Episode 223 - The Tolling Bell & The Story Hypothesis with JP Rindfleisch

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

JP Rindfleisch discusses THE TOLLING BELL & THE STORY HYPOTHESIS, including the formula of Story Hypothesis (initial want + developing need + true need); the nine fundamental needs and identifying the driving needs; using the Story Hypothesis to create a resonating theme; the downside of how the concept of "theme" is usually taught; the power of a non-hierarchical approach; applying the Story Hypothesis to a series; and considering the driving needs of the antagonist (with a fun conversation about Hannibal Lecter).

JP Rindfleisch IX, is a writer, editor, and podcaster from Rockford, Illinois, who loves the dark, strange, and queer. They co-author NRDS: National Recently Deceased Services with Jeff Elkins and the Leah Ackerman Dark Urban Fantasy series with AB Cohen. JP also penned the cozy queer fantasy Mandrake Manor. They co-host Writer's Ink podcast with JD Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tumlinson, and Patrick O'Donnell, discussing author interviews and publishing news. JP also leads a local authors' group in Rockford Illinois with over 60 members, dedicated to promoting, educating, and connecting writers with opportunities to enhance their careers and community presence.

Episode Links

Author website: https://www.jprindfleischix.com/
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/jprindfleischix/
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/jp_rindfleisch/

Summary

Introduction
 
Storytelling is an art, but behind that art lies the mechanics of creating a great story. Understanding the story's underlying structure can provide insights into why a narrative works and how you can improve your own stories. One such tool is the story hypothesis, a unique formula that can guide a story's structure, particularly the narrative's character arc.
 
The Story Hypothesis: A Synopsis
 
The Story Hypothesis, a tool crafted by J.P. Rindfleisch, mandates a formula connecting a character's needs throughout a story. This formula moves from an initial want to a developing need and finally to their true need, forming the character's journey. By identifying and focusing on these needs, writers can craft a more coherent, engaging script that resonates with readers.
 
This formula's advantage is that it does not need to be strictly chronological. The transformation of the wants and needs can occur in back-and-forth motion through the story, echoing the ebbs and flows of real-life expectations, disappointments, and triumphs.
 
Unpacking the Story Hypothesis
 
Examining the story hypothesis requires a component basis understanding. Rindfleisch primarily uses Max-Neef's fundamental human needs— nine pillars of human necessities that constitute the basis of a character's motivation. Ranging from subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation, creation, identity, and freedom, these nine needs offer a wide spectrum of motivations for character actions.
 
Applying the Story Hypothesis
 
Examining an existing story through the lens of the story hypothesis offers the opportunity to understand its principles better. Let's analyze the dystopian trilogy, "The Hunger Games," within this context. If we use the Story Hypothesis formula, Katniss Everdeen's journey might read something like this: Katniss's quest for identity leads her to fulfill affection and protection (true need) by developing participation. Every step closer to embracing her true identity assists her in understanding herself and her surroundings, leading to genuine affection and love.
 
Such a formula doesn't just apply during the creation phase of a story; it can also be an excellent revision tool, identifying scenes which may need alteration to align better with the core story hypothesis.
 
In conclusion
 
The Story Hypothesis is not the definitive tool for creating or revising a narrative, but it serves as a guide, offering rich insight into the journey their characters undertake. It challenges the rigidity of other storytelling hierarchies and offers a more complex, nuanced way of understanding characters and their journeys. As every storyteller knows, understanding the mechanics of your craft is just as important as the creative elements. The Story Hypothesis is one more tool in the writer's kit — a tool that could significantly enhance storytelling dynamics.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is J. P. Rindfleisch. Hey, J. P., how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] JP: I'm doing well, how are you?
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, J. P. Rindfleisch IX is a writer, editor, and podcaster from Rockford, Illinois, who loves the dark, strange, and queer. They co-author "Nerds, Recently Deceased Services" with Jeff Elkins and the Leah Ackerman Dark Urban Fantasy series with A. B. Cohen. J. P. also penned the cozy queer fantasy "Mandrake Manor." They co-host the Writer's Inc. podcast with J. D. Barker, Christine Daigle, Kevin Tomlinson, and Patrick O'Donnell.
 
[00:01:05] Matty: Obviously, I haven't listened to the Writer's Inc. podcast for a long time. I'm going to have to get back to that, where they discuss author interviews and publishing news. JP also leads a local author's group in Rockford, Illinois, with over 60 members, dedicated to promoting, educating, and connecting writers with opportunities to enhance their careers and community presence. And I would like to thank Jeff Elkins, the Dialogue Doctor, for recommending JP for the podcast and for introducing us. So thank you, Jeff, for that.
 
[00:01:31] JP: Yeah, thanks, Jeff.
 
Using the Story Hypothesis to create a resonating theme
 
[00:01:06] Matty: And we are going to be talking about using the story hypothesis to create a resonating theme for your readers. And JP, whenever I talk to anyone who has thought carefully about a topic like this, especially around craft and written about it, I also like to ask, what did you see either in your own writing or the writing of other writers you work with that led you to believe that this was going to be a necessary piece of information to share with your fellow writers?
 
[00:01:31] JP: Yeah, so fun fact, I didn't know if I was actually going to write Story Hypothesis. It was just an idea I had, and it was something that I kept talking about, and people were like, if I don't get a book about this, I'm going to hunt you down until I get one. So I was like, fine, fine, I'll write one. But ultimately, I started this writing journey, meeting J. Thorn and Zach Bohannon, and I really view them both as mentors. I've used a lot of their services, and I ended up becoming a 3 Story Method editor through them. 3 Story Method is such a simple way of having common communication between two people about the story without having super big methods that people need to learn and understand. Like I can tell someone what the three-story method is in a sitting, and we can start discussing the story and figure out and break it down.
 
The downside of how "theme" is usually taught
 
[00:02:20] JP: This is where the story hypothesis came in because there's something that I felt was missing. So, when looking at what we're taught in school, theme was such a common aspect that was taught, but I did not like how it was taught. It was too broad. It didn't really help me as a writer, but at the same time, it's one of those things that everyone always talks about. Theme is so important to your story, and I'm like, yeah, but half the people don't like it. Half the people are unsure what their theme is, so they're just saying it's about love when really it's a tragedy. And so, I thought, well, what about if there was a simple formula that people could use that could help them guide through the story.
 
[00:03:24] This is something that I was thinking about. I was using it in the way that I was writing to really hit like a tolling bell or a resonation with a reader. It was a culmination of the theme, the golden theme, but it was this idea that there's an architecture or a structure behind the story that has this resonance behind it. So, you just needed a formula, and that's where the story hypothesis came in.
 
[00:04:12] Matty: And we may be addressing this as you continue talking about the story hypothesis, but I think theme is one of those words that not only do people kind of toss it around, but I suspect that because it's so common, people are bringing different definitions to it without being aware that they're bringing different definitions to it. Is that something you want to talk about right up front, or do you want to kind of tease that out as we talk about the story hypothesis throughout?
 
[00:04:47] JP: Let's dive right in.
 
[00:04:14] Matty: Excellent.
 
[00:04:15] JP: In general, a theme is a subject, a conversation, a topic, more or less. It's the root of a story, and at the end of the day, it's the thing that will convey the needs that will imprint on the reader. So that's really the highlight: need, character need, and character wants. It's your undertolling or underscoring theme of your story. It's what's driving the story. It's what does your character want? And that resonates with your readers.
 
[00:05:03] Matty: You had used the example of some people say their stories about the theme is love when it's really a tragedy. Can you mention a couple of well-known books or movies or just things that everybody's going to be familiar with and share what you consider the theme of those works to be?
 
The formula of Story Hypothesis = Initial want + developing need + true need
 
[00:05:03] JP: Yeah, I mean, so, talking about story hypothesis, I kind of want to take a step back to explain a couple of things before hopping right into that. But the formula for the story hypothesis is a character's need for their initial want leads them to fulfill their true need by developing their developing need. It looks at three things that develop throughout the story: what a character thinks they want at the beginning of the story, what's driving them forward, this underscoring development throughout the story, and then the actual thing they need to attain by the end of the story. I know that was a lot of information, and hopefully that will convey as we talk about this, but using a method that we'll dive into, we can look at stories like "The Matrix."
 
With "The Matrix," at the beginning of the story, Neo doesn't know what the Matrix is, but it's this thing that he has been dying to know about. We jump in where he's been this hacker, hearing grumblings about this thing, and he just wants to understand. Understanding is the need that he's been desiring. As the story develops, that need for understanding turns into a need of "Who am I within the Matrix?" Because as we learn throughout the story, Neo, an anagram for "The One," is basically a savior character. It's really a story about identity, answering the question of who am I and where do I belong.
 
[00:06:48] Those are the needs that really pull on people. It's the thing that resonates within the story: understanding the world around you and then understanding who you are in that world.
 
Nine fundamental needs
 
[00:07:26] Matty: You had mentioned the three questions or parts of the formula, the initial want, the developing need, and the true need, and then the other aspect of it that I thought was very interesting is this idea of fundamental human needs, and you're tapping into something called the Max Neef Nine fundamental needs. I'd never heard of that before. I'm familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which I think is probably what everybody learns either in college psychology or in some class in the corporate world. Can you talk about that idea of how the fundamental needs work in, with the story hypothesis and why you tapped into this Max Neef model rather than something else like Maslow's hierarchy?
 
[00:09:53] JP: So there's actually a whole chapter on how much I dislike Maslow, and at the end of the day, hierarchical structures are limiting factors when it comes to being a writer. When you look at something like Maslow's Hierarchy of Need, it's all about self-actualization, about a person hitting these levels of needs, moving up this ladder until they are an individual, self-actualized. Unfortunately, that doesn't represent all cultures around the world. Personally, when I was trying to use this hierarchical need in storytelling, I found that I was missing out on something if I wanted a culture that didn't represent this sort of thinking because I would have to shoehorn in how needs fulfilled.
 
Let's look at a culture that praises communal efforts. That's not self-actualization. That's not how a pyramid's going to work for them. So how could I do that? And this involved a lot of conversations with a lot of different author friends, but at the end of the day, Max Neef, it's nine fundamental human needs, none are really hierarchical of each other. The one you could argue as a base level need is subsistence, which is the need for food at the end of the day, that's what it is. Obviously, if you don't have food, you're not going to be able to have identity and whatnot, but what it does in terms of storytelling is it allows you to no longer have to fit your ideas and your thoughts of a character's wants and needs into a hierarchical structure, you can pull on different ones and create different stories. So you could write a story about a starving artist that is creating something gorgeous and wonderful and something that goes and transcends humanity because that's a way that these needs would function that Maslow's technically doesn't. Because that character is starving, that character isn't able to move up that ladder or pyramid because they don't have their basic physical needs.
 
[00:09:22] Matty: Oh, interesting. So I'm just going to read through the nine. I did a little googling before our conversation. So subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation, creation, identity, and freedom. So when you're talking about the story hypothesis, do you think of that as mainly a structural approach to a story as opposed to a character development tool to use?
 
[00:09:53] JP: So I think of this as a way of having, one, a conversation with yourself with simple structures. When you can create a formula like, well, when I use it and I create a formula like this, it helps me ground myself and really look at the story in these simplified structure ways. So, I like to look at these nine as pillars to fit in how I want to tell a story.
 
[00:00:00] JP: With "Mandrake Manor," I really focused on it being a story that's basically Charmed meets HBO's "Looking." It's a romance where people realize they have magical powers. So, there are certain obvious things. If someone discovers they have magic, they begin a journey of understanding, a journey of identity. Why do I have this magic? What is this magic? Those sorts of questions. When we talk about romance, you're talking about affection, that's the story you'll probably be telling because romance will have affection either in the developing need or the final need, depending on the story you want to tell.
 
So, when I'm looking at these specific structures, it makes it easy if I just have nine to pick from. I don't have to think about special words and whatnot. I've got nine. And if I have nine, then I need to really use them efficiently.
 
[00:01:01] Matty: Do you have any guidance about when you're considering these nine? There's going to be a primary one, for example, affection in the case of a romance. Then do you check the story to make sure you're hitting all the other needs, or are you trying to hit all of them, identifying the driving needs?
 
[00:01:22] JP: Overkill. So, there are nine needs, and the story hypothesis for a standard novel has three that we pick from. Originally, it had two, but I really felt like there was this developing need, this thing that grows over time. As a person has it, they are rewarded with the other two needs. I'll explain what I mean by that in a second. These nine fundamental needs are what a person in society should have in different levels, representing how people live.
 
Max Neve created this as an economist looking at Chile, removing the concept of financials and focusing on the needs people would need fulfilled to be considered top of the line, in a culture and society we'd want to live in. If I could measure all these nine things separately, how can I determine if all are at 100%, or if we really need to focus on one in this economy, etc.
 
So, technically, a human being would have all nine in different meters. When we tell stories, if we overload readers with these nine needs, it's not a story that resonates. I personally use this to resonate with readers. Looking at something like "The Matrix," starting with Neo wanting to understand, his story ending in identity with his true need. What's the thing in the middle? It was participation. Whenever he got involved with others, he was rewarded with understanding, identity. When he pushed back, he was imprisoned, his understanding sometimes taken away, friends imprisoned or killed. There's this growth arc that happened. Obviously, the writers of "The Matrix" didn't think of story hypothesis, but looking at it through that lens, that's what I noticed. That's the formula I made.
 
[00:14:01] Matty: I can imagine that the number of needs that you reflect in a story could also be a function of how much material you have to work with. If you're writing a short story, then you probably are looking through this and saying, you know, this is going to be a story where the character is primarily focused on participation or primarily focused on identity or something like that.
 
Like identifying the one human need that the short story addresses is probably a good check. I can imagine, you know, I just read the latest Robert Galbraith book, the Cormoran Strike series. If you look through that series, you could probably pick out for each of the main characters because you have the wherewithal, you have the real estate, to delve into it. Someone working through a series might say, I'm on book 12 and you know what, I've never really talked about recreation or understanding. It might be a way of identifying a hole in a character where you do have that opportunity to delve into different needs.
 
[00:15:08] JP: Yeah, definitely. When looking at story hypotheses through a series, there are different things that we would pull on based on if you're writing to a genre or if you are a long-running series and you really want to pull on all of those needs as the story progresses. One series that comes to mind is "The Hunger Games." It's a story about a character dealing with an uprising and is at the forefront of that. The need or the tolling bell that the entire series pulls on is participation, rising up against oppressors, forming a community, and saying we won't stand for this oppression. We will participate together. You could argue freedom as another option, but it really focuses on this communal effort. The story starts with districts separated, communities broken apart, and they come together to face this bigger foe. The tolling bell for the entire story is participation.
 
Now, looking at the first book, Katniss isn't super interested in everyone else; she's more interested in not dying. But, she gets rewarded every time she participates. Her ultimate goal in book one is freedom. She says, come hell or high water, I'm going to get my freedom. I'm going to eat these berries, and I'm going to die, but that's going to be my freedom. That's what it takes. Participation grows throughout the story. Every time she works with someone, she's rewarded. Unfortunately, with one character, she's not so rewarded when that character dies, but it creates this growth arc for her. It's really when she wants to break those rules, and she wants to say, I have this community with me. My original District 12 Peeta is with me. We're the last two. I'm not going to kill him. We are doing this together. I'm full 100 percent participation. Then she gets her freedom. As the story progresses, I would say that the last book, her true need or whatever, is going to be the fulfillment of participation.
 
[00:17:31] Matty: Well, it's interesting because if you look at the first couple, there are the needs at the macro level, like you're talking about the ones that provide resonance for the reader. And then there are the needs at the micro level. If you look at, You know, just the first chapter or chapters of "The Hunger Games." So, subsistence, obviously. There's hunting, protection; she's trying to protect her sister for whom she feels affection, there's kind of an understanding, she comes to an understanding about her role in the games as a replacement for her sister, so she steps into participation. Not quite sure about recreation or recreation yet. You know, I think those ones become more, as you're saying, the macro ones are the ones you're talking about with identity and freedom and so on. But it's interesting to look at it at the micro and the macro levels.
 
So we've been talking about a formula, the story hypothesis formula, and there's also this idea, and we're going back a little bit now to the idea of the initial want, the developing need, and the true need about where in the story you expect the character to be moving from one of these to the other. Can you talk about that a little bit more from a structural point of view?
 
[00:18:41] JP: Yeah. So, let me just grab this really quick, because I did create something for "Silence of the Lambs," because I thought that would be fun to talk about, you know, as one decides. But, I think when looking at something like "Silence of the Lambs," we could argue a story hypothesis along the lines of Starling's need for understanding leads her to fulfill identity by developing participation.
 
Taking a step back, I think that we're in a state where Starling needs to understand the mind of a serial killer. That's really the kind of goal at the beginning of the story. Her identity is less of a who am I as much as am I good? Am I good enough? Am I a good cop? Am I, you know, all of these sorts of questions.
 
And then developing participation. I think in terms of this story, it's participation with a level of wariness, agreeing to be involved with working with a serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, in this sort of participating with what he wants without giving too much. If she gives too much, she runs in danger. So much danger. In many cases, but we can see this throughout the story, and I have some different types of scenes, like a resistance scene at the beginning; she's hesitating to engage with Hannibal Lecter, she's worried about those dangers that are going to happen, and because of that, because she's not participating, he's not going to give her answers.
 
She's not going to understand. So you can see how by her not participating, she won't understand. That's that core need. That's that initial want that she has. She has some failures because of that, because she's struggling with how much does she participate? Sometimes it's too much, sometimes it's too little. And so we see these failures that develop throughout the story. And then she starts to, she has maybe a misunderstanding where Lecter's clues lead Starling astray from the investigation because she's misinterpreting what he is trying to tell her, and then we have these transformations.
 
So, Lecter is reshaping Starling's understanding of Buffalo Bill and his capabilities. That's when she has a breakthrough in her understanding, and now she needs to shift her focus to her true need, which is to be the good cop she's meant to be, even when she faces pushback from other cops for working with Hannibal Lecter. Despite their objections, she insists on pursuing the answers she needs.
 
In the way the story is told, when we have the ultimate ending, if this was a story about participation, especially with other cops, the twist where Buffalo Bill hears knocking at the door, and we see the police knocking at a door, is significant. The twist is that it's actually Starling at the other end of Buffalo Bill's door. If the true need were participation, we would have seen something different – her bringing the cops with her. However, since her true need is identity, the twist works well because she's alone, fulfilling her needs.
 
Looking at a revelation or confrontation, such as the climax scene where she has developed the skills through participation and understanding, and is now ready to confront and prove herself, we see that resolution at the end where she truly becomes a competent FBI agent.
 
So that's how I would use these scenes or how I would expect to see a story flow, using those three needs for Hannibal Lecter or for "Silence of the Lambs."
 
[00:22:40] Matty: Well, it is interesting, as you were talking, any conversation about "Silence of the Lambs," I think, brings up the very interesting consideration of Hannibal Lecter as a character and this idea that you can pick someone who's objectively speaking the worst person ever, and yet, the author makes him compelling, even empathetic sometimes. Is there a different spin that you take if you're assessing the villain against the human needs? How would you apply the needs to Hannibal Lecter? We could make funny subsistence comments right off the bat.
 
[00:23:17] JP: Yeah, so this is something I haven't explored in this first book, but it's a conversation that's started to come up. There's this negative aspect to these needs or how they may function in this sense. One thing I really like about storytelling is how villains inside characters form as shadows and reflections of your main character. In the sense that Starling has a need for understanding and identity, and participation, Hannibal Lecter has corrupted versions of those. He wants to understand Starling, less about himself, but more, he has this weird desire to pick people apart.
 
It's both physically and mentally, like one of his strong desires is just to know how other people function. You can see it's this sort of understanding of other people's identities. It's less about him and more about other people. I don't have a full answer, but I think it falls within the lines of these corruptions of the needs or these other versions of them.
 
An example I can think of that isn't exactly for "Silence of the Lambs," but whenever looking at things like Rising Up Stories, Hunger Games, where we have participation as a form of good, participation can also be a form of bad. If you're looking at participation as participating in a community where you have a voice in that community, what's a negative aspect of that? Being a dictator, leading a cult, all of these things where you might be fulfilling your own need, but you're absorbing the need of others because you are this nexus of that need. So I think there's a fun thing to play with in there that I just don't have fully set yet.
 
[00:25:25] Matty: I'm going to ask one more question about Hannibal and the human needs. So one of them is freedom. On a very obvious level, freedom is a need that he has. It's a goal he achieves. Would you consider that as applied to Hannibal Lecter, that freedom is, in fact, the primary human need, or is it one of those where it's only superficially the human need and there's a more meaty, so to speak, need that he has achieved by the end of the movie.
 
[00:25:59] JP: I wonder because I see this underlying need for freedom, but at the same time, I feel like everything's kind of a game, you know? So what if he's in prison? He'll get out eventually. It's less of a he's just waiting for the opportune time to really show his mastermind. I think his desire or need is to prove that he is what everyone thinks he is. That almost makes me think that his need is identity. All the time. It's a corrupted form of, "I am the monster that you think I am," sort of thing, and using that identity as a means of manipulation to get what he wants.
 
[00:26:47] Matty: I do kind of feel as if there's a part of Hannibal that, that is so, does he end up on the beach at the end of the first movie, or is that a later movie?
 
[00:26:54] JP: I think it's the, I'm pretty sure it's the first movie, but I haven't seen it in a while.
 
[00:26:59] Matty: So at whatever point he ends up on the beach, spoiler alert, there's a part of me that thinks that he's kind of missing having his visits from Clarice, like the upside of prison for Hannibal Lecter is he's going to get to talk to the most fascinating people. Whereas, on the beach, you know, he can drink his drink, he can look at the water, but what's the fun there?
 
[00:27:20] JP: Exactly, which leads me to question, is freedom the true need, or is that just the thing that happens because he's fulfilling these other bits?
 
Looking at "House of the Cerulean Sea," if that works for you, we have something like Linus's need for identity leads him to fulfill affection by developing understanding. So those are taking the three needs of identity, affection, and understanding. We really start off this book with Linus not fulfilling his identity.
 
He's really unhappy, just doesn't like his job. He's going through the motions or the expectations of everyone. The book starts off with things being very drab, gray, and dark. It's not a very happy place that he's in. His true need in this story is affection. He meets somebody that he's investigating, more or less, but by the end of the book, it's really about this drive to have love, not only from the main head of this orphanage but also the children that are there as well. It's a sense of belonging and love and affection. It's this understanding of his role as a person throughout the story.
 
[00:28:46] JP: So I like to write out the formula, and then I like to reshape it into something that makes sense to me or something that I actually want to use as a mantra. If I were to be writing "House on the Cerulean Sea" and I had developed a story hypothesis at the beginning of the story, I might say something like, "By embracing our true identity, we begin to understand ourselves more, paving the way for genuine affection and love." So, I can use a mantra like that to really have it somewhere.
 
When I was writing "Mandrake Manor," I had it on a whiteboard over here, and I would just see it every day. I didn't really stop, pause, and think. It's just something I saw, and then I would just be like, oh yeah, that's why I'm writing this. Because I'm trying to tell a story about affection, more or less. And so if I were writing this one, and I was looking at this, and I was saying, every time that Linus gets closer to his true identity, he understands himself more. And then he can open himself up for affection and love. So as I'm writing the story, I need him to hit these little notes where he's getting closer to himself, understanding who he is, understanding the people around him and not really imposing judgment on them. And then all of those steps along the way will get him closer and closer to affection and love. There's going to be downfalls because that happens. Stories aren't linear. They're jumpy and that happens. But, that's kind of why I use this mantra as a tool to kind of set aside and just think about as I write the story.
 
[00:30:20] Matty: Got it. So, do you think that writers should go into writing a story with the idea of their formula in mind? Or might writers eventually get to the same endpoint if they start writing, and then they look back at a first draft and they say, oh, I see what's going on here and then they use that formula to, what's the word I want, solidify what they're trying to achieve?
 
[00:30:45] JP: 100%. So I used Story Hypothesis when I was drafting "Mandrake Manor," but I used Story Hypothesis when I was revising "Nerds." I hadn't used it before, and then I looked at it and I questioned what our hypothesis was, and I just kind of made sure that certain scenes, you know, were a little bit shaped in the hypothesis that I wanted it to be in.
 
I've had a couple of clients, which is where Story Hypothesis came from. These were conversations where I reviewed their work and provided my interpretation of it. Most of the time, I was hitting those notes that they wanted for their story. For example, if they were trying to embrace their true identity, but in a particular scene, the character was doing something cruel, it led me to question if the scene matched their intended hypothesis. We would then have a conversation to explore if there was a different choice the character could make in that scene for better flow. In revising, especially through conversation, Story Hypothesis proves to be a useful tool. It can be applied whenever, making it effective for various scenarios.
 
[00:32:54] Matty: Well, I think I'm seeing also why you object to the idea of a hierarchy because I think in a hierarchical structure, all the stories would be going from a lower level to a higher level. They start out starving, but when they're done, they're all self-actualized or whatever. You could shoehorn "The Hunger Games" into that, I think, but it limits you. You can imagine a story where you want to go from participation to protection or something like that. I don't know that the storyline always has to go from more foundational to more actualized or whatever. Is that part of why you don't like the idea of the hierarchical approach?
 
[00:33:39] JP: Yes, so I was actually doing a scene-by-scene analysis of "The Road" that may never see the light of day. We'll find out, but regardless, "The Road" is an apocalyptic story by Cormac McCarthy where a father and son are traveling down a road to find something better. In this world, starvation is the primary concern. There's no life anywhere, so they have to find canned goods. I was using Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but there were certain scenes where they were starving, yet making decisions that seemed higher up on this hierarchy.
 
And I had to almost continuously justify to myself, well, of course, they're starving, but we need to move the story forward because he loves his son so much. I'm like, well, emotional love is like four steps higher in the hierarchy, but they're outside in the rain, and they're going to die. But it just begs the question, does that hierarchy work all the time? Especially in Western culture, where the focus is on self-actualization, the hierarchy works well. However, in certain stories, it just doesn't. You don't have to use Max Neef, but I think the intent of using Max Neef and the chapter about my opinions about Maslow is just to think about your structure and maybe break apart from the hierarchy.
 
[00:35:14] Matty: Well, JP, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. I'm going to have to listen to it a couple of times and let it simmer because I just see all sorts of great ways to apply this to my own writing and reading. I think it's going to be fun to read books and watch movies with this kind of thing in mind. Believe it or not, I've never seen "The Matrix," and it comes up so often on the podcast that this evening, that's my assignment. I'm going to go watch "The Matrix." So I'm not just nodding like I know what I'm talking about. Thank you so much, and I know everybody's going to be interested in finding out more about Story Hypothesis. Please let them know where they can go to find that out.
 
[00:35:50] JP: Yeah, so I tried to make it as easy as possible, www.storyhypothesis.com. It redirects to my main site, but there is a page about it, so that's probably the easiest way.
 
[00:36:01] Matty: Great, thank you so much!
 
[00:36:02] JP: Thank you!

Episode 222 - Perfecting Your Story's Trajectory with Mary Carroll Moore

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

Mary Carroll Moore discusses PERFECTING YOUR STORY'S TRAJECTORY, including the value of having a visual map of your story's structure; the importance of understanding the triggering event that generates the crisis and the turn from outer to inner crisis; the power of considering how the question posed at the beginning of the story maps to the answer given at the end of the story; adjusting a plot to meet genre tropes; the often overlooked arc of setting and avoiding setting cliches; and using a storyboard to check for cause and effect.

Mary Carroll Moore is the author of 14 books in 3 genres, including the Amazon bestselling novel and Hot New Release, A WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SEARCH & RESCUE, and in fact, I met Mary when I interviewed her about that book as part of my WHAT I LEARNED video series. She’s also the author of the PEN-Faulkner nominated novel QUALITIES OF LIGHT. She has taught storyboarding and writing craft for two decades at writing schools around the U.S., including Grub Street in Boston and the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

Episode Links

Author website: https://www.marycarrollmoore.com
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/marycarrollmoore/
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/marycarrollmoore/
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marycarrollmoore/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MaryCarrollMoore

Summary

When crafting a compelling narrative, one significant task every writer must grapple with is creating a believable, engaging plot and characters, all while setting the scene flawlessly. This article serves as an enriching guide, based on a podcast conversation between Matty and best-selling author Mary Carol Moore, to creating powerful script arcs focusing on character, setting, and plot development.
 
Understanding Narrative Arcs
 
According to Mary, the trajectory a character takes from the start to the end of a book constitutes a narrative arc. Mary underlines the importance of making sure this trajectory isn't just about the character but includes the evolution of setting images and plot progression. To effectively harness narrative arcs, Mary advises intertwining character progression, plot development, and setting evolvement.
 
Plot Arc: The Compelling Question and Answer
 
Mapping your plot arc begins with identifying a central question for your story. This question forms the heart of your plot, and its resolution often provides the climax of the tale. Effectively, the crux of the plot lies in the systematic detailing of how the question asked at the beginning of the story gets answered at the end.
 
During the conversation, Mary stressed the importance of breaking that initial question up into a secondary question that comes up midway. A new challenge or crisis in the middle of the narrative can provide the necessary traction to keep the reader hooked.
 
Character Arc: Personality Development Matters
 
Similar to the plot arc, character arcs are structured around the evolution of the characters, displaying their personal growth throughout the story. They present in stages, allowing for character evolution at every step.
 
As put beautifully by Mary during the discussion, "Characters present a certain way, even in literature, and they think they're this way, and then something has to happen to make them more vulnerable, more revealed to the reader." Her conversation with Matty revolved around how an underlying event in the middle of a story can reveal a deep part of the character, prompting readers to connect more intensely with them.
 
Setting Arc: Unveiling the Story World
 
A commonly forgettable yet crucial part of the narrative arcs is the setting. For many readers and writers, the setting evolves into a character of its own. Whether it is the beautiful depiction of trees or the desolate portrayal of an abandoned city, the stage forms the canvas for the events to unfold.
 
Mary highly recommends writers to consider the setting as an essential tool to increase tension in the narrative. Going contrary to typical plot setups like 'a dark stormy night', exploring opposite scenarios, such as having intense scenes on a sunny, beautiful day, can make the experience even creepier and create thought-provoking reactions from the characters in response.
 
Ending Notes
 
Building a story is more than stitching events together. Whether you are a writer who starts with the plot, focuses on the characters, or begins with the world their characters inhabit, mingling these three elements- plot, character, and setting, remains crucial. Despite the challenges involved in arranging these elements of a story, doing so gives writers control over their narrative world and, hence, makes the process remarkably satisfying.
 
Remember, if you wish, you can find more about character, setting, and plot arcs as well as other writing techniques on Mary Carol Moore's YouTube channel. For a weekly dose of writing tips, you may also subscribe to her free Substack newsletter - 'Your Weekly Writing Exercise.' Stay tuned to more such enlightening conversations on our podcast, and keep exploring the wonderful world of writing.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Mary Carol Moore. Hey, Mary, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Mary: Hi, great to be here again.
 
Meet Mary Carroll Moore
 
[00:00:09] Matty: Yes, it is great to have you here. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Mary Carol Moore is the author of 14 books in three genres, including the Amazon bestselling novel and hot new release, "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue." I met Mary when I interviewed her about that book as part of my What I Learned video series. I was so intrigued; I had to read "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue," which was wonderful, and I can highly recommend.
 
It had two of the things that intrigue me either personally or vicariously—aviation. We talked about that earlier; I took flying lessons for a while, and my husband's a pilot. So the aviation aspect was fascinating. Also, my husband's the front man in a band in the Philadelphia area. So I also enjoyed the band-related aspects of "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue."
 
Mary is also the author of the Penn Faulkner-nominated novel, "Qualities of Light." She has taught storyboarding and writing craft for two decades at writing schools around the U.S., including Grub Street in Boston and the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
 
I invited Mary on the podcast to talk about narrative arcs. So let's make sure we're all coming at this from the same perspective.
 
How does Mary define narrative arcs?
 
[00:01:19] Matty: How do you define narrative arcs?
 
[00:01:22] Mary: It's a great question because there are different ways to define it, depending on what writing books you read or classes you take. For me, a narrative arc is the trajectory or the path through the story that the character takes—how the character evolves from the beginning of the book to the end of the book. I also use narrative arcs to refer to the evolution of setting images and plot. So, for me, the narrative arcs weave in three ways, and I think that's what we're going to be talking about today.
 
[00:01:55] Matty: Yeah, well, let's dive right in about what those three aspects of the arc are.
 
Having a visual map of your story's structure
 
[00:02:01] Mary: Okay. So when I've taught storyboarding at different writing schools, people come to me with the big question of structure. Many writers are confused about structure. We know how to flow things; we do NaNoWriMo or get all those words out on paper. When we come to actually analyzing the draft for whether it holds together structurally, this is often the biggest problem. When I worked as a teacher and a coach, I found that many manuscripts had a beautiful story, setting, and characters, but there weren't many solid structural elements. Readers kind of got lost. We're talking about creating a deliberate structure that you start with, and then you can go into your writing, which is flow writing or free writing, but you always have this visual map to come back to.
 
[00:02:55] Mary: And so, the easiest one to start with is plot. When people are used to doing all kinds of plot outlines, like "Save the Cat," and storyboards, there are just so many different ways to do plot outlines. I use a W storyboard because it has an up and down movement, and that is the thing that plots usually forget to do, like the middle. There needs to be something happening in the middle that really pulls the reader into a second reveal, a second crisis. We have the starting crisis that's usually in the beginning chapter or early in the book, and then we have a middle crisis that develops that original one, makes it even harder, worse, and then that will lead us to the place where things are resolved. A character has to face themselves or something has to change for the plot to be resolved. So that's, in a nutshell, how this particular approach to narrative arcs works. Yes.
 
[00:03:53] Matty: A question about that because you were saying that the plot arc is the good one to start out with. Do you find that the stumbling block that writers are facing is that they have the idea for that arc but they're forgetting about that secondary one that keeps pulling the reader through in the middle? Or is it just that it's missing, or is it just ineffectively constructed?
 
The triggering event that generates the crisis
 
[00:04:17] Mary: Well, that's a really good question. It's often missing, but if it is constructed, it doesn't tie back into the first one, so that the first one has to generate what I call the triggering event. It has to generate the crisis that runs through the first half of the book. But then there's a place in the middle of the book where things have been resolved to some extent, but something new has to come up. Some new crisis has to come up, new information. Oftentimes, this is where there's a double-crossing or a betrayal or something that you thought was true is not true, and oh my god, there's another big problem to solve. So this problem-solving has to be in, I feel, in stages. If you dump it all on the reader at the beginning, which many writers do, they think, okay, we're going to blow up a city and that will create the entire story, but it's not really true for the character part of it because characters evolve, and they might have solved that first problem, but what happens to the problem inside themselves? So having a second crisis often in the plot allows the character that evolution that you need to create the character's arc, the character's narrative arc.
 
[00:05:25] Matty: So what that made me think of, and I think because you mentioned blowing up the city, and I didn't think about this ahead, so listeners, bear with me, but what it made me think of was the Will Smith movie that was, I think it was called "I Am Legend," but it was at least based on the book "I Am Legend." It's where Will Smith is in the sort of post-apocalyptic world and is trying to escape the zombies. And what I thought of was the scene where, spoiler alert, his dog gets bitten by a zombie or wounded by a zombie. So now the dog is going to turn into a zombie. And that's both, I think, kind of that secondary hook that's going to keep the reader interested, but it's also very revealing of the character's personality. Is that actually an example of what you're talking about? Or is that an example of something different?
 
[00:06:17] Mary: No, that's a great example because what you're looking for in that second crisis is something that will reveal a deep part of the character, something that hasn't been shown yet. Because characters present a certain way, even in literature, and they think they're this way, and then something has to happen to make them actually more vulnerable, more revealed to the reader, so the reader can actually get behind them.
 
And this is a big part of literature today. We used to go for action stories that didn't really have to reveal any character, but then action stories, thrillers, started to reveal character, and then that started to be part of our culture as readers. We have to understand a person and who's behind this event and get to know them, and even if we don't like them, there's somebody that we are connected to by the end, and I think that point in the middle, in my particular narrative arc storyboards, that's where the reader gets to know the character. So, yes, a great example, Matty.
 
[00:07:14] Matty: Yeah, the example of character arc, this is an example that I think comes up each time, is the James Bond character. Like, I think if we were having this interview, I don't know, five or ten years ago, James Bond was always the example of the exception, the proof of the rule that James Bond has no character arc. Yet, I think as time went on, the screenwriters or the writers added that because I think it was something that current audiences would have been disappointed not to see.
 
[00:07:43] Mary: Yeah, I'm really intrigued by this. So I'm reading an older thriller that I love that's called "The Dog Stars" by Peter Heller. He's a literary thriller writer from Colorado, and he's won all sorts of awards, and he's very prolific. But this "Dog Stars" was his first book, and I was kind of preparing for this talk today with you, and I wanted to look at a book that I love and find out why I'm so invested in the character. And it turns out that he has a crisis right at that point of the mid-book, where something personal happens to him, and it causes him to make all these decisions that he wouldn't have made before. So he actually takes the risk that he had talked himself out of because he's lost something that was incredibly valuable to him.
 
And I thought, wow, what a great structure, you know? He's got that plot point in the middle that causes the character to face something. The end of his world, so then he has nothing to lose. He can go ahead and move forward into this huge risk, which of course creates the second half of the book and turns out really good in the end. But I think all these good writers, you know, the really good ones, you can kind of take their books and analyze them and find that second point.
 
[00:08:55] Matty: So I sort of took you from plot arc to character arc, but is there more you wanted to talk about with regard to the structure of the plot arc and what writers should be looking for to assess the plot arc in their own work?
 
How does the question posed at the beginning of the story map to the answer given at the end of the story?
 
[00:09:07] Mary: I think one of the best techniques I gave to my students when I was teaching was to see if there's a question asked at the beginning of the story, like, will this world be saved? You know, the blowing-up city thing. And then what kind of answer is given at the end. Yes, it's going to be saved. No, it's not going to be saved.
 
We're all going to colonize the new planet, whatever it is. So take those two points, the beginning and the ending point, which on the storyboard would be point one and point five because they're five points on a storyboard. And then consider point three. Take your question that you begin with, "Will this city be saved?" and see if you can twist it. What happens if this city is not saved? And then what other question would evolve from that? For instance, would we leave this city, or would we try to save it? So that there's kind of a new question asked at the center of the book. That seemed to help people, just to start with a question, figure out the answer at the end, and then break that question up so that you have a second question at the middle, and that's the thing that you can base your plot point on or your character change on.
 
