609 – Reader Meta Knowledge

Show Notes

• Save the Cat!
• Making Your Story Intuitive
• Tension & Conflict: What Every Writer Should Know
• Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories
• The Promise and Peril of Using Curiosity in Fiction Writing
• Goodbye, Lara
• Seven Common Causes of Reader Confusion
• Five Steps to a Great Plot Twist
• A Trade of Blood
• Teen Wolf
• Seven Tips for a Satisfying Mystery
• Carpe Jugulum
• Four Signs Your Story Escalates Too Quickly
• Seven Common Believability Issues
• Audiences Don’t Suspend Disbelief – We Do It for Them
• Coyote vs. Acme
• Explaining the Urban Fantasy Masquerade
• Dungeon Crawler Carl

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Oren, if I said something shocking right now, do you think our regular listeners would believe it?

Oren: You know, after 308 episodes, I suspect they would not.

Chris: Mm, am I not trustworthy?

Oren: I think it’s been pretty well established that you’re a lying liar who lies.

Chris: Hmm, I don’t know. I think our listeners are just cheating cheaters bringing in outside information to tell how sincere I’m being.

Oren: Yeah, they can’t be using the past 608 episodes against us, so that’s rude. They gotta judge us as completely new podcast hosts every episode.

Chris: Every episode.

Oren: It’s the only way it’s fair.

Chris: So, this time we’re talking about meta knowledge and how it affects stories. So, first of all, I have made up another term, sorry.

Oren: Yeah, well, I knew you were going to, cause I know you pretty well. I could guess that was gonna happen.

Chris: [laughs] After 600 episodes, people are probably used to me making up terms. So yeah, I’m talking about any knowledge or information that comes from outside the story, as in outside the story world, that is canonically supposed to be happening in the fiction.

Sherlock fans love to refer to this as a Doylean or Doylist perspective as opposed to a Watsonian perspective. They’re very proud of those terms. I’m just saying them right here because if I don’t, somebody in the comment section will be like, Oh, those are called Doylist and Watsonian.

And I know. It’s just those aren’t very intuitive terms, so I’m not gonna use them, sorry. But I know they exist, and they could also be used for this scenario.

Oren: We should go the Save-the-Cat route and name it something just completely absurd sounding that’s memorable but very silly. We could call it Dog Tail in the Sky.

Chris: [laughs]

Oren: And then have a little anecdote about how one time I saw a cloud that looked kind of like a dog tail but actually it had an eye, and that made me think of knowing things. And there, that’s why it’s called Dog Tail in the Sky.

Chris: Maybe Snyder was trying to make his terms memorable and evocative. I don’t know, or maybe he just wanted to trademark them or something.

Oren: If you make it sound silly enough, it is memorable. I don’t think that’s a good thing, though. I don’t think that’s the right way to make someone remember your term.

Chris: Yeah. We want it to be memorable, but also easily connected with the concept because otherwise we could remember one or not the other. Want them to kind of go together. And if you think about Doylist versus Watsonian, if you stop and be like, Okay, so the author is Doyle, the character is Watson. There is a link, but I have to stop and think about it every time.

Oren: Right. I have to remember which one is which. I have to remind myself that this isn’t the perspective of Emma Watson, famous actress. It’s a whole thing.

Chris: It’s a whole thing. Anyway, but it’s definitely worth talking about outside knowledge, the knowledge we get in the real world, knowledge we get from other stories, knowledge we might have about the production, that kind of thing, and how it affects the experience, or doesn’t.

Oren: Well, there’s the most obvious one, which is spoilers. That’s a kind of meta knowledge, cause you know what’s gonna happen and the story didn’t tell you yet.

Chris: Yeah. That’s a big one, and really interesting. They don’t affect tension as much as you’d think, and this comes up a lot, especially when I’m talking about the uncertainty requirement for tension, which is basically about the likelihood that the threat will come to pass or the bad thing, the stakes will happen. So, people will ask me, Okay, what if the audience already knows what the ending is?

