In this week’s episode, we take a look at plot complications and how you can add them to your novel. We also discuss the SUPER MARIO BROTHERS movie.
The Pulp Writer Show will be on hiatus until the second half of June 2023.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Projects Updates
Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 156 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 28th, 2023. And today we’re going to discuss introducing plot complications into your story. We’ll also talk a little bit about the recent Super Mario Brothers movie. Before we get into our main topics, let’s have an update on my current writing projects. I am pleased to report that Cloak of Dragonfire is done and ready to go. By the time this podcast episode goes live, hopefully the book should be live on Amazon and it should be appearing very shortly on the other stores as well.
So I hope you will be able to enjoy that book and now that Cloak of Dragonfire is done, my next main project will be Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, which I hope to have out in January. In audiobook news recording for Dragon Skull: Shield of the Knight is all done. We just approved everything and paid for everything this morning, so that should be coming out to the audiobook store of your choice sometime in May, if all goes well. So that is where I’m at with my current writing projects.
00:01:10 Reader Comments
We have a few comments from readers this week. Our first comment is from William, who says: Good afternoon, sir. I just started listening to the Dragontiarna series on Audible. I am up to book #3. I have not been able to stop and listen every moment I can. Ridmark is a wonderful hero. I found the series in my Audible Plus membership as free listening for books 1 through 2. I have purchased the rest of them. Unbeknownst to me, there are series with Ridmark before this one. I’ll be listening backwards as of listening to the history of his Ridmark and his champions. I cannot wait; my listening will be taken up for months to come. I’m already engrossed in the world. I wish there was a wiki I could look at when things were mentioned, but alas I will just need to listen more. Thank you so much for all the hard work, thoughts and creativity you poured into these stories. They are incredibly fascinating and I’m extremely excited to continue listening, knowing there’s so much more to go.
Thanks, William. I am glad you have enjoyed all the stories. Dragontiarna…actually, the first publisher’s pack of Dragontiarna, Dragontiarna number one and two, which I believe is Dragontiarna: Knights and Thieves, you can listen for free on Audible if you are an Audible Plus member. Audible has a different tiers of membership now, and if you’re in the highest one you can listen to the Audible Plus library at no cost yourself. All three series with Ridmark as the main character (Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, and Dragontiarna) are available in audiobook. Sevenfold Sword books are like the Dragontiarna ones, they are doubled up into bundles that have two per book. Frostborn, all the titles for Frostborn are individual ones, since I don’t have any bundles of that, but the entire Ridmark series, all 37 books of it, you can listen into audio from beginning to end for nearly 350 hours of finished listening enjoyment as excellently narrated by Steven Crossley, Brad Wills, and Steven Brand.
Our next comment ties into that quite a bit from Justin, who says: With the Jerry Pournelle quote and Jerry Pournelle said we’re basically after Joe’s beer money and Joe likes his beer, so you had better make sure that what you give him is at least as pleasurable to him as having a six pack of beer would be. I think that’s excellent advice for writers and other creative people. We want you to enjoy what we’ve written or created, and it should at least give you as much enjoyment as a six pack of beer.
In fact, I’m going to look something up real quick. According to Google, the average cost of a six pack of beer in the US, depending on where you live, is between $6 to $9 right now and Cloak of Dragonfire will be only $4.99, so it costs you even less money than a six pack of beer. But I think that’s something writers, authors, and movie makers forget to their peril, that if the audience doesn’t enjoy what you’re bringing them, then they’re going to go elsewhere and buy things that are more enjoyable, like a six pack of beer.
00:04:00 Movie Reviews for Super Mario Brothers and Ghosted
Speaking of things that are enjoyable, let’s talk about two movies I saw this past weekend. The first was Super Mario Brothers. I mentioned that I tried to see it the weekend before this in the local theater, but it was sold out. So this weekend I drove to a larger theater the next town over. Once again it was sold out, but this time I arrived early enough to get one of the last seats. Amusingly, I think I might have been the oldest person there, but I’ve been playing Mario games since before a lot of the audience had been born so I felt justified in that. But that explains why Super Mario Brothers is probably going to pass the billion dollar mark, doesn’t it? There are people with multi generational good memories of playing the original game or Mario Kart or Mario Party or whatever and the movie taps into that.
Of course, a billion dollars wouldn’t happen if the movie was bad, which it wasn’t, and it managed to land in the sweet spot of referencing all the games without getting bogged down in the details, the animation looked just like the more modern Mario games but with more detail, and it had a coherent plot that followed the rules of story structure and didn’t cheat. Granted, ultimately, Mario is about a mustachioed Italian plumber who uses magic power ups to fight a warlord dragon turtle who is obsessed with a princess who rules over a kingdom of anthropomorphic talking mushroom people, which doesn’t make a lot of sense when you lay it out like that. Anyway, I definitely recommend Super Mario Brothers if you played a Mario game in the last 35 years.
