The Mythcreant Podcast 574 – How to Craft a Satisfying Reveal
Here’s a surprise for ya: We’ve been ghosts this entire time. Ghosts in the machine, that is, because the true reveal is that you’re in a cyberpunk dystopia rather than a paranormal mystery! Is that a satisfying reveal? It’s impossible to say (but the answer is yes). Listen to this week’s episode and you’ll learn all kinds of tricks to make reveals that are just as good. Or perhaps the reveal is there was never any advice at all. You’ll just have to find out.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[intro music]Oren: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m sick Oren.
Chris: I am very well Chris.
Oren: And we’re doing great. Just everything’s fine over here. Don’t pay any attention to how my voice sounds.
Chris: [laughs]
Oren: So, I have an exciting reveal for the Mythcreants podcast. We’ve actually been professional stunt pilots this whole time. Now we’re gonna record the whole podcast flying a plane!
Chris: [plane noises] And also, we have to jump off the plane with parachutes.
Oren: Yes, obviously. I thought that was assumed.
Chris: Obviously.
Oren: Wow. Chris, you really wanna spoon-feed the audience here, don’t you? [laughs]
Chris: Here we go. [blowing noise]
Oren: That’s the sound it makes.
Chris: That’s the air whipping past us as we fall.
Oren: So that’s a really surprising reveal, and it’s exciting, right? So therefore, it must be a good reveal. I’m sure everyone loved it.
Chris: I’m sure no one expected it.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Yep. That must make it good, right?
Oren: That’s really all that matters. As long as nobody saw it coming, it’s automatically good.
Chris: No one suspects the stunt pilot.
Oren: [laughs] So, we’re talking about how to write a satisfying reveal and as much as we clown on authors for sacrificing everything else in the name of making the reveal a surprise, the reveal probably should be a surprise.
Chris: Probably. There are some exceptions where if you’d really try hard enough to hide the reveal where the reader has to think things through to catch on, they can get to the point where they are so proud of guessing it, that they don’t care that they saw it coming. As long as you make an effort to hide it.
Because again, some readers are always gonna be much, much savvier than others. But if you get it to the point where they can be proud of themselves and feel like they earned their correct guess, then you’re good.
Oren: Yeah. The benchmark that I always use is: Does this seem like the characters should have figured it out? Partly just because nothing is ever as obvious to the reader as the author thinks. So often you’ll have reveals that the author is worried, are too obvious, but to the reader, it’s like, no, I didn’t see that coming. I wasn’t thinking about it.
I’ve found that it generally becomes a problem if you have given the character enough clues that it’s like, why haven’t they figured it out yet?
Chris: Yeah. Although, you know, there can be meta reasons why it’s obvious. If the villain is twirling their mustache, like literally, but the character technically has no reason to suspect them. Or the butler did it.
Oren: Yeah, it wouldn’t be very satisfying if the villain comes in and starts talking like a JRPG villain, even if the main character would realize, like, why are they talking like a JRPG villain? That’s not actually a good reason to suspect someone of being a murderer. But it still probably wouldn’t be very satisfying.
Chris: Right. So, there could also be obvious things that are observable, not by the protagonist, but by the audience. That would also make it unsatisfying.
Can I go over some different types of reveals?
Oren: Yeah. Why not?
Chris: Because I do think this matters when we’re talking: Which ones are we talking about? Some places it doesn’t matter, but many places it does.
So, one that I talk about a lot is the distinction between… I’m just gonna call it a mystery reveal versus a spontaneous reveal.
I had an article recently on surprise villains, and I think we had a whole podcast episode on surprise villains, where I talked about this too. Where the mystery of reveal, basically you build up expectations because there is a known mystery or a curiosity hook. If you have a villain who’s wearing a mask, for instance, we’re asking a question and readers then start actively looking for answers in the story. We’re building up expectations and they expect a really big payoff.
And it’s harder because they’re actively looking for foreshadowing, so you have to hide it a lot more. It gives you a good hook, but it’s also much trickier.
Oren: There’s also a lot more pressure on the eventual reveal in that situation. And that’s the classic case of it can’t just be one of the options that you already knew about. If there are three suspects and you’re like, okay, who is it? It’s gotta be one of these three. You can’t just have it reveal be, oh, it was the first one, he did it. You gotta do something more than that. It’s gotta be more surprising than that.
