Writing With Mirrors: Transcript

Here's a fundamental intuition that's going to accompany us for the entire video:

Using a mirror — just the simple act of saying, these two things are similar, or these two things are different — is going to strengthen and enrich both sides. In other words, if I've got a mirroring between A and B,

then A is going to become more interesting and more important because it's a reflection of B,

and B is going to become more interesting and more important because it's a reflection of A.

And using a mirror also highlights the axis. In other words, it draws our attention to that particular point of comparison.

The way in which those two things are similar or different is going to seem more important because you've drawn our attention to it.

I'm going to make a few bold claims about what you can expect from this video.

I'm not going to justify them right now, but I hope by the end, you'll be persuaded.

I'm going to say that using mirrors adds depth and richness to your stories.

I'm going to say that using mirrors focuses your story on what's most important.

And I'm going to say that making up mirrors is easy,

which is a lot of why this is such a wonderful and accessible technique.

Lastly, before we dive in, my standard proviso:

There are no rules to writing.

Everything that I'm bringing here is my intuition my toolbox the things that I find useful when I think about stories and how they work.

But if this doesn't click for you, if it doesn't work with the way that you write, that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong; it just means something else works for you.

Mirroring for Characterization

Let's dive into our first topic, which is: Mirroring for Characterization.

The basic insight here is that instead of your character showing us who they are all on their own, we can characterize them by counterpoint.

Instead of them expressing themselves in a vacuum, showing us that they are smart or interesting or sympathetic in their own right,

we meet them in relation to other characters.

Let's look at an example.

Everybody knows Sherlock Holmes. What do we know about Sherlock Holmes?

We know that he is a genius. He solves mysteries; he sees things that nobody else does; he is brilliant.

We also know some other things about his personality:

We know that Sherlock Holmes is mysterious.

He plays his cards close to his vest; he never lets on what he's thinking.

He's unflappable. He seems to be always calm; never excited, never emotional.

We also know that he is never wrong.

He always impresses us by turning out to have been right, by having the right answer; you never want to bet against Sherlock Holmes.

But let's think a moment:

How do we actually know these things?

Where did we learn these things about Sherlock Holmes?

Well the main way we see them is in comparison to Watson, who is the exact opposite.

Where Holmes is a genius, Watson is — not stupid, but he's very very normal, and he's always surprised by deduction and insight.

Where Holmes is mysterious, Watson is transparent, telling us everything that he thinks and everything that he feels.

And he feels a lot — he's very emotional, compared to the unflappable Holmes.

And of course, where Sherlock Holmes is never wrong, the person who is wrong all the time is Watson.

So what we're constantly seeing is that we know who Holmes is by comparing him to Watson, who is the opposite.

Watson's character illuminates Sherlock Holmes, gives him the perfect setup to show off.

Another great example is Steven Universe,

where Steven has magic powers and goes on adventures and is generally a really sweet kid.

In the very first episode we meet the Crystal Gems, who are three magical warriors from another world, who go around saving the planet and fighting monsters,

and also raise Steven and teach him how to use his powers.

In the same way that Watson illuminates what's important about Holmes, we see the same dynamic between Steven and the Crystal Gems.

The gems are strange, amazing, larger than life.

Steven is human, full of heart, easy to identify with — which is a wonderful thing to have for your main character right at the beginning of a story!

This is a reflection by *contrast*.

Steven is defined in contrast with the Gems, and that makes his character really clear and immediate.

But there is another way to show Steven's human, empathetic side and that would be reflecting by similarity, instead.

That's something that we see with Steven's father Greg.

Greg is not magic. He doesn't have powers. He doesn't have adventures.

He is a regular schlub, running a car wash, walking around in sweatpants

and the most important thing about him is

that he loves Steven.

He's devoted, caring, encouraging, *human* in the best of ways—just like Steven is.

So we can see that Steven is reflected from both sides.

He's contrasted against the Gems, who are strange and magical;

and he's compared to his father, who is human and relatable just like Steven is.

But that's not all. There's another interesting thing going on here.

