Episode 55: Transcript

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and everything else. I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science journalist who writes a lot of science fiction.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:11] I’m Charlie Jane Anders. I’m a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science.

Annalee: [00:00:17] And in this episode, we’re going to talk about how to write a plot. We had a previous episode where we talked about worldbuilding in your storytelling, and we’re going to continue with that trend of giving out storytelling advice whether you are an amateur writer, video game developer, you’re a painter. Whatever you’re doing. If you’re just trying to create the plot of your life. We’re going to talk about what a plot is and how they get to be so tangled. And how you can keep that plot going so that people are excited and it doesn’t get completely out of your control.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:50] Unless you want it to.

Annalee: [00:00:52] Unless you want it to. All right. Here’s the show.

[00:00:54] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:01:21] So one of the things about the word “plot” is that it has a lot of meanings in English, and I actually love the fact that, first of all, a plot can be a nefarious conspiracy to do something criminal or underhanded. Plot can also mean, literally just drawing a direction on a map. So, plotting a course. And then, of course, it also means what we’re talking about in literature and storytelling in general which is basically the fundamental structure of a story. The events that take place. But I think that it’s useful to have those other two definitions in mind, about the secret conspiracy and the map because that’s kind of what a plot is in a lot of ways. It’s you as the storyteller secretly creating a map and leading your audience through it.

[00:02:10] It’s a complicated thing. It’s very hard. And how do you define plot, Charlie Jane?

Charlie Jane: [00:02:16] I mean, this is something I’ve obsessed a lot about, partly because plots did not come naturally to me. I had a really hard time learning to do plots as a writer. To me, a plot is kind of the bones of the story, plain and simple. It’s like, the story is this conflict, this thing that happens. These people are dealing with something and it changes them and hopefully we feel transformed by watching them change by what they go through. And the plot is the series of events that allows that to happen, and it’s the thing that creates a conflict that they have to resolve.

[00:02:50] And I feel like oftentimes a plot is just sort of there to give the characters something to do. And you see lots and lots of examples in pop culture of things where the plot is very basic and very aggressively simple in order to just provide the characters with an excuse to go some place and do stuff. Like there’s the quest plot, where it’s like we’ve got to find this thing before the bad guys find this thing. Which is everything from like, Raiders of the Lost Ark to the most recent Star Wars movie where they’re looking for the Sith artifact or whatever.

[00:03:21] There’s a Macguffin, there’s something that we’re searching for. You know, there’s lots of basic plots that just allow you to have people go from location to location trying to solve a mystery or find a thing. And that’s a perfectly serviceable plot. But oftentimes, the plot, a good plot, is one that has some meaning to the characters and that actually changes over the course of the story and your understanding of the plot and what’s at stake and what’s going on changes over the story.

[00:03:49] And I think a good plot is almost sort of a shapeshifter in a way in that your understanding of it kind of expands and grows and mutates over the course of the events.

Annalee: [00:03:58] I wanted to talk about what you were saying about simple plots because I do think that we tend to lump plots into simple and complex, which is obviously an oversimplification and we’ll get to different kinds of plots in a minute. You already mentioned the mystery plot and stuff like that. One of the movies that always comes up for me when I think about a simple plot is the original Alien film from the late 1970s, which as many critics even at the time said, was basically a kind of murder mystery.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:30] Mm-hmm. Or it’s a slasher.

Annalee: [00:04:32] It’s a slasher which was a genre that was really just coming into vogue at that time. But it’s also a mystery. It also has, like, who’s killing the people, so it’s like a slasher but also trying to figure it out. I guess slashers always have that element of murder mystery but it’s much more intimate because you’re hanging out with the killer instead of the detective.

[00:04:53] Like I said, the plot of Alien. It’s quite simple. They pick up an alien. It kills them all, and one of them survives. And that’s it. That’s the whole plot. There’s nothing else to it. However, it’s actually, I think, an example of one of these morphing plots that you were talking about. As I said, it starts out really simple where literally you’re just scared as hell watching this alien stalk everyone. But over the course of the narrative, you realize that actually the corporation that owns the ship, Weyland-Yutani, is kind of the bad guy in a weird way because over time we learn more and more about how it isn’t just that it’s an alien on a ship with a bunch of truck drivers. It’s actually this corporation trying to retrieve this life form and treating the humans as expendable in order to get their potentially lucrative object.

