Story Companion: Epiphanies, Part 2

Anthony and Joel continue their conversation about epiphanies in music and story.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Hello and welcome back to Jones and Wolf, an audio fiction podcast featuring original music. Today, Joel and I are back with part two of our companion episode on how epiphanies function in both story and music. I encourage everyone, of course, to listen to part one of this conversation if you haven't already. Today we're mostly going to talk about the use of Epiphany in the context of a story we put out back in March called a Parisian Interlude. Before we dive into our own content though, I'm curious, Joel, is there a film or TV show that you've seen recently with a character Epiphany that you thought was particularly moving or impactful? And how did the soundtrack enhance the moment?

SPEAKER_00 0:43

I've been watching a lot of old Hollywood films lately, you know, classics from the kind of golden age of Hollywood. Two that I've particularly liked are Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard. I don't know if you've seen either of those, but I think there are some interesting epiphanies or quasi-epiphanies in both of these films. I think in Sunset Boulevard, there's a struggling writer, and I think he basically has a negative epiphany, and he decides to accept living with this aging and slightly mad former movie star, someone that he he finds kind of unappealing, but he does it for the money. And it has fairly tragic consequences for him. But one of the things I think that's interesting about the music in that is so you know from the very first scene of that film that he dies, basically. The film opens with his death. So even though, in some ways, what it's building up to, the tension's already been resolved, I think the music does a really great job of building the tension throughout, getting darker and darker and darker, has this real sort of foreboding quality, and it really piles on this tension, and then you get to the sort of climax or the the worst part of the story, which you already knew at the beginning, but I think the music really does a good job of telling that story. And then I think in Casablanca, obviously quite a different film, it's unclear to me if Bogart's character actually has an epiphany or not. Uh, you know, if he resolves to do the right thing for the greater good, or if he'd always intended to do the right thing, and his sort of nihilistic selfishness is just just for show, it's just a suit of armour. But that's one of the things I like about the story, that ambiguity. And the music in that film is quite interesting too. So there's that song as time goes by, and it's used in the story, so the characters hear the hear the song. It's uh sort of special song between the two main characters, and the score incorporates melodies from that song, and it takes little bits and pieces and themes, and so there's this kind of cross between what's happening in the world of the characters and what's happening in our world as viewers, and I think just think it really uh helps tie the sort of emotional landscape of the film together, so not maybe not specifically related to the epiphany itself, but quite an interesting score, in my opinion. How about you? Is there something that you've seen lately that really has sticks in your mind as having an epiphany?

