Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-50-the-unreliable-narrator 

 

Key Points: Unreliable Narrators! Some know they are unreliable, others are fooling themselves. Reveal or revelation? If the character doesn't know they are unreliable, signpost it to the reader. Hang a lantern on it. Let another character question it. What is the scope of the unreliability, just one specific secret, or a broader range? Building trust with the reader for a character with a secret. Have the character reveal one secret, while holding others. Or save the cat. Don't overdo twist reveals! Consider intentional versus unintentional, and broad versus specific unreliability.

 

[Season 18, Episode 50]

 

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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Season 18, Episode 50]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Unreliable Narrator.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And you can't trust us.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm someone.

[DongWon] I'm someone else.

[Erin] I'm a third person.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But are you?

[DongWon] The most unreliable answer.

[Laughter]

 

[Erin] We are going to be talking today about the unreliable narrator. This is one of my favorite techniques. I… Well, I actually believe that all narrators are unreliable in their own way, because it's always, whenever you're telling a story, even in life, you're telling it from your perspective. But when we talk about unreliable narrators, these are when you're actually trying on purpose to have your narrator either believe or represent something different than the actual facts of what's happening on the page. I have this whole construct/theory of unreliable narrators that I'm going to pitch you all…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In sections. So, the first part I'm wondering about is do you think it matters? If the narrator knows that they are unreliable versus if they are fooling themselves and therefore fooling the reader?

[DongWon] I think it's incredibly important because it changes the relationship to the audience. So if your audience is reading a book that has an unreliable narrator who does not realize that that's what they're doing, then they… We are going through that journey with them. They're experiencing their slow realization that they are being unreliable or we are watching them descend further and further into a break from reality. Right? So there's us walking with somebody. If the narrator is being deliberately unreliable and lying to us, then… There's a different kind of experience where we are sort of… The audience is almost antagonistic to the narrator in a certain way. This doesn't mean that the narrator can't be sympathetic and fun and all of those things, and almost has to be to balance that out. But it requires a different care that you're taking of the audience to make sure that when the reveal comes, that they have been lied to, but they don't feel betrayed and angry at you, the author.

[Howard] I played How to Host a Murder once, and I was the killer. But the first 2 pages of my booklet were stuck together. I did not know I was the killer. I didn't know. So I was the most convincing liar of anybody, because I was utterly innocent in my own mind…

[Choked giggling]

[Howard] Of this killing. We went to the end, yeah, I totally got away with it. It was like, "Okay, who was the murderer? Who has the…" "I don't know." Everybody looked at the… We passed around our books. Somebody said, "Howard!" They peeled it apart and were like, "You did it!"

[Laughter]

[Howard] I was like, "Oh. I did?" Yeah. To me, that's the big distinction. The unreliable narrator who knows they're lying can be tripped up in their lie. Can be dishonest… They're dishonest with an agenda. Whereas the unreliable narrator who just doesn't know the truth is going to be utterly honest about what they know, and is, to my mind, more convincing.

[Mary Robinette] As we're talking about this, I'm thinking about something that I did in Relentless Moon, which is that my main character has 2 secrets. One of them she is keeping secret for societal reasons. She has anorexia. The other she's keeping secret for spoiler reasons. Which is… She's keeping those both secret from the reader. But then she also has a secret that she is keeping from the other characters. So one of the things that I was… But that she's sharing with the readers. So one of the things that I was playing with in that was having her lies be in the same patterns. So that when the reveal happened, that you recognized that you had been lied to in the same way that the other characters had been lied to about this different packet of information.

[Erin] Oo, that's cool.

[DongWon] That is really cool.

 

[Erin] I was thinking about the word reveal. So what I think is really interesting is that secrets are meant to be revealed. So part of the difference between these 2 unreliable narrators is what the story is building towards.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, in… If you're hiding a piece of information, your narrator is on purpose, at some point, there is a general sense that that will be revealed in a specific moment, or, like, it will come to light. Whereas if the person is fooling themselves… I think of it more of a revelation. A slow revelation, but the reader that something is happening that they shouldn't trust. But it doesn't have to happen… There's not necessarily a moment. There can be. But it doesn't have to go, like, one, like, "And then…"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Erin] "You'll never guess what really happened!" But more, as you're getting more and more details about the world, you're like, "There seems to be something that's askew." That kind of brings me to one craft technique that I learned about in creating unreliable narrators, which is that if they don't know that they're being unreliable, you have to give some sort of signpost to the reader that they are. Usually by bringing in something that the audience can make a very clear judgment about, and be like, "Well, that isn't the way I would interpret it, and they're interpreting it very differently, so something is off." In Wolfy Things, there's a moment where he sees his mother crying and he's like, "She still trying to, like, salt the food."