Most of the time they really do, because most stories end happily. So, a lot of times when we’re reading or watching something, we already know it ends happily if it does. Not all stories do, but enough of them do, [and] certainly in some genres it’s expected they will. So, in many cases we absolutely have an idea of what the ending is, but yet we still feel tension.

Oren: Right. Which is not to say that you should go around spoiling everybody and then be like, Ah, but it won’t affect your tension enjoyment that much! Cause first of all, rude. But there are other aspects that someone might not want to know the ending ahead of time. This isn’t a gotcha attempt, it’s just a description of how people engage with stories.

Chris: Yeah. There are some interesting studies. There’s a 2011 study from the University of California suggesting that spoiling a story actually improves the experience. But things like that need to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt, because we’d have to look at the specific stories they were testing, what engagement factors they were using.

And also, one of the interesting things about [that study:] it has a 4:1 ratio of women versus men in the study. And I’m not necessarily saying that people would have a different experience based on gender, but it’s always possible. This might just be toxic masculinity, but it’s pretty uncommon for men to say that something is too tense. Some women love tension, some women love horror. There’s never gonna be any general rules. But we don’t know without a lot more study.

But it does speak to the fact that if you spoil something, it doesn’t automatically just all fall flat just because you know what’s gonna happen.

Oren: Well, you know what they say, women do be discussing meta-knowledge. That’s the thing I always say in my observational comedy routine. The fellas know what I’m talking about.

Chris: [laughs] I think tension might be less affected than other engagement factors, just because tension is a very vicarious experience that really requires buying into the story because we’re worried whether a threat will happen to a character, right? When there’s tension in the story, the audience is never threatened, right?

Oren: Hopefully.

Chris: So, to even buy into the fact that there’s a threat, you have to buy into the story and make the story feel real. And that’s one reason why we’re not really thinking about the real world at that point. I think that’s one reason why if you have something that actually happens in the story that affects the likelihood that the hero will, for instance, survive, that has a much stronger effect than somebody telling us the hero’s gonna survive at the end.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

Chris: But I’m not sure that’s true for everything. In particular, I do wonder about threats that are mysterious because if you know what the threat is, if it’s no longer cloaked by fog or what have you, I feel like that might be more likely to change how that threat is interpreted.

Oren: Yeah, we talked about how curiosity is a lot more vulnerable to spoiling than tension is in general, and that feels like that would line up pretty well.

Because with curiosity, that’s not as vicarious. Like, you are wondering what’s happening, and so having that spoiled for you is gonna be more disappointing. So, I could believe that if there’s a mysterious threat, then there would be some crossover there.

I’ve also found that I find it pretty annoying when the story spoils itself in a way that is different than if someone tells me what happened.

Like mild spoilers, ironically, for the anime Goodbye, Lara. But one of the episodes has this weird thing where if you forgot to watch the post-credit scene of the last episode, it opens with what appears to be a flash forward of a new character showing up, a very mysterious new character. And I wanted to see that character appear in the story. I didn’t want to be told this character was gonna show up later, and I really resented that for a while. And then I figured out the reason this was happening was that I hadn’t watched the previous post-credit scene, and then I resented that for a while. And still do, cause post-credit scenes are a bane on television, and they should be banned. Hot take.

Chris: Not having adequate information was definitely the result of that. We missed an after-credit scene, and then suddenly the start of the next episode was really confusing. And instead of appreciating the experience that scene was supposed to give us, we spent it being like, What’s going on? Are we watching the correct episode? That kind of classic immersion break where we can’t really immerse ourselves in the story anymore cause we’re wondering what’s going on. And so yeah, that kind of experience was ruined.

I think in many cases, the thing is audiences also aren’t picky usually about how they get the answers to mysteries. So, I’m not sure to what extent if they get a spoiler for the answer, you know, maybe they’ll be really disappointed, or maybe it’ll be like, Oh, that’s what it is!

