and no one’s gonna notice.
Chris: Or just if guns would be around already, but guns are absolute pain in stories, you can just delay the development of a gun a little bit. Nobody will notice.
Oren: Yeah. Although it does have to be a little bit, right? You’re gonna get into the Korra problem before too much longer. And I don’t know, maybe no one else noticed this, but to me watching Legend of Korra, one of the issues was like, okay, this technology is clearly all 1920s or more advanced.
It’s weird that there aren’t guns because they have a bunch of things that only would exist for guns. Like, they have fighter planes, but no weapons to put on the fighter planes except for bolas, which, why do you have fighter planes if that’s the case? And the battleships have big turrets with huge gun barrels, and it’s like, okay, the explanation for that is that a firebender is inside the turret shooting fireballs through the tubes. Is that an advantage? Like, does that make the fire better? It doesn’t seem to.
Chris: Yeah. I think most people also don’t notice that it doesn’t make sense to have castles if there is something in the setting that can easily knock down castle walls, like dragons or something. Just ’cause the whole point of castles is a defensive structure, and those walls are not supposed to be easily knocked down or destroyed. If they are like, castles take forever to build, then you just wouldn’t build castles anymore. They’re not worth it if you can’t withstand a siege for years in there or whatever.
Oren: Yeah, or at least they would look very different, right? As has been pointed out very often, at least in terms of military technology, something is not necessarily rendered obsolete because it can be destroyed, but it tends to be rendered obsolete because something else can do its job better.
And in the case of castles, what you would probably see is fortifications that are more similar to what exists now, right? Dragons are weird because, in theory, they can attack with impunity, and there’s not really a whole lot anyone can do about it. So what effect does that have on warfare? I have no idea. That’s weird. That’s a weird thing to think about.
Chris: Yeah. We can talk about, what are the advantages and disadvantages of different eras? What are some things that we might wanna think about as terms of, okay, what do we want for a setting? And what are the different tech levels gonna have? How are they gonna affect that? We talked about weapons. I think weapons is what everybody thinks of first.
Oren: Right. Those have the most obvious effect on an adventure story.
Chris: Right. If you have action scenes, a lot of people know whether they want there to be guns. The answer is no. Okay, yeah. Some people want guns. I mean, if you have early guns, they’re probably a lot easier to deal with than later guns. It’s just once you add guns, it’s so hard to make the fight good. It’s so hard.
Oren: I mean, there are definitely some stories where they were written where the author clearly was writing them with this idea that only makes sense if guns exist, like the Lies of Locke Lamora series, specifically the second one where they do a bunch of ship battles.
They describe stuff in terms that would make sense if these were 16- and 1700s era sailing ships with cannons, but they don’t have cannons.
Chris: ‘Cause they’re doing broadsides?
Oren: Yeah, I mean, they don’t use the word broadside because there’s nothing to broadside. They don’t seem to recognize that what they’re doing now is basically land combat on the water.
Chris: It’s like the fighter planes with bolas all over again.
Oren: Yeah, it’s very similar to that. Or a lot of stories will have catapults instead of cannons, and it’s like, all right, well, that’ll work as long as nobody in your audience knows how a catapult works, right? Then you might have some problems.
Chris: So a lot of people know if they wanna use a sword. I can definitely understand that if you’re doing vehicle fights, and vehicles normally have guns on them, and that’s how they fight, why it would mess with things if you did not have guns.
Oren: Yeah, it just gets weird, right?
Chris: But at a smaller scale fight scene with individual people, it is just hard to make gun fights interesting and good and last any amount of time without people being really bad at aiming.
Oren: I mean, it does put a little bit of a damper on if you wanna have exciting sword fights, you first have to explain what happens to everyone’s pistols.
Chris; Obviously, there’s weapons, but not every story has all of those fights. Healing medicine, this can also matter because do you want people to get injured, and then how well are they gonna get patched up again? Because before germ theory, doctors were not very helpful.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, most stories that I have read do not have anything period appropriate, to the extent that that term applies to a fantasy world, medicine. They just don’t because if you followed the kind of medicine that would correspond with whatever other types of technology you seem to have, that’s gonna be both really unhelpful a lot of the times and also kind of tragically comic.
A lot of pre-modern medical treatments were, to our eyes, just ridiculous. And of course, people back then had reasons for doing those things. I’m not saying people in the past were stupid, but they did have very limited understandings of things that we, even now, people who aren’t doctors, have a general understanding of, you know, unless you’re an anti-vaxxer. Then who knows?
Chris: It’s true. Like, I mean, this is also if you do have a fantasy story, this is where magic comes in helpful. Can you make the magic do the healing, please? I don’t want my doctor to come in and start bloodletting or something.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, it takes a very specific kind of story for that to work.
Chris: Or just, man, we watched this show talking about Victorian pharmaceuticals—
Oren: Oof.
Chris: —and they’re all laxatives. All of them. ‘Cause that’s how you get the placebo effect because this medicine was almost all completely ineffective. To convince people it worked, it had to do something, and so generally they were laxatives.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, it does do something. You could say it had an effect.
Chris: Man. Okay, so other ones. Transportation has a huge effect on the story. Do you want traveling to be challenging? This can be an issue if your characters fly, too. I still remember in The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance how we have a bunch of, the characters have wings, and then we’re like, “Oh, look, this big barrier. How will we cross it?” It’s like, well, characters have wings. Maybe we could fly across the barrier.
Oren: Yeah, I think we can figure it out. You know, we’ll get there.
Chris: Think we can do that?
Oren: Yeah, we’ll get there eventually.
Chris: The other thing is that transportation used to take tons of time, right? If we want a character that is seriously globe-trotting and going to lots of places, and it’s just like, in this story, the character is gonna collect the five jewels in the five different corners of the world. This world is shaped like a star, apparently.
Oren: Sure.
Chris: And we don’t really want to be like, “Okay, now I’m gonna summarize the year the character spent traveling to the next corner of the world,” then maybe we want transportation that’s a little faster.
Oren: Yeah. It just takes forever to get anywhere, and it’s really hard. I mean, you can look at the casualty reports for a lot of these early long-distance expeditions that we have records for, whether those are European sailing expeditions or the various travels of Ibn Battuta, who just walked everywhere. And a lot of people died on those journeys, too, ’cause they were really grueling and hard. If you wanna get into the deeper world building, well, first just go read Bret Devereaux’s blog. Just power read it, and that’ll teach you a lot.
Chris: Admittedly, I do wish he had a TL;DR. I’m never going to ask an LLM to summarize his work ever, but I do kind of want the CliffsNotes sometimes. Because he’s like, “Okay, to answer this question, we’re gonna do all of this math.” And it’s like, okay, I trust you to do the math. How about you just do the math and tell me your results? Do I have to read about your entire mathematical equation and all the factors that got into it? Can I just—give me what’s a reasonable answer. But no, he has tons of unique, valuable information. His specialty is the Ancient Greek and Roman period, the Mediterranean, but he’ll also talk about other periods.
Oren: You can get really deep into this if you want to, right. You can think about, okay, does the farming technology exist to support the size of city that I want? And in most cases, most of your readers are not gonna ask that question, and as long as you aren’t super specific about how the farms work, even people who know the answer are probably not gonna ask. But if yo
598 – Structuring Horror
July 26, 2026
An exciting new horror story has come out, promising spooky monsters and exciting twists that will surely have a satisfying payoff. This week, we address some tricky questions about common pitfalls in horror …
Show notes
An exciting new horror story has come out, promising spooky monsters and exciting twists that will surely have a satisfying payoff. This week, we address some tricky questions about common pitfalls in horror. How do you resolve a conflict with an overwhelming force without seeming contrived? How do you keep squishy heroes alive while also keeping them in danger? Should you kill your protagonist halfway through and replace them with some guy? Listen as we try to figure that out.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]
Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: It’s time to read and/or watch the latest high novelty horror story everyone’s talking about. The opening is really cool and spooky. I’m sure I won’t be disappointed by the back half falling apart.
Chris: No, of course. It’s going to be cool and spooky the entire time, with the perfect twist that’s been perfectly foreshadowed.
Oren: It’ll be just as good.
Chris: It’ll be just as good. Never will we be disappointed ever.
Oren: Yeah, so this episode is about how to structure a horror story, and this has been encouraged by the fact that I’ve seen and/or read a number of really promising horror stories that just cannot follow through. And I wanted to talk about it, and then Chris can explain why that doesn’t work and how to do it better, ’cause I don’t know. I just know that it keeps happening. Uh, so there’s a good chance… We got to say this at the top: there’s a good chance there are going to be spoilers for Backrooms, the novella What Stalks the Deep, the novel There Is No Antimemetics Division, and then the movie Weapons. Backrooms is also a movie.
Chris: Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of this. We’ve seen a lot.
Oren: I don’t know if we’ll actually get to all four of those, but those are the things that motivated me to do this podcast, so there’s a good chance we’ll talk about them.
Chris: Yeah. So, first question is: All right, why are they falling apart? And I think there is a connection between the fact that these horror stories are really unique and novel and the fact that they are not lasting through to the end. And that’s just the fact that we can’t underestimate how many people out there don’t really understand storytelling very well. And, like, the haunted house, for instance, genre of horror: there are so many of them that people know what to look at, right? And so they know, like, “Oh, here’s the beats,” right? If I’m… And oftentimes even in screenwriting and movies, it is like that. They’re like, “Oh, this happens at this point, this happens at this point.” They just have a template that they’ve copied from other stories that they go off of.
Now, just to be clear to any listeners, we have had editing clients who have wanted to do this to help their plotting. They have a model work, and then they try to copy the plot. It actually does not… generally, especially if you’re doing it on your own, does not work as well as you would think, because almost always in these situations, there’s enough differences between one story and the next that when you try to do that, it will mean that the plot no longer works once it’s been transposed into your story.
But in the case of haunted house horror, for instance, there’s so many haunted house stories to look at, and they have many of the same constraints, where in particular you need a reason that people don’t leave the house. That’s, like, one of the central challenges of haunted house horror. But you can kind of see how that rhythm goes, and you know what to do there. But I think when people do something that’s less familiar and they have less models, it’s harder for them to figure out what they’re doing.
Oren: Yeah. And some of these, when I look at them, it’s a combination of, “Okay, this premise just seems genuinely very challenging to resolve in a satisfactory way,” and then also what just looks like really weird unforced errors. Backrooms is the perfect example because on the one hand, yeah, I have no idea how to resolve a story about thisinterdimensional utility corridor that kills people. That’s really neat and spooky and weird, but I wouldn’t know off the top of my head how a story about that should resolve. But I do know that it probably shouldn’t be by switching main characters halfway through.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Very strange choice. It’s like, hey, and then resulting in this weird thing where we have the haunted spooky utility corridor that brings to life your, you know, psychological issues and literalizes them into monsters, but for some reason that doesn’t happen with the second protagonist, even though we spent a lot of time flashbacking to her horrible psychological problem. That never appears in the haunted utility corridor, and I don’t get it. What, what? What is going on?
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think part of the issue is that movie’s running on analogy logic.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So, like, I’m pretty sure the Backrooms represent his mind specifically, so she’s not going into her own mind. She’s going into his.
Oren: Right. But, like, surely she would bring her own stuff in there with her, right? I would think. I don’t know… Maybe not.
Chris: Yeah. I don’t know. But it’s funny ’cause what you just said of switching main characters midway happens in two of these stories. It also happens in There Is No Antimemetics Division.
Oren: Yeah, why?
Chris: Why? I mean, again, that’s just a very basic thing that, if you’re… most storytellers know not to do, right? Again, somebody can always make the choice. Yeah, I understand this is going to have big consequences for audience engagement, but I’m doing it anyway, and that’s fine. At least in Backrooms, the therapist character is introduced pretty early as a character, so it’s not like some rando has just taken over the story.
Oren: Yeah. I mean the husband in ’-memetics Division is also technically introduced early, but he’s less important, right? The therapist has at least been sort of part of the plot till this point because she’s been talking to the first main character about his issues, whereas the husband is only, like, very tangentially related to what’s going on.
Chris: Yeah, I will also add that the therapist is a knowledgeable professional related to the area because the Backrooms are symbolic of the mind, right? And so that makes sense for her to be the hero. But the husband is, like, the non-professional who just happens to have some natural aptitude for seeing things that you can’t normally remember, and then he’s just, you know, a mediocre guy who skates on that.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Um, so anyway, not having a clear model, doing something unique does make it harder for writers, but to be clear, there isn’t actually anything super unique about horror structure, right? That’s not true for some other genres like romance, where there is unique things about how they work based on the engagement mechanisms they use. But horror is just running on tension. The only thing is that if you want it to feel like horror and not like action, you need the right atmosphere. And so that can add some additional restrictions, but we are just looking at normal tension structure here. I think the big issue is the fact that it happens at a small scale and we have a deadly menace, and we have a squishy person, and so it’s hard to figure out why it isn’t over. ‘Cause we want an underpowered protagonist because that disempowerment is part of how you build that horror atmosphere. Um, if you have, like, a muscled person with a machine gun that’s marching to the monster, it’s not… now it’s action; it’s not horror anymore really.
Oren: Right, which is why it’s like, okay, so in the Backrooms, that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been trying to figure out, like, what would a resolution to the Backrooms be? Because it probably can’t be, “And then we find the Backrooms’ secret weakness and destroy it, and now there’s no more haunted utility corridor.”
Chris: I mean, you could, though. It could, though. There are, like in the Poltergeist, it’s not exactly like that because the girl’s been taken to another dimension, but it is like, “Hey, we used this One Weird Trick to get rid of the poltergeist.” So you could absolutely have, “We found some secret mechanism to get rid of the Backrooms,” right? if the movie was set up that way. But it’s going to end either when the monster is defeated or, you know, our protagonists are killed. And we want lots of spooks, which means encounters with the scary monster, and our protagonist is extremely squishy. So there’s… it’s just difficult to figure out, “Okay, how do we keep this going?” Especially since we want those thrills. And I think for There Is No Antimemetics Division, I think part of the issue there with the second half just falling very flat is it just escalated quicker than it needed to. But, like, obviously the… qntm, the author, was really focused on making it exciting. And at some point in time, if you want to keep the story going, you can’t necessarily keep escalating that fast.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: But, like, there’s also, besides just, like, “Okay, why does one side not just kill the other?” there’s also definitely in Backrooms an issue related to movement. So: movement is the idea, like the feeling that you get that a story is progressing towards the finish line. And in order to get that feeling of progress, generally, there needs to be some sense of where you are going to. And if the storyteller doesn’t know where the story is supposed to go, I think it’s hard to create movement.
So, like, what happens in Backrooms is, like, the protagonist just runs around in all of these rooms, and there’s all of these spooky, scary, unsettling things in these rooms, but they don’t add up to anything. Nothing builds on nothing else. You could take any room out of the sequence and the plot would stay intact.
So as it keeps going, even though I started out being very engaged by this movie, it was increasingly like, “Man, this movie feels so long,” because nothing is adding up. It doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere because it doesn’t really have a proper resolution, right? And we could look at, “Okay, what are the arcs that are supposed to be here?” Because, again, there’s a couple of reasons why horrors don’t end instantly. And one is they have arcs besides just, like, “Do I kill the monster or does the monster kill me?” that spend the time and fill out that space. So a big part of horror is mystery. And you might’ve noticed in the Backrooms, we never solve any of the mysteries. It feels like, I mean, we do get kind of a monster, we find out what the monster is, but it doesn’t feel like we’re finding out how the place works.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, I have to admit I don’t want to know. It’s hard for me to imagine an explanation that wouldn’t just make it seem kind of silly or be kind of perfunctory, like, you know, “Ah, yeah, it’s a haunted utility corridor that brings to life your psychological insecurities.” It’s like, “Okay, yeah, I mean, I kind of guessed that from watching the movie ’cause that is what it does.” So, like, I guess we could add some kind of causal explanation, but it’s just hard for me to imagine that that would be anything other than disappointing.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, let’s use another horror as an example: Cabin in the Woods.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So: Cabin in the Woods, we have this company that is setting up this horrific cabin weekend, this evil company. We don’t know why the company’s doing what it’s doing, but we can already see it there. It’s not actually as mysterious to us as it would be to the characters. We see the characters make progress in trying to figure out what’s going on, right? Like they try various places to get away and find out there’s artificial technological barriers in the way, which gives them more information. And finally they find out that there is some technical mechanism that unleashed these zombies on them. And then they work their way back to the company headquarters, and then the actual horror kind of continues at the company headquarters, and we can see that that kind of allows them to make progress.
Now, the actual Elder Gods, the Older Ones that the company is trying to appease, that kind of remains mysterious, right? So we have a mysterious level there. But we can see that they’re, like, doing something, right? So in a haunted house, usually we are covering what is the history of this ghost oftentimes or figuring out how the house works in some way. And we can still have it be kind of magical and mysterious, but there has to be something for the characters to work towards as they’re running from this monster.
Oren: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess it’s just hard to imagine what that would be in the Backrooms, just ’cause the spooky aspect of the Backrooms is so visual and, like, so based on things like set design and cinematography and music choice that I’ve been trying to think, like, “What did I want this plot to be?” And I have no idea.
Chris: Well, I mean, I think the premise… I mean, they set up a whole premise where there’s a therapist and a guy in therapy, and it feels like they weren’t willing to be anything other than very obtuse about that, right? You know, we had a villain that is basically part of, you know, one of the protagonists’ sense of self. But, like, we don’t know anything about, like, what do those rooms mean to his psyche, and I think we could still have it be magical and that it represents his psyche, but also in some way understand his psyche, like, you know, you would have the therapist come in and be like, “Okay, the key to getting out is that we need to find his childhood self and make that self feel safe again,” right?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Right? So you would have the therapist, you know, they would figure out something about maybe him and what’s going on with his psyche while they’re running around from the monster so they can do something that builds on itself. And then they would have to identify an objective that the audience can understand despite the fact that the Backrooms itself works in mysterious ways. But that objective tells us about, like, “Okay, so that child we saw crying in the other room, we have to go retrieve that child, right? And then we have to make that child feel better and safe despite all of the horrors.” Right? So we can kind of see what they have to do and see how, as they learn more about his psyche, that’s the kind of, you know… And so they had some of that in there, but it felt like they just wanted to be very cryptic and didn’t want to actually tell a story about these characters. Even though those characters both had emotional problems, it just didn’t feel like we really wanted to be explicit about what those emotional problems were or give them meaningful progress.
Oren: I would probably not have spent so much time establishing the psychologist’s traumatic backstory if the only outcome of that was going to be that it was related to the piece of concrete she used to hit the monster with.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Oren: Probably not worth that investment.
Chris: Right. But, like, in a different… in the story if that was actually, like, followed up in some way we could’ve… then maybe that would’ve been meaningful. It might’ve been hard to delve into two characters, like, deep emotional backstories and weave them into a plot, but I’m not going to say it’s impossible. But yeah, I mean, I think with Backrooms it’s a matter of like, “Okay, we didn’t actually know…” Well, the arcs there are pretty simple, right? We have a guy who is… he has emotional problems, and the resolution, you know, is that, spoilers… he does not solve his emotional problems, right? That is a resolution. The problem with the other character, the therapist, is: What is her arc exactly?
Oren: Yeah.
Ch
597 – Creating Low Points
July 19, 2026
Characters sometimes feel sad. But what if they felt… extra sad? If it’s sad enough to be a big deal, probably the saddest they’ll ever be, we call that a low point. Much has been made of low points, with some …
Show notes
Characters sometimes feel sad. But what if they felt… extra sad? If it’s sad enough to be a big deal, probably the saddest they’ll ever be, we call that a low point. Much has been made of low points, with some giving them fancy names like “dark night of the soul” and insisting they must happen at a certain point in a certain way. Most of that is pure puffery, but it’s still useful to understand how these moments work and the best way to utilize them. It’s also important to understand that Mark Zuckerberg is getting sued by a bunch of porn companies. That’s not super relevant to storytelling, but it is funny.
Show Notes
Meta Sued by Porn Companies
Pseudo Structure
Save the Cat
Save the Cat Writes a Novel
Tension
Legendborn
The Raven Scholar
Rebellions Are Built on Hope
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Oren, I don’t know if I can podcast on. The tech companies are stealing all of our content, Google is stealing all of the web traffic, and you’re leaving for law school! I think I’ll just lay down in the Pit of Despair.
Oren: Ooh, are you having a Dark Night of the Soul!?
Chris: [chuckling] I don’t know. Maybe my soul likes the dark.
Oren: Could be. Could be very dark, but fiction has taught me that when, you know, things seem really bad, they’re about to get better. That’s how fiction works, so probably it’s fine actually. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Chris: Well, I do have to admit, it is getting a little bit boring in the Pit of Despair since I am just, you know, curled up doing nothing. So maybe you should just give me an inspiring speech so I regain hope and then I can get out of the Pit of Despair.
Oren: Oh, boy. An inspiring speech, huh?
Chris: Yeah, and remember, you have to start with a speech that sounds really bad, so I can be like, “Oren…” and then it suddenly corrects itself into a good speech. That’s how story speeches work.
Oren: Okay, have you considered that Meta is being sued by a bunch of porn companies for scraping all of their video files?
Chris: Hmmm.
Oren: Doesn’t that make you feel better? [both laughing] It makes me feel better.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, that would be great. If that-
Oren: I’ve got no idea if they’re going to win, but they did just survive a motion to dismiss, which is cool.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, for me, the thing about that lawsuit is it looks it might hinge a lot on them pirating the porn, which, again, that’s definitely better than nothing, but I really think they need to pay for the training data, for stealing training data, even if it didn’t involve pirating files. And I may, as a person with content online that you can read for free, may have a vested interest in this.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: In any case, well, I think we have climbed out of the Pit of Despair.
Oren: See, now we’re back in the fight.
Chris: So, we’re discussing low points, AKA Dark Night of the Soul, in the Hero’s Journey, there’s the Ordeal, I think it’s called, or sometimes people call it an All is Lost Moment. It’s really funny that this thing is so—even though people have different terms—but it’s so widespread. And my theory is that it tends to be a favorite of pseudo-structures. Which, we recall, is when people give you a structure that is not really story structure, like the Hero’s Journey, it’s mostly just vague inspiration. I just think that people are trying to figure out how a story structure works and they’re not getting it right but they can point to, hey, there’s a moment where bad things happen and the hero feels despair and, repeatedly point to that so it’s just easy to identify. Also, it’s dramatic and people like dramatic things.
Oren: Well, right, and it’s also by its definition always going to exist unless the hero’s emotional state is a flat line for the entire story. Because there will always be some point that is the lowest and if you don’t really care about how useful this concept is you can always just point to it and say, “Yep, there it is. That’s the lowest point.”
The low point in Star Wars is when Luke is sad because Obi-Wan died. Never mind that it lasts like two minutes and he’s just a little sad. The low point in Lord of the Rings is when Frodo gives into the ring. Never mind that that is during the climax. And the low point in Wrath of Khan is after the climax because Kirk’s friend has just died. So, you know, there is always a low point somewhere in that some point in the movie has to be the main character’s lowest emotional point.
Chris: It reminds me of midpoints where just by the law of averages or whatever, you can find, usually, an exciting point that’s vaguely in the middle of the story.
Oren: Right, if the midpoint is a false victory and/or real victory and/or false defeat and/or real defeat that happens somewhere around the middle of the story.
Chris: Oh, is that from Save the Cat Writes a Novel?
Oren: It is. [both laughing] Yeah, I bet you’ll find one if you look for it.
Chris: So, the point here is that I usually define a low point as something that is exceptionally devastating, which means that not every story has it nor is it necessary. If you want to say it’s necessary, then, I mean, you can do that if you make it milder and milder, the definition of how low does it have to go, but then it’s happening all the time and there’s not one distinct low point. Or if it’s just the lowest point as Oren said, then we could technically find that in any story, and that doesn’t help us become better storytellers. It’s not useful information.
But, despite that—we can totally make fun of it because it is worth making fun of—but at the same time, low points can be useful. But they have trade-offs. They have advantages, they have disadvantages. They’re not going to be the right solution for every situation or every story, but they are another tool in your toolbox. So, I’m not saying you shouldn’t use a low point, especially if you just…again some people just like the drama of it. They like the highs and the lows and that kind of thing. And if you enjoy it, yeah, go ahead. It’s just fine.
Oren: All right, so that’s what is low point, but why is low point? What is its purpose in the story? What does it actually do?
Chris: Well, I mean, if we’re talking about characters and their low points, we can talk about the character level and the bigger story level.
For character level, if we specifically want a character, because, again, depending on how you define a low point, since you could define a low point in any specific plot arc in your story, which will have multiple, or for any specific character, but if you’re specifically thinking, “I want this character to have a low point,” usually there’s a couple things you can do.
