503 – Building Tension in School Stories

The Mythcreant Podcast

Settle down class. Everyone pay attention as I write on the blackboard. Schools still have blackboards, right? This reference isn’t horribly dated? Anyway, this week is about building tension in stories that take place in school. That’s more difficult than it might appear, at least for the kind of high-action stories that speculative authors are fond of. Fortunately, we’ve got some ideas, and only one of them involves getting pedantic about what exactly constitutes a school.

Show Notes

• A Deadly Education
• Starfleet Academy
• Magic School
• House on the Cerulean Sea
• Fourth Wing
• Red Rising
• Mad Max
• Over My Dead Body
• Sorceline
• Legend Born

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.

[Intro Music]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren, and with me today is…

Chris: Chris

Oren: …and…

Bunny: Bunny!

Oren: Everyone, settle down! It’s time to learn things in a structured environment that also has a duty of care. If you need an adventure pass, you’re gonna have to raise your hand. You can’t go on a dangerous adventure without a pass. And if you misbehave, there’ll be a very normal consequence, like detention. In the seventh layer of hell.

Bunny: Ah!

Chris: Oh no, but I just gotta break the rules. I just gotta!

Bunny: How else am I supposed to be cool?

Oren: Yeah, there’s no other way. You’re gonna have to go out and do extremely dangerous things. What other options could you possibly have?

Bunny: But won’t I get extra credit for being brave and kind-hearted while I’m doing these things?

Oren: Yeah. Mostly for being in the Team Good house, I guess, is where you’ll get most of your points. That’s just how it goes.

Chris: Yeah. Your reward is that the headmaster will declare you and your fellows superior to everybody else. This is very healthy.

Bunny: Even though we’re not supposed to be doing that, but, you know, you can’t quash brave-heartedness.

Oren: So today we’re talking about creating tension in school stories. ‘Cause I’ve been thinking about this a lot because Starfleet Academy is finally happening as a TV show. It’s been like everyone’s second best idea for 50 years. And now they’re like, we’re finally making it! We’re doing it, full steam ahead. And I’m concerned to be honest.

Chris: Yeah. I wonder if the impossibility of the premise is why they keep punting it.

Oren: That seems like it to me, right? It just doesn’t seem like it would work very well because it’s a school, and school stories are notoriously difficult at the best of times.

Bunny: So is the premise just our heroes are in school? Is that it?

Oren: We don’t know. We don’t know much about it. All we know so far is that it’s called Starfleet Academy and we have like a cast list, which is a combination of actors from previous shows and like a group of hot young people who are presumably the students.

Chris: Maybe we should start placing our bets on whether in the first episode the entire school is just like attacked and then all the students have to flee, and then it’s just them fleeing around the galaxy. But you know, it’s a metaphorical school. I mean, it’s still technically a school ’cause there’s teachers with them. So we’ll call it school.

Oren: I have been wondering, okay. By Starfleet Academy, do they mean like a ship with cadets on it? Because that seems like a thing they might do. The USS Starfleet Academy. Surprise!

Chris: I’m sure that that’s not the original concept that they intended. Because I mean, we’ve seen these other Star Trek episodes where they hearken back to their academy days and tell stories about it. So I’m sure the idea is supposed to be that people are just at school. But yeah, that will take all of like a few writers in a room for a few hours to probably go out the window.

Oren: So I guess at this point, rather than just ragging on a show that doesn’t exist yet…

Chris: Yeah, maybe we should be optimistic. We should be kind and, you know…

Bunny: 20 points to you for being kind.

Oren: Yeah. Maybe it’ll be good. Who knows? I would like it to be good. It’s not like I’m cheering for it to fail, I just have concerns about the premise. But, okay, so the obvious obstacles to tension are that schools are learning environments for kids. And when people have a choice, they don’t typically send their kids somewhere dangerous. And then schools also have a direct incentive to not let their students get eaten, ’cause it’s harder to attract more students if your students get eaten.

Bunny: Especially private schools, because you are paying to be there. And presumably some of that is so that you don’t get eaten.

Oren: One of the ways we will go into a little bit of making this easier is not all schools are super well-funded, and not all schools have great incentives. So there’s that. And then the last one is that, especially in magic schools, which is the most common type of school narrative in spec fic, you have a bunch of teachers around and the teachers are usually more powerful mages than their students, ’cause that’s just how magic schools typically work. And then that creates another problem of if there’s an issue, why aren’t the teachers fixing it?

Chris: When I think about these problems, I think about a couple things. First, why parents would send their children to the school. And you could have a situation where everyone at the school is an orphan, but writers don’t usually wanna do that.

