Monster of the Week: Cassandra

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 5: Monster of the Week

Episode 11: Cassandra

Writing to be Read

I have a friend who said something that blew my mind the other day. 

He said that he writes to be read, and if he's not going to be read, he has no interest in writing.  He said that he's not the kind of person who has a story that needs to be told, a story he needs to get out.  He said that he would never write just for himself.

I cannot understand this mindset.  I've tried to use my empathy and see where he's coming from, and I literally cannot do it.

I write because I can't sleep at night if I have too much story in my brain, so I need to tidy up in there.  The projects I have the most fun with are the ones that I assume no one will ever read.  They're just for me, so I don't have to do boring transitions or work too hard on continuity or grammar.  In fact, with some of the later Twenty Percent True Podcast seasons, I've gotten in my own head about it, because I know people will listen to it.  It makes it so I don't want to work on it.  Or maybe it makes it so I HAVE to work on it, and I get anxious about the quality of it, and I fight back against that anxiety by shouting, "You cant tell me what to work on!" and then procrastinating.

I will often go back and read my own unfinished writing.  "Oh.  This is fun," I say to myself, reading the first chapter of a novel from eight years that's only 15 pages long.

So the idea of "I'm going to write something because I want people to read it," just doesn't make sense to me from a philosophical standpoint.  But it also doesn't make sense from a publishing standpoint.  If you're going the traditional publishing route, you spend a year or more on a novel with no guarantee that it will be published.  You find that out at the end, after you've put in the work.  There are so many reasons outside your control for why a book could get canned, and there are a thousand reasons why it might not sell as much as it should. 

I understand why the thought that someone could read your book could be a motivator.  I find that feedback on an unfinished project can encourage me to keep going.  But if that was my only motivation, if I was pouring out my blood, sweat, and tears in hopes that a hypothetical stranger in the future will like it...that's dangerous.  You are not going to get enough out of it to keep you moving.  Every piece of negative feedback is going to hit you ten times harder, because you've basically failed in your single goal to have people like your work.  And, most importantly, you're putting your success and your enjoyment and your project's value entirely in someone else's hands. You're forcing a situation already out of your control even further out of your control.

As tired as the saying goes: Write for you.

Monster of the Week: See the Hodag

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 5: Monster of the Week

Episode 9: The Albatross


For more: Background Information

More about the Hodag

Season 5, episode 10: Come See the Hodag!

The Hodag is a fearsome critter from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where it is a local attraction, the high school's mascot, and in the name of several local businesses.  It's fame has led to appearances in our old friend William Cox's "Fearsome Critters of the Lumberwoods," several Paul Bunyun stories, an episode of Scooby Doo, and a Harry Potter expanded universe entry on Pottermore.  (One of these did not do any research, and I'll give you one guess as to which one.)


To talk about the history of the Hodag, we first have to talk about Eugene Shepard.  He was a surveyor, timber cruiser, and renowned prankster/humorist.  He illustrated several Paul Bunyun stories, which were then widely circulated.  Later in life, he ran a resort in Rhinelander.  And he invented the Hodag.

Shepard started spreading rumors in 1893 about seeing the hodag out in the woods.  He described it as having "the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end."  He claimed it was 7 feet long, 30 inches tall, and weighed about 200 pounds.  In other descriptions, the hodag is a cross between bulldog and a dinosaur and about the size of a large dog.  It's favorite food is white bulldogs, which it eats only on Sundays.

Shepard gathered up a big posse of men to go out into the woods and kill the hodag.  The sheer number of people that went out with him showed not only how powerful the hodag was, but also how brave the people of Rhinelander were.  Unfortunately, they had to kill the beast, and they had to do it with dynamite, so they returned back to Rhinelander with a charred hide, feeling successful.  In 1896, Shepard brought the Hodag up again.  This time he claimed to have caught one alive by gathering together a bunch of bear wrestlers, who put chloroform on the ends of sticks, and poked the sticks into the hodag's cave until it passed out.

Capturing a hodag

By then, the hodag had nearly gone extinct, he explained, due to the severe lack of white bulldogs in the area.  So, of course, he put the captured Hodag on display at the Rhinelander fair grounds, where people would pay a dime to go into the hodag's dimly lit tent.  The dimly lit part was important, because if the Hodag knew that so many people were looking at it, it would become violent, and no one wanted that.  In the dark, the hodag would swing its tail and roar and people would scream and run away.  This all worked really well for Shepard until some people from the Smithsonian announced that they were coming to inspect his creature, at which point he fessed up that it was really a carved stump covered in cow hide and it's spikes were cow horns.  It moved with wires, and the growls were Shepard's sons standing behind it, making scary noises.