For instance, in this Peter Heller book, we have the question seems to be, am I going to survive this terrible situation that's happened to the world? You know, what will my life be like? Will I ever find love again? Can I stand living with this person that I'm living with who's the only other survivor that I know of? And then in the middle, the question is, how will I live without this thing that I've just lost? So it becomes more personal. It's almost like there's an individual question or a limited question in the beginning and then that evolves into a more universal question in the middle. And that seemed to help my students sometimes just to think of it as first in terms of questions and answers and then a midpoint question.
 
[00:11:43] Matty: Yeah, I like that idea of applying sort of like the rules you learn about writing a newspaper article, the who, what, when, where, why, and how, and say, and the middle point say, well, is it a good question, how is this going to happen, or is it a good question, why is this going to happen, or to whom is it going to happen, or whatever.
 
[00:11:17] Mary: Yeah, that's a fantastic way to approach it. Yeah.
 
[00:11:20] Matty: I was talking about Alien with someone, and I was trying to apply that, I'm trying to think in Alien, because Alien seems to me to be sort of at one level, at least a very straightforward, you know, there's a monster, are we going to get away from the monster kind of plotline. And I'm trying to think if there was that moment in the middle, in the way that there was that moment with the dog in “I Am Legend.”
 
[00:11:43] Mary: Think about the character. Like is there a question that the character asks in the middle that's different? So, are we going to get away from the monster? But is there something that becomes more personal than just the escape? Or am I going to be able to save someone? For instance, is often people take it out of just the initial crisis into something more personal.
 
[00:12:08] Matty: Yeah, I guess the only thing I'm thinking of is that, and I finally remembered where I was talking about this was a patron event with Jeff Elkins, the Dialogue Doctor, that there's this romantic interest that I think was inserted late in the game. It seemed like the kind of thing that was probably slapped on there at the end because they decided they needed a romantic relationship. So there was this kind of twist that all the characters weren't equally important to save, that's kind of, you know, there were people that I think the viewer wanted more to survive the encounter with the alien than others, the captain being one when it became clear that there was this relationship between Ripley and the captain, and some of the other characters were sort of odious and you didn't really care when they got eaten up by the monster.
 
[00:13:00] Matty: So I keep, keep taking off on these little sidetracks. Maybe I'll keep this in just because it's fun.
 
[00:13:05] Mary: I think it is.
 
[00:13:08] Matty: Yeah, so are there other examples you can think of in addition to the Dog Stars, where there are these questions? Because I've never heard anybody talk about structuring quite this way with this question in the middle that provides the impetus for drawing people through. I think it's worth some careful examination.
 
How Mary inserted the twist in A WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SEARCH AND RESCUE
 
[00:13:26] Mary: Well, can I use my book? “The Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue”? Okay. So, this book, I had to structure really carefully because I was working with the same dilemma that I had a woman who starts off with a plane crash. She escapes from the law, and she crashes her plane, and she has to meet her estranged sister. So, I thought, okay, well, that's a great start. It all, you know, all works.
 
But what am I going to have in the middle? Because, she's injured and she's stuck in a cabin in a blizzard, which is the worst kind of plot point you can imagine to work out of. You know, you've got someone stuck in a room or a cabin or anything. It's really bad news for structure. So I had to figure out what would happen in the middle that would change everything. And so what I thought was, what if her sister discovers her there and she decides to first turn her in and then decides to help her.
 
So that, it was about the two characters coming together, and the middle of my book is a fight, basically a fight scene with the two characters. They've decided that they're not going to collaborate, they're not going to be sisters, they're not going to be family, and the sister that finds the hidden sister, so Kate is the search and rescue pilot, and Red is the one who's escaped, and so Kate finds Red on her property, endangering her own daughter, and she's got to make this huge decision about what she's going to do.
 
A turn from outer crisis to inner crisis
 
[00:14:54] Mary: So that was my second plot point. And I decided to put that kind of in the middle of the book so that there would be not just the story of the search and rescue outwardly but the search and rescue inwardly. So that is what turned it from the outer crisis of the fleeing and the crime being investigated and Red being wanted by the law into something that's more important to me in this story, which is about the unity of the two sisters and how they're going to come together. And at first, of course, they can't. So the crisis is, oh my god, Red is in danger, she's come all this way, and she can't get help. So that was the point where she lost everything.
 
And Kate also, in a sense, lost everything because, you know, she's been lonely all her life, and here's the chance for her to have a family, and she says no, you know, but just because of her own rules and her decision to be somebody, you know, I would never help somebody who's slightly shady, you know, suspected of a crime.
 
So that was kind of my example of what I could do. So that changed everything, and now if Kate's going to help Red, then all of the rest of it comes together. Suddenly, they're a team, and Kate uses all her skills. She goes out to the woods again, and she finds the missing item that will exonerate Red.
 
So, all of the things that happen later are the things that will actually create the rest of the story. So, not to just point at my own work, but that was an example of me struggling for years trying to figure out, well, how do I get her out of this stupid cabin in a blizzard? You know, what can I create here? Well, what if her sister finds her and then refuses to help her? So that would be like the bottom, a moment of, you know, nothing is worse than this. So I guess that would be an example.
 
Adjusting a plot to meet genre tropes
 
[00:16:45] Matty: Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought that up because I did have a question, and we're sort of giving spoilers away for lots of things, but I don't think it would deter anyone from actually getting “A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue” based on our conversation, but one thing I was expecting that didn't happen, and it didn't lessen my enjoyment of the story, which I thought was wonderful, but did make me wonder, is that I was expecting that the, the bad guy, Cotton,
 
[00:17:09] Mary: Billy, Billy Cotton. Yeah, good.
 
[00:17:12] Matty: is, so there's the sort of flashback aspect of Red and Billy's interaction before the story takes place that sets the stage for what happens later, and then there's the altercation with Red and Billy, I think, kind of in the middle of the book, maybe a third over the way or three or something like that. But then I was expecting Billy to show up at the cabin because what I thought it was building to was going to be, the big climactic confrontation where Red was going to save her sister and her niece from Billy, who shows up in this seemingly safe place.
 
Mary: Well, I had that in there. I did.
 
[00:17:53] Matty: So can you talk a little bit about how you made the decision there?
 
[00:17:58] Mary: Well, I had him come back and burn the cabin down with them in it. And I thought that was great. So that was like the last, you know, big conflict scene. And, the feedback I got was, it's too much. It's, it makes it more thriller than women's lit. So I'm really interested in the women relationships in this book. I think that the whole idea of women heroes and found family and all of those aspects, those are the things that really do it for me.
 
The thriller part, I'm not really a thriller writer. So my feedback was, you know, you've got too many murders, too many things happening here and you've got to tone it down and we don't really need Billy again. We really are invested in the sisters. So I reluctantly took that out and that's going to be an outtake. I'm going to surely do something with it. Cause it was a fabulous scene. And, Alex ends up shooting Billy and he dies in the cabin fire. And I thought, oh, this is great.
 
[00:18:55] Matty: So he doesn't actually burn them with them in it, and then they all die except Billy.
 
[00:18:58] Mary: No, he sets it on fire and they, and Red is alert and found, finds him and goes out and tries to talk him into, you know, anyway, there's a whole thing where she manages to get him into the cabin and then she and Alex escape and he's drunk and he's basically a mess and he lights the cabin on fire and burns in it.
 
[00:22:38] Mary: So that was when I was, you know, trying to figure out how to simplify. I had actually given the manuscript to a beta reader, who said, you know, it was really great, but she said, I had to go to work the next day, and I couldn't put it down. So you know, you've got to fix that. And that was the feedback I was looking for. I thought, okay, I really want to fix that.
 
I really want to fix it so that you could read it in three days and really enjoy it. And so that was, you know, looking at the plot and cutting things out and then, and then making sure that the character was a continuous evolution. And that was, it was hard. It was really hard because the book was really all over the place. It was a mess.
 
And so I had to go back and cut and cut and cut. And then the editor, when I got the editor that I hired to help me with the plot, she suggested a couple of scenes in the middle, that were, where the characters were sitting around, and she just suggested I take them out because they weren't really evolving the plot.
 
They were just kind of interesting but a side road. And, that was a big revelation for me, you know, how plot can be, and it was fascinating because it really made the book much tighter.
 
[00:23:43] Matty: Yeah. So I'm also curious about the decision to tell the story out of chronological order because there's the initial plane crash that sort of sets everything in motion, but then you cut to what is the, you know, the big climactic confrontation with Billy before it actually happens, and then it happens.
 
And then there's the interaction between, Red and Billy before the story started. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to structure it that way?
 
Playing with timeline and tension
 
[00:24:11] Mary: Oh, I love playing with time. I do. I do it in all my books. So that's a really good point. I think, I think that, I don't know, it was probably five or six years ago. I went to see a play in New York and it was called Constellations. And it was the same, the same thing, but it was so beautifully done.
 
I just remember thinking, you know, I've got to try this sometime because what they did was play with the timeline and the two characters met each other over and over again. It was just a couple, but they met each other over and over again in different times and different places, different situations. So I really wanted to try that.
 
And in this book, it really worked because I wanted to give the reader kind of the bottom of the story. So, Billy, at the end, when the climax is there, is he's getting his due. You know, I really wanted him to get what he deserved, because he was just a really despicable character. So, I thought, well, what if I show that scene in the beginning, because I want the reader to know, that it's coming. I want them to be, you know, really wanting that to happen. So that was kind of the first, you know, the first thinking about it. And then I thought, well, what if I show how it actually happens? So I give them the bottom, and then I start working up.
 
[00:25:22] Mary: And then, you know, what happened before that that could, you know, lead to that. And then what happens before that? And I just kind of keep building it so that there's a climax, a climax, a climax, and then the big climax at the end. And that's what, you know, was really kind of fun for me to do and fun for me to read because I didn't know, you know, I didn't know what was going to happen. It was, oh my God, this is just so much fun.
 
[00:25:48] Matty: And it really, I think, sets up that, and I know I've talked about this in previous episodes, but that desire, not just to know what happens, but how does it happen, because you've set up this situation that I think you know, the reader is wondering, well, how are we going to get from where we are to there? Because it's not obvious.
 
[00:26:04] Mary: Right.
 
[00:26:05] Matty: So it really does drive you through the book in a way that I thought was just super clever and worked really well.
 
[00:26:13] Mary: Good, I'm glad. I'm glad it worked for you. Yeah. And it was fun. It was really fun to do. It was not easy, but it was fun.
 
[00:26:21] Matty: Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm glad that you did it because I do think that it really set up that sense of, you know, I got to keep turning pages because I need to know, you know, we're working our way up to the climax and I need to know how this is all going to, to play out.
 
[00:26:34] Mary: Yeah, it was, it was good. It was good. It was a good writing experience.
 
[00:26:38] Matty: Yeah. So, any other thoughts on narrative arcs before we sign off here?
 
[00:26:43] Mary: No, I think, I think I covered it. I just think that the three narrative arcs, the plot, the character, and the setting, if you can
 
So, she helped me because I had to go back to my strength and my entry point, which is characters. When I went back to characters, I realized I had enough plot to form the story, to make the structure work. The characters were the heart of it; that's where my strength is as a writer. We all have to know where we enter the story and how not to transform ourselves into something we're not.
 
That was my lesson, a costly many-year lesson, but I'm glad I worked it out.
 
[00:23:57] Matty: I think that's also a great example of when you're picking the people from whom you're going to accept critique, be sure that your expectation, their expectation, and their expertise are aligned. There's a lot of conversation about the importance of having a professional editor look at your work if you're independently published. Still, there isn't as much conversation about vetting the person giving advice. Every person brings their preferences and expectations, and it could lead you down a path you don't want to follow, as you were describing in your case at first.
 
[00:24:36] Mary: I'm such a good student. Somebody I respect says, "Add another murder here," I'll do it. Even if it's not my strength and the thing I really want to do, I'll go ahead and add the murder. Then I'll say, "Oh my god, I have taken this way far from who I am." Now I have to cut back, come back to the core of the story that is me. I'm happy because the book came out the way I wanted it to, even with the missing outtakes. The book is what I want, and people comment that they don't want to end it because they don't want to leave the characters. That's what I really wanted from my readers, that they get so involved in the characters they don't want to stop reading them.
 
Character arc across a series
 
[00:25:18] Matty: The people who are very interested in characters often go the series route. Now you have book after book where you can delve into those characters' arc in a more complex way than you can in an individual book.
 
[00:25:34] Mary: The second of a series, Qualities of Light, was the prequel. I do have a whole outline for the third book.
 
[00:25:42] Matty: Nice.
 
[00:25:43] Mary: If I really want to do it, where Kate and Red go to find their father. The missing piece for their relationship is that the father who's betrayed them both has another family and has a daughter he's taught to fly, who is now their half-sister. That may come up for me. I don't know. I have another book coming out next year that's not about this group of characters. It's a different book, but it's also a novel. I don't know that I'll, I have to take a break for a while, then I'll come back probably and consider what do I do with the characters of "Women's Guide to Search and Rescue" and their missing father because that's like a question mark at the end of the book.
 
[00:26:26] Matty: It's interesting because if you decide that you don't want to pursue that, your next book comes out, you're meshed with that. Maybe that takes you into a different direction. Then you have to have made sure that if someone only reads "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue," or reads the prequel or any combination of those things, the character experience they have is satisfying.
 
[00:26:57] Mary: I remember running into that when I read Philip Pullman's books, "The Golden Compass" and all of those. They're children's fantasy books that I loved. I remember them creating the movie for "The Golden Compass," and they left it with this huge bit of hanging story. There wasn't that feeling of completion that his book had. I was so mad as a viewer and reader that the movie didn't have that sense of closure. So, those question and answer techniques that I gave earlier, if the writer can answer that initial question and at least give the reader some satisfaction that something has been wrapped up, then I think a series works really well as standalone too.
 
But if the ending of the book is so dependent on not resolving that question that we asked in the beginning, either I would suggest that the writer rethink the question or somehow give the reader enough material, enough change, enough sense of satisfaction, so that they don't have that frustration that I had with the "Golden Compass" movie. Otherwise, you'd lose me completely. I need to have some closure at the end of a book, even if it's part of a series.
 
Adjusting secondary arcs to serve the primary
 
[00:28:13] Matty: Thinking about this in terms of my own two series, the Ann Kinnear suspense novels are more standalone. You can read them in order, and there's some benefit to doing that, but you could pick them up in any order, and that would be fine. The Lizzie Ballard thrillers are definitely a very obvious overarching arc. There are three books out now, and the fourth one is coming out in January 2024. That will be the first of, I'm anticipating, another set of three that will have a continuing but self-contained arc.
 
For all the books, I only have the most general possible idea of what the overarching arc is going to be for the second trilogy. Fortunately, so far, it's worked out. I'm really pleased with the arc as represented in the first trilogy. I feel relatively confident that the arc of the second trilogy is going to work out. But I can imagine getting to book five and going, "Oh my God! I don't know what's going to happen next." There are people who plan out their 10-book series ahead of time, which I just think would be so difficult because you learn so much when you're writing the book. You might get to the end of book three of your 10-book series and say, "Oh man, this person really wouldn't do what I thought they were going to be doing in the next X number of books."
 
[00:29:29] Mary: I'm so behind that. I really agree. I've never been somebody who could plot that much. The writing process for me, I'm more of a pantser than a plotter, but I tend to grow the book as I write it. I don't know what these characters are going to do. Since I'm a character-based writer, it's very hard for me to say, "By the end, she's going to do this and this and this." Maybe I'll have a sense that by the end, she's going to have a certain level of satisfaction about this question being answered, like found family. Do I have a family or don't I have a family? As far as what happens to the person in getting there, that's the stuff that evolves as I write.
 
I didn't know Red, for instance, was a self-centered person in the beginning, but she definitely is. She doesn't think about this family that she's fleeing to and what danger she's going to put them in. The fact that I had no clue about that until I had completed the draft and then realized, oh my god, she's changed by the end. She's now aware of other people, aware of the dangers she's brought, and she's willing to make amends for that. That was a big deal for me to learn as a writer. But how do you sit down and figure that out ahead of time? Maybe if you're a plot writer, you don't have that problem. But for me, as a character writer, that was—I'm with you Matty—I just can't know that ahead of time, I have to evolve it.
 
[00:30:56] Matty: Yeah, I think there's probably the consideration that forms the foundation of what you want to achieve across a series, and then you can tweak the other aspects accordingly. So for me, the arc of what I anticipate will be the second Lizzy Ballard trilogy will be mainly around the relationship of the protagonist and the antagonist, having it start with them very much at odds but evolving so that in the second book, they, in some way, would have to join forces against an even bigger evil. In the third one, in some way, one of them makes the sacrifice, decides to sacrifice herself for a greater good.
 
Having that as even that general idea, just knowing that, I feel like, okay, that's enough. I can proceed with this series knowing that that's enough structure. And I know that because that trajectory is based on the characters, then I can adjust the plot to accommodate, as opposed to a trajectory that's based on plot, and you would adjust the characters as needed to achieve that.
 
[00:32:08] Mary: That's exactly it. So I adjust the plot. I create the plot based on what the characters need to learn. Exactly. And I find that very satisfying as a writer. I don't like doing it the other way, although when I studied with the thriller writer, that's what he taught me how to do, you know, basically have your plot be the most important thing.
 
[00:32:28] Matty: Well, I think that, yes, we're talking about it. I'm thinking that basing it on plot—and I'm saying this as someone who's basing the trajectory on character—it would be more difficult to base it on plot because you have to keep coming up with new ideas to keep it interesting for yourself, not to mention the readers. Whereas with characters, if you've created characters you really love, then I think just naturally, you want to spend more time with them and then you find ways to put them in situations that enable you to spend more time with them.
 
[00:32:55] Mary: Right, right. Right, exactly. And they generate the ideas of, okay, I ask myself, what does this person long for? And what have they lost? And then from those two questions, I can go into, oh, they long for this and this. Then I can create the plot points based on that longing. And then what have they lost? Then again, I have a list of things they've lost. And then I can create plot points based on, well, what if they reclaim that in some way? So the character, for me, always drives those plot points. It's fun. You know, it's a really great way to approach writing.
 
[00:33:29] Matty: Well, when I talk to authors who are writing especially in a series, a lot of times the conversation is around, I need to have this happen plot-wise. What can I get the characters to do to enable that to happen? And I think, oh, that seems really backward. But then I'll read the resulting book. And I'm like, well, whatever they did, it worked because this is a great story. It's a great plot. It's great characters. It's a successful result.
 
Whereas for myself, I hold the plot up to. So, one of my little sayings for my craft is, you need to be able to explain everything the character does by saying, "She did this because," not "She did this despite the fact that." So, she went into the dark basement when she heard the mysterious sounds because the rabbit hutch was down there, and she had to make sure the rabbit was okay. Versus, "She went downstairs despite the fact that she had just heard on the news that a crazy person had escaped from the local mental hospital and was known to hide in people's basements when he got out." One of those works and one of those doesn't, but that's because I'm looking at it from a character-centric point of view.
 
[00:34:41] Mary: And I think that works for me best. It's great.
 
The arc of setting
 
[00:34:45] Mary: I was just going to talk about setting for a moment because that's the third arc that people often forget about, especially writers that focus on plot. They think the setting is not really important, and they get bored by it in other books. Long descriptions are not their thing. I would propose that the setting, and you probably heard this before, is a character. One thing you can do is look at the weather and chart the weather for the different plot points that you're going to be doing and see if the weather can become a problem in those plot points. Then you have an extra element of tension that both the characters and the plot have to deal with.
 
So I find setting to be really a fun and tricky thing. I actually chart the setting, you know, what it looks like and the temperature and all these things by day in my novels. I find that I can really use that, not to be cliched about it like a dark and stormy night, but the idea that a setting is going to create more problems for someone might give them an injury, for instance, or might make them lose something, or they're forced to stay in a place that they want to escape from. You can't really do that completely with plot. You have to have other elements. So I just say to all those plot writers out there that hate setting, you know, this is a possible addition and a positive for your narrative arcs.
 
[00:36:08] Matty: Well, I like that because I have a standalone that's coming out next year, and the weather plays a very strong role in it. With both plot and character, you want that kind of ebb and flow. You want to give the reader a little rest between the more exciting or emotionally intense parts. But it's interesting with setting, I think you can have sort of a straight line. In my story, the temperature gets colder and colder over the course of, um, some of the parts of "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue" reminded me of this. It's a straight line from the beginning of the book to the end of the book in terms of the falling temperatures. It creates a ticking time bomb because you kind of know, oh, if I follow this trajectory, we're going to get to a problem at the end. You don't necessarily need to have those same kinds of ups and downs in a setting arc. Do you concur with that, or does that seem weird?
 
[00:37:04] Mary: I do. Yeah, I do. And I just wanted people to know that it could be a really positive element in creating tension. And it doesn't have to be cliched. Like yours, getting colder and colder, that's definitely going to force the characters to do stuff. That'll force the plot to be some way, you know, so it's a very important, to me, it's a very important element. So it's part of your world-building. People buy into worlds now. It's really important in literature for me, at least. The world is like something that I relate to as a character. If the world is built well and the world changes as you go forward, then I'm really hooked.
 
Avoiding setting cliches
 
[00:37:40] Matty: Yeah, I'm a big fan of probably more description of setting than I think is fashionable to advise these days. If somebody goes into the bar, I kind of want to see what the bar looks like. I'm not happy with just, "She went into the bar and sat down and ordered a beer." I think that thing about what you said about cliches is really important because I'm just buffing up a chapter at the end of my fourth Lizzie Ballard book, and it's where the big physical altercation happens. I look back on my other books, and I'm like, "Yeah, there's one that happens, like, during a sleet storm, and there's one that takes place during a big storm in an Adirondack cabin."
 
I'm like, I don't want to keep going back to that, so I'm having it be like a beautiful sunny spring morning. But then you say, despite the fact that it was a beautiful sunny spring morning, it was still creepy and horrible. But you don't want it to tap into a dark and stormy night. Any tips there for how people can get around relying too heavily on the dark and stormy night.
 
[00:38:43] Mary: I think, I'm going to follow your lead, and I'm going to say, what if you did the opposite? Because that even makes it creepier. So if it happens on a completely beatific day, and the weather isn't a factor of negatives, then that's even more, you know, what if you can play with that? I like that idea. Yeah.
 
[00:39:06] Matty: And you could even, I mean, it offers some nice opportunities for character development because you can say, you know, how come despite the fact that it was a beautiful balmy morning, she was still miserable, or what about it set her teeth on edge, or how come, you know, she's complaining about the sun being in her eyes when she shouldn't. The character's reaction to the non-traditional setting can be illuminating.
 
[00:39:29] Mary: And what if you took that another step and asked about the memory? So the character's got all this backstory, right? Things happen at certain times and certain kinds of weather, and they have memories of setting, and then you can pull the memory of that setting in. It can be something that will enhance the miserableness. So you want to make your characters as miserable as possible so they'll be forced to act, right? So mean!
 
[00:39:57] Matty: The things we do. Rubbing our hands together and cackling evilly.
 
[00:40:02] Mary: I know, it's one of the few places we feel like we have control over our world here.
 
[00:40:06] Matty: Yes. Mary, I took us pretty far afield. Was there anything else about narrative arcs, plot arcs, character arcs, setting arcs that you would like to cover before we wrap up?
 
[00:40:18] Mary: One small technique that I have suggested, and by the way, listeners can look at my YouTube channel, and I have three different storyboarding videos, tutorials there, so you can check out how storyboards are built from those YouTube channels. But the one thing that I'd recommend is, once you have a draft that's pretty solid, that you're pretty pleased with as far as the plot points, I personally take each plot point, major and minor, and put it on individual index cards or sticky notes. Then I'll put them on my wall. I have a wall in my office, and I'll try to see if there's an effect from each thing. So, I'll try to, it's not going to be, you know, I think I heard once, you don't do this happened, and then this happened, then this happened. You do because of this, this happens. So I'm looking for cause and effect.
 
And so I have all these plot points that I've decided, and now I'm going to see does the second plot point connect to the first one? Does the first one create the second one? Does the second one create the third one? You can check your cause and effect for your narrative arc that way really well. I find when it's all written in a manuscript and it's on my computer, I can't separate out in my mind the different plot points. This physical storyboarding on my wall really helps. You can do that again with the character arc as well to say, okay, the character makes this decision in Chapter 3, do I set that up well in the previous chapters? So, does their state of mind or state of being create that decision point? Then, does that decision point create their next change?
 
Basically, you're analyzing the character arc that way too. That would be another kind of technique that I've used, and I've felt very successful with it because it really catches my blind spots and my, you know, this happened, then this happened, then this happened, or the character does something, and it's not earned out. So when I get feedback from my writers group or my agent, it's like, yeah, she does this decision, but there's no reason for it. I don't believe she'd do it. So this will catch those and keep you honest, I guess.
 
[00:42:30] Matty: Yeah, I love that. So much fun. Well, Mary, thank you so much for this great conversation about arcs. And you've given the listeners and viewers one place where they can go to find out more information about that topic, but where can they go to find out more about you and everything you do online?
 
[00:42:46] Mary: marycarolmoore.com. You got the spelling of my name there, two Rs, two Ls, two Os. And on that, I also have my link to my weekly Substack newsletter, which is your weekly writing exercise, where I give these techniques in a little essay every week. So that's free, and people can sign up for that if they'd like to get a little boost to their writing every Friday. I also have my books listed on that page on my website, but they're all over the internet too. Any bookseller, you can go and look for "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue."
 
[00:43:17] Matty: Which I can highly recommend.
 
[00:43:19] Mary: Thank you, Matty. I love that.
 
[00:43:22] Matty: Thank you, Mary.

Episode 218 - Story Bibles and How AI Can Help with Kaylin Tristano

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

Kaylin Tristano discusses STORY BIBLES AND HOW AI CAN HELP. If you’re tired of discussions about AI, you’ll find plenty to interest you in the first half of our conversation, and if you’re not tired of AI, you’ll find some great tips for uses of AI for authors that go way beyond the creation of story bibles. We start out our conversation discussing story bibles in a more traditional context, including what information is important to capture, and how much is too much; capturing story bible details during a proofread (or proof listen); and expanding our idea of story bibles beyond text to include things like maps and audio. In the AI-focused part of our conversation, we discuss tips for prompting; the need to babysit AI; using AI for brainstorming; concerns about AI and piracy; and how the different AI platforms use your data.

Kaylin Tristano is an indie author who has been writing contemporary romance and romantic suspense as Cara Malone for the past 7 years. She is also a freelance editor with Happy Ever Author, specialized in helping other indie authors produce great books. She has a bachelor's degree in writing and a master's in library science.

Episode Links

Kaylin's Links:
http://caramalone.com
http://happyeverauthor.com
 
Mentioned in the Interview:
https://coggle.it/
https://claude.ai/chats
Hard Fork Podcast on Spotify

Summary

Are you an indie author seeking to reshape your scriptwriting process? Have you considered using Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Whether you are a seasoned author or a newbie, Kaylin Tristano brings innovation to the table in her recent chat with Matty, the host of The Indy Author Podcast.
 
Kaylin is an accomplished indie author known for her contemporary romance and romantic suspense novels written under the pen name Cara Malone. With a background in writing and library science, she also works as a freelance editor at Happy Ever Author, helping other indie authors produce exceptional books. Kaylin shares her journey into using AI to develop story bibles—a cornerstone tool for authors to streamline their projects.
 
The Classic Art of a Story Bible
 
In the traditional sense, a story bible is a guide that helps authors maintain consistency within their narrative. It is especially useful for series, allowing authors to maintain accurate details throughout the chronology of the story. A story bible typically houses information about each character's physical descriptions, personality traits, habits, and history. This information can also extend to the setting and timeline of the story.
 
Kaylin pointed out that although templates are available on platforms like Scrivener, authors should not limit themselves. One could integrate spreadsheets, mind maps, images of characters, and even maps of story locations. This not only results in a more elaborate story bible but also makes it interactive and fun.
 
The Role of AI in Script Writing
 
Where does AI come into the picture, you might ask? Specifically, it comes in handy in automating and improving the process of creating a story bible. When an AI platform like Claude or ChatGPT hosts an entire novel, it can generate a character list, summarize important events, or provide detailed descriptions, all at the author's request.
 
AI offers an efficient method of asking precise, unambiguous questions to obtain required information. For instance, Cailin uses the prompts "Please compile a thorough story bible for this book, including names and physical descriptions of all major characters, as well as locations mentioned" and "Please provide a detailed list of the events in this book" for story bible creation.
 
The inclusion of a large context window (currently 100k tokens in Claude and 90k words in Playground by OpenAI) allows authors to paste extensive chunks of their novel for AI processing. However, the generated output should be carefully reviewed and babysat, as AI has been observed to make up its own answers, a phenomenon known as "hallucination," particularly when left for extended periods.
 
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Piracy
 
The fear of piracy is a major concern for authors venturing into AI platforms. However, as Kaylin reassured, platforms like Claude and OpenAI clarify how user content is handled in their terms of service.
 
Basically, on both Claude and OpenAI, you retain all rights to your content. Neither one uses the content added to their platforms without explicit permission. So, authors can feel secure while using these platforms to augment their story bible process.
 
In Conclusion
 
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has promised to significantly transform the writing process. While the technology is still evolving, it offers an innovative means of streamlining the creation of story bibles without draining an author's energy. As Kaylin puts it, it's about leveraging a powerful tool to save time and make the author's job easier.
 
What are your thoughts on the use of AI in your writing process? Now might be a great time to explore the plethora of opportunities AI opens up for indie authors!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Kaylin Tristano. Hey, Kaylin, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Kaylin: Hey, I'm good. How are you?
 
Meet Kaylin Tristano
 
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, Kaylin Tristano is an indie author who's been writing contemporary romance and romantic suspense as Cara Malone for the past seven years. She's also a freelance editor with Happy Ever Author, specializing in helping other indie authors produce great books. She has a bachelor's degree in writing and a master's in library science.
 
I invited Kaylin to the podcast to talk about story bibles, and we're going to discuss traditional story bibles as well as how to use AI to help create story bibles.
 
What made Kaylin decide to use the pen name Cara Malone
 
[00:00:37] Matty: But I had to start out because I met Kaylin as Cara Malone, and now I've spent, I don't know how long, maybe a year or something like that.
 
[00:00:44] Kaylin: At least a year.
 
[00:00:45] Matty: Yeah, so inevitably I'm going to call you Cara at some point. But I had to ask, Kaylin Tristano is such a great name. What made you decide that you were going to use a pen name?
 
[00:00:55] Kaylin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So really, the only reason was because I have my master's in library science, and in my experience looking for jobs, librarians aren't particularly forgiving if you appear to be interested in anything other than library science. I've been doing this for almost 10 years now, so maybe it's changed, but back when I worked as a librarian, I thought that it was important to keep my resume as Kaylin Tristano, strictly library science.
 
[00:01:24] Matty: That makes sense. And you'll forgive me if I call you Cara periodically throughout our conversation.
 
[00:01:28] Kaylin: I mean, like you said, I've been doing this for seven years, so I feel like Cara just as much as I feel like Kaylin.
 
What is a story bible?
 
[00:01:34] Matty: Okay, good, good. That'll make it easier for me. So we had been spending much of that year having almost daily writing sprints. And in one of those writing sprints, we got talking about story bibles, and you had some background in that. So I just wanted to invite you to chat a bit first about traditional story bibles. Well, let's start out saying what a story bible is, and then what made you decide that this was something you needed for your own work?
 
[00:02:00] Kaylin: So I imagine that story bibles are a lot of different things depending on the author you're talking to and what their particular needs are. Essentially, it's just a guide that you can reference that tells you the important details of your book. Most of the time, it's used in series. For example, if I was going to write book five and needed to refer back to book one and be like, "Oh, what type of car does XYZ character drive?" That's the type of detail that I personally would put in a story bible.
 
I'm a contemporary romance author, so a lot of my stuff is that kind of background and also chronology—when does a certain thing happen in the story, what happens in my characters' backgrounds. Things along those lines. But if you're a sci-fi fantasy author where you're creating worlds, then your worldbuilding would also go into your story bible, things like that.
 
And the reason I personally felt I needed a story bible was because instead of writing book one in the series, then book two, and then book three, where everything was constantly top of mind, my writing schedule involves different series. I write book one in series A, then maybe book three in series B, and then back to series one—I kind of rotate. So I needed a refresher on all those small details. That's why I started using story bibles.
 
[00:03:36] Matty: Did you have a standard list of fields that you collected, like eye color, hair color, height?
 
[00:03:43] Kaylin: Yeah, a lot of the stuff you would find in a character questionnaire or something like that. I like to use models for my visual cues, so I'll model a character after a particular actor. That way, I can look at a picture of them and remember what the visual cues are supposed to be. But yeah, age, race, sexual identity, jobs, education history, pets, hobbies, all those kinds of things.
 
[00:04:16] Matty: And then do you update that? For example, let's say someone has a pet in book one, and then something happens to the pet, and they get a different pet in book three. Do you have a way of accommodating those kinds of changes that happen over the course of the arc?
 
[00:04:32] Kaylin: I do. I try to incorporate that into my process, so I'll either do it right when I'm done with writing that book. Sometimes I capture those details as I'm going along, but you get into the zone, and you're writing, and you don't remember to jot down every single little detail. If I'm being a really good author, I do it right after I finish writing the book. But more often than not, I get lazy and I do it right before I write the next book. So I'll just reread the previous book in the series and jot down all of my series bible information.
 
Tools to create story bibles
 
[00:05:03] Kaylin: That might be a good time to mention there are different ways to keep a story bible. There's software you can download specifically for that, and I believe there are a number of them. I use Notion a little bit for that. I also put it directly into Scrivener, and that's where I do most of my writing. I break it down by character level, information, setting, chronology, things like that. Each one of those will have a separate document in Scrivener, or you could do like an Excel sheet or something like that. So there are many ways to capture the information.
 
[00:05:40] Matty: Yeah, I have a lot of mine in Excel because I find a lot of what I need to accommodate from book to book is chronologically related information. So I have basically a calendar that says, book four takes place in March, and book five takes place about a month later—you know, calculate that out. It helps me keep track of if I'm referencing back to a previous book, did that take place? Would snow have been on the ground? Would flowers have been blooming? Things like that. But I do like the idea of Scrivener. It kind of provides a template for occupation and physical characteristics and things like that, but I find that the things the templates ask for are not often the information I find I need a bible for.
 
[00:06:28] Kaylin: Yeah, I haven't played too much with their preset stuff. I just start with a blank document. But I do like Plottr. I've never used it consistently, but it has a lot of good features. You can create pages for each individual character, and you can create your fields. If you don't like the ones that they preset, then you just delete those and put your own in.
 
You can do that for characters and settings. And then if you don't want to use their timeline for your actual plotting, or I mean, I guess you could use it for both, but you could set up a book in Plottr that's specifically just the timeline for your book and do like across the top the actual chronology, and then down the side would be either each individual character or each plot line.
 
[00:07:22] Matty: Yeah, it gets tricky because there are so many things that could be considered story bible material, as you had mentioned to begin with. I know a lot of people who use Scrivener make a document for each character in Scrivener and then when they're starting a new book in the series, they just copy those files over into the new ones, and then they can build upon them so that you have this gradually expanding dossier of a certain character.
 
What I think is tricky with a story bible is that there are the obvious things that people want to capture mainly for story consistency purposes; you know, what's the pet's name or what's the character's eye color or something like that. But then there are things that you don't realize until later that you need, like, where did they go to college? You know, when you wrote that, you never expected to have to refer to it again, and that isn't too bad because you can always just go back and search for college or university or whatever it might be. But, do you have tips for recognizing the things that should be captured in a story bible?
 
[00:08:21] Kaylin: Only really from experience, like you said, stuff that you don't realize you're going to need to know, and then later you think back, and you need it, so then you start capturing that going forward. Once we get into the AI, that's actually one of my favorite reasons for using AI to do your story bibles because it makes it way easier to find that kind of stuff, so I can elaborate on that in a little while. But yeah, I don't know, just kind of anything that might stand out as a unique thing to that character, I would say. So yeah, like the type of car they drive, the way they take their coffee, stuff like that. Little nuggets.
 
How much info is too much in a story bible?
 
[00:09:03] Matty: Are there any things that you started to capture in a story bible, and then retrospectively you realized that that was just effort that wasn't worth investing? How much is too much for a story bible?
 
[00:09:14] Kaylin: Yeah, there's a fair amount. I try to keep in mind when I'm writing a series, and it all takes place in one city, the favorite diner that all of the characters go to obviously needs to be detailed. But if I think that this one character happens to be interested in yoga, so they go to a yoga studio, but no one else in the series is going to be interested, then I don't actually need details about that. Like, I might write down the name of the studio and what book it's in so that I can reference it later. But things like that I do sometimes get into the weeds about.
 
[00:09:46] Matty: Yeah, I think that just plain old search is your friend there because I have a folder where I have word exports of all my books, and if I'm having an inkling that somebody did something about yoga later, I can just search that folder for yoga, and nine times out of ten, maybe eight times out of ten, I can find what I need without having to diligently go through every single detail, which I think is not necessarily a useful use of time.
 
[00:10:09] Kaylin: I was just going to say sometimes I get it in my head that I gave something a name. I mentioned diners, and I'm seven books into my current romantic suspense series. And these characters have been going to this diner for three of those books. I was so sure I had given it a name by now, and writing book eight, I'm searching and I'm searching and I'm searching, and there is no name.
 
So, if you know the name, you can search for it. But if you don't know the name, then you're looking for a diner, and it's possible that there are other diners in the book, and maybe you called it a cafe instead or something like that. It can get difficult. Asking AI, "What is the diner that they like to go to?" and not needing those details is really cool.
 
[00:10:51] Matty: Yeah, I had a similar experience where I was writing a book, and one of the secondary characters, sort of a primary secondary character, I couldn't remember if I had described it as having a beard and mustache. So I searched for beard, I searched for mustache, I searched for facial hair, I searched for every way I could think of that I would have described somebody having a beard and mustache, and I couldn't find it, just as you're saying. But I do think that people shouldn't get so hung up in the story bible, partially because of some of the things you're about to discuss.
 
Story bibles beyond Text
 
[00:11:20] Matty: The other thing I wanted to mention is when I think of a story bible, I think of a written-out text document, but I've seen some really cool story bible kind of information, like a map of the town where the activity takes place, which I think is super fun. I love maps. Plus, it would be a very fun giveaway for fans, like subscribing to your email newsletter to give them a map of the town where it takes place.
 