The second movie was Ghosted. Ah, how to describe it? Think of the plot of a stock Hallmark movie. Stressed career women can’t find love, travels to a small town, meets a down to Earth yet handsome man (usually wearing a sweater). They click. Something unexpected happens in the second act driving them apart, but they reconnect to help save the small town’s baking festival or charming artisanal hotel or ecologically friendly horse ranch or whatever. Now imagine the same formula, but the stressed career woman is the CIA’s top assassin and the small town’s baking festival is actually a deadly bioweapon that various sinister organizations are trying to obtain. The end result is moving as a mixture of romantic comedy, His Girl Friday from the 1940s, and a Jason Bourne movie. I won’t say it’s brilliant cinema, but the weird fusion of separate genre elements manages to hold together for the most part, again, by following the rules of proper story structure. Definitely a solid B movie where you can turn off your brain and enjoy with some popcorn.
00:06:13 Introduction to Main Topic: Plot Complications
Now let’s go on to our main topic of the week, how to introduce complications into the plot of your story. You might have heard of Murphy’s Law, which in its most common form states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong and at the worst possible time. We’ve all experienced that at some point in our lives, and it’s never pleasant when that happens. But for writers of fiction, Murphy’s Law is a tremendous storytelling tool. Unexpected complications are the difference between short stories and novels, allowing you to extend your story to novel length. Indeed, you can help determine your novel’s eventual duration by deciding how many complications your characters will face as they try to resolve their conflicts and defeat their antagonists. Complications are also methods of providing additional narrative tension and plot hooks in your stories since your readers will want to know what happens next. What do I mean by complications? Specifically, I mean, anything unexpected that happens during the character’s attempt to resolve the story’s conflict. These complications can be either events that happen out of the blue or unintended things that happened as a result of the character’s efforts.
For example, think about a man driving to the post office to put his gas bill into the mail. The problem and conflict is the need to pay the gas bill and the action the man takes to resolve the conflict is driving to the post office. There are several potential complications. Man gets into an accident, his car breaks down, the post office is closed or on fire, the character is attacked by alien bounty hunters, he’s attacked by orcs, and so forth. Obviously, the appropriate complication would depend on the story’s genre, though it would be pretty funny if rampaging orcs turned up in what was supposed to be contemplative literary novel. Unexpected complications can both make a book interesting and extend its length. Additionally, there are several ways you could use unexpected complications to make a story more compelling, and we’ll explore some of those methods now.
00:08:02 #1: Avoid the Idiot Plot
First: avoid the idiot plot. It’s common advice for writers to avoid an idiot plot, but what does that mean? An idiot plot refers to a character doing something stupid or making a foolish decision specifically to advance the plot. This is especially annoying if a character was previously established as clever or intelligent, but suddenly becomes conveniently stupid at a time that allows the plot to continue. Alternatively, this can refer to an entire book whose conflict only works because the characters are idiots who make poor decisions. The classic example is a character in a horror movie who makes foolish decisions when stalked by killer or a monster: running alone into the woods, going into the darkened basement with a flickering candle, and so forth. Obviously, people under stress make bad decisions that seem like a good idea in the heat of the moment, and you can include that in your fiction. The danger to the story comes when the decision is so bad and so transparently designed to advance the plot that it breaks the reader’s suspension of disbelief. The examples from horror fiction in the last paragraph are well known.
Every genre has its examples of convenient, bad decisions to break the plot. Romance novels have characters who break up for reasons designed to artificially induce drama and prolong the tension between the lead and the love interest. Thriller novels have the protagonist foolishly leaving the hostage alone in the abandoned building while he goes out to have a look around. Mystery novels have the detective overlook the obvious, which is especially bad if the mystery is obvious to the reader. Fantasy novels have the protagonist ignore good advice from the wizard mentor and almost get killed. Science fiction novels have the characters do things like touch the glowing green space ooze with their bare hands. It’s a good idea in both real life and in fiction never to touch glowing ooze with your bare hand.
But as we mentioned above, people often make bad or irrational decisions while under stress. It would likewise break the suspension of disbelief if your characters always made the right decisions in moments of conflict. Police officers, soldiers, emergency medical technicians, and other people with dangerous and stressful jobs undergo lots and lots of training to ensure that they can keep their heads in a fraught situation, training that most people simply don’t have. It is unrealistic to expect characters to act like seasoned veterans in crisis unless they actually are seasoned veterans. The key to remember is that the plot requires a character to act like an idiot at the critical moment, then it will probably annoy the reader. People frequently make bad decisions in the heat of the moment, but those decisions almost always seem like a good idea at the time. That alone won’t break the reader’s suspension of disbelief, but if the entire plot hinges on a character acting like an idiot, indeed, if the plot grinds to a halt if a character doesn’t act foolishly, especially an uncharacteristic way, that will almost certainly annoy the readers and land your story in idiot plot territory. But how to add complications to your story without having to resort to idiot plot techniques? One good way is for your character’s decisions to generate unexpected consequences, and we’ll explore that more in the next section.