I’m not sure how picky they would be about getting the answer outside of the story because they’re just not picky about how they get the answers to mysteries inside the story, assuming we’re talking about just curiosity here and not tension anymore.

But the delivery of tension, of course, is important. And it doesn’t seem to be as affected as you would think by outside knowledge because we’re just focusing super hard on buying into the story and what’s happening in the story.

Oren: What about plot twists? Where does that fall on this question of knowing it’s going to happen ahead of time?

Chris: The question is what are you trying to achieve with a plot twist? If the goal is to shock the audience and they know it ahead, I do think that some of that shock is gonna be gone. But I don’t know, that’s not necessarily worse.

I sometimes wonder if storytellers like shocking their audience because it creates discussion that gives them free advertising and not because it’s a particularly good experience. I would expect some of that to wear off. But at the same time, if it’s a twist, a lot of the impact of the twist is still gonna be the same. For instance, if it’s a tense twist, I would expect that tension to still be there.

Oren: Yeah. There’s of course the inverse of all this because we’re talking about having knowledge of where the story is going because someone told you or whatever, but you can do the reverse, which is that you can guess where the story is going, not based on any in-universe knowledge, but just because you know how stories work or are perhaps genre-savvy, and so you can figure out, like, Okay, I think I know where we’re going with this because I’ve seen this before.

The most obvious example is guessing whodunit not based on any clues the characters have found, but by my method, which is to look at, okay, who’s had significant either screen presence or other narrative presences? It’s possible that it could be someone we’ve heard about, but we haven’t seen directly. That’s also possible. And then you compare that to the list of who-have-we-already-suspected, and whoever has yes for the first one but hasn’t been suspected yet is still in the suspect pool.

And you can then apply Do you know anything about the author?

More significant spoilers for Trade of Blood. I guessed it was Trecheo pretty early because he was, like, one of the last characters left who had significant screen time who we hadn’t suspected. But for a while, I wondered if it might be Dyn’s sister for edginess because Robert Jackson Bennett likes to be a little edgy sometimes, so I thought maybe that might be what we were going for. But towards about the last third, I was like, Nah, it’s definitely Trecheo. just because there’s no one else left it could be.

Chris: Yeah. Do you find that… First of all, are you intentionally doing this process of elimination, look at who the culprit is? And if so, does it improve your experience, or does it make it worse?

Oren: I mean, I mostly do it when I’m bored. And I was bored in the second half of Trade of Blood because all the stakes were gone, and it was just like, Yeah, I guess we’ll get him eventually. We have infinite time now cause he killed everyone he was trying to kill, so whatever.

Chris: I still remember when we were watching Teen Wolf. Teen Wolf has a mystery villain every season, and you guessed who it was, but there was no sign or any clues or any likelihood of this person actually being the mystery villain. It was just the only person left, and that was really unsatisfying, but it was unsatisfying because it didn’t actually make sense for this person to be the villain.

For a satisfied curiosity arc, you want it to be surprising, yet click into place. And if you just take the person who is like, Nobody suspects the dog, but there’s no clues that it was the dog. 

Oren: And then you have to spend 15 minutes explaining how the dog did all this because it’s so silly, and then it doesn’t make any sense, and so you have to try to bludgeon the audience into accepting that it happened.

Chris: To be fair, in most cases, if the readers guess who the culprit is, but it’s still something that would be surprising and plausible—and it’s not super easy to guess but they still manage to guess it—usually they’re too busy being proud of themselves for guessing to feel unsatisfied that they didn’t get a surprise when it was revealed. And I don’t know, maybe they got that sense of surprise when they guessed it. Maybe they’re like, Oh, mind blown, I know who it is! and that gave them their satisfaction already. Maybe that’s what happens.

Oren: I think it’s probably different for different people. For me, it’s a weird set of requirements where if I’m guessing purely on meta knowledge, then usually I’m doing it cause I’m bored.