[00:11:42] Kaylin: Yeah, I love stuff like that. It's fun, a fun extra. It's fun for you. I've done, because I write romance, and a lot of my stories are interconnected, I have a mind map on a website called Coggle, it's C O G G L E, and I believe it's dot I T. Where it's like the Cara Malone universe is the center of it, and then each branch off is all of the different towns that my books are set in. And then I have arrows going from like, alright, so this town has these three books in it, and here is the list of all the characters that are in that book, and this character is a side character in this book, but then it points over to this book where they become a main character, so I never really thought about that as a story bible, but I guess it kind of is.
 
Capturing Overlap Between Two Series
 
[00:12:32] Matty: Yeah, and that's bringing up a good topic that if you have very explicitly interconnected books, then it's probably clearer. But I have a couple of circumstances where, well, actually, this is a good example because I have two police detectives who primarily show up in the Lizzie Ballard books, but I gave them a little cameo, a couple of line cameo in one of the Ann Kinnear Novels, and I forgot to remind my audiobook narrator that they were the same characters. So, these two characters have totally different voices in the audio of the Ann Kinnear version than they did in the Lizzie version.
 
And those kinds of things, even expanding the story bible further, another thing on top of all those descriptive things like eye color and etcetera is if you can find a snippet of someone's voice, someone who sounds like you imagine the character to sound. Because I think I would have avoided some back and forth with my audio narrator if I had said, "I imagine this character sounds like Kathy Bates," and it would have avoided some of the sort of poking around to try to come up with a voice that is distinctive for that character and kind of makes sense with their personality and things like that.
 
[00:13:47] Kaylin: Yeah, that's a great idea. I never actually thought about telling my narrator a famous person's voice to reference.
 
[00:13:54] Matty: Yeah, it was a person who was very large. You know, people who are very large just have kind of a different timbre to their voice than people who are. Then I think because there's just like more lung area or something like that, you know, there's some physical reason for that. And when I was listening to it, it sounded like it didn't sound like that. So I found, I think it was, I don't know, like Dick Butkus. It was a very old Saturday Night Live. He had been the Saturday Night Live host, and I found the monologue, and it was perfect because I was saying, like a football player voice. Professional football player voice. So that was the kind of voice. So yeah, you could do multimedia story bibles, I guess is the underlying message.
 
[00:14:36] Kaylin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I do include images of my characters because I said I like to use famous people to reference.
 
[00:14:44] Matty: Yeah, that can, I think, even be helpful for audiobook narrators too because I've done that before. Kathy Bates is the example I'm thinking of because I got a sample chapter, and the person sounded much younger than I pictured. And so I said, no, it's really Kathy Bates, but not in Misery.
 
Created a Story bible with AI
 
[00:15:02] Matty: so we've mentioned a couple of times this idea of using AI. I'm very curious to hear more detail about how you are using AI to help you create story bibles.
 
[00:15:11] Kaylin: So, it all started with Claude because Claude is the original one that has a large context window, meaning you can paste in a really large chunk of text and have the AI reference that whole chunk of text when it's giving you answers. And actually, since you asked me to come on to this podcast, which has been less than a month now, ChatGPT now has a large context window option in GPT-4, specifically in their Playground model. So the stuff moves really fast, and it's entirely possible that anybody listening to this a month from now is going to need updated information too because it just goes so fast. But essentially, yeah, when Claude came out with their version that you could paste in, it was 60k, and that's in tokens, so that would be roughly 50,000 words. It blew my mind, and I was like, there are just so many different options for this.
 
I've used it for a whole bunch of different purposes. One of them is the story bibles because I write roughly 50,000-word novels, and at this point, they're up to 100,000 tokens, which is roughly 75,000 words. I know that was kind of a limiting factor for a lot of people. You would have to paste in half of your novel at a time in order to get your story bible. But if you write shorter or under 75,000 words, then it's relevant now. You can just do your whole novel. Yeah, you can paste it in and then ask it any kind of questions that, let's say you were going to outsource it and hire someone to create your story bible, you can ask it the same kind of questions.
 
So you're like, read this and give me a list of all the characters with their physical descriptions. Or give me a chronology of the events in the novel, things along those lines. So, for someone who's been writing in series for almost all of the seven years that I've been writing and also been putting off the job of doing a really good story bible on most of those series, this was a godsend because I could just sit down and knock it all out at once.
 
[00:17:33] Matty: So, I'm wrestling with this question about the amount of input you can provide. We had talked about this a little bit earlier, that maybe a little more than a month ago now, I've tried putting the AI-generated transcript of the podcast that I get from Descript, which is my audio and video editing software, and it does like a pretty good job, but not a publishable job, and I put it into ChatGPT, and I just gave it the prompt, "Correct the typos and grammatical errors in this transcript," and it does a great job. But I can only put in 4,000 characters at a time, and I've tried to experiment a little bit with other platforms, but I haven't found a platform where I can put in much more than that. Where would you direct people to go to enable them to put in these very long, like a novel-length chunk of information?
 
[00:18:23] Kaylin: Alright, so let me get the, I have them up on my screen so I can give you the exact URLs. Claude is run by Anthropic, and it's at claude.ai. You have to create an account there, and then once you have your account, it would be claude.ai/chat. You can either paste in, and it will convert it into an attachment, or if you have your document already in either Word or it also takes PDF, there's a spot to just upload the file.
 
Claude is free. They also have a paid option. The free option is, don't quote me on this because I don't know for sure the number, but it's roughly like 25 messages in a 24-hour period. So if you're trying to do your whole catalog, then you're probably going to have to stretch it out over multiple days if you don't want to pay for it. But they do have a paid plan where you get more messages.
 
The regular ChatGPT, where you either have the app on your phone or you're on the computer at chat.openai.com, that's the one with the 4,000-word limit. The other version, it's still GPT, but it gives you a longer context window, is called Playground. I believe it was originally developed for software engineers, like people who are writing code, but it works with just words too. And that one is platform.openai.com, and even if you have an account with ChatGPT, which is the regular ChatGPT. You would have to create a separate account for Playground. This one does charge you for messages.
 
ChatGPT is free and they have a paid option. This one, there's no free option. There's a free trial. And then after that, you're paying. By the generation. So, like if you put in a 4,000-character message in Playground, you're going to be paying a lot less than if you paste in your entire novel and start asking questions. But it's still pretty negligible. Like, I would say that you can easily do your whole manuscript for probably, like, definitely under 5, possibly under 1. It's very cheap right now.
 
[00:20:43] Matty: Okay. And once you've loaded it, is it there for you to query later. Is there a library you can add it to so that it's there for later use?
 
[00:20:54] Kaylin: It should be, yeah. So, for sure, in Playground, you can access your history, and on Claude, I believe they have a limit, they'll only go back so far. Let's see, so I have stuff that goes back three months, so I know that for sure it goes back three months, but I wouldn't expect it to save stuff just forever because you never know if something's going to go goofy on their end, and you're going to lose data.
 
[00:21:21] Matty: And when you're querying the information that you've put in there or the material you've put in there, do you have any tips for how to frame up the questions you ask? Does it work to just put in, "Give me a description of such and such character," or is it more complicated than that?
 
[00:21:38] Kaylin: No, you can use natural language. There are better ways to phrase questions. I would say, start with just ask it a question like you're talking to a person, and if it gives you a really weird answer, then you know you didn't phrase it quite right. You want to be as specific and unambiguous as possible is the basic trick to talking to AI, and I can give you some quick story bible prompts that I use.
 
So the four that I have been running my books through most recently, are I paste in the novel and I ask, "Please provide a detailed chronology of this book, including the amount of time from start to end, and any seasonal information provided." You would obviously, if you have different concerns, you would tweak that to include whatever information you want, but I struggle with, like specific months being mentioned, so that's why I put in the seasonal information.
 
I would recommend if you're in, Playground in particular, let it run the answer, copy that into whatever you're planning on storing your story bible in, so if you're going to put it in Scrivener or a Word document or whatever, put it in there. And then actually delete the answer that it gave you and just paste in a new question. So you're starting with a blank document where it's just your book and then the question that you have and then the new answer.
 
Because the question or the problem that you're going to run into is when you were talking about, well, two problems, really. Number one, you're talking about the context window on ChatGPT being short. If you pasted in an entire novel, and your novel is close to that limit, where, you're at, let's see, Playground is actually 90,000 words, and then Claude is 75,000 words, and those are estimates. If you're giving it a whole bunch of different questions, and it's giving you all the answers, that's going to eat into your context window, and it won't tell you that it's run out of context, it'll just start deleting stuff from the beginning. So, you could be missing out on some details because you've run out of context, so I always just copy-paste it into whatever I want. And then start a new question.
 
And then the second problem, I've noticed this with Claude more often, but, sometimes the AI can hallucinate, which means it starts making up its own answers. One time I pasted in a novel that was much larger than the 50,000 that I had access to at the time, so I had to cut it in half. I gave it the first half of the novel and I started asking it my chronology questions, and it summarized the first half of the book that I gave it, but then it just assumed that I wanted it to summarize the entire book, even though it didn't have the second half.
 
And it started writing, and I was reading it, and it actually took me a minute to figure out that it wasn't summarizing the information I gave it, it was hallucinating new information because it was doing a pretty good job of following what I had written, which was impressive, but, yeah, so you have to be careful if you give it if you leave the old answer in there, it could potentially reference that answer and then start making up its own stuff because it's considering that part of the context window as a whole.
 
So I basically just give it one thing at a time, delete the old stuff, put in the new question, to avoid that. So, a couple more questions that I give it are, "Please compile a thorough story bible for this book, including the names and physical descriptions of all major characters, as well as locations mentioned." I put story bible in there, even though we've been talking about story bibles as a whole, including the chronology, and the worldbuilding, and all these things, because through trial and error, it seems like when you say the phrase story bible to do that. Chat GPT or Claude, it thinks about the names and physical descriptions because that's what it'll spit out automatically. If you just say, "story bible" and nothing else, it'll give you names, physical descriptions, locations, things like that. So that's why I included that term there.
 
“Can you please let me know any major life changes or updates that occur by the end of this book for the following characters?” I use that for my series if I have a core group of characters that are going to need updates throughout the series, so I want to know, like, so and so just got engaged at the end of book two, and then by the end of book three, they're going to be married, and things like that. So, I'll just include a list of the specific characters that I want information on.
 
Please provide a detailed list of the events in this book. That one I have not fully tweaked to my satisfaction because it doesn't give you a super thorough list that I would like. It starts off thorough and then it kind of tapers off and gives you a more general list about the midpoint of the book, at least in my experience.
 
[00:26:58] Matty: It gets fatigued.
 
The need to babysit AI
 
[00:26:59] Kaylin: Yeah, it gets tired, and so I need to work on making my AI assistant do that task better. And that's kind of the challenge with AI in general. It's an amazingly powerful tool that can help you save a bunch of time, but you also have to babysit it, at least at this point in the game because, yeah, it gets bored and it starts hallucinating, or it starts doing a bad job, and you have to keep it on task.
 
[00:27:24] Matty: Well, I do think it's kind of a nice example of how we're not at a point yet where it's going to be taking over our jobs. I would never say never, but the fact that it needs to be babysat is what we humans are here for. I found that even with the transcript correction that the first time I put the podcast transcript into ChatGPT. I just said, "Fix this transcript," and it created like an article for me. I was like, "Well, that's nice, but it's not what I need." So I had to futz a little bit with the prompt, which ended up being more or less fixed typos and grammatical errors.
 
Then I also added, "And insert paragraph breaks as appropriate" because otherwise, it would just do one really long paragraph. If my guest or I were talking for a long chunk of time, it would just be one giant paragraph. It did a better job. It actually did break it up a little bit more if I put that extra prompt in. So I think it's very interesting to play around with this stuff because you do have to bring a different mindset to it than any previous interactions with computers that I've had before AI started hitting.
 
[00:28:25] Kaylin: Yeah, for sure. I think it's not even really consistent within itself yet because, last month, I was running a book through AI that I had written in the third person, and I decided that it actually needed to be in the first person. The old way would be to sit there for a week, tediously changing all of your pronouns. It's amazing that you can spend just a couple of days, paste in a chapter, tell it to change it to first person, paste in another chapter, hit go again. I would still have to sit there and scan through it and make sure it was doing it right because nothing else would change. The prompt would be the exact same. It's only been, like, three minutes since I ran it the last time. I paste in a new chapter, and it starts coming up with some kind of crazy stuff, and it's not even writing my book anymore. It's like, "Well, let's try that again. All you're doing is changing the tense, so stick to that, please."
 
[00:32:57] Matty: Yeah, these are all great examples of brainstorming possibilities as well as story bible creation. You could be working on a book and think, "Huh, I wonder if this would be better in the first person." You could stick a couple of chapters in there, run it through ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, see what comes out, and go, "Ah, no," or, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of better, I think I'm going to switch,” and do that much more effectively and efficiently than you would have been able to do in the past.
 
Kaylin: Oh yeah, for sure. This is one of the reasons I'm most excited about AI—tasks like brainstorming and outlining. It would help to have another person in the room. You can run it past AI. Many authors focus on the ethical use of AI to generate novels, big-picture questions. I think there are tons of small tasks that AI can help us do without necessarily touching on the big elephant in the room question.
 
Matty: Yeah, and even the idea of loading all your books into one of these. When you're starting work on the next book in the series, you could say, "Give me 10 ideas for what might happen next in the story or give me 10 ideas for what might happen next with this character." That could be a super cool brainstorming thing.
 
I've been using that a lot for nonfiction articles. I'll have a topic that I need to write about, I'll plug it in, and the text is so generic it would never make an interesting article. But oftentimes, the ideas or the way the information is organized are very useful to me to then write the article by myself.
 
Kaylin: Yeah, I've gotten all kinds of good details. The one that I have to chuckle about—hopefully, my reader who I talked to about this doesn't listen to this and learn my dirty secret. I had a character, this was just a total throwaway scene where the character was interacting with her sister, and her sister was teasing her as sisters do. The character said she got a new hobby, and the sister is like, "Oh, what are you doing now? Competitive air guitar?" My reader actually took the time to specifically message me about how hysterical she found that, and I was like, ChatGPT gave me that idea.
 
Matty: Oh, interesting! And what prompt—like, based on what prompt did it give you that idea?
 
Kaylin: Huh, I believe I asked it something along the lines of, "Give me ten ideas for ridiculous hobbies."
 
Matty: Oh, perfect! Yeah, I found it's good, if I'm looking for another word, of course, you can go to bazillion online thesauri. But, I often find I get more interesting suggestions. Like, I know this is almost the right word, but not quite. You can get more interesting input from AI than just the standard thesaurus.
 
Kaylin: Yeah, for sure.
 
Concerns about AI and piracy
 
Matty: One of the things that we wanted to talk about regarding AI was the idea of piracy. I mean, that's a concern for everybody. What are your thoughts about AI, either specific to story bible kind of information or more generally?
 
Kaylin: so, personally, I don't really worry about it because I think that authors who publish their work online are so used to being pirated by the billions of piracy websites that are out there. We know we're never going to get them all, even if you start sending takedown notices. They take them down, and then new ones pop up, and sometimes it seems like they even pop up maliciously. They're like, "Oh, you sent a takedown notice on this, so I'm going to upload it on five more." I have never personally been upset about the idea of piracy, either by AI or by actual humans. I don't worry about it, but I do know that a lot of my author friends I've talked to about AI are pretty concerned about that possibility.
 
How AI uses your data
 
Kaylin: I did take the time before our meeting to look up the terms of service for Claude and OpenAI, just to reference. You can look these up. I don't know if they change or if they're pretty set in stone, but if you're personally concerned with the AI protecting your copyright, then definitely look it up for yourself.
 
The essential overview is on Claude: anything you put into Claude, you own, you have the rights to it, and they're not going to use it. However, they authorize you to use the outputs, so you don't actually own them, but they're kind of informally licensed to you. That's my not-a-lawyer explanation of it. They also say that they do not train on the things you put into Claude.
 
OpenAI, on the other hand, is kind of the opposite. You still retain all of your ownership of anything you put into OpenAI, and you own the output as well. They don't authorize it to you; they just give it to you. But the way they majorly differ is they do train on anything you input, not output. If you put your novel into OpenAI, then you're giving them permission to use that as part of their large language model, unless you go in specifically and opt out. So you do have that option; you have to go through their helpdesk, and you can opt out of them using anything you put into their system.
 
Matty: Cool. Thank you very much for having done that research for us.
 
Kaylin: Yeah, I figured I should probably know these things too since I do use them.
 
Matty: As you're saying, it's tricky because it is a moving target. A huge fan of the “Hard Fork” podcast. If anyone is interested in AI and is looking for a great and fun source for information on AI, the Hard Fork podcast, which is put out through the New York Times is a great and very entertaining presentation of AI information.
 
Creating a story bible during the proofread
 
Matty: And then just to take the conversation away from AI for a little bit and back more to core story bible. I know we had early on referenced a couple of ways that we ourselves assemble the story bible. One thing that I've been trying with mixed results, because you do get in a flow, like you were saying earlier when you're writing, you sometimes just get in the zone and forget that you're supposed to be taking little notes about this stuff.
 
One way that I've worked to get around that is that I always, another computer-assisted thing. The very last thing I do with my book is I have my computer read it to me, and oftentimes I can pick up things that my proofreaders missed, or my editors missed. You know, there are always a couple of things that I get that way, and I try to use that time for consciously thinking, "Now I'm looking for story bible information." So if people don't quite want to make the jump to AI yet, I think that's a great time to accomplish two things. You can get your story bible written, and you can also do that final check on your manuscript. And, Kaylin, do you have any other, the old-fashioned way, any other tips, the old-fashioned way for story bible?
 
Kaylin: I guess maybe if you use a character questionnaire or something like that, then it can be helpful to just have a blank one. And that way, you know if there's anything that you missed in there because you have a blank spot.
 
Matty: Yeah, that's why I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are my go-to. I don't know what I'd do if Excel ever went away in terms of managing it, but it is nice because you can see very clearly where a hole is. Sometimes it doesn't matter; like, I'm never going to care where that character went to school or whatever, but I think that also sometimes looking at that and seeing where the holes are can give you story ideas because you think, "Oh, you know, not only do I still have to establish where they went to school, but hey, maybe I'm going to use that as a backstory or flashback or something like that."
 
Kaylin: Yeah, that's a great way to develop people. And then you're like, "Oh! Wow, I forgot completely to give these people parents."
 
Matty: Yes, exactly. That could be a whole series unto itself.
 
Well, thank you so much for sharing information on story bibles, old and new. So please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work and everything you do online.
 
Kaylin: All right, so if you're interested in me as an editor, my website is happyeverauthor.com, and if you're interested in my books, which are sapphic romance, it's caramalone.com.
 
Matty: Great, thank you so much.

Episode 216 - Learning from Our Readers and Our Characters with Frank Zafiro

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

Frank Zafiro discusses LEARNING FROM OUR READERS AND OUR CHARACTERS, including what writers can learn from a negative review (not to be confused with a bad review); tips for crafting realistic dialogue (it’s not a transcript); allowing a long-running series to evolve; the dynamics of an ensemble cast; and how to position a first book in a series as your craft skills grow with subsequent books.

Frank Zafiro writes gritty crime fiction from both sides of the badge. He was a police officer from 1993 to 2013, serving as a patrol officer, a training officer, and a detective, and leading K-9 and SWAT units. He retired as a captain. Frank is the award-winning author of over forty novels, including the River City series of police procedurals, and co-author of the Charlie-316 series. Frank also hosted the crime fiction podcast Wrong Place, Write Crime. He has written a textbook on police report writing and taught police leadership all over the US and Canada. An avid hockey fan and a tortured guitarist, he lives in the high desert of Redmond, Oregon.

Episode Links

Author website: http://frankzafiro.com
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/FrankZafiroAuthor/
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/frankzafiro370/
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-scalise-3b252252/
BookBub profile: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/frank-zafiro

Summary

Every writer embarks on a creative journey destined to teach them something new. In conversation with the noted crime fiction writer, Frank Zafiro, we explored those enlightening lessons that he picked up during the process of creating his latest book, ‘All the Forgotten Yesterdays’.
 
Frank Zafiro's Writing Voyage
For Frank, the act of writing isn't merely a creative endeavor - it's an opportunity to teach and learn simultaneously. With his highly successful 'River City' series, Zafiro stepped into the role of a seasoned crime fiction writer who mirrors his character's morality, struggles, and growth on real-life happenings and experiences.
 
Learning from the Critics
While 'All the Forgotten Yesterdays' is the 14th book in Zafiro's series, the seeds of inspiration can be traced back to his very first book in the series, ‘Under a Raging Moon'. Interestingly, it was a negative review on his debut book that fuelled his motive to write the latest installment. This review was not inaccurate or spiteful; it was thoughtful, measured, and full of insightful criticism.
 
Utilizing Criticism as Creative Fuel
The review in question was critical of the controversial actions of the police officer characters in the novel and even labeled the climactic event as 'murder'. This critique made Zafiro reevaluate his own work, and he realized the potentially alternative ways his book's events could be viewed.
 
This profound insight was later incorporated in 'All the Forgotten Yesterdays', where the protagonist Katie ends up facing a similar criticism as she investigates an important case. This intriguing shift in perspective and narrative was a direct result of the insight gained from the previously mentioned review - a clear testament to the power of constructive criticism not as a setback, but as an inspiration for growth and evolution.
 
Charting Character Evolution in Long-Running Series
Zafiro also shared valuable insights into the evolution of characters and their roles within a long-running series. By embracing changes in roles, power dynamics, and relationships between ensemble characters, he believes writers can create more engaging and resonant narratives.
 
The character arc of Katie McLeod, who transitioned from a patrol officer to a significant lead character, perfectly encapsulates this approach. The evolution doesn't stop there - as life changes, so do characters. Zafiro reveals plans for future books where Katie’s role will become secondary as she moves into positions less involved with active crime-solving.
 
Staying True to One's Work
Zafiro’s openness about the varying quality of work throughout a writer’s career was refreshing. He acknowledged the craft improvement between his earliest and most recent work. He also discussed the common writer’s dilemma - whether to “fix” or revise previously published works to match their current writing quality.
 
Despite the temptation to revise his first book, Zafiro opted to allow it to stand as a testament to his growth as a writer and respect the printed copy as a product of its time and his evolution.
 
In Conclusion
Frank Zafiro’s approach to accepting criticism and embracing character evolution within his long-standing series speaks to his flexibility and growth-oriented mindset as a writer. It provides important lessons for any writer, particularly those juggling long-running series. Recognizing that characters should evolve and undergo transitions, just like real people, can make for compelling storytelling and allow a series to breathe, grow, and remain engaging to its readers.
 
Moreover, his acceptance of thoughtful negative reviews as a source of inspiration rather than unwanted criticism sheds light on the importance of seeing the value in every feedback and turning potential setbacks into creative opportunities.
 
Frank Zafiro’s journey underscores the importance of learning from every external comment and impression, internal impulse, and unexpected character development in the writing process. As he rightly puts it, a book - just like an author’s growth - is never finished, but merely published and open for evolution.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, fellow book lovers, both readers and writers. I'm Matty Dalrymple. I write the Ann Kinnear suspense novels and suspense shorts, and the Lizzy Ballard thrillers. I also write, speak, podcast, and consult on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as The Indy Author. This is my video series, What I Learned, where I ask authors two questions related to their latest book.
 
What did they learn from that book that they'd like to share with their fellow writers? And what did they learn from their latest book that they'd like to share with their fellow readers? I am here today with Frank Zafiro. Hey, Frank, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:30] Frank: Are you, Matty?
 
[00:00:31] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you. To give our viewers a little bit of background on you, Frank Zafiro writes gritty crime fiction for both sides of the badge. He's a retired police officer. In fact, he was my guest on The Indy Author Podcast to discuss mistakes writers make about police roles and how to avoid them. His latest book is All the Forgotten Yesterdays. Today, I am asking Frank the two What I Learned questions about All the Forgotten Yesterdays, starting with what did you learn that you would like to share with your fellow writers?
 
A negative review can be an inspiration
 
[00:00:59] Frank: Well, I think the lesson I learned was, a lesson I learned actually before I even started writing the book, and that is that a negative review can be an inspiration. To give you the short version of what happened, I came across a, I think it was a three-star review on my first River City book. This current one is the 14th, Under a Raging Moon, and the review was not a bad review, which I would say is a review that just isn't accurate at all.
 
I mean, It might not even be about your book or it just doesn't, you know, worst book ever, you know, these are bad reviews. They don't do anybody any good, but a negative review can, you know, say negative things, critical things about your book, but it's thoughtful. It's considered, it informs the person reading the review as to whether they might want to try this book or stay away from it. And this negative review was written by someone who actually was complimentary of the writing itself but took issue with plot points, and not from a, like, plot hole standpoint, but it was a police procedural, of course, and the issue they took was with the things the police did, many of which were, I think, incorrectly labeled.
 
They talked about profiling and what was going on was not profiling, but I could understand why they would fall into thinking it was. But I, you know, so I read through that and it was one of those things where, well, this person's not very pro-police, but at least they're honest about what they're thinking and their opinions are sound and logical internally. They're not just, you know, cuckoo or anything.
 
Then I got to the final piece of critical statements that this reviewer made, and they took issue with the climactic event of the book. Now, I don't necessarily want to give it away, but it involves a clash between the main antagonist and one of the policed protagonists. The River City series is kind of an ensemble cast, so it's not always the same main character. Sometimes it's the main main, and then some secondary ones that get a fair amount of screen time as well. And this reviewer said, essentially, that, that wasn't justice, that wasn't legal, that was basically murder.
 
It stopped me in my tracks when I read that because I wrote this book in 1995 as a two-year officer, and it kind of sat on a shelf for a few years till I came back around to writing fiction again in the 2003, 2004 timeframe. And by that time, you know, the bones of that first draft are still what are in the book.
 
That was eventually published. At that time, I looked at all the events of the book more as almost historical, opposed to through a critical creation. Like you do with a work in progress. I never really framed the events any other way than the way the characters framed them. When this review came out, I looked at it and sat back, taking a look at the situation through what I hoped were close to the reviewer's eyes.
 
I realized, you know, taken from a certain point of view, that's not an unsound argument. There's some meat on that bone. No one else has ever pointed it out. So I think most readers believe what happened was justice in a fictional world. But the reviewer had a point, and again, this was a three-star review. It was like basically one star for what the cops did in this book, four or five stars for the writing of it, that it was well executed. I had to admire this person for taking the time to write a review that was thought out and logical and made their point, rather than just the two or three words you're lucky to get with a one-star review. It got me thinking and reframing that event a bit.
 
I wrote it in 1995. It was published in 2006. This was 20, a year ago. So quite a lot of time had passed. Ultimately, I took that realization and thought process and worked it into All the Forgotten Yesterdays. In the book, one of Katie's investigations takes her to a very interesting place. She confronts someone not very well-liked in the series at all. This person fires back at her about her hero, the protagonist involved in that first book event that the reviewer took issue with, reframing it in essentially the same way that the reviewer did, making a lot of the same points. Katie is resistant to it and doesn't accept it, but it's left a little unresolved. It'll play out over the next two or three books while she can't get that bug out of her ear, particularly as her perspective changes because her job changes.
 
The lesson I learned was that someone can be critical of your work, make a good point, and there's no reason why you can't embrace it. That was the climactic event of the first book. It was the big moment, and there's some sanctity to that in most cases. Somebody reframed it, and they made a good point. They made a good point with their reframing. Instead of getting frustrated, mad, or ignoring it, I decided to embrace it and use it. It's going to have a fair amount of impact on the series arc over the next two or three books.
 
[00:06:56] Matty: That's so fascinating. Do you know if the person who wrote that review has continued to follow you or read your books and would maybe happen upon this video? It would be super fun for that person, I think, to see this video.
 
[00:07:14] Frank: Yeah, that would be awesome. It would be awesome. You know, the weird thing, the Amazon algorithm is strange with reviews, as you well know." I went back and tried to find the review. I ruminated on this. First, I simmered on it briefly.
 
And then I was like, wait a minute. This is just like any other feedback. If I gave you my book and said, "Tell me what you think of this draft," why am I getting mad? Or I wasn't mad, but why am I being negative about it? It was quite a lot of time that had passed before I was like, you know, I'm going to go back and make sure I'm getting all the points the person made. If I'm going to use this, let's use it. I could not find the review again when I went through looking for it. I went way back, you know, because I thought maybe I just didn't notice it. It was a much older review or something like that, and I could not find it.
 
I'm going to make another attempt in case it's popped back up because I would be curious if, you know, did they pick up that first book? They read it through to the end, obviously. They liked the writing; they just didn't like the events. That's a candidate for somebody who might continue with the series, and I, you know, I mean, I'm biased, of course, but I would like to think that maybe there would, they would come around a little bit on some of the characters because of the things that happen to them and the choices that they make. They're essentially noble, admirable people. They just make mistakes. Or to see a video like this and go, huh, yeah, I'm going to shoot him an email because that was me. Where's my royalty check?
 
[00:08:47] Matty: Well, I think that we sort of touched on this idea of accepting input on one's work in some of our earlier conversations. And Frank, I think you're sort of like the poster child for the healthy way of handling it. As you said, you had to simmer on it for a little bit, but I do think it's sort of generalizing. It's a good lesson for writers to learn that if someone says, you know, hate the book, I didn't even read it, then you can just ignore them. Because that says more about the I'm not a bigger writer of the review than it does the writer of the book. But if you can bring yourself to look for those negative reviews that are thoughtful, as you're describing, it can be a learning experience.
 
[00:09:29] Frank: You're so right. You're so right. And there are trolls out there that, you know, I have a friend who's got somebody out there who just almost like a vulture just waits to swoop in and leave a one-star review with a pithy, useless comment and it, and especially when the book first comes out, you know, if there aren't many reviews, it really tanks the overall star rating.
 
But Kevin Tipple is an independent reviewer. He's the one who got me thinking in terms of a difference between a negative review and a bad review. And he described it the way, you know, I described how he described it, you know. A bad review is just... They say bad things and doesn't, there's no substance to it, or they say nothing, but a negative review can still be a positive experience for definitely the reader because, you know, just because I leave a negative review for something, "Oh, there's too much fishing in this book." Well, maybe you love fishing.
 
[00:10:25] Matty: Well, I do think the reviewer you're describing is a perfect example of that because I can imagine a lot of people reading that review and saying, oh, that's really interesting. I want, now I want to read that scene and I want to think for myself about, you know, my own interpretation of it. Or, you know, if someone says, if you have too much sex in the book, then you're going to sell a whole bunch of books to people who are looking for books with a lot of sex.
 
Factoring reviews into your craft
 
[00:10:48] Frank: Yeah, yeah, exactly, and, you know, anybody who says they don't read the reviews, I've said it before, they're lying. Everybody does. But, I think the point that I take from what you said and that I try to employ is you're looking for trends, you know, if you're getting a lot of low reviews and people are mentioning a certain element, well, you may have blown that element, and you know, you, I guess you could pull the book and fix it, but, you know, more to the point in your next book, you're going to make sure not to make that same mistake.
 
And the same is true with positive stuff! If people are loving your characters then you can, you know, kind of rest assured that you've written some vibrant characters and you want to keep doing what you're doing.
 
[00:11:31] Matty: Yeah, I had, the example of that for me is my first book, The Sense of Death. It had a sweary character in it, and when I wrote it, I had no idea who I was writing it for, but I saw that the trend in my reviews was a lot of people said, I really like the book, but yeah, I thought that there was excessive profanity, and I went back and I looked, and I was like, you know, they're kind of right, like, he doesn't have to swear quite that much, and I think I reduced the dropping of the F bomb from like 17 to 9 or something like that, with no loss of Like, creative, control over the situation, but the other thing I'm thinking of that is, I think, a good tip for writers is, I wouldn't just happen upon...
 
Bad reviews. Like, I often go, and look for good reviews if I'm doing, like, ads, and I'm looking for pull quotes from good reviews. And that's always fun. You know, you go look for the five-star ones, and you pat yourself on the back.
 
But I think that it's better if you're going to be looking at reviews across the board.To look for those kind of trends that you're talking about, then it's kind of nice to go into it intentionally and knowing that you're kind of in a place where you can read those things with a sort of frame of mind that you're describing. Not just, like, accidentally see them and maybe you're not in a mental place where you should be reading that kind of thing at the moment.
 
[00:12:49] Frank: I actually have a funny story about... swearing and you can cut this out. It might probably make us go too long. But when I wrote Under a Raging Moon, I tried to be very clear or very, true to, to dialogue. And dialogue is what was, has always been one of my strengths. And so I wrote the way cops talk, you know, and spoiler alert, but they talk like sailors. And so, A lot of the early readers, both professional and just lay people commented on that. Wow, there's a lot of swearing here. There's too much swearing in here. And I resisted it at first, but ultimately, I thought, you know, they've got a point here.
 
And so I went through, and I called out probably 70% of the profanity, and actually probably close to 90%, if you include softening some of the terms. Either cutting them out entirely, making them not a profanity, or softening them, or just saying, you know, Matty cursed into her hand quietly or something. So the book is published and it's out there. Some years later, I got another, I guess negative review, maybe a bad review, I don't know, you decide. The person wrote, "Too much swearing in this book, every other word, and yes, I don't care if you think that's how cops really talk." So I just, I had to laugh because on two points, you know, I mean, I think I know how cops actually talk was the biggest one, but then I remembered how much I cut out. So, you know, swearing is a thing.
 
[00:14:20] Matty: Yeah.
 
[00:14:21] Frank: Yeah, their head would have exploded.
 
Crafting realistic dialogue (not a transcript)
 
[00:14:24] Matty: Well, I think that's another good, the more we talk, the more I'm thinking this is turning into a podcast episode because I think the information you're sharing about what writers can learn is so great. And the other thing I'm realizing, apropos of dialogue, is that realistic dialogue isn't necessarily, and I'm not suggesting that you're suggesting it is, but it's not necessarily you turn on the recorder, you record The Room Full of Cops or whatever, and then you transcribe it that. You know, you might have a conversation where in reality it would be perfectly reasonable for those characters to drop 17 F-bombs, but you only need a couple to sort of convey the message. Gestalt of the situation.
 
[00:15:06] Frank: Yeah, it's like spice, really. I mean, if you put too much pepper, all you taste is the pepper, right? And so, and you're right, I mean, dialogue is meant to be an approximation of how people really talk, but it's much more concise, and, you know, characters don't interrupt each other nearly as much as we do in real life, and there's more direction to dialogue in fiction, whereas people wander in real life, you know, they go off on tangents and leave the path of the intended discussion and so forth. So, you make a great point, you make an excellent point there.
 
[00:15:41] Matty: Yeah. What I find in subsequent sweeps through my books on edits is that I'll shorten up the back and forth. So in an early draft, I might have, "I'm going to the store. Why are you doing that? Because I need to talk to Joe." And then it will become, "I'm going to the store because I need to talk to Joe," because the back and forth is just might it be realistic? Sure. But is it worth the extra line? Probably not. It's, you know, it's choppier than it needs to be, or it's more obtuse than it needs to be, or something like that.
 
[00:16:18] Frank: I wish I did that better. That's one that I've noticed when other people edit my work, whether it's an editor for a short story that they're publishing an anthology or something, those are the corrections that sometimes get made, and I'm like, oh yeah, that's tighter, you know, nine out of ten times I like it better.
 
You know, there are times where you want that response because you're slipping something in with it, either a characterization or a little. A little bit of a plot point there that, or a red herring or something, but nine out of ten times I think it's tighter, so that's, I'm glad you're on it because I'm certainly not.
 
Allowing a long-running series to evolve
 
[00:16:59] Matty: Well, let's address the other question, the other, "What I Learned" question, which is, what did you learn from All the Forgotten Yesterdays that you would like to share with your fellow readers?
 
[00:17:08] Frank: For the reader lesson that I learned, I think it's about allowing a long-running series to evolve, to breathe, that characters can come and go, especially if it's an ensemble cast, but even if it's a main character thing, then a lot of the secondary characters could be the ones to come and go.
 
And, you know, the main character of this book is no surprise, Katie McLeod; she's been a central character to the series since, well, for the entire series, but certainly by the third book, she became the core character. But, as time has gone on, I've tried to give some oxygen to other characters and some page time, explore a few other stories and go down a few side streets while still having her as the main character, most of the time.
 
And what I've come to realize is, you know, life is never static. It always changes, and so Katie is experiencing changes. She's gone from being a patrol officer on graveyard to a day shift officer to becoming a detective to becoming a major crimes detective. And when this book opens, she's taking the exam for promotion to sergeant. So her, you know, and she's gone from being involved with a fellow police officer to being kind of serially single, to being involved in a steady relationship for several years with an emergency room doctor, and, you know, these are all changes.
 
And if you think about it, those don't sound like radical changes in a real person's life. I mean, those sound like what happened to somebody over a decade or a decade and a half. But I realized as time has gone on that, you know, Katie's role will diminish somewhat in the coming books. Not go away, and not for a couple of books. But as her career progresses, she's going to be in some positions where I would be making one of those mistakes that we talked about on a previous podcast together, by having her do things in that role that people in that role don't do. You know, she won't be a detective anymore, so having her go out and solve crimes doesn't make sense.
 
And so it's time for the next generation, if you will, to step into that role and to have some face time and to, to get some time as the main or core characters, as we move on. And, you know, as this series has progressed, people have retired, people have, people died, you know, people have left the job for other reasons than retirement. Things have changed, and the one thing I've never really let change up, up till recently is, you know, I've clung to Katie because she's my favorite character. She's the core character, and it's hard to think about letting her become a secondary or tertiary character. And we're talking seven, eight books from now when we get to the tertiary stage, but still, I mean, it's difficult emotionally. But I think it's true to the series. I mean, it's an ensemble series, and people's roles change and who's doing what changes. And I think I need to stay true to that.
 
So for instance, in the previous book, Katie was in, the worst kind of truth. It was 100% from her point of view, third person. But from her point of view, that was Book 11. And Book 12 was a different book entirely. It was all about Tom Chisholm. It was away from the main River City storyline. And then 13 was a short story collection in which I don't think Katie was even in any of the stories. So this Book 14 is really the first novel that's back to the mainline events.
 
And in this book, she's probably 70 percent of the main perspective, the main POV, and there are two or three characters that share the other 30%. This is a trend that will continue as the next several books play out. She'll probably be roughly 60–70 percent for the next two or so, maybe three, and then her role will diminish. She'll always have a role no matter where she is because she's Katie in that, and she, you know, she is the iconic character of the series, but that's the path that I'm presently on, and it's a difficult one, so, if it's difficult for me, it might be difficult for readers who are attached to these characters as well. That's the lesson that I'm learning.
 
