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I balk at the thought Sando writes bad books; he successfully does exactly what he sets out to do and there are clearly a huge number of readers who enjoy it, and I'm not going to poo poo on that craft. The issue (which Sando himself has said he hates) is the insistence by a lot of his most vocal fans that it's the only way to write, that if your goals are different from his then your writing is defective, and it's common enough that it is affecting the industry -- reviews make or break books and if a significant-enough number of readers think Not Writing Mistborn is inherently flawed then writers are punished financially and professionally for not writing Mistborn. The man is a god-tier line cook, he can sling juicy burgers with incredible speed and consistency. The issue is that people are going to Indian restaurants and giving them 1-star on Yelp because they don't have a cheeseburger. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 21:24
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General Battuta posted:I don't know if that made any sense and I certainly didn't keep it short. This was excellent and made a ton of sense and hits at the core of my own beef with the Sandersonization of magic/storytelling/worldbuilding in fantasy. I recently started writing a fantasy after not writing anything for like ten years and also not reading anything new, so it's been interesting, to say the least, to return to the genre to find that quantifying and systematizing the absolute poo poo out of everything is all the rage, a la hard magic systems and LitRPG and progression fantasy and such. On magic in particular, I've always been partial to what Sanderson defines as soft magic, both reading and writing it. I guess what I like about it is the mystique and brushing up against the unknown (and unknowable), and a larger focus on what the magic feels like and, like General Battuta said, what it means to the characters and the story. Like, what does it mean if you can't add more than 6.4 globblespoons of blue nershgersh per pint of oobleblargh without causing an explosion but you CAN add at least 9.2 globblespoons of red nershgersh and even though red nershgersh has the side effect of giving you dick warts, it'll let you make a powerful enough batch of ooblegersh to magnify your scrying radius beyond your baseline of 5.6 miles so you can then spy on the enemy army that is camped 5.9 miles from your current position? As far as the story and characters are concerned, the important takeaway is that hopefully the intel gained is worth the dick warts. Was it the right decision? Was the quality of intel worth the sacrifice of MC's dick's wellbeing? What does this sacrifice mean for MC's relationship with his gf? You don't need to know the maximum safe nershgersh:oobleblargh ratio to answer those questions. Maybe it's my raging ADHD, but more often than not I find these sorts of hard systems exhausting to read about, especially when I don't actually need to understand low level details (like explosive threshold numbers) to follow the story or relate to the characters. There's just too much cognitive load involved, especially when, as a reader, you're just a passive, non-interacting observer.* Even though there are some good pointers and nuggets of wisdom in Sanderson's advice (like figuring your poo poo out in advance, maintaining internal consistency, depth before breadth, considering costs and limitations in magic), I find that the way it's presented is too rigid and prescriptive. And in my opinion, he kinda does soft magic dirty in his magic law write-ups and discounts the whole magic-with-meaning angle, where the magic is some allegory or about representing something more profound than a means to solve a plot puzzle, like a spiritual/religious experience, transcendence, deeper character moments/growth/discovery, and so on. * If that hypothetical alchemy system I just made up was in a video game, I'd be alllllll over it - as the player with the controller in my hands, I'm the one who gets to gets to dick around making potions and I don't have to remember or think about the numbers or rules or limitations because the game is there to actively enforce them for me, and I can learn those rules and limitations in fun ways, like discovering what the explosive thresholds are by accidentally blowing up my alchemy lab. Playing/interacting with a system like that would be SO much more fun than reading about it. At least in my opinion.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:24
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:
To defend him, he doesn't say that in his writing lectures. He also covers other kinds of magic (like LOTR's) and stresses that he just has a personal preference for hard magic systems. He also calls in guest lecturers for topics that he considers himself to not be the best at, like short stories, etc. He's more or less a solid, reasonable dude who actually knows all the criticisms one might have against his work and is remarkably gracious about it.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:34
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Megazver posted:To defend him, he doesn't say that in his writing lectures. He also covers other kinds of magic (like LOTR's) and stresses that he just has a personal preference for hard magic systems. He also calls in guest lecturers for topics that he considers himself to not be the best at, like short stories, etc. SurreptitiousMuffin posted:The issue (which Sando himself has said he hates)
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Apr 4, 2023 21:42
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Yeah, I was backing you up and also responding to a few other things mentioned in the last couple of pages. Sorry if it came off some other way.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:49
