In this week’s episode, I respond to reader questions & comments about the principles of storytelling.
Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!
SEVENFOLD SWORD: OMNIBUS ONE is going to have a Bookbub deal this month, so it seemed a good time to have SEVENFOLD SWORD: NECROMANCER be the coupon of the week! You can get 50% off the ebook with this coupon:
MARNECRO
The coupon code is valid until March 27th, 2023.
https://payhip.com/b/iowCD
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 149 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 10th, 2023 as I record this and today we’re going to talk about the principles of storytelling. Before we get into all that, we’re going to have some writing project updates, Coupon of the Week, and a few questions from readers.
First up, writing project updates. I am pleased to report that I am now done with the rough draft of Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock. Hopefully that will be out towards the end of March, if everything goes well and nothing drastic or unpleasant happens. Right now I am writing The First Holdfast, a bonus short story that my newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock comes out, so if you haven’t subscribed to my newsletter, now is an excellent time to do that.
I am also about 6,500 words into my next project, which is Cloak of Dragonfire. Once Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock is published, Cloak of Dragonfire Fire will be my main project and we will see how quick I can get that out. Hopefully that will be out in April. In audiobook news, I am going to start listening to the proofs of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire as narrated by Brad Wills and if all goes well, I think that will probably be out towards either beginning or end of April, assuming nothing goes wrong with that. But I’m looking forward to sharing all those books and audiobooks with you.
Now it’s once again time for Coupon of the Week, where, as I build up my Payhip store, I give away coupons for good deals on various items on the store. For this week, Sevenfold Sword: Omnibus One is going to have a Bookbub deal in about a week or so, so it seemed a good time to have Sevenfold Sword: Necromancer, the immediate sequel to Sevenfold Sword: Omnibus One be the coupon of the week. You can get 50% off the ebook with this coupon: MARNECRO and that is MARNECRO. I will include the coupon code and links to the store in the show notes and you can get to the book for 50% off with that coupon through March 27th, 2023. So act now!
00:02:16 Reader Questions
Now we have a few questions from readers. Our first question is from Gary who asks: Random question if you don’t mind. Why can’t people use the healing spell on something other than a humanoid, such as horses? The ability to heal a lame horse would really come in handy (he’s referring to the Frostborn and Dragonskull universe here). That is a good question. And honestly, I have never given it any thought before and I should have because taking care of one’s animals is important and a big business. Like many other people in the US, I watched All Creatures Great and Small when it came out about these veterinarians in late 1930s Yorkshire and they are very busy dealing with the many, many realities to which farm animals are prone. So that would make sense that if you can use the healing spell on like a lame horse or injured ox or a wounded donkey or something that you would do so. I have to admit that I haven’t given any thought how that would work in the Frostborn and Andomhaim setting, but it makes sense so I should give that some thought and see if I can come up with something that will turn up in future books.
Our next question is from Kenneth who asks: Haven’t started Dragonskull yet, but how many books are you planning for it? That answer is 9. There will be 9 books in the Dragonskull series when it is complete. Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock is the seventh one and if all goes well, which I say a lot, but you know, if all goes well, I am hoping to finish this series sometime in summer 2023, probably towards the end of summer 2023. So Dragonskull will have a total of nine books and that is a hard limit. I am not going over nine for this series.
We have a comment from Thuvia who says about Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation: Quite frankly, I bought it just to support you. I wasn’t particularly interested. I was astonished over how much I enjoyed it. Looking forward to the sequel. Thanks, Thuvia. I appreciate the support and I am glad you have enjoyed the book and I have gotten many comments or reviews along those lines where people were very skeptical about the book, but they bought it because they like my writing overall, which I appreciate. And then they were very surprised how much they liked it when they read it, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, you get the book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, Payhip, and I think it’s up on Scribd by now. So if you haven’t checked out Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation yet, it has persuaded many skeptics.
Finally, we have a comment from Jesse, which also triggered the idea for this week’s show. I just wanted to toss you a note of appreciation with respect to your Storytelling: How to write a Novel book as well of as well as several of your podcasts had touched on a similar topic. While I have yet to brave writing a novel myself, your advice in terms of conflict introduction and subsequent escalation has benefited me greatly as I spin tabletop RPG stories for my daughter to play. Keep up the good work and thank you again for your insights into compelling storytelling.
