In this week’s episode, we consider how the Nintendo Switch does the simple things well, and examine how writers can likewise do the simple things well to write excellent books.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 223 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 18th, 2024 and today we are discussing five lessons for writers from the Nintendo Switch, of all things. Don’t worry, the analogy will make sense later in the show. Before we get into that, let’s have an update on my current writing projects.
I am pleased to report that Ghost in the Tombs is completely done and is currently publishing on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. The links are already live on some of those stores. This episode should go out on the same day as my newsletter, so by the time this episode goes out, the book should be available at all ebook stores. If you are subscribed to my newsletter, you will also get a free ebook copy of the short story Ghost Tablet. So that is one of the many excellent reasons it is a good idea to subscribe to my newsletter. You can find the details how to do that on my website right at the top. My next main project now that Ghost in the Tombs is out will be Cloak of Illusion, the 12th Cloak Mage book. I am 31,000 words into that. I’m hoping to have that out before the end of November, if all goes well. After that, I am 11,000 words into Orc Hoard and hopefully that will be out in December, if all goes well.
As I mentioned earlier, the audiobook of Shield of Darkness is out, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. You can get that at Audible, Apple, Google Play, and all the usual audiobook stores. We are also working on Shield of Conquest right now, and that is being recorded as we speak. Hollis McCarthy is also recording Cloak of Spears and that should hopefully be out before the end of the year, if all goes well. This week, we’re not doing Question of the Week because all my time was going to finishing Ghost in the Tombs, but we will be doing another Question of the Week next week, so watch for that on my website and social media.
00:01:54 Main Topic: 5 Lessons Writers Can Learn from the Switch
Now let’s go to our main topic for the week, five lessons that writers can learn from the Nintendo Switch. So what can writers learn from the Nintendo Switch? A common complaint I sometimes see among newer writers is that all the stories have been told already, and that there are no truly original stories. Why try writing a mystery novel? Haven’t they all been told? Why try writing a romance novel? How many different ways are there for a woman to meet a man and fall in love? Why attempt to write an epic fantasy when there’s already Lord of the Rings and Mistborn and Shannara? Haven’t all the stories already been told? That is a fair question, but it misunderstands the nature of stories. It’s as profound a misunderstanding as saying that just because you’ve eaten one cheeseburger in your life, there is no need to ever have another or saying that since Pizza Hut makes pizzas, there is no need for anyone else to ever open a pizza restaurant or even to sell frozen pizzas.
To dispel this misapprehension, let us turn to the Nintendo Switch. It is not unfair to say that the Switch is one of the most popular game consoles in the world and is likely Nintendo’s second best-selling device of all time. The Switch is also significantly less powerful than its chief competitors, the various Xbox and PlayStation models offered by Microsoft and Sony. For that matter, the Switch has only received moderate updates in the seven years it has been on the market. Its internal components are basically those of a decent smartphone from 2017, yet despite that, the Switch has significantly outsold both the Xbox and the PlayStation over the last seven years. It was a remarkable reversal of fortune for Nintendo. The Switch’s predecessor, the Wii U, did so badly that the CEO of Nintendo at the time took a 50% pay cut to help avoid layoffs. One thinks American CEOs could stand to learn from this example, but that’s a different topic. So to go from that to the best-selling console of the last seven years is quite a swing of fate’s pendulum.
So let us then ask the obvious question: why did the Switch do better than its competitors, especially when it was so relatively underpowered compared to them in terms of hardware? The answer is simple. The Switch did the basics, but it did the basics exceptionally well and doing the basic simple things exceptionally well is often much harder than people imagine. The Switch doesn’t have a lot of the more advanced features from the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation ecosystems, but it doesn’t really need them. The Switch is easily portable. It has a strong library of first-party titles. The loading speed isn’t great, but it’s adequate. It has Switch Online for all the old Nintendo classics. You can play it handheld or docked. It’s popular enough that developers want to bring their games to the console whenever possible, including some that some that were very technically difficult, like Skyrim or The Witcher 3.
All that sounds simple, but it’s much harder to do than it sounds, and the basics done well are always a good thing, regardless of the field. In fact, that is traditionally part of Nintendo’s design philosophy. Nintendo has a thing they call “withered technology” (another translation from the Japanese would be “lateral thinking with seasoned technology”), which means rather than trying to use cutting edge technology, they use tried and true older technology and think about developing unique experiences with it. In other words, they used well established basic technology to build the Switch (which wasn’t exactly cutting edge even in 2017) and then just tried to use that established technology well.