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] You know, with her tears. Just because like… Like, that's so off, she's obviously upset about, like, the appearance of this wolf and what's going on there, but he misinterprets it so wrong, like so badly…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That you're thinking, "Okay. There's like something… He's not seeing the world the way that other people see the world."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[DongWon] How do you make sure in that moment that the reader isn't just like, "Oh, you, the author, missed something," or like, "That doesn't make sense to me, this book is bad." Right, like? Because I think when I see that done poorly, that is the result. The result can be like… Oh, I'm just not connecting with this. I don't understand this character. They're acting ideologically in some way. But when it's done really well, for me, that's like the most exciting thing. Right? Like, I loved that moment of realizing, like, "Oh, man, this mom at a way different experience than what this kid can see." It makes sense, because he's a kid. Right? Like… So…

[Howard] I hang a lantern on it. It creates conflict. Another character in the scene… I use it a lot with worldbuilding. I especially use it with worldbuilding when I realize, "Man. I built this earlier, and I have characters talk about it, and I don't like it. I don't think it works that way. I need them to have been wrong." So another character comes in and says, "Hey, guys. I think you're talking about this all wrong. Let's have an argument." There's comedy and there's argument and the reader now sees, "Oh. Oh. Yeah, I had some questions about that too. But now that a character is asking questions about it, I'm fine." They don't actually need to resolve it. They just need to question what was happening. Now the reader no longer blames you, the writer, because there like, "Oh, yes. My concern has now been raised in the text. I'm fine, I'm on board with whatever continues."

[DongWon] Yeah. Parallax can be really useful if you're in a longer text. Right? So if you're in a novel, your multi POV, you can have sort of 2 characters looking at the same thing from slightly different angles and you can sort of see the difference between them. In a really tight constrained text…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] With a single voice, like, how do you make that clear?

[Erin] I think one way is by bringing in…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] An outside influence. One of the reasons… One of the roles that the Conjureman plays in Snake Season is to present a point of view in the narrative that is not the point of view of the character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To see her interact with something that I could give you, like, here are the actual facts of what's happening in this interaction and here's the way she's seeing this interaction. Sort of show how those 2 things are diverging from each other as a way for you to be like, "okay. Something is a little different here." Then, at the very end, there's the husband's point of view and what he says in dialogue is another way of saying, like, this is where he's just describing exactly what he's seeing and what he understands. That's also a way to show an even greater contrast. As the contrast between the character's perspective and these other characters that the interact with becomes greater and greater, it gives a sense that there's more and more unreliability. I think the other thing that's really important is to give your character an absolutely genuine belief and reason for believing what they do. I think if you're like, "Oh, I'm just going to have them misunderstand this as a technique," it doesn't feel true to the character. Like, Nikki really believes that that's what's going on with his mom. He's really wrong. But what his belief is seems like it's really genuine, it's coming from a place of heart. I think if when people are sympathetic to your characters, then they care about them, and they want to understand why there seeing the world way that they are. That really brings them into the "Oh, this is what the character is about" mode versus "this is what the author is doing" mode. You basically keep them tightly in the head of the narrator, so they don't have time to think about what else is going on.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But I think the… Just to draw a line under the thing that you said, which is, in that sign posting that Howard was talking about, that you present the reader with something that is clearly recognizable to the reader as a… Like, his mother is looking out the window and giggling. It's like, okay, she's not afraid of this wolf. Then, having that obvious misinterpretation then sets them up before you get to all of the other misinterpretations, sets the reader up to know… To look for that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other pieces along those lines which is, I think, something that you're also doing with Nikki is what I call the doth protest too much. That they spend a lot of energy trying to justify their belief. That they think about it and talk about it…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Way more than it would… Otherwise, it would be like, oh, mom's upset again, and you move on. But it's like, moms upset because of this, or, actually, it's because of this. Like, that they doth protest too much.