Compared to the Gems, Steven feels human, normal.

But Steven has magic, and power, and he goes on adventures.

The Gems feel strange and magical compared to Steven. But when he's compared against Greg, then Steven is the one who feels strange and magical.

So it's not only that this mirroring demonstrates some of Steven's characteristics. It's placing him on a spectrum, and showing us an overall picture that's interesting and complex.

Now that we've seen a few examples, our base intuition is a little clearer.

The impressive, otherworldly Crystal Gems illuminate Stephen as being human and accessible,

but by the same token,

Stephen being such a familiar, normal kid helps show the Gems as strange and special in comparison.

Holmes and Watson illuminate each other in the same way.

It's mutual. Mirroring works like a feedback loop.

The more human and sympathetic Steven is, the more strange and unusual the Gems seem,

and then that, in turn, reflects Steven as normal,

and so on and so forth.

It reinforces itself.

And the mirror also highlights the axis.

It's no coincidence that the Sherlock Holmes stories emphasize intelligence, observation, insight,

while the Steven Universe stories are all about humanity and sympathy and grappling with what's strange and different from you.

Those exactly match the axes in each of the mirrorings that we see baked right into the premise of each of those stories.

So these are all ideas and techniques that you can use in your own writing. When do you use them?

Whenever you want to demonstrate who a character is, show us some important facet of who they are.

This is very very natural for a main character or protagonist, but it really works for any significant character that you want to introduce.

What you do is you invent an opposite character, and you just show us how the two of those are different,

and that way we'll know more about who this character is.

Or, if you want to go for similarity, then you can invent a similar character and show us how the two of them are alike.

We've also seen that, for characters who are in the middle, or in a more complex situation, you can use multiple mirrors in different directions and show us exactly where it is that this character stands.

Now, I'm going to expand on this in some accompanying videos, that are less focused on introducing the concepts and much more on using them in practice in your own writing.

So for more on this, you can check those out.

I want to show you a few more techniques for showing character using mirroring.

I'm going to show you Mirroring by Time;

I'm going to show you Mirroring by Projection;

and I'm going to show you the concept of a Mirror Duo.

Mirroring by Time just means using time as the axis that we're mirroring about.

We're going to compare what came before to what happened after.

So when we mirror this for contrast, that demonstrates how the character has changed over time.

And when we're mirroring for likeness, we're demonstrating stability, longevity of the particular characteristic which we're mirroring.

Let's give an example.

How do we know that Spider-Man is responsible and heroic?

Well, we know that because once, he wasn't.

And how do we know that Crowley and Aziraphale are friends?

Well, we know that because they've always been.

Mirroring by Projection is a technique that's a little less intuitive, but it's very powerful. The idea is that we identify between the character and something else, something external.

Now we can talk about that external thing instead of talking directly about the character.

What this does is it creates new unusual means and layers to portray your character with.

You get to talk about this other thing, about the mirror, instead of talking about the character itself.

A great example is Disney's movie "Encanto," where every member of the Madrigal family has a magic power of their own.

Conveniently, those magic powers happen to match very very well to each character's personality.

For example, prissy Isabela makes beautiful plants and flowers bloom everywhere that she goes,

while stormy, hot-headed Pepa creates storm clouds and sunshine and controls the weather.

Even more than just what the power is, we can see that the powers tend to match up to what the character is feeling at any given moment. Because the character and the power are unified, we understand that the magic is representing and reflecting the character's internal state.

This is a really great technique because, first of all,

it shows us the characters but it does so in a vivid, unique way; something that's specific to this one story.

And secondly, it also gives us a way to peek into characters who are more guarded, who would not in and of themselves tell us or let slip what they're actually feeling.

A few tips for choosing your mirror when you're— when you want to create this kind of a projection:

You can consider picking an element of your story or setting that's unusual, colorful, special. Something that you want to bring attention to, or that makes your story feel more fun. Because remember that the mirroring is going to strengthen both sides; both the character, and this thing that you're focusing their emotions and internal state on.

I also recommend you consider that multiple characters can be illuminated by the same element in different ways.