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Yeah, absolutely. I've got I've got one I want to talk about, but before we do, because those are literally two of my favorite movies, I love the classics and you know, I love Noir in particular. So Sunset Boulevard is this like titan of that genre. And yeah, the scene where Joseph Cotton is lying in the pool, dead at the beginning, is like, yeah, it's such an iconic scene and such an iconic storytelling technique. I'm I'm I'm almost certain that that's not the first time that that technique has been used, but I I kind of love that that aspect of it where it's gonna start with the ending and then we're gonna work our way backwards. But even though we know what's gonna happen, we're fascinated, you know, how do the dots connect? You know, it's such a, I think, a poignant message that that movie conveys around fame and the deleterious like impacts of being obsessed with fame and image and youth. Not that, you know, as a culture, we haven't learned any of those lessons, but it's sort of just a human constant, I think, of the reason why stories are so critical is because each generation has to relearn that lesson or try to learn that lesson as best as they possibly can to try to mitigate, I think, the forces within that tell us, well, no, let's live forever, let's be young forever, let's be beautiful forever, and let's just give in to the hedonism of that. And that's the you know, the highest order of life when we see what actually happens to those characters. In the end, though, that story, the morality is so clear saying, hey, this is the path of death and destruction. Yeah, so don't go down it. But you know, but but people still do, right? Like we we've got millions of stories that that tell a version of that morality tale, but I think that's a particularly poignant one. So I love that film. And then Casablanca is, you know, I've seen Casablanca many times, and I'm always moved by the ending because the story of of him, you know, having been once an idealist with principles who tried to live them to the fullest, and then having his heart broken descends into kind of a nihilistic self-centeredness. And that's where we find him at the beginning of that that film, and then to witness the unraveling of that to get back to the core of his morality and the part of him that is willing to sacrifice for what he believes in, which is ultimately, you know, a cause for the greater good. I think there's something that's just very beautiful in that, in that story about sacrifice. And again, it's it's a lesson to grow up, get over yourself, get over the things that maybe that have happened to you that you're still holding resentment over because it's impeding your progress in life. And there are opportunities to get back to, you know, a place where you feel like you can do some good in the world or you can be inspired to do that. So I that's at least what I take from it. But the film that I chose is actually a much more modern film. It's this movie called Honora, which came out a couple of years ago. It won the Academy Award. Loosely speaking, the plot it's uh follows Annie, a sex worker in New York and a stripper, and who meets the son of a billionaire heir and becomes involved with him. They ultimately get married very impulsively, and then the billionaire kids' parents find out about it. They're in Russia, but they find out and they send essentially their fixer to annul the marriage because they don't want um their son to have anything to do with Annie. Uh, unfortunately for Annie, she's coerced into this annulment, but in the process, she kind of develops a strange relationship/slash connection with one of the fixers who's uh working for the billionaire family. And at the very end of the film, after everything has kind of fallen apart for Annie, her dreams of being this billionaire wife have gone away, and she's kind of forced to realize that she's back where she started, which is, you know, just sort of an apartment in Brooklyn, I believe it is, maybe Bay Ridge, somewhere in the outer boroughs. She has this romantic moment with this guy and she breaks down in tears. And to me, it's her epiphany at that moment is that she, despite having these dreams of being this wealthy person, of kind of reaching the upper crust, she realizes that it was never going to happen for her. She was never actually close to that. At least this is my interpretation. And she just has this profound moment of sadness and emotional release. And it's just, it's heart-wrenching, you know, to kind of just see someone be in some ways just taken advantage of by a billionaire family and cast aside. And there's just something that is profoundly sad about that. And I, yeah, I found it very moving. I don't know. What was your you saw the movie, Joel? What did you think of it?

SPEAKER_00 8:22

I think one of the things I found interesting about that aspect of it was that the most sympathetic character turns out to be like the violent psychopath who is tasked with subduing her and tying her up, and yet he's the only person who actually shows her any humanity. Everyone else just treats her as a sort of an object or an encumbrance or a nuisance. So I just I thought that was quite interesting that there seemed to be quite a lot of ambiguity in the characters.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

And maybe it's a good segue to talk about our our story, a Parisian interlude, because there are similar themes in the story that there are with Honora. I mean, I I would hope that everyone has had a chance to listen to that story, but um, just to give a little bit of background, if you haven't, or if you need a refresher, um this story follows Mac, who's an aspiring pastry chef who's moved to Paris with nothing but a backpack, his blind bulldog, and a few bucks in his pocket, but he's determined to figure out how to make it there. Now, a chance encounter with Schmidt, who's a polyamorous billionaire heir, complicates things for him. Schmidt offers Mac money to go out on a date with his girlfriend, money Mac desperately needs to enroll in a pastry baking class, and an offer that he ultimately accepts. And it's maybe similar to Nora, again, because uh this idea of a billionaire waltzing into your life and then offering you something that you desperately need at a cost, but but at a cost that you're willing to accept because your chance for that dream seems so ridiculously close in that moment that the temptation is it's too much to pass up. So before we talk any more about the the narrative, though, I I was curious, Joel, when you read it, what was your sense of what Max Epiphany was by the end and how did it influence your musical choices?