One, maybe you just want to push the character to change. And so, in their character arc, often they have to learn a lesson of some kind and one way to teach them lessons is to have them do the wrong thing and then suffer for it, for instance. Or maybe they just need a little whip crack to actually do something a little more desperate or radical. And when we talk about this being an All is Lost Moment, this is often a time when we had a previous plan for saving the day and that was taken away. So that’s a time when they would have to change tactics in most cases.
Oren: Right. And then now they’re willing to do something they weren’t willing to do before. And that can be a positive thing, it can be what’s needed. If what’s needed here is for you to completely abolish the aristocracy and you weren’t willing to do that until your mild attempts at reform prompted an aristocrat to assassinate your wife. So that’s your low point and now you’re like, “I’m gonna take down that aristocracy!”
Or it can be a negative thing, where you were trying to avoid using the magical death ray that devastates the countryside but then someone precious to your character died and then they decide to use the death ray and that’s a downward turning point for them.
Chris: The other thing is, lots of writers may do it because they like the themes involved. The kind of like death and rebirth or defeat and hope. Some of them just want their characters to go through a moment when the character has to deal with a serious loss and then kind of recover from that and rally emotionally in some way, and that kind of emotional journey is just what interests the writer.
On the plotting level, for movies that have a big, what I would call a dramatic reversal, where generally this low point will happen shortly before the climax and the goal generally there is to raise tension. So, we make everything look as hopeless as possible so that coming out on top of the climax just feels really, really difficult, thereby making things tenser when we head into the climax.
Again, there are so many ways to create tension. I talk about, here’s the actual essential ingredients of tension, but there is no specific trope that you need to create tension. There’s lots of ways. So, this is used to create tension but is by no means necessary to have adequate tension going into the climax.
Oren: Yeah, and this is another case where the thing that pseudo-structures often call the low point or the Dark Night of the Soul or whatever, is just a result of the fact that you want tension to be highest at the climax and a way to create tension is often to make the situation much worse. And if your characters react to that in a naturalistic way, they will feel really bad. So, you know, that happens a lot. Just as an emergent property.
Chris: But outside of setting up the plot or setting up the climax, a low point often happens after, again, somebody dies or something really goes wrong or that kind of thing. So yeah, I don’t know. Some writers also are edgy and might just want somebody to die.
Oren: Yeah, sometimes they just want that. Is a low point as we’ve been talking about it, a conflict? Like is it something that the protagonist needs a turning point to resolve?
Chris: I mean, I would say that an emotional conflict you could say, or an emotional struggle, but the problem is it’s not typically a very exciting conflict.
Oren: Right. What I’m thinking is: is it going to be unsatisfying if we set up this tragedy and the protagonist is in despair, and then they fall asleep, despairing. And after a night’s sleep they wake up and decide, “Okay, well… everything sucks, but I have to fight anyway.” Is that going to be disappointing because they just kind of got over it? Or do I need more of a clear, “this is how they moved past it” moment?
Chris: Well, it’s definitely an arc, right? So, we can split the plot up into child arcs. If their hope seems lost and the protagonist is giving into despair, which is common in these low points, I feel like if you had a low point where something bad happened and then the character doesn’t … I mean, as we said, pseudo-structures will define these really broadly to try to say, “See, our structure is totally valid. All of these stories fit it.” And they’ll be, “Oh, you know, that could be kind of a Dark Night of the Soul.”
Oren: Yeah, sure. As long as, you know, you don’t care about it meeting most of the requirements, absolutely.
Chris: Yeah. But I mean, I think for me, something that I would actually call a low point is devastating enough that your hero is going to have an emotional reaction. And depending on how it’s framed, it can be different ways, like it could be the protagonist is just giving into despair, and that’s a problem, right? It’s a problem that would start a child arc and we would expect them to earn the solution to that problem just like for any other arc.
Or, if we’re thinking more about the plot outside of just what the character is going through, and what often happens here is we kind of eliminate the path to victory, I mean, that’s also an issue that has to be resolved. And again, whenever you have a plot arc start that because you present a problem, generally the hero is going to have to earn that solution.
But, depending on what your goals are, a lot of people might want to do deep, emotional soul-searching there. Hence why the Dark Night of the Soul label. But you could have a prior achievement turning point where the character earlier helped somebody else and then in this moment this person comes back and reminds the hero of what they accomplished. So, the hero is basically benefiting from earlier good deeds that they did, and that way it’s still earned but they don’t necessarily have a big emotional struggle.
Oren: Right. A prior achievement turning point feels pretty natural as a way to resolve this low point arc. You know, this is where you would have maybe another character who your protagonist has been helping out, lend emotional support, something that. Although lending emotional support could also be part of the protagonist resolving it themselves, right, as an emotional resolution.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, you could definitely have somebody say something and then the hero has kind of a realization. Or, you know, something else that this is worth it or whatever have you, but you wouldn’t just want to shrug it off. If we’re really presenting this as a problem, we need something to show that we’ve earned getting out the other side. Especially if it’s dramatic.
Oren: I’ve been thinking about how one creates a low point and I realize I have two, like, requirements that are both a little bit in opposition to each other and also very hard to intellectualize. So, I’m going to go through ’em and we’ll see if we can get something more useful than “I know it when I see it.”
First is that I feel the reaction has to match what has happened. If your hero probably isn’t, shouldn’t be, throwing a fit and be completely devastated because they lost their cool shirt. I’m not going to say that’s impossible to make that work, but in most cases, that’s going to seem like a big overreaction to me. Even if it is realistic for the hero, in most cases, I’m just not going to care because the hero is acting a big baby.
And then the other thing is that I feel like the cause of the low point doesn’t need to be exaggerated or really shouldn’t be exaggerated. Like it’s enough for a friend to die. That’s tragic enough. They don’t need to explode from agony maggots. [Chris laughing] And I don’t know exactly how to figure that out. I just know that when I read a story where I feel the hero is overreacting or I feel the tragic event is being really exaggerated it bothers me and I’m not sure how to advise on that.
Chris: Right. Well, one thing about, if a character’s going to die here, is that it shouldn’t feel like it’s designed just to make the reader feel as bad as possible. Because that feels manipulative to the reader. Again, some authors have a habit of choosing children. Just introducing a child character who’s there just to be killed off, you know? And that can feel manipulative, or something about the death, right, is there to just maximize and try to make the audience cry as much as possible. Generally, we don’t want to do that. People have definitely noticed on TV shows where we take a B-cast member and then suddenly we dump their backstory and then we kill them off.
Oren: Yeah, super goofy.
Chris: Just so that we can feel something when they die. So, the construction of the story with the character who dies has to feel natural and not like it’s designed just to manipulate emotions. I mean, you could have things other than characters dying. For instance, Legendborn, I think, has a good low point where the main character has been doing the whole plot just to find out what happened to her mother, because her mother’s dead. And after infiltrating this secret society and everything,, she finally gets to their files on her mother and just finds out it’s just what it looked. Her like: her mother died in a, in a car accident.
Oren: Yeah, that’s rough.
Chris: And a factor in this is that she is still grieving the death of her mother, and that helps her reaction feel more natural. But she reacts to that, so nobody had to die there. It just has to be something that we’ve set up that the character has some kind of attachment to, or something that’s really important to them.
For instance, maybe they spent the whole story believing that they could go back home again
596 – Annoying Portrayal of Writers in Fiction
July 12, 2026
Writers often have difficulty portraying other people’s jobs. There are so many little details to get right, tricks of the trade that are difficult to research, and perspective that can only be gained from …
Show notes
Writers often have difficulty portraying other people’s jobs. There are so many little details to get right, tricks of the trade that are difficult to research, and perspective that can only be gained from years of experience. But you’d think if there was one profession writers could get right, it would be writing. Absolutely not the case.
Show Notes
Romanticism
Deep Space Nine: The Muse
Middlemen
Lord Byron
La La Land
Stranger Than Fiction
Proactive vs Reactive Fiction
The Everlasting
Death of the Author
Middlegame
Story Within a Story
Ten Thousand Doors of January
The Name of the Wind
Interview With the Vampire
The Princess Bride
Pseudo Structures
Hero With a Thousand Faces
Voyager: Worst Case Scenario
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: Chris, I have a question. Have you ever researched a profession or job that you were going to write about?
Chris: Um, I plead the Fifth?
Oren: Oh, well, trick question. I know you have, ’cause I saw you researching farming, and your character’s not even a farmer, they’re just from a farm.
Chris: Okay, I guess I have. I always feel like my research is not enough, okay? I always feel like I could do more.
Oren: I mean, that’s technically true in that you always can do more. But I would say that in general, writers at least have an understanding that they should probably learn about a profession if they are trying to portray it, and do their best. They don’t always succeed. Certainly there is a lot of content out there about, you know, physicists or pilots or doctors or whatever, watching stuff about them and seeing all these mistakes. But you would figure that if there was one profession that writers could get right, it would be writing.
Chris: Yeah, you’d think maybe they should research it more.
Oren: And yet!
Chris: And yet!
Oren: And yet they’re often very annoying. Now, granted, a lot of this is probably just because I have a different opinion about writing than the people who are giving these portrayals. Nevertheless…
Chris: Yeah, it’s probably a combination of that and, like, if we see it in a story, somebody’s trying to make it fit what they think is a good story.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But to be perfectly honest, like, some of these things that I see that are obnoxious, they’re the same things that made me go “oh!” when I started giving writing advice and realizing how many aspects of writing culture make it hard for people to learn writing. And that’s why there isn’t better writing advice out there. It’s all connected, man.
Oren: Well, I mean, it is all connected, ’cause it’s all Romanticism.
Chris: Yeah. Okay, okay, yeah. It’s all Romanticism. It ruins everything.
Oren: Not 100% Romanticism, but so many problems about the way that writing is portrayed in fiction is about how you just need to disconnect from the world, stop looking at anything, just go deeper and deeper into your own mind. Just unblock your editor, stream of consciousness, hot alien lady, drain the life force from me to create the perfect book.
Chris: We’re, we’re definitely gonna have to talk about that one. But the weird thing about this is, so I was reading a book about agents recently, Laura McGrath’s Middleman. And one thing it mentions is how much the book industry purposely continues spreading Romanticism as a way of selling books.
Oren: Oh. Yeah, right.
Chris: Right? Now, is it really necessary to sell books? I don’t know, but there’s a big focus on genius, and certainly I think it might be easier to sell an author and books by a particular author if you’re like, “Oh, they’re just a genius.”
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which is sad.
Oren: Well, I mean, it’s, it’s hardly a surprise that if you are marketing a piece of art, the artist is often just as important as the art, right? And I think most people would understand that on some level.
Chris: And I would not call that exactly a bad thing in the age of AI.
Oren: Yeah. There’s that. But I also think that at least part of it is that a lot of writers wanna be Lord Byron. And, you know, Lord Byron is famous for, uh, being a huge weirdo, is the most generous way to describe him, and then dying young. So you know, we never had to deal with old, uncool Byron, just like normal, young, exciting, abusive Byron. He did a lot of abuse is all I’m saying.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: And I think a lot of writers want to be that, and I think that’s where that one Deep Space Nine episode where, uh, Jake runs into a hot alien lady who drains his life force to write a better book, where that’s coming from.
Chris: Yeah, okay. We’re just gonna have to get into this episode.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And it’s, uh… Oh, it was supposed to be the B plot, but it became the A plot, right?
Oren: Mm, something like that. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. So you know, Jake starts writing a book. It’s not very good. Hot alien lady shows up. She recognizes his natural genius, of course.
Oren: Mm-hmm, which he has.
Chris: And she’s gonna teach him to write better, but of course, she does it not by, like, actually teaching him how storytelling works or how writing works at all, but by just starting to feed off his brain juices to keep him from censoring himself.
Oren: Uh-huh. Mm-hmm.
Chris: Yeah, ’cause that’s, that’s all it takes, folks, is you just stop censoring yourself. Just write the most unhinged stuff imaginable on the page and it’s gonna be brilliant. That’s all it takes.
Oren: Right. Also, use a pen that famous authors use. She gives him, like, a famous author’s pen.
Chris: Yeah, make sure to use a traditional inkwell pen on physical paper.
Oren: Yeah. That’ll work great. That will definitely help.
Chris: Mm-hmm, yeah. And make sure you have a study with a big fancy wood desk and shelves full of books, you know?
Oren: Yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I can totally see how being in the proper atmosphere might help you relax and get in the mood for writing. Uh, but the way that it’s presented in the s- in the TV episode is very… almost like this pen has magical powers, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: And of course, you know, that feeds into the whole, you know, we hate editors. We don’t like the idea of studying this because that would make it less magical. It’s gotta be just pure soul. And this is a thing that continues with Jake’s character for a while, right? The show continually emphasizes this idea that he is a good writer because of his natural genius that he just has to figure out how to get out of the way of, right?
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And again, it goes to hiding… You know, most of the time editors, agents do not talk about what changes or suggestions they’ve made to a book. They pretend, “Oh, no, it’s all the author,” right? So we can build this aura of genius around them, which is… Again, I’ve said it before, it’s very toxic to writers because how is a new writer supposed to live up to this idea of being an automatic effortless genius, right? So is it worth doing this for selling books? I think readers would still buy books without Romanticism.
Oren: I mean, I don’t know. They barely buy books now, so who can say? This also ties into another one that I’ve just increasingly found annoying, which is the instant mega hit overnight success. And it’s not that this never happens, but it’s quite rare and it doesn’t usually happen the way that it is portrayed in books, right? Like, usually even if your book is very successful by book standards, you’re still not usually going to be a millionaire immediately, right? You know, if you get a six-figure advance, that’s a lot of money- And it’s potentially life-changing money, but it’s not like 1% money.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Oren: Which is what I think people think that’s what a successful book looks like. You know, a successful book means that you are a bazillionaire now, and I can’t prove this, but I also suspect that part of this is why book piracy is as common as it is, is that people think that authors are rich. They think, “Oh, well, it’s okay to pirate this guy’s books because, like, they were on the New York Times bestseller, and the only way that that could happen is if they are rich.” And I mean, I know that at least some people think this, ’cause yes, they say it on social media. They argue with the author that it’s okay to pirate their books, which I’m just… How are… How did you not die from shame doing that, is the part I don’t understand.
Chris: Oh my gosh.
Oren: Like, the idea of telling an author that I’m pirating their books and it’s okay, how did you not just combust instantly from doing that? I have no idea.
Chris: Meanwhile, many bestselling authors have day jobs. So you know, not great. Not a great look.
Oren: And of course, even the authors who do reach great success, it is almost never like, “And then I opened the inner floodgates and let my story out,” right? There’s almost always, when you dig into it, multiple drafts, and there’s editing. Even if they are discovery writers, which some of them are, they almost always have to make changes. They usually have books that they released first that didn’t do very well, or books that they maybe trunked because they weren’t marketable. Not necessarily worse, just not what the market wanted at that time, right?
Chris: Yeah, this reminds me of all of the, like, TV episodes where as soon as the protagonist puts something online, it goes viral. And rarely do they write anything that I think in real life had any chance of going viral. It’s like, well, it’s really hard to make viral content, because it has to stand out, and it’s a moving target. But everything goes viral in a story. But yeah, no, related to that, I was very annoyed with the ending of La La Land. This is a movie about two artists, an actor and a musician in Hollywood, who are trying to, you know, get their breakout. And one thing that really struck me about this is we’re clearly going with the idea where we don’t want a super happy ending, ’cause it would be too pat. And these two people are having a romance with each other. So to me, it made sense that, because again, most people who go to Hollywood don’t make it big. Right? More people who go into acting end up just… It’s so hard to get roles. It’s amazingly difficult to get a role as an actor, just amazingly difficult to break in. And ’cause, you know, people only look at you if you already have acting credits, so how do you get your first acting credit? It’s very similar to trying to break in and get an agent, for instance. So, well, I was expecting them to end up together, but not actually break out. But instead, they both become, like, huge successes.
Oren: Oh, good.
Chris: And one of them, by putting on a one-person play that literally almost nobody goes to, like the theater is totally empty, but apparently one of the few people in the audience is a casting director who happened to love her. And it’s like, really? Casting directors are super busy, and they have tons of people. They create acting workshops and charge people money to give them acting coaching, similar to agents charging money for pitches, to give them pitches in person at conferences.
Oren: Oof, I don’t like that. Yeah. That’s not my favorite.
Chris: No, it’s not my favorite either. So, like, the idea of a casting director just going to some unknown person’s one-woman play and then like, “I’ve discovered you,” and then that person becoming super successful, it just… Man, it feels like it undermines the experiences of most people who go to Hollywood and never break out. But see, the ending’s not pat because they don’t end up together as a couple. And it’s just like, what?
Oren: Look, man, most of us end up dating somebody eventually. Very few of us are gonna get breakout Hollywood roles.
Chris: And, ah, man, I would like, at this point, more stories about somebody trying to become successful as an artist and then realizing they’re never going to get paid a living for their art and then having to deal with that, right? And decide what they’re gonna do. And appreciate the art for the art’s sake, for instance, keep doing their day job or whatever it is.
Oren: Yeah. Somewhat related to the Romanticism thing is… and I know this one is touchy, ’cause this, like, affects authors in real life too, is this thing that I’ve noticed in a number of books where the narrative acts as though the author has zero responsibility to finish a series they’ve started. And I know why they do that. It’s because people were huge entitled dicks to George R. R. Martin and, you know, obviously went way over the line, and it’s probably why we’re never gonna get Game of Thrones over, ’cause at this point, if I was Martin, I would never finish the series, right? But at the same time, it’s weird to act as though there’s no responsibility because you’re effectively selling someone an incomplete product with an implied completion at some point. And if you go full caveat emptor and say, “Well, it’s on them for buying it,” is that really the attitude we want readers to take? That they should not buy a series until it’s finished ’cause they have no assurance at all that it will ever be finished? ‘Cause that’s a problem authors have is that people don’t wanna buy their series until the series is finished.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Oren: So I just think maybe there’s a little more to this than some of these portrayals would have you believe.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I think the problem is that you can’t have it both ways, right? If authors are under no obligation… I mean, again, authors are a single human being. Stuff can always happen, right? So it’s not like anybody’s a bad person for not finishing their series. Stuff happens. At the same time, I do think, you know, when we make certain promises to readers, we have some level of obligation to meet those promises if we can. And we can’t really have it both ways, right? Either we’re not gonna worry about doing it, and that means readers are reading a series at their own risk, and oftentimes they’re just not gonna wanna do that until it’s complete, or we have a serious obligation and we can ask them to trust us if the series isn’t finished yet. And we just kind of have to choose which way we wanna have it.
Oren: I just think that stories that do decide to go into this territory should acknowledge that this is a little bit of a both sides situation. Not like both sides as in “it’s okay to yell at George R. R. Martin,” obviously that’s wrong. But I just think that they should acknowledge that you’re not causing zero problems by not finishing a series you started, right? Like, that is a choice that- assuming it is a choice, maybe it’s not, depends on what’s happening, right? But if you’re making that choice, that does have some consequences.
Chris: Yep, it’s one of many obligations. Again, there are other things that could be more important. But… and certainly we shouldn’t do that and then, you know, tell readers they should start series that are not finished yet.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, you could go that direction and be like, “All right, well, you know, just don’t buy a series until it’s done.” Just, oh boy, that’s probably not a great message.
Chris: I wanna talk about Stranger Than Fiction.
Oren: Oh yeah?
Chris: Another one of those weird movies that depicts the writing process and is, and maybe it’s not as bad as the Deep Space Nine episode with
595 – Narrating Fights and Action Scenes
July 5, 2026
It’s time to narrate a deadly fight or a thrilling chase, but unfortunately, readers expect more than comic book action bubbles. Pretty unreasonable, if you ask us. However, let it never be said that we shirk …
Show notes
It’s time to narrate a deadly fight or a thrilling chase, but unfortunately, readers expect more than comic book action bubbles. Pretty unreasonable, if you ask us. However, let it never be said that we shirk from a challenge, so this week we’ve got advice on how to describe physical clashes. We talk about making sure each action matters, keeping track of multiple combatants, and why you probably can’t replicate one million punches on the page.
Show Notes
Eragon
Sin City
Ministry of Time Fight Scene
Babel
Rise of Kyoshi
Fight Scenes
The Mortal Instruments
Children of Blood and Bone
So, Your Fantasy World Is Based on D&D
Magic Systems for Fight Scenes
Shield of Sparrows
Rational Magic System
Santa Olivia
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[Promo for Tension & Hooks 2026]
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Kapow! I unleash a whole storm cloud of kicks while I simultaneously throw a grenade at the enemy. A whole bunch of them fall down at once. The blood is running in streams as the bodies pile up, but the horde keeps coming, impaling themselves on the blade which I now have.
Oren: A whole horde?
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: On one blade?
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Wow, okay.
Chris: I’m skewering them like a shish kebab, just a bunch at once.
Oren: They’re just all getting on there. Okay. All right. Got it.
Chris: It happens in Eragon, so I don’t see why I can’t do it.
Oren: That’s a fair point. Eragon sold well, so you should be able to do whatever it did.
Chris: Uh-huh. Next, the leader is bearing down on me, so I’m gonna run up the wall and do a back flip and land right on the leader’s head. It goes smoosh, and then everybody runs away.
Oren: Are all the bad guys still shish kebabbed on your sword while this is happening?
Chris: [Chuckles] But it’s a good fight scene because I have blood running in streams, and it’s very dramatic.
Oren: That’s where blood typically does run, so that tracks.
Chris: It is funny how many writers completely neglect description until it’s time to talk about blood.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Oren: Look, they all saw Sin City as kids, which has, everything’s black and white except for the blood, which is red, and it’s all cool and aesthetic, and they’re like, “I want that. That’s for me. That’s for my book, thank you.”
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: Tells you something about the writer’s priorities. So this time we’re talking about narrating fights and action. Fairly similar. They have some special concerns. Nothing that you won’t see anywhere else, but when you have these kinds of scenes, first, they happen very fast, and so we kind of want them to feel fast, and so the pacing starts to really matter. There’s often a lot of spatial logistics involved in these kind of high-stakes movements, shall we say.
Oren: “Where is everybody standing?” suddenly becomes very important.
Chris: And did we know there was a wall there before I ran up it to do a back flip? And of course, we want them to be very tense because they’re exciting moments.
Oren: Incidentally, this is one of the few places where you can actually get away with more doing this in a role-playing game than writing it down. Because normally, if you try to do anything contrived in a role-playing game, your players will be like, “Uh-uh. No.” They’ll be on you.
But if it’s in a fight and you’re like, “Yeah, you’re close enough to hit the enemy. Don’t worry about it,” they won’t. Whereas with readers, if you start to lose track of where everyone is, they’ll notice. They’ll be like, “Hey, hang on. Weren’t they across the room a second ago? What’s going on?”
Chris: I think some people notice more than others. I did do a critique of a book where there was running around a house, and I thought about how things were laid out, and I’m like, “I don’t… No house is laid out like this. I don’t know what’s happening. Are we in the upper floor? Are we in the bottom floor?” It’s like all the bedrooms are along a hallway that has a door. Usually the hallway’s open, so if you come in the front door and there’s a hallway on the first floor, you can just see down the hallway.
Things didn’t make sense. The protagonist was facing the wrong way. And it’s funny to think about that because that does require me to map it out all in my head. But most of us are familiar with how most houses are laid out to some degree. So it’s like taking a very familiar thing and then putting people in really unexpected places, and putting doors where I didn’t imagine there could be a door, and that kind of thing.
Oren: The one that I’m always gonna remember is that bizarre fight scene from The Ministry of Time, which involves things like the love interest pulling the unnamed narrator out of the way of a laser blast. Like, uh, no, step out of the way of the laser.
Chris: Very slow laser blast.
Oren: The world’s slowest laser. Which for some reason the bad guy aimed at her feet, which is weird. You would think he would aim at her center of mass, but no, instead he aims at her feet. And then suddenly the love interest teleports to him so that they can wrestle, because I guess it would be kind of awkward if he shot the love interest as the love interest was trying to close the distance. Which gives me, either the love interest teleported or this is a muzzle-loading laser gun that takes two business days to reload.
Chris: Okay, I have to say, one of my now most hated tropes is the trope where somebody pushes somebody else out of the way and gets shot instead of them, because it never feels like that’s how it would happen. Why are you pushing them? Why don’t you just run with them? If you have time to get them out of the way, I’m pretty sure you could get out of the way too. Why are you just pushing them and standing there?
Oren: You could imagine that if you hit them some of your momentum is absorbed, so maybe you would stop, but often there’s clearly plenty of time for you to keep going.
Chris: I’m not gonna say that there’s no circumstance in which this makes sense. Or somebody steps in front of the person about to get shot instead of grabbing them and moving them or something like that. I’m not gonna say there’s no situation in which this is not plausible, but I’m increasingly noticing how implausible it seems, and then sometimes it’s extremely frustrating, particularly if somebody dies. Like in Babel. So angry with that book.
Oren: That book makes some choices, for sure.
Chris: So if it’s really contrived and then something upsetting happens, that’s the worst combination.
