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[SPEAKER_02]: Season 21, Episode 3
[SPEAKER_02]: This is writing excuses.
[SPEAKER_02]: Geconstructing plots.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Mary Rebenett.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Don Lawn.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Erin.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we are going to be talking about the other big thread that we're going to be running through the whole year.
[SPEAKER_02]: So deconstructing plots.
[SPEAKER_02]: What does that even mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this thing that you'll see with food where they're like, this is a deconstructed peanut butter sandwich for they get into like what the essence of things are.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I've been thinking a lot about like what the salt fat acid heat of
[SPEAKER_02]: And what we're going to be doing this year is we are going to be digging into a bunch of different plot structures, looking at why they work, and then looking at the individual components of things that go into story.
[SPEAKER_02]: So because I mean there are so many plot structures out there, but you know flashing back to our lower metaphors, they're just recipes.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what are the underlying principles that they all have in common that lead us to things like the inciting incident or the dark night of the soul?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like what are those things?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm really excited for this season and as soon as you pitch it I was like very in on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm in on it for a contrary reason because
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't really believe in plot structure and so, you know, I think there's a thing about doing this podcast and about teaching, which is whenever I am asked to teach a class or we're talking about the seasons, I love doing it about something I don't really understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: which is contrary because like if I'm going to teach it I should probably know about it but sometimes the act of digging into teaching it gets my head around it in a way that I hadn't before so when you were talking about like let's deconstruct plots I was like hell yes let's go because I it's a thing that I don't feel like I have a really great handle on right like
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, I can tell when the story is slow.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can tell when the story structure isn't hitting in all these different ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: But for me, I always rounded up to, oh, plot to sense with character.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's like my one rule about plot is that plot to sense with character.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not helpful in 90% of situations where we need to talk about plot.
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyways, this is just me saying, hey, I'm going to be the audience or I get here being like, what do we mean?
[SPEAKER_01]: What does that mean?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then be, I'm just excited, really excited to dig into this.
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm really similar, actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we can fight over who can be the audience, sorry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I like plot, I mean, it's there, it's in a story.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's obviously important.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, but I think it is, it is interesting and that I really,
[SPEAKER_00]: I, I think over index away from pride.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thinking back to my sort of soap opera roots, like soap operas are such like a, they're on every day.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there are days in which like nothing really happens except a few, maybe there's a conversation and somebody looks good in a dress and then there are days in which everyone gets slapped, which are fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: But knowing how to link from one of those events to the next, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I sort of feel like to go back to a different metaphor, not my in fashion.
[SPEAKER_00]: I sometimes feel this way about clothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I can say this thing looks good at the Met Gala, and this one does not to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you ask me why, and then you ask somebody who actually understands clothes, why.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like they would be like, oh, it's this cut.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's this line.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's that long speech from,
[SPEAKER_00]: That was brought out where the character like who's it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Mariel Streets are really in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, she's playing like all the things that go into you deciding to wear this blue top.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't understand a lot of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And instead I'm working on instinct, which is great when you're just wanted to say which one looks better.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're home trying to figure out what how to dress yourself and you don't understand me the underlying principles, you might be like, oh, this look good on this person, but not on me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't understand why I just have to keep trying.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and especially if you are early in your career and you don't trust your own taste and then you are second guessing yourself all the time before you go out the door to a part yeah and so I I started off when I was writing I know people have heard me say this before that I understood character like that that was a thing from theater that I understood.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I would write really good stories that had a really good beginning, a really good middle, and a really good end to three completely different stories that just happened at the same set of characters.
[SPEAKER_02]: So structure and plot was the thing that I really focused on.
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the mistakes that I made, I think early on, was that I thought plot was just about the action, the things that happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: And plot isn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, you know, when you say plot descends from character, Rebecca Roenhorst describes this as, there's an action plot and there's
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, which is really interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: So she thinks that when the failure mode of an action plot is some of the sometimes you'll see this in science fiction early career stuff where there's so many things happening, but you don't understand why any of it's importantly.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they've focused on the action too much and they've forgotten the emotion and the failure mode of the emotion plot you'll see in some literary fiction where they've focused so much on the emotion that like nothing happens.