Bunny: They want their special chosen one to be an orphan!

Chris: Right? And they also want, usually to have like rich, privileged kids at the school. Other things like that. So we need an explanation for why parents would want to send their children to school. And if it’s too dangerous, that doesn’t work. And also, why doesn’t the school shut down if things start happening, right? If there’s, if kids are no longer safe, if they used to be safe, but that has changed… a normal school would just shut down and send all the kids home. So it’s hard to come up with a premise that works and creates tension when those two basic facts are in play.

Bunny: Right. And I think a lot of the conflict that we’re used to in like real world school is also like, not conflict that necessarily makes for a super exciting story. Like grades.

Oren: I mean, you can do a school drama, right? Where the drama, you know, all the storylines are emotional problems that kids are having. That’s a famous thing that happens even at well-run schools. And you know, you can be trying to study hard for tests, but let’s be honest, that’s not what most people want when they sit down to write a speculative fiction school story.

Bunny: Right, you want the magic part to have some salience, and in that case it could just be like your normal high school.

Oren: Yeah. If, if you go to a magic school and nothing magical, adventurous ever happens, readers are gonna wonder why this is a magic story in the first place.

Chris: I wouldn’t eliminate the possibility of a magic school cozy. It wouldn’t actually be necessarily that different from House in the Cerulean Sea, where we just have a bunch of magical kids. House of the Cerulean Sea basically has a threat of this orphanage shutting down as its throughline. That’s how it manages, but it still brings in lots of things that are from the outside and it doesn’t actually focus that much on the schoolwork. But you could probably, again, take some pressure off if you did want to do a lighter story.

Oren: So you can use the schoolwork itself to generate tension. I’ve seen people talk about that and, you know, you can attach some pretty hefty stakes to schoolwork depending on the type of story you’re telling. It can be potentially life or death stakes. Like it’s possible that your character is like some kind of renegade super mage or whatever, and they’re like, “you’ve got one chance to shape up. You’ve gotta stay at this school or else bad things.” So that’s an option. It could be something a little more reasonable that’s like, well, I need to do well here so that I can, you know, get a good job out of magic school.

Chris: Or something with the skills that they earn. Like, my family is cursed and I gotta somehow become good at magic to lift the curse on my family.

Oren: Yeah. So you can attach stakes to that. Those tend to make good background stakes and create like a base level of tension. It’s kind of hard to use those for the whole story just because if nothing else, it’ll get repetitive after a while of like, okay, well we’re studying for another test. Great.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I would say that if you have stakes like, okay, my family is cursed, or I gotta shape up, you’ll also need them to be present at the school so that you can find ways to ramp up tension. So if your family is cursed, then you would want that curse to somehow be present at the school and easily affecting the kid if possible, so that we don’t just have people periodically sending messages, “oh no, your uncle is getting worse. You better learn that magic!” And then you need a reason why the protagonist is struggling with their schoolwork, which is doable, but it just shouldn’t be asshole teachers who are bad at training.

Bunny: Right. And I think also we need to see why the schoolwork is difficult, which in some cases it’s clear. Like if you’re at a fighting school and you have to fight, clearly that’s difficult. But when you’re using a very abstract magic system, it can just feel like… I don’t know, your protagonist is thinking really hard and then failing to produce results for reasons.

Oren: Concentrate!

Bunny: Yeah. Think more!

Oren: Just tell them to concentrate harder. That’ll do it.

Bunny: Right. So I feel like it’s important to know if the classwork is going to be part of the tension, why it’s tense, why it’s difficult, why it’s a conflict, rather than just being like, well, you know, it is difficult.

Oren: Yeah. If you’re gonna use the school work as a source of tension and it’s a magic school work or a tech school work, in the case of Starfleet Academy or what have you, you do need to know how it works, at least on some level. I think Starfleet Academy is gonna suffer from that because we already know how Star Trek technology works and it’s bullshit!

Chris: It works by technobabble.

Oren: And that’s not an easy thing to make interesting stakes out of.

Bunny: Right, but obviously if your magic school is about like… to cast spells, you need to pull from the evil nether realm, and that might cause a demon to pop out onto your lap, it’s a little more intuitive why that might be difficult.

Oren: If you’re the kind of person who likes making detailed magic systems with specific rules and how they work, then a school story is a great place to introduce that, ’cause you have a built-in reason why we have to learn all of it.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I do think that if you were writing a long series, it might be hard, if you were just focusing on schoolwork, to keep that fresh after a while, but I do think that that might work pretty well in combination with some other solutions, right? Like if you had a curse and that curse caused some life or death stakes at the school occasionally on its own that you had to deal with besides just having the protagonist learn the schoolwork to try to eventually solve this problem, then that would give it some variety. When you run into really difficult plotting problems, sometimes the best you can do is a combination solution, so that no one solution is leaned on too hard.