So, for example, this can be as grandiose as what virtual realities each character likes to play on the holodeck—each one of them likes something different, does something different with the ability to create anything that they want; and what it is that they choose, tells us a lot about them.

Or it can be as simple and down to earth as what book Ted Lasso picks as a gift for each one of his players. He is sending each one of those a message, and even if we don't know exactly what it is we get a really strong vibe for each one of them.

I'd like to show you an example of how powerful this technique can be.

In Steven Universe, Pearl is a warrior whose life has been upended time and again, and she has suffered terrible trauma.

But Pearl is all about control; she keeps her trauma hidden.

And in order to tell us about it, the show can't really talk about Pearl directly.

That's where Connie comes in.

Connie is a good friend of Steven's, and up until this point, she didn't have any particular connection to Pearl.

I want to emphasize that, because this is clearly not a character who was built up or introduced as a mirror to Pearl, like some of the other examples that we've seen.

Then we get to an episode where Connie wants to help Steven on his adventures. She wants to protect him. And that urge to protect Steven — that is something that Pearl identifies with.

We don't know it yet, but it pushes all of her buttons.

So Pearl teaches Connie how to fight.

Suddenly Connie is Pearl's protégé.

She's set up as "just like Pearl,

but in the early days."

Now they have become the same thing. And now, exactly like the projections that we saw before—things that were separate from the character but represented them—that's the way that Connie now represents Pearl.

And so now, *now* we can start peeking into what Pearl has been through, the way that she's been wounded and scarred.

Because we're not talking about Pearl herself.

We're just talking about Connie —

about what she will need to go through.

But to us, the viewers, it's absolutely clear that talking about Connie and talking about Pearl is the exact same thing.

And I'd like to show you the concept of a Mirror Duo, and that's simply the observation that it can be easier to write two characters than to write one.

When your story is about a pair of characters, that pair reflects one another; it has a constant tension on a spectrum of similarities and differences, and those two characters can prod at each other's trigger spots.

They keep responding to one another, activating one another, sparking one another.

For every one of these pairs, you're going to find ways that they're opposites, and also common elements that bring them together.

Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are both "breaking bad," but their motivations for doing so could not be more diametrically opposed.

The X-Files pairs a conspiracy theorist with a skeptic in order to pursue the truth.

And Winnie the Pooh's genial confidence pairs perfectly with Piglet's constant anxiety.

None of these relationships are like the other; this is not a formula of any kind.

But each one of them feeds off the push and pull of similarity and contrast, on the exact axis that their story cares about.

Mirrors Defining Conflict

Our next topic is using mirrors in order to define conflict.

What mirrors let you do is they let you draw the sides — who is against who.

Consider that any story that has an antagonist, sets up "the protagonist versus the antagonist" as a natural inherent mirror.

People are going to be paying attention to that reflection,

and the difference and similarity between the protagonist and the antagonist is going to be perceived as what the story is about.

The question "what are they fighting over?" and "how are they fighting over it?" is critical to the story.

We'll look at a few important patterns that will demonstrate exactly what I mean here.

Consider Frodo versus Sauron.

These two characters are opposed by their inherent nature.

Frodo is weak; Sauron is strong.

Frodo is innocent; Sauron is greedy.

Frodo is a humble hobbit; while Sauron is a supreme supernatural being.

Other times, the difference might be one of personality.

In Disney's "Beauty and the Beast,"

Belle loves books, while Gaston loves hunting.

Belle is an independent woman; Gaston is a misogynist man.

These are two characters whose personalities clash and throw them into conflict and we see the differences that mirror them.

Other times, the opposition might be an ideological one.

In the X-Men, Professor X believes that mankind and mutantkind should coexist,

while Magneto thinks that the only way for mutants to be safe is to use preemptive force.

These two characters disagree on an important ideological principle, and that is where they differ.

But sometimes the antagonist isn't an opposite. They're a parallel.

Consider Frodo versus Gollum.

Both of them are hobbits.

Both of them have carried the Ring.