SPEAKER_00 10:22

I found it a little bit complex or or ambiguous, actually. Although Schmidt is painted in the story as a fairly unlikable guy, he he also seems committed to moral integrity. Like what really matters to him is this sort of the purity of his his bargain with his fiancee, and Mac helps him in that quest. And so I didn't necessarily feel like Mac had done something immoral just for cash, but then at the same time, Mac obviously feels like he's violated his own moral code in some way, and so he he makes this resolution to get back onto firmer moral ground, and so there's a a personal choice there to live up to his own moral standards, and I think it was interesting because it just sort of speaks to the complexities of morality, and you know, we talk about morality, and particularly in films, it's often good versus bad, but morality is not that simple, and I thought it was quite quite a good sort of microscope on how highly subjective all of these things can be and how highly personalized they are. Then in terms of how that sort of influenced the music, I think the uh epiphany in this obviously happens right at the end, so it's a bit different to what we were talking about last time, where there might be you know big sudden changes in the music and then it develops into a different place. So this time it was more like it built up towards that moment of epiphany. And I wanted to leave it with this sense of not being resolved. So he's made the epiphany, but we don't really know what happens next. Does he continue in the pastry course? Does he go on to become a pastry chef? Does he just quit and go back to his old life? Who knows? And so the music doesn't actually resolve. So I think that is probably how that influenced or how how his epiphany influenced the musical choice there. It was just the main thing being the choice to leave it unresolved and leave it open at the end.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

What you said about Schmidt is interesting because I think with that character, I was trying to present someone who was very, very confused. I was trying to get that across not only with Schmidt, but also with Anna. And confused in the sense that they they talk so much about their how about how they don't care about money. You know, they're obviously extremely wealthy, but they're constantly just saying how little money means to them. And to me, I think money means everything to them, and that they're just lying to themselves about that. And I was trying to, I think, get that across maybe suddenly. I don't know, did that come? Did that did you get that takeaway, or did it was that maybe a little too buried?

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Yeah, I did, and I I think you know that that's part of the complexity with Schmidt actually, is that he says he doesn't care about money, but then he also has to be really careful that people aren't marrying him just for his money. And you know, I it's pretty hard to hear somebody complaining about what a burden it is to have too much money. Yeah, I mean there are ways you can solve that problem. I I can think of a couple of ways to to get out of that situation if you ever unfortunately find yourself in the position of having billions of dollars that you don't like. But I think it was an interesting contrast between Schmidt and Anna, actually. Like I think his his character, like I said before, it it it seems a bit grating. Like he's he's very sort of self-centered, and he's got this I care so little about money that I'm gonna throw expensive bottles of whiskey around and I'm gonna tattoo stuff on my face and you know I'm gonna make a real big show of how much I care don't care about money, but then he does have he does have a sort of something that matters to him is that that uh moral integrity of the bargain he struck with his fiancee. And then I think Anna is portrayed as quite likable. She seems quite sensitive and and yet she's the one who's also willing to kind of forsake her true feelings and marry a guy that she doesn't love for the sake of you know, she says it's experience, but like really I think experience is just a proxy for wealth there. I mean it's it's the experiences that unlimited money will buy you that she's she's chasing there. Not so much you know, the experience of being deeply in love with somebody. Like that's an experience too, and it's pr it's pretty much free. That's not what she's after. She's after the helicopter rides and champagne and whatever. So I I thought that was quite interesting, actually, the way instinctively I disliked Schmidt and liked Anna, but actually on further examination, I felt maybe Schmidt was the the truer character and Anna was the less true character, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