[Erin] Exactly. All right. I love this. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, I have another question to pose for you in my grand unified unreliable narrator theory.

[DongWon] Or will we?

[Gasp]

 

[Erin] This week, I have a short story collection for you. It is Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker. Sarah Pinsker is an amazing short story writer. You gotta love that there are 2 Hugo and nebula winning short stories in this collection. 2 Truths and a Lie and Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather. But there's just… It's story after story after story. One of the things I find really interesting is that she does… She thinks about the world in such a fascinating way. I feel like there are the stories that she's really well known for, but some of the quieter pieces that are in here… Like I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of Noise are just really beautiful love letters I think to the form and just expertly crafted short story experiences. So, that's Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker.

 

[Erin] We're back. We weren't lying about it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, for the 2nd question that I have for you all about the unreliable narrator is the scope of the unreliability. So, the way I think about this is that you can have someone, like you were talking about your character having a secret. So that's like a very specific thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The way that say, the rest of the world, everything is accurate, but this one thing is something that they're hiding. Then, I think about somebody like Marie in Snake Season whose entire worldview is a little off. Like…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's not like she's hiding something specific, she's just misinterpreting everything around her.

[DongWon] The slow build to realizing how wide the scope is of her unreliability…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is so much the deliciousness of that story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] There… I've used this. I've used this? I've referenced this before. The lore master for the Elder Scrolls online… One of his first challenges was the fact that the Elder Scrolls games were terribly inconsistent in the way the history of that universe played out. Their solution was unreliable narrators. Anytime we describe something, we want to describe it in the narrative from the point of view of a character. Because a character can be wrong. But if we describe it without quotes around it, then people are going to take it as gospel truth. What was funny to me, and what I just now realized with regard to scope, is that in that article, the lore master never use the term unreliable narrator. It was exactly what he was talking about, but he never used that term. On the one hand, I thought, "You can't possibly not know the literary technique you're using," and just today I realized, "Oh, wait. You're writing game software. You don't want to put the word unreliable in the text…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "In front of the gamers…"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because you will communicate a whole new level of unreliability to them.

[DongWon] Well, this kind of goes to one of the earlier points that Erin was making, which is any time you have a character proclaiming their worldview, there's something always unreliable about that. Because we… Our subjectivity inherently influences how we see the world. This is going to be a minor spoiler for N. K. Jemison's The 5th Season…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But there's a moment in the book where you realize that the narration is 2nd person, that you are being told the story by somebody. That, for me, was such a moment of like, "Oh, no. Everything is now unreliable." Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That subjectivity has been influencing the story this whole time…  For me, that was just like a thrilling moment because it just inherent… By shifting me into a character's perspective, suddenly the scope of the unreliability was infinite.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It was this entire story, this entire world…

[Mary Robinette] That was such a gut punch. I was actually thinking about the broadness that you're talking about with Ghosts, because Ghosts has 2 things going on. One is that she has been made unreliable narrator by someone removing her memories. But she also… Like, when she… When she takes… When they take Princess to the…

[DongWon] Memories

[Mary Robinette] To the memory…

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] The 2nd time, none of her plan is in that narration. Even though it's kind of clear to the audience, but your… It's… She's justifying why she's making these choices. It's such a broad, like, there's so much broadness there, I think.

[DongWon] Yeah. She shifts from accidental to deliberate…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Unreliable narrator in a way that is very fun, and it is such a heel turn in the best ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So…

[Erin] It's funny, too, that I think of… Thinking about her looking at Princess's memories, I think it was interesting, there's a little bit of a… Her questioning of Princess as to whether or not Princess is actually a reliable narrator of her own relationship with her father and what was happening before. So that, I think, is also one of the reasons I love playing with memory is that like memory is one of the least reliable narrators.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That we have, and yet it is the way that we experience the world and kind of go through things.

[DongWon] Yeah. The fact that Princess was a reliable narrator was the unforgivable crime. Right? The realization that someone was… Dared to tell the truth was unbearable.

[Mary Robinette] Dared to tell the truth and also all of the things that princess may not have understood about her…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Own situation.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… There are so many layers of unreliability in that story. And revelation.