[SPEAKER_02]: So both of those things are important but you're right how do we do these things?
[SPEAKER_02]: The thing for me is something I always go back to which is that I do just want to write on instinct.
[SPEAKER_02]: I do just want to do the art of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: but the idea that technique exists for when the art isn't there and so I don't think that people need to be thinking about these things all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: The reason we keep saying tools not rules is that it's nice to have a toolbox and you know you can like I can improvise a meal in a kitchen but I didn't start off improvising a meal, started off following recipes.
[SPEAKER_02]: When I started writing, I didn't start up improvising a plot structure.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like some of my early structures, if you look at it, like my first sale is repunzel.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know?
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's like hitting those beats.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there's a lot of things where I borrowed someone else's plot structure.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and I think that we do that when it's like, oh, I love this thing that so and so wrote and I want to write a book like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, yeah, you want to you want to copy their recipe, which is like, there's nothing wrong with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can improvise around that.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can add your own details and flourishes.
[SPEAKER_02]: This isn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey, everybody.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything should be original and new.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, I think there are, I think there are actually things.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I love about the way you're talking about plot is it's like I was maybe I like plot more than I think because I often think about arcs and through loans in a piece which like if that is just also when you talk about an emotion plot I'm like oh I'm often thinking about what's the emotional through line or what's like the knowledge through line like when who knows what when and why and how does it affect them but I never think of that as plot I think because I often associate
[SPEAKER_00]: plot as being rules not tools, like I often think of as plot as like you must do these six things in this exact order or else you have broken everything and I hate that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I think one thing that come, I think about a lot of time when those, you know, the rules of plot is those are very culturally defined too, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I'm someone who, you know, certainly when it comes to my taste in movies, I'm notorious for liking these slowest,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, like when you were talking about like that it's a failure of, you know, the action plot, if they focus too much in the motion though, and I just thought immediately like three of my favorite films that I would describe is literally nothing happens in this movie and man cleans bathrooms for two hours and then I'm crying and I'm like this is a perfect movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: But also that movie is made by a Western director, but is about a Japanese man, takes place in Japan, and is using non-Western plot structures, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so to say that it is plotless is only from a perspective of a Western audience member, who's expecting heroes journey, who's expecting certain kinds of beats and structures.
[SPEAKER_01]: And instead, what I'm being fed is a really different structure.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I watch, one car, why, when I watch, you know, Korean cinema, these kind of things are pulling from very different rhythms.
[SPEAKER_02]: like there's this this rule that a story must have a character with a problem and and I and there's content that a story must have conflict and I I push against that so hard because I one of my favorite stories and I think one of the like the perfect stories out there is Ray Bradbury's there will come soft rain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's like, where it's show me the character with a problem and the action like there's there's not you can you can make an argument for you know for the house, but really no.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the beginning of the house the story the house is sad and lonely end of the story the house is sad and lonely nothing changes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: A character does not have to undergo change, Sherlock Holmes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Doesn't undergo change.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, but those stories are still engaging, and I think that there are reasons that they're still engaging, like what draws us in, and so the thing for me when you were talking, Aaron, about to through lines and arcs, the thing that I've been thinking about is, well, what pulls us through a story, and we talk about a hook, and you have different hooks to attract, I'm going to actually
[SPEAKER_02]: for readers for listeners.
[SPEAKER_02]: I previously confessed that I had for years thought that it was talking about a shepherd's hook instead of pushing the hook to move the sheep around.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when you're fishing, you've got to hook, you've got different lures on that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And different lures depending on what you're trying to catch, depending on what your intentions are.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think
[SPEAKER_02]: And when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the kinds of areas we're going to be poking at for the rest of the season.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, welcome back.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what are some things that you can look forward to?