This does not stop the people of Rhinelander from enjoying the hodag.  Ans it shouldn't.

Gradually Increasing Tension and Moments to Breathe

4theWords, one of the writing resources I use, had a scavenger hunt this October, where they sent their members to people's blogs so they could be introduced to writing resources.  I found it pretty interesting.  Also I was one of the stops, so maybe I'm biased.

But on one of the stops, there was a woman who made videos about craft, and the one I watched was something like "Common mistakes amateur writers make during character arcs."  And I want to talk about it.

First, I don't think there are really "mistakes" you can make in story telling.  There are grammar rules you can violate and you could switch point of view in confusing ways or jump time periods or have continuity issues in a way that makes the story hard to follow, and I think those could be called mistakes.  But in my opinion issues that deal with the shape of a story should be approached like, "This is a place where you have an opportunity you're not using to its fullest," or "You could do more with this," instead of "this is an error."

So with that in mind, let me tell you about the structure of a character arc.  Since junior high, you've probably seen the diagram that makes a story look like a mountain.  There's rising action, a climax at the peak, and then falling action.

The y-axis on this graph is not labeled, and I want to burn it to the ground.

What this video said was that everything during your rising action--so everything from your inciting incident to your climax--should get harder, and one of the common mistakes she sees with new writers is that one event will be very hard and the next event will be less hard and the next event will be a little hard, and it won't escalate.

And I have some issues with this.  Mainly, I think that if things just escalate and escalate and escalate without breathing room, the narrative becomes overwhelming.  Moments of quiet are necessary for the characters to reflect on why the last horrible event was horrible.  They're also necessary in novels to give the reader a break. If we look at the hero's journey, there's always a point where the hero faces death and usually has a revelatory moment or a second wind.  Think of "Die Hard" when John McClane is in the air duct with his feet all cut up, talking to Carl the cop, thinking he might not make it.  It's a lull in the action, a breath before the climax.  There's still tension, but it's a different flavor, and I'm not gripping my seat waiting for someone to get thrown out a window. 

So already, our neat triangular shape has some divots in it, or some moments between events.

I didn't add a y-axis label

Also, I think phrasing it like each episode or event should get harder is a simplification, which is fine when your audience is new writers.  You want to lay out rules and then later talk about how and when they can be broken.  Let's say I have a story where the kickball team has to play against a neighbor school who is also not very good, and then they play against the good team in town, and then they go to state.  That gets harder with every new challenge.  It would be a little weird for the games to happen in a different order.  But why's this team only playing three games in their combined season and post season?  Surely the teams they play in the regular season will be a mix of difficulties.  Maybe they'll even lose a few!  The thing that maybe would make each challenge progressively more difficult is that after winning against an easy team, maybe now there's an expectation set up, and they're fighting not just the other team but their own hopes and fears and the expectations of their coaches and parents.  Maybe after the game they lose, they're fighting against their fear of losing, maybe they super have to prove themselves.  Maybe they have to impress one kid's dad who finally shows up!  So it's not just that each team they play is more skilled and therefore more difficult to beat, but each game they play is harder because of baggage the characters have.

So if there's a story like a character is trying to get the band back together and has to visit the rhythm guitar player and the bassist and the drummer, it could be that the drummer is harder to convince than the bass player, who's harder to convince than the rhythm guitar player.  Or it could be that our main character has bigger drama with the drummer than the bassist than the rhythm guitar player, and each encounter is emotionally more fraught if not more difficult.   OR!  It could be that our main character brings all the drama from meeting the guitar player into their visit with the bassist, so they're going into the conversation with level 2 anxiety rather than level 0 anxiety, so already it's a harder meeting.  They go into the meeting with the drummer all wound up from meeting the guitarist and the bassist and they're starting from anxiety level 5. As long as they consistently carry that with them, each new situation builds.

So instead of the problem that each new episode doesn't provide a greater challenge, the real issue with the story telling might be that the character isn't carrying previous challenges with them or that the writer is letting the tension drop in unhelpful and unrealistic ways.