 

[Erin] I have a question, speaking of sort of reveals, about characters with secrets. Which is something I do less of. I tend to do like unreliable on a broad scale. How do you make sure that a character holding a secret doesn't feel like they can no longer be trusted in any way versus just in this one way?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things for me… One of my pet peeves is holding the secret to long from the reader. So, with the… One of the ways that I build trust with my readers is that I will raise a question then answer a question, raise a question, answer a question, then raise a question and not answer the question. So, with this one, because I knew that she had two secrets, I went ahead and gave the answer to the first one within… The anorexia, within the first couple of chapters. I feed it to you a little bit slowly, and then I give the answer so that the… So at that point, you're like, "Oh, now I can trust the character because they have let me in on this one secret." But then all of the other secrets that she's holding, the other secrets, you're like, "Well, she must be being forthcoming with me now, because she was honest about this other thing."

[Erin] That's awesome.

[Howard] I would do the… You're familiar with the term save the cat. Early in a story, you have a character save the, and now we know, "Oh, this is a good person." All right. That trick works after you have revealed that someone was keeping a secret. You have them do the save the cat, and we're like, "Oh. This person is actually okay. They've done a good thing." Now, you may be mistrusting whether that cat was actually worth saving. Maybe it was a feral, rabid cat, and they're saving it in order to kill us all. I don't know. But you get the point here. You're trying to… You adjust that likability slider strongly. Crank that all the way up so that we're willing to trust them again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I may be jumping a little bit too far ahead, and also maybe too much of this is a personal taste thing, but I always want to caution writers about over-relying on the twist type reveal.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? So, two movies that are incredibly popular, so this may undermine my point, but The Sixth Sense and Old Boy, the Park Chan-wook movie, both rely on last-minute reveals. They completely recontextualize all the action that has happened up until that point. I, as an audience member, in both of those cases, even though there's other aspects of those movies that I could really admire and really like, felt almost betrayed by the narrator. Right? The narrator in this case wasn't a character, but it was the authorial voice of those movies. So I got mad at M. Night Shyamalan, the person, which was unfair. I don't hold a grudge against the man. He's fine. He makes good movies. But, like, there was an aspect of that that…

[Mary Robinette] Thou doth protest too much.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I'm trying to be nice.

[Howard] It's okay to be mad at him for the Avatar movies.

[DongWon] Sure. But… I mean… There's a way in which that twist can really undermine your audience's relationship to the text. Now, that can be done very, very well. Sometimes that twist will have that backward ripple effect. One example I think of is Neon Genesis Evangelion, which I re-watched recently. There's a late reveal of Asuka's character that makes you recontextualize why she is the way she is in a way that I think is beautifully done and makes a character that I find very annoying suddenly, for me, one of the most sympathetic characters in the show. So, anyways, I'm not getting into the spoilers of that. But there are ways to do it really, really well, and there are ways that… I think sometimes if you don't have enough time after to really settle back into the story, it can just leave you with the feeling of being uncomfortable and unsettled in a way that is unpleasant to me narratively.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have this personal theory that one of the reasons that that particular thing happens to early career writers is that they are themselves unreliable, in that they didn't know the answer to something. So they were just like, well, now it's a big secret that I'll reveal later. Then they keep going until he hit a point where they have to reveal it, and they are justifying themselves… To it, justifying that choice to themselves all along as, well, I'm doing it this way because I'm going to build tension and will have this big twist. Really, it's that they just don't know the answer and don't want to write those scenes.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] I don't think…

[Howard] You've read the first 3 years of Schlock Mercenary.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm not pointing fingers.

[Howard] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] Doth protest too much.

[Erin] I will say that I think a lot of it's also trusting yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As a writer. That without a gimmick, people will still want to read your stories.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] One of the things that I struggled with a lot in trying to write Wolfy Things is that… I tried to make some a of the, like, the relationship between him and the wolf, like, a lot more like a lot less clear. In the original version. Like, where it was a big twist at the end. I would give it to people and they're like, "That's fine. But, like, I really didn't need to be surprised by that." In some ways, not being s… Like, being able to have your own revelation as a reader earlier and then see that you understood the truth of things and it's still going to go horribly wrong was actually more fun then the feeling of like, "You got me," that happened that the end of the story.

