In this week's episode, we wrap up the November Writing Challenge by taking a look back at the Five Iron Laws Of Storytelling, which have often been discussed on this show before.

Be sure to get your free copy of STORYTELLING: HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL at my Payhip store. The book will remain free until December 9th:

https://payhip.com/b/JPDoT

TRANSCRIPT

Note: Spoiler alert at 3:35. Please check this section of the podcast before proceeding if you are concerned about spoilers for several older television shows, movies, video games, and books.

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 229 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November 26th, 2024, and today we are wrapping up our November Writing Challenge with a look back at The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling. You may note that I am recording this a bit earlier than I usually do, but that is because I want to take a couple days off for Thanksgiving.

To celebrate the end of our November Writing Challenge and to congratulate you all for listening to these shows, I am giving away free copies of my nonfiction book, Storytelling: How to Write a Novel on my Payhip Store. The link will be in the show notes, and if you follow that link, you can get a free copy of Storytelling: How to Write a Novel from my Payhip Store until December 9th. So follow that link in the show notes to my Payhip store and you can get a free copy of Storytelling: How to Write a Novel until December 9th.

Before we get to our main topic, let's have a look at my current writing projects. My main project right now is Orc Hoard, the fourth book in the Rivah Half-Elven series, and that puts me at 55,000 words into it and that puts me on chapter 11 of 18. So I think the final draft will be around 85,000 words or so, which will make it the longest book in the series to date. And if all goes well, I very, very, very much want to have that out before Christmas. I'm also about 4,000 words into Shield of Deception, which will be the fourth book in my Shield War series and if all goes well, I am hoping that will be the first book I publish in 2025.

In audiobook news, the audiobook of Cloak of Spears, as excellent narrated by Hollis McCarthy, is now available at all the usual ebook stores. I will include a short preview of the audiobook of Cloak of Spears at the end of this episode, so you can listen to that then. And that is where I'm at with my current writing projects as we wrap up November and head into December.

00:01:57 Main Topic: The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling

So now let's go right into our main topic, The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling. I figured this would be a good main topic to wrap up our November Writing Challenge with as it is a good reminder and a good summation of many of the things we talked about in the past month. The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling is a concept I first talked about on my website like 10 years ago now. The name Iron Law is sort of a tongue in cheek joke because I got the idea from a science fiction author Jerry Pournelle, who termed what he called Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, where describing that after a certain amount of time, a bureaucracy will cease to attend to the function to which it was created and instead devote its attention to sustaining and perpetuating the bureaucracy.

And I'm sure we can all think of examples of that, so that's where I took the name from, but it's not so much Iron Laws as these are useful principles to guide you while you are writing a fictional story, whether it's a short story, a screenplay, or a novel. I would say it's fair to argue that storytelling does have some laws you can follow (or at least if you don't like the term laws, best practices) and a writer will ignore those best practices to his peril. When people get ticked off about the ending of a story like the ending of The Sopranos or the ending to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, if they simply don't like a novel or a TV show, it’s usually because the writer ignored one of more of these Iron Laws that we're going to talk about. These then are what I believe to be The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling.

When discussing them, I will cite five examples that I think to be excellent examples of the craft of storytelling: the movie the King’s Speech, the movie Wreck-It Ralph, the movie Gravity, the novel Pride and Prejudice, and the TV series Breaking Bad. I should note that I did not personally care for Breaking Bad because it was too nihilistic for my taste, but nonetheless, it was an excellently crafted example of a well-written story. I'll also cite four things I believe to be examples of bad storytelling: the final two volumes of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, the Dragon Age 2 computer game, the original ending of the Mass Effect 3 computer game, and the ending of the Sopranos TV series. So note that there will be spoilers for all of these shows, films, books, and games. Now onto the five laws.

#1: The protagonist must have a problem that results in a conflict because if there is no problem, there is no story. Conflict and problems are engines that drive the story. A happy life with minimal conflicts and problems might be the ideal that we all want in real life, but it does make for an exceedingly dull story. The main character of his story needs to have a problem that results in some kind of conflict. Note that this conflict doesn't necessarily have to have an actual villain, it just needs a problem to solve. The movie The King's Speech doesn't have a villain (though the future and former King Edward VII is kind of a jerk) but instead revolves around George VI’s efforts to deal with his speech impediment. Gravity likewise has no villain but centers around Dr. Stone's efforts to survive in the harsh environment of space. So the protagonist must have a problem. The story is about how he or she deals with said problem, which leads us on to number two.

#2: The protagonist’s problem and conflict must be consequential to the protagonist and have real stakes for the protagonist. The problem has to be serious because if it is not, there are no real stakes, the reader will get bored and cease to care about the character. The worst of all worlds is an unlikeable character with a trivial problem. Walter White in Breaking Bad is a thoroughly unlikable character, but he becomes sympathetic to the audience because of the nature of his problem. He's dying of cancer and so he turns to meth production to ensure his family's security after his death. Walter's problem, of course, has very real stakes, his own mortality and his family's future, but the stakes need not be life and death, but nonetheless, they need to be emotionally serious and significant to the protagonist.

In the King's Speech, at no point in the movie is George VI in any kind of physical danger. He is wealthy and respected, his wife and children love him, and he does not have the self-destructive impulses and nature of his brother. Nevertheless, his problem is real. It is emotionally painful and opposes a risk to both himself and his sense of duty to the monarchy and the country. Likewise, Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice is in no physical danger throughout the book. Nonetheless, the stakes of her problem and her feelings for Mr. Darcy are consequential. If she does not secure a good marriage when her father dies, there is a very real possibility she'll be impoverished. Or if she marries an unsuitable man like Mr. Wickham, her life will be miserable. So while a young woman dealing with her feelings seems like a trivial problem, it will nonetheless have potentially dire consequences for Elizabeth and her family if she chooses wrongly.

Physical danger is likewise an easy way to introduce high stakes to a story. In Gravity, Dr. Stone faces constant risk of death in a variety of agonizing ways due to the harsh nature of space. Wreck-It Ralph faces the prospect of non-existence if he dies outside his game. In Breaking Bad, other than the inevitable death from cancer, Walter White faces increasingly high odds of getting shot in the head by his business partners and customers, since crystal meth is clearly not a business for conservative-minded investors. Regardless of the nature of the problem and the conflict, it must be consequential and carry high risks and dangers for the protagonist. That said, the problem must be something the protagonist can conceivably deal with. Too vague of a problem or too powerful of a problem, and the story goes off the rails.

When I'm recording this in November of 2024, it's a few months since the fourth Dragon Age video game came out, and if you look at the internet at all, there are of course frequent debates about which Dragon Age game was the best and which one was the worst. But in my opinion, Dragon Age 2 is the weakest of them because it runs smack dab into the problem we've been talking about. The central conflict in the game was strife between the mages and the Templars who are supposed to police the mages. The Templars claim that the mages are demon worshiping abominations while the mages claim that Templars are arbitrary and brutal. As it turns out both sides are right, regardless of which faction the protagonist chooses to aid, making the conflict of Dragon Age 2 to be human nature/social injustice. Regardless, it's not a problem that can be resolved within the game and in the ending, the Templars and the mages go to war no matter what decisions the player actually makes, so I'm afraid that the story falls flat.

#3: The protagonist must take action and struggle to resolve his or her conflict and problem. A common failure in s...