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General Battuta posted:This conversation always turns into a giant fuckfest but I'll keep it brief.  I think many people confuse 'playing fair with the reader' or making sure your world building is 'consistent' to mean THERE MUST BE A PERFECT PROOF FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN THE STORY. Who the gently caress knows if Tolkien had all the magic mapped out (well, okay, we do now with the publishing of all his papers) it doesn't have to be spelled out in the work itself. Similarly, the Elvish language didn't have to include a treatise on Elven grammar (but he did that too... TOLKEIN!  ) in order for the language to feel authentic.Personally I love me some ambiguity. It's compelling, and keeps people talking about the work far longer than they normally would. Is Decker a replicant? There are clues either way (gently caress YOU TOO, RIDLEY SCOTT ). One of my favorite movies, The Thing doesn't really add up if you look at certain parts. What killed Fuchs? What happened to the Thing that escaped out the Dog kennel? When did Clark become infected? Is that a bottle of liquor or gasoline McReady has at the end? I tried to suss that all out for YEARS only to find out later that Carpenter intentionally didn't connect those dots so the story would always juuuuust out of reach of the full explanation. loving hell, my admiration for the man doubled when I learned that.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:57
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Queen Victorian posted:And in my opinion, he kinda does soft magic dirty in his magic law write-ups and discounts the whole magic-with-meaning angle, where the magic is some allegory or about representing something more profound than a means to solve a plot puzzle, like a spiritual/religious experience, transcendence, deeper character moments/growth/discovery, and so on. Like he's tithing millions to an organization that explicitly keeps queer people targeted by hate bills and thinks that's totally fine and good so long as he also donates a little to queer charity and makes an offhand gay character; the idea of thinking about greater meaning or purposeful intent or action is like oil to his room temperature left out all week nalgene of water.
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Apr 4, 2023 22:49
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General Battuta posted:This conversation always turns into a giant fuckfest but I'll keep it brief. i agree with everything you said, but i have to point out an irony. The first Mistborn book is about, basically, a hapless white settler who is humiliated by the competence and skill of his indigenous guides, who accumulate and pass on knowledge to each other through magical means. When he stumbles upon apotheosis he aims to debase their culture and creates a totalizing magic system (by appropriating their magic) that he believes will give him absolute control. But he underestimates the outmoded magic of the indigenous sages and it leads to his defeat. anyway i think a materialist view of how to write fantasy powers is fine if you want to write about materialist fantasy. it's a suffocating view if you want to write non-materialist fantasy. I am not smart enough to say what people ought to or ought not to write about. But I personally enjoy Earthsea more than Mistborn. And I think the story with the best use of magic in it is probably Twin Peaks lol. Although I also adore the ridiculous magic logic of shounen manga like Hunter x Hunter, which tends to shine when it stretches its logic to the near breaking point anyway. thanks for the great post!
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Apr 4, 2023 23:02
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General Battuta posted:This conversation always turns into a giant fuckfest but I'll keep it brief. Thanks for this. As someone nearly at the end of my fantasy novel WIP, it was super reassuring to hear
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Apr 4, 2023 23:24
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Great post, Battuta. The rise of LitRPGs and other gamelit texts feel like the latest iteration of that idea. It isn't just magic that is materialist, but the entire concept of the fictional world and the protagonist is essentially a normal person engaging with a life-like video game.
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Apr 4, 2023 23:55
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Cephas posted:i agree with everything you said, but i have to point out an irony. The first Mistborn book is about, basically, a hapless white settler who is humiliated by the competence and skill of his indigenous guides, who accumulate and pass on knowledge to each other through magical means. When he stumbles upon apotheosis he aims to debase their culture and creates a totalizing magic system (by appropriating their magic) that he believes will give him absolute control. But he underestimates the outmoded magic of the indigenous sages and it leads to his defeat. I should clarify that this is the backstory of the the first Mistborn book. The actual thrust of it is a My Fair Lady story where a street urchin is taught magic by a self-destructive but ultimately heroic con man who founds his own religion (yes this is intentional on the author's part). She's part of a rebellion of crooks, thieves, and the most desperate people against an evil emperor who, a thousand years prior, defeated the chosen hero who was meant to vanquish him. The white savior who gets his comeuppance was part of Sanderson playing with cliches here. Including the idea of "the dark lord won, here are the replacement heroes." It's a cute enough idea and a decent hook. The prose however is thoroughly Sanderson.