[00:05:49] Even though the plot itself doesn’t ever really change, the information that we have about the characters and the stakes change enough that it doesn’t feel like, when you’re done with the movie Alien, that you’ve just watched something that was like, oh, a bunch of people got killed and it was really gross and the end.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:07] Yeah, and I think that the deceptively simple plot, which is kind of what you’re talking about is the kind of plot that can be incredibly satisfying. And another movie from around that same time, I guess a few years later that I think about a lot is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Annalee: [00:06:21] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:21] Which is a movie that’s basically just—it’s got the simplest plot in the world. This dude Khan really wants to kill Captain Kirk but kind of wants to fuck him up first and that’s his whole thing. That’s his whole motivation. He’s mad at Captain Kirk.

Annalee: [00:06:36] Just revenge.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:35] He wants to take him down. But because they get entangled in this thing about the Genesis device, which is this terraforming engine that could be turned into a weapon of mass destruction in the wrong hands, but also has all these implications for creating life and the human ability to transform our surroundings and transform the natural world. It becomes complex by virtue of all this stuff that’s just kind of layered on top of it. And then in it the end, the Genesis device becomes kind of the central Macguffin that Khan gets his hands on and Kirk is trying to get it from Khan and then it’s used as a weapon. Sorry. Spoilers for like a 40-year-old movie at this point.

Annalee: [00:07:16] Yeah, when we’re talking about plot, spoilers actually are a big part of plots in a way.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:21] Yeah. You know. Oftentimes the reason people get so upset about spoilers is because the idea that if you know the plot of something, you’re not going to have that same kind of emotional reaction. You’re not going to be as—have that same visceral reaction, which is something Annalee and I are not spoiler avoiders most of the time. We mostly do enjoy knowing the plots of things before we go into them. But a lot of people feel like if you know what happens, that’s kind of the whole ball game.

[00:07:51] To me, what happens, this is the endless spoiler debate and it is actually illuminating for the question of what is plot. There are two sides to this debate. One side is what’s important is what happens. And the other side is what’s important is how it happens.

Annalee: [00:08:05] Exactly.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:05] And basically, one is making the plot kind of the ball game and kind of the central idea of the story. And the other is making it almost kind of incidental. I think the fact that I’m not a spoilerphobe jibes really well with the fact that I also consider plot to be kind of a thing that allows the story to happen rather than the story, kind of.

Annalee: [00:08:26] I really agree. I think that for me, when I think back on stories that have really moved me and been profound or have just been really fun. Usually it’s stuff about the characters, it’s elements of worldbuilding. It’s scenes. A moment where the characters do something and maybe that’s related to the plot. Maybe that’s related to a detail of the universe they are in. I rarely come away from a story and say like, wow! That plot! It was really the plot that satisfied me there. And as you were saying, I’m one of those people who, I will almost always, once I’m about a quarter of the way into the book, I often find myself going and reading the last page just to find out what’s going to happen. Just because then I enjoy it more. Because then I’m not sitting there reading it just to get to the end. I’m like, actually enjoying the character and the telling of it as opposed to, do they die? Do they end up together? Who gets to have the corn flakes at the end?

Charlie Jane: [00:09:25] I mean, I kind of actually disagree a little bit because to me a big part of the thrill of reading, and actually the thrill of writing as well, is figuring out what happens next. Finding out what happens next. When is this character going to find out this secret that this other character has. Are these two characters going to get together. Is this character ever going to achieve this goal that I desperately want them to achieve? I was recovering from surgery a year or two ago and I was binging The Flash, this superhero TV show, and I got really caught up in is he finally going to fucking take down Professor Zoom. Professor Zoom is so shitty, and I wish he would just fucking take that guy out. It’s like, every episode, he almost gets him and then, no! He didn’t get Professor Zoom yet. And when is he going to fucking do it? I know he’s not going to do it until the season finale, but I get really caught up in the fight to take down Professor Zoom.

[00:10:18] And it’s interesting because I used to obsessively read murder mysteries, when I was in college and after college. I read hundreds and hundreds of murder mysteries and noir detective novels. And those are often the best murder mysteries, are often a case where the plot is deceptively simple. Like, you have a thing where Philip Marlowe, or Lord Peter Wimsey or Spenser or whoever is investigating a murder or something bad has happened and they have to solve one question. They have to find out who did this thing. But then in the course of their investigation, they uncover all these other secrets and all these other things. 

[00:10:58] And Ross MacDonald often has this thing where there was something that happened right after World War II where a bunch of people changed their names or decided to cover something up, and there’s other kind of big mysteries and secrets that are bundled up, that become part of the solution of figuring out this one question of this one crime that just happened. 

