Last week we wormcanned “fulfilling promises to the reader,” so this week we’ll tackle the discussion using actual examples. We start with a deconstruction of The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse, which Howard wrote and illustrated in 2008 and 2009. We then spoil the story of the game Borderlands, talking about the woefully-unfulfilled promise made to the player. We also spoil Legion for you, but that film kind of ruined itself. A lot. At any rate, in both of these latter cases we talk about the promises being broken.

Then we talk about how we, as writers, know when we’re making promises to the reader, and what those promises are.

Dan talks about how, in the first draft of I Am Not a Serial Killer, the main character won out in the wrong way, and how he had to go back and fix the ending. He also talks about the biggest complaint anybody has with that book, and how that stems from the plot twist that, to some readers, breaks a promise inherent in the book’s genre. And that leads us into a discussion of Million Dollar Baby and of the first outline of Mistborn, which could have had a very, very disappointing ending.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, narrated by Adam Grupper

Writing Prompt: Pick a typical promise that a child might make, and use that as the promise you’re making to your readers.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Be careful of memorable, vivid phrases. Beware of a gorilla in a phone booth derailing your story. “Don’t put a gorilla in the phone booth if that’s not what your story is about.” Watch out for “bait and switch” endings (aka deus ex machina). When the rest of the story has built expectations, don’t yank the rug out from under them. Ask yourself, “Where am I spending my time?” That is making a promise. Beware deus ex wrench, things going wrong without foreshadowing. Cool twists may break promises, especially when they shift genres. Make sure you have enough foreshadowing, and that if you put a gorilla in the phone booth, you let him call Chekhov by the end.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Five Episode 19 — am I on 19?
[Dan] Yes.
[Howard] You’re on 19.
[Brandon] Yes, 19. Fulfilling promises to your readers. I promise we’ll be professional at all times.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we’re not that smart. And… we promise not to be.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I’m not that smart?

[Brandon] There we go. All right. We can-of-worms’d this last week, so we thought we would talk about this this week. Plus, as mentioned, this is one thing that we’ve gotten several e-mails about. We’ve talked about fulfilling and breaking them as… fulfilling them good, breaking them bad. People wanted examples. Imagine that. They want us to back up our words with actual references.
[Dan] They want us to actually put our…
[Howard] Let me give you… let me start with an example from my own work. In the book which is now titled Longshoreman of the Apocalypse which was nominated for a Hugo last year, I made… I told what I thought at first was a throwaway joke. If we build a loading robot out of the parts in this lab, we’re not building a longshoreman, we’re building the Longshoreman of the Apocalypse. As soon as I told that joke, I realized I’ve just made a promise to all my readers. I have to build the Longshoreman of the Apocalypse. Because I’m discovery writing my way through the book, that altered my outline a little bit, and I ended up writing this robotic longshoreman into the climax of the book. It worked very effectively. I have a moment there at the end of the book where the Longshoreman of the Apocalypse is standing amid a maelstrom and he has an Apocalypse over which he can preside. It worked.
[Brandon] Let’s talk… it’s break it down specifically in this example, though. What… why did you feel that you needed specifically to change everything by using that one phrase? Is it because the phrase was so awesome that it was going to draw all kinds of attention and therefore…
[Howard] The phrase itself was memorable and awesome. The other thing was that the phrase and the setting conjure up visions of a scrapyard of military equipment robot that is running amok and doing horrible catastrophic things. It was a very visual piece of imagery… visual piece of imagery? Nice work, Howard. I are a writer.
[Dan] [garbled]
[Brandon] What’s going on here is… it’s fascinating to me. I mean, I hadn’t anticipated this, but… what you’ve done in that case is… I’ve used the phrase “gorilla in a phone booth” before in the podcast, right? That’s where you’re telling this normal story and if one of the characters mentions, “Oh, there’s a gorilla in that phone booth,” and then keeps on walking, that completely derails your story because everyone is like, “What about the gorilla in the phone booth?” So you can have these throwaway lines that normally… the conventional wisdom at least… what I would recommend normally is, don’t put a gorilla in the phone booth if that’s not what your story is about. But what Howard said is, “I put a gorilla in that phone booth and it was awesome. So I decided to tell this whole story about gorillas living in phone booths.” That, I guess, is a way that you can make sure you are fulfilling your promises.
[Howard] Absolutely.
[Dan] Well, and if you can come up with… if whatever that gorilla is in that phone booth, if you can wrap a really cool story around it, and it’s cool enough that it distracts you from the story you were telling… that’s a good sign that it might be a better story for you to be telling.
[Brandon] Exactly.
[Howard] If you’ve got the luxury of going back and re-writing around the gorilla in the phone booth, that’s fantastic. I was fortunate in that the Longshoreman of the Apocalypse, I could shoehorn him just fine into the story I was already telling. It worked well. I was able to get away with it. If it hadn’t fit, then I would’ve come back to it in a later book and I would have treated this as a promise that I was delaying fulfillment on. I don’t think that would have been as strong.
[Brandon] Do you sometimes not put in things like that because you think, “Oh, I can’t fulfill this promise?”
[Howard] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Every week I sit down to write scripts and I’ll come up with a great joke and think, “Ah, this is along the lines of sentient elephants.” I threw in a footnote about everybody agreed that giving sentience to the African elephant was a mistake. My readers… I got all kinds of e-mail, where are the elephants?
[Brandon] Gorilla in a phone booth. Yeah.
[Howard] Where are all the dang elephants? So the very next story, I had to put an elephant in and I realized how much I hated drawing elephants. Now I’ve done a whole strip…
[Dan] So you decided to have a fight scene with 20 of them at once?
[Howard] I had a fight scene with elephants. Well, because my universe now has elephants in it, because I put a gorilla in a phone booth and I didn’t want it.
[Brandon] Well, this is interesting, because we’ve talked… this is totally getting derailed, but this is fascinating stuff because we’ve talked before about the balance in your writing, Howard, because balancing humor with a story with strong characterization…
[Howard] With discovery writing.
[Brandon] With discovery writing. What we’re seeing here right now is times where you have to be actually… you have to choose not to be as funny as you could be in order to preserve continuity and world building.
[Howard] Or I have to choose to take a horrible, horrible risk and tell a joke that threatens to undermine my entire ability to draw.