00:10:56 Unintended Consequences
Number two: unintended consequences. The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States is the source of the term blowback, which began as an informal way among CIA officers to describe a covert operation that had unplanned and unintended consequences, consequences that might even end up undermining the goals of the original operation. You can find many examples of blowback or unintended consequences throughout both modern and ancient history, but my favorite example because it so clearly illustrates the point is the American experiment in Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. During that time, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution made it illegal to produce or sell alcoholic beverages in the United States. Prohibition was the culmination of decades of work by Pro Temperance social reformers, dating back to the end of the US Civil War. And in many ways, the passage of Prohibition was their crowning achievement. However, that crowning achievement backfired.
A booming black market for alcohol emerged, fueling the rise of organized crime and more powerful, centralized law enforcement to fight the mobsters. When the Great Depression began, public support for Prohibition dropped and many cash strapped state and local governments wanted to use liquor taxes as a new source of revenue. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 by the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution and local restrictions on liquor sales have eroded ever since. The point of including the story of Prohibition in this podcast isn’t to debate the morality of alcohol consumption, but to illustrate the rule of unintended consequences. The goal of the Pro Temperance movement was to end alcohol use in The United States. And Prohibitions should, on paper, have accomplished that. Yet the rise of alcohol related organized crime was an unanticipated consequence and its widespread disregard for the law helped undermine its moral authority.
In the end, the net effect of Prohibition was the total opposite of its stated goal. Drinking was even more firmly established in American culture and state and local governments were unlikely to turn away from a new source of taxes. However, in the interest of historical accuracy, it is important to note that the Pro Temperance movement did win many smaller and lasting victories, even if it failed on a national level. The establishment of the minimum drinking age was a result of the Temperance movement and state and local laws banning alcohol sales on Sundays or after a certain time of the night can trace their origins back to Prohibition. But to return to the main point of this podcast, which is fiction writing, you can use the example of Prohibition to create unintended consequences and backfire decisions in your stories. These will generate new problems and conflicts for your characters; the complications and unintended consequences will push the story in new directions and create entertaining and attention-grabbing plot twists.
Let’s go back to the example of the man who drives to the post office to mail his gas bill. Any number of potential complications could ensue from the simple task. If you’re writing a mystery novel, the man might stumble across a crime in progress from a dead body in the street outside his house. In a romance novel, the man might meet a woman at the post office, starting a potential love affair. On a more prosaic level, any number of complications that we’ve already mentioned might occur: the character getting a car accident and suffering engine difficulties, arrive at the post office to find it as closed for gas leak, and so forth. Every genre has ways of introducing unintended consequences to the story. In a fantasy novel, the hero might save his village from orcish raiders only for the victory to draw the attention of a far more powerful orcish warlord. In a mystery novel, a detective could question a witness and the killer could decide to murder the witness to prevent damaging testimony. In a romance novel, the heroine could go on a date with her love interest, only to enrage her employer, who views her love interest as a business rival. In a science fiction story, a miraculous new technology might have dangerous side effects, a drug to cure an illness could result in unintentional telepathy or other mutations. Unintended consequences will help make your story more interesting as they present new problems for your characters to solve.
00:14:56 #3: Making the Conflict Worse
Number three: making the conflict worse. A specific kind of unintended consequence can make the stories conflict work even better. Your character sets out to resolve their conflicts, but their actions unintentionally make the conflict worse, like how Prohibition helped encourage long term drinking in the United States. In his classic book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis talked about how opposing evils, instead of canceling each other out, tend to aggravate one another. You can use this to help drive your story forward. In real life, we can all think of people who set out to solve problems, only to inadvertently make them worse. In fiction, this is an excellent way to add tension to your story. Earlier in this podcast, we discussed the idea of the idiot plot where the story only functions because the characters make unrealistically stupid decisions. The opposite of this is an idea I usually refer to as the fog of war. The term fog of war was originally used by German military writer Carl von Clausewitz to refer to the uncertainty that cloaks any sort of battlefield situation. A commander must make the best decision he can with the best information he can gather and even when a commander makes the best possible decision based on the available facts, it can still lead to disaster and defeat. Obviously, war is a dangerous and fluid situation that can change quickly, so it’s easy to see how a course of action that seems like an excellent idea at the time can nonetheless lead to catastrophe.