Oren: I’m upset, and so now I’m just gonna pick apart everything.
Chris: The author personally hurt me, on purpose. The logistics of that, I don’t think they work very well in most cases. So trying to get spatial stuff and communicate that is always extremely tough. I suppose if you have to, you can use the o’clocks. Something’s at 2:00, something’s at 6:00, if that helps. I think mostly you have to keep it simple and not try to do something too complex.
Oren: One thing that I think new writers need to understand, because I see a lot of people asking for advice, is like, “How do I narrate this cool action sequence from a movie that I’m watching?” And it’s some kind of kung fu scene where the characters exchange 30 blows in the space of a minute. And you probably can’t, is the answer.
Chris: And you shouldn’t.
Oren: Because if you try to do that, what you’re gonna end up with is one of two situations. You’re either gonna end up trying to describe every punch, which is not going to work. That’s too many punches. Or you’re gonna do something like, “He let loose a flurry of blows.” And now you’re summarizing the fight scene, which you also don’t want. And I’m not saying you can’t do kung fu fights in prose, but I am saying they are probably going to be less extended than the ones you see on TV, because those ones are visual spectacle.
Chris: On the plus side, they could be, in some ways, more realistic because they’re short.
Oren: Exactly. You’re gonna make less mean more. I think we did a podcast about that. Fewer blows will mean more when they are written down.
Chris: And again, human bodies are fragile, so many of the things that we see in movies are not actually plausible. The fight lasts too long, somebody would go down with just a few hits. We could talk about battles. Battles, the bigger it gets, the less we can really stay in the moment. But I think by default, what I try to say is, we want this to be exciting, and what makes exciting is how meaningful it is.
Instead of the visual spectacle, we have to make meaning out of these actions. And if you start summarizing the blows, then those blows become meaningless by virtue of you summarizing them. So we want to, by default, minimize summary and make the fight in-story shorter.
Now, with something like a chase, ’cause we’re talking about all kinds of action scenes, obviously the equivalent is almost like footfalls. Those don’t matter. So we obviously don’t wanna focus on every footfall. So depending on what kind of action scene you want, you have to look for the actions that could make the difference between winning or losing in that conflict. Those are the actions that matter, and you wanna focus on that.
So if it’s a running scene, for instance, jumping over a hurdle would be a make it or break it moment. So that’s the part that’s important. Maybe rounding a corner fast enough, that kind of thing. Those are the parts that you wanna focus on. But in a fight scene, a punch can put somebody out for the fight. So a punch really should matter, and we don’t wanna decide to exaggerate and rely on spectacle at the cost of making it feel like a punch is insignificant.
Oren: And what’ll end up happening if you try to describe a flurry of blows is that, well, now you feel like you’re writing a Marvel fight, where everyone’s made of rubber, and it’s just not that exciting. The Avatar Kyoshi books have that problem, and you can tell because in the TV show, the bending battles often involve a lot of punches and kicks and blasts of elements.
And so the writer is trying to directly adapt that instead of altering the way the fights work to make them fit better in a written format. ‘Cause I 100% fully believe that you could do a cool elemental bending fight on the page. I just think it would have to look a little different than most of the fights we see in the show.
Chris: And related to that, we have these make it or break it moments, and in running that could be jumping over an obstacle. In a fight it could be a punch or a block or a dodge, what have you. In some of these moments, your protagonist would naturally not succeed. So the thing we wanna show is that it matters.
This gets back to people being rubber or not. We wanna show why it matters when they don’t succeed. So if they, instead of jumping over something, they trip and fall, we can see, oh, if maybe they’re running from somebody, we can be able to describe that person gaining. We can see that there are consequences for that.
If they take a hit to the stomach, maybe they’re winded, and it gives the antagonist an opportunity to hit them again, that kind of thing, and actually have injuries. The more you can make injuries, and you can have injuries during running too. Somebody could sprain an ankle. We want to have them, but also have them feel like they matter and that they’re actually doing something to change the course of the action scene.
Oren: You also need to consider, and this is another thing, I’m just pulling stuff from The Ministry of Time fight scene ’cause it’s so rare that it’s so clearly laid out like this. You have to remember what everyone is doing. That includes both your character’s allies and the other side. And I don’t mean that you need to be fully describing every single character. Most of the time, that will be impossible. But you need it to feel as though the character didn’t just disappear.
So if you have an ally, you might describe the thing that they’re about to go do, and then not mention them for a little bit because they’re doing that thing, and then they come back. Or if it’s the enemy, you have to keep in mind, “Okay, what is the enemy doing in response to the things my characters are doing?”
‘Cause often with really badly written fight scenes, you have enemies that just kind of stand there, this is how you end up feeling like turn-based combat. Now, of course, you are actually taking turns. Due to the linear nature of time, you can only write one thing at a time that the character is doing.
Chris: You can stop and say everything happened at once.
Oren: Right, but that means nothing.
Chris: [Lauhgs] It doesn’t make it feel like it happens at once. There may be niche situations. I don’t like that so much ’cause it’s very heavy-handed. I want the reader to just look at how the fight is written and how it feels, the pace of how it feels. There may be some scenarios in which you need to specify two actions happen at once and just trust me, reader. I know it feels like they’re happening in sequence, but I swear they happen at once. It’s just to be avoided. Related to that, when you have multiple people, it’s easy to lose track of somebody, so we don’t know what they’re doing.
And then another thing is, is what they’re doing take an equivalent amount of time? So there’s a problem that I refer to as time dilation, which is pretty common in action scenes, where the timing does not line up. The time seems to stretch out in some way, and one of the reasons that happens is because people aren’t doing things that take equivalent amount of time.
A really funny one is in the beginning of the first book of Mortal Instruments. They go into this storage room that some nightclub owner forgot to lock, or some door that says storage. I assumed initially it was a closet. It’s a door that says storage, and they go through it, and it’s like I kept revising it to make it bigger and bigger. Because I thought this was a closet, but this is a room for one person to be tied up and for several other people to interrogate the captive person, so I guess it’s a room.
But then we have an action scene where one person is running inside this space while somebody else, I think they get knocked down and have to recover, which would naturally take a little time. And think of how far somebody could run while another person gets knocked out and recovers. Quite a long distance. So at that point, the storage room is very, very large. But that’s the kind of weird time dilation that happens.
Oren: That happened in Ministry of Time too. There’s a sequence where the boyfriend and the bad guy are wrestling on the ground, and for some reason, the boyfriend lets him go even though the bad guy still has the gun. And so there’s time for the boyfriend to have the protagonist run to a motorcycle, stop grappling, and then also run after her, get their helmets on, and get away on the motorcycle before the bad guy can shoot at them again, which really raises the possibility of the muzzle-loading laser gun, I think would solve this problem.
Chris: We saw the same thing in Children of Blood and Bone, where they’re surrounded by enemies, but they need to escape, so suddenly people come on, like, giant cat mount, and they’re able to climb aboard the cat mount with nobody shooting arrows at them, and then leap away. So that’s another thing that I see that causes time dilation, what I would say is kind of balancing the urgency of the situation.
It happens when we want the situation to be extremely urgent so that it’s exciting, but then the hero needs time to do stuff. So then we have weird pauses where the enemy apparently is not shooting while the hero gets on a mount. Or you can have this happen with, “Oh, somebody’s coming. I need time to prepare.” Okay, how close did y
594 – Plotting a Slow Burn Romance
June 28, 2026
You ever spend three months planning a first date and think, “This is going a little fast”? Then slow burns may be the genre for you! But there’s more to a slow burn than just making readers wait an …
Show notes
You ever spend three months planning a first date and think, “This is going a little fast”? Then slow burns may be the genre for you! But there’s more to a slow burn than just making readers wait an inordinately long time. You’ve also gotta make the waiting fun! We’ve got some thoughts on how to do that.
Show Notes
Warrior Princess Assassin
Midnight Girls
Romantic Tension and Longing
Paladin’s Grace
Uprooted
Weavingshaw
Julian Bashir
Ezri Dax
Kes
Neelix
Elim Garak
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[Promo for Tension & Hooks 2026]
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Theme]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: I have a story about two characters who are gonna kiss, but I would like to sell ten books and I know people are gonna stop reading the moment that they kiss. So I’d like to wait.
Chris: Oh, are they? Well, I think I found your problem.
Oren: That’s what’s gonna happen. I just know it. So I would like the kiss to not happen until the end of book ten, and I think I’ll call it a “Slow Burn” for marketing purposes.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: Is this gonna work, do you think?
Chris: That would be a slow, slow, slow Burn.
Oren: The slower, the more burn-y. That’s just how it works, I think.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. The slower you go, the more you burn. I think generally, especially in a full romance, if there is a kiss at the end of the book, that would be considered a Slow Burn.
Oren: I was wondering about that. At what point does it become a Slow Burn? How slow does it have to be before you start calling it that?
Chris: I’ve heard, for instance, Warrior Princess Assassin is referred to as a Slow Burn by many of its reviewers. And there is a sex scene at the end of the book. It’s … Okay, this is a little silly, because in hetero terms it would be still holding back for a sex scene. It’s pretty detailed, but the spice doesn’t go up to a sex scene until the end, and that would be considered a Slow Burn.
But I’ve seen other books where they just have a kiss at the end. Again, we can talk about a full romance versus a romantic subplot. But in a book where I’ve seen—like Midnight Girls, where it ends with just a kiss—I’m concerned about that leaving people too unsatisfied.
Oren: Yeah, there’s not enough romance in this romance at that point.
Chris: Right. We want that satisfaction. That satisfaction comes from seeing them kind of hook up a bit. You can withhold some relationship milestones, I think, and save those for a later book. But only a kiss … In Pride and Prejudice, that was famous for not having any kisses, but that’s because of the time period, and they’re still an official couple who are getting married at the end.
So it can kind of vary depending on the book’s spiciness level because the heat level and how many sex scenes we have will just vary from romance to romance. It’s not really the best judge probably. But certainly I think if it is less spicy, it’s more likely to be referred to as a Slow Burn.
Oren: You could have, for example, a story where the romance part is about whether or not they’ll get together and get married, but they’re banging the whole time ’cause they fell in lust immediately. And I don’t think you would generally call that a Slow Burn, even if it takes a long time to resolve.
Chris: The primary feature that I would say a Slow Burn has is that the relationship escalates slowly. If they get together and break up, or they’re banging each other a lot, I don’t think that people would call that a Slow Burn. On the other hand, though, a kiss at the end to indicate they’re together is pretty typical for a romantic subplot.
Though I don’t know that I would call a normal subplot where they kiss at the end just to make it official a Slow Burn. Just because, for the amount of content that romance probably gets, that could be completely normal because it’s taking up a lot less page space than if the whole book was a romance novel.
Oren: Does that mean we think that to be a Slow Burn it has to be like a full romance plot and not just a subplot in a larger story? Or does it just take longer for a subplot to be considered a Slow Burn?
Chris: There’s no hard line, ’cause you could have a really prominent romance subplot, but technically it could still be a subplot or kind of blurring the line in between.
I’m not saying that a subplot can’t be a Slow Burn if it gets a lot of time. I think we have to see … The thing that I think people like for Slow Burns, one of the things they like is pining. That’s one of the features that Slow Burns often have, and of course it can be done in different ways. But I think you wanna see a lot of time. We wanna see that there’s a lot of time for them to interact and have kind of development and also build chemistry without actually taking the next step in the relationship. So that requires page space.
If you had a subplot that was a very slow building and had a decent amount of page space, and maybe it doesn’t have a kiss until book two, that could certainly be considered a Slow Burn. I just would be hesitant to take the normal romantic subplot with the standard ending kiss and call that a Slow Burn because I think in many cases, while the romance just doesn’t get that much development, it doesn’t have that much page space, there’s not really that kind of long simmering time that a slow burn romance is supposed to have.
Oren: When I think about a long, normal plot, not romance, but just like an external plot of some kind, I plan it out in terms of what needs to happen for this plot to resolve in one way or the other. And I imagine those as important events and I add more of them if I want the plot to be longer. Do you want to be planning out a slow burn romance the same way? Or is that gonna be too confining?
Chris: How many plot events do we have?
Oren: ‘Cause like, in a normal plot I wouldn’t just be like, “And then my characters sword-fighted for twenty pages.” I would be like, “So the plot is that we’re defeating store brand Sauron and to do that we need to first take Minus Terith.” That’s gonna be what my city is called. Don’t sue.
Chris: [Laughter]
Oren: And then after that, we need to get it to the gates of Lessghoul, and I would plan it that way. But I don’t know if that has a direct comparison in a romance story or if they are just longing.
Chris: If you think about the movement in the romance, we’re talking about the escalation in the relationship. So normally when we have a romance and we’re looking at “longing structure,” for instance, we have chemistry and then we have some development of the relationship that makes it feel like things are progressing, and then usually our kind of down note or our sort of separation point.
In a Slow Burn, we want that movement to be real slow in comparison to the amount of time they get together. I have seen complaints from people reviewing romance books that something is not a real Slow Burn because there is not enough time with the love birds together. They spend too much time apart. We don’t have enough page space. That is a frequent romance complaint.
Oren: Like saying it’s a slow burn because they meet on page one and then take a two-hundred-page vacation from each other. That’s not gonna work? They need more actual contact?
Chris: Yes. Romance audiences just want them to have lots of time together, interacting with each other. [Laughs]
That would be a complaint. That’s not a valid Slow Burn. We want kind of slow progress or we want it to take a long time before we get to a certain point in the relationship. I do think that sometimes might be challenging to stretch out in some ways if you’re just relying on the romance itself to create structure.
We had another episode on Enemies to Lovers, and I do think that gives it more time. It has more miles to cover. And so you could do a Slow Burn a little easier if they start out as enemies. Then we have a lot more milestones that we can fit in. But I also think it’s worth considering whether we want to have an additional plot in there so the relationship doesn’t have as much structure and we can afford to have the relationship milestones go slowly because we have, for instance, a high tension plot.
Oren: That’s my instinct. If you want the romance to take a long time, you attach it to a long external plot which gives you something to do so you don’t have to explain why they’re constantly longing for each other but not together yet.
Chris: The external plot—depending on what it has, it may not save you from that. But what it does is it provides another form of structure using tension. Ideally, again, the external plot supports a romance. But in this case of a Slow Burn, all you might want is an external plot that gives them a reason to be together all the time. They’re stranded out on an island, whatever. They’re traveling together, something that makes them in close proximity all the time so that if they’re not in love yet, they can be. I’m not gonna eliminate that from consideration.
But if they were doing something like Enemies to Lovers, we need something to push them together when they’re enemies so that they spend time interacting, for instance. And so I think if you had to do strong plot that provided some level of excitement but just had them together a lot in their scenes, then you could sort of take a step back and not worry as much and just give them a lot of chemistry as they interact together and have that kind of slowly blooming relationship.
Oren: We mentioned the possibility of Enemies to Lovers, but obviously that’s only one way you can do a romance. Not every Slow Burn is gonna wanna be an Enemies to Lovers. So what else do you do to set up the situation where the characters have enough chemistry that we would want them to be together, but also they aren’t gonna get together for a long time? What’s the play to keep them apart?
Chris: Well, sometimes with a Slow Burn they are friends for a while. And there is definitely a trick to making sure that the readers feel some level of chemistry or the readers are invested in it without the characters being too invested in it.
I guess what we’re trying to avoid is—I’m thinking of Paladin’s Grace.
Oren: Yeah.
Both: [Burst of Laughter]
Chris: Where they’re like, all over each other, and it’s just like, “What’s wrong with me?” It’s like, why? What is the hang-up here? Why aren’t you guys together now?
I think that in many cases sometimes people really like the opposite of love at first sight. They like the slowly developing feelings. They’ll just be focusing on each other a lot and only very slowly coming into awareness of their attraction and their feelings for each other. But will still be focusing it a lot and still be creating that chemistry.
But in other cases, there may be something in the way of them getting together that provides a reason why they don’t get together. Like forbidden love or something like that.
So Warrior Princess Assassin has characters that as soon as they get together they have obvious attraction. This is a throuple romance. Maybe it helps a little bit that the time is divided between three different romances. [Chuckles] Because a throuple romance is three romances. That makes it easier to stretch those out for a novel.
But two of them are already in love, but their, like, relationship is forbidden because one of them is a princess. And then they meet their kind of like joint love interest, but there’s a lot of drama and political intrigue, and then a lack of trust between them.
In the case of one character, there’s some trauma where he isn’t comfortable often with people touching him. They spend the book just like, building trust with each other slowly and kind of overcoming those things. There are some external problems, but there’s also a lot of emotional problems.
Oren: I have another idea. You could make a huge deal about how this is a sex-negative society and you can’t just be having sex, and then have sex and nothing happens.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: ‘Cause we’re done with that. That’s over now.
Chris: In Midnight Girls, that one has two rival witches’ apprentices, that they have a long history of being rivals with each other. And this was actually confusing for me at first because I wasn’t sure if they knew who each other were. But no. So they both have their regular identity, and then they have like, their monster form. They’d only seen each other in monster form before.
So near the opening, they meet each other in normal girl form and kind of become a little attached to each other without knowing who each other is. And of course, then at some point they can find out and fight each other a little bit, and then decide that they need to ally with each other.
Oren: Use my most powerful transformation: normal girl form. [Chortle]
Chris: That one’s kind of like an Enemies to Lovers too, where we have an external reason why they think they shouldn’t be together. Something that provides a barrier.
Oren: So if you’re plotting a slow burn romance over multiple books, we’ve established that you probably want something a little more substantial than a kiss at the end of book one. You don’t gotta leave people feeling a little high and dry, as it were.
Chris: I don’t think we should think of this just in terms of what sexual act they take, because we can have different heat levels. Kisses may or may not be particularly sexual. I think the thing about Midnight Girls that feels really taunting about it is at the end there’s a kiss, and then one of the girls just, like, runs off.
Oren: Flee!
Chris: And then later we kind of hear that one of the girls, they came back. But we don’t actually see them together. They part at the end, and then we hear one of them is nearby and that they’re about to kind of reengage in their rivalry, but we don’t see them as a cute couple.
Oren: I’ve read a couple books where there’s like a romance going on, and then one of them leaves, and I’m like, “Alright, bye.” And then they come back, and then the book ends.
Chris: Yeah. Having a resolution that is too perfunctory is a common issue with romances that is … makes fans real grumpy. Just have some scenes at the end with them just like being a cute couple together, please. [Laughs]
Oren: That happened in Uprooted, but it was weird, ’cause I didn’t like the romance. I was like, “Yay, he’s gone!” And then he came back.
Chris: [Laughter]
Oren: No. Go away. I don’t know if I would qualify Uprooted as Slow Burn. It’s not a super long book.
Chris: Really? That book felt like forever to me.
Oren: Yeah, that’s ’cause it’s boring. It’s not long, it’s just dull.
Chris: It’s not? It felt really long. Well I mean, we start with one plot and then we abandon it for the protagonist travels to a completely different city without the love interest. That part without the love interest would not be good for romance.
Oren: OK, I take it back. It’s 17 hours and 44 minutes in audio.
Chris: I knew it was long!
Oren: It is long! You’re right, it is long. It’s also boring. [Laughs] Or at least parts of it are, not all of it.
Chris: I started a book that was supposed to be a Slow Burn romance, but put it down because I didn’t like it. This just came out this year: Weaving Shaw. And the issue that I had is I really felt that there was a complete lack of chemistry to the romance. And maybe some people who are more into the love interest than I was felt differently.
Even if it’s a Slow Burn and even if they’re not romantically interested in each other yet, or they don’t know they’re romantically interested in each other yet, I think the reader should still feel some attraction. Some of that positive charge, as I call it.
And in this case, it was just, I felt like that positive chemistry was completely lacking, where the love interest, yeah. He’s powerful, I guess and young. I don’t remember him being particularly attractive. Maybe. He’s probably supposed to be.
Oren: Just so hot. You don’t even know, Chris. And that’s literal. You don’t know.
Chris: But he’s just like the cold-hearted boss of the protagonist. And it’s definitely one of those things where he’s supposed to come off as more heartless than he ends up being later. I just felt like the chemistry wasn’t really there.
593 – Cozy Fantasy
June 21, 2026
Take a break, sit and relax, put your feet up. Maybe enjoy a refreshing hot beverage or a home-cooked meal. If you have time, you can read one of the panic pieces about how a new-ish genre is ruining …
Show notes
Take a break, sit and relax, put your feet up. Maybe enjoy a refreshing hot beverage or a home-cooked meal. If you have time, you can read one of the panic pieces about how a new-ish genre is ruining literature. Obviously, this is a cozy fantasy episode, where we not only talk about what cozy fantasy is but why cozy fantasy is. Plus, a look at all the books falsely categorized as cozy fantasy and a glimpse at our own totally real upcoming bestseller.
Show Notes
Cozy Fantasy
Wish Fulfillment
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
The Library of Amorlin
Legends and Lattes
Bookshops and Bonedust
The Spellshop
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
The Enchanted Greenhouse
Sexism In The Wheel of Time
What Is Cozy Fantasy and How to Write It
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Manasa. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[Promo for Tension & Hooks 2026]
Chris:Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: It’s a rainy day, but we’re all snug inside with some hot tea and our kitty cats, making content for our struggling small business with big dreams.
Oren: Whoa, hang on. It–it can’t be struggling too much, right? It’s gotta be – like – just a little struggle.
Chris: Just a little struggle, yeah. In fact, you know what we really need here is a magic amulet that automatically makes Mythcreant successful.
Oren: Yeah. There. Solved. Easy.
Chris: Yep, yep. I would very much like one of those. [laughter] If anybody makes magic amulets.
Oren: Okay, technically speaking, it doesn’t directly make Mythcreant successful. It just mind controls talented, driven people and brings them to us to work for free. [laughter] And we do have some of those, but we need more. So we need to strengthen the amulet …
Chris: …maybe so that as soon as I try anything to bring in more fans, suddenly it just works really well and I’ve got droves of fans.
Oren: It just makes sense.
Chris: Or it does in Cozy Fantasy.
Oren: Yeah, yeah. That’s true.
Chris: So, what is Cozy Fantasy? If you have not heard this genre term before, it’s relatively new. This is a sub-genre of fantasy: it’s light in tone; we’ve got no violence, no deaths – there could be deaths in the backstory, but generally no deaths during the current story; definitely no gore. The scope tends to be small: instead of it being like an epic over the fate of the world, we’re dealing with personal scale or the welfare of the community. I think the thing that really sets it apart the most is just the focus on idyllic living. We’ve got usually a plot that features problems that can be pertained to running a household or a business or an institution generally. And it’s got a lot of wish fulfillment when it comes to opening your new coffee shop or running a library or whatever cute thing that you would like to do – but only if it’s easy. [laughter] And not like a real business.
Oren: It’s a combination of wish fulfillment and low tension in a, if not domestic, then a comforting setting. Wish fulfillment can be a lot of things for different people, but this is a specific type of wish fulfillment.
The chaos gremlins over on Goodreads will put anything in this category: you got The Hobbit, you got Howl’s Moving Castle, you got A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking – which I get, that one. That’s a trick, ’cause it has “baking” in the title.
Chris: And it is cute baking magic, it’s just there’s – too much tension.
Oren: There’s like an assassin running around. People are getting murdered.
Chris: There was a book that came out this year, The Library of Amorlin, and we looked at the description like “is this a Cozy? Is this not a Cozy?” And it was kind of, maybe it’s borderline a Cozy. And then when I started reading it, the main character is, like, being forced to kill these magical animals,and we describe the bodies of these dead animals. Like nope, nope, nope: that is not something you put in a Cozy.
Oren: Doesn’t sound very cozy, I would think.
Chris: I mean, later what’s gonna happen is she’s gonna join the love interest who is trying to protect the magical animals, and protecting magical animals is something you might do in a Cozy, but you would never actually show them dying or dead, right? That is not part of that.
Another interesting case is right now I’m reading Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, and this book is a Cozy, but it has a problem, which is that it’s about a cat shelter, but it’s not. Because the plot is about these magicians making trouble…
Oren: What?
Chris: …and how we need to get rid of them. So instead of focusing on running the cat shelter, Agnes is like, “Nope, I don’t have any time to deal with the cat shelters now because I need to go and categorize this magician’s magical artifacts.” And in most stories I’d be like, “Yeah, cool, magical artifacts,” but in this story I’m like, “Hey, I wanted to hear about the cats.”
Oren: Ugh, I don’t have time to eat this delicious meal. I guess I have to go snack on some leaves. No, thanks.
Chris: The plot is built around something that in another book could be just fine. Having magic battles between misbehaving magicians. To get their power they have to go into this creepy forest. In another book that would all be great and I would be very interested in it, but in this one there’s cat shelters and I wanna hear about the cats because that’s what the Cozy is typically about, and that’s what we set up, right? We set up that she’s desperate to find a location for her cat shelter because nobody wants to lease their location to her once they hear she’s gonna bring in cats. It’s a very compelling problem that gets you attached to the cat shelter, and then suddenly having the plot be like, “No, we have to leave the cats behind to deal with these magicians now,” now I just hate the magicians.
