I realize that gripes about the show’s ending and the Mad Queen turn are nothing new, but there is an angle to this that I haven’t seen discussed: Daenerys Targaryen is the T-Rex from Jurassic Park. …Bear with me on this. In his discussion of the deus ex machina in Story, Robert McKee puts the…
Category: Game of Thrones
Deep Psychological Needs and Interpersonal Conflicts
Lesson 1 of story telling (even before “show, don’t tell” and “leave out the parts the reader’s going to skip”) is that stories are inherently about conflict. Someone wanted something, and then they got it — that’s not a story at all. There has to be an obstacle there, something creating conflict for the characters….
Save the Cat! Building Investment in Characters.
In lamenting some of the terribleness of modern screenwriting, Blake Snyder points out how many films lack a simple “Save the cat!” scene which he defines as such: It’s the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something — like saving a cat — that defines who he is and makes us,…
How Ignorance Can Hold a World Together
This post is about a really narrow part of world building, but I think it’s something that GRRM utilizes very well. To begin, when I say “ignorance” I don’t mean it in the pejorative sense; I just mean characters who don’t know things. And I’m talking about a specific sort of knowledge they lack, which…
What Maximalism is Doing in ASOIAF
In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King recalls advice he got form his editor during his first professional writing job as a highschooler covering sports news for a local paper: “When you’re writing a story, you’re telling yourself a story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that…
The Principle of Antagonism in ASOIAF
In Story, Robert McKee presents what he calls the Principle of Antagonism: A protagonist and the story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them. This isn’t about the protagonist having a compelling antagonist, but rather about the depth of antagonism against the protagonist’s central values. If…
How Interiority Builds Empathetic Readers
A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. Back in 2013, psychologists at The New School in New York City conducted an experiment to see how reading different types of literature affect the reader’s ability to empathize with others. To clarify, empathy is the ability to identify and understand the thoughts or feelings…
How Littlefinger’s Ending Got Story Basics Wrong
I know plenty has been written about the botched ending to Littlefinger’s story, because a lot went wrong in it. But, I want to break down the mechanical elements of the story, because there’s more to it than simply smart characters acting stupid, cliche sister-vs-sister conflict, and the worst criminal defense strategy in the history…
How to Put a Great Big World onto a Little Page
One of the things that makes really well done fantasy and scifi so enthralling is the bigness of the world building. Not every story needs to do this — Arrival doesn’t and it’s one of my favorite scifi movies; many of the best Star Trek episodes have nothing to do with exploring the galaxy. They’re…
World Building — The Mundane
One of the things that hooked readers (and show watchers) so quickly with the series is the richness of the world GRRM created. World building is also one of those incredibly challenging things that is daunting even for otherwise talented writers. I started this post intending to go into about five different elements of world…