Bunny: I will say I’m quite tired of the type of story in magic school settings or really just, you know, fantastical school settings where it seems like literally every part of the schoolwork is trying to kill you. Like you have gladiator battles that kill students, and this is not really commented upon like, oh, there’s just a tough school.

Chris: I do see some people wanting to make the school antagonistic, just like outright cruel. That is part of the premise. That’s not unheard of. But I do think that even in those stories, even if again, there are no parents, there are no loving parents sending their kids to school. So your backup like everyone is an orphan or something like that.

Bunny: There’s also not much point to it. Like if you try to position this in the larger society, I feel like I mostly see this with like, it’s the military, right? But then you’re killing all the soldiers.

Chris: Bunny, you can just say Fourth Wing.

Bunny: Look, I wasn’t gonna.

Oren: Or, I mean, Red Rising, if we want another example. Red Rising is one that supposedly all of these high caste gold families send their kids to murder school where half the students are killed on the first day. And it’s like, well, I don’t really believe you. And you know, I was willing to just buy into it, ’cause whatever, this is like a high octane space adventure where we kick ass and take names and don’t really worry about the societal implications that much. But then, like we also tried to use it for drama. So that the main character could have to feel guilty ’cause he had to kill a student who wasn’t prepared. And it’s like, well, I mean now I just kind of feel like you’re taking advantage of me. I was willing to suspend my disbelief, but now it’s like you’re trying to make me feel bad with it and I don’t appreciate that.

Bunny: Yeah. That would be kind of like if, I don’t know, like halfway through Mad Max, the title character got down outta the rig and just started weeping over all of the war boys he’d killed. Like it would feel dissonant.

Oren: Right. It’s like, that’s not what we’re here for, man. This is the story where we go to murder school. I am trying my best to buy into that premise.

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: Fourth Wing definitely has this problem. Again, it’s a Dragon Military Training Academy. So people try to become dragon riders and it’s supposed to be prestigious. Now, granted, if the death rate is too high, none of the powerful families would wanna actually send their kids there, probably. And if I’m gonna be really generous to it, we do have a setup where there are fewer dragons than riders. And the dragons, some of them seem kinda evil, so they don’t like the students. They might just burn them to death. And so you can theoretically see, the school is run by an evil empire, why it might let that go. Because the dragons have all the power in this situation and they’re the more precious resource. But like there’s still lots of things where, you know, on day one to even get into school, they have to go across this parapet that they could easily fall off of to their deaths. And there’s just no reason for that. It’s like, put some mats down there, so if they fail, they just don’t get into the school. There’s no reason to just have them fall to their death. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re just wasting resources at that point.

Oren: Plus they continue the whole “students can die at any moment” thing after they’ve bound their dragons. And we’ve been told that a rider dying can kill a dragon. So… what? Like, what’s going on?

Bunny: So be a little more careful guys, especially if dragons are a precious resource.

Oren: I get that they’re an evil empire, but that doesn’t make them incompetent, especially if they’ve conquered all this, their military must work on some level. Yeah, that’s a whole thing. One thing that I see people often reach for is the idea of like, well, what if the school is actually impoverished, right? And so it doesn’t have the resources for proper safety measures or the money to hire teachers who have the students’ best interests at heart. And sure, like that’s a real problem that exists. It’s tragic. I’d be careful throwing that in. I’m not gonna say you shouldn’t, but is that really the story you want to tell, is the question I would ask. ‘Cause when I run into a lot of authors who try this, they think it sounds cool for about five chapters, and then they’re like, “oh, this is actually a huge bummer. This isn’t actually what I wanted.” And then they end up doing something that just doesn’t fit with this supposedly poverty racked school they’ve created.

Bunny: Well, that’s because it’s like, you know, a big part of magic school is wish fulfillment and there’s not a lot of wish fulfillment in going to, I don’t know, a shabby public school where all they serve is meatloaf.

Oren: And also with a lot of these schools, even poverty isn’t gonna explain it anyway, right? Like, if you’re dealing with schools where demons are constantly attacking, even parents who don’t have any other options, they’re just gonna keep their kids home because like, okay, they’re not getting an education, but they’ll be alive. That explanation has limits and it very often doesn’t mesh with the kind of story authors wanna make anyway. You can also do what I’ve started calling the worldbuilding bonanza explanation, which is what you find in stories like A Deadly Education, where the entire novel is basically set up to try to justify this inherently illogical premise. And I wrote a whole article on why I didn’t buy it and why I felt like it really slowed the story down. But even if you think that it did a great job, Novik is basically – Naomi Novik is the author – is basically spending the entire book fighting her story’s momentum, and I just have to feel like there’s a better way. You want a setup where you don’t have to spend the entire thing fighting the premise you created.