Chris: Probably something more surprising. Because expectations have been built up so much that they need a big payoff at that point. But the benefit of course is that you get that nice curiosity hook. And a lot of times audiences really like that. It really raises the difficulty level.
Whereas a spontaneous reveal’s just a complete surprise. People don’t know that there’s a mystery. So, the hero’s best friend has been hanging around forever. Then we find out the best friend actually hates them and has been working against them. But we didn’t know that there was a villain around.
You know, when I look back, I think a lot of the most famous reveals are actually in this category. Darth Vader’s I am Your father is definitely in this category where we didn’t know that there was a surprise to be had or a question to answer before Darth Vader says that.
Oren: We weren’t wondering who is Luke’s father? If we had been, that would be a very different outcome.
Chris: Yeah. Foreshadowing is much easier because readers are not actively looking for foreshadowing. They’re not actively trying to guess an answer. So they’re gonna overlook it a lot more.
And especially if your character doesn’t need to solve, if Luke isn’t gonna figure this out, Darth Vader is just gonna tell him. You can go very light on foreshadowing, because Luke doesn’t actually need enough information to come to the conclusion that Darth Vader is his father.
It just needs to be a little bit. You just need to be able to look back and think, oh yeah, I can see those points.
Chris: At that point, you’re just going for plausibility.
Oren: Yeah. Interestingly, the Darth Vader reveal is sort of plausible. I would give it a C+ in terms of plausibility, in that it sort of feels right.
But it does create a lot of logistics problems that you run into the moment you start trying to figure out how we ended up in the scenario that we are in at the start of Star Wars.
Chris: Unfortunately, a lot of reveals are that way, where, if you watch through the beginning of the story again, you’ll find a lot more contradictions than you thought with the reveal. We’re relying on audiences to not remember everything that happened with super clarity.
Oren: In the beginning when Obi-Wan is just a Clone Wars veteran, living next to the son of another Clone Wars veteran that he fought with, it seems kind of believable that Luke would get pulled into this story, but then you’re like, wait, hang on… Vader is Luke’s dad and what the, how did this happen? And you have to come up with this whole elaborate baby theft storyline.
It’s just very strange. It doesn’t make any sense. Hot take: the prequels are bad. But even if they weren’t bad, getting everyone into their starting positions for a new hope would be very challenging.
Chris: And then we have the usually bad reveal, which is the meta reveal.
Oren: [tired] yeah…
Chris: We’ve talked before about meta mysteries. Meta mysteries are something that the viewpoint character or primary protagonist, that’s not a mystery for them. They already know the answer. It’s only a mystery for the audience.
The thing that’s the problem with these is they’re bad, because they create a layer of separation between the audience and the main character that prevents the audience from feeling what the main character feels. So, they have a tendency to kill emotion in the story.
Now granted if this information is not relevant to the story, then it’s fine. You don’t have to know the protagonist every moment in their life. But if it matters to the story, then it’s probably also gonna matter to feeling that emotional experience.
Now there can be some situations where we have a meta reveal, but more like a spontaneous reveal, like the mystery reveal like we were talking about. And if it’s really brief…
And so, we’ve talked about the hidden plan turning point probably before in this podcast a little bit. Some people really like this, mostly cause they want a candied protagonist, probably. It makes the protagonist look very clever where they go into a conflict and it looks like everything’s stacked against them. But then it turns out everything has been going according to their secret plan, and they’re already victorious, and they’re so clever.
Oren: Hidden plans also work a lot better in visual media than they do in prose stories. Cause we’re not expecting to be inside the character’s head anyway.
And by the same token, they are a lot easier to do in visual stories than a lot of clever deductions are. Because a clever deduction requires you to understand how the protagonist is coming up with this idea, which is harder to do when you don’t have a narrator.
Chris: Yeah. But it’s really funny. What happens in a movie, of course, is all of the characters are also really good actors. Just because they all act exactly like they don’t have a hidden plan. Perfectly. Wow, every character is a fantastic actor.