[00:11:21] Often that’s the thing that makes it interesting is uncovering the past or discovering that things are not what they appeared to be or people have been hiding a secret for a long time. And that’s often part of the thrill of detective novels. It’s not exactly the plot in the sense of, the linear thing of we have a question, we get the answer to the question. Or there’s a surprise in the end, or whatever and the answer is not what we thought it was going to be. The killer is not who we thought it was going to be. But often the complexity of the incidental stuff that gets dug up in the course of investigating.

Annalee: [00:11:55] Well, it’s like what I was saying about—

Charlie Jane: [00:11:56] You kick a bunch of anthills, yeah.

Annalee: [00:11:58] It’s like what I was saying about Alien where you think it’s just kind of a slasher mystery and then it actually winds up being this corporate conspiracy and this plot against the working class and a lot of other stuff that’s going on in the story, too.

[00:12:12] I want to turn to complicated plots for a minute before we go back to spoilers. Because I think we’re going to talk about spoilers a little bit later, too. But there’s a lot of ways that a plot can be super complex. There’s things like in the movie Inception, or the TV series, Sense 8 which we talked about in a previous episode, the Wachowski sisters’ amazing show.

[00:12:34] And then there’s things like Vampire Diaries, which—

Charlie Jane: [00:12:35] Vampire Diaries, oh my God.

Annalee: [00:12:37] —you and I mainlined many many seasons of and is one of the delights. So Vampire Diaries has a complicated plot because literally every episode when the show was kind of in its golden time. Nine million things would happen.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:52] Just twist upon twist upon twist upon twist and it was insane. And if you tried to diagram the plot of all of Vampire Diaries you’d basically have a giant illegible squiggle of a million lines going everywhere because there were so many stories and so many characters in every episode.

Annalee: [00:13:11] So many notecards stuck to walls in that writers’ room.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:13] Oh my God, I can’t even imagine what it must have been like in that writers’ room because must have just been… I mean, there must have been people whose entire job it was to keep track of the continuity because they would actually reflect on this thing happened two years ago and now there’s some new fallout from this even that everybody forgot about where Damon tried to kill Elena’s brother for like the fifth time and then she forgave him again. And it’s just like, you know.

Annalee: [00:13:37] Or like, whatever. One of Elena’s multiple dopplegangers. Tropplegangers.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:44] There were so many dopplegangers. I loved that show so much. I mean, I think that a lot of complexity in plotting. I’m going to turn on its head what we said before about the deceptively simple plot. I think there’s also such a thing as the deceptively complex plot.

Annalee: [00:13:58] I agree, yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:00] And a lot of, if you think about it, a lot of plotting is ornamentation. It’s rococo. It’s just lots and lots of extra little curlicues and little scribbles and little things that ultimately end up kind of coming out in the wash if you—they end up kind of being resolved in their own way and may be urgent and exciting and interesting for a minute and then they go away. A lot of times when you have a plot that’s that complex, it’s often just there’s extra characters doing extra stuff. There’s extra subplots, which we could talk about subplots for an hour. There’s extra ramifications that different characters are dealing with but the main plot is still very simple. The main plot of Vampire Diaries is it’s a love triangle between these two dudes and this one chick and she has to choose between them and she keeps changing her mind and that’s the entire plot, basically.

Annalee: [00:14:53] Yeah. But in that, there’s, as we were saying, there’s multiple versions of her. There’s also, in a sense, multiple versions of both her vampire boyfriends because they have each been through periods when they were nice, and then they were bad, and then they were nice again, and then they were nice in a new way and bad in another way. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:13] Plus, Stefan had a doppleganger, you know.

Annalee: [00:15:16] Oh my God, I forgot about that. Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:17] Silas. Don’t forget Silas [crosstalk]

Annalee: [00:15:20] And at a certain point there’s the next generation of vampire werewolves, and—

Charlie Jane: [00:15:25] The hybrids!

Annalee: [00:15:26] The hybrids, and then of course there were spinoffs which were further embroidering on this plot. But I want to get back to what you were saying about the curlicues of the plot and how the plot becomes kind of, just sort of busy, but ultimately is really simple. And I’m wondering if in something like Vampire Diaries… do we actually have a situation where the plot is super complex but the characters basically stay the same?

Charlie Jane: [00:15:53] I mean, yeah. I think that that’s most media. If you look at most superhero stories, most 99% of comics, like, superhero comics, it’s like, what they used to refer to as the illusion of change. The illusion of change was very important in Marvel comics in the 1960s when Stan Lee and those guys were writing them. It was this idea that you would have huge upheavals and everything would be like, oh my God, after this issue nothing is ever going to be the same again.