Oren: Get outta here, magicians.
Chris: [laughter] Now I’m sure it’ll come together at the end. Again, this is why a typical Cozy is about the success of the shop or the household or the institution. That’s what the plot is about and those are the activities that the protagonist engages in. Like in Legends & Lattes, it’s about a coffee shop. To engage in the plot and solve problems, the main character runs her coffee shop and finds new solutions for her coffee shop. She doesn’t, like, run off and deal with the mafia.
Oren: The way that that happens does have some problems, but it is definitely focused on the thing the story is about. The same thing with The Spell Shop or The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. I’m not saying these are perfect stories, but they know what they are about, and they don’t introduce it and then try to take you away from it.
I do get why stories like The Hobbit and Howl’s Moving Castle and Defensive Baking get on Cozy lists: it’s because they have cozy elements within them. There are all the food sequences in The Hobbit, there’s the taking care of Howl’s castle when he’s not around in Howl’s Moving Castle, and then of course there’s the baking in Defensive Baking.But I wouldn’t sell those as Cozies because I think someone looking for a Cozy is gonna pick these up, and it’s not gonna meet what they are looking for.
Chris: I would say the book Howl’s Moving Castle definitely feels lighter and lower in tension and, and more cozy than the movie. Than the anime movie.
Oren: Sure, that’s true.
Chris: Technically they do have a villainous witch in the book that they kind of fight at the end, but it has a lot more just hanging out, cleaning Howl’s castle, that kind of thing. I do think that things like Howl’s Moving Castle and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, which is another one that is not really cozy because it has too much danger. Generally in a Cozy, the protagonist is not facing a villain that is threatening to kill them. If they face any threat that could endanger, like cause injury, it’s usually something like a storm or some other natural disaster. It’s not like “somebody’s gonna murder me.”
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So Going Postal is not a Cozy, but this process of finding this old post office with all of these undelivered letters, and then inspiring the two remaining postal workers, and then starting to redeliver all those letters again and cleaning it up and coming up with new ideas to revitalize the post office: those are all activities that are just prime cozy activities.
Oren: Right. And a story where you take over a beloved institution and bring it back from the dead and strengthen it, it could not be a Cozy, right? It could be very high tension, but it will have some of the same wish fulfillment as a Cozy.
Chris: Yeah. If it’s good.
Oren: Yeah, if it’s good.
I was sad to discover that I think the era of Cozy Fantasy panic pieces may be over.
Chris: Oh, no. We need more silly pieces to make fun of.
Oren: ‘Cause there used to be every so often someone would publish a panic piece about “how Cozy Fiction was destroying literature and maybe also turning us into fascists”, depending on how spicy they felt. And I can’t help but feel like, maybe those went away because we suddenly had a lot of real problems to deal with and we had fewer people who had their heads far enough up their ass to write something like that. I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true.
Chris: It just feels so unfair to me. It’s like we had so many people pushing grim dark stories for so many years, and it’s like– look: the people who are sensitive to tension just wanna have their own stories to read, okay? Just let them have their stories.
Oren: It’s bad to want those, Chris. It is a moral failing. [laughter] I tried to find another one for today’s podcast, and the closest I could find was some guy on Bluesky being mad when a reviewer mentioned that they take the book’s genre into account when deciding how to judge it because in theory the publisher might have misfiled it in the wrong genre, so how could you punish the author for that? [laughter] Which was silly, but not nearly as silly as a Cozy Panic piece.
Chris: Another kind of Cozy Fail I’ve seen is at the beginning of Enchanted Greenhouse, which is the sequel to Spell Shop. There’s just a sequence that some readers would find very harrowing. I think the author just assumed this was not a big deal. We heard about this happening in the first book, but it was, you know, happening to a minor character and was not shown in detail. The protagonist is turned into a statue, a wooden statue, and at the beginning of Enchanted Greenhouse we find out she was conscious the whole time she was a statue.
Oren: Blah
Chris: And hear all about her being a statue in detail. That’s just – again – that’s the stuff of nightmares. It just doesn’t belong at the beginning of a Cozy. The whole point is this is a feel-good fantasy, and we’re going for positive feelings.
Oren: It is definitely a case of– if you do get readers who are like, “Hell yeah, trapped in a statue unable to move, but conscious of your environment for years, give me more of that,” and then they keep reading, they’re like, “What the heck is this greenhouse?” [laughter] “What’s, what’s, why, what did you trick me for, right?” There’s no win in that. That’s a lose-lose scenario.
Chris: I do think it is worth talking about Cozies and tension in general because I think a good Cozy has just the right amount of tension, it does have some tension. Like, for me, the sample Cozy reader is my mother, who is real tension-sensitive: she doesn’t like adversarial contests between people; she wants everybody to get along. And definitely prefers not to have violence in her stories, so she … Cozy Fantasy, as far as I can tell– if it’s not her favorite genre, is at least one of her favorite genres. But she even has a point at which she’s like, “Yeah, that was kind of low tension,” even though she doesn’t typically like tension that much.
I also think that, okay, there are always the readers who are like, “Yeah, I don’t care if this has tension as long as some characters I like are hanging out,” and that’s fine, but I do think having just that right amount of tension definitely helps broaden the audience. Some people liked, for instance,Bookshops & Bonedust, which was the sequel to Legends & Lattes. I was so bored because Legends & Lattes has a real tight plot, cohesive plot with problems. Bookshops & Bonedust is just fragmented and has no tension to speak of, and I couldn’t get through it. So again, I think there’s just a sweet spot to be had here, where we have just enough that there are actual problems that feel like they matter for the protagonist to tackle, but it is not supposed to be scary.
It’s not supposed to be a thriller, it’s not supposed to be particularly exciting. Basically, don’t want high stakes usually, and by “high stakes” that means somebody’s life is threatened. Instead, you want stakes that are, like, medium to low, where the institution is at risk or the business is at risk or something like that. A lot of times emotional stakes: somebody’s emotionally hurt and they need to heal. Or you could have somebody’s threatened in a lesser way, right? They’re gonna be conscripted, they’re gonna be jailed, they’re gonna be sent away, and that’s gonna cause them deep unhappiness and that’s enough.
Oren: Legends & Lattes is actually a fascinating example to consider tension in Cozies through, because it’s clear that the author, Baldree, does know the story needs some tension because he sets up problems. Not huge problems, but real problems, like getting the coffee shop off the ground, and then he sets up this distant but more serious problem of the local mobster wanting to charge protection money. And those are, I’d say about right for a Cozy. The mob’s not gonna break down her door tomorrow, but it’s something we have to deal with. And then, you know, not getting the kitchen extension on the coffee shop’s not gonna kill anybody, but it matters.
The problem is that every single problem is then resolved by her having magical friends who do everything for her. And by her, I mean the protagonist, Viv. So that’s an interesting case where the author knows that some tension is needed, but actually the problem is that he doesn’t know how to resolve problems satisfactorily.
Chris: Or in The Spellshop, the stakes are that “we’re not supposed to have these magic books because we’re kind of in an uncertain political situation in The Spellshop. But there was a previous empire that basically wanted to hoard all the magic for itself, so nobody else is allowed to have these books. But the community is suffering because it is actually dependent on magic, but because of the hoarding of magic, things on this idyllic little island are falling apart.” So the protagonist is trying to solve these problems, but also is trying to not get caught by any potential authorities that come by. And then later we have an inspector come by so we can worry about the protagonist getting caught. But that is as much tension as we have for the most part. And then they deal with a storm, but it doesn’t really feel in that storm like anybody’s gonna die. I mean, we have one, I think, situation where people are out in the water and we’re a little worried about them, but for the most part, you know, we’re not worried about people dying here. That’s kind of the level that you want for a Cozy.
I will say though that if you want lower tension, it does really help if the story keeps moving and has good novelty. So for instance, Teller of Small Fortunes, that one is a Cozy that has probably some of the lowest tension I’ve seen in a Cozy, but it actually kept my attention despite how low the tension was. It helped that it was a traveling story, so the characters moved around and encountered new people and did new things. That variety also helps retain attention. In Teller of Small Fortunes, instead of having a community problem, we just have four people that each have their own personal problem that’s not particularly urgent, and they travel around together and kind of work on their problems.
Oren: Yeah. If you have a high novelty that you can maintain, you can make up for a lot of other problems with that.
Chris: Just having the story move and having people encounter new things and do new things. Whereas if you take longer for everything that you cover, that is gonna make it a little bit harder to keep attention.
Oren: And when you’re planning your story, assuming that you do plan your story, it’s impor
592 – When Villains Are Too Weak
June 14, 2026
After 13 years, it’s hopefully clear that we recommend against having villains trip over their own feet. In most stories, if the villain is a pushover, there won’t be much tension or satisfaction. But why do …
Show notes
After 13 years, it’s hopefully clear that we recommend against having villains trip over their own feet. In most stories, if the villain is a pushover, there won’t be much tension or satisfaction. But why do villains become pushovers in the first place? And what should be done about it? Fortunately, we have thoughts.
Show Notes
The President’s Daughter Has Been Kidnapped
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
The White Witch
Loki
Ultron
Inuyasha Bees
Kvothe
Rand al’Thor
Paul Atreides
The Avatar State
Paradise
Cabin in the Woods
Kingpin
How to Realistically Depict Evil
Zuko
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: I’m Chris.
Oren: Oh no, the bad guy is going to conquer our planet with their mega space battleship as soon as they can get an orbital parking permit. There’s a long wait list, and obviously they’re not gonna invade without a permit. Can you imagine the kind of ticket they’d get?
Chris: Well, it’s okay. Once they do manage to park, we have all of the big weapons anyway.
Oren: Yeah, but they’re very scary ’cause, like, they had some dialogue about how they would want to see the world as a diamond that they wear on a ring. And it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s… Sure, bro.
Chris: Well, they are keeping one person hostage and threatening to kill that person, so we should probably… you know, we’re just gonna have to surrender all of our weapons.
Oren: Just have to give them everything they want, as opposed to just put someone in charge who isn’t that hostage’s parent? [laughter] Pro tip! West Wing did a whole story arc about this, about how, like, the president has to step away when his kid has been kidnapped, ’cause the president can’t make logical decisions at that point. Come on, guys, West Wing figured it out! [laughter] So this week we are talking about when the villain is too weak. And I’m including both villains who are just straightforwardly underpowered, like they’re just not powerful enough to defeat the heroes, or also villains who, in theory, should be, but just make comically bad choices to the point that they should be easy to defeat at that point.
Chris: What about villains that the storyteller just doesn’t like, and so they just fall on their face?
Oren: Yeah, I guess there’s always the, like, they didn’t technically make a bad choice, but they are just constantly– failed anyway, right? Like, they constantly have bad luck or whatever.
Chris: Actually, this usually happens, I think, in a lot of children’s cartoons or other lighter stories where the heroes are just not allowed to lose. You know, so, the most recent She-Ra had this problem, too, where it’s like, okay, we need to see the heroes triumphant every single time, and so then by fiat, the villain just always loses. It’s, you know, hard for them to not feel too weak.
Oren: Right. Well, and, and She-Ra has that problem from multiple angles, right? Because it has the issue where the heroes just always have to win, right? They are never allowed to lose. But they also are just, on paper, way more powerful than the villains, right? Because each of the princesses is, like, at least as strong as any of the bad guys, and there are only, like, two or three named bad guys who can fight worth anything, and there are eight of these princesses or something like… Oh, gosh, maybe it’s not eight, but there are a bunch, right?
Chris: Yeah. Maybe we should cover signs your villain is too weak because, again, a lot of storytellers do this, they don’t realize their villain is too weak. Like, obviously, a big one is, is the villain outnumbered? And to be clear, minions don’t always make up the difference. Like, if you put some time and effort into your minions, the minions can matter, but there’s just a lot of stories, especially if they escalate too quickly and the heroes are just steamrolling over hordes of minions immediately, where the minions just don’t feel significant enough. And then all we see is that, well, the villain is one person who has superpowers or incredible abilities or whatever, but then the team good is like, five people, and that just– doesn’t look even.
Oren: Yeah, we’re just gonna gang up on him. And also, authors often do this when they want to portray the villain as, like, scheming. Sometimes because they think that makes them look more evil. Uh, looking at you, C.S. Lewis, with the scheming White Witch. Oh, she’s scheming! But what you neglect to notice is that, A, every adaptation has made the White Witch hotter than the last adaptation. [laughter] So we’re doomed already. But also, the White Witch is the one putting in all the work to come up with this clever plan against a much more powerful enemy!
Chris: Right. If your villain has to be clever to win, they’re not powerful enough.
Oren: And She-Ra also had that problem sometimes because Catra would often come up with these clever strategies, and then Adora’s strategy was, “What if we just ran right at them because we have, like, a bunch of powerful princesses?” And I’m like, “Oh, it feels … Uh, Catra kinda earned this one,” but nope, she still loses.
Chris: This is why everybody loved Loki, who was originally a villain in Avengers, is because he’s clearly the underdog in this situation, and he has to be clever to get anywhere. Like, how could you not root for him? Also, he’s good-looking. How could you not root for him? [laughter]
Oren: Yeah, and he’s tortured a little bit.
Chris: And he’s tortured. Angsty boy.
Oren: Yeah. In The Avengers, it worked okay for a while because there was this period where, like, the conflict was over whether the Avengers could work together, and Loki was very powerful in stopping them from doing that. But once they start working together, it’s like, can six Avengers beat Loki? Half of whom could beat Loki in a one-on-one fight? Yes, it turns out they can. [chuckles]
Chris: And again, Loki is supposed to have minions, but, like, in those Marvel movies, minions just don’t mean anything, right? They’re just there so that we can have more, bigger, flashier fight scenes, and the minions are instantly just fodder for our heroes.
Oren: Yeah, there are a number of Marvel movies that have this problem. Age of Ultron had the same problem, where it’s, like, Ultron is here, and he’s about as powerful as Iron Man, and he’s fighting the whole Avengers team. And, like, yeah, you know, I think we’ll get him. I think we will.
[both laugh]
Chris: So yeah, another thing, if your villains have powers that are just to negate the hero’s powers, that is a bad sign. That is a bad sign that your heroes are too powerful in comparison to your villains. If they have to have, like, the mutant ability neutralizing collar or what have you, that strongly suggests that the villain is underpowered.
Oren: Right, and I mean, and that’s the case anytime you have to introduce a countermeasure just to, like, turn off an ability or a piece of tech that you’ve added, because that’s just a boring way to handle it. It’s like, oh, well, I wanted to see them use that. Well, too bad, they’re in the can’t-use-that zone. It’s like, all right, well, now it feels like you might as well not have added it.
Chris: Oh! Bees.
Oren: Yeah, the Inuyasha bees!
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: It’s like, “Hey, we gave this guy a black hole in his hand that defeats all enemies.” It’s like, “Well, I guess everyone has bees now, and the bees make the black hole not work.”
Chris: [laughs] That’s just so funny. The bees. Okay.
Oren: So we’ve talked about villains being outnumbered. That’s a big one. Um, villains being clever. There’s also just the straight up, like- The author loves the hero too much and isn’t, you know, willing to let them ever face enemies who actually know what they’re doing. This one doesn’t come up as often in published stories just because it’s pretty well known by professional authors that your hero is, like, measured by the strength of their villains. There have been enough, like, Batman essays for us to internalize that message. But it still happens occasionally. The Name of the Wind, of course, has this problem because, like, Kvothe is the greatest guy ever, and so when he actually has a rival, his rival has to suck ass and Kvothe is super cool and the best. Weirdly, in The Wheel of Time, Rand has this problem after about book three. He’s just way too strong, and the only way that we keep him from completely winning is by continually cutting away from his POV to a million other characters.
Chris: Doesn’t Dune have this issue with the rival guy?
Oren: Yes, Dune absolutely has this problem, where after, like…The first third or so is, you know, House Harkonnen living large, and they’ve got their evil plan, and they’re totally badass. And then as soon as Paul makes his alliance with the Fremen, every fight they have is basically a foregone conclusion, and he just steamrollers over all opposition. There’s one scene just to, like, to really drive home. There’s one scene where the Sardaukar, who are the imperial elite soldiers, ambush a group of Fremen non-combatants, which the book of course describes as women and children, and then have to, like, run away with their tails between their legs ’cause they got beat up so bad by the Fremen non-combatants.
Chris: [chuckling] Oh, no.
Oren: And this is, of course, where the Dune fans will claim, “Oh, you see? That’s because Paul’s not the hero. You’re not supposed to want him to win.” And I’m like, “Okay, first of all, no.”
Chris: Yes, you are. [laughs]
Oren: In the first book, you are absolutely supposed to want him to win. Don’t lie to me. But second, if you aren’t, what is the point of any of this? It goes on for a while. Like, that’s arguably worse. If I’m supposed to spend however many chapters watching two people I don’t care about fight? C’mon.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t know. I have run into a couple books that- were like, villain origin stories or something, and I’ve always been kinda baffled, like, what is the appeal of this? But I mean, if they’re good, they still get you to root for the character.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, the way that those usually work is they have them fight, like, someone who is more eviler, right? Assuming they’re an actual villain origin story and not just a popular villain that we have reimagined as a protagonist, right?
Chris: Okay, so those are signs that your villain is underpowered. So, you know, what should we do about it?
Oren: Okay, so the main thing that you have to be thinking about here is what kind of conflicts is my villain getting into with the hero, or in general, right? Like, what are they doing? And you need to plan for that sort of thing. Now, if you have a show like Deep Space Nine, in Deep Space Nine, the Dominion War is not going to be decided by Sisko punching the changeling leader. That’s not a thing that’s gonna happen. So it’s not a big deal that there are fewer named characters on Team Evil because this is not a personal contest. Now, it does kind of become one in the finale when, like, Sisko has to go down and have, like, a personal confrontation with Dukat, but that’s a separate issue. That doesn’t… I would argue that scene doesn’t work very well. But the Dominion War itself is not about that. So in this case, that’s a situation where minions work great, right? The Jem’Hadar are very threatening, and they do what they need to do. But if you’re imagining that your story is mainly going to be about the hero and the villain, or at least important named characters fighting each other, then you just have to balance them for that. And often that’s going to mean making more named villains or making the villain so strong that they can fight all of Team Good at the same time.
Chris: I mean, I also encourage people to not depower minions too quickly. You know, if you can make the minions actually intimidating when the story starts. And I think one reason this happens is the storyteller wants the hero to be, like, super badass immediately, right? And so they show them fighting the minions. So this does sometimes require a hero that’s sort of designed for growth, right? Instead of having that super badass hero immediately, you have your scrappy hero, and then your scrappy hero becomes badass during the story. But it’s certainly easier to keep tension up that way, right? If you have, “Oh. Oh, no, these minions, they’re gonna get me” and then, you know, progress to the point where you beat up the minions. It helps. It makes the minions more intimidating, so we’re not feeling like they don’t matter and it’s just a number of named characters.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s, you know, basically how Avatar does it, right? Like, early in the show, Fire Nation soldiers are a pretty serious threat, and then as the show progresses, that becomes less true. And, you know, by the time they get Toph, we’ve basically given up the idea that unnamed Fire Nation soldiers can threaten them, which is when we introduce Azula and her crew. So that’s why that worked out as well as it did. It is also important to think through the implications of the powers you give your heroes, ’cause I just mentioned Avatar. The Avatar State’s a huge problem. Like, “hey, we gave the, our main hero a god mode ability, and, uh, yeah, I guess it only turns on when he’s about to lose. Hmm. Y- yeah, okay, I see why that would be an issue, actually.” Now, of course, later, when the Avatar can control the Avatar State, it’s even worse. But even in the original show, if you stop to think about it for a minute, you realize that Aang can’t ever lose fights, barring something really clever like what Azula ends up doing. And so that’s not great. I would probably recommend not doing that.
Chris: Yeah. And again, if you’re wondering, what do I do when the hero and villain confront each other? If your hero just runs away and focuses on escaping as opposed to defeating the villain, right? You can still have a very exciting conflict that comes to a conclusion that is triumphant for your hero because your hero gets away. But if they don’t beat the villain, then the villain is still much more intimidating than they would be if they were defeated.
Oren: When it comes to villains just making really bad choices, one that I found that’s an interesting one is when we are shifting from the villain that we thought was the bad guy to reveal the true bad guy. And then there’s this weird period where the protagonist has basically won, but we’re kind of acting like there’s still a chance that the villain could beat them. And the reason that we’re doing that is because we’re about to bring in a new, different villain.
Chris: See, I assumed the causality was reversed, where, oh, the hero has to defeat this person to move the plot forward. Oh, what do we do? I know, we’ll bring in another villain.
Oren: Yeah, that’s possible.
Chris: It could be either way, right? We decide, oh, we have a bigger, bad villain we’re ready to introduce, therefore, we now can make our hero defeat the villain we’ve been working on finally. Or, okay, well, uh, that came to a head. What do we do now? Bigger villain!
Oren: Yeah. I mean, I was thinking of the big confrontation in the show Paradise, spoilers for that show. We have this weird sequence where the main character and his friends have gotten all the guns and have all the power because the villain at this point has no weapons, and so the main character should just be able to march up and take her prisoner. Like, what is she gonna do, right? Her guards have, like, little tasers. But we spend a whole episode with them being like, “Whoa, look at our clever plan for how we’re going to defeat her.” And part of this is rotating her out of being a villain. Like, she’s maybe gonna come back. Unclear, right? But we’ve sort of rotated her out of being a villain. But when you do that sort of thing, it probably should happen in a much shorter timeframe, right? You should treat them like a normal villain who looks like they’re gonna win, and then they are defeated, and there’s this brief period where we think the heroes have won, and then we re
591 – How to Make Less Mean More
June 7, 2026
How does one make less mean more? Well, you could always hack a bunch of dictionary sites to change the definition of “less,” but those changes always get reverted eventually. A more robust approach is to make …
Show notes
How does one make less mean more? Well, you could always hack a bunch of dictionary sites to change the definition of “less,” but those changes always get reverted eventually. A more robust approach is to make sure whatever you add to the story actually matters. That way, you won’t have to add more to get the point across. How do you do that? We have a few suggestions.
Show Notes
Lessons From the Excessive Writing of Anathema
Cheap Depictions of Bullying are Now On Our Hitlist
Into the Spider-Verse
A Study in Drowning
The Road to Ruin
The Skin of the Sea
Neelix
Should You Show or Tell?
Knight of the Seven Kingdom
Winter Soldier Turning Point
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Now, what if instead of making the case for our story recommendations we just shouted them louder? “Don’t you dare put in that mystery! Meta-mysteries are the worst things in the history of the earth! Everyone who uses them is a loser!”
Oren: And we could do the whole article in all caps.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. I think that would be more convincing, right?
Oren: Yeah. I don’t see any problems with this.
Chris: So, our topic is making less mean more, which sounds kind of vague, but I think it’s a good concept for a storyteller to keep in mind.
Oren: Chris, this is profoundly un-American. We don’t make less mean more here. We make more mean more. On a good day, we make more mean more. Often, we make more mean less.
Chris: More! Always more!
Oren: This is an attack on my national identity.
Chris: [laughing] Okay, so the reasoning behind this is that as storytellers, we’re always trying to create a certain impression or evoke a reaction in our readers when we’re writing a scene or a chapter or what have you. And we have an initial tendency to try to get that reaction or make that impression by exaggerating things in the story, when what we actually need to do is make it feel like the things that we are featuring matter. And in fact, there are a lot of cases when exaggerating the situation that happens in the story can backfire. Sometimes it becomes comical. I’m thinking of a recent critique where a baby was tossed into some hellfire.
Oren: [chuckling]
Chris: And it was supposed to be sad or tragic—and the baby was just fine in the story, this was an invulnerable baby—but we were supposed to be shocked by it, but it was just, it was hilarious. And again, just because of the exaggeration of it. And if it doesn’t reach the point of drawing laughs unintentionally, it can also just feel a little bit overly sensational and tasteless, or, in some cases, it’s not in our interest to create a super strong impression and so it’s easy to just go a little too far and that can actually create problems for you.
Oren: Yeah. Well, to a certain extent, if the thing that you’re doing is working, you may not need more of it, and if it’s not working, adding more is not going to help. If you have a message and you want the message to be that violence is bad. Then you would have a story where trying to use violence doesn’t work out and it causes more harm than it could solve. And okay, sure, that could work, but if you have the characters just repeating that over and over again then it’s like, all right, hang on. What are we doing here? What’s happening?
Chris: But Oren, what if I write a story where violence absolutely solves the problem but it’s super gory and the hero angsts about it a bunch?