So how does this apply to storytelling and writing? This is, after all, a writing podcast and not a video game podcast (even if I do talk about video games a fair bit). The same approach taken to writing can work out quite well. Don’t try to be excessively fancy or flashy. Focus on the simple things and do them as well as you can, and that will probably work out better than trying to be flashy or creative in a way that only ends up being off putting to the reader.
So when it comes to writing fiction, what are the simple things that you can do well? What is the “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” you can employ with writing a novel? I think there are five lessons we can take here.
#1: Understand the genre you are writing in and try to hit the appropriate tropes for that genre. A lot of writers when they are first starting out try to do too much, like a fantasy author tries to write a 12 volume epic fantasy series as their first writing attempt, or someone tries to fuse a bunch of genres and write a book that is simultaneously romance, a magical realism coming of age story, and somehow also a memoir. If you can’t clearly state the genre of your book, you’re going to have a hard time selling it. You might also have a hard time even finishing it.
What do I mean by the appropriate tropes for the genre? That’s just a way of saying that the storytelling conventions that readers come to expect in specific genres. For example, in a happily ever after clean romance, the readers will expect no explicit scenes and that the heroine and the love interest will end up together by the end of the book. Romance tends to have a lot of very specific subgenres, but the rule holds for many other genres as well. Epic fantasy readers typically expect a quest, some journeying, and a band of arguing adventures. Mystery readers expect a mystery with an actual solution at the end. Thriller readers look forward to some well executed fight scenes in a secret government building.
Some writers dislike the idea of writing to genre tropes but think of it this way: If you go to an Italian restaurant and order spaghetti carbonara, but the waiter instead brings out a steak burrito bowl with a side of French toast sticks and maple syrup, you’re going to be disappointed. Are there people who would enjoy a lunch of a burrito bowl and French toast sticks? Almost certainly, but you ordered spaghetti carbonara. The vast majority of people who go to an Italian restaurant are going to expect Italian food. The same thing applies to genres. If you buy a mystery book, you will expect a mystery novel and not an experimental cross genre thing. If you dislike writing to genre tropes, remember that readers only dislike tropes written to genre conventions if it’s done badly, but if you do it well, they appreciate it and that could be one of the simple things that you focus on doing well.
#2: A protagonist with relatable problems. Another important basic in genre fiction is the protagonist with problems that the reader can find compelling. There’s an endless tedious discussion about whether or not the protagonist should be likable or not, and frankly, it often degenerates into the standard Internet discussion about gender politics, whether or not a female protagonist has to be likable when a male one does not. But in my opinion, that discussion completely misses the point. What makes a character relatable, or more accurately sympathetic to the reader, is the character experiencing a conflict or some sort of emotional pain that allows the reader to sympathize with them. Whether their character is likable is less important than sympathy.
Let’s take two examples from recent television, specifically Disney properties. The characters of Syril Karn and Dedra Meero from the Star Wars show Andor are unlikable but sympathetic characters, while Jennifer Walters from She Hulk is both unlikable and unsympathetic. The difference between them is instructive for writers. Syril Karn and Dedra Meero are both essentially unlikable villains. Karn is a wannabe mall cop with puffed up delusions of his own importance and Meero is working for the Empire’s sinister secret police as a mid-level officer. Yet Karn’s circumstances make him emotionally sympathetic. He is stuck in a dead-end job and living with his cruel mother. Meero is trying to do the best job she can in the secret police and is fighting against her obstinate and clueless colleagues within a cumbersome bureaucracy, something many office workers can sympathize with. Indeed, it’s clever how the show sets her up as a strong woman making headway in the male dominated secret police, only to yank away the sympathy when she brutally tortures one of the show’s protagonists.
By contrast, Jennifer Walters is both unlikable and unsympathetic. She’s a rich lawyer who has rich lawyer problems, which is generally not sympathetic to most people. Indeed, she strongly establishes herself as unlikable in the first episode when she lectures Bruce Banner (who in past movies tried to kill himself in despair, was hunted by the US government, held as an enslaved gladiator for two years, brutally beaten by Thanos, and fried his right arm with the Infinity Gauntlet) about how much harder her life has been than his, which is objectively not true.
As we mentioned with Karn and Meero, it’s very possible for unlikable characters to be sympathetic, but Jennifer Walters is so unsympathetic that the best episodes of She Hulk were the ones where she becomes the unsympathetic comedy protagonist like David Brent from the UK Office or Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers and she suffers the comedic results of her own bad decisions.