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Apr 5, 2023 00:17
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I think the systemization of genre fiction also has the effect of making Plot more important than Theme or Character. The first one is easy to follow and consume, while the latter two can be a little difficult and abstract and bring up bad memories of lovely English teachers. So the audience develops a hyper-fixation on the what of a story rather than the why which feeds into a desire to reduce everything into easily-digestible chunks of perfect information.
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Apr 5, 2023 13:30
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General Battuta posted:I don't know if that made any sense and I certainly didn't keep it short. This was a very excellent post. Thank you for taking the time to put down your thoughts. For my part, I make no secret that Brandon Sanderson is absolutely my author goals insofar as it comes to running a business. Dude is a top tier CEO and way ahead of the curve as far as the publishing industry goes. There is a solid business rationale behind everything he does, from his choice of prose style to how he comes up with stories to how he interacts with his fan base and how he responds to critics. It's why he's so commercially successful. As a storyteller, I think he's always been very clear about his why: he fell in love with storytelling because it allowed him to understand what is like to be someone else and he writes to make other people feel things. He posted an essay yesterday in response to the recent Wired article which goes into his own neurodivergence and experience and lays it out. Anyway, I make those two points because they're really important. Not just for context in terms of Sanderson but just, in general as a writer. The one thing that I've been trying to get to grips with as a self published author is audience. Audience is important because, you know, I'm trying to make a sustainable living from this. And it's been very difficult to accept the truth that what I think might be great writing and story telling more often than not doesn't overlap with what is actually selling. (Or doesn't sell as much as I think it should.) Megazver posted:He's more or less a solid, reasonable dude who actually knows all the criticisms one might have against his work and is remarkably gracious about it. Yeah this. Sanderson is a very good and accessible lecturer. He's thought a lot about the frameworks that he uses and explains them well and explains the situations in which they work well. He is not at all prescriptive about "how to write" and despite having an entire lecture dedicated to "I am not the end all and be all of writing advice, I am just sharing my approach and what works for me, the only way you can learn to write is by actually writing words", people still come away with the opposite impression. I mean, he probably didn't help his case by naming his opinions "Sanderson's Laws" but he also didn't expect to go viral and just wanted to have some fun with it. Sanderson's BYU lectures were what tipped me over from "I really wanna write a novel" to "ok let's sit my butt down and write a damned novel". I've never been that person who's like, "I have so many stories to tell, they're just busting to get out into the world". I have the exact opposite problem, where I enjoy writing and creating but I never know what to write about. Sanderson's transparency about his process and how he actually goes from "My Fair Lady meets Ocean's Eleven but in a world where the Dark Lord won" to Mistborn helped SO MUCH because it was so accessible and made so much sense. It takes a really intimidating thing ("write a novel") and breaks it into constituent parts that feel achievable. I'm not one of those authors who has a thesis in mind or specific themes to explore before I write. If there's anything there, it's always something that comes up during the writing. I have no illusions that I've got anything mind blowing or special to say or that anything I produce is going to be Great Art that will endure for generations. I just want to write and publish books that aren't complete trash, are somewhat meaningful and people will buy and enjoy and be able to make a livable income from that endeavor and hopefully make a nice portfolio of cash generating assets that will keep me going in retirement and that I can subsequently hand down to my daughter. And Brandon Sanderson's lectures are very good for getting started on the writing part of that. SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I balk at the thought Sando writes bad books; he successfully does exactly what he sets out to do and there are clearly a huge number of readers who enjoy it, and I'm not going to poo poo on that craft. This is quite possibly the most eloquent way to put it. To be honest, I think the greatest problem is how people are tending more and more towards ONLY reading what they already know they like, instead of reading more widely and taking risks with their choice of reading, and together with recommendation algorithms it's creating a vicious feedback loop. As a kid, the entire library was my TBR; I would literally walk in, go to 'A', pick up the first 10 books that I saw and knew I hadn't read because that was the max I could borrow on my card, read them all and repeat until I got to the end of 'Z' and had to loop back to 'A'. Most of what I read made no impression on me but I also found a lot of books I loved that I never would have otherwise tried. And yeah, maybe a few that were really horrifying and in hindsight I probably shouldn't have read as a pre teen kid. But I was more willing to give a book a shot. Whereas these days I keep seeing readers ask for super specific recommendations, where it's all just a bunch of requested tropes, followed by a long list of unwanted tropes. And readers not wanting to read anything that might put them outside of their comfort zone, whether that's portrayal of characters they don't like, or characters that espouse views they don't agree with, or uncomfortable ideas, or authors whose political views or personal affiliations or some other attribute they find objectionable (which I have very complicated feelings about). We're at the point where I have to literally post a loving trope