[DongWon] This is a thing I've learned as a GM is that it has been way more fun just to tell my players stuff, just to be like, "Here's what's going on." Then they're like, "Oh, no. That's bad." Then they have to figure out what to do with that information. Then you can have more twists and reveals, but it's grounded in them knowing what's going on versus me trying to, like, surprise them with a big gotcha moment. I think that can be disorienting and unsatisfying for me as a storyteller and for them as the audience.

[Howard] We're recording in Utah. One of my favorite hikes here in Utah is to a place that we call First Falls up above Sundance. From the starting point of the hike, you can look up the hill into the cirque, up the mountain into the cirque you know that that's the ending, you know that that's your destination. As you walk, the scenery is beautiful. The plants, the bees, the bugs, the whatever else. There is this experience on the hike that is just wonderful. But the whole time you're hiking, the waterfall is now no longer visible. Then you come around the corner to it, and it's bigger and it's loud and it's wonderful. The whole voyage has been rewarding. It was not that last turn that made it worthwhile.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] That last turn…

[DongWon] It's a payoff, but [garbled]

[Howard] It is a payoff, but it was not the whole reason…

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] You took the trip.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I think, for me, the key is what emotion do you want the reader to have. Is it… Is that emotion, "Oh, that author is clever," or is the emotion, "Oh, the crippling dread…"?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, what emotion are you trying to have the reader…

[DongWon] Exactly.

 

[Erin] All right. Now, we have already been slightly unreliable about our 15 minutes long…

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, I am going to bring this together into my grand unified theory for 2 seconds, and then we will go to the homework. Which is to kind of think about how these 2 things intersect. I'll… We'll put a lovely graphic in the show notes so you can check it out. But thinking about what you want to do, I often think about how these 2 things come together. How intentional the narrator is in their unreliability or the author is in their unreliability, and how broad it is. So you've got your M. Night Shyamalan twist. That's when you're being broad. The entire nature of what you thought about this thing is wrong, and I'm going to tell you at the end intentionally. You've got something that's a secret. That's intentional and specific. I'm not going to tell you about this one aspect of me, but everything else is the way you think it is. There's what I call the memory hole, which is unintentional and specific. That's the I've repressed the memory of this time I killed that guy. You know?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The pages of my How to Host a Murder book are stuck together.

[Erin] Exactly. But everything else you did was actually accurate to the character, it was just those stuck pages. Then, lastly, the false belief, which is my favorite…

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] Which is when you're basically wrong about everything around you.

[DongWon] I have to say when Erin first showed me this chart, I then spent the next 10 minutes in a fugue state just categorizing everything I've ever read…

[Pain]

[DongWon] Into these categories. It is one of the most useful infographics I've seen about this topic.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[DongWon] Erin, you're very good at this.

[Erin] Thank you. With that, we will go to the homework.

 

[Howard] All right. Take an event that you are familiar with. Which probably means it has to be something that personally happened to you, and write about it as truthfully as possible. Then, write about it from the point of view of someone who knows the basics, but not the whole truth. Sort of the memory hole. For bonus points, tell the story a third time from the point of view of a lying liar with an agenda.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff that we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/06/17-6-hitting-reset-without-getting-hit-back/

 

Key points: How do you reset expectations, break old promises and make new ones, without breaking the trust of the audience? Deliver something different and amazing! Yes-and, keep the old promises and make new ones. No-but, break the old ones, but give them a different wonderful experience. Oh, crap. I broke it, and I don't know how to fix it. Dash through the red paint and hope no one notices. Telegraph the change as much as you can, and accept that you may lose some audience. Long-running shows often do a reset during season breaks. Give them a big moment of character change instead of the big climax they expected. And a Big Can of Worms for resetting your career... 

 

[Season 17, Episode 6]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] We are talking about resetting expectations. We are talking about breaking promises and then making new ones without actually betraying the trust of the audience. I'm trying to think of a good example of this. It's possible that the good example may be Million-Dollar Baby…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which breaks a promise to the audience, this is a sports movie, by giving us 1/3 act that shows that it's actually a drama about euthanasia, about… It's very dramatic and it's not very sports movie. As we pointed out when we mentioned it earlier, it's got a 90% fresh rating from critics and audiences over at Rotten Tomatoes. Maybe part of this is because it's 15 years old. But it won a lot of awards and it did great grossing in theaters. It was something which broke promises that audiences felt had been made to them, and then delivered something different, but delivered it so well that the majority of the audiences put up with it, they accepted it. They loved it, they came out of the theater… I don't want to say happy, but having experienced something amazing, which is what the filmmaker set out to do. So let's talk about that. What are some examples of things where you feel like the expectations have had to be reset and they did it well?