Thanks, Jesse. I’m glad you enjoyed the book. I’m glad that someone read it because until I got this comment from Jesse, I had actually forgotten I had written a book called Storytelling: How to Write a Novel because it hasn’t sold very well. I think in all of 2023 it’s sold, as of this recording, four copies so far, so it hasn’t really been one of my more successful books, but I am glad that people are finding it helpful and I bet that Jesse will end up attempting a novel at some point if he’s running tabletop games. Every Game Master or Dungeon Master I’ve ever encountered has novel in them and it comes out eventually, so that will be something to look forward to.
00:05:55: The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling
Now because of that comment, I thought I would use this podcast episode this week to talk about the main thesis of Storytelling, which is the what I what I jokingly call The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling, which are the key components your story needs if you’re going to write a novel that has a compelling plot that will hold the reader’s interest. So with in that mind, I’m going to read what I had to say about The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling in Chapter 2 of that book.
Understanding basic story structure gives you an excellent foundation upon which to write your novel. The going from understanding the structure of the story to actually telling a good story can be something of a challenging leap. We’ll discuss five rules for telling an interesting and compelling story. You will note that most of these rules revolve around the conflict and the climax, which are the most important parts of the story. I’m sure you can remember a book, a movie, or a TV show where the dialogue was clunky or some of the characters were annoying, but you kept reading or watching because the story was sufficiently interesting to hold your attention.
I originally thought up these five rules for a blog post I wrote way back in 2014, and I jokingly called them Iron Laws to make fun of how intellectuals frequently think up iron laws for politics or economics or whatever. Storytelling is a much less dour affair than politics or economics, thankfully. But as we discussed previously, the closer you discuss story structure, the better your book will be. These Five Iron Laws will help you put strong muscle on the skeleton of your story.
Number One: the protagonist must have a problem that results in a conflict, because if there is no problem, there is no story. Conflict and problems are the engines that drive stories. A happy existence with minimal conflicts and problems might be ideal for real life, but it makes an exceedingly dull story. The main character of the story needs to have a problem that results in a conflict. The protagonist battling a villain is the most popular way to generate a conflict. There are countless different kinds of villains you can use. A mystery novel would have the murderer or the instigator of the crime the detective wants to solve. A thriller novel might have a terrorist group plotting a large scale attack. A fantasy novel could have an evil wizard or a dark lord. Science fiction often has malevolent artificial intelligence, alien empires, or the space navy of a rival human nation. Romance novels can have a variety of villains: a rival who threatens to steal the heroine’s love interest, or the heroine’s evil boss, or someone else who stands in the way of the heroine having a happily ever after with her love interest.
The point of having a villain is to create an obstacle that the protagonist must overcome or conflict of the protagonist must resolve. It’s not even necessary for the antagonist to be a villain as such. You can have a story where two protagonists are having a strong disagreement, lawyers on the opposite sides of a major court case, for example. Neither one of them is the villain, or may not even be in their wrong, but the conflict between them drives the story. Note that the story doesn’t necessarily have to have an actual villain, it just needs a problem. Disaster movies are a good example of this kind of storytelling. The chief conflict is not against another character, but the natural disaster that threatens the characters and their town or city. Think of the movie Apollo 13, a dramatization of NASA’s ill-fated Apollo 13 launch to the moon. The movie doesn’t have a lot of interpersonal conflicts because the chief problem is so overwhelming and huge: how to get the astronauts back home to Earth after their spacecraft suffers a dangerous mechanical failure.
Speaking another space survival genre movie, the film Gravity starring Sandra Bullock, is another excellent example of a movie without a villain. The movie has no villain. The conflict results from the bad luck that destroys the space shuttle in orbit, and the heroine is trapped in space. Her efforts to survive and get back to Earth make up the plot, all while struggling to find the will to keep fighting after her child’s death several years ago. To sum up: your story’s protagonist absolutely must have a conflict to resolve or a problem to face.
Number Two: the protagonist’s problem and conflict must be consequential and have real stakes. The problem must be serious because if it is not, there are no real stakes and the reader will get bored and cease to care about the character. The worst of all worlds is an unlikable character with a trivial problem. Then you wind up with your reader rooting for bad things to happen to the protagonist, if the reader doesn’t abandon the book entirely. The absolute worst thing to hear about a book is a reader saying I just didn’t care what happened to these people. A high stakes problem doesn’t necessarily mean physical danger, though it can, nor does it mean that the problem must be something apocalyptic, like stopping terrorists from detonating a nuclear bomb in a major city or something like that. While that obviously is a high stakes problem, it’s not something that can happen in every book.