Chris: Yeah, honestly, at that point, I think-

Bunny: Right.

Chris: -just having a completely unrealistic school and ignoring the problem is better. I would choose that over spending my entire book with lots of exposition, trying to justify everything.

Bunny: I do wonder if part of this is sort of a bifurcated problem with two different types of magic school, one in which the danger could come up at any time and does, and the other in which like a cataclysmic danger has just showed up and it’s an anomaly. And I think most of these are dealing with the first one, right? Like you want this environment where the danger is all part of it. But I feel like the other option is something that more authors should think about. I think that there are a lot more plausible premises where everyone is out of their depth. And like students and teachers alike, it makes more sense that the students would be jumping in on the action or that maybe the teachers are antagonistic and they are part of what caused all of this. Like the call is inside the building.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, attacks and emergencies that are just one-off and aren’t normal at the school are definitely a solution that helps. The problem is that they only work for so long before they just become as unrealistic as everything else that’s been happening, because you have to explain why the school doesn’t shut down and send the kids home at that point. Now, you could have something like a literal siege where the kids can’t go home ’cause they’re surrounded. But sieges are pretty bleak. Again, so if we’re going for wish fulfillment, you know, having everybody like run out of food and start eating rats is probably not…

Oren: You’d also have to justify, why are we still doing classes at this point? Like is it really a school story if it’s a siege that happens to take place at a school? Like, it’s probably not what most people are imagining,

Bunny: Right, I feel like this would probably, unless you want to do the siege storyline and have your students eat magic rats or whatever, I think the premise that makes the most sense is like a mystery story in the setting where it’s not very bombastic, but like the students are investigating and who can you trust and stuff like that. I’ve actually read two different graphic novels recently that basically had that premise of like, it’s a mystery at magic school, one of which was Over My Dead Body, and the other, which was Sorceline, which was thoroughly meh, but did do the like, it’s an isolated school where weird things have started happening and it might be one of the professors, or it might be the protagonist inadvertently causing the spooky things to happen. So she doesn’t want to tell anyone.

Chris: Yeah, I mean if it’s subtle and under wraps enough, right, that the school can keep running. Yeah, you could keep that going for a while, right?

Bunny: And Under My Dead Body uses- or, Over My Dead Body uses- uh, wrong direction! Uses the antagonistic teachers thing to explain why people aren’t doing more, which ultimately works in its favor when that twist is found out.

Chris: Yeah. But again, just as a reminder, when we’re talking about things like mysteries, a mystery doesn’t typically on its own create tension, right? Because it’s more curiosity inducing, but that doesn’t sustain the plot in the same way. It is definitely an enhancement, but usually a mystery story also has stakes added to the mystery so that there’s like tension going forward. So right in this case we have the question of what’s happening, but the source of tension is like the actual threat that’s being perceived by the student when weird and possibly dangerous things are happening. And if it’s at a more personal scale, if it’s not an epic scale thing that’s threatening all the students in the whole school and it’s just one student, and the student has a reason not to disclose that, maybe they don’t trust their teachers, then yeah, I could see that that working for a while. I mean, maybe not an entire series, right, but for a book.

Bunny: Yeah. Right. And Sorceline, it was like people, I think people turning into glass, so like what’s causing that is part of the question. And they think it’s a one-off. But that does like, again, it veers towards the ” why aren’t they closing down? Because students are turning to glass” type of thing.

Oren: In my experience, you can figure out ways to make these sorts of special circumstances work and they can often work for maybe even an entire book if you’re devoted enough. One that comes to mind is Legendborn where the protagonist has to get into demon hunter school because she thinks that someone at the school killed her mom. And so she’s trying to find out who, so obviously she can’t tell anybody ’cause you know, they might protect each other and she doesn’t know who it was. So that worked out. Now that book ends and she’s no longer at demon hunter school, which I think is the right choice. ’cause I can’t imagine that premise working a second time. But it was strong enough to sustain a relatively long novel. So that worked out.

Bunny: Oh, now her other parent is dead and someone else might have done it!

Oren: No, I really like her dad!

Bunny: Let her stay another four years.