map on my Instagram to get eyeballs and have readers decide based on said trope map whether they're going to read my book instead of judging me on my writing and I hate it. I don't even want to talk about BookTok. Milkfred E. Moore posted:The rise of LitRPGs and other gamelit texts feel like the latest iteration of that idea. It isn't just magic that is materialist, but the entire concept of the fictional world and the protagonist is essentially a normal person engaging with a life-like video game. I mean, this is our reality right now. Everybody is being scored on their social media analytics, China has a social credit system. We've dodged blue system screens only because Google Glass turned out to be a massive fail but I'm sure we'll all eventually have eye implants that will give everybody perpetual HUDs. Honestly, I think the gravitation towards hard magic systems is due to how society is shifting in how it relates to the world. We don't know a lot, not really, but we have the illusion of knowing a lot so instead of attributing events/phenomena to the fantastical, we go looking for the great unified theory that must exist to explain it all. I'd bet that is a huge reason behind the appeal of hard magic systems. That and gaming and a widespread understanding of game design and game mechanics.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:06
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Instagram trope map sounds an awful lot like a parallel evolutionary development of the japanese webnovel market being so oversaturated that they put their entire premise, tagline, and tone in the title so they get someone scrolling through multipage lists of works to stop and click on theirs It also sounds awful just in general
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Apr 5, 2023 22:54
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"That time I was reincarnated as a LitRPG author, I'll jump on the bandwagon and cash in on the trend!"
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Apr 6, 2023 00:12
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I feel like the cultivation novel, LitRPG, and isekai trends are going to eventually devour each other and form one giant vortex of nerdy self-gratification at some point.
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Apr 6, 2023 00:14
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It's going to end with a set of electrodes clamped to your body giving you an endless series of increasingly painful yet recursively optimized orgasms as a bored minimum wage attendant swabs you down for bed sores
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Apr 6, 2023 00:20
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Leng posted:As a storyteller, I think he's always been very clear about his why: he fell in love with storytelling because it allowed him to understand what is like to be someone else and he writes to make other people feel things. He posted an essay yesterday in response to the recent Wired article which goes into his own neurodivergence and experience and lays it out. Not to diagnose the guy but, dang, if the thoughts and feelings he describes isn't really reminiscent of schizoid pd.
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Apr 6, 2023 02:41
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Leng posted:For my part, I make no secret that Brandon Sanderson is absolutely my author goals insofar as it comes to running a business. Dude is a top tier CEO and way ahead of the curve as far as the publishing industry goes. There is a solid business rationale behind everything he does, from his choice of prose style to how he comes up with stories to how he interacts with his fan base and how he responds to critics. It's why he's so commercially successful. Yeah, I agree that writing as business vs writing as art is a very important distinction because there are different end goals, different best practices, different audience considerations, etc. Back in my freelance days, I did cover and web design for some indie pulp authors and I gained A LOT of respect for what they do and it made me way less precious about my own writing at the time and it made me consider things like creating vs consuming, what purpose genre classification actually served, and what readers wanted from/got out of the books they read. Right now I'm writing primarily for my own creative fulfillment but I'm keeping considerations like marketability and such on the back burner so that if I do publish/get it published, other folks would actually enjoy it. If I was writing for business/self-pub success, I'd be writing VERY different stuff. quote:I mean, he probably didn't help his case by naming his opinions "Sanderson's Laws" but he also didn't expect to go viral and just wanted to have some fun with it. To add some context/clarification to my feeling that Sanderson's advice felt overly perspective, my take is mostly based on his writings around the laws (and maybe I just feel extra attacked because I write squishy soft lawbreaking magic according to said laws). I've only seen a couple of the lectures, but I've enjoyed and generally found useful what I've seen so far  But yeah, maybe "guidelines", "tips", or "theories" would have been better than "laws", because even though Sanderson himself stresses that they're just his thoughts/opinions and not hard and fast, it's that everyone else seems to take them as gospel. quote:To be honest, I think the greatest problem is how people are tending more and more towards ONLY reading what they already know they like, instead of reading more widely and taking risks with their choice of reading, and together with recommendation algorithms it's creating a vicious feedback loop. Holy poo poo this. I used to just go to the bookstore with all my birthday money and look at all the rad illustrated covers in the fantasy section, pick up the raddest ones, read some blurbs, maybe read a prologue or first chapter if I was intrigued, and then buy a bunch and read them. Sometimes I'd go in with some knowledge I'd picked up from those old human-curated rec lists on early aughts Amazon (I learned about ASOIAF and Robin Hobb (one of my faves) from one of those), other times I'd buy books/authors I'd never heard of before and read them with zero preconceived opinions/knowledge. It was so much