Annalee: [00:16:21] Mm-hmm. Crisis on Infinite Earths, which I realize was not in the ‘60s, but yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:24] You know? Every comic. It’s the mainstay of superhero comics, I think until, actually Crisis on Infinite Earths is actually the end of that because it’s the first time that comics creators really decide that they’re going to to try to have one continuity and it’s going to be cohesive. Marvel comics had a cohesive continuity since the early ‘60s, but again, things would change drastically and then change back. Like, Spider-Man would have four extra arms for an issue.

Annalee: [00:16:51] Or he was a clone.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:52] He was a clone for a while. There was a run in the Incredible Hulk where Betty, the Incredible Hulk’s girlfriend gets turned to glass and if anybody touches her, she’ll shatter, and like—

Annalee: [00:17:01] Well, and the Hulk also changes, there’s he gray Hulk—

Charlie Jane: [00:17:03] The Hulk is gray, he’s—

Annalee: [00:17:04] —red Hulk. He goes through therapy, there’s a lot of—

Charlie Jane: [00:17:08] There’s a lot of the Hulk going through therapy. It’s kind of amazing.

Annalee: [00:17:10] Which I under—it’s very relatable as a Hulk who went through therapy.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:17] I think that we’re all Hulks who went through therapy.

Annalee: [00:17:19] Yeah, so let’s talk about Sense 8, which was a very complicated plot. It was a television series that was two seasons on Netflix, where, like I said, we had a previous episode about it but basically it’s about kind of a hive mind coming together so it has a ton of different characters all of whom are sort of learning about each other and developing—

Charlie Jane: [00:17:38] They’re scattered all over the planet.

Annalee: [00:17:39] Right. And so, it’s a complicated narrative but also it moves backward and forward in time. Sometimes the characters aren’t sure what’s real because they’re inside of each others’ heads. There’s a conspiracy or maybe two conspiracies and a conspiracy within a conspiracy swaddled in darkness kind of thing. Does that feel different to you from what’s happening in Vampire Diaries where it’s the sort of more rococo kind of plot embroidery?

Charlie Jane: [00:18:08] I mean, it does and it doesn’t. I mean, the central plot of Sense 8 is basically that there are these new post-human people who are as you said, linked, and kind of in a hive mind. And there are people who are after them and trying to kill them. There’s like an evil organization and that’s the plot.

Annalee: [00:18:24] Right. So it’s almost like a chase narrative.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:27] Yeah. And if you think about it, Sense 8 is a perfect example of the complexity comes from the fact that there are all these different characters and they’re scattered geographically and they are each dealing with their own personal challenges and their own issues and there’s like… German gangster guy’s problems are different from African bus driver guy’s problems.

Annalee: [00:18:47] Yeah, and Mexican gay movie star—

Charlie Jane: [00:18:49] Lito.

Annalee: [00:18:50] And then there’s an Icelandic DJ and—

Charlie Jane: [00:18:54] She was too emo for me.

Annalee: [00:18:55] An Indian woman who’s in an arranged marriage, which is kind of an awesome marriage but maybe not.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:02] Yeah, another example that comes to mind is Game of Thrones in the George R.R. Martin books, the Song of Ice and Fire books, where again, the plot is very simple. There’s ice zombies and they’re going to invade and we have to all get our shit together if we’re going to stop the ice zombies, but people are having all these squabbles over power. That’s the plot. But you have a million characters, they’re scattered all over the place. They’re all dealing with their own shit. There’s all this complicated dynastic succession stuff happening. There’s wars. There’s people stabbing each other at weddings. There’s pies full of death birds. I don’t know.

[00:19:35] There’s all this shit going on but it’s all incidental to the main plot, and it’s all just kind of like curlicues in the end. And George R.R. Martin, I think, part of how those books have become more difficult for him to finish, if I can speculate, is that he has so many of these subplots to finish up and kind of bring together into some kind of main narrative. But they’re all just subplots. They’re not the plot.

Annalee: [00:19:58] All right, so we’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’re going to talk about why plots are just so hard to write.

[00:20:05] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Annalee: [00:20:16] I think plots are the hardest part of writing and I spend a lot of time trying to structure plots in my fiction and my nonfiction, and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you build plots in your fiction, Charlie?

Charlie Jane: [00:20:32] Yeah, I mean, how I build plots has changed over time. I think that it’s something that I’ve struggled with a lot as I’ve said before. And it’s often something that I kind of think about as I go because I know that I have these characters. I know that I have this setting, and I know that there’s stuff that I want to have happen, but the plot is something that kind of has to feel like it’s at the center of it but also it’s weirdly both urgent and incidental. And part of what I’ve learned about myself as a writer is that at a certain point I just have to commit to some kind of plot device. Like, there’s a doomsday weapon that we’re all looking for. We’re trying to escape from a thing. The plot can be just anything that you need that keeps the characters in the story.