Oren: And even then I have seen filmed hidden plans where once it’s revealed, you’re like, oh, you had that the whole time? I guess you weren’t ever in any danger. That’s disappointing. And if you go and watch it again, you may find places where they would not have done that.
Chris: If they really had this plan, they would’ve not have done that. It doesn’t make any sense.
And I do think in books, even if we managed to get out of their head, we have to not witness their thoughts, cause they would be thinking about their hidden plan. Again, it tends to be distancing, it dims emotions, and it’s really hard to create the most tense kind of conflict you can when this is happening. So it still does deaden emotions somewhat.
But if it’s not very long, if it’s really brief, I think doing it for some lesser conflicts is not necessarily a bad thing and some people like it. But I would just be wary. The longer you have this meta, you conceal all the things that the protagonist knows that are important to the story, the more damaging it becomes.
Oren: You also really need to strike this balance where once the hidden plan is revealed, it still needs to feel like there wasn’t a guarantee of victory. Victory was still unlikely.
Because otherwise you’re gonna end up in a situation where the character either acts totally confident because they know they have the secret victory, in which case that’s gonna be a boring scene.
Or after you reveal the secret victory, it’s gonna be like, why were you acting so worried? You know, I was in your head. I heard those emotions. I know you weren’t acting.
Chris: Look, you’re supposed to forget what happened before the reveal.
Oren: I know the author would like me to, but stubbornly I refuse. [laughs]
Chris: [laughs] So, the other thing I thought I’d mention is the distinction between a twist and a reveal. Often in my mind they become the same thing. But I would say that if it’s a twist but not a reveal—cause twists often are from reveals—that means that the protagonist wasn’t wrong about anything, but there was something surprising.
Project Hail Mary, for instance, has a big twist, which is not actually something that anybody would’ve been expected to know about. There is foreshadowing to make it plausible and it works really well. That is not really a reveal because it’s a new discovery. But it’s a very surprising new discovery, and so that would be a twist.
Oren: One aspect of reveals, which has big I-know-it-when-I-see-it energy, is that it should make the story more interesting, not less interesting.
Chris: Or just better! It should make the story better and not worse in general.
Oren: Yeah, I was trying to be a little more specific than that.
Chris: Interesting could be one thing, but sometimes tension is the issue.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true. For example, in Iron Man 3, there’s the big contentious reveal that the Mandarin is fake. Now, the issue with this reveal is not actually that the Mandarin is fake. That’s fine. The issue with this reveal is that the backup villain—the new guy that they bring in to be the actual bad guy is some guy that Tony Stark didn’t go to a business meeting with. That’s boring. At least before the Mandarin had, you know, pizzazz and an obsession with Tony Stark and was a larger-than-life figure. Now, obviously having the main villain of your story be the Mandarin is not ideal…
Chris: Cringeworthy.
Oren: …so I absolutely get why they went for that twist / reveal. That’s fine. It’s just that they needed something cooler to reveal. So it’s not like, oh, I guess we have to fight Tony’s disgruntled ex-business partner. That’s nice.
Chris: It’s just like Stranger Things season four. Where we find out, oh, didn’t you know this guy named Henry created the huge spider thing and these other cosmic horror monsters of gigantic scale? We thought that this was big, but actually it’s just Henry.
Oren: It’s just a guy named Henry.
Chris: That’s less interesting, but more than that, it’s less scary. He’s less threatening than the huge spider thing in the sky. So that’s just kind of underwhelming, it’s making the story worse.
Or again, if we have a reveal for the point of the reveal, and it does something like undermine the stakes; It’s like all this time you thought you were fighting to save the world, but really a character just lied to you and the world is not actually in danger after all. Or something like that.
But we needed that for tension.
Oren: Well, I guess I’ll just go home then.
Chris: Let’s see, what else have we covered? We’ve covered basic plausibility.
Oren: So, we covered surprising. Now let’s cover the other side of that, which is not feeling random. So spoilers for the movie Weapons
The reveal: You’re wondering this whole time, oh, what happened? Why did all these kids leave their house in the middle of the night at exactly the same time and then disappear? What’s going on? And then the big reveal is a wizard did it—technically a witch.
Chris: Wait, there are wizards in this?