[00:22:10] Matty: Yeah, this is going to be a really interesting conversation paired with podcast episode 210 with Sara Rosett on creating compelling series. And one of the conversations we had was about how do you make those kinds of evolutions either strictly for story reasons or because you're getting bored or because readers are getting bored or whatever. And it is interesting to hear about somebody who has such a sort of long-term view of where you're taking the series and the considerations, like a very sort of scientific step down of that character's involvement. Did you ever think about actually ending that, the Katie series, and then officially spinning up a separate one that might be one of the other characters, or have you always thought of it as it's a world and you're just continuing that world with a shifting cast of characters?
 
The dynamics of an ensemble cast
 
[00:23:03] Frank: Yeah, the latter. It's always been, you know, an ensemble cast was always the vision for this. Initially, it was a four-book series is all I had in mind. I had the titles, and I had an arc for the four books, and it changed a bit as time went on, and ultimately the fourth book radically changed. Nothing except the title remained from the original concept, and the character that I drew up early on as kind of one of the main characters, Stefan Kopriva, we talked about him on a different podcast. He ended up leaving the job after the second book, spoiler alert, and I thought he was going to be the main character of the series, and it ultimately became Katie.
 
And that, you know, that's the interesting dichotomy in that I'm sitting here today, and I have a long-term plan for the universe of River City and these characters, but at the same time, they surprised me. I mean, they surprised me in what happened with Kopriva, and Katie's emergence as the core, this stuff that we talked about here with how she's viewing Chisholm differently, or at least an event that occurred with Chisholm differently, because somebody reframed it, characters that I didn't realize were going to retire or be together or, you know, die, get killed. I mean, these things, they're still surprises no matter how much you plan. And so that's kind of the fun of it is, yeah, okay, maybe this is going to happen with Katie. She's going to go into this role or that role, but there may be some surprising things that happen during that time and other characters that. You know, are playing smaller roles now will have larger roles. I mean, it's not like I'm just going to suddenly have Dudley Do-Right show up and be the main character. I mean, it's just going to be characters who already have roles will just take on slightly larger roles. And that's, you know, to me, that's what a true ensemble show does.
 
Ensemble Cast Dynamics
 
I mean, if you think of NYPD Blue as an example, you know, David Caruso was the star of that. After two seasons, he left. And then they brought in Jimmy Smits and he was arguably the star of that. Then he left and they brought in Rick Schroeder, you know, and then he and Dennis France kind of shared the spotlight, and then Schroeder left. By the time they brought in his last partner, Sipowicz, a Dennis Frantz character, had become the main character of that series, and really was for the remainder of the series.
 
Now when you go back and watch those episodes, it's hard not to watch them without an eye towards that eventual, you know, development of him being the main character. And so, that's kind of what I've always liked about the idea of an ensemble cast, is it can ebb and flow, and people can come and go, and things can happen and surprise you, and yet you can still at least have a compass direction that you're taking the series.
 
Evolution of Characters: A Benefit of Ensemble Casts
 
[00:25:47] Matty: The Sipowetz example is a great one because that is a character that I think viewers would have had to have grown into accepting as a main character because, as I recall, he was pretty unpleasant, and it was only over time, I think he became somewhat less unpleasant probably as the writers sort of understood the potential they had there. Also, the more you knew him, the more empathetic and sympathetic a character he became.
 
And so that's another benefit of an ensemble cast is you have that time to, both for yourself and for other people, to understand the characters at a much deeper level and have the readers accept them in a way they might not have accepted them if you sort of, you know, shoved that character into the leading role right to begin with. Like, I don't know that show would have survived if they had just teed up Sipowitz as the primary guy.
 
[00:26:40] Frank: A fat bald guy in the lead in 1993 or whatever it was, I mean, I don't think so.
 
[00:26:48] Matty: And an unpleasant  bald guy, too.
 
[00:26:51] Frank: An anti-hero.
 
[00:26:53] Matty: yes, very much an antihero.
 
[00:26:56] Frank: Yeah. NYPD. Blue. Now that I think about it is really very much the story of the redemption of Andy Sipowitz. I mean, if you look at it, it's just that he's not the main character in that story for a while. At least in terms of screen time, but that's really what it's about. And if you recall, at the end of that series, he becomes a sergeant. He moves into a leadership role. So his, you know, everything changes right now. He's the one doing the leading and someone else is going to be doing the investigating. And so you, you have some of that evolution of life roles that takes place, and I've always admired that kind of storytelling in ensemble stories and have really wanted to represent it in my own series.
 
Positioning a First Book as Your Craft Skills Grow
 
[00:27:42] Matty: Well, obviously, we've gone so far off the rails with the, theoretical, what I learned thing. so, I'm going to ask one more question, unrelated to the questions I teed up for you, which is, I think a lot of people who've been writing a long time, look back at their first book. And hopefully they're proud of it, but maybe sometimes they think, oh, is that really the book I want to be sending readers to? Because, you know, if you've been writing for 5, 10, 15, 20, however many years, then, you know, your craft improves. And so, one assumes that your most recent, that one's most recent book is better than one's first book. But when you're writing the kind of series that you're writing, where there's this overarching story arc and the evolution of the characters, you probably don't expect your readers to be dipping in and out at different points. Do you still like to send readers to, the first book so they can read through in and experience the evolution of these characters in order?
 
[00:28:36] Frank: It's usually my recommendation. Any of the books can stand alone, and I'll tell people that. It's true, but I think you get more impactful enjoyment out of certain scenes if the weight of the cumulative events that preceded it is present for you. A good example might be in The Worst Kind of Truth; there's a wedding near the very beginning of the book and a retirement near the end of the book. They're kind of the bookend events of the worst kind of truth. The wedding is a culmination of a longstanding relationship that began in the shadow of a very untimely and sad death. So there's guilt associated with it, and it's just been a long time coming. If you read those scenes, you might pick up on what's going on, and it might be like, wow, this is kind of tense or this is kind of a beautiful thing.
 
But if you read the previous nine installments of the series to that point, you might be in tears. You might be crying at that wedding. I certainly very nearly was. I would send people back to the beginning. The danger of that is exactly what you said, Matty; if somebody asks me what's your worst book craft-wise, it's an easy answer. It's the first one, not only because it was the first one that was ever published, but you can still see the bones of that 1995 draft in there. Even in 2006, I was a better writer than I was in 1995. Certainly in 2023, I hope I'm better at it.
 
It's a mixed bag. You want them to start at the beginning for that sort of stick with the family and get the entire history of the family, sort of experience, but you're sending them to what is arguably your weakest book in terms of writing craft. I don't know the answer to that. I've been tempted, like I think many writers have in this digital age; it wouldn't take much to completely rewrite the book and republish it. You know, this is the book, you know, just feels dishonest, though. It's a product of its time. That was who I was when I wrote that book. That's who those characters were. That's how I saw them. That was the energy associated with it, and it feels untrue to go back and completely redo it, at least, and then represent it as the first book.
 
Maybe a special edition, available only through my direct sell store or something like that, where, you know, here's an alternative universe if I had waited another 20 years, what this book might have looked like.
 
[00:31:31] Matty: The question would be, do you just go through and tidy up the craft parts like a copy edit? I guess that's the question. You might look at it and say, oh, if I were going to return to it, it would be like a developmental edit. And yet you could return to it and have it be more like a copyedit where you're applying the line-by-line craft improvements you've experienced but maybe not taking down the whole structure of it.
 
[00:31:45] Frank: Yeah, I think copyedit stuff, I think it's okay to return to stuff that you've written in the past and fix outright typos or errors. I have a proofreader who is hell on that, kills so many "that's." She literally kills so many "that's" that I have to fight to keep some of them. I have to be very careful because occasionally the "that" that is being killed actually creates a problem with the logic of the sentence. It's a good point that we all have these tics, and copyediting, that's a gray area. I think it's okay to clean something up.
 
We live in a digital age, and that's the advantage of it. But a developmental edit would be something different. I've actually been toying with the idea, though. The book was out in 2006, so it'll have its 20-year anniversary here coming up a bit, and I haven't really announced publicly yet that I'm setting up a direct sell store that'll be available in January, but I am.
 
[00:33:01] Matty: You heard it here first.
 
[00:33:03] Frank: You actually did. It might be something that would be one of those things that's only available from that.
 
[00:33:10] Matty: Exactly.
 
[00:33:12] Frank: I think you've got to be careful going down that rabbit hole of fixing things because, you know, what do they say, a piece of art is never finished. It's just released. A book is never done. It's just published. You could go back and preen and polish till the cows come home and you might feel better about it from a compulsive, obsessive-compulsive standpoint, but isn't the point to tell new stories, and you're taking time away from that.
 
[00:33:40] Matty: So much great information. Well, Frank, if you're willing, this is definitely going to be a podcast episode because I just think you've shared lots of great lessons, both for readers and for writers as well. So now that you've piqued everybody's interest in your work, please let them know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
 
[00:34:00] Frank: You know, the easiest point right now is just to go to my website, frankzafiro.com. Everything's there that you need. All the books are laid out. There's a handy dandy little "which book is for you" sort of thing in the right-hand column there. So if you like procedurals, there's River City or Charlie 316. If you like private investigators, there's Copriva or another one. Thrillers, hard-boiled, whatever it is that you like, there's a series or two underneath each heading so you can know right where to start. But franksoffaro.com is the best place to get rolling.
 
[00:34:34] Matty: Great, thank you so much.
 
[00:34:36] Frank: Well, thank you, Matty, and I want to say thank you for all you do for writers. You put a lot of effort into promoting and supporting other writers with your Facebook page and this podcast and a myriad of other things that you do. I know firsthand how much work that is, and so I think writers should be very grateful to you for the work that you do. I think it's very selfless, and you should be commended.
 
[00:35:00] Matty: Well, thank you so much. What a nice thing to say. Thank you, Frank.
 
[00:35:04] Frank: Well, I mean it. It's very true. A lot, in today's world, a lot of people are understandably focused on promoting their own work all the time, that's what I'm doing here, but you know, it's a nice thing to see someone being so selfless, so good on you.
 
[00:35:18] Matty: Thank you.

Episode 215 - Mistakes Writers Make about Firefighters with Thomas Dunne

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, I talk with Thomas Dunne about MISTAKES WRITERS MAKE ABOUT FIREFIGHTERS, including the fact that firefighting is a small part of a firefighter’s job; how the variety of firefighter roles enables story and character depth; story opportunities involving false alarms; how where there's fire, there's (almost) always smoke, and portraying the experience of moving through smoke by tapping into all the senses; life in a firehouse, including the official and unofficial hierarchies; and the variety of personalities who choose firefighting.

Thomas Dunne is a retired Deputy Chief and 33-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department with extensive experience working in Mid-Manhattan and the Bronx, including acting as incident commander at hundreds of fires and emergencies in the city. Chief Dunne lectures at conferences and colleges across the country, has written numerous magazine articles, and serves as an adjunct instructor for the National Fire Academy and Kean University. He is the author of NOTES FROM THE FIREGROUND, a memoir of his experiences with the FDNY, and the novel A MOMENT IN TIME.

Episode Links

Author website: www.chieftomdunne.com
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/thomas.dunne.7568/
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-dunne-b6950b250/

References in Interview:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/08/nyregion/bronx-fire-nyc.html

Summary

Have you ever wondered about the life of a firefighter? The action? The atmosphere of a firehouse? Or perhaps you're drafting your next novel and have a main character who's a firefighter. The reality of firefighting is far removed from Hollywood portrayals. Understanding the nuances can help you write more authentic characters and scenes. While no better person can shed light on the reality of being a firefighter than a seasoned professional like Thomas Dunne.
 
Diving into Firefighting
 
A retired deputy chief and 33-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department, Thomas Dunne shared insightful glimpses of the life of firefighters on the Indie Author Podcast. Dunne lectured at conferences and universities across the country while also authoring numerous magazine articles. He wrote his memoir, "Notes from the Underground," based on his experiences with the FDNY and the novel "A Moment in Time."
 
Dunne expands on common misconceptions about the work of firefighters and how many fires they tackle. Thinking the life of a firefighter involves stepping into an inferno every few hours is far from reality, Dunne mentioned. He suggested that authors weave in aspects like answering fake calls, carrying out maintenance tasks, researching firefighting techniques or scenarios, or even downtime and sleep.
 
Sensory Details Matter
 
Dunne further explains the sensory experiences in firefighting as encompassing more than just visual cues. He delves into the smell of tar and smoke, the feel of handling firefighting tools, the hiss of the breathing apparatus, and the harsh calls from squad mates.
 
The physicality of the job is crucially important, he said. Description can include how a firefighter’s breath quickens inside a respirator mask. Equally critical is the post-fire atmosphere: the lingering smell of smoke and the soot everywhere. These are elements that can add depth and authenticity to a scene.
 
Life in the Firehouse
 
At the crux of writing a firefighter's story is depicting life in a firehouse. Dunne made it clear that firehouses differ from one place to another. Some might be a clamorous alpha-male-dominated environment, while others might be more laid back. Each firehouse has its own dynamic and individual character that distinguishes it from others.
 
While there's an allure to sliding down the fire poles, it's not as common as people imagine. Newer firehouses might not even feature them. But the tradition continues, with alterations, including steel poles replacing the older brass ones.
 
There's equal diversity among firefighters, dispelling myth that they're all burly, mustachioed men. Men and women in the service come from various backgrounds — from blue collar to lawyers, architects, or even actors. Firefighters joined the profession for different reasons. Some have lifelong dreams of firefighting, inspired by generations of family tradition; others having stumbled into it by chance.
 
True-to-Life Characters
 
The key takeaway from the interview is that when writing a character who is a firefighter, they should not be one-dimensional. Firefighters can be heroes saving lives, or they could be everyday people, coping with mundane routines and the occasional inferno. These characters come with unique backstories, motivations, and personalities, and that’s what makes them compelling to readers.
 
The world of firefighters offers a broad canvas for writers, but it's necessary to delve beyond the stereotypes. As Dunne suggests, don't be afraid to play with the tropes, yet ensure to embody authenticity throughout the character and the scenes.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Thomas Dunn. Hey, Thomas, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:05] Thomas: Morning, how are you doing, Matty?
 
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you.
 
Meet Chief Thomas Dunne 
[00:00:08] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Thomas Dunn is a retired deputy chief and 33-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department with extensive experience working in mid-Manhattan and the Bronx, including acting as incident commander at hundreds of fires and emergencies in the city. Chief Dunn lectures at conferences and colleges across the country, has written numerous magazine articles, and serves as an adjunct instructor for the National Fire Academy and Keene University. He is also the author of Notes from the Underground, a memoir of his experiences with the FDNY and the novel A Moment in Time.
 
And I asked, Tom to be on the podcast because he had been very helpful to me with some questions I had about firefighting for my Ann Kinnear novel, Furnace for Your Foe, and I wanted to add his perspective to the Mistakes Writers Make series, sort of focused on prime writers. now we have amassed the mistakes writers make about firearms, police procedure, coroners, first responders, the FBI, PIs, forensic psychiatry, police roles, and bladed weapons, and how to avoid mistakes about those in your writing. And you can find links to all of those episodes at theindyauthor.com forward slash podcast, and then scroll down to Crime Fiction Writer, or you can also find them at the Indy Author YouTube channel on the playlist for Crime Writers.
 
And just as a side note, I have also added another YouTube playlist for short story writers, that is short fiction. So you can find all that information at my website and at my YouTube channel.
 
Misconceptions about firefighters' work 
[00:01:34] Matty: And so, Tom, I wanted to start out talking about misconceptions that writers might have about the work that firefighters do. What do you see in writing that kind of makes you cringe as a professional firefighter?
 
[00:01:47] Thomas: Well, a couple of things. I mean, there's some real good stuff out there, but there's also, as you know, a lot of misconceptions, out in the world, out in the writing world, certainly in the movie industry, certainly on television shows. There are a number of shows now that are, I don't watch, that are, you know, not good shows, and there are a lot of misconceptions. But as you pointed out, 33 years as a firefighter and the last 20 years or so as a writer, or would be writer, I kind of have--
 
[00:02:14] Matty: an actual writer.
 
[00:02:16] Thomas: I guess at this point I could consider myself a writer.
 
[00:02:19] Matty: Yes, you can.
 
[00:02:20] Thomas: but I found myself in an interesting dichotomy in that one foot was in one world, one foot was in the other world, and they were two very different mindsets. in other words, the fire world was sort of a world of activity and action. The writer world, I think of a writer as an observer, and I tried to tie the two together as much as possible. So my hope would be that for the writers who tune into this, who have published or are anticipating writing, for the people who are at least considering writing, I would hope that maybe I could bring up one or two points that might give them a little more realistic approach to the world of emergency response, the world of firefighting, and the ability to create a variety of characters. # Firefighting is a small part of a firefighter’s job.
 
[00:03:08] Thomas: But you mentioned you wanted to start off with the work, I guess, I won't say illusions, but work misconceptions, and there certainly are a number out there. I think maybe, the first one is the concept that there are a lot of fires, and nationally and statistically there are, but realistically, if you're going to create a character or an imaginary firehouse or fire department as part of your storyline, there would probably be a mistake to introduce a story where they're going to fires like five, six, seven, eight times a night. It's not like that anymore.
 
That was the case in the so-called war years in New York City, where, for example, the South Bronx firefighters would go literally to 15 to 20 structural fires a night. Fortunately, it's no longer like that, in part because of the economy, in part because of fire prevention activities and things of that nature. Fire is the aspect of emergency response that seems to gather understandably all the attention. But in the last 20 years or so, certainly after 911, the fire department's responsibility and assignments are much broader.
 
So if you can picture a pie chart, which would constitute all the fire department's activities, in that pie chart, the firefighting would be a relatively small slice at this point. Largely, in urban areas, it might be different. The division I worked in, for example, covered, the Bronx and Manhattan, and over a 24-hour period, you did go to a lot of fires, but I would think it would be a little unrealistic to create a storyline, where somebody was going to a fire, like, every other hour. That just wouldn't happen.
 
[00:04:55] Matty: Can you talk a little bit about what constitutes the remainder of the pie outside of fighting fires?
 
[00:05:01] Thomas: a great deal of that, as I said, since 911, the fire department has picked up a lot of peripheral activity, all right? A lot of fire departments have assumed EMS responsibilities, which, you know, may constitute a third or more of the runs of the responses in parts of New York City or other fire departments. Hazardous materials, things of that nature, that are now... A lot of HAZMAT experts, a lot of HAZMAT incidents in the fire department, fire prevention activities, which are not, you know, again, if you want a realistic character, firefighters love going to fires. They love hands on challenges like that. You'll never have to motivate a firefighter. To do something out of fire. Things, the so-called soft areas like fire prevention activities, are not quite as popular, but that takes up a substantial part of any tour, typically.
 
Things like simple maintenance, you know, there's a great deal of maintenance that's required in the firehouse drill periods where the members of the fire department of that particular working that particular tour would sit down and drill something, which means a rehearsal of how to use a certain type of equipment, a rehearsal of What if situations? What if we had a fire in this type of building? What if we had a bus crash on the interstate? These scenarios, they review before it ever happens. So there's a lot of that going on.
 
In fact, there's a fair amount of downtime. In many fire departments. I got a, personally got a lot of reading in, mostly in the night tours. You know, during the day tours you kept pretty busy with responses, drill, maintenance, things of that nature. At nighttime, I went through a lot of novels. Had an ability to read a lot, especially since I stayed up most of the night and it was fairly exhausting, but you would do some reading, if you wanted, or studying for, advancement, things of that nature.
 
So I think maybe the first misconception, again, if someone out there is envisioning writing an imaginary fire department or creating a character, in a typical day by day, activity in that department, don't send them out the door 50 times for fire. That's not going to happen. # The variety of firefighter roles enables story and character depth
 
[00:07:09] Matty: I think that's good news for writers because even an exciting event like fighting a fire, if you just have a character doing that over and over again, even that would pall after a while. And I think it's actually good news for writers that there's this whole assortment of things a firefighter could be doing. And you could even bake in the idea that, okay, now I have to go to like, you know, the junior high and talk about fire prevention or something. And maybe the frustration that a firefighter would feel if that was what they were spending their day doing when what they really wanted to do was fight a fire.
 
[00:07:38] Thomas: Exactly. And then there's the frustration of the false alarm. a certain percentage of your responses, you go out the door and you have to be, you know, keyed up and mentally and emotionally prepared every time you go out, but a certain percentage, which will vary depending on where you work, will be for nothing.
 
For example, when I was a firefighter in mid-Manhattan, there are these mechanical alarm systems in just about every mid-Manhattan building. And they often malfunctioned, and especially, in the wintertime, it seemed to happen more often for whatever reason, and over a 24-hour, tour of duty, there are nights where we might have gone out 10 to 20 times, out the door, you know, lights and siren, all set for action, only to find out that it was, past. A defective alarm system. So there's that sense of frustration sometimes that, you know, there's a sense of wearing down over time when you go out the door a lot.
 
And certainly when you go out to a fire, you generally know, when you're actually going to do something real. Because, typically, you dispatch some basic dispatch information, and as you're responding, the dispatcher will contact the officer by the radio, so on the apparatus, the truck that you're responding on, you'll hear things like, sounds like you're going to work, fire in the top floor, sometimes you hear things like people are trapped, et cetera, et cetera, and now you're really geared for combat, so to speak, and, you know, you're going to do something real, something real. Fortunately, those are things that you certainly experience over a period of time, but they generally come every so often.
 
And that's in New York or any urban area, so you can imagine if your character lives or works in suburbia or a rural area. one of the things I always hear as I travel around the country, lecturing, especially to local firefighters, is that there's not enough fires. And that's bad for the fire department, but it's good for the people, but it's not unheard of for me to go to a small department somewhere, give them a lecture, and find out that nobody in that room has even been to a fire in six months, and they know you're from New York, and they envision it as, wow, I wish I was in New York. I should be going to fires every day.
 
So that's one of the misconceptions. What a typical tour of duty would involve, yes, absolutely. There'd be some firefighting, but it would not be as often as you might expect. There's a lot of peripheral stuff that is somewhat routine, somewhat tedious, you know, that might wear on you for a while.
 
Story opportunities involving false alarms 
[00:10:11] Matty: that reminds me of a story. A couple of years ago, my husband and I were sitting on our porch, and we're, in an area, we're in a forested area that has a lot of, deer, and we're also right down the street from the fire station. And so we were sitting on the porch and we heard this thump, and then the screech of brakes, which seemed odd, but I thought, I bet that a deer ran out into the road; the car hit the deer before it even had a chance to brake, and then slammed on the brakes, and we were kind of trying to look through the trees, it was right down the street from us, you know, trying to see what was going on, and we weren't hearing any noises that made us think it was a big emergency, but I thought, I don't know, you know, if somebody's And I they might just be in the car.
 
And so I called up 911, and I described what had happened, thinking that they would just send somebody, like, send a police car or something to see if there was even anything going on. And pretty soon, I think they rolled every piece of equipment in the fire department. I think partially just because why not? And then I thought, oh, no, I'm going to get in trouble because I just called out the whole fire department. And then when I made the call, I had given my address, and so pretty soon, one of the guys, I can't remember if it was a firefighter or one of the police officers stopped, and, it was also embarrassing because my husband and I had been drinking wine, so I thought, oh great, they're going to show up and think I just called because, like, I was drunk or something.
 
But it was super nice, and, you know, I described again what I had heard, and he said, oh, we looked around, The car must have driven away, and we looked in all the ditches, we don't see a deer. But he was super nice about it, and I actually, then a couple of months later ran into the chief, and I described the scenario to him, and I kind of apologized, and he said, no, never apologize, because we would rather hear it than have someone think, oh, well, it's probably nothing, and not make the call. And the next day, I did find a deer in a ditch, so I felt vindicated.
 
[00:12:03] Thomas: Yeah. people will call in for all kinds of reasons. And, since most people, thankfully, have not actually experienced the fire, or perhaps are not familiar with, everything, in, that's peculiar to their area, or their apartment, or the city, people will call in for things that you look back on and you feel that was a ridiculous reason to call, but... You have to make the call.
 
Where there's fire, there's (almost) always smoke 
[00:12:25] Thomas: And there's the other aspect, I like to call this the Hollywood syndrome. if you've been to any of the movies that came out over the last 20 or 30 years, and I really don't go to them. I saw one years ago. Understandably, Hollywood has a concept of what a fire should look like. And if you see a movie or perhaps an episode in one of these ongoing television serials about fire departments, typically it would be a room full of fire or a building with fire coming out of every conceivable window and no smoke at all. And, you see this over and over.
 
And nothing could be further from the realities. The realities are that certainly if you have a room full of fire in a typical building, you'll see fire pushing out that window. When you go inside a building, very often you don't see anything. Especially if you're sent to the floors above to do a search for life and see if anyone's been trapped up there, it's really an almost claustrophobic, blinding type of experience where they often say you can't see your hand in front of your face, and that's exactly it. You have a, a face piece on that you're breathing through, so you're kind of very myopic in your outlook. You can't see anything. You're going around almost like with braille. You're feeling your way for security. If you are going down, let's say, the length of an apartment, you typically would keep one hand, maybe your left hand or your right hand, depending on the layout, on the wall, because you can't see anything, and that is your way out.
 
So, I would say to anyone, again, who wants to, create a realistic fire scene in, in their storyline, yeah, absolutely, it has to be fire, all right, perhaps there's some heat, if you're feeling that in the hallway, or certainly in the floors above, but to make it realistic, I would definitely incorporate The smoke aspect of it, because that's, more than anything, that, that is what's going to overwhelm you at a fire.
 
[00:14:32] Matty: A really interesting resource, and you may be able to comment on this, based on your experience, but it was in the New York Times, it was one of their visual investigations, and it was about a fire in an apartment building, and the thing that I remember most is that they did this 3D sort of virtual model of the apartment building. And it was very odd in that it wasn't just a hallway with apartments off it. You would go into an apartment, and in some cases the apartments had been, made two floors, like I think retrofit is two floors, so you could go into an apartment and you'd be going downstairs, and now you were at the lower level, but there wasn't a door from that level into the hallway of that level. And also the apartments weren't just stacked one on top of the other. Sometimes, like the second floor of one apartment would be kind of like underneath the first floor of another apartment. Are you familiar with the scenario I'm describing?
 
[00:15:23] Thomas: I think those are probably the duplex apartments that you see in certain buildings, scattered, like, for example, throughout New York City, where, you go into an apartment and that apartment encompasses not only that floor, but conceivably an extension to rooms on the floor above, or in one case scenario, maybe a floor, the stairway goes to downwards, the sort of bottom, the floor below where the, perhaps the fire originated, and now you're obviously getting blasted with this smoke. The fire obviously burns and kills, but most of the deaths, most of the fatalities are really from smoke inhalation.
 
The experience of moving through smoke 
[00:16:00] Thomas: You know, and that's why, both in firefighting and in writing, I always tried to give a lot of credence to smoke and that feeling of being encompassed. It's almost like crawling or walking on the bottom of the ocean, where, yeah, you can move around, but you can't see anything, and your environment is totally encapsulated in your feelings of what you can feel through your gloves.
 
And even to some extent the experience of wearing that mask over your face that you're breathing through makes you more myopic, because now you can actually hear your breaths as the diaphragm in this thing opens and closes, and if you start getting nervous, or you start really getting too physically involved in it, you can actually hear your breaths increasing in this diaphragm. So it's kind of like the kind of thing that anyone who's been in a fire as a firefighter would know, and it could translate very nicely, I think, in certain scenes that a writer might want to sit down and write about.
 
Tapping into all the senses 
[00:17:04] Matty: I'm hoping I'm remembering the article correctly. I'm going to provide a link to this New York Times article because it was really... excellent. All their visual investigation articles are excellent, but I believe that was the article that also had, I think they had found a picture of one of the hallways from before the fire, and then they modified the photograph so it reflected what it would look like in the circumstances with the smoke, almost unrecognizable, you know, you could pick out tiny little things here and there, but, I think it's a really good illustration of exactly what you're saying, that, that sense of claustrophobia, that sense of, of, I think that idea of walking at the bottom of the ocean is an excellent analogy, that makes a lot of sense to me.
 
[00:17:46] Thomas: Yeah, I would say too that that post fire, when the fire is put out, the post fire sense of what it looks like, what it smells like, what it feels like, I don't know how easy it is for any author to get into a situation like that, but if you If you ever live near a building that burnt, most of the time you can't get in, but if you typically, let's say a mid-Manhattan high rise, if a person four or five or more stories below you has a fire, you're going to have a sense of that fire for days afterwards. the soot, the smell, you know, there is like a post fire experience that stays for a while that a person could incorporate into a storyline also.
 
So it's not only the fire. The fire most often, fortunately, gets knocked down fairly quickly. And then there are the important functions of searching for life, you know, overhauling the apartment to check for extension, things like that, and it is a very, one of the things I like about firefighting, I mean, I like writing because it's cerebral, and a writer is an observer, but I always was sort of a physical person, and I like the physicality of firefighting, I tried to describe in my writing what it felt like to handle tools to deal with the scent of tar and smoke and things like that, and even later as I became the chief and was the guy supervising and choreographing from the street, I kind of liked this sense of the physical challenge and the physical presence of smoke, water, tar, things like that. And, I think that's something that would be good for a writer to try to incorporate in a fire scene to make it, you know, more realistic. It's a very physical experience at the scene. But
 
[00:19:35] Matty: really like this idea that you're mentioning all these senses that can be involved, like the sound of the breathing apparatus. And, yeah, that's great. That's something. I think everybody goes to the, the visual aspect. And I think it's a great reminder not to, Stop there.
 
Creating a story without direct experience 
[00:19:49] Thomas: My two initial books were based on my experience, because I knew New York City intimately, I knew firefighting and the FDNY intimately, and I wrote about what I personally experienced. But I am a great believer that a good writer can create characters, can create a storyline, based on something they've never experienced. You know, I believe that, but in a good example, he's kind of, the same thing over and over, but Tom Clancy, all right, probably has never been in combat, and yet he made a whole industry out of books that were intricately described, combat and how it would be in combat. And I guess, again, my hope would be that if I could just throw a few tidbits about the realities of fire, about the realities of what it's like to be in a building, about some of the misconceptions of the work that's involved.
 
Life in a firehouse

[00:20:44] Thomas: Yeah, a lot of it is routine, some of it's boring, you know, but there are those moments, it's kind of like this, moments of utter boredom to moments of utter panic, it goes up and down, and I think is, certainly typical of most of the urban departments, you And as you get away from the city, maybe as you get into the suburban areas, or certainly the rural areas, the fire incidents, the fire activity diminishes quite a bit, and I would think, not having worked in areas like that, that you'd have a lot of downtime, which could be good or bad, depending on your relationships, in that particular fire station, which is a whole, you know, another tangent to go on. If you're spending 24 hours with a group of people, well, there are a lot of interesting characters, in the fire department, and you can create a lot of interesting characters from that environment in your writing, and especially when it's compacted into a building where You live together, you eat together; you sleep together for 24 hours, sometimes there's really good connections made, sometimes there's a lot of banging of the heads going on.
 
And I think a lot of people, again, going back to that Hollywood syndrome, if you've had no connection with the fire department, and most writers I imagine have had little or no connection, you might be subject to that, well, traditionally a firefighter has a mustache, right, He wears suspenders and has, slides a pole and has a dalmatian. a lot of fire departments don't have poles. Very few dalmatians. Usually it's some butt that walked in off the street that adopted the house and they adopted him. Uh, it's different than the storybook thing. And you can create a fire scenario, a firehouse. And when we talk about the people who do it, characters who have depth, who have variety. It's not all like the typical what you see on television or the thing you read about or heard about when you were in the second grade.
 
[00:22:46] Matty: Well, I think that's a great entrée to one of the other things we wanted to talk about, which was, maybe these are overlapping. One is misconceptions about the people who choose firefighting, but also life in the firehouse. So, let's maybe talk about life in the firehouse. And I actually have to start out. Are there any poles? Is that actually a thing anywhere?
 
[00:23:03] Thomas: Yes, there are.
 
[00:23:04] Matty: Okay.
 
[00:23:05] Thomas: Absolutely. Some of the newer stations, I've read about are not having poles installed and their argument would be, it eliminates the risk of injury. I don't know if that's a great idea. Sliding poles really facilitates and speeds up firefighters’ response to emergency. And it's always a ticking clock. The sooner you can get there, the better off the operation is, the safer the people who are affected by it are, and aside from this, the tradition. You know, fire poles were invented, I think, in Chicago around the 1890s or thereabouts, and they were invented for a reason, okay? They found that it would facilitate by x number of seconds or whatever the statistic was, every response they went on.
 
I got to a point where, certainly as a firefighter, I worked in firehouses that often had three stories. So if you were doing something on the top story, maybe you're doing something at your locker or maybe you were fixing or doing some maintenance work or cleaning. That's another thing, a typical firehouse day, a lot of cleaning, all right? The bunks have to be made. It might be as many as 15 or more bunks. There's a lot of routine day-to-day work like that. So if you're on the third floor and a run comes in, you can grab a pole, slide down that to the second floor. Before you know it, you're sliding down to the first floor. That still exists. Most New York City firehouses still have that.
 
[00:24:32] Matty: Is it one pole from the third floor to the first floor? Or do you stop at the second floor?
 
[00:24:37] Thomas: That would be quite a ride.
 
[00:24:38] Matty: Yeah, that would be.
 
[00:24:40] Thomas: no, the poles would not extend more than one floor. The book floor may have two or three poles that would go to the floor below, which then would go to the first floor where the truck is. That being said, there is one of the older firehouses in New York City is on the Lower East Side. And, this firehouse has a tremendous, it's the highest ceiling in New York City. It's like 30 New York City firehouses. And I remember sliding. I worked briefly in that firehouse and sliding that pole. And that was an experience. I mean, you felt like you should bring your lunch or something.
 
[00:25:13] Thomas: So yeah, the poles are there. There are a lot of firehouses. Some of the newer firehouses, certainly any firehouse like in my area here, which has a volunteer department, it's one level. There are a lot of firefighters who never in their careers slide the pole. There's a reason for it. It does facilitate response. I personally, and most firefighters, almost forget about it after a while because it becomes so routine. But to be very honest, I enjoyed it. I mean, I, even when I got to a point where I was responding from the second floor as the chief, it wasn't as important that I get there immediately because the firefighters would arrive first; they were doing the physical work, even if they were, let's say they were serving lunch or something, I could walk down the stairs or I could slide the pole. I often slide the pole. I just like the experience, you know, of sliding down the pole.
 
So yeah, in answer to your question, they are still there. I even try to incorporate the feeling of sliding a pole into my writing because it was something that meant something to me. And if an author wants to have a character slide a pole, by all means do it, if you can imagine what it feels like. I tried to describe, there are different types of poles, the traditional shiny brass pole I like, you slid very quickly along this brass pole. And then the newer firehouses, they introduced a stainless-steel pole. And the difference was the stainless-steel pole was wider. It had a different feel. It didn't have that slick, traditional, shiny brass feel. And the sliding process didn't feel the same. I kind of described it as the brass pole welcomed your embrace and the stainless steel just kind of tolerated you for a couple of seconds.
 
[00:27:08] Matty: I love that description.
 
[00:27:10] Thomas: Yeah. So that the poles exist, there are different types. And if someone wants to incorporate a pole into their story, include that part of it, that's fine. They would certainly be realistic in doing that.
 
[00:27:23] Matty: Well, I think that the opportunity to try to convey that sense of fun, I mean, it almost sounds like that sense of fun that attracted you to using the pole, even when you could have used the stairs, would be fun to represent in the story. What are some other misconceptions about life in the firehouse that you see writers or screenwriters doing?
 
Tips for a realistic portrayal of firefighters 
[00:27:43] Thomas: well, I don't really watch Uh, there are television shows that are fired. There's one, Chicago Fire. I don't watch any of them, but I caught about five minutes once, just out of curiosity and everybody is very well spoken. Everybody is kind of the same. They're Hollywood actors. They're incredibly pleasant. Handsome or beautiful, you know, there's, interaction that's almost predictable. The firehouses that I experienced, there are women in the fire service, there are women in the New York City Fire Department, they're still very much a minority at this point, there are very few women, there are a lot of men who have maybe never ever worked with a female firefighter. So that still creates and enables the typical firehouse environment, in my experience, to be a sort of a rough, tough, alpha male type of environment.
 
A guy I worked with and liked a lot made the analogy that a 24-hour tour in a New York City firehouse was almost like being in prison because we had to stay there for 24 hours. We wore the same clothes. We worked out with weights together. We ate the same meals together. And we always complained about the same things, you know. So the overall flavor of the firehouses, in my experience, has been kind of a loud, tough environment where if you can imagine a bunch of alpha males kind of competing for their ranking in this informal bureaucracy that's there.
 
Which is not to say that they're bad people. They're not. And it's not to say that they're bad people. There was not a tremendous variety of people, within that environment, because there were. The environment itself, if you basically are living in a version of a garage, the first floor would be the floor where the engine of a lot of companies is actually positioned. There's generally a small desk at front called the house watch desk where the person takes phone calls and handles the communication with the dispatcher. And the upstairs are lockers, offices, the bunk room.
 
But the walls, especially on the first floor, are generally a tile, like a white tile. And that kind of reverberates and amplifies all the noise that goes on in a firehouse. Firehouse can be a very noisy place. And part of that is the machinery, you know, testing out the equipment, all of that. But firefighters in general are very outspoken individuals, all right? You don't get a lot of subtleties. You'll get a fair amount of yelling, you know, and the noise of the equipment and the people, and the yelling, and the bells and the PA system, and the radio reports coming in, if you can imagine being in this environment for 24 hours, at least for me, it got to me after a while. We're to a point where it was, I liked being with the people I was with, but it was kind of a relief to get out of that noisy environment. So that's kind of the scenario.
 
Again, obviously, it really depends on the situation. There are some firehouses that are very quiet. There are some firehouses that have more than one unit assigned to it, and you have more people. I found sometimes that the really busy companies in the rundown areas of the city, there was a more of an informality of it because they did more work than, some of the companies in the nicer neighborhoods, and, that the noise would be comparable. You know, on the other hand, if you want to create an environment in your writing, in your storyline, of a sort of quiet, set off fire company where people sit around and discuss things at the kitchen table. Yeah, that could happen. That could happen also.
 