A common difficulty that writers of long series face is the escalation problem. The hero saves the city in the first book, the country in the second, and the world in the third. What’s after that? A good way to avoid that problem and direct conflict is to have the problem be high stakes for the protagonist personally, especially in an emotional sense. The hero doesn’t have to save the world, or the country, or even his hometown. In a thriller, it might be about rescuing one person or saving a group of hostages from bank robbers or in a mystery, it could be about solving the murder of one person. Sadly, people are murdered every day and the world at large really takes notice of one particular murder. But if the protagonist is emotionally invested in finding the killer, that will create a compelling story.
As I mentioned above, physical danger doesn’t necessarily have to be part of an emotionally significant plot. The classic novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is a good example of a novel without much physical danger. The protagonist, Elizabeth Bennett, is in no physical danger throughout the book, save for when Elizabeth gets caught in a rainstorm and falls sick afterward (Transcriber’s correction: Elizabeth’s sister Jane is the one who gets sick). Nonetheless, the stakes of her problem, her feelings for Mr. Darcy are consequential. If she does not secure a good marriage when her father dies, there is a very real possibility Elizabeth will be impoverished, or if she marries an unsuitable man like Mr. Wickham, her life will be miserable. While a young woman dealing with her feelings seems like a trivial problem, Elizabeth will nonetheless face potentially catastrophic consequences if she chooses wrongly.
That said, the problem must be something that the protagonist can conceivably deal with and handle, albeit with difficulty. Too vague of a problem or too intractable a problem and the story goes off the rails. It is possible to write a story where the central conflict arises from social injustice or class divisions. Indeed, many classic novels and movies deal with these themes (much of the work of Charles Dickens, for example). Nevertheless, it is good idea to keep those themes contained in the conflict between characters in a way that can actually be resolved at the end of the story. Sadly, no human society has yet solved the problems of social injustice and class divisions, and it is unlikely that one ever will. If you have a story where your protagonist is essentially fighting human nature itself, rather than trying to resolve a conflict or a problem that can actually be resolved, you will leave your reader unsatisfied at the end. That leads us to the Third Iron Law of storytelling.
Number Three: The protagonist must take action and struggle to resolve his or her conflict and problem. A common failure in storytelling is a protagonist who has a serious problem but does nothing about it. We’ve all read stories with the passive protagonist, or worse, a protagonist who does nothing but whine about his difficulties or thinks that by feeling bad about his problems they will somehow magically get better. Worst of all is when a protagonist does nothing but complain for two hours or 300 pages and somehow does solve all of his or her problems. Not to pick on a specific genre, but this is a common problem in romance novels from beginning writers, where things simply happen to a passive heroine who spends more time agonizing over her problems than acting upon them (not to pick out romance novels because other genres have similar examples of this).
The chosen one story trope in fantasy, for example, when mishandled, can lead to a very passive protagonist. Conflict is the first half of a compelling story, but the protagonist taking action to resolve that conflict is the second half. A passive protagonist who does nothing can be absolute poison to a compelling story. The protagonist must act to attempt to resolve the conflict or the problem. Note that he doesn’t necessarily have to act effectively, but he must take some action. In a fantasy novel, the hero must do something to defeat the Dark Lord or start the quest. In a mystery novel, the protagonist must begin investigating the crime or tracking down the murderer. In a thriller, the hero must battle the terrorists or fight the robbers. In a disaster novel, the protagonist needs to deal with the hurricane or the earthquake and its consequences. If you have a story with a conflict and the protagonists don’t take active action to resolve it, that’s not a story, that’s just the account of bad things happening to people. We can see that every day on the nightly news. While a novel like that would be depressing, you’ll do something even worse: it would bore the reader. Don’t be boring. Have your pain with struggle to overcome their difficulties, which leads us to the next Iron Law:
Number Four: the protagonists must face challenges and setbacks and his or her efforts to resolve his problem may even backfire. We touched on this briefly in the chapter on story structure, which is actually elsewhere in this book. One of the chief ways to make the story interesting is to have the protagonist experience setbacks in their efforts to resolve the conflict. Having the protagonist act to face the conflict makes for a satisfying story, but it can be undone if the hero overcomes the problems without any challenge. This can be a common problem in fantasy and science fiction, especially in the later books of the long series when a character becomes powerful enough that it’s difficult to think of challenges for him or her. For example, how does the writer think of believable foes for Superman, a character who is essentially invincible? In less fantastical settings, this can still be a problem for a character who is a billionaire or who is wealthy enough and powerful enough that it might be difficult to find problems that result in realistic conflicts and challenges.