It does, yeah, it does it it it does. I think probably part of it, part of your initial read was I'm definitely putting my finger on the scale to make Schmidt less likable and make Anna more likable, but I think Anna is a character who has she's already made her her bargain, so to speak. She's already decided that she is going to stay with Schmidt, even though she doesn't love him, because of the money, despite what she says, because she's sort of bought into this hedonistic lifestyle that his fortune has enabled for them. And Mac is right at the beginning to me of that decision point. He's just been offered, you know, kind of the first taste of, hey, here's a little bit of here's a little bit of money to do this favor for me. It's a lot of money to Mac. And it, in theory at least, can it can help him pursue his goal. But I think the question of the story is at what cost? Right. Like the way that I see Mac is he's sort of a, he's a younger, more idealistic, aspiring artist, essentially, who's willing to risk a lot in pursuit of that artistic dream. And here is, you know, sort of the first his first taste of reality of like it's a little bit harder to get this, to get this dream that he initially thought it was going to be. Okay, maybe he has to enroll in these classes. Okay, he needs money, and here's this opportunity to get this money, and it seems easy. But what is he sacrificing exactly to get that money? At face value, he's just going on a date with this girl to help prove to this billionaire heir that you know, whether or not his girl or his fiance is telling the truth to him. But I think on a deeper level, he's starting to participate in something that maybe I just as the author find a little bit more sinister, maybe is a strong word, but corrupting. Like I think there's something corrupt, corrupt about the deal that that Anna and Schmidt have made.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Yeah, it's unsavory, really, isn't it? Like there's there's a contrast between Mac just wanting to create, you know, being very interested in the purity of his pastry dreams. He's just interested in flour and salt and butter and sugar and whatever. And you know, those are the things that he he's actually really thinking about is how to combine these pure ingredients into some kind of creation. And yeah, he gets embroiled in this sort of double game. These two people who allegedly trust each other, but they clearly don't trust each other at all. They're making these twisted bargains with each other that neither one of them is really living up to. And it's sort of it's like not his world at all. He's he's coming into this world, these people who are live life in such a different way to him, and their cares are so different to the sort of simplicity and purity of his care just about pastry. So there was also an element there where it feels like Mac is getting sucked into something dark that he doesn't really want to be a part of.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

There also might be something here about the young artist. I wonder if that's I'm curious if it resonates at all with you. Like if you remember when you were maybe in your, let's say, early 20s, like pursuing music. And there's something I feel like there's something pure about pursuing art when you're much younger and you're not so obsessed with okay, where is this going? What kind of success is this going to lead to? You're just maybe excited by the act of doing it. And then, you know, over time, there are moments that just make you more cynical. I think anyone who's pursued art on any level, even if they've been successful, like they've had those moments where they feel like they've been sucked in directions that maybe were ultimately not where they wanted to go and not the best for the artistic process itself.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

That certainly resonates with me, the idea of being young, uh, maybe naive, but also just having this dream or just a desire to play music, make beautiful music, and that's all that really mattered. And I don't care if I don't have any money, and I don't care if no one recognizes what I do, and I don't care if I'm not famous, and I don't care about any of this stuff. All I want to do is be satisfied that I'm creating the best music I can possibly create. And you know, that's all well and good when you're 21 and 22 and don't have any responsibilities and don't have to sort of earn a living, and then after 20 years of earning a living from music and realizing that hey, making beautiful music is great, but you also have to eat and you know have a house and like all these normal things that you you need to be able to do. Yeah, like you said, the sort of cynicism creeps in, the world weariness creeps in. But there is something pure in that naivety of of being at the start of that journey. And it's not necessarily a bad thing that the reality comes in at some point. I mean that's I think that also informs the art and makes it deeper and more meaningful, having had to have gone through, you know, maybe personal tragedies or difficult circumstances or whatever. Uh all that stuff feeds into what you're creating. But yes, there is something that's kind of pure about being at the very start of that journey.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

That that came to mind for me because there was something about the music, at least for me, like especially when with the scenes with with Anna. Those scenes with Anna to me felt so sentimental. And I wonder, was that your intention with the music? Was that something that you were trying to evoke, or was that maybe just something that came out in me as I was listening to it?