[00:21:18] And it can be… In All the Birds in the Sky I have a plot that’s kind of all over the place but it comes together as this war between science and magic but it’s kind of deliberately diffuse and opaque for a lot of the book and that’s really hard to do.

Annalee: [00:21:33] Do you really think… not to challenge you on your own writing here, but I don’t think the war between science and magic is the plot of All the Birds in the Sky. I think that’s a theme.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:41] I think that’s the—

Annalee: [00:21:41] I think the plot is that there’s a doomsday device.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:44] Huh. I mean, I think that that’s interesting. I think that, to my mind…

Annalee: [00:21:48] There’s no moment when magicians and scientists are fighting each other, that’s not the point.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:52] There is. That’s the the whole final third of the book.

Annalee: [00:21:55] I mean, but thematically. Not like, there’s no moment where there’s swords versus computers or something.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:03] They build a giant mecha and attack the wizards in the mission at the end of the book.

Annalee: [00:22:07] I don’t know.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:08] I don’t know, I just gave the ending of my own book. I don’t know.

Annalee: [00:22:11] Spoilers, Charlie Jane!

Charlie Jane: [00:22:14] I don’t know. It’s been a while since I read that book, so I don’t know.

Annalee: [00:22:16] Same here.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:19] It’s really hazy.

Annalee: [00:22:19] It’s funny, though, because that is how I remembered it as being it’s a doomsday device. And I thought the theme was science versus magic, but yeah, I mean that’s part of the plot too, of course.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:28] I mean…

Annalee: [00:22:29] Yeah, and that’s how themes and plots get all intertwingled.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:31] All the Birds in the Sky, fundamentally is a relationship story and it’s really just about the relationship between Patricia and Laurence and that’s the thing that I was interested in and trying to explore in that book. But I needed plot devices, and it’s actually a book that’s full of plot devices, including the doomsday device you mentioned and the Caddies, these little iPad things that are actually sentient and, again another spoiler, sorry. I’m just spoiling the shit out of my own book today.

Annalee: [00:22:58] Well, we’re talking about plot. I mean, that’s what’s interesting about plot is that it’s hard to talk about because of these spoilers. It’s like, a part of narrative that we have all these taboos around. I hadn’t actually realized that until we started talking about plot.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:13] It’s really true. I think that there are two challenges in writing plot, basically. The first is just committing to a thing and just being like, okay. This is the thing I’m going to commit to. I’ve seen X, Y, and Z done a million times. I’ve seen a million road movies. I’ve seen a million quest narratives. I’ve seen a million portal fantasies. I’ve seen a million, whatever it is. I’m going to commit to it and I’m going to, you know, if you’re lucky, that’s the story idea that comes into your head originally. I often will start with a story idea like, what if there was a witch and a mad scientist and they were friends and I just follow that up. Or in my young adult novel coming out next year, what if there’s a teenage girl who finds out that she’s actually the clone/reincarnation of this alien space hero.

[00:24:03] The what if is where the story starts but that’s often not the plot for me. The plot is then, in the case of the alien space hero, it’s like, we have to go on a quest. Or in the case of the witch and the mad scientist, there’s all these other things that they have to deal with over the course of the story that are the plot. So there’s the what—the premise is not the plot, I guess is what I’m saying. That I got to by a round-about method. The premise is often what interests me about the story, but then the plot is the thing that you have to commit to that keeps moving the story forward, that keeps having conflict. It keeps generating conflict for the characters.

[00:24:38] Back when I was first writing short stories, and I was really trying to figure out how to do this, every short story that I wrote would introduce the central conflict in the first sentence. And I still do that a lot, like, my novelette, “Six Months, Three Days,” the first sentence introduces the conflict of the story. There’s a man who can see one single future and a woman who can see many possible futures and they’re going on a date. And that’s like the premise and the kind of the central conflict is just laid out there and we’re ripping the Band-aid off and telling you about it right away.

[00:25:09] So that’s the first thing, is, figuring out a conflict and figuring out the kind of Macguffiny kind of plot mechanics that you are willing to commit to as a thing that you are really going to double down on and put all of your heart and soul into making feel real to yourself and to your characters.