The key to overcoming these potential problems is remember two important elements of story plotting. First, every action in life will encounter complications. Second, every action has unanticipated consequences that may result in additional problems. Once you know to look for it, you can see this plot technique used in many classic stories. To cite a few examples, in The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship is first forced to divert from their planned route to Mordor into the mines of Moria, which results in even more challenges. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth goes disastrously wrong. In the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, Sherlock Holmes sets out to exaggerate his client, only to find absolutely no proof of his innocence and ample evidence of his guilt.
Whenever someone sets out to do something, whether a fictional character or in real life, complications and additional troubles are inevitable. Watching a character work through these difficulties makes for compelling fiction. Unintended consequences are a natural result of unplanned complications that can help with the plot of your novel. In storytelling, unintended consequences occur when a character sets out to do a task or solve the problem, only for something to happen that he did not intend.
To return to an earlier example, let’s say you start driving to the post office and hit a deer on the way. The damage to the car is an unintended consequence of the decision to drive from the post office. There could be other unintended consequences resulting from the collision. The insurance company could refuse to pay, or you might have to get a new car, or in all the trouble, you forgot to go to the post office and put the gas bill in the mail entirely. That was a relatively simple example, but you can see its useful application to storytelling. Unintended consequences are a great way to add tension to your plot. For example, you could have a murder mystery where the detective is interrogating a potential suspect for a murder. In a panic, the suspect flees or to be killed by the real murderer to remove a potential witness. This will add further complications to the plot since the detective’s investigation suffered a setback and the detective’s superiors might remove her from the case. It also provides the opportunity for additional characterization as the detective’s reaction to the accidental death will reveal a great deal about her. Of course, any conflicts raised within the story must be resolved, which leads to the Final Iron Law.
Number Five: the ending must absolutely provide satisfactory emotional resolution to the problems raised in the story. Of all the Five Laws, this one is the most important. Screw this up and readers will be ticked and talking about it on the Internet for years. Whatever crisis comes up in the story, whatever conflict or difficulties, it must be resolved in emotionally satisfying manner by the end of the story. Note that emotionally satisfying doesn’t mean that it has to be a happy ending, just that the ending must resolve the story’s conflicts in such a way that the reader doesn’t feel cheated for having read the book. Your story can have a happy ending or a sad ending, or a mixture of the two, but the ending must be emotionally satisfying.
What does it mean for the story’s conflicts to be resolved in an emotionally satisfying manner? Basically, two different things need to happen at the ending of the story. First, the conflict has to be resolved. Second, the characters need to experience change because of resolving the conflict. Let’s look at a few good examples. The ending of the Lord of the Rings provides an excellent example of this. The object that caused the central conflict in the story, the One Ring, is destroyed and the Dark Lord is defeated. All the main characters experience change as a result. Frodo is wounded and never really recovers, while Samwise steps up and becomes the leader of the Shire. Mary and Pippin evolve from young rascals and become the leading figures of the Shire while Aragorn becomes the King of Gondor and weds Arwen and Gandalf returns to the Undying Lands, his mission to oppose Sauron complete.
The ending of the movie The King’s Speech is another good example of resolving a conflict. Let’s leave out the historical accuracy of the movie, or lack thereof, which isn’t relevant to a discussion about story structure. At the end of the movie, King George VI addresses the nation over the radio without succumbing to his speech, simultaneously resolving the conflicts over his stammer and his fear of accepting his duties as king. This is an ambivalently happy ending. George VI has overcome his conflicts, but the viewers know that the United Kingdom is about to go through World War II and George himself will die of lung cancer and heart disease in 1952. Nevertheless, conflicts within the story have been resolved. An ending can also be tragic so long as the story’s conflicts are resolved. William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet is a classic example. Romeo and Juliet both commit suicide at the end of the play, but the tragedy of their death shocks their family so badly that they end their destructive conflict. All the conflicts in the story have been resolved, albeit at a high price.
So those are The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling, or so I termed them. If you want to read more stuff like this, my book Storytelling: How to Write a Novel is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Scribd so you can pick that up for just $2.99 USD in ebook format and get more of my hopefully helpful writing advice.
So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and interesting. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week.