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Yeah, I think it's always interesting when uh you know we talk about the music that I've written for these episodes. And I think there's often the question of did I intend to evoke this particular feeling? And I think at a at one level the answer is no, I didn't really. Intend anything specifically. I was just writing the music. With this episode in particular, I wrote the music much, much faster than I would normally write for our episodes. So they usually take significant time. I'm usually going backwards and forwards over them, deliberating pretty hard about what I want to do, trying an idea, doesn't work, scrap it, try something else. Whereas this one I just sort of I sat down one morning, I started writing, and by about lunchtime it was like 95% done. So in a way there wasn't really time to think about, I'm gonna intend this at this particular moment. It's just that in writing it, when Anna comes into the story, it felt to me like there needed to be some kind of change in the music there. There is a bit of a warmth to Anna, even though she's possibly the most soulless of all of them. Her coming into the story as well is also kind of for me a moment where things changed for Mac. So the music changes there, there's some more layers that come in and uh some harmonic changes, but there wasn't a sort of intention to evoke a particular emotion. So all of those words are basically me just saying no to your question, I think. So then it's just me.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

I mean, that makes sense that that the music is going to evoke something different in each listener. And I think just maybe for me, there's a sentimentality with how I think about Mac and think about that period in life of being, you know, a young artist in a city where all you're focused on is the craft and all you want to do is the thing that you love to do, and you're not so concerned with how it's gonna turn out or how much money you're gonna make from it. Like you're just so involved in the process and you're also excited about the potential of where it's going to go. Whereas I think how I would compare that to myself now as a you know, as someone in their 40s, is that you you become, or at least I feel like I've become, you know, much more skilled as a craftsman, but I'm less excited, or I don't even think much about the potential of where it could go, if that makes sense. Like I'm still open to the idea of, oh, well, maybe, you know, maybe I I write a I write a book that becomes very popular or something, or we create some audio fiction that for whatever reason, you know, gets shared widely and we have a, you know, a sharp uptick in listeners. But I don't know how much that would actually change my life at this point or change the process of the art itself. I think it's very well established. Like I enjoy doing this, the value is in the doing of it, and I'm gonna continue to do it regardless. But I don't know. There's a sort of peace in that, but there's also kind of a ceiling on how excited I am on a day-to-day basis. Whereas I feel like 20 years prior, where Mac is in the story, everything is exciting. Life has got, you know, far higher highs and and also far lower lows. And there's something awesome about that, you know. And so I think maybe the sentimentality is just coming from me as maybe middle a middle-aged person, just thinking back to that that time in life and and looking at it with a little bit of nostalgia.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

I mean, I I certainly think that in a lot of the music I write, there is a sort of nostalgic feeling or uh it's bittersweet. And so I think it it does make sense. Like if I were to listen to that music, like I yes, I hear the nostalgia in it. I think maybe the question is whether or not I intended that, and I'm not sure that I I deliberately intended that, unless it happened subconsciously, you know, like unless that just came out in the writing, which is is possible, but I wasn't necessarily thinking about that as a something to aim for before I started.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

