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Characters sometimes feel sad. But what if they felt… extra sad? If it’s sad enough to be a big deal, probably the saddest they’ll ever be, we call that a low point. Much has been made of low points, with some giving them fancy names like “dark night of the soul” and insisting they must happen at a certain point in a certain way. Most of that is pure puffery, but it’s still useful to understand how these moments work and the best way to utilize them. It’s also important to understand that Mark Zuckerberg is getting sued by a bunch of porn companies. That’s not super relevant to storytelling, but it is funny.
Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]
Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Oren, I don’t know if I can podcast on. The tech companies are stealing all of our content, Google is stealing all of the web traffic, and you’re leaving for law school! I think I’ll just lay down in the Pit of Despair.
Oren: Ooh, are you having a Dark Night of the Soul!?
Chris: [chuckling] I don’t know. Maybe my soul likes the dark.
Oren: Could be. Could be very dark, but fiction has taught me that when, you know, things seem really bad, they’re about to get better. That’s how fiction works, so probably it’s fine actually. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Chris: Well, I do have to admit, it is getting a little bit boring in the Pit of Despair since I am just, you know, curled up doing nothing. So maybe you should just give me an inspiring speech so I regain hope and then I can get out of the Pit of Despair.
Oren: Oh, boy. An inspiring speech, huh?
Chris: Yeah, and remember, you have to start with a speech that sounds really bad, so I can be like, “Oren…” and then it suddenly corrects itself into a good speech. That’s how story speeches work.
Oren: Okay, have you considered that Meta is being sued by a bunch of porn companies for scraping all of their video files?
Chris: Hmmm.
Oren: Doesn’t that make you feel better? [both laughing] It makes me feel better.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, that would be great. If that-
Oren: I’ve got no idea if they’re going to win, but they did just survive a motion to dismiss, which is cool.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, for me, the thing about that lawsuit is it looks it might hinge a lot on them pirating the porn, which, again, that’s definitely better than nothing, but I really think they need to pay for the training data, for stealing training data, even if it didn’t involve pirating files. And I may, as a person with content online that you can read for free, may have a vested interest in this.
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: In any case, well, I think we have climbed out of the Pit of Despair.
Oren: See, now we’re back in the fight.
Chris: So, we’re discussing low points, AKA Dark Night of the Soul, in the Hero’s Journey, there’s the Ordeal, I think it’s called, or sometimes people call it an All is Lost Moment. It’s really funny that this thing is so—even though people have different terms—but it’s so widespread. And my theory is that it tends to be a favorite of pseudo-structures. Which, we recall, is when people give you a structure that is not really story structure, like the Hero’s Journey, it’s mostly just vague inspiration. I just think that people are trying to figure out how a story structure works and they’re not getting it right but they can point to, hey, there’s a moment where bad things happen and the hero feels despair and, repeatedly point to that so it’s just easy to identify. Also, it’s dramatic and people like dramatic things.
Oren: Well, right, and it’s also by its definition always going to exist unless the hero’s emotional state is a flat line for the entire story. Because there will always be some point that is the lowest and if you don’t really care about how useful this concept is you can always just point to it and say, “Yep, there it is. That’s the lowest point.”
The low point in Star Wars is when Luke is sad because Obi-Wan died. Never mind that it lasts like two minutes and he’s just a little sad. The low point in Lord of the Rings is when Frodo gives into the ring. Never mind that that is during the climax. And the low point in Wrath of Khan is after the climax because Kirk’s friend has just died. So, you know, there is always a low point somewhere in that some point in the movie has to be the main character’s lowest emotional point.
Chris: It reminds me of midpoints where just by the law of averages or whatever, you can find, usually, an exciting point that’s vaguely in the middle of the story.
Oren: Right, if the midpoint is a false victory and/or real victory and/or false defeat and/or real defeat that happens somewhere around the middle of the story.
Chris: Oh, is that from Save the Cat Writes a Novel?
Oren: It is. [both laughing] Yeah, I bet you’ll find one if you look for it.
Chris: So, the point here is that I usually define a low point as something that is exceptionally devastating, which means that not every story has it nor is it necessary. If you want to say it’s necessary, then, I mean, you can do that if you make it milder and milder, the definition of how low does it have to go, but then it’s happening all the time and there’s not one distinct low point. Or if it’s just the lowest point as Oren said, then we could technically find that in any story, and that doesn’t help us become better storytellers. It’s not useful information.