 

[Kaela] Well, I think that, personally, for me, there are two main movies that come to mind for this. One is Kung Fu Panda Two, which is one of my favorite movies ever, and How to Train Your Dragon, for different reasons, but both of them playing with expectations. I think Kung Fu Panda Two does multiple things with your expectations. For one, it kind of gives you an origin story again, except it's deeper, it's bigger, it's… You're like, "Whoa, I didn't think I was going to get this from a Kung Fu Panda franchise."

[Laughter]

[Kaela] So I think that's the other thing is, tonally, it's a lot harder, it's a lot… It's more explorative of pain, of destruction, of trauma, of working out issues like… Heavier themes than the first one. Like, the first one had a good heart still, but the second one just really dives in there in a way that you wouldn't have expected. But at the same time, I was not like, "Why is my fun movie sad?" when I watched it. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, they do a great job of acclimatizing you." They start out fun and everything too, but they do a good job of acclimatizing you to this is going to be a bit heavier of a movie. It's still going to be an amazing adventure, but it's going to be more emotionally in-depth than the first one without losing you. I don't know anybody who was lost with Kung Fu Panda Two. I think… I know most people just sat there stunned and in awe instead. Not disappointed.

[Howard] Yeah. I was kind of slack-jawed. I was, "Wait. How did they do that?" Usually, the origin story has to come first, and the two movie is a raising of stakes and a new adventure. But you managed to raise the stakes and give me a new adventure and give me an origin story and it's… Wow. It seems to defy… It seemed to defy the number two.

[Kaela] Yeah.

[Howard] Which was pretty cool. Meg?

 

[Megan] I actually have an example of something that did it badly, that raised my expectations and then turned it on its head.

[Howard] Okay.

[Megan] It's the anime Attack on Titan. Which is about humanity fighting to survive when they are constantly attacked by huge giants who are referred to as Titans. We have are very strong protagonist character who's going to get revenge on all the Titans and he's going to save the world. They kill him off, seven episodes in. I was like, "Amazing. I love this. Now his meek sidekick character is going to have to step into his shoes and become the new protagonist and…" No. Protagonist came back, magically, and with magic powers.

[Chuckles]

[Megan] And is so magical now. I was like, "Man. I mean, that's cooler now, but… I wish he'd died."

[Laughter]

[You want a ghost?]

[Howard] Why couldn't you stay dead?

 

[Howard] As I categorized these in our outline, I talk about yes-and, which is a raising of expectations, making new promises while keeping old ones. I feel like yes-and is the easiest expectation reset. Because really, all you're doing is raising the bar. It's not like you've broken promises. No-but is the next one, and that's the actual reset where you had to make promises by breaking earlier ones. Yes, I know I promised you a sports movie, but I'm going to give you an amazing cinematic experience that's going to touch your soul and you wouldn't have come out to the theater to watch this anyway, but it's important and, thank you, everybody, and I'll take my Oscar now. I may be projecting a little bit. The third category is what I call oh, crap. It's the one where I felt like I most often lived in Schlock Mercenary, which is the discovery that you've broken a promise but only after it's too late to fix things. I foreshadowed something and got the technology wrong. Oh, crap. Oh, I can't actually make that work, what do I do instead? So in these three categories, what are our strategies?

[Sandra] I remember watching… Oh, it was decades ago, the making of Indiana Jones. A documentary. So it was like one hour long, the making of show. Listening to Steven Spielberg talk about how when they're writing the scripts, they would actually literally paint themselves into a corner. The opening sequence, Indiana Jones has just run from the boulder, tumbled out, and now he is standing trapped, facing a circle of spears, and there is literally no way to get out. Spielberg basically says, "Well, what you do when you've painted yourself into a corner is quickly duck and dash your way through the red paint and hope that nobody notices the footprints."

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Which is pretty much what that movie does. There may be better tools for this, but honestly, I think of like the Pirates of the Caribbean, I think it's 5, that begins with we're dragging an entire building through the middle of town using a horse-drawn cart.