[Brandon] All right. I’m going to give a bad example.
[Howard] We need one.
[Brandon] All right. This was actually Producer Jordo’s example, but I’ve played the game too. Those who have been watching my tweets, I mention I’m playing the game Borderlands. Fun game. I’m going to spoil a little bit for you, but it’s been out for a year, and also you don’t play this game for the story. Because there basically isn’t one. But… this is very instructional. Throughout the game, you’ve got this evil antagonist popping up and talking to you via your voice net, saying, “You have to leave the planet or we’re going to come and get you.” And “Stop competing for these resources that… this thing that we’re all trying to get. We’re going to totally take you down.” And, “You just better listen.” So you’re playing through the game, and you’re like, “Oh, holy cow. These people are better funded than me, they’ve got an entire army, and they’re searching for the same thing. I’m in trouble fighting them. But I’ve got to pick up my gun and go do it, because I’ve got to do it.” It’s the story. So you get to the climactic end battle, and they pull the… they are… they get there first. They’re opening up this portal thing. They’re going to get all these riches, and… something comes out of it and kills them all in a cut screen. Then you fight that thing for the climactic battle. Now in game terms, that’s cool, because you’ve been fighting these people all along as a videogame player, and you’re like, I’ve been killing them. So now there’s this big massive monster to kill, and it’s way cool on the screen and visually, but storytelling wise, that was a huge broken promise. Jordo said that he got to the end and he’s like, “What? I don’t get to face my nemesis that I’ve been seeing this entire time? I’ve got to instead fight this giant space lobster that’s going to destroy the planet or whatever?”
[Howard] Sorry about the spoiler. It looks like a giant space lobster.
[Dan] Put that into the context of a story that you’re familiar with, if you’re not familiar with the game. If the first Star Wars movie ended when they were trying to blow up the Deathstar, but then a giant space lobster came and ate Darth Vader, and you had to fight that instead, that would be stupid, and you would hate it because you love Darth Vader and you love to hate Darth Vader and everything’s built to that point.
[Howard] OK. Here’s an example from a movie that’s a little over a year old… a little less than a year old. Legion. Which I absolutely despised. It’s my lowest ranked movie the whole year. Not because the snively couple named Howard and Sandra in that film end up betraying the party and dying early. That had nothing to do with it.
[Dan] Sure.
[Brandon] Nothing at all. Nothing. Nothing at all.
[Howard] That’s not it at all. What bugs me… and here comes the spoiler… is that our protagonist reaches that point where he is at his absolute nadir, he’s being clobbered by evil angel, it looks like there is no way he can win — and an angel that we thought was dead has gone up to heaven and gotten all of his powers back and comes down and saves the day. Deus ex machina. I felt completely robbed. Because he was at his moment where… the hero is at his moment where in a better written movie he would have pulled something out…
[Dan] That was his time to shine and the movie didn’t let him.
[Howard] That was his time to shine, and he cowered on the ground while someone else saved the day.