The only difference is present and past—

Gollum used to have the ring, and Frodo has it now.

The tension here isn't defeating an opposite. It's in how similar both sides are.

This gives us a dramatic struggle, and it calls into question the protagonist's path and choices. How similar to the antagonist are they?

A great example is "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,"

where Adora and Catra are both soldiers of the Horde,

until Adora finds a magic sword which turns her into a hero of legend.

She realizes the Horde is cruel and powerhungry, and she defects over to the Rebel's side.

Now, the very first scene of the series is Adora and Catra training together. Both of them are strong and capable; united by a common mission. We see them together as friends.

...until Adora finds the sword.

Hypothetically, you could have told the same story without this mirror.

We could have just had a binary good-versus-evil.

Why does it matter? Why do this thing?

Well, it turns Adora's struggle into a fight against an earlier version of herself— who she was, the opinions that she held.

It gives the story a complex, tragic dimension. The fight is against someone that we identify with.

And on the lighter side, the mirror also keeps hope hanging in the air:

we know that Adora has had her reversal and changed her allegiance; Catra being a mirror hints that one day Catra might do the same.

So we get so many additional layers, new significance affecting everything that happens in the show, just by having this setup to begin with.

Those are mirrors with who we're struggling against.

Let's look at mirrors with the other people struggling on our side.

In "Good Omens," Crowley and Aziraphale are built as diametric opposites:

demon vs. angel;

evil vs. good;

cool vs. awkward.

They seem constructed to be the opposite of one another in every particular.

What you get here is allies who are in a kind of tension, who have different ways of doing things, and we get to see that full range.

Now, sometimes it's more severe than that. In some stories, that tension reaches the point where the alliance itself is uncertain—where one or both sides of the mirror do not trust each other.

That's a direction to go in if you want internal conflict.

And whether or not the characters pull together in the end, having strong mirrors for internal conflict is just as important as having strong mirrors for external conflict.

Now, those are mirroring with contrast. How about mirroring allies with similarity?

We usually won't see characters who are *too* similar, but:

building a similarity reflection between two allies is a good way to establish why they're together and how solid they are.

For all their differences, consider how much Crowley and Aziraphale have in common:

both of them are celestial, even if they're from different sides;

both of them have similar methods, and find that they approach the same problem in the same way, even if the color coding is different;

they have so much shared history;

and maybe most importantly:

they both like human stuff.

They both like the human world, in contrast—there's that word, contrast—

in contrast to both the angels and the demons who they are ostensibly on the same side with,

they both like humanity.

Now, a great thing about mirrors is that they can evolve.

Having defined all these sides and categories, who's against who,

there's huge significance when somebody switches sides.

In "The Matrix," we have a group who's discovered the truth:

the world is a lie; humanity is all trapped inside a simulation.

And Cypher is introduced as one of the good guys—someone who knows that truth.

During the film, Cypher turns out to be betraying the team.

But he's not just any old traitor.

He's betraying the group specifically on the story's critical axis.

Neo spends the film's first act awakening from the Matrix's false reality, from the simulation; accepting the harsh truth/

And that's exactly why the scene that reveals Cypher as a traitor isn't just,

"okay, that's cool, I hate Neo,"

or "give me money," or "don't hurt my family."

No.

The scene is Cypher eating a steak inside the simulation, and saying how much he enjoys it. Knowing that it's not real but declaring that he doesn't care.

So if earlier Cypher was part of the group of people accepting a harsh truth over a pleasant illusion, here Cypher is choosing to go to the other side.

This scene takes him out of that group and moves him to the opposite one.

Switching sides is often expressed by action—somebody unexpectedly showing up in a fight; a pair going from yelling at each other to passionate kissing.

Mirroring helps us understand *why* the switch, what caused it, what it means.

Let's see another example.

Ted Lasso is an irrepressibly cheerful American football coach who's been brought in to coach an English soccer team.

At the start of the series, everybody considers Ted to be incompetent,

so let's look at one of the first people he wins over:

Roy Kent.

Roy is the perfect representation of everybody who hates and disrespects Ted.

