510 – Dramatizing Your Story

The Mythcreant Podcast

The word “drama” gets used a lot in storytelling, but sometimes we need to stop and ask: What makes a scene dramatic? That may sound like a circular question, but it turns out that dramatization is often the difference between what feels like a laundry list of information and what feels like a story. This week, we’re talking about this elusive concept and what scenes are most likely to suffer from it, along with how to do better. Plus, a reminder that as authors, we are the masters of time and space!

Show Notes

• Malazan
• The Biologist
• Louis
• Lestat
• Temeraire
• The Red Knight
• How to Earn Clues

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Mukyuu. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.

[opening song]

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is–

Bunny: Bunny–

Chris: and–

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Hey, so I heard about this podcast called the Mythcreant Podcast. Apparently they taught someone to swim by making them watch others drown?

Bunny: Despite how horrible that sounds, that does sound like a pretty cool podcast.

Chris: And apparently they brought in like a huge holistic cup of depression to do this. But I’m just glad that we’re far away from watching anything dramatic like that happen.

Oren: Yeah. We wouldn’t wanna actually show anything like that. We can just tell you it happened in the driest manner possible.

Bunny: [Chuckle]

Chris: Just pass on all the rumors that people somewhere are saying.

Oren: Maybe we can do it while standing on a wall with a weathervane in the background or something.

Bunny: Maybe we can gaze upon it from afar while sitting on our saddles.

Chris: Now, let me tell you my entire backstory in detail. It happens over many years.

Bunny: [Laughter] When Chris was a child —

Oren: We need a flashback scene to establish that Chris was, in fact, a child at one point.

Chris: No, no, no. No flashbacks. I have to tell you without any flashbacks.

Oren: Silly me. I forgot. My bad.

Bunny: We don’t even get photographs from the family album.

Chris: Yeah, we can have a documentary where we just stare at a photograph for a really long time and maybe zoom in, zoom out. Use the “oohhh” dramatic voice, trying to make this sound interesting.

Bunny: There’s a thing you can apply that’s like a camera movement in iMovie that’s called Ken Burns. It shifts the view from one part of your screen to another. It’s just that, bouncing around a single image.

Chris; So this time we’re talking about dramatization. That’s probably something that you take for granted if you’ve been storytelling for a while, but nonetheless, especially for people who are new or just sometimes people who are not new, it does get messed up from time to time and it’s a good thing to think about because there’s a good chance that you could go further.

Basically it’s the process of creating specific, impactful events to represent your story and your story arcs. If you think “okay, I wanna write a story about two childhood best friends that grow apart and then one becomes a hero and the other a villain”, that’s a very vague concept.

There’s no specific moments there. It’s a really long process and very abstract. To dramatize that you need to choose events to represent those concepts. I’m gonna make a scene where they’re best friends in the scene, but then they encounter something that they disagree about. And then maybe I’ll have another scene years later where they’ve now, because of that thing, grown distant and they’re ready to go to blows.

So you have specific moments that you’ve sketched out to represent that general concept.

Oren: So if I’m understanding this correctly… lemme see if I get this concept ’cause it sounds like it might be a big brain elite concept.

Bunny and Chris: [Laughing in disbelief]

Chris: What?!

Oren: I just wanna make sure I understand. So something that might have trouble being dramatized is stuff that happens entirely off screen and that the author does not know how to translate into something in the events as they’re actually unfolding.

So an example that I’m thinking of is the biologist’s relationship with her husband in Annihilation ’cause that’s entirely offscreen. We are just told about it and it doesn’t really seem to affect anything she’s doing in the present until she randomly finds his journal and then reads more offscreen stuff about what he did.

Chris: Yeah, that would be an example of something that isn’t really being dramatized. Basically stories and visual mediums are forced to do this all the time because they have to show you something that you can witness. So they have to turn it into actual scenes, whereas novels can do more or less. They can include just a bunch of summary or exposition instead, but often they shouldn’t.

Yes, we should have exposition. Yes, we should have summary. Using a little bit of those is a great advantage because we can convey all sorts of information that would just be boring or awkward if we stuffed it in a scene or had a character say it as part of their dialogue. There’s a limit to how much you want to do because that’s gonna be less interesting and engaging.