But, despite that—we can totally make fun of it because it is worth making fun of—but at the same time, low points can be useful. But they have trade-offs. They have advantages, they have disadvantages. They’re not going to be the right solution for every situation or every story, but they are another tool in your toolbox. So, I’m not saying you shouldn’t use a low point, especially if you just…again some people just like the drama of it. They like the highs and the lows and that kind of thing. And if you enjoy it, yeah, go ahead. It’s just fine.
Oren: All right, so that’s what is low point, but why is low point? What is its purpose in the story? What does it actually do?
Chris: Well, I mean, if we’re talking about characters and their low points, we can talk about the character level and the bigger story level.
For character level, if we specifically want a character, because, again, depending on how you define a low point, since you could define a low point in any specific plot arc in your story, which will have multiple, or for any specific character, but if you’re specifically thinking, “I want this character to have a low point,” usually there’s a couple things you can do.
One, maybe you just want to push the character to change. And so, in their character arc, often they have to learn a lesson of some kind and one way to teach them lessons is to have them do the wrong thing and then suffer for it, for instance. Or maybe they just need a little whip crack to actually do something a little more desperate or radical. And when we talk about this being an All is Lost Moment, this is often a time when we had a previous plan for saving the day and that was taken away. So that’s a time when they would have to change tactics in most cases.
Oren: Right. And then now they’re willing to do something they weren’t willing to do before. And that can be a positive thing, it can be what’s needed. If what’s needed here is for you to completely abolish the aristocracy and you weren’t willing to do that until your mild attempts at reform prompted an aristocrat to assassinate your wife. So that’s your low point and now you’re like, “I’m gonna take down that aristocracy!”
Or it can be a negative thing, where you were trying to avoid using the magical death ray that devastates the countryside but then someone precious to your character died and then they decide to use the death ray and that’s a downward turning point for them.
Chris: The other thing is, lots of writers may do it because they like the themes involved. The kind of like death and rebirth or defeat and hope. Some of them just want their characters to go through a moment when the character has to deal with a serious loss and then kind of recover from that and rally emotionally in some way, and that kind of emotional journey is just what interests the writer.
On the plotting level, for movies that have a big, what I would call a dramatic reversal, where generally this low point will happen shortly before the climax and the goal generally there is to raise tension. So, we make everything look as hopeless as possible so that coming out on top of the climax just feels really, really difficult, thereby making things tenser when we head into the climax.
Again, there are so many ways to create tension. I talk about, here’s the actual essential ingredients of tension, but there is no specific trope that you need to create tension. There’s lots of ways. So, this is used to create tension but is by no means necessary to have adequate tension going into the climax.
Oren: Yeah, and this is another case where the thing that pseudo-structures often call the low point or the Dark Night of the Soul or whatever, is just a result of the fact that you want tension to be highest at the climax and a way to create tension is often to make the situation much worse. And if your characters react to that in a naturalistic way, they will feel really bad. So, you know, that happens a lot. Just as an emergent property.
Chris: But outside of setting up the plot or setting up the climax, a low point often happens after, again, somebody dies or something really goes wrong or that kind of thing. So yeah, I don’t know. Some writers also are edgy and might just want somebody to die.
Oren: Yeah, sometimes they just want that. Is a low point as we’ve been talking about it, a conflict? Like is it something that the protagonist needs a turning point to resolve?
Chris: I mean, I would say that an emotional conflict you could say, or an emotional struggle, but the problem is it’s not typically a very exciting conflict.
Oren: Right. What I’m thinking is: is it going to be unsatisfying if we set up this tragedy and the protagonist is in despair, and then they fall asleep, despairing. And after a night’s sleep they wake up and decide, “Okay, well… everything sucks, but I have to fight anyway.” Is that going to be disappointing because they just kind of got over it? Or do I need more of a clear, “this is how they moved past it” moment?
Chris: Well, it’s definitely an arc, right? So, we can split the plot up into child arcs. If their hope seems lost and the protagonist is giving into despair, which is common in these low points, I feel like if you had a low point where something bad happened and then the character doesn’t … I mean, as we said, pseudo-structures will define these really broadly to try to say, “See, our structure is totally valid. All of these stories fit it.” And they’ll be, “Oh, you know, that could be kind of a Dark Night of the Soul.”
Oren: Yeah, sure. As long as, you know, you don’t care about it meeting most of the requirements, absolutely.
Chris: Yeah. But I mean, I think for me, something that I would actually call a low point is devastating enough that your hero is going to have an emotional reaction. And depending on how it’s framed, it can be different ways, like it could be the protagonist is just giving into despair, and that’s a problem, right? It’s a problem that would start a child arc and we would expect them to earn the solution to that problem just like for any other arc.