Oren: That’s a different problem, I think. I think you got yourself a different problem. That’s just the issue of the story being at war with itself. But in general, doing more with less is helpful just for a number of reasons. If you have more signal and less noise, people are more likely to get it. It’ll have a stronger impact than if you just throw the thing in over and over again. It’s the same way that you emphasize a point in a single line, but you don’t emphasize every point in a single line.
Chris: Yeah, it’s true. Tightening, right? Taking out the stuff that’s less powerful and letting the powerful thing stand alone can be a great way to emphasize something or call attention to it.
Oren: Yeah. And then also sometimes whatever it is that you’re putting into the story has some impact that you may not want. And so if you do more with less of it, then you can get the same results, but with a lower impact. Like, a lot of readers don’t really want to read a bunch of gory details—and maybe you’re appealing to those who do, that’s a type of story you can tell—but assuming that you don’t want to scare off the readers who dislike gore, but you also want to show that your protagonist was in a fight and that that mattered and that they are hurt, you can make a lot out of a broken rib. Like a broken rib is bad. That hurts. Or even a cracked rib, that can be bad. You don’t have to go all the way to organs falling out.
Chris: [laughing] Yeah. I mean, especially with dark elements in the story, I think that’s where it makes the biggest difference, right? I think anything could potentially be exaggerated and come off a little bit cartoonish or comical, more than you want. But with dark elements especially where exaggerating tends to be more likely to feel tasteless or upsetting to people when that’s not what you needed.
I think a great example for me of making less mean more is bullying. So, we’ve covered sometimes the way that bullying is done in stories, especially in movies. It’s just, oh man, it’s so cliché at this point. Whave a school-age protagonist and because we want to create sympathy for them, suddenly we have a mob of bullies show up. Usually three. [laughing] Three is the magic number so that they outnumber the protagonist. And they always go straight to violence, punching the protagonist or whatnot. And it’s a lot. It feels cheap to me, very cheap.
It tends to normalize violence in a school setting, while downplaying the harassment. I feel that bullying usually involves a lot of harassment, and we tend to pretend the kid is on their own because we need a protagonist to face their own problems, which means we’re almost always absolving the schools of any responsibility for keeping kids safe. So, this happens in so many movies and I’m not a fan.
Oren: Yeah. And I do want to acknowledge that this kind of violence does happen in schools, so it’s not like I’m saying this is not a thing. I do think that a lot of authors, particularly authors who did not go to schools where this sort of thing happened, don’t really understand the context in which that kind of violence can become commonplace, and they don’t present it in their stories. It’s like, yeah, this is a story where upper class American kids, or upper middle class American kids go, and it’s well-funded, and then out of nowhere we just have a brawl in the front courtyard. It’s like, well, where I went to school, that would’ve been a scandal if that happened. So, if you want that sort of thing, it can work, but you need the right context, and most contexts that we look at don’t have it. It’s just not there, and so you’re usually better off using less and showing the impact of just being harassed. That’s also really bad.
Chris: Right. Which brings me to Into the SpiderVerse, where we have a much better depiction where Miles is stressed out because he’s now starting a new school, and these are different students with a different culture and it makes him really stressed out. And the movie makes that feel compelling and creates sympathy for him without even having a bully show up. Just because he is stressed out about the impression he’s making and the interactions with these new students and his new school setting. We also have a scene ahead of time showing him interacting with the other friends that he knows at his previous school and is comfortable with, so we see what he’s losing. So, we make just that stress of moving to a new school really compelling, and we don’t have to have a random bully show up from nowhere and punch him or something.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, the random bully is like… Again, does this bully exist when they aren’t giving your hero a hard time? That’s a thing that I see a lot in these stories where the bully just appears and then disappears once he’s done throwing the hero against the wall or whatever. And that’s a strange feeling.
Chris: Yeah, and so again, it’s not that you can’t have a darker story where a kid is facing violence, but in a lot of these cases, the story’s not really… it takes a lot more dedication when you’re doing something like that, and the story’s not necessarily prepared to handle that. And so, when we’re a storyteller and we’re just like, “Okay, I just have this moment, and I just need a problem to make my protagonist feel sympathetic, something to get the audience on board and start rooting for the protagonist.” That’s a very specific need that’s in one scene. We’re not usually looking to add an entire time-consuming plotline to the entire story. Those kinds of situations, I think this is especially likely for it to be too much to exaggerate things.
Oren: Yeah, I agree. Horror elements are another common one. A lot of horror, arguably most or all of horror, derives some of its fear from the unknown, and the more you show the thing the less unknown it is. Even if you obscure what it looks like, the more it shows up, the more familiar it becomes and now it’s just not as scary anymore. And so, in this case, having it show up fewer times is often the solution. People talk about Jaws a lot and how you almost never see the shark or what have you, but that can apply to other stories, too. If you have a spooky demon and you want the demon to actually be scary and not just a fantasy element, you usually reserve how often it appears, and if you are going have it appear more often you have to be willing to acknowledge that it’s just not going be as scary anymore.
Chris: That’s when it becomes an action flick.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So yeah, those types of horror, dark stuff, anything that’s sensitive is definitely a time to make less mean more. So, we have situations like the book A Study in Drowning where the main character was sexually assaulted by her advisor. We don’t show that happening, but we show the aftereffects on her instead, and the book still makes that very compelling and makes it great stakes. We really want her to get away from that toxic school. So that’s very powerful. We don’t have to show something that’s really sensitive and could potentially be triggering for some audiences.
Oren: Yeah, and I also think this is a case where we can see the value in showing that discrimination and bigotry is a big deal even when no one is intentionally doing it. Because that’s a thing a lot of people imagine: that bigotry looks like yelling slurs or talking about how much you don’t like people of another race. And it can look like that, but often it doesn’t. Often nobody is trying to be a jerk.
I read a client story recently where the main character is passed over for a job because it’s just kind of assumed that a man is going to do that job. And it’s not like anyone in this situation thinks that they’re sexist, and it was very useful. It was very powerful. It was very compelling, and I’m not going say you shouldn’t ever have people be intentionally bigoted, just that we could use more stories where it is understood that intent is not required and that is often going to mean doing more with less. Because you aren’t depending as much on the shock factor of someone yelling those slurs or what have you.
Chris: Yeah, and with these kinds of problems, I really do think that showing the smaller level of the problem and making that feel like it matters kind of sensitizes people to the issue, makes it feel more important. As opposed to exaggerating, which I think has the effect of making anything less feel like it doesn’t matter, right? Like, if the only depictions of bullying where we take bullying seriously that we see are always violent, then kids who are harassed in school, that just seems small in comparison. Where that’s also an important part of a safe school environment, not facing that kind of harassment. I think for a lot of sensitive things especially that’s really good. So, I think it’s worth asking, how do you make something matter?
Oren: Well, you could make it matter. There. That’s my advice.
Chris: [laughing] Okay, because that’s how we make less mean more, right? We focus on a smaller thing and then we show readers why it matters.
Okay, so to start, you need to know what emotion or effect you want to evoke. And again, this is just something that over time people get better at. When they start, they don’t necessarily know why they’re doing something. They’re like, “Hey, how about this in the story?” They’re not necessarily very intentional about what is the purpose of this scene, what is it supposed to do to strengthen the rest of the story, what experience it’s supposed to give. But if you want to make something matter, what exactly you need to evoke is very relevant, especially for those dark events. And I do have a recent article where I go through a whole bunch of reasons for inserting a dark event and give directions for each different reason. But it makes a difference whether something is, for instance, supposed to create tension or sympathy. They call for a different technique, bringing out different things. Sympathy calls for a feeling of ongoing unfairness that is creating a hardship for the protagonist, whereas for tension, you want a looming threat on the horizon. So, they just call for different things and knowing what you want to create and why is just an important part of that.

Then the really key thing that I think a lot of storytellers who are doing this kind of exaggeration are missing is that you need to build emotional investment in the key story elements that are involved.
So, if something or someone is threatened, that’s not going to mean a lot to readers until they care about that someone or something. If you want somebody to cry over a character that just died, and you need the right type of story for that, but if that’s your goal, they need to care about the person who died. If you just introduce a brand-new character only to immediately spill their guts, that’s not going to do the trick.
Oren: But Chris, what if I made the brand-new character a child and they were cute?
Chris: Oh, no.
Oren: What if I did that? Wouldn’t that have an emotional effect?
Chris: Then they’re probably very annoying and people will celebrate their death. Not in every case. I have run into cute children where I was actually angry that they were killed off. Spoilers, The Road to Ruin actually succeeded in doing that and I was mad. But most stories where I see that the kid, in an effort to make the kid precious, the kid was just really annoying.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, I found it can be both, right? I’ve read a couple of stories, The Skin of the Sea comes to mind.
Chris: Yeah, that’s the one where the kid is very annoying.
Oren: Yeah, they introduce this kid, and he’s really irritating and then he dies and I’m like, “Well, I didn’t want him to die, but I also don’t really care that he died because I didn’t like him.”
[laughing]
Yeah, so it’s a very awkward situation where it’s not like I’m celebrating the way I would if Neelix died, but I also don’t really feel sad, which I think I’m supposed to.
Chris: Yeah, and also when it comes to it—and I have another article on killing off protagonists and the things you should think about—but just so people know, you need to find this middle ground because if you do something like kill off a child, it generally feels manipulative to readers because they know you designed that character just to make them feel bad when the character was killed off. Whereas if you have a random character they’ve just met, they don’t feel anything. Usually, you’re going for something in between where it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to make them feel as bad as possible but also that it still matters a bit. So, they can be a little sad that this person died but not angry with you.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: That’s usually the goal there. In any case, that takes time usually. I mean, I’ve seen it done. If a storyteller is skilled, it’s possible to do it relatively quickly, but it takes some upfront investment and some upfront time to create that attachment to things and get that emotional investment. That really makes a big difference.
And so, when people exaggerate, a lot of times it’s because they are not trying to put in the time to make this matter. But it’s not the same. It doesn’t work very well.
So then, okay, we’ve built attac
590 – Prequel Constraints
May 31, 2026
Prequels: Why? We’re honestly curious. Despite just about everyone knowing that they’re a bad idea, they keep getting made. But since we can’t know the minds of media producers, our only recourse is to spend a …
Show notes
Prequels: Why? We’re honestly curious. Despite just about everyone knowing that they’re a bad idea, they keep getting made. But since we can’t know the minds of media producers, our only recourse is to spend a whole episode talking about the constraints a prequel is under. Those are often a much bigger problem than fears over readers already knowing the ending. Also: Star Trek is still a pretty awkward setting for a xenomorph plot.
Show Notes
Rise of Kyoshi
Vader’s Backstory
Magnum Opus
Making a Story Cohesive
Strange New Worlds Courtroom Episode
Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
Gathim
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Star Trek Year One
Obi-Wan Kenobi
Andor
Metalbending
Orc Light Sensitivity
Lockwood and Co
Xenomorphs
Strange New Worlds Aliens
The Hobbit
Lord of the Rings Midquels
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[opening theme]
Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So Chris, I am thinking that I’m gonna write my very own Star Wars prequel. ’cause as we all know, there haven’t been any of those yet.
Chris: Mmm, yep. Never.
Oren: So I think it’s gonna be easy because all I need to do is explain a few things, like how Anakin became Vader and nobody knows, how the Jedi are a myth after just a couple decades, why Obi-Wan barely changed his name, why Yoda is hanging out in a swamp, how Vader doesn’t know about his two kids, who Owen and Baru are, how a good person like Anakin could fall for the obviously evil Dar– Oh, well actually this is hard.
Chris: Just remember you also have to explain how Han Solo got his last name. Everybody’s wondering about that.
Oren: Mm-hmm. Because that’s definitely not just his name. There’s definitely a big ceremony where an Imperial guy gave him the name Solo. [quietly] Oh my God. [normal] Okay. I don’t hate the movie Solo, but that part is just real brain dead. It’s just like, who thought this was a good idea? It feels like that was put in there to be mocked. So we’re talking about prequel constraints, and the reason why is I am reading one of the two Kyoshi tie-in novels for the Avatar franchise. And it opens with this little author’s note talking about how prequels are challenging because the audience already knows how things turn out. And the implication is that there isn’t suspense. And while I won’t discount that entirely, I actually don’t think that’s the big problem here. I don’t think it’s that so much that the audience isn’t gonna feel tension ’cause they know how things go. I think the big issue is that you need things to end a certain way and it turns out that a lot of the things that go into making a good backstory don’t make a good story story.
Chris: I also think with Kyoshi in particular, we don’t really know… I mean, if you read all of the tie-in fiction, maybe people will know more about Kyoshi. But if you’ve just watched The Last Airbender, we know very little about Kyoshi. We know that she had to succeed in defeating Chin, the conqueror, but we don’t know if she died immediately after that, for instance.
Oren: Kyoshi is far enough back in time that I actually wouldn’t say this is under too many constraints. There are a few. Just because of the way that the Avatar setting works, with Kyoshi in particular, you have to explain, and this part has just never made sense to me, why Kyoshi only tries to stop Chin when he gets to her island. That’s not avatar behavior. And that raises this question like, does the avatar just not do anything about internal problems? Is the avatar’s only job to prevent nation-on-nation conflict? So there can be this huge civil war going in the Earth kingdom and the avatar just sits it out? That’s an interesting possibility, but I really don’t think that’s what we were supposed to take away from that. So that would be kind of hard, but also a Kyoshi book doesn’t necessarily even have to get to that part of her life. We could just ignore that.
Chris: I think Darth Vader’s backstory is obviously more challenging because we have a lot of the same characters, and so we just have a lot more detailed knowledge about how this is gonna turn out. And, and that can, again, it can, we get asked a lot, does it matter if people know there’s a happy ending? Can they still feel tension? The answer is yes. But there is a variety of ways in which knowing the outcome can affect the experience. In particular, it can dispel mysteries. So like for curiosity, it matters more than something that’s really tense, for instance. But a sense of mystery can also create more tension because it can make something seem scarier. So if you lose that mystery, you can not only lose the curiosity, but lose a little tension too. There’s a variety of ways. It does, you know, affect the experience, but it’s not like we can’t get tension out of a story where we have some idea of the ending and certainly with something like Kyoshi where we only have one event we know about, right. We could still definitely create tension in that situation.
Oren: Absolutely. And what makes Vader more challenging than Kyoshi is both the fact that we know so much more about him from the movies, but also because his backstory was changed between movies so that he could be Luke’s dad. That’s not part of the plan, and it raises a lot of questions when you look back at the first movie and you’re like, wait, wait, huh? Huh? Is Owen Anakin’s brother? Because that doesn’t make any sense. And so Lucas tries to explain it with this convoluted Tatooine plot that doesn’t make any sense, and it’s challenging. I would be hard pressed to explain that connection. It’s weird, right? It’s a difficult job.
Chris: Yeah. This honestly reminds me a lot of working with a client that has a magnum opus series, where it’s their first project. And of course, because it’s the first project, it’s often very, very big and it’s epic and they’re in love with it. And it’s a whole bunch of books. And what happens in those cases where normally when you start a series or somebody more experienced or more mercenary even starts a series, they’re really focused on that first book because they don’t know if the rest is gonna happen, right? So they focus on the first book and making that book great. And then sometimes they think too late about the sequels and they don’t have anywhere to go, and the sequels aren’t very good. That’s the risk here. But they focus on making that first book good because the rest depends on it. But when you have somebody who’s brand new and the idea gets away from them and it’s super huge, a lot of times what they’re in love with is where it ends, right? So they’re in love with that last book, and what that does is it turns the first book into like a prequel with all of these constraints. Because it’s like, okay, this book, it’s your first book, so of course it needs a lot of work. Then they’re like, no, because it has to all end this scene that I’m imagining in the final book that I’m completely in love with. And if we take out that character, then that character won’t be there to perform their role. And if we don’t have this event, then this won’t happen. And so it’ll ruin this scene in the last climactic volume
Oren: They end up putting the first book, possibly the first several books, in the role of building a story that will be fun once we get to the final installment.
Chris: Right. It’s like they get last priority when really the first book is by far the most important. If people don’t like the first book, they’re not gonna keep reading. That one absolutely has to be a success. The rest depends on it. So that’s the most important book. But when you’re thinking of the big story and you’re like, oh, well of course the climax is the most important, and that happens in the last book… This can happen if, again, too early in the process, especially before people know much about plotting and cohesiveness, they get really in love with that climactic volume. It can create a very similar problem where we’re only willing to change the first book where it doesn’t change that imagined last book.
Oren: Yeah, that is rough. I’d say that’s actually the most likely scenario that most people who go to Mythcreants are gonna run into this problem at, because the prequel problem tends to come up most often in Hollywood. Because I guess someone thinks that prequels are an easy way to make money on a setting without taking risks, and I don’t know why they think that. I have never been able to figure that out. Like, why is a prequel considered lower risk than a sequel? I don’t know, but they seem to think it is. So that’s strange. But most of us aren’t writing big franchises where this is a thing. So I’d say the magnum opus stage is very common. It happens to lots of us. But even for a novelist, you could still end up in a situation where you know you have the setting you really like, and now you want to tell a story earlier in the timeline. You wanna tell a story in the same setting and you know it’s not really gonna work to set one after your current story because your current story ends with your protagonists defeating the source of all evil. And so now there’s no conflict up left in the world or whatever. So you’re like, oh, that’s fine, I’ll just set it up a couple generations earlier. You think it’ll be easy and oh, now there are different problems for you to deal with
Chris: For one thing, sometimes you’re still facing the evil, but now it’s hopeless.
Oren: We can’t beat the evil because it still needs to be around in the later books. That was one of the big problems with the big courtroom episode of Strange New Worlds because they’re having a big courtroom episode over a legal problem that they can’t actually defeat, because it still needs to be there for Deep Space Nine. So if they actually did a bunch of stuff to try to defeat it, that would end up seeming pointless and frustrating because they would still end up losing. So instead they just don’t, really, and they spend the whole episode kind of giving speeches. It’s very strange. It’s a very strange episode.
Chris: One thing that comes to mind is the Dark Crystal TV show. Because in the Dark Crystal movie, there are only two Gelflings left. They were genocided. Now the show takes place where there’s still like Gelfling civilizations around. It’s like, oh, oh, this is not gonna go well. Are we sure we wanna watch this?
Oren: No, and that one’s perfect too, because it’s a prequel where they suddenly have to explain a thing that if you think about it for five seconds, is impossible to explain, which is, how on Earth did these nine Skeksis kill all the Gelflings. How did they do that? And the answer is offscreen. Don’t worry about it. There’s a part where, because the Gelflings, there are a bunch of them and they are the royal guards that the Skeksis have guarding their palace. So they have all the weapons and the combat training and then the Skeksis decide to kill them all. And we cut to later after they have killed them all.
Chris: Didn’t we see they were just starting to build the Garthim at the end of the first season. But they had to have some sort of force that was offscreen in order to be… How are they the rulers of the world? We’re not really sure.
Oren: And we also know that by the time of the Dark Crystal, yeah, they have some minions, but not a lot.
Chris: It really feels like in the movie that they’re in decline. They’re the evil overlords, but they’re the evil overlords in decline. I don’t know. I expected them to be a lot stronger in the show, but yeah, no, they’re exactly the same except for without their most powerful minions. So that was strange.
Oren: Which I think is another prequel constraint, which is that, especially if you’re using the same characters that audiences like those characters for who they were in the original story, that’s what they wanna see. They may not want to see the prequel version of these stories. Now with the Skeksis, I think it probably would’ve worked fine to have them be way more badass and powerful. But I can see why the people making the show we’re like, well no, we gotta make them like they are in the movie. Because that’s the thing everyone likes. Solo is another really funny example of that. Han Solo’s arc in New Hope is to overcome being a selfish jerk who only cares about himself, which is a tall order to make audiences like a character like that as the main character for a whole movie, which is what he would logically be in his solo backstory. There are probably ways you could have made that work. The most obvious is you could have had him fighting even worse people than him, and instead they decided to have him fight rebels for some reason.
Chris: I think we could have had him like working directly for the Empire and then breaking free of them is his arc. So then he’s no longer part of the Empire and that’s good, but he hasn’t learned to fight for the forces of good yet. Now he’s just in it for himself.
Oren: There are ways to do it. But you have to overcome these inherent problems. You have to be way more creative and be able to solve them. There are a bunch of new problems that you have, that you wouldn’t have if you were just telling a new story.
Chris: Yeah, for sure. And again, working with a character that already has that flaw that they have in their character arc can just be tough. Another one that I find really funny is when we have these franchises and they’re doing a prequel and they wanna include a team of two or more of the same characters that people love, but those characters met each other for the first time in what would become the sequel work. So it’s like, okay, what happened then iff they’re meeting for the first time. Do they get amnesia after this? Do we do…? And of course there’s the Discovery solution, which is hilarious.
Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it.
Chris: We’re like, okay, everything, all the adventures we’ve gone through together are gonna become top secret for some reason. And you never, never speak of this again. Like, okay.
Oren: And that one’s weird because, unlike most Star Trek series, the original series doesn’t start with the characters all meeting each other. They have in fact known each other for a while by that point, and their backstory is very vague. So in this case, there’s room for young Kirk to be hanging out with young Scotty. Now in Strange New Worlds it does start to strain credulity that so many of the future Enterprise characters are showing up on Pike’s Enterprise, and that was clearly something that they were doing in a now probably doomed attempt to get another show made. Which is a little sad. But you know, the Discovery thing where it’s like, yeah, actually Spock’s sister was super famous and like everybody knew about her.
Chris: But we’d never speak of her.
Oren: Yeah, we don’t talk about her because at the end of season two, everyone pinky promised not to. Like, guys, why is this a prequel? Why are you doing this to yourselves?
Chris: It reminds me of the Obi-wan midquel show, where it’s like, oh, apparently Obi-wan and Leia like had a lot more experience together than he had with Luke. Which is…
Oren: The idea that Obi-wan and Leia had this whole adventure when she was a kid is just, it’s wild to rewatch New Hope with that idea in your head.That’s so obviously not what happened.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, it is hard, often, to get them to line up perfectly, though. We made the mistake, after watching Andor, of watching Rogue One.
Oren: Yeah. [cackles]
Chris: You know, when I had not watched Rogue One again right after watching Andor they appeared to line up, but then when we watched Rogue One again we were reminded of things that do not seem to be true at all. Like, Andor’s statement that he’s been in this fight since he was six years old. It’s like, what are you talking about? No, you haven’t.
Oren: My favorite is that in Andor, K2SO is invincible. A choice I didn’t understand even in the show, but it certainly doesn’t line up with what he is in, in Rogue One, where he’s powerful, but he can still get shot and it still hurts him. But in Andor, blaster bolts just bounce off of him. Don’t even worry about it.
Chris: Such a strange choice. Don’t you
589 – Making Narration Easier to Read
May 24, 2026
Reading is an activity that takes effort, usually more effort than watching or listening to something. This is why it’s harder for you to get feedback on your novel than it is for your artist friend to show a …
Show notes
Reading is an activity that takes effort, usually more effort than watching or listening to something. This is why it’s harder for you to get feedback on your novel than it is for your artist friend to show a bunch of people their cool new drawing. But authors can make choices that affect how difficult their work is to read, and that’s our topic this week. We’ll talk about how to construct paragraphs, when details aren’t enough, and why random strings of characters and numbers are hard to remember. Isn’t that right, U-3125?
Show Notes
Conlang
Cognitive Burden
The Marvelers
Mystery Stories
Information Management
The Blade Itself
There Is No Antimemetics Division
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Now, Oren, I was thinking: I’m just very proud of this new conlang that I created, which may or may not be mangled French, and I’ve decided I’m just going to write the whole story in my conlang. What do you think?
Oren: Well, it’s a little unoriginal. They already speak a mangled version of the Quebec language in some European country called France. So I wouldn’t… I don’t know, man, I wouldn’t do that.
Chris: But see how authentic it will feel. It will be like an authentic, real-world document.
Oren: Well, if you say it’s a real document, then all criticism goes out the window. Sometimes people write real documents badly, so it just makes sense.
Chris: Yeah, sure! So yeah, this time we’re talking about making narration easy to read. Conlang is not the primary reason why manuscripts are difficult to read. It is a problem with conlangs in general.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, conlangs are a reason that a manuscript can be difficult to read. They’re far from the most common, although they are one of the most noticeable.
Chris: Yes.
Oren: If a conlang is making the narration hard to read, you will be able to tell. This is just a big old flare over all of these fake words that the author is making up and that you’re desperately trying to understand.
Chris: Yeah. Whereas otherwise, I think a lot of times writers don’t know that their work is hard to read. So first of all, what exactly do I mean here? I mean, it should be obvious, it’s hard to read, but basically, if people have to stop and think to understand what is happening in the story. So it just becomes a huge mental effort and it is quickly exhausting and just burns the reader out, just because of the effort that it takes. We’ve seen manuscripts where this happens every paragraph, or even during most sentences. When it gets bad, you will have trouble just getting feedback, because people look at it and it takes them work to read, it takes them a lot of work to read, and especially if you’re used to really nice people who just don’t want to give critical feedback, ’cause some people are really timid about that, they might have a hard time telling you, you don’t see the problems, so you’re expecting people will just read through and comment on the story itself. It may be hard to tell you that, “Well, I haven’t been able to actually look at the story because the prose itself is just hard to absorb.”