[SPEAKER_02]: Are we going to be talking about beginnings?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, we look at the other two, and they're like, I haven't looked at the other one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you want us to know the structure of this, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we just said we're not structure people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, but we through line.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but I think like one of the the few things that that stories have in common is beginning middle end.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, if for no other reason, then you start reading it and then you stop reading it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So looking at what are some things that are consistent when you're looking at all of these different structures?
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to be looking at middles, like people talk about the saggy middle, what are all the things?
[SPEAKER_02]: Most of the story actually happens in the middle.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's most of the book, yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's not the part that everyone remembers, usually, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So what's actually happening there?
[SPEAKER_01]: What makes it effective?
[SPEAKER_01]: And how do you keep people moving through it?
[SPEAKER_01]: These are all really, really important questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, I assume the ending at some point we will definitely talk about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how does it land.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny, like how much an ending can like taint or make a story.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think about weirdly two endings that I really love that other people did not like, which are the ending of Lost and the ending of Mass Effect Three.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which like the only person in history.
[SPEAKER_01]: Both of these are like her radical taste.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't add me, but my caticle one is I really love the ending of sunshine, you know, this Danny Boyle movie that everyone loves the first half and hates second half.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I like, I don't know, I think the whole thing works.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but it's interesting thing about like, why do those things work?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, me lost works because the ending is an emotional ending.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I cared more about the emotional content than the solving puzzles content of that particular piece.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it hit me in the heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't hit me in the head.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: And for I can't remember why I liked Mass Effect 3, but I remember being like people are very mad But I like these people who are too mad.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is still insane to say that you liked that ending But I don't need to come down But I do think it's really interesting to think about like how do we do that because what's unfortunate I think about the reason I picked those examples Are there two things where people never talk about the rest of it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And even they only talk about the ending And so if people are going to overindex on the ending, what does that mean that you have to do as a writer in order to not have them only be talking about?
[SPEAKER_00]: totally.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: And also the fact that they I think one of the reasons that people are mad about both of those is that they broke a rule.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so deciding when you're going to break it.
[SPEAKER_02]: We do talk about tools not rules, but the fact is that people have expectations and a lot of these
[SPEAKER_02]: these rules arose because someone reverse engineered something that they did by accident.
[SPEAKER_02]: Other people were like, oh, that's the way it should always be.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then an audience will over index on, well, that's the way it must be.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the other reason is that when you do that reverse engineering, when you figure out, well, what did I do?
[SPEAKER_02]: How did I get to this point?
[SPEAKER_02]: That a lot of times it is because it created a specific effect.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if your audience, if you've used all the tools at the beginning to set up one effect, and it's like this is the effect I'm going to give you, and then they are disappointed in that, that's where the disconnect happens.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think we've talked last season a little bit when Erin was talking about the chapter that's going in our craft book now go right about breaking rules.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like if you, I think it's like if you understand the effect of this thing, then you can decide how you're going to use it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's signaling that you've meant to break that rule.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's important, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think about another famously quote unquote bad ending that I adore, which is Neon Genesis, Ivan Kelly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then ending is completely bonkers.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love it because it closed in the motion arc like lost for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it also is that way because they ran out of money in time, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they weren't able to signal when we're doing this on purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because frankly, they weren't doing it on purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they did something incredible that works.
[SPEAKER_01]: But
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, it is the hand holding component.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the we are, hey, we know we're breaking a rule.
[SPEAKER_01]: We know you expected X.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to give you why trust us and go with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when that doesn't happen, I think that's when it feels like a mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I actually think that's why it's so important to actually learn more.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really excited to learn more about the cloud structures because what you don't want to have happen is everyone is aware whether intentionally or unintentionally of a particular plot thing that you are doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you don't know that that's what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you break away from it without signaling like somebody who goes across eight lanes of highway without signaling.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're like, oh my gosh, now you've caused an accident.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is happening?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to know what those rules are
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's actually, in some cases, less about signaling and understanding the ripple effects of the decision you made.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and sort of building on that, it's when we say rules, there's not a committee sitting somewhere that's being like, here are the rules of fiction.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you follow them, you'll be fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Humans are creatures of pattern recognition, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: All storytelling is this pattern recognition.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're seeing the same rhythms.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have the same expectations of like, oh, here's what happens in a story, because of all the other ones we've experienced, all the other ones that we've observed, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when we talk about different story structures, when we talk about different expectations, whether that's, you know, three act structures, seven point plots structure, you know, non-Western structures, all these different things,
[SPEAKER_01]: that is because over time people had developed certain expectations by observing certain patterns over and over again.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you are breaking with that expectation, when you're breaking that pattern, knowing what other patterns there are in moving from pattern A to pattern B or just even inverting the pattern on purpose becomes really important so that you're not just
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me give you a really concrete example of this kind of thing, which is the Rule of Three.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you hear it all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Three times as funny, three times as bad things come in three.