But if I’m not bored, maybe it’s between episodes of a TV show or something, that doesn’t really bother me for the most part. It’s like, okay, I recognize that there are only so many ways to tell a story, and the alternative to this is for the story to be bad. If the story is bad, it’s hard to predict cause it could do anything.

Chris: Right. That’s the thing about Bennett’s Anna and Din series, is that I can usually predict the culprit before the culprit is revealed. At the same time, I prefer that rather than having a completely nonsensical culprit pop out of nowhere.

Oren: Right. But then if I’m guessing based on clues, I feel a lot more clever at that point. I don’t really feel clever for guessing who it is based on screen time and the fact that we haven’t suspected them yet. That’s not clever. That’s just the fact that I’ve edited for a while.

Chris: It doesn’t feel as satisfying. That’s not the clues we’re looking for. We’re looking for in-story clues for that click-into-place feeling that we get with a good answer to a mystery. We need to have some story groundwork for that.

Oren: And of course, the danger zone is when I have figured it out either through my meta knowledge or through clues, and it feels too obvious. It feels like the characters should also have figured it out, and that’s hard for me to intellectually define when that is.

Like in Trade of Blood, I was really frustrated—again, partly because I was bored, but even beyond being bored—it was really frustrating that they weren’t looking at the guy who had the obvious motive and also the influence to do all of this. Especially since they had earlier had a big thing about how it always came down to money, and this guy had a huge financial incentive to commit the murders. So that was frustrating.

Chris: One thing I noticed is it really felt like the protagonists were trying very hard not to discuss any suspects. Bennett didn’t want to bring up anybody as a possibility and was doing that on purpose, maybe as a way to get away from this, Oh, if we haven’t suspected them, then they must be the culprit because we haven’t discussed anyone and how suspicious they are, except for Din’s love interest.

Oren: Yeah, except for blonde boyfriend.

Chris: He’s super sus, we’ve decided. [they both laugh] Maybe he was just too obvious, and so we really had to name him. But that was just an unusual choice, and it’s like, well, if we’re gonna talk about how suspicious this guy is, why not the other people?

Oren: No, cause none of them are as hot and blonde, so we can’t really be talking about them, can we?

Another piece of story meta knowledge that ideally doesn’t matter, but I definitely notice it when things go wrong, is how much of the story is left. Because there are some instances where the protagonists will try to do something, and I’ll be like, Obviously that’s not gonna work. There’s too much of the movie/book/episode left for that to work.

And that’s not really a logical way to look at things because that happens all the time. Characters are always trying things that don’t work because if they worked, the movie would be over, right? But sometimes I have that thought, and I think the reason is that I am subconsciously noticing that this plan they have has no real chance of success, and they’re trying it anyway, which feels silly and incompetent to me, and so that’s one of the ways I am voicing my frustration.

I noticed that in the Discworld book Carpe Jugulum. About halfway through the book, they decide they’re gonna go and storm the vampire castle and kill the vampires, and my first thought was There’s half a book left. Obviously this doesn’t work. But I think I was really reacting to the fact that A) the plan didn’t make any sense, and B) the pacing was wrong. Like, it was escalating too quickly. It’s like, no, we don’t go for the big castle storm until near the end, guys. Give us some room to breathe.

Chris: Right. That’s the thought that occurs to me. It can be really tricky to attribute why we’re feeling bad about something in the story. Those explanations aren’t given to us automatically. We have to figure out, okay, I find this really unsatisfying or I’m not enjoying this, and now we have to look at a whole bunch of things to figure out why. And so, it’s easier to say, well, they’re clearly gonna go storm the castle, and I know it’s only halfway through the book, and so that’s why this feels really like—I’m impatient and unsatisfied with it.

But it could be something else. Like, yeah, the story is escalating too quickly, and if it’s over this soon, that’s anticlimactic because I expected there to be more adventures before we got to this point.