Oren: Assuming that anyone listens to this episode beyond our main group of hardcore fans, I’m sure that there is someone out there who is thinking that they want people to stop and think about what happened, to try to figure it out.
Chris: Somebody who’s outside of our normal listeners.
Oren: Yeah, you know, someone who doesn’t quite share our philosophy on that, and, like, I would say for that, okay, that’s your prerogative, but like, let’s be aware of it, right? Let’s at least know what’s happening so that you can go into that with your eyes open and not do it by accident.
Chris: It’s enough mental effort that people will exhaust their brains, like burn out, trying to read it. So if you want people to sit down and relax and focus on a chapter, they may not get through a chapter, right? if it’s too much work. It’s just like lifting weights: if you make it too hard and people feel tired after one page, it’s just going to be hard for them to read your book. So it has a bunch of different causes. It’s not one thing, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer. To be clear, basic writing skills can be a cause. Basic writing skills is in grammar, spelling, you know, those things that we are all taught in grade school, but we’re probably not perfect at, even as professional writers. Paragraph breaks can be a big one that makes a surprisingly large difference. If your kind of grammar and spelling tends to be a little rough, right? obviously that can create this problem, but you could also have perfectly polished writing skills in other contexts and still have this problem in your fiction.
Oren: Yeah, I occasionally have clients who… their emails are perfectly legible and I can totally read them, and then, when I open the manuscript it’s like, “Oof, this is hard.” The sentences are just put together in odd ways that it’s hard for me to explain what exactly the problem is.
Chris: Besides just, you know, those basics, other common causes of narration that’s difficult to read is the fact that you don’t know what you know. Storytellers tend to overlook the basic information that they have and they kind of take for granted, but that readers need. Basic things like, “Okay, where is the character now? How much time has passed?” And a big one that I see a lot, that is kind of abstract, so it’s a little hard to explain, is: “What does this thing you’re talking about now in this sentence have to do with the last sentence?”
Oren: The sentences end up feeling kind of disconnected.
Chris: Right. That connective tissue, the flow of ideas and how they relate to each other and build on each other, that can get lost really easily and it’s just very disorienting, and then readers have a bunch of little ideas and don’t know how to place them together. And if they can’t place them together, they also can’t really remember them very easily.
Oren: That was the problem with The Marvellers, which was a magic school story that I read a little while back, that I bought a copy for you to take your own look at.
Chris: Yeah, The Marvellers is a fascinating case. It really is.
Oren: Because it had a lot of really neat details about what the environment looked like, and other kind of sensory notes, but I couldn’t for the life of me put any of them together, right? Like, I couldn’t tell how they related. It just became like a blur. It was like watching a collage on fastforward.
Chris: Yeah. So if anybody wants to see a published example, usually manuscripts that are this hard to read do not get published. Usually they just get filtered out. We see it in manuscripts and student work. We don’t usually see it in published works, but in this case, The Marvellers by Dhonielle Clayton, the prose is so lovely and has so many beautiful details that I think that whoever published it was like, “Okay, well, it’s hard to read, but it’s also so lovely.” So it made it out. I think that probably the book would’ve done better if it had been clarified a little bit, and that’s a pity because it is really lovely, but you can look at that as an example, and it’ll have some of the different things that we’re talking about that make manuscripts hard to read. Again, the relationships between things in The Marvellers… for instance, there’s a thing that happened in the beginning where they have this envelope of coupons, and the coupons are really fun because they’re like magical and they’re like auctioning against each other in real time, and that’s very fun. But it’s a little startling. You have to, like, “Wait, where did these coupons come from?” Because the envelope that they came in was mentioned like a while ago, and that connection between “Oh, these coupons came from the envelope” was only maybe weakly hinted at. Again, the big picture when it comes to your description: a really easy way to make sure your description is clear is to first describe the broad strokes or the big picture of the scene, and then add fun details to it. But in The Marvellers, that big picture description is often just missing. So when an airship shows up, I had to kind of guess it was an airship because Clayton describes all of the pieces of their ship, and again, her description is very, very lovely, but doesn’t describe the whole airship or tell us that it’s an airship. So you have to, like, “Okay, what could this be?” It’s like having a box full of beautiful puzzle pieces, but every page you’re trying to figure out how those pieces fit together.
Oren: Or like seeing an animal, but only seeing it at like 500x zoom and trying to figure out what it is. It’s like, “Okay, this is a neat thing. I’m seeing the fur follicles and everything,” but I don’t know it’s a cat because I’m never given an image that is recognizable as a cat.
Chris: It’s like, “Okay, so it has pointy ears over here, and over here I’m seeing some brown fur. I think it has sharp teeth,” right? And then eventually you have to piece together what the animal is.
Oren: I’m, like, inventing a cat from first principles here.
Chris: So that basic information, one thing that, again, I can see a lot is just being overly ambitious with your prose style. Which I sympathize, I have been guilty of this myself. So if you use a lot of fancy words, fancy metaphors, and are just trying really hard to impress, sometimes that actually makes… they’re very hard to read. It’s like too forced, and you just kind of ease back and be a little more laid back about it. I typically see this especially at the beginnings. The beginnings are very tricky, and we turn to work very hard in our stories’ opening, and so I’ve definitely noticed this is a problem when I see that the opening of the story is hard to read, but then it clears up. There’s other books where they have really beautiful style at the opening that kind of goes away, as the writer is not trying as hard, but if the beginning is harder to read than the middle, then that’s a big sign that it’s just being a little overly ambitious.
Oren: Yeah. One problem that I encounter quite a lot among my clients who are writing mystery stories is missing context. Like, they will introduce a new twist. It’ll be like, “Here, we’ve discovered that Mr. Paddington was at this location,” and the characters will go like, “Whoa!” I’m like, “Okay, okay, that’s cool. But can you remind me why that location was important?” I do a Control+F, and that location hasn’t been mentioned for like 50 pages, and I don’t remember why that location was so critical, because it was kind of a background thing. So remind me: Why does it matter that Mr. Paddington was there? You know, that sort of thing.
Chris: I mean, that’s a whole kind of information management issue. Obviously, information management is a complex art in itself, and you get better as you practice.
Oren: That’s why you have a whole series on it.
Chris: Yeah, but I mean, related to that, just keeping on too much complexity is also a common one, right?
So you know, this is the principle of cognitive burden. Ideas aren’t actually free, ’cause the reader has to spend their brainpower comprehending them, and they have limited space in their working memory to hold onto ideas. If your readers are mixing up names or titles, or can’t remember some things that were previously introduced, that’s a big sign that you might have too much complexity. Maybe you just need to remind them, but mixing up names often means there’s a lot of characters and a lot of names being thrown around, more than they can keep track of. Spatial information is a big one that is very hard to communicate. Don’t try to communicate a visual. I see a lot of writers that are like, “Hey, I have this beautiful picture or this beautiful drawing. Now how do I communicate that in words?” It’s like, “Nope, nope, you can’t, can’t do it.”
Oren: Pictures are way too information-dense to get the whole thing across with words. That’s just not going to happen.
Chris: You can only create vague impressions or, you know, important points. Again, getting back to the conlang, things that are unfamiliar add a lot of complexity and a lot of brainpower figuring out what they are. So if you have a lot of strained world things, throwing in or conlang terms…
Oren: Using multiple terms for the same thing is always a tricky one. And that one’s tough, because you want your world to feel real. And in the real world, we usually have multiple terms for the same thing. Like, we don’t always call it a car. We would also call it a sedan or a ride or a taxi. You know, we would call it lots of different things, but the more of those you introduce to things that the reader isn’t familiar with, the harder it is for them to keep up. Like, I always remember The Blade Itself had the Shanka and the Flathead, and I took me forever to figure out those were the same thing. Just because it gives no indication that those are the same thing. It just uses the terms interchangeably. And so I eventually decided they must be the same thing, ’cause otherwise there would be two things that Logan was fighting and he only seemed to be fighting one.
Chris: It also felt like Abercrombie was not going to any effort to tell readers what they needed to know in that opening.
Oren: Right. I mean, that opening had serious, like, not quite White Room Syndrome, because he did sort of describe the area, but like, who Logan was, there was no context for that. And the fact that his name was Logan, which sounds kind of modern. As I was reading it, I was like, “Is this a sci-fi story?” Like, “Is this guy like a sci-fi pilot who crashed on a fantasy planet?” No, that’s not what it is. I was just wondering, because there’s no context for who he is in that opening, nor is there any description of what the creature he’s fighting looks like. I just get the impression that he’s fighting like a white void in front of him.
Chris: Yeah. Another thing is just, again, when it comes back to the style of your sentences, it can really matter. So sometimes we do want to tighten and make our words efficient, but sometimes tightening too much can, again, get rid of important information or keep us from stepping through what’s happening a little bit more carefully and building those connections between ideas and taking one thing at a time. And so you get something that feels kind of disorienting and a little jumbled just because you’ve tightened so much that you’re kind of missing transitions and things that you need. And then the other thing that I really want to cover, and I have an example, is sentences that are doing too much, ’cause I see this a lot, and I think it’s really hard for people to recognize themselves. This is when we have sentences that are just too idea-dense, right? They’re introducing too many new things in a very kind of long clause. And it’s not that you can’t have long sentences, I’ll talk more about that, but long sentences have to be constructed in a particular way to keep from being kind of confusing and disorienting. So here’s an example of a sentence that is doing too much: “Sylvia’s attempts to get out of the way of a family heading out of the grocery exit were immediately halted when a cart bumped her from behind and sent her hurdling into a display of apples that were on sale.”
Oren: Oh, okay. Yeah, something was happening there, for sure.
Chris: But I see sentences like this all the time. Here’s a notable thing. Again, when you have a long sentence, they can work if each piece of the sentence builds on the last one in order, so that the reader can kind of understand as they go and they don’t have to hold on to the beginning of the sentence, and this sentence, just what we have here, “Sylvia’s attempts were halted,” that’s kind of like the base main clause of the sentence, but it’s broken into pieces. So what it actually says is, “Sylvia’s attempts to get out of the way of a family heading out of the grocery store exit were immediately halted,” right? So, to understand that “were immediately halted,” you have to go back to the beginning of the sentence, where it says, “Sylvia’s attempts to get out of the way.” And that jumping back and forth makes it impossible to assemble the whole picture ahead. You have to like hold on to the very beginning as you absorb more and more words and hold them in your working memory. That’s what makes it so hard to deal with: it requires holding the beginning in your mind and the end, and then, like, putting them together. The other thing is that it has a lot of elements that I did not previously introduce before I read the sentence. So we don’t know where Sylvia is. She’s trying to get out of the way, and then I introduce a family. Oh, there’s a family here. And by the way, they’re heading out of a grocery exit, so there’s a grocery exit here, and then she’s halted beca
588 – Structuring a Romance
May 17, 2026
We want some characters to fall in love, but how, exactly? What steps are involved? It probably won’t work if they jump into bed immediately, as that’s not much of an arc. And it’ll seem contrived if they act …
Show notes
We want some characters to fall in love, but how, exactly? What steps are involved? It probably won’t work if they jump into bed immediately, as that’s not much of an arc. And it’ll seem contrived if they act like they don’t like each other despite obviously being perfect together. Maybe the key is a slow yet steadily growing attachment? Sounds like it could get boring. This week, we’re talking about how to give your romance structure!
Show Notes
Romantic Structure
Does Romance Need a Happy Ending?
The Luminous Dead
Movement
Tension
Worf & Dax
Shield of Sparrows
Godkiller
Dark Winds
Turning Point
Willow
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[intro music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: I’m Chris.
Oren: So, I’m working on a romance and I want it to have structure. So I figured I would just have the characters get into a fight over which of them should have this magic sword over and over again, ’cause those are basically child arcs, right?
Chris: Yeah, that sounds great. And then the next time you do another romance book, you can just do that again.
Oren: Yeah. That fits perfect. Nothing could go wrong. So this episode is about how to structure a romance. It is inspired by me reading The Luminous Dead by Kaitlyn Starling, in which it felt like the lovebirds were just kind of going in circles, but I didn’t really know what they should have done instead, ’cause my first thought was like, well, they should go from not liking each other to liking each other. But then my thought was, that would be like a smooth, linear increase, and that sounds boring. So surely there has to be something else to it other than them just doing the same conflict over and over again, right?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: So I’m just gonna let Chris talk about this for half an hour. I’ll go get a snack or something.
Chris: Okay, so now we’re talking about structure, but we’re talking about structure with something other than tension. Not that tension isn’t also gonna be present. Usually—
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: There is—the way that you construct a romance just also happens to create tension, which is good, right? We want tension.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: It also gives us more entertainment. But typically for, you know, a romance romance in the romance genre especially, or just romance arcs in general, usually what we’re trying to create is romantic tension, which I like to call longing, so I’m not talking about three different types of tension.
Oren: Yeah. There’s so many different types. So what’s the difference between a longing-based arc and a tension-based arc?
Chris: Okay. So let’s just look at, like, what is the story situation. So we could do a comparison for a relationship arc that is based on tension, for one that is based on longing. I’m also gonna add in desire, sexual tension.
Oren: Oh boy.
Chris: Because it also matters a lot in romance arcs.
Oren: Sure.
Chris: Typically. Not all of them obviously, but. Okay, so tension. “Oh no. My spouse is gonna be so mad when they find out what I did.”
Oren: Okay.
Chris: Okay. So we have a meaningful relationship that is in danger and we’re worried about it, right? And we’re worried about how the rupture in their relationship might negatively impact the people involved. And that negative anticipation is tension.
Oren: Yeah, this is pretty familiar because, you know, we generally operate on the philosophy that readers are gonna care more about bad things that might happen than good things that might happen.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Okay. So now let’s look at longing. “My dream babe is making eyes at me, but if I touch them, we’ll both die.”
Oren: Whoa. That’s a little different.
Chris: Yeah. So basically instead we have a romantic relationship in the making, generally, that is wanted but appears unattainable. Okay. So that’s based on positive anticipation, but it also—there also has to be a barrier that it’s running into.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Right, and that barrier often creates tension, right, so we have a tension component in there, but at the end of the day, it’s about the wanting, right, it’s that positive anticipation.
Oren: Yeah. I certainly have worked with a number of clients who haven’t really put enough thought into what is it that’s keeping them from getting together right now?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: And I even, you know, occasionally a published story has that problem where it’s like, all right, well, they seem to get on great and they seem to want each other. So what’s the hold up?
Chris: Which brings me to desire.
Oren: Ooh. Yeah.
Chris: Or sexual tension.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So instead of “my dream babe is making eyes at me, but if I touch them, we’ll both die,” desire is “my dream babe is making eyes at me, and any moment we’re gonna touch.”
Oren: Oh boy.
Chris: Okay?
Oren: Mythcreants After Dark over here.
Chris: Like, if I was not intending to talk about sexual tension and desire in stories, but it’s really important to account for this component when we’re talking about romances, right?
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So, you know, in this case, you know, we’re just hot and bothered over somebody and not yet sexually satisfied, and it doesn’t require the same kind of unattainableness that longing does. And so that’s why in many romance books that are, you know, particularly these spicy ones, but any ones that rely on desire in general will have a place where it’ll feel like the writer often is kind of neglecting all of these longing child arcs because they’re just relying on desire.
Oren: Sure.
Chris: Because it doesn’t require those barriers. Now, I honestly think it’s better if we can also, you know, maintain longing too, because they’re all engagement factors, as best we can, right, and some readers are gonna, you know, be more drawn in by longing and more drawn in by desire. You know, different romances do cater to different people too, right? Obviously.
Oren: Yeah. With desire, do you need the same kind of barrier that you need with longing, ’cause otherwise, why don’t they just, like, bang it out.
Chris: No, that’s why they keep—no, that’s why—
Oren: Like right now.
Chris: —romance writers keep doing this thing where people are humping each other and yet never have sex for very flimsy reasons. Because all it requires is to not have sexual satisfaction and get hot and bothered.
Oren: Okay. So this is like scenes where they’re like, you know, eye banging each other and you’re kind of wondering, why don’t they move on to the next step? Is that what we’re talking about here?
Chris: Yeah. Okay, so the thing that I always think of, I know a lot of people love this book, is Paladin’s Grace.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Okay. So Paladin’s Grace did not particularly work very well for me personally because it was kind of hard to see why the two, you know, Grace and the Paladin—
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: —our two lovebirds, you know, why they weren’t getting together. Instead, we have a lot of scenes where they kind of get really close to each other and maybe almost kiss or touch each other a little bit and say over and over again, “oh, what’s wrong with me?”
Oren: Oh, yeah, that’s an interesting line. I hear that a lot in stories where the author doesn’t really have a good reason for them to not be together.
Chris: Right. It’s like they just find it very unreasonable that they are attracted to each other. It’s like, well, what do you mean, what’s wrong with you? Obviously, you’re into this person. I don’t— right. But for somebody who’s like, hot and bothered, right? It’s not gonna seem as repetitive as it did to me, who is not hot and bothered.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Right. It’s just a matter of, you know, which of these engagement factors are working? And different romances will definitely cater to different groups because taste is really important here, but, you know, typically a romance in the genre is written for people who will feel that longing. And, you know, depending on how spicy it is, desire might matter more or less.
Oren: Sure.
Chris: But not everybody’s gonna feel it. And again, sometimes when I talk about this, people get a little confused because they are not used to thinking about this in terms of what the reader experience is. They think, oh, well, the characters are experiencing longing.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: The characters are experiencing desire. It’s like, no. The goal is to get the reader in the same place as, you know, viewpoint character or protagonist typically. So we need the reader to get hot and bothered and we need the reader to feel longing. This isn’t just for the characters. We can make the characters feel whatever we want. It’s not gonna do it for the reader.
Oren: Right. When they get that confused between character feeling and reader feeling, is the issue that they are telling too much? They’re like, “oh, well, this character thought the other character was hot. There, I said they were into each other.” Or is it more that they just aren’t thinking about what might get the reader turned on as it were?
Chris: You know, I’m not sure, ’cause this is, you know, something that happens in my, you know, followers and students and—
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: —that they—I think they’re just used to thinking about it a certain way and not, you know, used to thinking of romances.
Oren: Sure.
Chris: These are two people falling in love and not thinking about in terms of, well, the reader is also falling in love.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Right. That’s our goal. And obviously it’s not the same as happening in real life, but that’s how it is for all story.
Oren: Right. I mean, and you get that sometimes in other types of storytelling scenes too, right? Where sometimes the author will think, “oh, well my character is scared, therefore the reader is also scared.” And it’s like, all right. But.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Exactly.
Oren: You know, the character being scared does matter, but if you don’t convince me that the situation is dangerous, I’m not gonna be worried, right.
Chris: Right. By default, we want the reader to feel what our protagonist is feeling.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Right? So that they can have that kind of vicarious experience. So we need to—and just saying the protagonist feels a certain way or even showing them feel a certain way is not gonna do it. And, a lot of, you know, storytellers have to learn, “no, no. I have to show the source of their feelings so that the readers can feel it with them, ’cause the readers are then responding emotionally to what’s happening in the same way the protagonist is.”
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which is a little different. So anyway, the goal here is of course, to create, we’re talking about longing.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So there’s three different things here, which makes, you know, again, romance seems simple, right? You know, people refer to it [as] formulaic, but what’s actually going along is there’s a lot of different engagement factors that puts romance under a lot of different constraints, which—
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: —tends to result in, you know, certain patterns of how we maximize these things. So it’s actually a result of more complexity, not less.
Oren: I used to work with people who would sometimes kind of derisively joke that if their chosen career path didn’t work out, they would just go write romance novels. And I’m just like, go do it, man. Go do it. If you think it’s that easy, go do it. Seems like free money. You know, none of them ever did as far as I know.
Chris: So longing, again, it’s about positive anticipation and for it to work, first of all, you have to have a taste fit, okay? So you need at least one character that fits the reader’s romantic tastes, or else it’s probably not gonna work.
Oren: Yeah, that would explain one reason I was having trouble with The Luminous Dead, because I did not want that romance to come to fruition. It’s like no, main character, you get away from that lady. That lady is dangerous. That is a bad person. You don’t want to be in a relationship with them.
Chris: So, yeah, that’s a starting requirement. And then what you want is, you know, what I call the clash of the positive charge and negative charge, right? The positive charge is the things that make this relationship compelling and desirable, doing chemistry and showing bonding and mutual appreciation and just, you know, describing a person as attractive.
Oren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, sure.
Chris: Those kinds of things. Whatever, you know, tropes or personality traits this particular audience likes. And then we have our negative charge, which is that sense of unattainableness. That barrier, you know, being rejected or feeling like the love interest is inaccessible or whatever. “Oh no, they’re already betrothed to somebody.” We got some logistical barrier in there, and I think the higher both of those things are, both the positive charge and the negative charge, the more longing you get. So you build your positive charge, you build your negative charge and lightning strikes.
Oren: Okay, this makes sense so far. When I’m thinking of a normal tension arc, the way that I imagine it in relation—the child arc in relation to the through line is that I imagine that a child arc is bringing us closer to the resolution of the through line while also seeming like it’s gonna be harder for the protagonist to get, you know, the thing they’re trying to get to win the day in some way or another. Like, you know, if you have a child arc where the protagonist gets a magic sword, you need to usually temper that by like, “oh no, getting the magic sword also awakened the evil army that’s gonna conquer your city or something,” ’cause otherwise it’s like, “oh, they have a magic sword, it seems like they’re doing great,” and you don’t usually want that. Is there an equivalent for that in this longing setup we’re talking about?
Chris: Yeah, so there does have to—it is very similar to tension in that there also has to be movement.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Right. Just so for tension, child arcs, again, as you described, we want to make it feel like we’ve taken a step forward towards the finish line, but now we’re making it harder in response to maintain the tension. Longing is very similar. So, you know, we might start with a situation priming the pump where, hey, let’s say love interest seems cool, but oh, it’s never gonna happen for whatever reason.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Right. And then we go back and forth, just like tension, you have like a problem or obstacle for each child arc, right? And then you go through the same, you know, turning point and resolution. For longing, we have kind of moments of bonding and moments of separation. And the separation would be like the equivalent to the obstacle or problem. So, you know, I think typically it’s almost like we start with bonding and then go to separation. So—
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: We have our bonding moment where they have a positive interaction and if there’s a previous barrier, it’s overcome, and we’ll talk more about the barriers ’cause it sounds like that’s the problem with the book you read.
Oren: Well, a problem.
Chris: A problem?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Okay. So movement is created as we see characters A) getting to know each other, getting to care about each other more. Their interest is piqued more.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Right. And we kind of see that their relationship is developing, right. That they are moving towards having a relationship.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Like movement. Yeah. Pretty simple. And then we have, usually this comes shortly following this where, as we kind of—as they start to cozy up to each other, we have, you know
587 – Revenge and Forgiveness in Fiction
May 10, 2026
Your hero has sworn to kill their archenemy in a bloody revenge quest. But when the moment comes, should they pull the trigger? We dunno, do you want them to? Revenge stories are often debated as moral issues …
Show notes
Your hero has sworn to kill their archenemy in a bloody revenge quest. But when the moment comes, should they pull the trigger? We dunno, do you want them to? Revenge stories are often debated as moral issues, but the reality is that how you craft them generally determines whether readers find the results just or not. In a shocking twist, we have some advice.
Show Notes
Redemption Arcs
Torhu
John Wick
Ishamael
The Southern Raiders
Hama the Bloodbender
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[intro music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So, Chris, do you remember back in 2014, 12 years ago, we had a debate about multiple points of view?
Chris: Mm, yeah. I couldn’t forget that because I won.
Oren: Yeah. See, I pretended to change my opinion and I’ve been planning my revenge for all that time, which is why now you need to beta read my new novel with 500 different POV characters each in their own universe and time period.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: Or maybe not. Maybe I’ve decided that you’ve suffered enough and that I forgive you.
Chris: I feel like that’s a self-own. I feel like that’s self-revenge right there.
Oren: [laughs] So today we are talking about the concepts of revenge and forgiveness in fiction, specifically in fiction. I’m not making any claims to real life, mind you. That’s a little more complicated.
Chris: Yeah. I could describe what causes a large group of people in general to forgive a person that they do not know personally. Like a character or a public figure. In general trends, I cannot predict what any individual person needs to forgive somebody in their life. Those two things are very different.
Oren: So first, there’s a concept that I see storytellers talk about sometimes with a lot of concern, and it’s this idea of a character being forced to forgive someone.
Chris: I can definitely sympathize that. I think that’s what happens when the GM creates an antagonist that you just love to hate. But then instead of letting you fight them and beat them, he decides to make them sympathetic and then so pathetic and compliant that you’re not really allowed to beat them up anymore. So, you grudgingly start working with them and then the other players think your PC is unreasonable for not forgiving them. Does this sound familiar, Oren? Does it sound like a familiar scenario?
