Episode: 2484
Title: HPR2484: The Big Idea
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2484/hpr2484.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:59:45

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This is HPR episode 2484 entitled The Big Idea.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 19 minutes long and Karima Cleanflag.
The summary is a really look at what a big idea means in storytelling.
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Hello, this is Lost in Drunks.
Today I'd like to talk about a particular aspect of storytelling, something I'm going
to call The Big Idea.
This isn't what you might call a creative idea per se.
This isn't one of those, where do you get your great ideas that you might ask a movie
maker or a writer or a play writer or something like that or a game maker for that matter.
That's not really what I'm talking about, although it's a part of that.
Very often in storytelling, a storyteller, and I'm going to use that term instead of a writer
because storytelling comes in various forms these days.
Every telling very often will hang its hat on a big idea, especially in speculative
fiction.
We'll talk about science fiction in particular, but I'm then going to expand on how it
really applies to all types of storytelling, every genre really.
In science fiction, you often have different kinds of approaches to storytelling.
In science fiction, often hung its hat on what you might call The Big Idea.
Think about Larry Niven's Ring World.
The entire concept, the entire sort of hook of that story is the Ring World, this titanic
feat of engineering, impossibly mind-boggling feat of engineering done by some alien race
in some ancient day, Isaac Asimov, the foundation trilogy, just this star-spanning civilization
that's so huge and so old that it doesn't even know where the human race began anymore.
They've forgotten that.
That information has gotten lost.
That goes on and on and on and on.
There's tons of them.
Tons of examples of that sort of thing, where there's this one idea that the entire story
is sort of built around, this one giant, huge sweeping idea.
For a very long time, that was science fiction for a lot of people.
If you go back to the early days to Jewels Verne, all of his science fiction stories,
what we would classify as science fiction today, they all have that.
They all have that in common.
From Earth to the Moon, The Big Idea is going to the Moon.
The entire story is about that.
It isn't just part of the background, and it isn't about the characters.
It's about that one thing, journey to the center of the Earth, 20,000 leagues under the
sea.
All of them have that one sort of single idea, and the entire story hangs on it.
In science fiction, that was the norm for a very long time, and only later on, did we
start getting more and more variety associated with that sort of thing, so that you might
have the big idea, but the big idea is in the background, and it's more of a character-driven
story, or it might be a mystery, there's some sort of mystery surrounding this thing,
and you'll have your big idea in the background, maybe.
If you have one at all, that's the difference between the big idea story and sort of a character-driven
story, or a plot-driven story, because you could have a plot-driven story that doesn't
have some giant feet of engineering, or some huge event, or war, or something like that.
You can have a very simple industrial spying sort of story.
You can hang it on very, very little when it comes right down to it, very little, and
yet make a really compelling story, because that one little element that you're working
with might have a great deal of texture or detail to it.
While in the larger sense, that one little bit, like say, it's a story about industrial
spying, we'll run with that.
You have a company that's making microchips, and maybe it's microchips for, if you want
the stakes to be high and kind of melodramatic, you could say it's some military application
that's going to have all these international ramifications, but you don't need to, because
in the end, that just adds to the stakes, but it doesn't add to the story, because in
the end, it's about stealing this piece of tech.
That's your industrial espionage story.
Let's not do that.
Let's not go there.
Say it's for a consumer product.
It's for a new type of blender, right?
This new blender can do something that no other blender can do, and it's because, let's
say, it's a new style blade for the blender.
Those ones that, you know, the blades that they use at the bottom of the blenders.
It's a new style.
It's a new design, and no one has seen it yet, but everybody knows that this thing is
going to happen.
They've seen demos maybe online.
These companies are going to come out with this blender.
They've had a prototype.
They show it.
They're demonstrating this thing, doing impossible stuff, incredible stuff, right?
And they're going to be offering this product at a price point that is simply going to sink
everybody else.
Well, a rival company that makes blenders says we got to find out what they have, because
the demo they showed online didn't give us a look at the blades, and it's got to be
the blades that are making the difference.
We have to get somebody in there.
We either have to get photos of these blades, or better yet, we have to get some of these
blades, you know, or the designs, because all of those would be very carefully designed
on computers and et cetera.
We have to get information about these freaking blades.
We have to get them.
The stakes are exactly the same as if this was some sort of state secret that is going
to decide the fate of nations, except, you know, and when I say the stakes, the stakes
for the characters.
Now when you start saying it's got a larger texture, you know, that it is, in fact, not
blender blades that we're talking about.
We are, in fact, talking about the guidance system to a new missile, or the list of all
of our agents that are undercover in foreign countries.
You know, the stakes are big at that point.