fun. I mean sure, there were some I didn't like, but then there were also ones that I loved that I probably never would have bought if I'd run it through some personalized taste compatibility checklist beforehand. It's like the algos have sucked every last drop of joy and spontaneity out of the book discovery process. The current fantasy cover design trend of drab and serious stock photo composite covers isn't helping. I was at Barnes & Noble recently looking to buy some fantasy books and walked past the fantasy section twice because it just looked like more general fiction and I used to just be able to home in on the fantasy from across the store because of the covers. But I guess attracting eyes in bookstores isn't as big of a deal when so much book discovery and buying happens online where algos control want you see, enforcing a feedback loop of authors writing to appease the algos which in turn work to appease incredibly picky readers that were able to become incredibly picky thanks to the algos. Not optimistic about what the algo-driven future holds for authors or content creators in general. The present is weird enough. quote:Honestly, I think the gravitation towards hard magic systems is due to how society is shifting in how it relates to the world. We don't know a lot, not really, but we have the illusion of knowing a lot so instead of attributing events/phenomena to the fantastical, we go looking for the great unified theory that must exist to explain it all. I'd bet that is a huge reason behind the appeal of hard magic systems. That and gaming and a widespread understanding of game design and game mechanics. Makes sense. Also kinda sad when you start thinking about it - that we're so caught in our own web of societal systems and structures and orderly manmade surroundings that our sense of magic starts to reflect those systems and structures and surroundings. And maybe that's why I've been drawn so hard to magic-as-mysticism - because it's an escape and the opposite of manmade order. As for the video game influence, in my previous post I'd originally written some rambling paragraphs about my thoughts as a UI/UX designer on the trappings of video games influencing the genre, but deleted them because I was getting way into the weeds, but the gist of what I was getting at was scratching my head over how/why LitRPG is popular because the way you interact with a video game is so different from how you interact with a book and in turning the video game experience into a book you lose out on all the player-directed interactive aspects and at that point I'd rather just go play a video game and make all the choices myself. Or maybe there's a meta appeal in getting into the nitty gritty of the underlying systems like the leveling and maybe even the engine itself? Even though LitRPG sounds like it's really not my cup of tea, I'm kinda interested in studying it because it's just so weird to me.
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Apr 6, 2023 05:52
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LitRPG is popular because it plays into the strange power fantasies that video games (and by extent other media that quantify their mechanics) cater to. It's not so much the experience of a game that they're after so much as it is the story of someone playing a world like a video game, and acting out the sorts of power fantasies you can have in video games. Like they want a story where you can grind EXP on rats all day and then become a demigod when you come back to the fighter's guild and turn in 30,000 rat heads all at once. Or what if you could use Persuade to talk people into anything, or what if the world had to react to you turning on godmode in the console. The crunchy system stuff is part of the appeal, but not quite as core as the expression of video game-style power. It's similar with cultivation stories. Part of the appeal is the setting and the skills they learn, but part of it is also just the progressive power fantasy. Structurally it's not unlike porn, since it's written to appeal to to the id in a similar way. I can't say how many internet porn stories I've heard on the F Plus that are just an excuse to describe the hot thing over and over for several thousand words. Sometimes people just want the thing they like to start happening at the start of a story and keep going until the end.
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Apr 6, 2023 07:32
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Queen Victorian posted:Not optimistic about what the algo-driven future holds for authors or content creators in general. The present is weird enough. This is certainly not the thread for this topic I'm sure, but drat do I agree with this. I have a social-ish website that I've been building and maintaining since the late 90s; it's a fan-art site for a movie that at its peak had thousands of active users and hundreds of uploaded pieces of art per day. Really a vast amount of creative work, all for one movie. And I had an excellent opportunity to build some recommendation algorithms around what people liked and commented on. But I never did, because I got into arguments with myself about exactly what problem am I trying to solve? Do I want to: - Make it so users can specify exactly the kind of art they like, so it can ONLY show them matching art - Recommend art that explicitly doesn't match what they say they like, to broaden their horizons - Get more traffic - Spur more comments and discussion - Make money from advertising The last one wasn't a factor for me, but I could see how these contradictory, often diametrically opposed goals would come into play for just about any platform, some of which want to sell you stuff, some of which want to get you coming back to a site to post content, some of which just want your email address so they can spam you. All this talk lately about The Algorithm and everybody seems to think they know exactly what any recommendation system's end goal is, but it's really not obvious or universal, even (maybe especially) to the people who are deepest in the weeds actually designing how they work. They just get handed axioms like "if we find out what user X likes we should show him more of it" and they go OK BOSS and code it up, and then we're all surprised when the Internet turns into a bunch of radicalized echo chambers.