Ted is American; Roy is British.

Ted is amateur, brand new at this; Roy is a pro.

Ted is cheerful, and Roy is the biggest grump in the world.

But there's also a really big difference between them beyond that:

Roy, like everybody else in the series, cares about the team winning.

Ted does not care about winning; he cares about caring.

He explains to everyone that the well-being of the team is the most important thing, even if they don't win anything.

Roy starts out right where the whole rest of the team is—

mocking Ted Lasso, calling him Ronald McDonald, saying that he should choke on a cheeseburger.

But the place we first see him shift is right after their first game together.

It's a predictable loss, and a humiliating one, continuing the pattern of the team as failed and hopeless.

Not Winning.

But when Roy hits the showers, he finds something unexpected:

the water pressure had been bad, and Ted has gotten it fixed.

Ted fixed the water pressure.

This doesn't move the team anywhere toward winning games.

But it's a tangible improvement.

It's a win in an arena that Roy hasn't been paying attention to.

So this is a scene where we see Roy start to shift—he starts appreciating things besides just trying to win, and starts moving over to Ted's side.

There are also examples that are...

less successful.

In "Batman vs. Superman," the climactic moment when the two heroes are fighting each other and they realize that they have common ground:

both of their mothers are named

Martha.

So there's a lesson to be learned here.

There is a mirroring being done here, but it's built poorly.

Yes, we have got a point of similarity, but we haven't established *sides*.

We haven't built up an axis of "people whose moms are named Martha" versus "people whose moms are named something else."

We haven't even really built up an axis of "people who love their moms" and "people who don't."

So learn from this:

Build up your sides,

build up your axis,

and then, when something changes, it's going to mean something.

Let's give a quick recap.

When we are defining conflict, and looking at the conflict in our story,

it is so easy to get caught up in the sides fighting, in the action, and which side wins.

But mirrors help you to find what your sides actually are,

and that's what tells us what the story is actually about.

You might say, in a bigger story with lots of different axes playing a role, that you get kind of a Venn diagram of the major forces and sides and values that are playing roles in our story, pushing and pulling against each other.

But we never need to go and draw a big, complicated diagram.

We just build it up, one step at a time.

What connections do I give *this* character?

What contrast do I give this one?

--and this system builds itself up. Complex, but always tightly connected to everything else.

In your own writing, you can use some guiding questions in order to help you choose what mirrors to build and create.

You can ask yourself: What are the key contrasts between your protagonist and your antagonist? Where do they differ? What's the source of their conflict?

You can ask: What do they have in common? How are they similar to one another?

You can ask what unites the protagonist's side as allies, what brings them together?

And you can ask what different approaches might there be among those allies.

You can also choose your balance.

What kind of conflict do you have; what's its style and tenor?

Is it a conflict that is epic, against a straightforward foe?

In that case you want to emphasize the differences.

Or is it tragic, kin against kin? And then the similarities are maybe even more important.

Maybe your conflict is internal, against friends and allies.

Or maybe it is some mix of them all.

Expectations and Narrative Logic

Let's talk about expectations and narrative logic.

This is a part of storytelling which is so fundamental that it's often easy to miss.

Whenever a reader enters a story, they are asking themselves, what are our expectations? How do things work here? How do I interpret what's going on?

Consider that, in order to want to read a story, you probably want to *anticipate* that there's going to be danger,

or that there's going to be a challenge,

or that there's going to be hope.

What ways can we as authors actually set out those expectations, and make people anticipate something that they are looking forward to?

Well, a really good thing to do is to see it happen to somebody else first.

Earlier we looked at the example of Frodo versus Gollum.

We saw how they're built as similar to one another,

except that Gollum had the Ring in the past and Frodo has it in the present.

We've described that as a mirroring over time, but we can also describe it like this:

a reflection of how similar they are.

And that similarity implies that what happened to one of them is likely to happen to the other one as well.

What's happened here is that we've had an expectation established.

We've basically been given a threat that we absolutely believe in, even though it's of something that hasn't happened yet.