But I would say, just keep in mind the overall nature of firefighters, that they tend to be conservative people. And if they're going to have a political discussion at the kitchen table, which is really the focal point of the firehouse, the kitchen table. They're going to tend to be conservative, if they disagree, it's not likely to be with a lot of subtleties. There'll be some butting of the heads, that type of thing. So it's a very different experience than what you might see in the corporate world or the typical office building.
 
The hierarchy (official and unofficial) in the firehouse 
[00:32:09] Matty: Well, I'm curious, can you describe a little bit, is there a hierarchy? I mean, I think we're all familiar with the concept of the fire chief. But are there, like you've made the analogy to prison. I originally thought you were going to go, that you would go with like being in the army, but it seems a little more democratic in both a good and bad way.
 
[00:32:32] Thomas: Well, typical firehouse, let's say, would have an officer on duty, could be the lieutenant or the captain, who's in charge of the tour, in charge of the personnel and the building for that, that particular tour, which, you know, could be 15 hours, could be 24 hours, depending on where you work. Firehouse in New York, again, would have an officer and four or five firefighters. If it were a house that had more than one company, you could have two or three officers, perhaps, it may be as many as 15 or 20 firefighters. And, there is a distinction between officer and firefighter, but it's not as rigid as in the army. All right, the New York City Fire Department is a quasi-military institution with the emphasis on quasi. So, yeah, if the officer tells you to do something, you're going to do it.
 
But within the ranks of firefighters themselves, there's sort of a rapidly established, how would you describe this, sort of chain of command in terms of you have the very newest person All right, the probationary firefighter who's first year, he has no experience or she has no experience, they come in, they are the lowest of the low, they are treated as such for a while until they are gradually accepted, and their job would be to keep their mouth shut, their eyes open, to keep constantly busy making the coffee, helping out here and there.
 
Then there are the real salty old veterans. This might be someone who has 25 or 30 years as a firefighter, and they are the senior person, most of the time, very well respected, okay, could have a variety of personalities. A lot of them would sort of just sit back and have their coffee and just watch things, you know, sort of as an informal supervisor. perhaps step up and teach and help some of the younger firefighters.
 
Some of the older guys, not many. But some were nasty. They were just nasty individuals that, for whatever reason, were not very helpful to new people, were very critical of new people. And then you have a lot of people in between, you know, who were just normal walking around Joes and Janes and they functioned and did their job. It is overall a blue-collar world. Many of the firefighters who work, at least in my experience, were from a blue-collar background. Many of them had relatives who had been firefighters, and, certainly my case, my dad also had been a New York City firefighter, which kind of, you know, even though I didn't know a lot about the job, definitely was an influence in my, doing what I did.
 
The variety of personalities who choose firefighting 
[00:35:07] Thomas: That being said, there were, there is an amazing variety of people who choose this type of work, and I throw this out because if a writer wanted to introduce a character who maybe was different, who maybe didn't exactly fit in. All right, who maybe was sort of, you know, alienated by some of the things they were experiencing. Feel free to do it. For example, I worked with, over the course of my career, I worked with, a couple of actors. I worked with several lawyers, you know, guys who had gone through law school and were practicing law on the side. I worked with an architect. I worked with a couple of writers. Alright.
 
In fact, in my novel, one of my initial characters initially he was a minor character, was a would-be author. He was actually sort of a failed author and in my scenario, the way I set up the storyline, he was this guy who was, had illusions of being a New York Times bestseller. He was kind of out of most of the firehouse activity, was not especially liked. And over time, as the story evolves, he eventually changes and becomes a major player towards the end of the book. So, if an author wanted to introduce a typical person from a blue-collar background, by all means, do it, but don't be afraid to stretch that a little bit. Okay, there, there can be an amazing variety of people who do this type of work.
 
I worked with some of the most intelligent people I ever met in the fire department. You know, as I said, the architect, the actors, the lawyers, one of my firefighters, had been a jet fighter pilot in the Navy, I believe. So there's a lot of this going on, as far as, Leaving the door open to establish a character that you want to be in there. He doesn't have to be 6’ 4” and full of muscles. He or she could be five foot eight and maybe had been a, a tax lawyer, maybe still works on the side as a tax lawyer, maybe fits in with the mores and values of the firehouse, maybe feels like a total misfit. I would say feel free to play with that because you're not being unrealistic. There are a lot of different varieties, a lot of different things in terms of the type of people who do this type of work, even the quality of the individuals.
 
The motivation for many firefighters I worked with was simply, it was a job. It was a reliable civil service job. They were going to make an adequate salary, have medical coverage, and eventually a pension. That motivated a lot of people. Other people viewed it entirely differently. There were people who approached this job like it was the priesthood. You know, where they just viewed it as this commitment that they were going to make and perhaps their father and their grandfather made a totally different approach to the work. So the motivation was different. The reason for joining the fire department was different.
 
Even the, I hate to say, the morality of individuals could vary greatly. I actually worked with a firefighter who in fact eventually became a priest. I worked with another firefighter who eventually became a murderer. So again, don't be afraid to throw in something in describing or creating a character that might seem utterly ridiculous, because that person who does fit in or doesn't fit in will become a priest or a rabbi or a murderer. It's happened, you know, and you can create that character and that storyline and not totally divorce yourself for reality because these were the realities that I actually saw.
 
[00:39:00] Matty: I like that idea of understanding the common gestalt of the firehouse and then playing around with how different characters would react to that. Like I can imagine a young man or woman who is one of these kind of alpha personalities, going in and how difficult that would be for that person to be having to you know, be in their probationary period and having to be making the coffee and, mopping the floor, whatever, and maybe being mistreated by the old timers, that could be very interesting. Or someone who had, is going into it because they have a family history, but they're far from being the alpha type and how that might pan out. It, there are all sorts of interesting, Plotting and character development opportunities there with such a strong emotional background for it.
 
[00:39:48] Thomas: Just what you said there, that particular thing, if you are third generation, and your grandfather, your father were firefighters, and you're from an Irish section of Queens, New York, let's say, and the expectation is you're going to take the firefighters test, civil service test, and as soon as your number comes up, you're taking that job. And you do this because well on some level you didn't want to do it but this was kind of like the family it's almost like an arranged marriage and now you find yourself in a loud, aggressive environment where perhaps on your previous job you were treated as an equal and respected Now you're almost being yelled at, and your job is a probie, make the coffee, hey, make that bed, hey, remake that bed, and the bathrooms need mopping, you know, there's an ego check going on there, and I can see where a person, a character may have some issues with that, you know, something interesting to play with in a storyline.
 
[00:40:46] Matty: I think a common trope in crime fiction is the person who joins the fire department because they're a pyromaniac or they're an arsonist. And they either want to use that experience to learn how to perfect their unofficial profession or they just like the experience of being at the fire but maybe not for... Well, let me frame it up. I would think there would be people who would be attracted because they like to be around fires, and then there are people who want to become a firefighter because they like to help people, and then a whole spectrum combining those two. Can you comment about those, especially when writers use that trope of someone's joining the department for nefarious purposes?
 
[00:41:24] Thomas: I'm not going to say outright it doesn't happen. Because there, there certainly are recorded cases of where it did happen. I'm trying, I'm thinking of the title of a non-fiction book I read recently about a fire officer in California who did exactly that, you know, he was a fire officer; he was setting fires over and over again and eventually got caught, I don't like it only because, well, it certainly can exist and does exist, it seems kind of trite; it doesn't happen that often, and it's been done a few times. I almost get the sense that that would be a television movie, you know, rather than a good movie or a good novel. So I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying that realistically, does it happen often? Absolutely not. Could it happen? Yeah.
 
On the other hand, as I just said, there is a real variety of motivations for being a firefighter. And I suspect that... Well, I can talk in my case, to be brutally honest, it had nothing to do with family tradition. It wasn't like I was trying to save mankind. I joined for my own self-centered reasons. I had, at the time, a job that was boring the heck out of me, and out of the clear blue, the fire department offered me a job, and my attitude at the time was, that sounds pretty exciting. You know, I'm doing something that's very boring. This is a job that is completely off the scale, that I've, I'll never have a chance to do again. I went into it thinking, I'm going to do this for a year, just to have the experience of doing it, and then I'm going to move on with my life. And obviously, 33 years later that was my motivation, and certainly I loved it, and I'm glad I did it.
 
But you could have that motivation, you could have the simple motivation that I've got three kids, or four kids, or whatever, and I have to provide for them, and this is the most “secure,” ironically, it's a secure job in that sense, a very insecure job in another sense, in the safety sense, that might be your motivation, and yes, there are people like the fellow I work with who was a firefighter, left the fire department and became a priest. In fact, he even gave his pension to the priesthood.
 
So, you know, there are people who come in, for very high, other-directed type of reasons. a person can join for any reason. Could they join to gather information that would help them for criminal purposes? Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, if you have the arsonist point of view. There are people who have that, you know, affliction, and I can see where the fire department might be something of great interest to them. It has happened.
 
You're also placed in a position in the fire department where you will often be in areas that are secure areas that you shouldn't be in. You have to force an entry into a bank, into a shoe store, into some type of occupancy. Mid-Manhattan was loaded with places like this. I wound up in places in the middle of the night where I was surrounded by stacks of money. You know, you could join the fire department and be one of the world's greatest thieves if you have that motivation. So, your motivation, your character's motivation for being a firefighter could be a whole variety, a whole spectrum of reasons, and you can play with that to create a character who accomplishes a lot of positive stuff, right?
 
Or on the other hand, maybe accomplishes and does a lot of negative, negative stuff. You know, it's, you have free range with that, I think, as an author. And you're not going to be unrealistic if you create the bad guy. You know, obviously, you don't want a character, a cardboard character, but if you can create a bad guy with some depth, and there's a reason for him being that bad guy, as opposed to the good guy, Again with some depth who is a good guy because his dad or grandpa or whatever was this tremendous influence and he wants to live up to that expectation. That's kind of like the motivational aspect of it which leads, you know, into the character development.
 
[00:45:37] Matty: That's so great. Well, Tom, I could continue talking with you for hours about this topic, but, we need to wrap up, but I really appreciate you bringing both 33 years of experience as a firefighter, but also your experiences as an author. I think you had some really invaluable advice about how people can pull those two concepts together.
 
[00:45:54] Thomas: Again, thank you. Thank you for inviting me, and I hope that we threw out a couple of bones that might help a couple of the authors out there a little bit.
 
[00:46:02] Matty: I know we did. And please let everyone know where they can find out more about you and your work online.
 
[00:46:08] Thomas: Yeah, the best way to get in touch with me is through my website, www.chieftomdundunne.com. And, if you have questions, comments, complaints, I always return. That's the best way to get in touch with me, or to order the books, and I always return any emails. If you have specific questions about the fire service or, writing about the fire service, feel free to contact me.
 
[00:46:34] Matty: Great, thank you so much!
 
[00:46:35] Thomas: Thank you.

Episode 213 - Melding Words and Animation - Exploring Storia with Todd Gallet

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

Todd Gallet discusses MELDING WORDS AND ANIMATION - EXPLORING STORIA, including the growing interest in multimedia and bingeable content; accommodating different preferences in consuming content; the opportunity for introducing new readers and viewers to our work; the kinds of stories Storia is looking for and the downside of basing Storia work on an established series; IP considerations; tapping into cross-promotional opportunities with your co-creators; involving the reader / viewer in the creative process; and the opportunity to interact with those who are enjoying your content.

Todd Gallet has spent the past eight years helping independent content creators monetize their work across video, audio, and now short fiction. This is the third venture of the founding team, leveraging their expertise in scaling content marketplaces and advertising to build engaged audiences.

Episode Links

https://www.storia.io/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddgallet/

Summary

Exploring the Fusion of Narrative, Animation, and Multimedia: An Inside Look at Storia
 
In our continuous journey to embrace innovations and challenge the conventional ways of storytelling, a new realm has captured our attention. Welcome to Storia - an immersive platform blending narrative, animation, and multimedia. It's a creative hub that sees written stories come to life through dynamic animations. Exciting? We thought so too.
 
In a recent conversation, we explored this intriguing world further with Todd Gallet, one of the brains behind Storia. We delved into its concept, potential, and what it could mean for the future of storytelling.
 
Storia - Writing Meets Animation Meets Multimedia
 
Storia's primary aim is to revamp how narrative content is presented and consumed. It's a platform designed to accommodate a short, immersive, and mobile reading experience layered with visual effects. With Storia, stories stretch beyond the confines of text and mindfulness to present a multimedia experience complete with animation, original score music, and sound effects.
 
Launching in December, Storia isn’t just focused on one genre; it aims to layer short fiction across all genres to attract a new wave of readers and potential readers. With original animations ranging from 2D, 3D to gaming realism, this platform holds promising potential to revolutionize reading.
 
The Interplay of writing and Animation
 
Creating a story for Storia does demand a tweak in a writer's traditional approach. The platform encourages writers to stay true to their narrative voice while integrating enough visual points and creative pacing.  This mixture enables creators to maximize the animation component and the effectiveness of the final content. The goal is to keep the process collaborative, drawing from the strengths and style of both writers and animators to make the stories both enchanting and engaging.
 
But does a writer need to be a fan of visual platforms to create for Storia? No! Instead, it's about finding great stories that could be accommodated into the new format. Stories that resonate, provoke emotional responses, introduce compelling characters, and can be brought to life with animation.
 
Building a Community of Creators and Readers
 
Building a thriving community of creators who can cross-promote their work is pivotal for Storia's journey. With the inclusive framework of this platform, creators can collaborate on new ideas and bring them to life. Furthermore, as Storia publishes the work, authors are credited and can interact with their fan base on various social media platforms.
 
While Storia doesn't dictate that authors engage on social media, they note that the platform provides an exciting opportunity for authors to reach new demographics and interact with a broader audience. In turn, this exposure could potentially drive more fans to the author's future works, thus expanding their influence and reach within the literature world.
 
In essence, Storia has one foot in the familiar world of written narrative and another in the not-so-familiar realm of animation and multimedia. This potent mix promises to breathe new life into the texture and pace of storytelling. Its launch is anticipated as a potential game-changer in the literary landscape — a playground for innovative content creation beyond the bounds of conventional writing or animation.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Todd Gallet. Hey, Todd, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Todd: Hello, pleasure to chat with you.
 
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure as well.
 
Meet Todd Gallet 
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you. Todd Gallet has spent the past eight years helping independent content creators monetize their work across video, audio, and now short fiction. This is the third venture of the founding team, leveraging their expertise in scaling content marketplaces and advertising to build engaged audiences. I heard about the topic we're going to be talking about today, Storia, from Josh Pachter, who I was talking with at dinner one night at the Creatures, Crimes, and Creativity Conference. Josh had been involved in this platform, and it's sort of focused on short fiction. Everybody knows I love everything related to short fiction.
 
What is Storia?
 
[00:00:44] Matty: So, Todd, let's start out just talking about what is Storia, and what made you see this as an opportunity that you wanted to pursue?
 
[00:00:52] Todd: Absolutely. So, Storia will be launching in December. It is a new immersive reading experience, which is going to layer short fiction, as you mentioned, across genres. So we can get into that, but pretty much across all genres, we'll be launching with, layering that with animation, across different types of animation, from 2D, 3D, gaming realism, etc., anime, and original score, music, and sound effects. So again, a multimedia platform really trying to attract the new and next generation of readers and potential readers.
 
The growing interest in multimedia 
[00:01:25] Matty: We were talking a little bit before we got started about your background in, interest in podcasting as well, and I think that all of these are, and Storia is just another example. All of these platforms are now finding ways to bring in other components, so, you know, what people might have thought of five years ago as a podcast is now maybe a multi-actor recreation of a fictional story or so on and so on. I'm guessing that kind of thing led into your interest in a platform like Storia.
 
[00:01:51] Todd: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you mentioned podcasting; we'll talk a little bit about our history and how that led us to today. But even with podcasting, again, even with the recording of this, it's not just an audio component anymore. There's a video component and a visual component to podcasting, which historically was an audio medium. Now, most of the consumption of podcasting is done on YouTube because people like to watch, as well as listen to this content. So, you know, that's always been of interest to us, is how we can blend the different media platforms.
 
Our expertise, historically, over the last eight, nine years, has been in scaling original content. Marketplaces. So, helping independent creators. First with video, we were in the early days of YouTube when YouTube creators were just getting started, and influencers were just starting to be a thing. We knew that there would be millions of creators who have quite a bit of talent but will have a hard time scaling their audiences, collaborating with other creators, monetizing that content. So, we became the largest independent marketplace for YouTubers and then sold that to YouTube in 2016. And then, as you mentioned, we got into the audio space for a few years and sold that company in 2020.
 
Opportunities in Top-Heavy Verticals and Fragmented Platforms 
[00:02:59] Todd: As we were looking for our next venture, we always look for verticals where there are a lot of talented creators, but it's very top-heavy, meaning that a few people make quite a bit of money, get quite a bit of marketing push, and receive a lot of attention. However, the long tail typically has a hard time breaking through, which is the case for most creative ventures. You can say the same thing about anything, you know, music, etc. But that's typically the way it is, but also in industries where the distribution is very fragmented. And, you know, unlike YouTube where there's one distribution, one platform, and many creators, in the literature space, it's quite fragmented in distribution, which makes it even harder for a writer to find an audience, to find a publication, to monetize their content, etc. So, that certainly was of interest.
 
And then when you look at the other side of this, which is animation, you know, once again, you have creators worldwide who are very talented across their particular type of animation, 2D, 3D, etc. But for them, very few have an opportunity to create their own content. Most of them end up working for a bigger studio, where they do a very specific thing for a year or two and then don't get any specific credit. They are just a cog in the animation wheel, and for many of them, they want the ability to express themselves creatively, to create new characters, create new worlds, but what they don't have are those characters and worlds to develop off of, right? Many of them just create a monster and put it out with no real narrative behind it. So we felt there would be an exciting opportunity to combine these two creatives and create a new output, which in the literary space, there hasn't been much new age innovation, like you mentioned, kind of a multimedia innovation in quite some time.
 
Introducing New Readers and Viewers to Our Work 
[00:04:41] Todd: So, our hope is that we can bring in new audiences that don't consider themselves readers by layering in this animation, which there are quite a few fans of, in anime, and comic books, and the explosion of comic cons. There is obviously a huge fan base there, and many of them might not consider themselves fiction readers. But they certainly are fans of this type of content, whether it be in live action or Marvel movies, etc. So they certainly love fiction, they love sci-fi, etc. But maybe they don't consider themselves readers, so they're not seeking out this short form content, which we believe and we're confident they will enjoy once it's presented to them in a more exciting, visually stimulating way. And our goal here is to bring all these creatives together.
 
[00:05:26] Matty: I think that the idea of people, the creators themselves not really recognizing the possible overlap is interesting from the point of view of fiction authors because I know until pretty recently, in fact, until I did a podcast episode with someone who had written and produced a graphic novel, I was not a graphic novel fan. Because I still thought of them as comic books, and I hadn't kind of made the jump to understand that, yes, there were comic books, but there was a whole spectrum of genres and approaches and levels of readership and so on. So do you feel as if an author is wanting to combine their written words with more visual aspects, is it something that they need to participate in, like, do they have to be readers of those more visual platforms in order to understand what is needed from a story point of view?
 
[00:06:17] Todd: No, I don't think so. You know, in fact, again, as we work with writers across genres, we are really excited to work with them in their own voice. We don't ask them to write any differently than they normally would. Obviously, there are some formatting things because we are layering animation, so there are certain formatting considerations on how we can maximize the animation component. But on the textual side, we really want them to express themselves as they normally would, and that's usually how we look at submissions. We want original voices, original ideas, etc. So, they don't necessarily have to be comic book fans or graphic novel fans to understand what we're trying to do here. Really, what we want to do is find great stories—some that have great subtext, some that have emotional pull at your heartstrings, some that just have great monsters, and our job is to go through them and adapt them into our new format, which again is basically just layering in animation. It's not completely animating the short stories.
 
Our goal here is that it is a reading experience; it'll be a mobile reading experience where someone controls the speed at which they read the text. But we are going to layer in the animation, either behind the text. So if you think of the opening to Star Wars, right, where you're reading and you're also seeing space behind it in a spaceship. It's very similar, right, so you're kind of reading and watching at the same time, or there'll be portions where someone is done reading that section, and it might just be a 20-30 second animation, full screen for them to kind of enjoy. So they're kind of bouncing back and forth; part of it they're imagining in their own head, some of it we're providing to them what it actually looks like. So it is quite an interesting experience, plus with the audio and the pacing music, etc.
 
So, you know, the impetus of this, we actually found is that with anime—and I don't know if you watch any anime or if your audience does—but quite a bit of anime is subtitled, right? It's in Japanese, but there's a huge number of Americans that don't speak Japanese that consume this content globally. Actually, not just Americans, but globally. So they're already used to reading the English subtitles along with an anime cartoon, right? So they're kind of already experiencing this, and it was when we started realizing that there's quite a bit of that on Netflix or on other platforms. People are already used to this behavior where they're kind of watching and reading and consuming at the same time. But nothing that's been kind of cross-genre that's typically done in the anime space.
 
But, we think we could bring that across genres, and to your point, blend some of these audiences. So it's not that if I like sci-fi, I have to go to a specific website because they have sci-fi content, or mystery thriller content, or romance novels. Those already seem to be niche in the distributions. There are specific websites or apps that focus on those types of content. We believe that there is an opportunity to blend those audiences. You know, once again, there are fans of Marvel movies that also consume rom-coms, and also consume, you know, when you think about streaming platforms. So it really is an opportunity to kind of provide just great stories and let people pick and choose what stories draw them in, and the types of art they like, the types of writers that they like. And in the end, hopefully, it drives more fans to the novel of that writer. You know, all of our stories are credited, so our goal, in a way that's mutually beneficial to everyone, is that they write a great story for us, it finds a home, it finds an audience. And then they can build a new fanbase for their next novel that is completely independent of our platform. I mean, that would be a win for both of us. What kinds of stories is Storia looking for?
 
[00:09:35] Matty: So, what kind of stories are you looking for? Like if someone is listening to this, a short fiction writer is listening to this and they're intrigued, are there characteristics of their own pool of short stories, because I understand you publish both original works and reprinted works, is that correct?
 
[00:09:49] Todd: Correct. Typically, with the reprints, you know, again, candidly, it has to be something that we just really love. And there have been. We definitely have licensed reprints. But with those, again, we want to find it a home. You know, typically with all of our stories, we really want to find a home for it as we kind of invest in the animation and marketing. So obviously originals are always preferable. Even working with writers to work, you know, some of the writers you have spoken to, they've worked with us on originals just for our platform. But across all genres, I guess to answer your question, it's across all genres. For us, we already work, as I mentioned, in sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery thrillers, romantic comedies, historical fiction, so anybody in your audience should feel comfortable submitting work.
 
I think for us, more importantly, is that it is... Visual, quote unquote, in nature, meaning it's descriptive and can be imagined in a way that is visual. It's not overly heavy in dialogue. Many times we'll get great stories that are heavy in dialogue, and what that does, it makes it difficult for us to animate. If there's three pages of dialogue for us, with two people sitting at a table, even if that dialogue is amazing, it's very difficult to animate in a way that's really exciting because it's just two people sitting at a table talking. So when people are writing or submitting work, for us, it's to keep the pacing of this story visually exciting. You know, every page or so has something new and exciting happening that we can bring in to life in an animation.
 
Outside of that, it's fairly open. You know, like I said, we were, in fact, intentionally looking to explore new categories, new storylines. How do we bring subtext into some of these and deeper messages in a way that's entertaining? So we're very open to, you know, reading anyone's story. The downside of tapping into an established series
 
[00:11:34] Matty: And do you have any preferences in terms of if someone has a series? I'm assuming it's okay for them to write a short story based on the characters of that series?
 
[00:11:44] Todd: Again, certainly open to it. You know, we actually just had a conversation with a writer earlier today who has a novel and a series of novels with the same IP. You know, for us, we're very open to it. Once again, similar to the reprint, I think it's often preferable that we start with a clean slate. What we've run into with having these discussions, especially if it's an IP, characters, world, etc., that have a significant fan base, is that we don't want to have pushback, where it should be a good thing, right, where we can market to these audiences that they could have a new visual experience. What you often find is that they're disappointed because they've imagined characters a certain way for the last five years. And now our artists are reimagining it in a way that they don't feel comfortable with. And that's actually where we ended up in that conversation, is that it might not be worth it because our artists are going to imagine it based on the short story description, and the characters might not look the way that they were described in a novel from years ago.
 
And you see this with other properties, right? Sometimes, fans are not happy with the way that the real, live-action version is presented, right? So, that is a bit of our concern. Though again, we're always open to conversations, and if it makes sense, but candidly, that's where we've netted out so far, that maybe it makes sense to just start with a clean slate, and then hopefully bring them into a new world where we can write those into novels or the author can write those into novels in the future with a new world.
 
[00:13:07] Matty: So, if somebody wanted to spin up a new world for Storia submission, would there be an expectation or an opportunity to make that a series of stories? And then you had also mentioned novel-length work, so can you talk about that a little bit?
 
[00:13:21] Todd: Yeah, no, absolutely. So we are starting with short fiction. So, you know, again, I would say two-to-four-thousand-word stories. Two to three is probably our sweet spot. A lot of it comes down to the animation component, which, as anyone might imagine, gets very costly the longer the story gets. Because even with our short stories, there's about three or four minutes of animation.
 
The power of bingeable content 
[00:13:42] Todd: And we also want to make this bingeable. Again, as we bring in new audiences, we want to make this bingeable content and exciting content. So, for us, we are starting with stories that are standalone, though oftentimes we encourage writers to leave it a bit open-ended, like you just said, that there could be new stories that are brought into these worlds. If a story is successful, we want to be able to come back to that writer and let's see what happens with this character after that initial short story. Let's bring in new characters, new exciting adventures in this world; we certainly are open as we continue to grow and see what the demand is to do lengthier productions. Full-length novels eventually, potentially, if there's a fan base and an interest for it.
 
But we do think the quickest path to building that audience is with kind of the short, bingeable fiction, so that's where we're starting. As we grow and as we explore, we might be exploring other things. So, to answer your question, we certainly want to be able to revisit episodic opportunities, though typically our first kind of go at it with a story and a world is going to be fairly standalone.
 
[00:14:40] Matty: I know you're not launching until December, but do you have an expectation about to what extent authors who find an audience, probably a new audience, well, maybe a new audience on Astoria, could expect to have those visually oriented fans, then follow them on to other works? If they have a back list of unanimated text, textual books, do you have an expectation that there will be, that it will, in a way, kind of act as a reader magnet for their other works?
 
[00:15:09] Todd: We certainly hope so. As I mentioned, all of the writers are credited in will be credited in the app, and then also when you look, again, very early days, but in just the explosion and the reception and engagement of our content on social platforms, you know, we're going heavy on TikTok, but also on Instagram, but we're launching short trailers of our stories, think movie trailers on TikTok, and some of them are getting millions of views, and engagement, and the writers and authors are tagged in those.
 
So as we go into this new medium, if your writers don't have Instagram and TikTok and some of these platforms, it'll be a great opportunity, like you just said, to attract new audiences and fanbases that they might not even be going after at this point, so this could be an exciting opportunity for writers to not only reach a completely different audience, but let's say our trailer for this story has two million views or a million views, and the author's tagged. Of course, it's an opportunity for them to leverage that and also co-market it. All of our agreements have the opportunity for our writers to co-market this content, to drive people to the app, and to talk to their fan bases, etc. So, we certainly hope it's an opportunity for them to increase their personal audience and fanbase for their other work.
 
IP considerations 
[00:16:20] Matty: I'm interested in this IP aspect, which I think is always important, in 'Taking the Short Cut,' which is the book I co-wrote with Mark Leslie Lefebvre about short fiction. We talk about this a little bit, but also, I think another great resource is Douglas Smith's 'Playing the Short Game,' which talks more about legal considerations. And, I'm thinking through, you know, what you were saying about maybe it's not ideal to have it be a character that already has an established fan base and book form, but I just had a conversation with a podcast guest about series, and we were talking about spin-off characters and how sometimes a character that is fun as a secondary character is too much as a primary character, but I can imagine a character in my Ann Kinnear suspense novels that I think would be great in two to three thousand word chunks, and would also be very fun to see an animation. And I think he's described in such a way that probably the animators and my readers would have the same expectation about what his appearance would be because I'm pretty explicit about it. Is that more attractive to you than an established protagonist? And if so, what are the IP considerations there since there is some overlap between an established series and a story?
 
[00:17:30] Todd: Yeah, I mean, that is a great point, and I actually think we'd be much more interested probably in that. Even when you think more broadly, as we work with other existing IPs, video games, or movie characters, or novels, we're actually very interested in the idea of let's fleshing out some of the secondary characters that haven't had backstories of that secondary character. I think that's like a perfect opportunity. I think you just made a great point that maybe 3,000 words are perfect to just establish a backstory on a character that people want more of, right, and start building out that world. So I think that is certainly an opportunity that we'd be open and interested in.
 
And from an IP perspective, of course, that's an important question, and we can segue to it here. We're very open to those conversations. You know, we have various opportunities to work with writers, whether it be original story content or existing stories in IP, on how we work with them from an agreement perspective. We have everything from, you know, full rights, like almost like a right-for-hire situation. Typically, those tend to be on originals that we collaborate on, that are kind of intended to be on the Storia platform, to license agreements, where we are licensing the story for a period of time. I mentioned, ideally we try to extend that exclusivity on the story itself, for as long as possible as we invest in the animation. But on the characters, we are open to the writer kind of continuing to explore that in published work, in extended work, etc. You know, novels, etc. So, you know, we've co-written these agreements. It's in conjunction with writers, various writers across various genres. So we feel, and the writers so far have felt that they're all like very fair and transparent and allow them to decide the direction that they want to go with the story.
 
So I think there are opportunities for all these different things, whether it be existing stories, existing IP, or, you know, original content that we can find a home for and explore.
 
[00:19:16] Matty: I have a little homework assignment to write up a two to three-thousand-word story.
 
[00:19:20] Todd: Yes, we're going to get you for that; we're going to get you on the story. I promise you that.
 
A valuable craft exercise 
[00:19:24] Matty: I hope so. It is interesting, though, two to three thousand words. I think this is a really interesting thought exercise or creative exercise for writers because I'm actually pursuing a guest who can address the question or the comment I get a lot from novel writers, which is, I'll talk about the opportunities that short fiction offers, and they'll say, "Oh, that all sounds really good, but I can't write that short." So, knowing how to write short is one skill set, but then knowing how to write short in two to three thousand words for a story that is going to be animated is a really different thing. You have to bring a really different mindset to that, I think.
 
One of the reasons I'm thinking that this character would be very good for an animated presentation is he's kind of exaggerated. He's very tall and very thin, has sunken eyes, and, you know, I think it would be a more interesting visual experience than my protagonist. But some of those things almost go against what writers have been trained to think about. You know, they're trained to think not in terms of exaggeration. Do you have any thoughts about that? How writers could or should get over the hump to make their work as appropriate for a platform like Storia as possible.
 
[00:20:32] Todd: Yeah, absolutely. And I think most of the writers, again, having conversations with them, most of them don't typically write two to three-thousand-word stories, right? Even for them, short fiction is longer than two to three thousand. When they consider what short fiction is, or again, like you said, they're working on novels or, you know, whatever it might be. I think it is an interesting exercise. One, how do you give something depth in two to three thousand words because again, you know, we don't want it to just be very surface? It's not typically our stories; the ones we have enjoyed and found the most successful are not just kind of a single scenario single scene short story. A lot of them do have, even if a single protagonist, multiple characters or some level of character development or in a mystery thriller some level of build-up.
 
But for them, the exercise is, again, how do you cram that in a way that still is digestible. How do we raise the stakes without giving a ton of exposition? How do you care about a character on the first page without kind of telling readers why they should care about that character? This is part of the exercise that I think writers have found fun, and a good opportunity for them to work on this kind of more niche skill set, right? I mean, how do you cram in visual description in a way that isn't necessarily overkill but gives the animator enough, you know, description to really bring to life what they're expressing? To build relationships without a ton of dialogue? These are the kind of things, again, that we have been working with writers on.
 
And also collaboration with our editor. You know, as we read thousands of these stories, and we produce, you know, what we'll be launching with 50, but, you know, as we end up producing hundreds of these, that process will only continue to improve. You know, as we read more of these and as we see what is successful, it is a continual learning process in conjunction with the writers and animators. We kind of started from scratch, so to be fair, the first couple were a complete learning process. We didn't really know—I mean, to your point—how does this all mesh together? What's the appropriate length of dialogue? Or, how much description is too much description?
 
So, all of this stuff is what we continue to learn, and I think once we launch and readers can, and writers can read the final content, I think it'll only improve and streamline because they'll have a better idea of what the output is. So I think this is an exciting time for writers to kind of collaborate with us and find the right mix of all these things. You know, again, it is a new medium. So no one's an expert, not even us. We're very open about that. We're open to the collaboration. What we really want is just to find good voices, good writers, good ideas because from there, we're going to find—we actually handpick the animators.
 
So, once again, this is a complete collaboration where if you write about a certain type of environment, or you have a monster, or you are a romantic comedy, all of these are brought to life in different formats. So we're not trying to fit it into a certain pot. We are actually handpicking an animator that can bring it to life in an appropriate way based on how you're describing things, right? So, you know, our goal here is to make it work in the most authentic and organic way possible.
 
The Experience of Creative Collaboration 
[00:23:35] Matty: The idea of the creative collaboration is really important. I think that probably our listeners would have most experience possibly with audiobooks. And I know that the experience of listening to a professional narrator read my work has been both very gratifying, but also a learning experience. I can see her emphasizing things that I didn't expect to be emphasized, and I can carry that learning forward to the next book to make it clearer what my intent was there.
 
I think there's a tendency for an author to want to say, "Oh, no, no, that's not what I meant. I want you to redo it," but they need to recognize that the narrator is also a creative professional and you need to give them some latitude in how they depict it. And I think it might be even more extreme when someone's seeing an animation of their work. Can you describe a little bit—do the writers have any input, little input, a lot of input into the animation? And can you provide any guidance on how people should absorb the animated rendition of their story when they finally see it if they are accepted as a story?
 
[00:24:36] Todd: I think coming into this with an open mind is probably going to be the most successful because like I said, we are all kind of learning and collaborating on the fly on this work. And also want to be respectful of both sides, the writer's work and the writer's voice, but also the animator's creative freedom and creativity and their style, etc.
 
So to date, we are pretty much the middleman between the writer and the animator. As we grow and expand our tech platform, there will be opportunities for our more established writers and animators on Storia to potentially collaborate, but right now, we are managing that process, to be fair. What we do always encourage is if a writer has any thoughts, notes, etc.
 
From an animation perspective, including the mood, colors, and style, we're certainly open to receiving feedback. However, what we do is pull out the animation notes, with our editor having the final say in creating the vision shared with the animator. As our team expands, dedicated art teams will handle this process. We take your writing as is and create a visual representation, providing the animator with creative freedom based on those notes.
 
There is collaboration in the process, and when we return to the writer, most edits focus on format rather than content. Occasionally, we may suggest trimming the conversation for a smoother reading experience or making structural changes to enhance the animation flow. The goal is to streamline the reading experience once the animations are incorporated.
 
Expect some back and forth in the editing process. While we may accept the story as is, there could be tweaks after animations are added. We act as intermediaries in these conversations and appreciate the writers' efforts. We credit the writers and aim to maintain the story in their voice, making changes based on their notes.
 
Our interactions with writers have been positive, and we aim to be respectful of their time and effort. We strive to accomplish as much upfront as possible, reducing the need for extensive edits later in the process. Our goal is to streamline the overall process and create the best possible product.
 
Reactions and Early Days 
While there haven't been many animations released on our social platforms yet, writers have expressed excitement. Seeing their stories garner over a million views on TikTok is thrilling, and we understand that there may be different interpretations. We hope writers are happy and excited about the outcomes, recognizing that this is an exploration with some expected variations from their initial visions.
 
I mean, you're basically giving your story, but in a way, that's kind of cool, right? Because that's how readers interpret. When you get, when you put your story out there, every reader envisions a character in their own mind, in a very different way. And this is basically what's happening here—our artists are reading your story, and our editor is reading your story totally objectively, bringing to life what they envisioned it to be based on your description.
 
So, I think it'll be a very cool exercise, and my estimation is that writers will be really excited once they see people providing feedback on a story that they might not otherwise have read or been exposed to. So, I think it's, most of the writers are very excited to see what comes out of it.
 
Involving the reader/viewer in the creative process 
[00:29:15] Matty: A past podcast guest, Robert Blake Whitehill, I remember him mentioning that he has a relationship with an art school, and he often has art school students who are interning for him. But one of the things they do is they illustrate scenes from his books, and he'll use those on social media. It's very interesting because they're freakishly different. Some are quite realistic, and some are very cartoonish in a stylistic way, or, you know, it's just all over the place. And I've never seen any pushback from people saying, "That's not how I saw it." It's an interesting analogy—the still picture, you know, it's a still picture, not an animation, but still seeing different people's interpretation of it. And I think it draws the reader, viewer, listener into the creative process in a way that can be very appealing.
 
[00:30:06] Todd: Yeah, and again, as we explore the visual medium of it, there are so many ways. You know, when you think about fan art as an entire category of creative content, right? People create their own interpretation of video games or movies, etc. Cosplay, all these different mediums where people are just providing their own interpretation of someone else's creative content.
 
So, we expect worlds of that, right? From our interpretation of someone's writing, someone will then reinterpret our interpretation into a cosplay or into fan art, and then we encourage that. That's kind of part of this whole medium—it's just to drive more interest in the characters, the world, etc.
 
Accommodating different preferences in consuming content
 
[00:30:47] Matty: I had a question that's, I'll probably just clip this out and use it as a standalone thing on social media and YouTube, but can you just describe how people listen to podcasts on YouTube? Because I have my podcast on YouTube, but I honestly don't understand the mechanics of how people are doing that.
 
[00:31:06] Todd: You know, it's funny, having worked at YouTube and then, you know, working on my own podcast company, I only consume podcasts on YouTube. So I guess maybe I'm most appropriate to answer this. You know, for me, it's all behavior-driven, right? Before becoming a quote-unquote podcast listener, I was a heavy YouTube consumer.
 
So whatever the content was, I, that's part of my behavior, to go to YouTube at certain times of the day and just watch stuff. Even with music, I listen to music on YouTube. So much of that is behavior. I do find myself liking the visual component. If I were to watch this interview, I liked seeing people and, you know, talking and seeing their facial expressions, etc.
 