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Apr 6, 2023 13:07
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If you call the plot thickening what happens as it becomes more complex, mysterious or interconnected, would things becoming clearer or more simple be called the plot thinning?
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Apr 11, 2023 01:07
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plot clarifying, like a consomme
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Apr 11, 2023 01:13
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Usually would say the plot threads are being tied up
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Apr 11, 2023 01:21
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the plot winnowing
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Apr 11, 2023 04:40
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deglazing the plot
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Apr 11, 2023 06:51
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Waxing plot and waning plot
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Apr 11, 2023 13:45
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There's up/down plots, strange/charm plots, and top/bottom plots.
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Apr 12, 2023 03:29
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I remember during one very dull MST3K movie Tom Servo announced darkly "The plot thinnens!"
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Apr 12, 2023 03:40
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The thick plottens!
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Apr 12, 2023 17:50
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Doctor Zero posted:The thick plottens! The thot plickens
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Apr 12, 2023 18:23
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I simply do not let my plots get thinner, instead choosing the cool act of making everything ever-complicated until the book collapses under the holy and good weight of my hefty word
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Apr 12, 2023 21:01
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I've put off posting this for a while but: I want my characters to do a medical heist--like a reverse heist--to stop a certain medicine from being used on people anymore*. I can't figure out a general mechanism to do so and I don't work in healthcare so I don't know this space at all. Like, where would the master medicinal source be stored or anything like that. I'm sorry for being vague. Any help is appreciated. *I'm not anti-vaxx or anything like that. The Sean fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Apr 12, 2023 |
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Apr 12, 2023 21:06
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Wungus posted:I simply do not let my plots get thinner, instead choosing the cool act of making everything ever-complicated until the book collapses under the holy and good weight of my hefty word Didn't know Robert Jordan was a goon The Sean posted:I've put off posting this for a while but: Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Apr 12, 2023 |
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Apr 12, 2023 21:14
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Is it like a brand new medicine that's only available in a couple of places? If it's already being widely used then there wouldn't be one place you could go to and get all of it. Is your story set in modern day? Can you bullshit a reason it's only in one location, like it's super experimental?
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Apr 12, 2023 21:27
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Hack the chemical warehouse so the shipping labels get swapped? There are goons who work in pharmaceutical clean rooms over in the dangerous chemistry thread, I'd ask there for some good process information.
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Apr 12, 2023 21:32
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The Sean posted:I've put off posting this for a while but: Bribe graft and seduce media figures/peer reviewers/bots on Facebook to make it seem like the medicine is killing people or giving them gout or some horrible side effect.
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Apr 13, 2023 00:19
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The Sean posted:I've put off posting this for a while but: It has to be a heist? Like honest to god Heist like Ocean's 11 style? Make the object they have to steal evidence that the medicine doesn't work. Say they have to steal evidence, and they find out the evidence is Patient Zero, a monkey or something. Or, the medical company is going to do a big, public test and they have to swap it with a placebo.
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Apr 13, 2023 03:32
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Create a viral tik-tok challenge of flushing it down the toilet, or turning it into pretty fireworks, or spread a rumour that it can be used to grow gems. Create a huge spike of demand outside of medical use, then have a heist to replace what's left with evacuant.
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Apr 13, 2023 04:53
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The Sean posted:I've put off posting this for a while but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOMUfql2Smc You are in luck, Mary Robinette Kowal just posted a video on how to write heist stories. You should be able to reuse most of the plot beats for a more abstract style of heist. The important thing is that there is a colorful ensemble of characters with different skills and personalities working together to carry out some kind of complex plan, but the plan goes wrong, but the goingwrongness was actually part of the plan all along, etc. In fact, all of Mary Robinette Kowals recent videos are great, so just watch the entire channel while you are there. I liked the one about prose as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc31v46TTLk
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Apr 13, 2023 06:53
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