The stakes are bigger, but for the characters involved, the actions are the same.
So you have to understand the context.
By making the stakes bigger, it only adds to the tension, but it doesn't add to the
story or the action.
And tension is entirely dependent upon character, or it can be.
It can be.
Think of it this way.
If we're just watching somebody steal the blender blades, it's like, okay, it's kind of like
a con man in action, right?
It's not that big a deal.
But what if we find out more about that character?
We find out that this character has got, you know, maybe a family member who's extremely
ill.
They can't pay for that.
They have to do this job, or their family member may not get the life-saving operation
or medical procedure, you know, and you got to run with me.
If you're not in the United States, this doesn't make any sense at all.
But in the United States, that's still a thing that you can die because you don't have enough
money.
That's still a thing here.
So for the sake of the blender story, the blender story takes place in the United
States because that's raising the stakes.
See?
If this took place in a more civilized country where you don't die because you can't afford
a medical procedure, then that goes away.
So we're going to raise the stakes.
We're going to put it here.
Or maybe some place even worse where there's bad medical coverage or no medical coverage
for anybody.
And maybe it's taking place there, right?
Some other country where that happens, right?
Now the stakes are very high because it is literally life and death for someone.
If you don't get this blender blade, the closer we are to that character, if we're seeing
what they're seeing, feeling what they're feeling, and we're, we see their life, they're
not just the action of what they're doing, but their life and why they're doing it, why
they're driven to do this thing.
The stakes are as high as you want to make them.
Even though it may not affect the world at all, but it will affect this person's world.
And if that's the world we're seeing.
If that's the world we're invested in, then that's the one that matters, right?
Now this could be a very compelling story, depending on how it's written, and yet it lacks
that big idea.
Again, in science fiction and often in fantasy as well, like high fantasy, especially sword
and sorcery and all that sort of stuff, the big idea is the driver of the story very
often, right?
So in the case of fantasy, it will be some ancient evil that's returning.
I mean, that's a trope that never goes away and never really gets old.
It's kind of always evergreen.
Some ancient evil is returning, and the heroes have to band together to find the Muguffin,
the item that is driving the plot, that if they get this thing, then they can prevent
the bad thing.
And very often, the ancient evil is searching for this thing too.
You saw it in the Lord of the Rings, the, you know, Shenara stories by Terry Brooks over
and over and over.
You see this trope.
It goes on and on and on.
But the big idea, the one that's driving all this, is that there is an ancient evil
that's returning.
Good against evil is a very standard sort of setup for that sort of story.
And if you have evil, then it's got to be a great evil, otherwise your characters don't
have very good stakes, right?
We're talking about stakes again, right?
The stakes in the sword and sorcery and high fantasy are almost always the world, right?
Sometimes it's even the multiverse, right?
It's always the big stakes.
It's always, we have to save the world.
Because if you're not saving the world, a lot of times it doesn't seem that important.
And again, it's because you are outside the character.
You're not inside the character.
What if, in the Lord of the Rings, taking that for example, what if Frodo and Sam never
left the Shire, right?
What if the ring never came to the Baggins family and all of that crap happens outside?
And maybe Sauron, the bad guy, gets the ring finally and starts, you know, he's got all
this incredible power and he starts taking over all of Middle Earth.
You could instead tell the story about how the ring is being destroyed.
You could tell a much smaller story about how the Shire is being invaded, right?
Like at the very end of the Lord of the Rings, not the movies, but the books.
There's a sequence called the scouring of the Shire.
And that's talking about how the Shire does get overrun by bad people and how the hobbits
have to band together and stop these people and things are never the same, right?
And it's kind of a pretty thinly veiled allegory about World War II, I think, specifically,
and the effect on Great Britain.
But that's, you know, that's probably debatable, but that was my takeaway.
But the idea that this beautiful pastoral place could be wiped out because of larger events.
Well, what if we told that story?
What if we told the story about trying to save the Shire, right?
The Shire is a very, very small place in the Lord of the Rings.
But if we're right in the middle of that tale, if we're right there, we're really close
to these characters.
And we see what they see.
We care about what they care about.
Then this is not a small story.
But it's a story without the big idea, the one that I've been describing, that giant sweeping
tale.
Yeah, it might be there.
It's in the background.
But when we're talking about a story like this, suddenly it becomes much less about a fantasy
and much less high fantasy and much more like what we would now consider a modern historical
drama, or sometimes even a historical romance, right?
Looking out of fantasy and into that area, historical stories, where you might have the
big idea, but it's in the background.
World War II, a particular battle of World War II.
You know, maybe there's a city under siege during World War II.
And that is your background.
And that's historical fact.
And people could look that up and understand what was going on at that time.