Also, there’s a matter of not just how much you do it, but how you do it. There’s a process of taking that vague concept of “oh, I want two childhood best friends that grow apart and become enemies” and then actually make interesting scenes that create an engaging story out of that.

Bunny: So the idea here–just to be clear– is to step back and look at the story level, what the scenes are that you have, rather than necessarily revising the scenes you already have because they just might not be serving the drama well enough.

Chris: Exactly. The scenes that you have might not be the best scenes for what you’re writing. You might be able to design your events better to create a better narrative or drama out of the general concepts that you came up with. It can also be a matter of how do you design the scenes so that everything comes together well, and what events do you include in your scenes?

I can give you some examples of stories that kind of struggled with dramatization a little bit, where this became an issue.

Oren: This feels like trying to explain water to a fish. This is where I’m trying to wrap my head around this. So some examples would be great.

Chris: For instance, Interview With a Vampire. If you’ve never read the book, it’s a retelling with a first person premise where Louis is just talking about life as a vampire.

A lot of that is just him talking in general about what vampire life was like without talking about specific moments. So he’s doing a lot of summarizing and a lot of telling, and not a lot of showing. He has, for instance, a place where he’s in general talking about Lestat preying on victims. “Oh, he liked to have a youth early in the evening, and then for his second pick of the evening, he liked to eat a woman” and then he talks about that.

Whereas then when we look at the movie, which struggled honestly with some of this general narration because the movie is forced to dramatize it and turn it into actually a series of events that we can actually show on a film. It makes a lot of use of voiceover to try to fit some of that in, which is clunky.

Oren: Don’t worry. People famously love voiceovers.

Bunny: [Laugh]

Chris: So we have a scene where Lestat turns Louis into a vampire, which is a good choice for a scene to show in the movie, but it’s hard to fit all of the interesting descriptions that Louis has about being a vampire. So we use voiceover to be like “oh, and the statues seem to move” and we show him looking at a statue once.

Bunny: [Laugh]

Chris: And then we have a specific scene where Louis and Lestat go hunting together, where we can actually show Lestat picking a youth for his first target of the evening. So we make some actual scenes to show what vampire life is like. But those now can be specific events and not just like general statements about their life.

Oren: Does the TV show handle that differently?

Chris: Yes. So the TV show doesn’t have such a heavy voiceover.

Oren: Yeah, that’s nice.

Chris:The TV show instead has the interview. Occasionally they would cut to the interview and talk in more general terms in that kind of conversation. But I think the thing about the show is it has more time.

If you have more time, then you can show a lot more scenes. If you’re trying to get a general idea of what life was like for a vampire, it’s just gonna be easier in a show where you have a number of episodes to do that.

Bunny: Yeah, I’ve seen What We Do in the Shadows.

Chris: I also think that the AMC version is willing to depart more from the book, hence this premise where they acted together for a second interview.

It’s not trying to copy as many specific quotes from the book, like the “Oh, statues seem to move”. That line is probably not in the AMC show whereas they were really trying to capture that in the movie.

Oren: I’m realizing now that one of the most common places this shows up in client manuscripts that I work on is when the client wants to do a political story. They want some big politics to change in the story somewhere, like for there to be a revolution or for the emperor to liberalize or whatever it is.

But they have also picked a character who isn’t really connected to that plot, at all. And sometimes it’s that they are connected, but they have no agency. But in a surprising number of times, it’s not even that they lack agency, they just aren’t where that stuff is happening. They’ll be in the imperial capital running a bakery and we’ll keep hearing about how there are these rebels fighting the evil empire out in the provinces. And I just desperately wish we were there.

Chris: That’s exactly what a good narrative design, good scene design, and good event design should be avoiding. And sometimes that happens because, very early in the process, the writer just didn’t consolidate their ideas and created something that was too sprawling and too complex to make a cohesive story.

Bunny: To put it in short, it’s basically that in order for it to be dramatic, you have to see it.

Chris: But you also wanna see it in a dramatic way. We want that conflict and that tension and all of these other things.

Bunny: Right, it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for the scene being dramatic.

Chris: Yeah. So generally, you wanna choose key points of change to show.