These expectations are so important because they establish what the narrative logic is; how consequences work in this story.

Narrative logic means being able to have an intuitive sense of questions like:

Is attacking a demon something very heroic, or is it something really really dumb?

Is an unsuitable marriage a happy ending, or a sad one?

Is the establishment something devoted, that we need to protect, or is it something corrupted that we need to break down?

There's no one answer to any one of these questions that's right for all stories.

When your story has one of these elements, you need to set up how people should think about it, how they should treat it.

The audience needs their expectations established.

So how do you do that?

How do you show the audience how the story works, and what they should be anticipating, looking forward to, worried about?

The answer is: let somebody else be first to face the consequences.

For example, in "The Hunger Games,"

Katniss Everdeen is pressed into a deadly contest as a representative of her district.

And it's not a fair fight. Because the wealthy districts have all the money and the training to wipe the competition out.

Now, Katniss is provided a mentor, Haymitch, who's the only person from her District who's ever survived the contest.

He's also a bitter drunk and, it seems, completely useless.

Haymitch is where Katniss wants to be — a victor. Someone who got through, and survived.

So he is a mirror of her anticipated future.

Now, his alcoholism, depression, and pessimism all stem from his experience at precisely the thing that Katniss is attempting.

So he mirrors how difficult her path is going to be, and he also shows us that even winning the games is far from a thing of joy.

And you can do the same thing in every field and in every genre.

In Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," we know that Lizzie Bennett's life is going to be shaped by who she chooses to marry.

Now the story lays out before her, and before us, some very poor matches:

Lizzie's friend Charlotte, who marries the awful Mr Collins because she has no other choices.

And Lizzie's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett ,who are poorly suited to one another, and both suffer from the match/

Both of these serve as warning signals for Lizzy—possible consequences, even probable ones, if she fails to find her path.

Once you're looking for them, you're going to see these mirrors everywhere, even for small, momentary effect.

When Indiana Jones sneaks into an ancient temple, and he sees specific, gruesome ways that previous intruders have died,

that is a mirror.

We're seeing how someone in *his specific situation* is likely to end up.

That makes this one scene stronger and more effective, because we've set up exactly what the reader should be worried about, or looking forward to.

Sometimes, "let someone else face the consequences first" can be the protagonist themselves,

if it's in a smaller, more limited, less critical way.

Sticking with Indiana Jones, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" begins with a short opening sequence, almost a standalone piece,

where Indy sneaks into the temple, overcomes all the death traps,

all to run into the waiting arms of a rival archaeologist, who snatches the prize away by sheer force.

This is exactly the structure of the film's big story, the chase after the Ark of the Covenant!

Indy goes through so much to find the Ark, and then when the villain shows up to, *again*, grab away the thing Indiana Jones has been trying to rescue.

This scene is stronger, makes more sense, provokes more emotion,

because we saw the same thing happening before.

We understand that *this* is how the story works.

So we've demonstrated audience expectations and narrative logic using the protagonist themselves. We've just done it in a small way—contained, controlled, preparing us for a point where it really matters, and where we'll want it to be immediately, viscerally accepted.

A quick recap on this topic of mirroring expectations.

The basic observation is just that you want to control your readers 'expectations. You want to let them know how things work in your story, because every story has a "way things work in this story", its own internal story logic. You want to encourage readers' anticipation, and you want to direct it to be where you want it.

So in your own writing, here are some guiding questions that will help you figure out where your focus should be, and what mirrors can help you get there.

You can ask yourself, what challenges and hardships are in store for your characters? Show us people who have been through that, who have suffered the consequences that loom over your hero.

You can ask yourself, what are your characters goals and dreams? Who has gotten to the place that your character aspires to be? Show us that, so that we know what to look forward to.

You can also ask yourself, what story conventions and core assumptions do readers need to understand and accept?

And then you can set that up by showing it to us in a small way, early on in the story, so that we will be prepared for it when it happens in a big way later on.

In your writing, you can look at later scenes and big moments, and ask yourself how can earlier scenes hint towards them, echo them in advance, and work in a similar way.