Oren: No, no. Her dad is great. Don’t touch her dad. Her dad is a precious snowflake. I love him a lot. You can also do one of my favorites, which is to dodge the issue entirely and just use the school as a backdrop for something else that’s happening. I love to like, find a difficult problem and just not deal with it, just cheat by doing something else. So, you know, this is like you’re technically students at a school. But really you’ve been recruited by the weird criminology professor to do a murder trial and you just happen to have shots at class sometimes, stuff like that. That sort of thing allows you to get some of that school flavor without having to deal with the huge constraints that being in a school puts on your plot.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, that’s not so different from the mystery plot that Bunny suggested, where something happens at school. It just has to be, again, there can’t be too much danger at the school. Our weird teacher can’t take us on adventures that are too dangerous, and at that point it’s just, okay, can you bring in the school enough that it still feels like they’re at school?

Bunny: It’s an internship for which you get class credit.

Oren: Another one that I haven’t actually seen much, but that I think has a lot of potential and I might have stolen this from Chris, if so, I apologize. It’s the idea of extending some kind of political conflict that is going on outside the school into the school, like if there are factions that are vying for power in the mageocracy or whatever, and those factions, you know, have a presence in the school that can create a lot of fun conflict and at the same time feel much more believable why the school doesn’t intervene to shut it down, because it has to also appease these much larger factions.

Chris: Now that I think about it, I did have some weird idea for a school political intrigue that I might have told you about.

Oren: This was a while ago now.

Chris: It was a while ago.

Oren: Yeah. I had this concept for like a magic school story and the idea would be that like people were in their school houses or whatever, but those houses are also like, you know, political factions outside the school. And so there was conflict within the school trying to recruit the best students. And then like the factions also would, some of the teachers were loyal to different factions. So that was a whole thing. I think that could probably work, you know, you’d have to actually make the politics believable. You probably don’t wanna have a house that is explicitly for evil people. That’s probably not gonna work.

Chris: I think you’d also, again, the institution of the school would need to be really culturally and politically important.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: So that what happens at the school matters at large. And that’s not impossible to do, but I think that would be important so that you can have like larger stakes beyond, you know, so when we do weird things at the school, other people notice.

Oren: Red Rising tried to do that, but it ended up actually making it worse because, so they have this thing where like, it’s not like the houses that they’re in, the Mars, Jupiter house or whatever… I don’t think those exist outside the school, but there are networks of people who know each other from the houses they were in at school. And so they like, you know, have a loyalty to their school and they do all kinds of politics in that regard. So like, getting to know people in your school is supposed to be important. But at the same time, the author really wanted the protagonist’s house to be like the disadvantaged, scrappy one. And there’s no explanation for why, they just get less stuff than everybody else. And I’m just wondering why that is. Why aren’t the patrons of that house on the outside objecting? ‘Cause this is hurting their chances of recruiting more qualified people out of the school. And it, you know, it was a weird thing that they added in, that clashed with another thing the author wanted to do, which I mean, story of my life. Fair enough.

Chris: I do wanna talk about rule breaking, since that is a fairly obvious source of conflict, that it can help, but it also has limited use. Which is, basically, you give your protagonist some reason to break school rules and get into trouble. And it could be, you know, them doing their own investigation and then doing forbidden things where they go spy on other students, or you have to arrange something, but it’s not too hard to arrange something. I think one of the things about that is besides just like, okay, how bad are the punishments? Like you could potentially make it so that there’s a reason why the protagonist has to stay at school and getting expelled from school would be bad, but you could only take that so far before the school starts to look toothless. So either the protagonist keeps breaking the rules and they never get caught, in which case it loses tension because the chances of them getting caught then feel really low, or the school catches them and gives them a punishment. But unless, again, we’re doing something really dangerous that no school would actually do as a reasonable punishment, that punishment is just not gonna look like much until this student reaches the point where they might actually be expelled or something, at which case, again, the punishments start to look meaningless as you give them more punishments.

Oren: The punishment is that you have to participate in the school’s amateur production of The Breakfast Club, which I think we can all agree is a fate worse than death.

Chris: So yeah, that after a while, again, the only way to make that last longer is to have punishments that are actually cruel.

Bunny: It’s also, I feel like you can extend that too. If the hero, like say if you’re doing that political maneuvering school story, if the hero has allies who call in a favor about it, so you don’t get the ultimate punishment, but now the stakes are higher because they’ve called in that favor, and also you owe them something. And that puts you in the bad graces of people who think you didn’t deserve that, etc.

Oren: That’s where you have the antagonistic love interest, who now you owe a favor to. Ooh!

Bunny: 10/10, would read.

Oren: All right, so that is about it. We are done for time. Class dismissed. All of you go home. Do your homework though, otherwise, you’re going to the murder forest.

Chris: No! Your homework is to go to patreon.com/mythcreants and support us.

Oren: All right, so before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.