So if I were to have those two friends, instead of being like “oh, they just grow apart very, very slowly”, sometimes in that situation, you wanna just change it. What if instead of growing apart slowly, there was one dramatic event that created a huge rift? Because many times that is gonna create a better story because you can show that in one scene and it’s more dramatic, but not always.

It’s not always what you want, in which case you can skip forward through time. But a lot of times it just works better if you have things happen faster.

Oren: Having a story that takes place over a hundred years is very difficult. I think, at least in my case, the reason this tends to happen is that I feel like the same group of authors who want to tell stories of big political change are also the kind of authors who know that historically the views of regular people tend to get left out.

So they come at the story wanting both of those things, and I think that’s where this divide comes from, at least in the clients that I work with.

Chris: Problems with dramatizing often happen when the storyteller is trying to fit in far too much complexity because you can stuff in more by telling instead of showing.

And so the first thing you have to do, if you want good scenes to actually bring the story to life, is to pare it down to a reasonable size to actually fit and show everything. If you make it too complex, it becomes a lot harder to actually dramatize appropriately because you just don’t have time.

The thing is one of the issues with Malazan, AKA sunk cost fallacy, the book series.

Oren: [Laughter]

Bunny: [Teasingly] Ohhh, burn.

Chris: Honestly, the way the fans talk about it really strongly suggests that. [Laughter] They’re already mad at me, so I’m not too worried about making them more mad.

Bunny: That burn was so strong. It smells like pork or whatever it was. [Laughter]

Chris: I did a critique on the first book of the Malazan series, just the beginning.

I criticized it for a lot of things, but actually the thing that I thought was its weakest point–beyond the characters or even how confusing it was, which is everyone’s big complaint–was just how terrible the scene design is. Because as Oren was joking earlier, it does start with just a kid on a wall being like, “Hey, did you hear about this famous guy and how he died because a god smited him? Are the rumors true?”

And anytime you have a character asking if the rumors are true, there’s a good chance the events have not been consolidated appropriately. We could be here on the wall with this precocious child, or we could be watching this guy get smited by a god. That sounds way more interesting. Why isn’t that the representation of these events that we’re seeing? Why are we just watching people talk about it?

Oren: That’s my favorite thing about the Malazan fan rage response. They’re always talking about how it starts in medias res, and you just need to be able to handle that.

This is the least in medias res opening I have ever seen. It’s like the opposite of whatever in medias res is.

Nothing is happening. We are just here with a kid and he is delivering exposition to us.

Bunny: Yeah. What isn’t in medias res?

Oren: [Laughter]

Chris: On the wall they have this convo about my gal Laseen.

Oren: Yeah, everyone loves Laseen. She’s cool.

Chris: They’re like “oh no, she’s getting uppity”.

Oren: [Laughter]

Chris: And then we cut after this prologue or what have you, we cut till a year later when she has apparently murdered the emperor and taken his place. And I’m just like, why don’t we see that? I would’ve liked to see my gal stab the emperor.

Oren: Spoilers for the very end of the Temeraire books, but it just reminds me how we spent all of the second to last book building up to the big battle with Napoleon, and the book ends right before the big battle, and then the last book starts after the battle.

Bunny: [Disbelief] No wait really?

Oren: Yes. Oh, it was so bad.

Bunny: Wow. It’s like the author lost confidence or something.

Oren: I think it was that if she had started the last book with this giant climactic battle, where is the rest of the book going to go after that? She made this attempt to reset and be like, “oh, okay, the last book’s actually going to be about the peace negotiations after the war”. Which, sure but we didn’t get to see the war end. It happened somewhere else. Please go back. I wanted to see that part.

Bunny: That does seem like bad planning. That seems like a victim of the stuff Chris was talking about.

Chris: With Malazan, again, the dramatis personae at the beginning of this book has like a hundred people, and some of them probably don’t need to be there, but you just know that there’s tons of viewpoints.

And so this really looks like an example where Steve Erickson, the author, was just trying to fit tons in. A lot of fantasy writers have this really big ambitious vision with all these viewpoints, but there are still limits on how much you can fit. And if you try to stuff too much in, you resort to things like a character giving a big lecture instead of showing your message in the story, which is gonna make it come off as preachy. This is another example where you have to create a narrative out of it.

