In this week's episode, we wrap up the November Writing Challenge by taking a look back at the Five Iron Laws Of Storytelling, which have often been discussed on this show before. Be sure to get your free copy of STORYTELLING: HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL at my Payhip store. The book will remain free until December 9th: https://payhip.com/b/JPDoT TRANSCRIPT Note: Spoiler alert at 3:35. Please check this section of the podcast before proceeding if you are concerned about spoilers for several older television shows, movies, video games, and books. 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 229 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November 26th, 2024, and today we are wrapping up our November Writing Challenge with a look back at The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling. You may note that I am recording this a bit earlier than I usually do, but that is because I want to take a couple days off for Thanksgiving. To celebrate the end of our November Writing Challenge and to congratulate you all for listening to these shows, I am giving away free copies of my nonfiction book, Storytelling: How to Write a Novel on my Payhip Store. The link will be in the show notes, and if you follow that link, you can get a free copy of Storytelling: How to Write a Novel from my Payhip Store until December 9th. So follow that link in the show notes to my Payhip store and you can get a free copy of Storytelling: How to Write a Novel until December 9th. Before we get to our main topic, let's have a look at my current writing projects. My main project right now is Orc Hoard, the fourth book in the Rivah Half-Elven series, and that puts me at 55,000 words into it and that puts me on chapter 11 of 18. So I think the final draft will be around 85,000 words or so, which will make it the longest book in the series to date. And if all goes well, I very, very, very much want to have that out before Christmas. I'm also about 4,000 words into Shield of Deception, which will be the fourth book in my Shield War series and if all goes well, I am hoping that will be the first book I publish in 2025. In audiobook news, the audiobook of Cloak of Spears, as excellent narrated by Hollis McCarthy, is now available at all the usual ebook stores. I will include a short preview of the audiobook of Cloak of Spears at the end of this episode, so you can listen to that then. And that is where I'm at with my current writing projects as we wrap up November and head into December. 00:01:57 Main Topic: The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling So now let's go right into our main topic, The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling. I figured this would be a good main topic to wrap up our November Writing Challenge with as it is a good reminder and a good summation of many of the things we talked about in the past month. The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling is a concept I first talked about on my website like 10 years ago now. The name Iron Law is sort of a tongue in cheek joke because I got the idea from a science fiction author Jerry Pournelle, who termed what he called Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, where describing that after a certain amount of time, a bureaucracy will cease to attend to the function to which it was created and instead devote its attention to sustaining and perpetuating the bureaucracy. And I'm sure we can all think of examples of that, so that's where I took the name from, but it's not so much Iron Laws as these are useful principles to guide you while you are writing a fictional story, whether it's a short story, a screenplay, or a novel. I would say it's fair to argue that storytelling does have some laws you can follow (or at least if you don't like the term laws, best practices) and a writer will ignore those best practices to his peril. When people get ticked off about the ending of a story like the ending of The Sopranos or the ending to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, if they simply don't like a novel or a TV show, it’s usually because the writer ignored one of more of these Iron Laws that we're going to talk about. These then are what I believe to be The Five Iron Laws of Storytelling. When discussing them, I will cite five examples that I think to be excellent examples of the craft of storytelling: the movie the King’s Speech, the movie Wreck-It Ralph, the movie Gravity, the novel Pride and Prejudice, and the TV series Breaking Bad. I should note that I did not personally care for Breaking Bad because it was too nihilistic for my taste, but nonetheless, it was an excellently crafted example of a well-written story. I'll also cite four things I believe to be examples of bad storytelling: the final two volumes of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, the Dragon Age 2 computer game, the original ending of the Mass Effect 3 computer game, and the ending of the Sopranos TV series. So note that there will be spoilers for all of these shows, films, books, and games. Now onto...