[Howard] Yes.

[Sandra] It is absolutely completely and totally ridiculous, but basically what it's saying is, "This is the movie you're getting. If you're not on board, just go ahead and leave the theater now." So if you have to reset, any time you have to reset expectations, you're going to lose some audience, you're going to shed some audience who don't make the turn with you. That's just normal and expected. If you need to make the turn, make the turn anyway. Telegraph it is much as you can, so that people are ready for that moment. Okay, we all need to lean to the right. Lean to the right so we can make this turn, and… Now the wheels are back on the ground and we can keep going.

[Howard] There were a lot of turns in that scene where they were dragging the…

[Sandra] The whole building.

[Howard] The bank through the village, and, as I recall, they lost all of the money.

[Sandra] They lost the entire building.

[Howard] In the course of doing that. Yeah. Nice. Good choice of scenes. Nice metaphor. Well played. Bravo.

 

[Megan] There's something, especially in long-running television series, where, in between seasons, they will reset. So it's always sad sometimes when they come back into a season and these characters are now gone, and, oh, no, the set where they spent all their time, that's different now, they're going to spend all their time here instead. Sometimes writers rooms will literally just reset the world and which characters we have and we just never mention it.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Yeah. That becomes part of the expectation of watching a long-running show. You just kind of know that there's going to be a reset. A…

[Howard] Sorry. Let me interrupt you there. That's the experience of someone who has watched lots of long-running shows.

[Sandra] Right.

[Howard] There are plenty of people who watch a long-running show for the first time and as those things happen, they're like, "No!"

[Yeah]

[Howard] No. Because they feel like they've been betrayed.

[Sandra] An excellent reset to examine is the movie Serenity versus the TV show Firefly. Because you have this TV show that only ran for a very short time and then was canceled. Then you have this gap of time. Then they make a movie. In order to… Which is actually a jump in media. It's… A movie is a different medium than a TV show. Which meant that there are different expectations, different language you can use, and in order to make that shift, they had to do some reset. The one that I… That jarred me the most, was that by the end of the run of the show, the doctor character had kind of become reconciled with the captain character as we're a family. When they start the movie, there's a lot more friction between them and it's more like the beginning of the show than the end of the show. They had to do that reset in order to give the proper arcs to the movie, because the movie had to be able to stand alone as well. So, it jarred me, as a watcher of the show, but once I was like, "Eh," it was not so jarring that I was knocked out and walked away. I was like, "Eh, I don't like that, but… Okay. Take me along for this ride." So…

 

[Megan] As an example for the no-but resetting expectations, Avatar the Last Airbender did that to me in, like, the third season. Like, the day of black sun. Because they really built up to it. I was watching this is a kid at the time, about 13-ish. I was like, "It's finally happening." We've had seasons building up to this day, they really built up to it in those moments, too, where they're like, "We're really… This is the day we lay siege on the Fire Nation." It's the eclipse that we risked all our lives to find information about in the previous seasons. This is it. It's a two-parter, and everything, so I was like, "Oh, this is finally going down. We're going to take down the Fire Nation." And it doesn't. It does not pan out. They fail the invasion. Because they already knew and were already ready and just gone. They're shocked and terrified, and I was too. I was like, "What?" But what they did was a great job in that, because otherwise it could of felt like really deflative, where you're like, "Well, great. Okay, but what did we spend all this time for, then?" But what they give you is a bunch of other things that you really wanted and needed, like, most particularly, the Zuko storyline carries out the days of black sun two parts. Having Zuko come in and that's the moment where he decides to defect from the Fire Nation and healthy avatars make his new plan to take down his dad. Like, that ends up making the story worthwhile. So, no, I didn't get like the big climax that I was really prepared for, but I got Zuko's storyline intersecting finally and his big moment of character change.

[Howard] You can argue that we set out to defeat the Fire Nation, and we got the victory we didn't expect, which was turning Zuko.

[Megan] Yeah.

[Howard] So, you can make the argument that you actually fulfilled the promise. I think that's part of how you make no-but work is that you take the new thing that you hand them and say, "By the way, this actually fulfills all of your other expectations." Trust… I'm just going to paint it red so that it looks like what you were…

[Giggles]

[Howard] Yeah. [Garbled a neat] trick.