[00:25:24] The second challenge to the plot is always plausibility. And that’s a thing that you have to keep going back and kicking the tires on. You have to keep going back and being like, does this really make sense? Would this happen? Would people actually do this in this situation. I want these characters to go left but in real life wouldn’t they really go right if they were facing a dragon attack. In a dragon attack scenario, what would people actually do? 

[00:25:52] And but okay… quick sidebar. Example of, we were talking about this recently. An example of a story where the premise and the plot are kind of almost… or the premise and a lot of the plot complications are very disconnected is the movie of Children of Men where the premise is that everybody’s infertile and that there’s only one woman left who can have a child. But the plot, a lot of it has to do with xenophobia and fear of immigrants and anti-immigrant bias and the notion that England is kind of turning into this—it’s a prescient story, unfortunately. England is turning into this anti-immigrant dystopia and we have to navigate that. And that’s where a lot of the plot complications come from.

[00:26:33] And then the plot in the end still has to do with this one woman who is the last fertile person, but a lot of the mechanics are built around this anti-immigrant stuff. The plausibility thing is a thing that I deal with a lot by just asking a million questions and being like, okay why. Why is this person doing this thing? What’s really going on here? What’s motivating this person to do this thing that they need to do for all these things to happen? And just kicking the tires and when I find something that’s implausible, bashing my head against the wall until I find a version that actually kind of passes the smell test a little more.

[00:27:08] I had this one urban fantasy novel that I wrote several years ago where in order to make it work I had to diagram the entire novel from the villain’s point of view and be like, okay. At the start of the story, what’s the villain trying to accomplish. All these things then happen. How does the villain respond to them, because a thing that often bothers me in narratives is villains who are incredibly passive until the last minute. Or, villains who are incredibly unstoppable until the last minute and suddenly they start making all these rookie mistakes. Or villains who just, their behavior makes no sense whatsoever. They’re just doing whatever the story requires them to do in the moment. I’m like, okay, this is what the villain knows. This is what the villain thinks is going on. What would the villain logically, or at least semi-logically, based on their motivations, want to do in this scenario. Once you have that then it gets a lot easier.

Annalee: [00:27:56] I love what you’re saying about how plot is where we think most about plausibility. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:05] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:28:05] Because, especially since we’re talking here on this show almost exclusively about speculative fiction, so it’s stuff that’s inherently implausible, basically. It’s either fantasy, so it goes against the laws of physics as we understand them, or it’s science fiction and so it’s set on another world that doesn’t exist as far as we know, or it’s in the future, or some other place that’s implausible or that we’re just fricking making up. But if the plot feels implausible somehow, that kind of throws you out of the story. I mean, I think it’s the plot that must be the place where we sort of solicit the audience to have that moment of suspension of disbelief. It’s really through the plot that you get that.

[00:28:46] I think, I shouldn’t say that that’s exclusively true, because I think that character does a lot of that work, too. If you have a character who’s a super relatable necromancer, it’s fine. If that—necromancers may be something that you’ve never seen before, especially necromancers in space but if that character is a grumpy teenager who reads dirty magazines… I am totally subtweeting Gideon the Ninth, here. You’re immediately there. You’re with the character even though she’s doing all this crazy stuff and flying around with bones in space.

[00:29:19] But I also think that plot is a huge, huge part of that.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:23] This is an area where plot and worldbuilding have a lot in common in that worldbuilding also has to pass the smell test and has to feel plausible.

Annalee: [00:29:30] That’s true, yeah

Charlie Jane: [00:29:30] It’s like, oh, it’s an entire planet of—

Annalee: [00:29:33] Bunnies.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:33] Bunny-people who only walk on their ears. And it’s like, how would that work? Could they actually walk on their ears? What would their ears have to be made of to allow them to walk on their bunny ears? I don’t know.

Annalee: [00:29:43] They have cybernetic ear exoskeletons.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:45] They have exoears. They have bunny exo-ear-skeletons.

Annalee: [00:29:48] I’m loving it.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:49] Anyway. Worldbuilding also has to be plausible, and the other thing that plot and worldbuilding have in common is that your characters have to believe in it. And it’s a thing that your characters can’t ignore. Like the thing I always say about worldbuilding is that you can’t walk through walls. You can’t go up to a policeman and punch a policeman in the face and then just have no consequences. Good worldbuilding feels like that. It feels like something that you can’t just ignore and kind of paper over. And a plot is the same way. If your characters can ignore the plot, if they can just be like, oh, you know what? I’m just going to fucking check out of this plot for the next 200 pages? It’s probably not a good plot.

Annalee: [00:30:23] I mean, and this happens all the time in television. When you have a long-running series and people just check out of a plot. That’s why people will get pissed off where they’re like, wait, that was never resolved. Whatever happened to that character—

Charlie Jane: [00:30:34] Right.

