609 – Reader Meta Knowledge

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

• Save the Cat!
• Making Your Story Intuitive
• Tension & Conflict: What Every Writer Should Know
• Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories
• The Promise and Peril of Using Curiosity in Fiction Writing
• Goodbye, Lara
• Seven Common Causes of Reader Confusion
• Five Steps to a Great Plot Twist
• A Trade of Blood
• Teen Wolf
• Seven Tips for a Satisfying Mystery
• Carpe Jugulum
• Four Signs Your Story Escalates Too Quickly
• Seven Common Believability Issues
• Audiences Don’t Suspend Disbelief – We Do It for Them
• Coyote vs. Acme
• Explaining the Urban Fantasy Masquerade
• Dungeon Crawler Carl

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