And that's when I consume podcasts. I like the visual version. I guess it draws me in. I guess that's part of our business model—is that the visual draws people in, beyond the single medium, right? Just the audio. I think the visual is another layer of kind of engagement that draws people in. Also, really kind of focuses the attention a little bit more, right?
 
On YouTube, you have to kind of sit and watch it. Many times, people aren't running or doing the dishes or whatever they're doing. With a podcast, you could put it in your pocket, or if you're in the car, you could do something else. That's a positive aspect of podcasting, but it also splits the attention.
 
I actually find on YouTube that you have to be a little more focused because most people consuming it are sitting and watching and listening. So, my assumption is that they're a little more engaged. Also, when you look at the numbers, the engagement numbers on YouTube for podcasts are crushing it.
 
I mean, they also have a very large audience, right? So, the algorithm and the audience base on YouTube help build podcasts faster than on an audio platform just because of the algorithm and the discovery. YouTube is so massive in that way. So, I don't know if that answered your question, but that seems to be my behavior.
 
And even when I was working in advertising on podcasts, the visual component is certainly a positive. I mean, the content itself being the same, the engagement on the YouTube side seems to be really valuable.
 
[00:33:13] Matty: Yeah, well, it's interesting because I was applying too much of my own preference to my misunderstanding of what was going on. To me, podcasts are by definition what I do when I'm multitasking, when I'm walking the dog or driving somewhere. So, I was thinking, well, people must be somehow downloading the audio. I wasn't making that leap to say, no, they actually are sitting and watching it.
 
[00:33:37] Todd: Yeah, no, exactly. It's funny; whenever I hear, and my wife says it often, that when she listens to an audiobook, she considers it reading. It kind of draws that same analogy. A podcast doesn't necessarily have to be audio. That's how it started, right? But it could be multi-dimensional. So, you could be watching a podcast on YouTube. It's all about the content and how you're consuming it and engaging with it. There's a social element to these platforms.
 
It would be the same thing as you chopping up your podcast; you just said you'd chop this up and put it on social—on TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram. People would be able to engage with it in a social component that on a podcast platform, they wouldn't be able to as much. Depending on where they're consuming their podcasts.
 
On Apple Podcasts, there really isn't much of a social element to it. You could write a review, but there isn't much social sharing, discussing, commenting. But if you chopped it up and put it on social, there is that for the same content. So, there are definitely pros and cons to leveraging all these different platforms for one single interview. We need a better phrase than "consuming content."
 
[00:34:41] Matty: I think that there's definitely a language lacking to cover the fact that the only way to describe what you were talking about—absorbing different content in different media—is consuming content, which sounds horrible. It sounds very medical and kind of like a problem. I think people do stumble over if I'm listening to an audiobook, am I really reading? And I wish that there were a better way to say consuming content in a way that sounded more appealing than consuming content because it does get awkward to say, "So, readers, listeners, and viewers," and stumble through all that, the lack of the appropriate language to use.
 
The opportunity to interact with those who are enjoying your content 
[00:35:20] Todd: Yeah, I mean, that's part of our exploration of this new medium. What draws people in? Is it the reading, the animation, or the audio? What do people respond to throughout the story? This is that part of it, right? And like, how do you draw them in? Is it promoting it to readers or animators? We're very excited to see, you know, like you said, what drives the engagement. At the end of the day, we just want content creators to be able to share their content, you know, whatever that content is, if it's long form, movies, or books. Whatever you want people to consume, you want people to enjoy it. Let's change "consume" to "enjoy." That's, you know, you said, well, let's change the language. We want people to enjoy it. And if you can't get people to enjoy it, then it's unfortunate, right? There are so many great stories to be told, but people have to, you know, find it and engage with it for it to find, you know, to find that audience. So, you know, that's our goal here is to see where we can expand that into.
 
[00:36:24] Matty: That's great. I can see there are two sets of... two different kinds of work for an author to do. One is to write the story and submit it and see what happens. And then if it's accepted, whether it's on Storia or they're finding some other way to expand beyond words on the page, audio or video or animation or whatever that might be, then there's the opportunity to interact with people on social media just as you're describing. And I can imagine that could be a huge time suck. I can totally see how this kind of thing would be very popular on TikTok, but I really have no desire to spend any time on TikTok. So, do you set expectations, or do you have hopes about the extent to which the story authors will interact with their fans on the different social media platforms that you would post the animations on?
 
[00:37:09] Todd: To say we have an expectation? No, not currently. I mean, it's really up to the writers, and again, we probably will, as we grow and evolve, have opportunities to help maybe writers that aren't kind of heavy on some of these social platforms so they can maximize that opportunity, but we don't currently or we haven't currently kind of leaned in to provide any insight there. Again, as I mentioned, I think the animators are probably a little more involved on social. Many of them have kind of social presences or posting their content there, their portfolio. So those probably a little more. A lot of the writers to date aren't on, let's say, TikTok, but might be on Facebook and Instagram or they don't have a huge following there.
 
So I think it'll be part of that evolution is to see how they can tap into some of that and leverage it. I think part of the exciting conversations I've had is with writers that are excited about reaching a new demographic, right? And then part of this whole experience is writers across genres that, you know, they don't think their fan base is 18 to 24 gamers, right? That's not an audience base that they thought that they'd be reaching. But we have a story that has 1.4 million views on TikTok that is a younger demographic audience. Our audience on TikTok is, you know, 18 to 24 US, you know, male-female split. So I think there is this exciting kind of evolution that will happen with a lot of these writers to find... And hopefully engage with, I mean, again, as part of that exploration is how do they engage with those new audiences? Because as they continue to put out new work, you know, my hope is that they will be able to leverage that.
 
Tapping into cross-promotional opportunities with your co-creators
 
[00:38:46] Matty: Well, one thing I think is really positive in what I'm hearing is that it seems like there's an opportunity for cross-promotion between the authors and the animators in a way that I don't see a lot in the audiobook world. I love my audiobook narrators, but I have to say, they've never been a promotional channel for me. Like, I thought, oh, well, you know, once, if I post about the audiobook and I flag them and I mention their name, then obviously they're going to be sharing, and it may just be, you know, coincidental to the audiobook narrators I have, but, The animators, I would think this would apply to audiobook narrators too, but the animators have a clear incentive to also be sharing this work, you know, both a creative pride incentive, but also probably a financial incentive because it would no doubt lead to more work for them, but I think any of those areas where you can collaborate with another creator and not only get the satisfaction of the new creation, but also The cross-promotional opportunities is really valuable.
 
[00:39:39] Todd: Yes, absolutely.
 
[00:39:41] Matty: Well, Todd, thank you so much. This has been so interesting, and please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online, including Storia.
 
[00:39:50] Todd: Absolutely, so our website is Storia.io. There you can find submission forms for writers and or animators, and also examples of our work, etc. You can also go on all social platforms, Storia Originals, on TikTok, on Instagram. There, as I mentioned, we're posting behind-the-scenes animations, we're posting excerpts from our stories and trailers, and it's a great place to kind of keep track of some of the work that we're putting out as we head towards our launch and also on our website if you want you can sign up for early access on our waitlist so we will be giving people access to kind of check out the early stories and give feedback and we're excited to start getting that feedback as we kind of get closer to our more formal launch so hopefully we'll have an opportunity to work with and speak to all of your listeners at some point along the way.
 
[00:40:40] Matty: That was great. Thank you so much.
 
[00:40:41] Todd: My pleasure, we'll talk soon.

Episode 212 - What Writers Can Learn from The First Two Pages with Art Taylor

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

Art Taylor discusses WHAT WRITERS CAN LEARN FROM THE FIRST TWO PAGES, including the backstory of why "two pages"; the power of being a percolator (in addition to a plotter or pantser); how research can engender a story; waiting as a mechanism of conflict and suspense; short fiction as an experimental platform; the importance of thinking consciously about the craft issues and studying what gets scrapped; considering advise from veteran and first-time writers; and the power of starting with a bang ... or not.

Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two collections: THE ADVENTURE OF THE CASTLE THIEF AND OTHER EXPEDITIONS AND INDISCRETIONS and THE BOY DETECTIVE & THE SUMMER OF ’74 AND OTHER TALES OF SUSPENSE. His debut book, ON THE ROAD WITH DEL & LOUISE: A NOVEL IN STORIES, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. His short fiction has also won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity Awards. He is an associate professor of English at George Mason University.

Episode Links

Author website: www.arttaylorwriter.com
Facebook profile: facebook.com/artTaylorShortStories
Instagram profile: www.instagram.com/arttaylorwriter/
LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/arttaylorwriter/

Transcript

The following is created by entering the Descript AI-generated transcript into ChatGPT with the prompt Correct spelling and grammatical mistakes in this transcript.

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Art Taylor. Hey Art, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Art: Good, how are you? Thanks for having me.
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
 
Meet Art Taylor
 
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two collections, "The Adventure of The Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions," and "The Boy Detective in the Summer of '74, and Other Tales of Suspense." His debut book, "On the Road with Del and Louise," a novel in stories, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel.
 
His short fiction has also won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity awards, and he is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. I met Art when I think we were both at Malice Domestic, and I attended one of your panel discussions, and I just thought it was so great. I did a little research on you after that, and I came across The First Two Pages.
 
So, before we dive into the focus of our conversation, I just wanted to ask you about what The First Two Pages are and what is the story behind that concept.
 
What is The First Two Pages?
 
[00:01:00] Art: Oh, sure. Thanks so much.
 
Um, you know, I'm very fortunate to be curating, and I use that word, The First Two Pages blog series. It was actually started by another short story writer in April of 2015, so it's been running for a while.
 
B. K. Stevens, Bonnie Stevens, was a terrific short story writer who came up with the idea of starting a blog. I'm going to read to you what she wrote to the folks who she recruited to participate. I hope the post on this blog will offer both writers and readers insights into how some successful opening pages were written.
 
What kinds of issues and approaches did the writers consider? What sort of decisions did they make? How did they create opening pages that made agents or editors keep reading? Why did these first pages work? I think your post will interest other readers if it offers them ideas they can use in their works.
 
I think it will interest your readers if it helps them understand why they've enjoyed your work so much. You know, there's the idea Noah Lukman wrote the first five pages. If you can't capture an agent's attention, an editor's attention in the first five pages, you've lost them.
 
[00:02:04] Matty: Or readers.
 
[00:02:05] Art: Stories, your readers, exactly. And if in a short story, is it the first five paragraphs? There's some shortness there. So a lot of that is how do you capture readers' attention?
 
Bonnie passed away in August of 2017, kind of abruptly right on the, in fact, as we were going to the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival in Suffolk, Virginia, and she did not attend and passed away soon after that.
 
Her family asked me to continue the series; I had been a contributor there. Bonnie and I were terrific friends, and our thoughts about the short stories were very similar in many ways, as we found on panels at Malice and in other places. So I've been pleased to carry it on since then. It's hard to believe that I have carried it on longer than she did it because I still feel like it's her blog, in many ways, but I'm grateful to be able to curate it.
 
So that's some background on The First Two Pages.
 
[00:02:57] Matty: That's great. And I think that even for a longer work, first two pages is a great target because you were talking about the first five pages concept and certainly you want to grab a reader in the first five pages. But I think that as time goes on, even with a long work, maybe The First Two Pages are, you know. The key pages, writers should be looking at anyway.
 
[00:03:15] Art: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's so much that can be done there. I mean, it's, and it has to do with so many things. You know, are we laying the first clues of the plot? Are we introducing our characters? We're trying to... Get some conflict and tension introduced, but also give some—I hate to use this word—but backstory, you know, fold some backstory in. So there's a lot that has to be done, and so I do think it's a good place to focus this kind of attention.
 
[00:03:41] Matty: Yeah, perfect. So I had asked you to just go through your experience with The First Two Pages blog and pull out some best practices, the top lessons that you and your readers have learned from The First Two Pages. And so I'm just going to work through some of these.
 
[00:03:56] Matty: And the first one is everyone works differently. What did you learn about everyone works differently?
 
[00:04:01] Art: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think there's a sense in which if we can just get the magic formula, you know, then we'll know what to do, and it's the same way that people ask the question, how do you write if you're a writer? As if we could just figure it out.
 
What time to write and that sort of thing. I think the same thing is true with The First Two Pages, and what I found was how very different everybody is, how very different people come to stories. Number one, where the ideas come from, and then also the way they start the story itself. But then also the way that their process is about writing in general.
 
We hear about pantsers and plotters. There are people that I've hosted on the blog who have mapped out everything about a story before they've put down word one. And other folks who are like, well, I've got this idea, and it's about a paragraph long, and then let me see what happens next. So there's that range.
 
And of course, many of the writers talk about the genesis of a short story. Whether it's like, I read this book, or this story, and this prompted me in this direction, or I had a dream, or I was taking a trip and something about the setting, or here's an idea situation I conjured up. So I think it's interesting to see every stage of the process there.
 
Where an idea comes from, how it propels a writer toward the page, and then how they think about those blank pages and how they're going to approach them. Another thing I think is interesting is how many writers discover something about their own craft as they begin writing the essay. I've had so many people write to me as they've turned in their essay and say, you know what, I didn't realize what I'd done here until I started trying to articulate what I'd done.
 
In some cases, there is a sense in which a veteran writer, particularly, may have absorbed a lot of these craft techniques where they're not thinking about it. The same way a golfer, you know, when I've tried to play golf, it's like, put this finger here, put this hand here, make sure it interlocks there, and I joke with my students, like, well, Tiger Woods doesn't do that whenever he grabs a golf club because it becomes natural.
 
When they're forced to articulate it, though, that's where some of those craft choices come to mind. I will say, if I'm not going on too long, this is something that I've done myself. When I wrote an essay for Bonnie, Bonnie asked me to write about a story called "Parallel Play." And when she asked me about it, I realized that I knew where I wanted to talk about.
 
There's a scene in this story. It's about a young mother at one of these kind of Gymboree places with her son who finds herself getting into some trouble as they're leaving, and there's a scene in which one of the men in the story kind of forces his way through a door, and I thought, that is something I can talk about.
 
That wasn't until 40 percent of the story when I looked back, and suddenly, I was trying to realize, well, what had I done in The First Two Pages that laid the groundwork for everything ahead? So I think there's a process in which not only the readers and the writers can learn something, but the writers themselves will learn something about their own craft just by articulating some of those craft choices.
 
Being a percolator
 
[00:07:11] Matty: Well, one of the things that I think you said at Mouse Domestic, and I wrote this down immediately, is that everybody knows about plotters and pantsers, but you talked about being a percolator. Was that you?
 
[00:07:22] Art: Yes, that was me, and
 
[00:07:24] Matty: Tell me about that. I just love that.
 
[00:07:27] Art: Coming back to it, you know, I mean, you hear about plotters, and I know novelists — I can mention two of them, James Ellroy and Jeffrey Deaver, who plot out every step of the book before they ever write anything. In fact, outlines that are going to run almost as long as the book.
 
I think people with short stories do the same thing. And then folks, as I said, who start out in the middle. You know, I get an idea, and a lot of times, before I write about it, I just take walks, ride around in the car, or if I've got part of it done, then I step away from it, and then, again, to use that word, percolate.
 
I just let stuff bubble up inside. What are the possibilities for this story? And I'm going to come back to The First Two Pages with this. What have I laid down, maybe in the opening that I've written, that provides some of the threads that I want to follow up on without my maybe knowing it?
 
I'm going to come up with this idea that, you know, there's a great book I'd recommend called "Narrative Design" by Madison Smart Bell, if only because of the essay in the beginning about the unconscious art. We do a lot of stuff creatively without thinking about what it is, and so I try to turn around and listen to whatever I've done creatively to see what I've laid down that might have some longer resonance with the plot. And a lot of times, that just takes thinking about it, getting away from the computer and letting it percolate a little bit to see what brews.
 
[00:09:00] Matty: Yeah, that's why word count has never worked for me because I'm writing not only when I'm sitting at the keyboard, and a lot of times I'm folding the laundry or walking the dog or, you know, driving to the grocery store or whatever, and I'm writing, percolating away. And so by the time I sit down, I have a clear idea of what I want to capture.
 
I'm just having this interesting experience with the book I'm working on now, which is my fourth Lizzy Ballard thriller. And there are two poker scenes. I'm not a poker player. The first poker scene is the first scene in the book.
 
And then there's one about halfway through. So I was trying to learn about poker while I was writing the book. And so in the first chapter, even the first chapter that I gave my editor, I had to put in a thing that said, "And then she plays poker" because I was really struggling with how to present it.
 
Spoiler alert, but it's not standard poker because she's reading the minds of the other people who are playing the game. And so it's not like I can kind of do standard poker research. It's different. And I am going to 20 Books Vegas in November. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to wait until I get to 20 Books Vegas to write this scene.
 
Or, I should say, I'm just going to wait until I get to Las Vegas to write this scene, kind of independent of 20 Books, but finally, thanks to friends, poker-playing friends, and YouTube, I finally got to write this scene. I got my brain around what I needed to have this poker scene be. However, there's a long way of setting up the fact that it's the first time I've given my editor what I felt was an editor-ready copy that still had the first chapter that was very, very sketchy. So once I got my brain around it, I've been working on that first chapter, and I realized that there's a risk. Because I'm kind of working on it out of order, the tone of the first chapter is starting to feel very different, almost like more of a short story. Because I know I have like 2,200 words, and I'm polishing them and polishing them and polishing them, which is important for the first chapter. But I almost feel like there's a risk I'm going to polish them too much, and now it's going to go from kind of like a short story vibe to a novel vibe, which is like, less fussy about exactly weird descriptive words, like, I don't know that I would have called something Azure before.
 
After the first chapter, is what I'm describing sounding familiar to you, either as a writer or as a teacher?
 
[00:11:24] Art: Yeah, I think it's interesting, you know, the way that something comes together and the way you're trying to get it as a whole there. We think about the opening; I understand what you're saying as setting the foundation, not just for plot and character and all that, but for tone and style and everything. And when you go back and try to maybe retrofit something, you know, there are some challenges into making it seamless. Is that kind of what you're talking about?
 
[00:11:50] Matty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's more of a change in tone, just as you're saying.
 
[00:11:55] Art: Yeah. And, you know, I'm a writer who doesn't necessarily, to be honest, always start with The First Two Pages. You know, sometimes I'll write something that's going to show up later in a short story and a primary, like short stories, something that'll show up later in a short story, even the end of a short story, and then it's a matter of how am I going to get a piece that I'm writing later that actually is earlier to work together.
 
And I think that's a challenge. This goes back to reinforce that there are a lot of different ways that a process can work, a lot of different ways that writers approach this. But I'm going to echo another point that you said as well about folding the laundry. You know, I've had people talk about they have to write 500 words a day or 1,000 words a day.
 
My advice is always don't focus on that, but just focus on steady steps forward. Whatever those steps are and wherever you're adding something to a manuscript, there are a lot of times when I'll write a lot during the day and other times when it's just. Use that word again, percolating in my head. That still counts as writing to me. And it is a matter of then fitting all the pieces together.
 
[00:13:00] Matty: Yeah, I think we're all doing all three of those things, plotting, pantsing, and percolating. It's just that one is more based at home, that we feel most comfortable with, and the other ones are maybe more of a stretch because everybody's got to plot at some point, and everybody pantses at some point, and everybody's percolating too. But sometimes they do it with their fingers on the keyboard, and sometimes they don't.
 
[00:13:17] Art: Yeah, I will say as well, you talked about kind of doing research and having to do the research. I'll fill in this scene later. You know, it's interesting the way that, looking at The First Two Pages that I've read, research can engender a story, can help to bring it along. I host the Edgar Award finalists each year, and I've hosted the Agatha Award finalists before as well.
 
I invited him to do an essay. James Ziskin did one, gosh, I guess it was a year and a half ago. I think it was, or maybe it was two years ago. I mean, post-COVID, all time is weird. But James Ziskin did a piece where he had written a Sherlock pastiche, and he was nominated for the Edgar for it.
 
It was interesting; the research he did, he looked at the concordance, read the Sherlock Holmes stories (he said he hadn't read them in a long time), and then looked at the concordance. See, what are the words that keep coming up in the Sherlock Holmes stories? And then looked at, and I'm going to check this out and make sure I have it right, the Ngram viewer on Google to look at word frequency, at the era in which he was writing.
 
So a lot of this was at the level of language. Let me do research about what was the vocabulary used at the time and let that contribute to things. In the same way you're talking about, let me go and see how poker is done. Let me immerse myself in some way in that world. What's going to come out of that?
 
And then the hope is that's going to lay a foundation for what's coming next, even though you're laying some of that foundation later. So yes, it's a challenge, I think.
 
[00:14:45] Matty: Yeah, and I think that idea of balancing the careful research with what you want to actually use in the story because I got to the point where I understood the poker terminology, and I have a friend who has actually played competitive poker, tournament poker, and she had given me a proposal for the game that this woman could play, but I realized that it was so heavy with poker terminology that would be unfamiliar to the reader, that I almost had to understand what she was saying at a more complex level, and then I had to dumb it down because this is not a book that's intended for poker players primarily, and so I have to create the excitement of the game without diving into too much detail, and I'm actually having fun watching, you know, what poker players consider the best movie poker scenes because that's, I think, a good example where the moviemakers have had to dumb it down a bit and yet still capture the emotion of the game.
 
[00:15:42] Art: Yep. Absolutely. I teach at Mason, as we said, I taught a course in spy novels and I taught an Ian Fleming book, "Casino Royale." It's amazing how much card playing is in the James Bond. We watch the movies, and you don't think about how much card playing. There's lots of card playing in the James Bond novel. So I would recommend you look in that direction, see how he manages that too. He does a good job of it, I think.
 
[00:16:03] Matty: Yeah, I just yesterday watched one where they're betting like 150 million dollars or something like that. That was super fun. And what I liked about that was there is a point where James Bond is looking at the guy he's finally betting against. It's just down to the two of them.
 
And there's a long period where he's just looking at him. I mean, it's probably only a few seconds, but in movie time, it feels very long. And you can tell he's kind of waiting to see if his opponent is going to have a tell. Super fun.
 
Waiting as a Mechanism of Conflict and Suspense
 
[00:16:36] Art: Yeah, I would say that's kind of a transition to another point. Something I've learned from The First Two Pages, and it brings us back to Bonnie as well, is about this idea of what conflict is, where tension is. You talk about the idea of just looking and waiting, and we don't think of that as action, you know, and yet it can be very suspenseful or a transition a little bit.
 
One of the things that I've learned from The First Two Pages is counterintuitive about what you can do, could do in the first two pages to capture the reader's attention without starting out at high conflict, without doing everything with a bang, I guess I should say. Bonnie, in addition to starting the blog, also contributed a couple of essays to it.
 
The last essay she did was on her story, "The Last Blue Glass." And I'm going to read what she said there. Conflict, we know, lies at the heart of fiction. That seems especially true of mystery fiction, where conflict leads to a crime. But it's not always possible or appropriate to open a mystery with a moment of intense conflict.
 
Sometimes I think it's more effective to begin with a quiet scene that drops hints about conflicts to come. If our characters are engaging, so engaging that readers both expect and dread the conflict, that can be a good way to keep them turning pages. And I thought about that a little bit, what you're talking about with a card scene, where not a lot is happening, and yet there's so much happening in terms of the way somebody's watching this, what the stakes are, how things are going to play.
 
It can be very quiet and yet very suspenseful. The conventional wisdom is to start with a body, start with something active, start with, and yet a lot of times I find that what works best is to lay these, what Patricia Highsmith called these lines of action or lines of tension between people, even if it's kind of quiet. If people can sense some tension and get to know the characters, they're going to invest in a different way than you.
 
Thank you. Then, if you just try to start with a body, with action, with movement, with a chase.
 
Studying What Gets Scrapped
 
[00:18:41] Art: One of the other essays I come back to again and again from The First Two Pages archive is Nick Kolakowski on "A Nice Pair of Guns." He started out writing this story, as he said, in medias res, you know, with action and with this happening. He said he kept thinking, got that gut feeling as a writer that something wasn't right there.
 
And he said he scrapped it. These are actually the most fascinating essays for me, where a writer says, here's what I did, here's what I scrapped, here's what I revised, here's why I changed it. Because I think it gives insight not only into the first draft but that revised draft, that final draft.
 
I'm going to read what he says as well. As any writer will tell you, there are times when you'll finish a draft and know there's something fundamentally wrong with it, but you can't figure out why. In the case of "A Nice Pair of Guns," I eventually decided that opening mid-story with a lot of action forced me to push way too much plot into the middle and end of the tale.
 
I might have succeeded in grabbing the reader's attention at the outset, but the story as a whole felt profoundly unbalanced. So when it came time to write the second draft, I decided to discard my fears about the hypothetical reader's attention span and begin at the beginning. I've got to tell you, I love that.
 
Follow your gut, follow your instinct, think through, and also write different versions of the same story to see where I'm going to introduce the tension that serves the reader. My story best rather than follow the conventional wisdom. So that made me, you're talking about the card scene, made me think about all that. How much can be invested in a quiet scene?
 
Short fiction as an experimental platform
 
[00:20:19] Matty: Well, the nice thing about short fiction is that you wouldn't want to do this with a novel, but you could write three or four, 12 or however many it takes, versions of the same story in a way that you would never want to do. You know, it would become a lifetime effort if you were to try to do that with a novel, but if you're writing three or four or five thousand words, you can keep putting the pieces together in different ways and see what the reaction is for you and maybe for early readers as well.
 
[00:20:44] Art: Yeah. It takes a lot of bravery to scrap something and start over to try something different with a short story. I think there's the possibility for that, as you said, often go to my son. I've told this before, when my son was little, you know, he was trying to walk and he took his first steps and it's like, well, you took a step and fell and took two steps and fell, but eventually got where he's going. Talk about the process, one step, two steps, you'll eventually get there if you just keep taking the steps. The other one is about the kind of willingness to tear something apart. If he's putting together a Lego. Something. Kids would be like, all right, I see a new idea. Let me rip this apart and start over. Whereas as writers, a lot of times we're like, gosh, I've put so much work into that. I can't, I have to, you know, and there is something, which I think is, you know, it takes a leap of faith to be like, tear it up. Let me start over or let me try something else as an alternative. So that's another thing from The First Two Pages that I've learned is writers who are willing to take those steps often get something much better out of it at the end.
 
[00:21:50] Matty: Yeah, I think the interesting thing about the Lego analogy is that the nice thing writers have is that they can keep the original construction and make a new one. You know, with Legos, unless you have an endless supply of Legos, you have to take the first one apart to make the second one. With writers, you can just set the first one aside and say, maybe I'll come back to that or maybe I won't.
 
[00:22:09] Art: Yep. Absolutely. Always an extra file. A new version. That's the perfect way to do it. Nothing's lost. Nothing's lost. 

Thinking consciously about the craft issues
 
[00:22:15] Matty: Yep. Exactly. So I feel like we're probably kind of hitting some of the topics you brought up as learnings you had from The First Two Pages. But another one was, many people don't think consciously about the craft issues. I feel like we've hit that a little bit, but other learnings you've had along those lines?
 
[00:22:33] Art: Yeah. You know, it's interesting to see writers who are forced to look back at what they've done and try to think through as readers. What they did? Why here instead of someplace else? Why introduce this bit of dialogue there? And so, I think that's an interesting move, both in terms of what I said about accepting the first draft as maybe something unconscious that you're doing, and then turning consciousness to it. It's also part of, in terms of recommending process for writers, something that I recommend to my students at Mason. We don't always have the option to do this because of the shortness of the semester, but a lot of times I'll say, write something, and then put it aside for a while so that you're coming back to it with greater objectivity, with a reader's eyes, with seeing it. I think as we write more often, we hopefully develop the capacity to not need six months to put something aside to be able to see what's there and come back to it the next day or a week later, or obviously rely on beta readers for some feedback there. But I think trying to get that step from creator to reader.

Of your own work, it's an important part of the process, not just for a specific product, but also for your writing process generally. What is working best for me? How do I get to that point of reading objectively to revise? I'm going to go back to Bonnie Stevens again. Bonnie used to try to read some of her pages backward, as I recall. Once she had a full draft, she'd be like, "Alright, let me read this page and then move back to this," because she was reading it with a different eye.
 
Change the font. These are not things from The First Two Pages, but change the font. It forces you to see things differently. Read just a couple of pages and then stop and come back and read a couple more. Some of that will force you to not get lost in what you're doing, but rather to keep that, I come back to this phrase, that objective eye on your own work, your own craft choices.
 
So, I do think most people, a lot of times, don't think about it, whatever stage they're at, in terms of beginning writer, veteran writer, and yet it's worthwhile to stop, pause, and actually think through your choices.
 
[00:24:52] Matty: Perfect. Another lesson you had mentioned from the first few pages is ideas come from a lot of places.
 
[00:24:59] Art: Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. I think I mentioned, you know, we have people who say, "I had a dream about something," or, "This is a memory from my childhood." I just hosted Kate Ellis. I'm starting a series right now, as we're recording this, on the anthology, "Happiness is a Warm Gun." And that was prime fiction inspired by the Beatles. Editor Josh Pachter does a series of these anthologies. Kate Ellis wrote an essay where she said, "Here's something that happened in my childhood," and she had grown up in Liverpool in the same area where the Beatles, two of them, grew up, and she said, "I went back to that as the starting point for the story."
 
That's terrific. We talked about the idea of song lyrics or songs inspiring things. I've had a lot of times where songs or something I've read have inspired me to think about, "Here's a what if story just going on." And you talk about research as well. I always host the Black Orchid, award winner. This is a novella award hosted by the Nero Wolf Society, Rex Stout. Jacqueline Freimor wrote last year about the case of the bogus Cinderellas. Bogus Cinderellas are stamps, and she said she'd read something on Atlas Obscura, just reading about this on stamps, and it prompted this idea. She went through a fascinating essay, went through a couple of ways to try to write this. I think she thought about it as a novel at one point, and then a short story, and then ultimately found the inspiration for what the story should be and then went on to win an award for it.
 
So, you never know where ideas are going to come from or what's going to spark things. Again, this goes back to different writers, different inspirations and influences, different processes, all that. There's no one way to do this, and that's one thing that keeps coming back to me. If there are a lot of ways to do it, you find your best way, or hopefully be inspired by some of these essays to be like, "Oh, I could do that. Here's another opening for me." I think that's moving us all in good directions.
 
Capturing your ideas
 
[00:26:59] Matty: Well, this might take us, such a tangent that we spend the entire rest of the time talking about it, but that idea of the bogus Cinderella's, right, is that what the phrase was. It brings to mind a conversation I was having online with some folks recently about where you store your ideas.
 
And so the dilemma I was finding myself in is that there were kind of three categories of ideas. One was, there's this concept of the Boca Cinderella stamps that would be super cool to include in a story. Another flavor is I really wanted to explore, like, the almost unhealthy tendency people have that is represented by collectors and what is really behind the whole concept of collecting and why would people care about having an unusual stamp or whatever.
 
And then there's like, "Oh, I really like that word. I'm sure I'm going to use that somewhere." And I'm just wondering if you have a system that you use that handles all three of those kinds of concepts because just as you have the, "I wrote this and I'm not going to use it now, but I'm going to put it in the file." I think there's the, "Here's the file of things that I might want to use in the future." But they're so different sometimes that I think it's hard to manage them. Any thoughts about that?
 
[00:28:10] Art: I am, um, you know, I try to be systematized about so many things in my life, but I always fall short in some ways it seems like. I do keep a notebook handy where I can write down a quick idea for something. I do keep a file on my computer where I'll write, you know, here's, talk about writing the first paragraph of something, or a paragraph that might end up somewhere.
 
Here's an idea I had and I wrote it down. Or again, like you said, here's a word, or, I mean, just the smallest thing. It's all over the place, though, and I've had the time, unfortunately, where I've gone back through my computer trying to clean up some stuff, and I opened a document, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I forgot completely about this. Where did that come from?" It ended up being not an idea I pursued, but the point is I wish I were more systematized so I could go back to the right place.
 
John Curran wrote about Agatha Christie's secret notebooks. I love these books in terms of what they tell us about the creative process. And she kept, I want to say it was like, there were 18 or 19 different notebooks, I've got the number wrong, but she didn't use them in order apparently, and so you'll find notes for a certain book in Notebook 16, as well as in Notebook 9, and in the midst of it, you might find a grocery list or something like that, so it's all over the place.
 
She seemed to do well with the unsystematized approach. The point is, write something down, get it somewhere, because it will stay there better. Then it does just in your mind. So I do try to get stuff down on paper in some place, even if I end up losing it.
 
[00:29:44] Matty: Well, I do kind of like the idea of the power of the physical page. And I can imagine having, you know, like three baskets in your office, one of which would be big ideas, one of which would be medium ideas, one of which would be small ideas. Maybe the small idea basket is tiny, and the big idea basket is big because one might be several pages of your written out or typed out notes, and one might be just little tiny pieces of paper where you're dropping in. And if you ever find yourself, like, at a loss, you could just take out a basket and start going through it and say, "Oh, cool. I haven't used the word azure forever!"
 
[00:30:14] Art: Yeah, and I think that's made me think about the ideas, not just the big ideas, it's the small ones. My notebook, as much as it might be filled with, "Here's an idea for a story," or "Here is a paragraph that's going to go in there," a lot of times it'll be like just some little stuff.
 
Yeah, phrase or little detail that I want to add to a scene I've been working on. And I don't have the time to go ahead and add it, so I just jot it down real quick so I can go back to it and remember. And that will a lot of times spark something, something bigger. So I think in terms of creativity, it's like, you know, obviously do whatever you need to keep that forward momentum, keep those ideas flowing, or keep those things percolating and come back to that word as well, and trust that it's going to go, hopefully where it needs to go.
 
Start with a bang... or not
 
[00:31:02] Matty: Another lesson that you would learn from The First Two Pages, which I think we've discussed, but you may have some things to add, is start with a bang or not. Were there any other thoughts you had about that?
 
[00:31:12] Art: Sure, yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about a little bit with Bonnie and with Nick Kolakowski, the idea of starting with something quiet. But I'm going to take this a little further. There are so many ways to start a story. Patricia Highsmith, whom I've come back to again and again, she has a great craft book.
 
Well, no, it's an awful craft book. It is very inspiring, but it is not the kind of craft book that people read to be like, "Here is step by step how to do something." It is more like, "Here's some ideas." But Patricia Highsmith would start a story with setting, you know, this thing we're not supposed to do, but she would start with this long description of setting in a story like "The Black House." Then in a story like "The Terrapin," she starts with this moment of great conflict, or small conflict, that leads to great conflict between a mother and her son, a little bit of dialogue, and a little bit of action, real short paragraph. I think this goes to the idea again that you don't have to start with action.
 
In the beginning, there's a lot of opportunity to begin in many places and still engage a reader, whether that's with—and I keep throwing out craft books—Michael Kardos has a great book, "The Art and Craft of Fiction," where he talks about the five elements of scene building: dialogue, narration (by which he means not just narrating things, but actual action, like stage directions), description, interiority, or exposition (by which he doesn't mean just backstory, but just like a little sentence of information).
 
You could start with dialogue. Start quickly with dialogue. Let us learn later who the people are that are talking. Other folks might argue, "Well, let's not start with dialogue. We want to know who people are talking to first. Give a little bit of description, then jump into the dialogue." Or as Patricia Highsmith did in "The Black House," start with this long paragraph about the city where "The Black House" is and the history of the city.
 
So, there's not one way of doing things. As long as you are finding a way, either through the prose, or through—I'm going to come back to this idea of lines of action, Trisha Heisman's lines of action—to begin to give a hint of conflict, a hint of tension, and I think your reader can pick up on even the small things, and then you can keep building on it. But again, there's not just one way of doing it. And that's one of the things that comes back again and again. Needless to say, I would encourage folks to look at the blog, first few pages, read some essays in order to see the wide range of approaches that writers can take and find possibilities of your own, experiment with things, see what's going to happen.
 
[00:33:51] Matty: I think that's always interesting, also, to listen to beta readers or read reviews or whatever to hear what other people's reactions are to, like starting a story with a long scene description, which as you're saying goes against most of the advice, but you might find that people are commenting that they're gripped by that, and that would be good input to have.
 
[00:34:11] Art: I had a time; this is my own kind of—this is not a first few pages essay but a story. I'd written a story, which was eventually published, called "Mrs. Marple and the Hit and Run." And I remember writing it for a reading. I'd written it originally for a reading, and it was long; it got long. It was 10,000 words long.
 
I was just going to read the first portion of it. And I read it to my then-girlfriend at the time, and my brother, and I could tell they were falling asleep. It was bad. I eventually cut the story, rearranged where the opening was, and cut the story from 10,000 words to about 2,500 words. So, I cut 75 percent of it out, and it was published in that way, but much stronger from having gone through that process of, "Let me try it first of all with some description, with some narration," and then it's like, "No, no, no, I got to start someplace else." I got to start someplace else. So, tinkering.
 
[00:35:00] Matty: Yeah, and I think that's the kind of thing that people who are writing novels have some leeway that people who are writing short stories don't because every once in a while, I'll kind of indulge myself by putting in a scene that tickles me and I think will tickle my readers too. And sometimes I actually get feedback that it's true, that I would never keep in, like, it's probably a darling I should kill, but I'm having so much fun with it, and then it turns out my readers do too. And I think you can do a little bit of that in longer work, whereas you probably can't do it in shorter work.
 
[00:35:29] Art: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Absolutely.
 
Advice from veteran versus first-time writers
 
[00:35:32] Matty: So, I think this takes us to the last tip, which I love, which is veteran writers versus first-time writers offering advice. What have you learned from The First Two Pages in that area?
 
[00:35:42] Art: Sure. You know, I mentioned Kate Ellis having a recent essay about her story, and actually, the story is "Happiness is a Warm Gun." But I'm also running an essay from the same anthology, by Kristopher Zgorski and Dru Ann Love, two bloggers whom many of us know and love, who are writing together their first piece of published fiction.
 
And so I've got their essay, and in the essay, Kristopher says, "We realize that we're new. We don't need to be offering advice to anybody on this," and yet, the insights they had into the creative process were terrific. My point: veteran writers obviously have a ton of experience, and we look at them for authority.
 
And I've been very fortunate that writers who are big-time established writers have been generous with their time, contributing an essay to the blog. I've had Martin Edwards and Peter Lovesy and Andrew Taylor, to mention three people who've won the CWA Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement who have contributed essays to the blog.
 