Oren: There are some books that show the problem of trying to dramatize everything instead of downsizing your story. The Red Knight is an example of this. I don’t use the Red Knight as an example of why multiple POVs don’t work because it has over 20 of them and they’re really bad. The way that you switch between them is super awkward and hard to track. So it’s like trying to critique cars by critiquing a Pinto.

This book tries to dramatize everything. Every character who might matter, even a little bit, gets their own POV and their own chapters. That doesn’t work either. You need to downsize to something manageable.

Chris: Definitely simplifying the story is really important for having good scenes. If you try to do something too complex, you’ll end up with too many exposition dumps, too many dialogue dumps, telling instead of showing.

Or if you were to make those all into scenes again, you could end up with something that’s really slow and fractured. So you have to prioritize. Then make sure you’re not leaning on dialogue too hard ’cause a lot of people just don’t know how to dramatize yet because they’re just getting started. They may just not think about it too hard and just start by like “oh, I know how to do this, I’ll have somebody talk about it!” Because that’s just easier, especially if they’re going “how do people know about events that are happening far away” and they’ve forgotten that they’re the overlord of space and time. You can just move the event closer and create an exciting scene out of that. It just may be a reflex to have people talk about the event instead.

Bunny: It’s certainly the easier path. It’s hard to depict dramatic events, especially dramatic events when they involve a lot of action and you’re working in a written medium rather than a visual one. So you don’t have that flash and bang. So you have two difficult things on your hands: narrating action and making it dramatic.

Oren: The opposite extreme can also create problems. Game of Thrones, for example. They did wanna show all the important stuff, but because the world is so big and there are so many different places where important things could be happening, and they wanted the major characters to be there for them, the later seasons are often critiqued for it feeling like the characters can just teleport around to be wherever they need to be as if travel time’s not a thing anymore

Bunny: “Often critiqued”. We know who’s making that critique.

Oren: [Protesting] It’s not me! I have very little opinions on the later Game of Thrones shows. I have not watched them.

Bunny: Hmm, okay [Bemused laughter]

Oren: So for all I know, maybe all those people were wrong and actually it does great at this. That’s a good example of how this could go wrong. From my clients, at least one place where I have seen this happen sometimes is in mysteries when the characters need to find clues.

Clues are challenging. The clue needs to be something that doesn’t just spell out what’s happening ’cause that’s boring. But it also needs to be indicative enough for the characters to make believable inferences and for the audience to be able to tell what’s happening.

So sometimes that’s hard, and I’ve sometimes had clients who instead just had their characters say that they found clues that indicated a certain direction. That makes the mystery not as satisfying. Did you find clues? Can you tell me what those are? I would like to know please.

Bunny: Yeah, we wanna see the reasoning. We wanna see the clue, and then what led them to make a conclusion about it. I’ve been writing a mystery story. I get the temptation to be “and then I figured this out.”

No, we’re in the character’s head as they’re investigating, and we need to see that train of thought.

Chris: And also, we wanna make a problem out of this. Making that engaging story structure right? Instead of just, “Here’s the answer. Oh, okay, I thought of it. We’re done.”

Bunny: I made myself an extra challenge where the character is supposed to be reading some detailed paperwork and finds the clue in there. I have them find the clue without making the reader also read the long dry paperwork. [Laughter]

Chris: That’s where we want a summary. But a lot of times those kinds of junctures are changed, showing the causes of distress or problems directly. Sometimes problems are ongoing when the story starts, and that’s fine. But in many cases, instead of a character saying they feel bad, you wanna show an event that makes them feel bad, and that makes the audience kind of go “oh, I would feel bad too if I were in that circumstance”.

Actually show events playing out instead of somebody being like “oh, I just feel bad about this. Make them do something that they would feel bad about.

Oren: I’ve mentioned this problem of what if you have a big story with a big setting and you don’t want your characters to just teleport around. Maybe I should have given a possible solution.

Chris: A teleporter, obviously.

Bunny: [Laughter]

Oren: Okay, so the real solution is to plan your events so that the important ones take place at places the main character already has a reason to be. That’s the best offer I can give, and I’m afraid it is tinged a bit with processed advice because if you have events scattered around your world at wherever it first feels like they should be, that’s how you’re gonna get into the teleporting hero problem.