Oren: [laughs] Yeah, well. I mean, this is a whole different ballgame when it comes to role-playing games because those characters have free will and you can’t edit the story, but—
Chris: You couldn’t force me to forgive. But some of the other players were like, really? You can’t forgive this person? No, never. Not doing it.
Oren: There is a prose fiction analogy to that, which is that the reader might disagree with the character. That can happen.
But when it comes to fiction, the way that I would advise people to look at this is you are not trying to force your character to do anything. You are trying to create proper circumstances so that this character, given what you have established about them before, will do the thing you want them to do.
So, if that means you want your character to forgive someone, you have to create the circumstances under which it makes sense for them to do that.
Chris: Yeah. I wanna be fair because I do think some narratives create this impression of forcing forgiveness.
For one, there’s the obvious thing of the other side characters who are clearly supposed to be the storyteller’s mouthpiece insisting that somebody has to forgive.
Oren: If you have direct badgering of your protagonist or some other character by another character in the story, that is definitely gonna change the dynamic of it.
Chris: Right. And again, we’re talking about situations where somebody has seriously wronged another person. Just to be clear: what we’re going off of is the idea that nobody is entitled to forgiveness by somebody they hurt.
So there can be obviously situations where the side characters act like the storyteller’s mouthpiece and insist on it, which is clearly a sign of that pressure. But I do think that sometimes there’s almost nothing that is necessary for a character to forgive in order to do. Because character functionally can take all the same actions, usually to succeed without technically forgiving. Forgiving is different than, for instance, cooperating.
Oren: That gets into the next part of the question, which, what is forgiveness exactly. Like what does that mean? Because that can mean a lot of different things and it matters in this case, this isn’t just a silly semantics question.
Because I think some writers tend to imagine it as we’re friends now and we’re on the same team, and I’ve decided that I am no longer upset by whatever it was that you did.
And that can happen but that’s not the only thing that I think we would think of that way. Right? It’s not the only way this kind of story can play out.
Chris: Yeah, I would think of a lot of different things as alternatives to forgiveness. I think if I were to pick one thing that is forgiveness, it’s that you are no longer holding whatever they did against that person. And that’s, in a lot of situations, still not reasonable. It’s an emotional thing.
Oren: This sort of thing can happen when you have your bad guy do something really bad. They did a real nasty thing, but then you kind of end up liking them. You decide, oh, but they’re kind of cool and they have a sympathetic backstory. And now I want them to be on team good. And I want my main character to hang out with them and for it to not be constantly unpleasant.
And if your reader is reading this and they’re like, well, hang on. That horrible thing happened; I felt that. You did a good job making me feel that I don’t like this.
And of course there’s the two questions. There’s the question of does it feel like it makes sense that the main character did this? And people will argue about that because that often gets tied into the question of is it satisfying that the main character did this?
And if someone doesn’t feel that it’s satisfying, they will often express that by arguing that it does not make sense. Regardless of whether that part is true or not, right? You might actually have made a character who is super forgiving. Maybe your character is Tohru from Fruits Basket who forgives everything immediately. But that might not be satisfying to your reader and you could still find them arguing with you that it doesn’t make sense cause that’s often how readers express themselves.
Chris: I do think that in situations where the readers are still upset after a character like Tohru forgive somebody, there’s probably something else going on. Because people do resent a character who does terrible things and then is successful. People wanna see that karma balanced out.
And I would say that the issue there probably isn’t completely just the forgiveness itself, but that that character hasn’t gotten their karma balanced, hasn’t suffered in accordance with the wrongdoing.
Oren: In Fruits Basket I had a problem with that the matriarch of the family—who is just the worst—I felt like she got off completely scot-free for all the horrible things she did, and is now having a great time. And I did not like that. No, that person sucks. I don’t want any of you to be associated with her anymore.
Chris: Right. I mean, this is the issue with a lot of abuse narratives, right? Because that was an abuse narrative, she was very clearly an abuser.
Often when people are writing these narratives, maybe they feel like it’s too black and white to just say, Hey. That person is bad and we’re just gonna, for at the very least, not have them in my life anymore. For the protagonist part.
And I think it’s an effort to try to make it nuanced. They try to absolve them or make excuses for them and be like, they’re a person too.
That’s very common and it’s not great because unfortunately, in real life, abusers will absolutely use any shred of sympathy you give them. They will apologize and pretend they’ll never do it again, only to do it again cause they’re manipulative people. That’s how abuse is done. That’s definitely a problem there.
And that might be part of the fact that people don’t like Tohru doing it. But I do think that there are some storylines where if the author equates working with somebody with forgiving them and there doesn’t seem like we’re presented with an option of, no, you can cooperate, but you still don’t have to forgive. Or it doesn’t feel natural for the character. There can be other reasons where it just feels a little too contrived.
I think some storytellers do equate forgiveness with this is just how the arc should end. Because the arc hasn’t ended unless there’s forgiveness. For instance.
Oren: Yeah, and of course we were talking about this in terms of revenge, which adds another wrinkle to it.
Because for example, you could have a story where the protagonist chooses not to take revenge, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they have forgiven whoever wronged them. It could mean that they have decided that this is more harmful to me than it is satisfying to get whatever this revenge is. So I’m going to stop, but that doesn’t mean that we’re friends. That doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped holding that against them.
Chris: Yeah. There are a lot of different things that can happen besides just forgiveness and revenge. And I think talking more about what the alternatives are is a good thing.
Personally, I think self-forgiveness is underrated. If we have one person who’s being redeemed, for instance, in another person who wants revenge on them or just is angry at them, have the person forgive themself even if they’re never gonna get forgiveness from the person they hurt. Eventually, once they’ve groveled enough. Of course.
Oren: Once they’ve had kind of a rough time.
This also, of course, raises the question that comes up in a lot of these revenge stories: Is revenge a compelling motivation? The answer is maybe.
Chris: If you get one of those characters that you make it so the audience really hates them that much and wants them to take them down a notch, it can be compelling. I personally wouldn’t try to rely on that.
Oren: For revenge to be the stakes, you have to really make the audience want that to happen, and so usually for that, you’re depending on them really liking your main character. Which is always a gamble because sometimes that’s not gonna work right away. And you are gambling on that they will really care about whatever the thing is. So that means you often have to make it pretty intense. And some people just go for that. Some people really like revenge stories, but others will kind of be like, well, the thing that they we’re trying to get revenge for already happened. Getting revenge isn’t gonna undo it. So is it that important?
Chris: Yeah. Isn’t that why in John Wick, the bad guy kills a dog? Because people get really upset watching a dog die, and so that’s a way of getting them upset enough that they really want to see the antagonist die. A bit harsh. I wouldn’t wanna do that, but it’s clearly worked for the franchise.
Oren: Yeah. Well, it’s so well-known with John Wick now at this point. I feel like if you did it, it would be hard pressed to not look like you were copying John Wick.
Chris: But I certainly wouldn’t want wanting to see a villain suffer, getting that schadenfreude be the only thing driving the story forward.
Oren: Which is usually why authors will add some additional stakes. Like this villain is still doing bad things and so a part of getting revenge will be stopping them. Or sometimes they’ll make it more of a broader justice issue, like this person has wronged a lot of people and so we have to get justice for them.
Chris: I also think when it comes to stakes, if you have something, some level of support, you can do a lot with just putting your protagonist in danger in order to get revenge. If we have a John Wick situation where we think that the audience is very likely to sympathize with this revenge quest and sympathize with our protagonist and we don’t have larger stakes, but we can make it feel like the protagonist is in danger when they are going to get revenge, that is stakes in itself.
It’s just, you need to tide the audience over before your protagonist gets in danger. And of course, you need a strong enough motivation for your protagonist to head into danger. But with revenge, I think that’s not too hard. If we’re going with John Wick as a power fantasy, that maybe doesn’t work as well because then John Wick is probably less likely to feel like he’s in serious danger, and so the stakes then become a little bit less compelling.
But in a lot of works, that would be just fine if you don’t have some evil plan that the antagonist is about to do.
Oren: Yeah. The other—of course—issue is if you do decide to add supplementary stakes, and then you end up wanting the protagonist to decide that actually they’re not going to take revenge—It’s like, all right, but what about all the bad stuff the bad guy is still doing right now? It feels like you’re shirking your responsibility.
I see this happen sometimes in stories that are inspired by superhero comics. Where it’s like, no, I won’t get revenge on the villain. It’s like, all right, but the villain is holding the city hostage, so maybe you still gotta stop him.
Chris: Yeah. I think the problem with a lot of the superhero stuff is, the assumption is you can’t really put them in jail ’cause they’ll just get out again for the next installment.
Oren: It’s weird because that’s almost never a thing in the story. It’s just a thing that infects fan discourse because it’s a meta problem.
Chris: But it’s hard to unsee once you know that’s always gonna happen.
Oren: It’s like, oh, this is kind of predictable that they’re gonna break out again.
Chris: I swear it’s gonna be very permanent. Prison has become very permanent this time.
Oren: That’s one of those things that superhero comics can get away with, that if any of us tried it, it would immediately get us left outta town. I mean, first of all, writing on a series long enough for this to be an issue is unlikely for most of us anyway.
But if you had a series that was several books long and the villain kept breaking out of jail to go do more mayhem and cause more destruction by like the second or third time this happened, your readers would just not continue if your main character was like, yep. Back to jail with you, Mr. Jail Escaper!
Chris: [laughs] Well, I think in most cases the villain would just get very old. People just like, well, you already beat that person. That’s not scary.
Oren: Which is fortunately not a problem most books have. In my experience, that problem is much more common in visual media…
Chris: Yeah, because you have an actor and the villain is more charismatic.
Oren: Or in the case of comics, because the villain is a brand.
Chris: Yeah
Oren: The only time I can think of off the top of my head that this happened in a book series is the first three Wheel of Time books where we fight the same guy and beat him three times.
Chris: That is too much.
Oren: It’s like the rule of three, I guess.
Chris: Yeah. The other thing to point out if your character is gonna reconsider is: have they been murdering any minions? Because if you wanna do the big action sequence where they have to get through all of the goons before they work their way up to the big bad, it’s a really bad luck to then agonize over whether you’re gonna kill somebody after you’ve been throwing people off of roofs.
Those people died and you didn’t agonize over whether you should kill them, even though they’re just earning a paycheck. They could have been strong armed into taking this job. They could be desperate, not have any other options and killed them without a thought. But no, the big bads gotta go to jail and that’s just very tiresome.
Oren: They shouldn’t have been wearing helmets, Chris. If they wanted me to think of them as human beings, I should have been able to see their faces.
Chris: I do think one of the more interesting parts of the Jessica Jones show was the fact that because the minions were just blatantly being mind controlled, she had to avoid hurting them too much when she was fighting. And that did make things harder for her.
Oren: That was very good.
Chris: So that could be interesting, intense. I think a lot of people don’t wanna do it cause they just want their power fantasy, or it takes more thought to avoid killing anybody.
Oren: I will say that also, if you want your character to take revenge, you can just do that. Most of the time. There are some things I see writers do that make that a little weird, but you just go for it, man. We’re not here to have to write our stories to say that revenge is always bad and you should
586 – Depicting Travel and Transport
May 3, 2026
Your characters start in one place. You would like them to be in another place, and the magic system doesn’t include teleportation. That means it’s time to depict some travel, which can range from the best …
Show notes
Your characters start in one place. You would like them to be in another place, and the magic system doesn’t include teleportation. That means it’s time to depict some travel, which can range from the best moments of a story to the equivalent of needing to eat your veggies before dessert. Which end your story falls on depends on both understanding how travel works and properly setting expectations. Also, having more than one horse per person. That’s very important.
Show Notes
Land Travel Before Engines
Water Travel Before Engines
The Abbess Rebellion
AI Slop
The Hirogen
The Olive Branch Petition
Percy Jackson
The Versailles Palace
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Theme]
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris …
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: So Oren, I want my protagonist to go on a dangerous journey to the center of this dark, enchanted wood. But then I realized I also want a friend from their hometown to just to be there when the protagonist arrives. And to be clear, this is somebody that the protagonist left behind at their hometown.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So they needed to get there ahead. And I was just thinking, well, I suppose the town could just invent a transporter while they are traveling. You know? Problem solved.
Oren: Is that you the later seasons of Game of Thrones?
Chris: [Laughter]
Oren: Which is funny because I never watched later seasons of Game of Thrones. That’s just a thing people say about it. To me, reading the books, it was the opposite. Suddenly in the books it takes forever to get anywhere.
Chris: Yeah, that’s sort of hard. The catch-22 of travel where you want something to take a long time, but you also want it to be super fast whenever it’s plot convenient.
Oren: Right. We made the mistake of being into fantasy, and usually in fantasy stories you don’t have super fast transit. You know? Usually a hallmark of fantasy is that you’re limited in how quickly you can move around. Which, you know, is cool and flavorful until you need to be somewhere. Then it’s a pain.
Chris: I do suspect that in space it’s easier to make everything just move at the speed of plot. ‘Cause you know, space is big and amorphous and it’s not that you couldn’t establish, like, Earth to Alpha Centauri-whatever takes this such and such time, and then later have it be a different time. But …
Oren: I mean, that is something that has been increasingly noticeable to me in every iteration of Star Wars and Star Trek, which is that travel times seem to shrink. And I don’t know for sure. It’s not like I’ve measured them. But I’ve just noticed that, especially in the newer versions of Star Wars and Star Trek, it kind of feels like when they want to go somewhere they’re just immediately there.
And maybe it was just more about the pacing of the actual scenes than real travel time, but it certainly felt like it took a little longer to get places in older iterations of both franchises.
Chris: I mean, I can believe that because usually the pace of stories is also continuously kind of sped up as times pass. But in this case, it’s partly about the believability of how fast. Does it feel real? Does it really feel like they’re traveling if they go there instantly? But like, once the audience gets used to, “okay, we could get there, but it felt like a day passed.” And that becomes realistic, you can kind of keep pushing the boundary if you want characters just to show up instantly.
Not that there isn’t reason to want some delays in travel. We can talk about fantasy. That’s one thing that’s interesting is just by being in different settings fantasy tends to have a very different relationship to travel than science fiction often does.
Oren: Although, I mean with certain magic systems, if you want, you can just start introducing teleportation magic and say, “I don’t wanna deal with that anymore.” It’s not my favorite.
Chris: Yeah. You better put some restrictions on the teleportation magic.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a huge ability. It has a lot of ways that it can potentially interfere with the plot. It’s not something I typically like to introduce.
Chris: Yeah I mean, I think if you wanna use teleportation magic, again, it’s a lot easier if you make it more an analogous to modern day travel or you travel to a portal zone and then you can go from one portal to the other as opposed to spot to spot teleportation.
Oren: Yeah, just being able to teleport wherever you want is gonna ’cause you some problems.
Chris: I mean, it helps if you have to have been there before or if you need an accurate picture of it. I mean, in modern day an accurate picture would be nothing. In some fantasy settings an accurate picture would still something, but I think even those will wear down.
Oren: Oh man! This is a great new plot idea. So you need an accurate picture of something, right? And in modern day, that’s not a problem, except because the internet is now flooded with slop. You look up a picture; is that really what it looks like? Is this a real picture? Who knows?
Chris: [Laughing] I just love the idea of like—so what happens to you if you tried to teleport into something that’s been like slop-ified. So it has something weird in the picture. Like a crab turning into a cabbage, you know?
Oren: Not good things happen to you. Let me tell you.
Chris: Do you go to the alternate slop dimension? Ah man.
Oren: you come out really convinced that you can replace forty percent of your workforce with an LLM.
Chris: [Burst of laughter] Oh no. Let’s get back to the speculative fiction. Let’s escape again, please.
Oren: Yeah. The optimistic fantasy world.
Chris: [Chuckling] Let’s go back to the optimistic fantasy world.
Oren: [Laughter]
Chris: So yeah, science fiction, it’s not that there’s no considerations. I do think that the trope of aliens leaving behind warp gates is particularly interesting.
Oren: Yeah, sci-fi authors love alien warp gates because they both give an explanation for where this technology came from and why the rest of your setting doesn’t seem that advanced. And they help create a reason why people don’t just blow them up if there’s a problem because you can say that they’re made of, like, special alien stuff or like, we can’t rebuild them or they’re invincible. Because that’s a problem with if you have some kind of warp gate system, it makes any kind of interstellar fighting very hard.
And you see this in Babylon 5, where in Babylon 5, after a while they just kind of gave up and every ship could open its own warp gates now. So the actual warp gate next to the station really didn’t seem like it mattered that much. Whereas in like, The Expanse or in Mass Effect their teleportation gates are made outta weird alien stuff. And so they either are afraid to mess with it or it’s too difficult to destroy, so you just have to accept that ships are gonna be coming through that.
Chris: I did notice in Star Flight Academy how they did have to come up with a reason why Discovery—the Discovery ship couldn’t just use its special drive to come to their rescue.
Oren: Yeah. They had to give a reason for that. It’s funny. The spore drive would’ve caused less of a problem if it hadn’t been a prequel, but it’s still kind of a problem. It’s like, your ship can teleport anywhere? Like, alright.
Chris: Again, it’s that point to point teleportation. Because at some point in time just having every single ship, every single force on the enemy or on the good guys be able to go anywhere instantly—that’s just a very different kind of conflict with very different logistics.
Oren: Yeah. I’m not gonna say you can’t do it. I am gonna say that most writers don’t know how to write that. I certainly don’t.
Chris: I mean, for the purpose of storytelling, we usually need stories where our protagonists are isolated. ‘Cause usually, you know, we have our little scrappy hero who is supposed to be the person who saves the day. And we have to come up with reasons why more powerful people can’t help them. And being physically isolated is a pretty important component of that. So if people are doing teleporting anywhere that certainly makes that harder. Which is why Starfleet Academy of course decided, oh! You know, Discovery’s just busy right now. Can’t come.
Oren: Yeah, they had a techno battle thing about it. Don’t worry. It’s fine.
Chris: The other thing that’s interesting is the fact that technically the speed of travel should usually affect the speed of communication.
Oren: Yeah. That’s another thing that is hard to wrap your head around as a modern person. The idea that messages in a lot of fantasy settings can’t go that much faster than a person can travel. There are some options. Fantasy settings can have limited communication over distances. You can set up smoke relays. If you’re a little more advanced, you can do something like the clacks towers from Discworld, which are based on a real thing. The Discworld versions are a lot more capable than the real version, but you know, they exist. And the more advanced you get the more options. But generally speaking, there isn’t a lot of information that’s going faster than a human can travel. And that’s also the same in some sci-fi settings actually. In some sci-fi settings there’s no intergalactic wireless. Messages move at how quickly a messenger ship can get there.
Chris: Although I do think in a lot of Star Trek episodes don’t they have some very long distance video calls?
Oren: Oh yeah, yeah. No, Star Trek doesn’t work like that. In Star Trek you can Zoom with anybody at any. And they have an explanation for that. They call it “subspace buoys,” which is how they explain how you can call Earth to anywhere in the Federation. But Voyager can’t call Earth ’cause there aren’t any buoys in the way.
Chris: But Voyager does eventually. Is it when they reach the buoys?
Oren: No, they access an ancient alien communication network. So sort of, but not Starfleet’s. I think it’s the Hirogen who used to be real big on building interstellar communication networks, and then they decided to be “diet Klingons” instead. Interesting cultural evolution.
Chris: I guess the useful thing of having all of your protagonists doing a long journey—traveling from one place to another—is if you have like one spot where people have the ability to communicate across the galaxy, then they’re only gonna be there for a temporary time, and then you can just take it away again.
Oren: I mean like, if you’re having it based on infrastructure you have a lot of flexibility. Because if you want your characters to be able to get messages and not have to go across the universe to get them, you can say, oh well, we stopped at a planet that had a big subspace antenna and so we were able to get some mail. But now we’re going out into the less developed area, so we’re not gonna be getting those.
Chris: But I will say that if you do want—kind of regardless of what you do, this is one of those things where if you’re doing it consistently it’s probably gonna constrain you at some point. There is no perfect solution that means that everything is plot convenient for you when you’re plotting as possible, but still is gonna seem perfectly consistent to the reader.
Oren: And you have to decide how much do you wanna lean into this? Because if you look at, for example, just a relatively recent example in real history in the run up to the American Revolution a lot of what happened had to do with the speed of travel. There were several attempts to cool down tension between the colony leaders and Parliament in the UK, but these messages take weeks to get across the Atlantic. And very often something happens while you’re waiting for a message.
Like the British general is waiting for a message from Parliament and the message says, “Don’t do any fighting stuff.” But before he gets that message he sees the colonials are up to something shady and he decides, “Well, I don’t have a message saying I’m not supposed to fight them yet, so I’m gonna go fight ’em.” And you have that kind of dynamic, and that can be fun, right? It helps. It makes your world more immersive. It helps you feel like you’re not just modern people wearing costumes.
But it also gets confusing and difficult. The further you get into a long story the harder it is to keep that up, because the more times you’re gonna risk your character, like missing the crucial information they need to be at a certain place for the story to work properly.
Chris: Yeah. And today everybody’s so used to having their cell phones that the default mindset is like, oh, this is really inconvenient. That character’s over there, but I just want them to know the things.
Oren: Right. Oh man, in role-playing games that’s especially bad because all the players are sitting around the table and they can just talk to each other.
Chris: Yeah, at this point I swear when I’m role playing, it’s like whatever. The team just has a hive mind.
Oren: Yeah! The party hive mind. Recently, we did a little mini Delta Green game and it was set in the ‘60s and I gave you guys walkie talkies. The idea was supposed to be that these were not as effective as regular cell phones. They were supposed to have limited range, and they were supposed to be kind of dangerous to use because they operate on a frequency that other people can listen in on. But after a while it just became clear that that was not what you guys were thinking of them as, and I hadn’t really made that clear in the game. So I just let them function effectively as cell phones, because that was clearly the direction we were going and I didn’t feel like fighting that.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, unless you really are in the mindset to leverage those communication gaps for drama, it just becomes too cumbersome to like, okay, you know? The other players just watched us play this out, but now I gotta repeat it over the walkie-talkie in character. But again, if you want actual travel adventures, which is what fantasy tends to lean into, because by nature it kind of is usually in a setting where traveling is a lot more cumbersome. And we were talking about Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which is a travel story where clearly Percy is supposed to be having travel adventures, but it’s awkward because it’s in modern day. So we have to start with an excuse for why he can’t fly.
Oren: ‘Cause Zeus is mad at him.
Chris: Zeus is mad at him, so he better not get in a plane.
Oren: Fortunately, he can’t take a high speed train because this is the United States, so he can’t do that. And for reasons only he and two other twelve-year-olds are allowed to go on the trip, so they can’t drive either. So you know, that worked itself out. [Sarcasticly] Don’t pay too much attention to the explanation for why only him and two twelve-year-olds can go. Just don’t worry about it.
Chris: But yeah, the same thing goes for, again, that balance between do you wanna have a venture while traveling or do you want people to get somewhere instantly? In a lot of fantasy settings one of the tricky things is anytime there’s water people will travel by water. But boats are just kind of—oh! Oh no! I was about to say boats are boring and Oren is— [Laughter]
Oren: [Indignant] How dare—I do beg your pardon, madam!
Chris: Look, there’s just less things for characters to do when they’re on a boat than there is when they’re land traveling.
Oren: Look, they got so many different kinds of knots that need to be tied and there’s a lot of cleaning. You gotta clean boats all the time.
Chris: [Noncommittal] Yes. Uh, it’s very exciting.
Oren: [Chuckling] That is actually an example of the difference between what I was in my notes referring to as active travel versus sedentary travel. Whereas in active travel, you’re either walking or riding a horse maybe. Like, the idea is that it requires constant effort on your part as opposed to sedentary travel where you are just sitting down waiting. If you’re a passenger on a boat or if you’re on a train or in a car that’s mostly sedentary travel.
It’s easier to skip over all that. People don’t expect you to cover it as much because it’s just sort of assumed, yeah, the boat will get where it’s going eventually. Whereas if you’re traveling on foot, it’s like that’s a little bit more of an effort. Readers may expect a little more from you there.
Chris: Yeah. Let’s talk about that, because that is an issue with fantasy. Do you have to show the traveling? Just because there are many stories where that’s not really what the writer has in mind as far as what they want to depict. No
585 – Do Writers Need to Read?
April 26, 2026
Yes, obviously. But maybe not in the way some people think? This is a weird question that comes up every so often in The Discourse, and it inevitably reveals more about emotional states than it does the craft …
Show notes
Yes, obviously. But maybe not in the way some people think? This is a weird question that comes up every so often in The Discourse, and it inevitably reveals more about emotional states than it does the craft of writing. It’s worth investigating what people actually mean when they ask this question, what role reading actually plays in writing, and why Interview With The Vampire is a fantastic adaptation.