All of this is about figuring out what you want readers to know, how you want them to react—

and you can set that all up using mirrors.

Mirroring for Depth and Theme

My last topic for this video is Mirroring for Depth and Theme.

And that's no small claim, so a couple of words about: what do I mean by depth?

I mean a few different ideas.

One of them is the idea of *substance*. This story has something to say, or describes familiar things in a compelling way.

It's just the sense that, at the end of the story, it has done *something*

Tthen there's the idea of *layers*. Having subtext and meaning beyond the surface level; that the text has more in it than just the words.

Lastly, the idea of *significance*, the idea that what happens has effect and consequence. That's what makes it so that when any individual event in the story happens, you feel like that event matters, because it affects things.

Multiple mirroring gives you all of those—

and I'd like to stress, *multiple* mirrors.

Mirrors within mirrors within mirrors.

Because here's the great thing: the more that you use them, the more that the effect builds up, and goes deeper.

I'd like to give the example of one work that is full of mirrors,

and what we're going to see is how the sheer number of mirrors makes the whole story feel richer and deeper, and even makes that feel almost effortless.

I'm going to talk about "The Good Place."

Some slight, oblique spoilers here—if you haven't seen the show, I don't think you'll catch these, but if you're, like, right in the middle, then maybe you'll want to close your eyes for a couple of minutes; that's all.

"The Good Place" is a comedy about the afterlife, and it all starts out on a foundation that's simple and familiar and we've discussed: the idea of a pair of opposites.

In this show, Eleanor has died, and after you die, there's a Good Place and a Bad Place, and Eleanor has been assigned to the Good Place, yay!

Uh, except there's been an error, Eleanor actually was a very selfish and cruel and callous person, and she's only here because she got mixed up with someone else, someone who is *actually* good.

So now Eleanor needs to be a good person, or she's going to get found out.

And this is where Chidi comes in—another good place resident.

Chidi is an Ethics professor; he is going to teach Eleanor how to be good.

Eleanor and Chidi are a classic pair of opposites, and they establish a critical axis of selfishness versus ethical behavior.

The series uses all the tools and techniques that we've discussed for pairs like these. Each of these characters illuminates the other one, shows their strengths and their flaws. Each of them naturally pushes the other one's buttons; anything that happens in the story sets off a chain reaction between the two, back and forth.

And all of this activity and tension are centered on the critical axis, on self-interest versus morality. That's how the show is built: to gravitate to questioning ethics and understanding them.

But Eleanor and Chidi are not the only characters in the story.

We meet other key characters in the Good Place, and they too address the critical axis, in different and complex ways.

Tahani is all about ethics and caring, but she's ostentatious about it, and condescending.

And Jason is so oblivious that trying to apply ethical questions to him feels almost absurd.

So this isn't just a pair of mirrors—it's a quartet.

The picture becomes more complicated and has more depth to it.

The chain reactions become longer, more intricate, and they go in many different directions.

This setup means that no one character has to be the right one or the wrong one on their own—each one of them illuminates the questions of ethics and morality from their own personal vantage point.

And the series continues and uses a multitude of mirrors in so many different ways.

We get the Good Place compared to the Bad Place.

We get who Eleanor has been in her lifetime, compared to who she's trying to be now.

We get the Eleanor we know, compared against "Real Eleanor," the good one, the Eleanor who's spot in the Good Place she's taken.

And we get a veritable ocean of repetitions and variations of key life moments for the characters.

We get projection, where the character's emotions are reflected and expressed in the world around them.

We get to see the same scenes and story lines repeated, only with key elements changed, roles reversed, characters in new constellations.

The series keeps returning again and again to the same topics, the same ideas. Each time it's jumping off something familiar, something well established, but it also keeps moving forward each time, introducing the next new element that gives the same thing a new meaning.

That is a whole lot of storytelling and mirroring going on.

But the fact that all of it is focused on these four specific characters with their common, tightly related themes, lets us see the same event through four different and complementary viewpoints, and lets us watch each of those characters develop and grow.