In fiction, you can use the fog of war to both advance the plot and add tension to the story. This is an excellent way to avoid the idiot plot trap because your characters can make intelligent and well reasoned decisions that nonetheless blow up in their faces because they didn’t have all the information or factors beyond their control alter the outcome. It can also have the effect of worsening the original conflict. Rather than resolving the conflict, the conflict is now even worse than before. Fantasy is my favorite genre, so we’ll use some fantasy themed examples. We already used the example of a village carried off into captivity by orcish raiders with protagonists pursuing them to rescue his neighbors. Let’s say the protagonist assembles a plucky band of allies, and together they rescue the villagers from the orcs. That would seem to resolve the conflict, but perhaps the orcish raiders are now furious at the slight to their honor and decided to wipe out the village entirely to avenge the defeat. Or the orcs are in service to a powerful evil wizard who decides to take matters into his own hands or maybe the fighting accidentally awakens the slumbering dragon, who decides to clear both the human and orcish intruders off his land.
In all these examples, unintended bad consequences spring from protagonist’s decisions and actions. The same complications could unfold in a mystery plot. A detective must investigate a man killed by multiple gunshot wounds on an abandoned farm. The investigation reveals that the man was killed in a drug deal gone bad and the police department decides to set up an ambush to arrest the entire drug ring, except the ambush goes wrong and multiple officers are killed as the direct consequences of the investigation or the detective realizes that someone within the police department is working for the drug gang and push tipped them off about the ambush.
Romance books thrive on the protagonist inadvertently making things worse. The normal plot for most romance novels is the heroine and the love interest want to get together but there’s some serious obstacle like family divisions, money, she’s a public defender and he’s a police officer, etcetera, standing in their way. In the romance genre, the conflict usually gets worse when the heroine tries to overcome the obstacles and aggravates it. Perhaps she and her love interest find themselves on opposite sides of contentious legal case or the heroine and her love interest’s families are business rivals, and her love interest’s family wins a victory over her family’s business. Your protagonist can inadvertently intensify the conflict, but if the story’s conflict has a villain or antagonist, you can’t expect them to take the protagonist’s challenge sitting down, which leads us to the next point.
00:18:39 #4: Pushback
Number four: pushback. If your story’s conflict revolves around an antagonist or villain, it would not be realistic to have the villain ignore the threat posed by your protagonist. Indeed, having the antagonist react to your protagonist is a superb way to enhance the rising action portion of your story. Having the villain push back against the protagonist’s actions is more realistic, adding to a sense of verisimilitude. It will make the villain’s character in the story more dynamic. The form this takes varies depending on the genre of the story and the specific character of the antagonists. A ruthless antagonist will take more immoral actions than an antagonist who has a strong moral or ethical code. For that matter, it’s possible to have an antagonist who isn’t really a villain. If your protagonist is falsely accused of a crime, he could be pursued by an honest detective. The detective would have scruples that, for example, a drug lord would not. And even if the detective was not completely honest, he would still be bound by the laws governing investigations and would need to at least attempt to follow them so evidence would not get thrown out in court. There are many ways that antagonists can react and attempt to shut down the protagonist’s efforts to resolve the conflict or to act to resolve the conflict in the antagonist’s favor.
To return to the previous example of a fantasy novel where orcish raiders carry off the protagonist’s neighbors as captives, let’s say the protagonist rescues his neighbors. The leader of the orcs is unlikely to accept this. He might chase the rescued villagers intending to recapture them. He might gather more allies or warriors for another attack on the village. Or as we mentioned previously, the orcish leader could serve a powerful wizard or a stronger warlord and the leader could appeal to his overlord for help. Pushback from your antagonist will help add tension and drama to your story. Like any of your protagonist’s actions, the antagonist’s decisions can have unintended consequences, even set back the villain’s cause, which will add an additional element of tension. Indeed, the villain can even be undone by reacting when he might have been better advised to do nothing. In the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, the villain is defeated when he deliberately leaves a bloody thumbprint at the crime scene in hopes of further framing his victim of murder, but Holmes notes the incongruity and the sudden appearance of the thumbprint, which leads to the villain’s undoing. However, to have a compelling story, the conflict must be resolved and in the end, despite however the plot has been thickened, the conflict must be resolved in the end.
00:21:01 Announcement: Podcast Hiatus during May/June 2023
So I hope that is helpful and gives you good tips and tricks for thickening the plot of your novel. So that is it for this week. I should mention that the podcast is going to go on hiatus until the end of June. There’s a couple of reasons for that. I have quite a lot of family stuff I need to do in May and June, and I also in that time want to finish Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress and the next Silent Order book. However, the main reason we’re going to go on hiatus for a few weeks is that starting next week, the siding on my house is going to be replaced. If you have never gone through this process before, you know that it can take a while and is often quite loud. So rather than try and dodge around when the siding work is being done and trying to find time for recording the podcast when I have many other things going on and people are actually pounding nails into the side of the house, I am simply going to put it on hiatus for a little bit and come back to it at the end of June, if all goes well. So that is it for this week.
Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all in June.