 

[Howard] We need to have a book of the week. Or a thing of the week. I think Meg's got it.

[Megan] I have a thing of the week that also ties up a lot of the things that we've been talking about in all of the other episodes. This is a Korean drama that I originally watched on WB's drama streaming service, which no longer exists. But you can purchase the show on DVD which I have. The show is called Circle: The Two Worlds or Circle: the Connected Worlds depending on your translation. But every episode is two completely different stories. The first half of the episode takes place in 2017, the other half takes place in the far future. The 2017 story is about these twin brothers who are going to university and there's some strange things going on and they're investigating it. It's a smaller story about brothers investigating a mystery. The future story is high sci-fi, and there's this town where you can only live if there's a chip implanted in your brain that regulates your emotions and there's no pain and no fear and there's no crime. It's about a police detective who is trying to investigate an alleged murder that's happened inside the perfect city. But the guards won't let him in. But it turns out he has a second motive to get in there. He believes there's evidence about two twin brothers who disappeared back in 2017. It's these two completely different stories, completely different genres, and you've got expectations set up for how these kinds of stories work. It's slowly about how these two storylines tie back into each other and influence each other. Circle: the Connected Worlds.

[Sounds cool]

[Howard] That sounds really cool, and I wish I had it on a streaming service right now.

[Megan] Howard, I have my DVDs here in Utah. They could end up at your house on accident or purpose at some point in time.

[Whew!]

[Howard] Well, see now you're making all of our listeners terribly, terribly jealous…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which just doesn't seem like a fair thing to do.

 

[Howard] Early on in Schlock Mercenary, I was writing… I mean, the design principles for Schlock Mercenary were I am not making fun of science fiction in my science fiction comic, the comedy will come from other things. But it was very newspaper humor, dad joke type stuff. Would have fit right in in the age of people collecting newspapers. But this was a web comic. About two years in, the Teraport wars begin, and the stories begin getting bigger. Brandon Sanderson wrote the introduction for book 2, The Teraport Wars, and said, "This is the book where Schlock Mercenary figures out what it wants to be when it grows up."

[Accurate]

[Howard] It very much… This was not a thing that I did consciously. It certainly wasn't a thing I did expertly. But it was a thing I did. I had an existing audience, an existing brand, and I decided to take them from a quick episodic fast beats sort of story to a much larger form story. I got lucky in that I guess the audience was so small to begin with that when it grew, we didn't notice that we lost anybody. But this was definitely a case of something which at the time I began creating it was one thing, and at the time I finished it was very much something else. Even though you still have this blob character and mercenaries running through the core of it.

[Sandra] You had an assist from the fact that web comics are expected to evolve. So there is a genre expectation that there will be evolution which totally assisted in the redirect, which [garbled can be…]

[Howard] Yeah. That is the… That is what we called the low expectations of audiences watching amateurs.

[There's that. Anyway…]

[Howard] Good times. Wow. Are we really already 19 minutes in? What else can we say? I had a… We just need to can of worms this part. The whole career level can of worms of how do you rebrand yourself after spending 20 years as a cartoonist. Whatever I go do next, how do I keep the promises of my old brand…

[That's]

[Howard] Or break them in such a way…

[Another can of worms]

[Howard] I don't know.

[I think we just need to…]

[Howard] That's an old can of worms.

[Garbled]

[slap a lid on that, and say, whoops, can't cover it.]

[Howard] Whoops. Sorry. That's another eight part thing.

 

[Howard] Okay. We ready for homework?

[Homework. You are giving us the homework this time.]

[Howard] Okay, I am. In the first episode, I talked about how this intensive was expectations and promises, and how I didn't call it Eight Expectations because that would have forced me to drill down and to configure the content in such a way that there were eight discrete elements covered across seven episodes plus a… It was a headache. Your homework is to fulfill the promise that I decided not to make because I would have broken it. Call this intensive, call this discussion we've had over these last eight episodes, Eight Expectations. For you, for your toolbox, write down eight different categories in which promises and expectations can be used as structural elements, as troubleshooting elements, as critical elements, as career elements. Laying over all of the other tools that you use, that we all use, when we write, when we create. So there's your homework. Write the thing that I was either not smart enough or into much of a hurry to write, the course outline for Eight Expectations. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.