I've been generous with their experience, but I also find myself learning something from those folks, like Chris and Drew Ann, or like Sarah Cotter, or like Lisa Matthews, Lisa Q. Matthews, who are first-time writers who are being like, "Here's what I discovered, here's what I thought about." They're bringing a lot of enthusiasm about new perspectives, a lot of discovery.
 
And the excitement of discovery to kind of what they're doing with short fiction, and I think that we other writers and we readers can learn from that, as well as we can learn from the professional veteran writer, so to speak, and so there's excitement to have that range. It's like in the classroom as well.
 
I learn from my students. Some of the things they do will oftentimes excite me in new directions, whether it's process or product or a detail or something like that. So always know that you can learn from many directions.

[00:37:34] Matty: Well, one of my bucket list interviews is going to be Stephen King, and the question I'm going to ask him is, what advice have you published that you now wish people hadn't taken so much to heart because they think that if they follow it, they're going to enjoy your success? Like, are adverbs really that bad?
 
And the thing that always makes me think about it when I'm reading one of his books is that I've got to believe that Stephen King's editor pretty much lets Stephen get away with whatever he wants to. And, that he'll go on these long, tangential stories about, and then we put on a play, kind of things.
 
And I love that kind of stuff. And he gets to do it because... You know, the book would be only 300 pages if he didn't, but now it's 450 pages, but he's Stephen King, so he can do it. But I don't think he would say, "Feel free to write these completely tangential subplots." And, I just sometimes wonder if he thinks, "What have I created?"
 
Because there are all these people who are like following the Stephen King way, but he was known as Stephen King, and I don't think he would have given the early Stephen King that advice.
 
[00:38:40] Art: Yeah, you know, that is so true in many ways, and there's a couple of directions I could go in with that. I think I'm not going to.
 
[00:38:48] Matty: No? Please feel free if you'd like.
 
[00:38:51] Art: Well, I mean, it's a matter of, you know, practice what you preach to some degree. But also, I mean, Stephen King is brilliant in so many ways, and we go with this idea of how you think about craft and what you might advise somebody who is struggling to get a story right is different from what somebody might be able to do once they learn the craft. I'm a take it out of writing, you know, Pablo Picasso can draw a few lines and they look really, really good.
 
And somebody out there is going to say like, "Well, my four-year-old could do that," but the four year old doesn't have the background and the learning to understand why this line, why that line, what this line does. And there's something that is sort of magical about, you know, about an artist in whatever field who has learned so much and then can do something different with it.
 
David Foster Wallace is, this is where I was hesitating to go. David Foster Wallace was, you know, obviously a brilliant writer, and he's got these long sentences and digressions and he's got footnotes and he's got asides and he's indulgent in so many ways and yet if you take a look at it, it works. When I've had students in the past, increasingly less these days, when I first started teaching, I had students who were just enamored of David Foster Wallace, and they tried to do that in their own work, and it didn't work.
 
[00:40:23] Matty: But if you listen to Wallace, as I did just the other day, talk about here are some suggestions for writers to follow. He's not just glibly filling the page with junk and free writes. He's really carefully constructing all this stuff, and I think that's something that writers will skip. Practice what you preach, yes, and it's not always about don't use the adverb, but use the adverb well, or use the adverb when you need to, and there comes a point where Stephen King can use an adverb, and I apologize, but it's, I love that. I'll have to percolate on that.
 
[00:41:02] Art: Yeah, there you go, there you go, bring it back, percolate it.
 
[00:41:05] Matty: Yes. Well, Art, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for sharing your best lessons from The First Two Pages, and please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and The First Two Pages and everything else you do online. Great.
 
[00:41:18] Art: Sure, my website is arttaylorwriter.com. The First Two Pages is a page on that website, part of the blog on that website, so if you go to arttaylorwriter.com, you'll actually just scroll down and you'll see The First Two Pages down there. It also has links to BK Stevens' website, which is still available; again, she passed away in 2017. But the archive of those original first two pages is at her website that's linked from mine on each and every first two pages essay. Check it out.
 
[00:41:51] Matty: Thank you so much.

Episode 210 - Constructing a Compelling Series with Sara Rosett

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

Sara Rosett discusses Constructing a Compelling Series, including the three types of series; how to extend your series beyond your original plan; preparing your readers for changes in your series; what happens when the flat arc protagonist is overshadowed by the antagonist; using a spin-off to extend a series; supplementing a series with short stories, or using a short story to experiment with a series concept; dealing with the challenges of being locked into your story world; and bringing a series to an end.

Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of 30 mysteries for readers who enjoy atmospheric settings and puzzling whodunits. She hosts two podcasts: MYSTERY BOOKS PODCAST for readers and, for writers, the WISH I’D KNOWN THEN PODCAST with Jami Albright. Sara also writes nonfiction for authors, including HOW TO OUTLINE A COZY MYSTERY and HOW TO WRITE A SERIES.

Episode Links

Author website: https://www.SaraRosett.com
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/sararosett/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Sara Rosette. Hey, Sara, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:05] Sara: Good, how are you?
 
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you.
 
Meet Sara Rosett
 
[00:00:08] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Sara Rosette is the USA Today bestselling author of 30 mysteries for readers who enjoy atmospheric settings and puzzling whodunits.
 
She hosts two podcasts, the Mystery Book Podcast, that sounds good, for readers and for writers. The Wish I'd Known Then podcast, which I love, she co-hosts that with Jami Albright, and she also writes nonfiction for authors, including "How to Outline a Cozy Mystery" and "How to Write a Series."
 
Sara's background as a series author
 
[00:00:33] Matty: I was very intrigued with the "How to Write a Series" topic, so I invited Sara to the podcast to talk about that very topic.
 
And I thought it would be helpful, Sara, to just start out, give us a little background on your own series, so we have some context for the conversation.
 
[00:00:48] Sara: Sure. Yeah. I started out writing cozy mysteries. I was traditionally published first, and I wrote a 10-book cozy mystery series about a military spouse, which is what I was. Somehow, I thought this could be the hook for the series, that it's about a person who moves around a lot and is involved in military life, because that's something people don't know about.
 
And then, I transitioned into a hybrid author, still doing traditional cozies. I also did some indie books. So, I have a series that is a throwback to classic romantic suspense. It's more in the style of Mary Stewart and Elizabeth Peters, if you're familiar with those authors. It involves travel, mystery, intrigue, some murders, some not, and art theft. It's a mix of all the things I love. These books are cozy-ish but not purely cozy. They have mysteries, but they're not straight mysteries. They don't fit neatly into any one category. It's my first foray into indie publishing.
 
Then, I thought I might do better if I wrote a straight cozy as an indie author. So, I wrote a series about a location scout who's working in England, trying to find locations for a Jane Austen adaptation. It's a modern mystery set in England, and I got to indulge my love for all things Jane Austen and country houses. I got to explore these locations, and it did well. After that, I was really into reading 1920s and 1930s Golden Age mysteries, and I thought it would be great to write a series set in that time period.
 
So, I took the same location from the series about the location scout in England and went back to the 1920s, setting a series in that village. That's how my "High Society Lady Detective" series came about. It's by far the most popular series I have, and I'm continuing to write it. The other two series, I've kind of tapered off, and I'm not writing novels in them anymore. I might write short stories or do some special projects with the other series. But for now, I'm focused on the 1920s country house mystery genre.
 
[00:03:21] Matty: Oh, my goodness. We have hours and hours worth of conversation to have here. We'll have to try to control ourselves.
 
Complying (or not) with Genre Expectations
 
[00:03:28] Matty: So, the one you mentioned had some murder, some not. Is that a series or was it? A series, were those standalones.
 
[00:03:35] Sara: I originally thought, okay, this will be a trilogy. It'll consist of three books. And I wrote those three books. It's one of those series that, once it finds its reader, the readers are super passionate about it, but it doesn't have a really big audience. However, the readers who love it, really love it.
 
So they would email me, asking, "Can you write more?" And I thought, okay, I could do another book. So I wrote another book. We may talk about this later in the context of extending a series. Because when I got to the end of that fourth book, I thought, "Oh, I have an idea for how I could continue the series in a new story arc." A new story arc, like the first story arc was complete in the first three books. The fourth book is a transition. Then I continued the series for a couple more books because I found a new direction for my character to explore. So it turned into a longer series than I had originally plAnnd.
 
[00:04:28] Matty: That's really interesting and something, I don't know if this is just a one-shot answer or something that maybe we can, as you mentioned, weave through the rest of our conversation, is the idea that some have murder, some do not. I was just at a book club where they were reading my Ann Kinnear suspense novel, "The Falcon and the Owl," and it's the first one that has a whodunit aspect. But there's a murder right at the beginning, and the whodunit is not related to the murder at the beginning. It's a death that doesn't appear to be a murder until later, spoiler alert, later in the story. And we had this whole conversation, as I often do on this podcast, about the trickiness of maintaining consistency in a series, such as characters, tone, and theme, but not consistency in the sense of whether it's a whodunit or not.
 
[00:05:15] Sara: The dead body?
 
[00:05:16] Matty: Yeah, where's the dead body? I'd be curious as we're talking to discuss how consistent one has to be throughout the series and those kinds of things. Any initial thoughts about that?
 
[00:05:26] Sara: Well, I think I'm always very clear in my mysteries, especially the ones that are whodunits. I make sure to introduce the murder and the cast of suspects right from the start, so readers know that these are definitely whodunits and that's the type of story they are. With these other ones, I try to convey through the blurb and the cover that they're not cozy mysteries, but they do have elements of mystery and intrigue in them. Some of the books do involve murder, but not all of them. The murder isn't the main focus. The main focus is, in the beginning, she's trying to find her ex who has disappeared, and she's involved in this more conspiratorial type of plot. That's the primary storyline. Hopefully, the cover, blurb, and the way the book starts convey that it's not a whodunit. It's more about suspense, possibly with intrigue and travel. There are more travel cozies now, but because this one includes travel and international settings, people realize it may not be a Small Town Cozy.
 
The three types of series
 
[00:07:12] Matty: So in your book, "How to Write a Series," you talk about three basic types of series. So what are those?
 
[00:07:17] Sara: Okay, so you've got the multi-protagonist series, which is like this: you have a new protagonist with each book, and the books are linked somehow. This is very common in romance; a lot of times, it'll be like a family or a group of friends, and each book is about a different friend.
 
Then you have a single-protagonist series where you follow one protagonist throughout the series. These can be broken down into two different types. You've got the flat-arc protagonist who doesn't change a whole lot. This is like, for example, James Bond or Mary Poppins; people who don't undergo a significant change throughout the story, but because they're in the story, things change. I mean, if Poirot hadn't been on the Orient Express, it would be a completely different story, right? So because he's there, he causes things to happen, and things change. A lot of times, there will be small character arcs throughout the series, but it's not a massive change.
 
That's what you get in the third type, which I think of as the robust character arc, where you've got a significant change. It's kind of the classic hero's journey. You start out, go through a big adventure or quest, and then at the end, your character has changed, and that type has a natural endpoint.
 
If you think about Harry Potter, he goes through all these adventures, and at the end, there's a resolution, and it's complete, usually marking the end of that series. So, the robust character arc series lends itself well to trilogies, fantasy, and sci-fi. The flat arc, which is more episodic, is seen more in mystery series, especially those that can go on for a long time because they're more episodic. So that's a high-level overview of the different types.
 
[00:09:16] Matty: And I suppose a benefit of that first type with the multi-protagonist is that if you get bored with one, you can switch to another.
 
[00:09:24] Sara: That is right.
 
[00:09:25] Matty: And you could go almost endlessly with that, I suppose.
 
Creating variations in a multi-protagonist series
 
[00:09:28] Sara: and you can keep creating variations. For example, if it's a small town, you can just keep writing about different characters in your town, or you can have new people move in. Or if it's a family, it could be like, well, guess what? We've heard the stories of all the sisters. Now we've got cousins moving in, you know, to explore their stories. So yeah, it can be endless. Focus on getting the first book written before worrying about what type of series it might be a part of
 
[00:09:50] Matty: So in the authors that you speak with and work with, do you find that people usually know what they're going to write as they're writing their first book? Even if they don't know or aren't sophisticated enough to refer to it in the terminology that you use, do they already have a sense?
 
Or are there cases where somebody wants to write a series and they're thinking through it, and are there flats that would make you say, "Oh, I would point you here, I would point you there," based on what they want to accomplish or what they, either creatively or from a business point of view.
 
[00:10:25] Sara: Yeah, I think that's really hard because when you're first starting out, you're just trying to get the book finished. And for me, I read mysteries. I loved mystery. That was what I knew I wanted to write, and that was pretty much what I was familiar with. So I've learned all this and figured it out in my mind. I've categorized these things this way to help me figure things out as I've learned more about genres, different types of stories, story arcs, and characters. So I think a lot of that may come as you learn more. So, I think probably, in the beginning, you're just worried about finishing the first book, but I do think it is good to have a plan. For me, I knew my book was going to be a cozy, and cozies are always part of a series.
 
I mean, it's not like I've never seen cozies. They're not marketed that way anyway. So I knew it was going to be a series, and I had some vague ideas for my first series about the next books, like what the mystery plots could be about. But I did not think at all about my character, and she was a flat character. I look back now and go, "Okay, so she was a flat character." That's why a lot of the advice about the hero's journey, I was like, "This doesn't really work for Cozy." I mean, you can make it work, but she doesn't have a big "aha" moment at the end of book one and then have another "aha" moment at the end of book two. It just doesn't work like that. So yeah, I think a lot of it, you kind of work your way into it. You get the book done, and especially if you know, "Okay, my genre normally has trilogies or normally has five books," then you know that's what readers expect. That's probably what you're going to write toward anyway.
 
Are there trends in flat- versus robust-arc series?
 
[00:12:08] Matty: Do you think there are fashions or trends in that? Because on the surface, a flat arc sounds like an insult. And, I think that if one had been able to go back in time and ask the authors what their plan was, they would probably have said, "Oh, yeah, I don't plan to have this character change over time. Like it was intentional."
 
[00:12:30] Sara: It wasn't like a craft failure on their part. Do you think that's still true? Are either the robust character arc or the flat character arc still desirable among readers? Or is one more popular currently? Well, I think a lot of it depends on the genre because in mystery, readers expect mystery series to go on for like 10, 15, 20 books. They're like, "This is great." I think, and in thriller too, like Jack Reacher, that's, I would say, more of a flat character arc. He doesn't change that much, but that's a long series.
 
And then I think readers like going back to that world if they enjoy whatever world it is, fantasy, mystery, whatever. They enjoy going back to it. There's a comfort and familiarity of going, "Okay, I know who this character is. I know what I'm going to get," even if it's book 17 or whatever. The drawback is you can get bored with that as an author. You may be like, "Huh, I've written everything I can think of in this world or this series or this character."
 
And I do think modern readers expect a little bit of a character arc. Like I was reading the books from the twenties and thirties; those mysteries were basically puzzle mysteries. And you didn't really learn a whole lot about the sleuths' personal lives, just little tidbits here and there, but it wasn't like they changed and grew that much. It was more like, "here's a mystery, can you solve it?"
 
And I feel like readers want more than that now. They want something extra. They need a little bit more. They still want a good puzzle; in my genre, they want a good puzzle, but they want a little bit extra, even if it's an episodic series. I think the through-line for your episodic series, your flat arc, is really what's happening in the main character's life and all the subplots that are going on, all the other relationships. People get heavily invested in those.
 
[00:14:29] Matty: Well, I would think that if you're writing more of a flat arc series, then you have to rely more heavily on the other characters, not the secondary characters, but whoever are kind of the co-protagonists of that particular book. The cast, yeah, exactly, because, like, I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't admit this, but my only exposure to Jack Reacher is I watched one of the TV shows, and I was really more interested in the characters that were surrounding Jack Reacher than I was in Jack Reacher himself, which I thought was very interesting.
 
Now, I'll see if I get angry emails about this, but I was really not compelled by the Jack Reacher character, and then somehow I happened upon an interview with the actor who played him, and he was very engaging and entertaining, you know, seemed like the kind of guy you'd want to go out to a bar for a beer with, and I thought, man, I would have liked it a lot better if more of that had come through in the characterization. But then I said that to someone who's more familiar with the books, and they said, well, yeah, but that really wouldn't be true to the books then; that's not the kind of character he is. So, um, yeah, but I was relying on what was going on with the other characters more to retain my interest in the show.
 
[00:15:39] Sara: Yeah. And I think that happens. I mean, with a flat arc character that's compelling, you're interested in that. Hopefully, you're interested in what's going on with them, but then all the other things that are going on in the world around them, that's the thread that's going to pull people through, I think, because you're not only ready to find out what happens to Poirot or Mary Poppins; you want to know what's going on in the family or the relationships.
 
[00:16:09] Sara: And a lot of times, the flat arc characters, if they have an antagonist, sometimes the antagonist is way more interesting and fun than the protagonists. You think about James Bond and the villains; those are the fun ones that you're like, "Oh, this is interesting, what's going on here?" Sometimes the antagonist can almost overshadow the protagonist in some ways, like Moriarty and Holmes, you know, Moriarty is fascinating, Holmes is fascinating too, but you're interested in Moriarty as well.
 
[00:16:44] Matty: Yeah, well, it does seem as if I'm relying on unreliable memory a little bit for this. Holmes was fascinating right from the get-go because of his idiosyncrasies, and then after a while, you know that he's going to do whatever the things that Holmes does, but then Moriarty gets added to the mix. So, I wonder if Conan Doyle was doing that because he was kind of tired of leaning on Holmes's idiosyncrasies to keep it interesting. He's throwing in this new person to kind of shake things up.
 
[00:17:22] Sara: Yeah, and that's a great way to keep things fresh. As you bring in somebody new, you introduce a different variable. Because after a couple of books, you kind of know what your character is like, your flat character. You know their reactions and their quirky little habits that are entertaining. But after six or seven books, after all these books, or even after three books, maybe you're ready for something new as a writer and a reader.
 
How to extend your series beyond your original plan
 
[00:17:49] Matty: Well, that's kind of a nice lead into one of the other things I wanted to talk about, which is extending your series beyond your original plan. So I guess some of this also goes back to the character arc. Let's say you've started out, and you think you're going to have three books, and then you and the readers continue to be interested. So you're extending it, but now maybe you have to not only adjust the idea for additional books but also the arc.
 
Can you talk a little bit about extending your series beyond the original plan?
 
[00:18:15] Sara: Yeah. So if you have a plan, and you're like, um, like that series I had, the first three books were like a quest. Could she figure out what had happened and unravel this conspiracy? So when that was done, and they were called "On the Run," I was like, okay, if I'm going to extend this, I can't have them being on the run indefinitely. That's just crazy. So I had to figure out something else. Sometimes you have to tie off one arc and then come up with something new. So with that series, I was like, okay, what if she went to work for somebody, and she gets involved in art recovery? So it's an entrepreneurial arc after that. It's like, can she get the job? Can she solve her first case? That's the next arc. Sometimes you have to figure out how your character retires. And then what are they going to do in retirement? Maybe they're a retired police detective or a magician, and they have to figure out what's going to happen next.
 
If you have a transition point, you can maybe find a new jumping-off storyline from that. There's a new challenge somehow. Maybe there's a new rival or competition. Something happens that gives you a new mix of challenges. Maybe they have a backstory you haven't explored, or maybe one of the side characters has a backstory that somehow your character is involved in, and it's a quest, like at the end, instead of the beginning, like my book. So you can just I think, you take your world you have, and you go, what have I not explored in here? And, if it's a town, are there people in the town, are there locations that you haven't delved into? For my 1920s series, it's set in different country homes in England. In the most recent one, "The Eight," I take her to Europe. She goes to Switzerland in the winter, goes to see the Alps, St. Moritz, and all that. So it's just like a whole new area to explore, which will keep you interested as well as the reader, hopefully.
 
Considering how your readers will react to changes in your series
 
[00:20:31] Matty: would be interesting, or important, I guess, to track what about the series your characters really like. Because I'm thinking of, I mean, Conan Doyle tried killing Holmes because he was so tired of it, so that's
 
[00:20:42] Sara: And that was a no-go.
 
[00:20:43] Matty: That was a no-go, but whoops, but I can imagine he might have said, "Oh, you know, I'm so bored with this. I'm going to mix things up. I'm going to have Watson, you know, move to the country, and I'm going to give Holmes a new partner."
 
[00:20:56] Sara: Yeah.
 
[00:20:57] Matty: If people were reading that series in part because they loved Watson, then that was going to be unsuccessful.
 
And so, those are things that apply to both extending a series and addressing the situation where you yourself are becoming bored with it. Understanding what you can change or extend that isn't going to violate the implicit contract you've made with your readers.
 
How do you assess those kinds of considerations?
 
[00:21:21] Sara: Well, for me, whenever I think about it, I know that my readers are reading most of my books because they like the character, they like the setting, and they like the supporting cast. If I'm going to take my character and do something new and different, and maybe she, maybe I'm like, "Oh, she's always been in this little town, but now I want to write a book set in Asia or Europe." If I just take her, my readers are going to be like, "Oh, what's going on with all these other 10 people? I want to know what's happening in their lives." So sometimes that's when you get those books where it's like the whole village goes and travels, you know, and sometimes you can make that happen, but you have to think about why are my readers reading this?
 
And if they want those interactions in a certain location with a lot of people, it's probably smarter to keep the action where it is, instead of trying to go to a new location, unless you're going to do like a complete reset. And sometimes people do that. They'll take a series and basically end it and have your character move to a totally new location and totally start over.
 
I wouldn't recommend that. I think that's kind of risky, but I mean, you could do it. Yeah.
 
[00:22:37] Matty: It's as if you're starting over with a new series, so even if there's a continuing character, the protagonist, you're going to lose some people, but pick up some people. But if you go into it with the expectation that you're not necessarily bringing along all your previous readers, that could be helpful.
 
Using a spin-off to extend a series
 
[00:22:54] Sara: Yeah, I think in that case, it might be smarter to do just a spin-off. Just take a character and, if you want to move your story to a new location or have a new tone, especially, you probably want to have a spin-off, but then they'd be linked, and then your readers who found one would probably try the other one or vice versa. If they start with a spin-off, they might go, "Oh, there's more books. Let me go back and read how it all started."
 
[00:23:25] Matty: When you're thinking about a spin-off, I've occasionally had people say that they like some of the secondary characters in my Ann Kinnear books and ask if I've ever thought about doing a spin-off. When I play it out in my mind, I think some of those characters, they're good in small doses, but I think a whole book of that particular character would be
 
[00:23:45] Sara: might be a little much.
 
[00:23:46] Matty: A little much.
 
Spin-offs are for more than just characters
 
[00:23:46] Matty: Yeah. So when you're assessing possible characters for a spinoff or maybe it's not just characters. Can you describe when you think of spin-offs, are there other flavors than spinning off a character, like a location, for example?
 
[00:23:59] Sara: Yeah, I would say you can do the character. You could take a side character, you know, and give them their whole story, but that is the problem. Maybe it's not ideal for a protagonist. Maybe they're better in a side character role. But then, like you could, like I did the location thing where it's this village in modern times, contemporary, and then this is the village in the past.
 
So that way you're linking the village, at least.
 
[00:24:25] Matty: Yeah, that's very cool. I've never heard that before, but that's super cool.
 
[00:24:28] Sara: Yeah, and I don't know how much read-through I get from that, but I mean, I figure it's a way that if people are interested, they might pick up the other series just because of the name. Other ways you could link or spin off would be like, I would think this might work in romance, like maybe you would have a shop or a store, and you would have different, or a hotel. They do that a lot. You know, like you have different stories with different people checking in and out. You know, like you could
 
[00:24:56] Matty: The Love Boat.
 
[00:24:57] Sara: Yes. Fantasy Island. There we go.
 
[00:24:59] Matty: Fantasy Island, exactly.
 
[00:25:01] Sara: Yeah.
 
[00:25:03] Matty: And if you're assessing a character as a spinoff, are there any either green flags or red flags that would say this is likely to be a good or not such a good idea?
 
[00:25:13] Sara: Well, I guess it depends on what type of series you're writing. So if you're doing a flat arc, do you have enough story around that person? Can you create enough story around that person to make it interesting and make it more than one book if you want a series? And if it's a robust character, like what characteristics, what change are they going to go through that's going to make it compelling that readers will want to read?
 
Because I do know what you're saying, like some of those characters are so fun to write as the comic relief or whatever, but then can you sustain a whole book or a whole series with them being the comic relief? And then are you going to bring in somebody else to be the straight man? You know, like you have to kind of think through these things down the line and can you do that for three, four, or five books?
 
Supplementing a series with short stories
 
[00:26:02] Matty: Well, one of the things you said that I love was that you write short stories, and whenever I hear short stories, I'm always immediately intrigued. And I think that's a great way to explore that. So one of the characters that people often say they would like to see in a spinoff is named Garrick Masser. He's in the Ann Kinnear novels. And basically, he's in there to be both Ann's mentor in the early books and then her kind of both colleague and competitor in later books. And he's very gruff and eccentric and won't eat anything but bread and drink water when he's in public, but then someone's in his house one time and notices that there's a pizza box in the garbage can. So, that would be fun for a short story, but not, I think, for a novel-length work.
 
Talk a little bit about how you've used short stories in conjunction with your series.
 
[00:26:47] Sara: Well, in my Murder on Location series, the one that's set in contemporary times about the location scout, I feel like it has kind of run its course. I've told the story I wanted to convey between the characters, and it's essentially done. However, my readers are like, "Oh, can you do something else? We want more, you know?" I mean, that's a good thing to have, but I just can't think of a story arc and a plot for a whole novel. But I did have some small ideas like, "Oh, I could do this." So I've written some short stories that continue the story, like taking little baby steps.
 
And then, recently with my first Kickstarter, I had an idea. I was looking for a short story, and I thought, "What if I turn this into letters?" Because I've seen some mysteries in the mail or these letter subscriptions that you can get. So I thought, "What if I turned it into letters from my main character? She gets involved in this mystery, and it's not big enough for a novel." I wrote eight letters, and that was part of the Kickstarter. They could sign up to get a special edition hardcover, the letters, or both. So they were mailed to you over eight weeks. Each one is like an installment, kind of like a mini-series, you know, like an episodic story. Here's what's happening in this town. This is what happened. This is the mystery. I'll write more when I know more, you know, and then the next one comes a week later. And it's a fun way for me to try a different writing style. I've always written long, so writing short is a challenge. But somehow, writing the letters made it easier and a totally different style of writing.
 
So, to me, that's a short form that I can explore. The first one was about my main character going to visit her eccentric aunt, who keeps peacocks and such. One of her peacocks had gone missing, and she wanted her niece, who's good at solving problems, to come find it. She's like, "This is not what I do, and I don't know how to do this." It's kind of funny, and you know, it could fit into a shorter form.
 
[00:29:06] Matty: Yeah, I have found that I'll have ideas. Sometimes I'll get interested in something that's not thematic, but something that's just topical, maybe the opposite. The example I always use is in 2019, I went on a cruise with my husband and some friends, and we cruised around the Hawaiian islands. Then we cruised from Hawaii to Vancouver. I got fascinated with the idea of what happens if somebody goes overboard. I wanted to write a story about what happens if somebody goes overboard, but I didn't want to base a whole novel on it.
 
So I wrote a short story called "Sea of Troubles" about that, just like four or 5,000 words, maybe 6,000 words about exploring that. But it was a topic, not a theme. When I'm thinking of novel-length works, it's more about how someone balances privacy and celebrity or how someone recovers from the guilt they feel about an act in their past. Those are more thematic, not topical.
 
[00:30:06] Sara: Right. And then a novel that's, you get to really explore all those levels, and it's much deeper. I think like the short story can be deep in a way, but it's so short. It lets you hit that situation and kind of, it's almost cathartic, you know, like you've got these ideas and you're like, "Oh, I want to write about this, but I don't really want to write a whole book or a whole series on this one thing or this one situation." So yeah, it makes perfect sense.
 
Using a short story to experiment with a series concept.
 
[00:30:38] Matty: And, sort of to loop back to the whole spinoff idea, a short story can be nice because you could experiment with a character. And I think that people would enjoy, you know, a short story of Garrick Masser, the character I was talking about from the Ann Kinnear ones, but I think it would confirm my belief that a novel like the work with Garrick is not going to be good.
 
[00:30:57] Sara: Right. Yeah. It lets you kind of try things out.
 
[00:31:01] Matty: And I did have the experience recently of having written the three Lizzy Ballard thrillers, and then I was working on the fourth Lizzy Ballard thriller, and I realized that a logistical problem I had is that the thing that happens to Lizzy Ballard after her last scene in book three could be days, weeks, or even months later, but the thing that happens to the antagonist at the end of book three is going to happen seconds after the end of the book.
 
And so I was really struggling with how to handle that without having the first five chapters of book four be about the antagonist, which I didn't want, and so I ended up writing a novella, kind of a long, short story, short novella, length work that is just taking the antagonist from the end of book three to the beginning of book four, where their chronologies match up.
 
And that's one where I truly love this antagonist, Louise Mortensen, for anyone who has read the Lizzy Ballard books, but I'm not sure other people would want an entire novel about the bad guy, but I had a lot of fun with it.
 
[00:32:01] Sara: Yeah. But that's a good solution because you get this. Any of your readers who are very into that can read that and it will bridge for them. Yeah. I think that's a great solution.
 
[00:32:13] Matty: And I think from a marketing point of view, it'll be sort of a nice tease as I'm leading up to the launch of book four. I can be offering that as something too.
 
[00:32:21] Sara: Yeah.
 
Dealing with the challenges of being locked into your story world.
 
[00:32:22] Matty: To bring people forward, one of the other things you address in your book is how do you deal with the problems that result from being locked into a story world? And I think this is, we probably kind of talked about this a little bit about expanding things in a way that's going to be interesting for you. Any other tips there that we haven't hit yet?
 
[00:32:38] Sara: Well, for me, I'm a high input person, so if I can just find something that's related to the story world, like the Jane Austen Country House Location Scout, if I can just find a book about it, right? Yeah. Well, thank you. A location scout or about country houses and just start reading it, or you know, watch a documentary or something.
 
I will get ideas from that. The same thing in the 1920s. If I read some biographies, if I read about something that happened during that time period, like how they traveled, and I mean, that will fire ideas for me. So that may be something that would help other people, for me.
 
And maybe look at a theme and say, "Okay, so this first part of the series is about X, what else can we explore?" So, maybe it's a very strong romantic subplot in the beginning, and now you want to transition to something else. You know, you just have to think about, I mean, it could be something, like revenge; something happens, and you explore the possibility of revenge or the push-pull of, "Do I want revenge? Will revenge help?" You know, things like that. I'm a murder mystery enthusiast, so, of course, I go to revenge and dark themes like that, but it could be anything, you know? So sometimes it's like maybe a theme could help you figure out something else you could explore.
 
[00:34:02] Matty: Yeah, I think even rereading your old books can help because I'm realizing that the way this has played out is that Ann Kinnear is a woman who can communicate with the dead. I mentioned in book one that her parents both died in a car crash when she was in college to emphasize the fact that it's her and her brother.
 
She has, at the beginning, a very insular world. It's basically her, her brother, and her brother's husband, and I didn't want her to have parents or another kind of support structure beyond that. But then I was working on, I don't know, book six or something like that, and I thought, you know, it's weird that a woman who can talk to dead people, we've never addressed this question about, has she ever tried to contact her parents? So I started putting that in; I needed a subplot for Book six because normally, Ann doesn't get involved in a case until later, so I need something else going on to introduce her early, and she's working on that, and so I started using that as a subplot, and then I thought, you know, if you have the protagonist trying to contact her dead mother, that's probably not a story by itself.
 
[00:35:11] Sara: And isn't that funny? It's something that you didn't explore early on, but it's something that, as you're describing it now, I'm like, of course, people would be curious about that, and they would be interested in that. So, you know, sometimes just going over what drives your characters and motivates them and things that they're involved with can give you new ideas too.
 
[00:35:36] Matty: So we've talked about ways that we can reignite our own interest and readers' interest, but at some point, it probably has to come to an end. What are the signs that might be happening, and how do you do that gracefully?
 
[00:35:48] Sara: So this is something I've struggled with a lot because, like I said, mystery readers expect a series to just continue. They want it to go on forever, and I can't write every series forever. So for me, I thought if I become bored with the characters, if you're bored and you don't want to write the books, if you don't want to go back to those characters, then that might be a sign that it's time to wrap things up.
 
If you're out of ideas on how to make it interesting, if you're like, "Okay, I've written about all the stuff I want to write about with this character." I heard one author one time say she knew she was out of ideas when she was writing the amnesia book. She was like, "Okay, if I'm going to amnesia, then basically it's time to end this thing."
 
And I was like, "Okay, that is kind of..."
 
[00:36:38] Matty: It was all a dream!
 
[00:36:39] Sara: That's right. Yeah.
 
[00:36:40] Matty: Then it's time to call it quits.
 
[00:36:42] Sara: Yeah. And then I feel like if there's no more potential for character growth, even in your flat art characters, usually you've got some challenges, some small things that are happening. And if you've kind of reached the end of what you want to write about or what you can explore with that character, then, you know, it's probably time to move on.
 
And for me, I was very worried about how my readers would react. So there's like the question of, "How will readers react?" And then there's the concern of, "How will it impact my writing, like my income?" Because if you have a workhorse series that, you know, if I release a book, I'll make this much money, that can be stressful to decide to end that. So there's a lot of anxiety around it that I don't think people really talk about.
 
So what I did was I've done two different things. One time I just kind of quietly stepped away and just didn't really mention the series and started emphasizing my other series. Then another time I said, "Hey, this series is ending." And I think for me, that was better because my readers weren't constantly going, "Oh, is there more?" So I just said, "This series is done. I've pretty much told the story I want to tell, and these characters, they're happy and they're content. They're not discovering any more dead bodies. So we can move on."
 
And I told my readers that I didn't have any more ideas that would support a novel. And I had so many nice emails from people saying, "Oh, thank you for letting us know. I appreciate that you're not going to basically flog a dead horse." And I was like, "Okay, that's nice."
 
And then for marketing, I tried to, what I've learned to do is if you can link your new series, if you're writing a new series, if you can link it somehow to the one you're closing off, that's smart. I didn't always do that. But if you can find some way, like through setting or character or some story world, like magic, if you're using some sort of magic, if the magic can continue in another person or setting, you know, then you can keep part of that element going to pull readers onto the next series.
 
[00:38:55] Matty: And I suppose if your goal is to write one very long series and keep your engagement and the reader's engagement, you could go into it knowing, "I'm going to start out with protagonist A, and I'm going to have secondary protagonist B be a big part, but clearly secondary, but then I'm going to have B's role become larger and larger, so I could kind of fade out A if I get tired of A, and now I can switch it, so it's the 'Life on a Spaceship' series and you're moving from the person who's the captain to the person who's the first officer, I don't know, but having that plan to say, 'Oh, I'm going to have somebody in the wings whose story and character really does support them being, moving into the A position.'
 
[00:39:35] Sara: Yeah. And I'm seeing more and more books, especially in the mystery genre, that are ensemble cast. And I think that would be a way you could maybe start out with the focus on one character, but you have, you know, four or five other characters that your readers are just as interested in. And, you know, like you can kind of, they can wax and wane as the story goes, and you can highlight somebody's story in maybe book three or book seven that didn't have as big a role in book one. And that can give you different. And, you know, it can just keep you interested, and the readers interested, too.
 
[00:40:10] Matty: And I think another thing to consider is, are you tired of this for all time, or are you just tired of it now? Because with my two series, I wrote two Ann Kinnear novels, then I wrote three Lizzy Ballard thrillers, and then I wrote four more Ann Kinnear novels. By the time I'd gotten to the sixth Ann Kinnear book, I was missing the Lizzy characters.
 
And part of it was that I was missing the characters because they do become like your friends. And part of it, too, was that I realized that my books had gotten, well, I don't really want to use the word "cozier," but cozier and cozier, shading toward the cozy end more with each book. I was really looking forward to writing some kick-ass fight scenes and letting people get stabbed and things like that. I thought, I just need to switch back to Lizzy because her world is a little more action-packed. I just needed that as a refresher. I'm going to be going back to the Ann Kinnear books. But if you have something you can switch to, if you can leave one series at a satisfying point but open so that if you want to go back to it, you can, and then switch to something else, then you might go back to it refreshed.
 
And I think, as you were saying, letting people know, letting your readers know kind of what's going on because I think they appreciate that. They not only appreciate that you're taking the time to let them know, but they kind of enjoy the glimpse behind the scenes of what's going on in a writer's mind and in a writer's life.
 
[00:41:36] Sara: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot to be said for, like you're talking about switching tones and stuff. It's almost like a palate cleanser. Okay, I'm going to have this one. I'm going to leave it open in case I want to come back to it, but it's on hiatus right now. I'm working on this. And then when you're ready, you can go back to the other.
 
And I totally understand about writing super cozy. That's why my second series that I wrote was just like, I had everything in it. The first series I wrote had a mom, and she had little kids, so she had to be, you know, she had little kids and had to be, I didn't want to be one of those writers who put kids in danger as a story element.
 
So I was always having to shuffle all the kids off to the babysitter. So my next series, I was like, she's not going to have any kids. She's going to be impulsive. She's going to do whatever she wants because I wanted that change, you know, to explore something different.
 
[00:42:29] Matty: So interesting. Well, Sara, this has been such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining me to have the conversation. And please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:42:40] Sara: My website is SaraRosett.com. My books, you can find them for sale at Sararosettebooks.com. And then if you're interested in the website, it's the "Wish I'd Known Them" podcast with Jami Albright. And if you're a mystery reader, there's the Mystery Books podcast.
 
[00:42:56] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
 
[00:42:58] Sara: Thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun.

Episode 208 - Mistakes Writers Make about Bladed Weapons with Teel James Glenn

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

Teel James Glenn discusses how he got his start as a stuntman and how "the will to push through" physical challenges enabled him to follow his dream; the different varieties of swords; the fact that your first service is to the story; how opponents will never be exactly equal; the fact that tough people don't pose; how to achieve a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds and guidelines for realistic recovery times; and examples of  well-done current-day knife and sword fight movie scenes.

Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times—on stage and screen—as he has traveled the world for forty-plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He is proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn’s last stunt double, and has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spenser for Hire TV show. He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over two hundred magazines including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventures, and more. His novel A COWBOY IN CARPATHIA: A BOB HOWARD ADVENTURE won best novel 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award. He is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Ark Award for Best Author.