And a good writer will explain much of that so that you understand what the stakes are
for your characters.
But it's not the central part of the story.
That is the background.
And in the central part of the story, you might have two characters who fall in love.
You might have one character who's a, you know, a thief and has to be captured.
You know, the very famous film, The Third Man, the texture of that, the background, isn't
World War II.
It's the aftermath of World War II.
It's in Vienna, just after the war.
And that's all historical fact.
And it was a very turbulent time.
It was an exciting time for, you know, kind of shady entrepreneurs, lots and lots of
spies, lots and lots of double dealing.
It was a crazy, crazy time.
Plus, you have the people of Vienna who were dealing with horrible trauma from the war.
Their city was still in ruins.
People are trying to, you know, survive all of this, right?
And that's your background.
That's not your foreground.
That's your background.
And you can use that.
And in that story, you end up with these characters that are, you know, you have Harry
Lyme, who's a, you know, a scoundrel and a terrible man in that story.
And you have all of these other people that are kind of spinning around what Harry is doing.
And that is your story.
And those are your stakes.
And the rest of it, this huge historical event is texture.
It's background.
The big idea isn't up here.
It's back there, right?
And that is very often the difference between what you might consider genre stories, many
genre stories, science fiction, fantasy, supernatural stories a lot of times, especially if they're
like big supernatural tales.
The big idea is the foreground.
It's what everybody is trying to do, you know, that's the entire focus of these people.
It's not the background.
So the Lord of the Rings, getting the ring, destroying the ring, fighting so on, that's
all the foreground.
That's what everybody is trying to do.
We're not seeing that in the background and having this romance going on in the front.
There are some elements of romance here and there and there, they're in there, but that's
not the story.
You know, that's not the story.
Those are just details, fine details and those are kind of nice cities tossed in to make
the characters seem more human, right?
Because even though most of them are not, they have to appear to be human.
They have to have human-like traits or else we don't care about them or we don't understand
them at all.
It's hard to tell a story that has a big idea in the forefront and yet still have characters
that really ring true, right?
You can have cool characters, you can have characters that, oh man, I really like that person,
but emotionally you don't have an awful lot of attachment to these characters.
You might have an intellectual attachment and there might be a severe, tremendous, cool
factor to these characters, but their heart, their motivations, the things they care about.
It's very hard to care about those things the way they do because they simply don't have
the time because the big idea is so central to that storyline.
When you're watching a movie, when you're reading a book, keep that in mind that a lot
of times there's a big idea and the big idea isn't necessarily in front, it might be in
the background.
There are a lot of drama stories, especially romances where there is modern romance specifically,
not historical romance because those are almost always set in a very specific historical
period that are used as background and texture.
But modern romances that might take place right here today, very often they don't have
the big idea.
That doesn't exist in those stories and that's an interesting thing because when you look
at those, all they have is character and yet it's still compelling.
We still care and that goes to show you that the big idea isn't always that vital.
It is a trope, it is a common element in certain types of storytelling.
Really it can be a common element in any type of storytelling.
I would argue right now, it can be used in any of them, it's a staple in some of them
but it's not vital to any of them.
You can tell a really compelling science fiction tale that doesn't have the big idea involved.
There's no grand sweeping anything, it's just this story about these people.
You can tell a fantasy story that does the exact same thing, it's just a human tale
regardless of whatever race is involved.
It's a human tale and we care about them because it matters to them.
You don't necessarily have to have the big idea to tell that kind of tale.
Does it help?
It depends.
It truly does.
On occasion, a big idea gets in the way and it's distracting and it's a good idea to leave
it out because if really all we want is to tell a story about these characters and what
they care about, having anything else is just going to get in the way.
Don't rid of it.
Don't use it.
Instead of setting it in post-war Vienna, set it in your own backyard, set it in your
neighborhood.
There's no reason to distract from what's going on but if what's going on can use vital
elements of that particular background, of that big idea, then by all means use it.
It's a tool and I think that's ultimately what I'm trying to say here.
The big idea in science fiction, in fantasy, in drama, in romance, in comedy, the big idea
is just a tool.
If you look at those stories and that's the only thing you're ever either talking about
or writing about, you're only ever using one tool.
Again, if you're a storyteller, that's limiting and you should expand.
You should go beyond that.
If you're just watching, if you're a consumer of this stuff and every producer of stories
is also a consumer of them.
As a consumer of stories, you should be looking to see how these things are being played
out, how the big idea is being used, if it's being used at all.
That's just a few thoughts about storytelling and the big idea.
This has been Lost in Bronx.
If you have any comments about this, please feel free to put them in the comments section
for this particular episode on Hacker Public Radio.
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