What’s really compelling is when you have a likeable character who has a sympathetic problem. As an added bonus, it’s usually easier to write a likeable character with a sympathetic problem. Striking the balance between an unlikable character with a sympathetic problem is often a challenge for even experienced writers. But if the reader likes your protagonist and the protagonist’s problem inspires emotional sympathy in the reader, then that’s half the battle. What is the other half of the battle lesson?
#3: A strong conflict. I’ve said on the podcast many times before that conflict is central to storytelling. If you have a sympathetic protagonist who has a serious conflict, you’ve got yourself the potential for a strong book. Another way of saying conflict is “the problem the protagonist must solve, face, overcome.” If the protagonist doesn’t have a problem, he or she might as well sit at home playing well, Nintendo Switch.
Fortunately, it is easy to think of a suitable conflict for your story, because in Real Life, the potential causes of conflict are sadly infinite, and you can easily apply that to fiction. Like if you write epic fantasy, you could have the conflict be the quest to stop the Dark Lord, or if you write sci-fi, it could be defeating the invasion of the space bugs. Mysteries have a conflict built in for the genre. Solving the crime, finding a missing person, etc. Thrillers tend to be all about violent conflict, but conflicts don’t have to be violent or even high stakes to be emotionally significant. It could be a conflict with a rival at work, or not even involve a person at all, like trying to survive the aftermath of a natural disaster. It boils down to that the protagonist must have a conflict and the protagonist must take some sort of action to resolve that conflict. Stories where this doesn’t happen tend to become boring quite quickly.
#4: A satisfactory ending. The ending is really, really important. You know how a joke isn’t funny if it doesn’t have a good punchline? A story with a bad ending, unfortunately, almost always turns out to be a bad story that leaves an unpleasant taste in a reader’s mouth. What makes for a good ending? The story’s central conflict has to be resolved in a satisfactory way, in a way that generates emotional catharsis. In fantasy, the quest needs to be achieved. In science fiction, the space bugs need to be defeated. In mystery, the killer has to be caught or the mystery resolved in a satisfactory way. In romance, the heroine needs to end up with her love interest. Bad endings are ones that don’t resolve the conflict or resolve the conflict in a way that feels like cheating to the reader. This can include the protagonist solving the conflict through no effort or struggle or a Deus Ex Machina style ending where the conflict is solved simply because the author wants to hurry up and finish the book. Granted, this doesn’t mean that a good ending is a happy one. The Lord of the Rings had a famously bittersweet ending. Sauron is defeated and the One Ring destroyed, but the Elves leave Middle Earth forever, and Frodo is too wounded to return to his homeland, instead choosing to accompany the Elves into the West.
There are many other examples. The mystery could have the detective solving the crime, but at the cost of his career and his marriage. The protagonist of a military science fiction story could win the battle but be the only surviving member of his squad. The ending must resolve the conflict in an emotionally satisfying manner that doesn’t leave the reader feeling cheated.
#5: The fifth simple thing you can do: write clear prose. Writing clear prose that unambiguously conveys your meaning is one of the vital basics for storytelling, and this is harder than it seems. An anecdote from this topic about this topic: back in 2023, Wired magazine ran a hit piece on fantasy author Brandon Sanderson about his Kickstarter. One of the criticisms in the article was that Sanderson’s books were written at a sixth-grade level, which is debatable, but that’s not the point. The point is the writer of the article and many other people have the profound misapprehension that simple, clearly written prose is somehow easier to write than more dense or complex prose. It’s really not, and this fact is easily proven.
Think about how many people you know in real life who struggle to communicate through written communications such as emails or text messages. Think how many times you’ve gotten an e-mail from a manager or client only to have no idea what the person in question is trying to ask for, or even say. Or how much family drama can be created by a badly written text message or social media post that is easily misunderstood. In all of these examples, people failed to communicate effectively through written prose and would have benefited from the ability to write simple, clear, not easily misunderstood prose. Therefore, developing the ability to write clear, transparent prose that precisely conveys your meaning is a useful skill for anyone, not just fiction writers. It just happens to be especially useful for writers of fiction. When writing fiction, it is probably best to remain as clear and concise as possible.
So in conclusion, these are the five simple things you can do well to have a good book:
#1: Understand the genre
#2: Have a protagonist with a sympathetic problem
#3: A strong conflict
#4: A satisfactory ending
#5: As clear of prose as possible
All relatively simple things, but if you do them well, I think you are well on the way to writing a good book. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes of the podcast on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