Oren: Yeah. You’re like, there are witches in this. What? And there’s nothing even remotely witchy in the movie before that happens. And so, it’s just kind of a, yeah. Okay. I guess. Could have been aliens, could have been Greek gods, could have been anything. Because there was nothing pointing in that direction before.
Chris: That would definitely be, for me, in the category of plausibility. And basically the thing there is that anything that you reveal has to be using information that’s pre-established. This also happens with, oh, suddenly I need to explain why my characters do this weird thing.
Well, first of all, there are wizards in this world and it’s like, no, no, no! You can’t add new elements to the world when you need to use them. When they become plot bearing or load bearing, you have to pre-establish those things, which is why you should always reuse elements that are already in the story whenever you can.
Oren: And this is hilarious cause I like Weapons. I thought it was a pretty good movie. But its reveal is also simultaneously not surprising enough because before you know that she’s a witch, the villain shows up in a random scene and is acting really shady and wearing Batman villain makeup, and it’s like, is she the bad guy? Is it that one? The one who’s acting super shady and looks like the Joker?
It turned out it was that lady! That she was the bad guy.
It’s a good movie, but the big mystery is not its strength.
Chris: Maybe we should cover some ways, because if you do have expectations built up because you have a mystery, it does get really hard to then come up with an answer—so you can just reveal it’s a person if you have convinced the audience that that person has definitely not done it.
For instance, in Knives Out, Marta—basically the main character—we have, 20 minutes in, this is the reveal that makes the movie. We introduce all these suspects and it’s like, oh, Marta, the character we’re rooting for, she did it and now she has to keep the detective from finding out.
It’s a nice twist because as the main sympathetic character, we would not suspect that. Another way again, that you should not do, that you’ll see a lot of stories have done. They’ll basically introduce a disabled character. And then they’ll rely on stereotypes about that disabled character being helpless and incapable of doing anything to avoid any suspicion on them, and then reveal it’s the disabled character. Because either they’re not really disabled, they were just, just faking it, or they’re just more capable than they’re pretending to be.
So don’t do that. Don’t do that. That’s not a good trope to have in your story. But if you can for some reason get audiences to discount a current character from the suspect list, then you can reveal it’s that person. You can change the nature of the crime. Or what happened, like, oh, nobody died. Sometimes you can change the number of people who did it.
Oren: Yeah. A very effective strategy is to suspect someone early and then find something that seems to clear them. Because that crosses them off the reader’s list of suspects. But then you can reveal later that that thing that you found that cleared them wasn’t real and it actually was them, which has the effect of being surprising, but also it being a guy who the readers already knew about, and had some reason to think was involved.
Yeah, so that’s a reliable tried and true works. Not every time, but 60% of the time it works a 100% of the time.
Chris: I would say that one works right now. I do wonder if in 5 to 10 years audiences will be onto that one.
Oren: No, don’t take that away from me, Chris. That’s my favorite. I use that one all the time.
Chris: [laughs] Sometimes they catch up with the tropes and we can’t trick them anymore.
Oren: No, this one will always work. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.
Chris: But yes, basically think outside the box with that one.
Another thing that a reveal needs is it’s gotta change the story going forward in some way. If nothing changes, then it just doesn’t matter. It’s like a so-what reveal.
Oren: You know, you thought that you were after this villain because he killed your brother, but it turned out actually he killed your dad! Oh, okay.
Chris: I’m still putting him away, I guess.
Oren: Sure. I guess.
Chris: Or he killed your brother. Did you know he also killed your dad? Well, I mean, I still hate him to the max.
Oren: Or he killed 10 other people you don’t know. That doesn’t really change anything for me.
Chris: So, yeah, it’s just, it should change the trajectory of the plot. Make things happen differently in some way.
Oren: It should also matter to the main character. This is true of everything in your story. It should matter to what the main character is doing, because that’s theoretically the throughline. But I have noticed in a number of stories, there’ll be a big reveal that, in theory, matters to the world, it changes the plot. But it’s not a plot the main character is part of.
This can happen with any kind of story element, but I’ve noticed it is particularly common in reveals just because authors are already so weird about reveals. They seem so cool and shiny [that] authors will often go out of their way and do weird stuff for the sake of getting them.