Annalee: [00:30:34] —didn’t he have, like, a weird gun that he was hiding in his cabin, what happened with that?

Charlie Jane: [00:30:40] The fucking weird gun, man.

Annalee: [00:30:42] I mean, it’s like. I’m sure we’ve all had this frustration with shows that we love. And so, I think that—I guess really what we’ve talked ourselves into is saying that plausibility is really built into all of these different aspects of storytelling. So it’s not just plot. I think what’s special about plot is plot is the pathway that your characters take through your—

Charlie Jane: [00:31:00] Yes.

Annalee: [00:31:00] —world. And that’s where the rubber hits the road in terms of plausibility, because that’s where you’re going to run into a wall or punch a policeman or meet a bunny walking on its techno ears. Cybernetically enhanced ears.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:15] Now I really want that world of bunny, or ear-walking bunnies.

Annalee: [00:31:20] Well, there’s always the Grant Morrison comic We Three, which does have a cyberbunny in it, although it has the cyberbunny has a… I don’t want to tell you the plot—

Charlie Jane: [00:31:27] Nooooo.

Annalee: [00:31:27] But just be prepared to cry your face off.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:29] Oh my God, that’s so, oh my God.

Annalee: [00:31:31] That’s such a great comic, oh my God. Okay. Anyway. So, one of the things that I have noticed, because I bounce between writing nonfiction and fiction is that writing nonfiction plots, which of course, any piece of writing has a plot, are a lot harder for me than fictional plots. And that’s saying a lot because my most recent novel, The Future of Another Timeline has a pretty twisty time travel plot and it has a couple of different moments where there’s like, an actual twist. Where something that you think is true turns out to not be true in a couple of different ways and it did take a lot of work to kind of build that plot. 

[00:32:12] But the book that I’ve just finished, it’s called Four Lost Cities and it’s about archaeology and four ancient cities that were abandoned. It’s a work of narrative nonfiction and it was really hard for me to structure it and I’ve been going over the proofs for the past week and have been really reading the book for the fourth time, which is incredibly painful. I’m seeing myself struggling and remembering how much I struggled to make this nonfiction reporting feel like a story.

[00:32:43] And the part that’s hard is that with fiction, I can just make everything in the world be exactly the way I want for the characters to do the thing.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:51] Right.

Annalee: [00:32:52] So it’s like, they walk into a room, and it’s a big room, and it’s well lit and all these things are happening in the room that I want to happen in the room. There’s a candle in the right place. Everything’s set up. There’s gin in the cabinet. But when I’m writing about, say, visiting Pompeii, which I did, and I dragged you along, in fact.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:10] It was lovely.

Annalee: [00:33:10] And I’m walking into a space, I want it to be. I want to tell a story where I walked into the space and there was this revelation and there was this room. And it’s like, unfortunately, what really happened was I walked up to a door. I couldn’t figure out how to get in. I had to knock a bunch of times and yell, and then walk through this weird back alley and that was actually this weird part of this house that I was looking at. This was like an ancient villa that I visited. And so it wasn’t—the reality of the situation, which of course, I have to report as someone who’s trying to tell the truth about what really occurred. The reality of this situation is kind of boring and things don’t unfold the way they do in kind of your imagination or in the way that you would hope. So it’s like the physical world doesn’t match the plot that I want and so a lot of my struggles in that book were around making my physical plot of discovering how these cities worked and why people abandoned them. How to place that plot in an actual physical location of a crumbling, abandoned city full of archaeologists and oftentimes a lot of security guards depending on where you were.

[00:34:25] And so occasionally I would do things where I would have a scene that had originally had two people in it and I would have to break the scene in half and tell the scene one way with one person and then return to that scene and tell it a different way with a different person that was in that scene. So I’m not misrepresenting the scene. You don’t need to know that both people were there. It’s two different archaeologists who I had two different conversations with. But if I were to tell the story of like, oh, I was standing on a street corner in Pompeii, I ran into these two archaeologists. I had one conversation with one, and one with another. That’s the order in which things actually happened, but the things I learned from those two people actually fit into very different parts of the plot of the story that I was telling.

[00:35:12] And so one of them you meet very early in this section of the book and one you meet really late in this section of the book. And it seems like, like I said, two different conversations. Anyway, this is just to say that it’s really frustrating when your job is to report reality but also to tell a good story. And it just reminds you how much that fiction is completely unlike reality and that there’s many things that happen in fiction that either way too convenient or in a lot of cases, way less extreme than what happens in reality. Because there’s things that don’t feel plausible in fiction that have happened in reality. There’s all kinds of crazy shit that went down in reality that it’s really fun to report on, but you would never get away with it in a fiction story. You would never believe that people were behaving the way they did. But indeed, for example, Pompeii really was full of giant statues of dicks.