Episode Links

Author website: TheUrbanSwashbuckler.com
Facebook profile: Teel James Glenn
Instagram profile: @teeljamesglenn
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teel-james-glenn-6a334b1/
Blsky.: @Teelglenn

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Teel James Glenn, or TJ. Hey, TJ, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:07] Teel: I'm doing fine. Very nice to meet you and everyone viewing.
 
[00:00:10] Matty: Oh, we are happy to have you here. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times on stage and screen as he has traveled the world for 40 plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He's proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn's Last Stunt Double, and he has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spencer for Hire TV show.
 
He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over 200 magazines, including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventure, and more. His novel, "A Cowboy in Carpathia," a Bob Howard adventure, won Best Novel in 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award, and he is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Arc Award for Best Author.
 
I invited TJ on the podcast to talk about what's going to become one of a series of "Mistakes Writers Make" episodes.
 
[00:01:06] Matty: And we're going to be talking about mistakes writers make about fight scenes and how to avoid them. This is going to join other entries in this series, which are: Police Roles with Frank Zaffiro, Forensic Psychiatry with Susan Hatters Friedman, P. I. s with Patrick Hoffman, The F. B. I. with Jerry Williams. First Responders with Ken Fritz, Coroners with Jennifer Grazer Dornbusch, Police Procedure with Bruce Coffin, and Firearms with Chris Grahl of TacticQuill. That set of podcast episodes became so popular that I finally created a little listening list on theindyauthor.com/podcast. So if you're writing crime fiction or a topic that includes any of those topics, you'll be able to find all those "Mistakes Writers Make" and how to avoid them all in one place.
 
[00:02:00] Matty: And so we're going to be adding to that list, "Mistakes Writers Make About Fight Scenes," and I'd like to start out asking TJ, what got you started as a stuntman?
 
[00:02:13] Teel: I was thinking about that actually last night very specifically. I was a very sickly kid. I couldn't take gym. I couldn't do any sports. Asthma. Sickly. I looked like a potato with pipe cleaners stuck in me. And when I was 15, I went to a Phil Suling comic convention. I was a reader of comic books, of course, and I saw chapter two of the "Adventures of Captain Marvel" movie serial, made in 1941, and the stunt work in it by a guy named Dave Sharpe. The editing and shooting were so amazing; you really did believe a man could fly. You really did see guys flipping around. And I went, "I want to do that." I started making Super 8 movies in high school. I read every single thing I could on stunts and movie serials and how they did it. I taught myself how to do stair falls at my high school with washcloths wrapped with ace bandages around my elbows and knees on the marble stairs, still wearing my glasses because I couldn't see otherwise. I learned to do high falls off of garage roofs and how to build box rigs and all of it from reading it, seeing any behind-the-scenes footage I could. And then, of course, I went to art school. But the last night in art school before I was supposed to graduate, I had a party who was auditioning people for a film, and on a lark, because I knew about film and I'd been making my own little stupid Super 8 movies, Captain Marvel, Rocketman.
 
I went, I got a part in it, and then he needed somebody to choreograph and storyboard it and to choreograph a fight. I knew how they did it in the movies, so that got me started. Once I did that, I ended up getting a lead in the movie, although he lost the equipment halfway through, and the film never got finished. But that led me to other movies, and then I thought, I got to get some training. So I was researching a book I was writing that had a sword fight, and I took a friend of mine who had studied with Ralph Faulkner in California, who was the swordmaster in a lot of the Errol Flynn movies. He said, "Hey, there's this guy teaching stage combat in the city. Do you want to come with me to the class?" I went, "Heck yeah!" So I took Swashbuckling 101, and the minute I held a sword in my hand, I knew that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was like a heavenly choir with lights shining on me. From that point, I started to train to be able to hold the sword, move, and breathe, and I never looked back. I studied with my first instructor for three to four years. When he started a Renaissance Fair, I was one of the instructors. Then I auditioned for other Renaissance Fairs and ultimately ended up doing 60 Renaissance Fairs, either as the fight choreographer, the assistant choreographer, the jouster, or, for the last bunch of years, I participated in a story show. What was cool about that was I did storytelling with all the voices and characters, and my daughter joined me when she was eight.
 
[00:05:17] Matty: Oh, cool.
 
[00:05:18] Teel: Every year we did at least one Renaissance Fair together for a weekend. Where she would beat me up with a quarterstaff at the beginning of the show because everyone likes to see the big guy beaten up. The last time we did it was just before she went off to college, and she was six foot three.
 
[00:05:38] Matty: Wow.
 
[00:05:39] Teel: It wasn't funny anymore. It was just an old guy fighting a young woman. It wasn't the giant fighting a little girl. So she did the last quarterstaff fight on her knees, so it looked funny. And she still beat me, of course. So, I mean, that's it. From learning stage combat, I ended up getting parts in low-budget movies, soap operas, where they needed a big guy who could be the tough guy and throw a punch. So I would often get hired as an actor, and then they would add stunts, or they would hire me as a stuntman and realize I could act, so they would start beefing up my part. But many of my roles were like, "You can't come in here," and then there'd be a fight. That was the main part of my career.
 
[00:06:24] Matty: I have to ask what happened between the asthmatic child that looked like a potato with pipe cleaners. Did something happen that enabled you to take part in those activities, or did taking part in those activities help address it?
 
[00:06:38] Teel: That's it. I had the will to push through it now because there was something I believed in. I don't care about sports; I still don't. So the idea of training to run around a field and throw a pigskin, why would you do that? But training to be able to sustain a sword fight and do a Shakespearean monologue all in a show? Yes, I would train for that. I used to live at the top of a hill, and you'd have to climb up stone stairs in a park for my stage combat class, which was on Saturday mornings. I would literally have to crawl up the stairs. At the end of the class, I could not function.
 
I still carry an inhaler with me to this day. I'm still asthmatic, not as bad as I was as a child, fortunately. One of the first fight choreographers, Jim Manley, who hired me as his assistant, was severely asthmatic; he always had his inhaler with him. And I mean, I can't run a block, but I can do a fight. I can jump off a building, and my martial arts, by the end of a martial arts class, I would be almost like a non-functional lump. But I'd made it through alive, and that was always an achievement for me. So it never went away. My reason for fighting it was stronger than the actual disease.
 
[00:07:58] Matty: That's a great story. We had sort of come up with a couple of categories about which we wanted to discuss the idea of mistakes writers make about fight scenes. We've talked about bladed weapons already a couple of times. So I'd like to start with that one. What are some mistakes writers make? And if you have any good or bad examples from movies people might be familiar with, that's always a fun way to illustrate it.
 
[00:08:23] Teel: Yeah, I almost always end up using movie references because most people haven't read obscure Raphael Sabatini books or whatever. First thing is when people say "sword," there are hundreds of types of swords, different weights, and each sword has a different purpose. When people are thinking, for instance, of the Conan movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will always and forever say that it was junk because Milius got his samurai instructor to teach Arnold how to use a sword, which makes no sense because samurai swords and broadswords don't work anywhere like each other. It would be the equivalent of having a bicyclist teach someone how to do motocross racing because they're completely separate. So everything he does with the broadsword is essentially wrong, and he moves like such a truck that anyone should have been able to kill him immediately.
 
On the other hand, you see a movie like Ladyhawke with Rutger Hauer, William Hobbs, who choreographed it, was the swordmaster in the 70s, 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. He did the Three and Four Musketeers with Michael York, the Mel Gibson Hamlet, and the Cyrano with Gepard. So he would study the specific weapon and teach you how to use that weapon. The broadsword techniques in Ladyhawke are real broadsword techniques, and you can see he moves completely differently. And, you know, and it really wouldn't have been a bad thing if they said, "We got a samurai guy, okay, we'll give him a curved sword." That's why Sandahl Bergman actually looks like she knows what she's doing, aside from being a dancer. She had a curved sword, so she was actually doing curved sword techniques. Samurai swords cut on the draw; they don't cut on the extension, so it's a completely different way of cutting. So, again, it's a stupid little nuance, but it's the kind of thing that drives me sane.
 
[00:10:34] Matty: The scene that this reminds me of is, and I'm not coming up with the name of the movie, but there was a movie with Liam Neeson.
 
[00:10:40] Teel: Rob Roy.
 
[00:10:43] Matty: Rob Roy, and there's that scene where he has what I guess is a broadsword. You can correct my terminology.
 
[00:10:48] Teel: A Scottish broadsword, Basket Hill broadsword, and he's fighting the guy.
 
[00:10:51] Matty: He's fighting a guy.
 
[00:10:54] Teel: With a small sword.
 
[00:10:55] Matty: Yeah, like a fencing thing almost.
 
[00:10:58] Teel: They were contemporary, same time. The Basket Hill broadsword was basically a war weapon, and the walking sword or court sword that ... He's always playing horrible, horrible human beings, and he's also really tiny. But he was using a contemporary sword of what the noblemen would have worn on their hip while walking around. They call it a walking sword. In that fight, he would have killed Liam Neeson in about 20 seconds because he had the lunge. The lunge gives you extension. Also, those basket-hilted swords, Rob Roy, whom Liam Neeson was playing, fought 60 duels in his life and never lost a duel. His last duel was when he was 63 years old, which, at that point, was old. We've pushed the extension of things. They wanted to make Liam Neeson the underdog, but in fact, if Liam Neeson's sword had ever actually contacted the court sword, it would have snapped it in half like a toothpick. So they had to work really hard to make you think the other guy was going to win, whereas if he'd gotten a lunge in that fight, the way it was choreographed, Liam Neeson was dead. In reality, the guy with the big hacking sword with longer arms would have won and gotten him on the first cut. If you miss while you're down there, the guy just lunges, and you're done. There's historical evidence of samurai swords against rapiers in Portuguese against bandits in the China Seas, and the Portuguese always won because a cutting sword requires an arc. A lunging sword does not. So while you're doing this, he's going like a sewing needle, and you're done.
 
[00:12:41] Matty: A That's an interesting, I mean, I imagine that in Rob Roy, they fussed with the reality because they needed that scene to extend longer.
 
[00:12:59] Teel: Yes, absolutely. And, yeah.
 
[00:13:00] Matty: Are there tips you can share that say, even like, how can someone do a realistic sword scene but extend it to extend the drama of the situation?
 
[00:13:10] Teel: If you ever see any of these commentaries on YouTube where they'll have, you know, a Swordmaster looks at a real thing and tells you, you know, the one thing all of them will say is that most fights, even if they last a long time, it's because nobody's doing anything. As soon as the blades start touching, the fight's over real quick because it is a case of who makes the first mistake. One of the things I write, I have a sword and sorcery series, and in any of my stuff, if I talk about people fighting with swords, I talk about the type of sword. Because certain swords have an innate advantage over other swords. And because of that, you then have to say, I want my hero to have a disadvantage so the other guy will have an arm that's three inches longer or my hero will have a stiff shoulder because he fell off his horse, to give them a disadvantage with that.
 
But in terms of, it's a case of just looking at the weapons and going, how is it used? And always, it's not the weapon, it's the individual using it. If somebody is skilled, the biggest problem I always see is people pick up a sword in some movie or in some book against someone who's actually trained in that weapon and somehow win. It doesn't work that way. You, even when they were training for combat, you trained with a weapon which was as close to the real weapon you were using as possible, even to the point where in Hamlet's time when they talk about foiled swords, they would take the real swords and wrap it in metal foil and stick a golf ball on the end of it. Because you wanted the actual weight of your weapon in your hand. If it's lighter, you're not going to learn how to use your weapon correctly. The familiarity with it often is the answer.
 
Now, a good swordsman is supposed to be able to use multiple weapons, but you always have your favorite; everybody. It's like everyone even has their favorite chair. You know, you get used to certain things. With any weapon, that weapon, even when I'm teaching stage combat or choreographing shows, I assign specific stage swords to specific actors and say, "That's yours," because every sword's balance is a little different. The weight of it is a little different. For instance, if you hand me a sword that I've never used before, and I'm immediately in battle, I really am not going to be familiar with how it moves. And that would be a disadvantage, which you can turn, as the protagonist gets used to it, perhaps. It gives you a nice disadvantage, even with a skilled fighter.
 
The other thing that drives me nuts, this is just the thing about cover artists and comic book artists. You don't switch your sword from one hand to the other unless you're Cornel Wilde, because you always have a strong side. Cornel Wilde in the old movies, the big trick at the end of every movie, he'd get stabbed in the right arm, and he'd have to do the final fight with his left hand. He was really a left-handed guy. He had to learn to do right-handed when he was competing for the Olympics. And so this was actually his strong side, but he learned to use the right. And 99 percent of people, or 98%, are right-handed. So a left-handed fencer always has an advantage because people are not used to going up against it.
 
[00:16:51] Matty: It makes me think of the scene in The Princess Bride, of course.
 
[00:16:55] Teel: Yes, yes. Believe it or not, that's the other thing. In the text, they go, "Ah, I see you've learned your Capo Ferro, ah, but I will use my Marozzo against you on Uneven Ground." They quote all these specific techniques, and they don't use a single one of them in the movie. The writer took the time to research them so they actually used real techniques. If you choreograph the fight that's in the book, it's a real fight.
 
[00:17:19] Matty: Oh, interesting.
 
[00:17:20] Teel: Using real techniques. Goldman did his research. But for the movie, they said, "Now we just want it to look like an Errol Flynn fight." So they had the dialogue, but they weren't doing Marozzo or Capo Ferro.
 
[00:17:30] Matty: That's very disappointing.
 
Your first service is to the story
 
[00:17:32] Teel: You know what? I still, it's still one of my favorite movies of all time. Because when you're choreographing fights, the first service is to the story. The second, but when you're doing it with real people, the story. And then if you're lucky, you can educate a little. You know, but when you're just writing it, it's always got to serve the story first. You know, and you can always fudge it if you don't know what to do with it. You could make it impressionistic. The feelings of the fight, without actually describing.
 
[00:18:04] Matty: Well, one of the things that I was thinking that's kind of related to that is that when you were describing, and people who are just listening maybe can pop over to YouTube and watch, but you were sort of illustrating why someone who is swinging a sword is at a disadvantage over someone who's thrusting a sword. We're using different terminology, but that's very apparent. Like, if you were watching a movie scene, I think even someone who knew nothing about swordplay would understand that, but when you're describing it, that would be hard to convey in writing. Do you have any tips for that?
 
[00:18:37] Teel: Honestly, I don't think it is because you can literally say, "I looked at him, and he had a curved war sword. That meant he had to swing it. I was lucky. Mine was straight. If I could avoid that first swing, I could stab him." I've actually had a scene in one of my books where two friends are fighting different bad guys. One guy has a two-handed sword and he's against a bunch of straight-handed people, and the other one, she's fighting a guy with a curved sword, she has a straight sword. So, literally, in the middle of the fight, they switch so that it goes straight to straight, curve to curve, to even it out a little. Because she had an advantage with the guy with the curved sword, but her buddy had none. She's also the better swordsman than him, so it makes sense she could take on the two guys with straight swords, and he would take on the one guy with the curve. You can build it in as part of the jeopardy for your hero, you know?
 
Size matters
 
[00:19:39] Teel: Also, the length of the sword matters. I'm sorry, size matters. If your hero is a petite woman, and even if she's an expert swordswoman, as my character Irina is, she has a sword that's scaled for her body, and so she will have less length than some goon she goes up against who's six inches, eight inches taller than her, who therefore has longer arms, and therefore, even if he had the same length sword, had an advantage. She has to make up for it by being more fleet and trying to get inside his range so that her blade is effective. So you really, there are a lot of factors you can use to even the fights up or uneven them against your hero.
 
The other thing is there's an old saying that the greatest swordsman in France is not afraid of the second greatest; they're afraid of the worst. And... So literally, someone who has no idea what they're doing can be on their side. They can just swing wildly, hit the right spot. I mean, how many times have you accidentally hit somebody's funny bone when you were reaching for something? You know, that could happen with a sword, to hit that one spot. There's a very funny story about when... if you've ever seen the movie The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, there's a scene in it where he's going up against Basil Rathbone, who was an excellent real fencer and a great stage combat fencer. But Danny's character is hypnotized to be the greatest with a blade. Unless you do this, then he's unhypnotized and he's a complete bumbling oaf. In the sequences where he's the greatest with the blade, Danny Kaye learned it so quickly and so well that the fight choreographer had to double Basil Rathbone because he couldn't keep up with the speed of Danny Kaye. On the other hand, there's a sequence where he's out in a courtyard, and he goes to Rathbone, "Your life's not worth that." Huh? Huh? Huh? And he's suddenly confused, and there's a scene where he's running around screaming, throwing the sword in the air, and you can see Basil Rathbone doing this. Rathbone said, "Neither one of us knew what he was going to do," and it was the only time I've ever been terrified with a sword in my hand because he could have literally stabbed him. He could have killed him. He was just running around being wild and crazy. So that can work too.
 
Opponents will never be exactly equal.
 
[00:21:57] Teel: You can work to have the guy you're up against. If you do something insane, they'll be like, "What are you doing?" Because also people who train in a style, and this is what Bruce Lee was against, when you train in one style, you're used to certain answers to certain movements. I do this, he always does this. Well, if you go up and complete a different style you've never seen before, you have no idea what they're going to do. If you, you do this and you expect them to do that, but they do this, suddenly, it throws your whole world out of kilter, which is why, In a lot of cultures, you would go around training in different schools, because everybody had their secret, vota secreta, their secret move, and each school would teach it, and you'd try to stay there long enough to learn their secret, and then you'd go on to the next school to learn their secret, because in a fight, you, you, you're not going to face a peer, you're going to face a peer, maybe. But you're not going to face an equal. No fight is ever equal, even if you both have the same training, the same body, the same skill level. one of you is going to be more motivated, or one of you is going to be tired from not getting enough sleep. So it's always, you might be equivalent, but it's never going to be exactly equal.
 
[00:23:43] Teel: That also works to give tension. When I have characters who are heroes and have had real training, I have to make sure they don't just Mary Sue their way through a story. You know, they can't walk into a room and kill everybody in the room like John Wick. Otherwise, there's no tension. Nobody really worries that John Wick is going to die; it's just about how he's going to kill them. It becomes like the Columbo of action films. You know he's going to win; you just want to see how.
 
[00:24:05] Matty: That makes me think of another interesting dramatic twist, which is the calm, cool, and collected combatant against the frantic, desperate combatant. And you can play that either way. You could say, you know, because he was frantic and panicked, he lost the fight. Or because he was frantic and panicked and had nothing to lose and was perhaps not trained. What you were saying before about it.
 
[00:24:30] Teel: That's a real thing. They train you in martial arts. The reason they want you to fight calmly and not fight angrily or excitedly is because when you have adrenaline in your system, you have the fight or flight response. Because of that, your body thinks, "Okay, I'm going to need energy to run away." It starts shutting down finer motor nerves, cuts off power to certain things. So you're, the old trope about somebody not being able to get their key in the door when the bad guy's coming after them, that's true because when you're in a frightened state, you lose fine motor nerves. So one of the reasons for martial arts repetition, and swords are martial arts, as are guns really, is you want to build a sense of, "This is the way you do it, and you're calm about it." You don't fight angrily, and you don't fight scared. You put that away, and you get angry or afraid after the fight is over.
 
One of the nice things, if anybody's ever read Modesty Blaise, or maybe I'm giving my age away, they were great books. One of the first true female heroes, who actually Emma Peel was somewhat modeled on, and one of her character traits is she will be phenomenal through a fight, very level-headed. Afterwards, she falls apart hysterically, but only in her friend Willie's arms. That's her complete release. She literally bottles all the emotion, and at the end, she explodes. It's her own way to deal with her own PTS. And he wrote this in the early '60s, before there was a real understanding of PTS. So I give much kudos to him, Peter O'Donnell, the writer. But you can really use the craziness because you will do things and take chances that no sane fighter would do.I had a friend, the first time he was in France, they still have rapier dagger fighting as a competition. And now it's been revived with HEMA, but back in the '70s, HEMA wasn't doing that stuff yet.
 
[00:26:08] Matty: And what is HEMA?
 
[00:26:22] Teel: Oh, Historical European Martial Arts. It was an answer to the huge explosion of martial arts, which everyone thinks is everything. They really are mostly referring to... Asian, but there's, I mean, the European martial arts are absolutely sophisticated, but we got guns earlier, and so they sort of became less a part of the world curriculum, but the more isolated communities in the east kept The older techniques alive much longer, but anyway, he was in a competition, and one of the things they allowed there, he didn't realize, he's busy, you know, parrying, blocking with rapier and dagger, he parries something, and the guy goes, whoop, and throws the dagger at him, and he said, I was standing there, and I watched this thing through my mask, coming at me in slow motion, going, this can't possibly be, and the guy won the point because they're allowed to throw the weapons.
 
[00:27:16] Matty: Interesting.
 
[00:27:17] Teel: Now, no one in a sane fight would throw away their only weapon, but in this case, he had parried the sword with both of his, so the guy had a free shot, but he wasn't in range to stab him, so he just threw it, and it's an insane move in a real fight, but on the other hand, he hit him. Now, in a real fight, maybe the guy would have dodged his head, but at the same time, that would have thrown his timing off, and you might have been able to kill him with the sword. You know, crazy stuff. It's perfectly justifiable, you know, the best knife fight I ever saw in any movie, the most realistic, was years ago, they used to have little video boxes outside movie theaters, and they would run a clip of a movie, and some Spanish film, I'll never, I don't know what it was, Mexican or Spanish film, because I don't speak Spanish, on 48th Street in Manhattan, and these two guys are in a pool hall, and they both got knives, and they're kind of doing this mirror thing, back and forth, one moves in, the other moves back, the other moves left, that guy moves right, and then, the first time one of them commits, he starts to lunge with it. The other guy reaches back, grabs a pool cue, and breaks it over his head. Most realistic sword-knife fight I've ever seen. Not the fight in Under Siege where they go, and they add in the sound effects of knife blades. You don't really parry with knives. Yeah, they're too small. Even Bowie knives are just too small, and the chances of actually catching it on your blade are minuscule. Again, an insane person or an unskilled person might do it, and that would be the one in a thousand times it worked.
 
[00:29:26] Matty: Well, I think that pool hall scene suggests an interesting scenario, which is the person who is carrying a knife because they intend to get in a fight and win, and the person who's carrying a knife because they're striking a pose, you know that they're threatening, but they're not positioning themselves in a way that they're imminently about to have an attack. Can you talk about that a little bit? Like if someone's using it mainly as a prop to threaten.
 
[00:29:51] Teel: Yes. Well, I mean, it's the whole bully scenario. People who bluster very seldom have the courage to carry through. I always tell actors when I'm working with them, don't play tough. Tough people don't pose. Tough people just are. They don't have to go, "Hey, oh," you know, they just look at you and go, "If you do that again, I'll kill you." It's just there. The mindset, and the samurai will talk about this a lot, is that every fight is won or lost before the first blow is struck. It is the mindset and the commitment, because you can't stop someone who's interested in hurting you and doesn't care about whether they get hurt or not. You cannot stop a determined assassin who does not care about their own safety. Which goes back to the crazy person. If a mother is protecting her child, she will leap onto a sword to throw the guy off a cliff with her. She won't parry it. She will do whatever it takes to make sure the child is safe. And if someone feels that the reason for defeating you is greater than their own personal safety, they will win the fight or have to be hacked down to the point where they can't function.
 
I always say that I fight like Brian Boru until five minutes after I'm dead. He was just that crazy. He would just charge large masses of people. There's actually an incident in Mexico when every year the Foreign Legion salutes a wooden hand. It was because it had been a lieutenant in a detachment when Maximilian was occupying Mexico. The lieutenant had a wooden hand from a previous engagement. There was a bunch of legionnaires that were trapped in a hacienda surrounded by hundreds of juaristas. The lieutenant was killed, but the sergeant made them all swear on his wooden hand they would never surrender. And it got to the point where there were like five of them left. Two of them were wounded. They had no bullets and they fixed bayonets and charged the Mexicans. The Mexicans were like, "You see this?" And they didn't fire because they were like, "These guys are crazy." And they didn't fire and didn't fire. The guys kept getting closer. And finally, somebody went, "Hey, we've got to do something about this." They all got up and surrounded them with bayonets to their throats and said, "Surrender." And the corporal, who was the only leader at that point, said, "The Legion does not surrender, you surrender." They all got bayonets at their throats. The Mexican commander said, "I'll tell you what, let's call it a truce." And he said, "We leave with our colors and our wounded comrades." The Mexicans were like, "You got it." And they saluted them as they marched out. Their determination was like the Alamo, but they won. Their determination. Their spirit was stronger than the people they were fighting because it really wasn't their battle anyway. They were occupying a foreign country, but it was for the honor of the Legion. That's one of the things is we've instilled a lot of artificial values in humans. One of them is the whole honor, flag, country, family. Family is the only one of those that's kind of a natural thing. You would protect your flag, and you would protect your offspring. The others have sort of been manufactured to give a reason for people to do things. Like I said, my reason to become fit, or at least appear to be fit, which is hilarious, people always used to say I was a physical guy, and I'm still not, never was. My reason to be fit was to be able to hold a sword. So that overcame my physical tiredness, my sickness, the exhaustion and stupidity. I mean, sometimes I think back at what I did when I was, you know, a 20, 30-year-old, and I'm like, how come I'm still alive? I mean, I went on to have people set me on fire for money.
 
Achieving a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds
 
[00:34:01] Matty: That could be a whole other podcast episode, but I wanted to use that as a takeoff. I want to stick with the bladed weapons conversation because I think we're delving into a great topic, and that is one of the other things we wanted to talk about was the wounds and the reaction to wounds and realistic portrayal. And we talked a couple of times about what adrenaline does for you, and you were just mentioning people fighting for things like family and honor and so on. So what do you see in movies, if you're the recipient of the bladed weapon attack, what do you see that is good or bad? What should people try for or avoid?
 
[00:34:37] Teel: I do a lecture on guns and violence with weapons that way. And one of the things is, Matt Dillon in 20 years of Gunsmoke was shot 50 times and knocked unconscious 20 times, and in 8 years on air, Mannix was shot 20 times and knocked unconscious 37 times. Now, if you're knocked unconscious, that's a concussion. You have enough concussions. You don't talk right. You don't walk right. You're neurologically dumb. If you're shot, there's trauma shock. If you're stabbed, one of the things in duels, realistically, most duels post-1600 in Europe, personally, if it was a duel of honor, you fought stripped to the waist, male or female. And the reason for that was they figured out that if you drive fabric into the wound, which you would if you're stabbing somebody wearing a cotton shirt, there's always going to be some cotton fibers in there. They will fester, and you will die of the infection. More people died of infections after sword fights than the actual cuts or thrusts. Now I've been stabbed. I was stabbed in the stomach when I was doing a movie, and one of the guys I was working with, we're doing a sequence, and he missed the mark and he just stabbed me in the stomach, and I looked down and said, "Damn it, Scott, you frickin stabbed me." And he looked at me and went, "Yeah, sorry about that."
 
[00:36:03] Matty: So, fortunately or unfortunately, I had enough blub, and he stopped it as soon as he made contact with my body. But I still have a stab mark. He went in maybe about an inch, and any penetration anywhere on the torso and in most of the limbs even, any penetration more than two inches, you will hit a vital organ. Which is why there used to be a rule in New York that you couldn't have a knife first. You can't have a knife that's two-edged, ever, because the only purpose for a two-edged knife is to kill. That's a weapon, and you couldn't have it longer than two fingers' width when you hold two fingers up and you're measuring from one side to the other, because that's a little bit less than two inches. It's supposedly to reduce the chance of fatal injuries if someone has a knife and uses it in a fight.
 
So, swords, you can survive an 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch slash with a much greater chance of recovering almost completely than you could a 3-inch stab. Anywhere on your torso, because that three-inch stab will go into the liver, kidney, heart, lungs, and at a point in history, there was no way to stop sucking chest wounds. There was no way to stop a punctured lung. You either recovered or you didn't. Jim Bowie was stabbed and shot and clubbed and spent, I think it was seven months recovering because he had a thrust through the lung, and after that, everybody considered him a superman, that he was unkillable in the famous sandbar fight.
 
So, infection was a very big risk. One of the things that's odd about history is the Mongols wore very light armor. They wore silk shirts. And one of the reasons they wore silk shirts is because when they were hit with an arrow, it would not penetrate the silk; it would push the silk into the wound, and you could literally grab the edges of the shirt and work it to pop the arrow back out. It reduced the chances of infection since silk didn't promote infection, and it also reduced the chances of penetration because silk was a stronger fabric. It's funny that now we have spiders weaving spider silk Kevlar fibers to be used in bulletproof or bullet-resistant vests. So, we've taken modern technology and gone backward. If you look at modern riot armor, it looks like 15th-century fighting armor because what worked then still works now. If someone's going to hit you with something, you're protected in those areas.
 
However, there were some wounds they could not heal. There was something called the Coupé de Jeannac, a very famous duel between the Comte de Jeannac and a favorite of one of the Louis. Dueling was forbidden except this was affair of honor. They got all dressed up in their armor, and the Comte de Jeannac asked his sword master, "Look, we're in armor. I'm not that good with a sword. Can you teach me something? Something that I might be able to use, you know, a secret move." His secret move was to parry, slide in on the blade, and then cut the back of the knee—the tendons in the back of the knee—because in armor, you have to leave that area open. Even if you're wearing chainmail, it's much less armored or protected. In this case, most of the time they were not wearing chainmail pants, or they were fighting on foot. It was just too heavy.
 
They fought for a while. He sliced the back of the guy's leg, and he went down. They moved into the pavilion to try and stitch it up, but they didn't have the capability to really fix it, and he would have been crippled for life. He was so upset he ripped off the bandages and bled to death. The other side of that was that he was the favorite of the king, and the king was so sure that his guy was going to win that he had a big pavilion full of food for the big party afterward. But when the guy died, the king was so disgusted he left, and the populace went in, looted the pavilion, and had a great feast. The Comte de Jeannac had to flee to another country. But it's called the Coupé de Jeannac, the Cut of Jeannac. There are a lot of wounds like that, unhealable. If you were a swordfighter who'd been in any kind of battles for any length of time, you limped, or you were missing a finger, or you had scars on you. You woke up in the morning and you ached like crazy. There was a reason Athos drank a lot of wine. He ached a lot from a lot of fights. The other thing people don't realize is Athos was probably in the ancient age of about 30. He was the old guy. You know, D'Artagnan was 16, and Aramis and Athos and Porthos were probably around 20 because you just didn't live that long then, certainly not in a profession where you were either under fire or being stabbed on a regular basis.
 
Guidelines for realistic portrayals of recovery time
 
[00:41:29] Matty: If someone's writing a current-day story and they have someone who's stabbed or otherwise injured with a bladed weapon, can you give some guidelines about what would be an actual realistic recovery time? And maybe you can assume one scenario where the person actually has access to medical care and one where they don't. Can you give some guidelines about that?
 
[00:41:49] Teel: Yeah, if you're stabbed, it depends on where you're stabbed. They're really big on getting shot in the arm or shot in the leg in Mannix and in a lot of Westerns, and they usually just put a handkerchief on it and wander off. By the end of the hour, they're wandering around. If you're shot in the leg, you're done. It's the largest artery in the body, the largest muscle group. You're going to walk like Chester if you recover. If you're stabbed, it depends on if it's in a muscle group, how much tissue damage is to it. So realistically, let's say it's a four-inch knife. You get cut badly on the forearm and then stabbed in the leg before you break a bottle over the guy's head, and he's out. The forearm, if it's a cut, chances are it'll be stitched up. Unless he cut tendons, you know, a couple of weeks from then, it'll be sore for quite a while, and you may always feel the weather, but you'll be fine.
 
If he stabs you in the thigh, that could be months of recovery time because it went deeper, and they would actually have to do surgery internally to sew up the layers. We are basically onions, and that's why we cry so much. If your hero has a deep cut like that on the leg, it could be months before they can walk normally, if ever, really. And I said if you're cut on the back, that's what I say if you're in a knife fight, you want to control where you're cut. If you're cut here, there's less damage than if you're cut here. If you're cut here, it's all the tendons that work your hand.
 
On the outside of the arm, if you're going to get cut or slashed, even in the bicep or tricep area, is the least of two evils. If you're cut on the inside, you have all of the tendons that operate your fingers, and you have a major vein that runs on the inside. The brachial vein runs on the inside of the bicep, so you want to protect that. There's a reason we were built like a cage. We are basically a layer of suet on top to help protect the bones so they're not brittle. That's fine for slashes or contact wounds. A stab can go through and between those bones. So that's why it's always more dangerous.
 
There's a very famous moment in the historical battle of Agincourt where the French were so jammed together because the English stopped the front line with their longbows. The French were so anxious to get going, they kept moving. So the back lines kept piling up on top of the front lines. They had their distance, so the English just kept shooting bows at them. They got to the point where they couldn't swing their swords. The big cry was, "Estoc! Estoc! Stab! Stab!" Because it was the only way they could fight. Also, when you're wearing armor, stabbing is actually more effective if you can get to the joints. Most knights, when we think of knightly combat, their main weapon was a hammer because you were wearing a tin can, you can't cut that, so they would basically use blunt force weapons, or they would have a pick. One side would be a flat hammer, and the other side would be like what we think of as a railroad pick. You would try to use the pick to get through the armor and pry the guy out. So, you know, it's, and while knights could move very fluidly, you know, up until recently, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, the myth persists because historians never put on armor. Historians sit in places and read books.
 
You have got guys who actually put the armor on when it's fitted for them. It actually is lighter than modern combat gear and is suspended from more points. A full suit of armor might have 80 points of suspension. You wore an arming coat underneath it. Each section was connected, and it might weigh 60 to 80 pounds. Modern combat gear that a Marine might wear, like going into Afghanistan, weighs 120 pounds. It's basically just over the shoulders and the waist. So it's only got three points of suspension. I liken it to modern-day firefighters with all of their gear. Knights could move faster and more nimbly. They could swim. They could climb. They could swing on ropes. Otherwise, no castle would have ever been invaded. You know, so the illusion that knights were big and clumsy and could move very well was not true. They also were the best-fed of the people. They had the most meat, and that's why the Royal Guards are called the Beefeaters. They got the highest percentage of actual meat and vegetables. They didn't have to live off millet and leeks. They also had a more nutritious diet, which gave them more energy and a higher calorie count.
 
A well-done current-day knife fight movie scene
 
[00:46:58] Matty: Well, I wanted to wrap up with one more question. This is to bring it back to writers who are writing more current-day knife fights or bladed weapons fights. Is there a movie scene that you think does an especially good job?
 
[00:47:14] Teel: The best knife fight I can think of is in a William Friedkin movie, "The Hunted." It stars Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones, and they have a brilliant knife fight in it. They have a little bit of a Wolverine thing going on. They play the wounds, but not as seriously as it would really be. They wouldn't have had that much adrenaline to keep going after being stabbed a couple of times. But, yeah, it's very realistic in the sense that they are two experts who know each other, so they can really engage in a fight, checkmate, fight, checkmate kind of thing realistically. It's not terribly drawn out, but it gives you a real sense of a visceral sword fight or knife fight.
 
The other one, believe it or not, is a Japanese film with Christopher Lambert called "The Hunted." The premise of it is that Christopher Lambert's a murder happens and he sees the face of one of the ninjas. They think they killed him, but he's not dead. This martial arts sect, though contemporary, has been fighting this ninja sect forever. They find out he's alive and they have to protect him.
 
It has some of the most realistic sword fights, and it's contemporary, from around 1990. There's a fight on a train that's phenomenal, where they're literally fighting guys in the middle of the smoking car, basically on a train. It very much kind of has Highlander vibes in that sense. Brilliantly shot, but both movies are called "The Hunted," so you have a nice, realistic and well-done knife fight, and another slightly less realistic but really well-done sword fights in the Lambert movie.
 
Matty: Well, DJ, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. I appreciate you sharing your insights and expertise with us. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
Teel: I have a website called theurbanswashbuckler.com. My books are on Amazon. I have "Dragon Throat," which is a novel of Alteva, a sword and fantasy, and "Journey to Stormrest," from the same series. I also have a book about a modern-day ninja, which I call "Martial Arts Noir." It's a murder mystery story, but his mother was an assassin for the Japanese during World War II, and he was raised by her. She taught him how to kill people. It's called "Killing Shadows," and they're both out from Airship 27. I'm around, I'm on Facebook with Teel James Glenn, T E E L, James Glenn. It's very hard for me to hide. I'm too big.
 
[00:49:55] Matty: Perfect. Thank you so much.
 
[00:49:57] Teel: Thank you.

Episode 202 - Acting on Inspiration Anywhere with Kevin Tumlinson

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

Kevin Tumlinson talks about ACTING ON INSPIRATION ANYWHERE, including how he wrote a short story, designed its cover, and published it while waiting in line at Disney World; the benefits of the small screen; how the option to write on your phone should be considered an opportunity but not a requirement to produce; the vital consideration of what fills you back up creatively; the madness of rapid release (exacerbated by AI); the question of whether an author can maintain a career by slowing down; and the possibilities of multi-media (but don't forget the words).

Kevin Tumlinson is a bestselling and award-winning novelist, a prolific podcaster, and a popular public speaker. He's known as "The Voice of Indie Publishing" for his work helping thousands of authors to start, build, and grow their writing careers.

Episode Links

https://kevintumlinson.com
https://twitter.com/kevintumlinson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevintumlinson/

Episode 201 - Crafting Great Scene Descriptions with Alessandra Torre

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube

Alessandra Torre talks about CRAFTING GREAT SCENE DESCRIPTIONS, including if and how scene descriptions vary by genre, the challenge of repeating descriptions across a series, the importance of engaging all the senses, tapping into the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the value of both potato chip scenes and casserole scenes.

And if you want to dive deeper into this topic, some of Alessandra’s recommendations, especially related to the power of assessing well-reviewed and successful books in your genre, are a great companion piece to Episode 195 - The Anatomy of a Bestseller with Sacha Black.
 
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
 
Alessandra / AR Torre is an award-winning New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels. She is self-published, as well as traditionally published by Hachett, Harlequin, and Thomas & Mercer. In addition to writing, Alessandra is the CEO of Authors AI and the cofounder of Inkers Con.

Episode Links

https://www.inkerscon.com/inkers-con-articles/2023/3/8/heres-a-fun-exercise-to-make-your-scene-descriptions-better
www.alessandratorre.com
www.facebook.com/alessandratorre0
www.instagram.com/alessandratorre4
https://www.youtube.com/@Alessandratorre00
https://www.tiktok.com/@alessandra_torre