Like for example, spoilers for the Raven Scholar. Actual spoilers this time, not like last time. At the end you get this big reveal that the bad guy, you thought that he was a different dude pretending to be the emperor, but then it turns out he was an even more different dude pretending to be the emperor.
Does any of this matter to the protagonist? No. This doesn’t really change what’s happening with her. She already knew he was trying to kill her, and this is just part of a reveal that there was some other secret plot going on that she knew nothing about and wasn’t involved in.
Chris: Going back to the mystery reveals where we have a lot of expectations set up. We talked about how there’s extra burden on those to be really surprising.
But the other thing that makes them so tricky beyond being surprising, is that you’re supposed to play fair with the audience. They need an opportunity to guess. Which means you can’t just pull a random person they’ve never heard of. We call this the Some Guy Reveal.
Oren: Yeah. Some guy.
Chris: Some guy. I recently watched I Know What You Did Last Summer. That classic one.
And after having this mystery person who’s sending them notes, we eventually find, oh, it’s this guy who is this father of this other girl. And we looked at, you know, some news events to see that some people had died in the past. But it’s like, well, did you know that this girl had a father and he was out there? And doing things? And it’s just some fishermen.
Okay, this violates expectations a couple ways.
One, he has not previously been introduced in the story, so at the very least, we need to introduce this fisherman as a character. And maybe we don’t know that he’s the father of the girl who died, but he needs to at least hang around and we need to see him as a recognizable character. He makes multiple appearances and we can remember him from last time. I feel like that’s the bare minimum.
Now it would be even better if we knew that he was connected to this girl who died. But we had reasons to think, of course it’s not him or didn’t have enough reason to suspect him for the longest time.
But if we just don’t meet him at all, even if he’s tangentially related to this news event, that is our justification for who this person is and why this person is threatening the protagonists, that’s not really enough because there’s no way to guess him because we don’t know him. We’ve never seen him. We have no way of predicting his existence.
So for these kinds of mysteries, again, the assumption is that there is some way to figure it out. Cause it really just has to—beyond being surprising—really has to click into place because we just have higher expectations for that curiosity payoff.
Oren: Probably the most famous example in our circles of this is Amon from Legend of Korra. It turns out he’s some guy.
Chris: And again, we tend gently connect him to people we know. He turns out to be the brother of some other guy we’ve heard of, but we had no way to know. We didn’t really meet him. Outside of him wearing the mask as a villain, we didn’t have any reason to identify him as a person. So he’s really random.
Oren: He just doesn’t mean anything. Yeah. I mean he could be that guy I guess, but it’s so tangential. Cause we have some flashbacks about how Aang fought his dad and at that level of connection, he could be basically anybody. There are a number of tangentially related characters to the previous avatar group that we hear about throughout the series. And it’s like, all right. So I guess it could be any of their kids. It’s just not very interesting.
Chris: So in that case, if you wanna do something like that, I would just have some sort of bender guy. They’re going to the fishing dock and there’s a friendly guy there that they ask some questions of. And he answers their questions and it turns out, oh, they happen to know the same person. Or he tells them about a tragedy or whatever. But we don’t know that he’s connected to the main plot. For instance. Something like that would definitely be a step better.
Unfortunately, at that point, somebody who’s really savvy can probably use process of elimination to find out who, but we don’t worry about those people. People like Oren.
Oren: If someone is using process of elimination, it’s either because they’re a weird little story freak like me, or they are bored, at which point you have bigger problems. If they’re bored and they’re so bored that all they can stop to do is think, all right—
Chris: Who are all the possible characters who it could be? So let’s go at them one at a time and figure out the person who is a bender who had a strange amount of screen time, but doesn’t seem to have a more important role. Somebody who’s savvy can pick up on that, but that’s generally… we don’t worry about those people.
Oren: Yeah. And those are the kind of people who also will often feel very cool and clever if they figure it out. Generally, I think you’ll be okay with them.
All right. With that I’m going to reveal that actually this episode has been over the whole time.
Chris: [laughs] And now my reveal. If you become a patron at the $5-a-month level, then we will have five more dollars a month.
Oren: A little less than that cause Patreon takes a cut.
Chris: Shhh! You’re ruining my reveal! It was so perfect.
Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
And we will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.