Or, if we’re thinking more about the plot outside of just what the character is going through, and what often happens here is we kind of eliminate the path to victory, I mean, that’s also an issue that has to be resolved. And again, whenever you have a plot arc start that because you present a problem, generally the hero is going to have to earn that solution.
But, depending on what your goals are, a lot of people might want to do deep, emotional soul-searching there. Hence why the Dark Night of the Soul label. But you could have a prior achievement turning point where the character earlier helped somebody else and then in this moment this person comes back and reminds the hero of what they accomplished. So, the hero is basically benefiting from earlier good deeds that they did, and that way it’s still earned but they don’t necessarily have a big emotional struggle.
Oren: Right. A prior achievement turning point feels pretty natural as a way to resolve this low point arc. You know, this is where you would have maybe another character who your protagonist has been helping out, lend emotional support, something that. Although lending emotional support could also be part of the protagonist resolving it themselves, right, as an emotional resolution.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, you could definitely have somebody say something and then the hero has kind of a realization. Or, you know, something else that this is worth it or whatever have you, but you wouldn’t just want to shrug it off. If we’re really presenting this as a problem, we need something to show that we’ve earned getting out the other side. Especially if it’s dramatic.
Oren: I’ve been thinking about how one creates a low point and I realize I have two, like, requirements that are both a little bit in opposition to each other and also very hard to intellectualize. So, I’m going to go through ’em and we’ll see if we can get something more useful than “I know it when I see it.”
First is that I feel the reaction has to match what has happened. If your hero probably isn’t, shouldn’t be, throwing a fit and be completely devastated because they lost their cool shirt. I’m not going to say that’s impossible to make that work, but in most cases, that’s going to seem like a big overreaction to me. Even if it is realistic for the hero, in most cases, I’m just not going to care because the hero is acting a big baby.
And then the other thing is that I feel like the cause of the low point doesn’t need to be exaggerated or really shouldn’t be exaggerated. Like it’s enough for a friend to die. That’s tragic enough. They don’t need to explode from agony maggots. [Chris laughing] And I don’t know exactly how to figure that out. I just know that when I read a story where I feel the hero is overreacting or I feel the tragic event is being really exaggerated it bothers me and I’m not sure how to advise on that.
Chris: Right. Well, one thing about, if a character’s going to die here, is that it shouldn’t feel like it’s designed just to make the reader feel as bad as possible. Because that feels manipulative to the reader. Again, some authors have a habit of choosing children. Just introducing a child character who’s there just to be killed off, you know? And that can feel manipulative, or something about the death, right, is there to just maximize and try to make the audience cry as much as possible. Generally, we don’t want to do that. People have definitely noticed on TV shows where we take a B-cast member and then suddenly we dump their backstory and then we kill them off.
Oren: Yeah, super goofy.
Chris: Just so that we can feel something when they die. So, the construction of the story with the character who dies has to feel natural and not like it’s designed just to manipulate emotions. I mean, you could have things other than characters dying. For instance, Legendborn, I think, has a good low point where the main character has been doing the whole plot just to find out what happened to her mother, because her mother’s dead. And after infiltrating this secret society and everything,, she finally gets to their files on her mother and just finds out it’s just what it looked. Her like: her mother died in a, in a car accident.
Oren: Yeah, that’s rough.
Chris: And a factor in this is that she is still grieving the death of her mother, and that helps her reaction feel more natural. But she reacts to that, so nobody had to die there. It just has to be something that we’ve set up that the character has some kind of attachment to, or something that’s really important to them.
For instance, maybe they spent the whole story believing that they could go back home again and then they find out that’s never going to happen. But we’ve seen how emotionally invested they are in that thing. And, and then ideally also, you want the audience to feel it with the character to a certain extent. Generally, the goal is to have the audience feel sad with them, but not so much that the audience gets upset [laughs] and doesn’t want to read anymore, which is one of the liabilities of low points, I should mention. We haven’t gone over liabilities yet, but one of the liabilities of low points is often they are caused by something bad happening in the story, and whenever you have that dark content, that is a place where readers are more likely to get alienated. So, for example, if you were to take a character that is people’s favorite character, their precious, precious cinnamon roll character and kill that character, audiences would be really angry with you, the writer.
Oren: They’re not going to like that.
Chris: Right, so we’re looking for something where we can feel it with the character, we can kind of feel the loss with them a little bit, but we, as the readers, weren’t super invested in the thing that’s being taken away. So, we can build up this home the hero’s trying to get back to, make us understand what’s so great about it, make us understand what the hero loses by not being there, maybe some family are there, and the hero’s thinking about those relationships, or something that, so that we’re a little sad with the hero when it’s lost.