Instead, what you do is you look at both the world and the plot as one thing and figure out, okay, there are gonna be big battles at these three cities ’cause they are important for these reasons. I will now craft a plot that credibly gets my hero to the place they need to be for those battles while also being engaging and fun.

That’s how you solve that problem.

Bunny: And I think it’s also important to stress here that while lack of drama can come from just characters talking about things rather than being involved in the events or witnessing them directly, it’s also important to mention that you can have lots of drama in talking scenes.

It just doesn’t come from talking about events that are more interesting happening in other places.

Chrisb: Talking can facilitate social conflicts and show the scene play out appropriately. It’s more like social events are happening. We have an encounter with a thief, and then we argue with a thief about whether they should come back and give back the item they stole and something is still happening and the social conversation facilitates that, which is very different from “hey, we’re just sitting around having a coffee and, oh, hey, did you hear about this dramatic thing that happened?”

Oren: What about quiet scenes? Because we talk about these sometimes when we do pacing. A story, even a really high action story, can’t be all tension, all the time. You need some dips, and I often describe those as quiet scenes. I’m just wondering — if the quiet scene feels boring, is it likely that that’s a dramatization problem or is something else going on?

Chris: If you have too much to do…. Again, sometimes this is just management of information and management of complexity. Generally, even in a quiet scene, you would have just lower stake arcs kind of playing out. Like the character is now dealing with the guilt from events, or they’re planning their next move, putting their supplies together, taking care of a friend that was injured. So usually they are still solving problems. They’re just more likely to be emotional problems, personal problems, lower stakes.

Oren: So there’s still movement on something.

Chris: Right. There’s still movement on something that usually happens. It’s just not as exciting as your high tension scenes.

Bunny: The relevant thing is still happening, it’s just that the relevant thing is downtime.

Chris: Let’s say we have a quiet scene. We’re tending to the injured friend. The injured friend reveals their dark backstory. That’s the kind of thing where if this was a movie, the movie would actually dramatize that too by showing scenes of the backstory. You notice in any high budget movie/TV show, when a character’s telling a story, they don’t just show the character telling the story. We don’t just watch a character talk.

We have flashback scenes to dramatize that. Now the reason that we don’t do that in novels —

Bunny: I have just seen this in a novel actually, and it was pretty awkward ‘cause it was someone telling someone else’s story too and flashback levels of detail.

Chris: So I should revise that. It’s not usually advisable to do that in a novel–

Bunny: [Laughter]

Chris: — because we can keep it efficient enough and short enough that it’s better than dramatizing it because this is a segment that is not gonna move the story forward. I would say that sometimes there may be exceptions. But in those cases, I would usually pare that conversation down and make it short. A few dramatic statements.

Sometimes you also need to question: does this character really need this much backstory? Are there more events that you need? If they are just supposed to have a relationship with an antagonist or one tragic event, do you need to talk about their 10 years at school?

[Laughter]

Sometimes you just do more than you need to do, and you need to choose what’s important and pare it down. With that kind of situation in a novel, you would just keep it brief instead of dramatizing it or doing a full flashback.

Oren: As you know, I was once a child.

Bunny: [Laughter]

Chris: My mother died tragically.

Oren: She was beautiful and kind. I have her eyes.

Bunny: [Laughter] I just had to be raised by my brave swordsman father who was very gruff.

Chrisb: That covers most of what I wanted to talk about. There’s a lot of different factors that go into choosing what scenes you have. It’s fine to factor in, I need to give this information and set scenes in places that will provide some context.

It’s usually just not the only factor. So if I have my childhood friends, we might set a scene that creates context that they’re childhood friends, but then we also need to have something interesting happening there. And then you want your key points of change, the instigating events that change what happens in the story with some problems and conflict and tension and all that, and wherever possible to multitask what you’re doing to keep the story kind of tight and consolidated.

If we have a disagreement between my two childhood friends, there are also things that foreshadow them becoming a hero and a villain, because that’s something else I also need to do. Put your character arc in the same scene where something really eventful happens. Don’t trade off between them and then just make it engaging.

And that’s basically what you do when you’re dramatizing your story.

Oren: All right. With that, I think we will call this very well dramatized podcast to a close.

Chrisb: If you’ve got any useful tips, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons.

First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson who is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[closing theme]

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.