[Brandon] Now let’s actually break this down as writers, and find out, now what’s going wrong here? We will do our book of the week, but we’ll wait. I want to talk about this first. With both of these stories, what’s happening is… and readers ask us… or listeners ask us, “How do I know if I’m making promises?” I want you to look at your fiction that you’re writing and ask yourself, “Where am I spending my time?” Now, with this game that I was playing, how much time and again was devoted to focusing your energies on this other character? That is making a promise. Where you are spending your time.
[Howard] Same exact thing held true in Legion. Our point of view character is the mortal who ends up cowering on the ground. Our… the stranger comes to town character is the one who ends up saving the day. We spent so much time building up this one hero, we think maybe he can pull it off. No, he can’t. Angel has to kill the other angel. Sorry.
[Brandon] It’s not just the deus ex machina which is a problem in yours. Deus ex machina is one way to break a promise to readers. But the reason this isn’t working… deus ex machina… the problem with deus ex machina is poor foreshadowing. That’s essentially what’s broken about deus ex machina. But what is making these terribly unfulfilling stories is not the deus ex machina… or in our case, what my friend Bryce Moore likes to call deus ex wrench, things going wrong without foreshadowing…
[Dan] For no reason.
[Brandon] Is that we have invested emotional energy and time and pages in our writing or time playing the videogame focused on something which is then snatched away from us and we aren’t allowed to achieve it.

[Dan] OK. Let me give an example from my first book, I Am Not a Serial Killer. This will be a little spoilery. I’ll try to keep it light, but the book’s been out for like two years, guys. OK? So in the first draft of this book, and Brandon will remember this from writing group, the end was significantly different. The ending was very disappointing. It’s because our main character, John, he is forced to fight this demon. He doesn’t know how. He doesn’t have any skills with which to fight a demon. He basically just beat it anyway. What I had to do was go back and what I did was literally look at the first chapter and say, “What is he doing right from the beginning of the book? What does he actually have talent with? Who are the other characters in the story? What is important to him as a character?” Then fold all of that into the ending, so that it’s seen coming back together again. So we had the embalming aspect comes back again in the end. His mother comes back again at the end. It’s much more personal…
[Howard] What you blended there is the concept of fulfilling a promise with the concept of surprising yet inevitable. That’s the promise that we didn’t know you made, and that we then realize has been fulfilled.

[Brandon] All right. Let’s stop and do the book of the week now.
[Howard] We need to do a book of the week.
[Dan] Yes. We do need to do the book of the week. Our book of the week this week is actually nonfiction. It is called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. It’s a couple of years old. It is basically… he takes the premise of if all humans disappeared for some reason, and he doesn’t bother explaining the reason because that’s not the point. The point is, if they all did disappear abruptly, what would happen next? How would Earth move on in our absence? What would happen to the things that we built? Which creations would last and which would degrade? What damage have we done? What good things have we done? It’s an absolutely fascinating look at biology, at geology, at ecology, and at our society today. Really interesting book, very compelling. I recommend it highly.
[Brandon] Sounds like it would be very useful for anyone writing some sort of post-apocalyptic…
[Dan] Absolutely. Which is honestly why I read it.
[Brandon] All right. Gotoaudiblepodcast.com/excuse to start your free trial and download a copy of the book.