Monster of the Week: The Albatross

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 5: Monster of the Week

Episode 9: The Albatross


For more: Background Information

More about the Albatross

Season 5, episode 9: The Albatross

The albatross is an actual family of sea birds.  They have the largest wingspan of any living bird, reaching up to 12 feet in width, which allows them to fly for 10,000 miles over open ocean without landing.  The albatross is a symbol of the Cape Horner's Association (people who have sailed around Cape Horn).

Association of Cape Horner's Flag

They appear largely in the mythology of Pacific peoples, but this episode is in conversation with stories from western traditions, most specifically the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, there's a guy on his way to a wedding, which is about to start. The bride has arrived and the band is playing and he's anxious to get inside and watch this wedding.  But he's stopped by an old mariner who sets him down on a rock and tells him a story and the story is so captivating and the ancient mariner's eyes are so wild that the wedding guest can't leave.  In the story, the mariner set out on a ship headed south, when all of a sudden there was a storm that blew them to Antarctica, where they were surrounded and trapped by ice.  An albatross appeared, flew over the ice, and guided them back to the open sea through a fog while a south wind picked up.  The sailors where cheering and crying, when all of a sudden, the mariner shoots the albatross.  At first, he's wracked with guilt and all his friends are like, "How dare you kill the bird that lead us out of the ice and brought this wind that's bringing us home!"  But when the fog clears and the wind keeps up, they say, "Maybe the bird actually brought that fog, and it's a good thing you shot it."  But, as soon as they decide this, the wind dies and the ship is stuck for days and days in the middle of the ocean, where they see slimy monsters rise up out of the water and the water burns green and they think spirits are following them.  This is where the line "Water, water, every where, /Nor any drop to drink" comes from.  Everyone agrees it's the spirit of the albatross that did this to them, and they hang the albatross' corpse around the mariner's neck as punishment.  The mariner sees a ship approaching and assumes they're saved.  (There's a wild bit here where the mariner's lips are so parched that he can't speak to draw attention to the ship, so he bites his own arm, and drinks his own blood so he can shout out.)  But as the ship approaches, it's a ghost ship, and aboard it is Death and Night-mare Life-In-Death, and they play dice and Night-mare Life-In-Death wins, and everyone aboard the mariner's ship except the mariner fall down dead, their souls making the same noise as the mariner's crossbow when they leave.  The mariner is stuck alone on the ship for a week, unable to die.  Finally, he notices the slimy things in the water are alive, he blesses them and feels love in his heart, and the albatross falls off his neck.  It rains and then a wind picks up, and when the moon rises that night, all the undead sailors stand up and sail the boat.  They all lie down again when the sun comes up, and the wind disappears, but the ship keeps moving because a spirit under the ship is moving it. Eventually, he comes within sight of land, and a luminous seraph (an angel) appears over each corpse and waves at the lighthouse until a boat comes out.  When it gets close to the ship, the ship sinks straight into the ocean, and the mariner ends up in the little boat.  When he gets the the shore, he feels the need to tell his story to the man who rescued him, and now he wanders around, compelled to tell his story to people.

Honestly, the thing I like best about this story is the framing device.  A guy with wild eyes just runs up and won't let you leave until he's told you a ghost story.  This happens to me at least once a month.

A second, less familiar story with which this episode is interacting is the story of the last Great Auk in the British Isles.  Great Auks were real birds that have been hunted to extinction because their feathers made really good down for pillows, their meat was delicious, and sailors made oil from their fat.  They also had no fear of humans, and the preferred method of hunting them was to walk up to a bird and strangle it with your bare hands while a hundred other Great Auks watched. They were a bit like large penguins, except they lived in the North Atlantic.  The last Great Auk was found on an island off Scotland in 1840.  By then, it was already a rare bird and the three guys who spotted it were like, "Whoa!  Look at that weird penguin!"  Instead of killing it (like pretty much anyone else from the time period would have done), they decided to grab it, tie its legs together, and take it with them.  The bird started to wail, the rain started to fall, and they holed up together in a tiny hut to wait out the storm.  They kept it alive for three days, but the bird would not stop wailing and the storm would not stop storming, and they grew stir-crazy and convinced that the Great Auk was causing the storm because it was a witch.  To put a stop to the storm, they decided to stone the bird to death, which does not seem like the quickest or easiest way to kill a slow, flightless bird, but what do I know?

What we learn from these stories is that you just shouldn't bother large birds, because they're magic.