Show Notes

• The Empire of Silence 





• The Name of the Wind





• Aristotle’s Poetics 





• Tension





• Throughline 





• Horace’s Writing Advice 





• The Wheel of Time 





• Temeraire





• Magic Schools 





• Crusader Kings 





• The Mysteries of Udolfo 





• Daisy Chain Plotting





• World War Z





• Discworld

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris …

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Wait, wait a second. Something isn’t right here. My schedule says we’re recording for only a half an hour. And where is Mike?

Oren: You know, we should probably tell the entire story of how Mike used to be on this podcast. And then Wes used to be on the podcast. And then Bunny was on the podcast, who we hope will be on the podcast again. And how much time do you have? ‘Cause that’s gonna take like, ten hours.

Chris: Whoa! Who are those people? And we’re on episode 558?! What happened? I swear it was just yesterday that we were on episode 50. That’s not right.

Oren: This is a simpler time. Back when we recorded hour long podcasts.

Chris: Oh no. It’s like we started a podcast and then jumped forward until we were seasoned podcasters with one of the oldest podcasts still going ’cause we’re too stubborn to stop.

Oren: That’s a weird thing to think about. This podcast is so old.

Chris: This podcast is so old. I mean, I don’t know what the oldest podcast is. But at the same time, we are definitely up there in oldest podcasts. We have to be.

Oren: We’re definitely older than any of the podcasts I listen to.

Chris: Mm-hmm. So any case. We’re gonna be talking about long stretches of time and covering them in stories. And in podcasts apparently.

Oren: And in podcasts. See, ’cause I—surprising everyone I’m sure—have a bone to pick about this.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Oren: Because I’m reading a book called The Empire of Silence, which is trying to do Name of the Wind, but as sci-fi.

Chris: Why!

Oren: And it’s so boring. I don’t get it.

Chris: That’s interesting. What essential parts of Name of the Wind is it trying to transfer to the sci-fi context? ‘Cause, I don’t know. I get the feeling that the setting is what makes Name of the Wind. Or at least the atmosphere. So what is the point?

Oren: So the essential Name of the Wind-ness that it is using is the idea of a super famous guy who did something bad telling you his memoir.

Chris: Okay.

Oren: Something that you don’t know what it was. It’s implied to be bad, but also cool. But The Name of the Wind series is called The King Killer Chronicle. So presumably he killed a king. We’ll never know now, but we’ll never know because we’ll never do the third book. Yeah. I forget what this series is called. I don’t remember if it’s called “The Emperor Murderer Series” or whatever, but it’s that premise. And like, Name of the Wind feels like it is just trying to tell us the entire life story of this character.

Chris: Aristotle says, don’t do that.

Oren: He says not to. And we have strayed from his ancient wisdom!

Chris: [laughter]

Oren: We are off the path. Aristotle, come back.

Chris: We’ve known that’s a bad idea for a really long time,

Oren: And I’ve noticed that when books try to do this, it’s always really boring and I’m not sure if that’s a requirement? In theory, my head tells me that what you should be able to do is just be like, okay, well we’re telling this part of his life. This is gonna be a little episode. And then that’s gonna be done, and then we’re gonna skip forward. And then we’ll have another little episode. And in theory, those could work independently and not be boring, but they always are.

Chris: Right. I mean, you can have an actual tension arc—and I can talk more about the difficulties and how to make it work. An actual tension arc that lasts through somebody’s whole life or longer.

Oren: Right.

Chris: You can do that. But I think the issue with this kind of Name of the Wind thing is that it’s being done instead of an actual throughline, often.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Or, okay. Does this “Space Name of the Wind” open with something equivalent to the giant demon spider threat that’s actually more interesting than the backstory only to abandon it?

Oren: No, it doesn’t. It’s actually worse in that respect, because it doesn’t have an interesting framing device that it abandons. It starts you right in the memoir with a little aside to tell you this is a memoir being dictated by somebody who did something bad. Both of them go through like, all right, this is his childhood. Now he’s a street urchin ’cause something bad happened. And it’s not exactly the same.

I wouldn’t say this book is copying or plagiarizing Name of the Wind. It’s just clearly heavily inspired by it. But both books have the problem of, there’s not really any tension. We’re just sort of watching things happen. There are maybe one or two moments where something might be tense, but mostly we’re just being told what this guy did for long periods of time. It’s almost all summary.

Chris: Look! Look, folks. Horace says that you should not start your story when Helen of Troy hatches from an egg. That’s just too early.

Oren: [laughing] Just don’t. If you won’t believe Aristotle, surely you’ll listen to Horace. Our good friend, Horace.

Chris: Anyway, but no. It is interesting that they talked about these things so long ago. I think when in Aristotle’s case, there must have been playwrights at the time we were trying to do that, and I do wonder if mythology had an effect on that. Mythology has a lot of origin stories.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: And so people, instead of actually having a cohesive plot—if people were trying to be like, “Here, all I have to do is just cover one person’s life or one hero’s deeds, and then automatically we have a plot.” And Aristotle’s like, “No, you need the ‘unity of an action,’” is what he called it.

But I don’t see any reason why it has to be that way. I think in this case, the starting forward in time, it’s like using a flash forward as a hook.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: To try to make up for the fact that starting with just like, okay, well the hero was born and then started to grow up, is just dull.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Which is why before adding a flash forward to your beginning or any other little tr