And there can be some wincing over what could happen. We know that just knowing there’s a happy ending isn’t going to ruin the tension, but giving away that there’s a bad ending might still raise tension, right? Just like if you have the narrator hinting in the story, and maybe this works because it comes from the story, but if you know something bad is coming, that’s what tension is all about. It’s about the anticipation of this negative thing that’s gonna happen. So that can still raise tension, and I think maybe if we know that a big effort is gonna fail, there may be a sense of frustration over the characters spending lots of time doing things that will amount to nothing.

Oren: Yeah, that makes sense.

Where do you think subject matter expertise falls here? You know, the classic example is it’s hard for doctors to enjoy medical dramas because so many things are wrong.

Chris: Yeah. I think it’s worth talking about believability in general when it comes to meta knowledge, because believability is informed by all sorts of things that come from different places, not just within the story, but outside the story too. I mean, when it comes down to it, I think that the audience does have to put together their conceptual model of the story world and how it works in their head, and as long as things proceed according to that conceptual model, it is believable.

But a story can’t fill in every single detail of how it works, so some of that conceptual model is always gonna come from outside stories the person has consumed, and the real world, and all of these other places.

So, if you have, for instance, a medical drama in a fantasy setting, and we have magic medical care, then at that point we’re probably not pulling too much from the real world about how this medical care is gonna work because it all clearly comes from some sort of fantasy setting.

But by default, if we don’t say that medicine in this world is super advanced or uses magic, then the audience is gonna fill in how medicine works in the real world and assume it’s the same. This just reminds me of in Lord of the Rings, the watery lava.

Oren: [laughs] Yeah.

Chris: So, this is a funny thing. Gollum, at the end of Lord of the Rings, sinks into lava. And is this in the book, do you remember? Or is it just the movies?

Oren: Heck if I know. It’s been so long.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. Most people don’t know, but actual real lava is too heavy for a person to sink into. You would just stay on the surface and burn up very fast.

Oren: Yeah. Be nice and crispy!

Chris: You burn up possibly before you even reach the lava. It’s very hot. But it’s not like water. And it’s a question of, like, Okay, well, why are you picking over the watery lava and you don’t care about the giant spider? The giant spider is a convention in fantasy settings. Those giant animals are something that we are used to. We have seen them before. They are a convention that we know about, that we bring with us when we start consuming the story. Watery lava is not a thing that is supposed to be magical. It’s not a convention that we know about. The assumption there is it’s like regular lava.

Oren: Yeah. I also suspect that there might be an element of some people who do know that might tend to be people who are annoyed with how ignorant your average person is about geology and how lava works. And so, they might see everyone accepting, Oh yeah, you sink into lava cause lava’s a liquid. That makes sense, and then be like, No, it doesn’t work that way. Why do you all know so little about my precious lava? I suspect that might be something going on there.

Chris: The thing that always bothers me science-wise in stories is one person falling faster than another. And I do think stories have gotten a little better at explaining why one person can fall fast enough to catch up to another person who is falling and catch them before they hit the ground, which is what usually happens, right? There’s somebody who falls and another person has to swoop and rescue them.

Sometimes the person who falls first has some wind resistance, or more often the person who’s catching them has rockets.

Oren: Yeah, some kind of propulsion.

Chris: Some kind of propulsion to make them fall faster. So, I think stories are getting a little better about that, but there’s a whole lot of stories where the bigger person just falls faster.

Oren: The part that I have trouble with now that is hard for me to unsee is when someone’s falling and someone else catches them, but the change in velocity isn’t really any different than if they just hit the ground, right? Basically you’re just slamming into another person instead of the ground, but it’s at the same speed, so that doesn’t really help you very much. And that’s something that I realized as someone explained it on the internet somewhere, and now I can’t unsee it when I watch superhero movies. It’s like, no, you can’t just stop their fall by catching them. You have to slow them down gradually. You have to cushion, then disperse the energy so it doesn’t all go into their body.

Chris: [laughs] Uh, maybe the person catching them goes splat, but then they can magically heal themselves.

Oren: Yeah, the person catching them becomes their crumple zone. There we go. Yeah, okay. I’ll accept that.