The operative word for me is is bittersweet, because I I do feel like Max's epiphany is one that is bittersweet. I mean, if I had to just put it super simply, I think what what his epiphany is as this younger man interested in art, willing to risk a lot in in pursuit of that, is all of a sudden he's had an experience where he's forced to realize, like, hey, this this journey is gonna be a lot more complicated than I than I originally thought. Like it's going to involve a lot of choices that are gonna take me down a lot of paths, a lot of a lot of blind alleys. And I need to figure out, you know, maybe a little bit stronger sense of who I am and what my principles are in order to navigate it. But at the end of the story, he's just left in that moment of feeling bothered, feeling like he did something that is not within his values, it's not within his principles. Um, and he's left on shaky ground, feeling like, okay, I I maybe made this trade-off, but maybe it was the wrong trade-off. I thought I was just doing it to pursue this dream of baking that I had, but maybe actually like I never should have got involved with these people, and I should have just tried to make money on my own or done it a different way. And so we're just sort of left in that uncertainty, that that kind of shaky feeling, that those moments of youth where all of a sudden you're so sure about what you're doing, and then bam, you're knocked off kilter by life. And you don't really know how you're gonna get back on kilter, but you just sort of have this vague understanding that life is a lot more complicated and a lot harder than you ever thought. Which I, you know, I don't know for you, Joel, but I gotta say, for me, even at 40, like I feel like I just I still have those moments, you know, on a daily or weekly basis, like, wow, this is no, life is actually a lot more complicated than I thought.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Yeah. And I look, I think uh that's really one of the beautiful but frustrating things about life is that just when you think you've got it all figured out, you realize how little you actually know and how much you really don't have it all figured out. And and I I wonder actually if you know there's that stereotype of fame and success destroying artists. So many tragic tales of artists who have created something and then get sucked into this vortex of celebrity and money, and then they just like get they die, or they get have horrendous substance abuse problems, or they turn into awful people, or all of the above, or whatever. And I guess it it goes back to that thing you were saying about not necessarily having your firm moral ground figured out or your understanding of how to navigate life figured out, and then all of a sudden being thrust into this different world with people who maybe have been there for a long time who offer you all of these corrupting influences. And maybe that's what happens to Mac. He gets a little taste of it, and that's enough for him to say, ooh, this is not right, this is uncomfortable. I need to understand my moral foundations better if I'm gonna actually navigate the world properly. I I wanted to ask what your thoughts were about ending at the moment of Epiphany, uh, rather than having the epiphany somewhere in the middle of the story and then us seeing how it plays out for Mac and what happens and how it resolves and how he transforms.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Yeah, and we in part one of this conversation, we had kind of talked about the classic use of epiphany in story, where a character has an internal realization about something where they um they grow and they become a different person internally, and then that allows them to then behave in a different way externally. And so, because as a result of that changed mindset, they can have changed behavior that leads traditionally to some heroic act or sacrifice, like the character, like Bogart's character in Casablanca, for example, that then leads to the resolution of the story. And that is that's sort of our our classic storytelling arc, and it's a great arc. I love that arc. I love Casablanca, as I was saying. But there's also, you know, as a writer and a storyteller, you have the ability of like, where do you want to end the story? Do you want to end it with a nice, perfect resolution, or do you want to end it earlier? Do you want to end it at the moment of epiphany? Like I would argue that's where Enora, the film, ends. It sort of ends at this moment of epiphany for the main character. And then it leaves, it leaves that lingering with the audience. And I think the idea there is as a storyteller, you want to leave the audience with a feeling, something for them to process emotionally, something for them to chew on intellectually. And then maybe the audience changes their behavior as a result. So I think that's sort of the the like the ideal use case of this technique. And that's what I'm also trying to accomplish in my own way with with this story. I am curious though, too, Joel, would you say, is there like a similar technique in music where rather than completing like a holistic like emotional experience musically for a listener, you want to like leave them more in a place of dissonance, or you want to leave them at a particular moment that doesn't seem like logical uh if you're comparing it to other traditional you know compositions or songs.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Absolutely. And I think it's actually something that I used in this story, uh, which I touched on a bit earlier, but in music there's a there's a technique called a cadence. Quintessential cadence is the perfect cadence, which is that thing you hear, you know, if you're listening to some sort of older classical music, you know, Beethoven symphony or something. It's that thing you hear at the end where it just kind of goes like, I'm finished, I'm finished, I'm finished, I'm finished. And then like you really know that it's over. You know, it's like it's done, and we're telling you it's done, and then it's done again, and then it's done again, and then like there's no doubt about it, it's just done. It's finished. And there are obviously varieties all the way through from that extreme example up until something that just ends completely unresolved and completely dissonant and at this moment of real tension. In this particular story, it's sort of about halfway. Like it's it doesn't end in a particularly tense way. Uh, it's not, it doesn't end on a tense chord, it doesn't end on a moment of tension, but it ends on uh uh an open kind of chord. You're not clear whether or not it's finished or it's tense. It's neither one of those things.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