And that same basic axis that we started with—that's what accompanies us the whole way through.

The story doesn't give us one definitive answer to "what is ethical".

What it does is give us more and more angles, more and more reflections, and it lets them slam into each other, activate one another, spark one another all around the critical axis.

What's created all that depth and insight is precisely the use of so many mirrors, so many angles and variations on the core axis, on the central elements of the story.

The mirroring means each of them relates to the others, is affected by all of them, and affects them back in return.

So, how do you use this in your own writing?

The big thing that we have seen in this section is that mirrors build on each other. So the way to use it in your own writing is to use all the tools that we have seen through this video and just have them build on top of each other.

You start by defining your central story themes. What does my story care about? What are the things, the axes, that I would like to examine?

Once you have that, you can shape your characters into mirrors around those axes. They can reflect different sides of that same issue, each one of them in their own way.

And then they reflect each other, and bring out that tension.

Then you can keep going. You can find events and scenes that demonstrate and revisit your key topics from new and different angles.

And all of these techniques will amplify and reinforce each other, so that the whole thing feels connected and focused on those core issues that you want them to.

Now, like most of my advice, these are things that you can do in initial planning, when you're outlining, before you've actually written a word.

But you can absolutely also do them in revision, once you've got a solid draft; you can look back and figure out, okay, now, that I've seen the whole thing, what do I really care about? What tension matters the most to me?

And then you can start shifting your characters and your sides and your events into reflecting these particular mirrors, into being focused and showing off as much as possible the axes, the reflections, the similarities and contrasts.

Conclusion

Let's sum up and look back on our bold claims from the beginning of the video.

We said that using mirrors adds depth and richness to your stories,

and we've seen that it does that.

We see that using mirrors gives you immediate, effective characterization.

We've seen that it gives you a wider palette to draw from; you can describe the same thing in more ways.

We've seen that mirrors help you examine the world and the characters from a whole variety of angles.

And, mirroring helps all of the elements feel interconnected, which is wonderful for giving that feeling of depth and richness.

We've said that using mirrors focuses your story on what's most important.

It does that because the mirrors always emphasize your axis; whatever you choose to mirror around, is what the story will be about, in a fundamental way.

It means that the different sides are going to be meaningful, and so the conflict is going to be meaningful.

The story becomes about similarities and differences in the specific areas that matter most to you.

Lastly, we have said that making up mirrors is *easy*,

because mirrors are a simple technique, that you can use yourself by just following some pretty simple guiding questions.

You can ask yourself,

What's the opposite of this?

What do these two things have in common?

What's a different approach to the same thing?

Or, what new event will echo my existing events?

All of the time, you can ask yourself what is important in this story?

And then, what is a slight variation on that?

And that gives you a mirror.

Not only that—

whenever you're stuck, whenever something's not working,

try using a mirror.

Because now you have a whole barrel of guiding questions, and so many different ways to put mirrors into your story. Almost always, trying to use these is going to suggest a path forward—some way to repeat or echo or strengthen the exact thing in your work that is interesting and important to you.

What mirrors really do is they build patterns,

and I'd like to close on a quote from "Plot," by Anson Dibell.

She writes:

"If you stop thinking in terms of things,

and start thinking in categories of things,

you'll see more resemblances, echoes and outright repetitions in your favorite fiction than you'd ever have suspected.

Look at how thoroughly all the threads are gathered into neat knots, how thoroughly the story belongs to itself."

Thank you so much! I hope you've enjoyed this video.

If you have any questions about mirroring, or if you know any books or movies that have great examples of the things that we've been discussing here—write me a comment! That's where follow-up videos come from.

Down in the show notes, you're going to find a handy reference summarizing all the main concepts and ideas from this video,

and I'm also recording some short, pinpoint videos meant for authors covering some specific topics in using mirrors in your own writing.

I'll be putting out one of those every few days, so watch for those, and you can check out my other videos,

like my series on learning story structure from the Discworld!

You can also find all my stuff and my blog and the other places where I write about writing and storycraft at zivwities.com .

Thank you, and see you next time!