And of course, it should be noted that even people with subject matter expertise, sometimes it’s a feeling they’re after more than strict accuracy.

Spoilers for Coyote vs. Acme. Great movie. Definitely recommend it. A friend of ours who saw it with us, who didn’t like it as much, was complaining about the legal inaccuracies. But when I looked at reviews of it written by other lawyers, they tended to like it and thought it portrayed civil litigation pretty well up to a point. And they weren’t really bothered by mistakes; we see the defense counsel give the opening statement, and it’s like, no, the lawyer for the plaintiff should do that, not the lawyer for the defendant. But that’s a technical issue that they didn’t mind so much. They enjoyed how much it felt like a small law firm being buried by all the resources of a much bigger legal entity.

That part they really liked, and they didn’t start to have a problem with it until later in the movie when the legal logic really starts to fall apart, which is incidentally the same time when the plot starts to get kind of squishy. So in that case, it was the mood that they were after as much as the specific legal technicalities.

Chris: Well, it’s certainly true that the more people enjoy a story, the more lenient they are with all of the flaws that they find, right? And those things don’t seem to be a big deal anymore because they’re looking through rose-colored lenses at that point.

That’s one thing is if you get your stories to a certain point where people are really enjoying them, you’ll probably find that your beta readers start picking over them significantly less because people just become less critical as their enjoyment goes up.

So when it comes to that meta knowledge, obviously that can ruin believability, but it can also boost believability quite a bit. And there’s a lot of conventions that we have that really are only believable because people are used to them, like the masquerade in urban fantasy where we’re assuming somehow nobody knows that magic exists even though that’s all but impossible. If you have not read any LitRPG…

Oren: Oh, boy.

Chris: It will make you appreciate this effect because when you first read LitRPG, it is so bizarre, where we have sometimes what looks like completely normal fantasy worlds, but for some reason the principles, the metaphysics of this world include messages from the ether that tell you you have leveled up. And that’s just how the world works. There’s no explanation for it.

Oren: Yeah. You’re in a normal fantasy setting and then someone opens up their inventory screen, and you’re like, What? What? Is this a video ga—No, it’s not a video game, or at least if it is, the author is waiting until book 10 to reveal it. It’s just a normal fantasy world except it has video game mechanics for some reason. Why? Who knows.

Chris: But again, those are conceits that once people consume enough stories with them and get used to them, they just stop questioning them after a while, right? And we don’t have to worry about that believability wise, so that can be a good thing.

In the reverse, though, sometimes you get situations where based on what you have, readers will predict that a common trope will happen, and it could be something they don’t like, and it’s not actually gonna happen. So, you kind of have to sometimes work around that.

They’re like, Oh no, this tiresome trope that I hate. You’re about to do that. It’s like, No, it’s fine. I’m not actually about to do that. It’s okay.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, that’s the classic. We have our cool lady who does cool stuff, and then she suddenly gets captured and is helpless, and everyone’s like, Ugh, I’m so tired of that. And then they put your book down. And you’re like, No! But she was gonna…

Chris: She was gonna free herself! She’s not gonna get rescued by somebody. She’s gonna do some daring, clever trickery to get out or something like that.

Oren: Yeah, she was gonna find out it was all a plot by the evil lord misogynist guy, and it was all commentary, but nobody got to that part cause they all just thought you were doing the trope normally.

Chris: [laughs] That can be troublesome. Yeah, you need to either hint that that’s not how it’s gonna happen or sometimes just building trust. Luckily, that kind of damseling has become much, much less common. And so, these days, if I otherwise thought that the story was not sexist, I probably wouldn’t assume that just because a female character gets captured that she’s gonna be a sitting duck until some man rescues her. Just because we’ve gotten so much better about that one.

But it can be a problem.

Oren: All right. With that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you’d like some more meta knowledge about Mythcreants, our patrons get our rambles with insider commentary on what we’re doing and why. To join, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.

We will talk to you next week