[Brandon] All right. Dan, I’m going to put you on the hot spot. I know you have a good example, but I want to first look at Serial Killer which we’ve already mentioned. Some… pretty much everybody who reads the book loves it, except for one group…
[Dan] Yes. And I know…
[Brandon] Which is a group that feels that their promise has been broken. Talk about that.
[Dan] OK. Almost every single negative review the book has received makes the same point, which is halfway through this book turns supernatural. People will begin it thinking that it is, while not necessarily a true crime, that it is crime genre. That is going to be about a sociopath dealing with an actual serial killer. Then when it turns out to be supernatural, a lot of people have been very bothered. We actually went to great lengths on the second book to put the supernatural elements on the cover to let people know right from the beginning what genre this book was. Now part of that we did on purpose. In fact, we heightened the surprise of the supernatural twist halfway through during the editing process because my editor and I and F. Paul Wilson who read the draft for us, we all agreed that that would be a really cool visceral punch. I think the thing that we were neglecting is that it would be a cool visceral punch if you were ready for it, and the book does not really get you ready for it. It does not prepare you as well as it should to realize that the serial killer is supernatural.
[Howard] Well, it’s… another example of this is Million Dollar Baby, where you think it is a movie about one thing and at the very end you realize it is a movie about something completely different.
[Brandon] I’m going to watch that one, so don’t spoil it for me.
[Howard] And the only way… OK. The only way for something like that to work is for you to make a promise and break it. Really. That’s the only way for it to work. There should be a genre of movies, a genre of books that is the “broken promise and we did it on purpose and it’s OK” genre so that you can buy it and not complain.
[Brandon] Well… anything done extraordinarily well, will be all right. I’ve talked before about… let’s just… I [garbled] this example of the reason I decided in Mistborn not to make the story of the hero failing at the end. Which was the original concept. Oh, I’ve got the Hero’s Journey, I’m going to have him fail at the end. Because that was partially a downer of a story, and I bet I could’ve done it in a way that wouldn’t have broken promises, but it felt like as I was planning it, but the only way to do this was to yank the rug out from underneath you in the last moments which makes for bad storytelling. Meaning… I mean, I could have… the only way to do it would be to do an exact… a hugely generic Hero’s Journey, which would put off all the readers that I wanted to attract who did not want that. All the people that would be left would be the ones who wanted a hugely generic Hero’s Journey…
[Dan] And then would be upset by the ending.
[Brandon] Which then would be upset by not getting the ending they want, and the people who would get the ending they want wouldn’t last through the three quarters of the book it would take them to get there.
[Dan] Now, Howard raised an interesting question. Million Dollar Baby… and I’ll do this without spoiling anything… did break a promise. But the reason it was able to make it work is because it tricked you into what kind of movie it actually was. Because by focusing heavily on the characters, even though it told you this was a plot movie… it focused so heavily on the characters that when, the plot changed rails you were so tied to the characters that it still worked.
[Howard] You were heavily invested in.
[Dan] And you went with them. Another fantastic example of this, we’re going to pull this out of TV, is Star Trek: the Next Generation. The episode Yesterday’s Enterprise which is… or not Yesterday’s Enterprise, it’s Best of Both Worlds, the one where Picard is kidnapped by the Borg and is turned into a Borg. That has this really kind of again big visceral punch at the end where you see Picard as a Borg. The reason it works is because the whole time, the episode has secretly been filling in all little hints that Riker is going to take over. Go back and watch that episode again. It is full from the beginning of little hints that Riker is going to take over as command. So even though you don’t realize it, all of those pieces are in place, so when that big thing happens at the end, you’re ready for it. So even though that’s not the promise that was made at the beginning, secretly it is the promise that was made at the beginning, you just didn’t realize it.
[Brandon] All right. We didn’t get to your good example. We’ll just have to hold that off for another time.
[Dan] That’s OK. I’ll just say Grosse Pointe Blank again, and then get cut off just like last episode.
[Brandon] OK. Go for it.
[Dan] Grosse Pointe Blank.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses… except we need a writing prompt. Howard?
[Howard] OK. Um… promises, promises, promises. All right.
[Brandon] Oh, I made you do it the other time. So you have to do it again. Dan’ll do it next time.
[Howard] No, we’ll be fine. I’ll get this. I just… it’s right here on the tip of my tongue. Think of all the times that… in grade school, you or a friend of yours said something and said, “I promise.” Any time that a child has made a promise in that sort of a context. Pick a really good… and that usually means in child context, stupid promise that a kid has made. Now use that as the leaping off point for a promise that you’re going to keep in a book.
[Brandon] OK. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.
[Howard] I’ll be your best friend.