Charlie Jane: [00:36:10] Right.

Annalee: [00:36:10] And, you can have that happen in a story, for sure, but it takes a lot of setup for that to be meaningful. And it’s like, when you get to Pompeii and you go to the Naples museum and you see a giant basket of dicks… they’re like. They liked to hang little penis chimes in their shops with bells on them. They were little wind chimes that had penises in them. Just for luck, you know. But it’s so weird that it really actually can only exist in nonfiction.

[00:36:41] So anyway, this is just to say that I think that we rarely… I think readers rarely think about nonfiction as having a plot and it always does. And you have to appreciate the artistry that goes into that and molding reality so that it is still accurate and real but also actually fun and plausible and interesting to follow. Because if you wander around in your real life, you may have noticed that it’s not quite as exciting as a novel is.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:14] Yeah, and actually as a journalist. I haven’t written any nonfiction books but I did do a lot of journalism. And there is that thing of, wouldn’t it be so much more fun or interesting if this were true? Or couldn’t we just skip over this part? I mean, I think that part of what you’re talking about in nonfiction where sort of, you have to stick to what really happened and it’s either more complicated or less glamorous or less linear than plotting in fiction. That does eliminate something about fictional plotting, which is that often you can have that layer of the kind of awkward complexity of reality and you can play with it in different ways. 

A lot of fiction, including a lot of speculative fiction, does make a huge effort to try to be realistic and show all of the messy stuff that goes on. But you can also kind of do what you were talking about where you took one encounter in Pompeii and broke it up into two different encounters and play around with point of view and play around with narrative structure and jump around in time. And one of the reasons, I think, that people are so interested in playing around with structure and time and kind of pov in fiction is that you get to kind of explore a series of events in a way that’s not necessarily linear or not necessarily straightforward and that’s one way to take a plot that’s actually kind of fairly straightforward or fairly just kind of goes all over the place and pin it down. And a lot of it has to do with the emotion of it and the point of view, how the characters see it, and what the characters think is important.

[00:38:45] I feel like, oftentimes good plotting is based in character in one way or the other. It comes out of things that the characters doe but also the structure of how events are presented is less concerned with, this happened and then this happened and then there was this other thing, and more like, what do the characters think is important and oftentimes when you get a story that really grips you from the get-go, it’s because the events are being presented in a way that’s tailored to what the character thinks is meaningful about them and how you—how the character’s processing them.

[00:39:21] Two examples that jump to mind that are very random are Veronica Mars, the first episode of Veronica Mars starts with Veronica kind of explaining her life and it’s very jumbled but incredibly urgent because she’s telling you about the stuff that she cares about. And also Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey kind of starts off with her telling her life story, but it’s the events that she thinks are important in her life and are not—but it’s charged with all this emotion. And I think that that often is really powerful, when it’s…

[00:39:51] And you know, the other thing I would say about character and plot is that a good plot twist often comes out of characters deciding to do something or the characters realizing that they’ve been wrong about something. That they’ve made a mistake and I think that that’s often more interesting than just you thought was an apple was actually an orange.

[00:40:13] And I wrote a thing up for io9 once that a good plot twist comes out of the characters realizing something, not the audience realizing something.

Annalee: [00:40:22] What this reveals is that linear time is really confusing—

Charlie Jane: [00:40:24] It is.

Annalee: [00:40:24] And actually not linear at all and if you actually try to tell things in linear time, they make no sense and so narrative… The job of plot is basically to chop up linear time, telescope in, pull out, rearrange—

Charlie Jane: [00:40:39] Yes.

Annalee: [00:40:39] Create something that feels like a story out of this ridiculous, chaotic, overlapping crazy thing that we think of as linear. Which is in fact not linear at all. So that’s where we’re going to leave you today. And you’ve been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. And you can find us everywhere that fine podcasts can be downloaded. Please leave a review for us on Apple Podcasts and other places, because it helps people find us. 

[00:41:10] We also have a Patreon. We would really appreciate your support. You can find us on Patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect. You can follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod, and we would love to thank our amazing, fearless producer, Veronica Simonetti, who is here in person despite the pandemic dangers. And our music is provided by Chris Palmer and we will hear you in two weeks.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:37] Bye!

Annalee: [00:41:37] Bye!

[00:41:37] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.