And then you would have the hero react, but, again, it’s not about how extreme the loss is and how extreme we make it. We just want the character to realistically react that way, and also readers to feel it on the right level, and a lot of that is going to depend on how invested we get readers in the thing that’s taken away, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be an upsetting death.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, that definitely helps with the second one, which was about the because not being exaggerated. What about for the reaction matching what’s happening? What’s the way to do that?
Chris: Well, I think that having the emotional reactions at the right level is just something that many writers have to practice and get better at in general.
Oren: Ick, practice? I hate it.
Chris: We’ve now encountered both writers who have a problem with melodrama, where the emotions are too much everywhere and we’re making what seems like a normal everyday scene into something that is a crisis, which is too much, or writers who go around making things that should be exciting or engaging feel they’re kind of shrug-worthy, like, “Oh, this is just another day. It’s just another moment in my life.” And they just don’t have enough emotion in there, and for some people, they have to get that balance right. But usually, if we’re talking about exactly how do I configure the hero’s reaction, I mean … But I will say there are some behaviors that are really over the top and you should almost never use, like howling.
Oren: [laughing] Yeah, they probably shouldn’t howl.
Chris: Probably shouldn’t be howling. Moaning doesn’t often have exactly the right connotation.
Oren: Nah.
Chris: [laughing] So, if you’re thinking, “Oh no, this is a super tragic moment, how does my hero react?” It’s not like screaming and flailing, you know.
Oren: Only use “shrieking” if you want the image to be grating. And maybe you do, people ugly cry, sometimes the reaction to grief is ugly, but just be aware that is the connotation you’re giving if your character is shrieking about something. It’s just a very unpleasant implication.
Chris: Yeah, and women don’t shriek all the time, just in case anybody, or scream.
Oren: Yeah, who is shrieking also matters.
Chris: I mean, screaming is just an interesting thing. We could talk a lot more about screaming, but it’s probably not the type of emotion we’re talking about in this. So, getting that right, you know, when somebody dies, you can think, in your life, when’s the last time that somebody who was important to you died? You know, you probably cried. You probably didn’t howl.
Oren: Probably not.
Chris: Sometimes just anchoring it to, “What is a similar thing that’s happened in my life? What was my reaction to that?” That can help you get a baseline for what is realistic for people reacting. But I also think there’s just a level of … people have to learn to add more emotion or take emotion away sometimes, too.
Oren: Shall we talk about the downsides more? Because you mentioned one, which was that your readers might hate you.
Chris: [chuckling] Yeah. Readers might hate you, so anytime we’re doing something that is, something bad happens in the story, which again, usually precedes a low point. So, we have that this something could be upsetting. Another thing that can happen is frustration, and frustration happens when readers are screaming at the main character to not do that and they do it anyway. Or can you just get up and do something? And this happens because readers are actually very invested in the story, which is good. It’s just like somebody looking at a sports game and being, “Just pass the ball. Just pass it!” [both laughing]
I’m not actually a sports person, but I’m pretty sure sports fans do that. So, if we have the hero make a mistake, and the audience is really invested in this arc going well and they can see that the hero’s choice is going to lead to bad things, and the hero does it anyway, they can get very, very frustrated. It will make them like the hero less. It will make them enjoy the story less, and that can be a tricky one. Sometimes, if you have a character arc and you want your hero to do something wrong, you know, the best you can do is try to make the thing that the hero did wrong, or, one option, is to make it a little bit milder. Sometimes we, people, do things that are only a little wrong, but then it causes much bigger consequences. Right? So that’s a common thing you would do. Oops, I forgot to lock the door, or I forgot to close the gate, but then the animals got out and that led to tragedy.
Oren: Right. For example, I copied an order for an unjust execution and therefore I am responsible for that execution happening, and everyone can, you know, dump on me for the whole story. [Chris laughing]
Chris: No.
Oren: Thank you, Raven Scholar.
Chris: So, you can try to make it milder and then give it outsized consequences, or you can just try to make it more understandable. So, if the audience better understands the character and why the character made this choice and sympathizes with them that also makes it easier.
Or maybe they don’t know it’s a mistake. Maybe they’re like, “Oh, that seems the right thing to do.” Then, of course, you need to make it believable that it wasn’t and not just contrived. Based on information the character didn’t know and couldn’t predict, this is arbitrarily the wrong thing to do.
Oren: Right. It’s like, “Oh, obviously I need to cross the river to go put out that fire.” And so then, “Oh, I should’ve known that today was going to be the day the bridge collapsed. All of it’s my fault,” you know? That sort of thing.