Show Notes
Reading Rates
Dark Stories
Hindrance Character
Film POV
Baldur’s Gate 3
Sanderson Adaptation
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Interview With The Vampire
Lockwood and Co.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Savannah. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
[intro music]
Oren: Welcome everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So, I have a book that I want you to buy and read, but I will never buy and read your book. I actually hate your book. I think it’s worthless. I hate the whole concept of your book. No, please buy my book.
Chris: Oh, no.
Oren: This opening bit is actually also setting context for an important part of our topic today, which is the question of: Do writers need to read question mark?
Chris: Is there really a question mark? Is there a really a−
Oren: I mean−
Chris: −question?
Oren: −sometimes.
Chris: Is this really any question?
Oren: I mean it’s a weird bit of perennial discourse that pops up every once in a while, and it’s like, I think it is 90% motivated by fear, in my experience.
Chris: Definitely feels like rage bait discourse.
Oren: Yeah. I have no idea how many people there are out there that seriously think that they can write a novel without ever having read a novel. Every once in a while you see someone who claims that, and I’m like, are you a real person? Who knows? I’ve certainly never met one of these people in real life. But at the same time, writers are scared that these people exist. And it’s for the reason I just described. At least, in my opinion it is. I’m doing a little bit of armchair psycho-analysis here, right?
You know, we’re all scared−for a bunch of reasons−but in this most immediate reason is that we all see the news articles about how reading rates are falling and who’s gonna buy and read our books if no one is buying or reading books? And then you’ve got these maybe real people who want to sell us their books, but refuse to read ours in return. And it’s, uh, it makes us very mad.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, even without the falling reading rates, it’s just so competitive. And we want people to buy more books so that more of us can have careers, or there could be kind of an implied insult to the medium itself. Like, well, if you’re not reading, it feels like the easy conclusion to take from that is that, well, you don’t enjoy reading. It’s not a fun pastime for you. So, if you don’t like this art medium, why are you creating stories in it, for instance? So, again, that can be a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but that is certainly how… I think, why it enrages people so much. I mean, that combined with just the fact that people really want to complain about new books and how they’re worse than yesterday’s books.
Oren: Yeah, they do like to do that.
Chris: I honestly think it’s the reverse. Over a long enough time span, I think books are getting better, not worse. It doesn’t mean that this year’s books are that much better than last year’s books.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But yeah, it’s just always very popular to complain about the books these days. Just like we complain about the kids these days.
Oren: Right, and if anyone has been able to find a well-known book by an author who never reads, I don’t know of that. I don’t think that’s a thing.
Chris: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s a thing either, but it certainly plays into the fear. It’s that like, oh, all of the books are now bad because writers don’t read anymore.
Oren: Right. And of course this combines with the young people panic, right? Every once in a while there’s a viral story where some professor will be like, the people in my class don’t know how to read books anymore. And it’s one of those things where on the one hand “kids these days”, this is a perennial complaint. Everyone always complains about kids these days. But I don’t want to entirely dismiss it because the education system is worse funded now than it used to be.
Chris: It’s worse funded. Yeah.
Oren: And of course there is the brand new, very fun variable of LLMs being everywhere, and we don’t really know exactly how that’s going to affect people. There are some preliminary reports that are pretty scary, but it’s still only, it’s still actually fairly new, and it’s hard to separate the real data from the panic pieces.
Chris: Yeah, it is. The idea that kids aren’t, for instance, not just not writing their own papers, but they don’t have to read books anymore because they’re just summarizing them, you know, it’s scary. I don’t know how much that’s common, right, but it’s−
Oren: −and to be clear, that happened before LLMs.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: Right?
Chris: Yeah, no, all the CliffsNotes. We were always doing that. I mean, I didn’t personally do that, but I assume lots of other people did. People who−
Oren: −yeah, I mean, I’m−
Chris: −were more reasonable with their time−
Oren: −I’m not−
Chris: −sometimes.
Oren: −I’m not gonna say that I never did that.
Chris: When I look back, at the time when I read through all of Atlas Shrugged, I was like, why didn’t I do that? Why did I make myself read over a thousand pages of Ayn Rand?
Oren: Right. So, but anyway, this all ties into the anxiety that people have about this supposed cohort of authors that don’t want to read books, and as a result, people are primed to jump at some random account with 15 followers that claims you don’t have to read books and may or may not be a real person. But at the other hand, at the other end of it, I’ve noticed another defensive reaction, which is from people who don’t just not read but maybe don’t read as much as they feel like they should read. And they feel judged by this whole thing. You know, like people who have read a lot but maybe don’t read much or at all anymore for whatever reason. That’s a pretty common narrative. You talk to people who are like, yeah, when I was in high school I read like a book a week, and now I just can’t get myself to do it.
And these people then feel judged, and they get upset, and then it just becomes a round and round and round endless cycle, and it gets… at that point, it’s less about the initial question of do writers need to read and more about how cool of a nerd you are in one way or another.
Chris: I do think that if you’re one of those people who feels a little insecure about how much you read because you don’t read as much as you would like to be reading, personally, I don’t think that’s the person that everybody else is panicking over.
Realistically, I think that when people get this negative reaction to the idea of writers not reading, they’re imagining a very stereotypical person who just hates books, or is, you know, at all… right, and doesn’t think that they need to put any work in and or whatever. They’re not thinking about the person who actually does like books and has read many books that they loved, but is doing a million things and raising kids, and taking care of their aging parents at the same time or whatever it is that you’re doing. Right? And is having trouble squirreling away the time to read. I don’t think−, that’s not the type of person that people are thinking of.
Oren: Right. There is a specific breed of writing advice giver whose first advice to any question is always go read lots of books.
Chris: Because they’re bad at their jobs.
Oren: It’s not good advice, right? Like yeah, reading… it can give you some help, right? It can be useful for your craft, but this idea that like more books equals more better writing, it’s not true.
Chris: If somebody gives that advice on top of also giving lots of good craft advice, okay, fine. But like−
Oren: Sure.
Chris: −I definitely feel like there is some, oh, you know it when you see it. I don’t want to have to personally do the work to figure out what that means or what the rules are to teach it to somebody else, so just read and you’ll just know it when you see it, too, if you read enough, right?
Oren: Yeah. There’s this attitude that if you read a lot of books, you can kind of absorb the skills through osmosis.
Chris: And it’s not impossible to do that, but it’s certainly not reliable, and it’s definitely slower than actually sitting down to really learn.
Oren: Right, because if you do want to learn from books, you have to be able to read critically, and that’s a kind of confusing term for some people because some people what they think that means is you should read a book and just trash everything in it. And don’t get me wrong, trashing will be involved, but you have to be able to do more than just find problems. You have to be able to look at the reasons why things are happening. And often this means looking past not only your own positive reactions, but also your own negative reactions.
Like, you didn’t like something−, this is something that I have to deal with, for example, when I’m reading a dark story, because I don’t tend to like dark stories very much, and so it’s easy for me to assume, “Ugh, I hate this character because they are a bad character and they’re terribly written.” It’s like, okay, is that really the reason or is the reason that I just didn’t like that they did dark things in a dark story? That sort of thing. Or, another big one is like, “Oh man, I hate this hindrance character so much. I wish that hindrance character was dead. This book would be so much better if that hindrance character was dead.” But is the issue really the character or is it that the author doesn’t want to move the plot forward and if that character wasn’t around, they would find some other reason?
Chris: Yeah. There are a lot of things that storytellers do that get blamed on characters, but we also hear from a lot of people who, again, when they’re new to this and they’re still learning to do critical reading, it takes some long time to figure out, “Okay, I’m not into it. Why? I don’t like this. Why?” And that just basic pinning down−, first of all, recognizing what you feel, which right can be a big step. Again, a new storyteller generally does not know what tension feels like. You have to pay attention to that and pay attention to your own feelings and learn that, and then from there, try to figure out why you are reacting the way you do. And then from there, you can start to get sort of storytelling lessons as you read material, but a lot of that takes a lot of introspection. And sometimes if you can’t tell right away, it might take: I’ve read several novels and was able to compare this one to this one, and it didn’t bother me in this case, but it did bother me in this case, and I think here’s why.
That takes a lot of time and introspection, but it does help for sure.
Oren: Yeah. And then there’s the more immediate benefits of keeping up with reading. Either, if it’s your own genre, then you know what people are doing in the genre. You have some idea, and that can help you decide which story ideas to pursue. I’m not suggesting you try to write to the market. I don’t think that’s viable for most people, but if you didn’t read modern fantasy these days, and by modern I mean fantasy written today, not fantasy set in a modern period, if you didn’t do that, you might think we were all still publishing Lord of the Rings clones, and that’s just not the case. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and you wouldn’t know that. So, you could end up being like, yeah, I’m going to write my own Lord of the Rings clone, and it’ll flop because everyone’s like, we’ve all read Lord of the Rings, man. Or maybe the genre is set for a resurgence, and there’s Lord of the Rings clones all over the place!
But if you don’t read in the genre at all, you won’t know any of that. You won’t be able to make an informed decision.
Chris: Again, we don’t encounter this very often, and so we don’t−, it doesn’t usually need to be said, but generally you want to be a fan of the genre that you’re writing in.
Oren: Probably.
Chris: That may seem obvious, but occasionally we run into somebody who has never read that genre before or is kind of like, oh, that genre’s so bad, I’m going to do it better; doesn’t really like it; doesn’t have an understanding, therefore, of what fans like about the genre, right? And that could be, like, if you read that subgenre and those types of stories and you don’t like them, then trying to mimic them is probably not a good idea.
Oren: And I understand writing out of spite. I’ve done that more than a few times. But there’s still like, what is it about this genre that you do want to have in your story? It’s probably gotta be something, right? Otherwise, why this genre? Pick one you like better. And this is a very long way of saying that if you are able to read critically and do this kind of analysis, that’s more important than the number of books you read. You don’t have, there’s not like a, I gotta read 20 books in a year. There’s no point in measuring it like that.
Chris: Obviously, people like to brag about their Read pile sometimes, although I think sometimes writers like to talk more about their To Be Read pile and how hopelessly big it is. So, if there’s all these books that you intended to read and never do read, you’re at least in good company.
Oren: That’s a very sympathetic problem to talk about these days, and it also helps them justify why they haven’t read whatever book you recommended to them. It’s like, oh, I totally would, but my To Be Read pile… it’s so big!
Chris: It’s so big, I can’t do it!
Oren: One talking point that I hadn’t seen before but has come up more recently is this idea that you can tell someone doesn’t read books because they don’t have any internalizing, which I find very weird.
Chris: I mean, I could see why somebody would make that assumption. That’s what it looks like. That’s why we call it film POV.
Oren: Yeah, and you can imagine some… you’re like, oh, okay, well, they’ve never read a book, so they don’t know what an internal narration looks like, so it’s all described from the outside like a camera. But this is one of the reasons why it’s hard for me to remember that not everyone has the same experience we do because I read lots of client manuscripts and they are often like that, and it’s not because the author doesn’t read. Now, certainly someone who doesn’t read could make that mistake, but also a number of authors that I’ve worked with who are voracious readers have made that mistake.
Chris: It’s funny because I’m sure if somebody stares at text−, and again, I say stare at text because I personally consume a lot of books on audio because that’s how I fit them into my schedule, right? I listen to them while I’m cooking, for instance. Otherwise, it would be a lot harder for me to consume as many books as I do. But a lot of readers, if you are looking at text on a page, a lot of times you would assume that people would know basic things, but everybody picks up some things and not other things, and so we get new clients that don’t know paragraph breaks. Just don’t know how to do them. Either they have almost no paragraph breaks or they just have too few, and so there’s huge chunks of text, for instance.
Oren: Or, people who haven’t learned the basics of when to start a new paragraph around dialogue or around character actions, that sort of thing.
Chris: That’s very common. Dialogue is pretty futzy. Another one I see is they don’t know how to integrate thoughts into the narration. There’s some of these things that writers, once you just get a little experience, you start to take for granted. But new people, they don’t know that. It’s not like when they’re reading a novel they’re staring at the text when somebody thinks and is like, okay, that’s how you do it. So, they just don’t
584 – Introducing Characters
April 19, 2026
We all dream of the day our characters turn into beloved household names, or perhaps feared household names, in the case of villains. But before that can happen, we must introduce our characters to readers, and …
Show notes
We all dream of the day our characters turn into beloved household names, or perhaps feared household names, in the case of villains. But before that can happen, we must introduce our characters to readers, and how are we even supposed to do that? There’s so much information that must be balanced, to say nothing of what happens if you need to introduce multiple characters at the same time. Fortunately, we have some tips.
Show Notes
Travel Stories
Kazon
The Bad Batch
Love Interest
Description
Character Appearance
Character Chemistry
Candy and Spinach
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Chris: Hello, I am Chris. I have blue eyes and brown hair, and that is all you need to know about me. Now you have a very clear picture of who I am and what I look like.
Oren: (Intense voice) There is also… Podcaster 2. He is very tall and he has a very distinctive gravelly voice and many weapons. Don’t worry about why he has those. He’s not important. He’s just a background character.
Chris: [Laughs]
Oren: Normal guy, Podcaster 2.
Chris: [Laughing] Is that like a video game NPC? Is that what that is?
Oren: No. He’s got five paragraphs of description because he’s actually the secret villain or love interest or rival, or…
Chris: [Laughs] That’s what I was gonna say, love interest.
Oren: He’s a secret something or other. We don’t know exactly what.
Chris: Both villain and love interest perhaps.
Oren: Could be both of those things. But the important thing is that the author is trying to disguise him as a normal character in the scene, but obviously we can’t do that ’cause we need to say how cool he is.
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: It’s been a while since I’ve read something like that in a published manuscript, but I still see it in client works. You’re like, “There was a guard by the door and there was a courtier, and then there was a spooky figure in the shadows with the robe over his head and a jeweled staff. Anyway, moving on.” I’m like, “Okay, so that’s the villain that we just saw.”
Chris: [Laughs] If it is a romance, I can see having, there’s a royal guard there, like, “Oh, that one guard is really hot.” And that is supposed to be the first time the protagonist notices the love interest. And then we’re gonna build on that later. But if we’re really trying to make a character blend in, adding a bunch of description is not gonna do that.
Any case, this time we’re talking about introducing characters. For a storyteller, this is not usually the most challenging task, but there are still a bunch of different little things that can go wrong. And we often see this in manuscripts, so it’s worth kind of talking about how you do character introductions.
Oren: You say it’s not hard, but I spent the last two weeks trying to revise a scene where I introduced two characters and it was too much. It was too confusing, and so I had to revise it to introduce one at a time, and that was really hard.
Chris: That is one of the trickier things is getting the timing right. First thing I wanna mention, there are characters that don’t need an introduction. But they’re not important, so they’re only usually kind of barely characters. They also have a label that explains specifically why they are in the scene. If your character walks into the lobby and sees the receptionist, that’s a label. We know why that person is there. They’re called a receptionist. We don’t really need more than that if we’re just walking by them briefly or saying just a few words to them. Doesn’t really need much introduction there.
The thing that we see in a lot of writers who don’t know how to do introductions, when we’re looking at manuscripts, we just drop a name. “I was going to the store and I stopped by home and George said, ‘Hi,’ and then I kept going.” And it’s like, “Who’s George?” I don’t know who George is. What is the relationship between the narrator or the protagonist and George? Why is George there?
As opposed to like, “Oh, I saw my neighbor George” or “I saw my coworker, George,” tells you what the relationship George has to the other elements in the story. It can be really funny in speculative fiction works because a lot of times we’ll just get proper nouns and I don’t know whether this is a person, a place, or a vegetable.
Oren: It’s like a fantasy story, and they say, “I saw ‘Gula.’” What is Gula? Is that a person? Is that a soup? What is that?
Chris: [Laughs] Oh, is that a strange monolith in the middle of the street? I don’t know.
Oren: It could be. Anything’s possible.
Chris: [Laughs] We literally have no idea what this thing is, whereas at least if it’s in a contemporary setting, I know George is a person.
Oren: But it could also be a cat. If you don’t describe it at all, it’s like, “Is that a person or an animal?”
Chris: It could be really jarring if George walks in and you assume it’s a man, and then the protagonist starts petting George.
Oren: Hey, I don’t judge. Live their lives however they want.
Chris: That’s the first rule, is don’t just drop in names. Give “George, my neighbor.” That two words is everything. And if you’re writing in a really close, limited perspective, don’t overthink it. Somebody might normally not think to themselves, “Oh, there’s George, my neighbor.” But don’t overthink it. Just put it in.
Oren: You’re already editing what the person’s train of thought is. When you see another person, you don’t just register their name. You almost certainly have other associations with them that if you tried to write them all out, would overwhelm the narration. We can abstract that down to “my neighbor.”
The one that I struggle with is when we introduce a character once and then they show back up again several hours, or hundreds of pages later, like I’m supposed to know who that is. Yeah, technically we did mention them, but I don’t remember who that is. It’s been too long. My memory is not that good.
Chris: Definitely if we’re doing a reintroduction, and it’s been a while, sometimes what actually needs to happen is we need to consolidate the characters. If we have lots of characters who only perform very small roles and there’s no logistical reason they have to be different. For instance, if your character is traveling, that’s a reason why people need to be different. ‘Cause otherwise you get the Kazons. It’s like, “How are they following us?”
Oren: There’s that one Kazon guide. He’s always there. Well actually we know how he’s keeping up. It’s ’cause Voyager keeps stopping to do side quests.
Chris: [Laughs] If you have the same character show up in different places as your protagonist travels, that will require explanation. But otherwise, if you have lots of little characters with tiny bit roles and they’re actually named people, not “the receptionist,” a lot of times you wanna merge those together and make it one person who reappears more times. So that helps.
Even so, there may be reasons to have one person who pops up early and then disappears for a while and pops in again. In some of those cases, your readers may kind of generally remember the incident and that there was somebody there, but pretty unlikely to remember exactly what their name was.
Names especially are very hard to remember. In that case, your kind of reintroduction needs to include some kind of reminder. Unless your protagonist sees this person all the time, this can often be framed as like, “Oh, who is that again? Oh yeah, that person.”
Oren: Assuming this is a significant character we’re introducing, I’m never sure, how much descriptive information do I need? I tend to go with a lot because I like describing characters and theoretically I put work into figuring out what this character should look like. But I always feel like I’m overdescribing them. Do we need to know all that? Who knows?
Chris: People definitely have different preferences here for how much description they like to put in. Some people do like to do a lot and some people don’t like to do very much. So there’s definitely some subjectivity. Probably one of the biggest signals for how important the character is going to be is how much description you have. And so what that means is if they’re important, you have some description. If they’re gonna be hanging out for the whole story, usually you want some description of them.
Whereas if they’re a bit character like the receptionist, you can say a few things about how the receptionist in the lobby looks if you want to, but you really don’t have to. The other thing is how long is this story? Makes a lot more sense to spend more time on description if the story is longer and you’re gonna be spending more time with those characters.
That leads into the question of, should you give away that a character is important? There’s multiple options. Usually, yes. Particularly if this is a protagonist. If the reader knows a character as a protagonist, I do think that they will kind of give that character a little bit more of the benefit of doubt, and they’re more willingly, emotionally invest in them.
If the reader doesn’t think the character’s important, that can be fine. If they have a bit role, it can be fun to have a character that seems like a minor character, and then for their role to grow and then to discover they’re important. So that’s not necessarily bad, and in fact that works better than the reverse where we think a character is important and then suddenly they’re not important. ‘Cause that could disappoint somebody who liked the character.
Oren: What gets me, this happens occasionally when you have a main character who is an ambassador or some kind of politician or other social character. And they have a bodyguard and they get attacked and the bodyguard has a fight scene, and I’m like, “Oh heck, that unnamed bodyguard seems cool. Tell me about them.” And then that bodyguard dies at the end of the scene. I’m like, “No, what? I wanted to know about that character. That seemed cool.”
Chris: [Laughs] It was better that you did not get attached.
Oren: That happened in one of The Bad Batch episodes. Some senator who was trying to do some behind the scenes politicking had a random guard who had this whole badass fight scene. And at the end of that he just dies.
Chris: [Laughs]
Oren: I guess he’s done now.
Chris: Bodyguards are for redshirting.
Oren: If they get redshirted, whatever. But it was just weird how long and drawn out that fight was. And it feels like we were treating this as though it was her fight. But she’s not fighting ’cause she’s not a fighting character. So it’s just her unnamed bodyguard.
Chris: I wonder if it’s because of all the stories where bodyguards are important characters. If the person who was depicting that, that rubbed off a little bit and is like, “Oh, well it’s her bodyguard, so this person must be really important to her and somebody she knows well and must be badass to be a scientist or bodyguard,” but that doesn’t actually change their role in the story. [Chuckles]
Oren: That could be.
Chris: That kind of thing where you set up that expectation. If you describe them and they’re really cool and unique, it definitely makes it feel like they’re gonna be important and it could get audiences interested in them. So after that, if it turns out they’re just not important, that could be disappointing.
Whereas if you have a really important character and they have a bit role at first, you can do that and then expand. But you just have to be conscious of the fact that if you don’t make them look important, readers will likely to forget them or not gonna get attached to them yet. When they bring them in the second time, you might need to be like, “Oh yeah, that was Guard #5. Oh yeah you were one of the guards over there.”
Oren: I’ll never forget you, Guard #5.
Chris: Just reintroduce them. Remind readers what they were doing and then build off of that. I don’t want them to be a jerk if they don’t seem like they’re gonna be an important protagonist. In general though, it works fine if you completely give away a character is important and do that by giving them a budget description.
As for what description to give, that’s another important question. I was joking in the intro about just hair and eye color, which is a thing that people tend to default to just ’cause that’s the fun description, I guess.
Oren: Hair color, sure. That’s something you would generally notice. I’m not sure how many people notice eye color most of the time.
Chris: Authors of course make the eye colors, like, violet.
Oren: I’ve occasionally met someone with really bright blue or green eyes and been like, “Wow, okay. Pretty intense.” But it’s not common. Most of the time I would never be able to tell you what color someone’s eyes are.
Chris: That’s an interesting one. It can have a surprisingly strong effect on somebody’s appearance, but you wouldn’t consciously remember exactly what their color of eyes are. But no, it’s very popular to be like, “Oh, and they were bound with flecks of gold and black.” Flecks are all the rage right now.
Oren: People love flecks.
Chris: Instead, what you really want is to give the big noticeable things first so that if the reader fills in the rest with their imagination, and then you describe more, it’s not jarring later. If you don’t specify a character’s age and then their age is not what the reader expected, that’s very jarring.
That’s the experience I had at the beginning of Sword of Shannara. I don’t know that anybody had the same experience that I did because when I looked at it, there’s just a few lines in here where his face is “weathered” and then he’s also got a whole “calm but alert.” Any person’s face can be weathered, but without any other context, that kind of worn downness. The things about it seemed to make him feel like he was like a really seasoned traveler that was used to the road. That was the impression that the first paragraph about him created.
So then we find out he’s really young. The associations we have with youth are more fresh faced and excitable and impulsive and energetic. Not all young people are that way, but when you don’t have that information, readers just fill in whatever feels natural.
Oren: I had the opposite experience. I was reading the beginning of a fantasy book, and it starts with the protagonist and she’s whimsically laying down in a field and looking at the clouds and skipping her chores and thinking very rose-colored lenses about traveling and how wonderful it would be to see the world. She would love to visit new things with her aunt and talking to her imaginary friend, and I’m like, “Okay, so this character is like, 12?” 19.
Chris: [Laughs] I’ve met some like less mature 19 year olds that would do those kinds of things.
Oren: It’s not like a 19-year-old can’t do any of those things. If they are mature, maybe you just enjoy being in a field and thinking about traveling.
Chris: And you still skip your chores.
Oren: And you still skip your chores, lots of people do that. But it was just a combination of things made me think this was a fairly young character, especially since they seemed to have very little concept of social relationships. I would expect a 19-year-old to care more about what their peers might think.
Granted, young kids care that way too. But that’s the thing I associate with late teenagers, is that they think about their peers a lot, and this character doesn’t seem to do that at all. Could be that’s just a trait of theirs, but wasn’t specified.
Chris: And of course, your character doesn’t have to be a stereotypical whatever. The point is that you wanna give that information early so that it feeds into that first impression. Instead of them forming a first impression without context and then finding it really jarring when you introduce information that contradicts what they imagined. Age is one, race is another one. And again, we want to specify race for everybody. Including white people. So finding some time to specify people have pale skin is a good thing to do.
Oren: It is weird to me when second-world fantasy settings use modern racial categories. That’s a little strange to me. It’s like describing someone as white or black. That’s such a context-specific term. Obviously all English words are context specific and everything’s being translated anyway, but it’s still just strange to me. It feels almost like calling someone Asian in a continent that doesn’t have Asia.
C

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