[SPEAKER_02]: Good things come in three.
[SPEAKER_02]: Three things as three times as funny.
[SPEAKER_02]: All of those are this expectation and Western culture that it's going to be one, two, three got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: In some of the cultures, it's Rule of Five, Rule of Seven.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's one that's Rule of 11, where I'm like, whoa, there's a long evening's.
[SPEAKER_02]: But, but once you know that the audience is expecting this done, done, done, done, got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you've been watching media and it's like, this is very predictable, it's probably because they've been doing Rule of Three every time.
[SPEAKER_02]: and so you can manipulate that.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you want something to feel harder for a character, then you can go to a rule of four or five.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have to put in four or five efforts.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you want it to be easier, you can do a rule of one or two.
[SPEAKER_02]: you can even have the character go into it, expecting it to be hard, get it on the first try, and have them be like, oh my goodness, you know, that there's this big cathartic release that they were not expecting.
[SPEAKER_02]: The reader wasn't expecting it because they're expecting this build up to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you know that, then you go in and you consciously break the rule of three for the effect because you know what the audience expectations are.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the kind of thing where I'm like, you don't have to signal it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you just have to know what the ripple effects are.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can set up the pattern and then break it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, when I love about when you mention them all is that.
[SPEAKER_00]: while there are maybe some that don't fit into this, it's very odd numbers.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I actually think the desire for things to be an odd numbers is like a human brain thing that goes across cultures.
[SPEAKER_00]: But some go five, some go seven, some go nine, but it's rare to have like six for some reason, like I don't know why our brains are like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I think is interesting is like just knowing that, like there's a discomfort in things ending in an even way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the fourth one was the one that you ended up with,
[SPEAKER_00]: maybe something is wrong about this can make you like if if in fact you wanted to secretly be the fifth the fourth seems right but in fact something is wrong there yeah you can actually like when you understand these patterns it's like you can subconsciously create things going on that even the reader like won't understand why it feels off but it just does
[SPEAKER_01]: You can deliberately un-saddle.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can make things feel unfinished, like the cord doesn't resolve.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, if you're telling a horror story, if you're telling something psychologically upsetting, yeah, make it four.
[SPEAKER_01]: Four feels bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why, but it doesn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's death.
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is the kind of thing that we're going to be talking about this season.
[SPEAKER_02]: In addition to that, what we are also going to be doing is we are going to be taking plot structures like the 3x structure, the heroes journey, the heroine's journey, the 4x structure.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to be looking at a bunch of different, very specific plot structures and taking them apart and going, well, why does this work?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why do we have to have that thing here?
[SPEAKER_02]: so those are the things that we're going to be doing this season.
[SPEAKER_02]: So for your homework, what I want you to do is I want you to grab something that you like and I want you to kind of look at it and do we've talked about doing reverse engineer of outlines before?
[SPEAKER_02]: I want you to do that with this but in a kind of very gentle way.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want you to go through and say,
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, good thing happened, bad thing happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: As the overall takeaway from the scene, and it looked to see if there's a pattern that you did not realize was in that work.
[SPEAKER_02]: This has been writing excuses.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're out of excuses.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now go right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends.
[SPEAKER_02]: Your hosts for this episode were a Mary Robinet co-wall, Dom on Song, and Erin Roberts.
[SPEAKER_02]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
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