Chris: But we don’t always want the hero to be super at fault. Sometimes, that could be an important part of a low point, that the hero has self-blame or legitimately did something wrong and has to learn from it. But depending on your low point, it may be just that the hero has an issue where they don’t feel they can do anything right and they are blaming themself for things that are not their fault.
You can have situations where you want a low point that’s not super blame-worthy for the protagonist, too. That can happen. And so, something where, “Oh, I took a little bit of a risk and it turned out bad for me, but it could have turned out well and it was still the right decision, but now I hate myself for it.” That could be a situation that you would have and that would certainly be less frustrating for readers because when they saw the hero make that decision, it was a reasonable decision to make.
And then the other one, the other big one we see with these low points a lot, despite the fact that they are often used to create tension, they also destroy tension.
Oren: Oh?
Chris: Yes.
Oren: Do tell.
Chris: Because tension relies on hope.
Oren: Rebellions are also built on hope!
Chris: [both laughing] So, tension is like a motivating emotion. It motivates us to do something, like, turn the page for instance. And so, it feels like, A., the thing is simple and we don’t really need to put in any effort to do anything, then that has no tension, and not motivating. But also, if it feels like anything we do is pointless and nothing’s going to make a difference, that is also not motivating and that also kills tension.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: So, generally when we have an All is Lost moment, that’s kind of, by definition, not tense. The tension will recover later after the hero finds a new path to success, regardless of how tenuous it is, and that’s the point where we can get more tension out of it, but not in the moment itself of despair itself. Also, a lot of times, heroes have given up and so they’re not doing anything, which is not particularly interesting. So, that’s the kind of thing where it’s important not to make these last too long.
Oren: Yeah. It also occurs to me that you can preempt the problem of it seeming like the conflict is now impossible to win by having the low point be caused by something more personal. Like, again, we keep going back to a friend dying, surely it could be something else, but a friend dying doesn’t necessarily mean it’s impossible to defeat the Big Bad. And at that point, the hero giving in to despair can actually generate its own tension because, well, if they give in to despair, we’re definitely not beating the Big Bad.
Chris: Right. Or if the hero, for instance, was doing this in hopes of finding a way home that has been taken away, but there’s still a Big Bad to defeat.
Oren: Right. Exactly.
Chris: But now the hero’s, like, curled up in a ball, you could do something that’s like that. If it’s not your throughline, where all hope is lost, if it’s some other arc, then you could still have tension. But in some cases, just keep in mind that there won’t be tension in an arc where there is no hope. You can have a scene where your hero deals with their despair, but if it lasts much longer, it is going to get old. Legendborn has a nice little montage. Where with Bree, the main character, it realistically would take her some days to recover from this, but we’re going to just kind of flashforward through the story, flashforward through those days in a very montage-like manner, and I thought it worked well.
Oren: Yeah, we don’t gotta deal with this. She does, but not us.
Chris: [both laughing] She’s going to take days, let’s not take days reading this.
Oren: I do have one final question which fits since we’re coming up on the end of the episode. Do we feel like the post-climax low points are filling a different role than what we’ve been talking about? Like when I mentioned how in The Wrath of Khan, when Kirk feels really awful because he finds that Spock has died, or in Empire Strikes Back when Luke has lost to Vader and is hanging out from the end of this dangly bit below Cloud City, those, colloquially, you could call those low points, but they might be doing something else because the main action of the story is already over at that point.
Chris: Yeah, I mean those are tragic resolutions. So, that’s if the arc, when the throughline ends badly, is generally what those are. And so that’s… I mean, you could call it a low point, I suppose, but generally what often happens when you have a story that just has an unhappy ending instead of a happy ending, like the hero fails, is oftentimes storytellers to lift the mood a little bit at the end by adding a little bit of hope. A little bit of hope or just something positive at the end.
And so that may look pretty similar to a low point and coming out of a low point, especially if it’s, you know, like with The Empire Strikes Back, well, it’s in the middle of a trilogy, so in the whole story there is three movies. So, what’s… I mean, stories are fractal. What’s the difference? There may not really be much difference there. And even in the middle of the story, a low point typically happens when the hero fails an arc of some kind. So, I guess when you think about it, it’s kind of the same thing, just at different scales.
Oren: All right. Well, that answered my question. And I think with that we can go ahead and end the podcast.
Chris: You can help us out of our low point by becoming a patron. It does really make our day when we see a new person has decided to support us. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Alternatively, if you are a porn company, sue an AI company near you. That will also make us feel better.
Before we go, I want to 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’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We shall talk to you next week.
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