And I really like that dichotomy of of tension versus resolution because I think it's similar in storytelling where are you going to leave the audience in a place of tension where they then have to leave the storytelling experience, whether it's reading a book or or watching a movie or listening to a story or whatever, and then they have to process that on their own and come to their own resolution, maybe through a changed mindset, maybe through a new, you know, lived behavior or set of behaviors. Again, that's like kind of a perfect world if you're actually influencing someone on that level with a story. That's an amazing accomplishment. Um, versus tying up everything neatly with a bow as a storyteller, where you're going to, you know, like a Lord of the Rings, you're going to give them the rising action, the conflict, the seemingly insurmountable, you know, odds that the hero has to overcome. But then the hero does overcome it and they save the day and everyone lives happily ever after. Which again, I I I love those stories, but I think a lot of times an audience might leave that just feeling like not much or nothing, because the emotional experience has been so nice and neat for them that they don't really have to do a ton of processing. And I wonder if it's maybe similar with music, although I'm sure you can also, like with the Beethoven example, like that obviously has left a lot of people with a lot of things to process. So yeah, it's just interesting. When do you find yourself leaning towards one technique or the other?

SPEAKER_00 35:21

I think it just really depends on the story and what I feel is right for the story. Uh I've used this that sort of technique in some of our other stories. Uh, I've also used, you know, the more final final technique uh in some of our stories. It really just depends on I think what happened what's happening in the story. If I feel like it's over, it's done, and I want to really communicate that sense of finality, I will make sure that that comes through through the music. And other at other times, like with this one, it just felt more like leaving it open or unresolved uh was the appropriate choice. I I know we've spoken before, I've asked you, you know, do you do you plot out what's happening, what's gonna happen in the story? Do you think about the whole thing before you write? And and you've uh mentioned that you tend to start writing and it sort of goes where it it goes where it goes. Um and with this one I was curious, did you just write it and then it just so happened that at the moment you thought Mac had his epiphany, you decided to just stop writing? Or did you kind of write beyond that and then cut that ending off and go, no, actually I want to leave it here?

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Yeah, I this was this was longer, and only when I went back and rewrote it did I decide to to end it um at that particular moment. And I think probably on my you know, the first time that I'd worked on this piece or written this piece, I I didn't quite know where the epiphany was. Uh, and then only in going back to it after some time had passed did it did it feel clear. But I think it is short story, like to me, whether it's a a novel-length work, uh a novella, a long short story, a medium-sized short story, a vignette or a flash fiction piece, or even a poem. Like to me, the goal of all those is to show some moment of emotional transformation. And to get to a point of emotional transformation, in my view, you have to have a character contending with something that is forcing them to birth a new perspective. And so once that has happened, and let's call again, let's call that the epiphany, the birth of that new perspective. It's just a different way to define that. Then I think the objective has been achieved. So to me, as a writer, that's it. Like that's the goal. So once that's done, I feel like I can end something and feel like it is a successful, holistic piece that's ready to go out into the world. It just becomes a question of like, how big of a perspective shift am I going for? Because the longer the length, the bigger the perspective shift or the bigger the emotional realization should be, because it it should ideally justify the work that the reader or the listener is putting into the story. So with a shorter piece like this, it's not gonna be the hugest realization ever because there's just frankly, there's not enough time and space to really like create the conditions where that would feel justified. Now, that's not to say that it can't be done. People who are more skilled have definitely done that. I've read very short stories that have been profoundly moving. I just think that's a that's a really, really, really hard thing to achieve. So here the ambition was a little bit, was much smaller than that. And then the moment that it happened, it felt like, okay, we can we can cut it here and and have this be done, as opposed to extending it and then trying to show some changed behavior that Mac had that would have maybe given this story uh a more traditional resolution. It just didn't really feel like that was going to add much. So yeah, I think in retrospect, the decision was okay, the moment happened, let's end it there and just kind of like leave on this high note. Okay, guys, that's it for now. Thanks so much for listening to this latest story companion piece. Joel and I will be back very soon with another story. We'll do, of course, more companion pieces in the future. And if you want to get in touch in the meantime, you can reach us at Jones and Wolf at gmail.com. That's J O N E S A N D W O O L F at Gmail.com. Thanks again, everyone. Talk to you soon.